Browning and His Century Part 14

Armed with this gracious permission on the part of a professor of poetry, we may venture to reason a little upon the foregoing quotations from Tennyson and Browning to the effect that the person of really good taste might like each of them in its place. While Tennyson's mystical quatrain is beautiful and quite appropriate in such a poem as "In Memoriam," it would not be in the least appropriate from the lips of a little silk-winding girl as she wanders through the streets of Asolo on a sunny morning singing her little songs. She is certainly a more lifelike child speaking Browningese, as she has often been criticised for doing, than she would be if upon this occasion she spoke in a Tennysonian manner. That her song has touched the hearts of the twentieth century, if it was not altogether appreciated in the nineteenth, is proved by the fact that it is one of the most popular songs of the day as set by Mrs. H. H. A. Beach, and that the line is heard upon the lips of people to-day who do not even know whose it is, and herein lies the ultimate test of greatness.

VI

CLa.s.sIC SURVIVALS

Before pa.s.sing in review Browning's treatment of cla.s.sical subjects as compared with the other great poets of the nineteenth century, it will be interesting to take a glimpse at his choice of subject-matter in general.

To compare Browning's choice of subject-matter with that of other English poets is to strike at the very root of his position in the chain of literary development. Subject-matter is by no means simple in its nature, but as a musical sound is composed of vibrations within vibrations, so it is made up of the complex relations of body and spirit--the mere external facts of the story are blended with such philosophical undercurrent, or dramatic _motif_, or unfolding of the hidden springs of action as the poet is able to insinuate into it.

However far back one penetrates in the history of poetry, poets will be found depending largely upon previous sources, rather than upon their own creative genius, for the body of their subject-matter, until the question presents itself with considerable force as to who could have been the mysterious first poet who supplied plots to the rest of mankind.

Conjecture is obliged to play a part here, as it does wherever human origins are in question. Doubtless, this first poet was no separate individual, but simply the elements man and nature, through whose action and reaction upon each other grew up story-forms, evidently compounded of human customs, and observed natural phenomena such as those we find in the great Hindu, Greek, and Teutonic cla.s.sics, and which thus crystallized became great well-springs of inspiration for future generations of poets.

Each new poet, however, who is worthy of the name, sets up his own particular interplay with man and nature; and however much he may be indebted for his inspiration to past products of this universal law of action and reaction, he is bound to use them or interpret them in a manner colored by his own personal and peculiar relations with the universe.

In so doing he supplies the more important spiritual side of subject-matter and becomes in very truth the poet or maker, to that extent at least which Browning himself lays down as the province of art--namely, to arrange,

"Dissociate, redistribute, interchange Part with part: lengthen, broaden ... simply what lay loose At first lies firmly after, what design Was faintly traced in hesitating line Once on a time grows firmly resolute Henceforth and evermore."

Sometimes the poet's power of arranging and redistributing and interchanging carries him upward into the realm of ideas alone, among which his imagination plays in absolute freedom; he throws over the results of man's past dallyings with Nature and makes his own terms with her, and the result is an approach to absolute creation.

Except in the case of lyric poetry the instances where there have been no suggestions as to subject-matter are rare in comparison with those where the subject-matter has been derived from some source.

Look, for instance, at the father of English poetry, Chaucer, how he ransacked French, Italian and Latin literature for his subject-matter, most conscientiously carrying out his own saying, that

"Out of olde feldys as men sey Comyth all this newe corn from yere to yere, And out of olde books in good fey Cometh all this new science that men alere."

How external a way he had of working over old materials, especially in his earlier work, is well ill.u.s.trated in "The Parliament of Fowls," which he opens by relating the dream of Scipio, originally contained in Cicero's treatise on the "Republic," and preserved by Macrobius. This dream, which tells how Africa.n.u.s appears to Scipio, and carries him up among the stars of the night, shows him Carthage, and prophesies to him of his future greatness, tells him of the blissful immortal life that is in store for those who have served their country, points out to him the brilliant celestial fires, and how insignificant the earth is in comparison with them, and opens his ears to the wondrous harmony of the spheres--this dream is as far removed from the main argument of the poem as anything well could be a contest between three falcons for the hand of a formel.

