Book: The Poetry Of Robert Browning

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THE POETRY

OF

ROBERT BROWNING

BY

STOPFORD A. BROOKE

AUTHOR OF "TENNYSON: HIS ART AND RELATION TO MODERN LIFE"

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LONDON

ISBISTER AND COMPANY LIMITED

1903

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Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & Co. London & Edinburgh

_First Edition, September 1902_
_Reprinted, October 1902_
_Reprinted, January 1903_

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CONTENTS


I. BROWNING AND TENNYSON

II. THE TREATMENT OF NATURE

III. THE TREATMENT OF NATURE

IV. BROWNING'S THEORY OF HUMAN LIFE--PAULINE AND PARACELSUS

V. THE POET OF ART

VI. SORDELLO

VII. BROWNING AND SORDELLO

VIII. THE DRAMAS

IX. POEMS OF THE PASSION OF LOVE

X. THE PASSIONS OTHER THAN LOVE

XI. IMAGINATIVE REPRESENTATIONS

XII. IMAGINATIVE REPRESENTATIONS--RENAISSANCE

XIII. WOMANHOOD IN BROWNING

XIV. WOMANHOOD IN BROWNING--(THE DRAMATIC LYRICS AND POMPILIA)

XV. BALAUSTION

XVI. THE RING AND THE BOOK

XVII. LATER POEMS

XVIII. THE LAST POEMS

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The publishers are indebted to Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co. on behalf
of the owner of the copyright for their permission to make extracts
from copyright poems for use in this volume

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CHAPTER I

_BROWNING AND TENNYSON_


Parnassus, Apollo's mount, has two peaks, and on these, for sixty years,
from 1830 to 1890,[1] two poets sat, till their right to these lofty
peaks became unchallenged. Beneath them, during these years, on the
lower knolls of the mount of song, many new poets sang; with diverse
instruments, on various subjects, and in manifold ways. They had their
listeners; the Muses were also their visitants; but none of them
ventured seriously to dispute the royal summits where Browning and
Tennyson sat, and smiled at one another across the vale between.

Both began together; and the impulses which came to them from the new
and excited world which opened its fountains in and about 1832 continued
to impel them till the close of their lives. While the poetic world
altered around them, while two generations of poets made new schools of
poetry, they remained, for the most part, unaffected by these schools.
There is nothing of Arnold and Clough, of Swinburne, Rossetti or Morris,
or of any of the others, in Browning or Tennyson. There is nothing even
of Mrs. Browning in Browning. What changes took place in them were
wrought, first, by the natural growth of their own character; secondly,
by the natural development of their art-power; and thirdly, by the slow
decaying of that power. They were, in comparison with the rest,
curiously uninfluenced by the changes of the world around them. The main
themes, with which they began, they retained to the end. Their methods,
their instruments, their way of feeling into the world of man and of
nature, their relation to the doctrines of God and of Man, did not,
though on all these matters they held diverse views, alter with the
alteration of the world. But this is more true of Browning than of
Tennyson. The political and social events of those years touched
Tennyson, as we see from _Maud_ and the _Princess_, but his way of
looking at them was not the way of a contemporary. It might have been
predicted from his previous career and work. Then the new movements of
Science and Criticism which disturbed Clough and Arnold so deeply, also
troubled Tennyson, but not half so seriously. He staggered for a time
under the attack on his old conceptions, but he never yielded to it. He
was angry with himself for every doubt that beset him, and angry with
the Science and Criticism which disturbed the ancient ideas he was
determined not to change. Finally, he rested where he had been when he
wrote _In Memoriam_, nay more, where he had been when he began to write.

There were no such intervals in Browning's thought. One could scarcely
say from his poetry, except in a very few places, that he was aware of
the social changes of his time, or of the scientific and critical
movement which, while he lived, so profoundly modified both theology and
religion.[2] _Asolando_, in 1890, strikes the same chords, but more
feebly, which _Paracelsus_ struck in 1835.

But though, in this lofty apartness and self-unity, Browning and
Tennyson may fairly be said to be at one, in themselves and in their
song they were different. There could scarcely be two characters, two
musics, two minds, two methods in art, two imaginations, more distinct
and contrasted than those which lodged in these men--and the object of
this introduction is to bring out this contrast, with the purpose of
placing in a clearer light some of the peculiar elements in the poetry
of Browning, and in his position as a poet.

