Browning and His Century Part 12

Browning's characters in his dramas are presented with a completeness of psychological a.n.a.lysis which makes them of paramount interest to those few who can and like to listen to people holding forth to any length on the stage, and with superb actors, who can give every subtlest change of mood, a Browning drama furnishes an opportunity for the utmost intensity of pleasure. Still, one cannot help but feel that the impressionistic psychology of Ibsen reaches a pinnacle of dramatic art not attained by Browning in his plays, delightful in character portrayal as they are, and not upon any account to have been missed from dramatic literature.

In the dramatic monologue Browning found just that form which would focus his forces, bringing them into the sort of relationship needed to reveal the true law of being for his new region of poetic art.

If we inquire just why this form was the true medium for the most perfect expression of his genius, I think we may answer that in it, as he has developed it, is given an opportunity for the legitimate exercise of his mental subtlety. Through the voice of one speaker he can portray not only the speaker but one or more other characters, and at the same time show the scene setting, and all without any direct description. On the other hand, his tendency to redundancy, so marked when he is making a character reveal only his own personality, is held in check by the necessity of using just those words and turns of expression and dwelling upon just those details which will make each character stand out distinctly, and at the same time bring the scene before the reader.

The people in his dramatic monologues live before us by means of a psychology as impressionistic as that of Ibsen's in his plays. The effect is the same as that in a really great impressionistic painting. Nature is revealed far more distinctly--the thing of lights and shadows, s.p.a.ce and movement--than in pictures bent upon endless details of form. "My Last d.u.c.h.ess" is one among many fine examples of his method in monologue. In that short poem we are made to see what manner of man is the duke, what manner of woman the d.u.c.h.ess. We see what has been the duke's past, what is to be his future, also the present scene, as the duke stands in the hall of his palace talking to an amba.s.sador from the count who has come to arrange a marriage with the duke for the count's daughter. Besides all this a glimpse of the amba.s.sador's att.i.tude of mind is given. This is done by an absolutely telling choice of words and by an organic relationing of the different elements. The law of his genius a.s.serts itself.

Browning's own ideal of the poet who makes others see was not completely realized until he had perfected a form which would lend itself most perfectly to the manner of thing which he desired to make others see--namely, the human soul in all its possible manifestations of feeling and mood, good, bad, and indifferent, from the uninspired organist who struggles with a mountainous fugue to the inspired improvisor whose soul ascends to G.o.d on the wings of his music, from the unknown sensitive painter who cannot bear to have his pictures the subject of criticism or commerce to the jolly life-loving Fra Lippo, from the jealous, vindictive woman of "The Laboratory" to the vision-seeing Pompilia, from Ned Bratts to Bishop Blougram, and so on--so many and wonderful that custom cannot state their infinite variety.

Consistent, so far, with his own theories we find the work of Browning to be. He also follows his ideal in the discarding of cla.s.sical allusion and ill.u.s.tration. Part of his dictum that the form should express the thought is shown in his habitual fitting of his allusions to the subject he is treating. By this means he produces his atmosphere and brings the scene clearly before us; witness his constant references to Molinos and his influence in "The Ring and the Book," an influence which was making itself felt in all cla.s.ses of society at the time when the actual tragedy portrayed in the poem occurred. This habit, of course, brings into his poetry a far wider range of allusions unfamiliar to his contemporaries than is to be found in other Victorian poets, and makes it necessary that these should be "looked up" before an adequate enjoyment of their fitness is possible. Hence the Browning societies, so often held up to ridicule by the critics, who blindly prefer to show their superior att.i.tude of mind in regard to everything they do not know, and growl about his obscurity, to welcoming any movement which means an increase of general culture. The Browning societies have not only done much to make Browning's unusual allusions common matters of knowledge, but they have helped to keep alive a taste for all poetry in an age when poetry has needed all the friendly support it could get.

All great poets lead the ordinary mind to unfamiliar regions of knowledge and thereby to fresh planes of enjoyment. That Browning has outdone all other poets in this particular should be to his honor, not to his dispraise.

In one very marked direction, however, he is not a perfect exemplar of his own theories--that is, he is not always consistently dramatic. He belongs to that order of poets described by himself in the Sh.e.l.ley Introduction as neither completely subjective nor completely objective, but with the two faculties at times running in upon each other. He is often absolutely objective in his expression of a mood or a feeling, but the moment the mood takes upon it the tinge of thought we begin to feel Browning himself.

