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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6833f05 --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +* text=auto +*.txt text +*.md text diff --git a/13342-0.txt b/13342-0.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3acc046 --- /dev/null +++ b/13342-0.txt @@ -0,0 +1,6309 @@ +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13342 *** + + ROBERT BROWNING + + + BY + + G.K. CHESTERTON + + + + + CONTENTS + + CHAPTER I +BROWNING IN EARLY LIFE 1 + + CHAPTER II +EARLY WORKS 34 + + CHAPTER III +BROWNING AND HIS MARRIAGE 55 + + CHAPTER IV +BROWNING IN ITALY 81 + + CHAPTER V +BROWNING IN LATER LIFE 105 + + CHAPTER VI +BROWNING AS A LITERARY ARTIST 133 + + CHAPTER VII +"THE RING AND THE BOOK" 160 + + CHAPTER VIII +THE PHILOSOPHY OF BROWNING 177 + +INDEX 203 + + + + + +ROBERT BROWNING + + + + +CHAPTER I + +BROWNING IN EARLY LIFE + + +On the subject of Browning's work innumerable things have been said +and remain to be said; of his life, considered as a narrative of +facts, there is little or nothing to say. It was a lucid and public +and yet quiet life, which culminated in one great dramatic test of +character, and then fell back again into this union of quietude and +publicity. And yet, in spite of this, it is a great deal more +difficult to speak finally about his life than about his work. His +work has the mystery which belongs to the complex; his life the much +greater mystery which belongs to the simple. He was clever enough to +understand his own poetry; and if he understood it, we can understand +it. But he was also entirely unconscious and impulsive, and he was +never clever enough to understand his own character; consequently we +may be excused if that part of him which was hidden from him is partly +hidden from us. The subtle man is always immeasurably easier to +understand than the natural man; for the subtle man keeps a diary of +his moods, he practises the art of self-analysis and self-revelation, +and can tell us how he came to feel this or to say that. But a man +like Browning knows no more about the state of his emotions than about +the state of his pulse; they are things greater than he, things +growing at will, like forces of Nature. There is an old anecdote, +probably apocryphal, which describes how a feminine admirer wrote to +Browning asking him for the meaning of one of his darker poems, and +received the following reply: "When that poem was written, two people +knew what it meant--God and Robert Browning. And now God only knows +what it means." This story gives, in all probability, an entirely +false impression of Browning's attitude towards his work. He was a +keen artist, a keen scholar, he could put his finger on anything, and +he had a memory like the British Museum Library. But the story does, +in all probability, give a tolerably accurate picture of Browning's +attitude towards his own emotions and his psychological type. If a man +had asked him what some particular allusion to a Persian hero meant he +could in all probability have quoted half the epic; if a man had asked +him which third cousin of Charlemagne was alluded to in _Sordello_, he +could have given an account of the man and an account of his father +and his grandfather. But if a man had asked him what he thought of +himself, or what were his emotions an hour before his wedding, he +would have replied with perfect sincerity that God alone knew. + +This mystery of the unconscious man, far deeper than any mystery of +the conscious one, existing as it does in all men, existed peculiarly +in Browning, because he was a very ordinary and spontaneous man. The +same thing exists to some extent in all history and all affairs. +Anything that is deliberate, twisted, created as a trap and a +mystery, must be discovered at last; everything that is done naturally +remains mysterious. It may be difficult to discover the principles of +the Rosicrucians, but it is much easier to discover the principles of +the Rosicrucians than the principles of the United States: nor has any +secret society kept its aims so quiet as humanity. The way to be +inexplicable is to be chaotic, and on the surface this was the quality +of Browning's life; there is the same difference between judging of +his poetry and judging of his life, that there is between making a map +of a labyrinth and making a map of a mist. The discussion of what some +particular allusion in _Sordello_ means has gone on so far, and may go +on still, but it has it in its nature to end. The life of Robert +Browning, who combines the greatest brain with the most simple +temperament known in our annals, would go on for ever if we did not +decide to summarise it in a very brief and simple narrative. + +Robert Browning was born in Camberwell on May 7th 1812. His father and +grandfather had been clerks in the Bank of England, and his whole +family would appear to have belonged to the solid and educated middle +class--the class which is interested in letters, but not ambitious in +them, the class to which poetry is a luxury, but not a necessity. + +This actual quality and character of the Browning family shows some +tendency to be obscured by matters more remote. It is the custom of +all biographers to seek for the earliest traces of a family in distant +ages and even in distant lands; and Browning, as it happens, has given +them opportunities which tend to lead away the mind from the main +matter in hand. There is a tradition, for example, that men of his +name were prominent in the feudal ages; it is based upon little beyond +a coincidence of surnames and the fact that Browning used a seal with +a coat-of-arms. Thousands of middle-class men use such a seal, merely +because it is a curiosity or a legacy, without knowing or caring +anything about the condition of their ancestors in the Middle Ages. +Then, again, there is a theory that he was of Jewish blood; a view +which is perfectly conceivable, and which Browning would have been the +last to have thought derogatory, but for which, as a matter of fact, +there is exceedingly little evidence. The chief reason assigned by his +contemporaries for the belief was the fact that he was, without doubt, +specially and profoundly interested in Jewish matters. This +suggestion, worthless in any case, would, if anything, tell the other +way. For while an Englishman may be enthusiastic about England, or +indignant against England, it never occurred to any living Englishman +to be interested in England. Browning was, like every other +intelligent Aryan, interested in the Jews; but if he was related to +every people in which he was interested, he must have been of +extraordinarily mixed extraction. Thirdly, there is the yet more +sensational theory that there was in Robert Browning a strain of the +negro. The supporters of this hypothesis seem to have little in +reality to say, except that Browning's grandmother was certainly a +Creole. It is said in support of the view that Browning was singularly +dark in early life, and was often mistaken for an Italian. There does +not, however, seem to be anything particular to be deduced from this, +except that if he looked like an Italian, he must have looked +exceedingly unlike a negro. + +There is nothing valid against any of these three theories, just as +there is nothing valid in their favour; they may, any or all of them, +be true, but they are still irrelevant. They are something that is in +history or biography a great deal worse than being false--they are +misleading. We do not want to know about a man like Browning, whether +he had a right to a shield used in the Wars of the Roses, or whether +the tenth grandfather of his Creole grandmother had been white or +black: we want to know something about his family, which is quite a +different thing. We wish to have about Browning not so much the kind +of information which would satisfy Clarencieux King-at-Arms, but the +sort of information which would satisfy us, if we were advertising for +a very confidential secretary, or a very private tutor. We should not +be concerned as to whether the tutor were descended from an Irish +king, but we should still be really concerned about his extraction, +about what manner of people his had been for the last two or three +generations. This is the most practical duty of biography, and this is +also the most difficult. It is a great deal easier to hunt a family +from tombstone to tombstone back to the time of Henry II. than to +catch and realise and put upon paper that most nameless and elusive of +all things--social tone. + +It will be said immediately, and must as promptly be admitted, that we +could find a biographical significance in any of these theories if we +looked for it. But it is, indeed, the sin and snare of biographers +that they tend to see significance in everything; characteristic +carelessness if their hero drops his pipe, and characteristic +carefulness if he picks it up again. It is true, assuredly, that all +the three races above named could be connected with Browning's +personality. If we believed, for instance, that he really came of a +race of mediæval barons, we should say at once that from them he got +his pre-eminent spirit of battle: we should be right, for every line +in his stubborn soul and his erect body did really express the +fighter; he was always contending, whether it was with a German theory +about the Gnostics, or with a stranger who elbowed his wife in a +crowd. Again, if we had decided that he was a Jew, we should point out +how absorbed he was in the terrible simplicity of monotheism: we +should be right, for he was so absorbed. Or again, in the case even of +the negro fancy; it would not be difficult for us to suggest a love of +colour, a certain mental gaudiness, a pleasure + + "When reds and blues were indeed red and blue," + +as he says in _The Ring and the Book_. We should be right; for there +really was in Browning a tropical violence of taste, an artistic +scheme compounded as it were, of orchids and cockatoos, which, amid +our cold English poets, seems scarcely European. All this is extremely +fascinating; and it may be true. But, as has above been suggested, +here comes in the great temptation of this kind of work, the noble +temptation to see too much in everything. The biographer can easily +see a personal significance in these three hypothetical nationalities. +But is there in the world a biographer who could lay his hand upon his +heart and say that he would not have seen as much significance in any +three other nationalities? If Browning's ancestors had been Frenchmen, +should we not have said that it was from them doubtless that he +inherited that logical agility which marks him among English poets? +If his grandfather had been a Swede, should we not have said that the +old sea-roving blood broke out in bold speculation and insatiable +travel? If his great-aunt had been a Red Indian, should we not have +said that only in the Ojibways and the Blackfeet do we find the +Browning fantasticality combined with the Browning stoicism? This +over-readiness to seize hints is an inevitable part of that secret +hero-worship which is the heart of biography. The lover of great men +sees signs of them long before they begin to appear on the earth, and, +like some old mythological chronicler, claims as their heralds the +storms and the falling stars. + +A certain indulgence must therefore be extended to the present writer +if he declines to follow that admirable veteran of Browning study, Dr. +Furnivall, into the prodigious investigations which he has been +conducting into the condition of the Browning family since the +beginning of the world. For his last discovery, the descent of +Browning from a footman in the service of a country magnate, there +seems to be suggestive, though not decisive evidence. But Browning's +descent from barons, or Jews, or lackeys, or black men, is not the +main point touching his family. If the Brownings were of mixed origin, +they were so much the more like the great majority of English +middle-class people. It is curious that the romance of race should be +spoken of as if it were a thing peculiarly aristocratic; that +admiration for rank, or interest in family, should mean only interest +in one not very interesting type of rank and family. The truth is that +aristocrats exhibit less of the romance of pedigree than any other +people in the world. For since it is their principle to marry only +within their own class and mode of life, there is no opportunity in +their case for any of the more interesting studies in heredity; they +exhibit almost the unbroken uniformity of the lower animals. It is in +the middle classes that we find the poetry of genealogy; it is the +suburban grocer standing at his shop door whom some wild dash of +Eastern or Celtic blood may drive suddenly to a whole holiday or a +crime. Let us admit then, that it is true that these legends of the +Browning family have every abstract possibility. But it is a far more +cogent and apposite truth that if a man had knocked at the door of +every house in the street where Browning was born, he would have found +similar legends in all of them. There is hardly a family in Camberwell +that has not a story or two about foreign marriages a few generations +back; and in all this the Brownings are simply a typical Camberwell +family. The real truth about Browning and men like him can scarcely be +better expressed than in the words of that very wise and witty story, +Kingsley's _Water Babies_, in which the pedigree of the Professor is +treated in a manner which is an excellent example of the wild common +sense of the book. "His mother was a Dutch woman, and therefore she +was born at Curaçoa (of course, you have read your geography and +therefore know why), and his father was a Pole, and therefore he was +brought up at Petropaulowski (of course, you have learnt your modern +politics, and therefore know why), but for all that he was as thorough +an Englishman as ever coveted his neighbour's goods." + +It may be well therefore to abandon the task of obtaining a clear +account of Brownings family, and endeavour to obtain, what is much +more important, a clear account of his home. For the great central +and solid fact, which these heraldic speculations tend inevitably to +veil and confuse, is that Browning was a thoroughly typical Englishman +of the middle class. He may have had alien blood, and that alien +blood, by the paradox we have observed, may have made him more +characteristically a native. A phase, a fancy, a metaphor may or may +not have been born of eastern or southern elements, but he was, +without any question at all, an Englishman of the middle class. +Neither all his liberality nor all his learning ever made him anything +but an Englishman of the middle class. He expanded his intellectual +tolerance until it included the anarchism of _Fifine at the Fair_ and +the blasphemous theology of Caliban; but he remained himself an +Englishman of the middle class. He pictured all the passions of the +earth since the Fall, from the devouring amorousness of _Time's +Revenges_ to the despotic fantasy of _Instans Tyrannus_; but he +remained himself an Englishman of the middle class. The moment that he +came in contact with anything that was slovenly, anything that was +lawless, in actual life, something rose up in him, older than any +opinions, the blood of generations of good men. He met George Sand and +her poetical circle and hated it, with all the hatred of an old city +merchant for the irresponsible life. He met the Spiritualists and +hated them, with all the hatred of the middle class for borderlands +and equivocal positions and playing with fire. His intellect went upon +bewildering voyages, but his soul walked in a straight road. He piled +up the fantastic towers of his imagination until they eclipsed the +planets; but the plan of the foundation on which he built was always +the plan of an honest English house in Camberwell. He abandoned, with +a ceaseless intellectual ambition, every one of the convictions of his +class; but he carried its prejudices into eternity. + +It is then of Browning as a member of the middle class, that we can +speak with the greatest historical certainty; and it is his immediate +forebears who present the real interest to us. His father, Robert +Browning, was a man of great delicacy of taste, and to all appearance +of an almost exaggerated delicacy of conscience. Every glimpse we have +of him suggests that earnest and almost worried kindliness which is +the mark of those to whom selfishness, even justifiable selfishness, +is really a thing difficult or impossible. In early life Robert +Browning senior was placed by his father (who was apparently a father +of a somewhat primitive, not to say barbaric, type) in an important +commercial position in the West Indies. He threw up the position +however, because it involved him in some recognition of slavery. +Whereupon his unique parent, in a transport of rage, not only +disinherited him and flung him out of doors, but by a superb stroke of +humour, which stands alone in the records of parental ingenuity, sent +him in a bill for the cost of his education. About the same time that +he was suffering for his moral sensibility he was also disturbed about +religious matters, and he completed his severance from his father by +joining a dissenting sect. He was, in short, a very typical example of +the serious middle-class man of the Wilberforce period, a man to whom +duty was all in all, and who would revolutionise an empire or a +continent for the satisfaction of a single moral scruple. Thus, while +he was Puritan at the core, not the ruthless Puritan of the +seventeenth, but the humanitarian Puritan of the eighteenth century, +he had upon the surface all the tastes and graces of a man of culture. +Numerous accomplishments of the lighter kind, such as drawing and +painting in water colours, he possessed; and his feeling for many +kinds of literature was fastidious and exact. But the whole was +absolutely redolent of the polite severity of the eighteenth century. +He lamented his son's early admiration for Byron, and never ceased +adjuring him to model himself upon Pope. + +He was, in short, one of the old-fashioned humanitarians of the +eighteenth century, a class which we may or may not have conquered in +moral theory, but which we most certainly have not conquered in moral +practice. Robert Browning senior destroyed all his fortunes in order +to protest against black slavery; white slavery may be, as later +economists tell us, a thing infinitely worse, but not many men destroy +their fortunes in order to protest against it. The ideals of the men +of that period appear to us very unattractive; to them duty was a kind +of chilly sentiment. But when we think what they did with those cold +ideals, we can scarcely feel so superior. They uprooted the enormous +Upas of slavery, the tree that was literally as old as the race of +man. They altered the whole face of Europe with their deductive +fancies. We have ideals that are really better, ideals of passion, of +mysticism, of a sense of the youth and adventurousness of the earth; +but it will be well for us if we achieve as much by our frenzy as they +did by their delicacies. It scarcely seems as if we were as robust in +our very robustness as they were robust in their sensibility. + +Robert Browning's mother was the daughter of William Wiedermann, a +German merchant settled in Dundee, and married to a Scotch wife. One +of the poet's principal biographers has suggested that from this union +of the German and Scotch, Browning got his metaphysical tendency; it +is possible; but here again we must beware of the great biographical +danger of making mountains out of molehills. What Browning's mother +unquestionably did give to him, was in the way of training--a very +strong religious habit, and a great belief in manners. Thomas Carlyle +called her "the type of a Scottish gentlewoman," and the phrase has a +very real significance to those who realise the peculiar condition of +Scotland, one of the very few European countries where large sections +of the aristocracy are Puritans; thus a Scottish gentlewoman combines +two descriptions of dignity at the same time. Little more is known of +this lady except the fact that after her death Browning could not bear +to look at places where she had walked. + +Browning's education in the formal sense reduces itself to a minimum. +In very early boyhood he attended a species of dame-school, which, +according to some of his biographers, he had apparently to leave +because he was too clever to be tolerable. However this may be, he +undoubtedly went afterwards to a school kept by Mr. Ready, at which +again he was marked chiefly by precocity. But the boy's education did +not in truth take place at any systematic seat of education; it took +place in his own home, where one of the quaintest and most learned and +most absurdly indulgent of fathers poured out in an endless stream +fantastic recitals from the Greek epics and mediæval chronicles. If we +test the matter by the test of actual schools and universities, +Browning will appear to be almost the least educated man in English +literary history. But if we test it by the amount actually learned, we +shall think that he was perhaps the most educated man that ever lived; +that he was in fact, if anything, overeducated. In a spirited poem he +has himself described how, when he was a small child, his father used +to pile up chairs in the drawing-room and call them the city of Troy. +Browning came out of the home crammed with all kinds of +knowledge--knowledge about the Greek poets, knowledge about the +Provençal Troubadours, knowledge about the Jewish Rabbis of the Middle +Ages. But along with all this knowledge he carried one definite and +important piece of ignorance, an ignorance of the degree to which such +knowledge was exceptional. He was no spoilt and self-conscious child, +taught to regard himself as clever. In the atmosphere in which he +lived learning was a pleasure, and a natural pleasure, like sport or +wine. He had in it the pleasure of some old scholar of the Renascence, +when grammar itself was as fresh as the flowers of spring. He had no +reason to suppose that every one did not join in so admirable a game. +His sagacious destiny, while giving him knowledge of everything else, +left him in ignorance of the ignorance of the world. + +Of his boyish days scarcely any important trace remains, except a kind +of diary which contains under one date the laconic statement, "Married +two wives this morning." The insane ingenuity of the biographer would +be quite capable of seeing in this a most suggestive foreshadowing of +the sexual dualism which is so ably defended in _Fifine at the Fair_. +A great part of his childhood was passed in the society of his only +sister Sariana; and it is a curious and touching fact that with her +also he passed his last days. From his earliest babyhood he seems to +have lived in a more or less stimulating mental atmosphere; but as he +emerged into youth he came under great poetic influences, which made +his father's classical poetic tradition look for the time insipid. +Browning began to live in the life of his own age. + +As a young man he attended classes at University College; beyond this +there is little evidence that he was much in touch with intellectual +circles outside that of his own family. But the forces that were +moving the literary world had long passed beyond the merely literary +area. About the time of Browning's boyhood a very subtle and profound +change was beginning in the intellectual atmosphere of such homes as +that of the Brownings. In studying the careers of great men we tend +constantly to forget that their youth was generally passed and their +characters practically formed in a period long previous to their +appearance in history. We think of Milton, the Restoration Puritan, +and forget that he grew up in the living shadow of Shakespeare and the +full summer of the Elizabethan drama. We realise Garibaldi as a sudden +and almost miraculous figure rising about fifty years ago to create +the new Kingdom of Italy, and we forget that he must have formed his +first ideas of liberty while hearing at his father's dinner-table that +Napoleon was the master of Europe. Similarly, we think of Browning as +the great Victorian poet, who lived long enough to have opinions on +Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bill, and forget that as a young man he +passed a bookstall and saw a volume ticketed "Mr. Shelley's Atheistic +Poem," and had to search even in his own really cultivated circle for +some one who could tell him who Mr. Shelley was. Browning was, in +short, born in the afterglow of the great Revolution. + +The French Revolution was at root a thoroughly optimistic thing. It +may seem strange to attribute optimism to anything so destructive; +but, in truth, this particular kind of optimism is inevitably, and by +its nature, destructive. The great dominant idea of the whole of that +period, the period before, during, and long after the Revolution, is +the idea that man would by his nature live in an Eden of dignity, +liberty and love, and that artificial and decrepit systems are keeping +him out of that Eden. No one can do the least justice to the great +Jacobins who does not realise that to them breaking the civilisation +of ages was like breaking the cords of a treasure-chest. And just as +for more than a century great men had dreamed of this beautiful +emancipation, so the dream began in the time of Keats and Shelley to +creep down among the dullest professions and the most prosaic classes +of society. A spirit of revolt was growing among the young of the +middle classes, which had nothing at all in common with the complete +and pessimistic revolt against all things in heaven or earth, which +has been fashionable among the young in more recent times. The +Shelleyan enthusiast was altogether on the side of existence; he +thought that every cloud and clump of grass shared his strict +republican orthodoxy. He represented, in short, a revolt of the normal +against the abnormal; he found himself, so to speak, in the heart of a +wholly topsy-turvy and blasphemous state of things, in which God was +rebelling against Satan. There began to arise about this time a race +of young men like Keats, members of a not highly cultivated middle +class, and even of classes lower, who felt in a hundred ways this +obscure alliance with eternal things against temporal and practical +ones, and who lived on its imaginative delight. They were a kind of +furtive universalist; they had discovered the whole cosmos, and they +kept the whole cosmos a secret. They climbed up dark stairs to meagre +garrets, and shut themselves in with the gods. Numbers of the great +men, who afterwards illuminated the Victorian era, were at this time +living in mean streets in magnificent daydreams. Ruskin was solemnly +visiting his solemn suburban aunts; Dickens was going to and fro in a +blacking factory; Carlyle, slightly older, was still lingering on a +poor farm in Dumfriesshire; Keats had not long become the assistant of +the country surgeon when Browning was a boy in Camberwell. On all +sides there was the first beginning of the æsthetic stir in the middle +classes which expressed itself in the combination of so many poetic +lives with so many prosaic livelihoods. It was the age of inspired +office-boys. + +Browning grew up, then, with the growing fame of Shelley and Keats, in +the atmosphere of literary youth, fierce and beautiful, among new +poets who believed in a new world. It is important to remember this, +because the real Browning was a quite different person from the grim +moralist and metaphysician who is seen through the spectacles of +Browning Societies and University Extension Lecturers. Browning was +first and foremost a poet, a man made to enjoy all things visible and +invisible, a priest of the higher passions. The misunderstanding that +has supposed him to be other than poetical, because his form was often +fanciful and abrupt, is really different from the misunderstanding +which attaches to most other poets. The opponents of Victor Hugo +called him a mere windbag; the opponents of Shakespeare called him a +buffoon. But the admirers of Hugo and Shakespeare at least knew +better. Now the admirers and opponents of Browning alike make him out +to be a pedant rather than a poet. The only difference between the +Browningite and the anti-Browningite, is that the second says he was +not a poet but a mere philosopher, and the first says he was a +philosopher and not a mere poet. The admirer disparages poetry in +order to exalt Browning; the opponent exalts poetry in order to +disparage Browning; and all the time Browning himself exalted poetry +above all earthly things, served it with single-hearted intensity, and +stands among the few poets who hardly wrote a line of anything else. + +The whole of the boyhood and youth of Robert Browning has as much the +quality of pure poetry as the boyhood and youth of Shelley. We do not +find in it any trace of the analytical Browning who is believed in by +learned ladies and gentlemen. How indeed would such sympathisers feel +if informed that the first poems that Browning wrote in a volume +called _Incondita_ were noticed to contain the fault of "too much +splendour of language and too little wealth of thought"? They were +indeed Byronic in the extreme, and Browning in his earlier appearances +in society presents himself in quite a romantic manner. Macready, the +actor, wrote of him: "He looks and speaks more like a young poet than +any one I have ever seen." A picturesque tradition remains that Thomas +Carlyle, riding out upon one of his solitary gallops necessitated by +his physical sufferings, was stopped by one whom he described as a +strangely beautiful youth, who poured out to him without preface or +apology his admiration for the great philosopher's works. Browning at +this time seems to have left upon many people this impression of +physical charm. A friend who attended University College with him +says: "He was then a bright handsome youth with long black hair +falling over his shoulders." Every tale that remains of him in +connection with this period asserts and reasserts the completely +romantic spirit by which he was then possessed. He was fond, for +example, of following in the track of gipsy caravans, far across +country, and a song which he heard with the refrain, "Following the +Queen of the Gipsies oh!" rang in his ears long enough to express +itself in his soberer and later days in that splendid poem of the +spirit of escape and Bohemianism, _The Flight of the Duchess_. Such +other of these early glimpses of him as remain, depict him as striding +across Wimbledon Common with his hair blowing in the wind, reciting +aloud passages from Isaiah, or climbing up into the elms above Norwood +to look over London by night. It was when looking down from that +suburban eyrie over the whole confounding labyrinth of London that he +was filled with that great irresponsible benevolence which is the best +of the joys of youth, and conceived the idea of a perfectly +irresponsible benevolence in the first plan of _Pippa Passes_. At the +end of his father's garden was a laburnum "heavy with its weight of +gold," and in the tree two nightingales were in the habit of singing +against each other, a form of competition which, I imagine, has since +become less common in Camberwell. When Browning as a boy was +intoxicated with the poetry of Shelley and Keats, he hypnotised +himself into something approaching to a positive conviction that these +two birds were the spirits of the two great poets who had settled in a +Camberwell garden, in order to sing to the only young gentleman who +really adored and understood them. This last story is perhaps the most +typical of the tone common to all the rest; it would be difficult to +find a story which across the gulf of nearly eighty years awakens so +vividly a sense of the sumptuous folly of an intellectual boyhood. +With Browning, as with all true poets, passion came first and made +intellectual expression, the hunger for beauty making literature as +the hunger for bread made a plough. The life he lived in those early +days was no life of dull application; there was no poet whose youth +was so young. When he was full of years and fame, and delineating in +great epics the beauty and horror of the romance of southern Europe, a +young man, thinking to please him, said, "There is no romance now +except in Italy." "Well," said Browning, "I should make an exception +of Camberwell." + +Such glimpses will serve to indicate the kind of essential issue that +there was in the nature of things between the generation of Browning +and the generation of his father. Browning was bound in the nature of +things to become at the outset Byronic, and Byronism was not, of +course, in reality so much a pessimism about civilised things as an +optimism about savage things. This great revolt on behalf of the +elemental which Keats and Shelley represented was bound first of all +to occur. Robert Browning junior had to be a part of it, and Robert +Browning senior had to go back to his water colours and the faultless +couplets of Pope with the full sense of the greatest pathos that the +world contains, the pathos of the man who has produced something that +he cannot understand. + +The earliest works of Browning bear witness, without exception, to +this ardent and somewhat sentimental evolution. _Pauline_ appeared +anonymously in 1833. It exhibits the characteristic mark of a juvenile +poem, the general suggestion that the author is a thousand years old. +Browning calls it a fragment of a confession; and Mr. Johnson Fox, an +old friend of Browning's father, who reviewed it for _Tait's +Magazine_, said, with truth, that it would be difficult to find +anything more purely confessional. It is the typical confession of a +boy laying bare all the spiritual crimes of infidelity and moral +waste, in a state of genuine ignorance of the fact that every one else +has committed them. It is wholesome and natural for youth to go about +confessing that the grass is green, and whispering to a priest +hoarsely that it has found a sun in heaven. But the records of that +particular period of development, even when they are as ornate and +beautiful as _Pauline_, are not necessarily or invariably wholesome +reading. The chief interest of _Pauline_, with all its beauties, lies +in a certain almost humorous singularity, the fact that Browning, of +all people, should have signalised his entrance into the world of +letters with a poem which may fairly be called morbid. But this is a +morbidity so general and recurrent that it may be called in a +contradictory phrase a healthy morbidity; it is a kind of intellectual +measles. No one of any degree of maturity in reading _Pauline_ will be +quite so horrified at the sins of the young gentleman who tells the +story as he seems to be himself. It is the utterance of that bitter +and heartrending period of youth which comes before we realise the one +grand and logical basis of all optimism--the doctrine of original sin. +The boy at this stage being an ignorant and inhuman idealist, regards +all his faults as frightful secret malformations, and it is only later +that he becomes conscious of that large and beautiful and benignant +explanation that the heart of man is deceitful above all things and +desperately wicked. That Browning, whose judgment on his own work was +one of the best in the world, took this view of _Pauline_ in after +years is quite obvious. He displayed a very manly and unique capacity +of really laughing at his own work without being in the least ashamed +of it. "This," he said of _Pauline_, "is the only crab apple that +remains of the shapely tree of life in my fool's paradise." It would +be difficult to express the matter more perfectly. Although _Pauline_ +was published anonymously, its authorship was known to a certain +circle, and Browning began to form friendships in the literary world. +He had already become acquainted with two of the best friends he was +ever destined to have, Alfred Domett, celebrated in "The Guardian +Angel" and "Waring," and his cousin Silverthorne, whose death is +spoken of in one of the most perfect lyrics in the English language, +Browning's "May and Death." These were men of his own age, and his +manner of speaking of them gives us many glimpses into that splendid +world of comradeship which. Plato and Walt Whitman knew, with its +endless days and its immortal nights. Browning had a third friend +destined to play an even greater part in his life, but who belonged to +an older generation and a statelier school of manners and +scholarship. Mr. Kenyon was a schoolfellow of Browning's father, and +occupied towards his son something of the position of an irresponsible +uncle. He was a rotund, rosy old gentleman, fond of comfort and the +courtesies of life, but fond of them more for others, though much for +himself. Elizabeth Barrett in after years wrote of "the brightness of +his carved speech," which would appear to suggest that he practised +that urbane and precise order of wit which was even then +old-fashioned. Yet, notwithstanding many talents of this kind, he was +not so much an able man as the natural friend and equal of able men. + +Browning's circle of friends, however, widened about this time in all +directions. One friend in particular he made, the Comte de +Ripert-Monclar, a French Royalist with whom he prosecuted with renewed +energy his studies in the mediæval and Renaissance schools of +philosophy. It was the Count who suggested that Browning should write +a poetical play on the subject of Paracelsus. After reflection, +indeed, the Count retracted this advice on the ground that the history +of the great mystic gave no room for love. Undismayed by this terrible +deficiency, Browning caught up the idea with characteristic +enthusiasm, and in 1835 appeared the first of his works which he +himself regarded as representative--_Paracelsus_. The poem shows an +enormous advance in technical literary power; but in the history of +Browning's mind it is chiefly interesting as giving an example of a +peculiarity which clung to him during the whole of his literary life, +an intense love of the holes and corners of history. Fifty-two years +afterwards he wrote _Parleyings with certain Persons of Importance in +their Day_, the last poem published in his lifetime; and any reader +of that remarkable work will perceive that the common characteristic +of all these persons is not so much that they were of importance in +their day as that they are of no importance in ours. The same +eccentric fastidiousness worked in him as a young man when he wrote +_Paracelsus_ and _Sordello_. Nowhere in Browning's poetry can we find +any very exhaustive study of any of the great men who are the +favourites of the poet and moralist. He has written about philosophy +and ambition and music and morals, but he has written nothing about +Socrates or Cæsar or Napoleon, or Beethoven or Mozart, or Buddha or +Mahomet. When he wishes to describe a political ambition he selects +that entirely unknown individual, King Victor of Sardinia. When he +wishes to express the most perfect soul of music, he unearths some +extraordinary persons called Abt Vogler and Master Hugues of +Saxe-Gotha. When he wishes to express the largest and sublimest scheme +of morals and religion which his imagination can conceive, he does not +put it into the mouth of any of the great spiritual leaders of +mankind, but into the mouth of an obscure Jewish Rabbi of the name of +Ben Ezra. It is fully in accordance with this fascinating craze of his +that when he wishes to study the deification of the intellect and the +disinterested pursuit of the things of the mind, he does not select +any of the great philosophers from Plato to Darwin, whose +investigations are still of some importance in the eyes of the world. +He selects the figure of all figures most covered with modern satire +and pity, the _à priori_ scientist of the Middle Ages and the +Renaissance. His supreme type of the human intellect is neither the +academic nor the positivist, but the alchemist. It is difficult to +imagine a turn of mind constituting a more complete challenge to the +ordinary modern point of view. To the intellect of our time the wild +investigators of the school of Paracelsus seem to be the very crown +and flower of futility, they are collectors of straws and careful +misers of dust. But for all that Browning was right. Any critic who +understands the true spirit of mediæval science can see that he was +right; no critic can see how right he was unless he understands the +spirit of mediæval science as thoroughly as he did. In the character +of Paracelsus, Browning wished to paint the dangers and +disappointments which attend the man who believes merely in the +intellect. He wished to depict the fall of the logician; and with a +perfect and unerring instinct he selected a man who wrote and spoke in +the tradition of the Middle Ages, the most thoroughly and even +painfully logical period that the world has ever seen. If he had +chosen an ancient Greek philosopher, it would have been open to the +critic to have said that that philosopher relied to some extent upon +the most sunny and graceful social life that ever flourished. If he +had made him a modern sociological professor, it would have been +possible to object that his energies were not wholly concerned with +truth, but partly with the solid and material satisfaction of society. +But the man truly devoted to the things of the mind was the mediæval +magician. It is a remarkable fact that one civilisation does not +satisfy itself by calling another civilisation wicked--it calls it +uncivilised. We call the Chinese barbarians, and they call us +barbarians. The mediæval state, like China, was a foreign +civilisation, and this was its supreme characteristic, that it cared +for the things of the mind for their own sake. To complain of the +researches of its sages on the ground that they were not materially +fruitful, is to act as we should act in telling a gardener that his +roses were not as digestible as our cabbages. It is not only true that +the mediæval philosophers never discovered the steam-engine; it is +quite equally true that they never tried. The Eden of the Middle Ages +was really a garden, where each of God's flowers--truth and beauty and +reason--flourished for its own sake, and with its own name. The Eden +of modern progress is a kitchen garden. + +It would have been hard, therefore, for Browning to have chosen a +better example for his study of intellectual egotism than Paracelsus. +Modern life accuses the mediæval tradition of crushing the intellect; +Browning, with a truer instinct, accuses that tradition of +over-glorifying it. There is, however, another and even more important +deduction to be made from the moral of _Paracelsus_. The usual +accusation against Browning is that he was consumed with logic; that +he thought all subjects to be the proper pabulum of intellectual +disquisition; that he gloried chiefly in his own power of plucking +knots to pieces and rending fallacies in two; and that to this method +he sacrificed deliberately, and with complete self-complacency, the +element of poetry and sentiment. To people who imagine Browning to +have been this frigid believer in the intellect there is only one +answer necessary or sufficient. It is the fact that he wrote a play +designed to destroy the whole of this intellectualist fallacy at the +age of twenty-three. + +_Paracelsus_ was in all likelihood Browning's introduction to the +literary world. It was many years, and even many decades, before he +had anything like a public appreciation, but a very great part of the +minority of those who were destined to appreciate him came over to his +standard upon the publication of _Paracelsus_. The celebrated John +Forster had taken up _Paracelsus_ "as a thing to slate," and had ended +its perusal with the wildest curiosity about the author and his works. +John Stuart Mill, never backward in generosity, had already interested +himself in Browning, and was finally converted by the same poem. Among +other early admirers were Landor, Leigh Hunt, Horne, Serjeant +Talfourd, and Monckton-Milnes. One man of even greater literary +stature seems to have come into Browning's life about this time, a man +for whom he never ceased to have the warmest affection and trust. +Browning was, indeed, one of the very few men of that period who got +on perfectly with Thomas Carlyle. It is precisely one of those little +things which speak volumes for the honesty and unfathomable good +humour of Browning, that Carlyle, who had a reckless contempt for most +other poets of his day, had something amounting to a real attachment +to him. He would run over to Paris for the mere privilege of dining +with him. Browning, on the other hand, with characteristic +impetuosity, passionately defended and justified Carlyle in all +companies. "I have just seen dear Carlyle," he writes on one occasion; +"catch me calling people dear in a hurry, except in a letter +beginning." He sided with Carlyle in the vexed question of the Carlyle +domestic relations, and his impression of Mrs. Carlyle was that she +was "a hard unlovable woman." As, however, it is on record that he +once, while excitedly explaining some point of mystical philosophy, +put down Mrs. Carlyle's hot kettle on the hearthrug, any frigidity +that he may have observed in her manner may possibly find a natural +explanation. His partisanship in the Carlyle affair, which was +characteristically headlong and human, may not throw much light on +that painful problem itself, but it throws a great deal of light on +the character of Browning, which was pugnaciously proud of its +friends, and had what may almost be called a lust of loyalty. Browning +was not capable of that most sagacious detachment which enabled +Tennyson to say that he could not agree that the Carlyles ought never +to have married, since if they had each married elsewhere there would +have been four miserable people instead of two. + +Among the motley and brilliant crowd with which Browning had now begun +to mingle, there was no figure more eccentric and spontaneous than +that of Macready the actor. This extraordinary person, a man living +from hand to mouth in all things spiritual and pecuniary, a man +feeding upon flying emotions, conceived something like an attraction +towards Browning, spoke of him as the very ideal of a young poet, and +in a moment of peculiar excitement suggested to him the writing of a +great play. Browning was a man fundamentally indeed more steadfast and +prosaic, but on the surface fully as rapid and easily infected as +Macready. He immediately began to plan out a great historical play, +and selected for his subject "Strafford." + +In Browning's treatment of the subject there is something more than a +trace of his Puritan and Liberal upbringing. It is one of the very +earliest of the really important works in English literature which +are based on the Parliamentarian reading of the incidents of the time +of Charles I. It is true that the finest element in the play is the +opposition between Strafford and Pym, an opposition so complete, so +lucid, so consistent, that it has, so to speak, something of the +friendly openness and agreement which belongs to an alliance. The two +men love each other and fight each other, and do the two things at the +same time completely. This is a great thing of which even to attempt +the description. It is easy to have the impartiality which can speak +judicially of both parties, but it is not so easy to have that larger +and higher impartiality which can speak passionately on behalf of both +parties. Nevertheless, it may be permissible to repeat that there is +in the play a definite trace of Browning's Puritan education and +Puritan historical outlook. + +For _Strafford_ is, of course, an example of that most difficult of +all literary works--a political play. The thing has been achieved once +at least admirably in Shakespeare's _Julius Cæsar_, and something like +it, though from a more one-sided and romantic stand-point, has been +done excellently in _L'Aiglon_. But the difficulties of such a play +are obvious on the face of the matter. In a political play the +principal characters are not merely men. They are symbols, +arithmetical figures representing millions of other men outside. It +is, by dint of elaborate stage management, possible to bring a mob +upon the boards, but the largest mob ever known is nothing but a +floating atom of the people; and the people of which the politician +has to think does not consist of knots of rioters in the street, but +of some million absolutely distinct individuals, each sitting in his +own breakfast room reading his own morning paper. To give even the +faintest suggestion of the strength and size of the people in this +sense in the course of a dramatic performance is obviously impossible. +That is why it is so easy on the stage to concentrate all the pathos +and dignity upon such persons as Charles I. and Mary Queen of Scots, +the vampires of their people, because within the minute limits of a +stage there is room for their small virtues and no room for their +enormous crimes. It would be impossible to find a stronger example +than the case of _Strafford_. It is clear that no one could possibly +tell the whole truth about the life and death of Strafford, +politically considered, in a play. Strafford was one of the greatest +men ever born in England, and he attempted to found a great English +official despotism. That is to say, he attempted to found something +which is so different from what has actually come about that we can in +reality scarcely judge of it, any more than we can judge whether it +would be better to live in another planet, or pleasanter to have been +born a dog or an elephant. It would require enormous imagination to +reconstruct the political ideals of Strafford. Now Browning, as we all +know, got over the matter in his play, by practically denying that +Strafford had any political ideals at all. That is to say, while +crediting Strafford with all his real majesty of intellect and +character, he makes the whole of his political action dependent upon +his passionate personal attachment to the King. This is +unsatisfactory; it is in reality a dodging of the great difficulty of +the political play. That difficulty, in the case of any political +problem, is, as has been said, great. It would be very hard, for +example, to construct a play about Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bill. It +would be almost impossible to get expressed in a drama of some five +acts and some twenty characters anything so ancient and complicated as +that Irish problem, the roots of which lie in the darkness of the age +of Strongbow, and the branches of which spread out to the remotest +commonwealths of the East and West. But we should scarcely be +satisfied if a dramatist overcame the difficulty by ascribing Mr. +Gladstone's action in the Home Rule question to an overwhelming +personal affection for Mr. Healy. And in thus basing Strafford's +action upon personal and private reasons, Browning certainly does some +injustice to the political greatness, of Strafford. To attribute Mr. +Gladstone's conversion to Home Rule to an infatuation such as that +suggested above, would certainly have the air of implying that the +writer thought the Home Rule doctrine a peculiar or untenable one. +Similarly, Browning's choice of a motive for Strafford has very much +the air of an assumption that there was nothing to be said on public +grounds for Strafford's political ideal. Now this is certainly not the +case. The Puritans in the great struggles of the reign of Charles I. +may have possessed more valuable ideals than the Royalists, but it is +a very vulgar error to suppose that they were any more idealistic. In +Browning's play Pym is made almost the incarnation of public spirit, +and Strafford of private ties. But not only may an upholder of +despotism be public-spirited, but in the case of prominent upholders +of it like Strafford he generally is. Despotism indeed, and attempts +at despotism, like that of Strafford, are a kind of disease of public +spirit. They represent, as it were, the drunkenness of responsibility. +It is when men begin to grow desperate in their love for the people, +when they are overwhelmed with the difficulties and blunders of +humanity, that they fall back upon a wild desire to manage everything +themselves. Their faith in themselves is only a disillusionment with +mankind. They are in that most dreadful position, dreadful alike in +personal and public affairs--the position of the man who has lost +faith and not lost love. This belief that all would go right if we +could only get the strings into our own hands is a fallacy almost +without exception, but nobody can justly say that it is not +public-spirited. The sin and sorrow of despotism is not that it does +not love men, but that it loves them too much and trusts them too +little. Therefore from age to age in history arise these great +despotic dreamers, whether they be Royalists or Imperialists or even +Socialists, who have at root this idea, that the world would enter +into rest if it went their way and forswore altogether the right of +going its own way. When a man begins to think that the grass will not +grow at night unless he lies awake to watch it, he generally ends +either in an asylum or on the throne of an Emperor. Of these men +Strafford was one, and we cannot but feel that Browning somewhat +narrows the significance and tragedy of his place in history by making +him merely the champion of a personal idiosyncrasy against a great +public demand. Strafford was something greater than this; if indeed, +when we come to think of it, a man can be anything greater than the +friend of another man. But the whole question is interesting, because +Browning, although he never again attacked a political drama of such +palpable importance as _Strafford_, could never keep politics +altogether out of his dramatic work. _King Victor and King Charles_, +which followed it, is a political play, the study of a despotic +instinct much meaner than that of Strafford. _Colombe's Birthday_, +again, is political as well as romantic. Politics in its historic +aspect would seem to have had a great fascination for him, as indeed +it must have for all ardent intellects, since it is the one thing in +the world that is as intellectual as the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ and +as rapid as the Derby. + +One of the favourite subjects among those who like to conduct long +controversies about Browning (and their name is legion) is the +question of whether Browning's plays, such as _Strafford_, were +successes upon the stage. As they are never agreed about what +constitutes a success on the stage, it is difficult to adjudge their +quarrels. But the general fact is very simple; such a play as +_Strafford_ was not a gigantic theatrical success, and nobody, it is +to be presumed, ever imagined that it would be. On the other hand, it +was certainly not a failure, but was enjoyed and applauded as are +hundreds of excellent plays which run only for a week or two, as many +excellent plays do, and as all plays ought to do. Above all, the +definite success which attended the representation of _Strafford_ from +the point of view of the more educated and appreciative was quite +enough to establish Browning in a certain definite literary position. +As a classical and established personality he did not come into his +kingdom for years and decades afterwards; not, indeed, until he was +near to entering upon the final rest. But as a detached and eccentric +personality, as a man who existed and who had arisen on the outskirts +of literature, the world began to be conscious of him at this time. + +Of what he was personally at the period that he thus became personally +apparent, Mrs. Bridell Fox has left a very vivid little sketch. She +describes how Browning called at the house (he was acquainted with her +father), and finding that gentleman out, asked with a kind of abrupt +politeness if he might play on the piano. This touch is very +characteristic of the mingled aplomb and unconsciousness of Browning's +social manner. "He was then," she writes, "slim and dark, and very +handsome, and--may I hint it?--just a trifle of a dandy, addicted to +lemon-coloured kid gloves and such things, quite the glass of fashion +and the mould of form. But full of 'ambition,' eager for success, +eager for fame, and, what is more, determined to conquer fame and to +achieve success." That is as good a portrait as we can have of the +Browning of these days--quite self-satisfied, but not self-conscious +young man; one who had outgrown, but only just outgrown, the pure +romanticism of his boyhood, which made him run after gipsy caravans +and listen to nightingales in the wood; a man whose incandescent +vitality, now that it had abandoned gipsies and not yet immersed +itself in casuistical poems, devoted itself excitedly to trifles, such +as lemon-coloured kid gloves and fame. But a man still above all +things perfectly young and natural, professing that foppery which +follows the fashions, and not that sillier and more demoralising +foppery which defies them. Just as he walked in coolly and yet +impulsively into a private drawing-room and offered to play, so he +walked at this time into the huge and crowded salon of European +literature and offered to sing. + + + + +CHAPTER II + +EARLY WORKS + + +In 1840 _Sordello_ was published. Its reception by the great majority +of readers, including some of the ablest men of the time, was a +reception of a kind probably unknown in the rest of literary history, +a reception that was neither praise nor blame. It was perhaps best +expressed by Carlyle, who wrote to say that his wife had read +_Sordello_ with great interest, and wished to know whether Sordello +was a man, or a city, or a book. Better known, of course, is the story +of Tennyson, who said that the first line of the poem-- + + "Who will, may hear Sordello's story told," + +and the last line-- + + "Who would, has heard Sordello's story told," + +were the only two lines in the poem that he understood, and they were +lies. + +Perhaps the best story, however, of all the cycle of Sordello legends +is that which is related of Douglas Jerrold. He was recovering from an +illness; and having obtained permission for the first time to read a +little during the day, he picked up a book from a pile beside the bed +and began _Sordello_. No sooner had he done so than he turned deadly +pale, put down the book, and said, "My God! I'm an idiot. My health +is restored, but my mind's gone. I can't understand two consecutive +lines of an English poem." He then summoned his family and silently +gave the book into their hands, asking for their opinion on the poem; +and as the shadow of perplexity gradually passed over their faces, he +heaved a sigh of relief and went to sleep. These stories, whether +accurate or no, do undoubtedly represent the very peculiar reception +accorded to _Sordello_, a reception which, as I have said, bears no +resemblance whatever to anything in the way of eulogy or condemnation +that had ever been accorded to a work of art before. There had been +authors whom it was fashionable to boast of admiring and authors whom +it was fashionable to boast of despising; but with _Sordello_ enters +into literary history the Browning of popular badinage, the author +whom it is fashionable to boast of not understanding. + +Putting aside for the moment the literary qualities which are to be +found in the poem, when it becomes intelligible, there is one question +very relevant to the fame and character of Browning which is raised by +_Sordello_ when it is considered, as most people consider it, as +hopelessly unintelligible. It really throws some light upon the reason +of Browning's obscurity. The ordinary theory of Browning's obscurity +is to the effect that it was a piece of intellectual vanity indulged +in more and more insolently as his years and fame increased. There are +at least two very decisive objections to this popular explanation. In +the first place, it must emphatically be said for Browning that in all +the numerous records and impressions of him throughout his long and +very public life, there is not one iota of evidence that he was a man +who was intellectually vain. The evidence is entirely the other way. +He was vain of many things, of his physical health, for example, and +even more of the physical health which he contrived to bestow for a +certain period upon his wife. From the records of his early dandyism, +his flowing hair and his lemon-coloured gloves, it is probable enough +that he was vain of his good looks. He was vain of his masculinity, +his knowledge of the world, and he was, I fancy, decidedly vain of his +prejudices, even, it might be said, vain of being vain of them. But +everything is against the idea that he was much in the habit of +thinking of himself in his intellectual aspect. In the matter of +conversation, for example, some people who liked him found him genial, +talkative, anecdotal, with a certain strengthening and sanative +quality in his mere bodily presence. Some people who did not like him +found him a mere frivolous chatterer, afflicted with bad manners. One +lady, who knew him well, said that, though he only met you in a crowd +and made some commonplace remark, you went for the rest of the day +with your head up. Another lady who did not know him, and therefore +disliked him, asked after a dinner party, "Who was that too-exuberant +financier?" These are the diversities of feeling about him. But they +all agree in one point--that he did not talk cleverly, or try to talk +cleverly, as that proceeding is understood in literary circles. He +talked positively, he talked a great deal, but he never attempted to +give that neat and æsthetic character to his speech which is almost +invariable in the case of the man who is vain of his mental +superiority. When he did impress people with mental gymnastics, it was +mostly in the form of pouring out, with passionate enthusiasm, whole +epics written by other people, which is the last thing that the +literary egotist would be likely to waste his time over. We have +therefore to start with an enormous psychological improbability that +Browning made his poems complicated from mere pride in his powers and +contempt of his readers. + +There is, however, another very practical objection to the ordinary +theory that Browning's obscurity was a part of the intoxication of +fame and intellectual consideration. We constantly hear the statement +that Browning's intellectual complexity increased with his later +poems, but the statement is simply not true. _Sordello_, to the +indescribable density of which he never afterwards even approached, +was begun before _Strafford_, and was therefore the third of his +works, and even if we adopt his own habit of ignoring _Pauline_, the +second. He wrote the greater part of it when he was twenty-four. It +was in his youth, at the time when a man is thinking of love and +publicity, of sunshine and singing birds, that he gave birth to this +horror of great darkness; and the more we study the matter with any +knowledge of the nature of youth, the more we shall come to the +conclusion that Browning's obscurity had altogether the opposite +origin to that which is usually assigned to it. He was not +unintelligible because he was proud, but unintelligible because he was +humble. He was not unintelligible because his thoughts were vague, but +because to him they were obvious. + +A man who is intellectually vain does not make himself +incomprehensible, because he is so enormously impressed with the +difference between his readers' intelligence and his own that he +talks down to them with elaborate repetition and lucidity. What poet +was ever vainer than Byron? What poet was ever so magnificently lucid? +But a young man of genius who has a genuine humility in his heart does +not elaborately explain his discoveries, because he does not think +that they are discoveries. He thinks that the whole street is humming +with his ideas, and that the postman and the tailor are poets like +himself. Browning's impenetrable poetry was the natural expression of +this beautiful optimism. _Sordello_ was the most glorious compliment +that has ever been paid to the average man. + +In the same manner, of course, outward obscurity is in a young author +a mark of inward clarity. A man who is vague in his ideas does not +speak obscurely, because his own dazed and drifting condition leads +him to clutch at phrases like ropes and use the formulæ that every one +understands. No one ever found Miss Marie Corelli obscure, because she +believes only in words. But if a young man really has ideas of his +own, he must be obscure at first, because he lives in a world of his +own in which there are symbols and correspondences and categories +unknown to the rest of the world. Let us take an imaginary example. +Suppose that a young poet had developed by himself a peculiar idea +that all forms of excitement, including religious excitement, were a +kind of evil intoxication, he might say to himself continually that +churches were in reality taverns, and this idea would become so fixed +in his mind that he would forget that no such association existed in +the minds of others. And suppose that in pursuance of this general +idea, which is a perfectly clear and intellectual idea, though a very +silly one, he were to say that he believed in Puritanism without its +theology, and were to repeat this idea also to himself until it became +instinctive and familiar, such a man might take up a pen, and under +the impression that he was saying something figurative indeed, but +quite clear and suggestive, write some such sentence as this, "You +will not get the godless Puritan into your white taverns," and no one +in the length and breadth of the country could form the remotest +notion of what he could mean. So it would have been in any example, +for instance, of a man who made some philosophical discovery and did +not realise how far the world was from it. If it had been possible for +a poet in the sixteenth century to hit upon and learn to regard as +obvious the evolutionary theory of Darwin, he might have written down +some such line as "the radiant offspring of the ape," and the maddest +volumes of mediæval natural history would have been ransacked for the +meaning of the allusion. The more fixed and solid and sensible the +idea appeared to him, the more dark and fantastic it would have +appeared to the world. Most of us indeed, if we ever say anything +valuable, say it when we are giving expression to that part of us +which has become as familiar and invisible as the pattern on our wall +paper. It is only when an idea has become a matter of course to the +thinker that it becomes startling to the world. + +It is worth while to dwell upon this preliminary point of the ground +of Browning's obscurity, because it involves an important issue about +him. Our whole view of Browning is bound to be absolutely different, +and I think absolutely false, if we start with the conception that he +was what the French call an intellectual. If we see Browning with the +eyes of his particular followers, we shall inevitably think this. For +his followers are pre-eminently intellectuals, and there never lived +upon the earth a great man who was so fundamentally different from his +followers. Indeed, he felt this heartily and even humorously himself. +"Wilkes was no Wilkite," he said, "and I am very far from being a +Browningite." We shall, as I say, utterly misunderstand Browning at +every step of his career if we suppose that he was the sort of man who +would be likely to take a pleasure in asserting the subtlety and +abstruseness of his message. He took pleasure beyond all question in +himself; in the strictest sense of the word he enjoyed himself. But +his conception of himself was never that of the intellectual. He +conceived himself rather as a sanguine and strenuous man, a great +fighter. "I was ever," as he says, "a fighter." His faults, a certain +occasional fierceness and grossness, were the faults that are counted +as virtues among navvies and sailors and most primitive men. His +virtues, boyishness and absolute fidelity, and a love of plain words +and things are the virtues which are counted as vices among the +æsthetic prigs who pay him the greatest honour. He had his more +objectionable side, like other men, but it had nothing to do with +literary egotism. He was not vain of being an extraordinary man. He +was only somewhat excessively vain of being an ordinary one. + +The Browning then who published _Sordello_ we have to conceive, not as +a young pedant anxious to exaggerate his superiority to the public, +but as a hot-headed, strong-minded, inexperienced, and essentially +humble man, who had more ideas than he knew how to disentangle from +each other. If we compare, for example, the complexity of Browning +with the clarity of Matthew Arnold, we shall realise that the cause +lies in the fact that Matthew Arnold was an intellectual aristocrat, +and Browning an intellectual democrat. The particular peculiarities of +_Sordello_ illustrate the matter very significantly. A very great part +of the difficulty of _Sordello_, for instance, is in the fact that +before the reader even approaches to tackling the difficulties of +Browning's actual narrative, he is apparently expected to start with +an exhaustive knowledge of that most shadowy and bewildering of all +human epochs--the period of the Guelph and Ghibelline struggles in +mediæval Italy. Here, of course, Browning simply betrays that +impetuous humility which we have previously observed. His father was a +student of mediæval chronicles, he had himself imbibed that learning +in the same casual manner in which a boy learns to walk or to play +cricket. Consequently in a literary sense he rushed up to the first +person he met and began talking about Ecelo and Taurello Salinguerra +with about as much literary egotism as an English baby shows when it +talks English to an Italian organ grinder. Beyond this the poem of +_Sordello_, powerful as it is, does not present any very significant +advance in Browning's mental development on that already represented +by _Pauline_ and _Paracelsus_. _Pauline, Paracelsus_, and _Sordello_ +stand together in the general fact that they are all, in the excellent +phrase used about the first by Mr. Johnson Fox, "confessional." All +three are analyses of the weakness which every artistic temperament +finds in itself. Browning is still writing about himself, a subject +of which he, like all good and brave men, was profoundly ignorant. +This kind of self-analysis is always misleading. For we do not see in +ourselves those dominant traits strong enough to force themselves out +in action which our neighbours see. We see only a welter of minute +mental experiences which include all the sins that were ever committed +by Nero or Sir Willoughby Patterne. When studying ourselves, we are +looking at a fresco with a magnifying glass. Consequently, these early +impressions which great men have given of themselves are nearly always +slanders upon themselves, for the strongest man is weak to his own +conscience, and Hamlet flourished to a certainty even inside Napoleon. +So it was with Browning, who when he was nearly eighty was destined to +write with the hilarity of a schoolboy, but who wrote in his boyhood +poems devoted to analysing the final break-up of intellect and soul. + +_Sordello_, with all its load of learning, and almost more oppressive +load of beauty, has never had any very important influence even upon +Browningites, and with the rest of the world the name has passed into +a jest. The most truly memorable thing about it was Browning's saying +in answer to all gibes and misconceptions, a saying which expresses +better than anything else what genuine metal was in him, "I blame no +one, least of all myself, who did my best then and since." This is +indeed a model for all men of letters who do not wish to retain only +the letters and to lose the man. + +When next Browning spoke, it was from a greater height and with a new +voice. His visit to Asolo, "his first love," as he said, "among +Italian cities," coincided with the stir and transformation in his +spirit and the breaking up of that splendid palace of mirrors in which +a man like Byron had lived and died. In 1841 _Pippa Passes_ appeared, +and with it the real Browning of the modern world. He had made the +discovery which Byron never made, but which almost every young man +does at last make--the thrilling discovery that he is not Robinson +Crusoe. _Pippa Passes_ is the greatest poem ever written, with the +exception of one or two by Walt Whitman, to express the sentiment of +the pure love of humanity. The phrase has unfortunately a false and +pedantic sound. The love of humanity is a thing supposed to be +professed only by vulgar and officious philanthropists, or by saints +of a superhuman detachment and universality. As a matter of fact, love +of humanity is the commonest and most natural of the feelings of a +fresh nature, and almost every one has felt it alight capriciously +upon him when looking at a crowded park or a room full of dancers. The +love of those whom we do not know is quite as eternal a sentiment as +the love of those whom we do know. In our friends the richness of life +is proved to us by what we have gained; in the faces in the street the +richness of life is proved to us by the hint of what we have lost. And +this feeling for strange faces and strange lives, when it is felt +keenly by a young man, almost always expresses itself in a desire +after a kind of vagabond beneficence, a desire to go through the world +scattering goodness like a capricious god. It is desired that mankind +should hunt in vain for its best friend as it would hunt for a +criminal; that he should be an anonymous Saviour, an unrecorded +Christ. Browning, like every one else, when awakened to the beauty +and variety of men, dreamed of this arrogant self-effacement. He has +written of himself that he had long thought vaguely of a being passing +through the world, obscure and unnameable, but moulding the destinies +of others to mightier and better issues. Then his almost faultless +artistic instinct came in and suggested that this being, whom he +dramatised as the work-girl, Pippa, should be even unconscious of +anything but her own happiness, and should sway men's lives with a +lonely mirth. It was a bold and moving conception to show us these +mature and tragic human groups all at the supreme moment eavesdropping +upon the solitude of a child. And it was an even more precise instinct +which made Browning make the errant benefactor a woman. A man's good +work is effected by doing what he does, a woman's by being what she +is. + +There is one other point about _Pippa Passes_ which is worth a +moment's attention. The great difficulty with regard to the +understanding of Browning is the fact that, to all appearance, +scarcely any one can be induced to take him seriously as a literary +artist. His adversaries consider his literary vagaries a +disqualification for every position among poets; and his admirers +regard those vagaries with the affectionate indulgence of a circle of +maiden aunts towards a boy home for the holidays. Browning is supposed +to do as he likes with form, because he had such a profound scheme of +thought. But, as a matter of fact, though few of his followers will +take Browning's literary form seriously, he took his own literary form +very seriously. Now _Pippa Passes_ is, among other things, eminently +remarkable as a very original artistic form, a series of disconnected +but dramatic scenes which have only in common the appearance of one +figure. For this admirable literary departure Browning, amid all the +laudations of his "mind" and his "message," has scarcely ever had +credit. And just as we should, if we took Browning seriously as a +poet, see that he had made many noble literary forms, so we should +also see that he did make from time to time certain definite literary +mistakes. There is one of them, a glaring one, in _Pippa Passes_; and, +as far as I know, no critic has ever thought enough of Browning as an +artist to point it out. It is a gross falsification of the whole +beauty of _Pippa Passes_ to make the Monseigneur and his accomplice in +the last act discuss a plan touching the fate of Pippa herself. The +whole central and splendid idea of the drama is the fact that Pippa is +utterly remote from the grand folk whose lives she troubles and +transforms. To make her in the end turn out to be the niece of one of +them, is like a whiff from an Adelphi melodrama, an excellent thing in +its place, but destructive of the entire conception of Pippa. Having +done that, Browning might just as well have made Sebald turn out to be +her long lost brother, and Luigi a husband to whom she was secretly +married. Browning made this mistake when his own splendid artistic +power was only growing, and its merits and its faults in a tangle. But +its real literary merits and its real literary faults have alike +remained unrecognised under the influence of that unfortunate +intellectualism which idolises Browning as a metaphysician and +neglects him as a poet. But a better test was coming. Browning's +poetry, in the most strictly poetical sense, reached its flower in +_Dramatic Lyrics_, published in 1842. Here he showed himself a +picturesque and poignant artist in a wholly original manner. And the +two main characteristics of the work were the two characteristics most +commonly denied to Browning, both by his opponents and his followers, +passion and beauty; but beauty had enlarged her boundaries in new +modes of dramatic arrangement, and passion had found new voices in +fantastic and realistic verse. Those who suppose Browning to be a +wholly philosophic poet, number a great majority of his commentators. +But when we come to look at the actual facts, they are strangely and +almost unexpectedly otherwise. + +Let any one who believes in the arrogantly intellectual character of +Browning's poetry run through the actual repertoire of the _Dramatic +Lyrics_. The first item consists of those splendid war chants called +"Cavalier Tunes." I do not imagine that any one will maintain that +there is any very mysterious metaphysical aim in them. The second item +is the fine poem "The Lost Leader," a poem which expresses in +perfectly lucid and lyrical verse a perfectly normal and old-fashioned +indignation. It is the same, however far we carry the query. What +theory does the next poem, "How they brought the Good News from Ghent +to Aix," express, except the daring speculation that it is often +exciting to ride a good horse in Belgium? What theory does the poem +after that, "Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr," express, except that +it is also frequently exciting to ride a good horse in Africa? Then +comes "Nationality in Drinks," a mere technical oddity without a gleam +of philosophy; and after that those two entirely exquisite "Garden +Fancies," the first of which is devoted to the abstruse thesis that a +woman may be charming, and the second to the equally abstruse thesis +that a book may be a bore. Then comes "The Soliloquy of the Spanish +Cloister," from which the most ingenious "Browning student" cannot +extract anything except that people sometimes hate each other in +Spain; and then "The Laboratory," from which he could extract nothing +except that people sometimes hate each other in France. This is a +perfectly honest record of the poems as they stand. And the first +eleven poems read straight off are remarkable for these two obvious +characteristics--first, that they contain not even a suggestion of +anything that could be called philosophy; and second, that they +contain a considerable proportion of the best and most typical poems +that Browning ever wrote. It may be repeated that either he wrote +these lyrics because he had an artistic sense, or it is impossible to +hazard even the wildest guess as to why he wrote them. + +It is permissible to say that the _Dramatic Lyrics_ represent the +arrival of the real Browning of literary history. It is true that he +had written already many admirable poems of a far more ambitious +plan--_Paracelsus_ with its splendid version of the faults of the +intellectual, _Pippa Passes_ with its beautiful deification of +unconscious influence. But youth is always ambitious and universal; +mature work exhibits more of individuality, more of the special type +and colour of work which a man is destined to do. Youth is universal, +but not individual. The genius who begins life with a very genuine and +sincere doubt whether he is meant to be an exquisite and idolised +violinist, or the most powerful and eloquent Prime Minister of modern +times, does at last end by making the discovery that there is, after +all, one thing, possibly a certain style of illustrating Nursery +Rhymes, which he can really do better than any one else. This was what +happened to Browning; like every one else, he had to discover first +the universe, and then humanity, and at last himself. With him, as +with all others, the great paradox and the great definition of life +was this, that the ambition narrows as the mind expands. In _Dramatic +Lyrics_ he discovered the one thing that he could really do better +than any one else--the dramatic lyric. The form is absolutely +original: he had discovered a new field of poetry, and in the centre +of that field he had found himself. + +The actual quality, the actual originality of the form is a little +difficult to describe. But its general characteristic is the fearless +and most dexterous use of grotesque things in order to express sublime +emotions. The best and most characteristic of the poems are +love-poems; they express almost to perfection the real wonderland of +youth, but they do not express it by the ideal imagery of most poets +of love. The imagery of these poems consists, if we may take a rapid +survey of Browning's love poetry, of suburban streets, straws, +garden-rakes, medicine bottles, pianos, window-blinds, burnt cork, +fashionable fur coats. But in this new method he thoroughly expressed +the true essential, the insatiable realism of passion. If any one +wished to prove that Browning was not, as he is said to be, the poet +of thought, but pre-eminently one of the poets of passion, we could +scarcely find a better evidence of this profoundly passionate element +than Browning's astonishing realism in love poetry. There is nothing +so fiercely realistic as sentiment and emotion. Thought and the +intellect are content to accept abstractions, summaries, and +generalisations; they are content that ten acres of ground should be +called for the sake of argument X, and ten widows' incomes called for +the sake of argument Y; they are content that a thousand awful and +mysterious disappearances from the visible universe should be summed +up as the mortality of a district, or that ten thousand intoxications +of the soul should bear the general name of the instinct of sex. +Rationalism can live upon air and signs and numbers. But sentiment +must have reality; emotion demands the real fields, the real widows' +homes, the real corpse, and the real woman. And therefore Browning's +love poetry is the finest love poetry in the world, because it does +not talk about raptures and ideals and gates of heaven, but about +window-panes and gloves and garden walls. It does not deal much with +abstractions; it is the truest of all love poetry, because it does not +speak much about love. It awakens in every man the memories of that +immortal instant when common and dead things had a meaning beyond the +power of any dictionary to utter, and a value beyond the power of any +millionaire to compute. He expresses the celestial time when a man +does not think about heaven, but about a parasol. And therefore he is, +first, the greatest of love poets, and, secondly, the only optimistic +philosopher except Whitman. + +The general accusation against Browning in connection with his use of +the grotesque comes in very definitely here; for in using these homely +and practical images, these allusions, bordering on what many would +call the commonplace, he was indeed true to the actual and abiding +spirit of love. In that delightful poem "Youth and Art" we have the +singing girl saying to her old lover-- + + "No harm! It was not my fault + If you never turned your eye's tail up + As I shook upon E _in alt_, + Or ran the chromatic scale up." + +This is a great deal more like the real chaff that passes between +those whose hearts are full of new hope or of old memory than half the +great poems of the world. Browning never forgets the little details +which to a man who has ever really lived may suddenly send an arrow +through the heart. Take, for example, such a matter as dress, as it is +treated in "A Lover's Quarrel." + + "See, how she looks now, dressed + In a sledging cap and vest! + 'Tis a huge fur cloak-- + Like a reindeer's yoke + Falls the lappet along the breast: + Sleeves for her arms to rest, + Or to hang, as my Love likes best." + +That would almost serve as an order to a dressmaker, and is therefore +poetry, or at least excellent poetry of this order. So great a power +have these dead things of taking hold on the living spirit, that I +question whether any one could read through the catalogue of a +miscellaneous auction sale without coming upon things which, if +realised for a moment, would be near to the elemental tears. And if +any of us or all of us are truly optimists, and believe as Browning +did, that existence has a value wholly inexpressible, we are most +truly compelled to that sentiment not by any argument or triumphant +justification of the cosmos, but by a few of these momentary and +immortal sights and sounds, a gesture, an old song, a portrait, a +piano, an old door. + +In 1843 appeared that marvellous drama _The Return of the Druses_, a +work which contains more of Browning's typical qualities exhibited in +an exquisite literary shape, than can easily be counted. We have in +_The Return of the Druses_ his love of the corners of history, his +interest in the religious mind of the East, with its almost terrifying +sense of being in the hand of heaven, his love of colour and verbal +luxury, of gold and green and purple, which made some think he must be +an Oriental himself. But, above all, it presents the first rise of +that great psychological ambition which Browning was thenceforth to +pursue. In _Pauline_ and the poems that follow it, Browning has only +the comparatively easy task of giving an account of himself. In _Pippa +Passes_ he has the only less easy task of giving an account of +humanity. In _The Return of the Druses_ he has for the first time the +task which is so much harder than giving an account of humanity--the +task of giving an account of a human being. Djabal, the great Oriental +impostor, who is the central character of the play, is a peculiarly +subtle character, a compound of blasphemous and lying assumptions of +Godhead with genuine and stirring patriotic and personal feelings: he +is a blend, so to speak, of a base divinity and of a noble humanity. +He is supremely important in the history of Browning's mind, for he is +the first of that great series of the apologiæ of apparently evil men, +on which the poet was to pour out so much of his imaginative +wealth--Djabal, Fra Lippo, Bishop Blougram, Sludge, Prince +Hohenstiel-Schwangau, and the hero of _Fifine at the Fair_. + +With this play, so far as any point can be fixed for the matter, he +enters for the first time on the most valuable of all his labours--the +defence of the indefensible. It may be noticed that Browning was not +in the least content with the fact that certain human frailties had +always lain more or less under an implied indulgence; that all human +sentiment had agreed that a profligate might be generous, or that a +drunkard might be high-minded. He was insatiable: he wished to go +further and show in a character like Djabal that an impostor might be +generous and that a liar might be high-minded. In all his life, it +must constantly be remembered, he tried always the most difficult +things. Just as he tried the queerest metres and attempted to manage +them, so he tried the queerest human souls and attempted to stand in +their place. Charity was his basic philosophy; but it was, as it were, +a fierce charity, a charity that went man-hunting. He was a kind of +cosmic detective who walked into the foulest of thieves' kitchens and +accused men publicly of virtue. The character of Djabal in _The Return +of the Druses_ is the first of this long series of forlorn hopes for +the relief of long surrendered castles of misconduct. As we shall see, +even realising the humanity of a noble impostor like Djabal did not +content his erratic hunger for goodness. He went further again, and +realised the humanity of a mean impostor like Sludge. But in all +things he retained this essential characteristic, that he was not +content with seeking sinners--he sought the sinners whom even sinners +cast out. + +Browning's feeling of ambition in the matter of the drama continued to +grow at this time. It must be remembered that he had every natural +tendency to be theatrical, though he lacked the essential lucidity. +He was not, as a matter of fact, a particularly unsuccessful +dramatist; but in the world of abstract temperaments he was by nature +an unsuccessful dramatist. He was, that is to say, a man who loved +above all things plain and sensational words, open catastrophes, a +clear and ringing conclusion to everything. But it so happened, +unfortunately, that his own words were not plain; that his +catastrophes came with a crashing and sudden unintelligibleness which +left men in doubt whether the thing were a catastrophe or a great +stroke of good luck; that his conclusion, though it rang like a +trumpet to the four corners of heaven, was in its actual message quite +inaudible. We are bound to admit, on the authority of all his best +critics and admirers, that his plays were not failures, but we can all +feel that they should have been. He was, as it were, by nature a +neglected dramatist. He was one of those who achieve the reputation, +in the literal sense, of eccentricity by their frantic efforts to +reach the centre. + +_A Blot on the 'Scutcheon_ followed _The Return of the Druses_. In +connection with the performance of this very fine play a quarrel arose +which would not be worth mentioning if it did not happen to illustrate +the curious energetic simplicity of Browning's character. Macready, +who was in desperately low financial circumstances at this time, tried +by every means conceivable to avoid playing the part; he dodged, he +shuffled, he tried every evasion that occurred to him, but it never +occurred to Browning to see what he meant. He pushed off the part upon +Phelps, and Browning was contented; he resumed it, and Browning was +only discontented on behalf of Phelps. The two had a quarrel; they +were both headstrong, passionate men, but the quarrel dealt entirely +with the unfortunate condition of Phelps. Browning beat down his own +hat over his eyes; Macready flung Browning's manuscript with a slap +upon the floor. But all the time it never occurred to the poet that +Macready's conduct was dictated by anything so crude and simple as a +desire for money. Browning was in fact by his principles and his +ideals a man of the world, but in his life far otherwise. That worldly +ease which is to most of us a temptation was to him an ideal. He was +as it were a citizen of the New Jerusalem who desired with perfect +sanity and simplicity to be a citizen of Mayfair. There was in him a +quality which can only be most delicately described; for it was a +virtue which bears a strange resemblance to one of the meanest of +vices. Those curious people who think the truth a thing that can be +said violently and with ease, might naturally call Browning a snob. He +was fond of society, of fashion and even of wealth: but there is no +snobbery in admiring these things or any things if we admire them for +the right reasons. He admired them as worldlings cannot admire them: +he was, as it were, the child who comes in with the dessert. He bore +the same relation to the snob that the righteous man bears to the +Pharisee: something frightfully close and similar and yet an +everlasting opposite. + + + + +CHAPTER III + +BROWNING AND HIS MARRIAGE + + +Robert Browning had his faults, and the general direction of those +faults has been previously suggested. The chief of his faults, a +certain uncontrollable brutality of speech and gesture when he was +strongly roused, was destined to cling to him all through his life, +and to startle with the blaze of a volcano even the last quiet years +before his death. But any one who wishes to understand how deep was +the elemental honesty and reality of his character, how profoundly +worthy he was of any love that was bestowed upon him, need only study +one most striking and determining element in the question--Browning's +simple, heartfelt, and unlimited admiration for other people. He was +one of a generation of great men, of great men who had a certain +peculiar type, certain peculiar merits and defects. Carlyle, Tennyson, +Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, were alike in being children of a very +strenuous and conscientious age, alike in possessing its earnestness +and air of deciding great matters, alike also in showing a certain +almost noble jealousy, a certain restlessness, a certain fear of other +influences. Browning alone had no fear; he welcomed, evidently without +the least affectation, all the influences of his day. A very +interesting letter of his remains in which he describes his pleasure +in a university dinner. "Praise," he says in effect, "was given very +deservedly to Matthew Arnold and Swinburne, and to that pride of +Oxford men, Clough." The really striking thing about these three names +is the fact that they are united in Browning's praise in a way in +which they are by no means united in each other's. Matthew Arnold, in +one of his extant letters, calls Swinburne "a young pseudo-Shelley," +who, according to Arnold, thinks he can make Greek plays good by +making them modern. Mr. Swinburne, on the other hand, has summarised +Clough in a contemptuous rhyme:-- + + "There was a bad poet named Clough, + Whom his friends all united to puff. + But the public, though dull, + Has not quite such a skull + As belongs to believers in Clough." + +The same general fact will be found through the whole of Browning's +life and critical attitude. He adored Shelley, and also Carlyle who +sneered at him. He delighted in Mill, and also in Ruskin who rebelled +against Mill. He excused Napoleon III. and Landor who hurled +interminable curses against Napoleon. He admired all the cycle of +great men who all contemned each other. To say that he had no streak +of envy in his nature would be true, but unfair; for there is no +justification for attributing any of these great men's opinions to +envy. But Browning was really unique, in that he had a certain +spontaneous and unthinking tendency to the admiration of others. He +admired another poet as he admired a fading sunset or a chance spring +leaf. He no more thought whether he could be as good as that man in +that department than whether he could be redder than the sunset or +greener than the leaf of spring. He was naturally magnanimous in the +literal sense of that sublime word; his mind was so great that it +rejoiced in the triumphs of strangers. In this spirit Browning had +already cast his eyes round in the literary world of his time, and had +been greatly and justifiably struck with the work of a young lady +poet, Miss Barrett. + +That impression was indeed amply justified. In a time when it was +thought necessary for a lady to dilute the wine of poetry to its very +weakest tint, Miss Barrett had contrived to produce poetry which was +open to literary objection as too heady and too high-coloured. When +she erred it was through an Elizabethan audacity and luxuriance, a +straining after violent metaphors. With her reappeared in poetry a +certain element which had not been present in it since the last days +of Elizabethan literature, the fusion of the most elementary human +passion with something which can only be described as wit, a certain +love of quaint and sustained similes, of parallels wildly logical, and +of brazen paradox and antithesis. We find this hot wit, as distinct +from the cold wit of the school of Pope, in the puns and buffooneries +of Shakespeare. We find it lingering in _Hudibras_, and we do not find +it again until we come to such strange and strong lines as these of +Elizabeth Barrett in her poem on Napoleon:-- + + "Blood fell like dew beneath his sunrise--sooth, + But glittered dew-like in the covenanted + And high-rayed light. He was a despot--granted, + But the [Greek: autos] of his autocratic mouth + Said 'Yea' i' the people's French! He magnified + The image of the freedom he denied." + +Her poems are full of quaint things, of such things as the eyes in the +peacock fans of the Vatican, which she describes as winking at the +Italian tricolor. She often took the step from the sublime to the +ridiculous: but to take this step one must reach the sublime. +Elizabeth Barrett contrived to assert, what still needs but then +urgently needed assertion, the fact that womanliness, whether in life +or poetry, was a positive thing, and not the negative of manliness. +Her verse at its best was quite as strong as Browning's own, and very +nearly as clever. The difference between their natures was a +difference between two primary colours, not between dark and light +shades of the same colour. + +Browning had often heard not only of the public, but of the private +life of this lady from his father's friend Kenyon. The old man, who +was one of those rare and valuable people who have a talent for +establishing definite relationships with people after a comparatively +short intercourse, had been appointed by Miss Barrett as her "fairy +godfather." He spoke much about her to Browning, and of Browning to +her, with a certain courtly garrulity which was one of his talents. +And there could be little doubt that the two poets would have met long +before had it not been for certain peculiarities in the position of +Miss Barrett. She was an invalid, and an invalid of a somewhat unique +kind, and living beyond all question under very unique circumstances. + +Her father, Edward Moulton Barrett, had been a landowner in the West +Indies, and thus, by a somewhat curious coincidence, had borne a part +in the same social system which stung Browning's father into revolt +and renunciation. The parts played by Edward Barrett, however, though +little or nothing is known of it, was probably very different. He was +a man Conservative by nature, a believer in authority in the nation +and the family, and endowed with some faculties for making his +conceptions prevail. He was an able man, capable in his language of a +certain bitter felicity of phrase. He was rigidly upright and +responsible, and he had a capacity for profound affection. But +selfishness of the most perilous sort, an unconscious selfishness, was +eating away his moral foundations, as it tends to eat away those of +all despots. His most fugitive moods changed and controlled the whole +atmosphere of the house, and the state of things was fully as +oppressive in the case of his good moods as in the case of his bad +ones. He had, what is perhaps the subtlest and worst spirit of +egotism, not that spirit merely which thinks that nothing should stand +in the way of its ill-temper, but that spirit which thinks that +nothing should stand in the way of its amiability. His daughters must +be absolutely at his beck and call, whether it was to be brow-beaten +or caressed. During the early years of Elizabeth Barrett's life, the +family had lived in the country, and for that brief period she had +known a more wholesome life than she was destined ever to know again +until her marriage long afterwards. She was not, as is the general +popular idea, absolutely a congenital invalid, weak, and almost +moribund from the cradle. In early girlhood she was slight and +sensitive indeed, but perfectly active and courageous. She was a good +horsewoman, and the accident which handicapped her for so many years +afterwards happened to her when she was riding. The injury to her +spine, however, will be found, the more we study her history, to be +only one of the influences which were to darken those bedridden years, +and to have among them a far less important place than has hitherto +been attached to it. Her father moved to a melancholy house in Wimpole +Street; and his own character growing gloomier and stranger as time +went on, he mounted guard over his daughter's sickbed in a manner +compounded of the pessimist and the disciplinarian. She was not +permitted to stir from the sofa, often not even to cross two rooms to +her bed. Her father came and prayed over her with a kind of melancholy +glee, and with the avowed solemnity of a watcher by a deathbed. She +was surrounded by that most poisonous and degrading of all +atmospheres--a medical atmosphere. The existence of this atmosphere +has nothing to do with the actual nature or prolongation of disease. A +man may pass three hours out of every five in a state of bad health, +and yet regard, as Stevenson regarded, the three hours as exceptional +and the two as normal. But the curse that lay on the Barrett household +was the curse of considering ill-health the natural condition of a +human being. The truth was that Edward Barrett was living emotionally +and æsthetically, like some detestable decadent poet, upon his +daughter's decline. He did not know this, but it was so. Scenes, +explanations, prayers, fury, and forgiveness had become bread and meat +for which he hungered; and when the cloud was upon his spirit, he +would lash out at all things and every one with the insatiable cruelty +of the sentimentalist. + +It is wonderful that Elizabeth Barrett was not made thoroughly morbid +and impotent by this intolerable violence and more intolerable +tenderness. In her estimate of her own health she did, of course, +suffer. It is evident that she practically believed herself to be +dying. But she was a high-spirited woman, full of that silent and +quite unfathomable kind of courage which is only found in women, and +she took a much more cheerful view of death than her father did of +life. Silent rooms, low voices, lowered blinds, long days of +loneliness, and of the sickliest kind of sympathy, had not tamed a +spirit which was swift and headlong to a fault. She could still own +with truth the magnificent fact that her chief vice was impatience, +"tearing open parcels instead of untying them;" looking at the end of +books before she had read them was, she said, incurable with her. It +is difficult to imagine anything more genuinely stirring than the +achievement of this woman, who thus contrived, while possessing all +the excuses of an invalid, to retain some of the faults of a tomboy. + +Impetuosity, vividness, a certain absoluteness and urgency in her +demands, marked her in the eyes of all who came in contact with her. +In after years, when Browning had experimentally shaved his beard off, +she told him with emphatic gestures that it must be grown again "that +minute." There we have very graphically the spirit which tears open +parcels. Not in vain, or as a mere phrase, did her husband after her +death describe her as "all a wonder and a wild desire." + +She had, of course, lived her second and real life in literature and +the things of the mind, and this in a very genuine and strenuous +sense. Her mental occupations were not mere mechanical accomplishments +almost as colourless as the monotony they relieved, nor were they +coloured in any visible manner by the unwholesome atmosphere in which +she breathed. She used her brains seriously; she was a good Greek +scholar, and read Æschylus and Euripides unceasingly with her blind +friend, Mr. Boyd; and she had, and retained even to the hour of her +death, a passionate and quite practical interest in great public +questions. Naturally she was not uninterested in Robert Browning, but +it does not appear that she felt at this time the same kind of fiery +artistic curiosity that he felt about her. He does appear to have felt +an attraction, which may almost be called mystical, for the +personality which was shrouded from the world by such sombre curtains. +In 1845 he addressed a letter to her in which he spoke of a former +occasion on which they had nearly met, and compared it to the +sensation of having once been outside the chapel of some marvellous +illumination and found the door barred against him. In that phrase it +is easy to see how much of the romantic boyhood of Browning remained +inside the resolute man of the world into which he was to all external +appearance solidifying. Miss Barrett replied to his letters with +charming sincerity and humour, and with much of that leisurely +self-revelation which is possible for an invalid who has nothing else +to do. She herself, with her love of quiet and intellectual +companionship, would probably have been quite happy for the rest of +her life if their relations had always remained a learned and +delightful correspondence. But she must have known very little of +Robert Browning if she imagined he would be contented with this airy +and bloodless tie. At all times of his life he was sufficiently fond +of his own way; at this time he was especially prompt and impulsive, +and he had always a great love for seeing and hearing and feeling +people, a love of the physical presence of friends, which made him +slap men on the back and hit them in the chest when he was very fond +of them. The correspondence between the two poets had not long begun +when Browning suggested something which was almost a blasphemy in the +Barrett household, that he should come and call on her as he would on +any one else. This seems to have thrown her into a flutter of fear and +doubt. She alleges all kinds of obstacles, the chief of which were her +health and the season of the year and the east winds. "If my truest +heart's wishes avail," replied Browning obstinately, "you shall laugh +at east winds yet as I do." + +Then began the chief part of that celebrated correspondence which has +within comparatively recent years been placed before the world. It is +a correspondence which has very peculiar qualities and raises many +profound questions. + +It is impossible to deal at any length with the picture given in these +remarkable letters of the gradual progress and amalgamation of two +spirits of great natural potency and independence, without saying at +least a word about the moral question raised by their publication and +the many expressions of disapproval which it entails. To the mind of +the present writer the whole of such a question should be tested by +one perfectly clear intellectual distinction and comparison. I am not +prepared to admit that there is or can be, properly speaking, in the +world anything that is too sacred to be known. That spiritual beauty +and spiritual truth are in their nature communicable, and that they +should be communicated, is a principle which lies at the root of every +conceivable religion. Christ was crucified upon a hill, and not in a +cavern, and the word Gospel itself involves the same idea as the +ordinary name of a daily paper. Whenever, therefore, a poet or any +similar type of man can, or conceives that he can, make all men +partakers in some splendid secret of his own heart, I can imagine +nothing saner and nothing manlier than his course in doing so. Thus it +was that Dante made a new heaven and a new hell out of a girl's nod in +the streets of Florence. Thus it was that Paul founded a civilisation +by keeping an ethical diary. But the one essential which exists in all +such cases as these is that the man in question believes that he can +make the story as stately to the whole world as it is to him, and he +chooses his words to that end. Yet when a work contains expressions +which have one value and significance when read by the people to whom +they were addressed, and an entirely different value and significance +when read by any one else, then the element of the violation of +sanctity does arise. It is not because there is anything in this world +too sacred to tell. It is rather because there are a great many things +in this world too sacred to parody. If Browning could really convey to +the world the inmost core of his affection for his wife, I see no +reason why he should not. But the objection to letters which begin "My +dear Ba," is that they do not convey anything of the sort. As far as +any third person is concerned, Browning might as well have been +expressing the most noble and universal sentiment in the dialect of +the Cherokees. Objection to the publication of such passages as that, +in short, is not the fact that they tell us about the love of the +Brownings, but that they do not tell us about it. + +Upon this principle it is obvious that there should have been a +selection among the Letters, but not a selection which should exclude +anything merely because it was ardent and noble. If Browning or Mrs. +Browning had not desired any people to know that they were fond of +each other, they would not have written and published "One Word More" +or "The Sonnets from the Portuguese." Nay, they would not have been +married in a public church, for every one who is married in a church +does make a confession of love of absolutely national publicity, and +tacitly, therefore, repudiates any idea that such confessions are too +sacred for the world to know. The ridiculous theory that men should +have no noble passions or sentiments in public may have been designed +to make private life holy and undefiled, but it has had very little +actual effect except to make public life cynical and preposterously +unmeaning. But the words of a poem or the words of the English +Marriage Service, which are as fine as many poems, is a language +dignified and deliberately intended to be understood by all. If the +bride and bridegroom in church, instead of uttering those words, were +to utter a poem compounded of private allusions to the foibles of Aunt +Matilda, or of childish secrets which they would tell each other in a +lane, it would be a parallel case to the publication of some of the +Browning Letters. Why the serious and universal portions of those +Letters could not be published without those which are to us idle and +unmeaning it is difficult to understand. Our wisdom, whether expressed +in private or public, belongs to the world, but our folly belongs to +those we love. + +There is at least one peculiarity in the Browning Letters which tends +to make their publication far less open to objection than almost any +other collection of love letters which can be imagined. The ordinary +sentimentalist who delights in the most emotional of magazine +interviews, will not be able to get much satisfaction out of them, +because he and many persons more acute will be quite unable to make +head or tail of three consecutive sentences. In this respect it is the +most extraordinary correspondence in the world. There seem to be only +two main rules for this form of letter-writing: the first is, that if +a sentence can begin with a parenthesis it always should; and the +second is, that if you have written from a third to half of a sentence +you need never in any case write any more. It would be amusing to +watch any one who felt an idle curiosity as to the language and +secrets of lovers opening the Browning Letters. He would probably come +upon some such simple and lucid passage as the following: "I ought to +wait, say a week at least, having killed all your mules for you, +before I shot down your dogs.... But not being Phoibos Apollon, you +are to know further that when I _did_ think I might go modestly on ... +[Greek: ômoi], let me get out of this slough of a simile, never mind +with what dislocated ankles." + +What our imaginary sentimentalist would make of this tender passage it +is difficult indeed to imagine. The only plain conclusion which +appears to emerge from the words is the somewhat curious one--that +Browning was in the habit of taking a gun down to Wimpole Street and +of demolishing the live stock on those somewhat unpromising premises. +Nor will he be any better enlightened if he turns to the reply of +Miss Barrett, which seems equally dominated with the great central +idea of the Browning correspondence that the most enlightening +passages in a letter consist of dots. She replies in a letter +following the above: "But if it could be possible that you should mean +to say you would show me. . . . Can it be? or am I reading this 'Attic +contraction' quite the wrong way. You see I am afraid of the +difference between flattering myself and being flattered . . . the +fatal difference. And now will you understand that I should be too +overjoyed to have revelations from the Portfolio . . . however +incarnated with blots and pen scratches . . . to be able to ask +impudently of them now? Is that plain?" Most probably she thought it +was. + +With regard to Browning himself this characteristic is comparatively +natural and appropriate. Browning's prose was in any case the most +roundabout affair in the world. Those who knew him say that he would +often send an urgent telegram from which it was absolutely impossible +to gather where the appointment was, or when it was, or what was its +object. This fact is one of the best of all arguments against the +theory of Browning's intellectual conceit. A man would have to be +somewhat abnormally conceited in order to spend sixpence for the +pleasure of sending an unintelligible communication to the dislocation +of his own plans. The fact was, that it was part of the machinery of +his brain that things came out of it, as it were, backwards. The words +"tail foremost" express Browning's style with something more than a +conventional accuracy. The tail, the most insignificant part of an +animal, is also often the most animated and fantastic. An utterance of +Browning is often like a strange animal walking backwards, who +flourishes his tail with such energy that every one takes it for his +head. He was in other words, at least in his prose and practical +utterances, more or less incapable of telling a story without telling +the least important thing first. If a man who belonged to an Italian +secret society, one local branch of which bore as a badge an +olive-green ribbon, had entered his house, and in some sensational +interview tried to bribe or blackmail him, he would have told the +story with great energy and indignation, but he would have been +incapable of beginning with anything except the question of the colour +of olives. His whole method was founded both in literature and life +upon the principle of the "ex pede Herculem," and at the beginning of +his description of Hercules the foot appears some sizes larger than +the hero. It is, in short, natural enough that Browning should have +written his love letters obscurely, since he wrote his letters to his +publisher and his solicitor obscurely. In the case of Mrs. Browning it +is somewhat more difficult to understand. For she at least had, beyond +all question, a quite simple and lucent vein of humour, which does not +easily reconcile itself with this subtlety. But she was partly under +the influence of her own quality of passionate ingenuity or emotional +wit of which we have already taken notice in dealing with her poems, +and she was partly also no doubt under the influence of Browning. +Whatever was the reason, their correspondence was not of the sort +which can be pursued very much by the outside public. Their letters +may be published a hundred times over, they still remain private. They +write to each other in a language of their own, an almost +exasperatingly impressionist language, a language chiefly consisting +of dots and dashes and asterisks and italics, and brackets and notes +of interrogation. Wordsworth when he heard afterwards of their +eventual elopement said with that slight touch of bitterness he always +used in speaking of Browning, "So Robert Browning and Miss Barrett +have gone off together. I hope they understand each other--nobody else +would." It would be difficult to pay a higher compliment to a +marriage. Their common affection for Kenyon was a great element in +their lives and in their correspondence. "I have a convenient theory +to account for Mr. Kenyon," writes Browning mysteriously, "and his +otherwise unaccountable kindness to me." "For Mr. Kenyon's kindness," +retorts Elizabeth Barrett, "no theory will account. I class it with +mesmerism for that reason." There is something very dignified and +beautiful about the simplicity of these two poets vying with each +other in giving adequate praise to the old dilettante, of whom the +world would never have heard but for them. Browning's feeling for him +was indeed especially strong and typical. "There," he said, pointing +after the old man as he left the room, "there goes one of the most +splendid men living--a man so noble in his friendship, so lavish in +his hospitality, so large-hearted and benevolent, that he deserves to +be known all over the world as 'Kenyon the Magnificent.'" There is +something thoroughly worthy of Browning at his best in this feeling, +not merely of the use of sociability, or of the charm of sociability, +but of the magnificence, the heroic largeness of real sociability. +Being himself a warm champion of the pleasures of society, he saw in +Kenyon a kind of poetic genius for the thing, a mission of +superficial philanthropy. He is thoroughly to be congratulated on the +fact that he had grasped the great but now neglected truth, that a man +may actually be great, yet not in the least able. + +Browning's desire to meet Miss Barrett was received on her side, as +has been stated, with a variety of objections. The chief of these was +the strangely feminine and irrational reason that she was not worth +seeing, a point on which the seeker for an interview might be +permitted to form his own opinion. "There is nothing to see in me; nor +to hear in me.--I never learned to talk as you do in London; although +I can admire that brightness of carved speech in Mr. Kenyon and +others. If my poetry is worth anything to any eye, it is the flower of +me. I have lived most and been most happy in it, and so it has all my +colours; the rest of me is nothing but a root, fit for the ground and +dark." The substance of Browning's reply was to the effect, "I will +call at two on Tuesday." + +They met on May 20, 1845. A short time afterwards he had fallen in +love with her and made her an offer of marriage. To a person in the +domestic atmosphere of the Barretts, the incident would appear to have +been paralysing. "I will tell you what I once said in jest ..." she +writes, "If a prince of El Dorado should come with a pedigree of +lineal descent from some signory in the moon in one hand and a ticket +of good behaviour from the nearest Independent chapel in the +other!