Book: The Poetry Of Robert Browning

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welding words into the crude
Mass from the new speech round him, till a rude
Armour was hammered out, in time to be
Approved beyond the Roman panoply
Melted to make it."

That is, he dissolved the Roman dialect to beat out of it an Italian
tongue. And in this new armour of language he clothed his thoughts. But
the language broke away from his thoughts: neither expressed them nor
made them clear. The people failed to understand his thought, and at the
new ways of using language the critics sneered. "Do get back," they
said, "to the simple human heart, and tell its tales in the simple
language of the people."

I do not think that the analogy can be missed. Browning is really
describing--with, perhaps, a half-scornful reference to his own desire
for public appreciation--what he tried to do in _Sordello_ for the
language in which his poetry was to be written. I have said that when he
came to write _Sordello_ his mind had fallen back from the clear theory
of life laid down in _Paracelsus_ into a tumbled sea of troubled
thoughts; and _Sordello_ is a welter of thoughts tossing up and down,
now appearing, then disappearing, and then appearing again in
conjunction with new matter, like objects in a sea above which a cyclone
is blowing. Or we may say that his mind, before and during the writing
of _Sordello_, was like the thirteenth century, pressing blindly in
vital disturbance towards an unknown goal. That partly accounts for the
confused recklessness of the language of the poem. But a great many of
the tricks Browning now played with his poetic language were
deliberately done. He had tried--like Sordello at the Court of Love--a
love-poem in _Pauline_. It had not succeeded. He had tried in
_Paracelsus_ to expose an abstract theory of life, as Sordello had tried
writing on abstract imaginings. That also had failed. Now he
determined--as he represents Sordello doing--to alter his whole way of
writing. "I will concentrate now," he thought, "since they say I am too
loose and too diffuse; cut away nine-tenths of all I write, and leave
out every word I can possibly omit. I will not express completely what I
think; I shall only suggest it by an illustration. And if anything occur
to me likely to illuminate it, I shall not add it afterwards but insert
it in a parenthesis. I will make a new tongue for my poetry." And the
result was the style and the strange manner in which _Sordello_ was
written. This partly excuses its obscurity, if deliberation can be an
excuse for a bad manner in literature. Malice prepense does not excuse a
murder, though it makes it more interesting. Finally, the manner in
which _Sordello_ was written did not please him. He left it behind him,
and _Pippa Passes_, which followed _Sordello_, is as clear and simple as
its predecessor is obscure in style.

Thirdly, the language of _Sordello_, and, in a lesser degree, that of
all Browning's poetry, proves--if his whole way of thought and passion
did not also prove it--that Browning was not a classic, that he
deliberately put aside the classic traditions in poetry. In this he
presents a strong contrast to Tennyson. Tennyson was possessed by those
traditions. His masters were Homer, Vergil, Milton and the rest of those
who wrote with measure, purity, and temperance; and from whose poetry
proceeded a spirit of order, of tranquillity, of clearness, of
simplicity; who were reticent in ornament, in illustration, and stern in
rejection of unnecessary material. None of these classic excellences
belong to Browning, nor did he ever try to gain them, and that was,
perhaps, a pity. But, after all, it would have been of no use had he
tried for them. We cannot impose from without on ourselves that which we
have not within; and Browning was, in spirit, a pure romantic, not a
classic. Tennyson never allowed what romanticism he possessed to have
its full swing. It always wore the classic dress, submitted itself to
the classic traditions, used the classic forms. In the _Idylls of the
King_ he took a romantic story; but nothing could be more unromantic
than many of the inventions and the characters; than the temper, the
morality, and the conduct of the poem. The Arthurian poets, Malory
himself, would have jumped out their skin with amazement, even with
indignation, had they read it. And a great deal of this oddity, this
unfitness of the matter to the manner, arose from the romantic story
being expressed in poetry written in accordance with classic traditions.
Of course, there were other sources for these inharmonies in the poem,
but that was one, and not the least of them.

Browning had none of these classic traditions. He had his own matter,
quite new stuff it was; and he made his own manner. He did not go back
to the old stories, but, being filled with the romantic spirit, embodied
it in new forms, and drenched with it his subjects, whether he took
them from ancient, mediaeval, Renaissance, or modern life. He felt, and
truly, that it is of the essence of romanticism to be always arising
into new shapes, assimilating itself, century by century, to the needs,
the thought and the passions of growing mankind; progressive, a lover of
change; in steady opposition to that dull conservatism the tendency to
which besets the classic literature.

