Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning. Robert Browning

Browning's first great productive period, 1841-46, the only other poems of note were Tennyson's two volumes in 1842. In the nine years from 1846 to Men and Women in 1855, the chief poems were Tennyson's The Princess, In Memoriam, and Maud, for though Wordsworth's Prelude was one of the greatest publications of the mid-century, it was written years before, and can hardly be counted as belonging to this era. There are, during the decade, many poems of secondary rank, the most important of them being Mrs. Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese and Aurora Leigh, but besides Tennyson and Browning, the only poet of high rank is Matthew Arnold, whose slender volumes voice the doubts and difficulties of the age as Browning's poems voice its optimism. In the fourteen years between Men and Women and The Ring and the Book poets of a new kind appear; William Morris's Defense of Guinevere, The Life and Death of Jason and The Earthly Paradise, and Swinburne's early poems are alien to the work of Browning in form, subject-matter, and ideals. The fact is, the more definitely we try to place Browning in his literary environment the more distinctly do we perceive that he was sui generis among his contemporaries. He combined in striking fashion the intensity of the poet and the strong social sense of the prose writer.

      It seems also wise to glance at the outset at a few of the main criticisms that have been made on Browning's poetry, for the result of his marked originality is that no poet of the time has been so greatly praised and blamed.

      A natural first topic is his really famous "obscurity." This obscurity is variously ascribed to a diction unduly learned, or almost unintelligibly colloquial, or grotesquely inventive; to figures of speech drawn from sources too unfamiliar or elaborated to the point of confusion; to sentences complicated by startling inversions, by double parentheses, by broken constructions, or by a grammatical structure defying analysis. It would be quite possible to illustrate each of these points from Browning's works, and it cannot be denied that his poetry is sometimes needlessly and inexcusably hard reading. But in reality the difficulties in his poems come less from stylistic defects than from the subject matter. What Mr. Chesterton calls Browning's love for "the holes and corners of history," leads him to the use of much unfamiliar detail. A large part of the difficulty in reading Sordello arises from the fact that all Browning's accumulated knowledge of medieval Italy is there poured forth in an allusive, taken-for-granted manner, till even the practiced reader turns away perplexed and overwhelmed. So, too, "Old Pictures in Florence," "Pictor Ignotus," and "Fra Lippo Lippi" assume on the part of the reader a minute familiarity with early Florentine art. Occasionally the poems demand an exceptional technical knowledge of some sort, as in "Abt Vogler," where only a trained musician can fully understand the terminology. Many even of the minor poems belong to realms of thought and experience so remote that only by distinct effort do we transport ourselves thither. It would, for instance, be absurd to call "Two in the Campagna" difficult in form or phrasing, yet it narrates an experience intelligible only to those who have loved deeply but have found in the very heart of that love a baffling sense of inevitable personal isolation. Sometimes the difficulty arises from the extreme subtlety of the thought. "Evelyn Hope," the simplest of poems in expression, presents novel and elusive ideas. Mr. Chesterton ingeniously ascribes Browning's obscurity to "intellectual humility," to an assumption that his readers were in possession of a native endowment and an acquired intellectual wealth on a par with his own; but the defense seems rather forced. Mrs. Browning gave one of the best brief analyses of Mr. Browning's obscurity. He had been attacked as being "misty" and she wrote to him, "You never are misty, not even in 'Sordello'—never vague. Your graver cuts deep, sharp lines, always—and there is an extra distinctness in your images and thoughts, from the midst of which, crossing each other infinitely, the general significance seems to escape." But the classic defense of Browning from this point of view may be found in Swinburne's Introduction to Chapman's Poems:

      "The difficulty found by many in certain of Mr. Browning's works arises from a quality the very reverse of that which produces obscurity, properly so-called. Obscurity is the natural product of turbid forces and confused ideas; of a feeble and clouded or of a vigorous but unfixed and chaotic intellect.... Now if there is any great quality more perceptible than another in Mr. Browning's intellect it is his decisive and incisive faculty of thought, his sureness and intensity of perception, his rapid and trenchant resolution of aim.... The very essence of Mr. Browning's aim and method, as exhibited in the ripest fruits of his intelligence, is such as implies above all other things the possession of a quality the very opposite of obscurity—a faculty of spiritual illumination rapid and intense and subtle as lightning, which brings to bear upon its object by way of direct and vivid illustration every symbol and every detail on which its light is flashed in passing." Browning has himself a word to say on this topic. He wrote to a friend:

      "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."

A second charge not infrequently brought against Browning's verse is that it is harsh, and at times even ugly. This charge, like that of obscurity, cannot be wholly denied. The harshness results from incorrect rhymes, from irregular movement of the verse, or from difficult combinations of vowels and consonants. No reader of Browning's poems can fail to have been impressed by his intellectual agility in matching odd rhymes. In dash and originality his rhymes out-rank even those in Butler's Hudibras and Lowell's Fable for Critics. We find in Pacchiarotto, for instance, many rhymes of the gayest, most freakish, most grotesque character—"monkey, one key," "prelude, hell-hued," "stubborn, cub-born," "was hard, hazard," all occur in a single stanza. An example of exceptional facility in rhyming is found in "Through the Metidja," where, without repetition of words and without forcing of the sense thirty-six words rhyme with "ride." It cannot be denied that this remarkable facility led Browning occasionally into the use of odd rhymes in poems where no light or comic effect was intended; but a detailed study of his rhymes[7] shows that the proportion of incorrect rhymes is really small, that the grotesque rhymes are more striking than numerous, and that they are usually in places where they are dramatically appropriate. His use of harsh words and sound-blendings is also often to be justified on the ground of their appropriateness to the idea. Compare, for instance, the flowing, easy words, the musical linking of sounds, in the first stanza of "Love Among the Ruins" with the harsh words, harshly combined, in the twelfth and thirteenth stanzas of "Childe Roland." Both effects are artistic because each sort of combination is in response to the nature of the thought. It is true that sometimes, perhaps not infrequently, the verse is rugged or uncouth where the sense does not call for such form, and there are lines that not only remind us of De Quincey's dictum that certain words should be "boiled before they are eaten," but which have no metrical flow at all; they defy any sort of scansion and read like rough prose. But a poet has a right of appeal to the sum of his manifest excellencies rather than to his defects, and if we take Browning's best work we find a harmony of movement superior in musical effect to a more technically regular meter. In many poems the meter is indissolubly fused with the pictures, the ideas, the events. Take, for instance, "The Pied Piper of Hamelin," where the hurry-skurry of the verse is in complete harmony with the quaint, rapid tale. The hoof-beats of galloping horses is heard all through "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix." The slow march, the stately chant, are rhythmically present throughout "A Grammarian's Funeral." In "The Flight of the Duchess" the change from the rough servitor's narrative to the incantation of the gypsy-queen is as exquisitely marked in the metrical movement and in the rhymes as it is in the diction and tone of thought. Many