The fundamental principles upon which he bases his own solution of the problems of existence are seen to crop out, colored, it is true, by the personality of the speaker, but yet traceable to their source in the mental make up of Browning himself. It may well be that Browning has come so near to the ultimate truth discoverable by man in his fundamental principles that they are actually universal truths, to be found lying deep down at the roots of all more partial expressions, just as gravitation, conservation of energy, evolution underlie every phenomena of nature, and therefore when a Pope in "The Ring and the Book," a Prince Hohenstiel-Sw.a.n.gau, a Bishop Blougram, a Cleon or a John in "The Death in the Desert," give utterance to their views upon life, they are bound to touch from one or another angle the basic principles of life common to all humanity as well as to the poet--the center within us all where "truth abides in fulness."

This would seem an even more complete fusing of the two faculties in one poet than that spoken of by Browning, where a poet would issue successive works, in some of them the one faculty and in some of them the other faculty being supreme.

That Browning was, to a certain extent, a poet of this third order of which he prophesied is true, for he has written a number of poems like "La Saisiaz," "Reverie," various of his prologues and epilogues which are purely subjective in content. There are also subjective pa.s.sages in the midst of other poems, like those in "Sordello," "Prince Hohenstiel," the "Parleyings," etc. If we place such a poem as "Reverie" side by side with "Fra Lippo Lippi" we see well-nigh perfect ill.u.s.trations of the two faculties as they existed in the one poet, Browning. On the other hand, in those poems where the thought, as I have said, suggests Browning, in the speech of his characters he has something of the quality of what Browning calls the subjective poet of modern cla.s.sification. "Gifted like the objective poet, with the fuller perception of nature and man, he is impelled to embody the thing he perceives, not so much with reference to the many below as to the One above him, the supreme intelligence which apprehends all things in their absolute truth, an ultimate view ever aspired to, if but partially attained, by the poet's soul."

Browning may be said to have carried to its flood tide the "Liberal Movement in English Literature," as Courthope calls it, inaugurated at the dawn of the century by the Lake School, which reacted against the correct school of Dryden and Pope. Along with the earlier poets of the century he shared lack of appreciation at the hands of critics in general. The critics had been bred in the school of the eighteenth century, and naturally would be incapable of understanding a man whose thought was permeated with the doctrines of evolution, then an unknown quant.i.ty except to the elect in scientific circles, and not to become the possession of the thinking world at large until beyond the middle of the century; whose soul was full of the ardor of democracy, shown not only in his choice and treatment of subjects, but in his reckless independence of all the shibboleths of the past; and whose liberalness in the treatment of moral and religious problems was such as to scandalize many in an age when the law forbade that a man should marry his deceased wife's sister, and when the Higher Criticism of the Bible had not yet migrated to England from Germany; and, finally, whose style was everything that was atrocious because entirely different from anything they had seen before.

The century had to grow up to him. It is needless to say that it did so.

Just as out of the turmoil of conflicting scientific and religious thought has emerged a serene belief in man's spiritual destiny, so out of the turmoil of conflicting schools of criticism has arisen a perception of the value of the new, the original, the different in art. Critics begin to apply the principles of evolution to their criticism as Browning applied it to his art, with the result that they no longer measure by past standards of art but by relating the art to the life of the time in its various manifestations, not forgetting that the poet or the dramatist may have a further vision of what is to come than any other man of his age.

The people first, for the most part, found out that here in Browning's work was a new force, and calmly formed themselves into groups to study what manner of force it might be, regardless of the sneers of newspaperdom and conventional academies. And gradually to the few appreciative critics of the early days have been added one authoritative voice after another until the chorus of praise has become a large one, and Browning, though later than any great poet of the century, is coming into his own.