--'Why, even _then_,' said my sister Arabel, 'it would not +_do_.' And she was right; we all agreed that she was right." + +This may be taken as a fairly accurate description of the real state +of Mr. Barrett's mind on one subject. It is illustrative of the very +best and breeziest side of Elizabeth Barrett's character that she +could be so genuinely humorous over so tragic a condition of the human +mind. + +Browning's proposals were, of course, as matters stood, of a character +to dismay and repel all those who surrounded Elizabeth Barrett. It was +not wholly a matter of the fancies of her father. The whole of her +family, and most probably the majority of her medical advisers, did +seriously believe at this time that she was unfit to be moved, to say +nothing of being married, and that a life passed between a bed and a +sofa, and avoiding too frequent and abrupt transitions even from one +to the other, was the only life she could expect on this earth. Almost +alone in holding another opinion and in urging her to a more vigorous +view of her condition, stood Browning himself. "But you are better," +he would say; "you look so and speak so." Which of the two opinions +was right is of course a complex medical matter into which a book like +this has neither the right nor the need to enter. But this much may be +stated as a mere question of fact. In the summer of 1846 Elizabeth +Barrett was still living under the great family convention which +provided her with nothing but an elegant deathbed, forbidden to move, +forbidden to see proper daylight, forbidden to receive a friend lest +the shock should destroy her suddenly. A year or two later, in Italy, +as Mrs. Browning, she was being dragged up hill in a wine hamper, +toiling up to the crests of mountains at four o'clock in the morning, +riding for five miles on a donkey to what she calls "an inaccessible +volcanic ground not far from the stars." It is perfectly incredible +that any one so ill as her family believed her to be should have +lived this life for twenty-four hours. Something must be allowed for +the intoxication of a new tie and a new interest in life. But such +exaltations can in their nature hardly last a month, and Mrs. Browning +lived for fifteen years afterwards in infinitely better health than +she had ever known before. In the light of modern knowledge it is not +very difficult or very presumptuous, of us to guess that she had been +in her father's house to some extent inoculated with hysteria, that +strange affliction which some people speak of as if it meant the +absence of disease, but which is in truth the most terrible of all +diseases. It must be remembered that in 1846 little or nothing was +known of spine complaints such as that from which Elizabeth Barrett +suffered, less still of the nervous conditions they create, and least +of all of hysterical phenomena. In our day she would have been ordered +air and sunlight and activity, and all the things the mere idea of +which chilled the Barretts with terror. In our day, in short, it would +have been recognised that she was in the clutch of a form of neurosis +which exhibits every fact of a disease except its origin, that strange +possession which makes the body itself a hypocrite. Those who +surrounded Miss Barrett knew nothing of this, and Browning knew +nothing of it; and probably if he knew anything, knew less than they +did. Mrs. Orr says, probably with a great deal of truth, that of +ill-health and its sensations he remained "pathetically ignorant" to +his dying day. But devoid as he was alike of expert knowledge and +personal experience, without a shadow of medical authority, almost +without anything that can be formally called a right to his opinion, +he was, and remained, right. He at least saw, he indeed alone saw, to +the practical centre of the situation. He did not know anything about +hysteria or neurosis, or the influence of surroundings, but he knew +that the atmosphere of Mr. Barrett's house was not a fit thing for any +human being, alive, dying, or dead. His stand upon this matter has +really a certain human interest, since it is an example of a thing +which will from time to time occur, the interposition of the average +man to the confounding of the experts. Experts are undoubtedly right +nine times out of ten, but the tenth time comes, and we find in +military matters an Oliver Cromwell who will make every mistake known +to strategy and yet win all his battles, and in medical matters a +Robert Browning whose views have not a technical leg to stand on and +are entirely correct. + +But while Browning was thus standing alone in his view of the matter, +while Edward Barrett had to all appearance on his side a phalanx of +all the sanities and respectabilities, there came suddenly a new +development, destined to bring matters to a crisis indeed, and to +weigh at least three souls in the balance. Upon further examination of +Miss Barrett's condition, the physicians had declared that it was +absolutely necessary that she should be taken to Italy. This may, +without any exaggeration, be called the turning-point and the last +great earthly opportunity of Barrett's character. He had not +originally been an evil man, only a man who, being stoical in +practical things, permitted himself, to his great detriment, a +self-indulgence in moral things. He had grown to regard his pious and +dying daughter as part of the furniture of the house and of the +universe. And as long as the great mass of authorities were on his +side, his illusion was quite pardonable. His crisis came when the +authorities changed their front, and with one accord asked his +permission to send his daughter abroad. It was his crisis, and he +refused. + +He had, if we may judge from what we know of him, his own peculiar and +somewhat detestable way of refusing. Once when his daughter had asked +a perfectly simple favour in a matter of expediency, permission, that +is, to keep her favourite brother with her during an illness, her +singular parent remarked that "she might keep him if she liked, but +that he had looked for greater self-sacrifice." These were the weapons +with which he ruled his people. For the worst tyrant is not the man +who rules by fear; the worst tyrant is he who rules by love and plays +on it as on a harp. Barrett was one of the oppressors who have +discovered the last secret of oppression, that which is told in the +fine verse of Swinburne:-- + + "The racks of the earth and the rods + Are weak as the foam on the sands; + The heart is the prey for the gods, + Who crucify hearts, not hands." + +He, with his terrible appeal to the vibrating consciences of women, +was, with regard to one of them, very near to the end of his reign. +When Browning heard that the Italian journey was forbidden, he +proposed definitely that they should marry and go on the journey +together. + +Many other persons had taken cognisance of the fact, and were active +in the matter. Kenyon, the gentlest and most universally complimentary +of mortals, had marched into the house and given Arabella Barrett, +the sister of the sick woman, his opinion of her father's conduct +with a degree of fire and frankness which must have been perfectly +amazing in a man of his almost antiquated social delicacy. Mrs. +Jameson, an old and generous friend of the family, had immediately +stepped in and offered to take Elizabeth to Italy herself, thus +removing all questions of expense or arrangement. She would appear to +have stood to her guns in the matter with splendid persistence and +magnanimity. She called day after day seeking for a change of mind, +and delayed her own journey to the continent more than once. At +length, when it became evident that the extraction of Mr. Barrett's +consent was hopeless, she reluctantly began her own tour in Europe +alone. She went to Paris, and had not been there many days, when she +received a formal call from Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett +Browning, who had been married for some days. Her astonishment is +rather a picturesque thing to think about. + +The manner in which this sensational elopement, which was, of course, +the talk of the whole literary world, had been effected, is narrated, +as every one knows, in the Browning Letters. Browning had decided that +an immediate marriage was the only solution; and having put his hand +to the plough, did not decline even when it became obviously necessary +that it should be a secret marriage. To a man of his somewhat stormily +candid and casual disposition this necessity of secrecy was really +exasperating; but every one with any imagination or chivalry will +rejoice that he accepted the evil conditions. He had always had the +courage to tell the truth; and now it was demanded of him to have the +greater courage to tell a lie, and he told it with perfect +cheerfulness and lucidity. In thus disappearing surreptitiously with +an invalid woman he was doing something against which there were +undoubtedly a hundred things to be said, only it happened that the +most cogent and important thing of all was to be said for it. + +It is very amusing, and very significant in the matter of Browning's +character, to read the accounts which he writes to Elizabeth Barrett +of his attitude towards the approaching _coup de théâtre_. In one +place he says, suggestively enough, that he does not in the least +trouble about the disapproval of her father; the man whom he fears as +a frustrating influence is Kenyon. Mr. Barrett could only walk into +the room and fly into a passion; and this Browning could have received +with perfect equanimity. "But," he says, "if Kenyon knows of the +matter, I shall have the kindest and friendliest of explanations (with +his arm on my shoulder) of how I am ruining your social position, +destroying your health, etc., etc." This touch is very suggestive of +the power of the old worldling, who could manoeuvre with young people +as well as Major Pendennis. Kenyon had indeed long been perfectly +aware of the way in which things were going; and the method he adopted +in order to comment on it is rather entertaining. In a conversation +with Elizabeth Barrett, he asked carelessly whether there was anything +between her sister and a certain Captain Cooke. On receiving a +surprised reply in the negative, he remarked apologetically that he +had been misled into the idea by the gentleman calling so often at the +house. Elizabeth Barrett knew perfectly well what he meant; but the +logical allusiveness of the attack reminds one of a fragment of some +Meredithian comedy. + +The manner in which Browning bore himself in this acute and +necessarily dubious position is, perhaps, more thoroughly to his +credit than anything else in his career. He never came out so well in +all his long years of sincerity and publicity as he does in this one +act of deception. Having made up his mind to that act, he is not +ashamed to name it; neither, on the other hand, does he rant about it, +and talk about Philistine prejudices and higher laws and brides in the +sight of God, after the manner of the cockney decadent. He was +breaking a social law, but he was not declaring a crusade against +social laws. We all feel, whatever may be our opinions on the matter, +that the great danger of this kind of social opportunism, this pitting +of a private necessity against a public custom, is that men are +somewhat too weak and self-deceptive to be trusted with such a power +of giving dispensations to themselves. We feel that men without +meaning to do so might easily begin by breaking a social by-law and +end by being thoroughly anti-social. One of the best and most striking +things to notice about Robert Browning is the fact that he did this +thing considering it as an exception, and that he contrived to leave +it really exceptional. It did not in the least degree break the +rounded clearness of his loyalty to social custom. It did not in the +least degree weaken the sanctity of the general rule. At a supreme +crisis of his life he did an unconventional thing, and he lived and +died conventional. It would be hard to say whether he appears the more +thoroughly sane in having performed the act, or in not having allowed +it to affect him. + +Elizabeth Barrett gradually gave way under the obstinate and almost +monotonous assertion of Browning that this elopement was the only +possible course of action. Before she finally agreed, however, she did +something, which in its curious and impulsive symbolism, belongs +almost to a more primitive age. The sullen system of medical seclusion +to which she had long been subjected has already been described. The +most urgent and hygienic changes were opposed by many on the ground +that it was not safe for her to leave her sofa and her sombre room. On +the day on which it was necessary for her finally to accept or reject +Browning's proposal, she called her sister to her, and to the +amazement and mystification of that lady asked for a carriage. In this +she drove into Regent's Park, alighted, walked on to the grass, and +stood leaning against a tree for some moments, looking round her at +the leaves and the sky. She then entered the cab again, drove home, +and agreed to the elopement. This was possibly the best poem that she +ever produced. + +Browning arranged the eccentric adventure with a great deal of +prudence and knowledge of human nature. Early one morning in September +1846 Miss Barrett walked quietly out of her father's house, became +Mrs. Robert Browning in a church in Marylebone, and returned home +again as if nothing had happened. In this arrangement Browning showed +some of that real insight into the human spirit which ought to make a +poet the most practical of all men. The incident was, in the nature of +things, almost overpoweringly exciting to his wife, in spite of the +truly miraculous courage with which she supported it; and he desired, +therefore, to call in the aid of the mysteriously tranquillising +effect of familiar scenes and faces. One trifling incident is worth +mentioning which is almost unfathomably characteristic of Browning. It +has already been remarked in these pages that he was pre-eminently one +of those men whose expanding opinions never alter by a hairsbreadth +the actual ground-plan of their moral sense. Browning would have felt +the same things right and the same things wrong, whatever views he had +held. During the brief and most trying period between his actual +marriage and his actual elopement, it is most significant that he +would not call at the house in Wimpole Street, because he would have +been obliged to ask if Miss Barrett was disengaged. He was acting a +lie; he was deceiving a father; he was putting a sick woman to a +terrible risk; and these things he did not disguise from himself for a +moment, but he could not bring himself to say two words to a +maidservant. Here there may be partly the feeling of the literary man +for the sacredness of the uttered word, but there is far more of a +certain rooted traditional morality which it is impossible either to +describe or to justify. Browning's respectability was an older and +more primeval thing than the oldest and most primeval passions of +other men. If we wish to understand him, we must always remember that +in dealing with any of his actions we have not to ask whether the +action contains the highest morality, but whether we should have felt +inclined to do it ourselves. + +At length the equivocal and exhausting interregnum was over. Mrs. +Browning went for the second time almost on tiptoe out of her father's +house, accompanied only by her maid and her dog, which was only just +successfully prevented from barking. Before the end of the day in all +probability Barrett had discovered that his dying daughter had fled +with Browning to Italy. + +They never saw him again, and hardly more than a faint echo came to +them of the domestic earthquake which they left behind them. They do +not appear to have had many hopes, or to have made many attempts at a +reconciliation. Elizabeth Barrett had discovered at last that her +father was in truth not a man to be treated with; hardly, perhaps, +even a man to be blamed. She knew to all intents and purposes that she +had grown up in the house of a madman. + + + + +CHAPTER IV + +BROWNING IN ITALY + + +The married pair went to Pisa in 1846, and moved soon afterwards to +Florence. Of the life of the Brownings in Italy there is much perhaps +to be said in the way of description and analysis, little to be said +in the way of actual narrative. Each of them had passed through the +one incident of existence. Just as Elizabeth Barrett's life had before +her marriage been uneventfully sombre, now it was uneventfully happy. +A succession of splendid landscapes, a succession of brilliant +friends, a succession of high and ardent intellectual interests, they +experienced; but their life was of the kind that if it were told at +all, would need to be told in a hundred volumes of gorgeous +intellectual gossip. How Browning and his wife rode far into the +country, eating strawberries and drinking milk out of the basins of +the peasants; how they fell in with the strangest and most picturesque +figures of Italian society; how they climbed mountains and read books +and modelled in clay and played on musical instruments; how Browning +was made a kind of arbiter between two improvising Italian bards; how +he had to escape from a festivity when the sound of Garibaldi's hymn +brought the knocking of the Austrian police; these are the things of +which his life is full, trifling and picturesque things, a series of +interludes, a beautiful and happy story, beginning and ending nowhere. +The only incidents, perhaps, were the birth of their son and the death +of Browning's mother in 1849. + +It is well known that Browning loved Italy; that it was his adopted +country; that he said in one of the finest of his lyrics that the name +of it would be found written on his heart. But the particular +character of this love of Browning for Italy needs to be understood. +There are thousands of educated Europeans who love Italy, who live in +it, who visit it annually, who come across a continent to see it, who +hunt out its darkest picture and its most mouldering carving; but they +are all united in this, that they regard Italy as a dead place. It is +a branch of their universal museum, a department of dry bones. There +are rich and cultivated persons, particularly Americans, who seem to +think that they keep Italy, as they might keep an aviary or a +hothouse, into which they might walk whenever they wanted a whiff of +beauty. Browning did not feel at all in this manner; he was +intrinsically incapable of offering such an insult to the soul of a +nation. If he could not have loved Italy as a nation, he would not +have consented to love it as an old curiosity shop. In everything on +earth, from the Middle Ages to the amoeba, who is discussed at such +length in "Mr. Sludge the Medium," he is interested in the life in +things. He was interested in the life in Italian art and in the life +in Italian politics. + +Perhaps the first and simplest example that can be given of this +matter is in Browning's interest in art. He was immeasurably +fascinated at all times by painting and sculpture, and his sojourn in +Italy gave him, of course, innumerable and perfect opportunities for +the study of painting and sculpture. But his interest in these studies +was not like that of the ordinary cultured visitor to the Italian +cities. Thousands of such visitors, for example, study those endless +lines of magnificent Pagan busts which are to be found in nearly all +the Italian galleries and museums, and admire them, and talk about +them, and note them in their catalogues, and describe them in their +diaries. But the way in which they affected Browning is described very +suggestively in a passage in the letters of his wife. She describes +herself as longing for her husband to write poems, beseeching him to +write poems, but finding all her petitions useless because her husband +was engaged all day in modelling busts in clay and breaking them as +fast as he made them. This is Browning's interest in art, the interest +in a living thing, the interest in a growing thing, the insatiable +interest in how things are done. Every one who knows his admirable +poems on painting--"Fra Lippo Lippi" and "Andrea del Sarto" and +"Pictor Ignotus"--will remember how fully they deal with +technicalities, how they are concerned with canvas, with oil, with a +mess of colours. Sometimes they are so technical as to be mysterious +to the casual reader. An extreme case may be found in that of a lady I +once knew who had merely read the title of "Pacchiarotto and how he +worked in distemper," and thought that Pacchiarotto was the name of a +dog, whom no attacks of canine disease could keep from the fulfilment +of his duty. These Browning poems do not merely deal with painting; +they smell of paint. They are the works of a man to whom art is not +what it is to so many of the non-professional lovers of art, a thing +accomplished, a valley of bones: to him it is a field of crops +continually growing in a busy and exciting silence. Browning was +interested, like some scientific man, in the obstetrics of art. There +is a large army of educated men who can talk art with artists; but +Browning could not merely talk art with artists--he could talk shop +with them. Personally he may not have known enough about painting to +be more than a fifth-rate painter, or enough about the organ to be +more than a sixth-rate organist. But there are, when all is said and +done, some things which a fifth-rate painter knows which a first-rate +art critic does not know; there are some things which a sixth-rate +organist knows which a first-rate judge of music does not know. And +these were the things that Browning knew. + +He was, in other words, what is called an amateur. The word amateur +has come by the thousand oddities of language to convey an idea of +tepidity; whereas the word itself has the meaning of passion. Nor is +this peculiarity confined to the mere form of the word; the actual +characteristic of these nameless dilettanti is a genuine fire and +reality. A man must love a thing very much if he not only practises it +without any hope of fame or money, but even practises it without any +hope of doing it well. Such a man must love the toils of the work more +than any other man can love the rewards of it. Browning was in this +strict sense a strenuous amateur. He tried and practised in the course +of his life half a hundred things at which he can never have even for +a moment expected to succeed. The story of his life is full of absurd +little ingenuities, such as the discovery of a way of making pictures +by roasting brown paper over a candle. In precisely the same spirit +of fruitless vivacity, he made himself to a very considerable extent a +technical expert in painting, a technical expert in sculpture, a +technical expert in music. In his old age, he shows traces of being so +bizarre a thing as an abstract police detective, writing at length in +letters and diaries his views of certain criminal cases in an Italian +town. Indeed, his own _Ring and the Book_ is merely a sublime +detective story. He was in a hundred things this type of man; he was +precisely in the position, with a touch of greater technical success, +of the admirable figure in Stevenson's story who said, "I can play the +fiddle nearly well enough to earn a living in the orchestra of a penny +gaff, but not quite." + +The love of Browning for Italian art, therefore, was anything but an +antiquarian fancy; it was the love of a living thing. We see the same +phenomenon in an even more important matter--the essence and +individuality of the country itself. + +Italy to Browning and his wife was not by any means merely that +sculptured and ornate sepulchre that it is to so many of those +cultivated English men and women who live in Italy and enjoy and +admire and despise it. To them it was a living nation, the type and +centre of the religion and politics of a continent; the ancient and +flaming heart of Western history, the very Europe of Europe. And they +lived at the time of the most moving and gigantic of all dramas--the +making of a new nation, one of the things that makes men feel that +they are still in the morning of the earth. Before their eyes, with +every circumstance of energy and mystery, was passing the panorama of +the unification of Italy, with the bold and romantic militarism of +Garibaldi, the more bold and more romantic diplomacy of Cavour. They +lived in a time when affairs of State had almost the air of works of +art; and it is not strange that these two poets should have become +politicians in one of those great creative epochs when even the +politicians have to be poets. + +Browning was on this question and on all the questions of continental +and English politics a very strong Liberal. This fact is not a mere +detail of purely biographical interest, like any view he might take of +the authorship of the "Eikon Basilike" or the authenticity of the +Tichborne claimant. Liberalism was so inevitably involved in the +poet's whole view of existence, that even a thoughtful and imaginative +Conservative would feel that Browning was bound to be a Liberal. His +mind was possessed, perhaps even to excess, by a belief in growth and +energy and in the ultimate utility of error. He held the great central +Liberal doctrine, a belief in a certain destiny of the human spirit +beyond, and perhaps even independent of, our own sincerest +convictions. The world was going right he felt, most probably in his +way, but certainly in its own way. The sonnet which he wrote in later +years, entitled "Why I am a Liberal," expresses admirably this +philosophical root of his politics. It asks in effect how he, who had +found truth in so many strange forms after so many strange wanderings, +can be expected to stifle with horror the eccentricities of others. A +Liberal may be defined approximately as a man who, if he could by +waving his hand in a dark room, stop the mouths of all the deceivers +of mankind for ever, would not wave his hand. Browning was a Liberal +in this sense. + +And just as the great Liberal movement which followed the French +Revolution made this claim for the liberty and personality of human +beings, so it made it for the liberty and personality of nations. It +attached indeed to the independence of a nation something of the same +wholly transcendental sanctity which humanity has in all legal systems +attached to the life of a man. The grounds were indeed much the same; +no one could say absolutely that a live man was useless, and no one +could say absolutely that a variety of national life was useless or +must remain useless to the world. Men remembered how often barbarous +tribes or strange and alien Scriptures had been called in to revive +the blood of decaying empires and civilisations. And this sense of the +personality of a nation, as distinct from the personalities of all +other nations, did not involve in the case of these old Liberals +international bitterness; for it is too often forgotten that +friendship demands independence and equality fully as much as war. But +in them it led to great international partialities, to a great system, +as it were, of adopted countries which made so thorough a Scotchman as +Carlyle in love with Germany, and so thorough an Englishman as +Browning in love with Italy. + +And while on the one side of the struggle was this great ideal of +energy and variety, on the other side was something which we now find +it difficult to realise or describe. We have seen in our own time a +great reaction in favour of monarchy, aristocracy, andecclesiasticism, +a reaction almost entirely noble in its instinct, and dwelling almost +entirely on the best periods and the best qualities of the old +_régime_. But the modern man, full of admiration for the great virtue +of chivalry which is at the heart of aristocracies, and the great +virtue of reverence which is at the heart of ceremonial religion, is +not in a position to form any idea of how profoundly unchivalrous, how +astonishingly irreverent, how utterly mean, and material, and devoid +of mystery or sentiment were the despotic systems of Europe which +survived, and for a time conquered, the Revolution. The case against +the Church in Italy in the time of Pio Nono was not the case which a +rationalist would urge against the Church of the time of St. Louis, +but diametrically the opposite case. Against the mediæval Church it +might be said that she was too fantastic, too visionary, too dogmatic +about the destiny of man, too indifferent to all things but the +devotional side of the soul. Against the Church of Pio Nono the main +thing to be said was that it was simply and supremely cynical; that it +was not founded on the unworldly instinct for distorting life, but on +the worldly counsel to leave life as it is; that it was not the +inspirer of insane hopes, of reward and miracle, but the enemy, the +cool and sceptical enemy, of hope of any kind or description. The same +was true of the monarchical systems of Prussia and Austria and Russia +at this time. Their philosophy was not the philosophy of the cavaliers +who rode after Charles I. or Louis XIII. It was the philosophy of the +typical city uncle, advising every one, and especially the young, to +avoid enthusiasm, to avoid beauty, to regard life as a machine, +dependent only upon the two forces of comfort and fear. That was, +there can be little doubt, the real reason of the fascination of the +Napoleon legend--that while Napoleon was a despot like the rest, he +was a despot who went somewhere and did something, and defied the +pessimism of Europe, and erased the word "impossible." One does not +need to be a Bonapartist to rejoice at the way in which the armies of +the First Empire, shouting their songs and jesting with their +colonels, smote and broke into pieces the armies of Prussia and +Austria driven into battle with a cane. + +Browning, as we have said, was in Italy at the time of the break-up of +one part of this frozen continent of the non-possumus, Austria's hold +in the north of Italy was part of that elaborate and comfortable and +wholly cowardly and unmeaning compromise, which the Holy Alliance had +established, and which it believed without doubt in its solid unbelief +would last until the Day of Judgment, though it is difficult to +imagine what the Holy Alliance thought would happen then. But almost +of a sudden affairs had begun to move strangely, and the despotic +princes and their chancellors discovered with a great deal of +astonishment that they were not living in the old age of the world, +but to all appearance in a very unmanageable period of its boyhood. In +an age of ugliness and routine, in a time when diplomatists and +philosophers alike tended to believe that they had a list of all human +types, there began to appear men who belonged to the morning of the +world, men whose movements have a national breadth and beauty, who act +symbols and become legends while they are alive. Garibaldi in his red +shirt rode in an open carriage along the front of a hostile fort +calling to the coachman to drive slower, and not a man dared fire a +shot at him. Mazzini poured out upon Europe a new mysticism of +humanity and liberty, and was willing, like some passionate Jesuit of +the sixteenth century, to become in its cause either a philosopher or +a criminal. Cavour arose with a diplomacy which was more thrilling and +picturesque than war itself. These men had nothing to do with an age +of the impossible. They have passed, their theories along with them, +as all things pass; but since then we have had no men of their type +precisely, at once large and real and romantic and successful. Gordon +was a possible exception. They were the last of the heroes. + +When Browning was first living in Italy, a telegram which had been +sent to him was stopped on the frontier and suppressed on account of +his known sympathy with the Italian Liberals. It is almost impossible +for people living in a commonwealth like ours to understand how a +small thing like that will affect a man. It was not so much the +obvious fact that a great practical injury was really done to him; +that the telegram might have altered all his plans in matters of vital +moment. It was, over and above that, the sense of a hand laid on +something personal and essentially free. Tyranny like this is not the +worst tyranny, but it is the most intolerable. It interferes with men +not in the most serious matters, but precisely in those matters in +which they most resent interference. It may be illogical for men to +accept cheerfully unpardonable public scandals, benighted educational +systems, bad sanitation, bad lighting, a blundering and inefficient +system of life, and yet to resent the tearing up of a telegram or a +post-card; but the fact remains that the sensitiveness of men is a +strange and localised thing, and there is hardly a man in the world +who would not rather be ruled by despots chosen by lot and live in a +city like a mediæval Ghetto, than be forbidden by a policeman to +smoke another cigarette, or sit up a quarter of an hour later; hardly +a man who would not feel inclined in such a case to raise a rebellion +for a caprice for which he did not really care a straw. Unmeaning and +muddle-headed tyranny in small things, that is the thing which, if +extended over many years, is harder to bear and hope through than the +massacres of September. And that was the nightmare of vexatious +triviality which was lying over all the cities of Italy that were +ruled by the bureaucratic despotisms of Europe. The history of the +time is full of spiteful and almost childish struggles--struggles +about the humming of a tune or the wearing of a colour, the arrest of +a journey, or the opening of a letter. And there can be little doubt +that Browning's temperament under these conditions was not of the kind +to become more indulgent, and there grew in him a hatred of the +Imperial and Ducal and Papal systems of Italy, which sometimes passed +the necessities of Liberalism, and sometimes even transgressed its +spirit. The life which he and his wife lived in Italy was +extraordinarily full and varied, when we consider the restrictions +under which one at least of them had always lain. They met and took +delight, notwithstanding their exile, in some of the most interesting +people of their time--Ruskin, Cardinal Manning, and Lord Lytton. +Browning, in a most characteristic way, enjoyed the society of all of +them, arguing with one, agreeing with another, sitting up all night by +the bedside of a third. + +It has frequently been stated that the only difference that ever +separated Mr. and Mrs. Browning was upon the question of spiritualism. +That statement must, of course, be modified and even contradicted if +it means that they never differed; that Mr. Browning never thought an +_Act of Parliament_ good when Mrs. Browning thought it bad; that Mr. +Browning never thought bread stale when Mrs. Browning thought it new. +Such unanimity is not only inconceivable, it is immoral; and as a +matter of fact, there is abundant evidence that their marriage +constituted something like that ideal marriage, an alliance between +two strong and independent forces. They differed, in truth, about a +great many things, for example, about Napoleon III. whom Mrs. Browning +regarded with an admiration which would have been somewhat beyond the +deserts of Sir Galahad, and whom Browning with his emphatic Liberal +principles could never pardon for the _Coup d'État_. If they differed +on spiritualism in a somewhat more serious way than this, the reason +must be sought in qualities which were deeper and more elemental in +both their characters than any mere matter of opinion. Mrs. Orr, in +her excellent _Life of Browning_, states that the difficulty arose +from Mrs. Browning's firm belief in psychical phenomena and Browning's +absolute refusal to believe even in their possibility. Another writer +who met them at this time says, "Browning cannot believe, and Mrs. +Browning cannot help believing." This theory, that Browning's aversion +to the spiritualist circle arose from an absolute denial of the +tenability of such a theory of life and death, has in fact often been +repeated. But it is exceedingly difficult to reconcile it with +Browning's character. He was the last man in the world to be +intellectually deaf to a hypothesis merely because it was odd. He had +friends whose opinions covered every description of madness from the +French legitimism of De Ripert-Monclar to the Republicanism of +Landor. Intellectually he may be said to have had a zest for heresies. +It is difficult to impute an attitude of mere impenetrable negation to +a man who had expressed with sympathy the religion of "Caliban" and +the morality of "Time's Revenges." It is true that at this time of the +first popular interest in spiritualism a feeling existed among many +people of a practical turn of mind, which can only be called a +superstition against believing in ghosts. But, intellectually +speaking, Browning would probably have been one of the most tolerant +and curious in regard to the new theories, whereas the popular version +of the matter makes him unusually intolerant and negligent even for +that time. The fact was in all probability that Browning's aversion to +the spiritualists had little or nothing to do with spiritualism. It +arose from quite a different side of his character--his uncompromising +dislike of what is called Bohemianism, of eccentric or slovenly +cliques, of those straggling camp followers of the arts who exhibit +dubious manners and dubious morals, of all abnormality and of all +irresponsibility. Any one, in fact, who wishes to see what it was that +Browning disliked need only do two things. First, he should read the +_Memoirs_ of David Home, the famous spiritualist medium with whom +Browning came in contact. These _Memoirs_ constitute a more thorough +and artistic self-revelation than any monologue that Browning ever +wrote. The ghosts, the raps, the flying hands, the phantom voices are +infinitely the most respectable and infinitely the most credible part +of the narrative. But the bragging, the sentimentalism, the moral and +intellectual foppery of the composition is everywhere, culminating +perhaps in the disgusting passage in which Home describes Mrs. +Browning as weeping over him and assuring him that all her husband's +actions in the matter have been adopted against her will. It is in +this kind of thing that we find the roots of the real anger of +Browning. He did not dislike spiritualism, but spiritualists. The +second point on which any one wishing to be just in the matter should +cast an eye, is the record of the visit which Mrs. Browning insisted +on making while on their honeymoon in Paris to the house of George +Sand. Browning felt, and to some extent expressed, exactly the same +aversion to his wife mixing with the circle of George Sand which he +afterwards felt at her mixing with the circle of Home. The society was +"of the ragged red, diluted with the low theatrical, men who worship +George Sand, _à genou bas_ between an oath and an ejection of saliva." +When we find that a man did not object to any number of Jacobites or +Atheists, but objected to the French Bohemian poets and to the early +occultist mediums as friends for his wife, we shall surely be fairly +right in concluding that he objected not to an opinion, but to a +social tone. The truth was that Browning had a great many admirably +Philistine feelings, and one of them was a great relish for his +responsibilities towards his wife. He enjoyed being a husband. This is +quite a distinct thing from enjoying being a lover, though it will +scarcely be found apart from it. But, like all good feelings, it has +its possible exaggerations, and one of them is this almost morbid +healthiness in the choice of friends for his wife. + +David Home, the medium, came to Florence about 1857. Mrs. Browning +undoubtedly threw herself into psychical experiments with great ardour +at first, and Browning, equally undoubtedly, opposed, and at length +forbade, the enterprise. He did not do so however until he had +attended one _séance_ at least, at which a somewhat ridiculous event +occurred, which is described in Home's _Memoirs_ with a gravity even +more absurd than the incident. Towards the end of the proceedings a +wreath was placed in the centre of the table, and the lights being +lowered, it was caused to rise slowly into the air, and after hovering +for some time, to move towards Mrs. Browning, and at length to alight +upon her head. As the wreath was floating in her direction, her +husband was observed abruptly to cross the room and stand beside her. +One would think it was a sufficiently natural action on the part of a +man whose wife was the centre of a weird and disturbing experiment, +genuine or otherwise. But Mr. Home gravely asserts that it was +generally believed that Browning had crossed the room in the hope that +the wreath would alight on his head, and that from the hour of its +disobliging refusal to do so dated the whole of his goaded and +malignant aversion to spiritualism. The idea of the very conventional +and somewhat bored Robert Browning running about the room after a +wreath in the hope of putting his head into it, is one of the genuine +gleams of humour in this rather foolish affair. Browning could be +fairly violent, as we know, both in poetry and conversation; but it +would be almost too terrible to conjecture what he would have felt and +said if Mr. Home's wreath had alighted on his head. + +Next day, according to Home's account, he called on the hostess of the +previous night in what the writer calls "a ridiculous state of +excitement," and told her apparently that she must excuse him if he +and his wife did not attend any more gatherings of the kind. What +actually occurred is not, of course, quite easy to ascertain, for the +account in Home's _Memoirs_ principally consists of noble speeches +made by the medium which would seem either to have reduced Browning to +a pulverised silence, or else to have failed to attract his attention. +But there can be no doubt that the general upshot of the affair was +that Browning put his foot down, and the experiments ceased. There can +be little doubt that he was justified in this; indeed, he was probably +even more justified if the experiments were genuine psychical +mysteries than if they were the _hocus-pocus_ of a charlatan. He knew +his wife better than posterity can be expected to do; but even +posterity can see that she was the type of woman so much adapted to +the purposes of men like Home as to exhibit almost invariably either a +great craving for such experiences or a great terror of them. Like +many geniuses, but not all, she lived naturally upon something like a +borderland; and it is impossible to say that if Browning had not +interposed when she was becoming hysterical she might not have ended +in an asylum. + +The whole of this incident is very characteristic of Browning; but the +real characteristic note in it has, as above suggested, been to some +extent missed. When some seven years afterwards he produced "Mr. +Sludge the Medium," every one supposed that it was an attack upon +spiritualism and the possibility of its phenomena. As we shall see +when we come to that poem, this is a wholly mistaken interpretation of +it. But what is really curious is that most people have assumed that a +dislike of Home's investigations implies a theoretic disbelief in +spiritualism. It might, of course, imply a very firm and serious +belief in it. As a matter of fact it did not imply this in Browning, +but it may perfectly well have implied an agnosticism which admitted +the reasonableness of such things. Home was infinitely less dangerous +as a dexterous swindler than he was as a bad or foolish man in +possession of unknown or ill-comprehended powers. It is surely curious +to think that a man must object to exposing his wife to a few +conjuring tricks, but could not be afraid of exposing her to the loose +and nameless energies of the universe. + +Browning's theoretic attitude in the matter was, therefore, in all +probability quite open and unbiassed. His was a peculiarly hospitable +intellect. If any one had told him of the spiritualist theory, or +theories a hundred times more insane, as things held by some sect of +Gnostics in Alexandria, or of heretical Talmudists at Antwerp, he +would have delighted in those theories, and would very likely have +adopted them. But Greek Gnostics and Antwerp Jews do not dance round a +man's wife and wave their hands in her face and send her into swoons +and trances about which nobody knows anything rational or scientific. +It was simply the stirring in Browning of certain primal masculine +feelings far beyond the reach of argument--things that lie so deep +that if they are hurt, though there may be no blame and no anger, +there is always pain. Browning did not like spiritualism to be +mentioned for many years. + +Robert Browning was unquestionably a thoroughly conventional man. +There are many who think this element of conventionality altogether +regrettable and disgraceful; they have established, as it were, a +convention of the unconventional. But this hatred of the conventional +element in the personality of a poet is only possible to those who do +not remember the meaning of words. Convention means only a coming +together, an agreement; and as every poet must base his work upon an +emotional agreement among men, so every poet must base his work upon a +convention. Every art is, of course, based upon a convention, an +agreement between the speaker and the listener that certain objections +shall not be raised. The most realistic art in the world is open to +realistic objection. Against the most exact and everyday drama that +ever came out of Norway it is still possible for the realist to raise +the objection that the hero who starts a subject and drops it, who +runs out of a room and runs back again for his hat, is all the time +behaving in a most eccentric manner, considering that he is doing +these things in a room in which one of the four walls has been taken +clean away and been replaced by a line of footlights and a mob of +strangers. Against the most accurate black-and-white artist that human +imagination can conceive it is still to be admitted that he draws a +black line round a man's nose, and that that line is a lie. And in +precisely the same fashion a poet must, by the nature of things, be +conventional. Unless he is describing an emotion which others share +with him, his labours will be utterly in vain. If a poet really had an +original emotion; if, for example, a poet suddenly fell in love with +the buffers of a railway train, it would take him considerably more +time than his allotted three-score years and ten to communicate his +feelings. + +Poetry deals with primal and conventional things--the hunger for +bread, the love of woman, the love of children, the desire for +immortal life. If men really had new sentiments, poetry could not deal +with them. If, let us say, a man did not feel a bitter craving to eat +bread; but did, by way of substitute, feel a fresh, original craving +to eat brass fenders or mahogany tables, poetry could not express him. +If a man, instead of falling in love with a woman, fell in love with a +fossil or a sea anemone, poetry could not express him. Poetry can only +express what is original in one sense--the sense in which we speak of +original sin. It is original, not in the paltry sense of being new, +but in the deeper sense of being old; it is original in the sense that +it deals with origins. + +All artists, who have any experience of the arts, will agree so far, +that a poet is bound to be conventional with regard to matters of art. +Unfortunately, however, they are the very people who cannot, as a +general rule, see that a poet is also bound to be conventional in +matters of conduct. It is only the smaller poet who sees the poetry of +revolt, of isolation, of disagreement; the larger poet sees the poetry +of those great agreements which constitute the romantic achievement of +civilisation. Just as an agreement between the dramatist and the +audience is necessary to every play; just as an agreement between the +painter and the spectators is necessary to every picture, so an +agreement is necessary to produce the worship of any of the great +figures of morality--the hero, the saint, the average man, the +gentleman. Browning had, it must thoroughly be realised, a real +pleasure in these great agreements, these great conventions. He +delighted, with a true poetic delight, in being conventional. Being +by birth an Englishman, he took pleasure in being an Englishman; being +by rank a member of the middle class, he took a pride in its ancient +scruples and its everlasting boundaries. He was everything that he was +with a definite and conscious pleasure--a man, a Liberal, an +Englishman, an author, a gentleman, a lover, a married man. + +This must always be remembered as a general characteristic of +Browning, this ardent and headlong conventionality. He exhibited it +pre-eminently in the affair of his elopement and marriage, during and +after the escape of himself and his wife to Italy. He seems to have +forgotten everything, except the splendid worry of being married. He +showed a thoroughly healthy consciousness that he was taking up a +responsibility which had its practical side. He came finally and +entirely out of his dreams. Since he had himself enough money to live +on, he had never thought of himself as doing anything but writing +poetry; poetry indeed was probably simmering and bubbling in his head +day and night. But when the problem of the elopement arose he threw +himself with an energy, of which it is pleasant to read, into every +kind of scheme for solidifying his position. He wrote to Monckton +Milnes, and would appear to have badgered him with applications for a +post in the British Museum. "I will work like a horse," he said, with +that boyish note, which, whenever in his unconsciousness he strikes +it, is more poetical than all his poems. All his language in this +matter is emphatic; he would be "glad and proud," he says, "to have +any minor post" his friend could obtain for him. He offered to read +for the Bar, and probably began doing so. But all this vigorous and +very creditable materialism was ruthlessly extinguished by Elizabeth +Barrett. She declined altogether even to entertain the idea of her +husband devoting himself to anything else at the expense of poetry. +Probably she was right and Browning wrong, but it was an error which +every man would desire to have made. + +One of the qualities again which make Browning most charming, is the +fact that he felt and expressed so simple and genuine a satisfaction +about his own achievements as a lover and husband, particularly in +relation to his triumph in the hygienic care of his wife. "If he is +vain of anything," writes Mrs. Browning, "it is of my restored +health." Later, she adds with admirable humour and suggestiveness, +"and I have to tell him that he really must not go telling everybody +how his wife walked here with him, or walked there with him, as if a +wife with two feet were a miracle in Nature." When a lady in Italy +said, on an occasion when Browning stayed behind with his wife on the +day of a picnic, that he was "the only man who behaved like a +Christian to his wife," Browning was elated to an almost infantile +degree. But there could scarcely be a better test of the essential +manliness and decency of a man than this test of his vanities. +Browning boasted of being domesticated; there are half a hundred men +everywhere who would be inclined to boast of not being domesticated. +Bad men are almost without exception conceited, but they are commonly +conceited of their defects. + +One picturesque figure who plays a part in this portion of the +Brownings' life in Italy is Walter Savage Landor. Browning found him +living with some of his wife's relations, and engaged in a continuous +and furious quarrel with them, which was, indeed, not uncommonly the +condition of that remarkable man when living with other human beings. +He had the double arrogance which is only possible to that old and +stately but almost extinct blend--the aristocratic republican. Like an +old Roman senator, or like a gentleman of the Southern States of +America, he had the condescension of a gentleman to those below him, +combined with the jealous self-assertiveness of a Jacobin to those +above. The only person who appears to have been able to manage him and +bring out his more agreeable side was Browning. It is, by the way, one +of the many hints of a certain element in Browning which can only be +described by the elementary and old-fashioned word goodness, that he +always contrived to make himself acceptable and even lovable to men of +savage and capricious temperament, of detached and erratic genius, who +could get on with no one else. Carlyle, who could not get a bitter +taste off his tongue in talking of most of his contemporaries, was +fond of Browning. Landor, who could hardly conduct an ordinary +business interview without beginning to break the furniture, was fond +of Browning. These are things which speak more for a man than many +people will understand. It is easy enough to be agreeable to a circle +of admirers, especially feminine admirers, who have a peculiar talent +for discipleship and the absorption of ideas. But when a man is loved +by other men of his own intellectual stature and of a wholly different +type and order of eminence, we may be certain that there was something +genuine about him, and something far more important than anything +intellectual. Men do not like another man because he is a genius, +least of all when they happen to be geniuses themselves. This general +truth about Browning is like hearing of a woman who is the most famous +beauty in a city, and who is at the same time adored and confided in +by all the women who live there. + +Browning came to the rescue of the fiery old gentleman, and helped by +Seymour Kirkup put him under very definite obligations by a course of +very generous conduct. He was fully repaid in his own mind for his +trouble by the mere presence and friendship of Landor, for whose +quaint and volcanic personality he had a vast admiration, compounded +of the pleasure of the artist in an oddity and of the man in a hero. +It is somewhat amusing and characteristic that Mrs. Browning did not +share this unlimited enjoyment of the company of Mr. Landor, and +expressed her feelings in her own humorous manner. She writes, "Dear, +darling Robert amuses me by talking of his gentleness and sweetness. A +most courteous and refined gentleman he is, of course, and very +affectionate to Robert (as he ought to be), but of self-restraint he +has not a grain, and of suspicion many grains. What do you really say +to dashing down a plate on the floor when you don't like what's on it? +Robert succeeded in soothing him, and the poor old lion is very quiet +on the whole, roaring softly to beguile the time in Latin alcaics +against his wife and Louis Napoleon." + +One event alone could really end this endless life of the Italian +Arcadia. That event happened on June 29, 1861. Robert Browning's wife +died, stricken by the death of her sister, and almost as hard (it is a +characteristic touch) by the death of Cavour. She died alone in the +room with Browning, and of what passed then, though much has been +said, little should be. He, closing the door of that room behind him, +closed a door in himself, and none ever saw Browning upon earth again +but only a splendid surface. + + + + +CHAPTER V + +BROWNING IN LATER LIFE + + +Browning's confidences, what there were of them, immediately after his +wife's death were given to several women-friends; all his life, +indeed, he was chiefly intimate with women. The two most intimate of +these were his own sister, who remained with him in all his later +years, and the sister of his wife, who seven years afterwards passed +away in his presence as Elizabeth had done. The other letters, which +number only one or two, referring in any personal manner to his +bereavement are addressed to Miss Haworth and Isa Blagden. He left +Florence and remained for a time with his father and sister near +Dinard. Then he returned to London and took up his residence in +Warwick Crescent. Naturally enough, the thing for which he now chiefly +lived was the education of his son, and it is characteristic of +Browning that he was not only a very indulgent father, but an +indulgent father of a very conventional type: he had rather the +chuckling pride of the city gentleman than the educational gravity of +the intellectual. + +Browning was now famous, _Bells and Pomegranates, Men and Women, +Christmas Eve_, and _Dramatis Personæ_ had successively glorified his +Italian period. But he was already brooding half-unconsciously on more +famous things. He has himself left on record a description of the +incident out of which grew the whole impulse and plan of his greatest +achievement. In a passage marked with all his peculiar sense of +material things, all that power of writing of stone or metal or the +fabric of drapery, so that we seem to be handling and smelling them, +he has described a stall for the selling of odds and ends of every +variety of utility and uselessness:-- + + "picture frames + White through the worn gilt, mirror-sconces chipped, + Bronze angel-heads once knobs attached to chests, + (Handled when ancient dames chose forth brocade) + Modern chalk drawings, studies from the nude, + Samples of stone, jet, breccia, porphyry + Polished and rough, sundry amazing busts + In baked earth, (broken, Providence be praised!) + A wreck of tapestry proudly-purposed web + When reds and blues were indeed red and blue, + Now offer'd as a mat to save bare feet + (Since carpets constitute a cruel cost). + * * * * * + Vulgarised Horace for the use of schools, + 'The Life, Death, Miracles of Saint Somebody, + Saint Somebody Else, his Miracles, Death, and Life'-- + With this, one glance at the lettered back of which, + And 'Stall,' cried I; a _lira_ made it mine." + +This sketch embodies indeed the very poetry of _débris_, and comes +nearer than any other poem has done to expressing the pathos and +picturesqueness of a low-class pawnshop. "This," which Browning bought +for a lira out of this heap of rubbish, was, of course, the old Latin +record of the criminal case of Guido Franceschini, tried for the +murder of his wife Pompilia in the year 1698. And this again, it is +scarcely necessary to say, was the ground-plan and motive of _The Ring +and the Book_. + +Browning had picked up the volume and partly planned the poem during +his wife's lifetime in Italy. But the more he studied it, the more the +dimensions of the theme appeared to widen and deepen; and he came at +last, there can be little doubt, to regard it definitely as his +_magnum opus_ to which he would devote many years to come. Then came +the great sorrow of his life, and he cast about him for something +sufficiently immense and arduous and complicated to keep his brain +going like some huge and automatic engine. "I mean to keep writing," +he said, "whether I like it or not." And thus finally he took up the +scheme of the Franceschini story, and developed it on a scale with a +degree of elaboration, repetition, and management, and inexhaustible +scholarship which was never perhaps before given in the history of the +world to an affair of two or three characters. Of the larger literary +and spiritual significance of the work, particularly in reference to +its curious and original form of narration, I shall speak +subsequently. But there is one peculiarity about the story which has +more direct bearing on Browning's life, and it appears singular that +few, if any, of his critics have noticed it. This peculiarity is the +extraordinary resemblance between the moral problem involved in the +poem if understood in its essence, and the moral problem which +constituted the crisis and centre of Browning's own life. Nothing, +properly speaking, ever happened to Browning after his wife's death; +and his greatest work during that time was the telling, under alien +symbols and the veil of a wholly different story, the inner truth +about his own greatest trial and hesitation. He himself had in this +sense the same difficulty as Caponsacchi, the supreme difficulty of +having to trust himself to the reality of virtue not only without the +reward, but even without the name of virtue. He had, like Caponsacchi, +preferred what was unselfish and dubious to what was selfish and +honourable. He knew better than any man that there is little danger of +men who really know anything of that naked and homeless responsibility +seeking it too often or indulging it too much. The conscientiousness +of the law-abider is nothing in its terrors to the conscientiousness +of the conscientious law-breaker. Browning had once, for what he +seriously believed to be a greater good, done what he himself would +never have had the cant to deny, ought to be called deceit and +evasion. Such a thing ought never to come to a man twice. If he finds +that necessity twice, he may, I think, be looked at with the beginning +of a suspicion. To Browning it came once, and he devoted his greatest +poem to a suggestion of how such a necessity may come to any man who +is worthy to live. + +As has already been suggested, any apparent danger that there may be +in this excusing of an exceptional act is counteracted by the perils +of the act, since it must always be remembered that this kind of act +has the immense difference from all legal acts--that it can only be +justified by success. If Browning had taken his wife to Paris, and she +had died in an hotel there, we can only conceive him saying, with the +bitter emphasis of one of his own lines, "How should I have borne me, +please?" Before and after this event his life was as tranquil and +casual a one as it would be easy to imagine; but there always remained +upon him something which was felt by all who knew him in after +years--the spirit of a man who had been ready when his time came, and +had walked in his own devotion and certainty in a position counted +indefensible and almost along the brink of murder. This great moral of +Browning, which may be called roughly the doctrine of the great hour, +enters, of course, into many poems besides _The Ring and the Book_, +and is indeed the mainspring of a great part of his poetry taken as a +whole. It is, of course, the central idea of that fine poem, "The +Statue and the Bust," which has given a great deal of distress to a +great many people because of its supposed invasion of recognised +morality. It deals, as every one knows, with a Duke Ferdinand and an +elopement which he planned with the bride of one of the Riccardi. The +lovers begin by deferring their flight for various more or less +comprehensible reasons of convenience; but the habit of shrinking from +the final step grows steadily upon them, and they never take it, but +die, as it were, waiting for each other. The objection that the act +thus avoided was a criminal one is very simply and quite clearly +answered by Browning himself. His case against the dilatory couple is +not in the least affected by the viciousness of their aim. His case is +that they exhibited no virtue. Crime was frustrated in them by +cowardice, which is probably the worse immorality of the two. The same +idea again may be found in that delightful lyric "Youth and Art," +where a successful cantatrice reproaches a successful sculptor with +their failure to understand each other in their youth and poverty. + + "Each life unfulfilled, you see; + It hangs still, patchy and scrappy: + We have not sighed deep, laughed free, + Starved, feasted, despaired,--been happy." + +And this conception of the great hour, which breaks out everywhere in +Browning, it is almost impossible not to connect with his own internal +drama. It is really curious that this correspondence has not been +insisted on. Probably critics have been misled by the fact that +Browning in many places appears to boast that he is purely dramatic, +that he has never put himself into his work, a thing which no poet, +good or bad, who ever lived could possibly avoid doing. + +The enormous scope and seriousness of _The Ring and the Book_ occupied +Browning for some five or six years, and the great epic appeared in +the winter of 1868. Just before it was published Smith and Elder +brought out a uniform edition of all Browning's works up to that time, +and the two incidents taken together may be considered to mark the +final and somewhat belated culmination of Browning's literary fame. +The years since his wife's death, that had been covered by the writing +of _The Ring and the Book_, had been years of an almost feverish +activity in that and many other ways. His travels had been restless +and continued, his industry immense, and for the first time he began +that mode of life which afterwards became so characteristic of +him--the life of what is called society. A man of a shallower and more +sentimental type would have professed to find the life of +dinner-tables and soirées vain and unsatisfying to a poet, and +especially to a poet in mourning. But if there is one thing more than +another which is stirring and honourable about Browning, it is the +entire absence in him of this cant of dissatisfaction. He had the one +great requirement of a poet--he was not difficult to please. The life +of society was superficial, but it is only very superficial people who +object to the superficial. To the man who sees the marvellousness of +all things, the surface of life is fully as strange and magical as its +interior; clearness and plainness of life is fully as mysterious as +its mysteries. The young man in evening dress, pulling on his gloves, +is quite as elemental a figure as any anchorite, quite as +incomprehensible, and indeed quite as alarming. + +A great many literary persons have expressed astonishment at, or even +disapproval of, this social frivolity of Browning's. Not one of these +literary people would have been shocked if Browning's interest in +humanity had led him into a gambling hell in the Wild West or a low +tavern in Paris; but it seems to be tacitly assumed that fashionable +people are not human at all. Humanitarians of a material and dogmatic +type, the philanthropists and the professional reformers go to look +for humanity in remote places and in huge statistics. Humanitarians of +a more vivid type, the Bohemian artists, go to look for humanity in +thieves' kitchens and the studios of the Quartier Latin. But +humanitarians of the highest type, the great poets and philosophers, +do not go to look for humanity at all. For them alone among all men +the nearest drawing-room is full of humanity, and even their own +families are human. Shakespeare ended his life by buying a house in +his own native town and talking to the townsmen. Browning was invited +to a great many conversaziones and private views, and did not pretend +that they bored him. In a letter belonging to this period of his life +he describes his first dinner at one of the Oxford colleges with an +unaffected delight and vanity, which reminds the reader of nothing so +much as the pride of the boy-captain of a public school if he were +invited to a similar function and received a few compliments. It may +be indeed that Browning had a kind of second youth in this +long-delayed social recognition, but at least he enjoyed his second +youth nearly as much as his first, and it is not every one who can do +that. + +Of Browning's actual personality and presence in this later middle age +of his, memories are still sufficiently clear. He was a middle-sized, +well set up, erect man, with somewhat emphatic gestures, and, as +almost all testimonies mention, a curiously strident voice. The beard, +the removal of which his wife had resented with so quaint an +indignation, had grown again, but grown quite white, which, as she +said when it occurred, was a signal mark of the justice of the gods. +His hair was still fairly dark, and his whole appearance at this time +must have been very well represented by Mr. G.F. Watts's fine portrait +in the National Portrait Gallery. The portrait bears one of the many +testimonies which exist to Mr. Watts's grasp of the essential of +character, for it is the only one of the portraits of Browning in +which we get primarily the air of virility, even of animal virility, +tempered but not disguised, with a certain touch of the pallor of the +brain-worker. He looks here what he was--a very healthy man, too +scholarly to live a completely healthy life. + +His manner in society, as has been more than once indicated, was that +of a man anxious, if anything, to avoid the air of intellectual +eminence. Lockhart said briefly, "I like Browning; he isn't at all +like a damned literary man." He was, according to some, upon occasion, +talkative and noisy to a fault; but there are two kinds of men who +monopolise conversation. The first kind are those who like the sound +of their own voice; the second are those who do not know what the +sound of their own voice is like. Browning was one of the latter +class. His volubility in speech had the same origin as his +voluminousness and obscurity in literature--a kind of headlong +humility. He cannot assuredly have been aware that he talked people +down or have wished to do so. For this would have been precisely a +violation of the ideal of the man of the world, the one ambition and +even weakness that he had. He wished to be a man of the world, and he +never in the full sense was one. He remained a little too much of a +boy, a little too much even of a Puritan, and a little too much of +what may be called a man of the universe, to be a man of the world. + +One of his faults probably was the thing roughly called prejudice. On +the question, for example, of table-turning and psychic phenomena he +was in a certain degree fierce and irrational. He was not indeed, as +we shall see when we come to study "Sludge the Medium," exactly +prejudiced against spiritualism. But he was beyond all question +stubbornly prejudiced against spiritualists. Whether the medium Home +was or was not a scoundrel it is somewhat difficult in our day to +conjecture. But in so far as he claimed supernatural powers, he may +have been as honest a gentleman as ever lived. And even if we think +that the moral atmosphere of Home is that of a man of dubious +character, we can still feel that Browning might have achieved his +purpose without making it so obvious that he thought so. Some traces +again, though much fainter ones, may be found of something like a +subconscious hostility to the Roman Church, or at least a less full +comprehension of the grandeur of the Latin religious civilisation than +might have been expected of a man of Browning's great imaginative +tolerance. Æstheticism, Bohemianism, the irresponsibilities of the +artist, the untidy morals of Grub Street and the Latin Quarter, he +hated with a consuming hatred. He was himself exact in everything, +from his scholarship to his clothes; and even when he wore the loose +white garments of the lounger in Southern Europe, they were in their +own way as precise as a dress suit. This extra carefulness in all +things he defended against the cant of Bohemianism as the right +attitude for the poet. When some one excused coarseness or negligence +on the ground of genius, he said, "That is an error: Noblesse oblige." + +Browning's prejudices, however, belonged altogether to that healthy +order which is characterised by a cheerful and satisfied ignorance. It +never does a man any very great harm to hate a thing that he knows +nothing about. It is the hating of a thing when we do know something +about it which corrodes the character. We all have a dark feeling of +resistance towards people we have never met, and a profound and manly +dislike of the authors we have never read. It does not harm a man to +be certain before opening the books that Whitman is an obscene ranter +or that Stevenson is a mere trifler with style. It is the man who can +think these things after he has read the books who must be in a fair +way to mental perdition. Prejudice, in fact, is not so much the great +intellectual sin as a thing which we may call, to coin a word, +"postjudice," not the bias before the fair trial, but the bias that +remains afterwards. With Browning's swift and emphatic nature the bias +was almost always formed before he had gone into the matter. But +almost all the men he really knew he admired, almost all the books he +had really read he enjoyed. He stands pre-eminent among those great +universalists who praised the ground they trod on and commended +existence like any other material, in its samples. He had no kinship +with those new and strange universalists of the type of Tolstoi who +praise existence to the exclusion of all the institutions they have +lived under, and all the ties they have known. He thought the world +good because he had found so many things that were good in +it--religion, the nation, the family, the social class. He did not, +like the new humanitarian, think the world good because he had found +so many things in it that were bad. + +As has been previously suggested, there was something very queer and +dangerous that underlay all the good humour of Browning. If one of +these idle prejudices were broken by better knowledge, he was all the +better pleased. But if some of the prejudices that were really rooted +in him were trodden on, even by accident, such as his aversion to +loose artistic cliques, or his aversion to undignified publicity, his +rage was something wholly transfiguring and alarming, something far +removed from the shrill disapproval of Carlyle and Ruskin. It can only +be said that he became a savage, and not always a very agreeable or +presentable savage. The indecent fury which danced upon the bones of +Edward Fitzgerald was a thing which ought not to have astonished any +one who had known much of Browning's character or even of his work. +Some unfortunate persons on another occasion had obtained some of Mrs. +Browning's letters shortly after her death, and proposed to write a +_Life_ founded upon them. They ought to have understood that Browning +would probably disapprove; but if he talked to them about it, as he +did to others, and it is exceedingly probable that he did, they must +have thought he was mad. "What I suffer with the paws of these +black-guards in my bowels you can fancy," he says. Again he writes: +"Think of this beast working away, not deeming my feelings, or those +of her family, worthy of notice. It shall not be done if I can stop +the scamp's knavery along with his breath." Whether Browning actually +resorted to this extreme course is unknown; nothing is known except +that he wrote a letter to the ambitious biographer which reduced him +to silence, probably from stupefaction. + +The same peculiarity ought, as I have said, to have been apparent to +any one who knew anything of Browning's literary work. A great number +of his poems are marked by a trait of which by its nature it is more +or less impossible to give examples. Suffice it to say that it is +truly extraordinary that poets like Swinburne (who seldom uses a gross +word) should have been spoken of as if they had introduced moral +license into Victorian poetry. What the Non-conformist conscience has +been doing to have passed Browning is something difficult to imagine. +But the peculiarity of this occasional coarseness in his work is +this--that it is always used to express a certain wholesome fury and +contempt for things sickly, or ungenerous, or unmanly. The poet seems +to feel that there are some things so contemptible that you can only +speak of them in pothouse words. It would be idle, and perhaps +undesirable, to give examples; but it may be noted that the same +brutal physical metaphor is used by his Caponsacchi about the people +who could imagine Pompilia impure and by his Shakespeare in "At the +Mermaid," about the claim of the Byronic poet to enter into the heart +of humanity. In both cases Browning feels, and perhaps in a manner +rightly, that the best thing we can do with a sentiment essentially +base is to strip off its affectations and state it basely, and that +the mud of Chaucer is a great deal better than the poison of Sterne. +Herein again Browning is close to the average man; and to do the +average man justice, there is a great deal more of this Browningesque +hatred of Byronism in the brutality of his conversation than many +people suppose. + +Such, roughly and as far as we can discover, was the man who, in the +full summer and even the full autumn of his intellectual powers, began +to grow upon the consciousness of the English literary world about +this time. For the first time friendship grew between him and the +other great men of his time. Tennyson, for whom he then and always +felt the best and most personal kind of admiration, came into his +life, and along with him Gladstone and Francis Palgrave. There began +to crowd in upon him those honours whereby a man is to some extent +made a classic in his lifetime, so that he is honoured even if he is +unread. He was made a Fellow of Balliol in 1867, and the homage of the +great universities continued thenceforth unceasingly until his death, +despite many refusals on his part. He was unanimously elected Lord +Rector of Glasgow University in 1875. He declined, owing to his deep +and somewhat characteristic aversion to formal public speaking, and in +1877 he had to decline on similar grounds the similar offer from the +University of St. Andrews. He was much at the English universities, +was a friend of Dr. Jowett, and enjoyed the university life at the age +of sixty-three in a way that he probably would not have enjoyed it if +he had ever been to a university. The great universities would not let +him alone, to their great credit, and he became a D.C.L. of Cambridge +in 1879, and a D.C.L. of Oxford in 1882. When he received these +honours there were, of course, the traditional buffooneries of the +undergraduates, and one of them dropped a red cotton night-cap neatly +on his head as he passed under the gallery. Some indignant +intellectuals wrote to him to protest against this affront, but +Browning took the matter in the best and most characteristic way. "You +are far too hard," he wrote in answer, "on the very harmless +drolleries of the young men. Indeed, there used to be a regularly +appointed jester, 'Filius Terrae' he was called, whose business it was +to gibe and jeer at the honoured ones by way of reminder that all +human glories are merely gilded baubles and must not be fancied +metal." In this there are other and deeper things characteristic of +Browning besides his learning and humour. In discussing anything, he +must always fall back upon great speculative and eternal ideas. Even +in the tomfoolery of a horde of undergraduates he can only see a +symbol of the ancient office of ridicule in the scheme of morals. The +young men themselves were probably unaware that they were the +representatives of the "Filius Terrae." + +But the years during which Browning was thus reaping some of his late +laurels began to be filled with incidents that reminded him how the +years were passing over him. On June 20, 1866, his father had died, a +man of whom it is impossible to think without a certain emotion, a man +who had lived quietly and persistently for others, to whom Browning +owed more than it is easy to guess, to whom we in all probability +mainly owe Browning. In 1868 one of his closest friends, Arabella +Barrett, the sister of his wife, died, as her sister had done, alone +with Browning. Browning was not a superstitious man; he somewhat +stormily prided himself on the contrary; but he notes at this time "a +dream which Arabella had of Her, in which she prophesied their meeting +in five years," that is, of course, the meeting of Elizabeth and +Arabella. His friend Milsand, to whom _Sordello_ was dedicated, died +in 1886. "I never knew," said Browning, "or ever shall know, his like +among men." But though both fame and a growing isolation indicated +that he was passing towards the evening of his days, though he bore +traces of the progress, in a milder attitude towards things, and a +greater preference for long exiles with those he loved, one thing +continued in him with unconquerable energy--there was no diminution in +the quantity, no abatement in the immense designs of his intellectual +output. + +In 1871 he produced _Balaustion's Adventure_, a work exhibiting not +only his genius in its highest condition of power, but something more +exacting even than genius to a man of his mature and changed life, +immense investigation, prodigious memory, the thorough assimilation +of the vast literature of a remote civilisation. _Balaustion's +Adventure_, which is, of course, the mere framework for an English +version of the Alcestis of Euripides, is an illustration of one of +Browning's finest traits, his immeasurable capacity for a classic +admiration. Those who knew him tell us that in conversation he never +revealed himself so impetuously or so brilliantly as when declaiming +the poetry of others; and _Balaustion's Adventure_ is a monument of +this fiery self-forgetfulness. It is penetrated with the passionate +desire to render Euripides worthily, and to that imitation are for the +time being devoted all the gigantic powers which went to make the +songs of Pippa and the last agony of Guido. Browning never put himself +into anything more powerfully or more successfully; yet it is only an +excellent translation. In the uncouth philosophy of Caliban, in the +tangled ethics of Sludge, in his wildest satire, in his most +feather-headed lyric, Browning was never more thoroughly Browning than +in this splendid and unselfish plagiarism. This revived excitement in +Greek matters; "his passionate love of the Greek language" continued +in him thenceforward till his death. He published more than one poem +on the drama of Hellas. _Aristophanes' Apology_ came out in 1875, and +_The Agamemnon of Æschylus_, another paraphrase, in 1877. All three +poems are marked by the same primary characteristic, the fact that the +writer has the literature of Athens literally at his fingers' ends. He +is intimate not only with their poetry and politics, but with their +frivolity and their slang; he knows not only Athenian wisdom, but +Athenian folly; not only the beauty of Greece, but even its vulgarity. +In fact, a page of _Aristophanes' Apology_ is like a page of +Aristophanes, dark with levity and as obscure as a schoolman's +treatise, with its load of jokes. + +In 1871 also appeared _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau: Saviour of +Society_, one of the finest and most picturesque of all Browning's +apologetic monologues. The figure is, of course, intended for Napoleon +III., whose Empire had just fallen, bringing down his country with it. +The saying has been often quoted that Louis Napoleon deceived Europe +twice--once when he made it think he was a noodle, and once when he +made it think he was a statesman. It might be added that Europe was +never quite just to him, and was deceived a third time, when it took +him after his fall for an exploded mountebank and nonentity. Amid the +general chorus of contempt which was raised over his weak and +unscrupulous policy in later years, culminating in his great disaster, +there are few things finer than this attempt of Browning's to give the +man a platform and let him speak for himself. It is the apologia of a +political adventurer, and a political adventurer of a kind peculiarly +open to popular condemnation. Mankind has always been somewhat +inclined to forgive the adventurer who destroys or re-creates, but +there is nothing inspiring about the adventurer who merely preserves. +We have sympathy with the rebel who aims at reconstruction, but there +is something repugnant to the imagination in the rebel who rebels in +the name of compromise. Browning had to defend, or rather to +interpret, a man who kidnapped politicians in the night and deluged +the Montmartre with blood, not for an ideal, not for a reform, not +precisely even for a cause, but simply for the establishment of a +_régime_. He did these hideous things not so much that he might be +able to do better ones, but that he and every one else might be able +to do nothing for twenty years; and Browning's contention, and a very +plausible contention, is that the criminal believed that his crime +would establish order and compromise, or, in other words, that he +thought that nothing was the very best thing he and his people could +do. There is something peculiarly characteristic of Browning in thus +selecting not only a political villain, but what would appear the most +prosaic kind of villain. We scarcely ever find in Browning a defence +of those obvious and easily defended publicans and sinners whose +mingled virtues and vices are the stuff of romance and melodrama--the +generous rake, the kindly drunkard, the strong man too great for +parochial morals. He was in a yet more solitary sense the friend of +the outcast. He took in the sinners whom even sinners cast out. He +went with the hypocrite and had mercy on the Pharisee. + +How little this desire of Browning's, to look for a moment at the +man's life with the man's eyes, was understood, may be gathered from +the criticisms on _Hohenstiel-Schwangau_, which, says Browning, "the +Editor of the _Edinburgh Review_ calls my eulogium on the Second +Empire, which it is not, any more than what another wiseacre affirms +it to be, a scandalous attack on the old constant friend of England. +It is just what I imagine the man might, if he pleased, say for +himself." + +In 1873 appeared _Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country_, which, if it be not +absolutely one of the finest of Browning's poems, is certainly one of +the most magnificently Browningesque. The origin of the name of the +poem is probably well known. He was travelling along the Normandy +coast, and discovered what he called + + "Meek, hitherto un-Murrayed bathing-places, + Best loved of sea-coast-nook-full Normandy!" + +Miss Thackeray, who was of the party, delighted Browning beyond +measure by calling the sleepy old fishing district "White Cotton +Night-Cap Country." It was exactly the kind of elfish phrase to which +Browning had, it must always be remembered, a quite unconquerable +attraction. The notion of a town of sleep, where men and women walked +about in nightcaps, a nation of somnambulists, was the kind of thing +that Browning in his heart loved better than _Paradise Lost_. Some +time afterwards he read in a newspaper a very painful story of +profligacy and suicide which greatly occupied the French journals in +the year 1871, and which had taken place in the same district. It is +worth noting that Browning was one of those wise men who can perceive +the terrible and impressive poetry of the police-news, which is +commonly treated as vulgarity, which is dreadful and may be +undesirable, but is certainly not vulgar. From _The Ring and the Book_ +to _Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country_ a great many of his works might be +called magnificent detective stories. The story is somewhat ugly, and +its power does not alter its ugliness, for power can only make +ugliness uglier. And in this poem there is little or nothing of the +revelation of that secret wealth of valour and patience in humanity +which makes real and redeems the revelation of its secret vileness in +_The Ring and the Book_. It almost looks at first sight as if Browning +had for a moment surrendered the whole of his impregnable +philosophical position and admitted the strange heresy that a human +story can be sordid. But this view of the poem is, of course, a +mistake. It was written in something which, for want of a more exact +word, we must call one of the bitter moods of Browning; but the +bitterness is entirely the product of a certain generous hostility +against the class of morbidities which he really detested, sometimes +more than they deserved. In this poem these principles of weakness and +evil are embodied to him as the sicklier kind of Romanism, and the +more sensual side of the French temperament. We must never forget what +a great deal of the Puritan there remained in Browning to the end. +This outburst of it is fierce and ironical, not in his best spirit. It +says in effect, "You call this a country of sleep, I call it a country +of death. You call it 'White Cotton Night-Cap Country'; I call it 'Red +Cotton Night-Cap Country.'" + +Shortly before this, in 1872, he had published _Fifine at the Fair_, +which his principal biographer, and one of his most uncompromising +admirers, calls a piece of perplexing cynicism. Perplexing it may be +to some extent, for it was almost impossible to tell whether Browning +would or would not be perplexing even in a love-song or a post-card. +But cynicism is a word that cannot possibly be applied with any +propriety to anything that Browning ever wrote. Cynicism denotes that +condition of mind in which we hold that life is in its nature mean and +arid; that no soul contains genuine goodness, and no state of things +genuine reliability. _Fifine at the Fair_, like _Prince +Hohenstiel-Schwangau_, is one of Browning's apologetic +soliloquies--the soliloquy of an epicurean who seeks half-playfully +to justify upon moral grounds an infidelity into which he afterwards +actually falls. This casuist, like all Browning's casuists, is given +many noble outbursts and sincere moments, and therefore apparently the +poem is called cynical. It is difficult to understand what particular +connection there is between seeing good in nobody and seeing good even +in a sensual fool. + +After _Fifine at the Fair_ appeared the _Inn Album_, in 1875, a purely +narrative work, chiefly interesting as exhibiting in yet another place +one of Browning's vital characteristics, a pleasure in retelling and +interpreting actual events of a sinister and criminal type; and after +the _Inn Album_ came what is perhaps the most preposterously +individual thing he ever wrote, _Of Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in +Distemper_, in 1876. It is impossible to call the work poetry, and it +is very difficult indeed to know what to call it. Its chief +characteristic is a kind of galloping energy, an energy that has +nothing intellectual or even intelligible about it, a purely animal +energy of words. Not only is it not beautiful, it is not even clever, +and yet it carries the reader away as he might be carried away by +romping children. It ends up with a voluble and largely unmeaning +malediction upon the poet's critics, a malediction so outrageously +good-humoured that it does not take the trouble even to make itself +clear to the objects of its wrath. One can compare the poem to nothing +in heaven or earth, except to the somewhat humorous, more or less +benevolent, and most incomprehensible catalogues of curses and oaths +which may be heard from an intoxicated navvy. This is the kind of +thing, and it goes on for pages:-- + + "Long after the last of your number + Has ceased my front-court to encumber + While, treading down rose and ranunculus, + You _Tommy-make-room-for-your-uncle_-us! + Troop, all of you man or homunculus, + Quick march! for Xanthippe, my housemaid, + If once on your pates she a souse made + With what, pan or pot, bowl or _skoramis_, + First comes to her hand--things were more amiss! + I would not for worlds be your place in-- + Recipient of slops from the basin! + You, Jack-in-the-Green, leaf-and-twiggishness + Won't save a dry thread on your priggishness!" + +You can only call this, in the most literal sense of the word, the +brute-force of language. + +In spite however of this monstrosity among poems, which gives its +title to the volume, it contains some of the most beautiful verses +that Browning ever wrote in that style of light philosophy in which he +was unequalled. Nothing ever gave so perfectly and artistically what +is too loosely talked about as a thrill, as the poem called "Fears and +Scruples," in which a man describes the mystifying conduct of an +absent friend, and reserves to the last line the climax-- + + "Hush, I pray you! + What if this friend happen to be--God." + +It is the masterpiece of that excellent but much-abused literary +quality, Sensationalism. + +The volume entitled _Pacchiarotto_, moreover, includes one or two of +the most spirited poems on the subject of the poet in relation to +publicity--"At the Mermaid," "House," and "Shop." + +In spite of his increasing years, his books seemed if anything to +come thicker and faster. Two were published in 1878--_La Saisiaz_, his +great metaphysical poem on the conception of immortality, and that +delightfully foppish fragment of the _ancien régime_, _The Two Poets +of Croisic_. Those two poems would alone suffice to show that he had +not forgotten the hard science of theology or the harder science of +humour. Another collection followed in 1879, the first series of +_Dramatic Idylls_, which contain such masterpieces as "Pheidippides" +and "Ivà n Ivà novitch." Upon its heels, in 1880, came the second series +of _Dramatic Idylls_, including "Muléykeh" and "Clive," possibly the +two best stories in poetry, told in the best manner of story-telling. +Then only did the marvellous fountain begin to slacken in quantity, +but never in quality. _Jocoseria_ did not appear till 1883. It +contains among other things a cast-back to his very earliest manner in +the lyric of "Never the Time and the Place," which we may call the +most light-hearted love-song that was ever written by a man over +seventy. In the next year appeared _Ferishtah's Fancies_, which +exhibit some of his shrewdest cosmic sagacity, expressed in some of +his quaintest and most characteristic images. Here perhaps more than +anywhere else we see that supreme peculiarity of Browning--his sense +of the symbolism of material trifles. Enormous problems, and yet more +enormous answers, about pain, prayer, destiny, liberty, and conscience +are suggested by cherries, by the sun, by a melon-seller, by an eagle +flying in the sky, by a man tilling a plot of ground. It is this +spirit of grotesque allegory which really characterises Browning among +all other poets. Other poets might possibly have hit upon the same +philosophical idea--some idea as deep, as delicate, and as spiritual. +But it may be safely asserted that no other poet, having thought of a +deep, delicate, and spiritual idea, would call it "A Bean Stripe; also +Apple Eating." + +Three more years passed, and the last book which Browning published in +his lifetime was _Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in +their Day_, a book which consists of apostrophes, amicable, furious, +reverential, satirical, emotional to a number of people of whom the +vast majority even of cultivated people have never heard in their +lives--Daniel Bartoli, Francis Furini, Gerard de Lairesse, and Charles +Avison. This extraordinary knowledge of the fulness of history was a +thing which never ceased to characterise Browning even when he was +unfortunate in every other literary quality. Apart altogether from +every line he ever wrote, it may fairly be said that no mind so rich +as his ever carried its treasures to the grave. All these later poems +are vigorous, learned, and full-blooded. They are thoroughly +characteristic of their author. But nothing in them is quite so +characteristic of their author as this fact, that when he had +published all of them, and was already near to his last day, he turned +with the energy of a boy let out of school, and began, of all things +in the world, to re-write and improve "Pauline," the boyish poem that +he had written fifty-five years before. Here was a man covered with +glory and near to the doors of death, who was prepared to give himself +the elaborate trouble of reconstructing the mood, and rebuilding the +verses of a long juvenile poem which had been forgotten for fifty +years in the blaze of successive victories. It is such things as these +which give to Browning an interest of personality which is far beyond +the more interest of genius. It was of such things that Elizabeth +Barrett wrote in one of her best moments of insight--that his genius +was the least important thing about him. + +During all these later years, Browning's life had been a quiet and +regular one. He always spent the winter in Italy and the summer in +London, and carried his old love of precision to the extent of never +failing day after day throughout the year to leave the house at the +same time. He had by this time become far more of a public figure than +he had ever been previously, both in England and Italy. In 1881, Dr. +Furnivall and Miss E.H. Hickey founded the famous "Browning Society." +He became President of the new "Shakespeare Society" and of the +"Wordsworth Society." In 1886, on the death of Lord Houghton, he +accepted the post of Foreign Correspondent to the Royal Academy. When +he moved to De Vere Gardens in 1887, it began to be evident that he +was slowly breaking up. He still dined out constantly; he still +attended every reception and private view; he still corresponded +prodigiously, and even added to his correspondence; and there is +nothing more typical of him than that now, when he was almost already +a classic, he answered any compliment with the most delightful vanity +and embarrassment. In a letter to Mr. George Bainton, touching style, +he makes a remark which is an excellent criticism on his whole +literary career: "I myself found many forgotten fields which have +proved the richest of pastures." But despite his continued energy, his +health was gradually growing worse. He was a strong man in a muscular, +and ordinarily in a physical sense, but he was also in a certain sense +a nervous man, and may be said to have died of brain-excitement +prolonged through a lifetime. In these closing years he began to feel +more constantly the necessity for rest. He and his sister went to live +at a little hotel in Llangollen, and spent hours together talking and +drinking tea on the lawn. He himself writes in one of his quaint and +poetic phrases that he had come to love these long country retreats, +"another term of delightful weeks, each tipped with a sweet starry +Sunday at the little church." For the first time, and in the last two +or three years, he was really growing old. On one point he maintained +always a tranquil and unvarying decision. The pessimistic school of +poetry was growing up all round him; the decadents, with their belief +that art was only a counting of the autumn leaves, were approaching +more and more towards their tired triumph and their tasteless +popularity. But Browning would not for one instant take the scorn of +them out of his voice. "Death, death, it is this harping on death that +I despise so much. In fiction, in poetry, French as well as English, +and I am told in American also, in art and literature, the shadow of +death, call it what you will, despair, negation, indifference, is upon +us. But what fools who talk thus! Why, _amico mio_, you know as well +as I, that death is life, just as our daily momentarily dying body is +none the less alive, and ever recruiting new forces of existence. +Without death, which is our church-yardy crape-like word for change, +for growth, there could be no prolongation of that which we call life. +Never say of me that I am dead." + +On August 13, 1888, he set out once more for Italy, the last of his +innumerable voyages. During his last Italian period he seems to have +fallen back on very ultimate simplicities, chiefly a mere staring at +nature. The family with whom he lived kept a fox cub, and Browning +would spend hours with it watching its grotesque ways; when it +escaped, he was characteristically enough delighted. The old man could +be seen continually in the lanes round Asolo, peering into hedges and +whistling for the lizards. + +This serene and pastoral decline, surely the mildest of slopes into +death, was suddenly diversified by a flash of something lying far +below. Browning's eye fell upon a passage written by the distinguished +Edward Fitzgerald, who had been dead for many years, in which +Fitzgerald spoke in an uncomplimentary manner of Elizabeth Barrett +Browning. Browning immediately wrote the "Lines to Edward Fitzgerald," +and set the whole literary world in an uproar. The lines were bitter +and excessive to have been written against any man, especially bitter +and excessive to have been written against a man who was not alive to +reply. And yet, when all is said, it is impossible not to feel a +certain dark and indescribable pleasure in this last burst of the old +barbaric energy. The mountain had been tilled and forested, and laid +out in gardens to the summit; but for one last night it had proved +itself once more a volcano, and had lit up all the plains with its +forgotten fire. And the blow, savage as it was, was dealt for that +great central sanctity--the story of a man's youth. All that the old +man would say in reply to every view of the question was, "I felt as +if she had died yesterday." + +Towards December of 1889 he moved to Venice, where he fell ill. He +took very little food; it was indeed one of his peculiar small fads +that men should not take food when they are ill, a matter in which he +maintained that the animals were more sagacious. He asserted +vigorously that this somewhat singular regimen would pull him through, +talked about his plans, and appeared cheerful. Gradually, however, the +talking became more infrequent, the cheerfulness passed into a kind of +placidity; and without any particular crisis or sign of the end, +Robert Browning died on December 12, 1889. The body was taken on board +ship by the Venice Municipal Guard, and received by the Royal Italian +marines. He was buried in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey, the +choir singing his wife's poem, "He giveth His beloved sleep." On the +day that he died _Asolando_ was published. + + + + +CHAPTER VI + +BROWNING AS A LITERARY ARTIST + + +Mr. William Sharp, in his _Life_ of Browning, quotes the remarks of +another critic to the following effect: "The poet's processes of +thought are scientific in their precision and analysis; the sudden +conclusion that he imposes upon them is transcendental and inept." + +This is a very fair but a very curious example of the way in which +Browning is treated. For what is the state of affairs? A man publishes +a series of poems, vigorous, perplexing, and unique. The critics read +them, and they decide that he has failed as a poet, but that he is a +remarkable philosopher and logician. They then proceed to examine his +philosophy, and show with great triumph that it is unphilosophical, +and to examine his logic and show with great triumph that it is not +logical, but "transcendental and inept." In other words, Browning is +first denounced for being a logician and not a poet, and then +denounced for insisting on being a poet when they have decided that he +is to be a logician. It is just as if a man were to say first that a +garden was so neglected that it was only fit for a boys' playground, +and then complain of the unsuitability in a boys' playground of +rockeries and flower-beds. + +As we find, after this manner, that Browning does not act +satisfactorily as that which we have decided that he shall be--a +logician--it might possibly be worth while to make another attempt to +see whether he may not, after all, be more valid than we thought as to +what he himself professed to be--a poet. And if we study this +seriously and sympathetically, we shall soon come to a conclusion. It +is a gross and complete slander upon Browning to say that his +processes of thought are scientific in their precision and analysis. +They are nothing of the sort; if they were, Browning could not be a +good poet. The critic speaks of the conclusions of a poem as +"transcendental and inept"; but the conclusions of a poem, if they are +not transcendental, must be inept. Do the people who call one of +Browning's poems scientific in its analysis realise the meaning of +what they say? One is tempted to think that they know a scientific +analysis when they see it as little as they know a good poem. The one +supreme difference between the scientific method and the artistic +method is, roughly speaking, simply this--that a scientific statement +means the same thing wherever and whenever it is uttered, and that an +artistic statement means something entirely different, according to +the relation in which it stands to its surroundings. The remark, let +us say, that the whale is a mammal, or the remark that sixteen ounces +go to a pound, is equally true, and means exactly the same thing, +whether we state it at the beginning of a conversation or at the end, +whether we print it in a dictionary or chalk it up on a wall. But if +we take some phrase commonly used in the art of literature--such a +sentence, for the sake of example, as "the dawn was breaking"--the +matter is quite different. If the sentence came at the beginning of a +short story, it might be a mere descriptive prelude. If it were the +last sentence in a short story, it might be poignant with some +peculiar irony or triumph. Can any one read Browning's great +monologues and not feel that they are built up like a good short +story, entirely on this principle of the value of language arising +from its arrangement. Take such an example as "Caliban upon Setebos," +a wonderful poem designed to describe the way in which a primitive +nature may at once be afraid of its gods and yet familiar with them. +Caliban in describing his deity starts with a more or less natural and +obvious parallel between the deity and himself, carries out the +comparison with consistency and an almost revolting simplicity, and +ends in a kind of blasphemous extravaganza of anthropomorphism, basing +his conduct not merely on the greatness and wisdom, but also on the +manifest weaknesses and stupidities, of the Creator of all things. +Then suddenly a thunderstorm breaks over Caliban's island, and the +profane speculator falls flat upon his face-- + + "Lo! 