Book: The Poetry Of Robert Browning

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But to return from this digression. Browning does not stand alone among
the poets in the apartness from his own land of which I have written.
Byron is partly with him. Where Byron differs from him is, first, in
this--that Byron had no poetic love for any special country as Browning
had for Italy; and, secondly, that his country was, alas, himself, until
at the end, sick of his self-patriotism, he gave himself to Greece.
Keats, on the other hand, had no country except, as I have said, the
country of Loveliness. Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley were not
exclusively English. Shelley belonged partly to Italy, but chiefly to
that future of mankind in which separate nationalities and divided
patriotisms are absorbed. Wordsworth and Coleridge, in their early days,
were patriots of humanity; they actually for a time abjured their
country. Even in his later days Wordsworth's sympathies reach far beyond
England. But none of these were so distinctively English as Tennyson,
and none of them were so outside of England as Browning. Interesting as
it is, the _completeness_ of this isolation from England was a
misfortune, not a strength, in his poetry.

There is another thing to say in this connection. The expansion of the
interests of the English poets beyond England was due in Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Shelley, and partly in Byron, to the great tidal-wave of
feeling for man as man, which, rising long before the French Revolution,
was lifted into twice its height and dashed on the shore of the world
with overwhelming volume, by the earthquake in France of 1789. Special
national sentiments were drowned in its waters. Patriotism was the duty
of man, not to any one nation but to the whole of humanity, conceived of
as the only nation.

In 1832 there was little left of that influence in England among the
educated classes, and Tennyson's insular patriotism represented their
feeling for many years, and partly represents it now. But the ideas of
the Revolution were at the same time taking a wiser and more practical
form among the English democracy than they even had at their first
outburst in France, and this emerged, on one side of it, in the idea of
internationalism. It grew among the propertied classes from the greater
facilities of travel, from the wide extension of commercial, and
especially of literary, intercommunication. Literature, even more than
commerce, diminishes the oppositions and increases the amalgamation of
nations. On her lofty plane nations breathe an air in which their
quarrels die. The same idea grew up of itself among the working classes,
not only in England, but in Germany, Italy, France, America. They began,
and have continued, to lose their old belief in distinct and warring
nationalities. To denationalise the nations into one nation only--the
nation of mankind--is too vast an idea to grow quickly, but in all
classes, and perhaps most in the working class, there are an increasing
number of thinking men who say to the varied nations, "We are all one;
our interests, duties, rights, nature and aims are one." And, for my
part, I believe that in the full development of that conception the
progress of mankind is most deeply concerned, and will be best secured.

Now, when all these classes in England, brought to much the same point
by different paths, seek for a poetry which is international rather than
national, and which recognises no special country as its own, they do
not find it in Tennyson, but they do find Browning writing, and quite
naturally, as if he belonged to other peoples as much as to his own,
even more than to his own. And they also find that he had been doing
this for many years before their own international interests had been
awakened. That, then, differentiates him completely from Tennyson, and
is another reason why he was not read in the past but is read in the
present.

9. Again, with regard to politics and social questions, Tennyson made us
know what his general politics were, and he has always pleased or
displeased men by his political position. The British Constitution
appears throughout his work seated like Zeus on Olympus, with all the
world awaiting its nod. Then, also, social problems raise their
storm-awakening heads in his poetry: the Woman's Question; War;
Competition; the State of the Poor; Education; a State without Religion;
the Marriage Question; where Freedom lies; and others. These are brought
by Tennyson, though tentatively, into the palace of poetry and given
rooms in it.

At both these points Browning differed from Tennyson. He was not the
politician, not the sociologist, only the poet. No trace of the British
Constitution is to be found in his poetry; no one could tell from it
that he had any social views or politics at all. Sixty years in close
contact with this country and its movements, and not a line about them!

He records the politics of the place and people of whom or of which he
is for the moment writing, but he takes no side. We know what they
thought at Rome or among the Druses of these matters, but we do not know
what Browning thought. The art-representation, the _Vorstellung_ of the
thing, is all; the personal view of the poet is nothing. It is the same
in social matters. What he says as a poet concerning the ideas which
should rule the temper of the soul and human life in relation to our
fellow men may be applied to our social questions, and usefully; but
Browning is not on that plane. There are no poems directly applied to
them. This means that he kept himself outside the realm of political and
social discussions and in the realm of those high emotions and ideas out
of which imagination in lonely creation draws her work to light. With
steady purpose he refused to make his poetry the servant of the
transient, of the changing elements of the world. He avoided the
contemporary. For this high reserve we and the future of art will owe
him gratitude.

