An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry Part 8

If all Christendom could take this remarkable poem of 'Christmas Eve'

to its heart, its tolerance, its Catholic spirit, and, more than all, the fealty it exhibits to the Personality who essentially is Lord of Life, what a revolution it would undergo! and what a ma.s.s of dogmatic and polemic theology would become utterly obsolete!

The most remarkable thing, perhaps, about the vast body of Christian theology which has been developed during the eighteen centuries which have elapsed since Christ was in the flesh, is, that it is occupied so largely, it might almost be said, exclusively, with what Christ and his disciples TAUGHT, and with fierce discussions about the manifold meanings which have been ingeniously extorted from the imperfect RECORD of what he taught.

British museum libraries of polemics have been written in defence of what Christ himself would have been indifferent to, and written with an animosity towards opponents which has been crystallized in a phrase now applied in a general way to any intense hate--ODIUM THEOLOGIc.u.m.

If the significance of Christ's mission, or a large part of it, is to be estimated by his teachings, from those teachings important deductions must be made, as many of them had been delivered long before his time.

Browning has something to say on this point, in this same poem of 'Christmas Eve':--

"Truth's atmosphere may grow mephitic When Papist struggles with Dissenter, Impregnating its pristine clarity, --One, by his daily fare's vulgarity, Its gust of broken meat and garlic; --One, by his soul's too-much presuming To turn the frankincense's fuming An vapors of the candle starlike Into the cloud her wings she buoys on.

Each that thus sets the pure air seething, May poison it for healthy breathing-- But the Critic leaves no air to poison; Pumps out by a ruthless ingenuity Atom by atom, and leaves you--vacuity.

Thus much of Christ, does he reject?

And what retain? His intellect?

What is it I must reverence duly?

Poor intellect for worship, truly, Which tells me simply what was told (If mere morality, bereft Of the G.o.d in Christ, be all that's left) Elsewhere by voices manifold; With this advantage, that the stater Made nowise the important stumble Of adding, he, the sage and humble, Was also one with the Creator."

Browning's poetry is instinct with the essence of Christianity-- the LIFE of Christ. There is no other poetry, there is no writing of any form, in this age, which so emphasizes the fact (and it's the most consoling of all facts connected with the Christian religion), that the Personality, Jesus Christ, is the impregnable fortress of Christianity. Whatever a.s.saults and inroads may be made upon the original records by Goettingen professors, upon the august fabric of the Church, with its creeds and dogmas, and formularies, and paraphernalia, this fortress will stand forever, and mankind will forever seek and find refuge in it.

The poem ent.i.tled 'Cleon' bears the intimation (there's nothing directly expressed thereupon), that Christianity is something distinct from, and beyond, whatever the highest civilization of the world, the civilization of Greece, attained to before Christ.

Through him the world obtained "a new truth--no conviction gained of an old one merely, made intense by a fresh appeal to the faded sense."

Cleon, the poet, writes to Protos in his Tyranny (that is, in the Greek sense, Sovereignty). Cleon must be understood as representing the ripe, composite result, as an individual, of what const.i.tuted the glory of Greece--her poetry, sculpture, architecture, painting, and music, and also her philosophy.

He acknowledges the gifts which the King has lavished upon him.

By these gifts we are to understand the munificent national patronage accorded to the arts. "The master of thy galley still unlades gift after gift; they block my court at last and pile themselves along its portico royal with sunset, like a thought of thee."

By the slave women that are among the gifts sent to Cleon, seems to be indicated the degradation of the spiritual by its subjection to earthly ideals, as were the ideals of Greek art.

This is more particularly indicated by the one white she-slave, the lyric woman, whom further on in his letter, Cleon promises to the King he will make narrate (in lyric song we must suppose) his fortunes, speak his great words, and describe his royal face.

He continues, that in such an act of love,--the bestowal of princely gifts upon him whose song gives life its joy,-- men shall remark the King's recognition of the use of life-- that his spirit is equal to more than merely to help on life in straight ways, broad enough for vulgar souls, by ruling and the rest.