Browning had the natural faults of the romantic poet; and these are most
remarkable when such a poet is young. The faults are the opposites of
the classic poet's excellences: want of measure, want of proportion,
want of clearness and simplicity, want of temperance, want of that
selective power which knows what to leave out or when to stop. And these
frequently become positive and end in actual disorder of composition,
huddling of the matters treated of into ill-digested masses, violence in
effects and phrase, bewildering obscurity, sought-out even desperate
strangeness of subject and expression, uncompromising individuality,
crude ornament, and fierce colour. Many examples of these faults are to
be found in _Sordello_ and throughout the work of Browning. They are the
extremes into which the Romantic is frequently hurried.

But, then, Browning has the natural gifts and excellences of the
romantic poet, and these elements make him dearer than the mere Classic
to a multitude of imaginative persons. One of them is endless and
impassioned curiosity, for ever unsatisfied, always finding new worlds
of thought and feeling into which to make dangerous and thrilling
voyages of discovery--voyages that are filled from end to end with
incessantly changing adventure, or delight in that adventure. This
enchants the world. And it is not only in his subjects that the romantic
poet shows his curiosity. He is just as curious of new methods of
tragedy, of lyric work, of every mode of poetry; of new ways of
expressing old thoughts; new ways of treating old metres; of the
invention of new metres and new ways of phrasing; of strange and
startling word-combinations, to clothe fittingly the strange and
startling things discovered in human nature, in one's own soul, or in
the souls of others. In ancient days such a temper produced the many
tales of invention which filled the romantic cycles.

Again and again, from century to century, this romantic spirit has done
its re-creating work in the development of poetry in France, Germany,
Italy, Spain, and England. And in 1840, and for many years afterwards,
it produced in Browning, and for our pleasure, his dramatic lyrics as he
called them; his psychological studies, which I may well call
excursions, adventures, battles, pursuits, retreats, discoveries of the
soul; for in the soul of man lay, for Browning, the forest of
Broceliande, the wild country of Morgan le Fay, the cliffs and moors of
Lyonnesse. It was there, over that unfooted country, that Childe Roland
rode to the Dark Tower. Nor can anything be more in the temper of old
spiritual romance--though with a strangely modern _mise-en-scene_--than
the great adventure on the dark common with Christ in _Christmas-Eve and
Easter-Day_.

Another root of the romantic spirit was the sense of, and naturally the
belief in, a world not to be felt of the senses or analysed by the
understanding; which was within the apparent world as its substance or
soul, or beyond it as the power by which it existed; and this mystic
belief took, among poets, philosophers, theologians, warriors and the
common people, a thousand forms, ranging from full-schemed philosophies
to the wildest superstitions. It tended, in its extremes, to make this
world a shadow, a dream; and our life only a real life when it
habitually dwelt in the mystic region mortal eye could not see, whose
voices mortal ear could not receive. Out of this root, which shot its
first fibres into the soul of humanity in the days of the earliest
savage and separated him by an unfathomable gulf from the brute, arose
all the myths and legends and mystic stories which fill romance. Out of
it developed the unquenchable thirst of those of the romantic temper for
communion with the spiritual beings of this mystic world; a thirst
which, however repressed for a time, always arises again; and is even
now arising among the poets of to-day.

