Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs/Browning

ROBERT BROWNING

December 12, 1889

ROBERT BROWNING

NE by one the Dii majores are leaving us: Carlyle, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold; and now Robert Browning, a greater name than all these, has passed into silence. It is almost startling to notice how their death radically alters their relation to us. Not only is their work rounded off, finished in a double sense, completed into a system, informed with a new life, as if, indeed, the poet's soul had passed at once from the body to the works. The poet has gone; his works at once group themselves into an organic whole, and become his work. Yet a still more vital change comes over our relations to the imaginative creator when his bodily presence is withdrawn. He ceases to be ours alone; Robert Browning no longer speaks only for and to Victorian England. He becomes part of England of the past and of the future—part of the spiritual heritage for which Englishmen have in the past shown themselves willing to die part of the English ideal, towards which the best of Englishmen aim to live. One advantage immediately accrues from the cessation of all personal intercourse between the world and the poet. The idle chatter of relative merit, 'Is he greater than A?' 'Is he better than B?' dies away with his death. Not how great he was, but what he was, engages our attention, and the searching demand that the soul of Robert Browning makes upon each and all of us who care for the higher life of our nation is, 'What I have done for England, say.'

The kingdom of poesy hath many mansions. That on whose portals Robert Browning's name is inscribed is distinguished from its neighbours both by its huge size and by its massive strength. The style is Gothic with a curious infusion of Italian Renaissance. Notice, before we enter, the quaint gargoyles that in part adorn, in part disfigure, every portion of the architecture that is susceptible of ornamentation. Gaining entrance with some difficulty—for the porter is somewhat gruff and scant of speech, giving but slight guidance to the visitor—we are at first struck by the obscurity that reigns in the interior, only lit up here and there by lurid splashes of splendour at spots which are in direct contact with the outer sunshine. But one's eyes soon get accustomed to the dim religious light, and if we have to strain our attention to catch the scheme of ornamentation, our satisfaction is the greater when we have caught it. The decoration is elaborate and masterly, but it almost always gives one the impression of being unfinished, owing to its over-elaboration. The subjects, again, are often on a grand scale, and often in the grand style, but many of them claim only to be quaint grotesques. The fertility of design is, however, extraordinary, and the mansion is abundantly spacious, each room and each cranny having its own individuality, marring somewhat the unity of design of the whole. Two or three of the tapestries strike us as of clearer outline and more finished design than the rest; one in particular in which the chief figure is a gaunt musician followed by a crowd of joyous children. Another, too, of three horsemen takes us, as it were, out into the open, and we seem to feel the air rush past us as they ride. But there is no need to complain of the atmosphere any. where; the air is fresh and sweet throughout; no closeness, no clouds of incense or whiffs of stifling perfume offend the nostril. One suite of rooms entrances our attention by its original scheme of ornament. In each the same design, in itself somewhat repulsive, is repeated in mirrors of different shape, parabolic, elliptical, concave, and the rest, distorting the image in each case, but giving, on the whole, a curious impression of reality. Altogether we leave the mansion with a feeling of having seen one of the great masterpieces of poetic architecture, and with an abiding sense of the high achievement and higher aspirations of the master builder.

But enough of allegory, though the one we give may serve as well as another to suggest the total impression made by Browning's work. The extent of his achievements is the most striking quality. Seventeen volumes represent the poet's legacy to his countrymen. And what volumes! Crammed with thought, suffused with imagination, crowded with figures with life more real than half the people we meet, filled with suggestion, historic, ethical, artistic, and contemporary, they represent at least fifty volumes, if their full meaning were drawn out and displayed. Nor has this huge bulk been attained by harping on a limited set of themes. On the contrary, his topics are bewildering in their variety. The players in Hamlet had not a more varied répertoire. No one could ever guess what a new volume of Browning would contain—whether it would be sportive or melodramatic, speculative or soul-searching. And the range of treatment was as extensive as that of subject. He was not a great metrical artist, but he at least utilised the metrical themes open to the English poet, with the exception only of the more recent importations from France, the rondeau and the rest. His remarkable versatility is, perhaps, best shown by the fact that his most popular productions were descriptive pieces of pure action—the themes of Hamelin and Ghent—which were outside his ordinary range of interest, wide as that was.