On the contrast between the theology we find in Tennyson and Browning,
and on the contrast between their ethical positions, it will be wiser
not to speak in this introduction. These two contrasts would lead me too
far afield, and they have little or nothing to do with poetry. Moreover,
Browning's theology and ethics, as they are called, have been discussed
at wearying length for the last ten years, and especially by persons who
use his poetry to illustrate from it their own systems of theology,
philosophy and ethics.

10. I will pass, therefore, to another contrast--the contrast between
them as Artists.

A great number of persons who write about the poets think, when they
have said the sort of things I have been saying, that they have said
either enough, or the most important things. The things are, indeed,
useful to say; they enable us to realise the poet and his character, and
the elements of which his poetry is made. They place him in a clear
relation to his time; they distinguish him from other poets, and, taken
all together, they throw light upon his work. But they are not half
enough, nor are they the most important. They leave out the essence of
the whole matter; they leave out the poetry. They illuminate the surface
of his poetry, but they do not penetrate into his interpretation, by
means of his special art, and under the influence of high emotion, of
the beautiful and sublime Matter of thought and feeling which arises out
of Nature and Human Nature, the two great subjects of song; which Matter
the poets represent in a form so noble and so lovely in itself that,
when it is received into a heart prepared for it, it kindles in the
receiver a love of beauty and sublimity similar to that which the poet
felt before he formed, and while he formed, his poem. Such a receiver,
reading the poem, makes the poem, with an individual difference, in
himself. And this is the main thing; the eternal, not the temporary
thing.

Almost all I have already discussed with regard to Tennyson and Browning
belongs to the temporary; and the varying judgments which their public
have formed of them, chiefly based on their appeal to the tendencies of
the time, do not at all predict what the final judgment on these men as
poets is likely to be. That will depend, not on feelings which belong to
the temporary elements of the passing day, but on how far the eternal
and unchanging elements of art appear in their work. The things which
fitted the poetry of Tennyson to the years between 1840 and 1870 have
already passed away; the things which, as I have explained, fitted the
poetry of Browning to the tendencies of the years after 1870 will also
disappear, and are already disappearing. Indeed, the excessive
transiency of nearly all the interests of cultivated society during the
last ten years is that in them which most deeply impresses any man who
sits somewhat apart from them. And, at any rate, none of these merely
contemporary elements, which often seem to men the most important, will
count a hundred years hence in the estimate of the poetry either of
Tennyson or Browning. They will be of historical interest, and no more.
Matters in their poetry, now the subjects of warm discussion among their
critics, will be laid aside as materials for judgment; and justly, for
they are of quite impermanent value.

Whenever, then, we try to judge them as poets, we must do our best to
discharge these temporary things, and consider their poetry as it will
seem a hundred years hence to men who will think seriously and feel
sensitively, even passionately, towards great and noble Matter of
imaginative thought and emotion concerning human life and the natural
world, and towards lovely creation of such matter into Form. Their
judgment will be made apart from the natural prejudices that arise from
contemporary movements. They will not be wiser in their judgment of
their own poets than we are about ours, but they will be wiser in their
judgment of our poets, because, though they will have their own
prejudices, they will not have ours. Moreover, the long, growing, and
incessantly corrected judgment of those best fitted to feel what is most
beautiful in shaping and most enduring in thought and feeling
penetrated and made infinite by imagination, will, by that time, have
separated the permanent from the impermanent in the work of Browning and
Tennyson.

