Halleck's New English Literature Part 65

"But G.o.d has a few of us whom He whispers in the ear; The rest may reason and welcome: 'tis we musicians know."

The beautiful song of David in the poem ent.i.tled _Saul_ shows a wonderful sympathy with the old Hebrew prophecies. _Cleon_ expresses the views of an early Greek upon the teachings of Christ and St. Paul.

_The Soliloquy of a Spanish Cloister_ describes the development of a coa.r.s.e, jealous nature in monastic life. _The Last Ride Together_ is one of Browning's many pa.s.sionate poems on the enn.o.bling power of love. That remarkable, grotesque poem, _Caliban upon Setebos_, transcends human fields altogether, and displays the brutelike theology of a fiend.

In these monologues, Browning interprets characters of varying faiths, nationalities, stations, and historic periods. He shows a wide range of knowledge and sympathy. One type, however, which he rarely presents, is the simple, commonplace man or woman. Browning excels in the portrayal of unusual, intricate, and difficult characters that have complicated problems to face, weaknesses to overcome, or lofty ambitions to attain.

The Ring and the Book.--When Browning was asked what he would advise a student of his poetry to read first, he replied: "_The Ring and the Book_, of course." He worked on this masterly study of human souls for many years in the decade in which his wife died. This poem (1868), which has been facetiously called "a Roman murder story," was suggested to him by a "square old yellow book," which he purchased for a few cents at Florence in 1860. This ma.n.u.script, dated 1698, gives an account of the trial of Guido Franceschini for the murder of his wife.

Out of this "mere ring metal," Browning fashioned his "Ring," a poem twice the length of _Paradise Lost_.

The subject of the story is an innocent girl, Pompilia, who, under the protection of a n.o.ble priest, flees from her brutal husband and seeks the home of her foster parents. Her husband wrathfully pursues her and kills both her and her parents. While this is but the barest outline, yet the story in its complete form is very simple. As is usual with Browning, the chief stress is laid upon the character portrayal.

He adopted the bold and unique plan of having different cla.s.ses of people in Rome and the various actors in the tragedy tell the story from their own point of view and thus reveal their own bias and characteristics. Each relation makes the story seem largely new.

Browning shows that all this testimony is necessary to establish a complete circle of evidence in regard to the central truth of the tragedy. The poem thus becomes a remarkable a.n.a.lytic study of the psychology of human minds.

The four important characters,--Guido, the husband; Caponsacchi, the priest; Pompilia, the girl-wife; and the Pope,--stand out in strong relief. The greatest development of character is seen in Guido, who starts with a defiant spirit of certain victory, but gradually becomes more subdued and abject, when he finds that he is to be killed, and finally shrieks in agony for the help of his victim, Pompilia. In Caponsacchi there is the inward questioning of the right and the wrong. He is a strongly-drawn character, full of pa.s.sion and n.o.ble desires. Pompilia, who has an intuitive knowledge of the right, is one of Browning's sweetest and purest women. From descriptions of Mrs.

Browning, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne gave, we may conclude that she furnished the suggestion for many of Pompilia's characteristics. The Pope, with his calm, wise judgment and his lofty philosophy, is probably the greatest product of Browning's intellect.

The books containing the monologues of these characters take first place among Browning's writings and occupy a high position in the century's work. They have a striking originality, intensity, vigor, and imaginative richness. The remaining books are incomparably inferior, and are marked at times by mere acuteness of reason and thoroughness of legal knowledge.

A Dramatic Poet.--Although Browning's genius is strongly dramatic, his best work is not found in the field of the drama. _Strafford_ (1837), _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_ (1843), and _Colombe's Birthday_ (1844) have been staged successfully, but they cannot be called great acting plays. The action is slight, the characters are complex, the soliloquies are lengthy, and the climaxes are too often wholly dependent upon emotional intensity rather than upon great or exciting deeds. The strongest interest of these dramas lies in their psychological subtlety, which is more enjoyable in the study than in the theater.

