An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry
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Title: An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry
Author: Robert Browning
Hiram Corson
Release date: July 5, 2008 [eBook #260]
Most recently updated: November 3, 2016
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/260
Credits: Produced by A. Light, Byron Bakker, and David Widger
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF ROBERT BROWNING'S POETRY ***
Produced by A. Light, and Byron Bakker
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF ROBERT BROWNING’S POETRY
by Hiram Corson
[This etext was prepared from a 1910 printing.
This third edition was originally published in 1886.]
Hiram Corson, LL.D., Professor of English Literature in the Cornell
University; Author of “An Introduction to the Study of Shakespeare”, “A
Primer of English Verse, chiefly in its Aesthetic and Organic
Character”, “The Aims of Literary Study”, etc.
“Subtlest Assertor of the Soul in song.”
{There are several Greek phrases in this book. ASCII cannot represent
the Greek characters, so if you are interested in these phrases,
use the following map. Hopefully these phrases will not be mistaken
for another language. . . .
ASCII to Greek
A,a alpha
B,b beta
G,g gamma
D,d delta
E,e epsilon
Z,z zeta
H,h eta
Q,q theta
I,i iota
K,k kappa
L,l lambda
M,m mi/mu
N,n ni/nu
J,j ksi/xi
O,o omikron/omicron
P,p pi
R,r rho
S,s,c sigma
T,t tau
U,u ypsilon/upsilon
F,f phi
X,x chi/khi
Y,y psi
W,w omega
‘,‘,/,\,^ Accents, follow the vowel. You figure them out.}
{The following is transcribed from a letter (from Browning to Corson)
which Corson chose to use in facsimile form to begin his text.
Unfortunately (or fortunately), it will be regular text here.}
19. Warwick Crescent.
W.
Dec. 28. ‘86
My dear Dr. Corson,
I waited some days after the arrival of your Book and Letter,
thinking I might be able to say more of my sense of your goodness:
but I can do no more now than a week ago. You “hope I shall not find
too much to disapprove of”: what I ought to protest against,
is “a load to sink a navy--too much honor”: how can I put aside
your generosity, as if cold justice--however befitting myself--
would be in better agreement with your nature? Let it remain
as an assurance to younger poets that, after fifty years’ work
unattended by any conspicuous recognition, an over-payment may be made,
if there be such another munificent appreciator as I have been
privileged to find, in which case let them, even if more deserving,
be equally grateful.
I have not observed anything in need of correction in the notes.
The “little Tablet” was a famous “Last Supper”, mentioned by Vasari,
(page. 232), and gone astray long ago from the Church of S. Spirito:
it turned up, according to report, in some obscure corner,
while I was in Florence, and was at once acquired by a stranger.
I saw it, genuine or no, a work of great beauty. (Page 156.)
“A canon”, in music, is a piece wherein the subject is repeated--
in various keys: and being strictly obeyed in the repetition,
becomes the “Canon”--the imperative law--to what follows.
Fifty of such parts would be indeed a notable peal:
to manage three is enough of an achievement for a good musician.
And now,--here is Christmas: all my best wishes go to you
and Mrs Corson. Those of my sister also. She was indeed suffering
from grave indisposition in the summer, but is happily recovered.
I could not venture, under the circumstances, to expose
her convalescence to the accidents of foreign travel:
hence our contenting ourselves with Wales rather than Italy.
Shall you be again induced to visit us? Present or absent,
you will remember me always, I trust, as
Yours most affectionately,
Robert Browning.
“Quanta subtilitate ipsa corda hominum reserat, intimos mentis
recessus explorat, varios animi motus perscrutatur.
Quod ad tragoediam antiquiorem attinet, interpretatus est,
uti nostis omnes, non modo Aeschylum quo nemo sublimior,
sed etiam Euripidem quo nemo humanior; quo fit ut etiam illos
qui Graece nesciunt, misericordia tangat Alcestis,
terrore tangat Hercules. Recentiora argumenta tragica cum lyrico
quodam scribendi genere coniunxit, duas Musas et Melpomenen
et Euterpen simul veneratus. Musicae miracula quis dignius cecinit?
Pictoris Florentini sine fraude vitam quasi inter crepuscula
vesperascentem coloribus quam vividis depinxit. Vesperi quotiens,
dum foco adsidemus, hoc iubente resurgit Italia. Vesperi nuper,
dum huius idyllia forte meditabar, Cami inter arundines mihi videbar
vocem magnam audire clamantis, Pa\n o‘ me/gas ou’ te/qnhken.
Vivit adhuc Pan ipse, cum Marathonis memoria et Pheidippidis
velocitate immortali consociatus.”
--Eulogium pronounced by
Mr. J. E. Sandys, Public Orator at the University of Cambridge,
on presenting Mr. Browning for the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws,
June 10, 1879.
PREFACE.
The purpose of the present volume is to afford some aid and guidance
in the study of Robert Browning’s Poetry, which, being the most
complexly subjective of all English poetry, is, for that reason alone,
the most difficult. And then the poet’s favorite art-form,
the dramatic, or, rather, psychologic, monologue, which is quite
original with himself, and peculiarly adapted to the constitution
of his genius and to the revelation of themselves by the several
“dramatis personae”, presents certain structural difficulties,
but difficulties which, with an increased familiarity,
grow less and less. The exposition presented in the Introduction,
of its constitution and skilful management, and the Arguments given
of the several poems included in the volume, will, it is hoped,
reduce, if not altogether remove, the difficulties of this kind.
In the same section of the Introduction, certain peculiarities
of the poet’s diction, which sometimes give a check to the reader’s
understanding of a passage, are presented and illustrated.
I think it not necessary to offer any apology for my going all the way
back to Chaucer, and noting the Ebb and Flow in English Poetry
down to the present time, of the spirituality which constitutes
the real life of poetry, and which should, as far as possible,
be brought to the consciousness and appreciation of students.
What I mean by spirituality is explained in my treatment
of the subject. The degree to which poetry is quickened with it
should always enter into an estimate of its absolute worth.
It is that, indeed, which constitutes its absolute worth.
The weight of thought conveyed, whatever that be, will not compensate
for the absence of it.
The study of poetry, in our institutions of learning, so far as I
have taken note of it, and the education induced thereby,
are almost purely intellectual. The student’s spiritual nature
is left to take care of itself; and the consequence is that he becomes,
at best, only a thinking and analyzing machine.
The spiritual claims of the study of poetry are especially demanded
in the case of Browning’s poetry. Browning is generally
and truly regarded as the most intellectual of poets.
No poetry in English literature, or in any literature,
is more charged with discursive thought than his. But he is,
at the same time, the most spiritual and transcendental of poets,
the “subtlest assertor of the Soul in Song”. His thought is never
an end to itself, but is always subservient to an ulterior
spiritual end--always directed towards “a presentment of
the correspondency of the universe to Deity, of the natural to
the spiritual, and of the actual to the ideal”; and it is
all-important that students should be awakened, and made,
as far as possible, responsive to this spiritual end.
The sections of the Introduction on Personality and Art
were read before the Browning Society of London, in June, 1882.
I have seen no reason for changing or modifying, in any respect,
the views therein expressed.
The idea of personality as a quickening, regenerating power,
and the idea of art as an intermediate agency of personality,
are, perhaps, the most reiterated (implicitly, not explicitly)
in Browning’s poetry, and lead up to the dominant idea of Christianity,
the idea of a Divine Personality; the idea that the soul,
to use an expression from his earliest poem, ‘Pauline’,
must “rest beneath some better essence than itself in weakness”.
The notes to the poems will be found, I trust, to cover all points
and features of the text which require explanation and elucidation.
I have not, at any rate, wittingly passed by any real difficulties.
Whether my explanations and interpretations will in all cases
be acceptable, remains to be seen.
Hiram Corson.
Cascadilla Cottage, Ithaca, N.Y.
September, 1886.
Note to the Second Edition.
In this edition, several errors of the first have been corrected.
For the notes on “fifty-part canon”, p. 156, and “a certain precious
little tablet”, p. 232, I am indebted to Mr. Browning.
H. C.
{p. 156--in this etext, see line 322 of “The Flight of the Duchess”,
in the Poems section. p. 232--see Stanza 30 of “Old Pictures
in Florence”, also in the Poems section.}
Note to the Third Edition.
In this edition have been added, ‘A Death in the Desert’,
with argument, notes, and commentary, a fac-simile of a letter
from the poet, and a portrait copied from a photograph
(the last taken of him) which he gave me when visiting him in Venice,
a month before his death.
It may be of interest, and of some value, to many students
of Browning’s poetry, to know a reply he made, in regard to
the expression in ‘My Last Duchess’, “I gave commands; then all smiles
stopped together.”
We were walking up and down the great hall of the Palazzo Rezzonico,
when, in the course of what I was telling him about the study
of his works in the United States, I alluded to the divided opinion
as to the meaning of the above expression in ‘My Last Duchess’,
some understanding that the commands were to put the Duchess to death,
and others, as I have explained the expression on p. 87 of this volume
(last paragraph). {For etext use, section III (Browning’s Obscurity)
of the Introduction, sixth paragraph before the end of the section.}
He made no reply, for a moment, and then said, meditatively, “Yes,
I meant that the commands were that she should be put to death.”
And then, after a pause, he added, with a characteristic dash
of expression, and as if the thought had just started in his mind,
“Or he might have had her shut up in a convent.” This was to me
very significant. When he wrote the expression, “I gave commands”,
etc., he may not have thought definitely what the commands were,
more than that they put a stop to the smiles of the sweet Duchess,
which provoked the contemptible jealousy of the Duke. This was all
his art purpose required, and his mind did not go beyond it.
I thought how many vain discussions take place in Browning Clubs,
about little points which are outside of the range
of the artistic motive of a composition, and how many minds
are occupied with anything and everything under the sun,
except the one thing needful (the artistic or spiritual motive),
the result being “as if one should be ignorant of nothing concerning
the scent of violets, except the scent itself.”
H.C.
CONTENTS.
PREFACE.
INTRODUCTION.
I. The Spiritual Ebb and Flow exhibited in English Poetry
from Chaucer to Tennyson and Browning.
{This section contains Browning’s ‘Popularity’ and many excerpts.}
II. The Idea of Personality and of Art as an intermediate agency
of Personality, as embodied in Browning’s Poetry.
III. Mr. Browning’s “Obscurity”.
{This section contains Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’}
IV. Browning’s Verse.
V. Arguments of the Poems.
Wanting is--What?
My Star.
The Flight of the Duchess.
The Last Ride Together.
By the Fireside.
Prospice.
Amphibian.
James Lee’s Wife.
A Tale.
Confessions.
Respectability.
Home-Thoughts from Abroad.
Home-Thoughts from the Sea.
Old Pictures in Florence.
Pictor Ignotus.
Andrea del Sarto.
Fra Lippo Lippi.
A Face.
The Bishop orders his Tomb.
A Toccata of Galuppi’s.
Abt Vogler.
‘Touch him ne’er so lightly’, etc.
Memorabilia.
How it strikes a Contemporary.
“Transcendentalism”.
Apparent Failure.
Rabbi Ben Ezra.
A Grammarian’s Funeral.
An Epistle containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish,
the Arab Physician.
A Martyr’s Epitaph.
Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister.
Holy-Cross Day.
Saul.
A Death in the Desert.
POEMS.
Wanting is--What?
My Star.
The Flight of the Duchess.
The Last Ride Together.
By the Fireside.
Prospice.
Amphibian.
James Lee’s Wife.
A Tale.
Confessions.
Respectability.
Home Thoughts, from Abroad.
Home Thoughts, from the Sea.
Old Pictures in Florence.
Pictor Ignotus.
Andrea del Sarto.
Fra Lippo Lippi.
A Face.
The Bishop orders his Tomb.
A Toccata of Galuppi’s.
Abt Vogler.
“Touch him ne’er so lightly.”
Memorabilia.
How it strikes a Contemporary.
“Transcendentalism”:
Apparent Failure.
Rabbi Ben Ezra.
A Grammarian’s Funeral.
An Epistle containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish,
the Arab Physician.
A Martyr’s Epitaph.
Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister.
Holy-Cross Day.
Saul.
A Death in the Desert.
A LIST OF CRITICISMS OF BROWNING’S WORKS.
INTRODUCTION.
I. The Spiritual Ebb and Flow exhibited in English Poetry from Chaucer to Tennyson and Browning.
Literature, in its most restricted art-sense, is an expression
in letters of the life of the spirit of man co-operating with
the intellect. Without the co-operation of the spiritual man,
the intellect produces only thought; and pure thought,
whatever be the subject with which it deals, is not regarded
as literature, in its strict sense. For example, Euclid’s ‘Elements’,
Newton’s ‘Principia’, Spinoza’s ‘Ethica’, and Kant’s
‘Critique of the Pure Reason’, do not properly belong to literature.
(By the “spiritual” I would be understood to mean the whole domain
of the emotional, the susceptible or impressible, the sympathetic,
the intuitive; in short, that mysterious something in the constitution
of man by and through which he holds relationship with
the essential spirit of things, as opposed to the phenomenal
of which the senses take cognizance.)
The term literature is sometimes extended in meaning (and it may be
so extended), to include all that has been committed to letters,
on all subjects. There is no objection to such extension
in ordinary speech, no more than there is to that of the signification
of the word, “beauty” to what is purely abstract. We speak,
for example, of the beauty of a mathematical demonstration;
but beauty, in its strictest sense, is that which appeals to
the spiritual nature, and must, therefore, be concrete, personal,
not abstract. Art beauty is the embodiment, adequate,
effective embodiment, of co-operative intellect and spirit,--
“the accommodation,” in Bacon’s words, “of the shows of things
to the desires of the mind.”
It follows that the relative merit and importance of different periods
of a literature should be determined by the relative degrees
of spirituality which these different periods exhibit.
The intellectual power of two or more periods, as exhibited
in their literatures, may show no marked difference,
while the spiritual vitality of these same periods may
very distinctly differ. And if it be admitted that literature proper
is the product of co-operative intellect and spirit (the latter being
always an indispensable factor, though there can be no high order
of literature that is not strongly articulated, that is not
well freighted, with thought), it follows that the periods
of a literature should be determined by the ebb and flow
of spiritual life which they severally register, rather than
by any other considerations. There are periods which
are characterized by a “blindness of heart”, an inactive,
quiescent condition of the spirit, by which the intellect
is more or less divorced from the essential, the eternal,
and it directs itself to the shows of things. Such periods may embody
in their literatures a large amount of thought,--thought which is
conversant with the externality of things; but that of itself
will not constitute a noble literature, however perfect
the forms in which it may be embodied, and the general sense
of the civilized world, independently of any theories of literature,
will not regard such a literature as noble. It is made up of what
must be, in time, superseded; it has not a sufficiently large element
of the essential, the eternal, which can be reached only through
the assimilating life of the spirit. The spirit may be
so “cabined, cribbed, confined” as not to come to any consciousness
of itself; or it may be so set free as to go forth and recognize
its kinship, respond to the spiritual world outside of itself, and,
by so responding, KNOW what merely intellectual philosophers
call the UNKNOWABLE.
To turn now to the line of English poets who may be said to have
passed the torch of spiritual life, from lifted hand to hand,
along the generations. And first is
“the morning star of song, who made
His music heard below:
“Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath
Preluded those melodious bursts that fill
The spacious times of great Elizabeth
With sounds that echo still.”
Chaucer exhibits, in a high degree, this life of the spirit,
and it is the secret of the charm which his poetry possesses for us
after a lapse of five hundred years. It vitalizes, warms, fuses,
and imparts a lightsomeness to his verse; it creeps and kindles
beneath the tissues of his thought. When we compare Dryden’s
modernizations of Chaucer with the originals, we see the difference
between the verse of a poet, with a healthy vitality of spirit, and,
through that healthy vitality of spirit, having secret dealings
with things, and verse which is largely the product of the rhetorical
or literary faculty. We do not feel, when reading the latter,
that any unconscious might co-operated with the conscious powers
of the writer. But we DO feel this when we read Chaucer’s verse.
All of the Canterbury Tales have originals or analogues,
most of which have been reproduced by the London Chaucer Society.
Not one of the tales is of Chaucer’s own invention. And yet they may
all be said to be original, in the truest, deepest sense of the word.
They have been vitalized from the poet’s own soul. He has infused
his own personality, his own spirit-life, into his originals;
he has “created a soul under the ribs of death.” It is this
infused vitality which will constitute the charm of
the Canterbury Tales for all generations of English speaking
and English reading people. This life of the spirit,
of which I am speaking, as distinguished from the intellect,
is felt, though much less distinctly, in a contemporary work,
‘The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman’.
What the author calls “KIND WIT”, that is, “natural intelligence”,
has, generally, the ascendency. We meet, however,
with powerful passages, wherein the thoughts are aglow
with the warmth from the writer’s inner spirit. He shows at times
the moral indignation of a Hebrew prophet.
The ‘Confessio Amantis’ of John Gower, another contemporary work,
exhibits comparatively little of the life of the spirit,
either in its verse or in its thought. The thought rarely passes
the limit of natural intelligence. The stories, which the poet drew
from the ‘Gesta Romanorum’ and numerous other sources, can hardly
be said to have been BORN AGAIN. The verse is smooth and fluent,
but the reader feels it to be the product of literary skill.
It wants what can be imparted only by an unconscious might
back of the consciously active and trained powers. It is this
unconscious might which John Keats, in his ‘Sleep and Poetry’,
speaks of as “might half slumbering on its own right arm”,
and which every reader, with the requisite susceptibility,
can always detect in the verse of a true poet.
In the interval between Chaucer and Spenser, this life of the spirit
is not distinctly marked in any of its authors, not excepting even
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, whose sad fate gave a factitious interest
to his writings. It is more noticeable in Thomas Sackville,
Lord Buckhurst’s ‘Induction to the Mirror for Magistrates’, which,
in the words of Hallam, “forms a link which unites the school
of Chaucer and Lydgate to the ‘Faerie Queene’.”
The Rev. James Byrne, of Trinity College, Dublin, in his lecture on
‘The Influence of National Character on English Literature’,
remarks of Spenser: “After that dark period which separated him
from Chaucer, after all the desolation of the Wars of the Roses,
and all the deep trials of the Reformation, he rose on England as if,
to use an image of his own,
“‘At last the golden orientall gate
Of greatest heaven gan to open fayre,
And Phoebus, fresh as brydegrome to his mate,
Came dauncing forth, shaking his deawie hayre,
And hurled his glistering beams through gloomy ayre.’
“That baptism of blood and fire through which England passed
at the Reformation, raised both Protestant and Catholic to a newness
of life. That mighty working of heart and mind with which the nation
then heaved throughout, went through every man and woman,
and tried what manner of spirits they were of. What a preparation
was this for that period of our literature in which man,
the great actor of the drama of life, was about to appear on the stage!
It was to be expected that the drama should then start into life,
and that human character should speak from the stage
with a depth of life never known before; but who could have
imagined Shakespeare?”
And what a new music burst upon the world in Spenser’s verse!
His noble stanza, so admirably adapted to pictorial effect,
has since been used by some of the greatest poets of the literature,
Thomson, Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Shelley, and numerous others;
but none of them, except in rare instances, have drawn the music
out of it which Spenser drew.
Professor Goldwin Smith well remarks, in his article
on Mark Pattison’s Milton, “The great growths of poetry have coincided
with the great bursts of national life, and the great bursts
of national life have hitherto been generally periods
of controversy and struggle. Art itself, in its highest forms,
has been the expression of faith. We have now people who profess
to cultivate art for its own sake; but they have hardly produced
anything which the world accepts as great, though they have supplied
some subjects for ‘Punch’.”
Spenser who, of all the great English poets, is regarded
by some critics as the most remote from real life,
and the least reflecting his age, is, nevertheless, filled with
the spirit of his age--its chivalric, romantic, patriotic, moral,
and religious spirit. When he began to write, the nation had
just passed through the fiery furnace of a religious persecution,
and was rejoicing in its deliverance from the papistical rule of Mary.
The devotion to the new queen with which it was inspired was grateful,
generous, enthusiastic, and even romantic. This devotion
Spenser’s great poem everywhere reflects, and it has been
justly pronounced to be the best exponent of the subtleties
of that Calvinism which was the aristocratic form of Protestantism
at that time in both France and England.
The renewed spiritual life which set in so strongly with Spenser,
reached its springtide in Shakespeare. It was the secret
of that sense of moral proportion which pervades his plays.
Moral proportion cannot be secured through the laws of the ancients,
or through any formulated theory of art. It was, I am assured,
through his deep and sensitive spirit-life that Shakespeare felt
the universal spirit and constitution of the world as fully, perhaps,
as the human soul, in this life, is capable of feeling it. Through it
he took cognizance of the workings of nature, and of the life of man,
BY DIRECT ASSIMILATION OF THEIR HIDDEN PRINCIPLES,--
principles which cannot be reached through an observation,
by the natural intelligence, of the phenomenal. He thus became
possessed of a knowledge, or rather wisdom, far beyond
his conscious observation and objective experience.