He ascribes to the King, in the building of his tower (and by this must be understood the building up of his own selfhood), a higher motive than work for mere work's sake,-- that higher motive being, the luring hope of some EVENTUAL REST atop of it (the tower), whence, all the tumult of the building hushed, the first of men may look out to the east. *

-- * Tennyson uses a similar figure in 'The Two Voices'. The speaker, who is meditating whether "to be or not to be", says:--

"Were this not well, to bide mine hour, Though watching from a ruined tower How grows the day of human power."

The ruined tower is his own dilapidated selfhood, whence he takes his outlook upon the world.

By the eventual rest atop of the tower, is indicated the aim of the Greek civilization, to reach a calm within the finite, while the soul is const.i.tuted and destined to gravitate forever towards the infinite--to "force our straitened sphere. . .

display completely here the mastery another life should learn."

('Sordello'.) The eventual rest in this world is not the Christian ideal. Earth-life, whatever its reach, and whatever its grasp, is to the Christian a broken arc, not a perfect round.

Cleon goes on to recount his accomplishments in the arts, and what he has done in philosophy, in reply to the first requirement of Protos's letter, Protos, as it appears, having heard of, and wonderingly enumerated, the great things Cleon has effected; and he has written to know the truth of the report. Cleon replies, that the epos on the King's hundred plates of gold is his, and his the little chaunt so sure to rise from every fishing-bark when, lights at prow, the seamen haul their nets; that the image of the sun-G.o.d on the light-house men turn from the sun's self to see, is his; that the Poecile, o'erstoried its whole length with painting, is his, too; that he knows the true proportions of a man and woman, not observed before; that he has written three books on the soul, proving absurd all written hitherto, and putting us to ignorance again; that in music he has combined the moods, inventing one; that, in brief, all arts are his, and so known and recognized. At this he writes the King to marvel not. We of these latter days, he says, being more COMPOSITE, appear not so great as our forerunners who, in their simple way, were greater in a certain single direction, than we; but our composite way is greater. This life of men on earth, this sequence of the soul's achievements here, he finds reason to believe, was intended to be viewed eventually as a great whole, the individual soul being only a factor toward the realization of this great whole--toward spelling out, so to speak, Zeus's idea in the race. Those divine men of old, he goes on to say, reached each at one point, the outside verge that rounds our faculty, and where they reached, who could do more than reach?

I have not chaunted, he says, verse like Homer's, nor swept string like Terpander, nor carved and painted men like Phidias and his friend; I am not great as they are, point by point; but I have entered into sympathy with these four, running these into one soul, who, separate, ignored each other's arts. The wild flower was the larger-- I have dashed rose-blood upon its petals, p.r.i.c.ked its cup's honey with wine, and driven its seed to fruit, and show a better flower, if not so large.

And now he comes to the important questions in the King's letter-- whether he, the poet, his soul thus in men's hearts, has not attained the very crown and proper end of life--whether, now life closeth up, he faces death with success in his right hand,--whether he fears death less than he, the King, does himself, the fortunate of men, who a.s.signs the reason for thinking that he does, that he, the poet, leaves much behind, his life stays in the poems men shall sing, the pictures men shall study; while the King's life, complete and whole now in its power and joy, dies altogether with his brain and arm, as HE leaves not behind, as the poet does, works of art embodying the essence of his life which, through those works, will pa.s.s into the lives of men of all succeeding times.

Cleon replies that if in the morning of philosophy, the King, with the light now in him, could have looked on all earth's tenantry, from worm to bird, ere man appeared, and if Zeus had questioned him whether he would improve on it, do more for visible creatures than was done, he would have answered, "Ay, by making each grow conscious in himself: all's perfect else, life's mechanics can no further go, and all this joy in natural life is put, like fire from off thy fingers into each, so exquisitely perfect is the same. But 'tis pure fire--and they mere matter are; it has THEM, not they IT: and so I choose, for man, that a third thing shall stand apart from both, a quality arise within the soul, which, intro-active, made to supervise and feel the force it has, may view itself and so be happy." But it is this quality, Cleon continues, which makes man a failure.