In Browning's view of the natural world some traces of this element of
the romantic spirit may be distinguished, but in his poetry of Man it
scarcely appears. Nor, indeed, is he ever the true mystic. He had too
much of the sense which handles daily life; he saw the facts of life too
clearly, to fall into the vaguer regions of mysticism. But one part of
its region, and of the romantic spirit, so incessantly recurs in
Browning that it may be said to underlie the whole of his work. It is
that into which the thoughts and passions of the romantic poets in all
ages ran up, as into a goal--the conception of a perfect world, beyond
this visible, in which the noble hopes, loves and work of
humanity--baffled, limited, and ruined here--should be fulfilled and
satisfied. The Greeks did not frame this conception as a people, though
Plato outreached towards it; the Romans had it not, though Vergil seems
to have touched it in hours of inspiration. The Teutonic folk did not
possess it till Christianity invaded them. Of course, it was alive like
a beating heart in Christianity, that most romantic of all religions.
But the Celtic peoples did conceive it before Christianity and with a
surprising fulness, and wherever they went through Europe they pushed it
into the thought, passions and action of human life. And out of this
conception, which among the Irish took form as the Land of Eternal
Youth, love and joy, where human trouble ceased, grew that element in
romance which is perhaps the strongest in it--the hunger for eternity,
for infinite perfection of being, and, naturally, for unremitting
pursuit of it; and among Christian folk for a life here which should fit
them for perfect life to come. Christian romance threw itself with
fervour into that ideal, and the pursuit, for example, of the Holy Grail
is only one of the forms of this hunger for eternity and perfection.

Browning possessed this element of romance with remarkable fulness, and
expressed it with undiminished ardour for sixty years of poetic work.
From _Pauline_ to _Asolando_ it reigns supreme. It is the
fountain-source of _Sordello_--by the pervasiveness of which the poem
consists. Immortal life in God's perfection! Into that cry the
Romantic's hunger for eternity had developed in the soul of Browning.
His heroes, in drama and lyric, in _Paracelsus_ and _Sordello_, pass
into the infinite, there to be completed.

And if I may here introduce a kind of note, it is at this moment that we
ought to take up the _Purgatorio_, and see Sordello as Dante saw him in
that flowery valley of the Ante-Purgatory when he talked with Dante and
Vergil. He is there a very different person from the wavering creature
Browning drew. He is on the way to that perfect fulfilment in God which
Browning desired for him and all mankind.

Nevertheless, in order to complete this statement, Browning, in his full
idea of life, was not altogether a romantic. He saw there was a great
danger that the romantic mysticism might lead its pursuers to neglect
the duties of life, or lessen their interest in the drama of mankind.
Therefore he added to his cry for eternity and perfection, his other
cry: "Recognise your limitations, and work within them, while you must
never be content with them. Give yourself in love and patience to the
present labour of mankind; but never imagine for a moment that it ends
on earth." He thus combined with the thirst of the romantic for eternity
the full ethical theory of life, as well as the classic poet's
determination to represent the complete aspect of human life on earth.
At this point, but with many fantastic deviations due to his prevailing
romanticism, he was partly of the classic temper. The poem of _Sordello_
is not without an image of this temper, set vigorously in contrast with
Sordello himself. This is Salinguerra, who takes the world as it is, and
is only anxious to do what lies before him day by day. His long
soliloquy, in which for the moment he indulges in dreams, ends in the
simple resolution to fight on, hour by hour, as circumstances call on
him.

Browning's position, then, is a combination of the romantic and
classical, of the Christian and ethical, of the imaginative and
scientific views of human life; of the temper which says, "Here only is
our life, here only our concern," and that which says, "Not here, but
hereafter is our life." "Here, and hereafter," answered Browning. "Live
within earth's limits with all your force; never give in, fight on; but
always transcend your fullest action in aspiration, faith and love."

It amuses me sometimes the way he is taken by his readers. The romantic
and the Christian folk often claim him as the despiser of this world, as
one who bids us live wholly for the future, or in the mystic ranges of
thought and passion. The scientific, humanitarian, and ethical folk
accept that side of him which agrees with their views of human
life--views which exclude God, immortality, and a world beyond--that
is, they take as the whole of Browning the lesser part of his theory of
life. This is not creditable to their understanding, though it is
natural enough. We may accept it as an innocent example of the power of
a strong bias in human nature. But it is well to remember that the
romantic, Christian, mystic elements of human life are more important in
Browning's eyes than the ethical or scientific; that the latter are
nothing to him without the former; that the best efforts of the latter
for humanity are in his belief not only hopeless, but the stuff that
dreams are made of, without the former. In the combination of both is
Browning's message to mankind.

FOOTNOTES:

[9] He makes a simile of this in _Sordello_. See Book iii. before his
waking up in Venice, the lines beginning

"Rather say
My transcendental platan!"