1. Their public fate was singularly different. In 1842 Tennyson, with
his two volumes of Collected Poems, made his position. The _Princess_,
in 1847, increased his reputation. In 1850, _In Memoriam_ raised him,
it was said, above all the poets of his time, and the book was
appreciated, read and loved by the greater part of the English-speaking
world. The success and popular fame which now followed were well
deserved and wisely borne. They have endured and will endure. A host of
imitators, who caught his music and his manner, filled the groves and
ledges which led up to the peak on which he lived. His side of Parnassus
was thronged.

It was quite otherwise with his brother-poet. Only a few clear-eyed
persons cared to read _Paracelsus_, which appeared in 1835. _Strafford_,
Browning's first drama, had a little more vogue; it was acted for a
while. When _Sordello_, that strange child of genius, was born in 1840,
those who tried to read its first pages declared they were
incomprehensible. It seems that critics in those days had either less
intelligence than we have, or were more impatient and less attentive,
for not only _Sordello_ but even _In Memoriam_ was said to be
exceedingly obscure.

Then, from 1841 to 1846, Browning published at intervals a series of
varied poems and dramas, under the title of _Bells and Pomegranates_.
These, one might imagine, would have grasped the heart of any public
which had a care for poetry. Among them were such diverse poems as
_Pippa Passes_; _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_; _Saul_; _The Pied Piper of
Hamelin_; _My Last Duchess_; _Waring_. I only mention a few (all different
in note, subject and manner from one another), in order to mark the
variety and range of imaginative power displayed in this wonderful set
of little books. The Bells of poetry's music, hung side by side with
the golden Pomegranates of thought, made the fringe of the robe of this
high priest of song. Rarely have imagination and intellect, ideal faith
and the sense which handles daily life, passion and quietude, the
impulse and self-mastery of an artist, the joy of nature and the fates
of men, grave tragedy and noble grotesque, been mingled together more
fully--bells for the pleasure and fruit for the food of man.

Yet, on the whole, they fell dead on the public. A few, however, loved
them, and all the poems were collected in 1849. _In Memoriam_ and this
Collected Edition of Browning issued almost together; but with how
different a fate and fame we see most plainly in the fact that Browning
can scarcely be said to have had any imitators. The groves and ledges of
his side of Apollo's mountain were empty, save for a few enchanted
listeners, who said: "This is our music, and here we build our tent."

As the years went on, these readers increased in number, but even when
the volumes entitled _Men and Women_ were published in 1855, and the
_Dramatis Personae_ in 1864, his followers were but a little company. For
all this neglect Browning cared as a bird cares who sings for the love
of singing, and who never muses in himself whether the wood is full or
not of listeners. Being always a true artist, he could not stop versing
and playing; and not one grain of villain envy touched his happy heart
when he looked across the valley to Tennyson. He loved his mistress Art,
and his love made him always joyful in creating.

At last his time came, but it was not till nearly twenty years after
the Collected Poems of 1849 that _The Ring and the Book_ astonished the
reading public so much by its intellectual _tour de force_ that it was
felt to be unwise to ignore Browning any longer. His past work was now
discovered, read and praised. It was not great success or worldwide fame
that he attained, but it was pleasant to him, and those who already
loved his poems rejoiced with him. Before he died he was widely read,
never so much as Tennyson, but far more than he had ever expected. It
had become clear to all the world that he sat on a rival height with
Tennyson, above the rest of his fellow-poets.

Their public fate, then, was very different. Tennyson had fifty years of
recognition, Browning barely ten. And to us who now know Browning this
seems a strange thing. Had he been one of the smaller men, a modern
specialist like Arnold or Rossetti, we could better understand it. But
Browning's work was not limited to any particular or temporary phase of
human nature. He set himself to represent, as far as he could, all types
of human nature; and, more audacious still, types taken from many
diverse ages, nations and climates. He told us of times and folk as far
apart as Caliban and Cleon, as Karshish and Waring, as Balaustion and
Fifine, as St. John and Bishop Blougram. The range and the contrasts of
his subjects are equally great. And he did this work with a searching
analysis, a humorous keenness, a joyous boldness, and an opulent
imagination at once penetrative and passionate. When, then, we realise
this as we realise it now, we are the more astonished that appreciation
of him lingered so long. Why did it not come at first, and why did it
come in the end?