Shakespeare may be regarded as the first and the last
great artistic physiologist or natural historian of the passions;
and he was this by virtue of the life of the spirit, which enabled him
to reproduce sympathetically the whole range of human passion
within himself. He was the first of the world’s dramatists
that exhibited the passions in their evolutions, and in
their subtlest complications. And the moral proportion he preserved
in exhibiting the complex and often wild play of the passions
must have been largely due to the harmony of his soul
with the constitution of things. What the Restoration dramatists
regarded or understood as moral proportion, was not moral proportion
at all, but a proportion fashioned according to merely conventional
ideas of justice. Shakespeare’s moral proportion appeared to them,
in their low spiritual condition, a moral chaos, which they
set about converting, in some of his great plays, into a cosmos;
and a sad muss, if not a ridiculous muss, they made of it.
Signal examples of this are the ‘rifacimenti’ of the Tempest by Dryden
and Davenant, the King Lear by Tate, and the Antony and Cleopatra
(entitled ‘All for Love, or the World well Lost’) by Dryden.
In Milton, though there is a noticeable, an even distinctly marked,
reduction of the life of the spirit (in the sense in which I have been
using these words) exhibited by Shakespeare, it is still very strong
and efficient, and continues uninfluenced by the malign atmosphere
around him the last fifteen years of his life, which were lived
in the reign of Charles II. Within that period he wrote
the ‘Paradise Lost’, ‘Paradise Regained’, and ‘Samson Agonistes’.
“Milton,” says Emerson, “was the stair or high table-land to let down
the English genius from the summits of Shakespeare.”
“These heights could not be maintained. They were followed by
a meanness and a descent of the mind into lower levels;
the loss of wings; no high speculation. Locke, to whom the meaning
of ideas was unknown, became the type of philosophy,
and his “understanding” the measure, in all nations,
of the English intellect. His countrymen forsook the lofty sides
of Parnassus, on which they had once walked with echoing steps,
and disused the studies once so beloved; the powers of thought
fell into neglect.”
The highest powers of thought cannot be realized without the life
of the spirit. It is this, as I have already said, which has been
the glory of the greatest thinkers since the world began;
not their intellects, but the co-operating, unconscious power
IMMANENT in their intellects.
During the Restoration period, and later, spiritual life
was at its very lowest ebb. I mean, spiritual life
as exhibited in the poetic and dramatic literature of the time,
whose poisoned fountain-head was the dissolute court of Charles II.
All the slops of that court went into the drama,
all the ‘sentina reipublicae’, the bilge water of the ship of state.
The dramatic writers of the time, to use the words of St. Paul
in his letter to the Ephesians, “walked in the vanity of their mind;
having the understanding darkened, being alienated from
the life of God through the ignorance that was in them
because of the blindness of their heart; who, being past feeling,
gave themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness
with greediness.” The age, as Emerson says, had no live, distinct,
actuating convictions. It was in even worse than a negative condition.
As represented by its drama and poetry, it may almost be said
to have repudiated the moral sentiment. A spiritual disease
affected the upper classes, which continued down into the reign
of the Georges. There appears to have been but little belief
in the impulse which the heart imparts to the intellect,
or that the latter draws greatness from the inspiration of the former.
There was a time in the history of the Jews in which, it is recorded,
“there was no open vision”. It can be said, emphatically,
that in the time of Charles II. there was no open vision.
And yet that besotted, that spiritually dark age, which was afflicted
with pneumatophobia, flattered itself that there had never been an age
so flooded with light. The great age of Elizabeth (which designation
I would apply to the period of fifty years or more, from 1575 to 1625,
or somewhat later), in which the human faculties, in their whole range,
both intellectual and spiritual, reached such a degree of expansion
as they had never before reached in the history of the world,--
that great age, I say, the age of Spenser, Sidney, Marlowe,
Shakespeare, Bacon, Raleigh, Hooker, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher,
Chapman, Dekker, Ford, Herbert, Heywood, Massinger (and this list
of great names might be continued),--that great age, I say,
was regarded by the men of the Restoration period as barbarous
in comparison with their own. But beneath all, still lay
the restorative elements of the English character, which were to
reassert themselves and usher in a new era of literary productiveness,
the greatest since the Elizabethan age, and embodying
the highest ideals of life to which the race has yet attained.
We can account, to some extent, for this interregnum or spiritual life,
but only to some extent. The brutal heartlessness and licentiousness
of the court which the exiled Charles brought back with him,
and the release from Puritan restraint, explain partly
the state of things, or rather the degree to which the state of things
was pushed.
In the middle of the eighteenth century, or somewhat earlier,
the rise of the spiritual tide is distinctly observable.
We see a reaction setting in against the soulless poetry
which culminated in Alexander Pope, whose ‘Rape of the Lock’
is the masterpiece of that poetry. It is, in fact, the most brilliant
society-poem in the literature. De Quincey pronounces it to be,
though somewhat extravagantly, “the most exquisite monument
of playful fancy that universal literature offers.” Bishop Warburton,
one of the great critical authorities of the age, believed in
the infallibility of Pope, if not of THE Pope.
To notice but a few of the influences at work: Thomson sang
of the Seasons, and invited attention to the beauties of
the natural world, to which the previous generation had been blind
and indifferent. Bishop Percy published his ‘Reliques of Ancient
English Poetry’, thus awakening a new interest in the old ballads
which had sprung from the heart of the people, and contributing much
to free poetry from the yoke of the conventional and the artificial,
and to work a revival of natural unaffected feeling. Thomas Tyrwhitt
edited in a scholarly and appreciative manner, the Canterbury Tales
of Chaucer. James McPherson published what he claimed to be
translations from the poems of Ossian, the son of Fingal.
Whether genuine or not, these poems indicated the tendency of the time.
In Scotland, the old ballad spirit, which had continued to exist
with a vigor but little abated by the influence of the artificial,
mechanical school of poetry, was gathered up and intensified
in the songs of him “who walked in glory and in joy,
following his plow, along the mountain-side”, and who is entitled to
a high rank among the poetical reformers of the age.
It is not surprising that the great literary dictator in Percy’s day,
Dr. Samuel Johnson, should treat the old ballads with ridicule.
The good man had been trained in a different school of poetry,
and could not in his old age yield to the reactionary movement.
Bishop Warburton, who ranked next to Johnson in literary authority,
had nothing but sneering contempt to bestow upon upon the old ballads,
and this feeling was shared by many others in the foremost ranks
of literature and criticism. But in the face of all opposition,
and aided by the yearning for literary liberty that was abroad,
the old ballads grew more and more into favor. The influence of
this folklore was not confined to England. It extended across the sea,
and swayed the genius of such poets as Buerger and Goethe
and Schiller.
Along with the poetical revival in the eighteenth century,
came the great religious revival inaugurated by the Wesleys
and Whitefield; and of this revival, the poetry of William Cowper
was a direct product. But the two revivals were co-radical,--
one was not derived from the other. The long-suppressed
spiritual elements of the nation began to reassert themselves
in religion and in poetry. The Church had been as sound asleep
as the Muses.
Cowper belongs to the Whitefield side of the religious revival,
the Evangelicals, as they were called (those that remained within
the Establishment). In his poem entitled ‘Hope’, he vindicates
the memory of Whitefield under the name Leuconomus, a translation
into Greek, of White field. It was his conversion to Evangelicism
which gave him his inspiration and his themes. ‘The Task’ has been
as justly called the poem of Methodism as the ‘Paradise Lost’
has been called the epic of Puritanism. In it we are presented with
a number of pictures of the utterly fossilized condition of the clergy
of the day in the Established Church (see especially book II.,
vv. 326-832, in which he satirizes the clergy and the universities).
Cowper has been truly characterized by Professor Goldwin Smith,
as “the apostle of feeling to a hard age, to an artificial age,
the apostle of nature. He opened beneath the arid surface
of a polished but soulless society, a fountain of sentiment
which had long ceased to flow.”
The greatest things in this world are often done by those
who do not know they are doing them. This is especially true
of William Cowper. He was wholly unaware of the great mission
he was fulfilling; his contemporaries were wholly unaware of it.
And so temporal are the world’s standards, in the best of times,
that spiritual regenerators are not generally recognized until
long after they have passed away, when the results of what they did
are fully ripe, and philosophers begin to trace the original impulses.
“Only reapers, reaping early
In among the bearded barley,
Hear a song that echoes cheerly
From the river winding clearly
Down to towered Camelot:
And by the moon the reaper weary,
Piling sheaves in uplands airy,
Listening, whispers, ‘Tis the fairy
Lady of Shalott.”
John Burroughs, in his inspiring essay on Walt Whitman
entitled ‘The Flight of the Eagle’, quotes the following sentence
from a lecture on Burns, delivered by “a lecturer from over seas”,
whom he does not name: “When literature becomes dozy, respectable,
and goes in the smooth grooves of fashion, and copies and copies again,
something must be done; and to give life to that dying literature,
a man must be found not educated under its influence.”
Such a man I would say was William Cowper, who, in his weakness, was
“Strong to sanctify the poet’s high vocation”,
and who
“Testified this solemn truth, while phrenzy desolated,--
Nor man nor angel satisfies whom only God created.”
John Keats, in his poem entitled ‘Sleep and Poetry’,
has well characterized the soulless poetry of the period between
the Restoration and the poetical revival in the latter part
of the eighteenth century, but more especially of the Popian period.
After speaking of the greatness of his favorite poets
of the Elizabethan period, he continues:--
“Could all this be forgotten? Yes, a schism
Nurtured by foppery and barbarism,
Made great Apollo blush for this his land.
Men were thought wise who could not understand
His glories: with a puling infant’s force
They sway’d about upon a rocking-horse,
And thought it Pegasus.”
(Alluding to the rocking-horse movement of the Popian verse.)
“Ah dismal soul’d!
The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll’d
It’s gathering waves--ye felt it not. The blue
Bar’d its eternal bosom, and the dew
Of summer nights collected still to make
The morning precious: beauty was awake!
Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead
To things ye knew not of,--were closely wed
To musty laws lined out with wretched rule
And compass vile: so that ye taught a school
Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit,
Till, like the certain wands of Jacob’s wit,
Their verses tallied. Easy was the task:
A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask
Of Poesy. Ill-fated, impious race!
That blasphem’d the bright Lyrist to his face,
And did not know it,--no, they went about,
Holding a poor, decrepid standard out
Mark’d with most flimsy mottoes, and in large
The name of one Boileau!”
It was these lines that raised the ire of Byron, who regarded them
as an irreverent assault upon his favorite poet, Pope.
In the controversy occasioned by the Rev. W. L. Bowles’s strictures
on the Life and Writings of Pope, Byron perversely asks,
“Where is the poetry of which one-half is good? Is it the Aeneid?
Is it Milton’s? Is it Dryden’s? Is it any one’s except Pope’s
and Goldsmith’s, of which ALL is good?”
In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the spiritual flow
which, as I have said, set in about the middle of
the eighteenth century, and received its first great impulse
from William Cowper, reached its high tide in Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Shelley, Keats, Southey, and Byron. These poets were all,
more or less, influenced by that great moral convulsion,
the French revolution, which stirred men’s souls to their
deepest depths, induced a vast stimulation of the meditative faculties,
and contributed much toward the unfolding of the ideas
“on man, on nature, and on human life”, which have since
so vitalized English poetry. *
--
* “The agitation, the frenzy, the sorrow of the times,
reacted upon the human intellect, and FORCED men into meditation.
Their own nature was held up before them in a sterner form.
They were compelled to contemplate an ideal of man, far more colossal
than is brought forward in the tranquil aspects of society;
and they were often engaged, whether they would or not,
with the elementary problems of social philosophy. Mere danger
forced a man into thoughts which else were foreign to his habits.
Mere necessity of action forced him to decide.”
--Thomas De Quincey’s ‘Essay on Style’.
--
Wordsworth exhibited in his poetry, as they had never before
been exhibited, the permanent absolute relations of nature
to the human spirit, interpreted the relations between
the elemental powers of creation and the moral life of man,
and vindicated the inalienable birthright of the lowliest of men
to those inward “oracles of vital deity attesting the Hereafter.”
Wordsworth’s poetry is, in fact, so far as it bears upon
the natural world, a protest against the association theory of beauty
of the eighteenth century--a theory which was an offshoot of
the philosophy of Locke, well characterized by Macvicar,
in his ‘Philosophy of the Beautiful’ (Introd., pp. xv., xvi),
as “an ingenious hypothesis for the close of the eighteenth century,
when the philosophy then popular did not admit, as the ground
of any knowledge, anything higher than self-repetition
and the transformation of sensations.”
Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ is an imaginative expression
of that divine love which embraces all creatures, from the highest
to the lowest, of the consequences of the severance of man’s soul
from this animating principle of the universe, and of those
spiritual threshings by and through which it is brought again
under its blessed influence. In his ‘Cristabel’ he has exhibited
the dark principle of evil, lurking within the good,
and ever struggling with it. We read it in the spell the wicked witch
Geraldine works upon her innocent and unsuspecting protector;
we read it in the strange words which Geraldine addresses
to the spirit of the saintly mother who has approached to shield
from harm the beloved child for whom she died; we read it in the story
of the friendship and enmity between the Baron and Sir Roland de Vaux
of Tryermaine; we read it in the vision seen in the forest
by the minstrel Bard, of the bright green snake coiled around
the wings and neck of a fluttering dove; and, finally, we read it
in its most startling form, in the conclusion of the poem,
“A little child, a limber elf, singing, dancing to itself,” etc.,
wherein is exhibited the strange tendency to express love’s excess
“with words of unmeant bitterness”. This dark principle of evil,
we may suppose, after dwelling in the poet’s mind, in an abstract form,
crept into this broken poem, where it lies coiled up among
the choicest and most fragrant flowers, and occasionally springs
its warning rattle, and projects its forked tongue, to assure us of
its ugly presence.
Both these great poems show the influence of the revival of
the old English Ballads. Coleridge had drunk deep of their spirit.
Shelley and Byron were fully charged with the revolutionary spirit
of the time. Shelley, of all the poets of his generation,
had the most prophetic fervor in regard to the progress of
the democratic spirit. All his greatest poems are informed
with this fervor, but it is especially exhibited in
the ‘Prometheus Unbound’, which is, in the words of Todhunter,
“to all other lyrical poems what the ninth symphony is to all
other symphonies; and more than this, for Shelley has here
outsoared himself more unquestionably than Beethoven in his last
great orchestral work. . . . The Titan Prometheus is the incarnation
of the genius of humanity, chained and suffering under the tyranny
of the evil principle which at present rules over the world,
typified in Jupiter; the name Prometheus, FORESIGHT, connecting him
with that poetic imagination which is the true prophetic power,
penetrating the mystery of things, because, as Shelley implies,
it is a kind of divine Logos incarnate in man--a creative force
which dominates nature by acting in harmony with her.”
It is, perhaps, more correct to say of Byron, that he was charged
with the spirit of revolt rather than with the revolutionary spirit.
The revolutionary spirit was in him indefinite, inarticulate;
he offered nothing to put in the place of the social and political
evils against which he rebelled. There is nothing CONSTRUCTIVE
in his poetry. But if his great passion-capital, his keen
spiritual susceptibility, and his great power of vigorous expression,
had been brought into the service of constructive thought,
he might have been a restorative power in his generation.
The greatest loss which English poetry ever sustained,
was in the premature death of John Keats. What he would have done
had his life been spared, we have an assurance in what he has left us.
He was spiritually constituted to be one of the subtlest interpreters
of the secrets of life that the whole range of English poetry exhibits.
No poet ever more deeply felt “the vital connection of beauty
with truth”. He realized in himself his idea of the poet
expressed in his lines,--
“‘Tis the man who with a man
Is an equal, be he king,
Or poorest of the beggar-clan,
Or any other wondrous thing
A man may be ‘twixt ape and Plato;
‘Tis the man who with a bird,
Wren, or eagle, finds his way to
All its instincts; he hath heard
The lion’s roaring, and can tell
What his horny throat expresseth,
And to him the tiger’s yell
Comes articulate and presseth
On his ear like mother tongue.” *
--
* “We often think of Shelley and Keats together,
and they seem to have an attraction for minds of the same cast.
They were both exposed to the same influences, those revolutionary
influences in literature and religion which inaugurated a new period.
Yet there is a great contrast as well as a great similarity
between them, and it is interesting to remark the different
spiritual results in the case of these two different minds
subjected to conditions so similar in general, though different
in detail. Both felt the same need, the need of ESCAPE,
desiring to escape from the actual world in which they perceived
more evil than good, to some other ideal world which they had
to create for themselves. This is the point of their similarity;
their need and motive were the same, to escape from the limitations
of the present. But they escaped in different directions,
Keats into the past where he reconstructed a mythical Greek world
after the designs of his own fancy, Shelley into a future where
he sought in a new and distant era, in a new and distant world,
a refuge from the present. We may compare Keats’s ‘Hyperion’
with Shelley’s ‘Prometheus’, as both poems touch the same idea--
the dominion of elder gods usurped by younger, for Prometheus belonged
to the elder generation. The impression Keats gives us is that
he represents the dethroned gods in the sad vale, “far from
the fiery noon”, for the pleasure of moving among them himself,
and creates their lonely world as a retreat for his own spirit.
Whereas in the ‘Prometheus Unbound’ we feel that the scenes
laid in ancient days and built on Greek myths, have a direct relation
to the destinies of man, and that Shelley went back into the past
because he believed it was connected with the future,
and because he could use it as an artistic setting for exhibiting
an ideal world in the future.
“This problem of escape--to rescue the soul from the clutches
of time, ‘ineluctabile tempus’,--which Keats and Shelley
tried to resolve for themselves by creating a new world in the past
and the future, met Browning too. The new way which Browning
has essayed--the way in which he accepts the present and deals
with it, CLOSES with time instead of trying to elude it,
and discovers in the struggle that this time, ‘ineluctabile tempus’,
is really a faithful vassal of eternity, and that its limits serve
and do not enslave illimitable spirit.”
--From a Paper
by John B. Bury, B.A., Trin. Coll., Dublin, on Browning’s
‘Aristophanes’ Apology’, read at 38th meeting of the Browning Soc.,
Jan. 29, 1886.
--
Wordsworth, and the other poets I have named, Byron, Shelley, Keats,
and Coleridge, made such a protest against authority in poetry
as had been made in the 16th century against authority in religion;
and for this authority were substituted the soul-experiences
of the individual poet, who set his verse to the song that was
within him, and chose such subjects as would best embody and articulate
that song.
But by the end of the first quarter of the present century,
the great poetical billow, which was not indeed caused by,
but received an impulse from, the great political billow,
the French Revolution (for they were cognate or co-radical movements),
had quite spent itself, and English poetry was at a comparatively
low ebb. The Poetical Revolution had done its work.
A poetical interregnum of a few years’ duration followed,
in which there appeared to be a great reduction of the spiritual life
of which poetry is the outgrowth.
Mr. Edmund W. Gosse, in his article ‘On the Early Writings
of Robert Browning’, in the ‘Century’ for December, 1881,
has characterized this interregnum a little too contemptuously,
perhaps. There was, indeed, a great fall in the spiritual tide;
but it was not such a dead-low tide as Mr. Gosse would make it.
At length, in 1830, appeared a volume of poems by a young man,
then but twenty-one years of age, which distinctly marked
the setting in of a new order of things. It bore the following title:
‘Poems, chiefly Lyrical. By Alfred Tennyson, London:
Effingham Wilson, Royal Exchange, Cornhill, 1830.’ pp. 154.
The volume comprised fifty-three poems, among which were ‘The Poet’
and ‘The Poet’s Mind’. These two poems were emphatically indicative
of the high ideal of poetry which had been attained,
and to the development of which the band of poets of
the preceding generation had largely contributed.
A review of the volume, by John Stuart Mill, then a young man
not yet twenty-five years of age, was published in ‘The Westminster’
for January, 1831. It bears testimony to the writer’s fine insight
and sure foresight; and it bears testimony, too, to his high estimate
of the function of poetry in this world--an estimate, too,
in kind and in degree, not older than this present century.
The review is as important a landmark in the development
of poetical criticism, as are the two poems I have mentioned,
in the development of poetical ideals, in the nineteenth century.
In the concluding paragraph of the review, Mill says: “A genuine poet
has deep responsibilities to his country and the world, to the present
and future generations, to earth and heaven. He, of all men,
should have distinct and worthy objects before him,
and consecrate himself to their promotion. It is thus that he
best consults the glory of his art, and his own lasting fame. . . .
Mr. Tennyson knows that “the poet’s mind is holy ground”;
he knows that the poet’s portion is to be
“Dower’d with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,
The love of love”;
he has shown, in the lines from which we quote, his own
just conception of the grandeur of a poet’s destiny;
and we look to him for its fulfilment. . . . If our estimate
of Mr. Tennyson be correct, he too is a poet; and many years hence
may be read his juvenile description of that character with
the proud consciousness that it has become the description and history
of his own works.”
