Browning's Shorter Poems. Robert Browning

Human affection transforms the bare room to a bower of fruits and flowers; human courage and resolution carry Childe Roland victoriously past the threats and terrors of malignant nature, and the despair from accumulated memories of failure; death itself is described in Evelyn Hope, in Prospice, in Rabbi Ben Ezra, as a phase, a transit of the soul, wherein the material aspects and the physical terrors disappear. In Browning's poetry, the one real and permanent thing is the world of ideas, the world of the spirit. He is in this one of the truest Platonists of modern times.

      To many young readers this method in art comes like a revelation. Other poets also portray the souls of men; but Browning does it more obviously, more intentionally, more insistently. It is well, therefore, to have read Browning. To learn to read him aright[page xvi] is to enter the gateway to other good and great poetry.

      Out of this predominating interest in the souls of men, and out of his intense intellectual activity and scientific curiosity, grows one of Browning's greatest defects. He is often led too far afield, into intricacies and anomalies of character beyond the range of common experience and sympathy. The criminal, the "moral idiot," belong to the alienist rather than to the poet. The abnormalities of nature have no place in the world of great art; they do not echo the common experience of mankind. Already the interest is decreasing in that part of his poetry which deals with such themes. Bishop Blougram and Mr. Sludge will not take place in the ranks of artistic creations. Nor can the poet's "special pleading" for such types, however ingenious it may be, whatever philanthropy of soul it may imply, be regarded as justification. Sometimes, indeed, the poet is led by his sympathy and his intellectual ingenuity into defences that are inconsistent with his own standards of the true and the beautiful.

      The trait in Browning which appeals to the largest number of readers is his strenuous optimism. He will admit no evil or sorrow too great to be borne, too irrational to have some ultimate purpose of beneficence. "There shall never be one lost good," says Abt Vogler. The suicides in the morgue only serve[page xvii] to call forth his declaration:—

      "My own hope is, a sun will pierce

       The thickest cloud earth ever stretched;

       ° ° ° ° °

       That what began best can't end worst,

       Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst."

      He has no fear of death; he will face it gladly, in confidence of the life beyond. His Grammarian is content to assume an order of things which will justify in the next life his ceaseless toil in this, merely to learn how to live. Rabbi Ben Ezra's old age is serene in the hope of the continuity of life and the eternal development of character; he finds life good, and the plan of things perfect. In brief, Browning accepts life as it is, and believes it good, piecing out his conception of the goodness of life by drawing without limit upon his hopes of the other world. With the exception of a few poems like Andrea del Sarto, this is the unbroken tone of his poetry. Calvinism, asceticism, pessimism in any form, he rejects. He sustains his position not by argument, but by hope and assertion. It is a matter of temperament: he is optimistic because he was born so. Different from the serene optimism of Shakespeare's later life, in The Tempest and The Winter's Tale, in that it is not, like Shakespeare's, born of long and deep suffering[page xviii] from the contemplation of the tragedies of human life, it bears, in that degree, less of solace and conviction.

      To Browning's temperament, also, may be ascribed another prominent trait in his work. He steadily asserts the right of the individual to live out his own life, to be himself in fulfilling his desires and aspirations. The Statue and the Bust is the famous exposition of this doctrine. It is a teaching that neither the poet's optimism nor his acumen has justified in the minds of men. It is a return to the unbridled freedom of nature advocated by Whitman and Rousseau; an extreme assertion of the value of the individual man, and of unregulated democracy; an outgrowth, it may be, of the robustness and originality of Browning's nature, and interesting—not as a clew to his life, which conformed to that of organized society—but as a clew to his independence of classical and conventional forms in the exercise of his art.

      Creative energy Browning has in high degree. With the poet's insight into character and motives, the poet's grasp of the essential laws of human life, the poet's vividness of imagination, he has portrayed a host of types distinct from each other, true to life, strongly marked and consistent. With fine dramatic instinct he has shown these characters in true relation to the facts of life and to each other. In this respect he has satisfied the most exigent demands of art, and has[page xix] already taken rank as one of the great creative minds of the nineteenth century.

      True poet he is, also, in his depth of feeling and range of sympathy. Beneath a ruggedness of intellect, like his landscape in De Gustibus, there is always sympathy and tenderness. It is, indeed, more like the serenity of Chaucer's emotions than like the tragic fervor of Shakespeare's. Mrs. Browning's estimate of him in Lady Geraldine's Courtship—

      "Or from Browning some 'Pomegranate,' which, if cut deep down the middle,

       Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity,"

      is true criticism.

      His love of nature, and his sense of the joy and beauty of it, appear often in his poetry; but not with the same insistence as in Wordsworth and Burns, and seldom with the same pervasiveness, or with the same beauty, as in Tennyson. He was rather the poet of men's souls. When he does use nature, it is generally to illustrate some phase or experience of the soul, and not for the sake of its beauty. He has, however, some nature-descriptions so exquisite that English poetry would be the poorer for their loss. Witness De Gustibus, Up at a Villa, Home Thoughts from Abroad, Pippa's Songs, and Saul.

      It is too early to guess at Browning's permanent[page xx] place in our literature. But his vigor of intellect, his insight into the human heart, his originality in phrase and conception, his unquenchable and fearless optimism, and his grasp of the problems of his century, make him beyond question one of its greatest figures.

APPRECIATIONS

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      Shakespeare is not our poet, but the world's,

       Therefore, on him no speech! and brief for thee,

       Browning! Since Chaucer was alive and hale

       No man has walked along our roads with step

       So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue

       So varied in discourse. But warmer climes

       Give brighter plumage, stronger wing: the breeze

       Of Alpine heights thou playest with, borne on

       Beyond Sorrento and Amalfi, where

       The Siren waits thee, singing song for song.

      —WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.

      Tennyson has a vivid feeling of the dignity and potency of law. … Browning vividly feels the importance, the greatness and beauty of passions and enthusiasms, and his imagination is comparatively unimpressed by the presence of law and its operations. … It is not the order and regularity in the processes of the natural world which chiefly delight Browning's imagination, but the streaming forth of power, and will, and love from the whole face of the visible universe. …

      Tennyson considers the chief instruments of human progress to be a vast increase of knowledge and of political organization. Browning makes that progress dependent on[page xxi] the production of higher passions, and aspirations—hopes, and joys, and sorrows; Tennyson finds the evidence of the truth of the doctrine of progress in the universal presence of a self-evolving law. Browning obtains his assurance of its truth from inward presages and prophecies of the soul, from anticipations, types, and symbols of a higher greatness in store for man, which even now reside within him, a creature ever unsatisfied, ever yearning upward in thought, feeling, and endeavour.

      … Hence, it is not obedience, it is not submission to