Browning's dramatic power is well exhibited in poems like _In a Balcony_ or _Pippa Pa.s.ses_, in which powerful individual scenes are presented without all the accompanying details of a complete drama.

The great force of such scenes lies in his manner of treating moments of severe trial. He selects such a moment, focuses his whole attention upon it, and makes the deed committed stand forth as an explanation of all the past emotions and as a prophecy of all future acts. _In a Balcony_ shows the lives of three characters converging toward a crisis. The hero of this drama thus expresses his theory of life's struggles in the development of the soul:--

"...I count life just stuff To try the soul's strength on, educe the man."

_Pippa Pa.s.ses_ is one of Browning's most artistic presentations of such dramatic scenes. The little silk weaver, Pippa, rises on the morning of her one holiday in the year, with the intention of enjoying in fancy the pleasures "of the Happiest Four in our Asolo," not knowing, in her innocence, of their misery and guilt. She wanders from house to house, singing her pure, significant refrains, and, in each case, her songs arrest the attention of the hearer at a critical moment. She thus becomes unconsciously a means of salvation. The first scene is the most intense. She approaches the home of the lovers, Sebald and Ottima, after the murder of Ottima's husband. As Sebald begins to reflect on the murder, there comes this song of Pippa's, like the knocking at the gate in Macbeth, to loose the floodgates of remorse:--

[Ill.u.s.tration: FACSIMILE OF MS. FROM PIPPA Pa.s.sES.]

His Optimistic Philosophy.--It has been seen that the Victorian age, as presented by Matthew Arnold, was a period of doubt and negation.

Browning, however, was not overcome by this wave of doubt. Although he recognized fully the difficulties of religious faith in an age just awakening to scientific inquiry, yet he retained a strong, fearless trust in G.o.d and in immortality.

Browning's reason demanded this belief. In this earthly life he saw the evil overcome the good, and beheld injustice, defeat, and despair follow the n.o.blest efforts. If there exists no compensation for these things, he says that life is a cheat, the moral nature a lie, and G.o.d a fiend. In _Asolando_, Browning thus presents his att.i.tude toward life:--

"One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, tho' right were worsted, wrong would triumph, Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, Sleep to wake."

There is no hesitancy in this philosophy of Browning's. With it, he does not fear to face all the problems and mysteries of existence. No other poet strikes such a resonant, hopeful note as he. His _Rabbi Ben Ezra_ is more a song of triumphant faith than anything written since the Puritan days:--

"Our times are in His hand Who saith, 'A whole I planned, Youth shows but half; trust G.o.d: see all, nor be afraid!'

"Earth changes, but thy soul and G.o.d stand sure: What entered into thee, _That_ was, is, and shall be: Time's wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure."

General Characteristics.--Browning is a poet of striking originality and impelling force. His writings are the spontaneous outpourings of a rich, full nature, whose main fabric is intellect, but intellect illumined with the glittering light of spiritual hopefulness and flushed with the glow of deep human pa.s.sion.

The subject of his greatest poetry is the human soul. While he possesses a large portion of dramatic suggestiveness, he nevertheless does not excel in setting off character against character in movement and speech, but rather in a minute, penetrating a.n.a.lysis, by which he insinuates himself into the thoughts and sensations of his characters, and views life through their eyes.

He is a p.r.o.nounced realist. His verse deals not only with the beautiful and the romantic, but also with the prosaic and the ugly, if they furnish true pictures for the panorama of real life. The unconventionality and realism of his poetic art will be made manifest by merely reading through the t.i.tles of his numerous works.

Browning did not write to amuse and entertain, but to stimulate thought and to "sting" the conscience to activity. The meaning of his verse is, therefore, the matter of paramount importance, far overshadowing the form of expression. In the haste and carelessness with which he wrote many of his difficult abstruse poems, he laid himself open to the charge of obscurity.