* * * * *




CHAPTER VIII

_THE DRAMAS_


Of the great poets who, not being born dramatists, have attempted to
write dramas in poetry, Browning was the most persevering. I suppose
that, being conscious of his remarkable power in the representation of
momentary action and of states of the soul, he thought that he could
harmonise into a whole the continuous action of a number of persons, and
of their passions in sword-play with one another; and then conduct to a
catastrophe their interaction. But a man may be capable of writing
dramatic lyrics and dramatic romances without being capable of writing a
drama. Indeed, so different are the two capabilities that I think the
true dramatist could not write such a lyric or romance as Browning calls
dramatic; his genius would carry one or the other beyond the just limits
of this kind of poetry into his own kind. And the writer of excellent
lyrics and romances of this kind will be almost sure to fail in real
drama. I wish, in order to avoid confusion of thought, that the term
"dramatic" were only used of poetry which belongs to drama itself. I
have heard Chaucer called dramatic. It is a complete misnomer. His
genius would have for ever been unable to produce a good drama. Had he
lived in Elizabeth's time, he would, no doubt, have tried to write one,
but he must have failed. The genius for story-telling is just the genius
which is incapable of being a fine dramatist. And the opposite is also
true. Shakespeare, great as his genius was, would not have been able to
write a single one of the Canterbury Tales. He would have been driven
into dramatising them.

Neither Tennyson nor Browning had dramatic genius--that is, the power to
conceive, build, co-ordinate and finish a drama. But they thought they
had, and we may pardon them for trying their hand. I can understand the
hunger and thirst which beset great poets, who had, like these two men,
succeeded in so many different kinds of poetry, to succeed also in the
serious drama, written in poetry. It is a legitimate ambition; but poets
should be acquainted with their limitations, and not waste their
energies or our patience on work which they cannot do well. That men
like Tennyson and Browning, who were profoundly capable of understanding
what a great drama means, and is; who had read what the
master-tragedians of Greece have done; who knew their Shakespeare, to
say nothing of the other Elizabethan dramatists; who had seen Moliere on
the stage; who must have felt how the thing ought to be done, composed,
and versed; that they, having written a play like _Harold_ or
_Strafford_, should really wish to stage it, or having heard and seen it
on the stage should go on writing more dramas, would seem
incomprehensible, were it not that power to do one thing very well is so
curiously liable to self-deceit.

The writing of the first drama is not to be blamed. It would be
unnatural not to try one's hand. It is the writing of the others which
is amazing in men like Tennyson and Browning. They ought to have felt,
being wiser than other men in poetry, that they had no true dramatic
capacity. Other poets who also tried the drama did know themselves
better. Byron wrote several dramas, but he made little effort to have
them represented on the stage. He felt they were not fit for that; and,
moreover, such scenic poems as _Manfred_ and _Cain_ were not intended
for the stage, and do not claim to be dramas in that sense. To write
things of this kind, making no claim to public representation, with the
purpose of painting a situation of the soul, is a legitimate part of a
poet's work, and among them, in Browning's work, might be classed _In a
Balcony_, which I suppose his most devoted worshipper would scarcely
call a drama.

Walter Scott, than whom none could conduct a conversation better in a
novel, or make more living the clash of various minds in a critical
event, whether in a cottage or a palace; whom one would select as most
likely to write a drama well--had self-knowledge enough to understand,
after his early attempts, that true dramatic work was beyond his power.
Wordsworth also made one effort, and then said good-bye to drama.
Coleridge tried, and staged _Remorse_. It failed and deserved to fail.
To read it is to know that the writer had no sense of an audience in his
mind as he wrote it--a fatal want in a dramatist. Even its purple
patches of fine poetry and its noble melody of verse did not redeem it.
Shelley did better than these brethren of his, and that is curious. One
would say, after reading his previous poems, that he was the least
likely of men to write a true drama. Yet the _Cenci_ approaches that
goal, and the fragment of _Charles the First_ makes so great a grip on
the noble passions and on the intellectual eye, and its few scenes are
so well woven, that it is one of the unfulfilled longings of literature
that it should have been finished. Yet Shelley himself gave it up. He
knew, like the others, that the drama was beyond his power.