'My stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul; little else is worth study.' These words from the dedication to the reprint of Sordello—itself the key to all Browning's more serious side—sum up his method. Spiritual dynamics, the influence of soul on soul, this is what his mind fixes upon amidst all the plexuses of things. Not action, but character, and not character formed, but in the forming—there is the staple of Browning's art. And in that direction his power is unique in the world's literature. Comparisons have been made with Shakespeare in this regard, but here the superiority is with Browning without a doubt, and a moment's reflection will show why it must be so. The business of the true dramatist is with action—with character too, but character formed, and only so far as action brings out the character that is already there. The conditions of Shakespeare's art prevented him from dealing with character formation, modification, elevation, development, or degradation, to the extent that Browning deals with them. Here, too, is the secret of Browning's failure as a dramatist, for failure it was for a man of Browning's calibre not to excel pre-eminently. Who would not prefer to have Colombe's Birthday or A Blot in the 'Scutcheon as a dramatic idyll? And the reason is that the dramatic side of these dramas—the action—is not the thing for which the poet cares or makes his audience care. Two acts of Colombe pass without any action whatever. Browning had a quick eye for a dramatic situation; he was dramatic in that sense, if you will. But of the power of connecting such situations together into one organic whole, in which each should add force to each of this, the true dramatic power, he had singularly little. Even Pippa Passes has, with all its grace and effectiveness, no real dramatic unity. Pippa passes through a series of dramatic situations, and so strings them together; but it is from the outside. Contrast the far more effective way in which a poet of infinitely less poetic force, but yet of keener dramatic instinct, M. François Coppée, has dealt with a kindred theme in Le Passant. No, Browning was no born dramatist, and was wisely advised by his own instinct to turn to 'Dramatic Idyls ' or 'Dramatis Personæ,' or in other words, dramatic situations instead of dramas.

This interest in characterisation led him to one of the most original of his themes—the self-portrayal of the humbug, religious (Blougram), political (Schwangau), or social (Sludge). These are, undoubtedly, tours de force of a remarkable kind—so remarkable, indeed, that they condemn themselves as unfit topics for poetry. To be poetical about the very antithesis of poetry; to present the humbug and the materialist—and sympathetically, for that is one of the conditions of the problem—in a medium which presupposes sincerity and idealism as essentials,—such was the task Browning set himself in these studies. The failure was magnificent, but it was a failure; the pieces are rhetoric, ingenious and subtle rhetoric, not poetry in any sense of the term that regards its essence as well as its form.

Akin to these studies of problematische Naturen—'humours' Ben Jonson called them—is his portrait-gallery of historical celebrities, or rather obscurities, his Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day, a title of one of his works that would cover a large section of them. It is characteristic of his method that his subjects are, in almost every case, nonentities. No literary artist who has had anything like his power of projecting himself into the past has refrained so rigidly from dealing with the great ones, the successes of history. His interest is with the failures; why they failed, how often their seeming failure is the highest success, the battling of the brave but weak soul with the might of circumstance—these are the favourite themes of his historic imagination. Hence a somewhat exaggerated impression of the extent of his learning. By the very exigencies of the case his dramatis personæ had to be obscurities, and, owing to his intimate relations with Italy, these were mostly Italian obscurities, of whom Englishmen had no knowledge. Hence the impression, 'If he knows the obscurities so well, how well must he know the greater lights of history!' Put thus, one sees the non sequitur. He sought for the curiosities of history, and found them in volumes of memoirs, causes célèbres, and books like Wanley's Wonders of the Little World. He revived in this one of the favourite topics of the Middle Ages, the Fall of Princes, the Mirror for Magistrates, and his portraits recall the exempla of the mediæval moralists and sermonisers. In this again he was on the search for dramatic situations, and he was chiefly interested in the pathos of disappointment.

It is here that his spiritual influence has been most profound. No English poet has felt like Browning the pathos of the battle of life. Yet keenly as he felt it, he did not despair nor bid the world despair. 'We bid ye be of good hope' was his message to the seeming failures in life, a class of ever-growing importance in this self-conscious age. His philosophy of life was eminently manly, and has brought cheer to many a despairing soul. If we could condense it into a formula, the maxim would run, 'Aspiration is achievement.' Herein his philosophy approached closely one of the implicit assumptions of the worldly life. The man of the world regards every experience as such as a gain, apart from its moral implications. It is better to have sinned and lived than never to have lived at all—never, that is, to have developed one's own personality. Much of Browning's thought comes perilously near this, and is only redeemed from it by his acute sense of the mordant poignancy of the conscience-pang. On the whole, his influence is of the very highest kind in this part of his work. It acts as a moral tonic to be brought in contact with such a manly, cheery soul, that does not faintly trust the larger hope, but is confidently sure that in aiming at the highest we are doing the best for our best selves.