Two years later, that is, in 1832 (the volume, however,
is antedated 1833), appeared ‘Poems by Alfred Tennyson’, pp. 163.
In it were contained ‘The Lady of Shalott’, and the untitled poems,
known by their first lines, ‘You ask me why, tho’ ill at ease’,
‘Of old sat Freedom on the Heights’, and ‘Love thou thy Land,
with Love far brought’.
In ‘The Lady of Shalott’ is mystically shadowed forth the relation
which poetic genius should sustain to the world for whose
spiritual redemption it labors, and the fatal consequences
of its being seduced by the world’s temptations, the lust of the flesh,
and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.
The other poems, ‘You ask me why’, ‘Of old sat Freedom’,
and ‘Love thou thy land’, are important as exponents of what
may be called the poet’s institutional creed. A careful study
of his subsequent poetry will show that in these early poems
he accurately and distinctly revealed the attitude toward
outside things which he has since maintained. He is a good deal
of an institutional poet, and, as compared with Browning,
a STRONGLY institutional poet. Browning’s supreme and
all-absorbing interest is in individual souls. He cares but little,
evidently, about institutions. At any rate, he gives them little
or no place in his poetry. Tennyson is a very decided
reactionary product of the revolutionary spirit which inspired
some of his poetical predecessors of the previous generation.
He has a horror of the revolutionary. To him, the French Revolution
was “the blind hysterics of the Celt”, {‘In Memoriam’, cix.},
and “the red fool-fury of the Seine” {‘I. M.’, cxxvii.}.
He attaches great importance to the outside arrangements of society
for upholding and advancing the individual. He would “make Knowledge
circle with the winds”, but “her herald, Reverence”, must
“fly
Before her to whatever sky
Bear seed of men and growth of minds.”
He has a great regard for precedents, almost AS precedents.
He is emphatically the poet of law and order. All his sympathies
are decidedly, but not narrowly, conservative. He is, in short,
a choice product of nineteenth century ENGLISH civilization;
and his poetry may be said to be the most distinct expression
of the refinements of English culture--refinements, rather than
the ruder but more vital forms of English strength and power.
All his ideals of institutions and the general machinery of life,
are derived from England. She is
“the land that freemen till,
That sober-suited Freedom chose,
The land where, girt with friends or foes,
A man may speak the thing he will;
A land of SETTLED GOVERNMENT,
A LAND OF JUST AND OLD RENOWN,
WHERE FREEDOM BROADENS SLOWLY DOWN
FROM PRECEDENT TO PRECEDENT:
Where faction seldom gathers head,
But by degrees to fullness wrought,
The strength of some diffusive thought
Hath time and space to work and spread.”
But the anti-revolutionary and the institutional features
of Tennyson’s poetry are not those of the higher ground of his poetry.
They are features which, though primarily due, it may be,
to the poet’s temperament, are indirectly due to the particular form
of civilization in which he has lived, and moved, and had his culture,
and which he reflects more than any of his poetical contemporaries.
The most emphasized and most vitalized idea, the idea which
glints forth everywhere in his poetry, which has the most important
bearing on man’s higher life, and which marks the height
of the spiritual tide reached in his poetry, is, that the highest
order of manhood is a well-poised, harmoniously operating duality
of the active or intellectual or discursive, and the passive
or spiritually sensitive. This is the idea which INFORMS his poem
of ‘The Princess’. It is prominent in ‘In Memoriam’ and in
‘The Idylls of the King’. In ‘The Princess’, the Prince,
speaking of the relations of the sexes, says:--
“in the long years liker must they grow;
The man be more of woman, she of man;
He gain in sweetness and in moral height,
Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world;
She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care,
Nor lose the childlike in the larger mind;
Till at the last she set herself to man,
Like perfect music unto noble words;
And so these twain, upon the skirts of Time,
Sit side by side, full-summ’d in all their powers,
Dispensing harvest, sowing the To-be,
Self-reverent each and reverencing each,
Distinct in individualities,
But like each other ev’n as those who love.
Then comes the statelier Eden back to men:
Then reign the world’s great bridals, chaste and calm:
Then springs the crowning race of humankind.”
To state briefly the cardinal Tennysonian idea, man must realize
a WOMANLY MANLINESS, and woman a MANLY WOMANLINESS.
Tennyson presents to us his ideal man in the 109th section
of ‘In Memoriam’. It is descriptive of his friend,
Arthur Henry Hallam. All that is most characteristic of Tennyson,
even his Englishness, is gathered up in this poem of six stanzas.
It is interesting to meet with such a representative and comprehensive
bit in a great poet.
“HEART-AFFLUENCE in discursive talk
From household fountains never dry;
The CRITIC CLEARNESS of an eye,
That saw through all the Muses’ walk;
SERAPHIC INTELLECT AND FORCE
TO SEIZE AND THROW THE DOUBTS OF MAN;
IMPASSIONED LOGIC, which outran
The bearer in its fiery course;
HIGH NATURE AMOROUS OF THE GOOD,
BUT TOUCH’D WITH NO ASCETIC GLOOM;
And passions pure in snowy bloom
Through all the years of April blood.”
The first two verses of this stanza also characterize the King Arthur
of the ‘Idylls of the King’. *1* In the next stanza we have
the poet’s institutional Englishness:--
“A love of freedom rarely felt,
Of freedom in her regal seat
Of England; not the school-boy heat,
The blind hysterics of the Celt;
And MANHOOD FUSED WITH FEMALE GRACE *2*
In such a sort, the child would twine
A trustful hand, unask’d, in thine,
And find his comfort in thy face;
All these have been, and thee mine eyes
Have look’d on; if they look’d in vain,
My shame is greater who remain,
Nor let thy wisdom make me wise.”
--
*1* See ‘The Holy Grail’, the concluding thirty-two verses, beginning:
“And spake I not too truly, O my Knights”, and ending “ye have seen
that ye have seen”.
*2* The idea of ‘The Princess’.
--
Tennyson’s genius was early trained by the skeptical philosophy
of the age. All his poetry shows this. The ‘In Memoriam’ may almost
be said to be the poem of nineteenth century scepticism.
To this scepticism he has applied an “all-subtilizing intellect”,
and has translated it into the poetical “concrete”, with a rare
artistic skill, and more than this, has subjected it to
the spiritual instincts and apperceptions of the feminine side
of his nature and made it vassal to a larger faith. But it is,
after all, not the vital faith which Browning’s poetry exhibits,
a faith PROCEEDING DIRECTLY FROM THE SPIRITUAL MAN. It is rather
the faith expressed by Browning’s Bishop Blougram:--
“With me faith means perpetual unbelief
Kept quiet like the snake ‘neath Michael’s foot,
Who stands firm just because he feels it writhe.”
And Tennyson, in picturing to us in the Idylls, the passage of the soul
“from the great deep to the great deep”, appears to have felt
it necessary to the completion of that picture (or why did he do it?),
that he should bring out that doubt at the last moment.
The dying Arthur is made to say:--
“I am going a long way
With these thou seest--if indeed I go
(For all my mind is clouded with a doubt)--
To the island-valley of Avilion”; etc.
Tennyson’s poetry is, in fact, an expression of the highest
sublimation of the scepticism which came out of the eighteenth century,
which invoked the authority of the sensualistic philosophy of Locke,
and has since been fostered by the science of the nineteenth;
while Browning’s poetry is a decided protest against,
and a reactionary product of, that scepticism, that infidel philosophy
(infidel as to the transcendental), and has CLOSED with it
and borne away the palm.
The key-note of his poetry is struck in ‘Paracelsus’,
published in 1835, in his twenty-third year, and, with the exception
of ‘Pauline’ published in 1833, the earliest of his compositions:
Paracelsus says (and he who knows Browning knows it to be
substantially his own creed):--
“Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise
From outward things, whate’er you may believe:
There is an inmost centre in us all,
Where truth abides in fulness; and around
Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in,
This perfect, clear perception--which is truth;
A baffling and perverting carnal mesh
Blinds it, and makes all error: and ‘TO KNOW’
Rather consists in opening out a way
Whence the imprisoned splendour may escape,
Than in effecting entry for a light
Supposed to be without. Watch narrowly
The demonstration of a truth, its birth,
And you trace back the effluence to its spring
And source within us, where broods radiance vast,
To be elicited ray by ray, as chance
Shall favour: chance--for hitherto, your sage
Even as he knows not how those beams are born,
As little knows he what unlocks their fount;
And men have oft grown old among their books
To die, case-hardened in their ignorance,
Whose careless youth had promised what long years
Of unremitted labour ne’er performed:
While, contrary, it has chanced some idle day,
That autumn-loiterers just as fancy-free
As the midges in the sun, have oft given vent
To truth--produced mysteriously as cape
Of cloud grown out of the invisible air.
Hence, may not truth be lodged alike in all,
The lowest as the highest? some slight film
The interposing bar which binds it up,
And makes the idiot, just as makes the sage
Some film removed, the happy outlet whence
Truth issues proudly? See this soul of ours!
How it strives weakly in the child, is loosed
In manhood, clogged by sickness, back compelled
By age and waste, set free at last by death:
Why is it, flesh enthralls it or enthrones?
What is this flesh we have to penetrate?
Oh, not alone when life flows still do truth
And power emerge, but also when strange chance
Ruffles its current; in unused conjuncture,
When sickness breaks the body--hunger, watching,
Excess, or languor--oftenest death’s approach--
Peril, deep joy, or woe. One man shall crawl
Through life, surrounded with all stirring things,
Unmoved--and he goes mad; and from the wreck
Of what he was, by his wild talk alone,
You first collect how great a spirit he hid.
Therefore set free the spirit alike in all,
Discovering the true laws by which the flesh
Bars in the spirit! . . .
* * * * *
I go to gather this
The sacred knowledge, here and there dispersed
About the world, long lost or never found.
And why should I be sad, or lorn of hope?
Why ever make man’s good distinct from God’s?
Or, finding they are one, why dare mistrust?
Who shall succeed if not one pledged like me?
Mine is no mad attempt to build a world
Apart from His, like those who set themselves
To find the nature of the spirit they bore,
And, taught betimes that all their gorgeous dreams
Were only born to vanish in this life,
Refused to fit them to this narrow sphere,
But chose to figure forth another world
And other frames meet for their vast desires,--
Still, all a dream! Thus was life scorned; but life
Shall yet be crowned: twine amaranth! I am priest!”
And again:--
“In man’s self arise
August anticipations, symbols, types
Of a dim splendour ever on before,
In that eternal circle run by life:
For men begin to pass their nature’s bound,
And find new hopes and cares which fast supplant
Their proper joys and griefs; and outgrow all *
The narrow creeds of right and wrong, which fade
Before the unmeasured thirst for good; while peace
Rises within them ever more and more.
Such men are even now upon the earth,
Serene amid the half-formed creatures round,
Who should be saved by them and joined with them.”
In the last three verses is indicated the doctrine of
the regenerating power of exalted personalities, so prominent
in Browning’s poetry, and which is treated in the next paper.
--
* proper: In the sense of the Latin PROPRIUS, peculiar, private, personal.
--
There is no ‘tabula rasa’ doctrine in these passages,
nor in any others, in the poet’s voluminous works; and of all men
of great intellect and learning (it is always a matter of mere
insulated intellect), born in England since the days of John Locke,
no one, perhaps, has been so entirely untainted with this doctrine
as Robert Browning. It is a doctrine which great spiritual vitality
(and that he early possessed), reaching out, as it does,
beyond all experience, beyond all transformation of sensations,
and all conclusions of the discursive understanding,
naturally and spontaneously rejects. It simply says, “I know better”,
and there an end.
The great function of the poet, as poet, is, with Browning,
to open out a way whence the imprisoned splendor may escape,
not to effect entry for a light supposed to be without;
to trace back the effluence to its spring and source within us,
where broods radiance vast, to be elicited ray by ray.
In ‘Fifine at the Fair’, published thirty-seven years
after ‘Paracelsus’, is substantially the same doctrine:--
“Truth inside, and outside, truth also; and between
Each, falsehood that is change, as truth is permanence.
The individual soul works through the shows of sense,
(Which, ever proving false, still promise to be true)
Up to an outer soul as individual too;
And, through the fleeting, lives to die into the fixed,
And reach at length ‘God, man, or both together mixed’.”
In his poem entitled ‘Popularity’, included in his “fifty men
and women”, the speaker, in the monologue, “draws” his “true poet”,
whom HE knows, if others do not; who, though he renders,
or stands ready to render, to his fellows, the supreme service
of opening out a way whence the imprisoned splendor of their souls
may escape, is yet locked safe from end to end of this dark world.
Though there may be, in his own time, no “reapers reaping early
in among the bearded barley” and “piling sheaves in uplands airy”
who hear his song, he holds the FUTURE fast, accepts
the COMING AGES’ duty, their present for this past. This true,
creative poet, whom the speaker calls “God’s glow-worm,
creative in the sense of revealing, whose inmost centre,
where truth abides in fulness, has that freedom of responsiveness
to the divine which makes him the revealer of it to men,
plays the part in the world of spirit which, in the material world
was played by the fisher who, first on the coast of Tyre the old,
fished up the purple-yielding murex. Until the precious liquor,
filtered by degrees, and refined to proof, is flasked and priced,
and salable at last, the world stands aloof. But when it is all ready
for the market, the small dealers, “put blue into their line”,
and outdare each other in azure feats by which they secure
great popularity, and, as a result, fare sumptuously;
while he who fished the murex up was unrecognized, and fed, perhaps,
on porridge.
Popularity.
I.
Stand still, true poet that you are!
I know you; let me try and draw you.
Some night you’ll fail us: when afar
You rise, remember one man saw you,
Knew you, and named a star! *1*
II.
My star, God’s glow-worm! Why extend
That loving hand of His which leads you,
Yet locks you safe from end to end
Of this dark world, unless He needs you,
Just saves your light to spend?
III.
His clenched hand shall unclose at last,
I know, and let out all the beauty:
My poet holds the future fast,
Accepts the coming ages’ duty,
Their present for this past.
IV.
That day, the earth’s feast-master’s brow
Shall clear, to God the chalice raising;
“Others give best at first, but Thou
Forever set’st our table praising,
Keep’st the good wine till now!”
V.
Meantime, I’ll draw you as you stand,
With few or none to watch and wonder:
I’ll say--a fisher, on the sand
By Tyre the old, with ocean-plunder,
A netful, brought to land.
VI.
Who has not heard how Tyrian shells
Enclosed the blue, that dye of dyes
Whereof one drop worked miracles,
And colored like Astarte’s eyes
Raw silk the merchant sells?
VII.
And each by-stander of them all
Could criticise, and quote tradition
How depths of blue sublimed some pall--
To get which, pricked a king’s ambition;
Worth sceptre, crown, and ball.
VIII.
Yet there’s the dye, in that rough mesh,
The sea has only just o’er-whispered!
Live whelks, each lip’s beard dripping fresh,
As if they still the water’s lisp heard
Through foam the rock-weeds thresh.
IX.
Enough to furnish Solomon
Such hangings for his cedar-house,
That, when gold-robed he took the throne
In that abyss of blue, the Spouse
Might swear his presence shone
X.
Most like the centre-spike of gold
Which burns deep in the blue-bell’s womb
What time, with ardors manifold,
The bee goes singing to her groom,
Drunken and overbold.
XI.
Mere conchs! not fit for warp or woof!
Till cunning come to pound and squeeze
And clarify,--refine to proof *2*
The liquor filtered by degrees,
While the world stands aloof.
XII.
And there’s the extract, flasked and fine,
And priced and salable at last!
And Hobbs, Nobbs, Stokes, and Nokes combine
To paint the future from the past,
Put blue into their line. *3*
XIII.
Hobbs hints blue,--straight he turtle eats:
Nobbs prints blue,--claret crowns his cup:
Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats,--
Both gorge. Who finished the murex up?
What porridge had John Keats?
--
*1* named: Announced.
*2* Original reading:--
“Till art comes,--comes to pound and squeeze
And clarify,--refines to proof.”
*3* “Line” is perhaps meant to be used equivocally,--
their line of business or line of their verse.
--
The spiritual ebb and flow exhibited in English poetry
(the highest tide being reached in Tennyson and Browning)
which I have endeavored cursorily to present, bear testimony
to the fact that human nature WILL assert its wholeness
in the civilized man. And there must come a time, in the progress
of civilization, when this ebb and flow will be less marked
than it has been heretofore, by reason of a better balancing,
which will be brought about, of the intellectual and the spiritual.
Each will have its due activity. The man of intellectual pursuits
will not have a starved spiritual nature; and the man of predominant
spiritual functions will not have an intellect weakened
into a submissiveness to formulated, stereotyped, and, consequently,
lifeless dogmas.
Robert Browning is in himself the completest fulfilment
of this equipoise of the intellectual and the spiritual,
possessing each in an exalted degree; and his poetry is
an emphasized expression of his own personality, and a prophecy
of the ultimate results of Christian civilization.
II. The Idea of Personality and of Art as an intermediate agency of Personality, as embodied in Browning’s Poetry.
1. General Remarks.
“Subsists no law of Life outside of Life.
* * * * *
The Christ himself had been no Lawgiver,
Unless he had given the LIFE, too, with the law.”
The importance of Robert Browning’s poetry, as embodying
the profoundest thought, the subtlest and most complex sentiment, and,
above all, the most quickening spirituality of the age, has, as yet,
notwithstanding the great increase within the last few years
of devoted students, received but a niggardly recognition when compared
with that received by far inferior contemporary poets. There are,
however, many indications in the poetical criticism of the day
that upon it will ere long be pronounced the verdict which is its due.
And the founding of a society in England in 1881, “to gather together
some at least of the many admirers of Robert Browning, for the study
and discussion of his works, and the publication of papers on them,
and extracts from works illustrating them” has already contributed
much towards paying a long-standing debt.
Mr. Browning’s earliest poems, ‘Pauline’ (he calls it in the preface
to the reprint of it in 1868 “a boyish work”, though it exhibits
the great basal thought of all his subsequent poetry),
was published in 1833, since which time he has produced
the largest body of poetry produced by any one poet
in English literature; and the range of thought and passion
which it exhibits is greater than that of any other poet,
without a single exception, since the days of Shakespeare.
And he is the most like Shakespeare in his deep interest
in human nature in all its varieties of good and evil.
Though endowed with a powerful, subtle, and restless intellect,
he has throughout his voluminous poetry made the strongest protest
that has been made in these days against mere intellect.
And his poetry has, therefore, a peculiar value in an age
like the present--an age exhibiting “a condition of humanity
which has thrown itself wholly on its intellect and its genius
in physics, and has done marvels in material science and invention,
but at the expense of the interior divinity.” It is the human heart,
that is, the intuitive, the non-discursive side of man, with its hopes
and its prophetic aspirations, as opposed to the analytic,
the discursive understanding, which is to him a subject
of the deepest and most scrutinizing interest. He knows that
its deepest depths are “deeper than did ever plummet sound”;
but he also knows that it is in these depths that life’s
greatest secrets must be sought. The philosophies excogitated
by the insulated intellect help nothing toward even a glimpse
of these secrets. In one of his later poems, that entitled ‘House’,
he has intimated, and forcibly intimated, his sense of
the impossibility of penetrating to the Holy of Holies of this
wondrous human heart, though assured as he is that all our hopes
in regard to the soul’s destiny are warmed and cherished
by what radiates thence. He quotes, in the last stanza of this poem,
from Wordsworth’s sonnet on the Sonnet, “With this same key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart,” and then adds, “DID Shakespeare?
If so, the less Shakespeare he!”
Mrs. Browning, in the Fifth Book of her ‘Aurora Leigh’,
has given a full and very forcible expression to the feeling
which has caused the highest dramatic genius of the present day
to seek refuge in the poem and the novel. “I will write no plays;
because the drama, less sublime in this, makes lower appeals,
defends more menially, adopts the standard of the public taste
to chalk its height on, wears a dog-chain round its regal neck,
and learns to carry and fetch the fashions of the day,
to please the day; . . . ‘Tis that, honoring to its worth the drama,
I would fear to keep it down to the level of the footlights. . . .
The growing drama has outgrown such toys of simulated stature, face,
and speech, it also, peradventure, may outgrow the simulation
of the painted scene, boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume;
and TAKE FOR A WORTHIER STAGE, THE SOUL ITSELF, ITS SHIFTING FANCIES
AND CELESTIAL LIGHTS, WITH ALL ITS GRAND ORCHESTRAL SILENCES
TO KEEP THE PAUSES OF THE RHYTHMIC SOUNDS.”