The first answer to that question is a general one. During the years
between 1860 and 1890, and especially during the latter half of these
years, science and criticism were predominant. Their determination to
penetrate to the roots of things made a change in the general direction
of thought and feeling on the main subjects of life. Analysis became
dearer to men than synthesis, reasoning than imagination. Doubtful
questions were submitted to intellectual decision alone. The
Understanding, to its great surprise, was employed on the investigation
of the emotions, and even the artists were drawn in this direction.
They, too, began to dissect the human heart. Poets and writers of
fiction, students of human nature, were keenly interested, not so much
in our thoughts and feelings as in exposing how and why we thought or
felt in this or that fashion. In such analysis they seemed to touch the
primal sources of life. They desired to dig about the tree of humanity
and to describe all the windings of its roots and fibres--not much
caring whether they withered the tree for a time--rather than to
describe and sing its outward beauty, its varied foliage, and its ruddy
fruit. And this liking to investigate the hidden inwardness of
motives--which many persons, weary of self-contemplation, wisely prefer
to keep hidden--ran through the practice of all the arts. They became,
on the whole, less emotional, more intellectual. The close marriage
between passion and thought, without whose cohabitation no work of
genius is born in the arts, was dissolved; and the intellect of the
artist often worked by itself, and his emotion by itself. Some of the
parthenogenetic children of these divorced powers were curious products,
freaks, even monsters of literature, in which the dry, cynical, or
vivisecting temper had full play, or the naked, lustful, or cruel
exposure of the emotions in ugly, unnatural, or morbid forms was
glorified. They made an impudent claim to the name of Art, but they were
nothing better than disagreeable Science. But this was an extreme
deviation of the tendency. The main line it took was not so detestable.
It was towards the ruthless analysis of life, and of the soul of man; a
part, in fact, of the general scientific movement. The outward forms of
things charmed writers less than the motives which led to their making.
The description of the tangled emotions and thoughts of the inner life,
before any action took place, was more pleasurable to the writer, and
easier, than any description of their final result in act. This was
borne to a wearisome extreme in fiction, and in these last days a
comfortable reaction from it has arisen. In poetry it did not last so
long. Morris carried us out of it. But long before it began, long before
its entrance into the arts, Browning, who on another side of his genius
delighted in the representation of action, anticipated in poetry, and
from the beginning of his career, twenty, even thirty years before it
became pronounced in literature, this tendency to the intellectual
analysis of human nature. When he began it, no one cared for it; and
_Paracelsus, Sordello_ and the soul-dissecting poems in _Bells and
Pomegranates_ fell on an unheeding world. But Browning did not heed the
unheeding of the world. He had the courage of his aims in art, and while
he frequently shaped in his verse the vigorous movement of life, even to
its moments of fierce activity, he went on quietly, amid the silence of
the world, to paint also the slowly interwoven and complex pattern of
the inner life of men. And then, when the tendency of which I speak had
collared the interest of society, society, with great and ludicrous
amazement, found him out. "Here is a man," it said, "who has been doing
in poetry for the last thirty years the very thing of which we are so
fond, and who is doing it with delightful and varied subtlety. We will
read him now." So Browning, anticipating by thirty years the drift of
the world, was not read at first; but, afterwards, the world having
reached him, he became a favoured poet.

However, fond as he was of metaphysical analysis, he did not fall into
the extremes into which other writers carried it, _Paracelsus_ is,
indeed, entirely concerned with the inner history of a soul, but
_Sordello_ combines with a similar history a tale of political and
warlike action in which men and women, like Salinguerra and Palma, who
live in outward work rather than in inward thought, are described; while
in poems like _Pippa Passes_ and some of the Dramas, emotion and
thought, intimately interwoven, are seen blazing, as it were, into a
lightning of swift deeds. Nor are other poems wanting, in which, not
long analysis, but short passion, fiery outbursts of thought, taking
immediate form, are represented with astonishing intensity.

2. This second remarkable power of his touches the transition which has
begun to carry us, in the last few years, from the subjective to the
objective in art. The time came, and quite lately, when art, weary of
intellectual and minute investigation, turned to realise, not the long
inward life of a soul with all its motives laid bare, but sudden moments
of human passion, swift and unoutlined impressions on the senses, the
moody aspects of things, flared-out concentrations of critical hours of
thought and feeling which years perhaps of action and emotion had
brought to the point of eruption. Impressionism was born in painting,
poetry, sculpture and music.