The bringing together of such diverse elements presents no difficulties to the childlike stage of literary development that depends upon surface a.n.a.logies for the linking together of its thoughts. Just as talking about his ancestor, the great Scipio Africa.n.u.s, with the old King Masinissa caused Scipio to dream of him, so reading about this dream caused Chaucer, who has to close his book and go to bed for want of a light, to dream of Scipio Africa.n.u.s also, who "was come and stood right at his bedis syde."

Africa.n.u.s then plays the part of conductor to Chaucer in a manner suggestive not only of his relations to Scipio, but of Virgil's relation to Dante, and brings him to the great gateway and through it into the garden of love. The description is of the temple of Venus in Boccaccio's "La Teseide." There Nature and the "Fowls" are introduced and described, and at last the point is reached. Nature proclaims that it is St.

Valentine's day, and all the fowls may choose them mates. The royal falcon is given first choice, and chooses the lovely formel that sits upon Nature's hand. Two other ardent falcons declare their devotion to the same fowl, and Nature, when the formel declares that she will serve neither Venus nor Cupid and asks a respite for a year, decides that the three shall serve their lady another year--a pretty allegory supposed to refer to the wooing of Blanche of Lancaster by John of Gaunt.

The main argument of this poem, when it finally is reached by artificially welding together rich links borrowed from other poets, is one of the few examples in Chaucer of subject-matter derived direct from a real event, but the putting of it in an allegorical form at once lays him under obligations to his poetic predecessors, not only on Anglo-Saxon soil, but in France and Italy.

His most important contributions as an inventor are, of course, his descriptions of the Canterbury Pilgrims, which are the pure outcome of a keen observation of men and women at first hand. So lifelike are they that in them he has made the England of the fourteenth century live again. But how small a proportion of the bulk of the "Canterbury Tales" is contained in these glimpses of English life and manners. It is but the framework upon which luxuriate vines of fancy transplanted from many another garden, and even in its place resembling, if not borrowed from, Boccaccio.

The thoroughly human instincts of the poet a.s.sert themselves, however, in the choice of the tales which he puts into the mouths of his pilgrims. He allows a place to the crudities and even the vulgarities of common stories as well as to culture-lore. The magic of the East, the love tales of Italy, the wisdom of philosophers, the common stories of the people, all give up their wealth to his gentle touch. With a keen sense of propriety he, with few exceptions, gives each one of his pilgrims a tale suited in its general tendency to the character of its narrator, and in the critical chatter of the pilgrims about the tales, reflects not only his own tastes, but that of the times, the opinions expressed frequently being most uncomplimentary in their tenor.

In fine, the life of reality and the life of books is spread out before Chaucer, and his observation of both is keen and interested; and this it is which makes him much more than the "great translator" that Eustace Les Champs called him, and settles the nature of the "subtle thing" called spirit contributed by the individuality of the poet to his subject-matter.

He brings everything within the reach of human sympathy, because his way of putting a story into his own words is sympathetic. He was a combination of the story-teller, the scholar, the poet, and the critic. As a scholar he brings in learned allusions that are entirely extraneous to the action in hand; as the story-teller, he takes delight in the tales that both the poet and the people have told; as the poet, his imagination dresses up a story with a fresh environment, often anachronous, and sometimes he alters the moral tone of the characters. Cressida is an interesting example of this. But instead of the characters suggesting by their own action and speech all the needed moral, Chaucer himself appears ever at hand to a.n.a.lyze and criticise and moralize, though he does it so delightfully that one hesitates to call him didactic. The result of all this is that the external form and the underlying essence of his subject-matter are not completely fused. We often see a sort of guileless working of the machinery of art, yet it is true, no doubt, though perhaps not to the extent insisted on by Morley, that he has something of the Shakespearian quality which enables him to show men as they really are, "wholly developed as if from within, not as described from without by an imperfect and prejudiced observer."

In his great work, Spenser is no less dependent upon sources for his inspiration, but there is a marked difference in his use of them. Although his range of observation is much narrower than Chaucer's, hardly extending at all into the realm of actual human effort, yet he makes an advance in so far as his powers of redistribution are much greater than Chaucer's.

The various knights of the "Fairy Queen" and their exploits are not modeled directly upon any previous stories, but they are made up of incidents similar to those found scattered all through cla.s.sic lore; and as his inspirations were drawn in most cases directly from the fountain-head of story in the Greek writers--instead of as they filtered through the Latin, Italian, and French, with the inevitable accretions that result from migrations,--and from the comparatively unalloyed Arthurian legends, there is a clearer reflection in them of the cosmic elements that shine through both the Greek and Arthurian originals than is found in Chaucer.

