Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning. Robert Browning
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examples might be cited. Mr. Brinton, who has made a detailed and competent study of Browning's verse, gives his final opinion in these words: "In the volumes of Browning I maintain that we find so many instances of profound insight into verbal harmonies, such singular strength of poetic grouping, and such a marvelous grasp of the rhythmic properties of the English language that we must assign to him a rank second to no English poet of this century."[8]
A third charge brought against Browning's art is that he makes all his characters talk "Browningese"; that is, that he endows all of them with the power to use such words and sentences and thought processes as are natural to him and to him only. Mr. Stedman in emphasizing this characteristic of the poet says of Pippa Passes: "The usual fault is present—the characters, whether students, peasants, or soldiers, all talk like sages; Pippa reasons like a Paracelsus in pantalettes." It is, of course, obvious at the first glance that there is a lack of verisimilitude in Pippa's rich and beautiful soliloquies. Certainly no fourteen-year-old mill girl could so describe a sunrise, or play so brilliantly with a sunbeam in a water-basin, or outline so cleverly the stories of the happiest four in Asolo. The same is true of Phene's long speech to Jules; no untutored girl brought up in degradation, could present such thoughts in such words. When we analyze Browning's way of presenting a character, however, we find that the lack of verisimilitude is usually external and has to do chiefly with expression. Browning works on the fundamental assumption that he has a poetic right to make all sorts of people articulate. He lends his mind out in the service of their thoughts and feelings. He makes people reveal themselves by putting into words their elusive, dim, tangled, and even unrecognized motives and hopes and joys and despairs. He sums up in the speeches all the potentialities of the situation. All the significance latent in the type of character and environment is somehow heightened and symbolized. All this is put in his own highly individual diction. Yet it can hardly be said that he violates poetic realism in the deeper sense, for he never puts a halo around a situation, never goes counter to its potentialities. Instead he strikes fire from it. He shows what is actually in the situation, but at white heat and laid bare to its center. When this method has once been recognized, discomfort on the score of lack of verisimilitude practically disappears, and the reader yields himself to the joy of the rich, subtle, and stimulating analysis.
We may now turn to a consideration of the subject-matter and the main ideas of Browning's poetry. From whatever point of view we regard his work, we find that ultimately the emphasis rests on the same great central fact, the supremacy of his interest in human nature. This dominating interest is shown, for instance, by a study of his treatment of physical nature. To be sure, no one can read his poems without recognizing the truth that his use of natural facts is distinctive in kind and very stimulating. A mere reference to the pictures of the sky in Pippa Passes, the vivid descriptions of fruits and flowers in "An Englishman in Italy," the remarkable studies of small animal life in "Saul" and "Caliban upon Setebos," of birds in "Home-Thoughts, from Abroad," of insects in the first part of Paracelsus and in many later poems, suffices to show that in mature life he did not lose the keenness of observation and interest characteristic of his youth. Yet it is also evident that his use of nature by way of direct description, or even as illustrative material, is far less in amount than that of other notable nineteenth century poets. He cares much less for "the river's line, the mountains round it and the sky above" than for the "figures of man, woman, and child these are frame to." Where nature is drawn upon, it is almost invariably in complete subordination to some human interest, and its literary form is almost always that of casual mention, background, or similitude, and the first of these is the most frequent. Furthermore, nearly all these passages are a mere statement of observed fact without comment or interpretation. There is one great passage in Paracelsus where the joy of God in the act of creation is depicted; there are occasional references to the delight of man in the external world; and now and then, as in "By the Fireside," man and nature are intimately fused; but such conceptions rarely occur. In Browning's poetry the boundary lines between man and nature are clearly marked. In Paracelsus he definitely protests against man's way of reading his own moods into nature, and of attributing to her his own qualities and emotions. He also always accounts man, if he has truly entered into his spiritual heritage, as consciously superior to nature. The troubadour Eglamour, in Sordello, says that man shrinks to naught if matched with a quiet sea or sky, but Browning calls that Eglamour's "false thought." To Browning, nature was to be studied, enjoyed, and used, but it was not as to Keats a realm of enchantment; or as to Wordsworth the realm where alone the divine and the human could pass the boundaries of sense and meet; or as to Matthew Arnold a refuge from pain and disillusionment. Browning regards the world about him more in the sane, unsentimental, straightforward, intelligible way of Chaucer or of Shakespeare. The mystical elements in Wordsworth's feeling for nature were foreign to Browning's mind. An instructive comparison might be made between Wordsworth's "Ode on Intimations of Immortality" and Browning's "Prologue to Asolando." The poems have the same starting point. Each one attributes sadness to the poet's old age, and each gives as a cause of the sadness the inevitable fading of the glory with which all nature was invested to the eye of his youth. But here the resemblance ends. Wordsworth believes that the youthful vision was a divine revelation to be regained when the round of existence should be completed by a return to his immortal home, and on the memory of that vision he founded his faith in a future life. But Browning welcomed the loss of the vision. Objects had been to him "palpably fire-clothed"; but with the loss of "flame" there was a gain in reality. The vision had enthralled and subjugated him; but with the sight of "a naked world" he had become conscious of things as they are, and he rejoiced in a justness of perception that declared what were to him the two great facts of life, the power and beauty of God, and the glory of the human soul. On these, not on nature, he put his stress.
Browning's paramount interest in human nature is further illustrated by his poems on the various arts. Of music, painting, and sculpture he has written with the intimate and minute knowledge of a specialist in each art. He is familiar with implements and materials, with the tricks of the trade, the talk of the studios; but, after all, the art as an art is of much less interest to him than is the worker. The process and even the completed product are in Browning's view important only in so far as they reveal or affect the artist, the musician, the sculptor, or some phase of life. In such poems as "Abt Vogler," "Fra Lippo Lippi," "Andrea del Sarto," we are conscious not so much of music and pictures as of the secret springs of failure, the divine despairs and discontents, the aspirations, the creative ecstasies, of the men who wrought in these realms. Andrea del Sarto's art is not the real theme of the poem bearing his name. It is, rather, his character, of which his art is an expression. The central fact of the poem is the recognition that a soul morally impoverished cannot, even with well-nigh perfect technique, produce great work, while, even with faulty technique, a setting of the soul to grand issues will secure transcendent meanings. So, too, with Abt Vogler. His music is not of the greatest, but our concern is with the musician who, through the completeness of his spiritual absorption in music, is conducted into a realm of experience beyond that of speech or even of articulate thought.
Another distinctly human aspect of art interests Browning, and that is its power to represent and so to recall a vanished civilization. Greek statues, the devotional pictures of the early Florentines, the work of the later Italian realists, stand, in "Old Pictures in Florence," as representatives of the life and thought that produced them. In "A Toccata of Galuppi's" the music revivifies the superficial gaiety, the undertone of fear, in the life of eighteenth century Venice. Highly significant in this connection are the poems in which he traces the evolution of art. Running through "Old Pictures in Florence" and "Fra Lippo Lippi" we find an ordered statement of the chief changes in the ideals of art as Browning saw them. The Greeks, we are told, had produced in sculpture the most beautiful representations of the human body. But if their successors had been content merely to admire this perfect achievement, they would have purchased satisfaction at the price of their own arrested development.