Robert Browning’s poetry is, in these days, the fullest realization
of what is expressed in the concluding lines of this passage:
he has taken for a worthier stage, the soul itself,
its shifting fancies and celestial lights, more than any other poet
of the age. And he has worked with a thought-and-passion capital
greater than the combined thought-and-passion capital of the richest
of his poetical contemporaries. And he has thought nobly of the soul,
and has treated it as, in its essence, above the fixed and law-bound
system of things which we call nature; in other words,
he has treated it as supernatural. “Mind,” he makes the Pope say,
in ‘The Ring and the Book’,--and his poetry bears testimony to
its being his own conviction and doctrine,--“Mind is not matter,
nor from matter, but above.” With every student of Browning,
the recognition and acceptance of this must be his starting-point.
Even that which impelled the old dog, in his poem entitled ‘Tray’
(‘Dramatic Lyrics’, First Series), to rescue the beggar child
that fell into the river, and then to dive after the child’s doll,
and bring it up, after a long stay under water, the poet evidently
distinguishes from matter,--regards as “not matter nor from matter,
but above”:--
“And so, amid the laughter gay,
Trotted my hero off,--old Tray,--
Till somebody, prerogatived
With reason, reasoned: ‘Why he dived,
His brain would show us, I should say.
‘John, go and catch--or, if needs be,
Purchase that animal for me!
By vivisection, at expense
Of half-an-hour and eighteen pence,
How brain secretes dog’s soul, we’ll see!”
In his poem entitled ‘Halbert and Hob’ (‘Dramatic Lyrics’,
First Series), quoting from Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’,
“Is there a reason in nature for these hard hearts?” the poet adds,
“O Lear, That a reason OUT of nature must turn them soft, seems clear!”
Mind is, with Browning, SUPERNATURAL, but linked with,
and restrained, and even enslaved by, the natural. The soul,
in its education, that is, in its awakening, becomes more and more
independent of the natural, and, as a consequence, more responsive to
higher souls and to the Divine. ALL SPIRIT IS MUTUALLY ATTRACTIVE,
and the degree of attractiveness results from the degree of freedom
from the obstructions of the material, or the natural.
Loving the truth implies a greater or less degree of that freedom
of the spirit which brings it into SYMPATHY with the true.
“If ye abide in My word,” says Christ (and we must understand by “word”
His own concrete life, the word made flesh, and living and breathing),
“if ye abide in My word” (that is, continue to live My life),
“then are ye truly My disciples; and ye shall know the truth,
and the truth shall make you free” (John viii. 32).
In regard to the soul’s INHERENT possessions, its microcosmic
potentialities, Paracelsus is made to say (and this may be taken,
too, as the poet’s own creed), “Truth is WITHIN ourselves;
it takes no rise from outward things, whate’er you may believe:
there is an inmost centre in us all, where truth abides in fulness;
and around, wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in,
this perfect, clear perception--which is truth. A baffling
and perverting carnal mesh blinds it, and makes all error:
and, TO KNOW, rather consists in opening out a way whence
the imprisoned splendour may escape, than in effecting entry
for a light supposed to be without.”
All possible thought is IMPLICIT in the mind, and waiting
for release--waiting to become EXPLICIT. “Seek within yourself,”
says Goethe, “and you will find everything; and rejoice that, without,
there lies a Nature that says yea and amen to all you have discovered
in yourself.” And Mrs. Browning, in the person of Aurora Leigh,
writes: “The cygnet finds the water; but the man is born
in ignorance of his element, and feels out blind at first,
disorganized by sin in the blood,--his spirit-insight
dulled and crossed by his sensations. Presently we feel it
quicken in the dark sometimes; then mark, be reverent, be obedient,--
for those dumb motions of imperfect life are oracles
of vital Deity attesting the Hereafter. Let who says
‘The soul’s a clean white paper’, rather say, a palimpsest,
a prophet’s holograph defiled, erased, and covered by a monk’s,--
the Apocalypse by a Longus! poring on which obscure text,
we may discern perhaps some fair, fine trace of what was written once,
some off-stroke of an alpha and omega expressing the old Scripture.”
This “fair, fine trace of what was written once”, it was the mission
of Christ, it is the mission of all great personalities,
of all the concrete creations of Genius, to bring out into
distinctness and vital glow. It is not, and cannot be, brought out,--
and this fact is emphasized in the poetry of Browning,--
it cannot be brought out, through what is born and resides in
the brain: it is brought out, either directly or indirectly,
by the attracting power of magnetic personalities, the ultimate,
absolute personality being the God-man, Christ, qea/nqrwpos.
The human soul is regarded in Browning’s poetry as
a complexly organized, individualized divine force,
destined to gravitate towards the Infinite. How is this force,
with its numberless checks and counter-checks, its centripetal
and centrifugal tendencies, best determined in its necessarily
oblique way? How much earthly ballast must it carry,
to keep it sufficiently steady, and how little, that it may not be
weighed down with materialistic heaviness? How much certainty
must it have of its course, and how much uncertainty,
that it may shun the “torpor of assurance”, *1* and not lose the vigor
which comes of a dubious and obstructed road, “which who stands upon
is apt to doubt if it’s indeed a road.” *2* “Pure faith indeed,”
says Bishop Blougram, to Gigadibs, the literary man, “you know not
what you ask! naked belief in God the Omnipotent, Omniscient,
Omnipresent, sears too much the sense of conscious creatures,
to be borne. It were the seeing him, no flesh shall dare.
Some think, Creation’s meant to show him forth: I say, it’s meant
to hide him all it can, and that’s what all the blessed Evil’s for.
Its use in time is to environ us, our breath, our drop of dew,
with shield enough against that sight till we can bear its stress.
Under a vertical sun, the exposed brain and lidless eye
and disimprisoned heart less certainly would wither up at once,
than mind, confronted with the truth of Him. But time and earth
case-harden us to live; the feeblest sense is trusted most:
the child feels God a moment, ichors o’er the place,
plays on and grows to be a man like us. With me, faith means
perpetual unbelief kept quiet like the snake ‘neath Michael’s foot,
who stands calm just because he feels it writhe.” *3*
--
*1* ‘The Ring and the Book’, The Pope, v. 1853.
*2* ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’, vv. 198, 199.
*3* ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’, vv. 650-671.
--
There is a remarkable passage to the same effect in ‘Paracelsus’,
in which Paracelsus expatiates on the “just so much of doubt
as bade him plant a surer foot upon the sun-road.”
And in ‘Easter Day’:--
“You must mix some uncertainty
With faith, if you would have faith BE.”
And the good Pope in ‘The Ring and the Book’, alluding to the absence
of true Christian soldiership, which is revealed by Pompilia’s case,
says: “Is it not this ignoble CONFIDENCE, cowardly hardihood,
that dulls and damps, makes the old heroism impossible?
Unless. . .what whispers me of times to come? What if it be
the mission of that age my death will usher into life,
to SHAKE THIS TORPOR OF ASSURANCE FROM OUR CREED,
reintroduce the DOUBT discarded, bring the formidable danger back
we drove long ago to the distance and the dark?”
True healthy doubt means, in Browning, that the spiritual nature
is sufficiently quickened not to submit to the conclusions of
the insulated intellect. It WILL reach out beyond them,
and assert itself, whatever be the resistance offered by the intellect.
Mere doubt, without any resistance from the intuitive,
non-discursive side of our nature, is the dry-rot of the soul.
The spiritual functions are “smothered in surmise”. Faith is not
a matter of blind belief, of slavish assent and acceptance,
as many no-faith people seem to regard it. It is what
Wordsworth calls it, “a passionate intuition”, and springs out of
quickened and refined sentiment, out of inborn instincts which are
as cultivable as are any other elements of our complex nature,
and which, too, may be blunted beyond a consciousness
of their possession. And when one in this latter state
denies the reality of faith, he is not unlike one born blind
denying the reality of sight.
A reiterated lesson in Browning’s poetry, and one that results from
his spiritual theory, is, that the present life is a tabernacle-life,
and that it can be truly lived only as a tabernacle-life;
for only such a life is compatible with the ever-continued
aspiration and endeavor which is a condition of, and inseparable from,
spiritual vitality.
Domizia, in the tragedy of ‘Luria’, is made to say:--
“How inexhaustibly the spirit grows!
One object, she seemed erewhile born to reach
With her whole energies and die content,--
So like a wall at the world’s edge it stood,
With naught beyond to live for,--is that reached?--
Already are new undream’d energies
Outgrowing under, and extending farther
To a new object;--there’s another world!”
The dying John in ‘A Death in the Desert’, is made to say:--
“I say that man was made to grow, not stop;
That help he needed once, and needs no more,
Having grown up but an inch by, is withdrawn:
For he hath new needs, and new helps to these.
This imports solely, man should mount on each
New height in view; the help whereby he mounts,
The ladder-rung his foot has left, may fall,
Since all things suffer change save God the Truth.
Man apprehends him newly at each stage
Whereat earth’s ladder drops, its service done;
And nothing shall prove twice what once was proved.”
And again:--
“Man knows partly but conceives beside,
Creeps ever on from fancies to the fact,
And in this striving, this converting air
Into a solid he may grasp and use,
Finds progress, man’s distinctive mark alone,
Not God’s, and not the beasts’: God is, they are,
Man partly is and wholly hopes to be.
Such progress could no more attend his soul
Were all it struggles after found at first
And guesses changed to knowledge absolute,
Than motion wait his body, were all else
Than it the solid earth on every side,
Where now through space he moves from rest to rest.
Man, therefore, thus conditioned, must expect
He could not, what he knows now, know at first;
What he considers that he knows to-day,
Come but to-morrow, he will find misknown;
Getting increase of knowledge, since he learns
Because he lives, which is to be a man,
Set to instruct himself by his past self:
First, like the brute, obliged by facts to learn,
Next, as man may, obliged by his own mind,
Bent, habit, nature, knowledge turned to law.
God’s gift was that man should conceive of truth
And yearn to gain it, catching at mistake,
As midway help till he reach fact indeed.
The statuary ere he mould a shape
Boasts a like gift, the shape’s idea, and next
The aspiration to produce the same;
So, taking clay, he calls his shape thereout,
Cries ever, ‘Now I have the thing I see’:
Yet all the while goes changing what was wrought,
From falsehood like the truth, to truth itself.
How were it had he cried, ‘I see no face,
No breast, no feet i’ the ineffectual clay’?
Rather commend him that he clapped his hands,
And laughed, ‘It is my shape and lives again!’
Enjoyed the falsehood touched it on to truth,
Until yourselves applaud the flesh indeed
In what is still flesh-imitating clay.
Right in you, right in him, such way be man’s!
God only makes the live shape at a jet.
Will ye renounce this fact of creatureship?
The pattern on the Mount subsists no more,
Seemed awhile, then returned to nothingness,
But copies, Moses strove to make thereby
Serve still and are replaced as time requires:
By these make newest vessels, reach the type!
If ye demur, this judgment on your head,
Never to reach the ultimate, angels’ law,
Indulging every instinct of the soul
There where law, life, joy, impulse are one thing.”
Browning has given varied and beautiful expressions to these ideas
throughout his poetry.
The soul must rest in nothing this side of the infinite.
If it does rest in anything, however relatively noble
that thing may be, whether art, or literature, or science,
or theology, even, it declines in vitality--it torpifies.
However great a conquest the combatant may achieve in any
of these arenas, “striding away from the huge gratitude,
his club shouldered, lion-fleece round loin and flank”, he must be
“bound on the next new labour, height o’er height ever surmounting--
destiny’s decree!” *
--
* ‘Aristophanes’ Apology’, p. 31, English ed.
--
“Rejoice that man is hurled
From change to change unceasingly,
His soul’s wings never furled!” *
--
* ‘James Lee’s Wife’, sect. 6.
--
But this tabernacle-life, which should ever look ahead, has its claims
which must not be ignored, and its standards which must not be
too much above present conditions. Man must “fit to the finite
his infinity” (‘Sordello’). Life may be over-spiritual
as well as over-worldly. “Let us cry, ‘All good things are ours,
nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!’” *
The figure the poet employs in ‘The Ring and the Book’
to illustrate the art process, may be as aptly applied to life itself--
the greatest of all arts. The life-artist must know how to secure
the proper degree of malleability in this mixture of flesh and soul.
He must mingle gold with gold’s alloy, and duly tempering both effect
a manageable mass. There may be too little of alloy in earth-life
as well as too much--too little to work the gold and fashion it,
not into a ring, but ring-ward. “On the earth the broken arcs;
in the heaven a perfect round” (‘Abt Vogler’). “Oh, if we draw
a circle premature, heedless of far gain, greedy for quick returns
of profit, sure, bad is our bargain” (‘A Grammarian’s Funeral’).
--
* ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’.
--
‘An Epistle containing the Strange Medical Experiences of Karshish,
the Arab Physician’, is one of Browning’s most remarkable
psychological studies. It may be said to polarize the idea,
so often presented in his poetry, that doubt is a condition
of the vitality of faith. In this poem, the poet has treated
a supposed case of a spiritual knowledge “increased beyond
the fleshly faculty--heaven opened to a soul while yet on earth,
earth forced on a soul’s use while seeing heaven”, a spiritual state,
less desirable and far less favorable to the true fulfilment
of the purposes of earth-life, than that expressed
in the following lines from ‘Easter Day’:--
“A world of spirit as of sense
Was plain to him, yet not TOO plain,
Which he could traverse, not remain
A GUEST IN:--else were permanent
Heaven on earth, which its gleams were meant
To sting with hunger for full light”, etc.
The Epistle is a subtle representation of a soul conceived with
absolute spiritual standards, while obliged to live in a world
where all standards are relative and determined by the circumstances
and limitations of its situation.
The spiritual life has been too distinctly revealed for
fulfilling aright the purposes of earth-life, purposes which the soul,
while in the flesh, must not ignore, since, in the words of
Rabbi Ben Ezra, “all good things are ours, nor soul helps flesh more,
now, than flesh helps soul.” The poem may also be said
to represent what is, or should be, the true spirit
of the man of science. In spite of what Karshish writes,
apologetically, he betrays his real attitude throughout,
towards the wonderful spiritual problem involved.
It is, as many of Browning’s Monologues are, a double picture--
one direct, the other reflected, and the reflected one is as distinct
as the direct. The composition also bears testimony to Browning’s
own soul-healthfulness. Though the spiritual bearing of things
is the all-in-all, in his poetry, the robustness of his nature,
the fulness and splendid equilibrium of his life, protect him against
an inarticulate mysticism. Browning is, in the widest and deepest
sense of the word, the healthiest of all living poets;
and in general constitution the most Shakespearian.
What he makes Shakespeare say, in the Monologue entitled
‘At the Mermaid’, he could say, with perhaps greater truth,
in his own person, than Shakespeare could have said it:--
“Have you found your life distasteful?
My life did and does smack sweet.
Was your youth of pleasure wasteful?
Mine I save and hold complete.
Do your joys with age diminish?
When mine fail me, I’ll complain.
Must in death your daylight finish?
My sun sets to rise again.
I find earth not gray but rosy,
Heaven not grim but fair of hue.
Do I stoop? I pluck a posy.
Do I stand and stare? All’s blue.”
It is the spirit expressed in these lines which has made his poetry
so entirely CONSTRUCTIVE. With the destructive spirit
he has no affinities. The poetry of despair and poets with the dumps
he cannot away with.
Perhaps the most comprehensive passage in Browning’s poetry,
expressive of his ideal of a complete man under the conditions
of earth-life, is found in ‘Colombe’s Birthday’, Act IV.
Valence says of Prince Berthold:--
“He gathers earth’s WHOLE GOOD into his arms, standing, as man, now,
stately, strong and wise--marching to fortune, not surprised by her:
one great aim, like a guiding star above--which tasks strength,
wisdom, stateliness, to lift his manhood to the height
that takes the prize; a prize not near--lest overlooking earth,
he rashly spring to seize it--nor remote, so that
he rests upon his path content: but day by day, while shimmering
grows shine, and the faint circlet prophesies the orb,
he sees so much as, just evolving these, the stateliness, the wisdom,
and the strength to due completion, will suffice this life,
and lead him at his grandest to the grave.”
Browning fully recognizes, to use an expression in his
‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, fully recognizes “the value and significance
of flesh.” A healthy and well-toned spiritual life is with him
the furthest removed from asceticism. To the passage from
his ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’ already quoted, “all good things are ours,
nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul”,
should be added what David sings to Saul, in the poem entitled ‘Saul’.
Was the full physical life ever more beautifully sung?
“Oh! our manhood’s prime vigour! no spirit feels waste,
Not a muscle is stopped in its playing, nor sinew unbraced.
Oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to rock,
The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool silver shock
Of the plunge in a pool’s living water, the hunt of the bear,
And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair.
And the meal, the rich dates yellowed over with gold dust divine,
And the locust-flesh steeped in the pitcher, the full draught of wine,
And the sleep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes tell
That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well.
How good is man’s life, the mere living! how fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses for ever in joy!”
Though this is said in the person of the beautiful shepherd-boy,
David, whoever has lived any time with Browning, through his poetry,
must be assured that it is also an expression of the poet’s
own experience of the glory of flesh. He has himself been
an expression of the fullest physical life: and now,
in his five and seventieth year, since the 7th of last May,
he preserves both mind and body in a magnificent vigor.
If his soul had been lodged in a sickly, rickety body,
he could hardly have written these lines from ‘Saul’. Nor could he
have written ‘Caliban upon Setebos’, especially the opening lines:
“Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best, flat on his belly
in the pit’s much mire, with elbows wide, fists clenched
to prop his chin. And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush,
and feels about his spine small eft-things course, run in and out
each arm, and make him laugh: and while above his head
a pompion-plant, coating the cave-top as a brow its eye,
creeps down to touch and tickle hair and beard, and now a flower drops
with a bee inside, and now a fruit to snap at, catch and crunch,--
he looks out o’er yon sea which sunbeams cross and recross
till they weave a spider-web (meshes of fire, some great fish breaks
at times), and talks to his own self, howe’er he please,
touching that other, whom his dam called God.”
There’s a grand passage in ‘Balaustion’s Adventure:
including a transcript from Euripides’, descriptive of Herakles
as he returns, after his conflict with Death, leading back Alkestis,
which shows the poet’s sympathy with the physical. The passage is
more valuable as revealing that sympathy, from the fact that
it’s one of his additions to Euripides:--
“there stood the strength,
Happy as always; something grave, perhaps;
The great vein-cordage on the fret-worked brow,
Black-swollen, beaded yet with battle-drops
The yellow hair o’ the hero!--his big frame
A-quiver with each muscle sinking back
Into the sleepy smooth it leaped from late.
Under the great guard of one arm, there leant
A shrouded something, live and woman-like,
Propped by the heart-beats ‘neath the lion-coat.
When he had finished his survey, it seemed,
The heavings of the heart began subside,
The helping breath returned, and last the smile
Shone out, all Herakles was back again,
As the words followed the saluting hand.”
It is not so much the glory of flesh which Euripides represents
in Herakles, as the indulgence of appetite, at a time, too,
when that indulgence is made to appear the more culpable and gross.
This idea of “the value and significance of flesh”, it is important
to note, along with the predominant spiritual bearing
of Browning’s poetry. It articulates everywhere the spiritual,
so to speak--makes it healthy and robust, and protects it
against volatility and from running into mysticism.
2. The Idea of Personality as embodied in Browning’s Poetry.
A cardinal idea in Browning’s poetry is the regeneration of men
through a personality who brings fresh stuff for them to mould,
interpret, and prove right,--new feeling fresh from God--
whose life re-teaches them what life should be, what faith is,
loyalty and simpleness, all once revealed, but taught them
so long since that they have but mere tradition of the fact,--
truth copied falteringly from copies faint, the early traits
all dropped away. (‘Luria’.) The intellect plays a secondary part.
Its place is behind the instinctive, spiritual antennae
which conduct along their trembling lines, fresh stuff
for the intellect to stamp and keep--fresh instinct for it
to translate into law.
“A people is but the attempt of many to rise to the completer life
of one.” (‘A Soul’s Tragedy’.)
Only the man who supplies new feeling fresh from God,
quickens and regenerates the race, and sets it on the King’s highway
from which it has wandered into by-ways--not the man
of mere intellect, of unkindled soul, that supplies only
stark-naked thought. Through the former, “God stooping shows
sufficient of His light for those i’ the dark to rise by.”
(‘R. and B., Pompilia’.) In him men discern “the dawn of
the next nature, the new man whose will they venture in the place
of theirs, and whom they trust to find them out new ways
to the new heights which yet he only sees.” (‘Luria’.)
It is by reaching towards, and doing fealty to, the greater spirit
which attracts and absorbs their own, that, “trace by trace
old memories reappear, old truth returns, their slow thought
does its work, and all’s re-known.” (‘Luria’.)
“Some existence like a pact
And protest against Chaos, . . .
. . . The fullest effluence of the finest mind,
All in degree, no way diverse in kind
From minds above it, minds which, more or less
Lofty or low, move seeking to impress
Themselves on somewhat; but one mind has climbed
Step after step, by just ascent sublimed.