Although Spenser was certainly unaware of any such modern refinement of the mythologist as a solar myth, yet the "Fairy Queen" forms a curious and interesting study on account of the survivals everywhere evident of solar characteristics in his characters and plots. Indeed it could hardly be otherwise, considering his intention, and his method of carrying it out, which he, himself, explains in his quaint letter to Sir Walter Raleigh--namely, "to fashion a gentleman or n.o.ble person in virtuous and gentle discipline." He goes on:

"I close the history of King Arthur as most fit for the excellency of his person, being made famous by many men's former works, and also further from danger and envy of suspicion of present time. In which I have followed all the antique poets historical; first Homer, who in the person of Agamemnon and Ulysses hath ensampled a good governor and a virtuous man, the one in his 'Iliad,' the other in his 'Odyssey'; then Virgil, whose like intention was to do in the person of aeneas: After him, Ariosto comprised them both in his Orlando, and lately Ta.s.so dissevered them again, and formed both parts in two persons, the part which they in Philosophy call Ethice or virtues of a private man, colored in his Rinaldo, the other, named Politice, in his G.o.dfieldo. By example of which excellent poets, I labor to portray in Arthur before he was King, the image of a brave Knight perfected in the twelve private moral virtues as Aristotle hath devised, the which is the purpose of these first twelve books."

In the fashioning of his knight he took Arthur, a hero whose life as it appears in the early romances is inextricably mingled with solar elements, and has built up his virtues upon other ancient solar heroes. Here are all the paraphernalia of solar mythology: invincible knights with marvelous weapons, brazen castles guarded by dragons, marriage with a beautiful maiden and parting from the bride to engage in new quests, an enchantress who turns men into animals, even the outcast child; but none of the incidents appear intact. It is as if there had been a great explosion in the ancient land of romance and that in the mending up of things the separate pieces are all recognizable, although all joined together in a different pattern, while under all is the allegory. A gentle knight is no longer a solar hero as set forth by Max Muller or c.o.x, but Holiness; his invincible armor is not the all-powerful rays of the sun, but truth; the enchantress not night casting a spell over mortals, but sensuous pleasure entangling them.

These two poets, Chaucer and Spenser, are prototypes of two poet types of two poetical tendencies that have gone on developing side by side in English literature: Chaucer, democratic, interested supremely in the personalities of men and women, portraying the real, and Spenser, aristocratic, interested in imaging forth an ideal of manhood, choosing his subject-matter from sources that will lend themselves to such a purpose; Chaucer drawing his lessons out of the real actions of humanity; Spenser framing his story so that it will ill.u.s.trate the moral he wishes to inculcate.

Shakespeare, of course, ranges himself in line with Chaucer. His interest centered on character, and wherever a story capable of character development presented itself, that he chose, altered it in outline comparatively little, and when he did so it was in order to carry forward the dramatic _motif_ which he infused into his subject. The dramatic form in which he wrote furnished him a better medium for reaching a complete welding together of the external and spiritual side of his subject-matter. Where Chaucer hinted at the possibilities of an artistic development of character that would cause the events of the story to appear as the inevitable outcome of the hidden springs of action, Shakespeare accomplished it, and peopled the world of imagination with group after group of living, acting characters.

In the nineteenth century Tennyson and Browning have represented, broadly speaking, these two tendencies. As with Spenser, the cla.s.sics and the Arthurian legends have been the sources from which Tennyson has drawn most largely; but although a philosophical undercurrent is this poet's spiritual addition to the subject-matter, his method of putting his soul inside his work is very different from Spenser's. He does not tear the old myths to pieces and join them together again after a pattern of his own to fit his allegorical situation, but keeps the events of his stories almost unchanged, in this particular resembling Chaucer and Shakespeare, and--except in a few instances, such as t.i.thonus and Lucretius, where the cla.s.sic spirit of the originals is preserved--he infuses in his subject a vein of philosophy, ill.u.s.trating those modern tendencies of English thought of which Tennyson, himself, was the exemplar. Even when inventing subjects, founded upon the experiences of everyday life, he so manipulates the story as to make it ill.u.s.trate some of his favorite moral maxims. His characters do not act from motives which are the inherent necessities of their natures, but they act in accordance with Tennyson's preconceived notions of how they ought to act. He manipulates the elements of character to suit his own view of development, just as Spenser manipulated the elements of the story to suit his own allegorical purpose.