It was curious that, when we sought for a master who had done this in
the art of poetry, we found that Browning--who had in long poems done
the very opposite of impressionism--had also, in a number of short
poems, anticipated impressionist art by nearly forty years. _Porphyria's
Lover_, many a scene in _Sordello_, _My Last Duchess_, _The Laboratory_,
_Home Thoughts from Abroad_, are only a few out of many. It is pleasant
to think of the ultimate appearance of Waring, flashed out for a moment
on the sea, only to disappear. In method, swiftness and colour, but done
in verse, it is an impressionist picture, as vivid in transient scenery
as in colour. He did the same sort of work in poems of nature, of human
life, of moments of passion, of states of the soul. That is another
reason why he was not read at first, and why he is read now. He was
impressionist long before Impressionism arrived. When it arrived he was
found out. And he stood alone, for Tennyson is never impressionist, and
never could have been. Neither was Swinburne nor Arnold, Morris nor
Rossetti.

3. Again, in the leisured upper ranges of thought and emotion, and in
the extraordinary complexity of human life which arose, first, out of
the more intimate admixture of all classes in our society; and secondly,
out of the wider and more varied world-life which increased means of
travel and knowledge afforded to men, Tennyson's smooth, melodious,
simple development of art-subjects did not represent the clashing
complexity of human life, whether inward in the passions, the intellect
or the soul, or in the active movement of the world. And the other poets
were equally incapable of representing this complexity of which the
world became clearly conscious. Arnold tried to express its beginnings,
and failed, because he tried to explain instead of representing them. He
wrote about them; he did not write them down. Nor did he really belong
to this novel, quick, variegated, involved world which was so pleased
with its own excitement and entanglement. He was the child of a world
which was then passing away, out of which life was fading, which was
tired like Obermann, and sought peace in reflective solitudes. Sometimes
he felt, as in _The New Age_, the pleasure of the coming life of the
world, but he was too weary to share in it, and he claimed quiet. But
chiefly he saw the disturbance, the unregulated life; and, unable to
realise that it was the trouble and wildness of youth, he mistook it for
the trouble of decay. He painted it as such. But it was really young,
and out of it broke all kinds of experiments in social, religious,
philosophical and political thought, such as we have seen and read of
for the last thirty years. Art joined in the experiments of this
youthful time. It opened a new fountain and sent forth from it another
stream, to echo this attempting, clanging and complicated society; and
this stream did not flow like a full river, making large or sweet
melody, but like a mountain torrent thick with rocks, the thunderous
whirlpools of whose surface were white with foam. Changing and
sensational scenery haunted its lower banks where it became dangerously
navigable. Strange boats, filled with outlandish figures, who played on
unknown instruments, and sang of deeds and passions remote from common
life, sailed by on its stormy waters. Few were the concords, many the
discords, and some of the discords were never resolved. But in one case
at least--in the case of Browning's poetry, and in very many cases in
the art of music--out of the discords emerged at last a full melody of
steady thought and controlled emotion as (to recapture my original
metaphor) the rude, interrupted music of the mountain stream reaches
full and concordant harmony when it flows in peace through the meadows
of the valley.

These complex and intercleaving conditions of thought and passion into
which society had grown Browning represented from almost the beginning
of his work. When society became conscious of them--there it found him.
And, amazed, it said, "Here is a man who forty years ago lived in the
midst of our present life and wrote about it." They saw the wild, loud
complexity of their world expressed in his verse; and yet were dimly
conscious, to their consolation, that he was aware of a central peace
where the noise was quieted and the tangle unravelled.

For Browning not only represented this discordant, varied hurly-burly of
life, but also, out of all the discords which he described, and which,
when he chose, even his rhythms and word-arrangements realised in sound,
he drew a concordant melody at last, and gave to a world, troubled with
itself, the hope of a great concent into which all the discords ran, and
where they were resolved. And this hope for the individual and the race
was one of the deepest elements in Browning's religion. It was also the
hope of Tennyson, but Tennyson was often uncertain of it, and bewailed
the uncertainty. Browning was certain of his hope, and for the most part
resolved his discords. Even when he did not resolve them, he firmly
believed that they would be resolved. This, his essential difference
from the other poets of the last fifty years, marks not only his
apartness from the self-ignorance of English society, and the
self-sceptical scepticism which arises from that self-ignorance, but
also how steadily assured was the foundation of his spiritual life. In
the midst of the shifting storms of doubt and trouble, of mockery,
contradiction, and assertion on religious matters, he stood unremoved.
Whatever men may think of his faith and his certainties, they reveal the
strength of his character, the enduring courage of his soul, and the
inspiring joyousness that, born of his strength, characterised him to
the last poem he wrote. While the other poets were tossing on the sea of
unresolved Question, he rested, musing and creating, on a green island
whose rocks were rooted on the ocean-bed, and wondered, with the smiling
tolerance of his life-long charity, how his fellows were of so little
faith, and why the sceptics made so much noise. He would have reversed
the Psalmist's cry. He would have said, "Thou art not cast down, O my
soul; thou art not disquieted within me. Thou hast hoped in God, who is
the light of thy countenance, and thy God."