Thought is the soul of act, and, stage by stage,
Is soul from body still to disengage,
As tending to a freedom which rejects
Such help, and incorporeally affects
The world, producing deeds but not by deeds,
Swaying, in others, frames itself exceeds,
Assigning them the simpler tasks it used
To patiently perform till Song produced
Acts, by thoughts only, for the mind: divest
Mind of e’en Thought, and, lo, God’s unexpressed
Will dawns above us!” (‘Sordello’.)
A dangerous tendency of civilization is that towards crystallization--
towards hardened, inflexible conventionalisms which “refuse the soul
its way”.
Such crystallization, such conventionalisms, yield only to
the dissolving power of the spiritual warmth of life-full personalities.
The quickening, regenerating power of personality is everywhere
exhibited in Browning’s poetry. It is emphasized in ‘Luria’,
and in the Monologues of the Canon Caponsacchi and Pompilia,
in the ‘Ring and the Book’; it shines out, or glints forth,
in ‘Colombe’s Birthday’, in ‘Saul’, in ‘Sordello’, and in all
the Love poems. I would say, en passant, that Love
is always treated by Browning as a SPIRITUAL claim;
while DUTY may be only a worldly one. SEE especially the poem
entitled ‘Bifurcation’. In ‘Balaustion’s Adventure:
including a transcipt from Euripides’, the regenerating power
of personality may be said to be the leavening idea, which the poet
has introduced into the Greek play. It is entirely absent
in the original. It baptizes, so to speak, the Greek play,
and converts it into a Christian poem. It is the “new truth”
of the poet’s ‘Christmas Eve’.
After the mourning friends have spoken their words of consolation
to the bereaved husband, the last word being, “Dead, thy wife--
living, the love she left”, Admetos “turned on the comfort,
with no tears, this time. HE WAS BEGINNING TO BE LIKE HIS WIFE.
I told you of that pressure to the point, word slow pursuing word
in monotone, Alkestis spoke with; so Admetos, now, solemnly bore
the burden of the truth. And as the voice of him grew,
gathered strength, and groaned on, and persisted to the end,
we felt how deep had been descent in grief, and WITH WHAT CHANGE
HE CAME UP NOW TO LIGHT, and left behind such littleness as tears.”
And when Alkestis was brought back by Herakles, “the hero
twitched the veil off: and there stood, with such fixed eyes
and such slow smile, Alkestis’ silent self! It was the crowning grace
of that great heart to keep back joy: procrastinate the truth
until the wife, who had made proof and found the husband wanting,
might essay once more, hear, see, and feel him RENOVATED now--
ABLE TO DO, NOW, ALL HERSELF HAD DONE, RISEN TO THE HEIGHT OF HER:
so, hand in hand, the two might go together, live and die.”
(Compare with this the restoration of Hermione to her husband,
in ‘The Winter’s Tale’, Act V.)
A good intellect has been characterized as the chorus of Divinity.
Substitute for “good intellect”, an exulted magnetic personality,
and the thought is deepened. An exalted magnetic personality
is the chorus of Divinity, which, in the great Drama of Humanity,
guides and interprets the feelings and sympathies of other souls
and thus adjusts their attitudes towards the Divine.
It is not the highest function of such a personality to TEACH,
but rather to INFORM, in the earlier and deeper sense of the word.
Whatever mere doctrine he may promulgate, is of inferior importance
to the spontaneous action of his concrete life, in which the True,
the Beautiful, and the Good, breathe and live. What is born
in the brain dies there, it may be; at best, it does not,
and cannot of itself, lead up to the full concrete life.
It is only through the spontaneou and unconscious fealty
which an inferior does to a superior soul (a fealty resulting
from the responsiveness of spirit to spirit), that the former
is slowly and silently transformed into a more or less
approximate image of the latter. The stronger personality
leads the weaker on by paths which the weaker knows not,
upward he leads him, though his steps be slow and vacillating.
Humility, in the Christian sense, means this fealty to the higher.
It doesn’t mean self-abasement, self-depreciation, as it has been
understood to mean, by both the Romish and the Protestant Church.
Pride, in the Christian sense, is the closing of the doors of the soul
to a great magnetic guest.
Browning beautifully expresses the transmission of personality
in his ‘Saul’. But according to Browning’s idea, personality cannot
strictly be said to be transmitted. Personality rather
evokes its LIKE from other souls, which are “all in degree,
no way diverse in kind.” (‘Sordello’.)
David has reached an advanced stage in his symbolic song to Saul.
He thinks now what next he shall urge “to sustain him where song
had restored him?--Song filled to the verge his cup with the wine
of this life, pressing all that it yields of mere fruitage,
the strength and the beauty: beyond, on what fields glean a vintage
more potent and perfect to brighten the eye and bring blood to the lip,
and commend them the cup they put by?” So once more
the string of the harp makes response to his spirit, and he sings:--
“In our flesh grows the branch of this life, in our soul it bears fruit.
Thou hast marked the slow rise of the tree,--how its stem
trembled first
Till it passed the kid’s lip, the stag’s antler; then safely outburst
The fan-branches all round; and thou mindest when these, too, in turn
Broke a-bloom and the palm-tree seemed perfect; yet more was to learn,
E’en the good that comes in with the palm-fruit. Our dates
shall we slight,
When their juice brings a cure for all sorrow? or care for the plight
Of the palm’s self whose slow growth produced them? Not so!
stem and branch
Shall decay, nor be known in their place, while the palm-wine
shall staunch
Every wound of man’s spirit in winter. I pour thee such wine.
Leave the flesh to the fate it was fit for! the spirit be thine!
By the spirit, when age shall o’ercome thee, thou still shalt enjoy
More indeed, than at first when, inconscious, the life of a boy.
Crush that life, and behold its wine running! each deed thou hast done
Dies, revives, goes to work in the world; until e’en as the sun
Looking down on the earth, though clouds spoil him,
though tempests efface,
Can find nothing his own deed produced not, must everywhere trace
The results of his past summer-prime,--SO, EACH RAY OF THY WILL,
EVERY FLASH OF THY PASSION AND PROWESS, LONG OVER, SHALL THRILL
THY WHOLE PEOPLE, THE COUNTLESS, WITH ARDOUR, TILL THEY TOO GIVE FORTH
A LIKE CHEER TO THEIR SONS: WHO IN TURN, FILL THE SOUTH AND THE NORTH
WITH THE RADIANCE THY DEED WAS THE GERM OF.”
In the concluding lines is set forth what might be characterized as
the apostolic succession of a great personality--the succession
of those “who in turn fill the South and the North with the radiance
his deed was the germ of.”
What follows in David’s song gives expression to the other mode
of transmitting a great personality--that is, through records
that “give unborn generations their due and their part in his being”,
and also to what those records owe their effectiveness, and are saved
from becoming a dead letter.
“Is Saul dead? In the depth of the vale make his tomb--bid arise
A grey mountain of marble heaped four-square, till, built to the skies,
Let it mark where the great First King slumbers: whose fame
would ye know?
Up above see the rock’s naked face, where the record shall go
In great characters cut by the scribe,--Such was Saul, so he did;
With the sages directing the work, by the populace chid,--
For not half, they’ll affirm, is comprised there! Which fault to amend,
In the grove with his kind grows the cedar, whereon they shall spend
(See, in tablets ‘tis level before them) their praise, and record
With the gold of the graver, Saul’s story,--the statesman’s great word
Side by side with the poet’s sweet comment. The river’s a-wave
With smooth paper-reeds grazing each other when prophet-winds rave:
So the pen gives unborn generations their due and their part
In thy being! Then, first of the mighty, thank God that thou art!”
What is said in this passage is applicable to the record we have
of Christ’s life upon earth. Christianity has only to
a very limited extent been perpetuated through the letter of
the New Testament. It has been perpetuated chiefly through
transmissions of personalities, through apostolic succession,
in a general sense, and through embodiments of his spirit
in art and literature--“the stateman’s great word”,
“the poet’s sweet comment”. Were it not for this transmission
of the quickening power of personality, the New Testament would be
to a great extent a dead letter. It owes its significance to
the quickened spirit which is brought to the reading of it.
The personality of Christ could not be, through a plastic sympathy,
moulded out of the New Testament records, without the aid
of intermediate personalities.
The Messianic idea was not peculiar to the Jewish race--
the idea of a Person gathering up within himself, in an effective
fulness and harmony, the restorative elements of humanity, which have
lost their power through dispersion and consequent obscuration.
There have been Messiahs of various orders and ranks in every age,--
great personalities that have realized to a greater or less extent
(though there has been but one, the God-Man, who fully realized),
the spiritual potentialities in man, that have stood upon
the sharpest heights as beacons to their fellows. In the individual
the species has, as it were, been gathered up, epitomized,
and intensified, and he has thus been a prophecy, and to some extent
a fulfilment of human destiny.
“A poet must be earth’s ESSENTIAL king”, as Sordello asserts,
and he is that by virtue of his exerting or shedding the influence of
his essential personality. “If caring not to exert the proper essence
of his royalty, he, the poet, trifle malapert with accidents instead--
good things assigned as heralds of a better thing behind”--he is
“deposed from his kingly throne, and his glory is taken from him”.
Of himself, Sordello says: “The power he took most pride to test,
whereby all forms of life had been professed at pleasure,
forms already on the earth, was but a means of power beyond,
whose birth should, in its novelty, be kingship’s proof. Now,
whether he came near or kept aloof the several forms he longed
to imitate, not there the kingship lay, he sees too late. Those forms,
unalterable first as last, proved him her copier, not the protoplast
of nature: what could come of being free by action to exhibit
tree for tree, bird, beast, for beast and bird, or prove earth bore
one veritable man or woman more? Means to an end such proofs are:
what the end?”
The answer given involves the great Browning idea of
the quickening power of personality: “Let essence, whatsoe’er it be,
extend--never contract!”
By “essence” we must understand that which “constitutes man’s self,
is what Is”, as the dying John, in ‘A Death in the Desert’,
expresses it--that which backs the active powers and
the conscious intellect, “subsisting whether they assist or no”.
“Let essence, whatsoe’er it be, extend--never contract!”
Sordello says. “Already you include the multitude”; that is,
you gather up in yourself, in an effective fulness and harmony,
what lies scattered and ineffective in the multitude;
“then let the mulitude include yourself”; that is, be substantiated,
essenced with yourself; “and the result were new: themselves before,
the multitude turn YOU” (become yourself). “This were to live
and move and have, in them, your being, and secure a diadem
you should transmit (because no cycle yearns beyond itself,
but on itself returns) when the full sphere in wane,
the world o’erlaid long since with you, shall have in turn obeyed
some orb still prouder, some displayer, still more potent than
the last, of human will, and some new king depose the old.”
This is a most important passage to get hold of in studying Browning.
It may be said to gather up Browning’s philosophy of life in a nutshell.
There’s a passage to the same effect in ‘Balaustion’s Adventure’,
in regard to the transmission of the poet’s essence. The enthusiastic
Rhodian girl, Balaustion, after she has told the play of Euripides,
years after her adventure, to her four friends, Petale,
Phullis, Charope, and Chrusion, says:--
“I think I see how. . . you, I, or any one, might mould a new Admetos,
new Alkestis. Ah, that brave bounty of poets, the one royal race
that ever was, or will be, in this world! They give no gift that
bounds itself, and ends i’ the giving and the taking:
theirs so breeds i’ the heart and soul of the taker, so transmutes
the man who only was a man before, that he grows god-like in his turn,
can give--he also: share the poet’s privilege, bring forth new good,
new beauty from the old. As though the cup that gave the wine,
gave too the god’s prolific giver of the grape, that vine,
was wont to find out, fawn around his footstep, springing still
to bless the dearth, at bidding of a Mainad.”
3. Art as an Intermediate Agency of Personality.
If Browning’s idea of the quickening, the regeneration,
the rectification of personality, through a higher personality,
be fully comprehended, his idea of the great function of Art,
as an intermediate agency of personality, will become plain.
To emphasize the latter idea may be said to be the ultimate purpose
of his masterpiece, ‘The Ring and the Book’.
The complexity of the circumstances involved in the Roman murder case,
adapts it admirably to the poet’s purpose--namely, to exhibit
the swervings of human judgment in spite of itself, and the conditions
upon which the rectification of that judgment depends.
This must be taken, however, as only the articulation,
the framework, of the great poem. It is richer in materials,
of the most varied character, than any other long poem in existence.
To notice one feature of the numberless features of the poem,
which might be noticed, Browning’s deep and subtle insight
into the genius of the Romish Church is shown in it more fully
than in any other of his poems,--though special phases of that genius
are distinctly exhibited in numerous poems: a remarkable one being
‘The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church’.
It is questionable whether any work of any kind has ever exhibited
that genius more fully and distinctly than ‘The Ring and the Book’
exhibits it. The reader breathes throughout the ecclesiastical
atmosphere of the Eternal City.
To return from this digression, the several monologues
of which the poem consists, with the exception of those
of the Canon Caponsacchi, Pompilia, and the Pope, are each curious
and subtle and varied exponents of the workings, without the guidance
of instinct at the heart, of the prepossessed, prejudiced intellect,
and of the sources of its swerving into error. What is said
of the “feel after the vanished truth” in the monologue entitled
‘Half Rome’--the speaker being a jealous husband--will serve
to characterize, in a general way, “the feel after truth”
exhibited in the other monologues: “honest enough, as the way is:
all the same, harboring in the CENTRE OF ITS SENSE a hidden germ
of failure, shy but sure, should neutralize that honesty and leave
that feel for truth at fault, as the way is too. Some prepossession,
such as starts amiss, by but a hair’s-breadth at the shoulder-blade,
the arm o’ the feeler, dip he ne’er so brave; and so leads waveringly,
lets fall wide o’ the mark his finger meant to find, and fix truth
at the bottom, that deceptive speck.”
The poet could hardly have employed a more effective metaphor
in which to embody the idea of mental swerving. The several monologues
all going over the same ground, are artistically justified
in their exhibiting, each of them, a quite distinct form
of this swerving. For the ultimate purpose of the poet,
it needed to be strongly emphasized. The student of the poem
is amazed, long before he gets over all these monologues,
at the Protean capabilities of the poet’s own intellect.
It takes all conceivable attitudes toward the case, and each seems
to be a perfectly easy one.
These monologues all lead up to the great moral of the poem, which is
explicitly set forth at the end, namely, “that our human speech
is naught, our human testimony false, our fame and human estimation,
words and wind. Why take the artistic way to prove so much? Because,
it is the glory and good of Art, that Art remains the one way possible
of speaking truth, to mouths like mine, at least. How look a brother
in the face and say, Thy right is wrong, eyes hast thou yet art blind,
thine ears are stuffed and stopped, despite their length: and, oh,
the foolishness thou countest faith! Say this as silvery
as tongue can troll--the anger of the man may be endured,
the shrug, the disappointed eyes of him are not so bad to bear--
but here’s the plague, that all this trouble comes of telling truth,
which truth, by when it reaches him, looks false, seems to be
just the thing it would supplant, nor recognizable by whom it left:
while falsehood would have done the work of truth. But Art,--
wherein man nowise speaks to men, only to mankind,--Art may tell
a truth obliquely, DO THE THING SHALL BREED THE THOUGHT”, that is,
bring what is IMPLICIT within the soul, into the right attitude
to become EXPLICIT--bring about a silent adjustment
through sympathy induced by the concrete; in other words,
prepare the way for the perception of the truth--
“do the thing shall breed the thought, nor wrong the thought
missing the mediate word”; meaning, that Art, so to speak,
is the word made flesh,--IS the truth, and, as Art,
has nothing directly to do with the explicit. “So may you paint
your picture, twice show truth, beyond mere imagery on the wall,--
so, note by note, bring music from your mind, deeper than ever
the Andante dived,--so write a book shall mean beyond the facts,
suffice the eye and save the soul beside.”
And what is the inference the poet would have us draw
from this passage? It is, that the life and efficacy of Art
depends on the personality of the artist, which “has informed,
transpierced, thridded, and so thrown fast the facts else free,
as right through ring and ring runs the djereed and binds the loose,
one bar without a break.” And it is really this fusion of
the artist’s soul, which kindles, quickens, INFORMS those who
contemplate, respond to, reproduce sympathetically within themselves
the greater spirit which attracts and absorbs their own.
The work of Art is apocalyptic of the artist’s own personality.
It CANNOT be impersonal. As is the temper of his spirit, so is,
MUST be, the temper of his Art product.* It is hard to believe,
almost impossible to believe, that ‘Titus Andronicus’ could have been
written by Shakespeare, the external testimony to the authorship,
notwithstanding. Even if he had written it as a burlesque
of such a play as Marlow’s ‘Jew of Malta’, he could not have avoided
some revelation of that sense of moral proportion which is omnipresent
in his Plays. But I can find no Shakespeare in ‘Titus Andronicus’.
Are we not certain what manner of man Shakespeare was from his Works
(notwithstanding that critics are ever asserting their impersonality)
--far more certain than if his biography had been written
by one who knew him all his life, and sustained to him
the most intimate relations? We know Shakespeare--or he CAN
be known, if the requisite conditions are met, better, perhaps,
than any other great author that ever lived--know,
in the deepest sense of the word, in a sense other than that in which
we know Dr. Johnson, through Boswell’s Biography. The moral proportion
which is so signal a characteristic of his Plays could not have been
imparted to them by the conscious intellect. It was SHED from
his spiritual constitution.
--
* “And long it was not after, when I was confirmed in this opinion,
that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter
in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem.”
--Milton’s ‘Apology for Sinectymnuus’.
--
By “speaking truth” in Art’s way, Browning means, inducing a right
ATTITUDE toward, a full and free SYMPATHY with, the True,
which is a far more important and effective way of speaking truth
than delivering truth ‘in re’. A work of Art, worthy of the name,
need not be true to fact, but must be true in its spiritual attitude,
and being thus true, it will tend to induce a corresponding attitude
in those who do fealty to it. It will have the influence,
though in an inferior degree, it may be, of a magnetic personality.
Personality is the ultimate source of spiritual quickening
and adjustment. Literature and all forms of Art are but
the intermediate agencies of personalities. The artist cannot be
separated from his art. As is the artist so MUST be his art.
The ‘aura’, so to speak, of a great work of Art, must come from
the artist’s own personality. The spiritual worth of Shakespeare’s
‘Winter’s Tale’ is not at all impaired by the fact that Bohemia is made
a maritime country, that Whitsun pastorals and Christian burial,
and numerous other features of Shakespeare’s own age, are introduced
into pagan times, that Queen Hermione speaks of herself as a daughter
of the Emperor of Russia, that her statue is represented as executed by
Julio Romano, an Italian painter of the 16th century, that a puritan
sings psalms to hornpipes, and, to crown all, that messengers are sent
to consult the oracle of Apollo, at Delphi, which is represented as
an island! All this jumble, this gallimaufry, I say,
does not impair the spiritual worth of the play. As an Art-product,
it invites a rectified attitude toward the True and the Sweet.
If we look at the letter of the trial scene in ‘The Merchant of Venice’,
it borders on the absurd; but if we look at its spirit,
we see the Shakespearian attitude of soul which makes for righteousness,
for the righteousness which is inherent in the moral constitution
of the universe.
The inmost, secretest life of Shakespeare’s Plays came from
the personality, the inmost, secretest life, of the man Shakespeare.
We might, with the most alert sagacity, note and tabulate and aggregate
his myriad phenomenal merits as a dramatic writer, but we might still
be very far from that something back of them all, or rather that
IMMANENT something, that mystery of personality, that microcosmos,
that “inmost centre, where truth abides in fulness”, as Browning makes
Paracelsus characterize it, “constituting man’s self, is what Is”,
as he makes the dying John characterize it, in ‘A Death in the Desert’,
that “innermost of the inmost, most interior of the interne”,
as Mrs. Browning characterizes it, “the hidden Soul”,
as Dallas characterizes it, which is projected into, and constitutes
the soul of, the Plays, and which is reached through an unconscious
and mystic sympathy on the part of him who habitually communes with
and does fealty to them. That personality, that living force,
co-operated spontaneously and unconsciously with the conscious powers,
in the creative process; and when we enter into a sympathetic communion
with the concrete result of that creative process, our own
mysterious personalities, being essentially identical with,
though less quickened than, Shakespeare’s, respond, though it may be
but feebly, to his. This response is the highest result of the study
of Shakespeare’s works.
It is a significant fact that Shakespearian critics and editors,
for nearly two centuries, have been a ‘genus irritabile’,
to which genus Shakespeare himself certainly did not belong.
The explanation may partly be, that they have been too much occupied
with the LETTER, and have fretted their nerves in angry dispute
about readings and interpretations; as theologians have done
in their study of the sacred records, instead of endeavoring to reach,
through the letter, the personality of which the letter is but
a manifestation more or less imperfect. To KNOW a personality is,
of course, a spiritual knowledge--the result of sympathy,
that is, spiritual responsiveness. Intellectually it is
but little more important to know one rather than another personality.
The highest worth of all great works of genius is due to the fact
that they are apocalyptic of great personalities.