This sense of sense, this spirit consciousness, grew the only life worth calling life, the pleasure-house, watch-tower, and treasure-fortress of the soul, which whole surrounding flats of natural life seemed only fit to yield subsistence to; a tower that crowns a country. But alas! the soul now climbs it just to perish there, for thence we have discovered that there's a world of capability for joy, spread round about us, meant for us, inviting us; and still the soul craves all, and still the flesh replies, "Take no jot more than ere you climbed the tower to look abroad! Nay, so much less, as that fatigue has brought deduction to it." After expatiating on this sad state of man, he arrives at the same conclusion as the King in his letter: "I agree in sum, O King, with thy profound discouragement, who seest the wider but to sigh the more. Most progress is most failure! thou sayest well."

And now he takes up the last point of the King's letter, that he, the King, holds joy not impossible to one with artist-gifts, who leaves behind living works. Looking over the sea, as he writes, he says, "Yon rower with the moulded muscles there, lowering the sail, is nearer it that I." He presents with clearness, and with rigid logic, the DILEMMA of the growing soul; shows the vanity of living in works left behind, and in the memory of posterity, while he, the feeling, thinking, acting man, shall sleep in his urn.

The horror of the thought makes him dare imagine at times some future state unlimited in capability for joy, as this is in DESIRE for joy. But no! Zeus had not yet revealed such a state; and alas! he must have done so were it possible!

He concludes, "Live long and happy, and in that thought die, glad for what was! Farewell." And then, as a matter of minor importance, he informs the King, in a postscript, that he cannot tell his messenger aright where to deliver what he bears to one called Paulus. Protos, it must be understood, having heard of the fame of Paul, and being perplexed in the extreme, has written the great apostle to know of his doctrine.

But Cleon writes that it is vain to suppose that a mere barbarian Jew, one circ.u.mcised, hath access to a secret which is shut from them, and that the King wrongs their philosophy in stooping to inquire of such an one. "Oh, he finds adherents, who does not.

Certain slaves who touched on this same isle, preached him and Christ, and, as he gathered from a bystander, their doctrines could be held by no sane man."

There is a quiet beauty about this poem which must insinuate itself into the feelings of every reader. In tone it resembles the 'Epistle of Karshish, the Arab Physician'. The verse of both poems is very beautiful. No one can read these two poems, and 'Bishop Blougram's Apology', and 'The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's Church', and not admit that Browning is a master of blank verse in its most difficult form--a form far more difficult than that of the epic blank verse of Milton, or the Idyllic blank verse of Tennyson, argumentative and freighted with thought, and, at the same time, almost chatty, as it is, and bearing in its course exquisitely poetical conceptions. The same may be said of much of the verse of 'The Ring and the Book', especially that of the monologues of the Canon Caponsacchi, Pompilia, the Pope, and Count Guido Franceschini. But this by the way.

'Cleon' belongs to a grand group of poems, in which Browning shows himself to be, as I've said, the most essentially Christian of living poets--the poet who, more emphatically than any of his contemporaries have done, has enforced the importance, the indispensableness of a new birth, the being born from above (a'/nwqen) as the condition not only of soul vitality and progress, but also of intellectual rect.i.tude. In this group of poems are embodied the profoundest principles of education-- principles which it behoves the present generation of educators to look well to. The acquisition of knowledge is a good thing, the sharpening of the intellect is a good thing, the cultivation of philosophy is a good thing; but there is something of infinitely more importance than all these--it is, the rectification, the adjustment, through that mysterious operation we call sympathy, of the unconscious personality, the hidden soul, which co-operates with the active powers, with the conscious intellect, and, as this unconscious personality is rectified or unrectified, determines the active powers, the conscious intellect, for righteousness or unrighteousness.

The attentive reader of Browning's poetry must soon discover how remarkably h.o.m.ogeneous it is in spirit. There are many authors, and great authors too, the reading of whose collected works gives the impression of their having "tried their hand" at many things.