His style has a strikingly individual stamp, which is marked far more by strength than by beauty. The bare and rugged style of his verse is often made profoundly impressive by its strenuous earnestness, its burning intensity, which seems to necessitate the broken lines and halting, interrupted rhythm. The following utterance of Caponsacchi, as he stands before his judges, will show the intensity and ruggedness of Browning's blank verse:--

"Sirs, how should I lie quiet in my grave Unless you suffer me wring, drop by drop, My brain dry, make a riddance of the drench Of minutes with a memory in each?"

His lines are often harsh and dissonant. Even in the n.o.ble poem _Rabbi Ben Ezra_, this jolting line appears:--

"Irks care the crop-full bird? Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?"

and in _Sordello_, Browning writes:--

"The Troubadour who sung Hundreds of songs, forgot, its trick his tongue, Its craft his brain."

No careful artist tolerates such ugly, rasping inversions.

In spite of these inharmonious tendencies in Browning, his poetry at times shows a lyric lightness, such as is heard in these lines:--

"Oh, to be in England Now that April's there, And whoever wakes in England Sees, some morning, unaware, That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough In England--now!"[15]

His verse often swells and falls with a wavelike rhythm as in _Saul_ or in these lines in _Abt Vogler_:--

"There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before; The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound; What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more; On the earth the broken arc; in the heaven, a perfect round."

While, therefore, Browning's poetry is sometimes harsh, faulty, and obscure, at times his melodies can be rhythmically simple and beautiful. He is one of the subtlest a.n.a.lysts of the human mind, the most original and impa.s.sioned poet of his age, and one of the most hopeful, inspiring, and uplifting teachers of modern times.

ALFRED TENNYSON, 1809-1892

[Ill.u.s.tration: ALFRED TENNYSON. _From a photograph by Mayall._]

Life.--Alfred Tennyson, one of the twelve children of the rector of Somersby, Lincolnshire, was born in that hamlet in 1809, a year memorable, both in England and America for the birth of such men as Charles Darwin, William E. Gladstone, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Edgar Allan Poe, and Abraham Lincoln.

Visitors to the Somersby rectory, in which Tennyson was born, note that it fits the description of the home in his fine lyric, _The Palace of Art_:--

"...an English home,--gray twilight pour'd On dewy pastures, dewy trees, Softer than sleep--all things in order stored, A haunt of ancient peace."

His mother, one of the beauties of Lincolnshire, had twenty-five offers of marriage. Of her Tennyson said in _The Princess:_--

"Happy he With such a mother! faith in womankind Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high Comes easy to him, and tho' he trip and fall, He shall not blind his soul with clay."

It is probable that Tennyson holds the record among English poets of his cla.s.s for the quant.i.ty of youthful verse produced. At the age of eight, he was writing blank verse in praise of flowers; at twelve, he began an epic which extended to six thousand lines.

In 1828 he entered Cambridge University; but in 1831 his father's sickness and death made it impossible for him to return to take his degree. Before leaving Cambridge, Tennyson had found a firm friend in a young college mate of great promise, Arthur Henry Hallam, who became engaged to the poet's sister, Emily Tennyson. Hallam's sudden death in 1832 was a profound shock to Tennyson and had far-reaching effects on his poetic development. For a long time he lived in comparative retirement, endeavoring to perfect himself in the poetic art.

His golden year was 1850, the year of the publication of _In Memoriam_, of his selection as poet laureate, to succeed Wordsworth, and of his marriage to Emily Sellwood. He had been in love with her for fourteen years, but insufficient income had hitherto prevented marriage.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FARRINGFORD.]

In 1855 Oxford honored him by bestowing on him the degree of D.C.L.

The students gave him an ovation and they properly honored his greatest poem, _In Memoriam_ by mentioning it first in their loud calls; but they also paid their respects to his _May Queen_, asking in chorus: "Did they wake and call you early, call you early, Alfred dear?"