Art says, as the Divine Person said, whose personality
and the personalities fashioned after it, have transformed and moulded
the ages, “Follow me!” Deep was the meaning wrapt up in this command:
it was, Do as I do, live as I live, not from an intellectual perception
of the principles involved in my life, but through a full sympathy,
through the awakening, vitalizing, actuating power of
the incarnate Word.
Art also says, as did the voice from the wilderness,
inadequately translated, “REPENT ye, for the kingdom of heaven
is at hand”. (Metanoei^te h’/ggike ga\r h‘ Basilei/a tw^n ou’ranw^n.)
Rather, be transformed, or, as De Quincey puts it, “Wheel into
a new centre your spiritual system; GEOCENTRIC has that system been
up to this hour--that is, having earth and the earthly
for its starting-point; henceforward make it HELIOCENTRIC (that is,
with the sun, or the heavenly, for its principle of motion).”
The poetry of Browning everywhere says this, and says it
more emphatically than that of any other poet in our literature.
It says everywhere, that not through knowledge, not through
a sharpened intellect, but through repentance, in the deeper sense
to which I have just alluded, through conversion, through wheeling into
a new centre its spiritual system, the soul attains to saving truth.
Salvation with him means that revelation of the soul to itself,
that awakening, quickening, actuating, attitude-adjusting, of the soul,
which sets it gravitating toward the Divine.
Browning’s idea of Conversion is, perhaps, most distinctly expressed
in a passage in the Monologue of the Canon Caponsacchi,
in ‘The Ring and the Book’, wherein he sets forth the circumstances
under which his soul was wheeled into a new centre, after a life
of dalliance and elegant folly, and made aware of “the marvellous dower
of the life it was gifted and filled with”. He has been telling
the judges, before whom he has been summoned, the story of the letters
forged by Guido to entrap him and Pompilia, and of his having seen
“right through the thing that tried to pass for truth and solid,
not an empty lie”. The conclusion and the resolve he comes to,
are expressed in the soliloquy which he repeats to the judges,
as having uttered at the time: “So, he not only forged
the words for her but words for me, made letters he called mine:
what I sent, he retained, gave these in place, all by
the mistress messenger! As I recognized her, at potency of truth,
so she, by the crystalline soul, knew me, never mistook the signs.
Enough of this--let the wraith go to nothingness again,
here is the orb, have only thought for her!” What follows admits us
to the very HEART of Browning’s poetry--admits us to the great Idea
which is almost, in these days, strange to say, peculiarly his--
which no other poet, certainly, of this intellectual, analytic,
scientific age, with its “patent, truth-extracting processes”,
has brought out with the same degree of distinctness--the great Idea
which may be variously characterized as that of soul-kindling,
soul-quickening, adjustment of soul-attitude, regeneration, conversion,
through PERSONALITY--a kindling, quickening, adjustment,
regeneration, conversion in which THOUGHT is not even a coefficient.
As expressed in Sordello, “Divest mind of e’en thought, and lo,
God’s unexpressed will dawns above us!” “Thought?” the Canon goes on
to say, “Thought? nay, Sirs, what shall follow was not thought:
I have thought sometimes, and thought long and hard.
I have stood before, gone round a serious thing, tasked my whole mind
to touch it and clasp it close, . . . God and man, and what duty
I owe both,--I dare say I have confronted these in thought:
but no such faculty helped here. I put forth no thought,--powerless,
all that night I paced the city: it was the first Spring.
By the INVASION I LAY PASSIVE TO, in rushed new things,
the old were rapt away; alike abolished--the imprisonment of
the outside air, the inside weight o’ the world that pulled me down.
Death meant, to spurn the ground, soar to the sky,--die well
and you do that. The very immolation made the bliss;
death was the heart of life, and all the harm my folly had crouched
to avoid, now proved a veil hiding all gain my wisdom strove to grasp.
. . . Into another state, under new rule I knew myself was passing
swift and sure; whereof the initiatory pang approached,
felicitous annoy, as bitter-sweet as when the virgin band,
the victors chaste, feel at the end the earthy garments drop,
and rise with something of a rosy shame into immortal nakedness:
so I lay, and let come the proper throe would thrill into the ecstasy
and out-throb pain. I’ the gray of the dawn it was I found myself
facing the pillared front o’ the Pieve--mine, my church:
it seemed to say for the first time, ‘But am not I the Bride,
the mystic love o’ the Lamb, who took thy plighted troth, my priest,
to fold thy warm heart on my heart of stone and freeze thee
nor unfasten any more? This is a fleshly woman,--let the free
bestow their life blood, thou art pulseless now!’ . . . Now,
when I found out first that life and death are means to an end,
that passion uses both, indisputably mistress of the man whose form
of worship is self-sacrifice--now, from the stone lungs sighed
the scrannel voice, ‘Leave that live passion, come be dead with me!’
As if, i’ the fabled garden, I had gone on great adventure,
plucked in ignorance hedge-fruit, and feasted to satiety,
laughing at such high fame for hips and haws, and scorned
the achievement: then come all at once o’ the prize o’ the place,
the thing of perfect gold, the apple’s self: and, scarce my eye
on that, was ‘ware as well of the sevenfold dragon’s watch. Sirs,
I obeyed. Obedience was too strange,--this new thing that had been
STRUCK INTO ME BY THE LOOK OF THE LADY, to dare disobey
the first authoritative word. ‘Twas God’s. I had been
LIFTED TO THE LEVEL OF HER, could take such sounds into my sense.
I said, ‘We two are cognizant o’ the Master now; it is she bids me
bow the head: how true, I am a priest! I see the function here;
I thought the other way self-sacrifice: this is the true,
seals up the perfect sum. I pay it, sit down, silently obey.’”
Numerous and varied expressions of the idea of conversion set forth
in this passage, occur in Browning’s poetry, evidencing his deep sense
of this great and indispensable condition of soul-life,
of being born anew (or from above, as it should be rendered
in the Gospel, a’/nwqen, that is, through the agency of
a higher personality), in order to see the kingdom of God--
evidencing his conviction that “the kingdom of God cometh not
with observation: for lo! the kingdom of God is within you.”
In the poem entitled ‘Cristina’, the speaker is made to say,--
“Oh, we’re sunk enough here, God knows! but not quite so sunk
that moments,
Sure tho’ seldom, are denied us, when the spirit’s true endowments
Stand out plainly from its false ones, and apprise it if pursuing
Or the right way or the wrong way, to its triumph or undoing.
There are flashes struck from midnights, there are fire-flames
noon-days kindle,
Whereby piled-up honors perish, whereby swollen ambitions dwindle,
While just this or that poor impulse, which for once had play unstifled,
Seems the sole work of a life-time that away the rest have trifled.”
And again, when the Pope in ‘The Ring and the Book’ has come
to the decision to sign the death-warrant of Guido and his accomplices,
he says: “For the main criminal I have no hope except in such
a SUDDENNESS OF FATE. I stood at Naples once, a night so dark
I could have scarce conjectured there was earth anywhere, sky or sea
or world at all: but the night’s black was burst through by a blaze--
thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore,
through her whole length of mountain visible: there lay the city
thick and plain with spires, and, like a ghost disshrouded,
white the sea. SO MAY THE TRUTH BE FLASHED OUT BY ONE BLOW,
AND GUIDO SEE, ONE INSTANT, AND BE SAVED. Else I avert my face,
nor follow him into that sad obscure sequestered state
where God UNMAKES BUT TO REMAKE the soul he else made first in vain;
which must not be. Enough, for I may die this very night:
and how should I dare die, this man let live? Carry this forthwith
to the Governor!”
Browning is the most essentially Christian of living poets.
Though he rarely speaks ‘in propria persona’ in his poetry,
any one who has gone over it all, can have no doubt as to his own
most vital beliefs. What the Beauty-loving Soul in Tennyson’s
‘Palace of Art’ say of herself, cannot be suspected even,
of Browning:--
“I take possession of man’s mind and deed.
I care not what the sects may brawl.
I sit as God holding no form of creed,
But contemplating all.”
Religion with him is, indeed, the all-in-all; but not any
particular form of it as a finality. This is not a world
for finalities of any kind, as he constantly teaches us:
it is a world of broken arcs, not of perfect rounds.
Formulations of some kind he would, no doubt, admit there must be,
as in everything else; but with him all formulations and tabulations
of beliefs, especially such as “make square to a finite eye
the circle of infinity”, *1* are, at the best, only PROVISIONAL,
and, at the worst, lead to spiritual standstill, spiritual torpor,
“a ghastly smooth life, dead at heart.” *2* The essential nature
of Christianity is contrary to special prescription, do this or do that,
believe this or believe that. Christ gave no recipes.
Christianity is with Browning, and this he sets forth again and again,
a LIFE, quickened and motived and nourished by the Personality of Christ.
And all that he says of this Personality can be accepted
by every Christian, whatever theological view he may entertain of Christ.
Christ’s teachings he regards but as INCIDENTS of that Personality,
and the records we have of his sayings and doings, but a fragment,
a somewhat distorted one, it may be, out of which we must,
by a mystic and plastic sympathy, {*} aided by the Christ spirit
which is immanent in the Christian world, mould the Personality,
and do fealty to it. The Christian must endeavor to be able to say,
with the dying John, in Browning’s ‘Death in the Desert’,
“To me that story,--ay, that Life and Death of which I wrote ‘it was’--
to me, it is.”
--
*1* ‘Christmas Eve’.
*2* ‘Easter Day’.
{*} ‘plastic’ in the 1800’s sense of ‘pliable’, not ‘fake’.--A.L.
--
The poem entitled ‘Christmas Eve’ contains the fullest
and most explicit expression, in Browning, of his idea
of the personality of Christ, as being the all-in-all of Christianity.
“The truth in God’s breast
Lies trace for trace upon ours impressed:
Though He is so bright and we so dim,
We are made in His image to witness Him:
And were no eye in us to tell,
Instructed by no inner sense,
The light of Heaven from the dark of Hell,
That light would want its evidence,--
Though Justice, Good, and Truth, were still
Divine, if, by some demon’s will,
Hatred and wrong had been proclaimed
Law through the worlds, and Right misnamed,
No mere exposition of morality
Made or in part or in totality,
Should win you to give it worship, therefore:
And if no better proof you will care for,
--Whom do you count the worst man upon earth?
Be sure, he knows, in his conscience, more
Of what Right is, than arrives at birth
In the best man’s acts that we bow before:
And thence I conclude that the real God-function
Is to furnish a motive and injunction
For practising what we know already.
And such an injunction and such a motive
As the God in Christ, do you waive, and ‘heady,
High-minded’, hang your tablet votive
Outside the fane on a finger-post?
Morality to the uttermost,
Supreme in Christ as we all confess,
Why need WE prove would avail no jot
To make Him God, if God he were not?
Where is the point where Himself lays stress?
Does the precept run ‘Believe in Good,
In Justice, Truth, now understood
For the first time’?--or ‘Believe in ME,
Who lived and died, yet essentially
Am Lord of Life’?* Whoever can take
The same to his heart and for mere love’s sake
Conceive of the love,--that man obtains
A new truth; no conviction gains
Of an old one only, made intense
By a fresh appeal to his faded sense.”
--
* “Subsists no law of life outside of life.”
. . . . .
“The Christ himself had been no Lawgiver,
Unless he had given the LIFE, too, with the law.”
Mrs. Browning’s ‘Aurora Leigh’.
--
If all Christendom could take this remarkable poem of ‘Christmas Eve’
to its heart, its tolerance, its Catholic spirit, and, more than all,
the fealty it exhibits to the Personality who essentially is
Lord of Life, what a revolution it would undergo! and what a mass
of dogmatic and polemic theology would become utterly obsolete!
The most remarkable thing, perhaps, about the vast body
of Christian theology which has been developed during
the eighteen centuries which have elapsed since Christ
was in the flesh, is, that it is occupied so largely, it might almost
be said, exclusively, with what Christ and his disciples TAUGHT,
and with fierce discussions about the manifold meanings which have been
ingeniously extorted from the imperfect RECORD of what he taught.
British museum libraries of polemics have been written in defence
of what Christ himself would have been indifferent to,
and written with an animosity towards opponents which has been
crystallized in a phrase now applied in a general way
to any intense hate--ODIUM THEOLOGICUM.
If the significance of Christ’s mission, or a large part of it,
is to be estimated by his teachings, from those teachings
important deductions must be made, as many of them had been delivered
long before his time.
Browning has something to say on this point, in this same poem
of ‘Christmas Eve’:--
“Truth’s atmosphere may grow mephitic
When Papist struggles with Dissenter,
Impregnating its pristine clarity,
--One, by his daily fare’s vulgarity,
Its gust of broken meat and garlic;
--One, by his soul’s too-much presuming
To turn the frankincense’s fuming
An vapors of the candle starlike
Into the cloud her wings she buoys on.
Each that thus sets the pure air seething,
May poison it for healthy breathing--
But the Critic leaves no air to poison;
Pumps out by a ruthless ingenuity
Atom by atom, and leaves you--vacuity.
Thus much of Christ, does he reject?
And what retain? His intellect?
What is it I must reverence duly?
Poor intellect for worship, truly,
Which tells me simply what was told
(If mere morality, bereft
Of the God in Christ, be all that’s left)
Elsewhere by voices manifold;
With this advantage, that the stater
Made nowise the important stumble
Of adding, he, the sage and humble,
Was also one with the Creator.”
Browning’s poetry is instinct with the essence of Christianity--
the LIFE of Christ. There is no other poetry, there is no writing
of any form, in this age, which so emphasizes the fact
(and it’s the most consoling of all facts connected with
the Christian religion), that the Personality, Jesus Christ,
is the impregnable fortress of Christianity. Whatever assaults
and inroads may be made upon the original records by
Goettingen professors, upon the august fabric of the Church,
with its creeds and dogmas, and formularies, and paraphernalia,
this fortress will stand forever, and mankind will forever
seek and find refuge in it.
The poem entitled ‘Cleon’ bears the intimation (there’s nothing
directly expressed thereupon), that Christianity is something
distinct from, and beyond, whatever the highest civilization
of the world, the civilization of Greece, attained to before Christ.
Through him the world obtained “a new truth--no conviction gained
of an old one merely, made intense by a fresh appeal
to the faded sense.”
Cleon, the poet, writes to Protos in his Tyranny (that is,
in the Greek sense, Sovereignty). Cleon must be understood
as representing the ripe, composite result, as an individual,
of what constituted the glory of Greece--her poetry, sculpture,
architecture, painting, and music, and also her philosophy.
He acknowledges the gifts which the King has lavished upon him.
By these gifts we are to understand the munificent national patronage
accorded to the arts. “The master of thy galley still unlades
gift after gift; they block my court at last and pile themselves
along its portico royal with sunset, like a thought of thee.”
By the slave women that are among the gifts sent to Cleon,
seems to be indicated the degradation of the spiritual by
its subjection to earthly ideals, as were the ideals of Greek art.
This is more particularly indicated by the one white she-slave,
the lyric woman, whom further on in his letter, Cleon promises
to the King he will make narrate (in lyric song we must suppose)
his fortunes, speak his great words, and describe his royal face.
He continues, that in such an act of love,--the bestowal of
princely gifts upon him whose song gives life its joy,--
men shall remark the King’s recognition of the use of life--
that his spirit is equal to more than merely to help on life in
straight ways, broad enough for vulgar souls, by ruling and the rest.
He ascribes to the King, in the building of his tower
(and by this must be understood the building up of his own selfhood),
a higher motive than work for mere work’s sake,--
that higher motive being, the luring hope of some EVENTUAL REST
atop of it (the tower), whence, all the tumult of the building hushed,
the first of men may look out to the east. *
--
* Tennyson uses a similar figure in ‘The Two Voices’. The speaker,
who is meditating whether “to be or not to be”, says:--
“Were this not well, to bide mine hour,
Though watching from a ruined tower
How grows the day of human power.”
The ruined tower is his own dilapidated selfhood, whence he takes
his outlook upon the world.
--
By the eventual rest atop of the tower, is indicated the aim
of the Greek civilization, to reach a calm within the finite,
while the soul is constituted and destined to gravitate forever
towards the infinite--to “force our straitened sphere. . .
display completely here the mastery another life should learn.”
(‘Sordello’.) The eventual rest in this world is not
the Christian ideal. Earth-life, whatever its reach,
and whatever its grasp, is to the Christian a broken arc,
not a perfect round.
Cleon goes on to recount his accomplishments in the arts,
and what he has done in philosophy, in reply to the first requirement
of Protos’s letter, Protos, as it appears, having heard of,
and wonderingly enumerated, the great things Cleon has effected;
and he has written to know the truth of the report. Cleon replies,
that the epos on the King’s hundred plates of gold is his,
and his the little chaunt so sure to rise from every fishing-bark when,
lights at prow, the seamen haul their nets; that the image of
the sun-god on the light-house men turn from the sun’s self to see,
is his; that the Poecile, o’erstoried its whole length with painting,
is his, too; that he knows the true proportions of a man and woman,
not observed before; that he has written three books on the soul,
proving absurd all written hitherto, and putting us to ignorance again;
that in music he has combined the moods, inventing one; that, in brief,
all arts are his, and so known and recognized. At this he writes
the King to marvel not. We of these latter days, he says,
being more COMPOSITE, appear not so great as our forerunners who,
in their simple way, were greater in a certain single direction,
than we; but our composite way is greater. This life of men on earth,
this sequence of the soul’s achievements here, he finds reason
to believe, was intended to be viewed eventually as a great whole,
the individual soul being only a factor toward the realization of
this great whole--toward spelling out, so to speak, Zeus’s idea
in the race. Those divine men of old, he goes on to say,
reached each at one point, the outside verge that rounds our faculty,
and where they reached, who could do more than reach?
I have not chaunted, he says, verse like Homer’s, nor swept string
like Terpander, nor carved and painted men like Phidias and his friend;
I am not great as they are, point by point; but I have entered into
sympathy with these four, running these into one soul, who, separate,
ignored each other’s arts. The wild flower was the larger--
I have dashed rose-blood upon its petals, pricked its cup’s honey
with wine, and driven its seed to fruit, and show a better flower,
if not so large.
And now he comes to the important questions in the King’s letter--
whether he, the poet, his soul thus in men’s hearts, has not attained
the very crown and proper end of life--whether, now life closeth up,
he faces death with success in his right hand,--whether he
fears death less than he, the King, does himself, the fortunate of men,
who assigns the reason for thinking that he does, that he, the poet,
leaves much behind, his life stays in the poems men shall sing,
the pictures men shall study; while the King’s life, complete and whole
now in its power and joy, dies altogether with his brain and arm,
as HE leaves not behind, as the poet does, works of art
embodying the essence of his life which, through those works,
will pass into the lives of men of all succeeding times.
Cleon replies that if in the morning of philosophy, the King,
with the light now in him, could have looked on all earth’s tenantry,
from worm to bird, ere man appeared, and if Zeus had questioned him
whether he would improve on it, do more for visible creatures
than was done, he would have answered, “Ay, by making each
grow conscious in himself: all’s perfect else, life’s mechanics
can no further go, and all this joy in natural life is put,
like fire from off thy fingers into each, so exquisitely perfect
is the same. But ‘tis pure fire--and they mere matter are;
it has THEM, not they IT: and so I choose, for man,
that a third thing shall stand apart from both, a quality arise
within the soul, which, intro-active, made to supervise and feel
the force it has, may view itself and so be happy.” But it is
this quality, Cleon continues, which makes man a failure.
This sense of sense, this spirit consciousness, grew the only life
worth calling life, the pleasure-house, watch-tower,
and treasure-fortress of the soul, which whole surrounding flats
of natural life seemed only fit to yield subsistence to;
a tower that crowns a country. But alas! the soul now climbs it
just to perish there, for thence we have discovered that
there’s a world of capability for joy, spread round about us,
meant for us, inviting us; and still the soul craves all,
and still the flesh replies, “Take no jot more than ere you climbed
the tower to look abroad! Nay, so much less, as that fatigue
has brought deduction to it.” After expatiating on this sad state
of man, he arrives at the same conclusion as the King in his letter:
“I agree in sum, O King, with thy profound discouragement,
who seest the wider but to sigh the more. Most progress
is most failure! thou sayest well.”
And now he takes up the last point of the King’s letter, that he,
the King, holds joy not impossible to one with artist-gifts,
who leaves behind living works. Looking over the sea, as he writes,
he says, “Yon rower with the moulded muscles there, lowering the sail,
is nearer it that I.” He presents with clearness, and with
rigid logic, the DILEMMA of the growing soul; shows the vanity
of living in works left behind, and in the memory of posterity,
while he, the feeling, thinking, acting man, shall sleep in his urn.
The horror of the thought makes him dare imagine at times
some future state unlimited in capability for joy, as this is
in DESIRE for joy. But no! Zeus had not yet revealed such a state;
and alas! he must have done so were it possible!