In a certain chart of English literature with which I am acquainted, wherein the poets are graphically represented in mountain ranges with peaks of various heights, Tennyson is shown as the towering peak of the Victorian Era, while Browning is a st.u.r.dy but much lower peak with a blunted top. This is quite symbolic of the general att.i.tude toward Browning at the end of the century, for, with all the appreciation, there has been on the part of authority a disinclination to a.s.sign to him the chief place among the poets of the Victorian Era. Courthope, who most of the time preserves a remarkable reticence upon Browning, voices this general att.i.tude in a remark ventured upon in one of his lectures in 1900. He says:

"No one who is capable of appreciating genius will refuse to admire the powers of this poet, the extent of his sympathy and interest in external things, the boldness of his invention, the energy of his a.n.a.lysis, the audacity of his experiments. But so absolutely does he exclude all consideration for the reader from his choice of subject, so arbitrarily, in his treatment of his themes, does he compel his audience to place themselves at his own point of view, that the life of his art depends entirely upon his own individuality. Should future generations be less inclined than our own to surrender their imagination to his guidance, he will not be able to appeal to them through that element of life which lies in the Universal."

To the present writer this seems simply like a confession on Courthope's part that he was unable to perceive in Browning the elements of the Universal which are most a.s.suredly there, and which were fully recognized by a Scotch writer, Dawson, at the same time that Courthope was questioning his power to hold coming generations.

"The fashions of the world may change," writes Dawson, "and the old doubts may wear themselves out and sink like shadows out of sight in the morning of a stronger faith; but even so the world will still turn to the finer poems of Browning for intellectual stimulus, for the purification of pity and of pathos, for the exaltation of hope.

"Or if the darkness still thickens, all the more will men turn to this strong man of the race, who has wrestled and prevailed; who has illumined with imaginative insight the deepest problems of the ages; who has made his poetry not merely the vehicle of pathos, pa.s.sion, tenderness, fancy, and imagination, but also of the most robust and masculine thought. He has written lyrics which must charm all who love, epics which must move all who act, songs which must cheer all who suffer, poems which must fascinate all who think; and when 'Time hath sundered sh.e.l.l from pearl,' however stern may be the scrutiny, it may be said that there will remain enough of Robert Browning to give him rank among the greatest of poets, and secure for him the sure reward of fame."

But it is to France we must go for the surest authoritative note--that land of the Academy and correct taste which _hums_ and _hahs_ over its own Immortals in proverbially unpenetrating conclave. No less a man than Taine declares that Browning stands first among English poets--"the most excellent where excellence is greatness, the most gifted where genius is a common dower."

While there can be no doubt that Browning outdid all the other great poets of his time in "azure feats," in developing an absolutely self-centered ideal of art, which is yet so true to the ultimate tendencies of the century, indeed to those of all time, for evolution and democracy are henceforth the torch-bearers of the human soul--each of the other half-dozen or so greatest poets had distinct and independent individualities which were more nearly the outcome of the current tendencies of the time than Browning's.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ALFRED TENNYSON]

Tennyson was equally familiar with the thought and much more familiar with the politics of the day, but there is an infinite difference in their att.i.tude. Browning, if I may be excused for quoting one of Shakespeare's most abused phrases, rides over the century like a "naked new-born babe striding the blast." Tennyson ambles through it on a palfrey which has a tendency to flounder into every slough of despond it comes to. This may seem to be putting it rather too strongly, but is it not true? Browning has the vision belonging to the latest child of time. He never follows; he leads. With his eyes fixed upon a far-off future where man shall be _man_ at last, he faces every problem with the intrepidity of an Oedipus confronting the Sphynx. The mystery of its riddles has no terrors for him.

It is given to him as to few others to see the ineffable beauty of life's mystery, the promise it holds out of eternal joy. While he frequently discourses upon the existence of evil, he never for a moment admits any doubt into his own utmost soul of the beneficent part evil is meant to play in the molding of human destinies. Mr. Santayana has called him a barbarous poet. In a certain sense he is, if to be born among the first on a new plane of psychic perception where of no account become the endless metaphysical meanderings of the intellect, which cry "proof, proof, where there can be no proof," is barbarous. It was doubtless largely owing to this power of vision reminding us again somewhat of the child's in Maeterlinck's "Les Aveugles" which kept Browning from tinkering in the half-measures of the political leaders of his time. His plane is not unlike that of his own Lazarus, about whom the Arab physician says:

"The man is witless of the size, the sum, The value in proportion of all things, Or whether it be little or be much.