That judgment will partly depend on the answers, slowly, as it were
unconsciously, given by the world to two questions. First, how far does
their poetry represent truly and passionately what is natural and most
widely felt in loving human nature, whether terrible or joyful, simple
or complex, tragic or humorous? Secondly, how far is the representation
beautiful and noble in form, and true to the laws of their art. That
poetry which is nearest to the most natural, the most universal elements
of human life when they are suffused with love--in some at least of its
various moods--and at the same time the most beautiful in form, is the
best. It wins most affection from mankind, for it is about noble matters
of thought which the greater number of men and women desire to
contemplate, and about noble matters of passion which the greater number
love and therefore enjoy. This poetry lasts from generation to
generation, is independent of differences made by climate, by caste, by
nationality, by religion, by politics, by knowledge, custom, tradition
or morals. These universal, natural elements of human nature are, in all
their infinite variety and striving, beloved by men, of undying interest
in action, and of immortal pleasure in thought. The nearer a poet is to
them, especially to what is lovable, and therefore beautiful in them,
the greater and the more enduring is his work. It follows that this
greater work will also be simple, that is, easy to feel with the heart
though it may be difficult to grasp by the intelligence. Were it not
simple in feeling, the general answer of mankind to the call of love, in
all its forms, for sympathy would be unheard. And if it be simple in
feeling, it does not much matter if the deep waters of its thought are
difficult for the understanding to fathom.

It would be ridiculous to dogmatise on a matter which can only be fully
answered a century hence, but this much is plain. Of these two poets,
taking into consideration the whole of their work, Tennyson is the
closest to human nature in its noble, common and loving forms, as
Browning is the closest to what is complex, subtle and uncommon in human
nature. The representation both of the simple and of the complex is a
good thing, and both poets have their place and honour. But the
representation of the complex is plainly the more limited in range of
influence, and appeals to a special class of minds rather than to
mankind at large. There are some, indeed, who think that the appeal to
the few, to thinkers alone or high-wrought specialists in various forms
of culture, marks out the greater poet. It is the tendency of literary
castes to think that specialised work is the greatest. "This man," they
say, "is our poet, not the mob's. He stands apart, and his apartness
marks his greatness." These are amusing persons, who practically say,
"We alone understand him, therefore he is great."

Yet a phrase like "apartness makes greatness," when justly applied to a
poet, marks, not his superiority of rank, but his inferiority. It
relegates him at once to a lower place. The greatest poets are loved by
all, and understood by all who think and feel naturally. Homer was
loved by Pericles and by the sausage-seller. Vergil was read with joy by
Maecenas and Augustus, and by the vine-dressers of Mantua. Dante drew
after him the greatest minds in Italy, and yet is sung to-day by the
shepherds and peasants of the hill-villages of Tuscany. Shakespeare
pleases the most selected spirits of the world and the galleries of the
strolling theatres.

And though Tennyson and Browning are far below these mightier poets, yet
when we apply to them this rule, drawn from what we know to be true of
the greatest, Tennyson answers its demand more closely than Browning.
The highest work which poetry can do is to glorify what is most natural
and simple in the whole of loving human nature, and to show the
excelling beauty, not so much of the stranger and wilder doings of the
natural world, but of its everyday doings and their common changes. In
doing these two things with simplicity, passion and beauty is the finest
work of the arts, the eternal youth, the illimitable material of poetry,
and it will endure while humanity endures in this world, and in that
which is to come. Among all our cultivated love of the uncommon, the
remote, the subtle, the involved, the metaphysical and the terrible--the
representation of which things has its due place, even its necessity--it
is well to think of that quiet truth, and to keep it as a first
principle in the judgment of the arts. Indeed, the recovery of the
natural, simple and universal ways of acting and feeling in men and
women who love as the finest subjects of the arts has always regenerated
them whenever, in pursuit of the unnatural, the complicated, the
analytic, and the sensational, they have fallen into decay.

Browning did not like this view, being conscious that his poetry did not
answer its demand. Not only in early but also in later poems, he
pictured his critics stating it, and his picture is scornful enough.
There is an entertaining sketch of Naddo, the Philistine critic, in the
second book of _Sordello_; and the view I speak of is expressed by him
among a huddle of criticisms--

"Would you have your songs endure?
Build on the human heart!--why, to be sure
Yours is one sort of heart.--But I mean theirs,
Ours, every one's, the healthy heart one cares
To build on! Central peace, mother of strength,
That's father of...."