He concludes, “Live long and happy, and in that thought die,
glad for what was! Farewell.” And then, as a matter
of minor importance, he informs the King, in a postscript,
that he cannot tell his messenger aright where to deliver what he bears
to one called Paulus. Protos, it must be understood, having heard
of the fame of Paul, and being perplexed in the extreme,
has written the great apostle to know of his doctrine.
But Cleon writes that it is vain to suppose that a mere barbarian Jew,
one circumcised, hath access to a secret which is shut from them,
and that the King wrongs their philosophy in stooping to inquire
of such an one. “Oh, he finds adherents, who does not.
Certain slaves who touched on this same isle, preached him and Christ,
and, as he gathered from a bystander, their doctrines could be held
by no sane man.”
There is a quiet beauty about this poem which must insinuate itself
into the feelings of every reader. In tone it resembles
the ‘Epistle of Karshish, the Arab Physician’. The verse
of both poems is very beautiful. No one can read these two poems,
and ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’, and ‘The Bishop orders his Tomb
at St. Praxed’s Church’, and not admit that Browning is a master
of blank verse in its most difficult form--a form far more difficult
than that of the epic blank verse of Milton, or the Idyllic blank verse
of Tennyson, argumentative and freighted with thought, and,
at the same time, almost chatty, as it is, and bearing in its course
exquisitely poetical conceptions. The same may be said of much
of the verse of ‘The Ring and the Book’, especially that
of the monologues of the Canon Caponsacchi, Pompilia, the Pope,
and Count Guido Franceschini. But this by the way.
‘Cleon’ belongs to a grand group of poems, in which Browning
shows himself to be, as I’ve said, the most essentially Christian
of living poets--the poet who, more emphatically than any
of his contemporaries have done, has enforced the importance,
the indispensableness of a new birth, the being born from above
(a’/nwqen) as the condition not only of soul vitality and progress,
but also of intellectual rectitude. In this group of poems
are embodied the profoundest principles of education--
principles which it behoves the present generation of educators
to look well to. The acquisition of knowledge is a good thing,
the sharpening of the intellect is a good thing, the cultivation
of philosophy is a good thing; but there is something of
infinitely more importance than all these--it is, the rectification,
the adjustment, through that mysterious operation we call sympathy,
of the unconscious personality, the hidden soul, which co-operates
with the active powers, with the conscious intellect, and,
as this unconscious personality is rectified or unrectified,
determines the active powers, the conscious intellect,
for righteousness or unrighteousness.
The attentive reader of Browning’s poetry must soon discover
how remarkably homogeneous it is in spirit. There are many authors,
and great authors too, the reading of whose collected works
gives the impression of their having “tried their hand” at many things.
No such impression is derivable from the voluminous poetry of Browning.
Wide as is its range, one great and homogeneous spirit pervades
and animates it all, from the earliest to the latest.
No other living poet gives so decided an assurance of having
a BURDEN to deliver. An appropriate general title to his works
would be, ‘The Burden of Robert Browning to the 19th Century’.
His earliest poems show distinctly his ATTITUDE toward things.
We see in what direction the poet has set his face--
what his philosophy of life is, what soul-life means with him,
what regeneration means, what edification means in its deepest sense
of building up within us the spiritual temple. And if he had left
this world after writing no more than those poems of his youth,
‘Pauline’ and ‘Paracelsus’, a very fair ‘ex-pede-Herculem’ estimate
might have been made of the possibilities which he has since
so grandly realized.
III. Mr. Browning’s “Obscurity”.
It was long the FASHION--and that fashion has not yet passed away
--with skimming readers and perfunctory critics to charge Mr. Browning
with being “wilfully obscure, unconscientiously careless,
and perversely harsh.”
There are readers and readers. One class, constituting, perhaps,
not more than one-tenth of one per cent, or a thousandth part
of the whole number, “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest”;
the remaining ninety-nine and nine-tenths per cent,
through a habit of loose and indiscriminate reading, are unequal to
the sustained concentration of mind demanded by the higher poetry,
the language of which is characterized by a severe economy
of expression--a closeness of texture, resulting from
the elliptical energy of highly impassioned thought.
Reading is, perhaps, more superficial at the present day
than it ever was before. There is an almost irresistible temptation
to reverse the “multum legendum esse non multa” of Quintilian,
overwhelmed as we are with books, magazines, and newspapers,
which no man can number, and of which thousands and tens of thousands
of minds endeavor to gobble up all they can; and yet, from want of
all digestive and assimilating power, they are pitiably famished
and deadened.
Sir John Lubbock has lately been interested in the preparation
of a list of the best hundred books, and to that end has solicited
the aid of a number of prominent scholars. Prof. Edward Dowden
remarks thereupon, in an article on ‘The Interpretation of Literature’,
“It would have been more profitable for us had we been advised
how to read any one of the hundred; for what, indeed, does it matter
whether we read the best books or the worst, if we lack the power or
the instinct or the skill by which to reach the heart of any of them?
Books for most readers are, as Montaigne says, ‘a languid pleasure’;
and so they must be, unless they become living powers, with a summons
or a challenge for our spirit, unless we embrace them or wrestle
with them.”
To return from this digression to the charge against Browning
of obscurity. And, first, it should be said that Browning has
so much material, such a large thought and passion capital,
that we never find him making a little go a great way,
by means of EXPRESSION, or rather concealing the little by means of
rhetorical tinsel. We can never justly demand of him what the Queen
in ‘Hamlet’ demands of Polonius, “more matter with less art”.
His thought is wide-reaching and discursive, and the motions
of his mind rapid and leaping. The connecting links of his thought
have often to be supplied by an analytic reader whose mind
is not up to the required tension to spring over the chasm.
He shows great faith in his reader and “leaves the mere rude
explicit details”, as if he thought,
“‘tis but brother’s speech
We need, speech where an accent’s change gives each
The other’s soul.” *
--
* ‘Sordello’.
--
A truly original writer like Browning, original, I mean,
in his spiritual attitudes, is always more of less difficult
to the uninitiated, for the reason that he demands of his reader
new standpoints, new habits of thought and feeling; says, virtually,
to his reader, Metanoei^te; and until these new standpoints are taken,
these new habits of thought and feeling induced, the difficulty,
while appearing to the reader at the outset, to be altogether objective,
will really be, to a great extent, subjective, that is,
will be in himself.
Goethe, in his ‘Wahrheit und Dichtung’, says:--
“Wer einem Autor Dunkelheit vorwerfen will, sollte erst sein eigenes
Innere besuchen, ob es denn da auch recht hell ist. In der Daemmerung
wird eine sehr deutliche Schrift unlesbar.” *
--
* He who would charge an author with obscurity, should first look
into his own mind, to know whether it is quite clear there.
In the dusk a very distinct handwriting becomes illegible.
--
And George Henry Lewes, in his ‘Life of Goethe’, well says:--
“A masterpiece excites no sudden enthusiasm; it must be studied much
and long, before it is fully comprehended; we must grow up to it,
for it will not descend to us. Its emphasis grows with familiarity.
We never become disenchanted; we grow more and more awe-struck
at its infinite wealth. We discover no trick, for there is none
to discover. Homer, Shakespeare, Raphael, Beethoven, Mozart,
never storm the judgment; but once fairly in possession,
they retain it with unceasing influence.”
And Professor Dowden, in the article from which I have just quoted,
says:--
“Approaching a great writer in this spirit of courageous
and affectionate fraternity, we need all our forces and all our craft
for the friendly encounter. If we love ease and lethargy,
let us turn in good time and fly. The interpretation of literature,
like the interpretation of Nature, is no mere record of facts;
it is no catalogue of the items which make up a book--
such catalogues and analyses of contents encumber our histories
of literature with some of their dreariest pages. The interpretation
of literature exhibits no series of dead items, but rather the life
and power of one mind at play upon another mind duly qualified
to receive and manifest these. Hence, one who would interpret
the work of a master must summon up all his powers, and must be alive
at as many points as possible. He who approaches his author
as a whole, bearing upon life as a whole, is himself alive
at the greatest possible number of points, will be the best
and truest interpreter. For he will grasp what is central,
and at the same time will be sensitive to the value of all details,
which details he will perceive not isolated, but in connection with
one another, and with the central life to which they belong
and from which they proceed.”
In his poem entitled ‘Pacchiarotto, and how he worked in distemper’,
Mr. Browning turns upon his critics, whom he characterizes as
“the privileged fellows, in the drabs, blues, and yellows”
(alluding to the covers of the leading British Reviews),
and especially upon Alfred Austin, the author of that work
of wholesale condemnation, ‘The Poetry of the Period’, and gives them
a sound and well-deserved drubbing. At the close of the onset
he says:--
“Was it ‘grammar’ wherein you would ‘coach’ me--
You,--pacing in even that paddock
Of language allotted you ad hoc,
With a clog at your fetlocks,--you--scorners
Of me free from all its four corners?
Was it ‘clearness of words which convey thought?’
Ay, if words never needed enswathe aught
But ignorance, impudence, envy
And malice--what word-swathe would then vie
With yours for a clearness crystalline?
But had you to put in one small line
Some thought big and bouncing--as noddle
Of goose, born to cackle and waddle
And bite at man’s heel as goose-wont is,
Never felt plague its puny os frontis--
You’d know, as you hissed, spat and sputtered,
Clear ‘quack-quack’ is easily uttered!”
In a letter written to Mr. W. G. Kingsland, in 1868,
Mr. Browning says:--
“I can have little doubt that my writing has been in the main
too hard for many I should have been pleased to communicate with;
but I never designedly tried to puzzle people, as some of my critics
have supposed. On the other hand, I never pretended to offer
such literature as should be a substitute for a cigar
or a game at dominoes to an idle man. So, perhaps, on the whole
I get my deserts, and something over--not a crowd, but a few
I value more.” *
--
* ‘Browning Society Papers’, III., p. 344.
--
It was never truer of any author than it is true of Browning,
that ‘Le style c’est l’homme’; and Browning’s style is an expression
of the panther-restlessness and panther-spring of his
impassioned intellect. The musing spirit of a Wordsworth
or a Tennyson he partakes not of.
Mr. Richard Holt Hutton’s characterization of the poet’s style,
as a “crowded note-book style”, is not a particularly happy one.
In the passage, which he cites from Sordello, to illustrate
the “crowded note-book style”, occurs the following parenthesis:--
“(To be by him themselves made act,
Not watch Sordello acting each of them.)”
“What the parenthesis means,” he says, “I have not
the most distant notion. Mr. Browning might as well have said,
‘to be by him her himself herself themselves made act’, etc.,
for any vestige of meaning I attach to this curious mob
of pronouns and verbs. It is exactly like the short notes of a speech
intended to be interpreted afterwards by one who had heard
and understood it himself.” *
--
* ‘Essays Theological and Literary’. Vol. II., 2d ed., rev.
and enl., p. 175.
--
At first glance, this parenthesis is obscure; but the obscurity
is not due to its being “exactly like the short notes of a speech”,
etc. It is due to what the “obscurity” of Mr. Browning’s language,
as language, is, in nine cases out of ten, due, namely,
to the COLLOCATION of the words, not to an excessive economy
of words. He often exercises a liberty in the collocation of his words
which is beyond what an uninflected language like the English
admits of, without more or less obscurity. There are difficult
passages in Browning which, if translated into Latin, would present
no difficulty at all; for in Latin, the relations of words
are more independent of their collocation, being indicated by
their inflections.
The meaning of the parenthesis is, and, independently of the context,
a second glance takes it in (the wonder is, Mr. Hutton didn’t
take it in),--
“To be themselves made by him {to} act,
Not each of them watch Sordello acting.”
There are two or three characteristics of the poet’s diction
which may be noticed here:--
1. The suppression of the relative, both nominative and accusative
or dative, is not uncommon; and, until the reader becomes familiar
with it, it often gives, especially if the suppression is that
of a subject relative, a momentary, but only a momentary,
check to the understanding of a passage.
The following examples are from ‘The Ring and the Book’:--
“Checking the song of praise in me, had else
Swelled to the full for God’s will done on earth.”
I. The Ring and the Book, v. 591.
i.e., which had (would have) else swelled to the full, etc.
“This that I mixed with truth, motions of mine
That quickened, made the inertness malleolable
O’ the gold was not mine,”--
I. The Ring and the Book, v. 703.
“Harbouring in the centre of its sense
A hidden germ of failure, shy but sure,
Should neutralize that honesty and leave
That feel for truth at fault, as the way is too.”
I. The Ring and the Book, v. 851.
“Elaborate display of pipe and wheel
Framed to unchoak, pump up and pour apace
Truth in a flowery foam shall wash the world.”
I. The Ring and the Book, v. 1113.
“see in such
A star shall climb apace and culminate,”
III. The Other Half Rome, v. 846.
“Guido, by his folly, forced from them
The untoward avowal of the trick o’ the birth,
Would otherwise be safe and secret now.”
IV. Tertium Quid, v. 1599.
“so I
Lay, and let come the proper throe would thrill
Into the ecstasy and outthrob pain.”
VI. Giuseppe Caponsacchi, v. 972.
“blind?
Ay, as a man would be inside the sun,
Delirious with the plentitude of light
Should interfuse him to the finger-ends”--
X. The Pope, 1564.
“You have the sunrise now, joins truth to truth.”
X. The Pope, 1763.
“One makes fools look foolisher fifty-fold
By putting in their place the wise like you,
To take the full force of an argument
Would buffet their stolidity in vain.”
XI. Guido, 858.
Here the infinitive “To take” might be understood, at first look,
as the subject of “Would buffet”; but it depends on “putting”, etc.,
and the subject relative “that” is suppressed: “an argument {that}
would buffet their stolidity in vain.”
“Will you hear truth can do no harm nor good?”
XI. Guido, 1915.
“I who, with outlet for escape to heaven,
Would tarry if such flight allowed my foe
To raise his head, relieved of that firm foot
Had pinned him to the fiery pavement else!”
XI. Guido, 2099.
i.e., “that firm foot {that} had (would have) pinned.”
. . ."ponder, ere ye pass,
Each incident of this strange human play
Privily acted on a theatre,
Was deemed secure from every gaze but God’s,”--
XII. The Book and the Ring, v. 546.
“As ye become spectators of this scene--
* * * * *
--A soul made weak by its pathetic want
Of just the first apprenticeship to sin,
Would thenceforth make the sinning soul secure
From all foes save itself, that’s truliest foe,”--
XII. The Book and the Ring, v. 559.
i.e., “sin, {that} would.”
“Was he proud,--a true scion of the stock
Which bore the blazon, shall make bright my page”--
XII. The Book and the Ring, v. 821.
2. The use of the infinitive without the prepositive “to”,
is frequently extended beyond present usage, especially in ‘Sordello’
and ‘The Ring and the Book’. The following are examples:--
“Who fails, through deeds howe’er diverse, RE-TRACK
My purpose still, my task?”
Sordello, p. 168.
“failed Adelaide SEE then
Who was the natural chief, the man of men?”
Sordello, p. 175.
“but when
‘Twas time expostulate, attempt withdraw
Taurello from his child,” . . .
Sordello, p. 180.
Here are two infinitives, with the prepositive omitted,
“expostulate” and “attempt”, both dependent on the noun “time”,
and another, “withdraw”, without the prepositive, dependent on
“attempt”: “but when ‘twas time {to} expostulate, {to} attempt
{to} withdraw”, etc.
“For thus he ventured, to the verge,
Push a vain mummery.” . . .
Sordello, p. 190.
i.e., for thus he ventured {to} push to the verge a vain mummery.
“as yet
He had inconsciously contrived FORGET
I’ the whole, to dwell o’ the points”. . .
Sordello, p. 190.
“Grown bestial, dreaming how BECOME divine.”
Sordello, p. 191.
“And the whole music it was framed AFFORD,”--
Sordello, p. 203.
“Was such a lighting-up of faith, in life,
Only allowed initiate, set man’s step
In the true way by help of the great glow?”
R. and B. X. The Pope, v. 1815.
i.e. only allowed {to} initiate, {to} set man’s step, etc.
“If I might read instead of print my speech,--
Ay, and enliven speech with many a flower
Refuses obstinately blow in print.”
R. and B. IX. Johannes-Baptista Bottinius, v. 4.
Here the subject relative of “refuses” is omitted, and the verb
followed by an infinitive without the prepositive:
“many a flower {that} refuses obstinately {to} blow in print.”
3. Instead of the modern analytic form, the simple form
of the past subjunctive derived from the Anglo-Saxon inflectional form,
and identical with that of the past indicative, is frequently employed,
the context only showing that it is the subjunctive. (See Abbott’s
‘Shakespearian Grammar’, 361 et seq.)
“Would we some prize might hold
To match those manifold
Possessions of the brute,--gain most, as we did best!”
Rabbi Ben Ezra, St. xi.
i.e., as we should do best.
“Thus were abolished Spring and Autumn both,”
I. The Ring and the Book, 1358.
i.e., would be abolished.
“His peevishness had promptly put aside
Such honor and refused the proffered boon,” . . .
II. Half Rome (R. and B.), 369.
i.e., would have promptly put aside.
“(What daily pittance pleased the plunderer dole.)”
X. The Pope (R. and B.), 561.
i.e., as the context shows, {it} might please the plunderer {to} dole.
“succession to the inheritance
Which bolder crime had lost you:”
IV. Tertium Quid (R. and B.), 1104.
i.e., would have lost you.
But the verbs “be” and “have” are chiefly so used, and not often
beyond what present usage allows. *
--
* Tennyson uses “saw” = ‘viderem’, in the following passage:--
“But since I did not see the Holy Thing,
I sware a vow to follow it till I saw.”
Sir Percivale in ‘The Holy Grail’.
--
4. The use of the dative, or indirect object, without “to” or “for”.
Such datives are very frequent, and scarcely need illustration.
The poet has simply carried the use of them beyond the present
general usage of the language. But there’s a noticeable one
in the Pope’s Monologue, in ‘The Ring and the Book’, vv. 1464-1466:
The Archbishop of Arezzo, to whom poor Pompilia has applied,
in her distress, for protection against her brutal husband,
thinks it politic not to take her part, but send her back to him
and enjoin obedience and submission. The Pope, in his Monologue,
represents the crafty Archbishop as saying, when Pompilia cries,
“Protect me from the wolf!”
“No, thy Guido is rough, heady, strong,
Dangerous to disquiet: let him bide!
He needs some bone to mumble, help amuse
The darkness of his den with: so, the fawn
Which limps up bleeding to my foot and lies,
--Come to me daughter!--thus I throw him back!”
i.e., thus I throw back {to} him the fawn which limps up bleeding
to my foot and lies. The parenthesis, “Come to me, daughter”,
being interposed, and which is introduced as preparatory
to his purpose, adds to the difficulty of the construction.
There are, after all, but comparatively few instances
in Browning’s poetry, where these features of his diction
can be fairly condemned. They often impart a crispness
to the expressions in which they occur.
The contriving spirit of the poet’s language often results
in great complexity of construction. Complexity of construction
may be a fault, and it may not. It may be justified by the complexity
of the thought which it bears along. “Clear quack-quack
is easily uttered.” But where an author’s thought is nimble,
far-reaching, elliptical through its energy, and discursive,
the expression of it must be more or less complex or involved;
he will employ subordinate clauses, and parentheses, through which
to express the outstanding, restricting, and toning relations
of his thought, that is, if he is a master of perspective,
and ranks his grouped thoughts according to their relative importance.
The poet’s apostrophe to his wife in the spirit-world, which closes
the long prologue to ‘The Ring and the Book’ (vv. 1391-1416),
and in which he invokes her aid and benediction, in the work
he has undertaken, presents a greater complexity of construction
than is to be met with anywhere else in his works; and of this passage
it may be said, as it may be said of any other having
a complex construction, supposing this to be the only difficulty,
that it’s hard rather than obscure, and demands close reading. But,
notwithstanding its complex structure and the freight of thought
conveyed, the passage has a remarkable LIGHTSOMENESS of movement,
and is a fine specimen of blank verse. The unobtrusive,
but distinctly felt, alliteration which runs through it,
contributes something toward this lightsomeness. The first two verses
have a Tennysonian ring:--
“O lyric Love, half-angel and half-bird
And all a wonder and a wild desire,--
Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun,
Took sanctuary within the holier blue,
5 And sang a kindred soul out to his face,--
Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart--
When the first summons from the darkling earth
Reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue,
And bared them of the glory--to drop down,
10 To toil for man, to suffer or to die,--
This is the same voice: can thy soul know change?
Hail then, and hearken from the realms of help!
