An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry Part 12

"All poetry may be cla.s.sified according to its form or its contents.

Formal cla.s.sification is easy, but of little use. When we have distinguished compositions as dramatic, lyrical, or characterized a poet in like manner, we have done little. What we want to ascertain is the peculiar quality of the imaginative stuff with which he plastically works, and to appreciate its worth. This is always a great task, but one particularly necessary in the case of Browning, because the stuff in which he has wrought is so novel in the poet's hands. Psychology itself is comparatively a new and modern study, as a distinct science; but a psychological poet, who has made it his business to clothe psychic abstractions 'in sights and sounds', is entirely a novel appearance in literature.

"Now that phrase 'clothing in sights and sounds' may yield us the clue to the cla.s.sification we are seeking. The function of artists, that is, musicians, poets in the narrower sense, and painters, is to clothe Truth in sights and sounds for the hearing and seeing of us all. Their call to do this lies in their finer and fuller aesthetic faculty. The sense of hearing and that of seeing stand in polar opposition, and thus a natural scale offers itself by which we may rank and arrange our artists. At the one end of the scale is the acoustic artist, i.e., the musician. At the other end of the scale is the optic artist, the painter and sculptor.

Between these, and comprising both these activities in his own, is the poet, who is both acoustic and optic artist. He translates the sounds of the world, both external and internal,-- the tumult of storms, the murmurs of waves, the SUSURRUS of the woodland, the tinkling of brooks, the throbbing of human hearts, the cries of all living creatures; all those groans of pain, stammers of desire, shrieks of despair, yawns even of languor, which are ever breaking out of the heart of things; and beside all this, the hearsay, commonplace, proverbial lore of the world.

He turns these into melodies which shall be caught up by those who listen. In short, he converts by his alchemy the common stuff of pain and of joy into music. But he is optic as well as acoustic; that is, he calls up at the same time by his art a procession of images which march or dance across the theatre of the listener's fancy.

Now the question of cla.s.sification on this scheme comes to this, Does the particular poet who invites our attention deal more with the aesthesis of the ear or with that of the eye? Does he more fill our ear with sweet tunes or our fancy with shapes and colours?

Does he compel us to listen and shut our eyes, or to open our eyes wide and dispense with all but the faintest musical accompaniment?

What sense, in short, does he mainly address himself to?

Goethe said that he was a 'seeing' man; W. von Humboldt, the great linguist, that he was a 'listening' man. The influence of Milton's blindness on his poetry was noticed by Lessing.

The short-sightedness of Wieland has also been detected in his poetry.

"If we apply these tests to Browning, there can be, I think, no doubt as to the answer. He is, in common with all poets, both musician and painter, but much more the latter than the former.

He is never for a moment the slave of his ear, if I may so express it.

We know that he has, on the contrary, the mastery of music.

But music helps and supports his imagination, never controls it.

Music is to Browning an inarticulate revelation of the truth of the supersensual world, the 'earnest of a heaven'.

He is no voluptuary in music. Music is simply the means by which the soul wings its way into the azure of spiritual theory and contemplation. Take only 'Saul' and 'Abt Vogler' in ill.u.s.tration.

'Saul' is a magnificent interpretation of the old theme, a favorite with the mystics, that evil spirits are driven out by music.

But in this interpretation it is not the mere tones, the thrumming on the harp, it is the religious movement of the intelligence, it is the truth of Divine love throbbing in every chord, which const.i.tutes the spell. And so in 'Abt Vogler'; the abbot's instrument is only the means whereby he strikes out the light of faith and hope within him. Not to dwell upon this point, I would only say that it seems clear that Browning has the finest acoustic gifts, and could, if he had chosen, have scattered musical bons-bons through every page. But he has printed no 'versus inopes rerum, nugaeque canorae' (Hor. ad Pis.).

He has had higher objects in view, and has dispensed better stuff than that which lingers in the ear, and tends to suppress rather than support the higher activity of thought.

"When for a moment he shuts his eyes, and falls purely into the listening or 'musing' mood, he becomes the instrument of a rich deep music, breaking out of the heart of the unseen world, as in the Dirge of unfaithful Poets in 'Paracelsus', or the Gypsy's Incantation in the 'Flight of the d.u.c.h.ess', or the Meditation at the crisis of Sordello's temptation.

"When the keen inquisitive intelligence is in its full waking activity there grows 'more of the words' and thought, and 'less of the music', to invert a phrase of the poet's. The melody ceases, the rhythm is broken, as in all intense, earnest conversation.