'Lieth flat and loveth Setebos! + 'Maketh his teeth meet through his upper lip, + Will let those quails fly, will not eat this month + One little mess of whelks, so he may 'scape!" + +Surely it would be very difficult to persuade oneself that this +thunderstorm would have meant exactly the same thing if it had +occurred at the beginning of "Caliban upon Setebos." It does not mean +the same thing, but something very different; and the deduction from +this is the curious fact that Browning is an artist, and that +consequently his processes of thought are not "scientific in their +precision and analysis." + +No criticism of Browning's poems can be vital, none in the face of the +poems themselves can be even intelligible, which is not based upon the +fact that he was successfully or otherwise a conscious and deliberate +artist. He may have failed as an artist, though I do not think so; +that is quite a different matter. But it is one thing to say that a +man through vanity or ignorance has built an ugly cathedral, and quite +another to say that he built it in a fit of absence of mind, and did +not know whether he was building a lighthouse or a first-class hotel. +Browning knew perfectly well what he was doing; and if the reader does +not like his art, at least the author did. The general sentiment +expressed in the statement that he did not care about form is simply +the most ridiculous criticism that could be conceived. It would be far +nearer the truth to say that he cared more for form than any other +English poet who ever lived. He was always weaving and modelling and +inventing new forms. Among all his two hundred to three hundred poems +it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that there are half as +many different metres as there are different poems. + +The great English poets who are supposed to have cared more for form +than Browning did, cared less at least in this sense--that they were +content to use old forms so long as they were certain that they had +new ideas. Browning, on the other hand, no sooner had a new idea than +he tried to make a new form to express it. Wordsworth and Shelley were +really original poets; their attitude of thought and feeling marked +without doubt certain great changes in literature and philosophy. +Nevertheless, the "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" is a +perfectly normal and traditional ode, and "Prometheus Unbound" is a +perfectly genuine and traditional Greek lyrical drama. But if we study +Browning honestly, nothing will strike us more than that he really +created a large number of quite novel and quite admirable artistic +forms. It is too often forgotten what and how excellent these were. +_The Ring and the Book_, for example, is an illuminating departure in +literary method--the method of telling the same story several times +and trusting to the variety of human character to turn it into several +different and equally interesting stories. _Pippa Passes_, to take +another example, is a new and most fruitful form, a series of detached +dramas connected only by the presence of one fugitive and isolated +figure. The invention of these things is not merely like the writing +of a good poem--it is something like the invention of the sonnet or +the Gothic arch. The poet who makes them does not merely create +himself--he creates other poets. It is so in a degree long past +enumeration with regard to Browning's smaller poems. Such a pious and +horrible lyric as "The Heretic's Tragedy," for instance, is absolutely +original, with its weird and almost blood-curdling echo verses, +mocking echoes indeed-- + + "And dipt of his wings in Paris square, + They bring him now to lie burned alive. + + _[And wanteth there grace of lute or clavicithern, + ye shall say to confirm him who singeth_-- + + We bring John now to be burned alive." + +A hundred instances might, of course, be given. Milton's "Sonnet on +his Blindness," or Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," are both thoroughly +original, but still we can point to other such sonnets and other such +odes. But can any one mention any poem of exactly the same structural +and literary type as "Fears and Scruples," as "The Householder," as +"House" or "Shop," as "Nationality in Drinks," as "Sibrandus +Schafnaburgensis," as "My Star," as "A Portrait," as any of +"Ferishtah's Fancies," as any of the "Bad Dreams." + +The thing which ought to be said about Browning by those who do not +enjoy him is simply that they do not like his form; that they have +studied the form, and think it a bad form. If more people said things +of this sort, the world of criticism would gain almost unspeakably in +clarity and common honesty. Browning put himself before the world as a +good poet. Let those who think he failed call him a bad poet, and +there will be an end of the matter. There are many styles in art which +perfectly competent æsthetic judges cannot endure. For instance, it +would be perfectly legitimate for a strict lover of Gothic to say that +one of the monstrous rococo altar-pieces in the Belgian churches with +bulbous clouds and oaken sun-rays seven feet long, was, in his +opinion, ugly. But surely it would be perfectly ridiculous for any one +to say that it had no form. A man's actual feelings about it might be +better expressed by saying that it had too much. To say that Browning +was merely a thinker because you think "Caliban upon Setebos" ugly, is +precisely as absurd as it would be to call the author of the old +Belgian altarpiece a man devoted only to the abstractions of religion. +The truth about Browning is not that he was indifferent to technical +beauty, but that he invented a particular kind of technical beauty to +which any one else is free to be as indifferent as he chooses. + +There is in this matter an extraordinary tendency to vague and +unmeaning criticism. The usual way of criticising an author, +particularly an author who has added something to the literary forms +of the world, is to complain that his work does not contain something +which is obviously the speciality of somebody else. The correct thing +to say about Maeterlinck is that some play of his in which, let us +say, a princess dies in a deserted tower by the sea, has a certain +beauty, but that we look in vain in it for that robust geniality, that +really boisterous will to live which may be found in _Martin +Chuzzlewit_. The right thing to say about _Cyrano de Bergerac_ is that +it may have a certain kind of wit and spirit, but that it really +throws no light on the duty of middle-aged married couples in Norway. +It cannot be too much insisted upon that at least three-quarters of +the blame and criticism commonly directed against artists and authors +falls under this general objection, and is essentially valueless. +Authors both great and small are, like everything else in existence, +upon the whole greatly under-rated. They are blamed for not doing, not +only what they have failed to do to reach their own ideal, but what +they have never tried to do to reach every other writer's ideal. If we +can show that Browning had a definite ideal of beauty and loyally +pursued it, it is not necessary to prove that he could have written +_In Memoriam_ if he had tried. + +Browning has suffered far more injustice from his admirers than from +his opponents, for his admirers have for the most part got hold of the +matter, so to speak, by the wrong end. They believe that what is +ordinarily called the grotesque style of Browning was a kind of +necessity boldly adopted by a great genius in order to express novel +and profound ideas. But this is an entire mistake. What is called +ugliness was to Browning not in the least a necessary evil, but a +quite unnecessary luxury, which he enjoyed for its own sake. For +reasons that we shall see presently in discussing the philosophical +use of the grotesque, it did so happen that Browning's grotesque style +was very suitable for the expression of his peculiar moral and +metaphysical view. But the whole mass of poems will be misunderstood +if we do not realise first of all that he had a love of the grotesque +of the nature of art for art's sake. Here, for example, is a short +distinct poem merely descriptive of one of those elfish German jugs in +which it is to be presumed Tokay had been served to him. This is the +whole poem, and a very good poem too-- + + "Up jumped Tokay on our table, + Like a pigmy castle-warder, + Dwarfish to see, but stout and able, + Arms and accoutrements all in order; + And fierce he looked North, then, wheeling South + Blew with his bugle a challenge to Drouth, + Cocked his flap-hat with the tosspot-feather, + Twisted his thumb in his red moustache, + Jingled his huge brass spurs together, + Tightened his waist with its Buda sash, + And then, with an impudence nought could abash, + Shrugged his hump-shoulder, to tell the beholder, + For twenty such knaves he would laugh but the bolder: + And so, with his sword-hilt gallantly jutting, + And dexter-hand on his haunch abutting, + Went the little man, Sir Ausbruch, strutting!" + +I suppose there are Browning students in existence who would think +that this poem contained something pregnant about the Temperance +question, or was a marvellously subtle analysis of the romantic +movement in Germany. But surely to most of us it is sufficiently +apparent that Browning was simply fashioning a ridiculous +knick-knack, exactly as if he were actually moulding one of these +preposterous German jugs. Now before studying the real character of +this Browningesque style, there is one general truth to be recognised +about Browning's work. It is this--that it is absolutely necessary to +remember that Browning had, like every other poet, his simple and +indisputable failures, and that it is one thing to speak of the +badness of his artistic failures, and quite another thing to speak of +the badness of his artistic aim. Browning's style may be a good style, +and yet exhibit many examples of a thoroughly bad use of it. On this +point there is indeed a singularly unfair system of judgment used by +the public towards the poets. It is very little realised that the vast +majority of great poets have written an enormous amount of very bad +poetry. The unfortunate Wordsworth is generally supposed to be almost +alone in this; but any one who thinks so can scarcely have read a +certain number of the minor poems of Byron and Shelley and Tennyson. + +Now it is only just to Browning that his more uncouth effusions should +not be treated as masterpieces by which he must stand or fall, but +treated simply as his failures. It is really true that such a line as + + "Irks fear the crop-full bird, frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?" + +is a very ugly and a very bad line. But it is quite equally true that +Tennyson's + + "And that good man, the clergyman, has told me words of peace," + +is a very ugly and a very bad line. But people do not say that this +proves that Tennyson was a mere crabbed controversialist and +metaphysician. They say that it is a bad example of Tennyson's form; +they do not say that it is a good example of Tennyson's indifference +to form. Upon the whole, Browning exhibits far fewer instances of this +failure in his own style than any other of the great poets, with the +exception of one or two like Spenser and Keats, who seem to have a +mysterious incapacity for writing bad poetry. But almost all original +poets, particularly poets who have invented an artistic style, are +subject to one most disastrous habit--the habit of writing imitations +of themselves. Every now and then in the works of the noblest +classical poets you will come upon passages which read like extracts +from an American book of parodies. Swinburne, for example, when he +wrote the couplet-- + + "From the lilies and languors of virtue + To the raptures and roses of vice," + +wrote what is nothing but a bad imitation of himself, an imitation +which seems indeed to have the wholly unjust and uncritical object of +proving that the Swinburnian melody is a mechanical scheme of initial +letters. Or again, Mr. Rudyard Kipling when he wrote the line-- + + "Or ride with the reckless seraphim on the rim of a red-maned star," + +was caricaturing himself in the harshest and least sympathetic spirit +of American humour. This tendency is, of course, the result of the +self-consciousness and theatricality of modern life in which each of +us is forced to conceive ourselves as part of a _dramatis personæ_ +and act perpetually in character. Browning sometimes yielded to this +temptation to be a great deal too like himself. + + "Will I widen thee out till thou turnest + From Margaret Minnikin mou' by God's grace, + To Muckle-mouth Meg in good earnest." + +This sort of thing is not to be defended in Browning any more than in +Swinburne. But, on the other hand, it is not to be attributed in +Swinburne to a momentary exaggeration, and in Browning to a vital +æsthetic deficiency. In the case of Swinburne, we all feel that the +question is not whether that particular preposterous couplet about +lilies and roses redounds to the credit of the Swinburnian style, but +whether it would be possible in any other style than the Swinburnian +to have written the Hymn to Proserpine. In the same way, the essential +issue about Browning as an artist is not whether he, in common with +Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, and Swinburne, sometimes wrote +bad poetry, but whether in any other style except Browning's you could +have achieved the precise artistic effect which is achieved by such +incomparable lyrics as "The Patriot" or "The Laboratory." The answer +must be in the negative, and in that answer lies the whole +justification of Browning as an artist. + +The question now arises, therefore, what was his conception of his +functions as an artist? We have already agreed that his artistic +originality concerned itself chiefly with the serious use of the +grotesque. It becomes necessary, therefore, to ask what is the serious +use of the grotesque, and what relation does the grotesque bear to the +eternal and fundamental elements in life? + +One of the most curious things to notice about popular æsthetic +criticism is the number of phrases it will be found to use which are +intended to express an æsthetic failure, and which express merely an +æsthetic variety. Thus, for instance, the traveller will often hear +the advice from local lovers of the picturesque, "The scenery round +such and such a place has no interest; it is quite flat." To disparage +scenery as quite flat is, of course, like disparaging a swan as quite +white, or an Italian sky as quite blue. Flatness is a sublime quality +in certain landscapes, just as rockiness is a sublime quality in +others. In the same way there are a great number of phrases commonly +used in order to disparage such writers as Browning which do not in +fact disparage, but merely describe them. One of the most +distinguished of Browning's biographers and critics says of him, for +example, "He has never meant to be rugged, but has become so in +striving after strength." To say that Browning never tried to be +rugged is to say that Edgar Allan Poe never tried to be gloomy, or +that Mr. W.S. Gilbert never tried to be extravagant. The whole issue +depends upon whether we realise the simple and essential fact that +ruggedness is a mode of art like gloominess or extravagance. Some +poems ought to be rugged, just as some poems ought to be smooth. When +we see a drift of stormy and fantastic clouds at sunset, we do not say +that the cloud is beautiful although it is ragged at the edges. When +we see a gnarled and sprawling oak, we do not say that it is fine +although it is twisted. When we see a mountain, we do not say that it +is impressive although it is rugged, nor do we say apologetically that +it never meant to be rugged, but became so in its striving after +strength. Now, to say that Browning's poems, artistically considered, +are fine although they are rugged, is quite as absurd as to say that a +rock, artistically considered, is fine although it is rugged. +Ruggedness being an essential quality in the universe, there is that +in man which responds to it as to the striking of any other chord of +the eternal harmonies. As the children of nature, we are akin not only +to the stars and flowers, but also to the toad-stools and the +monstrous tropical birds. And it is to be repeated as the essential of +the question that on this side of our nature we do emphatically love +the form of the toad-stools, and not merely some complicated botanical +and moral lessons which the philosopher may draw from them. For +example, just as there is such a thing as a poetical metre being +beautifully light or beautifully grave and haunting, so there is such +a thing as a poetical metre being beautifully rugged. In the old +ballads, for instance, every person of literary taste will be struck +by a certain attractiveness in the bold, varying, irregular verse-- + + "He is either himsell a devil frae hell, + Or else his mother a witch maun be; + I wadna have ridden that wan water + For a' the gowd in Christentie," + +is quite as pleasing to the ear in its own way as + + "There's a bower of roses by Bendemeer stream, + And the nightingale sings in it all the night long," + +is in another way. Browning had an unrivalled ear for this particular +kind of staccato music. The absurd notion that he had no sense of +melody in verse is only possible to people who think that there is no +melody in verse which is not an imitation of Swinburne. To give a +satisfactory idea of Browning's rhythmic originality would be +impossible without quotations more copious than entertaining. But the +essential point has been suggested. + + "They were purple of raiment and golden, + Filled full of thee, fiery with wine, + Thy lovers in haunts unbeholden, + In marvellous chambers of thine," + +is beautiful language, but not the only sort of beautiful language. +This, for instance, has also a tune in it-- + + "I--'next poet.' No, my hearties, + I nor am, nor fain would be! + Choose your chiefs and pick your parties, + Not one soul revolt to me! + * * * * * + Which of you did I enable + Once to slip inside my breast, + There to catalogue and label + What I like least, what love best, + Hope and fear, believe and doubt of, + Seek and shun, respect, deride, + Who has right to make a rout of + Rarities he found inside?" + +This quick, gallantly stepping measure also has its own kind of music, +and the man who cannot feel it can never have enjoyed the sound of +soldiers marching by. This, then, roughly is the main fact to remember +about Browning's poetical method, or about any one's poetical +method--that the question is not whether that method is the best in +the world, but the question whether there are not certain things which +can only be conveyed by that method. It is perfectly true, for +instance, that a really lofty and lucid line of Tennyson, such as-- + + "Thou art the highest, and most human too" +and + "We needs must love the highest when we see it" + +would really be made the worse for being translated into Browning. It +would probably become + + "High's human; man loves best, best visible," + +and would lose its peculiar clarity and dignity and courtly plainness. +But it is quite equally true that any really characteristic fragment +of Browning, if it were only the tempestuous scolding of the organist +in "Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha"-- + + "Hallo, you sacristan, show us a light there! + Down it dips, gone like a rocket. + What, you want, do you, to come unawares, + Sweeping the church up for first morning-prayers, + And find a poor devil has ended his cares + At the foot of your rotten-runged rat-riddled stairs? + Do I carry the moon in my pocket?" + +--it is quite equally true that this outrageous gallop of rhymes +ending with a frantic astronomical image would lose in energy and +spirit if it were written in a conventional and classical style, and +ran-- + + "What must I deem then that thou dreamest to find + Disjected bones adrift upon the stair + Thou sweepest clean, or that thou deemest that I + Pouch in my wallet the vice-regal sun?" + +Is it not obvious that this statelier version might be excellent +poetry of its kind, and yet would be bad exactly in so far as it was +good; that it would lose all the swing, the rush, the energy of the +preposterous and grotesque original? In fact, we may see how +unmanageable is this classical treatment of the essentially absurd in +Tennyson himself. The humorous passages in _The Princess_, though +often really humorous in themselves, always appear forced and feeble +because they have to be restrained by a certain metrical dignity, and +the mere idea of such restraint is incompatible with humour. If +Browning had written the passage which opens _The Princess_, +descriptive of the "larking" of the villagers in the magnate's park, +he would have spared us nothing; he would not have spared us the +shrill uneducated voices and the unburied bottles of ginger beer. He +would have crammed the poem with uncouth similes; he would have +changed the metre a hundred times; he would have broken into doggerel +and into rhapsody; but he would have left, when all is said and done, +as he leaves in that paltry fragment of the grumbling organist, the +impression of a certain eternal human energy. Energy and joy, the +father and the mother of the grotesque, would have ruled the poem. We +should have felt of that rowdy gathering little but the sensation of +which Mr. Henley writes-- + + "Praise the generous gods for giving, + In this world of sin and strife, + With some little time for living, + Unto each the joy of life," + +the thought that every wise man has when looking at a Bank Holiday +crowd at Margate. + +To ask why Browning enjoyed this perverse and fantastic style most +would be to go very deep into his spirit indeed, probably a great +deal deeper than it is possible to go. But it is worth while to +suggest tentatively the general function of the grotesque in art +generally and in his art in particular. There is one very curious idea +into which we have been hypnotised by the more eloquent poets, and +that is that nature in the sense of what is ordinarily called the +country is a thing entirely stately and beautiful as those terms are +commonly understood. The whole world of the fantastic, all things +top-heavy, lop-sided, and nonsensical are conceived as the work of +man, gargoyles, German jugs, Chinese pots, political caricatures, +burlesque epics, the pictures of Mr. Aubrey Beardsley and the puns of +Robert Browning. But in truth a part, and a very large part, of the +sanity and power of nature lies in the fact that out of her comes all +this instinct of caricature. Nature may present itself to the poet too +often as consisting of stars and lilies; but these are not poets who +live in the country; they are men who go to the country for +inspiration and could no more live in the country than they could go +to bed in Westminster Abbey. Men who live in the heart of nature, +farmers and peasants, know that nature means cows and pigs, and +creatures more humorous than can be found in a whole sketch-book of +Callot. And the element of the grotesque in art, like the element of +the grotesque in nature, means, in the main, energy, the energy which +takes its own forms and goes its own way. Browning's verse, in so far +as it is grotesque, is not complex or artificial; it is natural and in +the legitimate tradition of nature. The verse sprawls like the trees, +dances like the dust; it is ragged like the thunder-cloud, it is +top-heavy like the toadstool. Energy which disregards the standard of +classical art is in nature as it is in Browning. The same sense of the +uproarious force in things which makes Browning dwell on the oddity of +a fungus or a jellyfish makes him dwell on the oddity of a +philosophical idea. Here, for example, we have a random instance from +"The Englishman in Italy" of the way in which Browning, when he was +most Browning, regarded physical nature. + + "And pitch down his basket before us, + All trembling alive + With pink and grey jellies, your sea-fruit; + You touch the strange lumps, + And mouths gape there, eyes open, all manner + Of horns and of humps, + Which only the fisher looks grave at." + +Nature might mean flowers to Wordsworth and grass to Walt Whitman, but +to Browning it really meant such things as these, the monstrosities +and living mysteries of the sea. And just as these strange things +meant to Browning energy in the physical world, so strange thoughts +and strange images meant to him energy in the mental world. When, in +one of his later poems, the professional mystic is seeking in a +supreme moment of sincerity to explain that small things may be filled +with God as well as great, he uses the very same kind of image, the +image of a shapeless sea-beast, to embody that noble conception. + + "The Name comes close behind a stomach-cyst, + The simplest of creations, just a sac + That's mouth, heart, legs, and belly at once, yet lives + And feels, and could do neither, we conclude, + If simplified still further one degree." + + (SLUDGE.) + +These bulbous, indescribable sea-goblins are the first thing on which +the eye of the poet lights in looking on a landscape, and the last in +the significance of which he trusts in demonstrating the mercy of the +Everlasting. + +There is another and but slightly different use of the grotesque, but +which is definitely valuable in Browning's poetry, and indeed in all +poetry. To present a matter in a grotesque manner does certainly tend +to touch the nerve of surprise and thus to draw attention to the +intrinsically miraculous character of the object itself. It is +difficult to give examples of the proper use of grotesqueness without +becoming too grotesque. But we should all agree that if St. Paul's +Cathedral were suddenly presented to us upside down we should, for the +moment, be more surprised at it, and look at it more than we have done +all the centuries during which it has rested on its foundations. Now +it is the supreme function of the philosopher of the grotesque to make +the world stand on its head that people may look at it. If we say "a +man is a man" we awaken no sense of the fantastic, however much we +ought to, but if we say, in the language of the old satirist, "that +man is a two-legged bird, without feathers," the phrase does, for a +moment, make us look at man from the outside and gives us a thrill in +his presence. When the author of the Book of Job insists upon the +huge, half-witted, apparently unmeaning magnificence and might of +Behemoth, the hippopotamus, he is appealing precisely to this sense of +wonder provoked by the grotesque. "Canst thou play with him as with a +bird, canst thou bind him for thy maidens?" he says in an admirable +passage. The notion of the hippopotamus as a household pet is +curiously in the spirit of the humour of Browning. + +But when it is clearly understood that Browning's love of the +fantastic in style was a perfectly serious artistic love, when we +understand that he enjoyed working in that style, as a Chinese potter +might enjoy making dragons, or a mediæval mason making devils, there +yet remains something definite which must be laid to his account as a +fault. He certainly had a capacity for becoming perfectly childish in +his indulgence in ingenuities that have nothing to do with poetry at +all, such as puns, and rhymes, and grammatical structures that only +just fit into each other like a Chinese puzzle. Probably it was only +one of the marks of his singular vitality, curiosity, and interest in +details. He was certainly one of those somewhat rare men who are +fierily ambitious both in large things and in small. He prided himself +on having written _The Ring and the Book_, and he also prided himself +on knowing good wine when he tasted it. He prided himself on +re-establishing optimism on a new foundation, and it is to be +presumed, though it is somewhat difficult to imagine, that he prided +himself on such rhymes as the following in _Pacchiarotto_:-- + + "The wolf, fox, bear, and monkey, + By piping advice in one key-- + That his pipe should play a prelude + To something heaven-tinged not hell-hued, + Something not harsh but docile, + Man-liquid, not man-fossil." + +This writing, considered as writing, can only be regarded as a kind of +joke, and most probably Browning considered it so himself. It has +nothing at all to do with that powerful and symbolic use of the +grotesque which may be found in such admirable passages as this from +"Holy Cross Day":-- + + "Give your first groan--compunction's at work; + And soft! from a Jew you mount to a Turk. + Lo, Micah--the self-same beard on chin + He was four times already converted in!" + +This is the serious use of the grotesque. Through it passion and +philosophy are as well expressed as through any other medium. But the +rhyming frenzy of Browning has no particular relation even to the +poems in which it occurs. It is not a dance to any measure; it can +only be called the horse-play of literature. It may be noted, for +example, as a rather curious fact, that the ingenious rhymes are +generally only mathematical triumphs, not triumphs of any kind of +assonance. "The Pied Piper of Hamelin," a poem written for children, +and bound in general to be lucid and readable, ends with a rhyme which +it is physically impossible for any one to say:-- + + "And, whether they pipe us free, fróm rats or fróm mice, + If we've promised them aught, let us keep our promise!" + +This queer trait in Browning, his inability to keep a kind of demented +ingenuity even out of poems in which it was quite inappropriate, is a +thing which must be recognised, and recognised all the more because as +a whole he was a very perfect artist, and a particularly perfect +artist in the use of the grotesque. But everywhere when we go a little +below the surface in Browning we find that there was something in him +perverse and unusual despite all his working normality and +simplicity. His mind was perfectly wholesome, but it was not made +exactly like the ordinary mind. It was like a piece of strong wood +with a knot in it. + +The quality of what, can only be called buffoonery which is under +discussion is indeed one of the many things in which Browning was more +of an Elizabethan than a Victorian. He was like the Elizabethans in +their belief in the normal man, in their gorgeous and over-loaded +language, above all in their feeling for learning as an enjoyment and +almost a frivolity. But there was nothing in which he was so +thoroughly Elizabethan, and even Shakespearian, as in this fact, that +when he felt inclined to write a page of quite uninteresting nonsense, +he immediately did so. Many great writers have contrived to be +tedious, and apparently aimless, while expounding some thought which +they believed to be grave and profitable; but this frivolous stupidity +had not been found in any great writer since the time of Rabelais and +the time of the Elizabethans. In many of the comic scenes of +Shakespeare we have precisely this elephantine ingenuity, this hunting +of a pun to death through three pages. In the Elizabethan dramatists +and in Browning it is no doubt to a certain extent the mark of a real +hilarity. People must be very happy to be so easily amused. + +In the case of what is called Browning's obscurity, the question is +somewhat more difficult to handle. Many people have supposed Browning +to be profound because he was obscure, and many other people, hardly +less mistaken, have supposed him to be obscure because he was +profound. He was frequently profound, he was occasionally obscure, but +as a matter of fact the two have little or nothing to do with each +other. Browning's dark and elliptical mode of speech, like his love of +the grotesque, was simply a characteristic of his, a trick of is +temperament, and had little or nothing to do with whether what he was +expressing was profound or superficial. Suppose, for example, that a +person well read in English poetry but unacquainted with Browning's +style were earnestly invited to consider the following verse:-- + + "Hobbs hints blue--straight he turtle eats. + Nobbs prints blue--claret crowns his cup. + Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats-- + Both gorge. Who fished the murex up? + What porridge had John Keats?" + +The individual so confronted would say without hesitation that it must +indeed be an abstruse and indescribable thought which could only be +conveyed by remarks so completely disconnected. But the point of the +matter is that the thought contained in this amazing verse is not +abstruse or philosophical at all, but is a perfectly ordinary and +straightforward comment, which any one might have made upon an obvious +fact of life. The whole verse of course begins to explain itself, if +we know the meaning of the word "murex," which is the name of a +sea-shell, out of which was made the celebrated blue dye of Tyre. The +poet takes this blue dye as a simile for a new fashion in literature, +and points out that Hobbs, Nobbs, etc., obtain fame and comfort by +merely using the dye from the shell; and adds the perfectly natural +comment:-- + + "... Who fished the murex up? + What porridge had John Keats?" + +So that the verse is not subtle, and was not meant to be subtle, but +is a perfectly casual piece of sentiment at the end of a light poem. +Browning is not obscure because he has such deep things to say, any +more than he is grotesque because he has such new things to say. He is +both of these things primarily, because he likes to express himself in +a particular manner. The manner is as natural to him as a man's +physical voice, and it is abrupt, sketchy, allusive, and full of gaps. +Here comes in the fundamental difference between Browning and such a +writer as George Meredith, with whom the Philistine satirist would so +often in the matter of complexity class him. The works of George +Meredith are, as it were, obscure even when we know what they mean. +They deal with nameless emotions, fugitive sensations, subconscious +certainties and uncertainties, and it really requires a somewhat +curious and unfamiliar mode of speech to indicate the presence of +these. But the great part of Browning's actual sentiments, and almost +all the finest and most literary of them, are perfectly plain and +popular and eternal sentiments. Meredith is really a singer producing +strange notes and cadences difficult to follow because of the delicate +rhythm of the song he sings. Browning is simply a great demagogue, +with an impediment in his speech. Or rather, to speak more strictly, +Browning is a man whose excitement for the glory of the obvious is so +great that his speech becomes disjointed and precipitate: he becomes +eccentric through his advocacy of the ordinary, and goes mad for the +love of sanity. + +If Browning and George Meredith were each describing the same act, +they might both be obscure, but their obscurities would be entirely +different. Suppose, for instance, they were describing even so prosaic +and material an act as a man being knocked downstairs by another man +to whom he had given the lie, Meredith's description would refer to +something which an ordinary observer would not see, or at least could +not describe. It might be a sudden sense of anarchy in the brain of +the assaulter, or a stupefaction and stunned serenity in that of the +object of the assault. He might write, "Wainwood's 'Men vary in +veracity,' brought the baronet's arm up. He felt the doors of his +brain burst, and Wainwood a swift rushing of himself through air +accompanied with a clarity as of the annihilated." Meredith, in other +words, would speak queerly because he was describing queer mental +experiences. But Browning might simply be describing the material +incident of the man being knocked downstairs, and his description +would run:-- + + "What then? 'You lie' and doormat below stairs + Takes bump from back." + +This is not subtlety, but merely a kind of insane swiftness. Browning +is not like Meredith, anxious to pause and examine the sensations of +the combatants, nor does he become obscure through this anxiety. He is +only so anxious to get his man to the bottom of the stairs quickly +that he leaves out about half the story. + +Many who could understand that ruggedness might be an artistic +quality, would decisively, and in most cases rightly, deny that +obscurity could under any conceivable circumstances be an artistic +quality. But here again Browning's work requires a somewhat more +cautious and sympathetic analysis. There is a certain kind of +fascination, a strictly artistic fascination, which arises from a +matter being hinted at in such a way as to leave a certain tormenting +uncertainty even at the end. It is well sometimes to half understand a +poem in the same manner that we half understand the world. One of the +deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will +suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping +meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered +something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a +prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain +poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed +the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but +in this dazed and dramatic ignorance. + +But in truth it is very difficult to keep pace with all the strange +and unclassified artistic merits of Browning. He was always trying +experiments; sometimes he failed, producing clumsy and irritating +metres, top-heavy and over-concentrated thought. Far more often he +triumphed, producing a crowd of boldly designed poems, every one of +which taken separately might have founded an artistic school. But +whether successful or unsuccessful, he never ceased from his fierce +hunt after poetic novelty. He never became a conservative. The last +book he published in his life-time, _Parleyings with Certain People of +Importance in their Day_, was a new poem, and more revolutionary than +_Paracelsus_. This is the true light in which to regard Browning as an +artist. He had determined to leave no spot of the cosmos unadorned by +his poetry which he could find it possible to adorn. An admirable +example can be found in that splendid poem "Childe Roland to the Dark +Tower came." It is the hint of an entirely new and curious type of +poetry, the poetry of the shabby and hungry aspect of the earth +itself. Daring poets who wished to escape from conventional gardens +and orchards had long been in the habit of celebrating the poetry of +rugged and gloomy landscapes, but Browning is not content with this. +He insists upon celebrating the poetry of mean landscapes. That sense +of scrubbiness in nature, as of a man unshaved, had never been +conveyed with this enthusiasm and primeval gusto before. + + "If there pushed any ragged thistle-stalk + Above its mates, the head was chopped; the bents + Were jealous else. What made those holes and rents + In the dock's harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to baulk + All hope of greenness? 'tis a brute must walk + Pashing their life out, with a brute's intents." + +This is a perfect realisation of that eerie sentiment which comes upon +us, not so often among mountains and water-falls, as it does on some +half-starved common at twilight, or in walking down some grey mean +street. It is the song of the beauty of refuse; and Browning was the +first to sing it. Oddly enough it has been one of the poems about +which most of those pedantic and trivial questions have been asked, +which are asked invariably by those who treat Browning as a science +instead of a poet, "What does the poem of 'Childe Roland' mean?" The +only genuine answer to this is, "What does anything mean?" Does the +earth mean nothing? Do grey skies and wastes covered with thistles +mean nothing? Does an old horse turned out to graze mean nothing? If +it does, there is but one further truth to be added--that everything +means nothing. + + + + +CHAPTER VII + +_THE RING AND THE BOOK_ + + +When we have once realised the great conception of the plan of _The +Ring and the Book_, the studying of a single matter from nine +different stand-points, it becomes exceedingly interesting to notice +what these stand-points are; what figures Browning has selected as +voicing the essential and distinct versions of the case. One of the +ablest and most sympathetic of all the critics of Browning, Mr. +Augustine Birrell, has said in one place that the speeches of the two +advocates in _The Ring and the Book_ will scarcely be very interesting +to the ordinary reader. However that may be, there can be little doubt +that a great number of the readers of Browning think them beside the +mark and adventitious. But it is exceedingly dangerous to say that +anything in Browning is irrelevant or unnecessary. We are apt to go on +thinking so until some mere trifle puts the matter in a new light, and +the detail that seemed meaningless springs up as almost the central +pillar of the structure. In the successive monologues of his poem, +Browning is endeavouring to depict the various strange ways in which a +fact gets itself presented to the world. In every question there are +partisans who bring cogent and convincing arguments for the right +side; there are also partisans who bring cogent and convincing +arguments for the wrong side. But over and above these, there does +exist in every great controversy a class of more or less official +partisans who are continually engaged in defending each cause by +entirely inappropriate arguments. They do not know the real good that +can be said for the good cause, nor the real good that can be said for +the bad one. They are represented by the animated, learned, eloquent, +ingenious, and entirely futile and impertinent arguments of Juris +Doctor Bottinius and Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis. These two men +brilliantly misrepresent, not merely each other's cause, but their own +cause. The introduction of them is one of the finest and most artistic +strokes in _The Ring and the Book_. + +We can see the matter best by taking an imaginary parallel. Suppose +that a poet of the type of Browning lived some centuries hence and +found in some _cause célèbre_ of our day, such as the Parnell +Commission, an opportunity for a work similar in its design to _The +Ring and the Book_. The first monologue, which would be called +"Half-London," would be the arguments of an ordinary educated and +sensible Unionist who believed that there really was evidence that the +Nationalist movement in Ireland was rooted in crime and public panic. +The "Otherhalf-London" would be the utterance of an ordinary educated +and sensible Home Ruler, who thought that in the main Nationalism was +one distinct symptom, and crime another, of the same poisonous and +stagnant problem. The "Tertium Quid" would be some detached +intellectual, committed neither to Nationalism nor to Unionism, +possibly Mr. Bernard Shaw, who would make a very entertaining Browning +monologue. Then of course would come the speeches of the great actors +in the drama, the icy anger of Parnell, the shuffling apologies of +Pigott. But we should feel that the record was incomplete without +another touch which in practice has so much to do with the confusion +of such a question. Bottinius and Hyacinthus de Archangelis, the two +cynical professional pleaders, with their transparent assumptions and +incredible theories of the case, would be represented by two party +journalists; one of whom was ready to base his case either on the fact +that Parnell was a Socialist or an Anarchist, or an Atheist or a Roman +Catholic; and the other of whom was ready to base his case on the +theory that Lord Salisbury hated Parnell or was in league with him, or +had never heard of him, or anything else that was remote from the +world of reality. These are the kind of little touches for which we +must always be on the look-out in Browning. Even if a digression, or a +simile, or a whole scene in a play, seems to have no point or value, +let us wait a little and give it a chance. He very seldom wrote +anything that did not mean a great deal. + +It is sometimes curious to notice how a critic, possessing no little +cultivation and fertility, will, in speaking of a work of art, let +fall almost accidentally some apparently trivial comment, which +reveals to us with an instantaneous and complete mental illumination +the fact that he does not, so far as that work of art is concerned, in +the smallest degree understand what he is talking about. He may have +intended to correct merely some minute detail of the work he is +studying, but that single movement is enough to blow him and all his +diplomas into the air. These are the sensations with which the true +Browningite will regard the criticism made by so many of Browning's +critics and biographers about _The Ring and the Book_. That criticism +was embodied by one of them in the words "the theme looked at +dispassionately is unworthy of the monument in which it is entombed +for eternity." Now this remark shows at once that the critic does not +know what _The Ring and the Book_ means. We feel about it as we should +feel about a man who said that the plot of _Tristram Shandy_ was not +well constructed, or that the women in Rossetti's pictures did not +look useful and industrious. A man who has missed the fact that +_Tristram Shandy is_ a game of digressions, that the whole book is a +kind of practical joke to cheat the reader out of a story, simply has +not read _Tristram Shandy_ at all. The man who objects to the Rossetti +pictures because they depict a sad and sensuous day-dream, objects to +their existing at all. And any one who objects to Browning writing his +huge epic round a trumpery and sordid police-case has in reality +missed the whole length and breadth of the poet's meaning. The essence +of _The Ring and the Book_ is that it is the great epic of the +nineteenth century, because it is the great epic of the enormous +importance of small things. The supreme difference that divides _The +Ring and the Book_ from all the great poems of similar length and +largeness of design is precisely the fact that all these are about +affairs commonly called important, and _The Ring and the Book_ is +about an affair commonly called contemptible. Homer says, "I will show +you the relations between man and heaven as exhibited in a great +legend of love and war, which shall contain the mightiest of all +mortal warriors, and the most beautiful of all mortal women." The +author of the Book of Job says, "I will show you the relations between +man and heaven by a tale of primeval sorrows and the voice of God out +of a whirlwind." Virgil says, "I will show you the relations of man to +heaven by the tale of the origin of the greatest people and the +founding of the most wonderful city in the world." Dante says, "I will +show you the relations of man to heaven by uncovering the very +machinery of the spiritual universe, and letting you hear, as I have +heard, the roaring of the mills of God." Milton says, "I will show you +the relations of man to heaven by telling you of the very beginning of +all things, and the first shaping of the thing that is evil in the +first twilight of time." Browning says, "I will show you the relations +of man to heaven by telling you a story out of a dirty Italian book of +criminal trials from which I select one of the meanest and most +completely forgotten." Until we have realised this fundamental idea in +_The Ring and the Book_ all criticism is misleading. + +In this Browning is, of course, the supreme embodiment of his time. +The characteristic of the modern movements _par excellence_ is the +apotheosis of the insignificant. Whether it be the school of poetry +which sees more in one cowslip or clover-top than in forests and +waterfalls, or the school of fiction which finds something +indescribably significant in the pattern of a hearth-rug, or the tint +of a man's tweed coat, the tendency is the same. Maeterlinck stricken +still and wondering by a deal door half open, or the light shining out +of a window at night; Zola filling note-books with the medical +significance of the twitching of a man's toes, or the loss of his +appetite; Whitman counting the grass and the heart-shaped leaves of +the lilac; Mr. George Gissing lingering fondly over the third-class +ticket and the dilapidated umbrella; George Meredith seeing a soul's +tragedy in a phrase at the dinner-table; Mr. Bernard Shaw filling +three pages with stage directions to describe a parlour; all these +men, different in every other particular, are alike in this, that they +have ceased to believe certain things to be important and the rest to +be unimportant. Significance is to them a wild thing that may leap +upon them from any hiding-place. They have all become terribly +impressed with and a little bit alarmed at the mysterious powers of +small things. Their difference from the old epic poets is the whole +difference between an age that fought with dragons and an age that +fights with microbes. + +This tide of the importance of small things is flowing so steadily +around us upon every side to-day, that we do not sufficiently realise +that if there was one man in English literary history who might with +justice be called its fountain and origin, that man was Robert +Browning. When Browning arose, literature was entirely in the hands of +the Tennysonian poet. The Tennysonian poet does indeed mention +trivialities, but he mentions them when he wishes to speak trivially; +Browning mentions trivialities when he wishes to speak sensationally. +Now this sense of the terrible importance of detail was a sense which +may be said to have possessed Browning in the emphatic manner of a +demoniac possession. Sane as he was, this one feeling might have +driven him to a condition not far from madness. Any room that he was +sitting in glared at him with innumerable eyes and mouths gaping with +a story. There was sometimes no background and no middle distance in +his mind. A human face and the pattern on the wall behind it came +forward with equally aggressive clearness. It may be repeated, that if +ever he who had the strongest head in the world had gone mad, it would +have been through this turbulent democracy of things. If he looked at +a porcelain vase or an old hat, a cabbage, or a puppy at play, each +began to be bewitched with the spell of a kind of fairyland of +philosophers: the vase, like the jar in the _Arabian Nights_, to send +up a smoke of thoughts and shapes; the hat to produce souls, as a +conjuror's hat produces rabbits; the cabbage to swell and overshadow +the earth, like the Tree of Knowledge; and the puppy to go off at a +scamper along the road to the end of the world. Any one who has read +Browning's longer poems knows how constantly a simile or figure of +speech is selected, not among the large, well-recognised figures +common in poetry, but from some dusty corner of experience, and how +often it is characterised by smallness and a certain quaint exactitude +which could not have been found in any more usual example. Thus, for +instance, _Prince Hohenstiel--Schwangau_ explains the psychological +meaning of all his restless and unscrupulous activities by comparing +them to the impulse which has just led him, even in the act of +talking, to draw a black line on the blotting-paper exactly, so as to +connect two separate blots that were already there. This queer example +is selected as the best possible instance of a certain fundamental +restlessness and desire to add a touch to things in the spirit of +man. I have no doubt whatever that Browning thought of the idea after +doing the thing himself, and sat in a philosophical trance staring at +a piece of inked blotting-paper, conscious that at that moment, and in +that insignificant act, some immemorial monster of the mind, nameless +from the beginning of the world, had risen to the surface of the +spiritual sea. + +It is therefore the very essence of Browning's genius, and the very +essence of _The Ring and the Book_, that it should be the enormous +multiplication of a small theme. It is the extreme of idle criticism +to complain that the story is a current and sordid story, for the +whole object of the poem is to show what infinities of spiritual good +and evil a current and sordid story may contain. When once this is +realised, it explains at one stroke the innumerable facts about the +work. It explains, for example, Browning's detailed and picturesque +account of the glorious dust-bin of odds and ends for sale, out of +which he picked the printed record of the trial, and his insistence on +its cheapness, its dustiness, its yellow leaves, and its crabbed +Latin. The more soiled and dark and insignificant he can make the text +appear, the better for his ample and gigantic sermon. It explains +again the strictness with which Browning adhered to the facts of the +forgotten intrigue. He was playing the game of seeing how much was +really involved in one paltry fragment of fact. To have introduced +large quantities of fiction would not have been sportsmanlike. _The +Ring and the Book_ therefore, to re-capitulate the view arrived at so +far, is the typical epic of our age, because it expresses the richness +of life by taking as a text a poor story. It pays to existence the +highest of all possible compliments--the great compliment which +monarchy paid to mankind--the compliment of selecting from it almost +at random. + +But this is only the first half of the claim of _The Ring and the +Book_ to be the typical epic of modern times. The second half of that +claim, the second respect in which the work is representative of all +modern development, requires somewhat more careful statement. _The +Ring and the Book_ is of course, essentially speaking, a detective +story. Its difference from the ordinary detective story is that it +seeks to establish, not the centre of criminal guilt, but the centre +of spiritual guilt. But it has exactly the same kind of exciting +quality that a detective story has, and a very excellent quality it +is. But the element which is important, and which now requires +pointing out, is the method by which that centre of spiritual guilt +and the corresponding centre of spiritual rectitude is discovered. In +order to make clear the peculiar character of this method, it is +necessary to begin rather nearer the beginning, and to go back some +little way in literary history. + +I do not know whether anybody, including the editor himself, has ever +noticed a peculiar coincidence which may be found in the arrangement +of the lyrics in Sir Francis Palgrave's _Golden Treasury_. However +that may be, two poems, each of them extremely well known, are placed +side by side, and their juxtaposition represents one vast revolution +in the poetical manner of looking at things. The first is Goldsmith's +almost too well known + + "When lovely woman stoops to folly, + And finds too late that men betray, + What charm can soothe her melancholy? + What art can wash her guilt away?" + +Immediately afterwards comes, with a sudden and thrilling change of +note, the voice of Burns:-- + + "Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon, + How can ye bloom sae fair? + How can ye chant, ye little birds, + And I sae fu' of care? + + Thou'll break my heart, thou bonny bird, + That sings upon the bough, + Thou minds me of the happy days + When my fause Love was true." + +A man might read those two poems a great many times without happening +to realise that they are two poems on exactly the same subject--the +subject of a trusting woman deserted by a man. And the whole +difference--the difference struck by the very first note of the voice +of any one who reads them--is this fundamental difference, that +Goldsmith's words are spoken about a certain situation, and Burns's +words are spoken in that situation. + +In the transition from one of these lyrics to the other, we have a +vital change in the conception of the functions of the poet; a change +of which Burns was in many ways the beginning, of which Browning, in a +manner that we shall see presently, was the culmination. + +Goldsmith writes fully and accurately in the tradition of the old +historic idea of what a poet was. The poet, the _vates_, was the +supreme and absolute critic of human existence, the chorus in the +human drama; he was, to employ two words, which when analysed are the +same word, either a spectator or a seer. He took a situation, such as +the situation of a woman deserted by a man before-mentioned, and he +gave, as Goldsmith gives, his own personal and definite decision upon +it, entirely based upon general principles, and entirely from the +outside. Then, as in the case of _The Golden Treasury_, he has no +sooner given judgment than there comes a bitter and confounding cry +out of the very heart of the situation itself, which tells us things +which would have been quite left out of account by the poet of the +general rule. No one, for example, but a person who knew something of +the inside of agony would have introduced that touch of the rage of +the mourner against the chattering frivolity of nature, "Thou'll break +my heart, thou bonny bird." We find and could find no such touch in +Goldsmith. We have to arrive at the conclusion therefore, that the +_vates_ or poet in his absolute capacity is defied and overthrown by +this new method of what may be called the songs of experience. + +Now Browning, as he appears in _The Ring and the Book_, represents the +attempt to discover, not the truth in the sense that Goldsmith states +it, but the larger truth which is made up of all the emotional +experiences, such as that rendered by Burns. Browning, like Goldsmith, +seeks ultimately to be just and impartial, but he does it by +endeavouring to feel acutely every kind of partiality. Goldsmith +stands apart from all the passions of the case, and Browning includes +them all. If Browning were endeavouring to do strict justice in a case +like that of the deserted lady by the banks of Doon, he would not +touch or modify in the smallest particular the song as Burns sang it, +but he would write other songs, perhaps equally pathetic. A lyric or a +soliloquy would convince us suddenly by the mere pulse of its +language, that there was some pathos in the other actors in the drama; +some pathos, for example, in a weak man, conscious that in a +passionate ignorance of life he had thrown away his power of love, +lacking the moral courage to throw his prospects after it. We should +be reminded again that there was some pathos in the position, let us +say, of the seducer's mother, who had built all her hopes upon +developments which a mésalliance would overthrow, or in the position +of some rival lover, stricken to the ground with the tragedy in which +he had not even the miserable comfort of a _locus standi_. All these +characters in the story, Browning would realise from their own +emotional point of view before he gave judgment. The poet in his +ancient office held a kind of terrestrial day of judgment, and gave +men halters and haloes; Browning gives men neither halter nor halo, he +gives them voices. This is indeed the most bountiful of all the +functions of the poet, that he gives men words, for which men from the +beginning of the world have starved more than for bread. + +Here then we have the second great respect in which _The Ring and the +Book_ is the great epic of the age. It is the great epic of the age, +because it is the expression of the belief, it might almost be said, +of the discovery, that no man ever lived upon this earth without +possessing a point of view. No one ever lived who had not a little +more to say for himself than any formal system of justice was likely +to say for him. It is scarcely necessary to point out how entirely the +application of this principle would revolutionise the old heroic +epic, in which the poet decided absolutely the moral relations and +moral value of the characters. Suppose, for example, that Homer had +written the _Odyssey_ on the principle of _The Ring and the Book_, how +disturbing, how weird an experience it would be to read the story from +the point of view of Antinous! Without contradicting a single material +fact, without telling a single deliberate lie, the narrative would so +change the whole world around us, that we should scarcely know we were +dealing with the same place and people. The calm face of Penelope +would, it may be, begin to grow meaner before our eyes, like a face +changing in a dream. She would begin to appear as a fickle and selfish +woman, passing falsely as a widow, and playing a double game between +the attentions of foolish but honourable young men, and the fitful +appearances of a wandering and good-for-nothing sailor-husband; a man +prepared to act that most well-worn of melodramatic rôles, the +conjugal bully and blackmailer, the man who uses marital rights as an +instrument for the worse kind of wrongs. Or, again, if we had the +story of the fall of King Arthur told from the stand-point of Mordred, +it would only be a matter of a word or two; in a turn, in the +twinkling of an eye, we should find ourselves sympathising with the +efforts of an earnest young man to frustrate the profligacies of +high-placed paladins like Lancelot and Tristram, and ultimately +discovering, with deep regret but unshaken moral courage, that there +was no way to frustrate them, except by overthrowing the cold and +priggish and incapable egotist who ruled the country, and the whole +artificial and bombastic schemes which bred these moral evils. It +might be that in spite of this new view of the case, it would +ultimately appear that Ulysses was really right and Arthur was really +right, just as Browning makes it ultimately appear that Pompilia was +really right. But any one can see the enormous difference in scope and +difficulty between the old epic which told the whole story from one +man's point of view, and the new epic which cannot come to its +conclusion, until it has digested and assimilated views as paradoxical +and disturbing as our imaginary defence of Antinous and apologia of +Mordred. + +One of the most important steps ever taken in the history of the world +is this step, with all its various aspects, literary, political, and +social, which is represented by _The Ring and the Book_. It is the +step of deciding, in the face of many serious dangers and +disadvantages, to let everybody talk. The poet of the old epic is the +poet who had learnt to speak; Browning in the new epic is the poet who +has learnt to listen. This listening to truth and error, to heretics, +to fools, to intellectual bullies, to desperate partisans, to mere +chatterers, to systematic poisoners of the mind, is the hardest lesson +that humanity has ever been set to learn. _The Ring and the Book_ is +the embodiment of this terrible magnanimity and patience. It is the +epic of free speech. + +Free speech is an idea which has at present all the unpopularity of a +truism; so that we tend to forget that it was not so very long ago +that it had the more practical unpopularity which attaches to a new +truth. Ingratitude is surely the chief of the intellectual sins of +man. He takes his political benefits for granted, just as he takes +the skies and the seasons for granted. He considers the calm of a city +street a thing as inevitable as the calm of a forest clearing, whereas +it is only kept in peace by a sustained stretch and effort similar to +that which keeps up a battle or a fencing match. Just as we forget +where we stand in relation to natural phenomena, so we forget it in +relation to social phenomena. We forget that the earth is a star, and +we forget that free speech is a paradox. + +It is not by any means self-evident upon the face of it that an +institution like the liberty of speech is right or just. It is not +natural or obvious to let a man utter follies and abominations which +you believe to be bad for mankind any more than it is natural or +obvious to let a man dig up a part of the public road, or infect half +a town with typhoid fever. The theory of free speech, that truth is so +much larger and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, that it +is very much better at all costs to hear every one's account of it, is +a theory which has been justified upon the whole by experiment, but +which remains a very daring and even a very surprising theory. It is +really one of the great discoveries of the modern time; but, once +admitted, it is a principle that does not merely affect politics, but +philosophy, ethics, and finally poetry. + +Browning was upon the whole the first poet to apply the principle to +poetry. He perceived that if we wish to tell the truth about a human +drama, we must not tell it merely like a melodrama, in which the +villain is villainous and the comic man is comic. He saw that the +truth had not been told until he had seen in the villain the pure and +disinterested gentleman that most villains firmly believe themselves +to be, or until he had taken the comic man as seriously as it is the +custom of comic men to take themselves. And in this Browning is beyond +all question the founder of the most modern school of poetry. +Everything that was profound, everything, indeed, that was tolerable +in the aesthetes of 1880, and the decadent of 1890, has its ultimate +source in Browning's great conception that every one's point of view +is interesting, even if it be a jaundiced or a blood-shot point of +view. He is at one with the decadents, in holding that it is +emphatically profitable, that it is emphatically creditable, to know +something of the grounds of the happiness of a thoroughly bad man. +Since his time we have indeed been somewhat over-satisfied with the +moods of the burglar, and the pensive lyrics of the receiver of stolen +goods. But Browning, united with the decadents on this point, of the +value of every human testimony, is divided from them sharply and by a +chasm in another equally important point. He held that it is necessary +to listen to all sides of a question in order to discover the truth of +it. But he held that there was a truth to discover. He held that +justice was a mystery, but not, like the decadents, that justice was a +delusion. He held, in other words, the true Browning doctrine, that in +a dispute every one was to a certain extent right; not the decadent +doctrine that in so mad a place as the world, every one must be by the +nature of things wrong. + +Browning's conception of the Universe can hardly be better expressed +than in the old and pregnant fable about the five blind men who went +to visit an elephant. One of them seized its trunk, and asserted that +an elephant was a kind of serpent; another embraced its leg, and was +ready to die for the belief that an elephant was a kind of tree. In +the same way to the man who leaned against its side it was a wall; to +the man who had hold of its tail a rope, and to the man who ran upon +its tusk a particularly unpleasant kind of spear. This, as I have +said, is the whole theology and philosophy of Browning. But he differs +from the psychological decadents and impressionists in this important +point, that he thinks that although the blind men found out very +little about the elephant, the elephant was an elephant, and was there +all the time. The blind men formed mistaken theories because an +elephant is a thing with a very curious shape. And Browning firmly +believed that the Universe was a thing with a very curious shape +indeed. No blind poet could even imagine an elephant without +experience, and no man, however great and wise, could dream of God and +not die. But there is a vital distinction between the mystical view of +Browning, that the blind men are misled because there is so much for +them to learn, and the purely impressionist and agnostic view of the +modern poet, that the blind men were misled because there was nothing +for them to learn. To the impressionist artist of our time we are not +blind men groping after an elephant and naming it a tree or a serpent. +We are maniacs, isolated in separate cells, and dreaming of trees and +serpents without reason and without result. + + + + +CHAPTER VIII + +THE PHILOSOPHY OF BROWNING + + +The great fault of most of the appreciation of Browning lies in the +fact that it conceives the moral and artistic value of his work to lie +in what is called "the message of Browning," or "the teaching of +Browning," or, in other words, in the mere opinions of Browning. Now +Browning had opinions, just as he had a dress-suit or a vote for +Parliament. He did not hesitate to express these opinions any more +than he would have hesitated to fire off a gun, or open an umbrella, +if he had possessed those articles, and realised their value. For +example, he had, as his students and eulogists have constantly stated, +certain definite opinions about the spiritual function of love, or the +intellectual basis of Christianity. Those opinions were very striking +and very solid, as everything was which came out of Browning's mind. +His two great theories of the universe may be expressed in two +comparatively parallel phrases. The first was what may be called the +hope which lies in the imperfection of man. The characteristic poem of +"Old Pictures in Florence" expresses very quaintly and beautifully the +idea that some hope may always be based on deficiency itself; in other +words, that in so far as man is a one-legged or a one-eyed creature, +there is something about his appearance which indicates that he +should have another leg and another eye. The poem suggests admirably +that such a sense of incompleteness may easily be a great advance upon +a sense of completeness, that the part may easily and obviously be +greater than the whole. And from this Browning draws, as he is fully +justified in drawing, a definite hope for immortality and the larger +scale of life. For nothing is more certain than that though this world +is the only world that we have known, or of which we could even dream, +the fact does remain that we have named it "a strange world." In other +words, we have certainly felt that this world did not explain itself, +that something in its complete and patent picture has been omitted. +And Browning was right in saying that in a cosmos where incompleteness +implies completeness, life implies immortality. This then was the +first of the doctrines or opinions of Browning: the hope that lies in +the imperfection of man. The second of the great Browning doctrines +requires some audacity to express. It can only be properly stated as +the hope that lies in the imperfection of God. That is to say, that +Browning held that sorrow and self-denial, if they were the burdens of +man, were also his privileges. He held that these stubborn sorrows and +obscure valours might, to use a yet more strange expression, have +provoked the envy of the Almighty. If man has self-sacrifice and God +has none, then man has in the Universe a secret and blasphemous +superiority. And this tremendous story of a Divine jealousy Browning +reads into the story of the Crucifixion. If the Creator had not been +crucified He would not have been as great as thousands of wretched +fanatics among His own creatures. It is needless to insist upon this +point; any one who wishes to read it splendidly expressed need only be +referred to "Saul." But these are emphatically the two main doctrines +or opinions of Browning which I have ventured to characterise roughly +as the hope in the imperfection of man, and more boldly as the hope in +the imperfection of God. They are great thoughts, thoughts written by +a great man, and they raise noble and beautiful doubts on behalf of +faith which the human spirit will never answer or exhaust. But about +them in connection with Browning there nevertheless remains something +to be added. + +Browning was, as most of his upholders and all his opponents say, an +optimist. His theory, that man's sense of his own imperfection implies +a design of perfection, is a very good argument for optimism. His +theory that man's knowledge of and desire for self-sacrifice implies +God's knowledge of and desire for self-sacrifice is another very good +argument for optimism. But any one will make the deepest and blackest +and most incurable mistake about Browning who imagines that his +optimism was founded on any arguments for optimism. Because he had a +strong intellect, because he had a strong power of conviction, he +conceived and developed and asserted these doctrines of the +incompleteness of Man and the sacrifice of Omnipotence. But these +doctrines were the symptoms of his optimism, they were not its origin. +It is surely obvious that no one can be argued into optimism since no +one can be argued into happiness. Browning's optimism was not founded +on opinions which were the work of Browning, but on life which was +the work of God. One of Browning's most celebrated biographers has +said that something of Browning's theology must be put down to his +possession of a good digestion. The remark was, of course, like all +remarks touching the tragic subject of digestion, intended to be funny +and to convey some kind of doubt or diminution touching the value of +Browning's faith. But if we examine the matter with somewhat greater +care we shall see that it is indeed a thorough compliment to that +faith. Nobody, strictly speaking, is happier on account of his +digestion. He is happy because he is so constituted as to forget all +about it. Nobody really is convulsed with delight at the thought of +the ingenious machinery which he possesses inside him; the thing which +delights him is simply the full possession of his own human body. I +cannot in the least understand why a good digestion--that is, a good +body--should not be held to be as mystic a benefit as a sunset or the +first flower of spring. But there is about digestion this peculiarity +throwing a great light on human pessimism, that it is one of the many +things which we never speak of as existing until they go wrong. We +should think it ridiculous to speak of a man as suffering from his +boots if we meant that he had really no boots. But we do speak of a +man suffering from digestion when we mean that he suffers from a lack +of digestion. In the same way we speak of a man suffering from nerves +when we mean that his nerves are more inefficient than any one else's +nerves. If any one wishes to see how grossly language can degenerate, +he need only compare the old optimistic use of the word nervous, +which we employ in speaking of a nervous grip, with the new +pessimistic use of the word, which we employ in speaking of a nervous +manner. And as digestion is a good thing which sometimes goes wrong, +as nerves are good things which sometimes go wrong, so existence +itself in the eyes of Browning and all the great optimists is a good +thing which sometimes goes wrong. He held himself as free to draw his +inspiration from the gift of good health as from the gift of learning +or the gift of fellowship. But he held that such gifts were in life +innumerable and varied, and that every man, or at least almost every +man, possessed some window looking out on this essential excellence of +things. + +Browning's optimism then, since we must continue to use this somewhat +inadequate word, was a result of experience--experience which is for +some mysterious reason generally understood in the sense of sad or +disillusioning experience. An old gentleman rebuking a little boy for +eating apples in a tree is in the common conception the type of +experience. If he really wished to be a type of experience he would +climb up the tree himself and proceed to experience the apples. +Browning's faith was founded upon joyful experience, not in the sense +that he selected his joyful experiences and ignored his painful ones, +but in the sense that his joyful experiences selected themselves and +stood out in his memory by virtue of their own extraordinary intensity +of colour. He did not use experience in that mean and pompous sense in +which it is used by the worldling advanced in years. He rather used it +in that healthier and more joyful sense in which it is used at +revivalist meetings. In the Salvation Army a man's experiences mean +his experiences of the mercy of God, and to Browning the meaning was +much the same. But the revivalists' confessions deal mostly with +experiences of prayer and praise; Browning's dealt pre-eminently with +what may be called his own subject, the experiences of love. + +And this quality of Browning's optimism, the quality of detail, is +also a very typical quality. Browning's optimism is of that ultimate +and unshakeable order that is founded upon the absolute sight, and +sound, and smell, and handling of things. If a man had gone up to +Browning and asked him with all the solemnity of the eccentric, "Do +you think life is worth living?" it is interesting to conjecture what +his answer might have been. If he had been for the moment under the +influence of the orthodox rationalistic deism of the theologian he +would have said, "Existence is justified by its manifest design, its +manifest adaptation of means to ends," or, in other words, "Existence +is justified by its completeness." If, on the other hand, he had been +influenced by his own serious intellectual theories he would have +said, "Existence is justified by its air of growth and doubtfulness," +or, in other words, "Existence is justified by its incompleteness." +But if he had not been influenced in his answer either by the accepted +opinions, or by his own opinions, but had simply answered the question +"Is life worth living?" with the real, vital answer that awaited it in +his own soul, he would have said as likely as not, "Crimson toadstools +in Hampshire." Some plain, glowing picture of this sort left on his +mind would be his real verdict on what the universe had meant to him. +To his traditions hope was traced to order, to his speculations hope +was traced to disorder. But to Browning himself hope was traced to +something like red toadstools. His mysticism was not of that idle and +wordy type which believes that a flower is symbolical of life; it was +rather of that deep and eternal type which believes that life, a mere +abstraction, is symbolical of a flower. With him the great concrete +experiences which God made always come first; his own deductions and +speculations about them always second. And in this point we find the +real peculiar inspiration of his very original poems. + +One of the very few critics who seem to have got near to the actual +secret of Browning's optimism is Mr. Santayana in his most interesting +book _Interpretations of Poetry and Religion_. He, in contradistinction +to the vast mass of Browning's admirers, had discovered what was the +real root virtue of Browning's poetry; and the curious thing is, that +having discovered that root virtue, he thinks it is a vice. He +describes the poetry of Browning most truly as the poetry of +barbarism, by which he means the poetry which utters the primeval and +indivisible emotions. "For the barbarian is the man who regards his +passions as their own excuse for being, who does not domesticate them +either by understanding their cause, or by conceiving their ideal +goal." Whether this be or be not a good definition of the barbarian, +it is an excellent and perfect definition of the poet. It might, +perhaps, be suggested that barbarians, as a matter of fact, are +generally highly traditional and respectable persons who would not put +a feather wrong in their head-gear, and who generally have very few +feelings and think very little about those they have. It is when we +have grown to a greater and more civilised stature that we begin to +realise and put to ourselves intellectually the great feelings that +sleep in the depths of us. Thus it is that the literature of our day +has steadily advanced towards a passionate simplicity, and we become +more primeval as the world grows older, until Whitman writes huge and +chaotic psalms to express the sensations of a schoolboy out fishing, +and Maeterlinck embodies in symbolic dramas the feelings of a child in +the dark. + +Thus, Mr. Santayana is, perhaps, the most valuable of all the Browning +critics. He has gone out of his way to endeavour to realise what it is +that repels him in Browning, and he has discovered the fault which +none of Browning's opponents have discovered. And in this he has +discovered the merit which none of Browning's admirers have +discovered. Whether the quality be a good or a bad quality, Mr. +Santayana is perfectly right. The whole of Browning's poetry does rest +upon primitive feeling; and the only comment to be added is that so +does the whole of every one else's poetry. Poetry deals entirely with +those great eternal and mainly forgotten wishes which are the ultimate +despots of existence. Poetry presents things as they are to our +emotions, not as they are to any theory, however plausible, or any +argument, however conclusive. If love is in truth a glorious vision, +poetry will say that it is a glorious vision, and no philosophers will +persuade poetry to say that it is the exaggeration of the instinct of +sex. If bereavement is a bitter and continually aching thing, poetry +will say that it is so, and no philosophers will persuade poetry to +say that it is an evolutionary stage of great biological value. And +here comes in the whole value and object of poetry, that it is +perpetually challenging all systems with the test of a terrible +sincerity. The practical value of poetry is that it is realistic upon +a point upon which nothing else can be realistic, the point of the +actual desires of man. Ethics is the science of actions, but poetry is +the science of motives. Some actions are ugly, and therefore some +parts of ethics are ugly. But all motives are beautiful, or present +themselves for the moment as beautiful, and therefore all poetry is +beautiful. If poetry deals with the basest matter, with the shedding +of blood for gold, it ought to suggest the gold as well as the blood. +Only poetry can realise motives, because motives are all pictures of +happiness. And the supreme and most practical value of poetry is this, +that in poetry, as in music, a note is struck which expresses beyond +the power of rational statement a condition of mind, and all actions +arise from a condition of mind. Prose can only use a large and clumsy +notation; it can only say that a man is miserable, or that a man is +happy; it is forced to ignore that there are a million diverse kinds +of misery and a million diverse kinds of happiness. Poetry alone, with +the first throb of its metre, can tell us whether the depression is +the kind of depression that drives a man to suicide, or the kind of +depression that drives him to the Tivoli. Poetry can tell us whether +the happiness is the happiness that sends a man to a restaurant, or +the much richer and fuller happiness that sends him to church. + +Now the supreme value of Browning as an optimist lies in this that we +have been examining, that beyond all his conclusions, and deeper than +all his arguments, he was passionately interested in and in love with +existence. If the heavens had fallen, and all the waters of the earth +run with blood, he would still have been interested in existence, if +possible a little more so. He is a great poet of human joy for +precisely the reason of which Mr. Santayana complains: that his +happiness is primal, and beyond the reach of philosophy. He is +something far more convincing, far more comforting, far more +religiously significant than an optimist: he is a happy man. + +This happiness he finds, as every man must find happiness, in his own +way. He does not find the great part of his joy in those matters in +which most poets find felicity. He finds much of it in those matters +in which most poets find ugliness and vulgarity. He is to a +considerable extent the poet of towns. "Do you care for nature much?" +a friend of his asked him. "Yes, a great deal," he said, "but for +human beings a great deal more." Nature, with its splendid and +soothing sanity, has the power of convincing most poets of the +essential worthiness of things. There are few poets who, if they +escaped from the rowdiest waggonette of trippers, could not be quieted +again and exalted by dropping into a small wayside field. The +speciality of Browning is rather that he would have been quieted and +exalted by the waggonette. + +To Browning, probably the beginning and end of all optimism was to be +found in the faces in the street. To him they were all the masks of a +deity, the heads of a hundred-headed Indian god of nature. Each one of +them looked towards some quarter of the heavens, not looked upon by +any other eyes. Each one of them wore some expression, some blend of +eternal joy and eternal sorrow, not to be found in any other +countenance. The sense of the absolute sanctity of human difference +was the deepest of all his senses. He was hungrily interested in all +human things, but it would have been quite impossible to have said of +him that he loved humanity. He did not love humanity but men. His +sense of the difference between one man and another would have made +the thought of melting them into a lump called humanity simply +loathsome and prosaic. It would have been to him like playing four +hundred beautiful airs at once. The mixture would not combine all, it +would lose all. Browning believed that to every man that ever lived +upon this earth had been given a definite and peculiar confidence of +God. Each one of us was engaged on secret service; each one of us had +a peculiar message; each one of us was the founder of a religion. Of +that religion our thoughts, our faces, our bodies, our hats, our +boots, our tastes, our virtues, and even our vices, were more or less +fragmentary and inadequate expressions. + +In the delightful memoirs of that very remarkable man Sir Charles +Gavan Duffy, there is an extremely significant and interesting +anecdote about Browning, the point of which appears to have attracted +very little attention. Duffy was dining with Browning and John +Forster, and happened to make some chance allusion to his own +adherence to the Roman Catholic faith, when Forster remarked, half +jestingly, that he did not suppose that Browning would like him any +the better for that. Browning would seem to have opened his eyes with +some astonishment. He immediately asked why Forster should suppose +him hostile to the Roman Church. Forster and Duffy replied almost +simultaneously, by referring to "Bishop Blougram's Apology," which had +just appeared, and asking whether the portrait of the sophistical and +self-indulgent priest had not been intended for a satire on Cardinal +Wiseman. "Certainly," replied Browning cheerfully, "I intended it for +Cardinal Wiseman, but I don't consider it a satire, there is nothing +hostile about it." This is the real truth which lies at the heart of +what may be called the great sophistical monologues which Browning +wrote in later years. They are not satires or attacks upon their +subjects, they are not even harsh and unfeeling exposures of them. +They are defences; they say or are intended to say the best that can +be said for the persons with whom they deal. But very few people in +this world would care to listen to the real defence of their own +characters. The real defence, the defence which belongs to the Day of +Judgment, would make such damaging admissions, would clear away so +many artificial virtues, would tell such tragedies of weakness and +failure, that a man would sooner be misunderstood and censured by the +world than exposed to that awful and merciless eulogy. One of the most +practically difficult matters which arise from the code of manners and +the conventions of life, is that we cannot properly justify a human +being, because that justification would involve the admission of +things which may not conventionally be admitted. We might explain and +make human and respectable, for example, the conduct of some old +fighting politician, who, for the good of his party and his country, +acceded to measures of which he disapproved; but we cannot, because we +are not allowed to admit that he ever acceded to measures of which he +disapproved. We might touch the life of many dissolute public men with +pathos, and a kind of defeated courage, by telling the truth about the +history of their sins. But we should throw the world into an uproar if +we hinted that they had any. Thus the decencies of civilisation do not +merely make it impossible to revile a man, they make it impossible to +praise him. + +Browning, in such poems as "Bishop Blougram's Apology," breaks this +first mask of goodness in order to break the second mask of evil, and +gets to the real goodness at last; he dethrones a saint in order to +humanise a scoundrel. This is one typical side of the real optimism of +Browning. And there is indeed little danger that such optimism will +become weak and sentimental and popular, the refuge of every idler, +the excuse of every ne'er-do-well. There is little danger that men +will desire to excuse their souls before God by presenting themselves +before men as such snobs as Bishop Blougram, or such dastards as +Sludge the Medium. There is no pessimism, however stern, that is so +stern as this optimism, it is as merciless as the mercy of God. + +It is true that in this, as in almost everything else connected with +Browning's character, the matter cannot be altogether exhausted by +such a generalisation as the above. Browning's was a simple character, +and therefore very difficult to understand, since it was impulsive, +unconscious, and kept no reckoning of its moods. Probably in a great +many cases, the original impulse which led Browning to plan a +soliloquy was a kind of anger mixed with curiosity; possibly the first +charcoal sketch of Blougram was a caricature of a priest. Browning, +as we have said, had prejudices, and had a capacity for anger, and two +of his angriest prejudices were against a certain kind of worldly +clericalism, and against almost every kind of spiritualism. But as he +worked upon the portraits at least, a new spirit began to possess him, +and he enjoyed every spirited and just defence the men could make of +themselves, like triumphant blows in a battle, and towards the end +would come the full revelation, and Browning would stand up in the +man's skin and testify to the man's ideals. However this may be, it is +worth while to notice one very curious error that has arisen in +connection with one of the most famous of these monologues. + +When Robert Browning was engaged in that somewhat obscure quarrel with +the spiritualist Home, it is generally and correctly stated that he +gained a great number of the impressions which he afterwards embodied +in "Mr. Sludge the Medium." The statement so often made, particularly +in the spiritualist accounts of the matter, that Browning himself is +the original of the interlocutor and exposer of Sludge, is of course +merely an example of that reckless reading from which no one has +suffered more than Browning despite his students and societies. The +man to whom Sludge addresses his confession is a Mr. Hiram H. +Horsfall, an American, a patron of spiritualists, and, as it is more +than once suggested, something of a fool. Nor is there the smallest +reason to suppose that Sludge considered as an individual bears any +particular resemblance to Home considered as an individual. But +without doubt "Mr. Sludge the Medium" is a general statement of the +view of spiritualism at which Browning had arrived from his +acquaintance with Home and Home's circle. And about that view of +spiritualism there is something rather peculiar to notice. The poem, +appearing as it did at the time when the intellectual public had just +become conscious of the existence of spiritualism, attracted a great +deal of attention, and aroused a great deal of controversy. The +spiritualists called down thunder upon the head of the poet, whom they +depicted as a vulgar and ribald lampooner who had not only committed +the profanity of sneering at the mysteries of a higher state of life, +but the more unpardonable profanity of sneering at the convictions of +his own wife. The sceptics, on the other hand, hailed the poem with +delight as a blasting exposure of spiritualism, and congratulated the +poet on making himself the champion of the sane and scientific view of +magic. Which of these two parties was right about the question of +attacking the reality of spiritualism it is neither easy nor necessary +to discuss. For the simple truth, which neither of the two parties and +none of the students of Browning seem to have noticed, is that "Mr. +Sludge the Medium" is not an attack upon spiritualism. It would be a +great deal nearer the truth, though not entirely the truth, to call it +a justification of spiritualism. The whole essence of Browning's +method is involved in this matter, and the whole essence of Browning's +method is so vitally misunderstood that to say that "Mr. Sludge the +Medium" is something like a defence of spiritualism will bear on the +face of it the appearance of the most empty and perverse of paradoxes. +But so, when we have comprehended Browning's spirit, the fact will be +found to be. + +The general idea is that Browning must have intended "Sludge" for an +attack on spiritual phenomena, because the medium in that poem is made +a vulgar and contemptible mountebank, because his cheats are quite +openly confessed, and he himself put into every ignominious situation, +detected, exposed, throttled, horsewhipped, and forgiven. To regard +this deduction as sound is to misunderstand Browning at the very start +of every poem that he ever wrote. There is nothing that the man loved +more, nothing that deserves more emphatically to be called a +speciality of Browning, than the utterance of large and noble truths +by the lips of mean and grotesque human beings. In his poetry praise +and wisdom were perfected not only out of the mouths of babes and +sucklings, but out of the mouths of swindlers and snobs. Now what, as +a matter of fact, is the outline and development of the poem of +"Sludge"? The climax of the poem, considered as a work of art, is so +fine that it is quite extraordinary that any one should have missed +the point of it, since it is the whole point of the monologue. Sludge +the Medium has been caught out in a piece of unquestionable trickery, +a piece of trickery for which there is no conceivable explanation or +palliation which will leave his moral character intact. He is +therefore seized with a sudden resolution, partly angry, partly +frightened, and partly humorous, to become absolutely frank, and to +tell the whole truth about himself for the first time not only to his +dupe, but to himself. He excuses himself for the earlier stages of the +trickster's life by a survey of the border-land between truth and +fiction, not by any means a piece of sophistry or cynicism, but a +perfectly fair statement of an ethical difficulty which does exist. +There are some people who think that it must be immoral to admit that +there are any doubtful cases of morality, as if a man should refrain +from discussing the precise boundary at the upper end of the Isthmus +of Panama, for fear the inquiry should shake his belief in the +existence of North America. People of this kind quite consistently +think Sludge to be merely a scoundrel talking nonsense. It may be +remembered that they thought the same thing of Newman. It is actually +supposed, apparently in the current use of words, that casuistry is +the name of a crime; it does not appear to occur to people that +casuistry is a science, and about as much a crime as botany. This +tendency to casuistry in Browning's monologues has done much towards +establishing for him that reputation for pure intellectualism which +has done him so much harm. But casuistry in this sense is not a cold +and analytical thing, but a very warm and sympathetic thing. To know +what combination of excuse might justify a man in manslaughter or +bigamy, is not to have a callous indifference to virtue; it is rather +to have so ardent an admiration for virtue as to seek it in the +remotest desert and the darkest incognito. + +This is emphatically the case with the question of truth and falsehood +raised in "Sludge the Medium." To say that it is sometimes difficult +to tell at what point the romancer turns into the liar is not to state +a cynicism, but a perfectly honest piece of human observation. To +think that such a view involves the negation of honesty is like +thinking that red is green, because the two fade into each other in +the colours of the rainbow. It is really difficult to decide when we +come to the extreme edge of veracity, when and when not it is +permissible to create an illusion. A standing example, for instance, +is the case of the fairy-tales. We think a father entirely pure and +benevolent when he tells his children that a beanstalk grew up into +heaven, and a pumpkin turned into a coach. We should consider that he +lapsed from purity and benevolence if he told his children that in +walking home that evening he had seen a beanstalk grow half-way up the +church, or a pumpkin grow as large as a wheelbarrow. Again, few people +would object to that general privilege whereby it is permitted to a +person in narrating even a true anecdote to work up the climax by any +exaggerative touches which really tend to bring it out. The reason of +this is that the telling of the anecdote has become, like the telling +of the fairy-tale, almost a distinct artistic creation; to offer to +tell a story is in ordinary society like offering to recite or play +the violin. No one denies that a fixed and genuine moral rule could be +drawn up for these cases, but no one surely need be ashamed to admit +that such a rule is not entirely easy to draw up. And when a man like +Sludge traces much of his moral downfall to the indistinctness of the +boundary and the possibility of beginning with a natural extravagance +and ending with a gross abuse, it certainly is not possible to deny +his right to be heard. + +We must recur, however, to the question of the main development of the +Sludge self-analysis. He begins, as we have said, by urging a general +excuse by the fact that in the heat of social life, in the course of +telling tales in the intoxicating presence of sympathisers and +believers, he has slid into falsehood almost before he is aware of it. +So far as this goes, there is truth in his plea. Sludge might indeed +find himself unexpectedly justified if we had only an exact record of +how true were the tales told about Conservatives in an exclusive +circle of Radicals, or the stories told about Radicals in a circle of +indignant Conservatives. But after this general excuse, Sludge goes on +to a perfectly cheerful and unfeeling admission of fraud; this +principal feeling towards his victims is by his own confession a +certain unfathomable contempt for people who are so easily taken in. +He professes to know how to lay the foundations for every species of +personal acquaintanceship, and how to remedy the slight and trivial +slips of making Plato write Greek in naughts and crosses. + + "As I fear, sir, he sometimes used to do + Before I found the useful book that knows." + +It would be difficult to imagine any figure more indecently +confessional, more entirely devoid of not only any of the restraints +of conscience, but of any of the restraints even of a wholesome +personal conceit, than Sludge the Medium. He confesses not only fraud, +but things which are to the natural man more difficult to confess even +than fraud--effeminacy, futility, physical cowardice. And then, when +the last of his loathsome secrets has been told, when he has nothing +left either to gain or to conceal, then he rises up into a perfect +bankrupt sublimity and makes the great avowal which is the whole pivot +and meaning of the poem. He says in effect: "Now that my interest in +deceit is utterly gone, now that I have admitted, to my own final +infamy, the frauds that I have practised, now that I stand before you +in a patent and open villainy which has something of the +disinterestedness and independence of the innocent, now I tell you +with the full and impartial authority of a lost soul that I believe +that there is something in spiritualism. In the course of a thousand +conspiracies, by the labour of a thousand lies, I have discovered that +there is really something in this matter that neither I nor any other +man understands. I am a thief, an adventurer, a deceiver of mankind, +but I am not a disbeliever in spiritualism. I have seen too much for +that." This is the confession of faith of Mr. Sludge the Medium. It +would be difficult to imagine a confession of faith framed and +presented in a more impressive manner. Sludge is a witness to his +faith as the old martyrs were witnesses to their faith, but even more +impressively. They testified to their religion even after they had +lost their liberty, and their eyesight, and their right hands. Sludge +testifies to his religion even after he has lost his dignity and his +honour. + +It may be repeated that it is truly extraordinary that any one should +have failed to notice that this avowal on behalf of spiritualism is +the pivot of the poem. The avowal itself is not only expressed +clearly, but prepared and delivered with admirable rhetorical force:-- + + "Now for it, then! Will you believe me, though? + You've heard what I confess: I don't unsay + A single word: I cheated when I could, + Rapped with my toe-joints, set sham hands at work, + Wrote down names weak in sympathetic ink. + Rubbed odic lights with ends of phosphor-match, + And all the rest; believe that: believe this, + By the same token, though it seem to set + The crooked straight again, unsay the said, + Stick up what I've knocked down; I can't help that, + It's truth! I somehow vomit truth to-day. + This trade of mine--I don't know, can't be sure + But there was something in it, tricks and all!" + +It is strange to call a poem with so clear and fine a climax an attack +on spiritualism. To miss that climax is like missing the last sentence +in a good anecdote, or putting the last act of _Othello_ into the +middle of the play. Either the whole poem of "Sludge the Medium" means +nothing at all, and is only a lampoon upon a cad, of which the matter +is almost as contemptible as the subject, or it means this--that some +real experiences of the unseen lie even at the heart of hypocrisy, and +that even the spiritualist is at root spiritual. + +One curious theory which is common to most Browning critics is that +Sludge must be intended for a pure and conscious impostor, because +after his confession, and on the personal withdrawal of Mr. Horsfall, +he bursts out into horrible curses against that gentleman and cynical +boasts of his future triumphs in a similar line of business. Surely +this is to have a very feeble notion either of nature or art. A man +driven absolutely into a corner might humiliate himself, and gain a +certain sensation almost of luxury in that humiliation, in pouring out +all his imprisoned thoughts and obscure victories. For let it never be +forgotten that a hypocrite is a very unhappy man; he is a man who has +devoted himself to a most delicate and arduous intellectual art in +which he may achieve masterpieces which he must keep secret, fight +thrilling battles, and win hair's-breadth victories for which he +cannot have a whisper of praise. A really accomplished impostor is the +most wretched of geniuses; he is a Napoleon on a desert island. A man +might surely, therefore, when he was certain that his credit was gone, +take a certain pleasure in revealing the tricks of his unique trade, +and gaining not indeed credit, but at least a kind of glory. And in +the course of this self-revelation he would come at last upon that +part of himself which exists in every man--that part which does +believe in, and value, and worship something. This he would fling in +his hearer's face with even greater pride, and take a delight in +giving a kind of testimony to his religion which no man had ever given +before--the testimony of a martyr who could not hope to be a saint. +But surely all this sudden tempest of candour in the man would not +mean that he would burst into tears and become an exemplary ratepayer, +like a villain in the worst parts of Dickens. The moment the danger +was withdrawn, the sense of having given himself away, of having +betrayed the secret of his infamous freemasonry, would add an +indescribable violence and foulness to his reaction of rage. A man in +such a case would do exactly as Sludge does. He would declare his own +shame, declare the truth of his creed, and then, when he realised what +he had done, say something like this:-- + + "R-r-r, you brute-beast and blackguard! Cowardly scamp! + I only wish I dared burn down the house + And spoil your sniggering!" + +and so on, and so on. + +He would react like this; it is one of the most artistic strokes in +Browning. But it does not prove that he was a hypocrite about +spiritualism, or that he was speaking more truthfully in the second +outburst than in the first. Whence came this extraordinary theory that +a man is always speaking most truly when he is speaking most coarsely? +The truth about oneself is a very difficult thing to express, and +coarse speaking will seldom do it. + +When we have grasped this point about "Sludge the Medium," we have +grasped the key to the whole series of Browning's casuistical +monologues--_Bishop Blaugram's Apology, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, +Fra Lippo Lippi, Fifine at the Fair, Aristophanes' Apology_, and +several of the monologues in _The Ring and the Book_. They are all, +without exception, dominated by this one conception of a certain +reality tangled almost inextricably with unrealities in a man's mind, +and the peculiar fascination which resides in the thought that the +greatest lies about a man, and the greatest truths about him, may be +found side by side in the same eloquent and sustained utterance. + + "For Blougram, he believed, say, half he spoke." + +Or, to put the matter in another way, the general idea of these poems +is, that a man cannot help telling some truth even when he sets out to +tell lies. If a man comes to tell us that he has discovered perpetual +motion, or been swallowed by the sea-serpent, there will yet be some +point in the story where he will tell us about himself almost all that +we require to know. + +If any one wishes to test the truth, or to see the best examples of +this general idea in Browning's monologues, he may be recommended to +notice one peculiarity of these poems which is rather striking. As a +whole, these apologies are written in a particularly burly and even +brutal English. Browning's love of what is called the ugly is nowhere +else so fully and extravagantly indulged. This, like a great many +other things for which Browning as an artist is blamed, is perfectly +appropriate to the theme. A vain, ill-mannered, and untrustworthy +egotist, defending his own sordid doings with his own cheap and +weather-beaten philosophy, is very likely to express himself best in a +language flexible and pungent, but indelicate and without dignity. But +the peculiarity of these loose and almost slangy soliloquies is that +every now and then in them there occur bursts of pure poetry which are +like a burst of birds singing. Browning does not hesitate to put some +of the most perfect lines that he or anyone else have ever written in +the English language into the mouths of such slaves as Sludge and +Guido Franceschini. Take, for the sake of example, "Bishop Blougram's +Apology." The poem is one of the most grotesque in the poet's works. +It is intentionally redolent of the solemn materialism and patrician +grossness of a grand dinner-party _à deux_. It has many touches of an +almost wild bathos, such as the young man who bears the impossible +name of Gigadibs. The Bishop, in pursuing his worldly argument for +conformity, points out with truth that a condition of doubt is a +condition that cuts both ways, and that if we cannot be sure of the +religious theory of life, neither can we be sure of the material +theory of life, and that in turn is capable of becoming an uncertainty +continually shaken by a tormenting suggestion. We cannot establish +ourselves on rationalism, and make it bear fruit to us. Faith itself +is capable of becoming the darkest and most revolutionary of doubts. +Then comes the passage:-- + + "Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch, + A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, + A chorus ending from Euripides,-- + And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears + As old and new at once as Nature's self, + To rap and knock and enter in our soul, + Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring, + Round the ancient idol, on his base again,-- + The grand Perhaps!" + +Nobler diction and a nobler meaning could not have been put into the +mouth of Pompilia, or Rabbi Ben Ezra. It is in reality put into the +mouth of a vulgar, fashionable priest, justifying his own cowardice +over the comfortable wine and the cigars. + +Along with this tendency to poetry among Browning's knaves, must be +reckoned another characteristic, their uniform tendency to theism. +These loose and mean characters speak of many things feverishly and +vaguely; of one thing they always speak with confidence and composure, +their relation to God. It may seem strange at first sight that those +who have outlived the indulgence, and not only of every law, but of +every reasonable anarchy, should still rely so simply upon the +indulgence of divine perfection. Thus Sludge is certain that his life +of lies and conjuring tricks has been conducted in a deep and subtle +obedience to the message really conveyed by the conditions created by +God. Thus Bishop Blougram is certain that his life of panic-stricken +and tottering compromise has been really justified as the only method +that could unite him with God. Thus Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau is +certain that every dodge in his thin string of political dodges has +been the true means of realising what he believes to be the will of +God. Every one of these meagre swindlers, while admitting a failure in +all things relative, claims an awful alliance with the Absolute. To +many it will at first sight appear a dangerous doctrine indeed. But, +in truth, it is a most solid and noble and salutary doctrine, far less +dangerous than its opposite. Every one on this earth should believe, +amid whatever madness or moral failure, that his life and temperament +have some object on the earth. Every one on the earth should believe +that he has something to give to the world which cannot otherwise be +given. Every one should, for the good of men and the saving of his own +soul, believe that it is possible, even if we are the enemies of the +human race, to be the friends of God. The evil wrought by this +mystical pride, great as it often is, is like a straw to the evil +wrought by a materialistic self-abandonment. The crimes of the devil +who thinks himself of immeasurable value are as nothing to the crimes +of the devil who thinks himself of no value. With Browning's knaves we +have always this eternal interest, that they are real somewhere, and +may at any moment begin to speak poetry. We are talking to a peevish +and garrulous sneak; we are watching the play of his paltry features, +his evasive eyes, and babbling lips. And suddenly the face begins to +change and harden, the eyes glare like the eyes of a mask, the whole +face of clay becomes a common mouthpiece, and the voice that comes +forth is the voice of God, uttering His everlasting soliloquy. + + + + +INDEX + + +A + +_Agamemnon of Aeschylus, The_, 120. + +Alliance, The Holy, 89. + +"Andrea del Sarto," 83. + +_Aristophanes' Apology_, 120, 199. + +Arnold, Matthew, 41, 55, 56. + +_Asolando_, 132. + +Asolo (Italy), 42, 131. + +"At the Mermaid," 117. + +Austria, 88, 89. + + +B + +"Bad Dreams," 138. + +_Balaustion's Adventure_, 119-120. + +Barrett, Arabella, 74, 119. + +Barrett, Edward Moulton, 58 _seq._, 70, 73, 74, 76, 79. + +Beardsley, Mr. Aubrey, 149. + +_Bells and Pomegranates_, 105. + +"Ben Ezra," 23, 201. + +Birrell, Mr. Augustine, 160. + +"Bishop Blougram," 51, 189. + +_Bishop Blougram's Apology_, 188, 189, 199, 200. + +_Blot on the 'Scutcheon, A_, 53. + +Boyd, Mr., 62. + +Browning, Robert: birth and family history, 3; + theories as to his descent, 4-8; + a typical Englishman of the middle class, 9; + his immediate ancestors, 10 _seq._; + education, 12; + boyhood and youth, 17; + first poems, _Incondita_, 17; + romantic spirit, 18; + publication of _Pauline_, 20; + friendship with literary men, 21; + _Paracelsus_, 22; + introduction to literary world, 25; + his earliest admirers, 26; + friendship with Carlyle, 26; + _Strafford_, 27; + _Sordello_, 34; + _Pippa Passes_, 43; + _Dramatic Lyrics_, 45; + _The Return of the Druses_, 51; + _A Blot on the 'Scutcheon_, 53; + correspondence with Elizabeth Barrett, 62 _seq._; + their first meeting, 70; + marriage and elopement, 78, 79; + life in Italy, 81 _seq._; + love of Italy, 82, 85 _seq._; + sympathy with Italian Revolution, 90; + attitude towards spiritualism, 91 _seq._, 113, 190-199; + death of his wife, 103; + returns to England, 105; + _The Ring and the Book_, 110; + culmination of his literary fame, 110, 117; + life in society, 110; + elected Fellow of Balliol, 117; + honoured by the great Universities, 118; + _Balaustion's Adventure_, 119-120; + _Aristophanes' Apology_, 120; + _The Agamemnon of Aeschylus_, 120; + _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_, 121; + _Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country_, 122; + _Fifine at the Fair_, 124; + _The Inn Album_, 125; + _Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper_, 125; + _La Saisiaz_, 127; + _The Two Poets of Croisic_, 127; + _Dramatic Idylls_, 127; + _Jocoseria_, 127; + _Ferishtah's Fancies_, 127; + _Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day_, 128; + accepts post of Foreign Correspondent to the Royal Academy, 129; + goes to Llangollen with his sister, 130; + last journey to Italy, 130; + death at Venice, 132; + publication of _Asolando_, 132; + his conversation, 36; + vanity, 33, 36; + faults and virtues, 40, 55; + his interest in Art, 82 _seq._; + his varied accomplishments, 84-85; + personality and presence, 18, 33, 112 _seq._; + his prejudices, 113-116; + his occasional coarseness, 116; + politics, 86 _seq._; + Browning as a father, 105; + as dramatist, 52; + as a literary artist, 133 _seq._; + his use of the grotesque, 48, 140, 143, 148 _seq._; + his failures, 141; + artistic originality, 136, 143, 158; + keen sense of melody and rhythm, 145 _seq._; + ingenuity in rhyming, 152; + his buffoonery, 154; + obscurity, 154 _seq._; + his conception of the Universe, 175; + philosophy, 177 _seq._; + optimism, 179 _seq._; + his love poetry, 49; + his knaves, 51, 201-202; + the key to his casuistical monologues, 199. + +_Browning, Life of_ (Mrs. Orr), 92. + +Browning, Robert (father of the poet), 10, 119. + +Browning, Mrs., _née_ Wiedermann (mother), 11, 82. + +Browning, Anna (sister), 14, 105. + +Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (wife), +57 _seq._, 91-99, 101, 103, 116, 119, +129, 131. + +Browning Society, 129. + +Burns, Robert, 169-170. + +Byron, 11, 38, 141, 143. + +Byronism, 19, 117. + + +C + +"Caliban," 9, 120. + +"Caliban upon Setebos," 93, 135, 138. + +Camberwell, 3, 8, 19. + +"Caponsacchi," 108. + +Carlyle, Thomas, 12, 16, 17, 26, 55, 56, 87, 115. + +Carlyle, Mrs., 26. + +"Cavalier Tunes," 46. + +Cavour, 86, 90, 103. + +Charles I., 28, 29. + +Chaucer, 117. + +"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came," 159. + +_Christmas Eve_, 105. + +Church in Italy, The, 88. + +"Clive," 127. + +Clough, Arthur Hugh, 56. + +_Colombe's Birthday_, 32. + +Corelli, Miss Marie, 38. + +Cromwell, Oliver, 73. + + +D + +Darwin, 23, 39. + +Dickens, 16. + +"Djabal," 51, 52. + +Domett, Alfred, 21. + +"Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis," 161. + +_Dramatic Idylls_, 127. + +_Dramatic Lyrics_, 45-50. + +_Dramatis Personæ_, 105. + +Duffy, Sir Charles Gavan, 187, 188. + + +E + +_Edinburgh Review_, 122. + +"Englishman in Italy, The," 150. + + +F + +"Fears and Scruples," 126, 138. + +"Ferishtah's Fancies," 138. + +_Fifine at the Fair_, 9, 13, 51, 124, 199. + +Fitzgerald, Edward, 116, 131. + +_Flight of the Duchess, The_, 18. + +Florence, 81, 94. + +Forster, John, 26. + +Foster, John, 187, 188. + +Fox, Mr. Johnson, 20. + +Fox, Mrs. Bridell, 33. + +"Fra Lippo,", 51. + +_Fra Lippo Lippi_, 83, 199. + +French Revolution, 87. + +Furnivall, Dr., 7, 129. + + +G + +"Garden Fancies," 46. + +Garibaldi, 86, 89. + +Gilbert, W.S., 144. + +Gissing, Mr. George, 165. + +Gladstone, 117. + +_Golden Treasury_ (Palgrave), 168. + +Goldsmith, 169, 170. + +Gordon, General, 90. + +"Guido Franceschini," 106, 120, 200. + + +H + +Henley, Mr., 148. + +"Heretic's Tragedy, The," 137. + +Hickey, Miss E.H., 129. + +"Holy Cross Day," 153. + +Home, David (spiritualist), 93-97, 113, 190, 191. + +Home, David, _Memoirs_ of, 93 _seq._ + +Horne, 26. + +Houghton, Lord, 129. + +"House," 138. + +"Householder, The," 138. + +"How they brought the good News from Ghent to Aix," 46. + +_Hudibras_ (Butler), 57. + +Hugo, Victor, 17. + +Hunt, Leigh, 26. + + +I + +_Incondita_, 17. + +_Inn Album, The_, 125. + +_Instans Tyrannus_, 9. + +Italy, 85 _seq._ + +Italian Revolution, 88 _seq._ + +"Ivà n Ivà novitch," 127. + + +J + +Jameson, Mrs., 75. + +Jerrold, Douglas, 34. + +_Jocoseria_, 127. + +Jowett, Dr., 118. + +_Julius Cæsar_ (Shakespeare), 28. + +"Juris Doctor Bottinius," 161. + + +K + +Keats, 15, 16, 19, 137, 142. + +Kenyon, Mr., 22, 58, 69-70, 74, 76. + +_King Victor and King Charles_, 32. + +Kipling, Rudyard, 142. + +Kirkup, Seymour, 103. + + +L + +_L'Aiglon_, 28. + +"Laboratory, The," 47, 143. + +Landor, 26, 56, 93, 101-103. + +_La Saisiaz_, 127. + +_Letters, The Browning_, 63. + +Liberalism, 86. + +"Lines to Edward Fitzgerald," 131. + +Llangollen, 130. + +Lockhart, 112. + +"Lost Leader, The," 46. + +"Lover's Quarrel, A," 50. + +"Luigi," 45. + +Lytton, Lord (novelist), 91. + + +M + +Macready, 17, 27, 53. + +Maeterlinck, 164, 184. + +Manning, Cardinal, 91. + +Mary Queen of Scots, 29. + +"Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha," 147. + +"May and Death." 21. + +Mazzini, 89. + +_Men and Women_, 105. + +Meredith, George, 156, 165. +Mill, John Stuart, 26, 56. + +Milsand, 119. + +Milton, 137. + +Monckton-Milnes, 26, 100. + +_Mr. Sludge the Medium_, 82, 96, 120, 190-199. + +"Muléykeh," 127. + +"My Star," 138. + + +N + +"Nationality in Drinks," 46, 138. + +Napoleon, 42, 89. + +Napoleon III., 56, 92, 121. + +"Never the Time and the Place," 127. + +Newman, Cardinal, 193. + +Norwood, 18. + + +O + +"Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" (Wordsworth), 136. + +"Ode on a Grecian Urn" (Keats), 137. + +"Old Masters in Florence," 177. + +"One Word More," 65. + +Orr, Mrs., 72. + + +P + +_Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper_, 125, 126, 152. + +_Paracelsus_, 22, 25, 26, 41, 47, 158. + +"Paracelsus," 24, 25. + +Painting, Poems on, 83. + +Palgrave, Francis, 117. + +Paris, 94. + +_Parleyings with certain Persons of Importance in their Day_, 22, 128, 158. + +_Pauline_, 20, 21, 37, 41, 51. + +"Pheidippides," 127. + +Phelps (actor), 53. + +"Pictor Ignotus," 83. + +"Pied Piper of Hamelin, The," 153. + +"Pippa," 45, 120. + +_Pippa Passes_, 18, 45, 47, 51, 137. + +Pisa, 81. + +Pius IX., Church under, 88. + +Plato, 21, 23. + +Poe, Edgar Allan, 144. + +Poetry, Pessimistic school of, 130. + +"Pompilia," 201. + +Pope, 11, 20, 57. + +"Portrait, A," 138. + +_Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_, 121-122. + +_Princess, The_ (Tennyson), 148. + +"Prometheus Unbound" (Shelley), 137. + +Prussia, 88, 89. + +Puritans, 30. + +Pym, 28, 30. + + +R + +"Rabbi Ben Ezra," 201. + +_Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country_, 122-124. + +_Return of the Druses, The_, 51-53. + +Revolution, + The French, 15; + Italian, 90. + +_Ring and the Book, The_, 85, 106, 109, 123, 137, 160-176. + +Ripert-Monclar, Comte de, 22, 93. + +Roman Church, 114, 187, 188. + +Rossetti, 163. + +Royalists, 30. + +Ruskin, 16, 55, 56, 91, 115. + +Russia, 88. + + +S + +Sand, George, 9, 94. + +Santayana's, Mr., _Interpretations of Poetry and Religion_, 183-186. + +"Sebald," 45. + +Shakespeare, 17, 57. + +Shakespeare Society, 129. + +Sharp, Mr. William, 133. + +Shaw, Mr. Bernard, 165. + +Shelley, 15, 16, 17,19, 56, 136, 141, 143. + +"Shop," 138. + +"Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis," 138. + +Silverthorne (Browning's cousin), 21. + +"Sludge," 51, 52, 150, 189, 200. + +Smith, Elder (publishers), 110. + +"Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, The," 47. + +"Sonnets from the Portuguese," 65. + +_Sordello_, 23, 34, 42. + +Speech, Free, 173. + +Spenser, 142. + +Spiritualism, 9, 91, 113, 190. + +"Statue and the Bust, The," 109. + +Sterne, 117. + +Stevenson, Robert Louis, 60, 114. + +_Straford_, 27 _seq._, 37. + +"Stafford," 28, 29, 30. + +Swinburne, 56, 116, 142,143. + + +T + + +_Tait's Magazine_, 20. + +Talfourd, Sergeant, 26. + +Tennyson, 27, 34, 55, 117, 141, 142, 143, 148. + +Thackeray, Miss, 123. + +"Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr," 46. + +_Time's Revenges_, 9, 93. + +Tolstoi, 115. + +_Tristram Shandy_ (Sterne), 163. + +_Two Poets of Croisic, The_, 127. + + +U + + +University College, 14. + +"Up jumped Tokay" (poem quoted), 140. + + +V + + +Venice, 131. + +Victor of Sardinia, King, 23. + +Vogler, Abt, 23. + + +W + + +_Water Babies_ (Kingsley), 8. + +Watts, Mr. G.F., 112. + +Whitman, Walt, 21, 43, 49, 114, 165, 184. + +"Why I am a Liberal" (sonnet), 86. + +Wiedermann, William, 12. + +Wiseman, Cardinal, 188. + +Wimbledon Common, 18. + +Wordsworth, 69, 136, 141, 143. + +Wordsworth Society, 129. + + +Y + +"Youth and Art," 50, 109. + + +Z + +Zola, 164. + + * * * * * + +ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS. + +NEW SERIES. + +_Crown 8vo. 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Chesterton. + </title> + <style type="text/css"> +/*<![CDATA[ XML blockout */ +<!-- + P { margin-top: .75em; + text-align: justify; + margin-bottom: .75em; + } + H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { + text-align: center; /* all headings centered */ + } + HR { width: 33%; + margin-top: 1em; + margin-bottom: 1em; + } + BODY{margin-left: 10%; + margin-right: 10%; + } + + ol {list-style-type: none; } + + .linenum {position: absolute; top: auto; left: 4%;} /* poetry number */ + .note {margin-left: 2em; margin-right: 2em; margin-bottom: 1em;} /* footnote */ + .blkquot {margin-left: 4em; margin-right: 4em;} /* block indent */ + .pagenum {position: absolute; left: 92%; font-size: smaller; text-align: right;} /* page numbers */ + .sidenote {width: 20%; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-left: 1em; font-size: smaller; float: right; clear: right;} + + .ind1 {display: block; margin-left: 2em;} + + .poem {margin-left:10%; margin-right:10%; text-align: left;} + .poem .stanza {margin: 1em 0em 1em 0em;} + .poem span {display: block; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;} + .poem span.i2 {display: block; margin-left: 2em;} + .poem span.i4 {display: block; margin-left: 4em;} + .poem span.i10 {display: block; margin-left: 10em;} + .poem .caesura {vertical-align: -200%;} + // --> + /* XML end ]]>*/ + </style> + </head> +<body> +<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13342 ***</div> + +<br /><br /> +<h1>ROBERT BROWNING</h1> +<br /><br /> +<h3>BY</h3> + +<h2>G.K. CHESTERTON</h2> +<br /><br /> +<hr style="width: 100%" /> + +<h2>CONTENTS</h2> +<br /><br /> +<ol> + <li>CHAPTER I <a href="#CHAPTER_I">BROWNING IN EARLY LIFE</a></li> + <li>CHAPTER II <a href="#CHAPTER_II">EARLY WORKS</a></li> + <li>CHAPTER III <a href="#CHAPTER_III">BROWNING AND HIS MARRIAGE</a></li> + <li>CHAPTER IV <a href="#CHAPTER_IV">BROWNING IN ITALY</a></li> + <li>CHAPTER V <a href="#CHAPTER_V">BROWNING IN LATER LIFE</a></li> + <li>CHAPTER VI <a href="#CHAPTER_VI">BROWNING AS A LITERARY ARTIST</a></li> + <li>CHAPTER VII <a href="#CHAPTER_VII">"THE RING AND THE BOOK"</a></li> + <li>CHAPTER VIII <a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">THE PHILOSOPHY OF BROWNING</a></li> + <li><a href="#INDEX">INDEX</a></li> +</ol> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<a name="CHAPTER_I"></a><h2>CHAPTER I</h2> + +<h3>BROWNING IN EARLY LIFE</h3> + + +<p>On the subject of Browning's work innumerable things have been said +and remain to be said; of his life, considered as a narrative of +facts, there is little or nothing to say. It was a lucid and public +and yet quiet life, which culminated in one great dramatic test of +character, and then fell back again into this union of quietude and +publicity. And yet, in spite of this, it is a great deal more +difficult to speak finally about his life than about his work. His +work has the mystery which belongs to the complex; his life the much +greater mystery which belongs to the simple. He was clever enough to +understand his own poetry; and if he understood it, we can understand +it. But he was also entirely unconscious and impulsive, and he was +never clever enough to understand his own character; consequently we +may be excused if that part of him which was hidden from him is partly +hidden from us. The subtle man is always immeasurably easier to +understand than the natural man; for the subtle man keeps a diary of +his moods, he practises the art of self-analysis and self-revelation, +and can tell us how he came to feel this<a name="Page_2"></a> or to say that. But a man +like Browning knows no more about the state of his emotions than about +the state of his pulse; they are things greater than he, things +growing at will, like forces of Nature. There is an old anecdote, +probably apocryphal, which describes how a feminine admirer wrote to +Browning asking him for the meaning of one of his darker poems, and +received the following reply: "When that poem was written, two people +knew what it meant—God and Robert Browning. And now God only knows +what it means." This story gives, in all probability, an entirely +false impression of Browning's attitude towards his work. He was a +keen artist, a keen scholar, he could put his finger on anything, and +he had a memory like the British Museum Library. But the story does, +in all probability, give a tolerably accurate picture of Browning's +attitude towards his own emotions and his psychological type. If a man +had asked him what some particular allusion to a Persian hero meant he +could in all probability have quoted half the epic; if a man had asked +him which third cousin of Charlemagne was alluded to in <i>Sordello</i>, he +could have given an account of the man and an account of his father +and his grandfather. But if a man had asked him what he thought of +himself, or what were his emotions an hour before his wedding, he +would have replied with perfect sincerity that God alone knew.</p> + +<p>This mystery of the unconscious man, far deeper than any mystery of +the conscious one, existing as it does in all men, existed peculiarly +in Browning, because he was a very ordinary and spontaneous man. The +same thing exists to some extent in all history and all affairs. +Anything that is deliberate, twisted, created<a name="Page_3"></a> as a trap and a +mystery, must be discovered at last; everything that is done naturally +remains mysterious. It may be difficult to discover the principles of +the Rosicrucians, but it is much easier to discover the principles of +the Rosicrucians than the principles of the United States: nor has any +secret society kept its aims so quiet as humanity. The way to be +inexplicable is to be chaotic, and on the surface this was the quality +of Browning's life; there is the same difference between judging of +his poetry and judging of his life, that there is between making a map +of a labyrinth and making a map of a mist. The discussion of what some +particular allusion in <i>Sordello</i> means has gone on so far, and may go +on still, but it has it in its nature to end. The life of Robert +Browning, who combines the greatest brain with the most simple +temperament known in our annals, would go on for ever if we did not +decide to summarise it in a very brief and simple narrative.</p> + +<p>Robert Browning was born in Camberwell on May 7th 1812. His father and +grandfather had been clerks in the Bank of England, and his whole +family would appear to have belonged to the solid and educated middle +class—the class which is interested in letters, but not ambitious in +them, the class to which poetry is a luxury, but not a necessity.</p> + +<p>This actual quality and character of the Browning family shows some +tendency to be obscured by matters more remote. It is the custom of +all biographers to seek for the earliest traces of a family in distant +ages and even in distant lands; and Browning, as it happens, has given +them opportunities which tend to lead away the mind from the main +matter in hand. There is a<a name="Page_4"></a> tradition, for example, that men of his +name were prominent in the feudal ages; it is based upon little beyond +a coincidence of surnames and the fact that Browning used a seal with +a coat-of-arms. Thousands of middle-class men use such a seal, merely +because it is a curiosity or a legacy, without knowing or caring +anything about the condition of their ancestors in the Middle Ages. +Then, again, there is a theory that he was of Jewish blood; a view +which is perfectly conceivable, and which Browning would have been the +last to have thought derogatory, but for which, as a matter of fact, +there is exceedingly little evidence. The chief reason assigned by his +contemporaries for the belief was the fact that he was, without doubt, +specially and profoundly interested in Jewish matters. This +suggestion, worthless in any case, would, if anything, tell the other +way. For while an Englishman may be enthusiastic about England, or +indignant against England, it never occurred to any living Englishman +to be interested in England. Browning was, like every other +intelligent Aryan, interested in the Jews; but if he was related to +every people in which he was interested, he must have been of +extraordinarily mixed extraction. Thirdly, there is the yet more +sensational theory that there was in Robert Browning a strain of the +negro. The supporters of this hypothesis seem to have little in +reality to say, except that Browning's grandmother was certainly a +Creole. It is said in support of the view that Browning was singularly +dark in early life, and was often mistaken for an Italian. There does +not, however, seem to be anything particular to be deduced from this, +except that if he looked like an Italian, he must have looked +exceedingly unlike a negro.</p><a name="Page_5"></a> + +<p>There is nothing valid against any of these three theories, just as +there is nothing valid in their favour; they may, any or all of them, +be true, but they are still irrelevant. They are something that is in +history or biography a great deal worse than being false—they are +misleading. We do not want to know about a man like Browning, whether +he had a right to a shield used in the Wars of the Roses, or whether +the tenth grandfather of his Creole grandmother had been white or +black: we want to know something about his family, which is quite a +different thing. We wish to have about Browning not so much the kind +of information which would satisfy Clarencieux King-at-Arms, but the +sort of information which would satisfy us, if we were advertising for +a very confidential secretary, or a very private tutor. We should not +be concerned as to whether the tutor were descended from an Irish +king, but we should still be really concerned about his extraction, +about what manner of people his had been for the last two or three +generations. This is the most practical duty of biography, and this is +also the most difficult. It is a great deal easier to hunt a family +from tombstone to tombstone back to the time of Henry II. than to +catch and realise and put upon paper that most nameless and elusive of +all things—social tone.