Browning is the nineteenth-century heir of Chaucer; but it is doubtful whether Chaucer would recognize his own offspring, so remarkable has the development been in those five centuries. With Chaucer's keen interest in human nature deepened to a profound insight into the very soul of humanity, and the added wealth of these centuries of human history, Browning not only had a far wider range of choice in subject-matter, but he was enabled to instil into it greater intellectual and emotional complexities.

Rarely has he treated any subject that has already been treated poetically unless we except the transcripts from the cla.s.sics soon to be considered. Wherever he saw an interesting historical personage, interesting, not on account of his brilliant achievements in the eyes of the world, but on account of potentialities of character, such a one he has set before us to reveal himself. There are between twenty and thirty portraits of this nature in his work, chosen from all sorts and conditions of men--men who stand for some phase of growth in human thought; and always in developing a personality he gives the kernel of truth upon which their peculiar point of view is based. Thus, among the musical poems, Abt Vogler speaks for the intuitionalist--he who is blessed by a glimpse of the absolute truth. Charles Avison, on the other hand, is the philosopher of the relative in music and the arts generally. Among the art poems, Fra Lippo Lippi is the apostle of beauty in realism, Andrea del Sarto the attainer of perfection in form. In the religious poems the Jewish standpoint is ill.u.s.trated in "Saul" and "Rabbi Ben Ezra," the Christian in the portrait of John in "The Death in the Desert"; the empirical reasoner in "Paracelsus."

This is only one of Browning's methods in the choice and use of subject-matter. The characters and incidents in his stories are frequently the result of pure invention, but he sets them in an environment recreated from history, developing their individualities in harmony with the environment, thus giving at one stroke the spirit of the time and the individual qualities of special representatives of the time.

Examples of this are: "My Last d.u.c.h.ess," where the Duke is an entirely imaginary person and the particular incident is invented, but he is made to act and talk in a way perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the time--mediaeval Italy. "Hugues of Saxe-Gotha" is another being of Browning's fancy, who yet represents to perfection the spirit of the old fugue writers. "Luria," "The Soul's Tragedy," "In a Balcony," all represent the same method.

Another plan pursued by the poet is either to invent or borrow a historical personage into whose mouth he puts the defence of some course of action or ethical standard that may or may not be founded upon the highest ideals. Sludge, the hero of "Fifine at the Fair," Bishop Blougram, Hohenstiel-Schw.a.n.gau, range themselves in this group.

There are comparatively few cases where he has taken a complete story and developed its spiritual possibilities without much change in external detail, but how adequate his art was to such ends, "The Ring and the Book," "Inn Alb.u.m," "Two Poets of Croisic," "Red Cotton Nightcap Country,"

the historical dramas of "Strafford," and "King Victor and King Charles"

fully prove, including, as they do, some of his finest masterpieces.

History and story have furnished many of the incidents which he has worked up in his dramatic lyrics and romances like "Clive," "Herve Riel,"

"Donald," etc. There remains, however, a large number of poems containing some of Browning's loveliest work in which the subject-matter is, as far as we know, the creation of pure, unadulterated fancy. "A Blot in the 'Scutcheon," "In a Balcony," "Colombe's Birthday," "Childe Roland," "James Lee's Wife" are some of them. Even in this rapid survey of the field the fact is patent that Browning's range of subject-matter is infinitely wider and his method of developing it far more varied than has been that of any other English poet. He seems the first to have completely shaken himself free from the trammels of cla.s.sic or mediaeval literature. There are no echoes of Arthur and his Knights in his poetry, the shadows of the Greek G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses exert no spell--except in the few instances when he deliberately chose a Greek subject.

The fact that Browning was so free from cla.s.sical influence in the great body of his work as compared with the other chief poets of the nineteenth century gives an especial interest to those poems in which he chose cla.s.sical themes for his subjects. There are not more than ten all told, and one of these is a translation, yet they represent some of his finest and most original work, for Browning could not touch a cla.s.sical theme without infusing into it that grasp and insight peculiar to his own genius.

