An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry Part 4

Enough to furnish Solomon Such hangings for his cedar-house, That, when gold-robed he took the throne In that abyss of blue, the Spouse Might swear his presence shone

X.

Most like the centre-spike of gold Which burns deep in the blue-bell's womb What time, with ardors manifold, The bee goes singing to her groom, Drunken and overbold.

XI.

Mere conchs! not fit for warp or woof!

Till cunning come to pound and squeeze And clarify,--refine to proof *2*

The liquor filtered by degrees, While the world stands aloof.

XII.

And there's the extract, flasked and fine, And priced and salable at last!

And Hobbs, n.o.bbs, Stokes, and Nokes combine To paint the future from the past, Put blue into their line. *3*

XIII.

Hobbs hints blue,--straight he turtle eats: n.o.bbs prints blue,--claret crowns his cup: Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats,-- Both gorge. Who finished the murex up?

What porridge had John Keats?

-- *1* named: Announced.

*2* Original reading:-- "Till art comes,--comes to pound and squeeze And clarify,--refines to proof."

*3* "Line" is perhaps meant to be used equivocally,-- their line of business or line of their verse.

The spiritual ebb and flow exhibited in English poetry (the highest tide being reached in Tennyson and Browning) which I have endeavored cursorily to present, bear testimony to the fact that human nature WILL a.s.sert its wholeness in the civilized man. And there must come a time, in the progress of civilization, when this ebb and flow will be less marked than it has been heretofore, by reason of a better balancing, which will be brought about, of the intellectual and the spiritual.

Each will have its due activity. The man of intellectual pursuits will not have a starved spiritual nature; and the man of predominant spiritual functions will not have an intellect weakened into a submissiveness to formulated, stereotyped, and, consequently, lifeless dogmas.

Robert Browning is in himself the completest fulfilment of this equipoise of the intellectual and the spiritual, possessing each in an exalted degree; and his poetry is an emphasized expression of his own personality, and a prophecy of the ultimate results of Christian civilization.

II. The Idea of Personality and of Art as an intermediate agency of Personality, as embodied in Browning's Poetry.

1. General Remarks.

"Subsists no law of Life outside of Life.

The Christ himself had been no Lawgiver, Unless he had given the LIFE, too, with the law."

The importance of Robert Browning's poetry, as embodying the profoundest thought, the subtlest and most complex sentiment, and, above all, the most quickening spirituality of the age, has, as yet, notwithstanding the great increase within the last few years of devoted students, received but a n.i.g.g.ardly recognition when compared with that received by far inferior contemporary poets. There are, however, many indications in the poetical criticism of the day that upon it will ere long be p.r.o.nounced the verdict which is its due.

And the founding of a society in England in 1881, "to gather together some at least of the many admirers of Robert Browning, for the study and discussion of his works, and the publication of papers on them, and extracts from works ill.u.s.trating them" has already contributed much towards paying a long-standing debt.

Mr. Browning's earliest poems, 'Pauline' (he calls it in the preface to the reprint of it in 1868 "a boyish work", though it exhibits the great basal thought of all his subsequent poetry), was published in 1833, since which time he has produced the largest body of poetry produced by any one poet in English literature; and the range of thought and pa.s.sion which it exhibits is greater than that of any other poet, without a single exception, since the days of Shakespeare.

And he is the most like Shakespeare in his deep interest in human nature in all its varieties of good and evil.

Though endowed with a powerful, subtle, and restless intellect, he has throughout his voluminous poetry made the strongest protest that has been made in these days against mere intellect.