</p> + +<p>It will be said immediately, and must as promptly be admitted, that we +could find a biographical significance in any of these theories if we +looked for it. But it is, indeed, the sin and snare of biographers +that they tend to see significance in everything; characteristic +carelessness if their hero drops his pipe, and characteristic +carefulness if he picks it up again. It is true, assuredly, that all +the three races above named could be connected <a name="Page_6"></a>with Browning's +personality. If we believed, for instance, that he really came of a +race of mediæval barons, we should say at once that from them he got +his pre-eminent spirit of battle: we should be right, for every line +in his stubborn soul and his erect body did really express the +fighter; he was always contending, whether it was with a German theory +about the Gnostics, or with a stranger who elbowed his wife in a +crowd. Again, if we had decided that he was a Jew, we should point out +how absorbed he was in the terrible simplicity of monotheism: we +should be right, for he was so absorbed. Or again, in the case even of +the negro fancy; it would not be difficult for us to suggest a love of +colour, a certain mental gaudiness, a pleasure</p> + +<p class="note">"When reds and blues were indeed red and blue,"</p> + +<p>as he says in <i>The Ring and the Book</i>. We should be right; for there +really was in Browning a tropical violence of taste, an artistic +scheme compounded as it were, of orchids and cockatoos, which, amid +our cold English poets, seems scarcely European. All this is extremely +fascinating; and it may be true. But, as has above been suggested, +here comes in the great temptation of this kind of work, the noble +temptation to see too much in everything. The biographer can easily +see a personal significance in these three hypothetical nationalities. +But is there in the world a biographer who could lay his hand upon his +heart and say that he would not have seen as much significance in any +three other nationalities? If Browning's ancestors had been Frenchmen, +should we not have said that it was from them doubtless that he +inherited that logical agility <a name="Page_7"></a>which marks him among English poets? +If his grandfather had been a Swede, should we not have said that the +old sea-roving blood broke out in bold speculation and insatiable +travel? If his great-aunt had been a Red Indian, should we not have +said that only in the Ojibways and the Blackfeet do we find the +Browning fantasticality combined with the Browning stoicism? This +over-readiness to seize hints is an inevitable part of that secret +hero-worship which is the heart of biography. The lover of great men +sees signs of them long before they begin to appear on the earth, and, +like some old mythological chronicler, claims as their heralds the +storms and the falling stars.</p> + +<p>A certain indulgence must therefore be extended to the present writer +if he declines to follow that admirable veteran of Browning study, Dr. +Furnivall, into the prodigious investigations which he has been +conducting into the condition of the Browning family since the +beginning of the world. For his last discovery, the descent of +Browning from a footman in the service of a country magnate, there +seems to be suggestive, though not decisive evidence. But Browning's +descent from barons, or Jews, or lackeys, or black men, is not the +main point touching his family. If the Brownings were of mixed origin, +they were so much the more like the great majority of English +middle-class people. It is curious that the romance of race should be +spoken of as if it were a thing peculiarly aristocratic; that +admiration for rank, or interest in family, should mean only interest +in one not very interesting type of rank and family. The truth is that +aristocrats exhibit less of the romance of pedigree than any other +people in the world. For since it is their principle to marry only +within their <a name="Page_8"></a>own class and mode of life, there is no opportunity in +their case for any of the more interesting studies in heredity; they +exhibit almost the unbroken uniformity of the lower animals. It is in +the middle classes that we find the poetry of genealogy; it is the +suburban grocer standing at his shop door whom some wild dash of +Eastern or Celtic blood may drive suddenly to a whole holiday or a +crime. Let us admit then, that it is true that these legends of the +Browning family have every abstract possibility. But it is a far more +cogent and apposite truth that if a man had knocked at the door of +every house in the street where Browning was born, he would have found +similar legends in all of them. There is hardly a family in Camberwell +that has not a story or two about foreign marriages a few generations +back; and in all this the Brownings are simply a typical Camberwell +family. The real truth about Browning and men like him can scarcely be +better expressed than in the words of that very wise and witty story, +Kingsley's <i>Water Babies</i>, in which the pedigree of the Professor is +treated in a manner which is an excellent example of the wild common +sense of the book. "His mother was a Dutch woman, and therefore she +was born at Curaçoa (of course, you have read your geography and +therefore know why), and his father was a Pole, and therefore he was +brought up at Petropaulowski (of course, you have learnt your modern +politics, and therefore know why), but for all that he was as thorough +an Englishman as ever coveted his neighbour's goods."</p> + +<p>It may be well therefore to abandon the task of obtaining a clear +account of Brownings family, and endeavour to obtain, what is much +more important, a <a name="Page_9"></a>clear account of his home. For the great central +and solid fact, which these heraldic speculations tend inevitably to +veil and confuse, is that Browning was a thoroughly typical Englishman +of the middle class. He may have had alien blood, and that alien +blood, by the paradox we have observed, may have made him more +characteristically a native. A phase, a fancy, a metaphor may or may +not have been born of eastern or southern elements, but he was, +without any question at all, an Englishman of the middle class. +Neither all his liberality nor all his learning ever made him anything +but an Englishman of the middle class. He expanded his intellectual +tolerance until it included the anarchism of <i>Fifine at the Fair</i> and +the blasphemous theology of Caliban; but he remained himself an +Englishman of the middle class. He pictured all the passions of the +earth since the Fall, from the devouring amorousness of <i>Time's +Revenges</i> to the despotic fantasy of <i>Instans Tyrannus</i>; but he +remained himself an Englishman of the middle class. The moment that he +came in contact with anything that was slovenly, anything that was +lawless, in actual life, something rose up in him, older than any +opinions, the blood of generations of good men. He met George Sand and +her poetical circle and hated it, with all the hatred of an old city +merchant for the irresponsible life. He met the Spiritualists and +hated them, with all the hatred of the middle class for borderlands +and equivocal positions and playing with fire. His intellect went upon +bewildering voyages, but his soul walked in a straight road. He piled +up the fantastic towers of his imagination until they eclipsed the +planets; but the plan of the foundation on which he built was <a name="Page_10"></a>always +the plan of an honest English house in Camberwell. He abandoned, with +a ceaseless intellectual ambition, every one of the convictions of his +class; but he carried its prejudices into eternity.</p> + +<p>It is then of Browning as a member of the middle class, that we can +speak with the greatest historical certainty; and it is his immediate +forebears who present the real interest to us. His father, Robert +Browning, was a man of great delicacy of taste, and to all appearance +of an almost exaggerated delicacy of conscience. Every glimpse we have +of him suggests that earnest and almost worried kindliness which is +the mark of those to whom selfishness, even justifiable selfishness, +is really a thing difficult or impossible. In early life Robert +Browning senior was placed by his father (who was apparently a father +of a somewhat primitive, not to say barbaric, type) in an important +commercial position in the West Indies. He threw up the position +however, because it involved him in some recognition of slavery. +Whereupon his unique parent, in a transport of rage, not only +disinherited him and flung him out of doors, but by a superb stroke of +humour, which stands alone in the records of parental ingenuity, sent +him in a bill for the cost of his education. About the same time that +he was suffering for his moral sensibility he was also disturbed about +religious matters, and he completed his severance from his father by +joining a dissenting sect. He was, in short, a very typical example of +the serious middle-class man of the Wilberforce period, a man to whom +duty was all in all, and who would revolutionise an empire or a +continent for the satisfaction of a single moral scruple. Thus, while +he was Puritan at the core, not the ruthless Puritan of the +<a name="Page_11"></a>seventeenth, but the humanitarian Puritan of the eighteenth century, +he had upon the surface all the tastes and graces of a man of culture. +Numerous accomplishments of the lighter kind, such as drawing and +painting in water colours, he possessed; and his feeling for many +kinds of literature was fastidious and exact. But the whole was +absolutely redolent of the polite severity of the eighteenth century. +He lamented his son's early admiration for Byron, and never ceased +adjuring him to model himself upon Pope.</p> + +<p>He was, in short, one of the old-fashioned humanitarians of the +eighteenth century, a class which we may or may not have conquered in +moral theory, but which we most certainly have not conquered in moral +practice. Robert Browning senior destroyed all his fortunes in order +to protest against black slavery; white slavery may be, as later +economists tell us, a thing infinitely worse, but not many men destroy +their fortunes in order to protest against it. The ideals of the men +of that period appear to us very unattractive; to them duty was a kind +of chilly sentiment. But when we think what they did with those cold +ideals, we can scarcely feel so superior. They uprooted the enormous +Upas of slavery, the tree that was literally as old as the race of +man. They altered the whole face of Europe with their deductive +fancies. We have ideals that are really better, ideals of passion, of +mysticism, of a sense of the youth and adventurousness of the earth; +but it will be well for us if we achieve as much by our frenzy as they +did by their delicacies. It scarcely seems as if we were as robust in +our very robustness as they were robust in their sensibility.</p> + +<p>Robert Browning's mother was the daughter of<a name="Page_12"></a> William Wiedermann, a +German merchant settled in Dundee, and married to a Scotch wife. One +of the poet's principal biographers has suggested that from this union +of the German and Scotch, Browning got his metaphysical tendency; it +is possible; but here again we must beware of the great biographical +danger of making mountains out of molehills. What Browning's mother +unquestionably did give to him, was in the way of training—a very +strong religious habit, and a great belief in manners. Thomas Carlyle +called her "the type of a Scottish gentlewoman," and the phrase has a +very real significance to those who realise the peculiar condition of +Scotland, one of the very few European countries where large sections +of the aristocracy are Puritans; thus a Scottish gentlewoman combines +two descriptions of dignity at the same time. Little more is known of +this lady except the fact that after her death Browning could not bear +to look at places where she had walked.</p> + +<p>Browning's education in the formal sense reduces itself to a minimum. +In very early boyhood he attended a species of dame-school, which, +according to some of his biographers, he had apparently to leave +because he was too clever to be tolerable. However this may be, he +undoubtedly went afterwards to a school kept by Mr. Ready, at which +again he was marked chiefly by precocity. But the boy's education did +not in truth take place at any systematic seat of education; it took +place in his own home, where one of the quaintest and most learned and +most absurdly indulgent of fathers poured out in an endless stream +fantastic recitals from the Greek epics and mediæval chronicles. If we +test the matter by the test of actual schools and <a name="Page_13"></a>universities, +Browning will appear to be almost the least educated man in English +literary history. But if we test it by the amount actually learned, we +shall think that he was perhaps the most educated man that ever lived; +that he was in fact, if anything, overeducated. In a spirited poem he +has himself described how, when he was a small child, his father used +to pile up chairs in the drawing-room and call them the city of Troy. +Browning came out of the home crammed with all kinds of +knowledge—knowledge about the Greek poets, knowledge about the +Provençal Troubadours, knowledge about the Jewish Rabbis of the Middle +Ages. But along with all this knowledge he carried one definite and +important piece of ignorance, an ignorance of the degree to which such +knowledge was exceptional. He was no spoilt and self-conscious child, +taught to regard himself as clever. In the atmosphere in which he +lived learning was a pleasure, and a natural pleasure, like sport or +wine. He had in it the pleasure of some old scholar of the Renascence, +when grammar itself was as fresh as the flowers of spring. He had no +reason to suppose that every one did not join in so admirable a game. +His sagacious destiny, while giving him knowledge of everything else, +left him in ignorance of the ignorance of the world.</p> + +<p>Of his boyish days scarcely any important trace remains, except a kind +of diary which contains under one date the laconic statement, "Married +two wives this morning." The insane ingenuity of the biographer would +be quite capable of seeing in this a most suggestive foreshadowing of +the sexual dualism which is so ably defended in <i>Fifine at the Fair</i>. +A great part of his childhood was passed in the society of his only +<a name="Page_14"></a>sister Sariana; and it is a curious and touching fact that with her +also he passed his last days. From his earliest babyhood he seems to +have lived in a more or less stimulating mental atmosphere; but as he +emerged into youth he came under great poetic influences, which made +his father's classical poetic tradition look for the time insipid. +Browning began to live in the life of his own age.</p> + +<p>As a young man he attended classes at University College; beyond this +there is little evidence that he was much in touch with intellectual +circles outside that of his own family. But the forces that were +moving the literary world had long passed beyond the merely literary +area. About the time of Browning's boyhood a very subtle and profound +change was beginning in the intellectual atmosphere of such homes as +that of the Brownings. In studying the careers of great men we tend +constantly to forget that their youth was generally passed and their +characters practically formed in a period long previous to their +appearance in history. We think of Milton, the Restoration Puritan, +and forget that he grew up in the living shadow of Shakespeare and the +full summer of the Elizabethan drama. We realise Garibaldi as a sudden +and almost miraculous figure rising about fifty years ago to create +the new Kingdom of Italy, and we forget that he must have formed his +first ideas of liberty while hearing at his father's dinner-table that +Napoleon was the master of Europe. Similarly, we think of Browning as +the great Victorian poet, who lived long enough to have opinions on +Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bill, and forget that as a young man he +passed a bookstall and saw a volume ticketed "Mr. Shelley's Atheistic +Poem," and had to search even in <a name="Page_15"></a>his own really cultivated circle for +some one who could tell him who Mr. Shelley was. Browning was, in +short, born in the afterglow of the great Revolution.</p> + +<p>The French Revolution was at root a thoroughly optimistic thing. It +may seem strange to attribute optimism to anything so destructive; +but, in truth, this particular kind of optimism is inevitably, and by +its nature, destructive. The great dominant idea of the whole of that +period, the period before, during, and long after the Revolution, is +the idea that man would by his nature live in an Eden of dignity, +liberty and love, and that artificial and decrepit systems are keeping +him out of that Eden. No one can do the least justice to the great +Jacobins who does not realise that to them breaking the civilisation +of ages was like breaking the cords of a treasure-chest. And just as +for more than a century great men had dreamed of this beautiful +emancipation, so the dream began in the time of Keats and Shelley to +creep down among the dullest professions and the most prosaic classes +of society. A spirit of revolt was growing among the young of the +middle classes, which had nothing at all in common with the complete +and pessimistic revolt against all things in heaven or earth, which +has been fashionable among the young in more recent times. The +Shelleyan enthusiast was altogether on the side of existence; he +thought that every cloud and clump of grass shared his strict +republican orthodoxy. He represented, in short, a revolt of the normal +against the abnormal; he found himself, so to speak, in the heart of a +wholly topsy-turvy and blasphemous state of things, in which God was +rebelling against Satan. There began to arise about this time a race +of young <a name="Page_16"></a>men like Keats, members of a not highly cultivated middle +class, and even of classes lower, who felt in a hundred ways this +obscure alliance with eternal things against temporal and practical +ones, and who lived on its imaginative delight. They were a kind of +furtive universalist; they had discovered the whole cosmos, and they +kept the whole cosmos a secret. They climbed up dark stairs to meagre +garrets, and shut themselves in with the gods. Numbers of the great +men, who afterwards illuminated the Victorian era, were at this time +living in mean streets in magnificent daydreams. Ruskin was solemnly +visiting his solemn suburban aunts; Dickens was going to and fro in a +blacking factory; Carlyle, slightly older, was still lingering on a +poor farm in Dumfriesshire; Keats had not long become the assistant of +the country surgeon when Browning was a boy in Camberwell. On all +sides there was the first beginning of the æsthetic stir in the middle +classes which expressed itself in the combination of so many poetic +lives with so many prosaic livelihoods. It was the age of inspired +office-boys.</p> + +<p>Browning grew up, then, with the growing fame of Shelley and Keats, in +the atmosphere of literary youth, fierce and beautiful, among new +poets who believed in a new world. It is important to remember this, +because the real Browning was a quite different person from the grim +moralist and metaphysician who is seen through the spectacles of +Browning Societies and University Extension Lecturers. Browning was +first and foremost a poet, a man made to enjoy all things visible and +invisible, a priest of the higher passions. The misunderstanding that +has supposed him to be other than poetical, because his form was often +fanciful and <a name="Page_17"></a>abrupt, is really different from the misunderstanding +which attaches to most other poets. The opponents of Victor Hugo +called him a mere windbag; the opponents of Shakespeare called him a +buffoon. But the admirers of Hugo and Shakespeare at least knew +better. Now the admirers and opponents of Browning alike make him out +to be a pedant rather than a poet. The only difference between the +Browningite and the anti-Browningite, is that the second says he was +not a poet but a mere philosopher, and the first says he was a +philosopher and not a mere poet. The admirer disparages poetry in +order to exalt Browning; the opponent exalts poetry in order to +disparage Browning; and all the time Browning himself exalted poetry +above all earthly things, served it with single-hearted intensity, and +stands among the few poets who hardly wrote a line of anything else.</p> + +<p>The whole of the boyhood and youth of Robert Browning has as much the +quality of pure poetry as the boyhood and youth of Shelley. We do not +find in it any trace of the analytical Browning who is believed in by +learned ladies and gentlemen. How indeed would such sympathisers feel +if informed that the first poems that Browning wrote in a volume +called <i>Incondita</i> were noticed to contain the fault of "too much +splendour of language and too little wealth of thought"? They were +indeed Byronic in the extreme, and Browning in his earlier appearances +in society presents himself in quite a romantic manner. Macready, the +actor, wrote of him: "He looks and speaks more like a young poet than +any one I have ever seen." A picturesque tradition remains that Thomas +Carlyle, riding out upon one of his solitary gallops necessitated <a name="Page_18"></a>by +his physical sufferings, was stopped by one whom he described as a +strangely beautiful youth, who poured out to him without preface or +apology his admiration for the great philosopher's works. Browning at +this time seems to have left upon many people this impression of +physical charm. A friend who attended University College with him +says: "He was then a bright handsome youth with long black hair +falling over his shoulders." Every tale that remains of him in +connection with this period asserts and reasserts the completely +romantic spirit by which he was then possessed. He was fond, for +example, of following in the track of gipsy caravans, far across +country, and a song which he heard with the refrain, "Following the +Queen of the Gipsies oh!" rang in his ears long enough to express +itself in his soberer and later days in that splendid poem of the +spirit of escape and Bohemianism, <i>The Flight of the Duchess</i>. Such +other of these early glimpses of him as remain, depict him as striding +across Wimbledon Common with his hair blowing in the wind, reciting +aloud passages from Isaiah, or climbing up into the elms above Norwood +to look over London by night. It was when looking down from that +suburban eyrie over the whole confounding labyrinth of London that he +was filled with that great irresponsible benevolence which is the best +of the joys of youth, and conceived the idea of a perfectly +irresponsible benevolence in the first plan of <i>Pippa Passes</i>. At the +end of his father's garden was a laburnum "heavy with its weight of +gold," and in the tree two nightingales were in the habit of singing +against each other, a form of competition which, I imagine, has since +become less common in Camberwell. When Browning <a name="Page_19"></a>as a boy was +intoxicated with the poetry of Shelley and Keats, he hypnotised +himself into something approaching to a positive conviction that these +two birds were the spirits of the two great poets who had settled in a +Camberwell garden, in order to sing to the only young gentleman who +really adored and understood them. This last story is perhaps the most +typical of the tone common to all the rest; it would be difficult to +find a story which across the gulf of nearly eighty years awakens so +vividly a sense of the sumptuous folly of an intellectual boyhood. +With Browning, as with all true poets, passion came first and made +intellectual expression, the hunger for beauty making literature as +the hunger for bread made a plough. The life he lived in those early +days was no life of dull application; there was no poet whose youth +was so young. When he was full of years and fame, and delineating in +great epics the beauty and horror of the romance of southern Europe, a +young man, thinking to please him, said, "There is no romance now +except in Italy." "Well," said Browning, "I should make an exception +of Camberwell."</p> + +<p>Such glimpses will serve to indicate the kind of essential issue that +there was in the nature of things between the generation of Browning +and the generation of his father. Browning was bound in the nature of +things to become at the outset Byronic, and Byronism was not, of +course, in reality so much a pessimism about civilised things as an +optimism about savage things. This great revolt on behalf of the +elemental which Keats and Shelley represented was bound first of all +to occur. Robert Browning junior had to be a part of it, and Robert +Browning senior had to go back to his <a name="Page_20"></a>water colours and the faultless +couplets of Pope with the full sense of the greatest pathos that the +world contains, the pathos of the man who has produced something that +he cannot understand.</p> + +<p>The earliest works of Browning bear witness, without exception, to +this ardent and somewhat sentimental evolution. <i>Pauline</i> appeared +anonymously in 1833. It exhibits the characteristic mark of a juvenile +poem, the general suggestion that the author is a thousand years old. +Browning calls it a fragment of a confession; and Mr. Johnson Fox, an +old friend of Browning's father, who reviewed it for <i>Tait's +Magazine</i>, said, with truth, that it would be difficult to find +anything more purely confessional. It is the typical confession of a +boy laying bare all the spiritual crimes of infidelity and moral +waste, in a state of genuine ignorance of the fact that every one else +has committed them. It is wholesome and natural for youth to go about +confessing that the grass is green, and whispering to a priest +hoarsely that it has found a sun in heaven. But the records of that +particular period of development, even when they are as ornate and +beautiful as <i>Pauline</i>, are not necessarily or invariably wholesome +reading. The chief interest of <i>Pauline</i>, with all its beauties, lies +in a certain almost humorous singularity, the fact that Browning, of +all people, should have signalised his entrance into the world of +letters with a poem which may fairly be called morbid. But this is a +morbidity so general and recurrent that it may be called in a +contradictory phrase a healthy morbidity; it is a kind of intellectual +measles. No one of any degree of maturity in reading <i>Pauline</i> will be +quite so horrified at the sins of the young gentleman who tells the +story <a name="Page_21"></a>as he seems to be himself. It is the utterance of that bitter +and heartrending period of youth which comes before we realise the one +grand and logical basis of all optimism—the doctrine of original sin. +The boy at this stage being an ignorant and inhuman idealist, regards +all his faults as frightful secret malformations, and it is only later +that he becomes conscious of that large and beautiful and benignant +explanation that the heart of man is deceitful above all things and +desperately wicked. That Browning, whose judgment on his own work was +one of the best in the world, took this view of <i>Pauline</i> in after +years is quite obvious. He displayed a very manly and unique capacity +of really laughing at his own work without being in the least ashamed +of it. "This," he said of <i>Pauline</i>, "is the only crab apple that +remains of the shapely tree of life in my fool's paradise." It would +be difficult to express the matter more perfectly. Although <i>Pauline</i> +was published anonymously, its authorship was known to a certain +circle, and Browning began to form friendships in the literary world. +He had already become acquainted with two of the best friends he was +ever destined to have, Alfred Domett, celebrated in "The Guardian +Angel" and "Waring," and his cousin Silverthorne, whose death is +spoken of in one of the most perfect lyrics in the English language, +Browning's "May and Death." These were men of his own age, and his +manner of speaking of them gives us many glimpses into that splendid +world of comradeship which. Plato and Walt Whitman knew, with its +endless days and its immortal nights. Browning had a third friend +destined to play an even greater part in his life, but who belonged to +an older generation and a statelier school of manners and +<a name="Page_22"></a>scholarship. Mr. Kenyon was a schoolfellow of Browning's father, and +occupied towards his son something of the position of an irresponsible +uncle. He was a rotund, rosy old gentleman, fond of comfort and the +courtesies of life, but fond of them more for others, though much for +himself. Elizabeth Barrett in after years wrote of "the brightness of +his carved speech," which would appear to suggest that he practised +that urbane and precise order of wit which was even then +old-fashioned. Yet, notwithstanding many talents of this kind, he was +not so much an able man as the natural friend and equal of able men.</p> + +<p>Browning's circle of friends, however, widened about this time in all +directions. One friend in particular he made, the Comte de +Ripert-Monclar, a French Royalist with whom he prosecuted with renewed +energy his studies in the mediæval and Renaissance schools of +philosophy. It was the Count who suggested that Browning should write +a poetical play on the subject of Paracelsus. After reflection, +indeed, the Count retracted this advice on the ground that the history +of the great mystic gave no room for love. Undismayed by this terrible +deficiency, Browning caught up the idea with characteristic +enthusiasm, and in 1835 appeared the first of his works which he +himself regarded as representative—<i>Paracelsus</i>. The poem shows an +enormous advance in technical literary power; but in the history of +Browning's mind it is chiefly interesting as giving an example of a +peculiarity which clung to him during the whole of his literary life, +an intense love of the holes and corners of history. Fifty-two years +afterwards he wrote <i>Parleyings with certain Persons of Importance in +their Day</i>, the last poem published in <a name="Page_23"></a>his lifetime; and any reader +of that remarkable work will perceive that the common characteristic +of all these persons is not so much that they were of importance in +their day as that they are of no importance in ours. The same +eccentric fastidiousness worked in him as a young man when he wrote +<i>Paracelsus</i> and <i>Sordello</i>. Nowhere in Browning's poetry can we find +any very exhaustive study of any of the great men who are the +favourites of the poet and moralist. He has written about philosophy +and ambition and music and morals, but he has written nothing about +Socrates or Cæsar or Napoleon, or Beethoven or Mozart, or Buddha or +Mahomet. When he wishes to describe a political ambition he selects +that entirely unknown individual, King Victor of Sardinia. When he +wishes to express the most perfect soul of music, he unearths some +extraordinary persons called Abt Vogler and Master Hugues of +Saxe-Gotha. When he wishes to express the largest and sublimest scheme +of morals and religion which his imagination can conceive, he does not +put it into the mouth of any of the great spiritual leaders of +mankind, but into the mouth of an obscure Jewish Rabbi of the name of +Ben Ezra. It is fully in accordance with this fascinating craze of his +that when he wishes to study the deification of the intellect and the +disinterested pursuit of the things of the mind, he does not select +any of the great philosophers from Plato to Darwin, whose +investigations are still of some importance in the eyes of the world. +He selects the figure of all figures most covered with modern satire +and pity, the <i>à priori</i> scientist of the Middle Ages and the +Renaissance. His supreme type of the human intellect is neither the +academic nor the positivist, but the <a name="Page_24"></a>alchemist. It is difficult to +imagine a turn of mind constituting a more complete challenge to the +ordinary modern point of view. To the intellect of our time the wild +investigators of the school of Paracelsus seem to be the very crown +and flower of futility, they are collectors of straws and careful +misers of dust. But for all that Browning was right. Any critic who +understands the true spirit of mediæval science can see that he was +right; no critic can see how right he was unless he understands the +spirit of mediæval science as thoroughly as he did. In the character +of Paracelsus, Browning wished to paint the dangers and +disappointments which attend the man who believes merely in the +intellect. He wished to depict the fall of the logician; and with a +perfect and unerring instinct he selected a man who wrote and spoke in +the tradition of the Middle Ages, the most thoroughly and even +painfully logical period that the world has ever seen. If he had +chosen an ancient Greek philosopher, it would have been open to the +critic to have said that that philosopher relied to some extent upon +the most sunny and graceful social life that ever flourished. If he +had made him a modern sociological professor, it would have been +possible to object that his energies were not wholly concerned with +truth, but partly with the solid and material satisfaction of society. +But the man truly devoted to the things of the mind was the mediæval +magician. It is a remarkable fact that one civilisation does not +satisfy itself by calling another civilisation wicked—it calls it +uncivilised. We call the Chinese barbarians, and they call us +barbarians. The mediæval state, like China, was a foreign +civilisation, and this <a name="Page_25"></a>was its supreme characteristic, that it cared +for the things of the mind for their own sake. To complain of the +researches of its sages on the ground that they were not materially +fruitful, is to act as we should act in telling a gardener that his +roses were not as digestible as our cabbages. It is not only true that +the mediæval philosophers never discovered the steam-engine; it is +quite equally true that they never tried. The Eden of the Middle Ages +was really a garden, where each of God's flowers—truth and beauty and +reason—flourished for its own sake, and with its own name. The Eden +of modern progress is a kitchen garden.</p> + +<p>It would have been hard, therefore, for Browning to have chosen a +better example for his study of intellectual egotism than Paracelsus. +Modern life accuses the mediæval tradition of crushing the intellect; +Browning, with a truer instinct, accuses that tradition of +over-glorifying it. There is, however, another and even more important +deduction to be made from the moral of <i>Paracelsus</i>. The usual +accusation against Browning is that he was consumed with logic; that +he thought all subjects to be the proper pabulum of intellectual +disquisition; that he gloried chiefly in his own power of plucking +knots to pieces and rending fallacies in two; and that to this method +he sacrificed deliberately, and with complete self-complacency, the +element of poetry and sentiment. To people who imagine Browning to +have been this frigid believer in the intellect there is only one +answer necessary or sufficient. It is the fact that he wrote a play +designed to destroy the whole of this intellectualist fallacy at the +age of twenty-three.</p> + +<p><i>Paracelsus</i> was in all likelihood Browning's introduction to the +literary world. It was many years, and <a name="Page_26"></a>even many decades, before he +had anything like a public appreciation, but a very great part of the +minority of those who were destined to appreciate him came over to his +standard upon the publication of <i>Paracelsus</i>. The celebrated John +Forster had taken up <i>Paracelsus</i> "as a thing to slate," and had ended +its perusal with the wildest curiosity about the author and his works. +John Stuart Mill, never backward in generosity, had already interested +himself in Browning, and was finally converted by the same poem. Among +other early admirers were Landor, Leigh Hunt, Horne, Serjeant +Talfourd, and Monckton-Milnes. One man of even greater literary +stature seems to have come into Browning's life about this time, a man +for whom he never ceased to have the warmest affection and trust. +Browning was, indeed, one of the very few men of that period who got +on perfectly with Thomas Carlyle. It is precisely one of those little +things which speak volumes for the honesty and unfathomable good +humour of Browning, that Carlyle, who had a reckless contempt for most +other poets of his day, had something amounting to a real attachment +to him. He would run over to Paris for the mere privilege of dining +with him. Browning, on the other hand, with characteristic +impetuosity, passionately defended and justified Carlyle in all +companies. "I have just seen dear Carlyle," he writes on one occasion; +"catch me calling people dear in a hurry, except in a letter +beginning." He sided with Carlyle in the vexed question of the Carlyle +domestic relations, and his impression of Mrs. Carlyle was that she +was "a hard unlovable woman." As, however, it is on record that he +once, while excitedly explaining some point of <a name="Page_27"></a>mystical philosophy, +put down Mrs. Carlyle's hot kettle on the hearthrug, any frigidity +that he may have observed in her manner may possibly find a natural +explanation. His partisanship in the Carlyle affair, which was +characteristically headlong and human, may not throw much light on +that painful problem itself, but it throws a great deal of light on +the character of Browning, which was pugnaciously proud of its +friends, and had what may almost be called a lust of loyalty. Browning +was not capable of that most sagacious detachment which enabled +Tennyson to say that he could not agree that the Carlyles ought never +to have married, since if they had each married elsewhere there would +have been four miserable people instead of two.</p> + +<p>Among the motley and brilliant crowd with which Browning had now begun +to mingle, there was no figure more eccentric and spontaneous than +that of Macready the actor. This extraordinary person, a man living +from hand to mouth in all things spiritual and pecuniary, a man +feeding upon flying emotions, conceived something like an attraction +towards Browning, spoke of him as the very ideal of a young poet, and +in a moment of peculiar excitement suggested to him the writing of a +great play. Browning was a man fundamentally indeed more steadfast and +prosaic, but on the surface fully as rapid and easily infected as +Macready. He immediately began to plan out a great historical play, +and selected for his subject "Strafford."</p> + +<p>In Browning's treatment of the subject there is something more than a +trace of his Puritan and Liberal upbringing. It is one of the very +earliest of the <a name="Page_28"></a>really important works in English literature which +are based on the Parliamentarian reading of the incidents of the time +of Charles I. It is true that the finest element in the play is the +opposition between Strafford and Pym, an opposition so complete, so +lucid, so consistent, that it has, so to speak, something of the +friendly openness and agreement which belongs to an alliance. The two +men love each other and fight each other, and do the two things at the +same time completely. This is a great thing of which even to attempt +the description. It is easy to have the impartiality which can speak +judicially of both parties, but it is not so easy to have that larger +and higher impartiality which can speak passionately on behalf of both +parties. Nevertheless, it may be permissible to repeat that there is +in the play a definite trace of Browning's Puritan education and +Puritan historical outlook.</p> + +<p>For <i>Strafford</i> is, of course, an example of that most difficult of +all literary works—a political play. The thing has been achieved once +at least admirably in Shakespeare's <i>Julius Cæsar</i>, and something like +it, though from a more one-sided and romantic stand-point, has been +done excellently in <i>L'Aiglon</i>. But the difficulties of such a play +are obvious on the face of the matter. In a political play the +principal characters are not merely men. They are symbols, +arithmetical figures representing millions of other men outside. It +is, by dint of elaborate stage management, possible to bring a mob +upon the boards, but the largest mob ever known is nothing but a +floating atom of the people; and the people of which the politician +has to think does not consist of knots of rioters in the street, but +of some million absolutely <a name="Page_29"></a>distinct individuals, each sitting in his +own breakfast room reading his own morning paper. To give even the +faintest suggestion of the strength and size of the people in this +sense in the course of a dramatic performance is obviously impossible. +That is why it is so easy on the stage to concentrate all the pathos +and dignity upon such persons as Charles I. and Mary Queen of Scots, +the vampires of their people, because within the minute limits of a +stage there is room for their small virtues and no room for their +enormous crimes. It would be impossible to find a stronger example +than the case of <i>Strafford</i>. It is clear that no one could possibly +tell the whole truth about the life and death of Strafford, +politically considered, in a play. Strafford was one of the greatest +men ever born in England, and he attempted to found a great English +official despotism. That is to say, he attempted to found something +which is so different from what has actually come about that we can in +reality scarcely judge of it, any more than we can judge whether it +would be better to live in another planet, or pleasanter to have been +born a dog or an elephant. It would require enormous imagination to +reconstruct the political ideals of Strafford. Now Browning, as we all +know, got over the matter in his play, by practically denying that +Strafford had any political ideals at all. That is to say, while +crediting Strafford with all his real majesty of intellect and +character, he makes the whole of his political action dependent upon +his passionate personal attachment to the King. This is +unsatisfactory; it is in reality a dodging of the great difficulty of +the political play. That difficulty, in the case of any political +problem, <a name="Page_30"></a>is, as has been said, great. It would be very hard, for +example, to construct a play about Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bill. It +would be almost impossible to get expressed in a drama of some five +acts and some twenty characters anything so ancient and complicated as +that Irish problem, the roots of which lie in the darkness of the age +of Strongbow, and the branches of which spread out to the remotest +commonwealths of the East and West. But we should scarcely be +satisfied if a dramatist overcame the difficulty by ascribing Mr. +Gladstone's action in the Home Rule question to an overwhelming +personal affection for Mr. Healy. And in thus basing Strafford's +action upon personal and private reasons, Browning certainly does some +injustice to the political greatness, of Strafford. To attribute Mr. +Gladstone's conversion to Home Rule to an infatuation such as that +suggested above, would certainly have the air of implying that the +writer thought the Home Rule doctrine a peculiar or untenable one. +Similarly, Browning's choice of a motive for Strafford has very much +the air of an assumption that there was nothing to be said on public +grounds for Strafford's political ideal. Now this is certainly not the +case. The Puritans in the great struggles of the reign of Charles I. +may have possessed more valuable ideals than the Royalists, but it is +a very vulgar error to suppose that they were any more idealistic. In +Browning's play Pym is made almost the incarnation of public spirit, +and Strafford of private ties. But not only may an upholder of +despotism be public-spirited, but in the case of prominent upholders +of it like Strafford he generally is. Despotism indeed, and attempts +at despotism, like that of Strafford, are <a name="Page_31"></a>a kind of disease of public +spirit. They represent, as it were, the drunkenness of responsibility. +It is when men begin to grow desperate in their love for the people, +when they are overwhelmed with the difficulties and blunders of +humanity, that they fall back upon a wild desire to manage everything +themselves. Their faith in themselves is only a disillusionment with +mankind. They are in that most dreadful position, dreadful alike in +personal and public affairs—the position of the man who has lost +faith and not lost love. This belief that all would go right if we +could only get the strings into our own hands is a fallacy almost +without exception, but nobody can justly say that it is not +public-spirited. The sin and sorrow of despotism is not that it does +not love men, but that it loves them too much and trusts them too +little. Therefore from age to age in history arise these great +despotic dreamers, whether they be Royalists or Imperialists or even +Socialists, who have at root this idea, that the world would enter +into rest if it went their way and forswore altogether the right of +going its own way. When a man begins to think that the grass will not +grow at night unless he lies awake to watch it, he generally ends +either in an asylum or on the throne of an Emperor. Of these men +Strafford was one, and we cannot but feel that Browning somewhat +narrows the significance and tragedy of his place in history by making +him merely the champion of a personal idiosyncrasy against a great +public demand. Strafford was something greater than this; if indeed, +when we come to think of it, a man can be anything greater than the +friend of another man. But the whole question is interesting, because +Browning, although he <a name="Page_32"></a>never again attacked a political drama of such +palpable importance as <i>Strafford</i>, could never keep politics +altogether out of his dramatic work. <i>King Victor and King Charles</i>, +which followed it, is a political play, the study of a despotic +instinct much meaner than that of Strafford. <i>Colombe's Birthday</i>, +again, is political as well as romantic. Politics in its historic +aspect would seem to have had a great fascination for him, as indeed +it must have for all ardent intellects, since it is the one thing in +the world that is as intellectual as the <i>Encyclopædia Britannica</i> and +as rapid as the Derby.</p> + +<p>One of the favourite subjects among those who like to conduct long +controversies about Browning (and their name is legion) is the +question of whether Browning's plays, such as <i>Strafford</i>, were +successes upon the stage. As they are never agreed about what +constitutes a success on the stage, it is difficult to adjudge their +quarrels. But the general fact is very simple; such a play as +<i>Strafford</i> was not a gigantic theatrical success, and nobody, it is +to be presumed, ever imagined that it would be. On the other hand, it +was certainly not a failure, but was enjoyed and applauded as are +hundreds of excellent plays which run only for a week or two, as many +excellent plays do, and as all plays ought to do. Above all, the +definite success which attended the representation of <i>Strafford</i> from +the point of view of the more educated and appreciative was quite +enough to establish Browning in a certain definite literary position. +As a classical and established personality he did not come into his +kingdom for years and decades afterwards; not, indeed, until he was +near to entering upon the final rest. But as a detached and eccentric +personality, as a man who existed and who <a name="Page_33"></a>had arisen on the outskirts +of literature, the world began to be conscious of him at this time.</p> + +<p>Of what he was personally at the period that he thus became personally +apparent, Mrs. Bridell Fox has left a very vivid little sketch. She +describes how Browning called at the house (he was acquainted with her +father), and finding that gentleman out, asked with a kind of abrupt +politeness if he might play on the piano. This touch is very +characteristic of the mingled aplomb and unconsciousness of Browning's +social manner. "He was then," she writes, "slim and dark, and very +handsome, and—may I hint it?—just a trifle of a dandy, addicted to +lemon-coloured kid gloves and such things, quite the glass of fashion +and the mould of form. But full of 'ambition,' eager for success, +eager for fame, and, what is more, determined to conquer fame and to +achieve success." That is as good a portrait as we can have of the +Browning of these days—quite self-satisfied, but not self-conscious +young man; one who had outgrown, but only just outgrown, the pure +romanticism of his boyhood, which made him run after gipsy caravans +and listen to nightingales in the wood; a man whose incandescent +vitality, now that it had abandoned gipsies and not yet immersed +itself in casuistical poems, devoted itself excitedly to trifles, such +as lemon-coloured kid gloves and fame. But a man still above all +things perfectly young and natural, professing that foppery which +follows the fashions, and not that sillier and more demoralising +foppery which defies them. Just as he walked in coolly and yet +impulsively into a private drawing-room and offered to play, so he +walked at this time into the huge and crowded salon of European +literature and offered to sing.</p><a name="Page_34"></a> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<a name="CHAPTER_II"></a><h2>CHAPTER II</h2> + +<h2>EARLY WORKS</h2> + + +<p>In 1840 <i>Sordello</i> was published. Its reception by the great majority +of readers, including some of the ablest men of the time, was a +reception of a kind probably unknown in the rest of literary history, +a reception that was neither praise nor blame. It was perhaps best +expressed by Carlyle, who wrote to say that his wife had read +<i>Sordello</i> with great interest, and wished to know whether Sordello +was a man, or a city, or a book. Better known, of course, is the story +of Tennyson, who said that the first line of the poem—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"Who will, may hear Sordello's story told,"</p></div> + +<p>and the last line—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"Who would, has heard Sordello's story told,"</p></div> + +<p>were the only two lines in the poem that he understood, and they were +lies.</p> + +<p>Perhaps the best story, however, of all the cycle of Sordello legends +is that which is related of Douglas Jerrold. He was recovering from an +illness; and having obtained permission for the first time to read a +little during the day, he picked up a book from a pile beside the bed +and began <i>Sordello</i>. No sooner had he done so than he turned deadly +pale, put <a name="Page_35"></a>down the book, and said, "My God! I'm an idiot. My health +is restored, but my mind's gone. I can't understand two consecutive +lines of an English poem." He then summoned his family and silently +gave the book into their hands, asking for their opinion on the poem; +and as the shadow of perplexity gradually passed over their faces, he +heaved a sigh of relief and went to sleep. These stories, whether +accurate or no, do undoubtedly represent the very peculiar reception +accorded to <i>Sordello</i>, a reception which, as I have said, bears no +resemblance whatever to anything in the way of eulogy or condemnation +that had ever been accorded to a work of art before. There had been +authors whom it was fashionable to boast of admiring and authors whom +it was fashionable to boast of despising; but with <i>Sordello</i> enters +into literary history the Browning of popular badinage, the author +whom it is fashionable to boast of not understanding.</p> + +<p>Putting aside for the moment the literary qualities which are to be +found in the poem, when it becomes intelligible, there is one question +very relevant to the fame and character of Browning which is raised by +<i>Sordello</i> when it is considered, as most people consider it, as +hopelessly unintelligible. It really throws some light upon the reason +of Browning's obscurity. The ordinary theory of Browning's obscurity +is to the effect that it was a piece of intellectual vanity indulged +in more and more insolently as his years and fame increased. There are +at least two very decisive objections to this popular explanation. In +the first place, it must emphatically be said for Browning that in all +the numerous records and impressions of him throughout his long and +very public life, there is not one iota of <a name="Page_36"></a>evidence that he was a man +who was intellectually vain. The evidence is entirely the other way. +He was vain of many things, of his physical health, for example, and +even more of the physical health which he contrived to bestow for a +certain period upon his wife. From the records of his early dandyism, +his flowing hair and his lemon-coloured gloves, it is probable enough +that he was vain of his good looks. He was vain of his masculinity, +his knowledge of the world, and he was, I fancy, decidedly vain of his +prejudices, even, it might be said, vain of being vain of them. But +everything is against the idea that he was much in the habit of +thinking of himself in his intellectual aspect. In the matter of +conversation, for example, some people who liked him found him genial, +talkative, anecdotal, with a certain strengthening and sanative +quality in his mere bodily presence. Some people who did not like him +found him a mere frivolous chatterer, afflicted with bad manners. One +lady, who knew him well, said that, though he only met you in a crowd +and made some commonplace remark, you went for the rest of the day +with your head up. Another lady who did not know him, and therefore +disliked him, asked after a dinner party, "Who was that too-exuberant +financier?" These are the diversities of feeling about him. But they +all agree in one point—that he did not talk cleverly, or try to talk +cleverly, as that proceeding is understood in literary circles. He +talked positively, he talked a great deal, but he never attempted to +give that neat and æsthetic character to his speech which is almost +invariable in the case of the man who is vain of his mental +superiority. When he did impress people with mental gymnastics, it was +mostly in the form of pouring <a name="Page_37"></a>out, with passionate enthusiasm, whole +epics written by other people, which is the last thing that the +literary egotist would be likely to waste his time over. We have +therefore to start with an enormous psychological improbability that +Browning made his poems complicated from mere pride in his powers and +contempt of his readers.</p> + +<p>There is, however, another very practical objection to the ordinary +theory that Browning's obscurity was a part of the intoxication of +fame and intellectual consideration. We constantly hear the statement +that Browning's intellectual complexity increased with his later +poems, but the statement is simply not true. <i>Sordello</i>, to the +indescribable density of which he never afterwards even approached, +was begun before <i>Strafford</i>, and was therefore the third of his +works, and even if we adopt his own habit of ignoring <i>Pauline</i>, the +second. He wrote the greater part of it when he was twenty-four. It +was in his youth, at the time when a man is thinking of love and +publicity, of sunshine and singing birds, that he gave birth to this +horror of great darkness; and the more we study the matter with any +knowledge of the nature of youth, the more we shall come to the +conclusion that Browning's obscurity had altogether the opposite +origin to that which is usually assigned to it. He was not +unintelligible because he was proud, but unintelligible because he was +humble. He was not unintelligible because his thoughts were vague, but +because to him they were obvious.</p> + +<p>A man who is intellectually vain does not make himself +incomprehensible, because he is so enormously impressed with the +difference between his readers'<a name="Page_38"></a> intelligence and his own that he +talks down to them with elaborate repetition and lucidity. What poet +was ever vainer than Byron? What poet was ever so magnificently lucid? +But a young man of genius who has a genuine humility in his heart does +not elaborately explain his discoveries, because he does not think +that they are discoveries. He thinks that the whole street is humming +with his ideas, and that the postman and the tailor are poets like +himself. Browning's impenetrable poetry was the natural expression of +this beautiful optimism. <i>Sordello</i> was the most glorious compliment +that has ever been paid to the average man.</p> + +<p>In the same manner, of course, outward obscurity is in a young author +a mark of inward clarity. A man who is vague in his ideas does not +speak obscurely, because his own dazed and drifting condition leads +him to clutch at phrases like ropes and use the formulæ that every one +understands. No one ever found Miss Marie Corelli obscure, because she +believes only in words. But if a young man really has ideas of his +own, he must be obscure at first, because he lives in a world of his +own in which there are symbols and correspondences and categories +unknown to the rest of the world. Let us take an imaginary example. +Suppose that a young poet had developed by himself a peculiar idea +that all forms of excitement, including religious excitement, were a +kind of evil intoxication, he might say to himself continually that +churches were in reality taverns, and this idea would become so fixed +in his mind that he would forget that no such association existed in +the minds of others. And suppose that in pursuance of this general +idea, which is a <a name="Page_39"></a>perfectly clear and intellectual idea, though a very +silly one, he were to say that he believed in Puritanism without its +theology, and were to repeat this idea also to himself until it became +instinctive and familiar, such a man might take up a pen, and under +the impression that he was saying something figurative indeed, but +quite clear and suggestive, write some such sentence as this, "You +will not get the godless Puritan into your white taverns," and no one +in the length and breadth of the country could form the remotest +notion of what he could mean. So it would have been in any example, +for instance, of a man who made some philosophical discovery and did +not realise how far the world was from it. If it had been possible for +a poet in the sixteenth century to hit upon and learn to regard as +obvious the evolutionary theory of Darwin, he might have written down +some such line as "the radiant offspring of the ape," and the maddest +volumes of mediæval natural history would have been ransacked for the +meaning of the allusion. The more fixed and solid and sensible the +idea appeared to him, the more dark and fantastic it would have +appeared to the world. Most of us indeed, if we ever say anything +valuable, say it when we are giving expression to that part of us +which has become as familiar and invisible as the pattern on our wall +paper. It is only when an idea has become a matter of course to the +thinker that it becomes startling to the world.</p> + +<p>It is worth while to dwell upon this preliminary point of the ground +of Browning's obscurity, because it involves an important issue about +him. Our whole view of Browning is bound to be absolutely different, +and I think absolutely false, if we start with the conception <a name="Page_40"></a>that he +was what the French call an intellectual. If we see Browning with the +eyes of his particular followers, we shall inevitably think this. For +his followers are pre-eminently intellectuals, and there never lived +upon the earth a great man who was so fundamentally different from his +followers. Indeed, he felt this heartily and even humorously himself. +"Wilkes was no Wilkite," he said, "and I am very far from being a +Browningite." We shall, as I say, utterly misunderstand Browning at +every step of his career if we suppose that he was the sort of man who +would be likely to take a pleasure in asserting the subtlety and +abstruseness of his message. He took pleasure beyond all question in +himself; in the strictest sense of the word he enjoyed himself. But +his conception of himself was never that of the intellectual. He +conceived himself rather as a sanguine and strenuous man, a great +fighter. "I was ever," as he says, "a fighter." His faults, a certain +occasional fierceness and grossness, were the faults that are counted +as virtues among navvies and sailors and most primitive men. His +virtues, boyishness and absolute fidelity, and a love of plain words +and things are the virtues which are counted as vices among the +æsthetic prigs who pay him the greatest honour. He had his more +objectionable side, like other men, but it had nothing to do with +literary egotism. He was not vain of being an extraordinary man. He +was only somewhat excessively vain of being an ordinary one.</p> + +<p>The Browning then who published <i>Sordello</i> we have to conceive, not as +a young pedant anxious to exaggerate his superiority to the public, +but as a hot-headed, strong-minded, inexperienced, and essentially +humble <a name="Page_41"></a>man, who had more ideas than he knew how to disentangle from +each other. If we compare, for example, the complexity of Browning +with the clarity of Matthew Arnold, we shall realise that the cause +lies in the fact that Matthew Arnold was an intellectual aristocrat, +and Browning an intellectual democrat. The particular peculiarities of +<i>Sordello</i> illustrate the matter very significantly. A very great part +of the difficulty of <i>Sordello</i>, for instance, is in the fact that +before the reader even approaches to tackling the difficulties of +Browning's actual narrative, he is apparently expected to start with +an exhaustive knowledge of that most shadowy and bewildering of all +human epochs—the period of the Guelph and Ghibelline struggles in +mediæval Italy. Here, of course, Browning simply betrays that +impetuous humility which we have previously observed. His father was a +student of mediæval chronicles, he had himself imbibed that learning +in the same casual manner in which a boy learns to walk or to play +cricket. Consequently in a literary sense he rushed up to the first +person he met and began talking about Ecelo and Taurello Salinguerra +with about as much literary egotism as an English baby shows when it +talks English to an Italian organ grinder. Beyond this the poem of +<i>Sordello</i>, powerful as it is, does not present any very significant +advance in Browning's mental development on that already represented +by <i>Pauline</i> and <i>Paracelsus</i>. <i>Pauline, Paracelsus</i>, and <i>Sordello</i> +stand together in the general fact that they are all, in the excellent +phrase used about the first by Mr. Johnson Fox, "confessional." All +three are analyses of the weakness which every artistic temperament +finds in <a name="Page_42"></a>itself. Browning is still writing about himself, a subject +of which he, like all good and brave men, was profoundly ignorant. +This kind of self-analysis is always misleading. For we do not see in +ourselves those dominant traits strong enough to force themselves out +in action which our neighbours see. We see only a welter of minute +mental experiences which include all the sins that were ever committed +by Nero or Sir Willoughby Patterne. When studying ourselves, we are +looking at a fresco with a magnifying glass. Consequently, these early +impressions which great men have given of themselves are nearly always +slanders upon themselves, for the strongest man is weak to his own +conscience, and Hamlet flourished to a certainty even inside Napoleon. +So it was with Browning, who when he was nearly eighty was destined to +write with the hilarity of a schoolboy, but who wrote in his boyhood +poems devoted to analysing the final break-up of intellect and soul.</p> + +<p><i>Sordello</i>, with all its load of learning, and almost more oppressive +load of beauty, has never had any very important influence even upon +Browningites, and with the rest of the world the name has passed into +a jest. The most truly memorable thing about it was Browning's saying +in answer to all gibes and misconceptions, a saying which expresses +better than anything else what genuine metal was in him, "I blame no +one, least of all myself, who did my best then and since." This is +indeed a model for all men of letters who do not wish to retain only +the letters and to lose the man.</p> + +<p>When next Browning spoke, it was from a greater height and with a new +voice. His visit to Asolo, "his <a name="Page_43"></a>first love," as he said, "among +Italian cities," coincided with the stir and transformation in his +spirit and the breaking up of that splendid palace of mirrors in which +a man like Byron had lived and died. In 1841 <i>Pippa Passes</i> appeared, +and with it the real Browning of the modern world. He had made the +discovery which Byron never made, but which almost every young man +does at last make—the thrilling discovery that he is not Robinson +Crusoe. <i>Pippa Passes</i> is the greatest poem ever written, with the +exception of one or two by Walt Whitman, to express the sentiment of +the pure love of humanity. The phrase has unfortunately a false and +pedantic sound. The love of humanity is a thing supposed to be +professed only by vulgar and officious philanthropists, or by saints +of a superhuman detachment and universality. As a matter of fact, love +of humanity is the commonest and most natural of the feelings of a +fresh nature, and almost every one has felt it alight capriciously +upon him when looking at a crowded park or a room full of dancers. The +love of those whom we do not know is quite as eternal a sentiment as +the love of those whom we do know. In our friends the richness of life +is proved to us by what we have gained; in the faces in the street the +richness of life is proved to us by the hint of what we have lost. And +this feeling for strange faces and strange lives, when it is felt +keenly by a young man, almost always expresses itself in a desire +after a kind of vagabond beneficence, a desire to go through the world +scattering goodness like a capricious god. It is desired that mankind +should hunt in vain for its best friend as it would hunt for a +criminal; that he should be an anonymous Saviour, an unrecorded +Christ. Browning, like <a name="Page_44"></a>every one else, when awakened to the beauty +and variety of men, dreamed of this arrogant self-effacement. He has +written of himself that he had long thought vaguely of a being passing +through the world, obscure and unnameable, but moulding the destinies +of others to mightier and better issues. Then his almost faultless +artistic instinct came in and suggested that this being, whom he +dramatised as the work-girl, Pippa, should be even unconscious of +anything but her own happiness, and should sway men's lives with a +lonely mirth. It was a bold and moving conception to show us these +mature and tragic human groups all at the supreme moment eavesdropping +upon the solitude of a child. And it was an even more precise instinct +which made Browning make the errant benefactor a woman. A man's good +work is effected by doing what he does, a woman's by being what she +is.</p> + +<p>There is one other point about <i>Pippa Passes</i> which is worth a +moment's attention. The great difficulty with regard to the +understanding of Browning is the fact that, to all appearance, +scarcely any one can be induced to take him seriously as a literary +artist. His adversaries consider his literary vagaries a +disqualification for every position among poets; and his admirers +regard those vagaries with the affectionate indulgence of a circle of +maiden aunts towards a boy home for the holidays. Browning is supposed +to do as he likes with form, because he had such a profound scheme of +thought. But, as a matter of fact, though few of his followers will +take Browning's literary form seriously, he took his own literary form +very seriously. Now <i>Pippa Passes</i> is, among other things, eminently +remarkable as a very original artistic form, a series of <a name="Page_45"></a>disconnected +but dramatic scenes which have only in common the appearance of one +figure. For this admirable literary departure Browning, amid all the +laudations of his "mind" and his "message," has scarcely ever had +credit. And just as we should, if we took Browning seriously as a +poet, see that he had made many noble literary forms, so we should +also see that he did make from time to time certain definite literary +mistakes. There is one of them, a glaring one, in <i>Pippa Passes</i>; and, +as far as I know, no critic has ever thought enough of Browning as an +artist to point it out. It is a gross falsification of the whole +beauty of <i>Pippa Passes</i> to make the Monseigneur and his accomplice in +the last act discuss a plan touching the fate of Pippa herself. The +whole central and splendid idea of the drama is the fact that Pippa is +utterly remote from the grand folk whose lives she troubles and +transforms. To make her in the end turn out to be the niece of one of +them, is like a whiff from an Adelphi melodrama, an excellent thing in +its place, but destructive of the entire conception of Pippa. Having +done that, Browning might just as well have made Sebald turn out to be +her long lost brother, and Luigi a husband to whom she was secretly +married. Browning made this mistake when his own splendid artistic +power was only growing, and its merits and its faults in a tangle. But +its real literary merits and its real literary faults have alike +remained unrecognised under the influence of that unfortunate +intellectualism which idolises Browning as a metaphysician and +neglects him as a poet. But a better test was coming. Browning's +poetry, in the most strictly poetical sense, reached its flower in +<i>Dramatic Lyrics</i>, published in 1842. Here <a name="Page_46"></a>he showed himself a +picturesque and poignant artist in a wholly original manner. And the +two main characteristics of the work were the two characteristics most +commonly denied to Browning, both by his opponents and his followers, +passion and beauty; but beauty had enlarged her boundaries in new +modes of dramatic arrangement, and passion had found new voices in +fantastic and realistic verse. Those who suppose Browning to be a +wholly philosophic poet, number a great majority of his commentators. +But when we come to look at the actual facts, they are strangely and +almost unexpectedly otherwise.</p> + +<p>Let any one who believes in the arrogantly intellectual character of +Browning's poetry run through the actual repertoire of the <i>Dramatic +Lyrics</i>. The first item consists of those splendid war chants called +"Cavalier Tunes." I do not imagine that any one will maintain that +there is any very mysterious metaphysical aim in them. The second item +is the fine poem "The Lost Leader," a poem which expresses in +perfectly lucid and lyrical verse a perfectly normal and old-fashioned +indignation. It is the same, however far we carry the query. What +theory does the next poem, "How they brought the Good News from Ghent +to Aix," express, except the daring speculation that it is often +exciting to ride a good horse in Belgium? What theory does the poem +after that, "Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr," express, except that +it is also frequently exciting to ride a good horse in Africa? Then +comes "Nationality in Drinks," a mere technical oddity without a gleam +of philosophy; and after that those two entirely exquisite "Garden +Fancies," the first of which is devoted to the abstruse thesis that a +woman may be <a name="Page_47"></a>charming, and the second to the equally abstruse thesis +that a book may be a bore. Then comes "The Soliloquy of the Spanish +Cloister," from which the most ingenious "Browning student" cannot +extract anything except that people sometimes hate each other in +Spain; and then "The Laboratory," from which he could extract nothing +except that people sometimes hate each other in France. This is a +perfectly honest record of the poems as they stand. And the first +eleven poems read straight off are remarkable for these two obvious +characteristics—first, that they contain not even a suggestion of +anything that could be called philosophy; and second, that they +contain a considerable proportion of the best and most typical poems +that Browning ever wrote. It may be repeated that either he wrote +these lyrics because he had an artistic sense, or it is impossible to +hazard even the wildest guess as to why he wrote them.</p> + +<p>It is permissible to say that the <i>Dramatic Lyrics</i> represent the +arrival of the real Browning of literary history. It is true that he +had written already many admirable poems of a far more ambitious +plan—<i>Paracelsus</i> with its splendid version of the faults of the +intellectual, <i>Pippa Passes</i> with its beautiful deification of +unconscious influence. But youth is always ambitious and universal; +mature work exhibits more of individuality, more of the special type +and colour of work which a man is destined to do. Youth is universal, +but not individual. The genius who begins life with a very genuine and +sincere doubt whether he is meant to be an exquisite and idolised +violinist, or the most powerful and eloquent Prime Minister of modern +times, does at last end by making <a name="Page_48"></a>the discovery that there is, after +all, one thing, possibly a certain style of illustrating Nursery +Rhymes, which he can really do better than any one else. This was what +happened to Browning; like every one else, he had to discover first +the universe, and then humanity, and at last himself. With him, as +with all others, the great paradox and the great definition of life +was this, that the ambition narrows as the mind expands. In <i>Dramatic +Lyrics</i> he discovered the one thing that he could really do better +than any one else—the dramatic lyric. The form is absolutely +original: he had discovered a new field of poetry, and in the centre +of that field he had found himself.</p> + +<p>The actual quality, the actual originality of the form is a little +difficult to describe. But its general characteristic is the fearless +and most dexterous use of grotesque things in order to express sublime +emotions. The best and most characteristic of the poems are +love-poems; they express almost to perfection the real wonderland of +youth, but they do not express it by the ideal imagery of most poets +of love. The imagery of these poems consists, if we may take a rapid +survey of Browning's love poetry, of suburban streets, straws, +garden-rakes, medicine bottles, pianos, window-blinds, burnt cork, +fashionable fur coats. But in this new method he thoroughly expressed +the true essential, the insatiable realism of passion. If any one +wished to prove that Browning was not, as he is said to be, the poet +of thought, but pre-eminently one of the poets of passion, we could +scarcely find a better evidence of this profoundly passionate element +than Browning's astonishing realism in love poetry. There is nothing +so fiercely realistic as sentiment and emotion. Thought <a name="Page_49"></a>and the +intellect are content to accept abstractions, summaries, and +generalisations; they are content that ten acres of ground should be +called for the sake of argument X, and ten widows' incomes called for +the sake of argument Y; they are content that a thousand awful and +mysterious disappearances from the visible universe should be summed +up as the mortality of a district, or that ten thousand intoxications +of the soul should bear the general name of the instinct of sex. +Rationalism can live upon air and signs and numbers. But sentiment +must have reality; emotion demands the real fields, the real widows' +homes, the real corpse, and the real woman. And therefore Browning's +love poetry is the finest love poetry in the world, because it does +not talk about raptures and ideals and gates of heaven, but about +window-panes and gloves and garden walls. It does not deal much with +abstractions; it is the truest of all love poetry, because it does not +speak much about love. It awakens in every man the memories of that +immortal instant when common and dead things had a meaning beyond the +power of any dictionary to utter, and a value beyond the power of any +millionaire to compute. He expresses the celestial time when a man +does not think about heaven, but about a parasol. And therefore he is, +first, the greatest of love poets, and, secondly, the only optimistic +philosopher except Whitman.</p> + +<p>The general accusation against Browning in connection with his use of +the grotesque comes in very definitely here; for in using these homely +and practical images, these allusions, bordering on what many would +call the commonplace, he was indeed true to the actual and abiding +spirit of love. In that delightful <a name="Page_50"></a>poem "Youth and Art" we have the +singing girl saying to her old lover—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"No harm! It was not my fault<br /> +<span class="i2">If you never turned your eye's tail up</span> +As I shook upon E <i>in alt</i>,<br /> +<span class="i2">Or ran the chromatic scale up."</span></p></div> + +<p>This is a great deal more like the real chaff that passes between +those whose hearts are full of new hope or of old memory than half the +great poems of the world. Browning never forgets the little details +which to a man who has ever really lived may suddenly send an arrow +through the heart. Take, for example, such a matter as dress, as it is +treated in "A Lover's Quarrel."</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"See, how she looks now, dressed<br /> +In a sledging cap and vest!<br /> +<span class="i2">'Tis a huge fur cloak—</span> +<span class="i2">Like a reindeer's yoke</span> +Falls the lappet along the breast:<br /> +Sleeves for her arms to rest,<br /> +Or to hang, as my Love likes best."</p></div> + +<p>That would almost serve as an order to a dressmaker, and is therefore +poetry, or at least excellent poetry of this order. So great a power +have these dead things of taking hold on the living spirit, that I +question whether any one could read through the catalogue of a +miscellaneous auction sale without coming upon things which, if +realised for a moment, would be near to the elemental tears. And if +any of us or all of us are truly optimists, and believe as Browning +did, that existence has a value wholly inexpressible, we are most +truly compelled to that sentiment not by any argument or triumphant +justification of the cosmos, <a name="Page_51"></a>but by a few of these momentary and +immortal sights and sounds, a gesture, an old song, a portrait, a +piano, an old door.</p> + +<p>In 1843 appeared that marvellous drama <i>The Return of the Druses</i>, a +work which contains more of Browning's typical qualities exhibited in +an exquisite literary shape, than can easily be counted. We have in +<i>The Return of the Druses</i> his love of the corners of history, his +interest in the religious mind of the East, with its almost terrifying +sense of being in the hand of heaven, his love of colour and verbal +luxury, of gold and green and purple, which made some think he must be +an Oriental himself. But, above all, it presents the first rise of +that great psychological ambition which Browning was thenceforth to +pursue. In <i>Pauline</i> and the poems that follow it, Browning has only +the comparatively easy task of giving an account of himself. In <i>Pippa +Passes</i> he has the only less easy task of giving an account of +humanity. In <i>The Return of the Druses</i> he has for the first time the +task which is so much harder than giving an account of humanity—the +task of giving an account of a human being. Djabal, the great Oriental +impostor, who is the central character of the play, is a peculiarly +subtle character, a compound of blasphemous and lying assumptions of +Godhead with genuine and stirring patriotic and personal feelings: he +is a blend, so to speak, of a base divinity and of a noble humanity. +He is supremely important in the history of Browning's mind, for he is +the first of that great series of the apologiæ of apparently evil men, +on which the poet was to pour out so much of his imaginative +wealth—Djabal, Fra Lippo, Bishop Blougram, Sludge, Prince +Hohenstiel-Schwangau, and the hero of <i>Fifine at the Fair</i>.</p><a name="Page_52"></a> + +<p>With this play, so far as any point can be fixed for the matter, he +enters for the first time on the most valuable of all his labours—the +defence of the indefensible. It may be noticed that Browning was not +in the least content with the fact that certain human frailties had +always lain more or less under an implied indulgence; that all human +sentiment had agreed that a profligate might be generous, or that a +drunkard might be high-minded. He was insatiable: he wished to go +further and show in a character like Djabal that an impostor might be +generous and that a liar might be high-minded. In all his life, it +must constantly be remembered, he tried always the most difficult +things. Just as he tried the queerest metres and attempted to manage +them, so he tried the queerest human souls and attempted to stand in +their place. Charity was his basic philosophy; but it was, as it were, +a fierce charity, a charity that went man-hunting. He was a kind of +cosmic detective who walked into the foulest of thieves' kitchens and +accused men publicly of virtue. The character of Djabal in <i>The Return +of the Druses</i> is the first of this long series of forlorn hopes for +the relief of long surrendered castles of misconduct. As we shall see, +even realising the humanity of a noble impostor like Djabal did not +content his erratic hunger for goodness. He went further again, and +realised the humanity of a mean impostor like Sludge. But in all +things he retained this essential characteristic, that he was not +content with seeking sinners—he sought the sinners whom even sinners +cast out.</p> + +<p>Browning's feeling of ambition in the matter of the drama continued to +grow at this time. It must be remembered that he had every natural +<a name="Page_53"></a>tendency to be theatrical, though he lacked the essential lucidity. +He was not, as a matter of fact, a particularly unsuccessful +dramatist; but in the world of abstract temperaments he was by nature +an unsuccessful dramatist. He was, that is to say, a man who loved +above all things plain and sensational words, open catastrophes, a +clear and ringing conclusion to everything. But it so happened, +unfortunately, that his own words were not plain; that his +catastrophes came with a crashing and sudden unintelligibleness which +left men in doubt whether the thing were a catastrophe or a great +stroke of good luck; that his conclusion, though it rang like a +trumpet to the four corners of heaven, was in its actual message quite +inaudible. We are bound to admit, on the authority of all his best +critics and admirers, that his plays were not failures, but we can all +feel that they should have been. He was, as it were, by nature a +neglected dramatist. He was one of those who achieve the reputation, +in the literal sense, of eccentricity by their frantic efforts to +reach the centre.</p> + +<p><i>A Blot on the 'Scutcheon</i> followed <i>The Return of the Druses</i>. In +connection with the performance of this very fine play a quarrel arose +which would not be worth mentioning if it did not happen to illustrate +the curious energetic simplicity of Browning's character. Macready, +who was in desperately low financial circumstances at this time, tried +by every means conceivable to avoid playing the part; he dodged, he +shuffled, he tried every evasion that occurred to him, but it never +occurred to Browning to see what he meant. He pushed off the part upon +Phelps, and Browning was contented; he resumed it, and Browning was +only <a name="Page_54"></a>discontented on behalf of Phelps. The two had a quarrel; they +were both headstrong, passionate men, but the quarrel dealt entirely +with the unfortunate condition of Phelps. Browning beat down his own +hat over his eyes; Macready flung Browning's manuscript with a slap +upon the floor. But all the time it never occurred to the poet that +Macready's conduct was dictated by anything so crude and simple as a +desire for money. Browning was in fact by his principles and his +ideals a man of the world, but in his life far otherwise. That worldly +ease which is to most of us a temptation was to him an ideal. He was +as it were a citizen of the New Jerusalem who desired with perfect +sanity and simplicity to be a citizen of Mayfair. There was in him a +quality which can only be most delicately described; for it was a +virtue which bears a strange resemblance to one of the meanest of +vices. Those curious people who think the truth a thing that can be +said violently and with ease, might naturally call Browning a snob. He +was fond of society, of fashion and even of wealth: but there is no +snobbery in admiring these things or any things if we admire them for +the right reasons. He admired them as worldlings cannot admire them: +he was, as it were, the child who comes in with the dessert. He bore +the same relation to the snob that the righteous man bears to the +Pharisee: something frightfully close and similar and yet an +everlasting opposite.</p><a name="Page_55"></a> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<a name="CHAPTER_III"></a><h2>CHAPTER III</h2> + +<h2>BROWNING AND HIS MARRIAGE</h2> + + +<p>Robert Browning had his faults, and the general direction of those +faults has been previously suggested. The chief of his faults, a +certain uncontrollable brutality of speech and gesture when he was +strongly roused, was destined to cling to him all through his life, +and to startle with the blaze of a volcano even the last quiet years +before his death. But any one who wishes to understand how deep was +the elemental honesty and reality of his character, how profoundly +worthy he was of any love that was bestowed upon him, need only study +one most striking and determining element in the question—Browning's +simple, heartfelt, and unlimited admiration for other people. He was +one of a generation of great men, of great men who had a certain +peculiar type, certain peculiar merits and defects. Carlyle, Tennyson, +Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, were alike in being children of a very +strenuous and conscientious age, alike in possessing its earnestness +and air of deciding great matters, alike also in showing a certain +almost noble jealousy, a certain restlessness, a certain fear of other +influences. Browning alone had no fear; he welcomed, evidently without +the least affectation, all the influences of his day. A very +interesting letter of his remains in which he describes <a name="Page_56"></a>his pleasure +in a university dinner. "Praise," he says in effect, "was given very +deservedly to Matthew Arnold and Swinburne, and to that pride of +Oxford men, Clough." The really striking thing about these three names +is the fact that they are united in Browning's praise in a way in +which they are by no means united in each other's. Matthew Arnold, in +one of his extant letters, calls Swinburne "a young pseudo-Shelley," +who, according to Arnold, thinks he can make Greek plays good by +making them modern. Mr. Swinburne, on the other hand, has summarised +Clough in a contemptuous rhyme:—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"There was a bad poet named Clough,<br /> +Whom his friends all united to puff.<br /> +But the public, though dull,<br /> +Has not quite such a skull<br /> +As belongs to believers in Clough."<br /></p></div> + +<p>The same general fact will be found through the whole of Browning's +life and critical attitude. He adored Shelley, and also Carlyle who +sneered at him. He delighted in Mill, and also in Ruskin who rebelled +against Mill. He excused Napoleon III. and Landor who hurled +interminable curses against Napoleon. He admired all the cycle of +great men who all contemned each other. To say that he had no streak +of envy in his nature would be true, but unfair; for there is no +justification for attributing any of these great men's opinions to +envy. But Browning was really unique, in that he had a certain +spontaneous and unthinking tendency to the admiration of others. He +admired another poet as he admired a fading sunset or a chance spring +leaf. He no more thought whether he could be as good as that man in +that department <a name="Page_57"></a>than whether he could be redder than the sunset or +greener than the leaf of spring. He was naturally magnanimous in the +literal sense of that sublime word; his mind was so great that it +rejoiced in the triumphs of strangers. In this spirit Browning had +already cast his eyes round in the literary world of his time, and had +been greatly and justifiably struck with the work of a young lady +poet, Miss Barrett.</p> + +<p>That impression was indeed amply justified. In a time when it was +thought necessary for a lady to dilute the wine of poetry to its very +weakest tint, Miss Barrett had contrived to produce poetry which was +open to literary objection as too heady and too high-coloured. When +she erred it was through an Elizabethan audacity and luxuriance, a +straining after violent metaphors. With her reappeared in poetry a +certain element which had not been present in it since the last days +of Elizabethan literature, the fusion of the most elementary human +passion with something which can only be described as wit, a certain +love of quaint and sustained similes, of parallels wildly logical, and +of brazen paradox and antithesis. We find this hot wit, as distinct +from the cold wit of the school of Pope, in the puns and buffooneries +of Shakespeare. We find it lingering in <i>Hudibras</i>, and we do not find +it again until we come to such strange and strong lines as these of +Elizabeth Barrett in her poem on Napoleon:—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"Blood fell like dew beneath his sunrise—sooth,<br /> +But glittered dew-like in the covenanted<br /> +And high-rayed light. He was a despot—granted,<br /> +But the [Greek: autos] of his autocratic mouth<br /> +Said 'Yea' i' the people's French! He magnified<br /> +The image of the freedom he denied."<br /> +</p></div> +<a name="Page_58"></a> + +<p>Her poems are full of quaint things, of such things as the eyes in the +peacock fans of the Vatican, which she describes as winking at the +Italian tricolor. She often took the step from the sublime to the +ridiculous: but to take this step one must reach the sublime. +Elizabeth Barrett contrived to assert, what still needs but then +urgently needed assertion, the fact that womanliness, whether in life +or poetry, was a positive thing, and not the negative of manliness. +Her verse at its best was quite as strong as Browning's own, and very +nearly as clever. The difference between their natures was a +difference between two primary colours, not between dark and light +shades of the same colour.</p> + +<p>Browning had often heard not only of the public, but of the private +life of this lady from his father's friend Kenyon. The old man, who +was one of those rare and valuable people who have a talent for +establishing definite relationships with people after a comparatively +short intercourse, had been appointed by Miss Barrett as her "fairy +godfather." He spoke much about her to Browning, and of Browning to +her, with a certain courtly garrulity which was one of his talents. +And there could be little doubt that the two poets would have met long +before had it not been for certain peculiarities in the position of +Miss Barrett. She was an invalid, and an invalid of a somewhat unique +kind, and living beyond all question under very unique circumstances.</p> + +<p>Her father, Edward Moulton Barrett, had been a landowner in the West +Indies, and thus, by a somewhat curious coincidence, had borne a part +in the same social system which stung Browning's father into revolt +and renunciation. The parts played by Edward<a name="Page_59"></a> Barrett, however, though +little or nothing is known of it, was probably very different. He was +a man Conservative by nature, a believer in authority in the nation +and the family, and endowed with some faculties for making his +conceptions prevail. He was an able man, capable in his language of a +certain bitter felicity of phrase. He was rigidly upright and +responsible, and he had a capacity for profound affection. But +selfishness of the most perilous sort, an unconscious selfishness, was +eating away his moral foundations, as it tends to eat away those of +all despots. His most fugitive moods changed and controlled the whole +atmosphere of the house, and the state of things was fully as +oppressive in the case of his good moods as in the case of his bad +ones. He had, what is perhaps the subtlest and worst spirit of +egotism, not that spirit merely which thinks that nothing should stand +in the way of its ill-temper, but that spirit which thinks that +nothing should stand in the way of its amiability. His daughters must +be absolutely at his beck and call, whether it was to be brow-beaten +or caressed. During the early years of Elizabeth Barrett's life, the +family had lived in the country, and for that brief period she had +known a more wholesome life than she was destined ever to know again +until her marriage long afterwards. She was not, as is the general +popular idea, absolutely a congenital invalid, weak, and almost +moribund from the cradle. In early girlhood she was slight and +sensitive indeed, but perfectly active and courageous. She was a good +horsewoman, and the accident which handicapped her for so many years +afterwards happened to her when she was riding. The injury to her +spine, however, <a name="Page_60"></a>will be found, the more we study her history, to be +only one of the influences which were to darken those bedridden years, +and to have among them a far less important place than has hitherto +been attached to it. Her father moved to a melancholy house in Wimpole +Street; and his own character growing gloomier and stranger as time +went on, he mounted guard over his daughter's sickbed in a manner +compounded of the pessimist and the disciplinarian. She was not +permitted to stir from the sofa, often not even to cross two rooms to +her bed. Her father came and prayed over her with a kind of melancholy +glee, and with the avowed solemnity of a watcher by a deathbed. She +was surrounded by that most poisonous and degrading of all +atmospheres—a medical atmosphere. The existence of this atmosphere +has nothing to do with the actual nature or prolongation of disease. A +man may pass three hours out of every five in a state of bad health, +and yet regard, as Stevenson regarded, the three hours as exceptional +and the two as normal. But the curse that lay on the Barrett household +was the curse of considering ill-health the natural condition of a +human being. The truth was that Edward Barrett was living emotionally +and æsthetically, like some detestable decadent poet, upon his +daughter's decline. He did not know this, but it was so. Scenes, +explanations, prayers, fury, and forgiveness had become bread and meat +for which he hungered; and when the cloud was upon his spirit, he +would lash out at all things and every one with the insatiable cruelty +of the sentimentalist.</p> + +<p>It is wonderful that Elizabeth Barrett was not made <a name="Page_61"></a>thoroughly morbid +and impotent by this intolerable violence and more intolerable +tenderness. In her estimate of her own health she did, of course, +suffer. It is evident that she practically believed herself to be +dying. But she was a high-spirited woman, full of that silent and +quite unfathomable kind of courage which is only found in women, and +she took a much more cheerful view of death than her father did of +life. Silent rooms, low voices, lowered blinds, long days of +loneliness, and of the sickliest kind of sympathy, had not tamed a +spirit which was swift and headlong to a fault. She could still own +with truth the magnificent fact that her chief vice was impatience, +"tearing open parcels instead of untying them;" looking at the end of +books before she had read them was, she said, incurable with her. It +is difficult to imagine anything more genuinely stirring than the +achievement of this woman, who thus contrived, while possessing all +the excuses of an invalid, to retain some of the faults of a tomboy.</p> + +<p>Impetuosity, vividness, a certain absoluteness and urgency in her +demands, marked her in the eyes of all who came in contact with her. +In after years, when Browning had experimentally shaved his beard off, +she told him with emphatic gestures that it must be grown again "that +minute." There we have very graphically the spirit which tears open +parcels. Not in vain, or as a mere phrase, did her husband after her +death describe her as "all a wonder and a wild desire."</p> + +<p>She had, of course, lived her second and real life in literature and +the things of the mind, and this in a very genuine and strenuous +sense. Her mental occupations were not mere mechanical accomplishments +almost <a name="Page_62"></a>as colourless as the monotony they relieved, nor were they +coloured in any visible manner by the unwholesome atmosphere in which +she breathed. She used her brains seriously; she was a good Greek +scholar, and read Æschylus and Euripides unceasingly with her blind +friend, Mr. Boyd; and she had, and retained even to the hour of her +death, a passionate and quite practical interest in great public +questions. Naturally she was not uninterested in Robert Browning, but +it does not appear that she felt at this time the same kind of fiery +artistic curiosity that he felt about her. He does appear to have felt +an attraction, which may almost be called mystical, for the +personality which was shrouded from the world by such sombre curtains. +In 1845 he addressed a letter to her in which he spoke of a former +occasion on which they had nearly met, and compared it to the +sensation of having once been outside the chapel of some marvellous +illumination and found the door barred against him. In that phrase it +is easy to see how much of the romantic boyhood of Browning remained +inside the resolute man of the world into which he was to all external +appearance solidifying. Miss Barrett replied to his letters with +charming sincerity and humour, and with much of that leisurely +self-revelation which is possible for an invalid who has nothing else +to do. She herself, with her love of quiet and intellectual +companionship, would probably have been quite happy for the rest of +her life if their relations had always remained a learned and +delightful correspondence. But she must have known very little of +Robert Browning if she imagined he would be contented with this airy +and bloodless tie. At all times of his life he was <a name="Page_63"></a>sufficiently fond +of his own way; at this time he was especially prompt and impulsive, +and he had always a great love for seeing and hearing and feeling +people, a love of the physical presence of friends, which made him +slap men on the back and hit them in the chest when he was very fond +of them. The correspondence between the two poets had not long begun +when Browning suggested something which was almost a blasphemy in the +Barrett household, that he should come and call on her as he would on +any one else. This seems to have thrown her into a flutter of fear and +doubt. She alleges all kinds of obstacles, the chief of which were her +health and the season of the year and the east winds. "If my truest +heart's wishes avail," replied Browning obstinately, "you shall laugh +at east winds yet as I do."</p> + +<p>Then began the chief part of that celebrated correspondence which has +within comparatively recent years been placed before the world. It is +a correspondence which has very peculiar qualities and raises many +profound questions.</p> + +<p>It is impossible to deal at any length with the picture given in these +remarkable letters of the gradual progress and amalgamation of two +spirits of great natural potency and independence, without saying at +least a word about the moral question raised by their publication and +the many expressions of disapproval which it entails. To the mind of +the present writer the whole of such a question should be tested by +one perfectly clear intellectual distinction and comparison. I am not +prepared to admit that there is or can be, properly speaking, in the +world anything that is too sacred to be known. That spiritual beauty +and spiritual truth are in their <a name="Page_64"></a>nature communicable, and that they +should be communicated, is a principle which lies at the root of every +conceivable religion. Christ was crucified upon a hill, and not in a +cavern, and the word Gospel itself involves the same idea as the +ordinary name of a daily paper. Whenever, therefore, a poet or any +similar type of man can, or conceives that he can, make all men +partakers in some splendid secret of his own heart, I can imagine +nothing saner and nothing manlier than his course in doing so. Thus it +was that Dante made a new heaven and a new hell out of a girl's nod in +the streets of Florence. Thus it was that Paul founded a civilisation +by keeping an ethical diary. But the one essential which exists in all +such cases as these is that the man in question believes that he can +make the story as stately to the whole world as it is to him, and he +chooses his words to that end. Yet when a work contains expressions +which have one value and significance when read by the people to whom +they were addressed, and an entirely different value and significance +when read by any one else, then the element of the violation of +sanctity does arise. It is not because there is anything in this world +too sacred to tell. It is rather because there are a great many things +in this world too sacred to parody. If Browning could really convey to +the world the inmost core of his affection for his wife, I see no +reason why he should not. But the objection to letters which begin "My +dear Ba," is that they do not convey anything of the sort. As far as +any third person is concerned, Browning might as well have been +expressing the most noble and universal sentiment in the dialect of +the Cherokees. Objection to the publication of such passages as that, +in short, is <a name="Page_65"></a>not the fact that they tell us about the love of the +Brownings, but that they do not tell us about it.</p> + +<p>Upon this principle it is obvious that there should have been a +selection among the Letters, but not a selection which should exclude +anything merely because it was ardent and noble. If Browning or Mrs. +Browning had not desired any people to know that they were fond of +each other, they would not have written and published "One Word More" +or "The Sonnets from the Portuguese." Nay, they would not have been +married in a public church, for every one who is married in a church +does make a confession of love of absolutely national publicity, and +tacitly, therefore, repudiates any idea that such confessions are too +sacred for the world to know. The ridiculous theory that men should +have no noble passions or sentiments in public may have been designed +to make private life holy and undefiled, but it has had very little +actual effect except to make public life cynical and preposterously +unmeaning. But the words of a poem or the words of the English +Marriage Service, which are as fine as many poems, is a language +dignified and deliberately intended to be understood by all. If the +bride and bridegroom in church, instead of uttering those words, were +to utter a poem compounded of private allusions to the foibles of Aunt +Matilda, or of childish secrets which they would tell each other in a +lane, it would be a parallel case to the publication of some of the +Browning Letters. Why the serious and universal portions of those +Letters could not be published without those which are to us idle and +unmeaning it is difficult to understand. Our wisdom, whether expressed +in private or public, belongs to the world, but our folly belongs to +those we love.</p><a name="Page_66"></a> + +<p>There is at least one peculiarity in the Browning Letters which tends +to make their publication far less open to objection than almost any +other collection of love letters which can be imagined. The ordinary +sentimentalist who delights in the most emotional of magazine +interviews, will not be able to get much satisfaction out of them, +because he and many persons more acute will be quite unable to make +head or tail of three consecutive sentences. In this respect it is the +most extraordinary correspondence in the world. There seem to be only +two main rules for this form of letter-writing: the first is, that if +a sentence can begin with a parenthesis it always should; and the +second is, that if you have written from a third to half of a sentence +you need never in any case write any more. It would be amusing to +watch any one who felt an idle curiosity as to the language and +secrets of lovers opening the Browning Letters. He would probably come +upon some such simple and lucid passage as the following: "I ought to +wait, say a week at least, having killed all your mules for you, +before I shot down your dogs.... But not being Phoibos Apollon, you +are to know further that when I <i>did</i> think I might go modestly on ... +[Greek: ômoi], let me get out of this slough of a simile, never mind +with what dislocated ankles."</p> + +<p>What our imaginary sentimentalist would make of this tender passage it +is difficult indeed to imagine. The only plain conclusion which +appears to emerge from the words is the somewhat curious one—that +Browning was in the habit of taking a gun down to Wimpole Street and +of demolishing the live stock on those somewhat unpromising premises. +Nor will he be any better enlightened if he turns to the reply of +Miss<a name="Page_67"></a> Barrett, which seems equally dominated with the great central +idea of the Browning correspondence that the most enlightening +passages in a letter consist of dots. She replies in a letter +following the above: "But if it could be possible that you should mean +to say you would show me. . . . Can it be? or am I reading this 'Attic +contraction' quite the wrong way. You see I am afraid of the +difference between flattering myself and being flattered . . . the +fatal difference. And now will you understand that I should be too +overjoyed to have revelations from the Portfolio . . . however +incarnated with blots and pen scratches . . . to be able to ask +impudently of them now? Is that plain?" Most probably she thought it +was.</p> + +<p>With regard to Browning himself this characteristic is comparatively +natural and appropriate. Browning's prose was in any case the most +roundabout affair in the world. Those who knew him say that he would +often send an urgent telegram from which it was absolutely impossible +to gather where the appointment was, or when it was, or what was its +object. This fact is one of the best of all arguments against the +theory of Browning's intellectual conceit. A man would have to be +somewhat abnormally conceited in order to spend sixpence for the +pleasure of sending an unintelligible communication to the dislocation +of his own plans. The fact was, that it was part of the machinery of +his brain that things came out of it, as it were, backwards. The words +"tail foremost" express Browning's style with something more than a +conventional accuracy. The tail, the most insignificant part of an +animal, is also often the most animated and fantastic. An utterance of +Browning is often like a strange animal walking <a name="Page_68"></a>backwards, who +flourishes his tail with such energy that every one takes it for his +head. He was in other words, at least in his prose and practical +utterances, more or less incapable of telling a story without telling +the least important thing first. If a man who belonged to an Italian +secret society, one local branch of which bore as a badge an +olive-green ribbon, had entered his house, and in some sensational +interview tried to bribe or blackmail him, he would have told the +story with great energy and indignation, but he would have been +incapable of beginning with anything except the question of the colour +of olives. His whole method was founded both in literature and life +upon the principle of the "ex pede Herculem," and at the beginning of +his description of Hercules the foot appears some sizes larger than +the hero. It is, in short, natural enough that Browning should have +written his love letters obscurely, since he wrote his letters to his +publisher and his solicitor obscurely. In the case of Mrs. Browning it +is somewhat more difficult to understand. For she at least had, beyond +all question, a quite simple and lucent vein of humour, which does not +easily reconcile itself with this subtlety. But she was partly under +the influence of her own quality of passionate ingenuity or emotional +wit of which we have already taken notice in dealing with her poems, +and she was partly also no doubt under the influence of Browning. +Whatever was the reason, their correspondence was not of the sort +which can be pursued very much by the outside public. Their letters +may be published a hundred times over, they still remain private. They +write to each other in a language of their own, an almost +exasperatingly impressionist <a name="Page_69"></a>language, a language chiefly consisting +of dots and dashes and asterisks and italics, and brackets and notes +of interrogation. Wordsworth when he heard afterwards of their +eventual elopement said with that slight touch of bitterness he always +used in speaking of Browning, "So Robert Browning and Miss Barrett +have gone off together. I hope they understand each other—nobody else +would." It would be difficult to pay a higher compliment to a +marriage. Their common affection for Kenyon was a great element in +their lives and in their correspondence. "I have a convenient theory +to account for Mr. Kenyon," writes Browning mysteriously, "and his +otherwise unaccountable kindness to me." "For Mr. Kenyon's kindness," +retorts Elizabeth Barrett, "no theory will account. I class it with +mesmerism for that reason." There is something very dignified and +beautiful about the simplicity of these two poets vying with each +other in giving adequate praise to the old dilettante, of whom the +world would never have heard but for them. Browning's feeling for him +was indeed especially strong and typical. "There," he said, pointing +after the old man as he left the room, "there goes one of the most +splendid men living—a man so noble in his friendship, so lavish in +his hospitality, so large-hearted and benevolent, that he deserves to +be known all over the world as 'Kenyon the Magnificent.'" There is +something thoroughly worthy of Browning at his best in this feeling, +not merely of the use of sociability, or of the charm of sociability, +but of the magnificence, the heroic largeness of real sociability. +Being himself a warm champion of the pleasures of society, he saw in +Kenyon a kind of poetic genius for the thing, a mission <a name="Page_70"></a>of +superficial philanthropy. He is thoroughly to be congratulated on the +fact that he had grasped the great but now neglected truth, that a man +may actually be great, yet not in the least able.</p> + +<p>Browning's desire to meet Miss Barrett was received on her side, as +has been stated, with a variety of objections. The chief of these was +the strangely feminine and irrational reason that she was not worth +seeing, a point on which the seeker for an interview might be +permitted to form his own opinion. "There is nothing to see in me; nor +to hear in me.—I never learned to talk as you do in London; although +I can admire that brightness of carved speech in Mr. Kenyon and +others. If my poetry is worth anything to any eye, it is the flower of +me. I have lived most and been most happy in it, and so it has all my +colours; the rest of me is nothing but a root, fit for the ground and +dark." The substance of Browning's reply was to the effect, "I will +call at two on Tuesday."</p> + +<p>They met on May 20, 1845. A short time afterwards he had fallen in +love with her and made her an offer of marriage. To a person in the +domestic atmosphere of the Barretts, the incident would appear to have +been paralysing. "I will tell you what I once said in jest ..." she +writes, "If a prince of El Dorado should come with a pedigree of +lineal descent from some signory in the moon in one hand and a ticket +of good behaviour from the nearest Independent chapel in the +other!—'Why, even <i>then</i>,' said my sister Arabel, 'it would not +<i>do</i>.' And she was right; we all agreed that she was right."</p> + +<p>This may be taken as a fairly accurate description of the real state +of Mr. Barrett's mind on one subject.<a name="Page_71"></a> It is illustrative of the very +best and breeziest side of Elizabeth Barrett's character that she +could be so genuinely humorous over so tragic a condition of the human +mind.</p> + +<p>Browning's proposals were, of course, as matters stood, of a character +to dismay and repel all those who surrounded Elizabeth Barrett. It was +not wholly a matter of the fancies of her father. The whole of her +family, and most probably the majority of her medical advisers, did +seriously believe at this time that she was unfit to be moved, to say +nothing of being married, and that a life passed between a bed and a +sofa, and avoiding too frequent and abrupt transitions even from one +to the other, was the only life she could expect on this earth. Almost +alone in holding another opinion and in urging her to a more vigorous +view of her condition, stood Browning himself. "But you are better," +he would say; "you look so and speak so." Which of the two opinions +was right is of course a complex medical matter into which a book like +this has neither the right nor the need to enter. But this much may be +stated as a mere question of fact. In the summer of 1846 Elizabeth +Barrett was still living under the great family convention which +provided her with nothing but an elegant deathbed, forbidden to move, +forbidden to see proper daylight, forbidden to receive a friend lest +the shock should destroy her suddenly. A year or two later, in Italy, +as Mrs. Browning, she was being dragged up hill in a wine hamper, +toiling up to the crests of mountains at four o'clock in the morning, +riding for five miles on a donkey to what she calls "an inaccessible +volcanic ground not far from the stars." It is perfectly incredible +that any one so ill as her family believed her to be <a name="Page_72"></a>should have +lived this life for twenty-four hours. Something must be allowed for +the intoxication of a new tie and a new interest in life. But such +exaltations can in their nature hardly last a month, and Mrs. Browning +lived for fifteen years afterwards in infinitely better health than +she had ever known before. In the light of modern knowledge it is not +very difficult or very presumptuous, of us to guess that she had been +in her father's house to some extent inoculated with hysteria, that +strange affliction which some people speak of as if it meant the +absence of disease, but which is in truth the most terrible of all +diseases. It must be remembered that in 1846 little or nothing was +known of spine complaints such as that from which Elizabeth Barrett +suffered, less still of the nervous conditions they create, and least +of all of hysterical phenomena. In our day she would have been ordered +air and sunlight and activity, and all the things the mere idea of +which chilled the Barretts with terror. In our day, in short, it would +have been recognised that she was in the clutch of a form of neurosis +which exhibits every fact of a disease except its origin, that strange +possession which makes the body itself a hypocrite. Those who +surrounded Miss Barrett knew nothing of this, and Browning knew +nothing of it; and probably if he knew anything, knew less than they +did. Mrs. Orr says, probably with a great deal of truth, that of +ill-health and its sensations he remained "pathetically ignorant" to +his dying day. But devoid as he was alike of expert knowledge and +personal experience, without a shadow of medical authority, almost +without anything that can be formally called a right to his opinion, +he was, and remained, <a name="Page_73"></a>right. He at least saw, he indeed alone saw, to +the practical centre of the situation. He did not know anything about +hysteria or neurosis, or the influence of surroundings, but he knew +that the atmosphere of Mr. Barrett's house was not a fit thing for any +human being, alive, dying, or dead. His stand upon this matter has +really a certain human interest, since it is an example of a thing +which will from time to time occur, the interposition of the average +man to the confounding of the experts. Experts are undoubtedly right +nine times out of ten, but the tenth time comes, and we find in +military matters an Oliver Cromwell who will make every mistake known +to strategy and yet win all his battles, and in medical matters a +Robert Browning whose views have not a technical leg to stand on and +are entirely correct.</p> + +<p>But while Browning was thus standing alone in his view of the matter, +while Edward Barrett had to all appearance on his side a phalanx of +all the sanities and respectabilities, there came suddenly a new +development, destined to bring matters to a crisis indeed, and to +weigh at least three souls in the balance. Upon further examination of +Miss Barrett's condition, the physicians had declared that it was +absolutely necessary that she should be taken to Italy. This may, +without any exaggeration, be called the turning-point and the last +great earthly opportunity of Barrett's character. He had not +originally been an evil man, only a man who, being stoical in +practical things, permitted himself, to his great detriment, a +self-indulgence in moral things. He had grown to regard his pious and +dying daughter as part of the furniture of the house and of the +universe. And as long as the great mass of authorities <a name="Page_74"></a>were on his +side, his illusion was quite pardonable. His crisis came when the +authorities changed their front, and with one accord asked his +permission to send his daughter abroad. It was his crisis, and he +refused.</p> + +<p>He had, if we may judge from what we know of him, his own peculiar and +somewhat detestable way of refusing. Once when his daughter had asked +a perfectly simple favour in a matter of expediency, permission, that +is, to keep her favourite brother with her during an illness, her +singular parent remarked that "she might keep him if she liked, but +that he had looked for greater self-sacrifice." These were the weapons +with which he ruled his people. For the worst tyrant is not the man +who rules by fear; the worst tyrant is he who rules by love and plays +on it as on a harp. Barrett was one of the oppressors who have +discovered the last secret of oppression, that which is told in the +fine verse of Swinburne:—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"The racks of the earth and the rods<br /> +Are weak as the foam on the sands;<br /> +The heart is the prey for the gods,<br /> +Who crucify hearts, not hands."