Never may I commence my song, my due
To God who best taught song by gift of thee,
15 Except with bent head and beseeching hand--
That still, despite the distance and the dark,
What was, again may be; some interchange
Of grace, some splendour once thy very thought,
Some benediction anciently thy smile:
20 --Never conclude, but raising hand and head
Thither where eyes, that cannot reach, yet yearn
For all hope, all sustainment, all reward,
Their utmost up and on,--so blessing back
In those thy realms of help, that heaven thy home,
25 Some whiteness which, I judge, thy face makes proud,
Some wanness where, I think, thy foot may fall!” *
--
* In the last three verses of ‘The Ring and the Book’
the poet again addresses his “Lyric Love” to express the wish
that the Ring, which he has rounded out of the rough ore
of the Roman murder case, might but lie “in guardianship”
outside hers,
“Thy rare gold ring of verse (the poet praised)
Linking our England to his Italy.”
The reference is to the inscription on Casa Guidi,
Via Maggiore, 9. Florence:
QUI SCRISSE E MORI
ELISABETTA BARRETT BROWNING
CHE IN CUORE DI DONNA CONCILIAVA
SCIENZA DI DOTTO E SPIRITO DI POETA
E FECE DEL SUO VERSO AUREO ANELLO
FRA ITALIA E INGHILTERRA
PONE QUESTO MEMORIA
FIRENZE GRATA
1861.
--
“his”, v. 5, the sun’s. “Yet human”, v. 6: though ‘kindred’
to the sun, yet proved ‘human’. . .‘when the first summons’, etc.
“This is the same voice”, v. 11, i.e., a voice of the same import
as was “the first summons”--one invoking help. The nouns
“interchange”, “splendour”, “benediction”, vv. 17, 18, 19,
are appositives of “what”, v. 17. “Never conclude”, v. 20,
to be construed with “commence”, v. 13: “Never {may I} conclude”.
“Their utmost up and on”, v. 23, to be construed with “yearn”, v. 21.
“so”, v. 23, looks back to “raising hand and head”, etc.
“Some whiteness” . . . v. 25, “Some wanness” . . . v. 26,
to be construed with “blessing back”.
See an elaborate analysis of this Invocation, by Dr. F. J. Furnivall,
read at the forty-eighth meeting of the Browning Society, February 25,
1887, being No. 39 of the Society’s Papers.
But, after all, the difficulties in Browning which result from
the construction of the language, be that what it may,
are not the main difficulties, as has been too generally supposed.
THE MAIN DIFFICULTIES ARE QUITE INDEPENDENT OF THE CONSTRUCTION
OF THE LANGUAGE.
Many readers, especially those who take an intellectual attitude
toward all things, in the heavens above and in the earth beneath,
suppose that they are prepared to understand almost anything
which is understandable if it is only PUT right. This is a most
egregious mistake, especially in respect to the subtle and complex
spiritual experiences which the more deeply subjective poetry embodies.
What De Quincey says in his paper on Kant,* of the comprehension of
the higher philosophical truths, can, with still better reason,
be said of the responsiveness to the higher spiritual truths:
“No complex or very important truth was ever yet transferred
in full development from one mind to another: truth of that character
is not a piece of furniture to be shifted; it is a seed which must be sown,
and pass through the several stages of growth. No doctrine of importance
can be transferred in a matured shape into any man’s understanding
from without: it must arise by an act of genesis within
the understanding itself.”
--
* ‘Letters to a Young Man’. Letter V.
--
And so it may be said in regard to the responsiveness to
the higher spiritual truths--I don’t say COMPREHENSION of
the higher spiritual truths (that word pertains rather to
an intellectual grasp), but RESPONSIVENESS to the higher
spiritual truths. Spiritual truths must be spiritually responded to;
they are not and cannot be intellectually comprehended. The condition
of such responsiveness it may require a long while to fulfil.
New attitudes of the soul, a meta/noia, may be demanded,
before such responsiveness is possible. And what some people
may regard in the higher poetry as obscure, by reason of the mode
of its presentation on the part of the poet, may be only relatively so
--that is, the obscurity may be wholly due to the wrong attitudes,
or the no attitudes, of their own souls, and to the limitations of
their spiritual experiences. In that case “the patient must minister
to himself”.
While on the subject of “obscurity”, I must notice a difficulty
which the reader at first experiences in his study of Browning’s poetry
--a difficulty resulting from the poet’s favorite art-form,
the dramatic or psychologic monologue.* The largest portion
of his voluminous poetry is in this form. Some speaker is made
to reveal his character, and, sometimes, by reflection, or directly,
the character of some one else--to set forth some subtle
and complex soul-mood, some supreme, all-determining movement or experience
of a life; or, it may be, to RATIOCINATE subtly on some curious question
of theology, morals, philosophy, or art. Now it is in strictly preserving
the monologue character that obscurity often results. A monologue
often begins with a startling abruptness, and the reader must
read along some distance before he gathers what the beginning means.
Take the monologue of Fra Lippo Lippi for example. The situation
is necessarily left more or less unexplained. The poet says nothing
‘in propria persona’, and no reply is made to the speaker
by the person or persons addressed. Sometimes a look, a gesture,
or a remark, must be supposed on the part of the one addressed,
which occasions a responsive remark. Sometimes the speaker IMPUTES
a question; and the reader is sometimes obliged to stop and consider
whether a question is imputed by the speaker to the one
he is addressing, or is a direct question of his own. This is often
the case throughout ‘The Ring and the Book’. But to the initiated,
these features of the monologue present little or no difficulty,
and they conduce to great compactness of composition--
a closeness of texture which the reader comes in time to enjoy,
and to prefer to a more loosely woven diction.
--
* The dramatic monologue differs from a soliloquy in this:
while there is but one speaker, the presence of a silent second person
is supposed, to whom the arguments of the speaker are addressed.
Perhaps such a situation may be termed a novelty of invention
in our Poet. It is obvious that the dramatic monologue gains over
the soliloquy in that it allows the artist greater room in which
to work out his conception of character. We cannot gaze long
at a solitary figure on a canvas, however powerfully treated,
without feeling some need of relief. In the same way a soliloquy
(comp. the great soliloquies of Shakespeare) cannot be protracted
to any great length without wearying the listener. The thoughts
of a man in self-communion are apt to run in a certain circle,
and to assume a monotony. The introduction of a second person
acting powerfully upon the speaker throughout, draws the latter forth
into a more complete and varied expression of his mind.
The silent person in the background, who may be all the time
master of the situation, supplies a powerful stimulus
to the imagination of the reader.--Rev. Prof. E. Johnson’s
“Paper on ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’” (‘Browning Soc. Papers’,
Pt. III., p. 279).
--
The monologue entitled ‘My Last Duchess. Ferrara’ is a good example
of the constitution of this art-form. It is one of the most perfect
in artistic treatment, and exhibits all the features I have just noticed.
Originally, this monologue and that now entitled ‘Count Gismond.
Aix in Provence’, had the common title, ‘Italy and France’,
the former being No. I. Italy; the latter, No. II. France. The poet,
no doubt, afterward thought that the Duke of the one monologue,
and the Count of the other, could not justly be presented
as representatives, respectively, of Italy and France.
In giving the monologues new titles, ‘My Last Duchess’ and ‘Count Gismond’,
he added to the one, ‘Ferrara’, and to the other, ‘Aix in Provence’,
thus locally restricting the order of character which
they severally represent.
In ‘My Last Duchess’, the speaker is a soulless VIRTUOSO--
a natural product of a proud, arrogant, and exclusive aristocracy,
on the one hand, and on the other, of an old and effete city,
like Ferrara, where art, rather than ministering to soul-life
and true manliness of character, has become an end to itself--
is valued for its own sake.
The Duke is showing, with the weak pride of the mere virtuoso,
a portrait of his last Duchess, to some one who has been sent
to negotiate another marriage. We see that he is having
an entertainment or reception of some kind in his palace,
and that he has withdrawn from the company with the envoy
to the picture-gallery on an upper floor. He has pulled aside
the curtain from before the portrait, and in remarking on
the expression which the artist, Fra Pandolf,
has given to the face, he is made to reveal a fiendish jealousy
on his part, occasioned by the sweetness and joyousness of
his late Duchess, who, he thought, should show interest in nothing
but his own fossilized self. “She had,” he says, “a heart--
how shall I say?--too soon made glad, too easily impressed;
she liked whate’er she looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, ‘twas all one! My favour at her breast, the dropping of
the daylight in the West, the bough of cherries some officious fool
broke in the orchard for her, the white mule she rode with
round the terrace--all and each would draw from her alike
the approving speech, or blush, at least. She thanked men,--good!
but thanked somehow--I know not how--as if she ranked my gift
of a nine-hundred-years-old name with anybody’s gift.”
Her fresh interest in things, and the sweet smile she had for all,
due to a generous soul-life, proved fatal to the lovely Duchess:
“Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt, whene’er I passed her; but who passed
without much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
then all smiles stopped together.”
He succeeded, and he seems to be proud of it, in shutting off
all her life-currents, pure, and fresh, and sparkling, as they were,
and we must suppose that she than sank slowly and uncomplainingly away.
What a deep pathos there is in “then all smiles stopped together”! *
--
* “I gave commands” certainly must not be understood to mean
commands for her death, as it is understood by the writer of the
articles in ‘The Saint Paul’s Magazine’ for December, 1870, and
January, 1871. {See Preface: Note to the Third Edition.}
--
The contemptible meanness and selfishness of jealousy
were never exhibited with greater power, than they are exhibited in
this short monologue--a power largely due to the artistic treatment.
The jealousy of Leontes, in ‘The Winter’s Tale’, of Shakespeare,
is nobility itself, in comparison with the Duke’s. How distinctly,
while indirectly, the sweet Duchess is, with a few masterly touches,
placed before us! The poet shows his artistic skill especially
in his indirect, reflected portraitures.
This short composition, comprising as it does but fifty-six lines,
is, of itself, sufficient to prove the poet a consummate artist.
Tennyson’s TECHNIQUE is quite perfect, almost “faultily faultless”,
indeed; but in no one of his compositions has he shown an equal degree
of art-power, in the highest sense of the word.
{‘My Last Duchess’}
“That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Fra Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said,
‘Fra Pandolf’ by design: for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so, not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, ‘twas not
Her husband’s presence only, called that spot
Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek: perhaps
Fra Pandolf chanced to say ‘Her mantle laps
Over my lady’s wrist too much’, or ‘Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half-flush that dies along her throat’: such stuff
Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She had
A heart--how shall I say?--too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, ‘twas all one! My favour at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace--all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least. She thanked men,--good! but thanked
Somehow--I know not how--as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame
This sort of trifling? Even had you skill
In speech--(which I have not)--to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say, ‘Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
Or there exceed the mark’--and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse,
--E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive. Will’t please you rise? We’ll meet
The company below, then. I repeat,
The Count your master’s known munificence
Is ample warrant that no just pretence
Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;
Though his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed
At starting, is my object. Nay, we’ll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me! *
--
* Claus of Innsbruck and also Fra Pandolf (v. 3) are imaginary
artists.
--
The last ten verses illustrate well the poet’s skilful management
of his difficult art-form. After the envoy has had his look
at the portrait, the Duke, thinking it time to return to his guests,
says “Will’t please you rise? We’ll meet the company below, then.”
His next speech, which indicates what he has been talking about,
during the envoy’s study of the picture, must be understood
as uttered while they are moving toward the stairway. The next,
“Nay, we’ll go together down, sir”, shows that they have reached
the head of the stairway, and that the envoy has politely motioned
the Duke to lead the way down. This is implied in the “Nay”.
The last speech indicates that on the stairway is a window
which affords an outlook into the courtyard, where he calls
the attention of the envoy to a Neptune, taming a sea-horse,
cast in bronze for him by Claus of Innsbruck. The pride
of the virtuoso is also implied in the word, “though”.
It should be noticed, also, that the Duke values his wife’s picture
wholly as a picture, not as the “counterfeit presentment” and reminder
of a sweet and lovely woman, who might have blessed his life,
if he had been capable of being blessed. It is to him a picture
by a great artist, and he values it only as such. He says,
parenthetically, “since none puts by the curtain I have drawn for you,
but I.” It’s too precious a work of art to be entrusted to anybody else.
IV. Browning’s Verse.
It seems to be admitted, even by many of the poet’s
most devoted students, that his verse is, in its general character,
harsh and rugged. To judge it fairly, one must free his mind
of many merely conventional canons in regard to verse.
Pure music is absolute. The music of verse moves, or should move,
under the conditions of the thought which articulates it. It should
serve as a chorus to the thought, expressing a mystic sympathy
with it. Verse may be very musical, and yet more or less mechanical;
that is, it may CLOTHE thought and sentiment, but not be a part
of it, not EMBODY it. Unrippled verse, which many readers demand,
MUST be more or less mechanical. Such verse flows according to
its own sweet will, independently of the thought-articulation.
But the thought-articulation may be so flimsy that it’s well enough
for the verse so to flow.
The careful student of Browning’s language-shaping must discover--
the requisite susceptibility to vitality of form being supposed--
that his verse is remarkably organic: often, indeed, more organic,
even when it appears to be clumsy, than the “faultily faultless” verse
of Tennyson. The poet who has written ‘In a Gondola’,
‘By the Fireside’, ‘Meeting at Night’, ‘Parting at Morning’,
‘Gold Hair’, ‘May and Death’, ‘Love among the Ruins’,
‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’, ‘Home Thoughts from the Sea’,
the Incantation in ‘The Flight of the Duchess’ (some of which are both
song and picture), and many, many more that might be named,
certainly has the very highest faculty of word and verse music,
of music, too, that is entirely new in English Poetry;
and it can be shown that he always exercises that faculty
WHENEVER THERE’S A REAL ARTISTIC OCCASION FOR IT, not otherwise.
Verse-music is never with him a mere literary indulgence.
The grotesquerie of rhythm and rhyme which some of his poems exhibit,
is as organic as any other feature of his language-shaping,
and shows the rarest command of language. He has been charged with
having “failed to reach continuous levels of musical phrasing”.
It’s a charge which every one who appreciates Browning’s verse
in its higher forms (and its higher forms are not those which are
addressed especially to the physical ear) will be very ready to admit.
In the general tenor of his poetry, he is ABOVE the Singer,--
he is the Seer and Revealer, who sees great truths beyond the bounds
of the territory of general knowledge, instead of working over truths
within that territory; and no seer of modern times has had his eyes
more clearly purged with euphrasy and rue. Poetry is with him,
in the language of Mr. E. Paxton Hood (‘Eclectic and Congregational Rev.’,
Dec., 1868), “no jingle of words, or pretty amusement
for harpsichord or piano, but rather a divine trigonometry,
a process of celestial triangulation, a taking observations of
celestial places and spheres, an attempt to estimate our world,
its place, its life amidst the boundless immeasurable sweeps
of space and time; or if describing, then describing
the animating stories of the giants, how they fought and fell,
or conquered. . .a great all-inclusive strength of song,
which is as a battle march to warriors, or as the refreshment
of brooks and dates to the spent and toiling soldiers on their way,
is more than the pretty idyll, whose sweet and plaintive story
pleases the idle hour or idle ear.”
The Rev. Prof. E. Johnson, in the section entitled ‘Poets of the Ear
and of the Eye’, of his valuable paper on ‘Conscience and Art
in Browning’ (‘Browning Soc. Papers’, Part III., pp. 345-380),
has ably shown that “the economy of music is a necessity
of Browning’s Art”--that music, instead of ever being an end
to itself, is with him a means to a much higher end. He says:--
“All poetry may be classified according to its form or its contents.
Formal classification is easy, but of little use. When we have
distinguished compositions as dramatic, lyrical, or characterized
a poet in like manner, we have done little. What we want to ascertain
is the peculiar quality of the imaginative stuff with which
he plastically works, and to appreciate its worth. This is always
a great task, but one particularly necessary in the case of Browning,
because the stuff in which he has wrought is so novel
in the poet’s hands. Psychology itself is comparatively a new
and modern study, as a distinct science; but a psychological poet,
who has made it his business to clothe psychic abstractions
‘in sights and sounds’, is entirely a novel appearance in literature.
“Now that phrase ‘clothing in sights and sounds’ may yield us the clue
to the classification we are seeking. The function of artists,
that is, musicians, poets in the narrower sense, and painters,
is to clothe Truth in sights and sounds for the hearing and seeing
of us all. Their call to do this lies in their finer and fuller
aesthetic faculty. The sense of hearing and that of seeing
stand in polar opposition, and thus a natural scale offers itself
by which we may rank and arrange our artists. At the one end
of the scale is the acoustic artist, i.e., the musician. At the other
end of the scale is the optic artist, the painter and sculptor.
Between these, and comprising both these activities in his own,
is the poet, who is both acoustic and optic artist. He translates
the sounds of the world, both external and internal,--
the tumult of storms, the murmurs of waves, the SUSURRUS of
the woodland, the tinkling of brooks, the throbbing of human hearts,
the cries of all living creatures; all those groans of pain,
stammers of desire, shrieks of despair, yawns even of languor,
which are ever breaking out of the heart of things; and beside
all this, the hearsay, commonplace, proverbial lore of the world.
He turns these into melodies which shall be caught up by those
who listen. In short, he converts by his alchemy the common stuff
of pain and of joy into music. But he is optic as well as acoustic;
that is, he calls up at the same time by his art a procession of images
which march or dance across the theatre of the listener’s fancy.
Now the question of classification on this scheme comes to this,
Does the particular poet who invites our attention deal more
with the aesthesis of the ear or with that of the eye? Does he more
fill our ear with sweet tunes or our fancy with shapes and colours?
Does he compel us to listen and shut our eyes, or to open our eyes wide
and dispense with all but the faintest musical accompaniment?
What sense, in short, does he mainly address himself to?
Goethe said that he was a ‘seeing’ man; W. von Humboldt,
the great linguist, that he was a ‘listening’ man. The influence
of Milton’s blindness on his poetry was noticed by Lessing.
The short-sightedness of Wieland has also been detected in his poetry.
“If we apply these tests to Browning, there can be, I think,
no doubt as to the answer. He is, in common with all poets,
both musician and painter, but much more the latter than the former.
He is never for a moment the slave of his ear, if I may so express it.
We know that he has, on the contrary, the mastery of music.
But music helps and supports his imagination, never controls it.
Music is to Browning an inarticulate revelation of the truth
of the supersensual world, the ‘earnest of a heaven’.
He is no voluptuary in music. Music is simply the means
by which the soul wings its way into the azure of spiritual theory
and contemplation. Take only ‘Saul’ and ‘Abt Vogler’ in illustration.
‘Saul’ is a magnificent interpretation of the old theme,
a favorite with the mystics, that evil spirits are driven out by music.
But in this interpretation it is not the mere tones, the thrumming
on the harp, it is the religious movement of the intelligence,
it is the truth of Divine love throbbing in every chord,
which constitutes the spell. And so in ‘Abt Vogler’;
the abbot’s instrument is only the means whereby he strikes out
the light of faith and hope within him. Not to dwell upon this point,
I would only say that it seems clear that Browning has the finest
acoustic gifts, and could, if he had chosen, have scattered
musical bons-bons through every page. But he has printed
no ‘versus inopes rerum, nugaeque canorae’ (Hor. ad Pis.).
He has had higher objects in view, and has dispensed better stuff
than that which lingers in the ear, and tends to suppress
rather than support the higher activity of thought.
“When for a moment he shuts his eyes, and falls purely into
the listening or ‘musing’ mood, he becomes the instrument of
a rich deep music, breaking out of the heart of the unseen world,
as in the Dirge of unfaithful Poets in ‘Paracelsus’,
or the Gypsy’s Incantation in the ‘Flight of the Duchess’,
or the Meditation at the crisis of Sordello’s temptation.
“When the keen inquisitive intelligence is in its full waking activity
there grows ‘more of the words’ and thought, and ‘less of the music’,
to invert a phrase of the poet’s. The melody ceases,
the rhythm is broken, as in all intense, earnest conversation.
At times only the tinkle of the pairing rhymes, of which Browning
has made a most witty use, reminds that we are called to partake
a mood in which commonplace associations are melting into the ideal.
I believe the economy of music is a necessity of Browning’s art;
and it would be only fair, if those who attack him on this ground
would consider how far thought of such quality as his admits of
being chanted, or otherwise musically accompanied. In plain words
the problem is, how far the pleasures of sound and of sense
can be united in poetry; and it will be found in every case
that a poet sacrifices something either to the one or to the other.
Browning has said something in his arch way on this point. In effect,
he remarks, Italian prose can render a simple thought more sweetly
to the ear than either Greek or English verse. It seems clear
from many other of his critical remarks that he considers the demand
for music in preference to thought in poetry, as the symptom
of a false taste.
“Browning’s poetry is to be gazed at, rather than listened to
and recited, for the most part. It is infinitely easier to listen
for an hour to spiritual music than to fix one’s whole attention
for a few minutes on a spiritual picture. In the latter act of mind
we find a rich musical accompaniment distracting, while a slight
musical accompaniment is probably helpful. And perhaps
we may characterize Browning’s poetry as a series of spiritual pictures
with a faint musical accompaniment.
“For illustration by extreme contrast, Milton may be compared
with Browning. Milton was a great hearsay poet, Browning repeats
no hearsay. In reading Milton, the difficulty is to keep up
the mental tension where there is so
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