At times only the tinkle of the pairing rhymes, of which Browning has made a most witty use, reminds that we are called to partake a mood in which commonplace a.s.sociations are melting into the ideal.

I believe the economy of music is a necessity of Browning's art; and it would be only fair, if those who attack him on this ground would consider how far thought of such quality as his admits of being chanted, or otherwise musically accompanied. In plain words the problem is, how far the pleasures of sound and of sense can be united in poetry; and it will be found in every case that a poet sacrifices something either to the one or to the other.

Browning has said something in his arch way on this point. In effect, he remarks, Italian prose can render a simple thought more sweetly to the ear than either Greek or English verse. It seems clear from many other of his critical remarks that he considers the demand for music in preference to thought in poetry, as the symptom of a false taste.

"Browning's poetry is to be gazed at, rather than listened to and recited, for the most part. It is infinitely easier to listen for an hour to spiritual music than to fix one's whole attention for a few minutes on a spiritual picture. In the latter act of mind we find a rich musical accompaniment distracting, while a slight musical accompaniment is probably helpful. And perhaps we may characterize Browning's poetry as a series of spiritual pictures with a faint musical accompaniment.

"For ill.u.s.tration by extreme contrast, Milton may be compared with Browning. Milton was a great hearsay poet, Browning repeats no hearsay. In reading Milton, the difficulty is to keep up the mental tension where there is so little thought, strictly speaking.

With Browning the highest tension is exacted.

"He is pre-eminently the looker, the seer, the 'maker-see'; the reporter, the painter of the scenery and events of the soul.

And if the sense of vision is our n.o.blest, and we instinctively express the acts of intelligence in terms drawn from physical vision, the poet who leans most towards the 'SEER of Power and Love in the absolute, Beauty and Goodness in the concrete', takes the higher rank. This is no matter for bigotry of taste.

Singers and seers, musicians and reporters, and reproducers of every degree, who have something to tell us or to show us of the 'world as G.o.d has made it, where all is beauty', we have need of all. But of singers there are many, of seers there are few, that is all."

In the most difficult form of verse, namely, blank verse, Browning has shown himself a great master, and has written some of the very best in the literature. And great as is the extent of his blank verse, the 'Ring and the Book' alone containing 21,116 verses, it never entirely lapses into prose.

One grand merit of blank verse is in the SWEEP of it; another, in its pause-melody, which can be secured only by a skilful recurrence of an unbroken measure; without this, variety of pause ceases to be variety, and results in a metrical chaos; a third is in its lightsomeness of movement, its go, when well-freighted with thought. All these merits are found united in much of Browning's blank verse, especially in that of 'The Ring and the Book'. As an example of this, take the following pa.s.sage from the monologue of the Canon Caponsacchi.

It gives expression to his vision of Count Guido's spiritual down-sliding; "in the lowest deep a lower deep still threatening to devour him, opens wide":--

"And thus I see him slowly and surely edged Off all the table-land whence life upsprings Aspiring to be immortality, As the snake, hatched on hill-top by mischance, Despite his wriggling, slips, slides, slidders down Hill-side, lies low and prostrate on the smooth Level of the outer place, lapsed in the vale: So I lose Guido in the loneliness, Silence, and dusk, till at the doleful end, At the horizontal line, creation's verge, From what just is to absolute nothingness-- Lo, what is this he meets, strains onward still?

What other man, deep further in the fate, Who, turning at the prize of a foot-fall To flatter him and promise fellowship, Discovers in the act a frightful face-- Judas, made monstrous by much solitude!

The two are at one now! Let them love their love That bites and claws like hate, or hate their hate That mops and mows and makes as it were love!

There, let them each tear each in devil's-fun, Or fondle this the other while malice aches-- Both teach, both learn detestability!

Kiss him the kiss, Iscariot! Pay that back, That smatch o' the slaver blistering on your lip-- By the better trick, the insult he spared Christ-- Lure him the lure o' the letters, Aretine!

Lick him o'er slimy-smooth with jelly-filth O' the verse-and-prose pollution in love's guise!

The c.o.c.katrice is with the basilisk!

There let him grapple, denizens o' the dark, Foes or friends, but indissolubly bound, In their one spot out of the ken of G.o.d Or care of man for ever and ever more!"

Browning has distinctly indicated the standard by which he estimates art-work, in the closing paragraph of his Essay 'On the Poet objective and subjective; on the latter's aim; on Sh.e.l.ley as man and poet'.