No such impression is derivable from the voluminous poetry of Browning.

Wide as is its range, one great and h.o.m.ogeneous spirit pervades and animates it all, from the earliest to the latest.

No other living poet gives so decided an a.s.surance of having a BURDEN to deliver. An appropriate general t.i.tle to his works would be, 'The Burden of Robert Browning to the 19th Century'.

His earliest poems show distinctly his ATt.i.tUDE toward things.

We see in what direction the poet has set his face-- what his philosophy of life is, what soul-life means with him, what regeneration means, what edification means in its deepest sense of building up within us the spiritual temple. And if he had left this world after writing no more than those poems of his youth, 'Pauline' and 'Paracelsus', a very fair 'ex-pede-Herculem' estimate might have been made of the possibilities which he has since so grandly realized.

III. Mr. Browning's "Obscurity".

It was long the FASHION--and that fashion has not yet pa.s.sed away --with skimming readers and perfunctory critics to charge Mr. Browning with being "wilfully obscure, unconscientiously careless, and perversely harsh."

There are readers and readers. One cla.s.s, const.i.tuting, perhaps, not more than one-tenth of one per cent, or a thousandth part of the whole number, "read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest"; the remaining ninety-nine and nine-tenths per cent, through a habit of loose and indiscriminate reading, are unequal to the sustained concentration of mind demanded by the higher poetry, the language of which is characterized by a severe economy of expression--a closeness of texture, resulting from the elliptical energy of highly impa.s.sioned thought.

Reading is, perhaps, more superficial at the present day than it ever was before. There is an almost irresistible temptation to reverse the "multum legendum esse non multa" of Quintilian, overwhelmed as we are with books, magazines, and newspapers, which no man can number, and of which thousands and tens of thousands of minds endeavor to gobble up all they can; and yet, from want of all digestive and a.s.similating power, they are pitiably famished and deadened.

Sir John Lubbock has lately been interested in the preparation of a list of the best hundred books, and to that end has solicited the aid of a number of prominent scholars. Prof. Edward Dowden remarks thereupon, in an article on 'The Interpretation of Literature', "It would have been more profitable for us had we been advised how to read any one of the hundred; for what, indeed, does it matter whether we read the best books or the worst, if we lack the power or the instinct or the skill by which to reach the heart of any of them?

Books for most readers are, as Montaigne says, 'a languid pleasure'; and so they must be, unless they become living powers, with a summons or a challenge for our spirit, unless we embrace them or wrestle with them."

To return from this digression to the charge against Browning of obscurity. And, first, it should be said that Browning has so much material, such a large thought and pa.s.sion capital, that we never find him making a little go a great way, by means of EXPRESSION, or rather concealing the little by means of rhetorical tinsel. We can never justly demand of him what the Queen in 'Hamlet' demands of Polonius, "more matter with less art".

His thought is wide-reaching and discursive, and the motions of his mind rapid and leaping. The connecting links of his thought have often to be supplied by an a.n.a.lytic reader whose mind is not up to the required tension to spring over the chasm.

He shows great faith in his reader and "leaves the mere rude explicit details", as if he thought,

"'tis but brother's speech We need, speech where an accent's change gives each The other's soul." *

-- * 'Sordello'.

A truly original writer like Browning, original, I mean, in his spiritual att.i.tudes, is always more of less difficult to the uninitiated, for the reason that he demands of his reader new standpoints, new habits of thought and feeling; says, virtually, to his reader, Metanoei^te; and until these new standpoints are taken, these new habits of thought and feeling induced, the difficulty, while appearing to the reader at the outset, to be altogether objective, will really be, to a great extent, subjective, that is, will be in himself.

Goethe, in his 'Wahrheit und Dichtung', says:--

"Wer einem Autor Dunkelheit vorwerfen will, sollte erst sein eigenes Innere besuchen, ob es denn da auch recht h.e.l.l ist. In der Daemmerung wird eine sehr deutliche Schrift unlesbar." *

-- * He who would charge an author with obscurity, should first look into his own mind, to know whether it is quite clear there.