This is good fooling, and Naddo is an ass. Nevertheless, though Naddo
makes nonsense of the truth, he was right in the main, and Browning as
well as Sordello suffered when they forgot or ignored that truth. And,
of course, Browning did not forget or ignore it in more than half his
work. Even in _Sordello_ he tells us how he gave himself up to recording
with pity and love the doings of the universal soul. He strove to paint
the whole. It was a bold ambition. Few have fulfilled it so well. None,
since Shakespeare, have had a wider range. His portraiture of life was
so much more varied than that of Tennyson, so much more extensive and
detailed, that on this side he excels Tennyson; but such portraiture is
not necessarily poetic, and when it is fond of the complex, it is always
in danger of tending to prose. And Browning, picturing human life,
deviated too much into the delineation of its more obscure and complex
forms. It was in his nature to do and love this kind of work; and indeed
it has to be done, if human life is to be painted fully. Only, it is not
to be done too much, if one desires to be always the poet. For the
representation of the complex and obscure is chiefly done by the
analysing understanding, and its work and pleasure in it lures the poet
away from art. He loses the poetic turn of the thing of which he writes,
and what he produces is not better than rhythmical prose. Again and
again Browning fell into that misfortune; and it is a strange problem
how a man, who was in one part of his nature a great poet, could, under
the sway of another, cease to be a poet. At this point his inferiority
to Tennyson as a poet is plain. Tennyson scarcely ever wrote a line
which was not unmistakably poetry, while Browning could write pages
which were unmistakably not poetry.

I do not mean, in saying all this, that Browning did not appeal to that
which is deepest and universal in nature and human nature, but only that
he did not appeal to it as much as Tennyson. Browning is often simple,
lovely and universal. And when he speaks out of that emotional
imagination wherein is the hiding of a poet's power, and which is the
legitimate sovereign of his intellectual work, he will win and keep the
delight and love of the centuries to come. By work of this type he will
be finally judged and finally endure; and, even now, every one who loves
great poetry knows what these master-poems are. As to the others, the
merely subtle, analytic poems in which intellect, not imagination, is
supreme, especially those into which he drifted in his later life when
the ardour of his poetic youth glowed less warmly--they will always
appeal to a certain class of persons who would like to persuade
themselves that they like poetry but to whom its book is sealed; and
who, in finding out what Browning means, imagine to their great surprise
that they find out that they care for poetry. What they really care for
is their own cleverness in discovering riddles, and they are as far away
from poetry as Sirius is from the Sun.

There are, however, many true lovers of poetry who are enthusiastic
about these poems. And parts of them deserve this enthusiasm, for they
have been conceived and made in a wild borderland between analysis and
imagination. They occupy a place apart, a backwater in the noble stream
of English poetry, filled with strange plants; and the final judgment of
Browning's rank as an artist will not depend on them but on the earlier
poems, which, being more "simple, sensuous and passionate," are nearer
to the common love and life of man. When, then, we apply this test, the
difference of rank between him and Tennyson is not great, but it is
plain. Yet comparison, on this point, is difficult. Both drew mankind.
Tennyson is closer to that which is most universal in the human heart,
Browning to the vast variety within it; and men in the future will find
their poetic wants best satisfied by reading the work of both these
poets. Let us say then that in this matter they are equal. Each has done
a different part of that portraiture of human nature which is the chief
work of a poet.

But this is not the only test we may apply to these men as poets. The
second question which tries the endurance and greatness of poetic work
is this: "How far is any poet's representation of what is true and
loving in itself lovely?" Their stuff may be equally good. Is their form
equally good? Is it as beautiful as an artist, whose first duty is to be
true to beauty as the shape of love and truth, ought to make it? The
judgment of the future will also be formed on that ground, and
inevitably.

What we call form in poetry may be said to consist of, or to depend on,
three things: (1) on a noble style; (2) on a harmonious composition,
varied but at unity; (3) on a clear, sweet melody of lawful movement in
verse. These are not everything in poetry, but they are the half of its
whole. The other half is that the "matter"--that is, the deep substance
of amalgamated Thought and Emotion--should be great, vital and fair. But
both halves are necessary, and when the half which regards form is weak
or unbeautiful, the judgment of the future drops the poems which are
faulty in form out of memory, just as it drops out of its affections
poems which are excellent in form, but of ignoble, unimpassioned, feeble
or thoughtless matter. There was, for example, a whole set of poets
towards the end of the Elizabethan period who were close and weighty
thinkers, whose poetry is full of intellectual surprises and
difficulties, who were capable of subtlety of expression and even of
lovely turns and phantasies of feeling; whom students read to-day, but
whom the poetical world does not read at all. And the reason is that
their style, their melody, and their composition do not match in
excellence their matter. Their stuff is good, their form is bad. The
judgment of the future gives them no high rank. They do not answer well
to the test of which I speak.