Discourse to him of prodigious armament a.s.sembled to besiege his city now, And of the pa.s.sing of a mule with gourds-- 'Tis one! Then take it on the other side, Speak of some trifling fact,--he will gaze rapt With stupor at its very littleness, (For as I see) as if in that indeed He caught prodigious import, whole results; And so will turn to us the bystanders In ever the same stupor (note this point) That we, too, see not with his opened eyes."

The import of an event is everything. Large imports may lurk more surely in the awakening of some obscure soul than in the pageantry of law bringing a tardy and wholly inadequate measure of justice to humanity.

Though Tennyson talks of the "far-off divine event" he has no burning conviction of it and does not ride toward it with triumph in his eye and flaming joy in his soul. As he ambles along, steeping himself in the science of the time, its revelations make him nervous; he falls into doubt from which he can only extricate himself by holding on to belief, a very different thing from Browning's vision.

Thus it happens that Tennyson voices the feelings of an immense cla.s.s of cultured people, who have gone through the century in the same ambling fashion, a prey to its fears, intellectual enough to see the truths of science, but not spiritual enough to see the import of the dawn of the new day.

Tennyson, then, quite of and in his time, would desire above all things to appeal to it as it appealed to him. He waxes enthusiastic over conventional politics, he treats his social problems so entirely in accordance with the conventions of the day that they are not problems at all, and he is quite in love with the beauty of aristocratic society, though he occasionally descends to the people for a subject. These are all entirely sufficient reasons for his popularity as a poet during his life, further emphasized by the added fact that having no subject matter (that is thought-content) wherewith to startle the world by strangeness, he took the wiser part of delighting them with his exquisite music.

Though so satisfactory a representative of his times, he did outrage one of the shibboleths of the critics in his efforts to find a new and richer music than poets had before used by bringing scientific imagery into his verse. Of all the absurd controversies indulged in by critics, the most absurd is that fought out around the contention that science and poetry cannot be made to harmonize. Wordsworth was keen enough to see this before the rest of the world and prophesied in the preface to his "Lyrical Ballads" that science would one day become the closest of allies to poetry, and Tennyson was brilliant enough to seize the new possibilities in scientific language with a realization that nature imagery might almost be made over by the use in describing it of scientific epithets. A famous ill.u.s.tration of the happy effects he produced by these means is in the lines "Move eastward happy Earth and round again to-night." His observation of Nature, moreover, had a scientific accuracy, which made possible far more delicate and individual descriptions of Nature's aspects than had been produced before. It was also a happy thought for him to weave so much of his poetry around the Arthurian legends. Beautiful in themselves, they came nearer home than cla.s.sical or Italian legends, and, when made symbolic of an ideal which must appeal to the heart of every cultured Englishman, who regarded himself as a sort of prototype of the blameless King Arthur, and whose grief at the failure of the social fabric planned by him would be as poignant as that of the King himself, they carried with them a romantic and irresistible attraction.

The reasons why Tennyson should appeal especially to the nineteenth century cultured and highly respectable Englishman far outweighed any criticisms that might be made by critics on his departure from poetic customs of the past. He pleased the highest powers in the land, became Laureate and later Lord Tennyson. He will therefore always remain the poet most thoroughly representative of that especial sort of beauty belonging to a social order which has reached a climax of refinement and intelligence, but which, through its very self-satisfaction, cuts itself off from a perception of the true value of the new forces coming into play in the on-rushing stream of social development.

The other poets who divide with Browning and Tennyson the highest honors of the Victorian Era are Landor, Arnold, Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris, Mrs.

Browning, George Meredith.

Landor and Arnold preserved more than any of the others a genuine cla.s.sical aroma in their verse, and on this account have always been delighted in by a few. After all, the people may not immediately accept a poet of too great independence, but they are least of all likely to grow enthusiastic over anything reactionary either in style or thought.

Romantic elements of not too startling a character win the favor of most readers.

Though cla.s.sic in style both these poets reflected phases of the century's thought. Landor differed from Browning in the fact that he frequently expressed himself vigorously upon the subject of current politics. His political principles were not of the most advanced type, however. He believed in the notion of a free society, but seems to have thought the best way of attaining it would be a commonwealth in which the wise should rule, and see that the interests of all should be secured. Still his insistence upon liberty, however old-fashioned his ideas of the means by which it should be maintained, puts him in the line of the democratic march of the century.