</p></div> + +<p>He, with his terrible appeal to the vibrating consciences of women, +was, with regard to one of them, very near to the end of his reign. +When Browning heard that the Italian journey was forbidden, he +proposed definitely that they should marry and go on the journey +together.</p> + +<p>Many other persons had taken cognisance of the fact, and were active +in the matter. Kenyon, the gentlest and most universally complimentary +of mortals, had marched into the house and given Arabella Barrett, +<a name="Page_75"></a>the sister of the sick woman, his opinion of her father's conduct +with a degree of fire and frankness which must have been perfectly +amazing in a man of his almost antiquated social delicacy. Mrs. +Jameson, an old and generous friend of the family, had immediately +stepped in and offered to take Elizabeth to Italy herself, thus +removing all questions of expense or arrangement. She would appear to +have stood to her guns in the matter with splendid persistence and +magnanimity. She called day after day seeking for a change of mind, +and delayed her own journey to the continent more than once. At +length, when it became evident that the extraction of Mr. Barrett's +consent was hopeless, she reluctantly began her own tour in Europe +alone. She went to Paris, and had not been there many days, when she +received a formal call from Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett +Browning, who had been married for some days. Her astonishment is +rather a picturesque thing to think about.</p> + +<p>The manner in which this sensational elopement, which was, of course, +the talk of the whole literary world, had been effected, is narrated, +as every one knows, in the Browning Letters. Browning had decided that +an immediate marriage was the only solution; and having put his hand +to the plough, did not decline even when it became obviously necessary +that it should be a secret marriage. To a man of his somewhat stormily +candid and casual disposition this necessity of secrecy was really +exasperating; but every one with any imagination or chivalry will +rejoice that he accepted the evil conditions. He had always had the +courage to tell the truth; and now it was demanded of him to have the +greater courage to tell a lie, and he told <a name="Page_76"></a>it with perfect +cheerfulness and lucidity. In thus disappearing surreptitiously with +an invalid woman he was doing something against which there were +undoubtedly a hundred things to be said, only it happened that the +most cogent and important thing of all was to be said for it.</p> + +<p>It is very amusing, and very significant in the matter of Browning's +character, to read the accounts which he writes to Elizabeth Barrett +of his attitude towards the approaching <i>coup de théâtre</i>. In one +place he says, suggestively enough, that he does not in the least +trouble about the disapproval of her father; the man whom he fears as +a frustrating influence is Kenyon. Mr. Barrett could only walk into +the room and fly into a passion; and this Browning could have received +with perfect equanimity. "But," he says, "if Kenyon knows of the +matter, I shall have the kindest and friendliest of explanations (with +his arm on my shoulder) of how I am ruining your social position, +destroying your health, etc., etc." This touch is very suggestive of +the power of the old worldling, who could manoeuvre with young people +as well as Major Pendennis. Kenyon had indeed long been perfectly +aware of the way in which things were going; and the method he adopted +in order to comment on it is rather entertaining. In a conversation +with Elizabeth Barrett, he asked carelessly whether there was anything +between her sister and a certain Captain Cooke. On receiving a +surprised reply in the negative, he remarked apologetically that he +had been misled into the idea by the gentleman calling so often at the +house. Elizabeth Barrett knew perfectly well what he meant; but the +logical allusiveness of the attack reminds one of a fragment of some +Meredithian comedy.</p><a name="Page_77"></a> + +<p>The manner in which Browning bore himself in this acute and +necessarily dubious position is, perhaps, more thoroughly to his +credit than anything else in his career. He never came out so well in +all his long years of sincerity and publicity as he does in this one +act of deception. Having made up his mind to that act, he is not +ashamed to name it; neither, on the other hand, does he rant about it, +and talk about Philistine prejudices and higher laws and brides in the +sight of God, after the manner of the cockney decadent. He was +breaking a social law, but he was not declaring a crusade against +social laws. We all feel, whatever may be our opinions on the matter, +that the great danger of this kind of social opportunism, this pitting +of a private necessity against a public custom, is that men are +somewhat too weak and self-deceptive to be trusted with such a power +of giving dispensations to themselves. We feel that men without +meaning to do so might easily begin by breaking a social by-law and +end by being thoroughly anti-social. One of the best and most striking +things to notice about Robert Browning is the fact that he did this +thing considering it as an exception, and that he contrived to leave +it really exceptional. It did not in the least degree break the +rounded clearness of his loyalty to social custom. It did not in the +least degree weaken the sanctity of the general rule. At a supreme +crisis of his life he did an unconventional thing, and he lived and +died conventional. It would be hard to say whether he appears the more +thoroughly sane in having performed the act, or in not having allowed +it to affect him.</p> + +<p>Elizabeth Barrett gradually gave way under the obstinate and almost +monotonous assertion of Browning <a name="Page_78"></a>that this elopement was the only +possible course of action. Before she finally agreed, however, she did +something, which in its curious and impulsive symbolism, belongs +almost to a more primitive age. The sullen system of medical seclusion +to which she had long been subjected has already been described. The +most urgent and hygienic changes were opposed by many on the ground +that it was not safe for her to leave her sofa and her sombre room. On +the day on which it was necessary for her finally to accept or reject +Browning's proposal, she called her sister to her, and to the +amazement and mystification of that lady asked for a carriage. In this +she drove into Regent's Park, alighted, walked on to the grass, and +stood leaning against a tree for some moments, looking round her at +the leaves and the sky. She then entered the cab again, drove home, +and agreed to the elopement. This was possibly the best poem that she +ever produced.</p> + +<p>Browning arranged the eccentric adventure with a great deal of +prudence and knowledge of human nature. Early one morning in September +1846 Miss Barrett walked quietly out of her father's house, became +Mrs. Robert Browning in a church in Marylebone, and returned home +again as if nothing had happened. In this arrangement Browning showed +some of that real insight into the human spirit which ought to make a +poet the most practical of all men. The incident was, in the nature of +things, almost overpoweringly exciting to his wife, in spite of the +truly miraculous courage with which she supported it; and he desired, +therefore, to call in the aid of the mysteriously tranquillising +effect of familiar scenes and faces. One <a name="Page_79"></a>trifling incident is worth +mentioning which is almost unfathomably characteristic of Browning. It +has already been remarked in these pages that he was pre-eminently one +of those men whose expanding opinions never alter by a hairsbreadth +the actual ground-plan of their moral sense. Browning would have felt +the same things right and the same things wrong, whatever views he had +held. During the brief and most trying period between his actual +marriage and his actual elopement, it is most significant that he +would not call at the house in Wimpole Street, because he would have +been obliged to ask if Miss Barrett was disengaged. He was acting a +lie; he was deceiving a father; he was putting a sick woman to a +terrible risk; and these things he did not disguise from himself for a +moment, but he could not bring himself to say two words to a +maidservant. Here there may be partly the feeling of the literary man +for the sacredness of the uttered word, but there is far more of a +certain rooted traditional morality which it is impossible either to +describe or to justify. Browning's respectability was an older and +more primeval thing than the oldest and most primeval passions of +other men. If we wish to understand him, we must always remember that +in dealing with any of his actions we have not to ask whether the +action contains the highest morality, but whether we should have felt +inclined to do it ourselves.</p> + +<p>At length the equivocal and exhausting interregnum was over. Mrs. +Browning went for the second time almost on tiptoe out of her father's +house, accompanied only by her maid and her dog, which was only just +successfully prevented from barking. Before the end of the day in all +probability Barrett had discovered <a name="Page_80"></a>that his dying daughter had fled +with Browning to Italy.</p> + +<p>They never saw him again, and hardly more than a faint echo came to +them of the domestic earthquake which they left behind them. They do +not appear to have had many hopes, or to have made many attempts at a +reconciliation. Elizabeth Barrett had discovered at last that her +father was in truth not a man to be treated with; hardly, perhaps, +even a man to be blamed. She knew to all intents and purposes that she +had grown up in the house of a madman.</p><a name="Page_81"></a> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<a name="CHAPTER_IV"></a><h2>CHAPTER IV</h2> + +<h2>BROWNING IN ITALY</h2> + + +<p>The married pair went to Pisa in 1846, and moved soon afterwards to +Florence. Of the life of the Brownings in Italy there is much perhaps +to be said in the way of description and analysis, little to be said +in the way of actual narrative. Each of them had passed through the +one incident of existence. Just as Elizabeth Barrett's life had before +her marriage been uneventfully sombre, now it was uneventfully happy. +A succession of splendid landscapes, a succession of brilliant +friends, a succession of high and ardent intellectual interests, they +experienced; but their life was of the kind that if it were told at +all, would need to be told in a hundred volumes of gorgeous +intellectual gossip. How Browning and his wife rode far into the +country, eating strawberries and drinking milk out of the basins of +the peasants; how they fell in with the strangest and most picturesque +figures of Italian society; how they climbed mountains and read books +and modelled in clay and played on musical instruments; how Browning +was made a kind of arbiter between two improvising Italian bards; how +he had to escape from a festivity when the sound of Garibaldi's hymn +brought the knocking of the Austrian police; these are the things of +which his life is full, trifling <a name="Page_82"></a>and picturesque things, a series of +interludes, a beautiful and happy story, beginning and ending nowhere. +The only incidents, perhaps, were the birth of their son and the death +of Browning's mother in 1849.</p> + +<p>It is well known that Browning loved Italy; that it was his adopted +country; that he said in one of the finest of his lyrics that the name +of it would be found written on his heart. But the particular +character of this love of Browning for Italy needs to be understood. +There are thousands of educated Europeans who love Italy, who live in +it, who visit it annually, who come across a continent to see it, who +hunt out its darkest picture and its most mouldering carving; but they +are all united in this, that they regard Italy as a dead place. It is +a branch of their universal museum, a department of dry bones. There +are rich and cultivated persons, particularly Americans, who seem to +think that they keep Italy, as they might keep an aviary or a +hothouse, into which they might walk whenever they wanted a whiff of +beauty. Browning did not feel at all in this manner; he was +intrinsically incapable of offering such an insult to the soul of a +nation. If he could not have loved Italy as a nation, he would not +have consented to love it as an old curiosity shop. In everything on +earth, from the Middle Ages to the amoeba, who is discussed at such +length in "Mr. Sludge the Medium," he is interested in the life in +things. He was interested in the life in Italian art and in the life +in Italian politics.</p> + +<p>Perhaps the first and simplest example that can be given of this +matter is in Browning's interest in art. He was immeasurably +fascinated at all times by painting and sculpture, and his sojourn in +Italy gave him, <a name="Page_83"></a>of course, innumerable and perfect opportunities for +the study of painting and sculpture. But his interest in these studies +was not like that of the ordinary cultured visitor to the Italian +cities. Thousands of such visitors, for example, study those endless +lines of magnificent Pagan busts which are to be found in nearly all +the Italian galleries and museums, and admire them, and talk about +them, and note them in their catalogues, and describe them in their +diaries. But the way in which they affected Browning is described very +suggestively in a passage in the letters of his wife. She describes +herself as longing for her husband to write poems, beseeching him to +write poems, but finding all her petitions useless because her husband +was engaged all day in modelling busts in clay and breaking them as +fast as he made them. This is Browning's interest in art, the interest +in a living thing, the interest in a growing thing, the insatiable +interest in how things are done. Every one who knows his admirable +poems on painting—"Fra Lippo Lippi" and "Andrea del Sarto" and +"Pictor Ignotus"—will remember how fully they deal with +technicalities, how they are concerned with canvas, with oil, with a +mess of colours. Sometimes they are so technical as to be mysterious +to the casual reader. An extreme case may be found in that of a lady I +once knew who had merely read the title of "Pacchiarotto and how he +worked in distemper," and thought that Pacchiarotto was the name of a +dog, whom no attacks of canine disease could keep from the fulfilment +of his duty. These Browning poems do not merely deal with painting; +they smell of paint. They are the works of a man to whom art is not +what it is to so many of the non-professional <a name="Page_84"></a>lovers of art, a thing +accomplished, a valley of bones: to him it is a field of crops +continually growing in a busy and exciting silence. Browning was +interested, like some scientific man, in the obstetrics of art. There +is a large army of educated men who can talk art with artists; but +Browning could not merely talk art with artists—he could talk shop +with them. Personally he may not have known enough about painting to +be more than a fifth-rate painter, or enough about the organ to be +more than a sixth-rate organist. But there are, when all is said and +done, some things which a fifth-rate painter knows which a first-rate +art critic does not know; there are some things which a sixth-rate +organist knows which a first-rate judge of music does not know. And +these were the things that Browning knew.</p> + +<p>He was, in other words, what is called an amateur. The word amateur +has come by the thousand oddities of language to convey an idea of +tepidity; whereas the word itself has the meaning of passion. Nor is +this peculiarity confined to the mere form of the word; the actual +characteristic of these nameless dilettanti is a genuine fire and +reality. A man must love a thing very much if he not only practises it +without any hope of fame or money, but even practises it without any +hope of doing it well. Such a man must love the toils of the work more +than any other man can love the rewards of it. Browning was in this +strict sense a strenuous amateur. He tried and practised in the course +of his life half a hundred things at which he can never have even for +a moment expected to succeed. The story of his life is full of absurd +little ingenuities, such as the discovery of a way of making pictures +by <a name="Page_85"></a>roasting brown paper over a candle. In precisely the same spirit +of fruitless vivacity, he made himself to a very considerable extent a +technical expert in painting, a technical expert in sculpture, a +technical expert in music. In his old age, he shows traces of being so +bizarre a thing as an abstract police detective, writing at length in +letters and diaries his views of certain criminal cases in an Italian +town. Indeed, his own <i>Ring and the Book</i> is merely a sublime +detective story. He was in a hundred things this type of man; he was +precisely in the position, with a touch of greater technical success, +of the admirable figure in Stevenson's story who said, "I can play the +fiddle nearly well enough to earn a living in the orchestra of a penny +gaff, but not quite."</p> + +<p>The love of Browning for Italian art, therefore, was anything but an +antiquarian fancy; it was the love of a living thing. We see the same +phenomenon in an even more important matter—the essence and +individuality of the country itself.</p> + +<p>Italy to Browning and his wife was not by any means merely that +sculptured and ornate sepulchre that it is to so many of those +cultivated English men and women who live in Italy and enjoy and +admire and despise it. To them it was a living nation, the type and +centre of the religion and politics of a continent; the ancient and +flaming heart of Western history, the very Europe of Europe. And they +lived at the time of the most moving and gigantic of all dramas—the +making of a new nation, one of the things that makes men feel that +they are still in the morning of the earth. Before their eyes, with +every circumstance of energy and mystery, was passing the panorama <a name="Page_86"></a>of +the unification of Italy, with the bold and romantic militarism of +Garibaldi, the more bold and more romantic diplomacy of Cavour. They +lived in a time when affairs of State had almost the air of works of +art; and it is not strange that these two poets should have become +politicians in one of those great creative epochs when even the +politicians have to be poets.</p> + +<p>Browning was on this question and on all the questions of continental +and English politics a very strong Liberal. This fact is not a mere +detail of purely biographical interest, like any view he might take of +the authorship of the "Eikon Basilike" or the authenticity of the +Tichborne claimant. Liberalism was so inevitably involved in the +poet's whole view of existence, that even a thoughtful and imaginative +Conservative would feel that Browning was bound to be a Liberal. His +mind was possessed, perhaps even to excess, by a belief in growth and +energy and in the ultimate utility of error. He held the great central +Liberal doctrine, a belief in a certain destiny of the human spirit +beyond, and perhaps even independent of, our own sincerest +convictions. The world was going right he felt, most probably in his +way, but certainly in its own way. The sonnet which he wrote in later +years, entitled "Why I am a Liberal," expresses admirably this +philosophical root of his politics. It asks in effect how he, who had +found truth in so many strange forms after so many strange wanderings, +can be expected to stifle with horror the eccentricities of others. A +Liberal may be defined approximately as a man who, if he could by +waving his hand in a dark room, stop the mouths of all the deceivers +of mankind <a name="Page_87"></a>for ever, would not wave his hand. Browning was a Liberal +in this sense.</p> + +<p>And just as the great Liberal movement which followed the French +Revolution made this claim for the liberty and personality of human +beings, so it made it for the liberty and personality of nations. It +attached indeed to the independence of a nation something of the same +wholly transcendental sanctity which humanity has in all legal systems +attached to the life of a man. The grounds were indeed much the same; +no one could say absolutely that a live man was useless, and no one +could say absolutely that a variety of national life was useless or +must remain useless to the world. Men remembered how often barbarous +tribes or strange and alien Scriptures had been called in to revive +the blood of decaying empires and civilisations. And this sense of the +personality of a nation, as distinct from the personalities of all +other nations, did not involve in the case of these old Liberals +international bitterness; for it is too often forgotten that +friendship demands independence and equality fully as much as war. But +in them it led to great international partialities, to a great system, +as it were, of adopted countries which made so thorough a Scotchman as +Carlyle in love with Germany, and so thorough an Englishman as +Browning in love with Italy.</p> + +<p>And while on the one side of the struggle was this great ideal of +energy and variety, on the other side was something which we now find +it difficult to realise or describe. We have seen in our own time a +great reaction in favour of monarchy, aristocracy, and +ecclesiasticism, a reaction almost entirely noble in its instinct, and +dwelling almost entirely on the best <a name="Page_88"></a>periods and the best qualities +of the old <i>régime</i>. But the modern man, full of admiration for the +great virtue of chivalry which is at the heart of aristocracies, and +the great virtue of reverence which is at the heart of ceremonial +religion, is not in a position to form any idea of how profoundly +unchivalrous, how astonishingly irreverent, how utterly mean, and +material, and devoid of mystery or sentiment were the despotic systems +of Europe which survived, and for a time conquered, the Revolution. +The case against the Church in Italy in the time of Pio Nono was not +the case which a rationalist would urge against the Church of the time +of St. Louis, but diametrically the opposite case. Against the +mediæval Church it might be said that she was too fantastic, too +visionary, too dogmatic about the destiny of man, too indifferent to +all things but the devotional side of the soul. Against the Church of +Pio Nono the main thing to be said was that it was simply and +supremely cynical; that it was not founded on the unworldly instinct +for distorting life, but on the worldly counsel to leave life as it +is; that it was not the inspirer of insane hopes, of reward and +miracle, but the enemy, the cool and sceptical enemy, of hope of any +kind or description. The same was true of the monarchical systems of +Prussia and Austria and Russia at this time. Their philosophy was not +the philosophy of the cavaliers who rode after Charles I. or Louis +XIII. It was the philosophy of the typical city uncle, advising every +one, and especially the young, to avoid enthusiasm, to avoid beauty, +to regard life as a machine, dependent only upon the two forces of +comfort and fear. That was, there can be little doubt, the real reason +of the fascination of the Napoleon legend—that <a name="Page_89"></a>while Napoleon was a +despot like the rest, he was a despot who went somewhere and did +something, and defied the pessimism of Europe, and erased the word +"impossible." One does not need to be a Bonapartist to rejoice at the +way in which the armies of the First Empire, shouting their songs and +jesting with their colonels, smote and broke into pieces the armies of +Prussia and Austria driven into battle with a cane.</p> + +<p>Browning, as we have said, was in Italy at the time of the break-up of +one part of this frozen continent of the non-possumus, Austria's hold +in the north of Italy was part of that elaborate and comfortable and +wholly cowardly and unmeaning compromise, which the Holy Alliance had +established, and which it believed without doubt in its solid unbelief +would last until the Day of Judgment, though it is difficult to +imagine what the Holy Alliance thought would happen then. But almost +of a sudden affairs had begun to move strangely, and the despotic +princes and their chancellors discovered with a great deal of +astonishment that they were not living in the old age of the world, +but to all appearance in a very unmanageable period of its boyhood. In +an age of ugliness and routine, in a time when diplomatists and +philosophers alike tended to believe that they had a list of all human +types, there began to appear men who belonged to the morning of the +world, men whose movements have a national breadth and beauty, who act +symbols and become legends while they are alive. Garibaldi in his red +shirt rode in an open carriage along the front of a hostile fort +calling to the coachman to drive slower, and not a man dared fire a +shot at him. Mazzini poured out upon Europe a new mysticism of +humanity and liberty, and was willing, like some <a name="Page_90"></a>passionate Jesuit of +the sixteenth century, to become in its cause either a philosopher or +a criminal. Cavour arose with a diplomacy which was more thrilling and +picturesque than war itself. These men had nothing to do with an age +of the impossible. They have passed, their theories along with them, +as all things pass; but since then we have had no men of their type +precisely, at once large and real and romantic and successful. Gordon +was a possible exception. They were the last of the heroes.</p> + +<p>When Browning was first living in Italy, a telegram which had been +sent to him was stopped on the frontier and suppressed on account of +his known sympathy with the Italian Liberals. It is almost impossible +for people living in a commonwealth like ours to understand how a +small thing like that will affect a man. It was not so much the +obvious fact that a great practical injury was really done to him; +that the telegram might have altered all his plans in matters of vital +moment. It was, over and above that, the sense of a hand laid on +something personal and essentially free. Tyranny like this is not the +worst tyranny, but it is the most intolerable. It interferes with men +not in the most serious matters, but precisely in those matters in +which they most resent interference. It may be illogical for men to +accept cheerfully unpardonable public scandals, benighted educational +systems, bad sanitation, bad lighting, a blundering and inefficient +system of life, and yet to resent the tearing up of a telegram or a +post-card; but the fact remains that the sensitiveness of men is a +strange and localised thing, and there is hardly a man in the world +who would not rather be ruled by despots chosen by lot and live in a +city like a mediæval<a name="Page_91"></a> Ghetto, than be forbidden by a policeman to +smoke another cigarette, or sit up a quarter of an hour later; hardly +a man who would not feel inclined in such a case to raise a rebellion +for a caprice for which he did not really care a straw. Unmeaning and +muddle-headed tyranny in small things, that is the thing which, if +extended over many years, is harder to bear and hope through than the +massacres of September. And that was the nightmare of vexatious +triviality which was lying over all the cities of Italy that were +ruled by the bureaucratic despotisms of Europe. The history of the +time is full of spiteful and almost childish struggles—struggles +about the humming of a tune or the wearing of a colour, the arrest of +a journey, or the opening of a letter. And there can be little doubt +that Browning's temperament under these conditions was not of the kind +to become more indulgent, and there grew in him a hatred of the +Imperial and Ducal and Papal systems of Italy, which sometimes passed +the necessities of Liberalism, and sometimes even transgressed its +spirit. The life which he and his wife lived in Italy was +extraordinarily full and varied, when we consider the restrictions +under which one at least of them had always lain. They met and took +delight, notwithstanding their exile, in some of the most interesting +people of their time—Ruskin, Cardinal Manning, and Lord Lytton. +Browning, in a most characteristic way, enjoyed the society of all of +them, arguing with one, agreeing with another, sitting up all night by +the bedside of a third.</p> + +<p>It has frequently been stated that the only difference that ever +separated Mr. and Mrs. Browning was upon the question of spiritualism. +That statement must, of <a name="Page_92"></a>course, be modified and even contradicted if +it means that they never differed; that Mr. Browning never thought an +<i>Act of Parliament</i> good when Mrs. Browning thought it bad; that Mr. +Browning never thought bread stale when Mrs. Browning thought it new. +Such unanimity is not only inconceivable, it is immoral; and as a +matter of fact, there is abundant evidence that their marriage +constituted something like that ideal marriage, an alliance between +two strong and independent forces. They differed, in truth, about a +great many things, for example, about Napoleon III. whom Mrs. Browning +regarded with an admiration which would have been somewhat beyond the +deserts of Sir Galahad, and whom Browning with his emphatic Liberal +principles could never pardon for the <i>Coup d'État</i>. If they differed +on spiritualism in a somewhat more serious way than this, the reason +must be sought in qualities which were deeper and more elemental in +both their characters than any mere matter of opinion. Mrs. Orr, in +her excellent <i>Life of Browning</i>, states that the difficulty arose +from Mrs. Browning's firm belief in psychical phenomena and Browning's +absolute refusal to believe even in their possibility. Another writer +who met them at this time says, "Browning cannot believe, and Mrs. +Browning cannot help believing." This theory, that Browning's aversion +to the spiritualist circle arose from an absolute denial of the +tenability of such a theory of life and death, has in fact often been +repeated. But it is exceedingly difficult to reconcile it with +Browning's character. He was the last man in the world to be +intellectually deaf to a hypothesis merely because it was odd. He had +friends whose opinions covered every description of madness from the +French legitimism <a name="Page_93"></a>of De Ripert-Monclar to the Republicanism of +Landor. Intellectually he may be said to have had a zest for heresies. +It is difficult to impute an attitude of mere impenetrable negation to +a man who had expressed with sympathy the religion of "Caliban" and +the morality of "Time's Revenges." It is true that at this time of the +first popular interest in spiritualism a feeling existed among many +people of a practical turn of mind, which can only be called a +superstition against believing in ghosts. But, intellectually +speaking, Browning would probably have been one of the most tolerant +and curious in regard to the new theories, whereas the popular version +of the matter makes him unusually intolerant and negligent even for +that time. The fact was in all probability that Browning's aversion to +the spiritualists had little or nothing to do with spiritualism. It +arose from quite a different side of his character—his uncompromising +dislike of what is called Bohemianism, of eccentric or slovenly +cliques, of those straggling camp followers of the arts who exhibit +dubious manners and dubious morals, of all abnormality and of all +irresponsibility. Any one, in fact, who wishes to see what it was that +Browning disliked need only do two things. First, he should read the +<i>Memoirs</i> of David Home, the famous spiritualist medium with whom +Browning came in contact. These <i>Memoirs</i> constitute a more thorough +and artistic self-revelation than any monologue that Browning ever +wrote. The ghosts, the raps, the flying hands, the phantom voices are +infinitely the most respectable and infinitely the most credible part +of the narrative. But the bragging, the sentimentalism, the moral and +intellectual foppery of the composition is everywhere, culminating +perhaps in the disgusting passage in <a name="Page_94"></a>which Home describes Mrs. +Browning as weeping over him and assuring him that all her husband's +actions in the matter have been adopted against her will. It is in +this kind of thing that we find the roots of the real anger of +Browning. He did not dislike spiritualism, but spiritualists. The +second point on which any one wishing to be just in the matter should +cast an eye, is the record of the visit which Mrs. Browning insisted +on making while on their honeymoon in Paris to the house of George +Sand. Browning felt, and to some extent expressed, exactly the same +aversion to his wife mixing with the circle of George Sand which he +afterwards felt at her mixing with the circle of Home. The society was +"of the ragged red, diluted with the low theatrical, men who worship +George Sand, <i>à genou bas</i> between an oath and an ejection of saliva." +When we find that a man did not object to any number of Jacobites or +Atheists, but objected to the French Bohemian poets and to the early +occultist mediums as friends for his wife, we shall surely be fairly +right in concluding that he objected not to an opinion, but to a +social tone. The truth was that Browning had a great many admirably +Philistine feelings, and one of them was a great relish for his +responsibilities towards his wife. He enjoyed being a husband. This is +quite a distinct thing from enjoying being a lover, though it will +scarcely be found apart from it. But, like all good feelings, it has +its possible exaggerations, and one of them is this almost morbid +healthiness in the choice of friends for his wife.</p> + +<p>David Home, the medium, came to Florence about 1857. Mrs. Browning +undoubtedly threw herself into psychical experiments with great ardour +at first, and<a name="Page_95"></a> Browning, equally undoubtedly, opposed, and at length +forbade, the enterprise. He did not do so however until he had +attended one <i>séance</i> at least, at which a somewhat ridiculous event +occurred, which is described in Home's <i>Memoirs</i> with a gravity even +more absurd than the incident. Towards the end of the proceedings a +wreath was placed in the centre of the table, and the lights being +lowered, it was caused to rise slowly into the air, and after hovering +for some time, to move towards Mrs. Browning, and at length to alight +upon her head. As the wreath was floating in her direction, her +husband was observed abruptly to cross the room and stand beside her. +One would think it was a sufficiently natural action on the part of a +man whose wife was the centre of a weird and disturbing experiment, +genuine or otherwise. But Mr. Home gravely asserts that it was +generally believed that Browning had crossed the room in the hope that +the wreath would alight on his head, and that from the hour of its +disobliging refusal to do so dated the whole of his goaded and +malignant aversion to spiritualism. The idea of the very conventional +and somewhat bored Robert Browning running about the room after a +wreath in the hope of putting his head into it, is one of the genuine +gleams of humour in this rather foolish affair. Browning could be +fairly violent, as we know, both in poetry and conversation; but it +would be almost too terrible to conjecture what he would have felt and +said if Mr. Home's wreath had alighted on his head.</p> + +<p>Next day, according to Home's account, he called on the hostess of the +previous night in what the writer calls "a ridiculous state of +excitement," and told her apparently that she must excuse him if he +and his wife <a name="Page_96"></a>did not attend any more gatherings of the kind. What +actually occurred is not, of course, quite easy to ascertain, for the +account in Home's <i>Memoirs</i> principally consists of noble speeches +made by the medium which would seem either to have reduced Browning to +a pulverised silence, or else to have failed to attract his attention. +But there can be no doubt that the general upshot of the affair was +that Browning put his foot down, and the experiments ceased. There can +be little doubt that he was justified in this; indeed, he was probably +even more justified if the experiments were genuine psychical +mysteries than if they were the <i>hocus-pocus</i> of a charlatan. He knew +his wife better than posterity can be expected to do; but even +posterity can see that she was the type of woman so much adapted to +the purposes of men like Home as to exhibit almost invariably either a +great craving for such experiences or a great terror of them. Like +many geniuses, but not all, she lived naturally upon something like a +borderland; and it is impossible to say that if Browning had not +interposed when she was becoming hysterical she might not have ended +in an asylum.</p> + +<p>The whole of this incident is very characteristic of Browning; but the +real characteristic note in it has, as above suggested, been to some +extent missed. When some seven years afterwards he produced "Mr. +Sludge the Medium," every one supposed that it was an attack upon +spiritualism and the possibility of its phenomena. As we shall see +when we come to that poem, this is a wholly mistaken interpretation of +it. But what is really curious is that most people have assumed that a +dislike of Home's investigations implies <a name="Page_97"></a>a theoretic disbelief in +spiritualism. It might, of course, imply a very firm and serious +belief in it. As a matter of fact it did not imply this in Browning, +but it may perfectly well have implied an agnosticism which admitted +the reasonableness of such things. Home was infinitely less dangerous +as a dexterous swindler than he was as a bad or foolish man in +possession of unknown or ill-comprehended powers. It is surely curious +to think that a man must object to exposing his wife to a few +conjuring tricks, but could not be afraid of exposing her to the loose +and nameless energies of the universe.</p> + +<p>Browning's theoretic attitude in the matter was, therefore, in all +probability quite open and unbiassed. His was a peculiarly hospitable +intellect. If any one had told him of the spiritualist theory, or +theories a hundred times more insane, as things held by some sect of +Gnostics in Alexandria, or of heretical Talmudists at Antwerp, he +would have delighted in those theories, and would very likely have +adopted them. But Greek Gnostics and Antwerp Jews do not dance round a +man's wife and wave their hands in her face and send her into swoons +and trances about which nobody knows anything rational or scientific. +It was simply the stirring in Browning of certain primal masculine +feelings far beyond the reach of argument—things that lie so deep +that if they are hurt, though there may be no blame and no anger, +there is always pain. Browning did not like spiritualism to be +mentioned for many years.</p> + +<p>Robert Browning was unquestionably a thoroughly conventional man. +There are many who think this element of conventionality altogether +regrettable and <a name="Page_98"></a>disgraceful; they have established, as it were, a +convention of the unconventional. But this hatred of the conventional +element in the personality of a poet is only possible to those who do +not remember the meaning of words. Convention means only a coming +together, an agreement; and as every poet must base his work upon an +emotional agreement among men, so every poet must base his work upon a +convention. Every art is, of course, based upon a convention, an +agreement between the speaker and the listener that certain objections +shall not be raised. The most realistic art in the world is open to +realistic objection. Against the most exact and everyday drama that +ever came out of Norway it is still possible for the realist to raise +the objection that the hero who starts a subject and drops it, who +runs out of a room and runs back again for his hat, is all the time +behaving in a most eccentric manner, considering that he is doing +these things in a room in which one of the four walls has been taken +clean away and been replaced by a line of footlights and a mob of +strangers. Against the most accurate black-and-white artist that human +imagination can conceive it is still to be admitted that he draws a +black line round a man's nose, and that that line is a lie. And in +precisely the same fashion a poet must, by the nature of things, be +conventional. Unless he is describing an emotion which others share +with him, his labours will be utterly in vain. If a poet really had an +original emotion; if, for example, a poet suddenly fell in love with +the buffers of a railway train, it would take him considerably more +time than his allotted three-score years and ten to communicate his +feelings.</p><a name="Page_99"></a> + +<p>Poetry deals with primal and conventional things—the hunger for +bread, the love of woman, the love of children, the desire for +immortal life. If men really had new sentiments, poetry could not deal +with them. If, let us say, a man did not feel a bitter craving to eat +bread; but did, by way of substitute, feel a fresh, original craving +to eat brass fenders or mahogany tables, poetry could not express him. +If a man, instead of falling in love with a woman, fell in love with a +fossil or a sea anemone, poetry could not express him. Poetry can only +express what is original in one sense—the sense in which we speak of +original sin. It is original, not in the paltry sense of being new, +but in the deeper sense of being old; it is original in the sense that +it deals with origins.</p> + +<p>All artists, who have any experience of the arts, will agree so far, +that a poet is bound to be conventional with regard to matters of art. +Unfortunately, however, they are the very people who cannot, as a +general rule, see that a poet is also bound to be conventional in +matters of conduct. It is only the smaller poet who sees the poetry of +revolt, of isolation, of disagreement; the larger poet sees the poetry +of those great agreements which constitute the romantic achievement of +civilisation. Just as an agreement between the dramatist and the +audience is necessary to every play; just as an agreement between the +painter and the spectators is necessary to every picture, so an +agreement is necessary to produce the worship of any of the great +figures of morality—the hero, the saint, the average man, the +gentleman. Browning had, it must thoroughly be realised, a real +pleasure in these great agreements, these great conventions. He +delighted, with a true <a name="Page_100"></a>poetic delight, in being conventional. Being +by birth an Englishman, he took pleasure in being an Englishman; being +by rank a member of the middle class, he took a pride in its ancient +scruples and its everlasting boundaries. He was everything that he was +with a definite and conscious pleasure—a man, a Liberal, an +Englishman, an author, a gentleman, a lover, a married man.</p> + +<p>This must always be remembered as a general characteristic of +Browning, this ardent and headlong conventionality. He exhibited it +pre-eminently in the affair of his elopement and marriage, during and +after the escape of himself and his wife to Italy. He seems to have +forgotten everything, except the splendid worry of being married. He +showed a thoroughly healthy consciousness that he was taking up a +responsibility which had its practical side. He came finally and +entirely out of his dreams. Since he had himself enough money to live +on, he had never thought of himself as doing anything but writing +poetry; poetry indeed was probably simmering and bubbling in his head +day and night. But when the problem of the elopement arose he threw +himself with an energy, of which it is pleasant to read, into every +kind of scheme for solidifying his position. He wrote to Monckton +Milnes, and would appear to have badgered him with applications for a +post in the British Museum. "I will work like a horse," he said, with +that boyish note, which, whenever in his unconsciousness he strikes +it, is more poetical than all his poems. All his language in this +matter is emphatic; he would be "glad and proud," he says, "to have +any minor post" his friend could obtain for him. He offered to read +for the Bar, and probably began doing <a name="Page_101"></a>so. But all this vigorous and +very creditable materialism was ruthlessly extinguished by Elizabeth +Barrett. She declined altogether even to entertain the idea of her +husband devoting himself to anything else at the expense of poetry. +Probably she was right and Browning wrong, but it was an error which +every man would desire to have made.</p> + +<p>One of the qualities again which make Browning most charming, is the +fact that he felt and expressed so simple and genuine a satisfaction +about his own achievements as a lover and husband, particularly in +relation to his triumph in the hygienic care of his wife. "If he is +vain of anything," writes Mrs. Browning, "it is of my restored +health." Later, she adds with admirable humour and suggestiveness, +"and I have to tell him that he really must not go telling everybody +how his wife walked here with him, or walked there with him, as if a +wife with two feet were a miracle in Nature." When a lady in Italy +said, on an occasion when Browning stayed behind with his wife on the +day of a picnic, that he was "the only man who behaved like a +Christian to his wife," Browning was elated to an almost infantile +degree. But there could scarcely be a better test of the essential +manliness and decency of a man than this test of his vanities. +Browning boasted of being domesticated; there are half a hundred men +everywhere who would be inclined to boast of not being domesticated. +Bad men are almost without exception conceited, but they are commonly +conceited of their defects.</p> + +<p>One picturesque figure who plays a part in this portion of the +Brownings' life in Italy is Walter Savage Landor. Browning found him +living with some of his <a name="Page_102"></a>wife's relations, and engaged in a continuous +and furious quarrel with them, which was, indeed, not uncommonly the +condition of that remarkable man when living with other human beings. +He had the double arrogance which is only possible to that old and +stately but almost extinct blend—the aristocratic republican. Like an +old Roman senator, or like a gentleman of the Southern States of +America, he had the condescension of a gentleman to those below him, +combined with the jealous self-assertiveness of a Jacobin to those +above. The only person who appears to have been able to manage him and +bring out his more agreeable side was Browning. It is, by the way, one +of the many hints of a certain element in Browning which can only be +described by the elementary and old-fashioned word goodness, that he +always contrived to make himself acceptable and even lovable to men of +savage and capricious temperament, of detached and erratic genius, who +could get on with no one else. Carlyle, who could not get a bitter +taste off his tongue in talking of most of his contemporaries, was +fond of Browning. Landor, who could hardly conduct an ordinary +business interview without beginning to break the furniture, was fond +of Browning. These are things which speak more for a man than many +people will understand. It is easy enough to be agreeable to a circle +of admirers, especially feminine admirers, who have a peculiar talent +for discipleship and the absorption of ideas. But when a man is loved +by other men of his own intellectual stature and of a wholly different +type and order of eminence, we may be certain that there was something +genuine about him, and something far more important than anything +intellectual. Men do not like another <a name="Page_103"></a>man because he is a genius, +least of all when they happen to be geniuses themselves. This general +truth about Browning is like hearing of a woman who is the most famous +beauty in a city, and who is at the same time adored and confided in +by all the women who live there.</p> + +<p>Browning came to the rescue of the fiery old gentleman, and helped by +Seymour Kirkup put him under very definite obligations by a course of +very generous conduct. He was fully repaid in his own mind for his +trouble by the mere presence and friendship of Landor, for whose +quaint and volcanic personality he had a vast admiration, compounded +of the pleasure of the artist in an oddity and of the man in a hero. +It is somewhat amusing and characteristic that Mrs. Browning did not +share this unlimited enjoyment of the company of Mr. Landor, and +expressed her feelings in her own humorous manner. She writes, "Dear, +darling Robert amuses me by talking of his gentleness and sweetness. A +most courteous and refined gentleman he is, of course, and very +affectionate to Robert (as he ought to be), but of self-restraint he +has not a grain, and of suspicion many grains. What do you really say +to dashing down a plate on the floor when you don't like what's on it? +Robert succeeded in soothing him, and the poor old lion is very quiet +on the whole, roaring softly to beguile the time in Latin alcaics +against his wife and Louis Napoleon."</p> + +<p>One event alone could really end this endless life of the Italian +Arcadia. That event happened on June 29, 1861. Robert Browning's wife +died, stricken by the death of her sister, and almost as hard (it is a +characteristic touch) by the death of Cavour. She died alone <a name="Page_104"></a>in the +room with Browning, and of what passed then, though much has been +said, little should be. He, closing the door of that room behind him, +closed a door in himself, and none ever saw Browning upon earth again +but only a splendid surface.</p><a name="Page_105"></a> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<a name="CHAPTER_V"></a><h2>CHAPTER V</h2> + +<h2>BROWNING IN LATER LIFE</h2> + + +<p>Browning's confidences, what there were of them, immediately after his +wife's death were given to several women-friends; all his life, +indeed, he was chiefly intimate with women. The two most intimate of +these were his own sister, who remained with him in all his later +years, and the sister of his wife, who seven years afterwards passed +away in his presence as Elizabeth had done. The other letters, which +number only one or two, referring in any personal manner to his +bereavement are addressed to Miss Haworth and Isa Blagden. He left +Florence and remained for a time with his father and sister near +Dinard. Then he returned to London and took up his residence in +Warwick Crescent. Naturally enough, the thing for which he now chiefly +lived was the education of his son, and it is characteristic of +Browning that he was not only a very indulgent father, but an +indulgent father of a very conventional type: he had rather the +chuckling pride of the city gentleman than the educational gravity of +the intellectual.</p> + +<p>Browning was now famous, <i>Bells and Pomegranates, Men and Women, +Christmas Eve</i>, and <i>Dramatis Personæ</i> had successively glorified his +Italian period. But he was already brooding half-unconsciously on more +<a name="Page_106"></a>famous things. He has himself left on record a description of the +incident out of which grew the whole impulse and plan of his greatest +achievement. In a passage marked with all his peculiar sense of +material things, all that power of writing of stone or metal or the +fabric of drapery, so that we seem to be handling and smelling them, +he has described a stall for the selling of odds and ends of every +variety of utility and uselessness:—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p><span class="i10">"picture frames</span> +White through the worn gilt, mirror-sconces chipped,<br /> +Bronze angel-heads once knobs attached to chests,<br /> +(Handled when ancient dames chose forth brocade)<br /> +Modern chalk drawings, studies from the nude,<br /> +Samples of stone, jet, breccia, porphyry<br /> +Polished and rough, sundry amazing busts<br /> +In baked earth, (broken, Providence be praised!)<br /> +A wreck of tapestry proudly-purposed web<br /> +When reds and blues were indeed red and blue,<br /> +Now offer'd as a mat to save bare feet<br /> +(Since carpets constitute a cruel cost).</p> +<hr style="width: 45%;" /><br /> +<p>Vulgarised Horace for the use of schools,<br /> +'The Life, Death, Miracles of Saint Somebody,<br /> +Saint Somebody Else, his Miracles, Death, and Life'—<br /> +With this, one glance at the lettered back of which,<br /> +And 'Stall,' cried I; a <i>lira</i> made it mine."<br /> +</p></div> + + +<p>This sketch embodies indeed the very poetry of <i>débris</i>, and comes +nearer than any other poem has done to expressing the pathos and +picturesqueness of a low-class pawnshop. "This," which Browning bought +for a lira out of this heap of rubbish, was, of course, the old Latin +record of the criminal case of Guido Franceschini, tried for the +murder of his wife Pompilia <a name="Page_107"></a>in the year 1698. And this again, it is +scarcely necessary to say, was the ground-plan and motive of <i>The Ring +and the Book</i>.</p> + +<p>Browning had picked up the volume and partly planned the poem during +his wife's lifetime in Italy. But the more he studied it, the more the +dimensions of the theme appeared to widen and deepen; and he came at +last, there can be little doubt, to regard it definitely as his +<i>magnum opus</i> to which he would devote many years to come. Then came +the great sorrow of his life, and he cast about him for something +sufficiently immense and arduous and complicated to keep his brain +going like some huge and automatic engine. "I mean to keep writing," +he said, "whether I like it or not." And thus finally he took up the +scheme of the Franceschini story, and developed it on a scale with a +degree of elaboration, repetition, and management, and inexhaustible +scholarship which was never perhaps before given in the history of the +world to an affair of two or three characters. Of the larger literary +and spiritual significance of the work, particularly in reference to +its curious and original form of narration, I shall speak +subsequently. But there is one peculiarity about the story which has +more direct bearing on Browning's life, and it appears singular that +few, if any, of his critics have noticed it. This peculiarity is the +extraordinary resemblance between the moral problem involved in the +poem if understood in its essence, and the moral problem which +constituted the crisis and centre of Browning's own life. Nothing, +properly speaking, ever happened to Browning after his wife's death; +and his greatest work during that time was the telling, under alien +symbols and the veil <a name="Page_108"></a>of a wholly different story, the inner truth +about his own greatest trial and hesitation. He himself had in this +sense the same difficulty as Caponsacchi, the supreme difficulty of +having to trust himself to the reality of virtue not only without the +reward, but even without the name of virtue. He had, like Caponsacchi, +preferred what was unselfish and dubious to what was selfish and +honourable. He knew better than any man that there is little danger of +men who really know anything of that naked and homeless responsibility +seeking it too often or indulging it too much. The conscientiousness +of the law-abider is nothing in its terrors to the conscientiousness +of the conscientious law-breaker. Browning had once, for what he +seriously believed to be a greater good, done what he himself would +never have had the cant to deny, ought to be called deceit and +evasion. Such a thing ought never to come to a man twice. If he finds +that necessity twice, he may, I think, be looked at with the beginning +of a suspicion. To Browning it came once, and he devoted his greatest +poem to a suggestion of how such a necessity may come to any man who +is worthy to live.</p> + +<p>As has already been suggested, any apparent danger that there may be +in this excusing of an exceptional act is counteracted by the perils +of the act, since it must always be remembered that this kind of act +has the immense difference from all legal acts—that it can only be +justified by success. If Browning had taken his wife to Paris, and she +had died in an hotel there, we can only conceive him saying, with the +bitter emphasis of one of his own lines, "How should I have borne me, +please?" Before and after this event his life was as <a name="Page_109"></a>tranquil and +casual a one as it would be easy to imagine; but there always remained +upon him something which was felt by all who knew him in after +years—the spirit of a man who had been ready when his time came, and +had walked in his own devotion and certainty in a position counted +indefensible and almost along the brink of murder. This great moral of +Browning, which may be called roughly the doctrine of the great hour, +enters, of course, into many poems besides <i>The Ring and the Book</i>, +and is indeed the mainspring of a great part of his poetry taken as a +whole. It is, of course, the central idea of that fine poem, "The +Statue and the Bust," which has given a great deal of distress to a +great many people because of its supposed invasion of recognised +morality. It deals, as every one knows, with a Duke Ferdinand and an +elopement which he planned with the bride of one of the Riccardi. The +lovers begin by deferring their flight for various more or less +comprehensible reasons of convenience; but the habit of shrinking from +the final step grows steadily upon them, and they never take it, but +die, as it were, waiting for each other. The objection that the act +thus avoided was a criminal one is very simply and quite clearly +answered by Browning himself. His case against the dilatory couple is +not in the least affected by the viciousness of their aim. His case is +that they exhibited no virtue. Crime was frustrated in them by +cowardice, which is probably the worse immorality of the two. The same +idea again may be found in that delightful lyric "Youth and Art," +where a successful cantatrice reproaches a successful sculptor with +their failure to understand each other in their youth and poverty.</p><a name="Page_110"></a> + +<div class="poem"><p>"Each life unfulfilled, you see;<br /> +It hangs still, patchy and scrappy:<br /> +We have not sighed deep, laughed free,<br /> +Starved, feasted, despaired,—been happy."<br /> +</p></div> + +<p>And this conception of the great hour, which breaks out everywhere in +Browning, it is almost impossible not to connect with his own internal +drama. It is really curious that this correspondence has not been +insisted on. Probably critics have been misled by the fact that +Browning in many places appears to boast that he is purely dramatic, +that he has never put himself into his work, a thing which no poet, +good or bad, who ever lived could possibly avoid doing.</p> + +<p>The enormous scope and seriousness of <i>The Ring and the Book</i> occupied +Browning for some five or six years, and the great epic appeared in +the winter of 1868. Just before it was published Smith and Elder +brought out a uniform edition of all Browning's works up to that time, +and the two incidents taken together may be considered to mark the +final and somewhat belated culmination of Browning's literary fame. +The years since his wife's death, that had been covered by the writing +of <i>The Ring and the Book</i>, had been years of an almost feverish +activity in that and many other ways. His travels had been restless +and continued, his industry immense, and for the first time he began +that mode of life which afterwards became so characteristic of +him—the life of what is called society. A man of a shallower and more +sentimental type would have professed to find the life of +dinner-tables and soirées vain and unsatisfying to a poet, and +especially to a poet in mourning. But if there is one thing more than +another which is stirring and honourable about Browning, it is <a name="Page_111"></a>the +entire absence in him of this cant of dissatisfaction. He had the one +great requirement of a poet—he was not difficult to please. The life +of society was superficial, but it is only very superficial people who +object to the superficial. To the man who sees the marvellousness of +all things, the surface of life is fully as strange and magical as its +interior; clearness and plainness of life is fully as mysterious as +its mysteries. The young man in evening dress, pulling on his gloves, +is quite as elemental a figure as any anchorite, quite as +incomprehensible, and indeed quite as alarming.</p> + +<p>A great many literary persons have expressed astonishment at, or even +disapproval of, this social frivolity of Browning's. Not one of these +literary people would have been shocked if Browning's interest in +humanity had led him into a gambling hell in the Wild West or a low +tavern in Paris; but it seems to be tacitly assumed that fashionable +people are not human at all. Humanitarians of a material and dogmatic +type, the philanthropists and the professional reformers go to look +for humanity in remote places and in huge statistics. Humanitarians of +a more vivid type, the Bohemian artists, go to look for humanity in +thieves' kitchens and the studios of the Quartier Latin. But +humanitarians of the highest type, the great poets and philosophers, +do not go to look for humanity at all. For them alone among all men +the nearest drawing-room is full of humanity, and even their own +families are human. Shakespeare ended his life by buying a house in +his own native town and talking to the townsmen. Browning was invited +to a great many conversaziones and private views, and did not pretend +that they bored him. In a letter belonging to this <a name="Page_112"></a>period of his life +he describes his first dinner at one of the Oxford colleges with an +unaffected delight and vanity, which reminds the reader of nothing so +much as the pride of the boy-captain of a public school if he were +invited to a similar function and received a few compliments. It may +be indeed that Browning had a kind of second youth in this +long-delayed social recognition, but at least he enjoyed his second +youth nearly as much as his first, and it is not every one who can do +that.</p> + +<p>Of Browning's actual personality and presence in this later middle age +of his, memories are still sufficiently clear. He was a middle-sized, +well set up, erect man, with somewhat emphatic gestures, and, as +almost all testimonies mention, a curiously strident voice. The beard, +the removal of which his wife had resented with so quaint an +indignation, had grown again, but grown quite white, which, as she +said when it occurred, was a signal mark of the justice of the gods. +His hair was still fairly dark, and his whole appearance at this time +must have been very well represented by Mr. G.F. Watts's fine portrait +in the National Portrait Gallery. The portrait bears one of the many +testimonies which exist to Mr. Watts's grasp of the essential of +character, for it is the only one of the portraits of Browning in +which we get primarily the air of virility, even of animal virility, +tempered but not disguised, with a certain touch of the pallor of the +brain-worker. He looks here what he was—a very healthy man, too +scholarly to live a completely healthy life.</p> + +<p>His manner in society, as has been more than once indicated, was that +of a man anxious, if anything, to avoid the air of intellectual +eminence. Lockhart said <a name="Page_113"></a>briefly, "I like Browning; he isn't at all +like a damned literary man." He was, according to some, upon occasion, +talkative and noisy to a fault; but there are two kinds of men who +monopolise conversation. The first kind are those who like the sound +of their own voice; the second are those who do not know what the +sound of their own voice is like. Browning was one of the latter +class. His volubility in speech had the same origin as his +voluminousness and obscurity in literature—a kind of headlong +humility. He cannot assuredly have been aware that he talked people +down or have wished to do so. For this would have been precisely a +violation of the ideal of the man of the world, the one ambition and +even weakness that he had. He wished to be a man of the world, and he +never in the full sense was one. He remained a little too much of a +boy, a little too much even of a Puritan, and a little too much of +what may be called a man of the universe, to be a man of the world.</p> + +<p>One of his faults probably was the thing roughly called prejudice. On +the question, for example, of table-turning and psychic phenomena he +was in a certain degree fierce and irrational. He was not indeed, as +we shall see when we come to study "Sludge the Medium," exactly +prejudiced against spiritualism. But he was beyond all question +stubbornly prejudiced against spiritualists. Whether the medium Home +was or was not a scoundrel it is somewhat difficult in our day to +conjecture. But in so far as he claimed supernatural powers, he may +have been as honest a gentleman as ever lived. And even if we think +that the moral atmosphere of Home is that of a man of dubious +character, we can still feel that<a name="Page_114"></a> Browning might have achieved his +purpose without making it so obvious that he thought so. Some traces +again, though much fainter ones, may be found of something like a +subconscious hostility to the Roman Church, or at least a less full +comprehension of the grandeur of the Latin religious civilisation than +might have been expected of a man of Browning's great imaginative +tolerance. Æstheticism, Bohemianism, the irresponsibilities of the +artist, the untidy morals of Grub Street and the Latin Quarter, he +hated with a consuming hatred. He was himself exact in everything, +from his scholarship to his clothes; and even when he wore the loose +white garments of the lounger in Southern Europe, they were in their +own way as precise as a dress suit. This extra carefulness in all +things he defended against the cant of Bohemianism as the right +attitude for the poet. When some one excused coarseness or negligence +on the ground of genius, he said, "That is an error: Noblesse oblige."</p> + +<p>Browning's prejudices, however, belonged altogether to that healthy +order which is characterised by a cheerful and satisfied ignorance. It +never does a man any very great harm to hate a thing that he knows +nothing about. It is the hating of a thing when we do know something +about it which corrodes the character. We all have a dark feeling of +resistance towards people we have never met, and a profound and manly +dislike of the authors we have never read. It does not harm a man to +be certain before opening the books that Whitman is an obscene ranter +or that Stevenson is a mere trifler with style. It is the man who can +think these things after he has read the books who must be in a fair +way to mental perdition. Prejudice, <a name="Page_115"></a>in fact, is not so much the great +intellectual sin as a thing which we may call, to coin a word, +"postjudice," not the bias before the fair trial, but the bias that +remains afterwards. With Browning's swift and emphatic nature the bias +was almost always formed before he had gone into the matter. But +almost all the men he really knew he admired, almost all the books he +had really read he enjoyed. He stands pre-eminent among those great +universalists who praised the ground they trod on and commended +existence like any other material, in its samples. He had no kinship +with those new and strange universalists of the type of Tolstoi who +praise existence to the exclusion of all the institutions they have +lived under, and all the ties they have known. He thought the world +good because he had found so many things that were good in +it—religion, the nation, the family, the social class. He did not, +like the new humanitarian, think the world good because he had found +so many things in it that were bad.</p> + +<p>As has been previously suggested, there was something very queer and +dangerous that underlay all the good humour of Browning. If one of +these idle prejudices were broken by better knowledge, he was all the +better pleased. But if some of the prejudices that were really rooted +in him were trodden on, even by accident, such as his aversion to +loose artistic cliques, or his aversion to undignified publicity, his +rage was something wholly transfiguring and alarming, something far +removed from the shrill disapproval of Carlyle and Ruskin. It can only +be said that he became a savage, and not always a very agreeable or +presentable savage. The indecent fury which danced upon <a name="Page_116"></a>the bones of +Edward Fitzgerald was a thing which ought not to have astonished any +one who had known much of Browning's character or even of his work. +Some unfortunate persons on another occasion had obtained some of Mrs. +Browning's letters shortly after her death, and proposed to write a +<i>Life</i> founded upon them. They ought to have understood that Browning +would probably disapprove; but if he talked to them about it, as he +did to others, and it is exceedingly probable that he did, they must +have thought he was mad. "What I suffer with the paws of these +black-guards in my bowels you can fancy," he says. Again he writes: +"Think of this beast working away, not deeming my feelings, or those +of her family, worthy of notice. It shall not be done if I can stop +the scamp's knavery along with his breath." Whether Browning actually +resorted to this extreme course is unknown; nothing is known except +that he wrote a letter to the ambitious biographer which reduced him +to silence, probably from stupefaction.</p> + +<p>The same peculiarity ought, as I have said, to have been apparent to +any one who knew anything of Browning's literary work. A great number +of his poems are marked by a trait of which by its nature it is more +or less impossible to give examples. Suffice it to say that it is +truly extraordinary that poets like Swinburne (who seldom uses a gross +word) should have been spoken of as if they had introduced moral +license into Victorian poetry. What the Non-conformist conscience has +been doing to have passed Browning is something difficult to imagine. +But the peculiarity of this occasional coarseness in his work is +this—that it is always used to express a certain wholesome <a name="Page_117"></a>fury and +contempt for things sickly, or ungenerous, or unmanly. The poet seems +to feel that there are some things so contemptible that you can only +speak of them in pothouse words. It would be idle, and perhaps +undesirable, to give examples; but it may be noted that the same +brutal physical metaphor is used by his Caponsacchi about the people +who could imagine Pompilia impure and by his Shakespeare in "At the +Mermaid," about the claim of the Byronic poet to enter into the heart +of humanity. In both cases Browning feels, and perhaps in a manner +rightly, that the best thing we can do with a sentiment essentially +base is to strip off its affectations and state it basely, and that +the mud of Chaucer is a great deal better than the poison of Sterne. +Herein again Browning is close to the average man; and to do the +average man justice, there is a great deal more of this Browningesque +hatred of Byronism in the brutality of his conversation than many +people suppose.</p> + +<p>Such, roughly and as far as we can discover, was the man who, in the +full summer and even the full autumn of his intellectual powers, began +to grow upon the consciousness of the English literary world about +this time. For the first time friendship grew between him and the +other great men of his time. Tennyson, for whom he then and always +felt the best and most personal kind of admiration, came into his +life, and along with him Gladstone and Francis Palgrave. There began +to crowd in upon him those honours whereby a man is to some extent +made a classic in his lifetime, so that he is honoured even if he is +unread. He was made a Fellow of Balliol in 1867, and the homage of the +great universities continued thenceforth unceasingly <a name="Page_118"></a>until his death, +despite many refusals on his part. He was unanimously elected Lord +Rector of Glasgow University in 1875. He declined, owing to his deep +and somewhat characteristic aversion to formal public speaking, and in +1877 he had to decline on similar grounds the similar offer from the +University of St. Andrews. He was much at the English universities, +was a friend of Dr. Jowett, and enjoyed the university life at the age +of sixty-three in a way that he probably would not have enjoyed it if +he had ever been to a university. The great universities would not let +him alone, to their great credit, and he became a D.C.L. of Cambridge +in 1879, and a D.C.L. of Oxford in 1882. When he received these +honours there were, of course, the traditional buffooneries of the +undergraduates, and one of them dropped a red cotton night-cap neatly +on his head as he passed under the gallery. Some indignant +intellectuals wrote to him to protest against this affront, but +Browning took the matter in the best and most characteristic way. "You +are far too hard," he wrote in answer, "on the very harmless +drolleries of the young men. Indeed, there used to be a regularly +appointed jester, 'Filius Terrae' he was called, whose business it was +to gibe and jeer at the honoured ones by way of reminder that all +human glories are merely gilded baubles and must not be fancied +metal." In this there are other and deeper things characteristic of +Browning besides his learning and humour. In discussing anything, he +must always fall back upon great speculative and eternal ideas. Even +in the tomfoolery of a horde of undergraduates he can only see a +symbol of the ancient office of ridicule in the scheme of morals. The +young men themselves were probably <a name="Page_119"></a>unaware that they were the +representatives of the "Filius Terrae."</p> + +<p>But the years during which Browning was thus reaping some of his late +laurels began to be filled with incidents that reminded him how the +years were passing over him. On June 20, 1866, his father had died, a +man of whom it is impossible to think without a certain emotion, a man +who had lived quietly and persistently for others, to whom Browning +owed more than it is easy to guess, to whom we in all probability +mainly owe Browning. In 1868 one of his closest friends, Arabella +Barrett, the sister of his wife, died, as her sister had done, alone +with Browning. Browning was not a superstitious man; he somewhat +stormily prided himself on the contrary; but he notes at this time "a +dream which Arabella had of Her, in which she prophesied their meeting +in five years," that is, of course, the meeting of Elizabeth and +Arabella. His friend Milsand, to whom <i>Sordello</i> was dedicated, died +in 1886. "I never knew," said Browning, "or ever shall know, his like +among men." But though both fame and a growing isolation indicated +that he was passing towards the evening of his days, though he bore +traces of the progress, in a milder attitude towards things, and a +greater preference for long exiles with those he loved, one thing +continued in him with unconquerable energy—there was no diminution in +the quantity, no abatement in the immense designs of his intellectual +output.</p> + +<p>In 1871 he produced <i>Balaustion's Adventure</i>, a work exhibiting not +only his genius in its highest condition of power, but something more +exacting even than genius to a man of his mature and changed life, +immense investigation, prodigious memory, the thorough <a name="Page_120"></a>assimilation +of the vast literature of a remote civilisation. <i>Balaustion's +Adventure</i>, which is, of course, the mere framework for an English +version of the Alcestis of Euripides, is an illustration of one of +Browning's finest traits, his immeasurable capacity for a classic +admiration. Those who knew him tell us that in conversation he never +revealed himself so impetuously or so brilliantly as when declaiming +the poetry of others; and <i>Balaustion's Adventure</i> is a monument of +this fiery self-forgetfulness. It is penetrated with the passionate +desire to render Euripides worthily, and to that imitation are for the +time being devoted all the gigantic powers which went to make the +songs of Pippa and the last agony of Guido. Browning never put himself +into anything more powerfully or more successfully; yet it is only an +excellent translation. In the uncouth philosophy of Caliban, in the +tangled ethics of Sludge, in his wildest satire, in his most +feather-headed lyric, Browning was never more thoroughly Browning than +in this splendid and unselfish plagiarism. This revived excitement in +Greek matters; "his passionate love of the Greek language" continued +in him thenceforward till his death. He published more than one poem +on the drama of Hellas. <i>Aristophanes' Apology</i> came out in 1875, and +<i>The Agamemnon of Æschylus</i>, another paraphrase, in 1877. All three +poems are marked by the same primary characteristic, the fact that the +writer has the literature of Athens literally at his fingers' ends. He +is intimate not only with their poetry and politics, but with their +frivolity and their slang; he knows not only Athenian wisdom, but +Athenian folly; not only the beauty of Greece, but even its vulgarity. +In fact, a page of <i>Aristophanes' Apology</i> is like a page of<a name="Page_121"></a> +Aristophanes, dark with levity and as obscure as a schoolman's +treatise, with its load of jokes.</p> + +<p>In 1871 also appeared <i>Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau: Saviour of +Society</i>, one of the finest and most picturesque of all Browning's +apologetic monologues. The figure is, of course, intended for Napoleon +III., whose Empire had just fallen, bringing down his country with it. +The saying has been often quoted that Louis Napoleon deceived Europe +twice—once when he made it think he was a noodle, and once when he +made it think he was a statesman. It might be added that Europe was +never quite just to him, and was deceived a third time, when it took +him after his fall for an exploded mountebank and nonentity. Amid the +general chorus of contempt which was raised over his weak and +unscrupulous policy in later years, culminating in his great disaster, +there are few things finer than this attempt of Browning's to give the +man a platform and let him speak for himself. It is the apologia of a +political adventurer, and a political adventurer of a kind peculiarly +open to popular condemnation. Mankind has always been somewhat +inclined to forgive the adventurer who destroys or re-creates, but +there is nothing inspiring about the adventurer who merely preserves. +We have sympathy with the rebel who aims at reconstruction, but there +is something repugnant to the imagination in the rebel who rebels in +the name of compromise. Browning had to defend, or rather to +interpret, a man who kidnapped politicians in the night and deluged +the Montmartre with blood, not for an ideal, not for a reform, not +precisely even for a cause, but simply for the establishment of a +<i>régime</i>. He did these hideous things not so much that he might <a name="Page_122"></a>be +able to do better ones, but that he and every one else might be able +to do nothing for twenty years; and Browning's contention, and a very +plausible contention, is that the criminal believed that his crime +would establish order and compromise, or, in other words, that he +thought that nothing was the very best thing he and his people could +do. There is something peculiarly characteristic of Browning in thus +selecting not only a political villain, but what would appear the most +prosaic kind of villain. We scarcely ever find in Browning a defence +of those obvious and easily defended publicans and sinners whose +mingled virtues and vices are the stuff of romance and melodrama—the +generous rake, the kindly drunkard, the strong man too great for +parochial morals. He was in a yet more solitary sense the friend of +the outcast. He took in the sinners whom even sinners cast out. He +went with the hypocrite and had mercy on the Pharisee.</p> + +<p>How little this desire of Browning's, to look for a moment at the +man's life with the man's eyes, was understood, may be gathered from +the criticisms on <i>Hohenstiel-Schwangau</i>, which, says Browning, "the +Editor of the <i>Edinburgh Review</i> calls my eulogium on the Second +Empire, which it is not, any more than what another wiseacre affirms +it to be, a scandalous attack on the old constant friend of England. +It is just what I imagine the man might, if he pleased, say for +himself."</p> + +<p>In 1873 appeared <i>Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country</i>, which, if it be not +absolutely one of the finest of Browning's poems, is certainly one of +the most magnificently Browningesque. The origin of the name of the +poem is probably well known. He was travelling <a name="Page_123"></a>along the Normandy +coast, and discovered what he called</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"Meek, hitherto un-Murrayed bathing-places,<br /> +Best loved of sea-coast-nook-full Normandy!"<br /> +</p></div> + +<p>Miss Thackeray, who was of the party, delighted Browning beyond +measure by calling the sleepy old fishing district "White Cotton +Night-Cap Country." It was exactly the kind of elfish phrase to which +Browning had, it must always be remembered, a quite unconquerable +attraction. The notion of a town of sleep, where men and women walked +about in nightcaps, a nation of somnambulists, was the kind of thing +that Browning in his heart loved better than <i>Paradise Lost</i>. Some +time afterwards he read in a newspaper a very painful story of +profligacy and suicide which greatly occupied the French journals in +the year 1871, and which had taken place in the same district. It is +worth noting that Browning was one of those wise men who can perceive +the terrible and impressive poetry of the police-news, which is +commonly treated as vulgarity, which is dreadful and may be +undesirable, but is certainly not vulgar. From <i>The Ring and the Book</i> +to <i>Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country</i> a great many of his works might be +called magnificent detective stories. The story is somewhat ugly, and +its power does not alter its ugliness, for power can only make +ugliness uglier. And in this poem there is little or nothing of the +revelation of that secret wealth of valour and patience in humanity +which makes real and redeems the revelation of its secret vileness in +<i>The Ring and the Book</i>. It almost looks at first sight as if Browning +had for a moment surrendered the <a name="Page_124"></a>whole of his impregnable +philosophical position and admitted the strange heresy that a human +story can be sordid. But this view of the poem is, of course, a +mistake. It was written in something which, for want of a more exact +word, we must call one of the bitter moods of Browning; but the +bitterness is entirely the product of a certain generous hostility +against the class of morbidities which he really detested, sometimes +more than they deserved. In this poem these principles of weakness and +evil are embodied to him as the sicklier kind of Romanism, and the +more sensual side of the French temperament. We must never forget what +a great deal of the Puritan there remained in Browning to the end. +This outburst of it is fierce and ironical, not in his best spirit. It +says in effect, "You call this a country of sleep, I call it a country +of death. You call it 'White Cotton Night-Cap Country'; I call it 'Red +Cotton Night-Cap Country.'"</p> + +<p>Shortly before this, in 1872, he had published <i>Fifine at the Fair</i>, +which his principal biographer, and one of his most uncompromising +admirers, calls a piece of perplexing cynicism. Perplexing it may be +to some extent, for it was almost impossible to tell whether Browning +would or would not be perplexing even in a love-song or a post-card. +But cynicism is a word that cannot possibly be applied with any +propriety to anything that Browning ever wrote. Cynicism denotes that +condition of mind in which we hold that life is in its nature mean and +arid; that no soul contains genuine goodness, and no state of things +genuine reliability. <i>Fifine at the Fair</i>, like <i>Prince +Hohenstiel-Schwangau</i>, is one of Browning's apologetic +soliloquies—the <a name="Page_125"></a>soliloquy of an epicurean who seeks half-playfully +to justify upon moral grounds an infidelity into which he afterwards +actually falls. This casuist, like all Browning's casuists, is given +many noble outbursts and sincere moments, and therefore apparently the +poem is called cynical. It is difficult to understand what particular +connection there is between seeing good in nobody and seeing good even +in a sensual fool.</p> + +<p>After <i>Fifine at the Fair</i> appeared the <i>Inn Album</i>, in 1875, a purely +narrative work, chiefly interesting as exhibiting in yet another place +one of Browning's vital characteristics, a pleasure in retelling and +interpreting actual events of a sinister and criminal type; and after +the <i>Inn Album</i> came what is perhaps the most preposterously +individual thing he ever wrote, <i>Of Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in +Distemper</i>, in 1876. It is impossible to call the work poetry, and it +is very difficult indeed to know what to call it. Its chief +characteristic is a kind of galloping energy, an energy that has +nothing intellectual or even intelligible about it, a purely animal +energy of words. Not only is it not beautiful, it is not even clever, +and yet it carries the reader away as he might be carried away by +romping children. It ends up with a voluble and largely unmeaning +malediction upon the poet's critics, a malediction so outrageously +good-humoured that it does not take the trouble even to make itself +clear to the objects of its wrath. One can compare the poem to nothing +in heaven or earth, except to the somewhat humorous, more or less +benevolent, and most incomprehensible catalogues of curses and oaths +which may be heard from an intoxicated navvy. This is the kind of +thing, and it goes on for pages:—</p><a name="Page_126"></a> + +<div class="poem"><p>"Long after the last of your number<br /> +Has ceased my front-court to encumber<br /> +While, treading down rose and ranunculus,<br /> +You <i>Tommy-make-room-for-your-uncle</i>-us!<br /> +Troop, all of you man or homunculus,<br /> +Quick march! for Xanthippe, my housemaid,<br /> +If once on your pates she a souse made<br /> +With what, pan or pot, bowl or <i>skoramis</i>,<br /> +First comes to her hand—things were more amiss!<br /> +I would not for worlds be your place in—<br /> +Recipient of slops from the basin!<br /> +You, Jack-in-the-Green, leaf-and-twiggishness<br /> +Won't save a dry thread on your priggishness!"<br /></p></div> + +<p>You can only call this, in the most literal sense of the word, the +brute-force of language.</p> + +<p>In spite however of this monstrosity among poems, which gives its +title to the volume, it contains some of the most beautiful verses +that Browning ever wrote in that style of light philosophy in which he +was unequalled. Nothing ever gave so perfectly and artistically what +is too loosely talked about as a thrill, as the poem called "Fears and +Scruples," in which a man describes the mystifying conduct of an +absent friend, and reserves to the last line the climax—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p><span class="i10">"Hush, I pray you!</span> +What if this friend happen to be—God."<br /></p></div> + +<p>It is the masterpiece of that excellent but much-abused literary +quality, Sensationalism.</p> + +<p>The volume entitled <i>Pacchiarotto</i>, moreover, includes one or two of +the most spirited poems on the subject of the poet in relation to +publicity—"At the Mermaid," "House," and "Shop."</p> + +<p>In spite of his increasing years, his books seemed <a name="Page_127"></a>if anything to +come thicker and faster. Two were published in 1878—<i>La Saisiaz</i>, his +great metaphysical poem on the conception of immortality, and that +delightfully foppish fragment of the <i>ancien régime</i>, <i>The Two Poets +of Croisic</i>. Those two poems would alone suffice to show that he had +not forgotten the hard science of theology or the harder science of +humour. Another collection followed in 1879, the first series of +<i>Dramatic Idylls</i>, which contain such masterpieces as "Pheidippides" +and "Ivàn Ivànovitch." Upon its heels, in 1880, came the second series +of <i>Dramatic Idylls</i>, including "Muléykeh" and "Clive," possibly the +two best stories in poetry, told in the best manner of story-telling. +Then only did the marvellous fountain begin to slacken in quantity, +but never in quality. <i>Jocoseria</i> did not appear till 1883. It +contains among other things a cast-back to his very earliest manner in +the lyric of "Never the Time and the Place," which we may call the +most light-hearted love-song that was ever written by a man over +seventy. In the next year appeared <i>Ferishtah's Fancies</i>, which +exhibit some of his shrewdest cosmic sagacity, expressed in some of +his quaintest and most characteristic images. Here perhaps more than +anywhere else we see that supreme peculiarity of Browning—his sense +of the symbolism of material trifles. Enormous problems, and yet more +enormous answers, about pain, prayer, destiny, liberty, and conscience +are suggested by cherries, by the sun, by a melon-seller, by an eagle +flying in the sky, by a man tilling a plot of ground. It is this +spirit of grotesque allegory which really characterises Browning among +all other poets. Other poets might possibly have hit upon the same +philosophical <a name="Page_128"></a>idea—some idea as deep, as delicate, and as spiritual. +But it may be safely asserted that no other poet, having thought of a +deep, delicate, and spiritual idea, would call it "A Bean Stripe; also +Apple Eating."</p> + +<p>Three more years passed, and the last book which Browning published in +his lifetime was <i>Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in +their Day</i>, a book which consists of apostrophes, amicable, furious, +reverential, satirical, emotional to a number of people of whom the +vast majority even of cultivated people have never heard in their +lives—Daniel Bartoli, Francis Furini, Gerard de Lairesse, and Charles +Avison. This extraordinary knowledge of the fulness of history was a +thing which never ceased to characterise Browning even when he was +unfortunate in every other literary quality. Apart altogether from +every line he ever wrote, it may fairly be said that no mind so rich +as his ever carried its treasures to the grave. All these later poems +are vigorous, learned, and full-blooded. They are thoroughly +characteristic of their author. But nothing in them is quite so +characteristic of their author as this fact, that when he had +published all of them, and was already near to his last day, he turned +with the energy of a boy let out of school, and began, of all things +in the world, to re-write and improve "Pauline," the boyish poem that +he had written fifty-five years before. Here was a man covered with +glory and near to the doors of death, who was prepared to give himself +the elaborate trouble of reconstructing the mood, and rebuilding the +verses of a long juvenile poem which had been forgotten for fifty +years in the blaze of successive victories. It is such things as these +which give to Browning an interest of personality which is far beyond +<a name="Page_129"></a>the more interest of genius. It was of such things that Elizabeth +Barrett wrote in one of her best moments of insight—that his genius +was the least important thing about him.</p> + +<p>During all these later years, Browning's life had been a quiet and +regular one. He always spent the winter in Italy and the summer in +London, and carried his old love of precision to the extent of never +failing day after day throughout the year to leave the house at the +same time. He had by this time become far more of a public figure than +he had ever been previously, both in England and Italy. In 1881, Dr. +Furnivall and Miss E.H. Hickey founded the famous "Browning Society." +He became President of the new "Shakespeare Society" and of the +"Wordsworth Society." In 1886, on the death of Lord Houghton, he +accepted the post of Foreign Correspondent to the Royal Academy. When +he moved to De Vere Gardens in 1887, it began to be evident that he +was slowly breaking up. He still dined out constantly; he still +attended every reception and private view; he still corresponded +prodigiously, and even added to his correspondence; and there is +nothing more typical of him than that now, when he was almost already +a classic, he answered any compliment with the most delightful vanity +and embarrassment. In a letter to Mr. George Bainton, touching style, +he makes a remark which is an excellent criticism on his whole +literary career: "I myself found many forgotten fields which have +proved the richest of pastures." But despite his continued energy, his +health was gradually growing worse. He was a strong man in a muscular, +and ordinarily in a physical sense, but he was also in a certain sense +a <a name="Page_130"></a>nervous man, and may be said to have died of brain-excitement +prolonged through a lifetime. In these closing years he began to feel +more constantly the necessity for rest. He and his sister went to live +at a little hotel in Llangollen, and spent hours together talking and +drinking tea on the lawn. He himself writes in one of his quaint and +poetic phrases that he had come to love these long country retreats, +"another term of delightful weeks, each tipped with a sweet starry +Sunday at the little church." For the first time, and in the last two +or three years, he was really growing old. On one point he maintained +always a tranquil and unvarying decision. The pessimistic school of +poetry was growing up all round him; the decadents, with their belief +that art was only a counting of the autumn leaves, were approaching +more and more towards their tired triumph and their tasteless +popularity. But Browning would not for one instant take the scorn of +them out of his voice. "Death, death, it is this harping on death that +I despise so much. In fiction, in poetry, French as well as English, +and I am told in American also, in art and literature, the shadow of +death, call it what you will, despair, negation, indifference, is upon +us. But what fools who talk thus! Why, <i>amico mio</i>, you know as well +as I, that death is life, just as our daily momentarily dying body is +none the less alive, and ever recruiting new forces of existence. +Without death, which is our church-yardy crape-like word for change, +for growth, there could be no prolongation of that which we call life. +Never say of me that I am dead."</p> + +<p>On August 13, 1888, he set out once more for Italy, the last of his +innumerable voyages. During his <a name="Page_131"></a>last Italian period he seems to have +fallen back on very ultimate simplicities, chiefly a mere staring at +nature. The family with whom he lived kept a fox cub, and Browning +would spend hours with it watching its grotesque ways; when it +escaped, he was characteristically enough delighted. The old man could +be seen continually in the lanes round Asolo, peering into hedges and +whistling for the lizards.</p> + +<p>This serene and pastoral decline, surely the mildest of slopes into +death, was suddenly diversified by a flash of something lying far +below. Browning's eye fell upon a passage written by the distinguished +Edward Fitzgerald, who had been dead for many years, in which +Fitzgerald spoke in an uncomplimentary manner of Elizabeth Barrett +Browning. Browning immediately wrote the "Lines to Edward Fitzgerald," +and set the whole literary world in an uproar. The lines were bitter +and excessive to have been written against any man, especially bitter +and excessive to have been written against a man who was not alive to +reply. And yet, when all is said, it is impossible not to feel a +certain dark and indescribable pleasure in this last burst of the old +barbaric energy. The mountain had been tilled and forested, and laid +out in gardens to the summit; but for one last night it had proved +itself once more a volcano, and had lit up all the plains with its +forgotten fire. And the blow, savage as it was, was dealt for that +great central sanctity—the story of a man's youth. All that the old +man would say in reply to every view of the question was, "I felt as +if she had died yesterday."</p> + +<p>Towards December of 1889 he moved to Venice, where he fell ill. He +took very little food; it was <a name="Page_132"></a>indeed one of his peculiar small fads +that men should not take food when they are ill, a matter in which he +maintained that the animals were more sagacious. He asserted +vigorously that this somewhat singular regimen would pull him through, +talked about his plans, and appeared cheerful. Gradually, however, the +talking became more infrequent, the cheerfulness passed into a kind of +placidity; and without any particular crisis or sign of the end, +Robert Browning died on December 12, 1889. The body was taken on board +ship by the Venice Municipal Guard, and received by the Royal Italian +marines. He was buried in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey, the +choir singing his wife's poem, "He giveth His beloved sleep." On the +day that he died <i>Asolando</i> was published.</p><a name="Page_133"></a> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<a name="CHAPTER_VI"></a><h2>CHAPTER VI</h2> + +<h2>BROWNING AS A LITERARY ARTIST</h2> + +<p>Mr. William Sharp, in his <i>Life</i> of Browning, quotes the remarks of +another critic to the following effect: "The poet's processes of +thought are scientific in their precision and analysis; the sudden +conclusion that he imposes upon them is transcendental and inept."</p> + +<p>This is a very fair but a very curious example of the way in which +Browning is treated. For what is the state of affairs? A man publishes +a series of poems, vigorous, perplexing, and unique. The critics read +them, and they decide that he has failed as a poet, but that he is a +remarkable philosopher and logician. They then proceed to examine his +philosophy, and show with great triumph that it is unphilosophical, +and to examine his logic and show with great triumph that it is not +logical, but "transcendental and inept." In other words, Browning is +first denounced for being a logician and not a poet, and then +denounced for insisting on being a poet when they have decided that he +is to be a logician. It is just as if a man were to say first that a +garden was so neglected that it was only fit for a boys' playground, +and then complain of the unsuitability in a boys' playground of +rockeries and flower-beds.</p> + +<p>As we find, after this manner, that Browning does <a name="Page_134"></a>not act +satisfactorily as that which we have decided that he shall be—a +logician—it might possibly be worth while to make another attempt to +see whether he may not, after all, be more valid than we thought as to +what he himself professed to be—a poet. And if we study this +seriously and sympathetically, we shall soon come to a conclusion. It +is a gross and complete slander upon Browning to say that his +processes of thought are scientific in their precision and analysis. +They are nothing of the sort; if they were, Browning could not be a +good poet. The critic speaks of the conclusions of a poem as +"transcendental and inept"; but the conclusions of a poem, if they are +not transcendental, must be inept. Do the people who call one of +Browning's poems scientific in its analysis realise the meaning of +what they say? One is tempted to think that they know a scientific +analysis when they see it as little as they know a good poem. The one +supreme difference between the scientific method and the artistic +method is, roughly speaking, simply this—that a scientific statement +means the same thing wherever and whenever it is uttered, and that an +artistic statement means something entirely different, according to +the relation in which it stands to its surroundings. The remark, let +us say, that the whale is a mammal, or the remark that sixteen ounces +go to a pound, is equally true, and means exactly the same thing, +whether we state it at the beginning of a conversation or at the end, +whether we print it in a dictionary or chalk it up on a wall. But if +we take some phrase commonly used in the art of literature—such a +sentence, for the sake of example, as "the dawn was breaking"—the +matter is quite different. If the <a name="Page_135"></a>sentence came at the beginning of a +short story, it might be a mere descriptive prelude. If it were the +last sentence in a short story, it might be poignant with some +peculiar irony or triumph. Can any one read Browning's great +monologues and not feel that they are built up like a good short +story, entirely on this principle of the value of language arising +from its arrangement. Take such an example as "Caliban upon Setebos," +a wonderful poem designed to describe the way in which a primitive +nature may at once be afraid of its gods and yet familiar with them. +Caliban in describing his deity starts with a more or less natural and +obvious parallel between the deity and himself, carries out the +comparison with consistency and an almost revolting simplicity, and +ends in a kind of blasphemous extravaganza of anthropomorphism, basing +his conduct not merely on the greatness and wisdom, but also on the +manifest weaknesses and stupidities, of the Creator of all things. +Then suddenly a thunderstorm breaks over Caliban's island, and the +profane speculator falls flat upon his face—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"Lo! 'Lieth flat and loveth Setebos!<br /> +'Maketh his teeth meet through his upper lip,<br /> +Will let those quails fly, will not eat this month<br /> +One little mess of whelks, so he may 'scape!"</p></div> + +<p>Surely it would be very difficult to persuade oneself that this +thunderstorm would have meant exactly the same thing if it had +occurred at the beginning of "Caliban upon Setebos." It does not mean +the same thing, but something very different; and the deduction from +this is the curious fact that Browning is an artist, and that +consequently his processes of thought are not "scientific in their +precision and analysis."</p><a name="Page_136"></a> + +<p>No criticism of Browning's poems can be vital, none in the face of the +poems themselves can be even intelligible, which is not based upon the +fact that he was successfully or otherwise a conscious and deliberate +artist. He may have failed as an artist, though I do not think so; +that is quite a different matter. But it is one thing to say that a +man through vanity or ignorance has built an ugly cathedral, and quite +another to say that he built it in a fit of absence of mind, and did +not know whether he was building a lighthouse or a first-class hotel. +Browning knew perfectly well what he was doing; and if the reader does +not like his art, at least the author did. The general sentiment +expressed in the statement that he did not care about form is simply +the most ridiculous criticism that could be conceived. It would be far +nearer the truth to say that he cared more for form than any other +English poet who ever lived. He was always weaving and modelling and +inventing new forms. Among all his two hundred to three hundred poems +it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that there are half as +many different metres as there are different poems.</p> + +<p>The great English poets who are supposed to have cared more for form +than Browning did, cared less at least in this sense—that they were +content to use old forms so long as they were certain that they had +new ideas. Browning, on the other hand, no sooner had a new idea than +he tried to make a new form to express it. Wordsworth and Shelley were +really original poets; their attitude of thought and feeling marked +without doubt certain great changes in literature and philosophy. +Nevertheless, the "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" is a +perfectly normal and traditional ode, <a name="Page_137"></a>and "Prometheus Unbound" is a +perfectly genuine and traditional Greek lyrical drama. But if we study +Browning honestly, nothing will strike us more than that he really +created a large number of quite novel and quite admirable artistic +forms. It is too often forgotten what and how excellent these were. +<i>The Ring and the Book</i>, for example, is an illuminating departure in +literary method—the method of telling the same story several times +and trusting to the variety of human character to turn it into several +different and equally interesting stories. <i>Pippa Passes</i>, to take +another example, is a new and most fruitful form, a series of detached +dramas connected only by the presence of one fugitive and isolated +figure. The invention of these things is not merely like the writing +of a good poem—it is something like the invention of the sonnet or +the Gothic arch. The poet who makes them does not merely create +himself—he creates other poets. It is so in a degree long past +enumeration with regard to Browning's smaller poems. Such a pious and +horrible lyric as "The Heretic's Tragedy," for instance, is absolutely +original, with its weird and almost blood-curdling echo verses, +mocking echoes indeed—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"And dipt of his wings in Paris square,<br /> +<span class="i2">They bring him now to lie burned alive.</span> +<br /> +<span class="i2"><i>[And wanteth there grace of lute or clavicithern,</i></span> +<span class="i4"><i>ye shall say to confirm him who singeth</i>—</span> +<br /> +<span class="i2">We bring John now to be burned alive."</span></p></div> + +<p>A hundred instances might, of course, be given. Milton's "Sonnet on +his Blindness," or Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," are both thoroughly +original, but still we can point to other such sonnets and other such +odes. But can any one mention any poem of exactly the same <a name="Page_138"></a>structural +and literary type as "Fears and Scruples," as "The Householder," as +"House" or "Shop," as "Nationality in Drinks," as "Sibrandus +Schafnaburgensis," as "My Star," as "A Portrait," as any of +"Ferishtah's Fancies," as any of the "Bad Dreams."</p> + +<p>The thing which ought to be said about Browning by those who do not +enjoy him is simply that they do not like his form; that they have +studied the form, and think it a bad form. If more people said things +of this sort, the world of criticism would gain almost unspeakably in +clarity and common honesty. Browning put himself before the world as a +good poet. Let those who think he failed call him a bad poet, and +there will be an end of the matter. There are many styles in art which +perfectly competent æsthetic judges cannot endure. For instance, it +would be perfectly legitimate for a strict lover of Gothic to say that +one of the monstrous rococo altar-pieces in the Belgian churches with +bulbous clouds and oaken sun-rays seven feet long, was, in his +opinion, ugly. But surely it would be perfectly ridiculous for any one +to say that it had no form. A man's actual feelings about it might be +better expressed by saying that it had too much. To say that Browning +was merely a thinker because you think "Caliban upon Setebos" ugly, is +precisely as absurd as it would be to call the author of the old +Belgian altarpiece a man devoted only to the abstractions of religion. +The truth about Browning is not that he was indifferent to technical +beauty, but that he invented a particular kind of technical beauty to +which any one else is free to be as indifferent as he chooses.</p> + +<p>There is in this matter an extraordinary tendency to vague and +unmeaning criticism. The usual way of <a name="Page_139"></a>criticising an author, +particularly an author who has added something to the literary forms +of the world, is to complain that his work does not contain something +which is obviously the speciality of somebody else. The correct thing +to say about Maeterlinck is that some play of his in which, let us +say, a princess dies in a deserted tower by the sea, has a certain +beauty, but that we look in vain in it for that robust geniality, that +really boisterous will to live which may be found in <i>Martin +Chuzzlewit</i>. The right thing to say about <i>Cyrano de Bergerac</i> is that +it may have a certain kind of wit and spirit, but that it really +throws no light on the duty of middle-aged married couples in Norway. +It cannot be too much insisted upon that at least three-quarters of +the blame and criticism commonly directed against artists and authors +falls under this general objection, and is essentially valueless. +Authors both great and small are, like everything else in existence, +upon the whole greatly under-rated. They are blamed for not doing, not +only what they have failed to do to reach their own ideal, but what +they have never tried to do to reach every other writer's ideal. If we +can show that Browning had a definite ideal of beauty and loyally +pursued it, it is not necessary to prove that he could have written +<i>In Memoriam</i> if he had tried.</p> + +<p>Browning has suffered far more injustice from his admirers than from +his opponents, for his admirers have for the most part got hold of the +matter, so to speak, by the wrong end. They believe that what is +ordinarily called the grotesque style of Browning was a kind of +necessity boldly adopted by a great genius in order to express novel +and profound ideas. But this is an entire mistake. What is called +ugliness was to<a name="Page_140"></a> Browning not in the least a necessary evil, but a +quite unnecessary luxury, which he enjoyed for its own sake. For +reasons that we shall see presently in discussing the philosophical +use of the grotesque, it did so happen that Browning's grotesque style +was very suitable for the expression of his peculiar moral and +metaphysical view. But the whole mass of poems will be misunderstood +if we do not realise first of all that he had a love of the grotesque +of the nature of art for art's sake. Here, for example, is a short +distinct poem merely descriptive of one of those elfish German jugs in +which it is to be presumed Tokay had been served to him. This is the +whole poem, and a very good poem too—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"Up jumped Tokay on our table,<br /> +Like a pigmy castle-warder,<br /> +Dwarfish to see, but stout and able,<br /> +Arms and accoutrements all in order;<br /> +And fierce he looked North, then, wheeling South<br /> +Blew with his bugle a challenge to Drouth,<br /> +Cocked his flap-hat with the tosspot-feather,<br /> +Twisted his thumb in his red moustache,<br /> +Jingled his huge brass spurs together,<br /> +Tightened his waist with its Buda sash,<br /> +And then, with an impudence nought could abash,<br /> +Shrugged his hump-shoulder, to tell the beholder,<br /> +For twenty such knaves he would laugh but the bolder:<br /> +And so, with his sword-hilt gallantly jutting,<br /> +And dexter-hand on his haunch abutting,<br /> +Went the little man, Sir Ausbruch, strutting!"</p></div> + +<p>I suppose there are Browning students in existence who would think +that this poem contained something pregnant about the Temperance +question, or was a marvellously subtle analysis of the romantic +movement in Germany. But surely to most of us it is sufficiently +<a name="Page_141"></a>apparent that Browning was simply fashioning a ridiculous +knick-knack, exactly as if he were actually moulding one of these +preposterous German jugs. Now before studying the real character of +this Browningesque style, there is one general truth to be recognised +about Browning's work. It is this—that it is absolutely necessary to +remember that Browning had, like every other poet, his simple and +indisputable failures, and that it is one thing to speak of the +badness of his artistic failures, and quite another thing to speak of +the badness of his artistic aim. Browning's style may be a good style, +and yet exhibit many examples of a thoroughly bad use of it. On this +point there is indeed a singularly unfair system of judgment used by +the public towards the poets. It is very little realised that the vast +majority of great poets have written an enormous amount of very bad +poetry. The unfortunate Wordsworth is generally supposed to be almost +alone in this; but any one who thinks so can scarcely have read a +certain number of the minor poems of Byron and Shelley and Tennyson.</p> + +<p>Now it is only just to Browning that his more uncouth effusions should +not be treated as masterpieces by which he must stand or fall, but +treated simply as his failures. It is really true that such a line as</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"Irks fear the crop-full bird, frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?"</p></div> + +<p>is a very ugly and a very bad line. But it is quite equally true that +Tennyson's</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"And that good man, the clergyman, has told me words of peace,"</p></div> + +<p>is a very ugly and a very bad line. But people do not <a name="Page_142"></a>say that this +proves that Tennyson was a mere crabbed controversialist and +metaphysician. They say that it is a bad example of Tennyson's form; +they do not say that it is a good example of Tennyson's indifference +to form. Upon the whole, Browning exhibits far fewer instances of this +failure in his own style than any other of the great poets, with the +exception of one or two like Spenser and Keats, who seem to have a +mysterious incapacity for writing bad poetry. But almost all original +poets, particularly poets who have invented an artistic style, are +subject to one most disastrous habit—the habit of writing imitations +of themselves. Every now and then in the works of the noblest +classical poets you will come upon passages which read like extracts +from an American book of parodies. Swinburne, for example, when he +wrote the couplet—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"From the lilies and languors of virtue<br /> +To the raptures and roses of vice,"</p></div> + +<p>wrote what is nothing but a bad imitation of himself, an imitation +which seems indeed to have the wholly unjust and uncritical object of +proving that the Swinburnian melody is a mechanical scheme of initial +letters. Or again, Mr. Rudyard Kipling when he wrote the line—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"Or ride with the reckless seraphim on the rim of a red-maned star,"</p></div> + +<p>was caricaturing himself in the harshest and least sympathetic spirit +of American humour. This tendency is, of course, the result of the +self-consciousness and theatricality of modern life in which each of +us is forced to conceive ourselves as part of a <i>dramatis personæ</i> +and act perpetually in character. Browning <a name="Page_143"></a>sometimes yielded to this +temptation to be a great deal too like himself.</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"Will I widen thee out till thou turnest<br /> +From Margaret Minnikin mou' by God's grace,<br /> +To Muckle-mouth Meg in good earnest."</p></div> + +<p>This sort of thing is not to be defended in Browning any more than in +Swinburne. But, on the other hand, it is not to be attributed in +Swinburne to a momentary exaggeration, and in Browning to a vital +æsthetic deficiency. In the case of Swinburne, we all feel that the +question is not whether that particular preposterous couplet about +lilies and roses redounds to the credit of the Swinburnian style, but +whether it would be possible in any other style than the Swinburnian +to have written the Hymn to Proserpine. In the same way, the essential +issue about Browning as an artist is not whether he, in common with +Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, and Swinburne, sometimes wrote +bad poetry, but whether in any other style except Browning's you could +have achieved the precise artistic effect which is achieved by such +incomparable lyrics as "The Patriot" or "The Laboratory." The answer +must be in the negative, and in that answer lies the whole +justification of Browning as an artist.</p> + +<p>The question now arises, therefore, what was his conception of his +functions as an artist? We have already agreed that his artistic +originality concerned itself chiefly with the serious use of the +grotesque. It becomes necessary, therefore, to ask what is the serious +use of the grotesque, and what relation does the grotesque bear to the +eternal and fundamental elements in life?</p><a name="Page_144"></a> + +<p>One of the most curious things to notice about popular æsthetic +criticism is the number of phrases it will be found to use which are +intended to express an æsthetic failure, and which express merely an +æsthetic variety. Thus, for instance, the traveller will often hear +the advice from local lovers of the picturesque, "The scenery round +such and such a place has no interest; it is quite flat." To disparage +scenery as quite flat is, of course, like disparaging a swan as quite +white, or an Italian sky as quite blue. Flatness is a sublime quality +in certain landscapes, just as rockiness is a sublime quality in +others. In the same way there are a great number of phrases commonly +used in order to disparage such writers as Browning which do not in +fact disparage, but merely describe them. One of the most +distinguished of Browning's biographers and critics says of him, for +example, "He has never meant to be rugged, but has become so in +striving after strength." To say that Browning never tried to be +rugged is to say that Edgar Allan Poe never tried to be gloomy, or +that Mr. W.S. Gilbert never tried to be extravagant. The whole issue +depends upon whether we realise the simple and essential fact that +ruggedness is a mode of art like gloominess or extravagance. Some +poems ought to be rugged, just as some poems ought to be smooth. When +we see a drift of stormy and fantastic clouds at sunset, we do not say +that the cloud is beautiful although it is ragged at the edges. When +we see a gnarled and sprawling oak, we do not say that it is fine +although it is twisted. When we see a mountain, we do not say that it +is impressive although it is rugged, nor do we say apologetically that +it never meant to be rugged, but became so in its striving after +strength. Now, to <a name="Page_145"></a>say that Browning's poems, artistically considered, +are fine although they are rugged, is quite as absurd as to say that a +rock, artistically considered, is fine although it is rugged. +Ruggedness being an essential quality in the universe, there is that +in man which responds to it as to the striking of any other chord of +the eternal harmonies. As the children of nature, we are akin not only +to the stars and flowers, but also to the toad-stools and the +monstrous tropical birds. And it is to be repeated as the essential of +the question that on this side of our nature we do emphatically love +the form of the toad-stools, and not merely some complicated botanical +and moral lessons which the philosopher may draw from them. For +example, just as there is such a thing as a poetical metre being +beautifully light or beautifully grave and haunting, so there is such +a thing as a poetical metre being beautifully rugged. In the old +ballads, for instance, every person of literary taste will be struck +by a certain attractiveness in the bold, varying, irregular verse—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"He is either himsell a devil frae hell,<br /> +Or else his mother a witch maun be;<br /> +I wadna have ridden that wan water<br /> +For a' the gowd in Christentie,"</p></div> + +<p>is quite as pleasing to the ear in its own way as</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"There's a bower of roses by Bendemeer stream,<br /> +And the nightingale sings in it all the night long,"</p></div> + +<p>is in another way. Browning had an unrivalled ear for this particular +kind of staccato music. The absurd notion that he had no sense of +melody in verse is only possible to people who think that there is no +melody in <a name="Page_146"></a>verse which is not an imitation of Swinburne. To give a +satisfactory idea of Browning's rhythmic originality would be +impossible without quotations more copious than entertaining. But the +essential point has been suggested.