Nowhere is his influence higher in this regard than in his love poems, the highest test of a poet's powers. The world is right in thinking that the chief business of the poet is to express love and to teach how to love. Browning's love poems are equally remarkable for their range and for their intensity. Nowhere in English literature does this passion of love burn higher or burn purer. The passion that pulsates through In a Balcony or In a Gondola is as intense as anything in Heine, and yet it is purged of all fleshly dross. Not by any sacrifice of body to spirit, nor by any lapse into sickly sentimentalism, does Browning reach this result. The claims of the whole being, body and spirit, are admitted to the utmost, and as a consequence those of the former die away in the serener glow of the spiritual passion. As Browning regarding the struggle of life the contest of soul with soul or against all souls is eminently a man, so in his depicting of love the union of soul with soul he is preeminently the gentleman. Refinement is of the very soul of him, and that without, as so often happens, any loss of virile strength. Here more than anywhere we trace the influence of his marriage, that ideal union of two equally gifted souls which is unique in the world's history. How abiding was this influence was shown but a few months before his death in the Fitzgerald incident. It was clear enough to the dispassionate observer that Fitzgerald was speaking of Mrs. Browning the writer, not Mrs. Browning the woman. But Browning could be no dispassionate observer of the slightest aspersion on his wife, and in a spirit of almost boyish gallantry struck out on behalf of the wife who had been taken from his side more than a quarter of a century.

This is, perhaps, the place to treat of Browning's humour—a necessary side of a complete poetic nature, indeed of any complete man. Browning's gift in this direction was large, as witness the Piper, The Two Poets of Croisic, and the whole series of studies of humbugs and nonentities to which we have referred. But it is somewhat one-sided, allied to his interest in the pathetic, and thus somewhat grim. But it is never cynical, except when dealing with cynics; and though it is rarely hearty or a direct object of his art, it is always refined and manly. Mr. Ruskin, in a passage remarkable for its insight and for the quarter whence it comes, notices how inevitably the strongest English poetic force tends to degenerate into coarseness. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dryden, Byron, are instances of what he means. Browning is the exception to the rule—he has the strength of these, but he has not their coarseness—and here again we probably have to thank the influence of the Lyric Love that interpenetrated his whole being during the greater part of his life.

All the qualities we have been noticing—his virile strength, his humour, his refinement, his interest in the pathetic, the pureness and intensity of his passion, his interest in the obscurities of history, his fertility and manysidedness, his eye for the dramatic situation, but want of the true dramatic instinct—all these qualities culminate in The Ring and the Book, his greatest work in point of size and in the sense it gives us of his sustained power. But the whole impression is one of power misdirected. Not to speak of the irritating bizarreries of the advocates and of the fractions of Rome, the whole method of the book is anti-poetical. Poetic truth does not consist in displaying the facets of truth disconnectedly: the poet sees life singly and sees it whole, and should enable us so to see it. But if the experiment of trying to give the totality of truth by presenting its dislocated parts in small doses is a failure, what gigantic powers are displayed in the failure! The Titan piles Pelion on Ossa, and if he fails to reach the all-commanding heights of Olympus, the massy pile remains as an enduring monument of his strength; and the incidental successes on the way to the failure would be sufficient to found a dozen poetic reputations. The contrast of Guide's two soliloquies, Pompilia's purity, the Pope's placid objectivity—these and a thousand other points betray the master's hand. It has been said that the whole concentrated energy of Vanity Fair finds a vent through Colonel Crawley's knuckles as he stretches the marquis at his wife's feet. So the whole pathos and tragedy of The Ring and the Book finds utterance in Guido's last words:

Abate—Cardinal—Christ—Maria—God, …
Pompilia, will you let them murder me?

but the highest order of poet one that controls his faculties instead of being controlled by them—would not have been led astray from such effects as these by over-refinements of intellectual subtlety.

There we reach the last quality of Browning's mind of which we need take explicit notice, and this intellectual subtlety is the disturbing element in his art. He is both too intellectual and too subtle. These are qualities the reverse of poetical. Not that a poet need be a fool or dense. But the things of the intellect must be subordinate to the purposes of his art, not objects of independent interest. The intellect analyses and abstracts, poetry synthesises and concretes. In consequence of Browning's interest in the gambollings of the human intellect, and especially of his own intellect, much of his work reads like so many exercises in forensic dialectics. 'What a grand Q.C. the world has lost!' is our thought, but that is not a thought that a great poet should arouse. The Browningites, with the perverse ingenuity of the uncritical worshipper, lay stress upon this side of the poet's characteristics as if it were his most desirable quality. 'He is so subtle,' say they, and think they have thereby pronounced his greatest praise. Profound a poet should be, but hardly subtle. All art is at root selective; the poet's art consists in selecting out of the mass of thoughts and feelings which a poetic subject arouses in his soul those streams of thought and emotion that are essential to the subject. But Browning too often did not select, but gave, or attempted to give, the whole mass. The outcome has its interest—the interest of the riddle and the puzzle, which have their attraction for the uncultivated or the immature mind. But it is a vital mistake to confuse this interest, as the Browningites do, with the poetic effect which the poet quâ poet alone arrives at. 'How clever I am to have solved that!' is the feeling produced by the solution of the riddle. We have no quarrel with the feeling, but it is vastly different from the proper ejaculation after being moved by the poet, 'How noble to have felt that!'