Swinburne calls him his master, and represents himself in verse as having learned many wise and gracious things of him, but his thought was not sufficiently progressive to triumph over the cla.s.sicism of his style in an age of romantic poetry, though there will always be those who hold on to the shibboleth that, after all, the cla.s.sic is the real thing in poetry, never realizing that where the romantic is old enough, it, too, becomes cla.s.sic.

Matthew Arnold stands in poetry where men like Huxley and Clifford stood in science, who, Childe-Roland like, came to the dark tower, calmly put the slug horn to their lips and blew a blast of courage. Science had undermined their belief in a future life as well as destroying the revealed basis of moral action. In such a man the intellectual nature overbalances the intuitional, and when inherited belief based on authority is destroyed, there is nothing but the habit of morality left.

Arnold has had the sympathy of those who could no longer believe in their revealed religion, but who loved it and regretted its pa.s.sing away from them. He gives expression to this feeling in lines like these:

"The sea of faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's sh.o.r.e Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.

But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world."

The regret for something beautiful that is gone is capable of exquisite poetic treatment, but it is not an abiding note of the century. It represents only one phase of its thought, and that a transcient one, because it could be felt with poignancy only by those whose lives were rudely shaken by the destruction of the ideal in which they had been bred and in which they devoutly believed. Arnold's sympathetic treatment of this phase of doubt seems, however, to have been of incalculable service to those who felt as he did. It softened the anguish of the shock to have not only the beauty of the past dwelt upon, but to have the beauty of courage in the face of a destroyed ideal erected into a new ideal for living brave and n.o.ble lives. In "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse" is a fine example of the beauty which may be imparted to a mood as melancholy as could well be imagined:

"Not as their friend, or child, I speak!

But as, on some far northern strand, Thinking of his own G.o.ds, a Greek In pity and mournful awe might stand Before some fallen Runic stone-- For both were faiths, and both are gone.

"Wandering between two worlds, one dead The other powerless to be born, With nowhere yet to rest my head, Like these, on earth I wait forlorn, Their faith, my tears, the world deride-- I come to shed them at their side."

Such hope as he has to offer comes out in stanzas like the following, but all is dependent upon strenuous living:

"No, no! the energy of life may be Kept on after the grave, but not begun; And he who flagg'd not in the earthly strife, From strength to strength advancing--only he, His soul well-knit, and all his battle won, Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life."

Nor shall better days on earth come without struggle since life

"Is on all sides o'ershadowed by the high Uno'erleaped Mountains of Necessity, Sparing us narrower margin than we deem.

Nor will that day dawn at a human nod, When, bursting through the network, superposed By selfish occupation--plot and plan, l.u.s.t, avarice, envy-liberated man, All difference with his fellow-mortal closed, Shall be left standing face to face with G.o.d."

Though Arnold was sternly criticised he had before the end of the century been accorded his proper place as a poet, which was that of the chief poet between the greatest lights of the century, Browning and Tennyson and the pre-Raphaelite group. Gosse, with more penetration than can always be accorded to him, declares that "His devotion to beauty, the composure, simplicity and dignity of his temper, and his deep moral sincerity gave to his poetry a singular charm which may prove as durable as any element in modern verse."

The phase of romanticism carried to its climax by the pre-Raphaelite poets Rossetti and his sister, Morris and Swinburne had, like the work of Tennyson, its full recognition, in its own time, because these poets, like him, have put into exquisite music romantic subjects derived both from the cla.s.sics and from mediaeval legend. The new note of sensuousness, due largely to the Italian influence of Rossetti, with his sensuous temperament, his intensity of pa.s.sion and his love of art, and also in Morris and Swinburne to their pagan feeling, one of the elements inaugurated by the general breaking down of orthodox religious ideals through the encroachments of science, does not seem to have affected their popularity.

As there were those who would sympathize with the Tennysonian att.i.tude toward doubt, and those who would sympathize with Matthew Arnold's, there were others to feel like Swinburne, pantheistic, and, like Morris, utterly hopeless of a future, while others again might criticise the pagan feeling, but, with their inheritance of beauty from Tennyson and his predecessors of the dawn of the century, would delight in these new developments of the romantic spirit.