And his poetry has, therefore, a peculiar value in an age like the present--an age exhibiting "a condition of humanity which has thrown itself wholly on its intellect and its genius in physics, and has done marvels in material science and invention, but at the expense of the interior divinity." It is the human heart, that is, the intuitive, the non-discursive side of man, with its hopes and its prophetic aspirations, as opposed to the a.n.a.lytic, the discursive understanding, which is to him a subject of the deepest and most scrutinizing interest. He knows that its deepest depths are "deeper than did ever plummet sound"; but he also knows that it is in these depths that life's greatest secrets must be sought. The philosophies excogitated by the insulated intellect help nothing toward even a glimpse of these secrets. In one of his later poems, that ent.i.tled 'House', he has intimated, and forcibly intimated, his sense of the impossibility of penetrating to the Holy of Holies of this wondrous human heart, though a.s.sured as he is that all our hopes in regard to the soul's destiny are warmed and cherished by what radiates thence. He quotes, in the last stanza of this poem, from Wordsworth's sonnet on the Sonnet, "With this same key Shakespeare unlocked his heart," and then adds, "DID Shakespeare?

If so, the less Shakespeare he!"

Mrs. Browning, in the Fifth Book of her 'Aurora Leigh', has given a full and very forcible expression to the feeling which has caused the highest dramatic genius of the present day to seek refuge in the poem and the novel. "I will write no plays; because the drama, less sublime in this, makes lower appeals, defends more menially, adopts the standard of the public taste to chalk its height on, wears a dog-chain round its regal neck, and learns to carry and fetch the fashions of the day, to please the day; . . . 'Tis that, honoring to its worth the drama, I would fear to keep it down to the level of the footlights. . . .

The growing drama has outgrown such toys of simulated stature, face, and speech, it also, peradventure, may outgrow the simulation of the painted scene, boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume; and TAKE FOR A WORTHIER STAGE, THE SOUL ITSELF, ITS SHIFTING FANCIES AND CELESTIAL LIGHTS, WITH ALL ITS GRAND ORCHESTRAL SILENCES TO KEEP THE PAUSES OF THE RHYTHMIC SOUNDS."

Robert Browning's poetry is, in these days, the fullest realization of what is expressed in the concluding lines of this pa.s.sage: he has taken for a worthier stage, the soul itself, its shifting fancies and celestial lights, more than any other poet of the age. And he has worked with a thought-and-pa.s.sion capital greater than the combined thought-and-pa.s.sion capital of the richest of his poetical contemporaries. And he has thought n.o.bly of the soul, and has treated it as, in its essence, above the fixed and law-bound system of things which we call nature; in other words, he has treated it as supernatural. "Mind," he makes the Pope say, in 'The Ring and the Book',--and his poetry bears testimony to its being his own conviction and doctrine,--"Mind is not matter, nor from matter, but above." With every student of Browning, the recognition and acceptance of this must be his starting-point.

Even that which impelled the old dog, in his poem ent.i.tled 'Tray'

('Dramatic Lyrics', First Series), to rescue the beggar child that fell into the river, and then to dive after the child's doll, and bring it up, after a long stay under water, the poet evidently distinguishes from matter,--regards as "not matter nor from matter, but above":--

"And so, amid the laughter gay, Trotted my hero off,--old Tray,-- Till somebody, prerogatived With reason, reasoned: 'Why he dived, His brain would show us, I should say.

'John, go and catch--or, if needs be, Purchase that animal for me!

By vivisection, at expense Of half-an-hour and eighteen pence, How brain secretes dog's soul, we'll see!"

In his poem ent.i.tled 'Halbert and Hob' ('Dramatic Lyrics', First Series), quoting from Shakespeare's 'King Lear', "Is there a reason in nature for these hard hearts?" the poet adds, "O Lear, That a reason OUT of nature must turn them soft, seems clear!"

Mind is, with Browning, SUPERNATURAL, but linked with, and restrained, and even enslaved by, the natural. The soul, in its education, that is, in its awakening, becomes more and more independent of the natural, and, as a consequence, more responsive to higher souls and to the Divine. ALL SPIRIT IS MUTUALLY ATTRACTIVE, and the degree of attractiveness results from the degree of freedom from the obstructions of the material, or the natural.

Loving the truth implies a greater or less degree of that freedom of the spirit which brings it into SYMPATHY with the true.