</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"They were purple of raiment and golden,<br /> +Filled full of thee, fiery with wine,<br /> +Thy lovers in haunts unbeholden,<br /> +In marvellous chambers of thine,"</p></div> + +<p>is beautiful language, but not the only sort of beautiful language. +This, for instance, has also a tune in it—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"I—'next poet.' No, my hearties,<br /> +I nor am, nor fain would be!<br /> +Choose your chiefs and pick your parties,<br /> +Not one soul revolt to me!</p></div> +<hr style="width: 45%;" /> +<div class="poem"><p>Which of you did I enable<br /> +Once to slip inside my breast,<br /> +There to catalogue and label<br /> +What I like least, what love best,<br /> +Hope and fear, believe and doubt of,<br /> +Seek and shun, respect, deride,<br /> +Who has right to make a rout of<br /> +Rarities he found inside?"</p></div> + +<p>This quick, gallantly stepping measure also has its own kind of music, +and the man who cannot feel it can never have enjoyed the sound of +soldiers marching by. This, then, roughly is the main fact to remember +about Browning's poetical method, or about any one's poetical +method—that the question is not whether that method is the best in +the world, but the question whether there are not certain things which +can only be conveyed by <a name="Page_147"></a>that method. It is perfectly true, for +instance, that a really lofty and lucid line of Tennyson, such as—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"Thou art the highest, and most human too"</p></div> + +<p>and</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"We needs must love the highest when we see it"</p></div> + +<p>would really be made the worse for being translated into Browning. It +would probably become</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"High's human; man loves best, best visible,"</p></div> + +<p>and would lose its peculiar clarity and dignity and courtly plainness. +But it is quite equally true that any really characteristic fragment +of Browning, if it were only the tempestuous scolding of the organist +in "Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha"—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"Hallo, you sacristan, show us a light there!<br /> +Down it dips, gone like a rocket.<br /> +What, you want, do you, to come unawares,<br /> +>Sweeping the church up for first morning-prayers,<br /> +And find a poor devil has ended his cares<br /> +At the foot of your rotten-runged rat-riddled stairs?<br /> +Do I carry the moon in my pocket?"</p></div> + +<p>—it is quite equally true that this outrageous gallop of rhymes +ending with a frantic astronomical image would lose in energy and +spirit if it were written in a conventional and classical style, and +ran—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"What must I deem then that thou dreamest to find<br /> +Disjected bones adrift upon the stair<br /> +Thou sweepest clean, or that thou deemest that I<br /> +Pouch in my wallet the vice-regal sun?"</p></div> + +<p>Is it not obvious that this statelier version might be excellent +poetry of its kind, and yet would be bad <a name="Page_148"></a>exactly in so far as it was +good; that it would lose all the swing, the rush, the energy of the +preposterous and grotesque original? In fact, we may see how +unmanageable is this classical treatment of the essentially absurd in +Tennyson himself. The humorous passages in <i>The Princess</i>, though +often really humorous in themselves, always appear forced and feeble +because they have to be restrained by a certain metrical dignity, and +the mere idea of such restraint is incompatible with humour. If +Browning had written the passage which opens <i>The Princess</i>, +descriptive of the "larking" of the villagers in the magnate's park, +he would have spared us nothing; he would not have spared us the +shrill uneducated voices and the unburied bottles of ginger beer. He +would have crammed the poem with uncouth similes; he would have +changed the metre a hundred times; he would have broken into doggerel +and into rhapsody; but he would have left, when all is said and done, +as he leaves in that paltry fragment of the grumbling organist, the +impression of a certain eternal human energy. Energy and joy, the +father and the mother of the grotesque, would have ruled the poem. We +should have felt of that rowdy gathering little but the sensation of +which Mr. Henley writes—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"Praise the generous gods for giving,<br /> +In this world of sin and strife,<br /> +With some little time for living,<br /> +Unto each the joy of life,"</p></div> + +<p>the thought that every wise man has when looking at a Bank Holiday +crowd at Margate.</p> + +<p>To ask why Browning enjoyed this perverse and fantastic style most +would be to go very deep into his <a name="Page_149"></a>spirit indeed, probably a great +deal deeper than it is possible to go. But it is worth while to +suggest tentatively the general function of the grotesque in art +generally and in his art in particular. There is one very curious idea +into which we have been hypnotised by the more eloquent poets, and +that is that nature in the sense of what is ordinarily called the +country is a thing entirely stately and beautiful as those terms are +commonly understood. The whole world of the fantastic, all things +top-heavy, lop-sided, and nonsensical are conceived as the work of +man, gargoyles, German jugs, Chinese pots, political caricatures, +burlesque epics, the pictures of Mr. Aubrey Beardsley and the puns of +Robert Browning. But in truth a part, and a very large part, of the +sanity and power of nature lies in the fact that out of her comes all +this instinct of caricature. Nature may present itself to the poet too +often as consisting of stars and lilies; but these are not poets who +live in the country; they are men who go to the country for +inspiration and could no more live in the country than they could go +to bed in Westminster Abbey. Men who live in the heart of nature, +farmers and peasants, know that nature means cows and pigs, and +creatures more humorous than can be found in a whole sketch-book of +Callot. And the element of the grotesque in art, like the element of +the grotesque in nature, means, in the main, energy, the energy which +takes its own forms and goes its own way. Browning's verse, in so far +as it is grotesque, is not complex or artificial; it is natural and in +the legitimate tradition of nature. The verse sprawls like the trees, +dances like the dust; it is ragged like the thunder-cloud, it is +top-heavy like the toadstool.<a name="Page_150"></a> Energy which disregards the standard of +classical art is in nature as it is in Browning. The same sense of the +uproarious force in things which makes Browning dwell on the oddity of +a fungus or a jellyfish makes him dwell on the oddity of a +philosophical idea. Here, for example, we have a random instance from +"The Englishman in Italy" of the way in which Browning, when he was +most Browning, regarded physical nature.</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"And pitch down his basket before us,<br /> +All trembling alive<br /> +With pink and grey jellies, your sea-fruit;<br /> +You touch the strange lumps,<br /> +And mouths gape there, eyes open, all manner<br /> +Of horns and of humps,<br /> +Which only the fisher looks grave at."</p></div> + +<p>Nature might mean flowers to Wordsworth and grass to Walt Whitman, but +to Browning it really meant such things as these, the monstrosities +and living mysteries of the sea. And just as these strange things +meant to Browning energy in the physical world, so strange thoughts +and strange images meant to him energy in the mental world. When, in +one of his later poems, the professional mystic is seeking in a +supreme moment of sincerity to explain that small things may be filled +with God as well as great, he uses the very same kind of image, the +image of a shapeless sea-beast, to embody that noble conception.</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"The Name comes close behind a stomach-cyst,<br /> +The simplest of creations, just a sac<br /> +That's mouth, heart, legs, and belly at once, yet lives<br /> +And feels, and could do neither, we conclude,<br /> +If simplified still further one degree."</p></div> + +<p><span style="margin-left: 12em;">(SLUDGE.)</span></p><a name="Page_151"></a> + +<p>These bulbous, indescribable sea-goblins are the first thing on which +the eye of the poet lights in looking on a landscape, and the last in +the significance of which he trusts in demonstrating the mercy of the +Everlasting.</p> + +<p>There is another and but slightly different use of the grotesque, but +which is definitely valuable in Browning's poetry, and indeed in all +poetry. To present a matter in a grotesque manner does certainly tend +to touch the nerve of surprise and thus to draw attention to the +intrinsically miraculous character of the object itself. It is +difficult to give examples of the proper use of grotesqueness without +becoming too grotesque. But we should all agree that if St. Paul's +Cathedral were suddenly presented to us upside down we should, for the +moment, be more surprised at it, and look at it more than we have done +all the centuries during which it has rested on its foundations. Now +it is the supreme function of the philosopher of the grotesque to make +the world stand on its head that people may look at it. If we say "a +man is a man" we awaken no sense of the fantastic, however much we +ought to, but if we say, in the language of the old satirist, "that +man is a two-legged bird, without feathers," the phrase does, for a +moment, make us look at man from the outside and gives us a thrill in +his presence. When the author of the Book of Job insists upon the +huge, half-witted, apparently unmeaning magnificence and might of +Behemoth, the hippopotamus, he is appealing precisely to this sense of +wonder provoked by the grotesque. "Canst thou play with him as with a +bird, canst thou bind him for thy maidens?" he says in an admirable +passage. The notion of the hippopotamus as a household <a name="Page_152"></a>pet is +curiously in the spirit of the humour of Browning.</p> + +<p>But when it is clearly understood that Browning's love of the +fantastic in style was a perfectly serious artistic love, when we +understand that he enjoyed working in that style, as a Chinese potter +might enjoy making dragons, or a mediæval mason making devils, there +yet remains something definite which must be laid to his account as a +fault. He certainly had a capacity for becoming perfectly childish in +his indulgence in ingenuities that have nothing to do with poetry at +all, such as puns, and rhymes, and grammatical structures that only +just fit into each other like a Chinese puzzle. Probably it was only +one of the marks of his singular vitality, curiosity, and interest in +details. He was certainly one of those somewhat rare men who are +fierily ambitious both in large things and in small. He prided himself +on having written <i>The Ring and the Book</i>, and he also prided himself +on knowing good wine when he tasted it. He prided himself on +re-establishing optimism on a new foundation, and it is to be +presumed, though it is somewhat difficult to imagine, that he prided +himself on such rhymes as the following in <i>Pacchiarotto</i>:—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"The wolf, fox, bear, and monkey,<br /> +By piping advice in one key—<br /> +That his pipe should play a prelude<br /> +To something heaven-tinged not hell-hued,<br /> +Something not harsh but docile,<br /> +Man-liquid, not man-fossil."</p></div> + +<p>This writing, considered as writing, can only be regarded as a kind of +joke, and most probably Browning considered it so himself. It has +nothing at <a name="Page_153"></a>all to do with that powerful and symbolic use of the +grotesque which may be found in such admirable passages as this from +"Holy Cross Day":—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"Give your first groan—compunction's at work;<br /> +And soft! from a Jew you mount to a Turk.<br /> +Lo, Micah—the self-same beard on chin<br /> +He was four times already converted in!"</p></div> + +<p>This is the serious use of the grotesque. Through it passion and +philosophy are as well expressed as through any other medium. But the +rhyming frenzy of Browning has no particular relation even to the +poems in which it occurs. It is not a dance to any measure; it can +only be called the horse-play of literature. It may be noted, for +example, as a rather curious fact, that the ingenious rhymes are +generally only mathematical triumphs, not triumphs of any kind of +assonance. "The Pied Piper of Hamelin," a poem written for children, +and bound in general to be lucid and readable, ends with a rhyme which +it is physically impossible for any one to say:—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"And, whether they pipe us free, fróm rats or fróm mice,<br /> +If we've promised them aught, let us keep our promise!"</p></div> + +<p>This queer trait in Browning, his inability to keep a kind of demented +ingenuity even out of poems in which it was quite inappropriate, is a +thing which must be recognised, and recognised all the more because as +a whole he was a very perfect artist, and a particularly perfect +artist in the use of the grotesque. But everywhere when we go a little +below the surface in Browning we find that there was something in him +perverse and unusual despite all his working normality <a name="Page_154"></a>and +simplicity. His mind was perfectly wholesome, but it was not made +exactly like the ordinary mind. It was like a piece of strong wood +with a knot in it.</p> + +<p>The quality of what, can only be called buffoonery which is under +discussion is indeed one of the many things in which Browning was more +of an Elizabethan than a Victorian. He was like the Elizabethans in +their belief in the normal man, in their gorgeous and over-loaded +language, above all in their feeling for learning as an enjoyment and +almost a frivolity. But there was nothing in which he was so +thoroughly Elizabethan, and even Shakespearian, as in this fact, that +when he felt inclined to write a page of quite uninteresting nonsense, +he immediately did so. Many great writers have contrived to be +tedious, and apparently aimless, while expounding some thought which +they believed to be grave and profitable; but this frivolous stupidity +had not been found in any great writer since the time of Kabelais and +the time of the Elizabethans. In many of the comic scenes of +Shakespeare we have precisely this elephantine ingenuity, this hunting +of a pun to death through three pages. In the Elizabethan dramatists +and in Browning it is no doubt to a certain extent the mark of a real +hilarity. People must be very happy to be so easily amused.</p> + +<p>In the case of what is called Browning's obscurity, the question is +somewhat more difficult to handle. Many people have supposed Browning +to be profound because he was obscure, and many other people, hardly +less mistaken, have supposed him to be obscure because he was +profound. He was frequently profound, he was occasionally obscure, but +as a matter <a name="Page_155"></a>of fact the two have little or nothing to do with each +other. Browning's dark and elliptical mode of speech, like his love of +the grotesque, was simply a characteristic of his, a trick of is +temperament, and had little or nothing to do with whether what he was +expressing was profound or superficial. Suppose, for example, that a +person well read in English poetry but unacquainted with Browning's +style were earnestly invited to consider the following verse:—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"Hobbs hints blue—straight he turtle eats.<br /> +<span class="i2">Nobbs prints blue—claret crowns his cup.</span> +Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats—<br /> +<span class="i2">Both gorge. Who fished the murex up?</span> +What porridge had John Keats?"</p></div> + +<p>The individual so confronted would say without hesitation that it must +indeed be an abstruse and indescribable thought which could only be +conveyed by remarks so completely disconnected. But the point of the +matter is that the thought contained in this amazing verse is not +abstruse or philosophical at all, but is a perfectly ordinary and +straightforward comment, which any one might have made upon an obvious +fact of life. The whole verse of course begins to explain itself, if +we know the meaning of the word "murex," which is the name of a +sea-shell, out of which was made the celebrated blue dye of Tyre. The +poet takes this blue dye as a simile for a new fashion in literature, +and points out that Hobbs, Nobbs, etc., obtain fame and comfort by +merely using the dye from the shell; and adds the perfectly natural +comment:—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"... Who fished the murex up?<br /> +What porridge had John Keats?"</p></div><a name="Page_156"></a> + +<p>So that the verse is not subtle, and was not meant to be subtle, but +is a perfectly casual piece of sentiment at the end of a light poem. +Browning is not obscure because he has such deep things to say, any +more than he is grotesque because he has such new things to say. He is +both of these things primarily, because he likes to express himself in +a particular manner. The manner is as natural to him as a man's +physical voice, and it is abrupt, sketchy, allusive, and full of gaps. +Here comes in the fundamental difference between Browning and such a +writer as George Meredith, with whom the Philistine satirist would so +often in the matter of complexity class him. The works of George +Meredith are, as it were, obscure even when we know what they mean. +They deal with nameless emotions, fugitive sensations, subconscious +certainties and uncertainties, and it really requires a somewhat +curious and unfamiliar mode of speech to indicate the presence of +these. But the great part of Browning's actual sentiments, and almost +all the finest and most literary of them, are perfectly plain and +popular and eternal sentiments. Meredith is really a singer producing +strange notes and cadences difficult to follow because of the delicate +rhythm of the song he sings. Browning is simply a great demagogue, +with an impediment in his speech. Or rather, to speak more strictly, +Browning is a man whose excitement for the glory of the obvious is so +great that his speech becomes disjointed and precipitate: he becomes +eccentric through his advocacy of the ordinary, and goes mad for the +love of sanity.</p> + +<p>If Browning and George Meredith were each describing the same act, +they might both be obscure, <a name="Page_157"></a>but their obscurities would be entirely +different. Suppose, for instance, they were describing even so prosaic +and material an act as a man being knocked downstairs by another man +to whom he had given the lie, Meredith's description would refer to +something which an ordinary observer would not see, or at least could +not describe. It might be a sudden sense of anarchy in the brain of +the assaulter, or a stupefaction and stunned serenity in that of the +object of the assault. He might write, "Wainwood's 'Men vary in +veracity,' brought the baronet's arm up. He felt the doors of his +brain burst, and Wainwood a swift rushing of himself through air +accompanied with a clarity as of the annihilated." Meredith, in other +words, would speak queerly because he was describing queer mental +experiences. But Browning might simply be describing the material +incident of the man being knocked downstairs, and his description +would run:—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"What then? 'You lie' and doormat below stairs<br /> +Takes bump from back."</p></div> + +<p>This is not subtlety, but merely a kind of insane swiftness. Browning +is not like Meredith, anxious to pause and examine the sensations of +the combatants, nor does he become obscure through this anxiety. He is +only so anxious to get his man to the bottom of the stairs quickly +that he leaves out about half the story.</p> + +<p>Many who could understand that ruggedness might be an artistic +quality, would decisively, and in most cases rightly, deny that +obscurity could under any conceivable circumstances be an artistic +quality. But here again Browning's work requires a somewhat more +cautious and sympathetic analysis. There is a certain <a name="Page_158"></a>kind of +fascination, a strictly artistic fascination, which arises from a +matter being hinted at in such a way as to leave a certain tormenting +uncertainty even at the end. It is well sometimes to half understand a +poem in the same manner that we half understand the world. One of the +deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will +suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping +meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered +something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a +prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain +poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed +the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but +in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.</p> + +<p>But in truth it is very difficult to keep pace with all the strange +and unclassified artistic merits of Browning. He was always trying +experiments; sometimes he failed, producing clumsy and irritating +metres, top-heavy and over-concentrated thought. Far more often he +triumphed, producing a crowd of boldly designed poems, every one of +which taken separately might have founded an artistic school. But +whether successful or unsuccessful, he never ceased from his fierce +hunt after poetic novelty. He never became a conservative. The last +book he published in his life-time, <i>Parleyings with Certain People of +Importance in their Day</i>, was a new poem, and more revolutionary than +<i>Paracelsus</i>. This is the true light in which to regard Browning as an +artist. He had determined to leave no spot of the cosmos unadorned by +his poetry which he could find it possible to adorn. An admirable +example can be found in that splendid poem "Childe<a name="Page_159"></a> Roland to the Dark +Tower came." It is the hint of an entirely new and curious type of +poetry, the poetry of the shabby and hungry aspect of the earth +itself. Daring poets who wished to escape from conventional gardens +and orchards had long been in the habit of celebrating the poetry of +rugged and gloomy landscapes, but Browning is not content with this. +He insists upon celebrating the poetry of mean landscapes. That sense +of scrubbiness in nature, as of a man unshaved, had never been +conveyed with this enthusiasm and primeval gusto before.</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"If there pushed any ragged thistle-stalk<br /> +<span class="i2">Above its mates, the head was chopped; the bents</span> +<span class="i2">Were jealous else. What made those holes and rents</span> +In the dock's harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to baulk<br /> +All hope of greenness? 'tis a brute must walk<br /> +<span class="i2">Pashing their life out, with a brute's intents."</span></p></div> + +<p>This is a perfect realisation of that eerie sentiment which comes upon +us, not so often among mountains and water-falls, as it does on some +half-starved common at twilight, or in walking down some grey mean +street. It is the song of the beauty of refuse; and Browning was the +first to sing it. Oddly enough it has been one of the poems about +which most of those pedantic and trivial questions have been asked, +which are asked invariably by those who treat Browning as a science +instead of a poet, "What does the poem of 'Childe Roland' mean?" The +only genuine answer to this is, "What does anything mean?" Does the +earth mean nothing? Do grey skies and wastes covered with thistles +mean nothing? Does an old horse turned out to graze mean nothing? If +it does, there is but one further truth to be added—that everything +means nothing.</p><a name="Page_160"></a> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<a name="CHAPTER_VII"></a><h2>CHAPTER VII</h2> + +<h2><i>THE RING AND THE BOOK</i></h2> + +<p>When we have once realised the great conception of the plan of <i>The +Ring and the Book</i>, the studying of a single matter from nine +different stand-points, it becomes exceedingly interesting to notice +what these stand-points are; what figures Browning has selected as +voicing the essential and distinct versions of the case. One of the +ablest and most sympathetic of all the critics of Browning, Mr. +Augustine Birrell, has said in one place that the speeches of the two +advocates in <i>The Ring and the Book</i> will scarcely be very interesting +to the ordinary reader. However that may be, there can be little doubt +that a great number of the readers of Browning think them beside the +mark and adventitious. But it is exceedingly dangerous to say that +anything in Browning is irrelevant or unnecessary. We are apt to go on +thinking so until some mere trifle puts the matter in a new light, and +the detail that seemed meaningless springs up as almost the central +pillar of the structure. In the successive monologues of his poem, +Browning is endeavouring to depict the various strange ways in which a +fact gets itself presented to the world. In every question there are +partisans who bring cogent and convincing arguments for the right +side; there are also partisans who bring <a name="Page_161"></a>cogent and convincing +arguments for the wrong side. But over and above these, there does +exist in every great controversy a class of more or less official +partisans who are continually engaged in defending each cause by +entirely inappropriate arguments. They do not know the real good that +can be said for the good cause, nor the real good that can be said for +the bad one. They are represented by the animated, learned, eloquent, +ingenious, and entirely futile and impertinent arguments of Juris +Doctor Bottinius and Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis. These two men +brilliantly misrepresent, not merely each other's cause, but their own +cause. The introduction of them is one of the finest and most artistic +strokes in <i>The Ring and the Book</i>.</p> + +<p>We can see the matter best by taking an imaginary parallel. Suppose +that a poet of the type of Browning lived some centuries hence and +found in some <i>cause célèbre</i> of our day, such as the Parnell +Commission, an opportunity for a work similar in its design to <i>The +Ring and the Book</i>. The first monologue, which would be called +"Half-London," would be the arguments of an ordinary educated and +sensible Unionist who believed that there really was evidence that the +Nationalist movement in Ireland was rooted in crime and public panic. +The "Otherhalf-London" would be the utterance of an ordinary educated +and sensible Home Ruler, who thought that in the main Nationalism was +one distinct symptom, and crime another, of the same poisonous and +stagnant problem. The "Tertium Quid" would be some detached +intellectual, committed neither to Nationalism nor to Unionism, +possibly Mr. Bernard Shaw, who would make a very entertaining Browning +<a name="Page_162"></a>monologue. Then of course would come the speeches of the great actors +in the drama, the icy anger of Parnell, the shuffling apologies of +Pigott. But we should feel that the record was incomplete without +another touch which in practice has so much to do with the confusion +of such a question. Bottinius and Hyacinthus de Archangelis, the two +cynical professional pleaders, with their transparent assumptions and +incredible theories of the case, would be represented by two party +journalists; one of whom was ready to base his case either on the fact +that Parnell was a Socialist or an Anarchist, or an Atheist or a Roman +Catholic; and the other of whom was ready to base his case on the +theory that Lord Salisbury hated Parnell or was in league with him, or +had never heard of him, or anything else that was remote from the +world of reality. These are the kind of little touches for which we +must always be on the look-out in Browning. Even if a digression, or a +simile, or a whole scene in a play, seems to have no point or value, +let us wait a little and give it a chance. He very seldom wrote +anything that did not mean a great deal.</p> + +<p>It is sometimes curious to notice how a critic, possessing no little +cultivation and fertility, will, in speaking of a work of art, let +fall almost accidentally some apparently trivial comment, which +reveals to us with an instantaneous and complete mental illumination +the fact that he does not, so far as that work of art is concerned, in +the smallest degree understand what he is talking about. He may have +intended to correct merely some minute detail of the work he is +studying, but that single movement is enough to blow him and all his +diplomas into the air. These are the sensations <a name="Page_163"></a>with which the true +Browningite will regard the criticism made by so many of Browning's +critics and biographers about <i>The Ring and the Book</i>. That criticism +was embodied by one of them in the words "the theme looked at +dispassionately is unworthy of the monument in which it is entombed +for eternity." Now this remark shows at once that the critic does not +know what <i>The Ring and the Book</i> means. We feel about it as we should +feel about a man who said that the plot of <i>Tristram Shandy</i> was not +well constructed, or that the women in Rossetti's pictures did not +look useful and industrious. A man who has missed the fact that +<i>Tristram Shandy is</i> a game of digressions, that the whole book is a +kind of practical joke to cheat the reader out of a story, simply has +not read <i>Tristram Shandy</i> at all. The man who objects to the Rossetti +pictures because they depict a sad and sensuous day-dream, objects to +their existing at all. And any one who objects to Browning writing his +huge epic round a trumpery and sordid police-case has in reality +missed the whole length and breadth of the poet's meaning. The essence +of <i>The Ring and the Book</i> is that it is the great epic of the +nineteenth century, because it is the great epic of the enormous +importance of small things. The supreme difference that divides <i>The +Ring and the Book</i> from all the great poems of similar length and +largeness of design is precisely the fact that all these are about +affairs commonly called important, and <i>The Ring and the Book</i> is +about an affair commonly called contemptible. Homer says, "I will show +you the relations between man and heaven as exhibited in a great +legend of love and war, which shall contain the mightiest of all +<a name="Page_164"></a>mortal warriors, and the most beautiful of all mortal women." The +author of the Book of Job says, "I will show you the relations between +man and heaven by a tale of primeval sorrows and the voice of God out +of a whirlwind." Virgil says, "I will show you the relations of man to +heaven by the tale of the origin of the greatest people and the +founding of the most wonderful city in the world." Dante says, "I will +show you the relations of man to heaven by uncovering the very +machinery of the spiritual universe, and letting you hear, as I have +heard, the roaring of the mills of God." Milton says, "I will show you +the relations of man to heaven by telling you of the very beginning of +all things, and the first shaping of the thing that is evil in the +first twilight of time." Browning says, "I will show you the relations +of man to heaven by telling you a story out of a dirty Italian book of +criminal trials from which I select one of the meanest and most +completely forgotten." Until we have realised this fundamental idea in +<i>The Ring and the Book</i> all criticism is misleading.</p> + +<p>In this Browning is, of course, the supreme embodiment of his time. +The characteristic of the modern movements <i>par excellence</i> is the +apotheosis of the insignificant. Whether it be the school of poetry +which sees more in one cowslip or clover-top than in forests and +waterfalls, or the school of fiction which finds something +indescribably significant in the pattern of a hearth-rug, or the tint +of a man's tweed coat, the tendency is the same. Maeterlinck stricken +still and wondering by a deal door half open, or the light shining out +of a window at night; Zola filling note-books with the medical +significance of the twitching <a name="Page_165"></a>of a man's toes, or the loss of his +appetite; Whitman counting the grass and the heart-shaped leaves of +the lilac; Mr. George Gissing lingering fondly over the third-class +ticket and the dilapidated umbrella; George Meredith seeing a soul's +tragedy in a phrase at the dinner-table; Mr. Bernard Shaw filling +three pages with stage directions to describe a parlour; all these +men, different in every other particular, are alike in this, that they +have ceased to believe certain things to be important and the rest to +be unimportant. Significance is to them a wild thing that may leap +upon them from any hiding-place. They have all become terribly +impressed with and a little bit alarmed at the mysterious powers of +small things. Their difference from the old epic poets is the whole +difference between an age that fought with dragons and an age that +fights with microbes.</p> + +<p>This tide of the importance of small things is flowing so steadily +around us upon every side to-day, that we do not sufficiently realise +that if there was one man in English literary history who might with +justice be called its fountain and origin, that man was Robert +Browning. When Browning arose, literature was entirely in the hands of +the Tennysonian poet. The Tennysonian poet does indeed mention +trivialities, but he mentions them when he wishes to speak trivially; +Browning mentions trivialities when he wishes to speak sensationally. +Now this sense of the terrible importance of detail was a sense which +may be said to have possessed Browning in the emphatic manner of a +demoniac possession. Sane as he was, this one feeling might have +driven him to a condition not far <a name="Page_166"></a>from madness. Any room that he was +sitting in glared at him with innumerable eyes and mouths gaping with +a story. There was sometimes no background and no middle distance in +his mind. A human face and the pattern on the wall behind it came +forward with equally aggressive clearness. It may be repeated, that if +ever he who had the strongest head in the world had gone mad, it would +have been through this turbulent democracy of things. If he looked at +a porcelain vase or an old hat, a cabbage, or a puppy at play, each +began to be bewitched with the spell of a kind of fairyland of +philosophers: the vase, like the jar in the <i>Arabian Nights</i>, to send +up a smoke of thoughts and shapes; the hat to produce souls, as a +conjuror's hat produces rabbits; the cabbage to swell and overshadow +the earth, like the Tree of Knowledge; and the puppy to go off at a +scamper along the road to the end of the world. Any one who has read +Browning's longer poems knows how constantly a simile or figure of +speech is selected, not among the large, well-recognised figures +common in poetry, but from some dusty corner of experience, and how +often it is characterised by smallness and a certain quaint exactitude +which could not have been found in any more usual example. Thus, for +instance, <i>Prince Hohenstiel—Schwangau</i> explains the psychological +meaning of all his restless and unscrupulous activities by comparing +them to the impulse which has just led him, even in the act of +talking, to draw a black line on the blotting-paper exactly, so as to +connect two separate blots that were already there. This queer example +is selected as the best possible instance of a certain fundamental +restlessness and <a name="Page_167"></a>desire to add a touch to things in the spirit of +man. I have no doubt whatever that Browning thought of the idea after +doing the thing himself, and sat in a philosophical trance staring at +a piece of inked blotting-paper, conscious that at that moment, and in +that insignificant act, some immemorial monster of the mind, nameless +from the beginning of the world, had risen to the surface of the +spiritual sea.</p> + +<p>It is therefore the very essence of Browning's genius, and the very +essence of <i>The Ring and the Book</i>, that it should be the enormous +multiplication of a small theme. It is the extreme of idle criticism +to complain that the story is a current and sordid story, for the +whole object of the poem is to show what infinities of spiritual good +and evil a current and sordid story may contain. When once this is +realised, it explains at one stroke the innumerable facts about the +work. It explains, for example, Browning's detailed and picturesque +account of the glorious dust-bin of odds and ends for sale, out of +which he picked the printed record of the trial, and his insistence on +its cheapness, its dustiness, its yellow leaves, and its crabbed +Latin. The more soiled and dark and insignificant he can make the text +appear, the better for his ample and gigantic sermon. It explains +again the strictness with which Browning adhered to the facts of the +forgotten intrigue. He was playing the game of seeing how much was +really involved in one paltry fragment of fact. To have introduced +large quantities of fiction would not have been sportsmanlike. <i>The +Ring and the Book</i> therefore, to re-capitulate the view arrived at so +far, is the typical epic of our age, because it expresses the richness +of life by taking as a text <a name="Page_168"></a>a poor story. It pays to existence the +highest of all possible compliments—the great compliment which +monarchy paid to mankind—the compliment of selecting from it almost +at random.</p> + +<p>But this is only the first half of the claim of <i>The Ring and the +Book</i> to be the typical epic of modern times. The second half of that +claim, the second respect in which the work is representative of all +modern development, requires somewhat more careful statement. <i>The +Ring and the Book</i> is of course, essentially speaking, a detective +story. Its difference from the ordinary detective story is that it +seeks to establish, not the centre of criminal guilt, but the centre +of spiritual guilt. But it has exactly the same kind of exciting +quality that a detective story has, and a very excellent quality it +is. But the element which is important, and which now requires +pointing out, is the method by which that centre of spiritual guilt +and the corresponding centre of spiritual rectitude is discovered. In +order to make clear the peculiar character of this method, it is +necessary to begin rather nearer the beginning, and to go back some +little way in literary history.</p> + +<p>I do not know whether anybody, including the editor himself, has ever +noticed a peculiar coincidence which may be found in the arrangement +of the lyrics in Sir Francis Palgrave's <i>Golden Treasury</i>. However +that may be, two poems, each of them extremely well known, are placed +side by side, and their juxtaposition represents one vast revolution +in the poetical manner of looking at things. The first is Goldsmith's +almost too well known<a name="Page_169"></a> + +<div class="poem"><p>"When lovely woman stoops to folly,<br /> +And finds too late that men betray,<br /> +What charm can soothe her melancholy?<br /> +What art can wash her guilt away?"</p></div> + +<p>Immediately afterwards comes, with a sudden and thrilling change of +note, the voice of Burns:—</p> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"><p>"Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon,<br /> +<span class="i2">How can ye bloom sae fair?</span> +How can ye chant, ye little birds,<br /> +<span class="i2">And I sae fu' of care?</span></p> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<p>Thou'll break my heart, thou bonny bird,<br /> +<span class="i2">That sings upon the bough,</span> +Thou minds me of the happy days<br /> +<span class="i2">When my fause Love was true."</span></p></div></div> + +<p>A man might read those two poems a great many times without happening +to realise that they are two poems on exactly the same subject—the +subject of a trusting woman deserted by a man. And the whole +difference—the difference struck by the very first note of the voice +of any one who reads them—is this fundamental difference, that +Goldsmith's words are spoken about a certain situation, and Burns's +words are spoken in that situation.</p> + +<p>In the transition from one of these lyrics to the other, we have a +vital change in the conception of the functions of the poet; a change +of which Burns was in many ways the beginning, of which Browning, in a +manner that we shall see presently, was the culmination.</p> + +<p>Goldsmith writes fully and accurately in the tradition of the old +historic idea of what a poet was. The poet, the <i>vates</i>, was the +supreme and absolute critic of human existence, the chorus in the +human drama; he <a name="Page_170"></a>was, to employ two words, which when analysed are the +same word, either a spectator or a seer. He took a situation, such as +the situation of a woman deserted by a man before-mentioned, and he +gave, as Goldsmith gives, his own personal and definite decision upon +it, entirely based upon general principles, and entirely from the +outside. Then, as in the case of <i>The Golden Treasury</i>, he has no +sooner given judgment than there comes a bitter and confounding cry +out of the very heart of the situation itself, which tells us things +which would have been quite left out of account by the poet of the +general rule. No one, for example, but a person who knew something of +the inside of agony would have introduced that touch of the rage of +the mourner against the chattering frivolity of nature, "Thou'll break +my heart, thou bonny bird." We find and could find no such touch in +Goldsmith. We have to arrive at the conclusion therefore, that the +<i>vates</i> or poet in his absolute capacity is defied and overthrown by +this new method of what may be called the songs of experience.</p> + +<p>Now Browning, as he appears in <i>The Ring and the Book</i>, represents the +attempt to discover, not the truth in the sense that Goldsmith states +it, but the larger truth which is made up of all the emotional +experiences, such as that rendered by Burns. Browning, like Goldsmith, +seeks ultimately to be just and impartial, but he does it by +endeavouring to feel acutely every kind of partiality. Goldsmith +stands apart from all the passions of the case, and Browning includes +them all. If Browning were endeavouring to do strict justice in a case +like that of the deserted lady by the banks of Doon, he would not +touch or <a name="Page_171"></a>modify in the smallest particular the song as Burns sang it, +but he would write other songs, perhaps equally pathetic. A lyric or a +soliloquy would convince us suddenly by the mere pulse of its +language, that there was some pathos in the other actors in the drama; +some pathos, for example, in a weak man, conscious that in a +passionate ignorance of life he had thrown away his power of love, +lacking the moral courage to throw his prospects after it. We should +be reminded again that there was some pathos in the position, let us +say, of the seducer's mother, who had built all her hopes upon +developments which a mésalliance would overthrow, or in the position +of some rival lover, stricken to the ground with the tragedy in which +he had not even the miserable comfort of a <i>locus standi</i>. All these +characters in the story, Browning would realise from their own +emotional point of view before he gave judgment. The poet in his +ancient office held a kind of terrestrial day of judgment, and gave +men halters and haloes; Browning gives men neither halter nor halo, he +gives them voices. This is indeed the most bountiful of all the +functions of the poet, that he gives men words, for which men from the +beginning of the world have starved more than for bread.</p> + +<p>Here then we have the second great respect in which <i>The Ring and the +Book</i> is the great epic of the age. It is the great epic of the age, +because it is the expression of the belief, it might almost be said, +of the discovery, that no man ever lived upon this earth without +possessing a point of view. No one ever lived who had not a little +more to say for himself than any formal system of justice was likely +to say for him. It is scarcely necessary to point out how entirely the +<a name="Page_172"></a>application of this principle would revolutionise the old heroic +epic, in which the poet decided absolutely the moral relations and +moral value of the characters. Suppose, for example, that Homer had +written the <i>Odyssey</i> on the principle of <i>The Ring and the Book</i>, how +disturbing, how weird an experience it would be to read the story from +the point of view of Antinous! Without contradicting a single material +fact, without telling a single deliberate lie, the narrative would so +change the whole world around us, that we should scarcely know we were +dealing with the same place and people. The calm face of Penelope +would, it may be, begin to grow meaner before our eyes, like a face +changing in a dream. She would begin to appear as a fickle and selfish +woman, passing falsely as a widow, and playing a double game between +the attentions of foolish but honourable young men, and the fitful +appearances of a wandering and good-for-nothing sailor-husband; a man +prepared to act that most well-worn of melodramatic rôles, the +conjugal bully and blackmailer, the man who uses marital rights as an +instrument for the worse kind of wrongs. Or, again, if we had the +story of the fall of King Arthur told from the stand-point of Mordred, +it would only be a matter of a word or two; in a turn, in the +twinkling of an eye, we should find ourselves sympathising with the +efforts of an earnest young man to frustrate the profligacies of +high-placed paladins like Lancelot and Tristram, and ultimately +discovering, with deep regret but unshaken moral courage, that there +was no way to frustrate them, except by overthrowing the cold and +priggish and incapable egotist who ruled the country, and the whole +artificial and bombastic schemes which <a name="Page_173"></a>bred these moral evils. It +might be that in spite of this new view of the case, it would +ultimately appear that Ulysses was really right and Arthur was really +right, just as Browning makes it ultimately appear that Pompilia was +really right. But any one can see the enormous difference in scope and +difficulty between the old epic which told the whole story from one +man's point of view, and the new epic which cannot come to its +conclusion, until it has digested and assimilated views as paradoxical +and disturbing as our imaginary defence of Antinous and apologia of +Mordred.</p> + +<p>One of the most important steps ever taken in the history of the world +is this step, with all its various aspects, literary, political, and +social, which is represented by <i>The Ring and the Book</i>. It is the +step of deciding, in the face of many serious dangers and +disadvantages, to let everybody talk. The poet of the old epic is the +poet who had learnt to speak; Browning in the new epic is the poet who +has learnt to listen. This listening to truth and error, to heretics, +to fools, to intellectual bullies, to desperate partisans, to mere +chatterers, to systematic poisoners of the mind, is the hardest lesson +that humanity has ever been set to learn. <i>The Ring and the Book</i> is +the embodiment of this terrible magnanimity and patience. It is the +epic of free speech.</p> + +<p>Free speech is an idea which has at present all the unpopularity of a +truism; so that we tend to forget that it was not so very long ago +that it had the more practical unpopularity which attaches to a new +truth. Ingratitude is surely the chief of the intellectual sins of +man. He takes his political benefits for granted, <a name="Page_174"></a>just as he takes +the skies and the seasons for granted. He considers the calm of a city +street a thing as inevitable as the calm of a forest clearing, whereas +it is only kept in peace by a sustained stretch and effort similar to +that which keeps up a battle or a fencing match. Just as we forget +where we stand in relation to natural phenomena, so we forget it in +relation to social phenomena. We forget that the earth is a star, and +we forget that free speech is a paradox.</p> + +<p>It is not by any means self-evident upon the face of it that an +institution like the liberty of speech is right or just. It is not +natural or obvious to let a man utter follies and abominations which +you believe to be bad for mankind any more than it is natural or +obvious to let a man dig up a part of the public road, or infect half +a town with typhoid fever. The theory of free speech, that truth is so +much larger and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, that it +is very much better at all costs to hear every one's account of it, is +a theory which has been justified upon the whole by experiment, but +which remains a very daring and even a very surprising theory. It is +really one of the great discoveries of the modern time; but, once +admitted, it is a principle that does not merely affect politics, but +philosophy, ethics, and finally poetry.</p> + +<p>Browning was upon the whole the first poet to apply the principle to +poetry. He perceived that if we wish to tell the truth about a human +drama, we must not tell it merely like a melodrama, in which the +villain is villainous and the comic man is comic. He saw that the +truth had not been told until he had seen in the <a name="Page_175"></a>villain the pure and +disinterested gentleman that most villains firmly believe themselves +to be, or until he had taken the comic man as seriously as it is the +custom of comic men to take themselves. And in this Browning is beyond +all question the founder of the most modern school of poetry. +Everything that was profound, everything, indeed, that was tolerable +in the aesthetes of 1880, and the decadent of 1890, has its ultimate +source in Browning's great conception that every one's point of view +is interesting, even if it be a jaundiced or a blood-shot point of +view. He is at one with the decadents, in holding that it is +emphatically profitable, that it is emphatically creditable, to know +something of the grounds of the happiness of a thoroughly bad man. +Since his time we have indeed been somewhat over-satisfied with the +moods of the burglar, and the pensive lyrics of the receiver of stolen +goods. But Browning, united with the decadents on this point, of the +value of every human testimony, is divided from them sharply and by a +chasm in another equally important point. He held that it is necessary +to listen to all sides of a question in order to discover the truth of +it. But he held that there was a truth to discover. He held that +justice was a mystery, but not, like the decadents, that justice was a +delusion. He held, in other words, the true Browning doctrine, that in +a dispute every one was to a certain extent right; not the decadent +doctrine that in so mad a place as the world, every one must be by the +nature of things wrong.</p> + +<p>Browning's conception of the Universe can hardly be better expressed +than in the old and pregnant fable about the five blind men who went +to visit an elephant.<a name="Page_176"></a> One of them seized its trunk, and asserted that +an elephant was a kind of serpent; another embraced its leg, and was +ready to die for the belief that an elephant was a kind of tree. In +the same way to the man who leaned against its side it was a wall; to +the man who had hold of its tail a rope, and to the man who ran upon +its tusk a particularly unpleasant kind of spear. This, as I have +said, is the whole theology and philosophy of Browning. But he differs +from the psychological decadents and impressionists in this important +point, that he thinks that although the blind men found out very +little about the elephant, the elephant was an elephant, and was there +all the time. The blind men formed mistaken theories because an +elephant is a thing with a very curious shape. And Browning firmly +believed that the Universe was a thing with a very curious shape +indeed. No blind poet could even imagine an elephant without +experience, and no man, however great and wise, could dream of God and +not die. But there is a vital distinction between the mystical view of +Browning, that the blind men are misled because there is so much for +them to learn, and the purely impressionist and agnostic view of the +modern poet, that the blind men were misled because there was nothing +for them to learn. To the impressionist artist of our time we are not +blind men groping after an elephant and naming it a tree or a serpent. +We are maniacs, isolated in separate cells, and dreaming of trees and +serpents without reason and without result.</p><a name="Page_177"></a> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<a name="CHAPTER_VIII"></a><h2>CHAPTER VIII</h2> + +<h2>THE PHILOSOPHY OF BROWNING</h2> + + +<p>The great fault of most of the appreciation of Browning lies in the +fact that it conceives the moral and artistic value of his work to lie +in what is called "the message of Browning," or "the teaching of +Browning," or, in other words, in the mere opinions of Browning. Now +Browning had opinions, just as he had a dress-suit or a vote for +Parliament. He did not hesitate to express these opinions any more +than he would have hesitated to fire off a gun, or open an umbrella, +if he had possessed those articles, and realised their value. For +example, he had, as his students and eulogists have constantly stated, +certain definite opinions about the spiritual function of love, or the +intellectual basis of Christianity. Those opinions were very striking +and very solid, as everything was which came out of Browning's mind. +His two great theories of the universe may be expressed in two +comparatively parallel phrases. The first was what may be called the +hope which lies in the imperfection of man. The characteristic poem of +"Old Pictures in Florence" expresses very quaintly and beautifully the +idea that some hope may always be based on deficiency itself; in other +words, that in so far as man is a one-legged or a one-eyed creature, +<a name="Page_178"></a>there is something about his appearance which indicates that he +should have another leg and another eye. The poem suggests admirably +that such a sense of incompleteness may easily be a great advance upon +a sense of completeness, that the part may easily and obviously be +greater than the whole. And from this Browning draws, as he is fully +justified in drawing, a definite hope for immortality and the larger +scale of life. For nothing is more certain than that though this world +is the only world that we have known, or of which we could even dream, +the fact does remain that we have named it "a strange world." In other +words, we have certainly felt that this world did not explain itself, +that something in its complete and patent picture has been omitted. +And Browning was right in saying that in a cosmos where incompleteness +implies completeness, life implies immortality. This then was the +first of the doctrines or opinions of Browning: the hope that lies in +the imperfection of man. The second of the great Browning doctrines +requires some audacity to express. It can only be properly stated as +the hope that lies in the imperfection of God. That is to say, that +Browning held that sorrow and self-denial, if they were the burdens of +man, were also his privileges. He held that these stubborn sorrows and +obscure valours might, to use a yet more strange expression, have +provoked the envy of the Almighty. If man has self-sacrifice and God +has none, then man has in the Universe a secret and blasphemous +superiority. And this tremendous story of a Divine jealousy Browning +reads into the story of the Crucifixion. If the Creator had not been +crucified He would not have been as <a name="Page_179"></a>great as thousands of wretched +fanatics among His own creatures. It is needless to insist upon this +point; any one who wishes to read it splendidly expressed need only be +referred to "Saul." But these are emphatically the two main doctrines +or opinions of Browning which I have ventured to characterise roughly +as the hope in the imperfection of man, and more boldly as the hope in +the imperfection of God. They are great thoughts, thoughts written by +a great man, and they raise noble and beautiful doubts on behalf of +faith which the human spirit will never answer or exhaust. But about +them in connection with Browning there nevertheless remains something +to be added.</p> + +<p>Browning was, as most of his upholders and all his opponents say, an +optimist. His theory, that man's sense of his own imperfection implies +a design of perfection, is a very good argument for optimism. His +theory that man's knowledge of and desire for self-sacrifice implies +God's knowledge of and desire for self-sacrifice is another very good +argument for optimism. But any one will make the deepest and blackest +and most incurable mistake about Browning who imagines that his +optimism was founded on any arguments for optimism. Because he had a +strong intellect, because he had a strong power of conviction, he +conceived and developed and asserted these doctrines of the +incompleteness of Man and the sacrifice of Omnipotence. But these +doctrines were the symptoms of his optimism, they were not its origin. +It is surely obvious that no one can be argued into optimism since no +one can be argued into happiness. Browning's optimism was not founded +on <a name="Page_180"></a>opinions which were the work of Browning, but on life which was +the work of God. One of Browning's most celebrated biographers has +said that something of Browning's theology must be put down to his +possession of a good digestion. The remark was, of course, like all +remarks touching the tragic subject of digestion, intended to be funny +and to convey some kind of doubt or diminution touching the value of +Browning's faith. But if we examine the matter with somewhat greater +care we shall see that it is indeed a thorough compliment to that +faith. Nobody, strictly speaking, is happier on account of his +digestion. He is happy because he is so constituted as to forget all +about it. Nobody really is convulsed with delight at the thought of +the ingenious machinery which he possesses inside him; the thing which +delights him is simply the full possession of his own human body. I +cannot in the least understand why a good digestion—that is, a good +body—should not be held to be as mystic a benefit as a sunset or the +first flower of spring. But there is about digestion this peculiarity +throwing a great light on human pessimism, that it is one of the many +things which we never speak of as existing until they go wrong. We +should think it ridiculous to speak of a man as suffering from his +boots if we meant that he had really no boots. But we do speak of a +man suffering from digestion when we mean that he suffers from a lack +of digestion. In the same way we speak of a man suffering from nerves +when we mean that his nerves are more inefficient than any one else's +nerves. If any one wishes to see how grossly language can degenerate, +he need only compare the old optimistic <a name="Page_181"></a>use of the word nervous, +which we employ in speaking of a nervous grip, with the new +pessimistic use of the word, which we employ in speaking of a nervous +manner. And as digestion is a good thing which sometimes goes wrong, +as nerves are good things which sometimes go wrong, so existence +itself in the eyes of Browning and all the great optimists is a good +thing which sometimes goes wrong. He held himself as free to draw his +inspiration from the gift of good health as from the gift of learning +or the gift of fellowship. But he held that such gifts were in life +innumerable and varied, and that every man, or at least almost every +man, possessed some window looking out on this essential excellence of +things.</p> + +<p>Browning's optimism then, since we must continue to use this somewhat +inadequate word, was a result of experience—experience which is for +some mysterious reason generally understood in the sense of sad or +disillusioning experience. An old gentleman rebuking a little boy for +eating apples in a tree is in the common conception the type of +experience. If he really wished to be a type of experience he would +climb up the tree himself and proceed to experience the apples. +Browning's faith was founded upon joyful experience, not in the sense +that he selected his joyful experiences and ignored his painful ones, +but in the sense that his joyful experiences selected themselves and +stood out in his memory by virtue of their own extraordinary intensity +of colour. He did not use experience in that mean and pompous sense in +which it is used by the worldling advanced in years. He rather used it +in that healthier and more joyful sense in which it is used at +revivalist meetings. In the<a name="Page_182"></a> Salvation Army a man's experiences mean +his experiences of the mercy of God, and to Browning the meaning was +much the same. But the revivalists' confessions deal mostly with +experiences of prayer and praise; Browning's dealt pre-eminently with +what may be called his own subject, the experiences of love.</p> + +<p>And this quality of Browning's optimism, the quality of detail, is +also a very typical quality. Browning's optimism is of that ultimate +and unshakeable order that is founded upon the absolute sight, and +sound, and smell, and handling of things. If a man had gone up to +Browning and asked him with all the solemnity of the eccentric, "Do +you think life is worth living?" it is interesting to conjecture what +his answer might have been. If he had been for the moment under the +influence of the orthodox rationalistic deism of the theologian he +would have said, "Existence is justified by its manifest design, its +manifest adaptation of means to ends," or, in other words, "Existence +is justified by its completeness." If, on the other hand, he had been +influenced by his own serious intellectual theories he would have +said, "Existence is justified by its air of growth and doubtfulness," +or, in other words, "Existence is justified by its incompleteness." +But if he had not been influenced in his answer either by the accepted +opinions, or by his own opinions, but had simply answered the question +"Is life worth living?" with the real, vital answer that awaited it in +his own soul, he would have said as likely as not, "Crimson toadstools +in Hampshire." Some plain, glowing picture of this sort left on his +mind would be his real verdict on what the universe had meant to him. +To his traditions hope was traced to <a name="Page_183"></a>order, to his speculations hope +was traced to disorder. But to Browning himself hope was traced to +something like red toadstools. His mysticism was not of that idle and +wordy type which believes that a flower is symbolical of life; it was +rather of that deep and eternal type which believes that life, a mere +abstraction, is symbolical of a flower. With him the great concrete +experiences which God made always come first; his own deductions and +speculations about them always second. And in this point we find the +real peculiar inspiration of his very original poems.</p> + +<p>One of the very few critics who seem to have got near to the actual +secret of Browning's optimism is Mr. Santayana in his most interesting +book <i>Interpretations of Poetry and Religion</i>. He, in +contradistinction to the vast mass of Browning's admirers, had +discovered what was the real root virtue of Browning's poetry; and the +curious thing is, that having discovered that root virtue, he thinks +it is a vice. He describes the poetry of Browning most truly as the +poetry of barbarism, by which he means the poetry which utters the +primeval and indivisible emotions. "For the barbarian is the man who +regards his passions as their own excuse for being, who does not +domesticate them either by understanding their cause, or by conceiving +their ideal goal." Whether this be or be not a good definition of the +barbarian, it is an excellent and perfect definition of the poet. It +might, perhaps, be suggested that barbarians, as a matter of fact, are +generally highly traditional and respectable persons who would not put +a feather wrong in their head-gear, and who generally have very few +feelings and think very little about those they have. It is when we +have <a name="Page_184"></a>grown to a greater and more civilised stature that we begin to +realise and put to ourselves intellectually the great feelings that +sleep in the depths of us. Thus it is that the literature of our day +has steadily advanced towards a passionate simplicity, and we become +more primeval as the world grows older, until Whitman writes huge and +chaotic psalms to express the sensations of a schoolboy out fishing, +and Maeterlinck embodies in symbolic dramas the feelings of a child in +the dark.</p> + +<p>Thus, Mr. Santayana is, perhaps, the most valuable of all the Browning +critics. He has gone out of his way to endeavour to realise what it is +that repels him in Browning, and he has discovered the fault which +none of Browning's opponents have discovered. And in this he has +discovered the merit which none of Browning's admirers have +discovered. Whether the quality be a good or a bad quality, Mr. +Santayana is perfectly right. The whole of Browning's poetry does rest +upon primitive feeling; and the only comment to be added is that so +does the whole of every one else's poetry. Poetry deals entirely with +those great eternal and mainly forgotten wishes which are the ultimate +despots of existence. Poetry presents things as they are to our +emotions, not as they are to any theory, however plausible, or any +argument, however conclusive. If love is in truth a glorious vision, +poetry will say that it is a glorious vision, and no philosophers will +persuade poetry to say that it is the exaggeration of the instinct of +sex. If bereavement is a bitter and continually aching thing, poetry +will say that it is so, and no philosophers will persuade poetry to +say that it is an <a name="Page_185"></a>evolutionary stage of great biological value. And +here comes in the whole value and object of poetry, that it is +perpetually challenging all systems with the test of a terrible +sincerity. The practical value of poetry is that it is realistic upon +a point upon which nothing else can be realistic, the point of the +actual desires of man. Ethics is the science of actions, but poetry is +the science of motives. Some actions are ugly, and therefore some +parts of ethics are ugly. But all motives are beautiful, or present +themselves for the moment as beautiful, and therefore all poetry is +beautiful. If poetry deals with the basest matter, with the shedding +of blood for gold, it ought to suggest the gold as well as the blood. +Only poetry can realise motives, because motives are all pictures of +happiness. And the supreme and most practical value of poetry is this, +that in poetry, as in music, a note is struck which expresses beyond +the power of rational statement a condition of mind, and all actions +arise from a condition of mind. Prose can only use a large and clumsy +notation; it can only say that a man is miserable, or that a man is +happy; it is forced to ignore that there are a million diverse kinds +of misery and a million diverse kinds of happiness. Poetry alone, with +the first throb of its metre, can tell us whether the depression is +the kind of depression that drives a man to suicide, or the kind of +depression that drives him to the Tivoli. Poetry can tell us whether +the happiness is the happiness that sends a man to a restaurant, or +the much richer and fuller happiness that sends him to church.</p> + +<p>Now the supreme value of Browning as an optimist lies in this that we +have been examining, that beyond <a name="Page_186"></a>all his conclusions, and deeper than +all his arguments, he was passionately interested in and in love with +existence. If the heavens had fallen, and all the waters of the earth +run with blood, he would still have been interested in existence, if +possible a little more so. He is a great poet of human joy for +precisely the reason of which Mr. Santayana complains: that his +happiness is primal, and beyond the reach of philosophy. He is +something far more convincing, far more comforting, far more +religiously significant than an optimist: he is a happy man.</p> + +<p>This happiness he finds, as every man must find happiness, in his own +way. He does not find the great part of his joy in those matters in +which most poets find felicity. He finds much of it in those matters +in which most poets find ugliness and vulgarity. He is to a +considerable extent the poet of towns. "Do you care for nature much?" +a friend of his asked him. "Yes, a great deal," he said, "but for +human beings a great deal more." Nature, with its splendid and +soothing sanity, has the power of convincing most poets of the +essential worthiness of things. There are few poets who, if they +escaped from the rowdiest waggonette of trippers, could not be quieted +again and exalted by dropping into a small wayside field. The +speciality of Browning is rather that he would have been quieted and +exalted by the waggonette.</p> + +<p>To Browning, probably the beginning and end of all optimism was to be +found in the faces in the street. To him they were all the masks of a +deity, the heads of a hundred-headed Indian god of nature. Each one of +them looked towards some quarter of the heavens, not looked upon by +any other eyes. Each one of them <a name="Page_187"></a>wore some expression, some blend of +eternal joy and eternal sorrow, not to be found in any other +countenance. The sense of the absolute sanctity of human difference +was the deepest of all his senses. He was hungrily interested in all +human things, but it would have been quite impossible to have said of +him that he loved humanity. He did not love humanity but men. His +sense of the difference between one man and another would have made +the thought of melting them into a lump called humanity simply +loathsome and prosaic. It would have been to him like playing four +hundred beautiful airs at once. The mixture would not combine all, it +would lose all. Browning believed that to every man that ever lived +upon this earth had been given a definite and peculiar confidence of +God. Each one of us was engaged on secret service; each one of us had +a peculiar message; each one of us was the founder of a religion. Of +that religion our thoughts, our faces, our bodies, our hats, our +boots, our tastes, our virtues, and even our vices, were more or less +fragmentary and inadequate expressions.</p> + +<p>In the delightful memoirs of that very remarkable man Sir Charles +Gavan Duffy, there is an extremely significant and interesting +anecdote about Browning, the point of which appears to have attracted +very little attention. Duffy was dining with Browning and John +Forster, and happened to make some chance allusion to his own +adherence to the Roman Catholic faith, when Forster remarked, half +jestingly, that he did not suppose that Browning would like him any +the better for that. Browning would seem to have opened his eyes with +some astonishment. He immediately asked why<a name="Page_188"></a> Forster should suppose +him hostile to the Roman Church. Forster and Duffy replied almost +simultaneously, by referring to "Bishop Blougram's Apology," which had +just appeared, and asking whether the portrait of the sophistical and +self-indulgent priest had not been intended for a satire on Cardinal +Wiseman. "Certainly," replied Browning cheerfully, "I intended it for +Cardinal Wiseman, but I don't consider it a satire, there is nothing +hostile about it." This is the real truth which lies at the heart of +what may be called the great sophistical monologues which Browning +wrote in later years. They are not satires or attacks upon their +subjects, they are not even harsh and unfeeling exposures of them. +They are defences; they say or are intended to say the best that can +be said for the persons with whom they deal. But very few people in +this world would care to listen to the real defence of their own +characters. The real defence, the defence which belongs to the Day of +Judgment, would make such damaging admissions, would clear away so +many artificial virtues, would tell such tragedies of weakness and +failure, that a man would sooner be misunderstood and censured by the +world than exposed to that awful and merciless eulogy. One of the most +practically difficult matters which arise from the code of manners and +the conventions of life, is that we cannot properly justify a human +being, because that justification would involve the admission of +things which may not conventionally be admitted. We might explain and +make human and respectable, for example, the conduct of some old +fighting politician, who, for the good of his party and his country, +acceded to measures of which he disapproved; but we cannot, because we +are not <a name="Page_189"></a>allowed to admit that he ever acceded to measures of which he +disapproved. We might touch the life of many dissolute public men with +pathos, and a kind of defeated courage, by telling the truth about the +history of their sins. But we should throw the world into an uproar if +we hinted that they had any. Thus the decencies of civilisation do not +merely make it impossible to revile a man, they make it impossible to +praise him.</p> + +<p>Browning, in such poems as "Bishop Blougram's Apology," breaks this +first mask of goodness in order to break the second mask of evil, and +gets to the real goodness at last; he dethrones a saint in order to +humanise a scoundrel. This is one typical side of the real optimism of +Browning. And there is indeed little danger that such optimism will +become weak and sentimental and popular, the refuge of every idler, +the excuse of every ne'er-do-well. There is little danger that men +will desire to excuse their souls before God by presenting themselves +before men as such snobs as Bishop Blougram, or such dastards as +Sludge the Medium. There is no pessimism, however stern, that is so +stern as this optimism, it is as merciless as the mercy of God.</p> + +<p>It is true that in this, as in almost everything else connected with +Browning's character, the matter cannot be altogether exhausted by +such a generalisation as the above. Browning's was a simple character, +and therefore very difficult to understand, since it was impulsive, +unconscious, and kept no reckoning of its moods. Probably in a great +many cases, the original impulse which led Browning to plan a +soliloquy was a kind of anger mixed with curiosity; possibly the first +<a name="Page_190"></a>charcoal sketch of Blougram was a caricature of a priest. Browning, +as we have said, had prejudices, and had a capacity for anger, and two +of his angriest prejudices were against a certain kind of worldly +clericalism, and against almost every kind of spiritualism. But as he +worked upon the portraits at least, a new spirit began to possess him, +and he enjoyed every spirited and just defence the men could make of +themselves, like triumphant blows in a battle, and towards the end +would come the full revelation, and Browning would stand up in the +man's skin and testify to the man's ideals. However this may be, it is +worth while to notice one very curious error that has arisen in +connection with one of the most famous of these monologues.</p> + +<p>When Robert Browning was engaged in that somewhat obscure quarrel with +the spiritualist Home, it is generally and correctly stated that he +gained a great number of the impressions which he afterwards embodied +in "Mr. Sludge the Medium." The statement so often made, particularly +in the spiritualist accounts of the matter, that Browning himself is +the original of the interlocutor and exposer of Sludge, is of course +merely an example of that reckless reading from which no one has +suffered more than Browning despite his students and societies. The +man to whom Sludge addresses his confession is a Mr. Hiram H. +Horsfall, an American, a patron of spiritualists, and, as it is more +than once suggested, something of a fool. Nor is there the smallest +reason to suppose that Sludge considered as an individual bears any +particular resemblance to Home considered as an individual. But +without doubt "Mr. Sludge the Medium" is a general <a name="Page_191"></a>statement of the +view of spiritualism at which Browning had arrived from his +acquaintance with Home and Home's circle. And about that view of +spiritualism there is something rather peculiar to notice. The poem, +appearing as it did at the time when the intellectual public had just +become conscious of the existence of spiritualism, attracted a great +deal of attention, and aroused a great deal of controversy. The +spiritualists called down thunder upon the head of the poet, whom they +depicted as a vulgar and ribald lampooner who had not only committed +the profanity of sneering at the mysteries of a higher state of life, +but the more unpardonable profanity of sneering at the convictions of +his own wife. The sceptics, on the other hand, hailed the poem with +delight as a blasting exposure of spiritualism, and congratulated the +poet on making himself the champion of the sane and scientific view of +magic. Which of these two parties was right about the question of +attacking the reality of spiritualism it is neither easy nor necessary +to discuss. For the simple truth, which neither of the two parties and +none of the students of Browning seem to have noticed, is that "Mr. +Sludge the Medium" is not an attack upon spiritualism. It would be a +great deal nearer the truth, though not entirely the truth, to call it +a justification of spiritualism. The whole essence of Browning's +method is involved in this matter, and the whole essence of Browning's +method is so vitally misunderstood that to say that "Mr. Sludge the +Medium" is something like a defence of spiritualism will bear on the +face of it the appearance of the most empty and perverse of paradoxes. +But so, when we have <a name="Page_192"></a>comprehended Browning's spirit, the fact will be +found to be.</p> + +<p>The general idea is that Browning must have intended "Sludge" for an +attack on spiritual phenomena, because the medium in that poem is made +a vulgar and contemptible mountebank, because his cheats are quite +openly confessed, and he himself put into every ignominious situation, +detected, exposed, throttled, horsewhipped, and forgiven. To regard +this deduction as sound is to misunderstand Browning at the very start +of every poem that he ever wrote. There is nothing that the man loved +more, nothing that deserves more emphatically to be called a +speciality of Browning, than the utterance of large and noble truths +by the lips of mean and grotesque human beings. In his poetry praise +and wisdom were perfected not only out of the mouths of babes and +sucklings, but out of the mouths of swindlers and snobs. Now what, as +a matter of fact, is the outline and development of the poem of +"Sludge"? The climax of the poem, considered as a work of art, is so +fine that it is quite extraordinary that any one should have missed +the point of it, since it is the whole point of the monologue. Sludge +the Medium has been caught out in a piece of unquestionable trickery, +a piece of trickery for which there is no conceivable explanation or +palliation which will leave his moral character intact. He is +therefore seized with a sudden resolution, partly angry, partly +frightened, and partly humorous, to become absolutely frank, and to +tell the whole truth about himself for the first time not only to his +dupe, but to himself. He excuses himself for the earlier stages of the +trickster's life by a survey <a name="Page_193"></a>of the border-land between truth and +fiction, not by any means a piece of sophistry or cynicism, but a +perfectly fair statement of an ethical difficulty which does exist. +There are some people who think that it must be immoral to admit that +there are any doubtful cases of morality, as if a man should refrain +from discussing the precise boundary at the upper end of the Isthmus +of Panama, for fear the inquiry should shake his belief in the +existence of North America. People of this kind quite consistently +think Sludge to be merely a scoundrel talking nonsense. It may be +remembered that they thought the same thing of Newman. It is actually +supposed, apparently in the current use of words, that casuistry is +the name of a crime; it does not appear to occur to people that +casuistry is a science, and about as much a crime as botany. This +tendency to casuistry in Browning's monologues has done much towards +establishing for him that reputation for pure intellectualism which +has done him so much harm. But casuistry in this sense is not a cold +and analytical thing, but a very warm and sympathetic thing. To know +what combination of excuse might justify a man in manslaughter or +bigamy, is not to have a callous indifference to virtue; it is rather +to have so ardent an admiration for virtue as to seek it in the +remotest desert and the darkest incognito.</p> + +<p>This is emphatically the case with the question of truth and falsehood +raised in "Sludge the Medium." To say that it is sometimes difficult +to tell at what point the romancer turns into the liar is not to state +a cynicism, but a perfectly honest piece of human observation. To +think that such a view involves the <a name="Page_194"></a>negation of honesty is like +thinking that red is green, because the two fade into each other in +the colours of the rainbow. It is really difficult to decide when we +come to the extreme edge of veracity, when and when not it is +permissible to create an illusion. A standing example, for instance, +is the case of the fairy-tales. We think a father entirely pure and +benevolent when he tells his children that a beanstalk grew up into +heaven, and a pumpkin turned into a coach. We should consider that he +lapsed from purity and benevolence if he told his children that in +walking home that evening he had seen a beanstalk grow half-way up the +church, or a pumpkin grow as large as a wheelbarrow. Again, few people +would object to that general privilege whereby it is permitted to a +person in narrating even a true anecdote to work up the climax by any +exaggerative touches which really tend to bring it out. The reason of +this is that the telling of the anecdote has become, like the telling +of the fairy-tale, almost a distinct artistic creation; to offer to +tell a story is in ordinary society like offering to recite or play +the violin. No one denies that a fixed and genuine moral rule could be +drawn up for these cases, but no one surely need be ashamed to admit +that such a rule is not entirely easy to draw up. And when a man like +Sludge traces much of his moral downfall to the indistinctness of the +boundary and the possibility of beginning with a natural extravagance +and ending with a gross abuse, it certainly is not possible to deny +his right to be heard.</p> + +<p>We must recur, however, to the question of the main development of the +Sludge self-analysis. He begins, as we have said, by urging a general +excuse by the <a name="Page_195"></a>fact that in the heat of social life, in the course of +telling tales in the intoxicating presence of sympathisers and +believers, he has slid into falsehood almost before he is aware of it. +So far as this goes, there is truth in his plea. Sludge might indeed +find himself unexpectedly justified if we had only an exact record of +how true were the tales told about Conservatives in an exclusive +circle of Radicals, or the stories told about Radicals in a circle of +indignant Conservatives. But after this general excuse, Sludge goes on +to a perfectly cheerful and unfeeling admission of fraud; this +principal feeling towards his victims is by his own confession a +certain unfathomable contempt for people who are so easily taken in. +He professes to know how to lay the foundations for every species of +personal acquaintanceship, and how to remedy the slight and trivial +slips of making Plato write Greek in naughts and crosses.</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"As I fear, sir, he sometimes used to do<br /> +Before I found the useful book that knows."</p></div> + +<p>It would be difficult to imagine any figure more indecently +confessional, more entirely devoid of not only any of the restraints +of conscience, but of any of the restraints even of a wholesome +personal conceit, than Sludge the Medium. He confesses not only fraud, +but things which are to the natural man more difficult to confess even +than fraud—effeminacy, futility, physical cowardice. And then, when +the last of his loathsome secrets has been told, when he has nothing +left either to gain or to conceal, then he rises up into a perfect +bankrupt sublimity and makes the great avowal which is the whole pivot +and meaning of the poem.<a name="Page_196"></a> He says in effect: "Now that my interest in +deceit is utterly gone, now that I have admitted, to my own final +infamy, the frauds that I have practised, now that I stand before you +in a patent and open villainy which has something of the +disinterestedness and independence of the innocent, now I tell you +with the full and impartial authority of a lost soul that I believe +that there is something in spiritualism. In the course of a thousand +conspiracies, by the labour of a thousand lies, I have discovered that +there is really something in this matter that neither I nor any other +man understands. I am a thief, an adventurer, a deceiver of mankind, +but I am not a disbeliever in spiritualism. I have seen too much for +that." This is the confession of faith of Mr. Sludge the Medium. It +would be difficult to imagine a confession of faith framed and +presented in a more impressive manner. Sludge is a witness to his +faith as the old martyrs were witnesses to their faith, but even more +impressively. They testified to their religion even after they had +lost their liberty, and their eyesight, and their right hands. Sludge +testifies to his religion even after he has lost his dignity and his +honour.</p> + +<p>It may be repeated that it is truly extraordinary that any one should +have failed to notice that this avowal on behalf of spiritualism is +the pivot of the poem. The avowal itself is not only expressed +clearly, but prepared and delivered with admirable rhetorical force:—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"Now for it, then! Will you believe me, though?<br /> +You've heard what I confess: I don't unsay<br /> +A single word: I cheated when I could,<br /> +Rapped with my toe-joints, set sham hands at work,<br /> +Wrote down names weak in sympathetic ink.<br /><a name="Page_197"></a> +Rubbed odic lights with ends of phosphor-match,<br /> +And all the rest; believe that: believe this,<br /> +By the same token, though it seem to set<br /> +The crooked straight again, unsay the said,<br /> +Stick up what I've knocked down; I can't help that,<br /> +It's truth! I somehow vomit truth to-day.<br /> +This trade of mine—I don't know, can't be sure<br /> +But there was something in it, tricks and all!"</p></div> + +<p>It is strange to call a poem with so clear and fine a climax an attack +on spiritualism. To miss that climax is like missing the last sentence +in a good anecdote, or putting the last act of <i>Othello</i> into the +middle of the play. Either the whole poem of "Sludge the Medium" means +nothing at all, and is only a lampoon upon a cad, of which the matter +is almost as contemptible as the subject, or it means this—that some +real experiences of the unseen lie even at the heart of hypocrisy, and +that even the spiritualist is at root spiritual.</p> + +<p>One curious theory which is common to most Browning critics is that +Sludge must be intended for a pure and conscious impostor, because +after his confession, and on the personal withdrawal of Mr. Horsfall, +he bursts out into horrible curses against that gentleman and cynical +boasts of his future triumphs in a similar line of business. Surely +this is to have a very feeble notion either of nature or art. A man +driven absolutely into a corner might humiliate himself, and gain a +certain sensation almost of luxury in that humiliation, in pouring out +all his imprisoned thoughts and obscure victories. For let it never be +forgotten that a hypocrite is a very unhappy man; he is a man who has +devoted himself to a most delicate and arduous intellectual art in +which he may achieve masterpieces which he must keep secret, fight +thrilling <a name="Page_198"></a>battles, and win hair's-breadth victories for which he +cannot have a whisper of praise. A really accomplished impostor is the +most wretched of geniuses; he is a Napoleon on a desert island. A man +might surely, therefore, when he was certain that his credit was gone, +take a certain pleasure in revealing the tricks of his unique trade, +and gaining not indeed credit, but at least a kind of glory. And in +the course of this self-revelation he would come at last upon that +part of himself which exists in every man—that part which does +believe in, and value, and worship something. This he would fling in +his hearer's face with even greater pride, and take a delight in +giving a kind of testimony to his religion which no man had ever given +before—the testimony of a martyr who could not hope to be a saint. +But surely all this sudden tempest of candour in the man would not +mean that he would burst into tears and become an exemplary ratepayer, +like a villain in the worst parts of Dickens. The moment the danger +was withdrawn, the sense of having given himself away, of having +betrayed the secret of his infamous freemasonry, would add an +indescribable violence and foulness to his reaction of rage. A man in +such a case would do exactly as Sludge does. He would declare his own +shame, declare the truth of his creed, and then, when he realised what +he had done, say something like this:—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"R-r-r, you brute-beast and blackguard! Cowardly scamp!<br /> +I only wish I dared burn down the house<br /> +And spoil your sniggering!"</p></div> + +<p>and so on, and so on.</p> + +<p>He would react like this; it is one of the most artistic strokes in +Browning. But it does not prove that he was a hypocrite about +spiritualism, or that he <a name="Page_199"></a>was speaking more truthfully in the second +outburst than in the first. Whence came this extraordinary theory that +a man is always speaking most truly when he is speaking most coarsely? +The truth about oneself is a very difficult thing to express, and +coarse speaking will seldom do it.</p> + +<p>When we have grasped this point about "Sludge the Medium," we have +grasped the key to the whole series of Browning's casuistical +monologues—<i>Bishop Blaugram's Apology, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, +Fra Lippo Lippi, Fifine at the Fair, Aristophanes' Apology</i>, and +several of the monologues in <i>The Ring and the Book</i>. They are all, +without exception, dominated by this one conception of a certain +reality tangled almost inextricably with unrealities in a man's mind, +and the peculiar fascination which resides in the thought that the +greatest lies about a man, and the greatest truths about him, may be +found side by side in the same eloquent and sustained utterance.</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"For Blougram, he believed, say, half he spoke."</p></div> + +<p>Or, to put the matter in another way, the general idea of these poems +is, that a man cannot help telling some truth even when he sets out to +tell lies. If a man comes to tell us that he has discovered perpetual +motion, or been swallowed by the sea-serpent, there will yet be some +point in the story where he will tell us about himself almost all that +we require to know.</p> + +<p>If any one wishes to test the truth, or to see the best examples of +this general idea in Browning's monologues, he may be recommended to +notice one peculiarity of these poems which is rather striking. As a +whole, these apologies are written in a particularly burly and even +brutal English. Browning's <a name="Page_200"></a>love of what is called the ugly is nowhere +else so fully and extravagantly indulged. This, like a great many +other things for which Browning as an artist is blamed, is perfectly +appropriate to the theme. A vain, ill-mannered, and untrustworthy +egotist, defending his own sordid doings with his own cheap and +weather-beaten philosophy, is very likely to express himself best in a +language flexible and pungent, but indelicate and without dignity. But +the peculiarity of these loose and almost slangy soliloquies is that +every now and then in them there occur bursts of pure poetry which are +like a burst of birds singing. Browning does not hesitate to put some +of the most perfect lines that he or anyone else have ever written in +the English language into the mouths of such slaves as Sludge and +Guido Franceschini. Take, for the sake of example, "Bishop Blougram's +Apology." The poem is one of the most grotesque in the poet's works. +It is intentionally redolent of the solemn materialism and patrician +grossness of a grand dinner-party <i>à deux</i>. It has many touches of an +almost wild bathos, such as the young man who bears the impossible +name of Gigadibs. The Bishop, in pursuing his worldly argument for +conformity, points out with truth that a condition of doubt is a +condition that cuts both ways, and that if we cannot be sure of the +religious theory of life, neither can we be sure of the material +theory of life, and that in turn is capable of becoming an uncertainty +continually shaken by a tormenting suggestion. We cannot establish +ourselves on rationalism, and make it bear fruit to us. Faith itself +is capable of becoming the darkest and most revolutionary of doubts. +Then comes the passage:—</p><a name="Page_201"></a> + +<div class="poem"><p>"Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch,<br /> +A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death,<br /> +A chorus ending from Euripides,—<br /> +And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears<br /> +As old and new at once as Nature's self,<br /> +To rap and knock and enter in our soul,<br /> +Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring,<br /> +Round the ancient idol, on his base again,—<br /> +The grand Perhaps!"</p></div> + +<p>Nobler diction and a nobler meaning could not have been put into the +mouth of Pompilia, or Rabbi Ben Ezra. It is in reality put into the +mouth of a vulgar, fashionable priest, justifying his own cowardice +over the comfortable wine and the cigars.</p> + +<p>Along with this tendency to poetry among Browning's knaves, must be +reckoned another characteristic, their uniform tendency to theism. +These loose and mean characters speak of many things feverishly and +vaguely; of one thing they always speak with confidence and composure, +their relation to God. It may seem strange at first sight that those +who have outlived the indulgence, and not only of every law, but of +every reasonable anarchy, should still rely so simply upon the +indulgence of divine perfection. Thus Sludge is certain that his life +of lies and conjuring tricks has been conducted in a deep and subtle +obedience to the message really conveyed by the conditions created by +God. Thus Bishop Blougram is certain that his life of panic-stricken +and tottering compromise has been really justified as the only method +that could unite him with God. Thus Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau is +certain that every dodge in his thin string of political dodges has +been the true means of realising what he believes to be the <a name="Page_202"></a>will of +God. Every one of these meagre swindlers, while admitting a failure in +all things relative, claims an awful alliance with the Absolute. To +many it will at first sight appear a dangerous doctrine indeed. But, +in truth, it is a most solid and noble and salutary doctrine, far less +dangerous than its opposite. Every one on this earth should believe, +amid whatever madness or moral failure, that his life and temperament +have some object on the earth. Every one on the earth should believe +that he has something to give to the world which cannot otherwise be +given. Every one should, for the good of men and the saving of his own +soul, believe that it is possible, even if we are the enemies of the +human race, to be the friends of God. The evil wrought by this +mystical pride, great as it often is, is like a straw to the evil +wrought by a materialistic self-abandonment. The crimes of the devil +who thinks himself of immeasurable value are as nothing to the crimes +of the devil who thinks himself of no value. With Browning's knaves we +have always this eternal interest, that they are real somewhere, and +may at any moment begin to speak poetry. We are talking to a peevish +and garrulous sneak; we are watching the play of his paltry features, +his evasive eyes, and babbling lips. And suddenly the face begins to +change and harden, the eyes glare like the eyes of a mask, the whole +face of clay becomes a common mouthpiece, and the voice that comes +forth is the voice of God, uttering His everlasting soliloquy.<a name="Page_203"></a> </p> + +<br /> + +<a id="INDEX" name="INDEX"></a><h2>INDEX</h2> + + +<b>A</b> + +<p><i>Agamemnon of Aeschylus, The</i>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a></p> + +<p>Alliance, The Holy, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>. + +<p>"Andrea del Sarto," <a href="#Page_83">83</a></p> + +<p><i>Aristophanes' Apology</i>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>.</p> + +<p>Arnold, Matthew, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Asolando</i>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>.</p> + +<p>Asolo (Italy), <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>.</p> + +<p>"At the Mermaid," <a href="#Page_117">117</a>.</p> + +<p>Austria, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>B</b> + +<p>"Bad Dreams," <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Balaustion's Adventure</i>, <a href="#Page_119">119-120</a>.</p> + +<p>Barrett, Arabella, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>.</p> + +<p>Barrett, Edward Moulton, <a href="#Page_58">58</a> <i>seq.</i>, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>.</p> + +<p>Beardsley, Mr. Aubrey, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Bells and Pomegranates</i>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>.</p> + +<p>"Ben Ezra," <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>.</p> + +<p>Birrell, Mr. Augustine, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>.</p> + +<p>"Bishop Blougram," <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Bishop Blougram's Apology</i>, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Blot on the 'Scutcheon, A</i>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>.</p> + +<p>Boyd, Mr., <a href="#Page_62">62</a>.</p> + +<p>Browning, Robert: + <span class="ind1"> birth and family history, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> theories as to his descent, <a href="#Page_4">4-8</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> a typical Englishman of the middle class, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> his immediate ancestors, <a href="#Page_10">10</a> <i>seq.</i>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> education, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> boyhood and youth, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> first poems, <i>Incondita</i>, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> romantic spirit, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> publication of <i>Pauline</i>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> friendship with literary men, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>Paracelsus</i>, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> introduction to literary world, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> his earliest admirers, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> friendship with Carlyle, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>Strafford</i>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>Sordello</i>, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>Pippa Passes</i>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>Dramatic Lyrics</i>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>The Return of the Druses</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>A Blot on the 'Scutcheon</i>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> correspondence with Elizabeth Barrett, <a href="#Page_62">62</a> <i>seq.</i>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> their first meeting, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> marriage and elopement, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> life in Italy, <a href="#Page_81">81</a> <i>seq.</i>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> love of Italy, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a> <i>seq.</i>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> sympathy with Italian Revolution, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> attitude towards spiritualism, <a href="#Page_91">91</a> <i>seq.</i>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190-199</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> death of his wife, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> returns to England, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>The Ring and the Book</i>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> culmination of his literary fame, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> life in society, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> elected Fellow of Balliol, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> honoured by the great Universities, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>Balaustion's Adventure</i>, <a href="#Page_119">119-120</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>Aristophanes' Apology</i>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>The Agamemnon of Aeschylus</i>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau</i>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country</i>, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>Fifine at the Fair</i>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>The Inn Album</i>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper</i>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>La Saisiaz</i>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>The Two Poets of Croisic</i>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>Dramatic Idylls</i>, 127;</span> + <span class="ind1"><a name="Page_204"></a> <i>Jocoseria</i>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>Ferishtah's Fancies</i>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day</i>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> accepts post of Foreign Correspondent to the Royal Academy, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>; </span> + <span class="ind1"> goes to Llangollen with his sister, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> last journey to Italy, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> death at Venice, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> publication of <i>Asolando</i>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> his conversation, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> vanity, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> faults and virtues, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> his interest in Art, <a href="#Page_82">82</a> <i>seq.</i>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> his varied accomplishments, <a href="#Page_84">84-85</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> personality and presence, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a> <i>seq.</i>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> his prejudices, <a href="#Page_113">113-116</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> his occasional coarseness, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> politics, <a href="#Page_86">86</a> <i>seq.</i>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> Browning as a father, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> as dramatist, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> as a literary artist, <a href="#Page_133">133</a> <i>seq.</i>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> his se of the grotesque, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a> <i>seq.</i>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> his failures, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> artistic originality, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, 158;</span> + <span class="ind1"> keen sense of melody and rhythm, <a href="#Page_145">145</a> <i>seq.</i>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> ingenuity in rhyming, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> his buffoonery, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> obscurity, <a href="#Page_154">154</a> <i>seq.</i>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> his conception of the Universe, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> philosophy, <a href="#Page_177">177</a> <i>seq.</i>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> optimism, <a href="#Page_179">179</a> <i>seq.</i>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> his love poetry, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> his knaves, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_201">201-202</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> the key to his casuistical monologues, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>.</span> +</p> + +<p><i>Browning, Life of</i> (Mrs. Orr), <a href="#Page_92">92</a>.</p> + +<p>Browning, Robert (father of the poet), <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>.</p> + +<p>Browning, Mrs., <i>née</i> Wiedermann (mother), <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>.</p> + +<p>Browning, Anna (sister), <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>.</p> + +<p>Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (wife), <a href="#Page_57">57</a> <i>seq.</i>, <a href="#Page_91">91-99</a>, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, +119, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>.</p> + +<p>Browning Society, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.</p> + +<p>Burns, Robert, <a href="#Page_169">169-170</a>.</p> + +<p>Byron, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>.</p> + +<p>Byronism, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>C</b> + +<p>"Caliban," <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>.</p> + +<p>"Caliban upon Setebos," <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</p> + +<p>Camberwell, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>.</p> + +<p>"Caponsacchi," <a href="#Page_108">108</a>.</p> + +<p>Carlyle, Thomas, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>.</p> + +<p>Carlyle, Mrs., <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.</p> + +<p>"Cavalier Tunes," <a href="#Page_46">46</a>.</p> + +<p>Cavour, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>.</p> + +<p>Charles I., <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>.</p> + +<p>Chaucer, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>.</p> + +<p>"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came," <a href="#Page_159">159</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Christmas Eve</i>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>.</p> + +<p>Church in Italy, The, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>.</p> + +<p>"Clive," <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.</p> + +<p>Clough, Arthur Hugh, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Colombe's Birthday</i>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.</p> + +<p>Corelli, Miss Marie, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>.</p> + +<p>Cromwell, Oliver, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>D</b> + +<p>Darwin, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>.</p> + +<p>Dickens, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>.</p> + +<p>"Djabal," <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>.</p> + +<p>Domett, Alfred, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.</p> + +<p>"Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis," <a href="#Page_161">161</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Dramatic Idylls</i>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Dramatic Lyrics</i>, <a href="#Page_45">45-50</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Dramatis Personæ</i>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>.</p> + +<p>Duffy, Sir Charles Gavan, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>.</p> + + +<b>E</b> + +<p><i>Edinburgh Review</i>, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>.</p> + +<p>"Englishman in Italy, The," <a href="#Page_150">150</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>F</b> + +<p>"Fears and Scruples," <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</p> + +<p>"Ferishtah's Fancies," <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Fifine at the Fair</i>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>.</p> + +<p>Fitzgerald, Edward, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>.</p><a name="Page_205"></a> + +<p><i>Flight of the Duchess, The</i>, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>.</p> + +<p>Florence, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>.</p> + +<p>Forster, John, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.</p> + +<p>Foster, John, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>.</p> + +<p>Fox, Mr. Johnson, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>.</p> + +<p>Fox, Mrs. Bridell, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>.</p> + +<p>"Fra Lippo,", <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Fra Lippo Lippi</i>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>.</p> + +<p>French Revolution, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>.</p> + +<p>Furnivall, Dr., <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>G</b> + +<p>"Garden Fancies," <a href="#Page_46">46</a>.</p> + +<p>Garibaldi, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>.</p> + +<p>Gilbert, W.S., <a href="#Page_144">144</a>.</p> + +<p>Gissing, Mr. George, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>.</p> + +<p>Gladstone, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Golden Treasury</i> (Palgrave), <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.</p> + +<p>Goldsmith, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>.</p> + +<p>Gordon, General, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>.</p> + +<p>"Guido Franceschini," <a href="#Page_106">106</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>H</b> + +<p>Henley, Mr., <a href="#Page_148">148</a>.</p> + +<p>"Heretic's Tragedy, The," <a href="#Page_137">137</a>.</p> + +<p>Hickey, Miss E.H., <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.</p> + +<p>"Holy Cross Day," <a href="#Page_153">153</a>.</p> + +<p>Home, David (spiritualist), <a href="#Page_93">93-97</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>.</p> + +<p>Home, David, <i>Memoirs</i> of, <a href="#Page_93">93</a> <i>seq.</i></p> + +<p>Horne, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.</p> + +<p>Houghton, Lord, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.</p> + +<p>"House," <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</p> + +<p>"Householder, The," <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</p> + +<p>"How they brought the good News from Ghent to Aix," <a href="#Page_46">46</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Hudibras</i> (Butler), <a href="#Page_57">57</a>.</p> + +<p>Hugo, Victor, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>.</p> + +<p>Hunt, Leigh, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>I</b> + +<p><i>Incondita</i>, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Inn Album, The</i>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Instans Tyrannus</i>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>.</p> + +<p>Italy, <a href="#Page_85">85</a> <i>seq.</i></p> + +<p>Italian Revolution, <a href="#Page_88">88</a> <i>seq.</i></p> + +<p>"Ivàn Ivànovitch," <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>J</b> + +<p>Jameson, Mrs., <a href="#Page_75">75</a>.</p> + +<p>Jerrold, Douglas, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Jocoseria</i>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.</p> + +<p>Jowett, Dr., <a href="#Page_118">118</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Julius Cæsar</i> (Shakespeare), <a href="#Page_28">28</a>.</p> + +<p>"Juris Doctor Bottinius," <a href="#Page_161">161</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>K</b> + +<p>Keats, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>.</p> + +<p>Kenyon, Mr., <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_69">69-70</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>.</p> + +<p><i>King Victor and King Charles</i>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.</p> + +<p>Kipling, Rudyard, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>.</p> + +<p>Kirkup, Seymour, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>L</b> + +<p><i>L'Aiglon</i>, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>.</p> + +<p>"Laboratory, The," <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>.</p> + +<p>Landor, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_101">101-103</a>.</p> + +<p><i>La Saisiaz</i>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Letters, The Browning</i>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>.</p> + +<p>Liberalism, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>.</p> + +<p>"Lines to Edward Fitzgerald," <a href="#Page_131">131</a>.</p> + +<p>Llangollen, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>.</p> + +<p>Lockhart, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>.</p> + +<p>"Lost Leader, The," <a href="#Page_46">46</a>.</p> + +<p>"Lover's Quarrel, A," <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.</p> + +<p>"Luigi," <a href="#Page_45">45</a>.</p> + +<p>Lytton, Lord (novelist), <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>M</b> + +<p>Macready, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>.</p> + +<p>Maeterlinck, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>.</p> + +<p>Manning, Cardinal, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.</p> + +<p>Mary Queen of Scots, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>.</p> + +<p>"Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha," <a href="#Page_147">147</a>.</p> + +<p>"May and Death." <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.</p> + +<p>Mazzini, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Men and Women</i>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>.</p> + +<p>Meredith, George, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>.</p> +<a name="Page_206"></a> +<p>Mill, John Stuart, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>.</p> + +<p>Milsand, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>.</p> + +<p>Milton, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>.</p> + +<p>Monckton-Milnes, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Mr. Sludge the Medium</i>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190-199</a>.</p> + +<p>"Muléykeh," <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.</p> + +<p>"My Star," <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>N</b> + +<p>"Nationality in Drinks," <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</p> + +<p>Napoleon, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>.</p> + +<p>Napoleon III., <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>.</p> + +<p>"Never the Time and the Place," <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.</p> + +<p>Newman, Cardinal, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>.</p> + +<p>Norwood, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>O</b> + +<p>"Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" (Wordsworth), <a href="#Page_136">136</a>.</p> + +<p>"Ode on a Grecian Urn" (Keats), <a href="#Page_137">137</a>.</p> + +<p>"Old Masters in Florence," <a href="#Page_177">177</a>.</p> + +<p>"One Word More," <a href="#Page_65">65</a>.</p> + +<p>Orr, Mrs., <a href="#Page_72">72</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>P</b> + +<p><i>Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper</i>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Paracelsus</i>, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>.