Tennyson and Browning did not so easily recognise their limits. They
went on writing dramas, not for the study, which would have been natural
and legitimate, but for the stage. This is a curious psychological
problem, and there is only one man who could have given us, if he had
chosen, a poetic study of it, and that is Browning himself. I wish,
having in his mature age read _Strafford_ over, and then read his other
dramas--all of them full of the same dramatic weaknesses as
_Strafford_--he had analysed himself as "the poet who would be a
dramatist and could not." Indeed, it is a pity he did not do this. He
was capable of smiling benignly at himself, and sketching himself as if
he were another man; a thing of which Tennyson, who took himself with
awful seriousness, and walked with himself as a Druid might have walked
in the sacred grove of Mona, was quite incapable.

However, the three important dramas of Tennyson are better, as dramas,
than Browning's. That is natural enough. For Browning's dramas were
written when he was young, when his knowledge of the dramatic art was
small, and when his intellectual powers were not fully developed.
Tennyson wrote his when his knowledge of the Drama was great, and when
his intellect had undergone years of careful training. He studied the
composition and architecture of the best plays; he worked at the stage
situations; he created a blank verse for his plays quite different from
that he used in his poems, and a disagreeable thing it is; he introduced
songs, like Shakespeare, at happy moments; he imitated the old work, and
at the same time strove hard to make his own original. He laboured at
the history, and _Becket_ and _Harold_ are painfully historical. History
should not master a play, but the play the history. The poet who is
betrayed into historical accuracy so as to injure the development of his
conception in accordance with imaginative truth, is lost; and _Harold_
and _Becket_ both suffer from Tennyson falling into the hands of those
critical historians whom Tennyson consulted.

Nevertheless, by dint of laborious intellectual work, but not by the
imagination, not by dramatic genius, Tennyson arrived at a relative
success. He did better in these long dramas than Coleridge, Wordsworth,
Scott or Byron. _Queen Mary_, _Harold_, and _Becket_ get along in one's
mind with some swiftness when one reads them in an armchair by the fire.
Some of the characters are interesting and wrought with painful skill.
We cannot forget the pathetic image of Queen Mary, which dwells in the
mind when the play has disappeared; nor the stately representation in
_Becket_ of the mighty and overshadowing power of Rome, claiming as its
own possession the soul of the world. But the minor characters; the
action; the play of the characters, great and small, and of the action
and circumstance together towards the catastrophe--these things were out
of Tennyson's reach, and still more out of Browning's. They could both
build up characters, and Browning better than Tennyson; they could both
set two people to talk together, and by their talk to reveal their
character to us; but to paint action, and the action of many men and
women moving to a plotted end; to paint human life within the limits of
a chosen subject, changing and tossing and unconscious of its fate, in a
town, on a battlefield, in the forum, in a wild wood, in the king's
palace or a shepherd farm; and to image this upon the stage, so that
nothing done or said should be unmotived, unrelated to the end, or
unnatural; of that they were quite incapable, and Browning more
incapable than Tennyson.

There is another thing to say. The three long dramas of Tennyson are
better as dramas than the long ones of Browning. But the smaller
dramatic pieces of Browning are much better than the smaller ones of
Tennyson. _The Promise of May_ is bad in dialogue, bad in composition,
bad in delineation of character, worst of all in its subject, in its
plot, and in its motives. _The Cup_, and _The Falcon_, a beautiful story
beautifully written by Boccaccio, is strangely dulled, even vulgarised,
by Tennyson. The _Robin Hood_ play has gracious things in it, but as a
drama it is worthless, and it is impossible to forgive Tennyson for his
fairies. All these small plays are dreadful examples of what a great
poet may do when he works in a vehicle--if I may borrow a term from
painting--for which he has no natural capacity, but for which he thinks
he has. He is then like those sailors, and meets justly the same fate,
who think that because they can steer a boat admirably, they can also
drive a coach and four. The love scene in _Becket_ between Rosamund and
Henry illustrates my meaning. It was a subject in itself that Tennyson
ought to have done well, and would probably have done well in another
form of poetry; but, done in a form for which he had no genius, he did
it badly. It is the worst thing in the play. Once, however, he did a
short drama fairly well. _The Cup_ has some dramatic movement, its
construction is clear, its verse imaginative, its scenery well
conceived; and its motives are simple and easily understood. But then,
as in _Becket_, Irving stood at his right hand, and advised him
concerning dramatic changes and situations. Its passion is, however,
cold; it leaves us unimpressed.

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