At first the world, enamoured of its own complex discords, and pleased,
like boys in the street, with the alarms it made, only cared for that
part of Browning which represented the tangle and the clash, and ignored
his final melody. But of late it has begun, tired of the restless
clatter of intellectual atoms, to desire to hear, if possible, the
majestic harmonies in which the discords are resolved. And at this point
many at present and many more in the future will find their poetic and
religious satisfaction in Browning. At the very end, then, of the
nineteenth century, in a movement which had only just begun, men said to
themselves, "Browning felt beforehand what we are beginning to hope for,
and wrote of it fifty, even sixty years ago. No one cared then for him,
but we care now."

Again, though he thus anticipated the movements of the world, he did
not, like the other poets, change his view about Nature, Man and God. He
conceived that view when he was young, and he did not alter it. Hence,
he did not follow or reflect from year to year the opinions of his time
on these great matters. When _Paracelsus_ was published in 1835 Browning
had fully thought out, and in that poem fully expressed, his theory of
God's relation to man, and of man's relation to the universe around him,
to his fellow men, and to the world beyond. It was a theory which was
original, if any theory can be so called. At least, its form, as he
expressed it, was clearly original. Roughly sketched in _Pauline_, fully
rounded in _Paracelsus_, it held and satisfied his mind till the day of
his death. But Tennyson had no clear theory about Man or Nature or God
when he began, nor was he afterwards, save perhaps when he wrote the
last stanzas of _In Memoriam_, a fully satisfied citizen of the city
that has foundations. He believed in that city, but he could not always
live in it. He grew into this or that opinion about the relations of God
and man, and then grew out of it. He held now this, now that view of
nature, and of man in contact with nature. There was always battle in
his soul; although he won his brittle in the end, he had sixty years of
war. Browning was at peace, firm-fixed. It is true the inward struggle
of Tennyson enabled him to image from year to year his own time better
than Browning did. It is true this struggle enabled him to have great
variety in his art-work when it was engaged with the emotions which
belong to doubt and faith; but it also made him unable to give to his
readers that sense of things which cannot be shaken, of faith in God and
in humanity wholly independent, in its depths, of storms on the surface
of this mortal life, which was one of Browning's noblest legacies to
that wavering, faithless, pessimistic, analysis-tormented world through
which we have fought our way, and out of which we are emerging.

4. The danger in art, or for an artist, of so settled a theory is that
in expression it tends to monotony; and sometimes, when we find almost
every poem of Browning's running up into his theory, we arrive at the
borders of the Land of Weary-men. But he seems to have been aware of
this danger, and to have conquered it. He meets it by the immense
variety of the subjects he chooses, and of the scenery in which he
places them. I do not think he ever repeats any one of his examples,
though he always repeats his theory. And the pleasant result is that we
can either ignore the theory if we like, or rejoice over its universal
application, or, beyond it altogether, be charmed and excited by the
fresh examples alone. And they are likely to charm, at least by variety,
for they are taken from all ages of history; from as many diverse phases
of human act, character and passion as there are poems which concern
them; from many periods of the arts; from most of the countries of
Europe, from France, Germany, Spain, Italy, (rarely from England,) with
their specialised types of race and of landscape; and from almost every
class of educated modern society. Moreover, he had a guard within his
own nature against the danger of this monotony. It was the youthful
freshness with which, even in advanced age, he followed his rapid
impulses to art-creation. No one was a greater child than he in the
quickness with which he received a sudden call to poetry from passing
events or scenes, and in the eagerness with which he seized them as
subjects. He took the big subjects now and then which the world expects
to be taken, and treated them with elaborate thought and steadfast
feeling, but he was more often like the girl in his half-dramatic poem,
whom the transient occurrences and sights of the day touched into song.
He picked up his subjects as a man culls flowers in a mountain walk,
moved by an ever-recurring joy and fancy in them--a book on a stall, a
bust in an Italian garden, a face seen at the opera, the market chatter
of a Tuscan town, a story told by the roadside in Brittany, a picture in
some Accademia--so that, though the ground-thought might incur the
danger of dulness through repetition, the joy of the artist so filled
the illustration, and his freshness of invention was so delighted with
itself, that even to the reader the theory seemed like a new star.

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