"If ye abide in My word," says Christ (and we must understand by "word"

His own concrete life, the word made flesh, and living and breathing), "if ye abide in My word" (that is, continue to live My life), "then are ye truly My disciples; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John viii. 32).

In regard to the soul's INHERENT possessions, its microcosmic potentialities, Paracelsus is made to say (and this may be taken, too, as the poet's own creed), "Truth is WITHIN ourselves; it takes no rise from outward things, whate'er you may believe: there is an inmost centre in us all, where truth abides in fulness; and around, wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in, this perfect, clear perception--which is truth. A baffling and perverting carnal mesh blinds it, and makes all error: and, TO KNOW, rather consists in opening out a way whence the imprisoned splendour may escape, than in effecting entry for a light supposed to be without."

All possible thought is IMPLICIT in the mind, and waiting for release--waiting to become EXPLICIT. "Seek within yourself,"

says Goethe, "and you will find everything; and rejoice that, without, there lies a Nature that says yea and amen to all you have discovered in yourself." And Mrs. Browning, in the person of Aurora Leigh, writes: "The cygnet finds the water; but the man is born in ignorance of his element, and feels out blind at first, disorganized by sin in the blood,--his spirit-insight dulled and crossed by his sensations. Presently we feel it quicken in the dark sometimes; then mark, be reverent, be obedient,-- for those dumb motions of imperfect life are oracles of vital Deity attesting the Hereafter. Let who says 'The soul's a clean white paper', rather say, a palimpsest, a prophet's holograph defiled, erased, and covered by a monk's,-- the Apocalypse by a Longus! poring on which obscure text, we may discern perhaps some fair, fine trace of what was written once, some off-stroke of an alpha and omega expressing the old Scripture."

This "fair, fine trace of what was written once", it was the mission of Christ, it is the mission of all great personalities, of all the concrete creations of Genius, to bring out into distinctness and vital glow. It is not, and cannot be, brought out,-- and this fact is emphasized in the poetry of Browning,-- it cannot be brought out, through what is born and resides in the brain: it is brought out, either directly or indirectly, by the attracting power of magnetic personalities, the ultimate, absolute personality being the G.o.d-man, Christ, qea/nqrwpos.

The human soul is regarded in Browning's poetry as a complexly organized, individualized divine force, destined to gravitate towards the Infinite. How is this force, with its numberless checks and counter-checks, its centripetal and centrifugal tendencies, best determined in its necessarily oblique way? How much earthly ballast must it carry, to keep it sufficiently steady, and how little, that it may not be weighed down with materialistic heaviness? How much certainty must it have of its course, and how much uncertainty, that it may shun the "torpor of a.s.surance", *1* and not lose the vigor which comes of a dubious and obstructed road, "which who stands upon is apt to doubt if it's indeed a road." *2* "Pure faith indeed,"

says Bishop Blougram, to Gigadibs, the literary man, "you know not what you ask! naked belief in G.o.d the Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent, sears too much the sense of conscious creatures, to be borne. It were the seeing him, no flesh shall dare.

Some think, Creation's meant to show him forth: I say, it's meant to hide him all it can, and that's what all the blessed Evil's for.

Its use in time is to environ us, our breath, our drop of dew, with shield enough against that sight till we can bear its stress.

Under a vertical sun, the exposed brain and lidless eye and disimprisoned heart less certainly would wither up at once, than mind, confronted with the truth of Him. But time and earth case-harden us to live; the feeblest sense is trusted most: the child feels G.o.d a moment, ichors o'er the place, plays on and grows to be a man like us. With me, faith means perpetual unbelief kept quiet like the snake 'neath Michael's foot, who stands calm just because he feels it writhe." *3*

-- *1* 'The Ring and the Book', The Pope, v. 1853.

*2* 'Bishop Blougram's Apology', vv. 198, 199.

*3* 'Bishop Blougram's Apology', vv. 650-671.

There is a remarkable pa.s.sage to the same effect in 'Paracelsus', in which Paracelsus expatiates on the "just so much of doubt as bade him plant a surer foot upon the sun-road."

And in 'Easter Day':--