His first and most conventionally cla.s.sical poem is the fragment in "Men and Women," "Artemis Prologizes," written in 1842. It was to have been the introduction to a long poem telling of the mad love of Hippolytus for a nymph of Artemis, after that G.o.ddess had brought about his resuscitation.

It has been suggested by Mr. Boynton in an interesting paper that Browning shows traces of the influence of Landor in his poetry. This fragment certainly furnishes argument for this opinion, though it has a strength of diction along with its Greek severity and terseness of style which leads to the conclusion that the influence came from the fountain head of Greek poetry itself rather than through the lesser muse of this nineteenth-century Greek.

The poem is said to have been begun on a sick-bed and when the poet recovered he had forgotten or lost interest in his plans. This is to be regretted for if he had continued as he began, the poem would have stood unique in his work as a true survival of Greek subject wedded with cla.s.sical form and style, and would certainly have challenged comparison with the best work done in this field by Landor or Swinburne, who tell over the cla.s.sical stories or even invent new episodes, but, when all is said, do not write as if they were actually themselves Greeks.

There is no other instance in Browning of such a survival. In his other poems on Greek subjects it is Browning bringing Greek life to our ken with wonderful distinctness, but doing it according to his own accustomed poetical methods, or, as in "Ixion," a Greek story has been used as a symbol for the inculcating of a philosophy which is largely Browning's own.

In spite of the fact that he has turned to Greece so seldom for inspiration, his Greek poems range from such stirring pictures of Greek life and feeling as one gets in the splendid dramatic idyl "Pheidippides," based on a historical incident, through the imaginary "Cleon," in which is found the sublimated essence of Greek philosophical thought at the time of Christ--thought, weary of law and beauty, longing for a fresh inspiration, knowing not what, and unable to perceive it in the new ideal of love being taught by the Christians--to "Aristophanes'

Apology," in which the Athens of his day, with its literary and political factions, is presented with a force and a.n.a.lysis which place it second only to "The Ring and the Book."

This poem taken, with Balaustion, gives the reader not only a comprehensive view of the historical atmosphere of the time but indirectly shows the poet's own att.i.tude toward the literary war between Euripides and Aristophanes. So different are Browning's Greek poems from all other poems upon cla.s.sical subjects that it will be interesting to dwell upon the most important of them at greater length than has been deemed necessary in the case of the more widely known and read of the poems.

"Cleon" links itself with the nineteenth century, because of its dealing with the problem of immortality, a problem which has been ever present in the mind of the century. Cleon has, beside that type of synthetic mind which belongs to a ripe phase of civilization. Though he is a Greek and a pagan, he stretches hands across the centuries to men of the type of Morris or Matthew Arnold. He is the latest child of his own time, the heir of all the ages during which Greece had developed its aesthetic perfection, discovered the inadequacy of its established religion, come through its philosophers and poets to a perception of the immortality of the soul, and sunk again to a skepticism which had no vision of personal immortality at least, though among the stoics there were some who believed in an absorption into divine being. Cleon would fain believe in personal immortality but cannot, and, like Matthew Arnold, believes in facing death imperturbably.

In "Balaustion's Adventure" a historical tradition is used as the central episode of the poem, but life and romance are given to it by the creation of the heroine, Balaustion, a young Greek woman whose fascinating personality dominates the whole poem. She was a Rhodian, else her freedom of action and speech might seem too modern, but among the islands of Greece, at least at the time of Euripides, there still survived that att.i.tude toward woman which we see reflected in the Homeric epics. Away from Athens, too, Euripides was a power; hence his defence is put into the mouth of one not an Athenian. She had saved a shipload of Athenian sympathizers by reciting Euripides when they were in danger from the hostile Syracusans.

[Ill.u.s.tration: EURIPIDES]

Besides the romantic touch which is given the story by the creation of the lyric girl, there is an especial fitness in making the enthusiastic devotee of this poet a woman, for no one among the ancients has so fully and sympathetically portrayed woman in all her human possibilities of goodness and badness as Euripides, yet he has been called a woman-hater--because some of his men have railed against women--but one Alkestis is enough to offset any dramatic utterances of his men about women. The poet's att.i.tude should be looked for in his power of portraying women of fine traits, not in any opinions expressed by his men.