</p> + +<p>"Paracelsus," <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.</p> + +<p>Painting, Poems on, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>.</p> + +<p>Palgrave, Francis, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>.</p> + +<p>Paris, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Parleyings with certain Persons of Importance in their Day</i>, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, + <a href="#Page_158">158</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Pauline</i>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</p> + +<p>"Pheidippides," <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.</p> + +<p>Phelps (actor), <a href="#Page_53">53</a>.</p> + +<p>"Pictor Ignotus," <a href="#Page_83">83</a>.</p> + +<p>"Pied Piper of Hamelin, The," <a href="#Page_153">153</a>.</p> + +<p>"Pippa," <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Pippa Passes</i>, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>.</p> + +<p>Pisa, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>.</p> + +<p>Pius IX., Church under, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>.</p> + +<p>Plato, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>.</p> + +<p>Poe, Edgar Allan, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>.</p> + +<p>Poetry, Pessimistic school of, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>.</p> + +<p>"Pompilia," <a href="#Page_201">201</a>.</p> + +<p>Pope, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>.</p> + +<p>"Portrait, A," <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau</i>, <a href="#Page_121">121-122</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Princess, The</i> (Tennyson), <a href="#Page_148">148</a>.</p> + +<p>"Prometheus Unbound" (Shelley), <a href="#Page_137">137</a>.</p> + +<p>Prussia, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>.</p> + +<p>Puritans, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>.</p> + +<p>Pym, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>R</b> + +<p>"Rabbi Ben Ezra," <a href="#Page_201">201</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country</i>, <a href="#Page_122">122-124</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Return of the Druses, The</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51-53</a>.</p> + +<p>Revolution,<br /> +<span class="ind1">The French, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>;</span> +<span class="ind1">Italian, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>.</span></p> + +<p><i>Ring and the Book, The</i>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160-176</a>.</p> + +<p>Ripert-Monclar, Comte de, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>.</p> + +<p>Roman Church, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>.</p> + +<p>Rossetti, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>.</p> + +<p>Royalists, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>.</p> + +<p>Ruskin, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>.</p> + +<p>Russia, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>S</b> + +<p>Sand, George, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>.</p> + +<p>Santayana's, Mr., <i>Interpretations of Poetry and Religion</i>, <a href="#Page_183">183-186</a>.</p> + +<p>"Sebald," <a href="#Page_45">45</a>.</p> + +<p>Shakespeare, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>.</p> + +<p>Shakespeare Society, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.</p> + +<p>Sharp, Mr. William, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>.</p> + +<p>Shaw, Mr. Bernard, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>.</p> + +<p>Shelley, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>,19, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>.</p> + +<p>"Shop," <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</p><a name="Page_207"></a> + +<p>"Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis," <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</p> + +<p>Silverthorne (Browning's cousin), <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.</p> + +<p>"Sludge," <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>.</p> + +<p>Smith, Elder (publishers), <a href="#Page_110">110</a>.</p> + +<p>"Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, The," <a href="#Page_47">47</a>.</p> + +<p>"Sonnets from the Portuguese," <a href="#Page_65">65</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Sordello</i>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>.</p> + +<p>Speech, Free, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>.</p> + +<p>Spenser, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>.</p> + +<p>Spiritualism, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>.</p> + +<p>"Statue and the Bust, The," <a href="#Page_109">109</a>.</p> + +<p>Sterne, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>.</p> + +<p>Stevenson, Robert Louis, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Straford</i>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a> <i>seq.</i>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>.</p> + +<p>"Stafford," <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>.</p> + +<p>Swinburne, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>,143.</p> +<br /> + +<b>T</b> +<br /> + +<p><i>Tait's Magazine</i>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>.</p> + +<p>Talfourd, Sergeant, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.</p> + +<p>Tennyson, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>.</p> + +<p>Thackeray, Miss, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>.</p> + +<p>"Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr," <a href="#Page_46">46</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Time's Revenges</i>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>.</p> + +<p>Tolstoi, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Tristram Shandy</i> (Sterne), <a href="#Page_163">163</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Two Poets of Croisic, The</i>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>U</b> +<br /> + +<p>University College, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>.</p> + +<p>"Up jumped Tokay" (poem quoted), <a href="#Page_140">140</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>V</b> +<br /> + +<p>Venice, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>.</p> + +<p>Victor of Sardinia, King, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>.</p> + +<p>Vogler, Abt, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>W</b> +<br /> + +<p><i>Water Babies</i> (Kingsley), <a href="#Page_8">8</a>.</p> + +<p>Watts, Mr. G.F., <a href="#Page_112">112</a>.</p> + +<p>Whitman, Walt, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>.</p> + +<p>"Why I am a Liberal" (sonnet), <a href="#Page_86">86</a>.</p> + +<p>Wiedermann, William, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.</p> + +<p>Wiseman, Cardinal, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>.</p> + +<p>Wimbledon Common, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>.</p> + +<p>Wordsworth, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>.</p> + +<p>Wordsworth Society, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>Y</b> + +<p>"Youth and Art," <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>Z</b> + +<p>Zola, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>.</p><a name="Page_208"></a><a name="Page_209"></a> + +<br /> + +<h3>English Men of Letters.</h3> + +<p>NEW SERIES.</p> + +<p><i>Crown 8vo. 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TOUT, M.A., Professor of History, The Owens +College, Manchester.</p> + +<p><b>HENRY VII.</b> By JAMES GAIRDNER. <b>CARDINAL WOLSEY.</b> By Bishop +CREIGHTON, D.D., late Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the +University of Cambridge.</p> + +<p><b>ELIZABETH.</b> By E.S. BEESLY, M.A., Professor of Modern History, +University College, London.</p> + +<p><b>OLIVER CROMWELL.</b> By FREDERIC HARRISON.</p> + +<p><b>WILLIAM III.</b> By H.D. TRAILL.</p> + +<p><b>WALPOLE.</b> By JOHN MORLEY.</p> + +<p><b>CHATHAM.</b> By JOHN MORLEY. [<i>In preparation</i></p> + +<p><b>PITT.</b> By Lord ROSEBERY.</p> + +<p><b>PEEL.</b> By J.R. THURSFIELD, M.A., late Fellow of Jesus College, +Oxford.</p><a name="Page_211"></a> + +<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13342 ***</div> +</body> +</html> + + + diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6312041 --- /dev/null +++ b/LICENSE.txt @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements, +metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be +in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES. + +Procedures for determining public domain status are described in +the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org. + +No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in +jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize +this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright +status under the laws that apply to them. diff --git a/README.md b/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b8280e4 --- /dev/null +++ b/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for +eBook #13342 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13342) diff --git a/old/13342-8.txt b/old/13342-8.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..943ffc7 --- /dev/null +++ b/old/13342-8.txt @@ -0,0 +1,6699 @@ +The Project Gutenberg EBook of Robert Browning, by G. K. Chesterton + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Robert Browning + +Author: G. K. Chesterton + +Release Date: August 31, 2004 [EBook #13342] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROBERT BROWNING *** + + + + +Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Victoria Woosley and PG Distributed +Proofreaders + + + + + + + + ROBERT BROWNING + + + BY + + G.K. CHESTERTON + + + + + CONTENTS + + CHAPTER I +BROWNING IN EARLY LIFE 1 + + CHAPTER II +EARLY WORKS 34 + + CHAPTER III +BROWNING AND HIS MARRIAGE 55 + + CHAPTER IV +BROWNING IN ITALY 81 + + CHAPTER V +BROWNING IN LATER LIFE 105 + + CHAPTER VI +BROWNING AS A LITERARY ARTIST 133 + + CHAPTER VII +"THE RING AND THE BOOK" 160 + + CHAPTER VIII +THE PHILOSOPHY OF BROWNING 177 + +INDEX 203 + + + + + +ROBERT BROWNING + + + + +CHAPTER I + +BROWNING IN EARLY LIFE + + +On the subject of Browning's work innumerable things have been said +and remain to be said; of his life, considered as a narrative of +facts, there is little or nothing to say. It was a lucid and public +and yet quiet life, which culminated in one great dramatic test of +character, and then fell back again into this union of quietude and +publicity. And yet, in spite of this, it is a great deal more +difficult to speak finally about his life than about his work. His +work has the mystery which belongs to the complex; his life the much +greater mystery which belongs to the simple. He was clever enough to +understand his own poetry; and if he understood it, we can understand +it. But he was also entirely unconscious and impulsive, and he was +never clever enough to understand his own character; consequently we +may be excused if that part of him which was hidden from him is partly +hidden from us. The subtle man is always immeasurably easier to +understand than the natural man; for the subtle man keeps a diary of +his moods, he practises the art of self-analysis and self-revelation, +and can tell us how he came to feel this or to say that. But a man +like Browning knows no more about the state of his emotions than about +the state of his pulse; they are things greater than he, things +growing at will, like forces of Nature. There is an old anecdote, +probably apocryphal, which describes how a feminine admirer wrote to +Browning asking him for the meaning of one of his darker poems, and +received the following reply: "When that poem was written, two people +knew what it meant--God and Robert Browning. And now God only knows +what it means." This story gives, in all probability, an entirely +false impression of Browning's attitude towards his work. He was a +keen artist, a keen scholar, he could put his finger on anything, and +he had a memory like the British Museum Library. But the story does, +in all probability, give a tolerably accurate picture of Browning's +attitude towards his own emotions and his psychological type. If a man +had asked him what some particular allusion to a Persian hero meant he +could in all probability have quoted half the epic; if a man had asked +him which third cousin of Charlemagne was alluded to in _Sordello_, he +could have given an account of the man and an account of his father +and his grandfather. But if a man had asked him what he thought of +himself, or what were his emotions an hour before his wedding, he +would have replied with perfect sincerity that God alone knew. + +This mystery of the unconscious man, far deeper than any mystery of +the conscious one, existing as it does in all men, existed peculiarly +in Browning, because he was a very ordinary and spontaneous man. The +same thing exists to some extent in all history and all affairs. +Anything that is deliberate, twisted, created as a trap and a +mystery, must be discovered at last; everything that is done naturally +remains mysterious. It may be difficult to discover the principles of +the Rosicrucians, but it is much easier to discover the principles of +the Rosicrucians than the principles of the United States: nor has any +secret society kept its aims so quiet as humanity. The way to be +inexplicable is to be chaotic, and on the surface this was the quality +of Browning's life; there is the same difference between judging of +his poetry and judging of his life, that there is between making a map +of a labyrinth and making a map of a mist. The discussion of what some +particular allusion in _Sordello_ means has gone on so far, and may go +on still, but it has it in its nature to end. The life of Robert +Browning, who combines the greatest brain with the most simple +temperament known in our annals, would go on for ever if we did not +decide to summarise it in a very brief and simple narrative. + +Robert Browning was born in Camberwell on May 7th 1812. His father and +grandfather had been clerks in the Bank of England, and his whole +family would appear to have belonged to the solid and educated middle +class--the class which is interested in letters, but not ambitious in +them, the class to which poetry is a luxury, but not a necessity. + +This actual quality and character of the Browning family shows some +tendency to be obscured by matters more remote. It is the custom of +all biographers to seek for the earliest traces of a family in distant +ages and even in distant lands; and Browning, as it happens, has given +them opportunities which tend to lead away the mind from the main +matter in hand. There is a tradition, for example, that men of his +name were prominent in the feudal ages; it is based upon little beyond +a coincidence of surnames and the fact that Browning used a seal with +a coat-of-arms. Thousands of middle-class men use such a seal, merely +because it is a curiosity or a legacy, without knowing or caring +anything about the condition of their ancestors in the Middle Ages. +Then, again, there is a theory that he was of Jewish blood; a view +which is perfectly conceivable, and which Browning would have been the +last to have thought derogatory, but for which, as a matter of fact, +there is exceedingly little evidence. The chief reason assigned by his +contemporaries for the belief was the fact that he was, without doubt, +specially and profoundly interested in Jewish matters. This +suggestion, worthless in any case, would, if anything, tell the other +way. For while an Englishman may be enthusiastic about England, or +indignant against England, it never occurred to any living Englishman +to be interested in England. Browning was, like every other +intelligent Aryan, interested in the Jews; but if he was related to +every people in which he was interested, he must have been of +extraordinarily mixed extraction. Thirdly, there is the yet more +sensational theory that there was in Robert Browning a strain of the +negro. The supporters of this hypothesis seem to have little in +reality to say, except that Browning's grandmother was certainly a +Creole. It is said in support of the view that Browning was singularly +dark in early life, and was often mistaken for an Italian. There does +not, however, seem to be anything particular to be deduced from this, +except that if he looked like an Italian, he must have looked +exceedingly unlike a negro. + +There is nothing valid against any of these three theories, just as +there is nothing valid in their favour; they may, any or all of them, +be true, but they are still irrelevant. They are something that is in +history or biography a great deal worse than being false--they are +misleading. We do not want to know about a man like Browning, whether +he had a right to a shield used in the Wars of the Roses, or whether +the tenth grandfather of his Creole grandmother had been white or +black: we want to know something about his family, which is quite a +different thing. We wish to have about Browning not so much the kind +of information which would satisfy Clarencieux King-at-Arms, but the +sort of information which would satisfy us, if we were advertising for +a very confidential secretary, or a very private tutor. We should not +be concerned as to whether the tutor were descended from an Irish +king, but we should still be really concerned about his extraction, +about what manner of people his had been for the last two or three +generations. This is the most practical duty of biography, and this is +also the most difficult. It is a great deal easier to hunt a family +from tombstone to tombstone back to the time of Henry II. than to +catch and realise and put upon paper that most nameless and elusive of +all things--social tone. + +It will be said immediately, and must as promptly be admitted, that we +could find a biographical significance in any of these theories if we +looked for it. But it is, indeed, the sin and snare of biographers +that they tend to see significance in everything; characteristic +carelessness if their hero drops his pipe, and characteristic +carefulness if he picks it up again. It is true, assuredly, that all +the three races above named could be connected with Browning's +personality. If we believed, for instance, that he really came of a +race of mediæval barons, we should say at once that from them he got +his pre-eminent spirit of battle: we should be right, for every line +in his stubborn soul and his erect body did really express the +fighter; he was always contending, whether it was with a German theory +about the Gnostics, or with a stranger who elbowed his wife in a +crowd. Again, if we had decided that he was a Jew, we should point out +how absorbed he was in the terrible simplicity of monotheism: we +should be right, for he was so absorbed. Or again, in the case even of +the negro fancy; it would not be difficult for us to suggest a love of +colour, a certain mental gaudiness, a pleasure + + "When reds and blues were indeed red and blue," + +as he says in _The Ring and the Book_. We should be right; for there +really was in Browning a tropical violence of taste, an artistic +scheme compounded as it were, of orchids and cockatoos, which, amid +our cold English poets, seems scarcely European. All this is extremely +fascinating; and it may be true. But, as has above been suggested, +here comes in the great temptation of this kind of work, the noble +temptation to see too much in everything. The biographer can easily +see a personal significance in these three hypothetical nationalities. +But is there in the world a biographer who could lay his hand upon his +heart and say that he would not have seen as much significance in any +three other nationalities? If Browning's ancestors had been Frenchmen, +should we not have said that it was from them doubtless that he +inherited that logical agility which marks him among English poets? +If his grandfather had been a Swede, should we not have said that the +old sea-roving blood broke out in bold speculation and insatiable +travel? If his great-aunt had been a Red Indian, should we not have +said that only in the Ojibways and the Blackfeet do we find the +Browning fantasticality combined with the Browning stoicism? This +over-readiness to seize hints is an inevitable part of that secret +hero-worship which is the heart of biography. The lover of great men +sees signs of them long before they begin to appear on the earth, and, +like some old mythological chronicler, claims as their heralds the +storms and the falling stars. + +A certain indulgence must therefore be extended to the present writer +if he declines to follow that admirable veteran of Browning study, Dr. +Furnivall, into the prodigious investigations which he has been +conducting into the condition of the Browning family since the +beginning of the world. For his last discovery, the descent of +Browning from a footman in the service of a country magnate, there +seems to be suggestive, though not decisive evidence. But Browning's +descent from barons, or Jews, or lackeys, or black men, is not the +main point touching his family. If the Brownings were of mixed origin, +they were so much the more like the great majority of English +middle-class people. It is curious that the romance of race should be +spoken of as if it were a thing peculiarly aristocratic; that +admiration for rank, or interest in family, should mean only interest +in one not very interesting type of rank and family. The truth is that +aristocrats exhibit less of the romance of pedigree than any other +people in the world. For since it is their principle to marry only +within their own class and mode of life, there is no opportunity in +their case for any of the more interesting studies in heredity; they +exhibit almost the unbroken uniformity of the lower animals. It is in +the middle classes that we find the poetry of genealogy; it is the +suburban grocer standing at his shop door whom some wild dash of +Eastern or Celtic blood may drive suddenly to a whole holiday or a +crime. Let us admit then, that it is true that these legends of the +Browning family have every abstract possibility. But it is a far more +cogent and apposite truth that if a man had knocked at the door of +every house in the street where Browning was born, he would have found +similar legends in all of them. There is hardly a family in Camberwell +that has not a story or two about foreign marriages a few generations +back; and in all this the Brownings are simply a typical Camberwell +family. The real truth about Browning and men like him can scarcely be +better expressed than in the words of that very wise and witty story, +Kingsley's _Water Babies_, in which the pedigree of the Professor is +treated in a manner which is an excellent example of the wild common +sense of the book. "His mother was a Dutch woman, and therefore she +was born at Curaçoa (of course, you have read your geography and +therefore know why), and his father was a Pole, and therefore he was +brought up at Petropaulowski (of course, you have learnt your modern +politics, and therefore know why), but for all that he was as thorough +an Englishman as ever coveted his neighbour's goods." + +It may be well therefore to abandon the task of obtaining a clear +account of Brownings family, and endeavour to obtain, what is much +more important, a clear account of his home. For the great central +and solid fact, which these heraldic speculations tend inevitably to +veil and confuse, is that Browning was a thoroughly typical Englishman +of the middle class. He may have had alien blood, and that alien +blood, by the paradox we have observed, may have made him more +characteristically a native. A phase, a fancy, a metaphor may or may +not have been born of eastern or southern elements, but he was, +without any question at all, an Englishman of the middle class. +Neither all his liberality nor all his learning ever made him anything +but an Englishman of the middle class. He expanded his intellectual +tolerance until it included the anarchism of _Fifine at the Fair_ and +the blasphemous theology of Caliban; but he remained himself an +Englishman of the middle class. He pictured all the passions of the +earth since the Fall, from the devouring amorousness of _Time's +Revenges_ to the despotic fantasy of _Instans Tyrannus_; but he +remained himself an Englishman of the middle class. The moment that he +came in contact with anything that was slovenly, anything that was +lawless, in actual life, something rose up in him, older than any +opinions, the blood of generations of good men. He met George Sand and +her poetical circle and hated it, with all the hatred of an old city +merchant for the irresponsible life. He met the Spiritualists and +hated them, with all the hatred of the middle class for borderlands +and equivocal positions and playing with fire. His intellect went upon +bewildering voyages, but his soul walked in a straight road. He piled +up the fantastic towers of his imagination until they eclipsed the +planets; but the plan of the foundation on which he built was always +the plan of an honest English house in Camberwell. He abandoned, with +a ceaseless intellectual ambition, every one of the convictions of his +class; but he carried its prejudices into eternity. + +It is then of Browning as a member of the middle class, that we can +speak with the greatest historical certainty; and it is his immediate +forebears who present the real interest to us. His father, Robert +Browning, was a man of great delicacy of taste, and to all appearance +of an almost exaggerated delicacy of conscience. Every glimpse we have +of him suggests that earnest and almost worried kindliness which is +the mark of those to whom selfishness, even justifiable selfishness, +is really a thing difficult or impossible. In early life Robert +Browning senior was placed by his father (who was apparently a father +of a somewhat primitive, not to say barbaric, type) in an important +commercial position in the West Indies. He threw up the position +however, because it involved him in some recognition of slavery. +Whereupon his unique parent, in a transport of rage, not only +disinherited him and flung him out of doors, but by a superb stroke of +humour, which stands alone in the records of parental ingenuity, sent +him in a bill for the cost of his education. About the same time that +he was suffering for his moral sensibility he was also disturbed about +religious matters, and he completed his severance from his father by +joining a dissenting sect. He was, in short, a very typical example of +the serious middle-class man of the Wilberforce period, a man to whom +duty was all in all, and who would revolutionise an empire or a +continent for the satisfaction of a single moral scruple. Thus, while +he was Puritan at the core, not the ruthless Puritan of the +seventeenth, but the humanitarian Puritan of the eighteenth century, +he had upon the surface all the tastes and graces of a man of culture. +Numerous accomplishments of the lighter kind, such as drawing and +painting in water colours, he possessed; and his feeling for many +kinds of literature was fastidious and exact. But the whole was +absolutely redolent of the polite severity of the eighteenth century. +He lamented his son's early admiration for Byron, and never ceased +adjuring him to model himself upon Pope. + +He was, in short, one of the old-fashioned humanitarians of the +eighteenth century, a class which we may or may not have conquered in +moral theory, but which we most certainly have not conquered in moral +practice. Robert Browning senior destroyed all his fortunes in order +to protest against black slavery; white slavery may be, as later +economists tell us, a thing infinitely worse, but not many men destroy +their fortunes in order to protest against it. The ideals of the men +of that period appear to us very unattractive; to them duty was a kind +of chilly sentiment. But when we think what they did with those cold +ideals, we can scarcely feel so superior. They uprooted the enormous +Upas of slavery, the tree that was literally as old as the race of +man. They altered the whole face of Europe with their deductive +fancies. We have ideals that are really better, ideals of passion, of +mysticism, of a sense of the youth and adventurousness of the earth; +but it will be well for us if we achieve as much by our frenzy as they +did by their delicacies. It scarcely seems as if we were as robust in +our very robustness as they were robust in their sensibility. + +Robert Browning's mother was the daughter of William Wiedermann, a +German merchant settled in Dundee, and married to a Scotch wife. One +of the poet's principal biographers has suggested that from this union +of the German and Scotch, Browning got his metaphysical tendency; it +is possible; but here again we must beware of the great biographical +danger of making mountains out of molehills. What Browning's mother +unquestionably did give to him, was in the way of training--a very +strong religious habit, and a great belief in manners. Thomas Carlyle +called her "the type of a Scottish gentlewoman," and the phrase has a +very real significance to those who realise the peculiar condition of +Scotland, one of the very few European countries where large sections +of the aristocracy are Puritans; thus a Scottish gentlewoman combines +two descriptions of dignity at the same time. Little more is known of +this lady except the fact that after her death Browning could not bear +to look at places where she had walked. + +Browning's education in the formal sense reduces itself to a minimum. +In very early boyhood he attended a species of dame-school, which, +according to some of his biographers, he had apparently to leave +because he was too clever to be tolerable. However this may be, he +undoubtedly went afterwards to a school kept by Mr. Ready, at which +again he was marked chiefly by precocity. But the boy's education did +not in truth take place at any systematic seat of education; it took +place in his own home, where one of the quaintest and most learned and +most absurdly indulgent of fathers poured out in an endless stream +fantastic recitals from the Greek epics and mediæval chronicles. If we +test the matter by the test of actual schools and universities, +Browning will appear to be almost the least educated man in English +literary history. But if we test it by the amount actually learned, we +shall think that he was perhaps the most educated man that ever lived; +that he was in fact, if anything, overeducated. In a spirited poem he +has himself described how, when he was a small child, his father used +to pile up chairs in the drawing-room and call them the city of Troy. +Browning came out of the home crammed with all kinds of +knowledge--knowledge about the Greek poets, knowledge about the +Provençal Troubadours, knowledge about the Jewish Rabbis of the Middle +Ages. But along with all this knowledge he carried one definite and +important piece of ignorance, an ignorance of the degree to which such +knowledge was exceptional. He was no spoilt and self-conscious child, +taught to regard himself as clever. In the atmosphere in which he +lived learning was a pleasure, and a natural pleasure, like sport or +wine. He had in it the pleasure of some old scholar of the Renascence, +when grammar itself was as fresh as the flowers of spring. He had no +reason to suppose that every one did not join in so admirable a game. +His sagacious destiny, while giving him knowledge of everything else, +left him in ignorance of the ignorance of the world. + +Of his boyish days scarcely any important trace remains, except a kind +of diary which contains under one date the laconic statement, "Married +two wives this morning." The insane ingenuity of the biographer would +be quite capable of seeing in this a most suggestive foreshadowing of +the sexual dualism which is so ably defended in _Fifine at the Fair_. +A great part of his childhood was passed in the society of his only +sister Sariana; and it is a curious and touching fact that with her +also he passed his last days. From his earliest babyhood he seems to +have lived in a more or less stimulating mental atmosphere; but as he +emerged into youth he came under great poetic influences, which made +his father's classical poetic tradition look for the time insipid. +Browning began to live in the life of his own age. + +As a young man he attended classes at University College; beyond this +there is little evidence that he was much in touch with intellectual +circles outside that of his own family. But the forces that were +moving the literary world had long passed beyond the merely literary +area. About the time of Browning's boyhood a very subtle and profound +change was beginning in the intellectual atmosphere of such homes as +that of the Brownings. In studying the careers of great men we tend +constantly to forget that their youth was generally passed and their +characters practically formed in a period long previous to their +appearance in history. We think of Milton, the Restoration Puritan, +and forget that he grew up in the living shadow of Shakespeare and the +full summer of the Elizabethan drama. We realise Garibaldi as a sudden +and almost miraculous figure rising about fifty years ago to create +the new Kingdom of Italy, and we forget that he must have formed his +first ideas of liberty while hearing at his father's dinner-table that +Napoleon was the master of Europe. Similarly, we think of Browning as +the great Victorian poet, who lived long enough to have opinions on +Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bill, and forget that as a young man he +passed a bookstall and saw a volume ticketed "Mr. Shelley's Atheistic +Poem," and had to search even in his own really cultivated circle for +some one who could tell him who Mr. Shelley was. Browning was, in +short, born in the afterglow of the great Revolution. + +The French Revolution was at root a thoroughly optimistic thing. It +may seem strange to attribute optimism to anything so destructive; +but, in truth, this particular kind of optimism is inevitably, and by +its nature, destructive. The great dominant idea of the whole of that +period, the period before, during, and long after the Revolution, is +the idea that man would by his nature live in an Eden of dignity, +liberty and love, and that artificial and decrepit systems are keeping +him out of that Eden. No one can do the least justice to the great +Jacobins who does not realise that to them breaking the civilisation +of ages was like breaking the cords of a treasure-chest. And just as +for more than a century great men had dreamed of this beautiful +emancipation, so the dream began in the time of Keats and Shelley to +creep down among the dullest professions and the most prosaic classes +of society. A spirit of revolt was growing among the young of the +middle classes, which had nothing at all in common with the complete +and pessimistic revolt against all things in heaven or earth, which +has been fashionable among the young in more recent times. The +Shelleyan enthusiast was altogether on the side of existence; he +thought that every cloud and clump of grass shared his strict +republican orthodoxy. He represented, in short, a revolt of the normal +against the abnormal; he found himself, so to speak, in the heart of a +wholly topsy-turvy and blasphemous state of things, in which God was +rebelling against Satan. There began to arise about this time a race +of young men like Keats, members of a not highly cultivated middle +class, and even of classes lower, who felt in a hundred ways this +obscure alliance with eternal things against temporal and practical +ones, and who lived on its imaginative delight. They were a kind of +furtive universalist; they had discovered the whole cosmos, and they +kept the whole cosmos a secret. They climbed up dark stairs to meagre +garrets, and shut themselves in with the gods. Numbers of the great +men, who afterwards illuminated the Victorian era, were at this time +living in mean streets in magnificent daydreams. Ruskin was solemnly +visiting his solemn suburban aunts; Dickens was going to and fro in a +blacking factory; Carlyle, slightly older, was still lingering on a +poor farm in Dumfriesshire; Keats had not long become the assistant of +the country surgeon when Browning was a boy in Camberwell. On all +sides there was the first beginning of the æsthetic stir in the middle +classes which expressed itself in the combination of so many poetic +lives with so many prosaic livelihoods. It was the age of inspired +office-boys. + +Browning grew up, then, with the growing fame of Shelley and Keats, in +the atmosphere of literary youth, fierce and beautiful, among new +poets who believed in a new world. It is important to remember this, +because the real Browning was a quite different person from the grim +moralist and metaphysician who is seen through the spectacles of +Browning Societies and University Extension Lecturers. Browning was +first and foremost a poet, a man made to enjoy all things visible and +invisible, a priest of the higher passions. The misunderstanding that +has supposed him to be other than poetical, because his form was often +fanciful and abrupt, is really different from the misunderstanding +which attaches to most other poets. The opponents of Victor Hugo +called him a mere windbag; the opponents of Shakespeare called him a +buffoon. But the admirers of Hugo and Shakespeare at least knew +better. Now the admirers and opponents of Browning alike make him out +to be a pedant rather than a poet. The only difference between the +Browningite and the anti-Browningite, is that the second says he was +not a poet but a mere philosopher, and the first says he was a +philosopher and not a mere poet. The admirer disparages poetry in +order to exalt Browning; the opponent exalts poetry in order to +disparage Browning; and all the time Browning himself exalted poetry +above all earthly things, served it with single-hearted intensity, and +stands among the few poets who hardly wrote a line of anything else. + +The whole of the boyhood and youth of Robert Browning has as much the +quality of pure poetry as the boyhood and youth of Shelley. We do not +find in it any trace of the analytical Browning who is believed in by +learned ladies and gentlemen. How indeed would such sympathisers feel +if informed that the first poems that Browning wrote in a volume +called _Incondita_ were noticed to contain the fault of "too much +splendour of language and too little wealth of thought"? They were +indeed Byronic in the extreme, and Browning in his earlier appearances +in society presents himself in quite a romantic manner. Macready, the +actor, wrote of him: "He looks and speaks more like a young poet than +any one I have ever seen." A picturesque tradition remains that Thomas +Carlyle, riding out upon one of his solitary gallops necessitated by +his physical sufferings, was stopped by one whom he described as a +strangely beautiful youth, who poured out to him without preface or +apology his admiration for the great philosopher's works. Browning at +this time seems to have left upon many people this impression of +physical charm. A friend who attended University College with him +says: "He was then a bright handsome youth with long black hair +falling over his shoulders." Every tale that remains of him in +connection with this period asserts and reasserts the completely +romantic spirit by which he was then possessed. He was fond, for +example, of following in the track of gipsy caravans, far across +country, and a song which he heard with the refrain, "Following the +Queen of the Gipsies oh!" rang in his ears long enough to express +itself in his soberer and later days in that splendid poem of the +spirit of escape and Bohemianism, _The Flight of the Duchess_. Such +other of these early glimpses of him as remain, depict him as striding +across Wimbledon Common with his hair blowing in the wind, reciting +aloud passages from Isaiah, or climbing up into the elms above Norwood +to look over London by night. It was when looking down from that +suburban eyrie over the whole confounding labyrinth of London that he +was filled with that great irresponsible benevolence which is the best +of the joys of youth, and conceived the idea of a perfectly +irresponsible benevolence in the first plan of _Pippa Passes_. At the +end of his father's garden was a laburnum "heavy with its weight of +gold," and in the tree two nightingales were in the habit of singing +against each other, a form of competition which, I imagine, has since +become less common in Camberwell. When Browning as a boy was +intoxicated with the poetry of Shelley and Keats, he hypnotised +himself into something approaching to a positive conviction that these +two birds were the spirits of the two great poets who had settled in a +Camberwell garden, in order to sing to the only young gentleman who +really adored and understood them. This last story is perhaps the most +typical of the tone common to all the rest; it would be difficult to +find a story which across the gulf of nearly eighty years awakens so +vividly a sense of the sumptuous folly of an intellectual boyhood. +With Browning, as with all true poets, passion came first and made +intellectual expression, the hunger for beauty making literature as +the hunger for bread made a plough. The life he lived in those early +days was no life of dull application; there was no poet whose youth +was so young. When he was full of years and fame, and delineating in +great epics the beauty and horror of the romance of southern Europe, a +young man, thinking to please him, said, "There is no romance now +except in Italy." "Well," said Browning, "I should make an exception +of Camberwell." + +Such glimpses will serve to indicate the kind of essential issue that +there was in the nature of things between the generation of Browning +and the generation of his father. Browning was bound in the nature of +things to become at the outset Byronic, and Byronism was not, of +course, in reality so much a pessimism about civilised things as an +optimism about savage things. This great revolt on behalf of the +elemental which Keats and Shelley represented was bound first of all +to occur. Robert Browning junior had to be a part of it, and Robert +Browning senior had to go back to his water colours and the faultless +couplets of Pope with the full sense of the greatest pathos that the +world contains, the pathos of the man who has produced something that +he cannot understand. + +The earliest works of Browning bear witness, without exception, to +this ardent and somewhat sentimental evolution. _Pauline_ appeared +anonymously in 1833. It exhibits the characteristic mark of a juvenile +poem, the general suggestion that the author is a thousand years old. +Browning calls it a fragment of a confession; and Mr. Johnson Fox, an +old friend of Browning's father, who reviewed it for _Tait's +Magazine_, said, with truth, that it would be difficult to find +anything more purely confessional. It is the typical confession of a +boy laying bare all the spiritual crimes of infidelity and moral +waste, in a state of genuine ignorance of the fact that every one else +has committed them. It is wholesome and natural for youth to go about +confessing that the grass is green, and whispering to a priest +hoarsely that it has found a sun in heaven. But the records of that +particular period of development, even when they are as ornate and +beautiful as _Pauline_, are not necessarily or invariably wholesome +reading. The chief interest of _Pauline_, with all its beauties, lies +in a certain almost humorous singularity, the fact that Browning, of +all people, should have signalised his entrance into the world of +letters with a poem which may fairly be called morbid. But this is a +morbidity so general and recurrent that it may be called in a +contradictory phrase a healthy morbidity; it is a kind of intellectual +measles. No one of any degree of maturity in reading _Pauline_ will be +quite so horrified at the sins of the young gentleman who tells the +story as he seems to be himself. It is the utterance of that bitter +and heartrending period of youth which comes before we realise the one +grand and logical basis of all optimism--the doctrine of original sin. +The boy at this stage being an ignorant and inhuman idealist, regards +all his faults as frightful secret malformations, and it is only later +that he becomes conscious of that large and beautiful and benignant +explanation that the heart of man is deceitful above all things and +desperately wicked. That Browning, whose judgment on his own work was +one of the best in the world, took this view of _Pauline_ in after +years is quite obvious. He displayed a very manly and unique capacity +of really laughing at his own work without being in the least ashamed +of it. "This," he said of _Pauline_, "is the only crab apple that +remains of the shapely tree of life in my fool's paradise." It would +be difficult to express the matter more perfectly. Although _Pauline_ +was published anonymously, its authorship was known to a certain +circle, and Browning began to form friendships in the literary world. +He had already become acquainted with two of the best friends he was +ever destined to have, Alfred Domett, celebrated in "The Guardian +Angel" and "Waring," and his cousin Silverthorne, whose death is +spoken of in one of the most perfect lyrics in the English language, +Browning's "May and Death." These were men of his own age, and his +manner of speaking of them gives us many glimpses into that splendid +world of comradeship which. Plato and Walt Whitman knew, with its +endless days and its immortal nights. Browning had a third friend +destined to play an even greater part in his life, but who belonged to +an older generation and a statelier school of manners and +scholarship. Mr. Kenyon was a schoolfellow of Browning's father, and +occupied towards his son something of the position of an irresponsible +uncle. He was a rotund, rosy old gentleman, fond of comfort and the +courtesies of life, but fond of them more for others, though much for +himself. Elizabeth Barrett in after years wrote of "the brightness of +his carved speech," which would appear to suggest that he practised +that urbane and precise order of wit which was even then +old-fashioned. Yet, notwithstanding many talents of this kind, he was +not so much an able man as the natural friend and equal of able men. + +Browning's circle of friends, however, widened about this time in all +directions. One friend in particular he made, the Comte de +Ripert-Monclar, a French Royalist with whom he prosecuted with renewed +energy his studies in the mediæval and Renaissance schools of +philosophy. It was the Count who suggested that Browning should write +a poetical play on the subject of Paracelsus. After reflection, +indeed, the Count retracted this advice on the ground that the history +of the great mystic gave no room for love. Undismayed by this terrible +deficiency, Browning caught up the idea with characteristic +enthusiasm, and in 1835 appeared the first of his works which he +himself regarded as representative--_Paracelsus_. The poem shows an +enormous advance in technical literary power; but in the history of +Browning's mind it is chiefly interesting as giving an example of a +peculiarity which clung to him during the whole of his literary life, +an intense love of the holes and corners of history. Fifty-two years +afterwards he wrote _Parleyings with certain Persons of Importance in +their Day_, the last poem published in his lifetime; and any reader +of that remarkable work will perceive that the common characteristic +of all these persons is not so much that they were of importance in +their day as that they are of no importance in ours. The same +eccentric fastidiousness worked in him as a young man when he wrote +_Paracelsus_ and _Sordello_. Nowhere in Browning's poetry can we find +any very exhaustive study of any of the great men who are the +favourites of the poet and moralist. He has written about philosophy +and ambition and music and morals, but he has written nothing about +Socrates or Cæsar or Napoleon, or Beethoven or Mozart, or Buddha or +Mahomet. When he wishes to describe a political ambition he selects +that entirely unknown individual, King Victor of Sardinia. When he +wishes to express the most perfect soul of music, he unearths some +extraordinary persons called Abt Vogler and Master Hugues of +Saxe-Gotha. When he wishes to express the largest and sublimest scheme +of morals and religion which his imagination can conceive, he does not +put it into the mouth of any of the great spiritual leaders of +mankind, but into the mouth of an obscure Jewish Rabbi of the name of +Ben Ezra. It is fully in accordance with this fascinating craze of his +that when he wishes to study the deification of the intellect and the +disinterested pursuit of the things of the mind, he does not select +any of the great philosophers from Plato to Darwin, whose +investigations are still of some importance in the eyes of the world. +He selects the figure of all figures most covered with modern satire +and pity, the _à priori_ scientist of the Middle Ages and the +Renaissance. His supreme type of the human intellect is neither the +academic nor the positivist, but the alchemist. It is difficult to +imagine a turn of mind constituting a more complete challenge to the +ordinary modern point of view. To the intellect of our time the wild +investigators of the school of Paracelsus seem to be the very crown +and flower of futility, they are collectors of straws and careful +misers of dust. But for all that Browning was right. Any critic who +understands the true spirit of mediæval science can see that he was +right; no critic can see how right he was unless he understands the +spirit of mediæval science as thoroughly as he did. In the character +of Paracelsus, Browning wished to paint the dangers and +disappointments which attend the man who believes merely in the +intellect. He wished to depict the fall of the logician; and with a +perfect and unerring instinct he selected a man who wrote and spoke in +the tradition of the Middle Ages, the most thoroughly and even +painfully logical period that the world has ever seen. If he had +chosen an ancient Greek philosopher, it would have been open to the +critic to have said that that philosopher relied to some extent upon +the most sunny and graceful social life that ever flourished. If he +had made him a modern sociological professor, it would have been +possible to object that his energies were not wholly concerned with +truth, but partly with the solid and material satisfaction of society. +But the man truly devoted to the things of the mind was the mediæval +magician. It is a remarkable fact that one civilisation does not +satisfy itself by calling another civilisation wicked--it calls it +uncivilised. We call the Chinese barbarians, and they call us +barbarians. The mediæval state, like China, was a foreign +civilisation, and this was its supreme characteristic, that it cared +for the things of the mind for their own sake. To complain of the +researches of its sages on the ground that they were not materially +fruitful, is to act as we should act in telling a gardener that his +roses were not as digestible as our cabbages. It is not only true that +the mediæval philosophers never discovered the steam-engine; it is +quite equally true that they never tried. The Eden of the Middle Ages +was really a garden, where each of God's flowers--truth and beauty and +reason--flourished for its own sake, and with its own name. The Eden +of modern progress is a kitchen garden. + +It would have been hard, therefore, for Browning to have chosen a +better example for his study of intellectual egotism than Paracelsus. +Modern life accuses the mediæval tradition of crushing the intellect; +Browning, with a truer instinct, accuses that tradition of +over-glorifying it. There is, however, another and even more important +deduction to be made from the moral of _Paracelsus_. The usual +accusation against Browning is that he was consumed with logic; that +he thought all subjects to be the proper pabulum of intellectual +disquisition; that he gloried chiefly in his own power of plucking +knots to pieces and rending fallacies in two; and that to this method +he sacrificed deliberately, and with complete self-complacency, the +element of poetry and sentiment. To people who imagine Browning to +have been this frigid believer in the intellect there is only one +answer necessary or sufficient. It is the fact that he wrote a play +designed to destroy the whole of this intellectualist fallacy at the +age of twenty-three. + +_Paracelsus_ was in all likelihood Browning's introduction to the +literary world. It was many years, and even many decades, before he +had anything like a public appreciation, but a very great part of the +minority of those who were destined to appreciate him came over to his +standard upon the publication of _Paracelsus_. The celebrated John +Forster had taken up _Paracelsus_ "as a thing to slate," and had ended +its perusal with the wildest curiosity about the author and his works. +John Stuart Mill, never backward in generosity, had already interested +himself in Browning, and was finally converted by the same poem. Among +other early admirers were Landor, Leigh Hunt, Horne, Serjeant +Talfourd, and Monckton-Milnes. One man of even greater literary +stature seems to have come into Browning's life about this time, a man +for whom he never ceased to have the warmest affection and trust. +Browning was, indeed, one of the very few men of that period who got +on perfectly with Thomas Carlyle. It is precisely one of those little +things which speak volumes for the honesty and unfathomable good +humour of Browning, that Carlyle, who had a reckless contempt for most +other poets of his day, had something amounting to a real attachment +to him. He would run over to Paris for the mere privilege of dining +with him. Browning, on the other hand, with characteristic +impetuosity, passionately defended and justified Carlyle in all +companies. "I have just seen dear Carlyle," he writes on one occasion; +"catch me calling people dear in a hurry, except in a letter +beginning." He sided with Carlyle in the vexed question of the Carlyle +domestic relations, and his impression of Mrs. Carlyle was that she +was "a hard unlovable woman." As, however, it is on record that he +once, while excitedly explaining some point of mystical philosophy, +put down Mrs. Carlyle's hot kettle on the hearthrug, any frigidity +that he may have observed in her manner may possibly find a natural +explanation. His partisanship in the Carlyle affair, which was +characteristically headlong and human, may not throw much light on +that painful problem itself, but it throws a great deal of light on +the character of Browning, which was pugnaciously proud of its +friends, and had what may almost be called a lust of loyalty. Browning +was not capable of that most sagacious detachment which enabled +Tennyson to say that he could not agree that the Carlyles ought never +to have married, since if they had each married elsewhere there would +have been four miserable people instead of two. + +Among the motley and brilliant crowd with which Browning had now begun +to mingle, there was no figure more eccentric and spontaneous than +that of Macready the actor. This extraordinary person, a man living +from hand to mouth in all things spiritual and pecuniary, a man +feeding upon flying emotions, conceived something like an attraction +towards Browning, spoke of him as the very ideal of a young poet, and +in a moment of peculiar excitement suggested to him the writing of a +great play. Browning was a man fundamentally indeed more steadfast and +prosaic, but on the surface fully as rapid and easily infected as +Macready. He immediately began to plan out a great historical play, +and selected for his subject "Strafford." + +In Browning's treatment of the subject there is something more than a +trace of his Puritan and Liberal upbringing. It is one of the very +earliest of the really important works in English literature which +are based on the Parliamentarian reading of the incidents of the time +of Charles I. It is true that the finest element in the play is the +opposition between Strafford and Pym, an opposition so complete, so +lucid, so consistent, that it has, so to speak, something of the +friendly openness and agreement which belongs to an alliance. The two +men love each other and fight each other, and do the two things at the +same time completely. This is a great thing of which even to attempt +the description. It is easy to have the impartiality which can speak +judicially of both parties, but it is not so easy to have that larger +and higher impartiality which can speak passionately on behalf of both +parties. Nevertheless, it may be permissible to repeat that there is +in the play a definite trace of Browning's Puritan education and +Puritan historical outlook. + +For _Strafford_ is, of course, an example of that most difficult of +all literary works--a political play. The thing has been achieved once +at least admirably in Shakespeare's _Julius Cæsar_, and something like +it, though from a more one-sided and romantic stand-point, has been +done excellently in _L'Aiglon_. But the difficulties of such a play +are obvious on the face of the matter. In a political play the +principal characters are not merely men. They are symbols, +arithmetical figures representing millions of other men outside. It +is, by dint of elaborate stage management, possible to bring a mob +upon the boards, but the largest mob ever known is nothing but a +floating atom of the people; and the people of which the politician +has to think does not consist of knots of rioters in the street, but +of some million absolutely distinct individuals, each sitting in his +own breakfast room reading his own morning paper. To give even the +faintest suggestion of the strength and size of the people in this +sense in the course of a dramatic performance is obviously impossible. +That is why it is so easy on the stage to concentrate all the pathos +and dignity upon such persons as Charles I. and Mary Queen of Scots, +the vampires of their people, because within the minute limits of a +stage there is room for their small virtues and no room for their +enormous crimes. It would be impossible to find a stronger example +than the case of _Strafford_. It is clear that no one could possibly +tell the whole truth about the life and death of Strafford, +politically considered, in a play. Strafford was one of the greatest +men ever born in England, and he attempted to found a great English +official despotism. That is to say, he attempted to found something +which is so different from what has actually come about that we can in +reality scarcely judge of it, any more than we can judge whether it +would be better to live in another planet, or pleasanter to have been +born a dog or an elephant. It would require enormous imagination to +reconstruct the political ideals of Strafford. Now Browning, as we all +know, got over the matter in his play, by practically denying that +Strafford had any political ideals at all. That is to say, while +crediting Strafford with all his real majesty of intellect and +character, he makes the whole of his political action dependent upon +his passionate personal attachment to the King. This is +unsatisfactory; it is in reality a dodging of the great difficulty of +the political play. That difficulty, in the case of any political +problem, is, as has been said, great. It would be very hard, for +example, to construct a play about Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bill. It +would be almost impossible to get expressed in a drama of some five +acts and some twenty characters anything so ancient and complicated as +that Irish problem, the roots of which lie in the darkness of the age +of Strongbow, and the branches of which spread out to the remotest +commonwealths of the East and West. But we should scarcely be +satisfied if a dramatist overcame the difficulty by ascribing Mr. +Gladstone's action in the Home Rule question to an overwhelming +personal affection for Mr. Healy. And in thus basing Strafford's +action upon personal and private reasons, Browning certainly does some +injustice to the political greatness, of Strafford. To attribute Mr. +Gladstone's conversion to Home Rule to an infatuation such as that +suggested above, would certainly have the air of implying that the +writer thought the Home Rule doctrine a peculiar or untenable one. +Similarly, Browning's choice of a motive for Strafford has very much +the air of an assumption that there was nothing to be said on public +grounds for Strafford's political ideal. Now this is certainly not the +case. The Puritans in the great struggles of the reign of Charles I. +may have possessed more valuable ideals than the Royalists, but it is +a very vulgar error to suppose that they were any more idealistic. In +Browning's play Pym is made almost the incarnation of public spirit, +and Strafford of private ties. But not only may an upholder of +despotism be public-spirited, but in the case of prominent upholders +of it like Strafford he generally is. Despotism indeed, and attempts +at despotism, like that of Strafford, are a kind of disease of public +spirit. They represent, as it were, the drunkenness of responsibility. +It is when men begin to grow desperate in their love for the people, +when they are overwhelmed with the difficulties and blunders of +humanity, that they fall back upon a wild desire to manage everything +themselves. Their faith in themselves is only a disillusionment with +mankind. They are in that most dreadful position, dreadful alike in +personal and public affairs--the position of the man who has lost +faith and not lost love. This belief that all would go right if we +could only get the strings into our own hands is a fallacy almost +without exception, but nobody can justly say that it is not +public-spirited. The sin and sorrow of despotism is not that it does +not love men, but that it loves them too much and trusts them too +little. Therefore from age to age in history arise these great +despotic dreamers, whether they be Royalists or Imperialists or even +Socialists, who have at root this idea, that the world would enter +into rest if it went their way and forswore altogether the right of +going its own way. When a man begins to think that the grass will not +grow at night unless he lies awake to watch it, he generally ends +either in an asylum or on the throne of an Emperor. Of these men +Strafford was one, and we cannot but feel that Browning somewhat +narrows the significance and tragedy of his place in history by making +him merely the champion of a personal idiosyncrasy against a great +public demand. Strafford was something greater than this; if indeed, +when we come to think of it, a man can be anything greater than the +friend of another man. But the whole question is interesting, because +Browning, although he never again attacked a political drama of such +palpable importance as _Strafford_, could never keep politics +altogether out of his dramatic work. _King Victor and King Charles_, +which followed it, is a political play, the study of a despotic +instinct much meaner than that of Strafford. _Colombe's Birthday_, +again, is political as well as romantic. Politics in its historic +aspect would seem to have had a great fascination for him, as indeed +it must have for all ardent intellects, since it is the one thing in +the world that is as intellectual as the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ and +as rapid as the Derby. + +One of the favourite subjects among those who like to conduct long +controversies about Browning (and their name is legion) is the +question of whether Browning's plays, such as _Strafford_, were +successes upon the stage. As they are never agreed about what +constitutes a success on the stage, it is difficult to adjudge their +quarrels. But the general fact is very simple; such a play as +_Strafford_ was not a gigantic theatrical success, and nobody, it is +to be presumed, ever imagined that it would be. On the other hand, it +was certainly not a failure, but was enjoyed and applauded as are +hundreds of excellent plays which run only for a week or two, as many +excellent plays do, and as all plays ought to do. Above all, the +definite success which attended the representation of _Strafford_ from +the point of view of the more educated and appreciative was quite +enough to establish Browning in a certain definite literary position. +As a classical and established personality he did not come into his +kingdom for years and decades afterwards; not, indeed, until he was +near to entering upon the final rest. But as a detached and eccentric +personality, as a man who existed and who had arisen on the outskirts +of literature, the world began to be conscious of him at this time. + +Of what he was personally at the period that he thus became personally +apparent, Mrs. Bridell Fox has left a very vivid little sketch. She +describes how Browning called at the house (he was acquainted with her +father), and finding that gentleman out, asked with a kind of abrupt +politeness if he might play on the piano. This touch is very +characteristic of the mingled aplomb and unconsciousness of Browning's +social manner. "He was then," she writes, "slim and dark, and very +handsome, and--may I hint it?--just a trifle of a dandy, addicted to +lemon-coloured kid gloves and such things, quite the glass of fashion +and the mould of form. But full of 'ambition,' eager for success, +eager for fame, and, what is more, determined to conquer fame and to +achieve success." That is as good a portrait as we can have of the +Browning of these days--quite self-satisfied, but not self-conscious +young man; one who had outgrown, but only just outgrown, the pure +romanticism of his boyhood, which made him run after gipsy caravans +and listen to nightingales in the wood; a man whose incandescent +vitality, now that it had abandoned gipsies and not yet immersed +itself in casuistical poems, devoted itself excitedly to trifles, such +as lemon-coloured kid gloves and fame. But a man still above all +things perfectly young and natural, professing that foppery which +follows the fashions, and not that sillier and more demoralising +foppery which defies them. Just as he walked in coolly and yet +impulsively into a private drawing-room and offered to play, so he +walked at this time into the huge and crowded salon of European +literature and offered to sing. + + + + +CHAPTER II + +EARLY WORKS + + +In 1840 _Sordello_ was published. Its reception by the great majority +of readers, including some of the ablest men of the time, was a +reception of a kind probably unknown in the rest of literary history, +a reception that was neither praise nor blame. It was perhaps best +expressed by Carlyle, who wrote to say that his wife had read +_Sordello_ with great interest, and wished to know whether Sordello +was a man, or a city, or a book. Better known, of course, is the story +of Tennyson, who said that the first line of the poem-- + + "Who will, may hear Sordello's story told," + +and the last line-- + + "Who would, has heard Sordello's story told," + +were the only two lines in the poem that he understood, and they were +lies. + +Perhaps the best story, however, of all the cycle of Sordello legends +is that which is related of Douglas Jerrold. He was recovering from an +illness; and having obtained permission for the first time to read a +little during the day, he picked up a book from a pile beside the bed +and began _Sordello_. No sooner had he done so than he turned deadly +pale, put down the book, and said, "My God! I'm an idiot. My health +is restored, but my mind's gone. I can't understand two consecutive +lines of an English poem." He then summoned his family and silently +gave the book into their hands, asking for their opinion on the poem; +and as the shadow of perplexity gradually passed over their faces, he +heaved a sigh of relief and went to sleep. These stories, whether +accurate or no, do undoubtedly represent the very peculiar reception +accorded to _Sordello_, a reception which, as I have said, bears no +resemblance whatever to anything in the way of eulogy or condemnation +that had ever been accorded to a work of art before. There had been +authors whom it was fashionable to boast of admiring and authors whom +it was fashionable to boast of despising; but with _Sordello_ enters +into literary history the Browning of popular badinage, the author +whom it is fashionable to boast of not understanding. + +Putting aside for the moment the literary qualities which are to be +found in the poem, when it becomes intelligible, there is one question +very relevant to the fame and character of Browning which is raised by +_Sordello_ when it is considered, as most people consider it, as +hopelessly unintelligible. It really throws some light upon the reason +of Browning's obscurity. The ordinary theory of Browning's obscurity +is to the effect that it was a piece of intellectual vanity indulged +in more and more insolently as his years and fame increased. There are +at least two very decisive objections to this popular explanation. In +the first place, it must emphatically be said for Browning that in all +the numerous records and impressions of him throughout his long and +very public life, there is not one iota of evidence that he was a man +who was intellectually vain. The evidence is entirely the other way. +He was vain of many things, of his physical health, for example, and +even more of the physical health which he contrived to bestow for a +certain period upon his wife. From the records of his early dandyism, +his flowing hair and his lemon-coloured gloves, it is probable enough +that he was vain of his good looks. He was vain of his masculinity, +his knowledge of the world, and he was, I fancy, decidedly vain of his +prejudices, even, it might be said, vain of being vain of them. But +everything is against the idea that he was much in the habit of +thinking of himself in his intellectual aspect. In the matter of +conversation, for example, some people who liked him found him genial, +talkative, anecdotal, with a certain strengthening and sanative +quality in his mere bodily presence. Some people who did not like him +found him a mere frivolous chatterer, afflicted with bad manners. One +lady, who knew him well, said that, though he only met you in a crowd +and made some commonplace remark, you went for the rest of the day +with your head up. Another lady who did not know him, and therefore +disliked him, asked after a dinner party, "Who was that too-exuberant +financier?" These are the diversities of feeling about him. But they +all agree in one point--that he did not talk cleverly, or try to talk +cleverly, as that proceeding is understood in literary circles. He +talked positively, he talked a great deal, but he never attempted to +give that neat and æsthetic character to his speech which is almost +invariable in the case of the man who is vain of his mental +superiority. When he did impress people with mental gymnastics, it was +mostly in the form of pouring out, with passionate enthusiasm, whole +epics written by other people, which is the last thing that the +literary egotist would be likely to waste his time over. We have +therefore to start with an enormous psychological improbability that +Browning made his poems complicated from mere pride in his powers and +contempt of his readers. + +There is, however, another very practical objection to the ordinary +theory that Browning's obscurity was a part of the intoxication of +fame and intellectual consideration. We constantly hear the statement +that Browning's intellectual complexity increased with his later +poems, but the statement is simply not true. _Sordello_, to the +indescribable density of which he never afterwards even approached, +was begun before _Strafford_, and was therefore the third of his +works, and even if we adopt his own habit of ignoring _Pauline_, the +second. He wrote the greater part of it when he was twenty-four. It +was in his youth, at the time when a man is thinking of love and +publicity, of sunshine and singing birds, that he gave birth to this +horror of great darkness; and the more we study the matter with any +knowledge of the nature of youth, the more we shall come to the +conclusion that Browning's obscurity had altogether the opposite +origin to that which is usually assigned to it. He was not +unintelligible because he was proud, but unintelligible because he was +humble. He was not unintelligible because his thoughts were vague, but +because to him they were obvious. + +A man who is intellectually vain does not make himself +incomprehensible, because he is so enormously impressed with the +difference between his readers' intelligence and his own that he +talks down to them with elaborate repetition and lucidity. What poet +was ever vainer than Byron? What poet was ever so magnificently lucid? +But a young man of genius who has a genuine humility in his heart does +not elaborately explain his discoveries, because he does not think +that they are discoveries. He thinks that the whole street is humming +with his ideas, and that the postman and the tailor are poets like +himself. Browning's impenetrable poetry was the natural expression of +this beautiful optimism. _Sordello_ was the most glorious compliment +that has ever been paid to the average man. + +In the same manner, of course, outward obscurity is in a young author +a mark of inward clarity. A man who is vague in his ideas does not +speak obscurely, because his own dazed and drifting condition leads +him to clutch at phrases like ropes and use the formulæ that every one +understands. No one ever found Miss Marie Corelli obscure, because she +believes only in words. But if a young man really has ideas of his +own, he must be obscure at first, because he lives in a world of his +own in which there are symbols and correspondences and categories +unknown to the rest of the world. Let us take an imaginary example. +Suppose that a young poet had developed by himself a peculiar idea +that all forms of excitement, including religious excitement, were a +kind of evil intoxication, he might say to himself continually that +churches were in reality taverns, and this idea would become so fixed +in his mind that he would forget that no such association existed in +the minds of others. And suppose that in pursuance of this general +idea, which is a perfectly clear and intellectual idea, though a very +silly one, he were to say that he believed in Puritanism without its +theology, and were to repeat this idea also to himself until it became +instinctive and familiar, such a man might take up a pen, and under +the impression that he was saying something figurative indeed, but +quite clear and suggestive, write some such sentence as this, "You +will not get the godless Puritan into your white taverns," and no one +in the length and breadth of the country could form the remotest +notion of what he could mean. So it would have been in any example, +for instance, of a man who made some philosophical discovery and did +not realise how far the world was from it. If it had been possible for +a poet in the sixteenth century to hit upon and learn to regard as +obvious the evolutionary theory of Darwin, he might have written down +some such line as "the radiant offspring of the ape," and the maddest +volumes of mediæval natural history would have been ransacked for the +meaning of the allusion. The more fixed and solid and sensible the +idea appeared to him, the more dark and fantastic it would have +appeared to the world. Most of us indeed, if we ever say anything +valuable, say it when we are giving expression to that part of us +which has become as familiar and invisible as the pattern on our wall +paper. It is only when an idea has become a matter of course to the +thinker that it becomes startling to the world. + +It is worth while to dwell upon this preliminary point of the ground +of Browning's obscurity, because it involves an important issue about +him. Our whole view of Browning is bound to be absolutely different, +and I think absolutely false, if we start with the conception that he +was what the French call an intellectual. If we see Browning with the +eyes of his particular followers, we shall inevitably think this. For +his followers are pre-eminently intellectuals, and there never lived +upon the earth a great man who was so fundamentally different from his +followers. Indeed, he felt this heartily and even humorously himself. +"Wilkes was no Wilkite," he said, "and I am very far from being a +Browningite." We shall, as I say, utterly misunderstand Browning at +every step of his career if we suppose that he was the sort of man who +would be likely to take a pleasure in asserting the subtlety and +abstruseness of his message. He took pleasure beyond all question in +himself; in the strictest sense of the word he enjoyed himself. But +his conception of himself was never that of the intellectual. He +conceived himself rather as a sanguine and strenuous man, a great +fighter. "I was ever," as he says, "a fighter." His faults, a certain +occasional fierceness and grossness, were the faults that are counted +as virtues among navvies and sailors and most primitive men. His +virtues, boyishness and absolute fidelity, and a love of plain words +and things are the virtues which are counted as vices among the +æsthetic prigs who pay him the greatest honour. He had his more +objectionable side, like other men, but it had nothing to do with +literary egotism. He was not vain of being an extraordinary man. He +was only somewhat excessively vain of being an ordinary one. + +The Browning then who published _Sordello_ we have to conceive, not as +a young pedant anxious to exaggerate his superiority to the public, +but as a hot-headed, strong-minded, inexperienced, and essentially +humble man, who had more ideas than he knew how to disentangle from +each other. If we compare, for example, the complexity of Browning +with the clarity of Matthew Arnold, we shall realise that the cause +lies in the fact that Matthew Arnold was an intellectual aristocrat, +and Browning an intellectual democrat. The particular peculiarities of +_Sordello_ illustrate the matter very significantly. A very great part +of the difficulty of _Sordello_, for instance, is in the fact that +before the reader even approaches to tackling the difficulties of +Browning's actual narrative, he is apparently expected to start with +an exhaustive knowledge of that most shadowy and bewildering of all +human epochs--the period of the Guelph and Ghibelline struggles in +mediæval Italy. Here, of course, Browning simply betrays that +impetuous humility which we have previously observed. His father was a +student of mediæval chronicles, he had himself imbibed that learning +in the same casual manner in which a boy learns to walk or to play +cricket. Consequently in a literary sense he rushed up to the first +person he met and began talking about Ecelo and Taurello Salinguerra +with about as much literary egotism as an English baby shows when it +talks English to an Italian organ grinder. Beyond this the poem of +_Sordello_, powerful as it is, does not present any very significant +advance in Browning's mental development on that already represented +by _Pauline_ and _Paracelsus_. _Pauline, Paracelsus_, and _Sordello_ +stand together in the general fact that they are all, in the excellent +phrase used about the first by Mr. Johnson Fox, "confessional." All +three are analyses of the weakness which every artistic temperament +finds in itself. Browning is still writing about himself, a subject +of which he, like all good and brave men, was profoundly ignorant. +This kind of self-analysis is always misleading. For we do not see in +ourselves those dominant traits strong enough to force themselves out +in action which our neighbours see. We see only a welter of minute +mental experiences which include all the sins that were ever committed +by Nero or Sir Willoughby Patterne. When studying ourselves, we are +looking at a fresco with a magnifying glass. Consequently, these early +impressions which great men have given of themselves are nearly always +slanders upon themselves, for the strongest man is weak to his own +conscience, and Hamlet flourished to a certainty even inside Napoleon. +So it was with Browning, who when he was nearly eighty was destined to +write with the hilarity of a schoolboy, but who wrote in his boyhood +poems devoted to analysing the final break-up of intellect and soul. + +_Sordello_, with all its load of learning, and almost more oppressive +load of beauty, has never had any very important influence even upon +Browningites, and with the rest of the world the name has passed into +a jest. The most truly memorable thing about it was Browning's saying +in answer to all gibes and misconceptions, a saying which expresses +better than anything else what genuine metal was in him, "I blame no +one, least of all myself, who did my best then and since." This is +indeed a model for all men of letters who do not wish to retain only +the letters and to lose the man. + +When next Browning spoke, it was from a greater height and with a new +voice. His visit to Asolo, "his first love," as he said, "among +Italian cities," coincided with the stir and transformation in his +spirit and the breaking up of that splendid palace of mirrors in which +a man like Byron had lived and died. In 1841 _Pippa Passes_ appeared, +and with it the real Browning of the modern world. He had made the +discovery which Byron never made, but which almost every young man +does at last make--the thrilling discovery that he is not Robinson +Crusoe. _Pippa Passes_ is the greatest poem ever written, with the +exception of one or two by Walt Whitman, to express the sentiment of +the pure love of humanity. The phrase has unfortunately a false and +pedantic sound. The love of humanity is a thing supposed to be +professed only by vulgar and officious philanthropists, or by saints +of a superhuman detachment and universality. As a matter of fact, love +of humanity is the commonest and most natural of the feelings of a +fresh nature, and almost every one has felt it alight capriciously +upon him when looking at a crowded park or a room full of dancers. The +love of those whom we do not know is quite as eternal a sentiment as +the love of those whom we do know. In our friends the richness of life +is proved to us by what we have gained; in the faces in the street the +richness of life is proved to us by the hint of what we have lost. And +this feeling for strange faces and strange lives, when it is felt +keenly by a young man, almost always expresses itself in a desire +after a kind of vagabond beneficence, a desire to go through the world +scattering goodness like a capricious god. It is desired that mankind +should hunt in vain for its best friend as it would hunt for a +criminal; that he should be an anonymous Saviour, an unrecorded +Christ. Browning, like every one else, when awakened to the beauty +and variety of men, dreamed of this arrogant self-effacement. He has +written of himself that he had long thought vaguely of a being passing +through the world, obscure and unnameable, but moulding the destinies +of others to mightier and better issues. Then his almost faultless +artistic instinct came in and suggested that this being, whom he +dramatised as the work-girl, Pippa, should be even unconscious of +anything but her own happiness, and should sway men's lives with a +lonely mirth. It was a bold and moving conception to show us these +mature and tragic human groups all at the supreme moment eavesdropping +upon the solitude of a child. And it was an even more precise instinct +which made Browning make the errant benefactor a woman. A man's good +work is effected by doing what he does, a woman's by being what she +is. + +There is one other point about _Pippa Passes_ which is worth a +moment's attention. The great difficulty with regard to the +understanding of Browning is the fact that, to all appearance, +scarcely any one can be induced to take him seriously as a literary +artist. His adversaries consider his literary vagaries a +disqualification for every position among poets; and his admirers +regard those vagaries with the affectionate indulgence of a circle of +maiden aunts towards a boy home for the holidays. Browning is supposed +to do as he likes with form, because he had such a profound scheme of +thought. But, as a matter of fact, though few of his followers will +take Browning's literary form seriously, he took his own literary form +very seriously. Now _Pippa Passes_ is, among other things, eminently +remarkable as a very original artistic form, a series of disconnected +but dramatic scenes which have only in common the appearance of one +figure. For this admirable literary departure Browning, amid all the +laudations of his "mind" and his "message," has scarcely ever had +credit. And just as we should, if we took Browning seriously as a +poet, see that he had made many noble literary forms, so we should +also see that he did make from time to time certain definite literary +mistakes. There is one of them, a glaring one, in _Pippa Passes_; and, +as far as I know, no critic has ever thought enough of Browning as an +artist to point it out. It is a gross falsification of the whole +beauty of _Pippa Passes_ to make the Monseigneur and his accomplice in +the last act discuss a plan touching the fate of Pippa herself. The +whole central and splendid idea of the drama is the fact that Pippa is +utterly remote from the grand folk whose lives she troubles and +transforms. To make her in the end turn out to be the niece of one of +them, is like a whiff from an Adelphi melodrama, an excellent thing in +its place, but destructive of the entire conception of Pippa. Having +done that, Browning might just as well have made Sebald turn out to be +her long lost brother, and Luigi a husband to whom she was secretly +married. Browning made this mistake when his own splendid artistic +power was only growing, and its merits and its faults in a tangle. But +its real literary merits and its real literary faults have alike +remained unrecognised under the influence of that unfortunate +intellectualism which idolises Browning as a metaphysician and +neglects him as a poet. But a better test was coming. Browning's +poetry, in the most strictly poetical sense, reached its flower in +_Dramatic Lyrics_, published in 1842. Here he showed himself a +picturesque and poignant artist in a wholly original manner. And the +two main characteristics of the work were the two characteristics most +commonly denied to Browning, both by his opponents and his followers, +passion and beauty; but beauty had enlarged her boundaries in new +modes of dramatic arrangement, and passion had found new voices in +fantastic and realistic verse. Those who suppose Browning to be a +wholly philosophic poet, number a great majority of his commentators. +But when we come to look at the actual facts, they are strangely and +almost unexpectedly otherwise. + +Let any one who believes in the arrogantly intellectual character of +Browning's poetry run through the actual repertoire of the _Dramatic +Lyrics_. The first item consists of those splendid war chants called +"Cavalier Tunes." I do not imagine that any one will maintain that +there is any very mysterious metaphysical aim in them. The second item +is the fine poem "The Lost Leader," a poem which expresses in +perfectly lucid and lyrical verse a perfectly normal and old-fashioned +indignation. It is the same, however far we carry the query. What +theory does the next poem, "How they brought the Good News from Ghent +to Aix," express, except the daring speculation that it is often +exciting to ride a good horse in Belgium? What theory does the poem +after that, "Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr," express, except that +it is also frequently exciting to ride a good horse in Africa? Then +comes "Nationality in Drinks," a mere technical oddity without a gleam +of philosophy; and after that those two entirely exquisite "Garden +Fancies," the first of which is devoted to the abstruse thesis that a +woman may be charming, and the second to the equally abstruse thesis +that a book may be a bore. Then comes "The Soliloquy of the Spanish +Cloister," from which the most ingenious "Browning student" cannot +extract anything except that people sometimes hate each other in +Spain; and then "The Laboratory," from which he could extract nothing +except that people sometimes hate each other in France. This is a +perfectly honest record of the poems as they stand. And the first +eleven poems read straight off are remarkable for these two obvious +characteristics--first, that they contain not even a suggestion of +anything that could be called philosophy; and second, that they +contain a considerable proportion of the best and most typical poems +that Browning ever wrote. It may be repeated that either he wrote +these lyrics because he had an artistic sense, or it is impossible to +hazard even the wildest guess as to why he wrote them. + +It is permissible to say that the _Dramatic Lyrics_ represent the +arrival of the real Browning of literary history. It is true that he +had written already many admirable poems of a far more ambitious +plan--_Paracelsus_ with its splendid version of the faults of the +intellectual, _Pippa Passes_ with its beautiful deification of +unconscious influence. But youth is always ambitious and universal; +mature work exhibits more of individuality, more of the special type +and colour of work which a man is destined to do. Youth is universal, +but not individual. The genius who begins life with a very genuine and +sincere doubt whether he is meant to be an exquisite and idolised +violinist, or the most powerful and eloquent Prime Minister of modern +times, does at last end by making the discovery that there is, after +all, one thing, possibly a certain style of illustrating Nursery +Rhymes, which he can really do better than any one else. This was what +happened to Browning; like every one else, he had to discover first +the universe, and then humanity, and at last himself. With him, as +with all others, the great paradox and the great definition of life +was this, that the ambition narrows as the mind expands. In _Dramatic +Lyrics_ he discovered the one thing that he could really do better +than any one else--the dramatic lyric. The form is absolutely +original: he had discovered a new field of poetry, and in the centre +of that field he had found himself. + +The actual quality, the actual originality of the form is a little +difficult to describe. But its general characteristic is the fearless +and most dexterous use of grotesque things in order to express sublime +emotions. The best and most characteristic of the poems are +love-poems; they express almost to perfection the real wonderland of +youth, but they do not express it by the ideal imagery of most poets +of love. The imagery of these poems consists, if we may take a rapid +survey of Browning's love poetry, of suburban streets, straws, +garden-rakes, medicine bottles, pianos, window-blinds, burnt cork, +fashionable fur coats. But in this new method he thoroughly expressed +the true essential, the insatiable realism of passion. If any one +wished to prove that Browning was not, as he is said to be, the poet +of thought, but pre-eminently one of the poets of passion, we could +scarcely find a better evidence of this profoundly passionate element +than Browning's astonishing realism in love poetry. There is nothing +so fiercely realistic as sentiment and emotion. Thought and the +intellect are content to accept abstractions, summaries, and +generalisations; they are content that ten acres of ground should be +called for the sake of argument X, and ten widows' incomes called for +the sake of argument Y; they are content that a thousand awful and +mysterious disappearances from the visible universe should be summed +up as the mortality of a district, or that ten thousand intoxications +of the soul should bear the general name of the instinct of sex. +Rationalism can live upon air and signs and numbers. But sentiment +must have reality; emotion demands the real fields, the real widows' +homes, the real corpse, and the real woman. And therefore Browning's +love poetry is the finest love poetry in the world, because it does +not talk about raptures and ideals and gates of heaven, but about +window-panes and gloves and garden walls. It does not deal much with +abstractions; it is the truest of all love poetry, because it does not +speak much about love. It awakens in every man the memories of that +immortal instant when common and dead things had a meaning beyond the +power of any dictionary to utter, and a value beyond the power of any +millionaire to compute. He expresses the celestial time when a man +does not think about heaven, but about a parasol. And therefore he is, +first, the greatest of love poets, and, secondly, the only optimistic +philosopher except Whitman. + +The general accusation against Browning in connection with his use of +the grotesque comes in very definitely here; for in using these homely +and practical images, these allusions, bordering on what many would +call the commonplace, he was indeed true to the actual and abiding +spirit of love. In that delightful poem "Youth and Art" we have the +singing girl saying to her old lover-- + + "No harm! It was not my fault + If you never turned your eye's tail up + As I shook upon E _in alt_, + Or ran the chromatic scale up." + +This is a great deal more like the real chaff that passes between +those whose hearts are full of new hope or of old memory than half the +great poems of the world. Browning never forgets the little details +which to a man who has ever really lived may suddenly send an arrow +through the heart. Take, for example, such a matter as dress, as it is +treated in "A Lover's Quarrel." + + "See, how she looks now, dressed + In a sledging cap and vest! + 'Tis a huge fur cloak-- + Like a reindeer's yoke + Falls the lappet along the breast: + Sleeves for her arms to rest, + Or to hang, as my Love likes best." + +That would almost serve as an order to a dressmaker, and is therefore +poetry, or at least excellent poetry of this order. So great a power +have these dead things of taking hold on the living spirit, that I +question whether any one could read through the catalogue of a +miscellaneous auction sale without coming upon things which, if +realised for a moment, would be near to the elemental tears. And if +any of us or all of us are truly optimists, and believe as Browning +did, that existence has a value wholly inexpressible, we are most +truly compelled to that sentiment not by any argument or triumphant +justification of the cosmos, but by a few of these momentary and +immortal sights and sounds, a gesture, an old song, a portrait, a +piano, an old door. + +In 1843 appeared that marvellous drama _The Return of the Druses_, a +work which contains more of Browning's typical qualities exhibited in +an exquisite literary shape, than can easily be counted. We have in +_The Return of the Druses_ his love of the corners of history, his +interest in the religious mind of the East, with its almost terrifying +sense of being in the hand of heaven, his love of colour and verbal +luxury, of gold and green and purple, which made some think he must be +an Oriental himself. But, above all, it presents the first rise of +that great psychological ambition which Browning was thenceforth to +pursue. In _Pauline_ and the poems that follow it, Browning has only +the comparatively easy task of giving an account of himself. In _Pippa +Passes_ he has the only less easy task of giving an account of +humanity. In _The Return of the Druses_ he has for the first time the +task which is so much harder than giving an account of humanity--the +task of giving an account of a human being. Djabal, the great Oriental +impostor, who is the central character of the play, is a peculiarly +subtle character, a compound of blasphemous and lying assumptions of +Godhead with genuine and stirring patriotic and personal feelings: he +is a blend, so to speak, of a base divinity and of a noble humanity. +He is supremely important in the history of Browning's mind, for he is +the first of that great series of the apologiæ of apparently evil men, +on which the poet was to pour out so much of his imaginative +wealth--Djabal, Fra Lippo, Bishop Blougram, Sludge, Prince +Hohenstiel-Schwangau, and the hero of _Fifine at the Fair_. + +With this play, so far as any point can be fixed for the matter, he +enters for the first time on the most valuable of all his labours--the +defence of the indefensible. It may be noticed that Browning was not +in the least content with the fact that certain human frailties had +always lain more or less under an implied indulgence; that all human +sentiment had agreed that a profligate might be generous, or that a +drunkard might be high-minded. He was insatiable: he wished to go +further and show in a character like Djabal that an impostor might be +generous and that a liar might be high-minded. In all his life, it +must constantly be remembered, he tried always the most difficult +things. Just as he tried the queerest metres and attempted to manage +them, so he tried the queerest human souls and attempted to stand in +their place. Charity was his basic philosophy; but it was, as it were, +a fierce charity, a charity that went man-hunting. He was a kind of +cosmic detective who walked into the foulest of thieves' kitchens and +accused men publicly of virtue. The character of Djabal in _The Return +of the Druses_ is the first of this long series of forlorn hopes for +the relief of long surrendered castles of misconduct. As we shall see, +even realising the humanity of a noble impostor like Djabal did not +content his erratic hunger for goodness. He went further again, and +realised the humanity of a mean impostor like Sludge. But in all +things he retained this essential characteristic, that he was not +content with seeking sinners--he sought the sinners whom even sinners +cast out. + +Browning's feeling of ambition in the matter of the drama continued to +grow at this time. It must be remembered that he had every natural +tendency to be theatrical, though he lacked the essential lucidity. +He was not, as a matter of fact, a particularly unsuccessful +dramatist; but in the world of abstract temperaments he was by nature +an unsuccessful dramatist. He was, that is to say, a man who loved +above all things plain and sensational words, open catastrophes, a +clear and ringing conclusion to everything. But it so happened, +unfortunately, that his own words were not plain; that his +catastrophes came with a crashing and sudden unintelligibleness which +left men in doubt whether the thing were a catastrophe or a great +stroke of good luck; that his conclusion, though it rang like a +trumpet to the four corners of heaven, was in its actual message quite +inaudible. We are bound to admit, on the authority of all his best +critics and admirers, that his plays were not failures, but we can all +feel that they should have been. He was, as it were, by nature a +neglected dramatist. He was one of those who achieve the reputation, +in the literal sense, of eccentricity by their frantic efforts to +reach the centre. + +_A Blot on the 'Scutcheon_ followed _The Return of the Druses_. In +connection with the performance of this very fine play a quarrel arose +which would not be worth mentioning if it did not happen to illustrate +the curious energetic simplicity of Browning's character. Macready, +who was in desperately low financial circumstances at this time, tried +by every means conceivable to avoid playing the part; he dodged, he +shuffled, he tried every evasion that occurred to him, but it never +occurred to Browning to see what he meant. He pushed off the part upon +Phelps, and Browning was contented; he resumed it, and Browning was +only discontented on behalf of Phelps. The two had a quarrel; they +were both headstrong, passionate men, but the quarrel dealt entirely +with the unfortunate condition of Phelps. Browning beat down his own +hat over his eyes; Macready flung Browning's manuscript with a slap +upon the floor. But all the time it never occurred to the poet that +Macready's conduct was dictated by anything so crude and simple as a +desire for money. Browning was in fact by his principles and his +ideals a man of the world, but in his life far otherwise. That worldly +ease which is to most of us a temptation was to him an ideal. He was +as it were a citizen of the New Jerusalem who desired with perfect +sanity and simplicity to be a citizen of Mayfair. There was in him a +quality which can only be most delicately described; for it was a +virtue which bears a strange resemblance to one of the meanest of +vices. Those curious people who think the truth a thing that can be +said violently and with ease, might naturally call Browning a snob. He +was fond of society, of fashion and even of wealth: but there is no +snobbery in admiring these things or any things if we admire them for +the right reasons. He admired them as worldlings cannot admire them: +he was, as it were, the child who comes in with the dessert. He bore +the same relation to the snob that the righteous man bears to the +Pharisee: something frightfully close and similar and yet an +everlasting opposite. + + + + +CHAPTER III + +BROWNING AND HIS MARRIAGE + + +Robert Browning had his faults, and the general direction of those +faults has been previously suggested. The chief of his faults, a +certain uncontrollable brutality of speech and gesture when he was +strongly roused, was destined to cling to him all through his life, +and to startle with the blaze of a volcano even the last quiet years +before his death. But any one who wishes to understand how deep was +the elemental honesty and reality of his character, how profoundly +worthy he was of any love that was bestowed upon him, need only study +one most striking and determining element in the question--Browning's +simple, heartfelt, and unlimited admiration for other people. He was +one of a generation of great men, of great men who had a certain +peculiar type, certain peculiar merits and defects. Carlyle, Tennyson, +Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, were alike in being children of a very +strenuous and conscientious age, alike in possessing its earnestness +and air of deciding great matters, alike also in showing a certain +almost noble jealousy, a certain restlessness, a certain fear of other +influences. Browning alone had no fear; he welcomed, evidently without +the least affectation, all the influences of his day. A very +interesting letter of his remains in which he describes his pleasure +in a university dinner. "Praise," he says in effect, "was given very +deservedly to Matthew Arnold and Swinburne, and to that pride of +Oxford men, Clough." The really striking thing about these three names +is the fact that they are united in Browning's praise in a way in +which they are by no means united in each other's. Matthew Arnold, in +one of his extant letters, calls Swinburne "a young pseudo-Shelley," +who, according to Arnold, thinks he can make Greek plays good by +making them modern. Mr. Swinburne, on the other hand, has summarised +Clough in a contemptuous rhyme:-- + + "There was a bad poet named Clough, + Whom his friends all united to puff. + But the public, though dull, + Has not quite such a skull + As belongs to believers in Clough." + +The same general fact will be found through the whole of Browning's +life and critical attitude. He adored Shelley, and also Carlyle who +sneered at him. He delighted in Mill, and also in Ruskin who rebelled +against Mill. He excused Napoleon III. and Landor who hurled +interminable curses against Napoleon. He admired all the cycle of +great men who all contemned each other. To say that he had no streak +of envy in his nature would be true, but unfair; for there is no +justification for attributing any of these great men's opinions to +envy. But Browning was really unique, in that he had a certain +spontaneous and unthinking tendency to the admiration of others. He +admired another poet as he admired a fading sunset or a chance spring +leaf. He no more thought whether he could be as good as that man in +that department than whether he could be redder than the sunset or +greener than the leaf of spring. He was naturally magnanimous in the +literal sense of that sublime word; his mind was so great that it +rejoiced in the triumphs of strangers. In this spirit Browning had +already cast his eyes round in the literary world of his time, and had +been greatly and justifiably struck with the work of a young lady +poet, Miss Barrett. + +That impression was indeed amply justified. In a time when it was +thought necessary for a lady to dilute the wine of poetry to its very +weakest tint, Miss Barrett had contrived to produce poetry which was +open to literary objection as too heady and too high-coloured. When +she erred it was through an Elizabethan audacity and luxuriance, a +straining after violent metaphors. With her reappeared in poetry a +certain element which had not been present in it since the last days +of Elizabethan literature, the fusion of the most elementary human +passion with something which can only be described as wit, a certain +love of quaint and sustained similes, of parallels wildly logical, and +of brazen paradox and antithesis. We find this hot wit, as distinct +from the cold wit of the school of Pope, in the puns and buffooneries +of Shakespeare. We find it lingering in _Hudibras_, and we do not find +it again until we come to such strange and strong lines as these of +Elizabeth Barrett in her poem on Napoleon:-- + + "Blood fell like dew beneath his sunrise--sooth, + But glittered dew-like in the covenanted + And high-rayed light. He was a despot--granted, + But the [Greek: autos] of his autocratic mouth + Said 'Yea' i' the people's French! He magnified + The image of the freedom he denied." + +Her poems are full of quaint things, of such things as the eyes in the +peacock fans of the Vatican, which she describes as winking at the +Italian tricolor. She often took the step from the sublime to the +ridiculous: but to take this step one must reach the sublime. +Elizabeth Barrett contrived to assert, what still needs but then +urgently needed assertion, the fact that womanliness, whether in life +or poetry, was a positive thing, and not the negative of manliness. +Her verse at its best was quite as strong as Browning's own, and very +nearly as clever. The difference between their natures was a +difference between two primary colours, not between dark and light +shades of the same colour. + +Browning had often heard not only of the public, but of the private +life of this lady from his father's friend Kenyon. The old man, who +was one of those rare and valuable people who have a talent for +establishing definite relationships with people after a comparatively +short intercourse, had been appointed by Miss Barrett as her "fairy +godfather." He spoke much about her to Browning, and of Browning to +her, with a certain courtly garrulity which was one of his talents. +And there could be little doubt that the two poets would have met long +before had it not been for certain peculiarities in the position of +Miss Barrett. She was an invalid, and an invalid of a somewhat unique +kind, and living beyond all question under very unique circumstances. + +Her father, Edward Moulton Barrett, had been a landowner in the West +Indies, and thus, by a somewhat curious coincidence, had borne a part +in the same social system which stung Browning's father into revolt +and renunciation. The parts played by Edward Barrett, however, though +little or nothing is known of it, was probably very different. He was +a man Conservative by nature, a believer in authority in the nation +and the family, and endowed with some faculties for making his +conceptions prevail. He was an able man, capable in his language of a +certain bitter felicity of phrase. He was rigidly upright and +responsible, and he had a capacity for profound affection. But +selfishness of the most perilous sort, an unconscious selfishness, was +eating away his moral foundations, as it tends to eat away those of +all despots. His most fugitive moods changed and controlled the whole +atmosphere of the house, and the state of things was fully as +oppressive in the case of his good moods as in the case of his bad +ones. He had, what is perhaps the subtlest and worst spirit of +egotism, not that spirit merely which thinks that nothing should stand +in the way of its ill-temper, but that spirit which thinks that +nothing should stand in the way of its amiability. His daughters must +be absolutely at his beck and call, whether it was to be brow-beaten +or caressed. During the early years of Elizabeth Barrett's life, the +family had lived in the country, and for that brief period she had +known a more wholesome life than she was destined ever to know again +until her marriage long afterwards. She was not, as is the general +popular idea, absolutely a congenital invalid, weak, and almost +moribund from the cradle. In early girlhood she was slight and +sensitive indeed, but perfectly active and courageous. She was a good +horsewoman, and the accident which handicapped her for so many years +afterwards happened to her when she was riding. The injury to her +spine, however, will be found, the more we study her history, to be +only one of the influences which were to darken those bedridden years, +and to have among them a far less important place than has hitherto +been attached to it. Her father moved to a melancholy house in Wimpole +Street; and his own character growing gloomier and stranger as time +went on, he mounted guard over his daughter's sickbed in a manner +compounded of the pessimist and the disciplinarian. She was not +permitted to stir from the sofa, often not even to cross two rooms to +her bed. Her father came and prayed over her with a kind of melancholy +glee, and with the avowed solemnity of a watcher by a deathbed. She +was surrounded by that most poisonous and degrading of all +atmospheres--a medical atmosphere. The existence of this atmosphere +has nothing to do with the actual nature or prolongation of disease. A +man may pass three hours out of every five in a state of bad health, +and yet regard, as Stevenson regarded, the three hours as exceptional +and the two as normal. But the curse that lay on the Barrett household +was the curse of considering ill-health the natural condition of a +human being. The truth was that Edward Barrett was living emotionally +and æsthetically, like some detestable decadent poet, upon his +daughter's decline. He did not know this, but it was so. Scenes, +explanations, prayers, fury, and forgiveness had become bread and meat +for which he hungered; and when the cloud was upon his spirit, he +would lash out at all things and every one with the insatiable cruelty +of the sentimentalist. + +It is wonderful that Elizabeth Barrett was not made thoroughly morbid +and impotent by this intolerable violence and more intolerable +tenderness. In her estimate of her own health she did, of course, +suffer. It is evident that she practically believed herself to be +dying. But she was a high-spirited woman, full of that silent and +quite unfathomable kind of courage which is only found in women, and +she took a much more cheerful view of death than her father did of +life. Silent rooms, low voices, lowered blinds, long days of +loneliness, and of the sickliest kind of sympathy, had not tamed a +spirit which was swift and headlong to a fault. She could still own +with truth the magnificent fact that her chief vice was impatience, +"tearing open parcels instead of untying them;" looking at the end of +books before she had read them was, she said, incurable with her. It +is difficult to imagine anything more genuinely stirring than the +achievement of this woman, who thus contrived, while possessing all +the excuses of an invalid, to retain some of the faults of a tomboy. + +Impetuosity, vividness, a certain absoluteness and urgency in her +demands, marked her in the eyes of all who came in contact with her. +In after years, when Browning had experimentally shaved his beard off, +she told him with emphatic gestures that it must be grown again "that +minute." There we have very graphically the spirit which tears open +parcels. Not in vain, or as a mere phrase, did her husband after her +death describe her as "all a wonder and a wild desire." + +She had, of course, lived her second and real life in literature and +the things of the mind, and this in a very genuine and strenuous +sense. Her mental occupations were not mere mechanical accomplishments +almost as colourless as the monotony they relieved, nor were they +coloured in any visible manner by the unwholesome atmosphere in which +she breathed. She used her brains seriously; she was a good Greek +scholar, and read Æschylus and Euripides unceasingly with her blind +friend, Mr. Boyd; and she had, and retained even to the hour of her +death, a passionate and quite practical interest in great public +questions. Naturally she was not uninterested in Robert Browning, but +it does not appear that she felt at this time the same kind of fiery +artistic curiosity that he felt about her. He does appear to have felt +an attraction, which may almost be called mystical, for the +personality which was shrouded from the world by such sombre curtains. +In 1845 he addressed a letter to her in which he spoke of a former +occasion on which they had nearly met, and compared it to the +sensation of having once been outside the chapel of some marvellous +illumination and found the door barred against him. In that phrase it +is easy to see how much of the romantic boyhood of Browning remained +inside the resolute man of the world into which he was to all external +appearance solidifying. Miss Barrett replied to his letters with +charming sincerity and humour, and with much of that leisurely +self-revelation which is possible for an invalid who has nothing else +to do. She herself, with her love of quiet and intellectual +companionship, would probably have been quite happy for the rest of +her life if their relations had always remained a learned and +delightful correspondence. But she must have known very little of +Robert Browning if she imagined he would be contented with this airy +and bloodless tie. At all times of his life he was sufficiently fond +of his own way; at this time he was especially prompt and impulsive, +and he had always a great love for seeing and hearing and feeling +people, a love of the physical presence of friends, which made him +slap men on the back and hit them in the chest when he was very fond +of them. The correspondence between the two poets had not long begun +when Browning suggested something which was almost a blasphemy in the +Barrett household, that he should come and call on her as he would on +any one else. This seems to have thrown her into a flutter of fear and +doubt. She alleges all kinds of obstacles, the chief of which were her +health and the season of the year and the east winds. "If my truest +heart's wishes avail," replied Browning obstinately, "you shall laugh +at east winds yet as I do." + +Then began the chief part of that celebrated correspondence which has +within comparatively recent years been placed before the world. It is +a correspondence which has very peculiar qualities and raises many +profound questions. + +It is impossible to deal at any length with the picture given in these +remarkable letters of the gradual progress and amalgamation of two +spirits of great natural potency and independence, without saying at +least a word about the moral question raised by their publication and +the many expressions of disapproval which it entails. To the mind of +the present writer the whole of such a question should be tested by +one perfectly clear intellectual distinction and comparison. I am not +prepared to admit that there is or can be, properly speaking, in the +world anything that is too sacred to be known. That spiritual beauty +and spiritual truth are in their nature communicable, and that they +should be communicated, is a principle which lies at the root of every +conceivable religion. Christ was crucified upon a hill, and not in a +cavern, and the word Gospel itself involves the same idea as the +ordinary name of a daily paper. Whenever, therefore, a poet or any +similar type of man can, or conceives that he can, make all men +partakers in some splendid secret of his own heart, I can imagine +nothing saner and nothing manlier than his course in doing so. Thus it +was that Dante made a new heaven and a new hell out of a girl's nod in +the streets of Florence. Thus it was that Paul founded a civilisation +by keeping an ethical diary. But the one essential which exists in all +such cases as these is that the man in question believes that he can +make the story as stately to the whole world as it is to him, and he +chooses his words to that end. Yet when a work contains expressions +which have one value and significance when read by the people to whom +they were addressed, and an entirely different value and significance +when read by any one else, then the element of the violation of +sanctity does arise. It is not because there is anything in this world +too sacred to tell. It is rather because there are a great many things +in this world too sacred to parody. If Browning could really convey to +the world the inmost core of his affection for his wife, I see no +reason why he should not. But the objection to letters which begin "My +dear Ba," is that they do not convey anything of the sort. As far as +any third person is concerned, Browning might as well have been +expressing the most noble and universal sentiment in the dialect of +the Cherokees. Objection to the publication of such passages as that, +in short, is not the fact that they tell us about the love of the +Brownings, but that they do not tell us about it. + +Upon this principle it is obvious that there should have been a +selection among the Letters, but not a selection which should exclude +anything merely because it was ardent and noble. If Browning or Mrs. +Browning had not desired any people to know that they were fond of +each other, they would not have written and published "One Word More" +or "The Sonnets from the Portuguese." Nay, they would not have been +married in a public church, for every one who is married in a church +does make a confession of love of absolutely national publicity, and +tacitly, therefore, repudiates any idea that such confessions are too +sacred for the world to know. The ridiculous theory that men should +have no noble passions or sentiments in public may have been designed +to make private life holy and undefiled, but it has had very little +actual effect except to make public life cynical and preposterously +unmeaning. But the words of a poem or the words of the English +Marriage Service, which are as fine as many poems, is a language +dignified and deliberately intended to be understood by all. If the +bride and bridegroom in church, instead of uttering those words, were +to utter a poem compounded of private allusions to the foibles of Aunt +Matilda, or of childish secrets which they would tell each other in a +lane, it would be a parallel case to the publication of some of the +Browning Letters. Why the serious and universal portions of those +Letters could not be published without those which are to us idle and +unmeaning it is difficult to understand. Our wisdom, whether expressed +in private or public, belongs to the world, but our folly belongs to +those we love. + +There is at least one peculiarity in the Browning Letters which tends +to make their publication far less open to objection than almost any +other collection of love letters which can be imagined. The ordinary +sentimentalist who delights in the most emotional of magazine +interviews, will not be able to get much satisfaction out of them, +because he and many persons more acute will be quite unable to make +head or tail of three consecutive sentences. In this respect it is the +most extraordinary correspondence in the world. There seem to be only +two main rules for this form of letter-writing: the first is, that if +a sentence can begin with a parenthesis it always should; and the +second is, that if you have written from a third to half of a sentence +you need never in any case write any more. It would be amusing to +watch any one who felt an idle curiosity as to the language and +secrets of lovers opening the Browning Letters. He would probably come +upon some such simple and lucid passage as the following: "I ought to +wait, say a week at least, having killed all your mules for you, +before I shot down your dogs.... But not being Phoibos Apollon, you +are to know further that when I _did_ think I might go modestly on ... +[Greek: ômoi], let me get out of this slough of a simile, never mind +with what dislocated ankles." + +What our imaginary sentimentalist would make of this tender passage it +is difficult indeed to imagine. The only plain conclusion which +appears to emerge from the words is the somewhat curious one--that +Browning was in the habit of taking a gun down to Wimpole Street and +of demolishing the live stock on those somewhat unpromising premises. +Nor will he be any better enlightened if he turns to the reply of +Miss Barrett, which seems equally dominated with the great central +idea of the Browning correspondence that the most enlightening +passages in a letter consist of dots. She replies in a letter +following the above: "But if it could be possible that you should mean +to say you would show me. . . . Can it be? or am I reading this 'Attic +contraction' quite the wrong way. You see I am afraid of the +difference between flattering myself and being flattered . . . the +fatal difference. And now will you understand that I should be too +overjoyed to have revelations from the Portfolio . . . however +incarnated with blots and pen scratches . . . to be able to ask +impudently of them now? Is that plain?" Most probably she thought it +was. + +With regard to Browning himself this characteristic is comparatively +natural and appropriate. Browning's prose was in any case the most +roundabout affair in the world. Those who knew him say that he would +often send an urgent telegram from which it was absolutely impossible +to gather where the appointment was, or when it was, or what was its +object. This fact is one of the best of all arguments against the +theory of Browning's intellectual conceit. A man would have to be +somewhat abnormally conceited in order to spend sixpence for the +pleasure of sending an unintelligible communication to the dislocation +of his own plans. The fact was, that it was part of the machinery of +his brain that things came out of it, as it were, backwards. The words +"tail foremost" express Browning's style with something more than a +conventional accuracy. The tail, the most insignificant part of an +animal, is also often the most animated and fantastic. An utterance of +Browning is often like a strange animal walking backwards, who +flourishes his tail with such energy that every one takes it for his +head. He was in other words, at least in his prose and practical +utterances, more or less incapable of telling a story without telling +the least important thing first. If a man who belonged to an Italian +secret society, one local branch of which bore as a badge an +olive-green ribbon, had entered his house, and in some sensational +interview tried to bribe or blackmail him, he would have told the +story with great energy and indignation, but he would have been +incapable of beginning with anything except the question of the colour +of olives. His whole method was founded both in literature and life +upon the principle of the "ex pede Herculem," and at the beginning of +his description of Hercules the foot appears some sizes larger than +the hero. It is, in short, natural enough that Browning should have +written his love letters obscurely, since he wrote his letters to his +publisher and his solicitor obscurely. In the case of Mrs. Browning it +is somewhat more difficult to understand. For she at least had, beyond +all question, a quite simple and lucent vein of humour, which does not +easily reconcile itself with this subtlety. But she was partly under +the influence of her own quality of passionate ingenuity or emotional +wit of which we have already taken notice in dealing with her poems, +and she was partly also no doubt under the influence of Browning. +Whatever was the reason, their correspondence was not of the sort +which can be pursued very much by the outside public. Their letters +may be published a hundred times over, they still remain private. They +write to each other in a language of their own, an almost +exasperatingly impressionist language, a language chiefly consisting +of dots and dashes and asterisks and italics, and brackets and notes +of interrogation. Wordsworth when he heard afterwards of their +eventual elopement said with that slight touch of bitterness he always +used in speaking of Browning, "So Robert Browning and Miss Barrett +have gone off together. I hope they understand each other--nobody else +would." It would be difficult to pay a higher compliment to a +marriage. Their common affection for Kenyon was a great element in +their lives and in their correspondence. "I have a convenient theory +to account for Mr. Kenyon," writes Browning mysteriously, "and his +otherwise unaccountable kindness to me." "For Mr. Kenyon's kindness," +retorts Elizabeth Barrett, "no theory will account. I class it with +mesmerism for that reason." There is something very dignified and +beautiful about the simplicity of these two poets vying with each +other in giving adequate praise to the old dilettante, of whom the +world would never have heard but for them. Browning's feeling for him +was indeed especially strong and typical. "There," he said, pointing +after the old man as he left the room, "there goes one of the most +splendid men living--a man so noble in his friendship, so lavish in +his hospitality, so large-hearted and benevolent, that he deserves to +be known all over the world as 'Kenyon the Magnificent.'" There is +something thoroughly worthy of Browning at his best in this feeling, +not merely of the use of sociability, or of the charm of sociability, +but of the magnificence, the heroic largeness of real sociability. +Being himself a warm champion of the pleasures of society, he saw in +Kenyon a kind of poetic genius for the thing, a mission of +superficial philanthropy. He is thoroughly to be congratulated on the +fact that he had grasped the great but now neglected truth, that a man +may actually be great, yet not in the least able. + +Browning's desire to meet Miss Barrett was received on her side, as +has been stated, with a variety of objections. The chief of these was +the strangely feminine and irrational reason that she was not worth +seeing, a point on which the seeker for an interview might be +permitted to form his own opinion. "There is nothing to see in me; nor +to hear in me.