Akin to this is the error of placing in the forefront of his work the argumentative disquisitions on theological subjects, which form no inconsiderable portion of his poetical activity. There is no reason why a poet should not be a theologian; in these days, which have seen more theological disquisition than any period since the Council of Trent, there is every reason why a poet should share in such an absorbing interest of the audience he addresses. But he has not to display the processes of his thoughts on theology; he has only to give results in imaginative form. Browning has shown how to do this in Rabbi ben Ezra, but he has also shown us how not to do it in La Saisiaz. The poet may be—nay, he must be—very sure of God and of an eternal soul, but he is to convince us by his very sureness, not by process of reasoning.

We have now touched on all the sides of the poetic activity of Browning which need touching upon for the purpose of indicating the poetic force of the man, the large stores of spiritual energy which are contained in his works. But poetry has form as well as force, and we know but half of a poet's art when we have measured his poetic force. And in judging of Browning's poetic form there can be no hesitation about the verdict. He was faulty in form almost always faultless scarcely ever. Often, indeed, his choice of metre struck a false note from the start; he wrote argument in jerky trochaics, he expressed lyric emotion in blank verse. Such lapses in a man of sure touch in matters of this sort point to some inherent defect in the poet's method. Worse even than this was the over-subtlety of intellect to which we have already referred, and which is at the root of his so-called obscurity. He attempted not only to give the emotive iridescence of the poetic afflatus, but also at the same time to suggest the accompanying inrush of clustering thoughts. The psychology of the poetic afflatus is obscure, but one thing is at least certain about it. Under the inrush of the emotive impulse the poet remains master of his passion, directing it into artistic channels. Browning had this power to the highest, and misused it. He attempted the impossible task of setting forth in verse the totality of impressions, emotional, æsthetic, and intellectual, which his object made upon him. When one reflects on what the totality of impressions on such a nature as Browning's must mean, one recognises the impossibility of the task. To make even an approach to it he had to write in a kind of lyric shorthand, and his sentences become congested with suggestion. Hence their stimulating effect,, but it is not a poetical one. The poet's art consists in selecting one particular order of impressions out of the totality which 'inspires' him. To attempt to give the whole is, we will not say inartistic, but extra-artistic. The poetic influence is diffracted and dispersed among the conflicting orders of interest that are aroused. It is much the same effect, to use a homely illustration, as is produced by the attempt to watch Barnum's five performances all at once. Only one art is capable of producing unity amid such complexity; not poetry, but music, was the art in which Browning's method was possible. His whole conception of poetic form was consequently false, and goes far to mar the greatest poetic force England has seen for centuries. Perhaps the secret of the matter was that his imagination was less intense than that of most poets of anything like his power. With them the vivid mental picture enables them to concentrate attention on it, and to inhibit, as the psychologists say, the crowd of surging thoughts that accompany it. That Browning had less of this visual insight than most poets is shown by the comparative infrequency of descriptive passages as well as by a certain lack of minute observation of externals. His insight was into the soul of things. His translations from the Greek brought out his imperfect form in a most instructive way. While he reproduced their spirit very effectually, he was hopelessly inadequate in representing their form. It was as if Greek temples had been transformed into Gothic cathedrals. The sense of rugged power is always with us, rarely or never the impression of god-like grace. He was of the Titans, not of the Gods.

Standing by his open grave, we give the last thought to the man we have lost as well as the poet. His warm geniality made him a universal favourite in society. If to some it seems incongruous to think of the vates sacer at the five o'clock tea-table, it must be remembered that the spiritual influence of such a nature would radiate through the very class that needs idealising. With him has gone a spiritual force of the first magnitude. The firm friend, the free giver, the sympathiser in all the higher forms of the nation's life, the inspirer of painting, music, and the higher criticism—all these are gone in Robert Browning the man. And notwithstanding all deductions of faulty form, of infelicitous choice of subject and medium, a large body of work remains of Browning the poet in which these imperfections were reduced to a minimum. If aspiration were indeed achievement, Robert Browning would have been the greatest name in the roll of English poets; and even as it is, his work will rank among the greatest spiritual forces of England.