"I would rather," he says, "consider Sh.e.l.ley's poetry as a sublime fragmentary essay towards a presentment of the correspondency of the universe to Deity, of the natural to the spiritual, and of the actual to the ideal, than I would isolate and separately appraise the worth of many detachable portions which might be acknowledged AS UTTERLY PERFECT IN A LOWER MORAL POINT OF VIEW, UNDER THE MERE CONDITIONS OF ART.

It would be easy to take my stand on successful instances of objectivity in Sh.e.l.ley: there is the unrivalled 'Cenci'; there is the 'Julian and Maddalo' too; there is the magnificent 'Ode to Naples': why not regard, it may be said, the less organized matter as the radiant elemental foam and solution, out of which would have been evolved, eventually, creations as perfect even as those?

But I prefer to look for the highest attainment, not simply the high, --and, seeing it, I hold by it. There is surely enough of the work 'Sh.e.l.ley' to be known enduringly among men, and, I believe, to be accepted of G.o.d, as human work may; and AROUND THE IMPERFECT PROPORTIONS OF SUCH, THE MOST ELABORATED PRODUCTIONS OF ORDINARY ART MUST ARRANGE THEMSELVES AS INFERIOR ILl.u.s.tRATIONS."

The italics are mine. I would say, but without admitting imperfect art on the part of Browning, for I regard him as one of the greatest of literary artists, that HE must be estimated by the standard presented in this pa.s.sage, by the "presentment", everywhere in his poetry, "of the correspondency of the universe to Deity, of the natural to the spiritual, and of the actual to the ideal."

The same standard is presented in 'Andrea del Sarto', in 'Old Pictures in Florence', and in other of his poems.

V. Arguments of the Poems.

* It has not been thought necessary, in these Arguments, to use quotation marks wherever expressions from the poems are incorporated; and especially where they are adapted in construction to the place where they are introduced.

Wanting is--What?

"Love, the soul of soul, within the soul", the Christ-spirit, the spirit of the "Comer" (o' e'rxo/menos, Matt. 11:3), completes incompletion, reanimates that which without it is dead, and admits to a fellowship with the soul of things; 'Ubi caritas, ibi claritas'. See pa.s.sage from 'Fifine at the Fair', quoted under 'My Star'.

My Star.

The following pa.s.sage from 'Fifine at the Fair', section 55, is an expansion of the idea involved in 'My Star', and is the best commentary which can be given on it:--

"I search but cannot see What purpose serves the soul that strives, or world it tries Conclusions with, unless the fruit of victories Stay, one and all, stored up and guaranteed its own For ever, by some mode whereby shall be made known The gain of every life. Death reads the t.i.tle clear-- What each soul for itself conquered from out things here: Since, IN THE SEEING SOUL, ALL WORTH LIES, I a.s.sERT,-- AND NOUGHT I' THE WORLD, WHICH, SAVE FOR SOUL THAT SEES, INERT WAS, IS, AND WOULD BE EVER,--STUFF FOR TRANs.m.u.tING--NULL AND VOID UNTIL MAN'S BREATH EVOKE THE BEAUTIFUL-- BUT, TOUCHED ARIGHT, PROMPT YIELDS EACH PARTICLE, ITS TONGUE OF ELEMENTAL FLAME,--no matter whence flame sprung From gums and spice, or else from straw and rottenness, So long as soul has power to make them burn, express What lights and warms henceforth, leaves only ash behind, Howe'er the chance: if soul be privileged to find Food so soon that, at first s.n.a.t.c.h of eye, suck of breath, It shall absorb pure life:" etc.

The Flight of the d.u.c.h.ess.

In 'The Flight of the d.u.c.h.ess' we are presented with a generous soul-life, as exhibited by the sweet, glad d.u.c.h.ess, linked with fossil conventionalism and mediaevalsim, and an inherited authority which brooks no submissiveness, as exhibited by the Duke, her husband, "out of whose veins ceremony and pride have driven the blood, leaving him but a fumigated and embalmed self". The scene of the poem is a "rough north land", subject to a Kaiser of Germany. The story is so plainly told that no prose summary of it could make it plainer. Its deeper meaning centres in the incantation of the old gypsy woman, in which is mystically shadowed forth the long and painful discipline through which the soul must pa.s.s before being fully admitted to the divine arcanum, "how love is the only good in the world".

The poem is one which readily lends itself to an allegorical interpretation. For such an interpretation, the reader is referred to Mrs. Owen's paper, read before the Browning Society of London, and contained in the Society's Papers, Part IV., pp. 49* et seq.

It is too long to be given here.