I do not mean to apply that analogy altogether, only partly, to
Browning. He rises far above these poets in style, composition and
melody, but he skirts their faults. And if we are asked to compare him
to Tennyson, he is inferior to Tennyson at all these points of Form.

(1) His composition was rarely sufficiently careful. It was broken up,
overcrowded; minor objects of thought or feeling are made too remarkable
for the whole; there is far too little of poetical perspective; the
variety of the poem does not always grow out of the subject itself, but
out of the external play of Browning's mind upon things remotely
connected with the subject; too many side-issues are introduced;
everything he imagined is cast upon the canvas, too little is laid
aside, so that the poems run to a length which weakens instead of
strengthening the main impression. A number of the poems have, that is,
the faults of a composer whose fancy runs away with him, who does not
ride it as a master; and in whom therefore, for a time, imagination has
gone to sleep. Moreover, only too often, they have those faults of
composition which naturally belong to a poet when he writes as if
intellect rather than passion were the ultimate umpire of the work of
his art. Of course, there are many exceptions; and the study of those
exceptions, as exceptions, would make an interesting essay. On the other
hand, Tennyson's composition was for the most part excellent, and
always careful.

(2) Then as to style. Browning had a style of his own, wholly devoid of
imitation, perfectly individual, and this is one of the marks of a good
artist. It was the outcome of his poetic character, and represented it.
At this point his style is more interesting than Tennyson's. Tennyson's
style was often too much worked, too consciously subjected to the rules
of his art, too worn down to smoothness of texture. Moreover, the
natural surprises of an unchartered individuality do not sufficiently
appear in it (Tennyson repressed the fantastic), though the whole weight
of his character does magnificently appear. But if Tennyson was too
conscious of his style--a great misfortune especially in passionate
song--Browning did not take any deliberate pains with his style, and
that is a greater misfortune. His freedom ran into undue licence; and he
seems to be over-conscious, even proud, of his fantastical way of
writing. His individuality runs riot in his style. He paid little
attention to the well-established rules of his art, in a revulsion,
perhaps, from any imitation of the great models. He had not enough
reverence for his art, and little for the public. He flung his diction
at our heads and said: "This is myself; take it or leave it."

None of the greater artists of the world have ever done this. They have
not cared for what the world said, but they have cared for their art.
There are certain limits to individual capriciousness in style, long
since laid down, as it were, by Beauty herself; which, transgressed,
lessen, injure or lose beauty; and Browning continually transgressed
those limits.

Again, clearness is one of the first elements in style, and on poetry
attaining clearness, depends, in great measure, its enduringness in the
future. So far as clearness carries him, Tennyson's poetry is sure to
last. So far as Browning's obscurity goes, his poetry will not last like
Tennyson's. It is all very well for his students to say that he is not
obscure; he is. Nor is it by any exceptional depth of thought or by any
specially profound analysis of the soul that Browning is obscure. It is
by his style. By that he makes what is easy difficult. The reader does
not get at what he means as he gets at what Homer, Dante, and
Shakespeare mean. Dante and Shakespeare are often difficult through the
depth and difficulty of their matter; they are not difficult, except
Shakespeare when he was learning his art, by obscurity or carelessness
of style. But Browning is difficult not by his thoughts, but by his
expression of them. A poet has no right to be so indifferent, so
careless of clearness in his art, I might almost say, so lazy. Browning
is negligent to a fault, almost to impertinence. The great poets put the
right words in the right places, and Tennyson is with them in that.
Browning continually puts his words into the wrong places. He leaves out
words necessary for the easy understanding of the passage, and for no
reason except his fancy. He leaves his sentences half-finished and his
meaning half-expressed. He begins a sentence, and having begun it, three
or four thoughts connected with it slide into his mind, and instead of
putting them aside or using them in another place, he jerks them into
the middle of his sentence in a series of parentheses, and then inserts
the end of the original sentence, or does not insert it at all. This is
irritating except to folk who like discovery of the twisted rather than
poetry; and it is quite needless. It is worse than needless, for it
lowers the charm and the dignity of the poetry.

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