--I never learned to talk as you do in London; although +I can admire that brightness of carved speech in Mr. Kenyon and +others. If my poetry is worth anything to any eye, it is the flower of +me. I have lived most and been most happy in it, and so it has all my +colours; the rest of me is nothing but a root, fit for the ground and +dark." The substance of Browning's reply was to the effect, "I will +call at two on Tuesday." + +They met on May 20, 1845. A short time afterwards he had fallen in +love with her and made her an offer of marriage. To a person in the +domestic atmosphere of the Barretts, the incident would appear to have +been paralysing. "I will tell you what I once said in jest ..." she +writes, "If a prince of El Dorado should come with a pedigree of +lineal descent from some signory in the moon in one hand and a ticket +of good behaviour from the nearest Independent chapel in the +other!--'Why, even _then_,' said my sister Arabel, 'it would not +_do_.' And she was right; we all agreed that she was right." + +This may be taken as a fairly accurate description of the real state +of Mr. Barrett's mind on one subject. It is illustrative of the very +best and breeziest side of Elizabeth Barrett's character that she +could be so genuinely humorous over so tragic a condition of the human +mind. + +Browning's proposals were, of course, as matters stood, of a character +to dismay and repel all those who surrounded Elizabeth Barrett. It was +not wholly a matter of the fancies of her father. The whole of her +family, and most probably the majority of her medical advisers, did +seriously believe at this time that she was unfit to be moved, to say +nothing of being married, and that a life passed between a bed and a +sofa, and avoiding too frequent and abrupt transitions even from one +to the other, was the only life she could expect on this earth. Almost +alone in holding another opinion and in urging her to a more vigorous +view of her condition, stood Browning himself. "But you are better," +he would say; "you look so and speak so." Which of the two opinions +was right is of course a complex medical matter into which a book like +this has neither the right nor the need to enter. But this much may be +stated as a mere question of fact. In the summer of 1846 Elizabeth +Barrett was still living under the great family convention which +provided her with nothing but an elegant deathbed, forbidden to move, +forbidden to see proper daylight, forbidden to receive a friend lest +the shock should destroy her suddenly. A year or two later, in Italy, +as Mrs. Browning, she was being dragged up hill in a wine hamper, +toiling up to the crests of mountains at four o'clock in the morning, +riding for five miles on a donkey to what she calls "an inaccessible +volcanic ground not far from the stars." It is perfectly incredible +that any one so ill as her family believed her to be should have +lived this life for twenty-four hours. Something must be allowed for +the intoxication of a new tie and a new interest in life. But such +exaltations can in their nature hardly last a month, and Mrs. Browning +lived for fifteen years afterwards in infinitely better health than +she had ever known before. In the light of modern knowledge it is not +very difficult or very presumptuous, of us to guess that she had been +in her father's house to some extent inoculated with hysteria, that +strange affliction which some people speak of as if it meant the +absence of disease, but which is in truth the most terrible of all +diseases. It must be remembered that in 1846 little or nothing was +known of spine complaints such as that from which Elizabeth Barrett +suffered, less still of the nervous conditions they create, and least +of all of hysterical phenomena. In our day she would have been ordered +air and sunlight and activity, and all the things the mere idea of +which chilled the Barretts with terror. In our day, in short, it would +have been recognised that she was in the clutch of a form of neurosis +which exhibits every fact of a disease except its origin, that strange +possession which makes the body itself a hypocrite. Those who +surrounded Miss Barrett knew nothing of this, and Browning knew +nothing of it; and probably if he knew anything, knew less than they +did. Mrs. Orr says, probably with a great deal of truth, that of +ill-health and its sensations he remained "pathetically ignorant" to +his dying day. But devoid as he was alike of expert knowledge and +personal experience, without a shadow of medical authority, almost +without anything that can be formally called a right to his opinion, +he was, and remained, right. He at least saw, he indeed alone saw, to +the practical centre of the situation. He did not know anything about +hysteria or neurosis, or the influence of surroundings, but he knew +that the atmosphere of Mr. Barrett's house was not a fit thing for any +human being, alive, dying, or dead. His stand upon this matter has +really a certain human interest, since it is an example of a thing +which will from time to time occur, the interposition of the average +man to the confounding of the experts. Experts are undoubtedly right +nine times out of ten, but the tenth time comes, and we find in +military matters an Oliver Cromwell who will make every mistake known +to strategy and yet win all his battles, and in medical matters a +Robert Browning whose views have not a technical leg to stand on and +are entirely correct. + +But while Browning was thus standing alone in his view of the matter, +while Edward Barrett had to all appearance on his side a phalanx of +all the sanities and respectabilities, there came suddenly a new +development, destined to bring matters to a crisis indeed, and to +weigh at least three souls in the balance. Upon further examination of +Miss Barrett's condition, the physicians had declared that it was +absolutely necessary that she should be taken to Italy. This may, +without any exaggeration, be called the turning-point and the last +great earthly opportunity of Barrett's character. He had not +originally been an evil man, only a man who, being stoical in +practical things, permitted himself, to his great detriment, a +self-indulgence in moral things. He had grown to regard his pious and +dying daughter as part of the furniture of the house and of the +universe. And as long as the great mass of authorities were on his +side, his illusion was quite pardonable. His crisis came when the +authorities changed their front, and with one accord asked his +permission to send his daughter abroad. It was his crisis, and he +refused. + +He had, if we may judge from what we know of him, his own peculiar and +somewhat detestable way of refusing. Once when his daughter had asked +a perfectly simple favour in a matter of expediency, permission, that +is, to keep her favourite brother with her during an illness, her +singular parent remarked that "she might keep him if she liked, but +that he had looked for greater self-sacrifice." These were the weapons +with which he ruled his people. For the worst tyrant is not the man +who rules by fear; the worst tyrant is he who rules by love and plays +on it as on a harp. Barrett was one of the oppressors who have +discovered the last secret of oppression, that which is told in the +fine verse of Swinburne:-- + + "The racks of the earth and the rods + Are weak as the foam on the sands; + The heart is the prey for the gods, + Who crucify hearts, not hands." + +He, with his terrible appeal to the vibrating consciences of women, +was, with regard to one of them, very near to the end of his reign. +When Browning heard that the Italian journey was forbidden, he +proposed definitely that they should marry and go on the journey +together. + +Many other persons had taken cognisance of the fact, and were active +in the matter. Kenyon, the gentlest and most universally complimentary +of mortals, had marched into the house and given Arabella Barrett, +the sister of the sick woman, his opinion of her father's conduct +with a degree of fire and frankness which must have been perfectly +amazing in a man of his almost antiquated social delicacy. Mrs. +Jameson, an old and generous friend of the family, had immediately +stepped in and offered to take Elizabeth to Italy herself, thus +removing all questions of expense or arrangement. She would appear to +have stood to her guns in the matter with splendid persistence and +magnanimity. She called day after day seeking for a change of mind, +and delayed her own journey to the continent more than once. At +length, when it became evident that the extraction of Mr. Barrett's +consent was hopeless, she reluctantly began her own tour in Europe +alone. She went to Paris, and had not been there many days, when she +received a formal call from Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett +Browning, who had been married for some days. Her astonishment is +rather a picturesque thing to think about. + +The manner in which this sensational elopement, which was, of course, +the talk of the whole literary world, had been effected, is narrated, +as every one knows, in the Browning Letters. Browning had decided that +an immediate marriage was the only solution; and having put his hand +to the plough, did not decline even when it became obviously necessary +that it should be a secret marriage. To a man of his somewhat stormily +candid and casual disposition this necessity of secrecy was really +exasperating; but every one with any imagination or chivalry will +rejoice that he accepted the evil conditions. He had always had the +courage to tell the truth; and now it was demanded of him to have the +greater courage to tell a lie, and he told it with perfect +cheerfulness and lucidity. In thus disappearing surreptitiously with +an invalid woman he was doing something against which there were +undoubtedly a hundred things to be said, only it happened that the +most cogent and important thing of all was to be said for it. + +It is very amusing, and very significant in the matter of Browning's +character, to read the accounts which he writes to Elizabeth Barrett +of his attitude towards the approaching _coup de théâtre_. In one +place he says, suggestively enough, that he does not in the least +trouble about the disapproval of her father; the man whom he fears as +a frustrating influence is Kenyon. Mr. Barrett could only walk into +the room and fly into a passion; and this Browning could have received +with perfect equanimity. "But," he says, "if Kenyon knows of the +matter, I shall have the kindest and friendliest of explanations (with +his arm on my shoulder) of how I am ruining your social position, +destroying your health, etc., etc." This touch is very suggestive of +the power of the old worldling, who could manoeuvre with young people +as well as Major Pendennis. Kenyon had indeed long been perfectly +aware of the way in which things were going; and the method he adopted +in order to comment on it is rather entertaining. In a conversation +with Elizabeth Barrett, he asked carelessly whether there was anything +between her sister and a certain Captain Cooke. On receiving a +surprised reply in the negative, he remarked apologetically that he +had been misled into the idea by the gentleman calling so often at the +house. Elizabeth Barrett knew perfectly well what he meant; but the +logical allusiveness of the attack reminds one of a fragment of some +Meredithian comedy. + +The manner in which Browning bore himself in this acute and +necessarily dubious position is, perhaps, more thoroughly to his +credit than anything else in his career. He never came out so well in +all his long years of sincerity and publicity as he does in this one +act of deception. Having made up his mind to that act, he is not +ashamed to name it; neither, on the other hand, does he rant about it, +and talk about Philistine prejudices and higher laws and brides in the +sight of God, after the manner of the cockney decadent. He was +breaking a social law, but he was not declaring a crusade against +social laws. We all feel, whatever may be our opinions on the matter, +that the great danger of this kind of social opportunism, this pitting +of a private necessity against a public custom, is that men are +somewhat too weak and self-deceptive to be trusted with such a power +of giving dispensations to themselves. We feel that men without +meaning to do so might easily begin by breaking a social by-law and +end by being thoroughly anti-social. One of the best and most striking +things to notice about Robert Browning is the fact that he did this +thing considering it as an exception, and that he contrived to leave +it really exceptional. It did not in the least degree break the +rounded clearness of his loyalty to social custom. It did not in the +least degree weaken the sanctity of the general rule. At a supreme +crisis of his life he did an unconventional thing, and he lived and +died conventional. It would be hard to say whether he appears the more +thoroughly sane in having performed the act, or in not having allowed +it to affect him. + +Elizabeth Barrett gradually gave way under the obstinate and almost +monotonous assertion of Browning that this elopement was the only +possible course of action. Before she finally agreed, however, she did +something, which in its curious and impulsive symbolism, belongs +almost to a more primitive age. The sullen system of medical seclusion +to which she had long been subjected has already been described. The +most urgent and hygienic changes were opposed by many on the ground +that it was not safe for her to leave her sofa and her sombre room. On +the day on which it was necessary for her finally to accept or reject +Browning's proposal, she called her sister to her, and to the +amazement and mystification of that lady asked for a carriage. In this +she drove into Regent's Park, alighted, walked on to the grass, and +stood leaning against a tree for some moments, looking round her at +the leaves and the sky. She then entered the cab again, drove home, +and agreed to the elopement. This was possibly the best poem that she +ever produced. + +Browning arranged the eccentric adventure with a great deal of +prudence and knowledge of human nature. Early one morning in September +1846 Miss Barrett walked quietly out of her father's house, became +Mrs. Robert Browning in a church in Marylebone, and returned home +again as if nothing had happened. In this arrangement Browning showed +some of that real insight into the human spirit which ought to make a +poet the most practical of all men. The incident was, in the nature of +things, almost overpoweringly exciting to his wife, in spite of the +truly miraculous courage with which she supported it; and he desired, +therefore, to call in the aid of the mysteriously tranquillising +effect of familiar scenes and faces. One trifling incident is worth +mentioning which is almost unfathomably characteristic of Browning. It +has already been remarked in these pages that he was pre-eminently one +of those men whose expanding opinions never alter by a hairsbreadth +the actual ground-plan of their moral sense. Browning would have felt +the same things right and the same things wrong, whatever views he had +held. During the brief and most trying period between his actual +marriage and his actual elopement, it is most significant that he +would not call at the house in Wimpole Street, because he would have +been obliged to ask if Miss Barrett was disengaged. He was acting a +lie; he was deceiving a father; he was putting a sick woman to a +terrible risk; and these things he did not disguise from himself for a +moment, but he could not bring himself to say two words to a +maidservant. Here there may be partly the feeling of the literary man +for the sacredness of the uttered word, but there is far more of a +certain rooted traditional morality which it is impossible either to +describe or to justify. Browning's respectability was an older and +more primeval thing than the oldest and most primeval passions of +other men. If we wish to understand him, we must always remember that +in dealing with any of his actions we have not to ask whether the +action contains the highest morality, but whether we should have felt +inclined to do it ourselves. + +At length the equivocal and exhausting interregnum was over. Mrs. +Browning went for the second time almost on tiptoe out of her father's +house, accompanied only by her maid and her dog, which was only just +successfully prevented from barking. Before the end of the day in all +probability Barrett had discovered that his dying daughter had fled +with Browning to Italy. + +They never saw him again, and hardly more than a faint echo came to +them of the domestic earthquake which they left behind them. They do +not appear to have had many hopes, or to have made many attempts at a +reconciliation. Elizabeth Barrett had discovered at last that her +father was in truth not a man to be treated with; hardly, perhaps, +even a man to be blamed. She knew to all intents and purposes that she +had grown up in the house of a madman. + + + + +CHAPTER IV + +BROWNING IN ITALY + + +The married pair went to Pisa in 1846, and moved soon afterwards to +Florence. Of the life of the Brownings in Italy there is much perhaps +to be said in the way of description and analysis, little to be said +in the way of actual narrative. Each of them had passed through the +one incident of existence. Just as Elizabeth Barrett's life had before +her marriage been uneventfully sombre, now it was uneventfully happy. +A succession of splendid landscapes, a succession of brilliant +friends, a succession of high and ardent intellectual interests, they +experienced; but their life was of the kind that if it were told at +all, would need to be told in a hundred volumes of gorgeous +intellectual gossip. How Browning and his wife rode far into the +country, eating strawberries and drinking milk out of the basins of +the peasants; how they fell in with the strangest and most picturesque +figures of Italian society; how they climbed mountains and read books +and modelled in clay and played on musical instruments; how Browning +was made a kind of arbiter between two improvising Italian bards; how +he had to escape from a festivity when the sound of Garibaldi's hymn +brought the knocking of the Austrian police; these are the things of +which his life is full, trifling and picturesque things, a series of +interludes, a beautiful and happy story, beginning and ending nowhere. +The only incidents, perhaps, were the birth of their son and the death +of Browning's mother in 1849. + +It is well known that Browning loved Italy; that it was his adopted +country; that he said in one of the finest of his lyrics that the name +of it would be found written on his heart. But the particular +character of this love of Browning for Italy needs to be understood. +There are thousands of educated Europeans who love Italy, who live in +it, who visit it annually, who come across a continent to see it, who +hunt out its darkest picture and its most mouldering carving; but they +are all united in this, that they regard Italy as a dead place. It is +a branch of their universal museum, a department of dry bones. There +are rich and cultivated persons, particularly Americans, who seem to +think that they keep Italy, as they might keep an aviary or a +hothouse, into which they might walk whenever they wanted a whiff of +beauty. Browning did not feel at all in this manner; he was +intrinsically incapable of offering such an insult to the soul of a +nation. If he could not have loved Italy as a nation, he would not +have consented to love it as an old curiosity shop. In everything on +earth, from the Middle Ages to the amoeba, who is discussed at such +length in "Mr. Sludge the Medium," he is interested in the life in +things. He was interested in the life in Italian art and in the life +in Italian politics. + +Perhaps the first and simplest example that can be given of this +matter is in Browning's interest in art. He was immeasurably +fascinated at all times by painting and sculpture, and his sojourn in +Italy gave him, of course, innumerable and perfect opportunities for +the study of painting and sculpture. But his interest in these studies +was not like that of the ordinary cultured visitor to the Italian +cities. Thousands of such visitors, for example, study those endless +lines of magnificent Pagan busts which are to be found in nearly all +the Italian galleries and museums, and admire them, and talk about +them, and note them in their catalogues, and describe them in their +diaries. But the way in which they affected Browning is described very +suggestively in a passage in the letters of his wife. She describes +herself as longing for her husband to write poems, beseeching him to +write poems, but finding all her petitions useless because her husband +was engaged all day in modelling busts in clay and breaking them as +fast as he made them. This is Browning's interest in art, the interest +in a living thing, the interest in a growing thing, the insatiable +interest in how things are done. Every one who knows his admirable +poems on painting--"Fra Lippo Lippi" and "Andrea del Sarto" and +"Pictor Ignotus"--will remember how fully they deal with +technicalities, how they are concerned with canvas, with oil, with a +mess of colours. Sometimes they are so technical as to be mysterious +to the casual reader. An extreme case may be found in that of a lady I +once knew who had merely read the title of "Pacchiarotto and how he +worked in distemper," and thought that Pacchiarotto was the name of a +dog, whom no attacks of canine disease could keep from the fulfilment +of his duty. These Browning poems do not merely deal with painting; +they smell of paint. They are the works of a man to whom art is not +what it is to so many of the non-professional lovers of art, a thing +accomplished, a valley of bones: to him it is a field of crops +continually growing in a busy and exciting silence. Browning was +interested, like some scientific man, in the obstetrics of art. There +is a large army of educated men who can talk art with artists; but +Browning could not merely talk art with artists--he could talk shop +with them. Personally he may not have known enough about painting to +be more than a fifth-rate painter, or enough about the organ to be +more than a sixth-rate organist. But there are, when all is said and +done, some things which a fifth-rate painter knows which a first-rate +art critic does not know; there are some things which a sixth-rate +organist knows which a first-rate judge of music does not know. And +these were the things that Browning knew. + +He was, in other words, what is called an amateur. The word amateur +has come by the thousand oddities of language to convey an idea of +tepidity; whereas the word itself has the meaning of passion. Nor is +this peculiarity confined to the mere form of the word; the actual +characteristic of these nameless dilettanti is a genuine fire and +reality. A man must love a thing very much if he not only practises it +without any hope of fame or money, but even practises it without any +hope of doing it well. Such a man must love the toils of the work more +than any other man can love the rewards of it. Browning was in this +strict sense a strenuous amateur. He tried and practised in the course +of his life half a hundred things at which he can never have even for +a moment expected to succeed. The story of his life is full of absurd +little ingenuities, such as the discovery of a way of making pictures +by roasting brown paper over a candle. In precisely the same spirit +of fruitless vivacity, he made himself to a very considerable extent a +technical expert in painting, a technical expert in sculpture, a +technical expert in music. In his old age, he shows traces of being so +bizarre a thing as an abstract police detective, writing at length in +letters and diaries his views of certain criminal cases in an Italian +town. Indeed, his own _Ring and the Book_ is merely a sublime +detective story. He was in a hundred things this type of man; he was +precisely in the position, with a touch of greater technical success, +of the admirable figure in Stevenson's story who said, "I can play the +fiddle nearly well enough to earn a living in the orchestra of a penny +gaff, but not quite." + +The love of Browning for Italian art, therefore, was anything but an +antiquarian fancy; it was the love of a living thing. We see the same +phenomenon in an even more important matter--the essence and +individuality of the country itself. + +Italy to Browning and his wife was not by any means merely that +sculptured and ornate sepulchre that it is to so many of those +cultivated English men and women who live in Italy and enjoy and +admire and despise it. To them it was a living nation, the type and +centre of the religion and politics of a continent; the ancient and +flaming heart of Western history, the very Europe of Europe. And they +lived at the time of the most moving and gigantic of all dramas--the +making of a new nation, one of the things that makes men feel that +they are still in the morning of the earth. Before their eyes, with +every circumstance of energy and mystery, was passing the panorama of +the unification of Italy, with the bold and romantic militarism of +Garibaldi, the more bold and more romantic diplomacy of Cavour. They +lived in a time when affairs of State had almost the air of works of +art; and it is not strange that these two poets should have become +politicians in one of those great creative epochs when even the +politicians have to be poets. + +Browning was on this question and on all the questions of continental +and English politics a very strong Liberal. This fact is not a mere +detail of purely biographical interest, like any view he might take of +the authorship of the "Eikon Basilike" or the authenticity of the +Tichborne claimant. Liberalism was so inevitably involved in the +poet's whole view of existence, that even a thoughtful and imaginative +Conservative would feel that Browning was bound to be a Liberal. His +mind was possessed, perhaps even to excess, by a belief in growth and +energy and in the ultimate utility of error. He held the great central +Liberal doctrine, a belief in a certain destiny of the human spirit +beyond, and perhaps even independent of, our own sincerest +convictions. The world was going right he felt, most probably in his +way, but certainly in its own way. The sonnet which he wrote in later +years, entitled "Why I am a Liberal," expresses admirably this +philosophical root of his politics. It asks in effect how he, who had +found truth in so many strange forms after so many strange wanderings, +can be expected to stifle with horror the eccentricities of others. A +Liberal may be defined approximately as a man who, if he could by +waving his hand in a dark room, stop the mouths of all the deceivers +of mankind for ever, would not wave his hand. Browning was a Liberal +in this sense. + +And just as the great Liberal movement which followed the French +Revolution made this claim for the liberty and personality of human +beings, so it made it for the liberty and personality of nations. It +attached indeed to the independence of a nation something of the same +wholly transcendental sanctity which humanity has in all legal systems +attached to the life of a man. The grounds were indeed much the same; +no one could say absolutely that a live man was useless, and no one +could say absolutely that a variety of national life was useless or +must remain useless to the world. Men remembered how often barbarous +tribes or strange and alien Scriptures had been called in to revive +the blood of decaying empires and civilisations. And this sense of the +personality of a nation, as distinct from the personalities of all +other nations, did not involve in the case of these old Liberals +international bitterness; for it is too often forgotten that +friendship demands independence and equality fully as much as war. But +in them it led to great international partialities, to a great system, +as it were, of adopted countries which made so thorough a Scotchman as +Carlyle in love with Germany, and so thorough an Englishman as +Browning in love with Italy. + +And while on the one side of the struggle was this great ideal of +energy and variety, on the other side was something which we now find +it difficult to realise or describe. We have seen in our own time a +great reaction in favour of monarchy, aristocracy, andecclesiasticism, +a reaction almost entirely noble in its instinct, and dwelling almost +entirely on the best periods and the best qualities of the old +_régime_. But the modern man, full of admiration for the great virtue +of chivalry which is at the heart of aristocracies, and the great +virtue of reverence which is at the heart of ceremonial religion, is +not in a position to form any idea of how profoundly unchivalrous, how +astonishingly irreverent, how utterly mean, and material, and devoid +of mystery or sentiment were the despotic systems of Europe which +survived, and for a time conquered, the Revolution. The case against +the Church in Italy in the time of Pio Nono was not the case which a +rationalist would urge against the Church of the time of St. Louis, +but diametrically the opposite case. Against the mediæval Church it +might be said that she was too fantastic, too visionary, too dogmatic +about the destiny of man, too indifferent to all things but the +devotional side of the soul. Against the Church of Pio Nono the main +thing to be said was that it was simply and supremely cynical; that it +was not founded on the unworldly instinct for distorting life, but on +the worldly counsel to leave life as it is; that it was not the +inspirer of insane hopes, of reward and miracle, but the enemy, the +cool and sceptical enemy, of hope of any kind or description. The same +was true of the monarchical systems of Prussia and Austria and Russia +at this time. Their philosophy was not the philosophy of the cavaliers +who rode after Charles I. or Louis XIII. It was the philosophy of the +typical city uncle, advising every one, and especially the young, to +avoid enthusiasm, to avoid beauty, to regard life as a machine, +dependent only upon the two forces of comfort and fear. That was, +there can be little doubt, the real reason of the fascination of the +Napoleon legend--that while Napoleon was a despot like the rest, he +was a despot who went somewhere and did something, and defied the +pessimism of Europe, and erased the word "impossible." One does not +need to be a Bonapartist to rejoice at the way in which the armies of +the First Empire, shouting their songs and jesting with their +colonels, smote and broke into pieces the armies of Prussia and +Austria driven into battle with a cane. + +Browning, as we have said, was in Italy at the time of the break-up of +one part of this frozen continent of the non-possumus, Austria's hold +in the north of Italy was part of that elaborate and comfortable and +wholly cowardly and unmeaning compromise, which the Holy Alliance had +established, and which it believed without doubt in its solid unbelief +would last until the Day of Judgment, though it is difficult to +imagine what the Holy Alliance thought would happen then. But almost +of a sudden affairs had begun to move strangely, and the despotic +princes and their chancellors discovered with a great deal of +astonishment that they were not living in the old age of the world, +but to all appearance in a very unmanageable period of its boyhood. In +an age of ugliness and routine, in a time when diplomatists and +philosophers alike tended to believe that they had a list of all human +types, there began to appear men who belonged to the morning of the +world, men whose movements have a national breadth and beauty, who act +symbols and become legends while they are alive. Garibaldi in his red +shirt rode in an open carriage along the front of a hostile fort +calling to the coachman to drive slower, and not a man dared fire a +shot at him. Mazzini poured out upon Europe a new mysticism of +humanity and liberty, and was willing, like some passionate Jesuit of +the sixteenth century, to become in its cause either a philosopher or +a criminal. Cavour arose with a diplomacy which was more thrilling and +picturesque than war itself. These men had nothing to do with an age +of the impossible. They have passed, their theories along with them, +as all things pass; but since then we have had no men of their type +precisely, at once large and real and romantic and successful. Gordon +was a possible exception. They were the last of the heroes. + +When Browning was first living in Italy, a telegram which had been +sent to him was stopped on the frontier and suppressed on account of +his known sympathy with the Italian Liberals. It is almost impossible +for people living in a commonwealth like ours to understand how a +small thing like that will affect a man. It was not so much the +obvious fact that a great practical injury was really done to him; +that the telegram might have altered all his plans in matters of vital +moment. It was, over and above that, the sense of a hand laid on +something personal and essentially free. Tyranny like this is not the +worst tyranny, but it is the most intolerable. It interferes with men +not in the most serious matters, but precisely in those matters in +which they most resent interference. It may be illogical for men to +accept cheerfully unpardonable public scandals, benighted educational +systems, bad sanitation, bad lighting, a blundering and inefficient +system of life, and yet to resent the tearing up of a telegram or a +post-card; but the fact remains that the sensitiveness of men is a +strange and localised thing, and there is hardly a man in the world +who would not rather be ruled by despots chosen by lot and live in a +city like a mediæval Ghetto, than be forbidden by a policeman to +smoke another cigarette, or sit up a quarter of an hour later; hardly +a man who would not feel inclined in such a case to raise a rebellion +for a caprice for which he did not really care a straw. Unmeaning and +muddle-headed tyranny in small things, that is the thing which, if +extended over many years, is harder to bear and hope through than the +massacres of September. And that was the nightmare of vexatious +triviality which was lying over all the cities of Italy that were +ruled by the bureaucratic despotisms of Europe. The history of the +time is full of spiteful and almost childish struggles--struggles +about the humming of a tune or the wearing of a colour, the arrest of +a journey, or the opening of a letter. And there can be little doubt +that Browning's temperament under these conditions was not of the kind +to become more indulgent, and there grew in him a hatred of the +Imperial and Ducal and Papal systems of Italy, which sometimes passed +the necessities of Liberalism, and sometimes even transgressed its +spirit. The life which he and his wife lived in Italy was +extraordinarily full and varied, when we consider the restrictions +under which one at least of them had always lain. They met and took +delight, notwithstanding their exile, in some of the most interesting +people of their time--Ruskin, Cardinal Manning, and Lord Lytton. +Browning, in a most characteristic way, enjoyed the society of all of +them, arguing with one, agreeing with another, sitting up all night by +the bedside of a third. + +It has frequently been stated that the only difference that ever +separated Mr. and Mrs. Browning was upon the question of spiritualism. +That statement must, of course, be modified and even contradicted if +it means that they never differed; that Mr. Browning never thought an +_Act of Parliament_ good when Mrs. Browning thought it bad; that Mr. +Browning never thought bread stale when Mrs. Browning thought it new. +Such unanimity is not only inconceivable, it is immoral; and as a +matter of fact, there is abundant evidence that their marriage +constituted something like that ideal marriage, an alliance between +two strong and independent forces. They differed, in truth, about a +great many things, for example, about Napoleon III. whom Mrs. Browning +regarded with an admiration which would have been somewhat beyond the +deserts of Sir Galahad, and whom Browning with his emphatic Liberal +principles could never pardon for the _Coup d'État_. If they differed +on spiritualism in a somewhat more serious way than this, the reason +must be sought in qualities which were deeper and more elemental in +both their characters than any mere matter of opinion. Mrs. Orr, in +her excellent _Life of Browning_, states that the difficulty arose +from Mrs. Browning's firm belief in psychical phenomena and Browning's +absolute refusal to believe even in their possibility. Another writer +who met them at this time says, "Browning cannot believe, and Mrs. +Browning cannot help believing." This theory, that Browning's aversion +to the spiritualist circle arose from an absolute denial of the +tenability of such a theory of life and death, has in fact often been +repeated. But it is exceedingly difficult to reconcile it with +Browning's character. He was the last man in the world to be +intellectually deaf to a hypothesis merely because it was odd. He had +friends whose opinions covered every description of madness from the +French legitimism of De Ripert-Monclar to the Republicanism of +Landor. Intellectually he may be said to have had a zest for heresies. +It is difficult to impute an attitude of mere impenetrable negation to +a man who had expressed with sympathy the religion of "Caliban" and +the morality of "Time's Revenges." It is true that at this time of the +first popular interest in spiritualism a feeling existed among many +people of a practical turn of mind, which can only be called a +superstition against believing in ghosts. But, intellectually +speaking, Browning would probably have been one of the most tolerant +and curious in regard to the new theories, whereas the popular version +of the matter makes him unusually intolerant and negligent even for +that time. The fact was in all probability that Browning's aversion to +the spiritualists had little or nothing to do with spiritualism. It +arose from quite a different side of his character--his uncompromising +dislike of what is called Bohemianism, of eccentric or slovenly +cliques, of those straggling camp followers of the arts who exhibit +dubious manners and dubious morals, of all abnormality and of all +irresponsibility. Any one, in fact, who wishes to see what it was that +Browning disliked need only do two things. First, he should read the +_Memoirs_ of David Home, the famous spiritualist medium with whom +Browning came in contact. These _Memoirs_ constitute a more thorough +and artistic self-revelation than any monologue that Browning ever +wrote. The ghosts, the raps, the flying hands, the phantom voices are +infinitely the most respectable and infinitely the most credible part +of the narrative. But the bragging, the sentimentalism, the moral and +intellectual foppery of the composition is everywhere, culminating +perhaps in the disgusting passage in which Home describes Mrs. +Browning as weeping over him and assuring him that all her husband's +actions in the matter have been adopted against her will. It is in +this kind of thing that we find the roots of the real anger of +Browning. He did not dislike spiritualism, but spiritualists. The +second point on which any one wishing to be just in the matter should +cast an eye, is the record of the visit which Mrs. Browning insisted +on making while on their honeymoon in Paris to the house of George +Sand. Browning felt, and to some extent expressed, exactly the same +aversion to his wife mixing with the circle of George Sand which he +afterwards felt at her mixing with the circle of Home. The society was +"of the ragged red, diluted with the low theatrical, men who worship +George Sand, _à genou bas_ between an oath and an ejection of saliva." +When we find that a man did not object to any number of Jacobites or +Atheists, but objected to the French Bohemian poets and to the early +occultist mediums as friends for his wife, we shall surely be fairly +right in concluding that he objected not to an opinion, but to a +social tone. The truth was that Browning had a great many admirably +Philistine feelings, and one of them was a great relish for his +responsibilities towards his wife. He enjoyed being a husband. This is +quite a distinct thing from enjoying being a lover, though it will +scarcely be found apart from it. But, like all good feelings, it has +its possible exaggerations, and one of them is this almost morbid +healthiness in the choice of friends for his wife. + +David Home, the medium, came to Florence about 1857. Mrs. Browning +undoubtedly threw herself into psychical experiments with great ardour +at first, and Browning, equally undoubtedly, opposed, and at length +forbade, the enterprise. He did not do so however until he had +attended one _séance_ at least, at which a somewhat ridiculous event +occurred, which is described in Home's _Memoirs_ with a gravity even +more absurd than the incident. Towards the end of the proceedings a +wreath was placed in the centre of the table, and the lights being +lowered, it was caused to rise slowly into the air, and after hovering +for some time, to move towards Mrs. Browning, and at length to alight +upon her head. As the wreath was floating in her direction, her +husband was observed abruptly to cross the room and stand beside her. +One would think it was a sufficiently natural action on the part of a +man whose wife was the centre of a weird and disturbing experiment, +genuine or otherwise. But Mr. Home gravely asserts that it was +generally believed that Browning had crossed the room in the hope that +the wreath would alight on his head, and that from the hour of its +disobliging refusal to do so dated the whole of his goaded and +malignant aversion to spiritualism. The idea of the very conventional +and somewhat bored Robert Browning running about the room after a +wreath in the hope of putting his head into it, is one of the genuine +gleams of humour in this rather foolish affair. Browning could be +fairly violent, as we know, both in poetry and conversation; but it +would be almost too terrible to conjecture what he would have felt and +said if Mr. Home's wreath had alighted on his head. + +Next day, according to Home's account, he called on the hostess of the +previous night in what the writer calls "a ridiculous state of +excitement," and told her apparently that she must excuse him if he +and his wife did not attend any more gatherings of the kind. What +actually occurred is not, of course, quite easy to ascertain, for the +account in Home's _Memoirs_ principally consists of noble speeches +made by the medium which would seem either to have reduced Browning to +a pulverised silence, or else to have failed to attract his attention. +But there can be no doubt that the general upshot of the affair was +that Browning put his foot down, and the experiments ceased. There can +be little doubt that he was justified in this; indeed, he was probably +even more justified if the experiments were genuine psychical +mysteries than if they were the _hocus-pocus_ of a charlatan. He knew +his wife better than posterity can be expected to do; but even +posterity can see that she was the type of woman so much adapted to +the purposes of men like Home as to exhibit almost invariably either a +great craving for such experiences or a great terror of them. Like +many geniuses, but not all, she lived naturally upon something like a +borderland; and it is impossible to say that if Browning had not +interposed when she was becoming hysterical she might not have ended +in an asylum. + +The whole of this incident is very characteristic of Browning; but the +real characteristic note in it has, as above suggested, been to some +extent missed. When some seven years afterwards he produced "Mr. +Sludge the Medium," every one supposed that it was an attack upon +spiritualism and the possibility of its phenomena. As we shall see +when we come to that poem, this is a wholly mistaken interpretation of +it. But what is really curious is that most people have assumed that a +dislike of Home's investigations implies a theoretic disbelief in +spiritualism. It might, of course, imply a very firm and serious +belief in it. As a matter of fact it did not imply this in Browning, +but it may perfectly well have implied an agnosticism which admitted +the reasonableness of such things. Home was infinitely less dangerous +as a dexterous swindler than he was as a bad or foolish man in +possession of unknown or ill-comprehended powers. It is surely curious +to think that a man must object to exposing his wife to a few +conjuring tricks, but could not be afraid of exposing her to the loose +and nameless energies of the universe. + +Browning's theoretic attitude in the matter was, therefore, in all +probability quite open and unbiassed. His was a peculiarly hospitable +intellect. If any one had told him of the spiritualist theory, or +theories a hundred times more insane, as things held by some sect of +Gnostics in Alexandria, or of heretical Talmudists at Antwerp, he +would have delighted in those theories, and would very likely have +adopted them. But Greek Gnostics and Antwerp Jews do not dance round a +man's wife and wave their hands in her face and send her into swoons +and trances about which nobody knows anything rational or scientific. +It was simply the stirring in Browning of certain primal masculine +feelings far beyond the reach of argument--things that lie so deep +that if they are hurt, though there may be no blame and no anger, +there is always pain. Browning did not like spiritualism to be +mentioned for many years. + +Robert Browning was unquestionably a thoroughly conventional man. +There are many who think this element of conventionality altogether +regrettable and disgraceful; they have established, as it were, a +convention of the unconventional. But this hatred of the conventional +element in the personality of a poet is only possible to those who do +not remember the meaning of words. Convention means only a coming +together, an agreement; and as every poet must base his work upon an +emotional agreement among men, so every poet must base his work upon a +convention. Every art is, of course, based upon a convention, an +agreement between the speaker and the listener that certain objections +shall not be raised. The most realistic art in the world is open to +realistic objection. Against the most exact and everyday drama that +ever came out of Norway it is still possible for the realist to raise +the objection that the hero who starts a subject and drops it, who +runs out of a room and runs back again for his hat, is all the time +behaving in a most eccentric manner, considering that he is doing +these things in a room in which one of the four walls has been taken +clean away and been replaced by a line of footlights and a mob of +strangers. Against the most accurate black-and-white artist that human +imagination can conceive it is still to be admitted that he draws a +black line round a man's nose, and that that line is a lie. And in +precisely the same fashion a poet must, by the nature of things, be +conventional. Unless he is describing an emotion which others share +with him, his labours will be utterly in vain. If a poet really had an +original emotion; if, for example, a poet suddenly fell in love with +the buffers of a railway train, it would take him considerably more +time than his allotted three-score years and ten to communicate his +feelings. + +Poetry deals with primal and conventional things--the hunger for +bread, the love of woman, the love of children, the desire for +immortal life. If men really had new sentiments, poetry could not deal +with them. If, let us say, a man did not feel a bitter craving to eat +bread; but did, by way of substitute, feel a fresh, original craving +to eat brass fenders or mahogany tables, poetry could not express him. +If a man, instead of falling in love with a woman, fell in love with a +fossil or a sea anemone, poetry could not express him. Poetry can only +express what is original in one sense--the sense in which we speak of +original sin. It is original, not in the paltry sense of being new, +but in the deeper sense of being old; it is original in the sense that +it deals with origins. + +All artists, who have any experience of the arts, will agree so far, +that a poet is bound to be conventional with regard to matters of art. +Unfortunately, however, they are the very people who cannot, as a +general rule, see that a poet is also bound to be conventional in +matters of conduct. It is only the smaller poet who sees the poetry of +revolt, of isolation, of disagreement; the larger poet sees the poetry +of those great agreements which constitute the romantic achievement of +civilisation. Just as an agreement between the dramatist and the +audience is necessary to every play; just as an agreement between the +painter and the spectators is necessary to every picture, so an +agreement is necessary to produce the worship of any of the great +figures of morality--the hero, the saint, the average man, the +gentleman. Browning had, it must thoroughly be realised, a real +pleasure in these great agreements, these great conventions. He +delighted, with a true poetic delight, in being conventional. Being +by birth an Englishman, he took pleasure in being an Englishman; being +by rank a member of the middle class, he took a pride in its ancient +scruples and its everlasting boundaries. He was everything that he was +with a definite and conscious pleasure--a man, a Liberal, an +Englishman, an author, a gentleman, a lover, a married man. + +This must always be remembered as a general characteristic of +Browning, this ardent and headlong conventionality. He exhibited it +pre-eminently in the affair of his elopement and marriage, during and +after the escape of himself and his wife to Italy. He seems to have +forgotten everything, except the splendid worry of being married. He +showed a thoroughly healthy consciousness that he was taking up a +responsibility which had its practical side. He came finally and +entirely out of his dreams. Since he had himself enough money to live +on, he had never thought of himself as doing anything but writing +poetry; poetry indeed was probably simmering and bubbling in his head +day and night. But when the problem of the elopement arose he threw +himself with an energy, of which it is pleasant to read, into every +kind of scheme for solidifying his position. He wrote to Monckton +Milnes, and would appear to have badgered him with applications for a +post in the British Museum. "I will work like a horse," he said, with +that boyish note, which, whenever in his unconsciousness he strikes +it, is more poetical than all his poems. All his language in this +matter is emphatic; he would be "glad and proud," he says, "to have +any minor post" his friend could obtain for him. He offered to read +for the Bar, and probably began doing so. But all this vigorous and +very creditable materialism was ruthlessly extinguished by Elizabeth +Barrett. She declined altogether even to entertain the idea of her +husband devoting himself to anything else at the expense of poetry. +Probably she was right and Browning wrong, but it was an error which +every man would desire to have made. + +One of the qualities again which make Browning most charming, is the +fact that he felt and expressed so simple and genuine a satisfaction +about his own achievements as a lover and husband, particularly in +relation to his triumph in the hygienic care of his wife. "If he is +vain of anything," writes Mrs. Browning, "it is of my restored +health." Later, she adds with admirable humour and suggestiveness, +"and I have to tell him that he really must not go telling everybody +how his wife walked here with him, or walked there with him, as if a +wife with two feet were a miracle in Nature." When a lady in Italy +said, on an occasion when Browning stayed behind with his wife on the +day of a picnic, that he was "the only man who behaved like a +Christian to his wife," Browning was elated to an almost infantile +degree. But there could scarcely be a better test of the essential +manliness and decency of a man than this test of his vanities. +Browning boasted of being domesticated; there are half a hundred men +everywhere who would be inclined to boast of not being domesticated. +Bad men are almost without exception conceited, but they are commonly +conceited of their defects. + +One picturesque figure who plays a part in this portion of the +Brownings' life in Italy is Walter Savage Landor. Browning found him +living with some of his wife's relations, and engaged in a continuous +and furious quarrel with them, which was, indeed, not uncommonly the +condition of that remarkable man when living with other human beings. +He had the double arrogance which is only possible to that old and +stately but almost extinct blend--the aristocratic republican. Like an +old Roman senator, or like a gentleman of the Southern States of +America, he had the condescension of a gentleman to those below him, +combined with the jealous self-assertiveness of a Jacobin to those +above. The only person who appears to have been able to manage him and +bring out his more agreeable side was Browning. It is, by the way, one +of the many hints of a certain element in Browning which can only be +described by the elementary and old-fashioned word goodness, that he +always contrived to make himself acceptable and even lovable to men of +savage and capricious temperament, of detached and erratic genius, who +could get on with no one else. Carlyle, who could not get a bitter +taste off his tongue in talking of most of his contemporaries, was +fond of Browning. Landor, who could hardly conduct an ordinary +business interview without beginning to break the furniture, was fond +of Browning. These are things which speak more for a man than many +people will understand. It is easy enough to be agreeable to a circle +of admirers, especially feminine admirers, who have a peculiar talent +for discipleship and the absorption of ideas. But when a man is loved +by other men of his own intellectual stature and of a wholly different +type and order of eminence, we may be certain that there was something +genuine about him, and something far more important than anything +intellectual. Men do not like another man because he is a genius, +least of all when they happen to be geniuses themselves. This general +truth about Browning is like hearing of a woman who is the most famous +beauty in a city, and who is at the same time adored and confided in +by all the women who live there. + +Browning came to the rescue of the fiery old gentleman, and helped by +Seymour Kirkup put him under very definite obligations by a course of +very generous conduct. He was fully repaid in his own mind for his +trouble by the mere presence and friendship of Landor, for whose +quaint and volcanic personality he had a vast admiration, compounded +of the pleasure of the artist in an oddity and of the man in a hero. +It is somewhat amusing and characteristic that Mrs. Browning did not +share this unlimited enjoyment of the company of Mr. Landor, and +expressed her feelings in her own humorous manner. She writes, "Dear, +darling Robert amuses me by talking of his gentleness and sweetness. A +most courteous and refined gentleman he is, of course, and very +affectionate to Robert (as he ought to be), but of self-restraint he +has not a grain, and of suspicion many grains. What do you really say +to dashing down a plate on the floor when you don't like what's on it? +Robert succeeded in soothing him, and the poor old lion is very quiet +on the whole, roaring softly to beguile the time in Latin alcaics +against his wife and Louis Napoleon." + +One event alone could really end this endless life of the Italian +Arcadia. That event happened on June 29, 1861. Robert Browning's wife +died, stricken by the death of her sister, and almost as hard (it is a +characteristic touch) by the death of Cavour. She died alone in the +room with Browning, and of what passed then, though much has been +said, little should be. He, closing the door of that room behind him, +closed a door in himself, and none ever saw Browning upon earth again +but only a splendid surface. + + + + +CHAPTER V + +BROWNING IN LATER LIFE + + +Browning's confidences, what there were of them, immediately after his +wife's death were given to several women-friends; all his life, +indeed, he was chiefly intimate with women. The two most intimate of +these were his own sister, who remained with him in all his later +years, and the sister of his wife, who seven years afterwards passed +away in his presence as Elizabeth had done. The other letters, which +number only one or two, referring in any personal manner to his +bereavement are addressed to Miss Haworth and Isa Blagden. He left +Florence and remained for a time with his father and sister near +Dinard. Then he returned to London and took up his residence in +Warwick Crescent. Naturally enough, the thing for which he now chiefly +lived was the education of his son, and it is characteristic of +Browning that he was not only a very indulgent father, but an +indulgent father of a very conventional type: he had rather the +chuckling pride of the city gentleman than the educational gravity of +the intellectual. + +Browning was now famous, _Bells and Pomegranates, Men and Women, +Christmas Eve_, and _Dramatis Personæ_ had successively glorified his +Italian period. But he was already brooding half-unconsciously on more +famous things. He has himself left on record a description of the +incident out of which grew the whole impulse and plan of his greatest +achievement. In a passage marked with all his peculiar sense of +material things, all that power of writing of stone or metal or the +fabric of drapery, so that we seem to be handling and smelling them, +he has described a stall for the selling of odds and ends of every +variety of utility and uselessness:-- + + "picture frames + White through the worn gilt, mirror-sconces chipped, + Bronze angel-heads once knobs attached to chests, + (Handled when ancient dames chose forth brocade) + Modern chalk drawings, studies from the nude, + Samples of stone, jet, breccia, porphyry + Polished and rough, sundry amazing busts + In baked earth, (broken, Providence be praised!) + A wreck of tapestry proudly-purposed web + When reds and blues were indeed red and blue, + Now offer'd as a mat to save bare feet + (Since carpets constitute a cruel cost). + * * * * * + Vulgarised Horace for the use of schools, + 'The Life, Death, Miracles of Saint Somebody, + Saint Somebody Else, his Miracles, Death, and Life'-- + With this, one glance at the lettered back of which, + And 'Stall,' cried I; a _lira_ made it mine." + +This sketch embodies indeed the very poetry of _débris_, and comes +nearer than any other poem has done to expressing the pathos and +picturesqueness of a low-class pawnshop. "This," which Browning bought +for a lira out of this heap of rubbish, was, of course, the old Latin +record of the criminal case of Guido Franceschini, tried for the +murder of his wife Pompilia in the year 1698. And this again, it is +scarcely necessary to say, was the ground-plan and motive of _The Ring +and the Book_. + +Browning had picked up the volume and partly planned the poem during +his wife's lifetime in Italy. But the more he studied it, the more the +dimensions of the theme appeared to widen and deepen; and he came at +last, there can be little doubt, to regard it definitely as his +_magnum opus_ to which he would devote many years to come. Then came +the great sorrow of his life, and he cast about him for something +sufficiently immense and arduous and complicated to keep his brain +going like some huge and automatic engine. "I mean to keep writing," +he said, "whether I like it or not." And thus finally he took up the +scheme of the Franceschini story, and developed it on a scale with a +degree of elaboration, repetition, and management, and inexhaustible +scholarship which was never perhaps before given in the history of the +world to an affair of two or three characters. Of the larger literary +and spiritual significance of the work, particularly in reference to +its curious and original form of narration, I shall speak +subsequently. But there is one peculiarity about the story which has +more direct bearing on Browning's life, and it appears singular that +few, if any, of his critics have noticed it. This peculiarity is the +extraordinary resemblance between the moral problem involved in the +poem if understood in its essence, and the moral problem which +constituted the crisis and centre of Browning's own life. Nothing, +properly speaking, ever happened to Browning after his wife's death; +and his greatest work during that time was the telling, under alien +symbols and the veil of a wholly different story, the inner truth +about his own greatest trial and hesitation. He himself had in this +sense the same difficulty as Caponsacchi, the supreme difficulty of +having to trust himself to the reality of virtue not only without the +reward, but even without the name of virtue. He had, like Caponsacchi, +preferred what was unselfish and dubious to what was selfish and +honourable. He knew better than any man that there is little danger of +men who really know anything of that naked and homeless responsibility +seeking it too often or indulging it too much. The conscientiousness +of the law-abider is nothing in its terrors to the conscientiousness +of the conscientious law-breaker. Browning had once, for what he +seriously believed to be a greater good, done what he himself would +never have had the cant to deny, ought to be called deceit and +evasion. Such a thing ought never to come to a man twice. If he finds +that necessity twice, he may, I think, be looked at with the beginning +of a suspicion. To Browning it came once, and he devoted his greatest +poem to a suggestion of how such a necessity may come to any man who +is worthy to live. + +As has already been suggested, any apparent danger that there may be +in this excusing of an exceptional act is counteracted by the perils +of the act, since it must always be remembered that this kind of act +has the immense difference from all legal acts--that it can only be +justified by success. If Browning had taken his wife to Paris, and she +had died in an hotel there, we can only conceive him saying, with the +bitter emphasis of one of his own lines, "How should I have borne me, +please?" Before and after this event his life was as tranquil and +casual a one as it would be easy to imagine; but there always remained +upon him something which was felt by all who knew him in after +years--the spirit of a man who had been ready when his time came, and +had walked in his own devotion and certainty in a position counted +indefensible and almost along the brink of murder. This great moral of +Browning, which may be called roughly the doctrine of the great hour, +enters, of course, into many poems besides _The Ring and the Book_, +and is indeed the mainspring of a great part of his poetry taken as a +whole. It is, of course, the central idea of that fine poem, "The +Statue and the Bust," which has given a great deal of distress to a +great many people because of its supposed invasion of recognised +morality. It deals, as every one knows, with a Duke Ferdinand and an +elopement which he planned with the bride of one of the Riccardi. The +lovers begin by deferring their flight for various more or less +comprehensible reasons of convenience; but the habit of shrinking from +the final step grows steadily upon them, and they never take it, but +die, as it were, waiting for each other. The objection that the act +thus avoided was a criminal one is very simply and quite clearly +answered by Browning himself. His case against the dilatory couple is +not in the least affected by the viciousness of their aim. His case is +that they exhibited no virtue. Crime was frustrated in them by +cowardice, which is probably the worse immorality of the two. The same +idea again may be found in that delightful lyric "Youth and Art," +where a successful cantatrice reproaches a successful sculptor with +their failure to understand each other in their youth and poverty. + + "Each life unfulfilled, you see; + It hangs still, patchy and scrappy: + We have not sighed deep, laughed free, + Starved, feasted, despaired,--been happy." + +And this conception of the great hour, which breaks out everywhere in +Browning, it is almost impossible not to connect with his own internal +drama. It is really curious that this correspondence has not been +insisted on. Probably critics have been misled by the fact that +Browning in many places appears to boast that he is purely dramatic, +that he has never put himself into his work, a thing which no poet, +good or bad, who ever lived could possibly avoid doing. + +The enormous scope and seriousness of _The Ring and the Book_ occupied +Browning for some five or six years, and the great epic appeared in +the winter of 1868. Just before it was published Smith and Elder +brought out a uniform edition of all Browning's works up to that time, +and the two incidents taken together may be considered to mark the +final and somewhat belated culmination of Browning's literary fame. +The years since his wife's death, that had been covered by the writing +of _The Ring and the Book_, had been years of an almost feverish +activity in that and many other ways. His travels had been restless +and continued, his industry immense, and for the first time he began +that mode of life which afterwards became so characteristic of +him--the life of what is called society. A man of a shallower and more +sentimental type would have professed to find the life of +dinner-tables and soirées vain and unsatisfying to a poet, and +especially to a poet in mourning. But if there is one thing more than +another which is stirring and honourable about Browning, it is the +entire absence in him of this cant of dissatisfaction. He had the one +great requirement of a poet--he was not difficult to please. The life +of society was superficial, but it is only very superficial people who +object to the superficial. To the man who sees the marvellousness of +all things, the surface of life is fully as strange and magical as its +interior; clearness and plainness of life is fully as mysterious as +its mysteries. The young man in evening dress, pulling on his gloves, +is quite as elemental a figure as any anchorite, quite as +incomprehensible, and indeed quite as alarming. + +A great many literary persons have expressed astonishment at, or even +disapproval of, this social frivolity of Browning's. Not one of these +literary people would have been shocked if Browning's interest in +humanity had led him into a gambling hell in the Wild West or a low +tavern in Paris; but it seems to be tacitly assumed that fashionable +people are not human at all. Humanitarians of a material and dogmatic +type, the philanthropists and the professional reformers go to look +for humanity in remote places and in huge statistics. Humanitarians of +a more vivid type, the Bohemian artists, go to look for humanity in +thieves' kitchens and the studios of the Quartier Latin. But +humanitarians of the highest type, the great poets and philosophers, +do not go to look for humanity at all. For them alone among all men +the nearest drawing-room is full of humanity, and even their own +families are human. Shakespeare ended his life by buying a house in +his own native town and talking to the townsmen. Browning was invited +to a great many conversaziones and private views, and did not pretend +that they bored him. In a letter belonging to this period of his life +he describes his first dinner at one of the Oxford colleges with an +unaffected delight and vanity, which reminds the reader of nothing so +much as the pride of the boy-captain of a public school if he were +invited to a similar function and received a few compliments. It may +be indeed that Browning had a kind of second youth in this +long-delayed social recognition, but at least he enjoyed his second +youth nearly as much as his first, and it is not every one who can do +that. + +Of Browning's actual personality and presence in this later middle age +of his, memories are still sufficiently clear. He was a middle-sized, +well set up, erect man, with somewhat emphatic gestures, and, as +almost all testimonies mention, a curiously strident voice. The beard, +the removal of which his wife had resented with so quaint an +indignation, had grown again, but grown quite white, which, as she +said when it occurred, was a signal mark of the justice of the gods. +His hair was still fairly dark, and his whole appearance at this time +must have been very well represented by Mr. G.F. Watts's fine portrait +in the National Portrait Gallery. The portrait bears one of the many +testimonies which exist to Mr. Watts's grasp of the essential of +character, for it is the only one of the portraits of Browning in +which we get primarily the air of virility, even of animal virility, +tempered but not disguised, with a certain touch of the pallor of the +brain-worker. He looks here what he was--a very healthy man, too +scholarly to live a completely healthy life. + +His manner in society, as has been more than once indicated, was that +of a man anxious, if anything, to avoid the air of intellectual +eminence. Lockhart said briefly, "I like Browning; he isn't at all +like a damned literary man." He was, according to some, upon occasion, +talkative and noisy to a fault; but there are two kinds of men who +monopolise conversation. The first kind are those who like the sound +of their own voice; the second are those who do not know what the +sound of their own voice is like. Browning was one of the latter +class. His volubility in speech had the same origin as his +voluminousness and obscurity in literature--a kind of headlong +humility. He cannot assuredly have been aware that he talked people +down or have wished to do so. For this would have been precisely a +violation of the ideal of the man of the world, the one ambition and +even weakness that he had. He wished to be a man of the world, and he +never in the full sense was one. He remained a little too much of a +boy, a little too much even of a Puritan, and a little too much of +what may be called a man of the universe, to be a man of the world. + +One of his faults probably was the thing roughly called prejudice. On +the question, for example, of table-turning and psychic phenomena he +was in a certain degree fierce and irrational. He was not indeed, as +we shall see when we come to study "Sludge the Medium," exactly +prejudiced against spiritualism. But he was beyond all question +stubbornly prejudiced against spiritualists. Whether the medium Home +was or was not a scoundrel it is somewhat difficult in our day to +conjecture. But in so far as he claimed supernatural powers, he may +have been as honest a gentleman as ever lived. And even if we think +that the moral atmosphere of Home is that of a man of dubious +character, we can still feel that Browning might have achieved his +purpose without making it so obvious that he thought so. Some traces +again, though much fainter ones, may be found of something like a +subconscious hostility to the Roman Church, or at least a less full +comprehension of the grandeur of the Latin religious civilisation than +might have been expected of a man of Browning's great imaginative +tolerance. Æstheticism, Bohemianism, the irresponsibilities of the +artist, the untidy morals of Grub Street and the Latin Quarter, he +hated with a consuming hatred. He was himself exact in everything, +from his scholarship to his clothes; and even when he wore the loose +white garments of the lounger in Southern Europe, they were in their +own way as precise as a dress suit. This extra carefulness in all +things he defended against the cant of Bohemianism as the right +attitude for the poet. When some one excused coarseness or negligence +on the ground of genius, he said, "That is an error: Noblesse oblige." + +Browning's prejudices, however, belonged altogether to that healthy +order which is characterised by a cheerful and satisfied ignorance. It +never does a man any very great harm to hate a thing that he knows +nothing about. It is the hating of a thing when we do know something +about it which corrodes the character. We all have a dark feeling of +resistance towards people we have never met, and a profound and manly +dislike of the authors we have never read. It does not harm a man to +be certain before opening the books that Whitman is an obscene ranter +or that Stevenson is a mere trifler with style. It is the man who can +think these things after he has read the books who must be in a fair +way to mental perdition. Prejudice, in fact, is not so much the great +intellectual sin as a thing which we may call, to coin a word, +"postjudice," not the bias before the fair trial, but the bias that +remains afterwards. With Browning's swift and emphatic nature the bias +was almost always formed before he had gone into the matter. But +almost all the men he really knew he admired, almost all the books he +had really read he enjoyed. He stands pre-eminent among those great +universalists who praised the ground they trod on and commended +existence like any other material, in its samples. He had no kinship +with those new and strange universalists of the type of Tolstoi who +praise existence to the exclusion of all the institutions they have +lived under, and all the ties they have known. He thought the world +good because he had found so many things that were good in +it--religion, the nation, the family, the social class. He did not, +like the new humanitarian, think the world good because he had found +so many things in it that were bad. + +As has been previously suggested, there was something very queer and +dangerous that underlay all the good humour of Browning. If one of +these idle prejudices were broken by better knowledge, he was all the +better pleased. But if some of the prejudices that were really rooted +in him were trodden on, even by accident, such as his aversion to +loose artistic cliques, or his aversion to undignified publicity, his +rage was something wholly transfiguring and alarming, something far +removed from the shrill disapproval of Carlyle and Ruskin. It can only +be said that he became a savage, and not always a very agreeable or +presentable savage. The indecent fury which danced upon the bones of +Edward Fitzgerald was a thing which ought not to have astonished any +one who had known much of Browning's character or even of his work. +Some unfortunate persons on another occasion had obtained some of Mrs. +Browning's letters shortly after her death, and proposed to write a +_Life_ founded upon them. They ought to have understood that Browning +would probably disapprove; but if he talked to them about it, as he +did to others, and it is exceedingly probable that he did, they must +have thought he was mad. "What I suffer with the paws of these +black-guards in my bowels you can fancy," he says. Again he writes: +"Think of this beast working away, not deeming my feelings, or those +of her family, worthy of notice. It shall not be done if I can stop +the scamp's knavery along with his breath." Whether Browning actually +resorted to this extreme course is unknown; nothing is known except +that he wrote a letter to the ambitious biographer which reduced him +to silence, probably from stupefaction. + +The same peculiarity ought, as I have said, to have been apparent to +any one who knew anything of Browning's literary work. A great number +of his poems are marked by a trait of which by its nature it is more +or less impossible to give examples. Suffice it to say that it is +truly extraordinary that poets like Swinburne (who seldom uses a gross +word) should have been spoken of as if they had introduced moral +license into Victorian poetry. What the Non-conformist conscience has +been doing to have passed Browning is something difficult to imagine. +But the peculiarity of this occasional coarseness in his work is +this--that it is always used to express a certain wholesome fury and +contempt for things sickly, or ungenerous, or unmanly. The poet seems +to feel that there are some things so contemptible that you can only +speak of them in pothouse words. It would be idle, and perhaps +undesirable, to give examples; but it may be noted that the same +brutal physical metaphor is used by his Caponsacchi about the people +who could imagine Pompilia impure and by his Shakespeare in "At the +Mermaid," about the claim of the Byronic poet to enter into the heart +of humanity. In both cases Browning feels, and perhaps in a manner +rightly, that the best thing we can do with a sentiment essentially +base is to strip off its affectations and state it basely, and that +the mud of Chaucer is a great deal better than the poison of Sterne. +Herein again Browning is close to the average man; and to do the +average man justice, there is a great deal more of this Browningesque +hatred of Byronism in the brutality of his conversation than many +people suppose. + +Such, roughly and as far as we can discover, was the man who, in the +full summer and even the full autumn of his intellectual powers, began +to grow upon the consciousness of the English literary world about +this time. For the first time friendship grew between him and the +other great men of his time. Tennyson, for whom he then and always +felt the best and most personal kind of admiration, came into his +life, and along with him Gladstone and Francis Palgrave. There began +to crowd in upon him those honours whereby a man is to some extent +made a classic in his lifetime, so that he is honoured even if he is +unread. He was made a Fellow of Balliol in 1867, and the homage of the +great universities continued thenceforth unceasingly until his death, +despite many refusals on his part. He was unanimously elected Lord +Rector of Glasgow University in 1875. He declined, owing to his deep +and somewhat characteristic aversion to formal public speaking, and in +1877 he had to decline on similar grounds the similar offer from the +University of St. Andrews. He was much at the English universities, +was a friend of Dr. Jowett, and enjoyed the university life at the age +of sixty-three in a way that he probably would not have enjoyed it if +he had ever been to a university. The great universities would not let +him alone, to their great credit, and he became a D.C.L. of Cambridge +in 1879, and a D.C.L. of Oxford in 1882. When he received these +honours there were, of course, the traditional buffooneries of the +undergraduates, and one of them dropped a red cotton night-cap neatly +on his head as he passed under the gallery. Some indignant +intellectuals wrote to him to protest against this affront, but +Browning took the matter in the best and most characteristic way. "You +are far too hard," he wrote in answer, "on the very harmless +drolleries of the young men. Indeed, there used to be a regularly +appointed jester, 'Filius Terrae' he was called, whose business it was +to gibe and jeer at the honoured ones by way of reminder that all +human glories are merely gilded baubles and must not be fancied +metal." In this there are other and deeper things characteristic of +Browning besides his learning and humour. In discussing anything, he +must always fall back upon great speculative and eternal ideas. Even +in the tomfoolery of a horde of undergraduates he can only see a +symbol of the ancient office of ridicule in the scheme of morals. The +young men themselves were probably unaware that they were the +representatives of the "Filius Terrae." + +But the years during which Browning was thus reaping some of his late +laurels began to be filled with incidents that reminded him how the +years were passing over him. On June 20, 1866, his father had died, a +man of whom it is impossible to think without a certain emotion, a man +who had lived quietly and persistently for others, to whom Browning +owed more than it is easy to guess, to whom we in all probability +mainly owe Browning. In 1868 one of his closest friends, Arabella +Barrett, the sister of his wife, died, as her sister had done, alone +with Browning. Browning was not a superstitious man; he somewhat +stormily prided himself on the contrary; but he notes at this time "a +dream which Arabella had of Her, in which she prophesied their meeting +in five years," that is, of course, the meeting of Elizabeth and +Arabella. His friend Milsand, to whom _Sordello_ was dedicated, died +in 1886. "I never knew," said Browning, "or ever shall know, his like +among men." But though both fame and a growing isolation indicated +that he was passing towards the evening of his days, though he bore +traces of the progress, in a milder attitude towards things, and a +greater preference for long exiles with those he loved, one thing +continued in him with unconquerable energy--there was no diminution in +the quantity, no abatement in the immense designs of his intellectual +output. + +In 1871 he produced _Balaustion's Adventure_, a work exhibiting not +only his genius in its highest condition of power, but something more +exacting even than genius to a man of his mature and changed life, +immense investigation, prodigious memory, the thorough assimilation +of the vast literature of a remote civilisation. _Balaustion's +Adventure_, which is, of course, the mere framework for an English +version of the Alcestis of Euripides, is an illustration of one of +Browning's finest traits, his immeasurable capacity for a classic +admiration. Those who knew him tell us that in conversation he never +revealed himself so impetuously or so brilliantly as when declaiming +the poetry of others; and _Balaustion's Adventure_ is a monument of +this fiery self-forgetfulness. It is penetrated with the passionate +desire to render Euripides worthily, and to that imitation are for the +time being devoted all the gigantic powers which went to make the +songs of Pippa and the last agony of Guido. Browning never put himself +into anything more powerfully or more successfully; yet it is only an +excellent translation. In the uncouth philosophy of Caliban, in the +tangled ethics of Sludge, in his wildest satire, in his most +feather-headed lyric, Browning was never more thoroughly Browning than +in this splendid and unselfish plagiarism. This revived excitement in +Greek matters; "his passionate love of the Greek language" continued +in him thenceforward till his death. He published more than one poem +on the drama of Hellas. _Aristophanes' Apology_ came out in 1875, and +_The Agamemnon of Æschylus_, another paraphrase, in 1877. All three +poems are marked by the same primary characteristic, the fact that the +writer has the literature of Athens literally at his fingers' ends. He +is intimate not only with their poetry and politics, but with their +frivolity and their slang; he knows not only Athenian wisdom, but +Athenian folly; not only the beauty of Greece, but even its vulgarity. +In fact, a page of _Aristophanes' Apology_ is like a page of +Aristophanes, dark with levity and as obscure as a schoolman's +treatise, with its load of jokes. + +In 1871 also appeared _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau: Saviour of +Society_, one of the finest and most picturesque of all Browning's +apologetic monologues. The figure is, of course, intended for Napoleon +III., whose Empire had just fallen, bringing down his country with it. +The saying has been often quoted that Louis Napoleon deceived Europe +twice--once when he made it think he was a noodle, and once when he +made it think he was a statesman. It might be added that Europe was +never quite just to him, and was deceived a third time, when it took +him after his fall for an exploded mountebank and nonentity. Amid the +general chorus of contempt which was raised over his weak and +unscrupulous policy in later years, culminating in his great disaster, +there are few things finer than this attempt of Browning's to give the +man a platform and let him speak for himself. It is the apologia of a +political adventurer, and a political adventurer of a kind peculiarly +open to popular condemnation. Mankind has always been somewhat +inclined to forgive the adventurer who destroys or re-creates, but +there is nothing inspiring about the adventurer who merely preserves. +We have sympathy with the rebel who aims at reconstruction, but there +is something repugnant to the imagination in the rebel who rebels in +the name of compromise. Browning had to defend, or rather to +interpret, a man who kidnapped politicians in the night and deluged +the Montmartre with blood, not for an ideal, not for a reform, not +precisely even for a cause, but simply for the establishment of a +_régime_. He did these hideous things not so much that he might be +able to do better ones, but that he and every one else might be able +to do nothing for twenty years; and Browning's contention, and a very +plausible contention, is that the criminal believed that his crime +would establish order and compromise, or, in other words, that he +thought that nothing was the very best thing he and his people could +do. There is something peculiarly characteristic of Browning in thus +selecting not only a political villain, but what would appear the most +prosaic kind of villain. We scarcely ever find in Browning a defence +of those obvious and easily defended publicans and sinners whose +mingled virtues and vices are the stuff of romance and melodrama--the +generous rake, the kindly drunkard, the strong man too great for +parochial morals. He was in a yet more solitary sense the friend of +the outcast. He took in the sinners whom even sinners cast out. He +went with the hypocrite and had mercy on the Pharisee. + +How little this desire of Browning's, to look for a moment at the +man's life with the man's eyes, was understood, may be gathered from +the criticisms on _Hohenstiel-Schwangau_, which, says Browning, "the +Editor of the _Edinburgh Review_ calls my eulogium on the Second +Empire, which it is not, any more than what another wiseacre affirms +it to be, a scandalous attack on the old constant friend of England. +It is just what I imagine the man might, if he pleased, say for +himself." + +In 1873 appeared _Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country_, which, if it be not +absolutely one of the finest of Browning's poems, is certainly one of +the most magnificently Browningesque. The origin of the name of the +poem is probably well known. He was travelling along the Normandy +coast, and discovered what he called + + "Meek, hitherto un-Murrayed bathing-places, + Best loved of sea-coast-nook-full Normandy!" + +Miss Thackeray, who was of the party, delighted Browning beyond +measure by calling the sleepy old fishing district "White Cotton +Night-Cap Country." It was exactly the kind of elfish phrase to which +Browning had, it must always be remembered, a quite unconquerable +attraction. The notion of a town of sleep, where men and women walked +about in nightcaps, a nation of somnambulists, was the kind of thing +that Browning in his heart loved better than _Paradise Lost_. Some +time afterwards he read in a newspaper a very painful story of +profligacy and suicide which greatly occupied the French journals in +the year 1871, and which had taken place in the same district. It is +worth noting that Browning was one of those wise men who can perceive +the terrible and impressive poetry of the police-news, which is +commonly treated as vulgarity, which is dreadful and may be +undesirable, but is certainly not vulgar. From _The Ring and the Book_ +to _Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country_ a great many of his works might be +called magnificent detective stories. The story is somewhat ugly, and +its power does not alter its ugliness, for power can only make +ugliness uglier. And in this poem there is little or nothing of the +revelation of that secret wealth of valour and patience in humanity +which makes real and redeems the revelation of its secret vileness in +_The Ring and the Book_. It almost looks at first sight as if Browning +had for a moment surrendered the whole of his impregnable +philosophical position and admitted the strange heresy that a human +story can be sordid. But this view of the poem is, of course, a +mistake. It was written in something which, for want of a more exact +word, we must call one of the bitter moods of Browning; but the +bitterness is entirely the product of a certain generous hostility +against the class of morbidities which he really detested, sometimes +more than they deserved. In this poem these principles of weakness and +evil are embodied to him as the sicklier kind of Romanism, and the +more sensual side of the French temperament. We must never forget what +a great deal of the Puritan there remained in Browning to the end. +This outburst of it is fierce and ironical, not in his best spirit. It +says in effect, "You call this a country of sleep, I call it a country +of death. You call it 'White Cotton Night-Cap Country'; I call it 'Red +Cotton Night-Cap Country.'" + +Shortly before this, in 1872, he had published _Fifine at the Fair_, +which his principal biographer, and one of his most uncompromising +admirers, calls a piece of perplexing cynicism. Perplexing it may be +to some extent, for it was almost impossible to tell whether Browning +would or would not be perplexing even in a love-song or a post-card. +But cynicism is a word that cannot possibly be applied with any +propriety to anything that Browning ever wrote. Cynicism denotes that +condition of mind in which we hold that life is in its nature mean and +arid; that no soul contains genuine goodness, and no state of things +genuine reliability. _Fifine at the Fair_, like _Prince +Hohenstiel-Schwangau_, is one of Browning's apologetic +soliloquies--the soliloquy of an epicurean who seeks half-playfully +to justify upon moral grounds an infidelity into which he afterwards +actually falls. This casuist, like all Browning's casuists, is given +many noble outbursts and sincere moments, and therefore apparently the +poem is called cynical. It is difficult to understand what particular +connection there is between seeing good in nobody and seeing good even +in a sensual fool. + +After _Fifine at the Fair_ appeared the _Inn Album_, in 1875, a purely +narrative work, chiefly interesting as exhibiting in yet another place +one of Browning's vital characteristics, a pleasure in retelling and +interpreting actual events of a sinister and criminal type; and after +the _Inn Album_ came what is perhaps the most preposterously +individual thing he ever wrote, _Of Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in +Distemper_, in 1876. It is impossible to call the work poetry, and it +is very difficult indeed to know what to call it. Its chief +characteristic is a kind of galloping energy, an energy that has +nothing intellectual or even intelligible about it, a purely animal +energy of words. Not only is it not beautiful, it is not even clever, +and yet it carries the reader away as he might be carried away by +romping children. It ends up with a voluble and largely unmeaning +malediction upon the poet's critics, a malediction so outrageously +good-humoured that it does not take the trouble even to make itself +clear to the objects of its wrath. One can compare the poem to nothing +in heaven or earth, except to the somewhat humorous, more or less +benevolent, and most incomprehensible catalogues of curses and oaths +which may be heard from an intoxicated navvy. This is the kind of +thing, and it goes on for pages:-- + + "Long after the last of your number + Has ceased my front-court to encumber + While, treading down rose and ranunculus, + You _Tommy-make-room-for-your-uncle_-us! + Troop, all of you man or homunculus, + Quick march! for Xanthippe, my housemaid, + If once on your pates she a souse made + With what, pan or pot, bowl or _skoramis_, + First comes to her hand--things were more amiss! + I would not for worlds be your place in-- + Recipient of slops from the basin! + You, Jack-in-the-Green, leaf-and-twiggishness + Won't save a dry thread on your priggishness!" + +You can only call this, in the most literal sense of the word, the +brute-force of language. + +In spite however of this monstrosity among poems, which gives its +title to the volume, it contains some of the most beautiful verses +that Browning ever wrote in that style of light philosophy in which he +was unequalled. Nothing ever gave so perfectly and artistically what +is too loosely talked about as a thrill, as the poem called "Fears and +Scruples," in which a man describes the mystifying conduct of an +absent friend, and reserves to the last line the climax-- + + "Hush, I pray you! + What if this friend happen to be--God." + +It is the masterpiece of that excellent but much-abused literary +quality, Sensationalism. + +The volume entitled _Pacchiarotto_, moreover, includes one or two of +the most spirited poems on the subject of the poet in relation to +publicity--"At the Mermaid," "House," and "Shop." + +In spite of his increasing years, his books seemed if anything to +come thicker and faster. Two were published in 1878--_La Saisiaz_, his +great metaphysical poem on the conception of immortality, and that +delightfully foppish fragment of the _ancien régime_, _The Two Poets +of Croisic_. Those two poems would alone suffice to show that he had +not forgotten the hard science of theology or the harder science of +humour. Another collection followed in 1879, the first series of +_Dramatic Idylls_, which contain such masterpieces as "Pheidippides" +and "Ivàn Ivànovitch." Upon its heels, in 1880, came the second series +of _Dramatic Idylls_, including "Muléykeh" and "Clive," possibly the +two best stories in poetry, told in the best manner of story-telling. +Then only did the marvellous fountain begin to slacken in quantity, +but never in quality. _Jocoseria_ did not appear till 1883. It +contains among other things a cast-back to his very earliest manner in +the lyric of "Never the Time and the Place," which we may call the +most light-hearted love-song that was ever written by a man over +seventy. In the next year appeared _Ferishtah's Fancies_, which +exhibit some of his shrewdest cosmic sagacity, expressed in some of +his quaintest and most characteristic images. Here perhaps more than +anywhere else we see that supreme peculiarity of Browning--his sense +of the symbolism of material trifles. Enormous problems, and yet more +enormous answers, about pain, prayer, destiny, liberty, and conscience +are suggested by cherries, by the sun, by a melon-seller, by an eagle +flying in the sky, by a man tilling a plot of ground. It is this +spirit of grotesque allegory which really characterises Browning among +all other poets. Other poets might possibly have hit upon the same +philosophical idea--some idea as deep, as delicate, and as spiritual. +But it may be safely asserted that no other poet, having thought of a +deep, delicate, and spiritual idea, would call it "A Bean Stripe; also +Apple Eating." + +Three more years passed, and the last book which Browning published in +his lifetime was _Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in +their Day_, a book which consists of apostrophes, amicable, furious, +reverential, satirical, emotional to a number of people of whom the +vast majority even of cultivated people have never heard in their +lives--Daniel Bartoli, Francis Furini, Gerard de Lairesse, and Charles +Avison. This extraordinary knowledge of the fulness of history was a +thing which never ceased to characterise Browning even when he was +unfortunate in every other literary quality. Apart altogether from +every line he ever wrote, it may fairly be said that no mind so rich +as his ever carried its treasures to the grave. All these later poems +are vigorous, learned, and full-blooded. They are thoroughly +characteristic of their author. But nothing in them is quite so +characteristic of their author as this fact, that when he had +published all of them, and was already near to his last day, he turned +with the energy of a boy let out of school, and began, of all things +in the world, to re-write and improve "Pauline," the boyish poem that +he had written fifty-five years before. Here was a man covered with +glory and near to the doors of death, who was prepared to give himself +the elaborate trouble of reconstructing the mood, and rebuilding the +verses of a long juvenile poem which had been forgotten for fifty +years in the blaze of successive victories. It is such things as these +which give to Browning an interest of personality which is far beyond +the more interest of genius. It was of such things that Elizabeth +Barrett wrote in one of her best moments of insight--that his genius +was the least important thing about him. + +During all these later years, Browning's life had been a quiet and +regular one. He always spent the winter in Italy and the summer in +London, and carried his old love of precision to the extent of never +failing day after day throughout the year to leave the house at the +same time. He had by this time become far more of a public figure than +he had ever been previously, both in England and Italy. In 1881, Dr. +Furnivall and Miss E.H. Hickey founded the famous "Browning Society." +He became President of the new "Shakespeare Society" and of the +"Wordsworth Society." In 1886, on the death of Lord Houghton, he +accepted the post of Foreign Correspondent to the Royal Academy. When +he moved to De Vere Gardens in 1887, it began to be evident that he +was slowly breaking up. He still dined out constantly; he still +attended every reception and private view; he still corresponded +prodigiously, and even added to his correspondence; and there is +nothing more typical of him than that now, when he was almost already +a classic, he answered any compliment with the most delightful vanity +and embarrassment. In a letter to Mr. George Bainton, touching style, +he makes a remark which is an excellent criticism on his whole +literary career: "I myself found many forgotten fields which have +proved the richest of pastures." But despite his continued energy, his +health was gradually growing worse. He was a strong man in a muscular, +and ordinarily in a physical sense, but he was also in a certain sense +a nervous man, and may be said to have died of brain-excitement +prolonged through a lifetime. In these closing years he began to feel +more constantly the necessity for rest. He and his sister went to live +at a little hotel in Llangollen, and spent hours together talking and +drinking tea on the lawn. He himself writes in one of his quaint and +poetic phrases that he had come to love these long country retreats, +"another term of delightful weeks, each tipped with a sweet starry +Sunday at the little church." For the first time, and in the last two +or three years, he was really growing old. On one point he maintained +always a tranquil and unvarying decision. The pessimistic school of +poetry was growing up all round him; the decadents, with their belief +that art was only a counting of the autumn leaves, were approaching +more and more towards their tired triumph and their tasteless +popularity. But Browning would not for one instant take the scorn of +them out of his voice. "Death, death, it is this harping on death that +I despise so much. In fiction, in poetry, French as well as English, +and I am told in American also, in art and literature, the shadow of +death, call it what you will, despair, negation, indifference, is upon +us. But what fools who talk thus! Why, _amico mio_, you know as well +as I, that death is life, just as our daily momentarily dying body is +none the less alive, and ever recruiting new forces of existence. +Without death, which is our church-yardy crape-like word for change, +for growth, there could be no prolongation of that which we call life. +Never say of me that I am dead." + +On August 13, 1888, he set out once more for Italy, the last of his +innumerable voyages. During his last Italian period he seems to have +fallen back on very ultimate simplicities, chiefly a mere staring at +nature. The family with whom he lived kept a fox cub, and Browning +would spend hours with it watching its grotesque ways; when it +escaped, he was characteristically enough delighted. The old man could +be seen continually in the lanes round Asolo, peering into hedges and +whistling for the lizards. + +This serene and pastoral decline, surely the mildest of slopes into +death, was suddenly diversified by a flash of something lying far +below. Browning's eye fell upon a passage written by the distinguished +Edward Fitzgerald, who had been dead for many years, in which +Fitzgerald spoke in an uncomplimentary manner of Elizabeth Barrett +Browning. Browning immediately wrote the "Lines to Edward Fitzgerald," +and set the whole literary world in an uproar. The lines were bitter +and excessive to have been written against any man, especially bitter +and excessive to have been written against a man who was not alive to +reply. And yet, when all is said, it is impossible not to feel a +certain dark and indescribable pleasure in this last burst of the old +barbaric energy. The mountain had been tilled and forested, and laid +out in gardens to the summit; but for one last night it had proved +itself once more a volcano, and had lit up all the plains with its +forgotten fire. And the blow, savage as it was, was dealt for that +great central sanctity--the story of a man's youth. All that the old +man would say in reply to every view of the question was, "I felt as +if she had died yesterday." + +Towards December of 1889 he moved to Venice, where he fell ill. He +took very little food; it was indeed one of his peculiar small fads +that men should not take food when they are ill, a matter in which he +maintained that the animals were more sagacious. He asserted +vigorously that this somewhat singular regimen would pull him through, +talked about his plans, and appeared cheerful. Gradually, however, the +talking became more infrequent, the cheerfulness passed into a kind of +placidity; and without any particular crisis or sign of the end, +Robert Browning died on December 12, 1889. The body was taken on board +ship by the Venice Municipal Guard, and received by the Royal Italian +marines. He was buried in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey, the +choir singing his wife's poem, "He giveth His beloved sleep." On the +day that he died _Asolando_ was published. + + + + +CHAPTER VI + +BROWNING AS A LITERARY ARTIST + + +Mr. William Sharp, in his _Life_ of Browning, quotes the remarks of +another critic to the following effect: "The poet's processes of +thought are scientific in their precision and analysis; the sudden +conclusion that he imposes upon them is transcendental and inept." + +This is a very fair but a very curious example of the way in which +Browning is treated. For what is the state of affairs? A man publishes +a series of poems, vigorous, perplexing, and unique. The critics read +them, and they decide that he has failed as a poet, but that he is a +remarkable philosopher and logician. They then proceed to examine his +philosophy, and show with great triumph that it is unphilosophical, +and to examine his logic and show with great triumph that it is not +logical, but "transcendental and inept." In other words, Browning is +first denounced for being a logician and not a poet, and then +denounced for insisting on being a poet when they have decided that he +is to be a logician. It is just as if a man were to say first that a +garden was so neglected that it was only fit for a boys' playground, +and then complain of the unsuitability in a boys' playground of +rockeries and flower-beds. + +As we find, after this manner, that Browning does not act +satisfactorily as that which we have decided that he shall be--a +logician--it might possibly be worth while to make another attempt to +see whether he may not, after all, be more valid than we thought as to +what he himself professed to be--a poet. And if we study this +seriously and sympathetically, we shall soon come to a conclusion. It +is a gross and complete slander upon Browning to say that his +processes of thought are scientific in their precision and analysis. +They are nothing of the sort; if they were, Browning could not be a +good poet. The critic speaks of the conclusions of a poem as +"transcendental and inept"; but the conclusions of a poem, if they are +not transcendental, must be inept. Do the people who call one of +Browning's poems scientific in its analysis realise the meaning of +what they say? One is tempted to think that they know a scientific +analysis when they see it as little as they know a good poem. The one +supreme difference between the scientific method and the artistic +method is, roughly speaking, simply this--that a scientific statement +means the same thing wherever and whenever it is uttered, and that an +artistic statement means something entirely different, according to +the relation in which it stands to its surroundings. The remark, let +us say, that the whale is a mammal, or the remark that sixteen ounces +go to a pound, is equally true, and means exactly the same thing, +whether we state it at the beginning of a conversation or at the end, +whether we print it in a dictionary or chalk it up on a wall. But if +we take some phrase commonly used in the art of literature--such a +sentence, for the sake of example, as "the dawn was breaking"--the +matter is quite different. If the sentence came at the beginning of a +short story, it might be a mere descriptive prelude. If it were the +last sentence in a short story, it might be poignant with some +peculiar irony or triumph. Can any one read Browning's great +monologues and not feel that they are built up like a good short +story, entirely on this principle of the value of language arising +from its arrangement. Take such an example as "Caliban upon Setebos," +a wonderful poem designed to describe the way in which a primitive +nature may at once be afraid of its gods and yet familiar with them. +Caliban in describing his deity starts with a more or less natural and +obvious parallel between the deity and himself, carries out the +comparison with consistency and an almost revolting simplicity, and +ends in a kind of blasphemous extravaganza of anthropomorphism, basing +his conduct not merely on the greatness and wisdom, but also on the +manifest weaknesses and stupidities, of the Creator of all things. +Then suddenly a thunderstorm breaks over Caliban's island, and the +profane speculator falls flat upon his face-- + + "Lo! 'Lieth flat and loveth Setebos! + 'Maketh his teeth meet through his upper lip, + Will let those quails fly, will not eat this month + One little mess of whelks, so he may 'scape!" + +Surely it would be very difficult to persuade oneself that this +thunderstorm would have meant exactly the same thing if it had +occurred at the beginning of "Caliban upon Setebos." It does not mean +the same thing, but something very different; and the deduction from +this is the curious fact that Browning is an artist, and that +consequently his processes of thought are not "scientific in their +precision and analysis." + +No criticism of Browning's poems can be vital, none in the face of the +poems themselves can be even intelligible, which is not based upon the +fact that he was successfully or otherwise a conscious and deliberate +artist. He may have failed as an artist, though I do not think so; +that is quite a different matter. But it is one thing to say that a +man through vanity or ignorance has built an ugly cathedral, and quite +another to say that he built it in a fit of absence of mind, and did +not know whether he was building a lighthouse or a first-class hotel. +Browning knew perfectly well what he was doing; and if the reader does +not like his art, at least the author did. The general sentiment +expressed in the statement that he did not care about form is simply +the most ridiculous criticism that could be conceived. It would be far +nearer the truth to say that he cared more for form than any other +English poet who ever lived. He was always weaving and modelling and +inventing new forms. Among all his two hundred to three hundred poems +it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that there are half as +many different metres as there are different poems. + +The great English poets who are supposed to have cared more for form +than Browning did, cared less at least in this sense--that they were +content to use old forms so long as they were certain that they had +new ideas. Browning, on the other hand, no sooner had a new idea than +he tried to make a new form to express it. Wordsworth and Shelley were +really original poets; their attitude of thought and feeling marked +without doubt certain great changes in literature and philosophy. +Nevertheless, the "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" is a +perfectly normal and traditional ode, and "Prometheus Unbound" is a +perfectly genuine and traditional Greek lyrical drama. But if we study +Browning honestly, nothing will strike us more than that he really +created a large number of quite novel and quite admirable artistic +forms. It is too often forgotten what and how excellent these were. +_The Ring and the Book_, for example, is an illuminating departure in +literary method--the method of telling the same story several times +and trusting to the variety of human character to turn it into several +different and equally interesting stories. _Pippa Passes_, to take +another example, is a new and most fruitful form, a series of detached +dramas connected only by the presence of one fugitive and isolated +figure. The invention of these things is not merely like the writing +of a good poem--it is something like the invention of the sonnet or +the Gothic arch. The poet who makes them does not merely create +himself--he creates other poets. It is so in a degree long past +enumeration with regard to Browning's smaller poems. Such a pious and +horrible lyric as "The Heretic's Tragedy," for instance, is absolutely +original, with its weird and almost blood-curdling echo verses, +mocking echoes indeed-- + + "And dipt of his wings in Paris square, + They bring him now to lie burned alive. + + _[And wanteth there grace of lute or clavicithern, + ye shall say to confirm him who singeth_-- + + We bring John now to be burned alive." + +A hundred instances might, of course, be given. Milton's "Sonnet on +his Blindness," or Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," are both thoroughly +original, but still we can point to other such sonnets and other such +odes. But can any one mention any poem of exactly the same structural +and literary type as "Fears and Scruples," as "The Householder," as +"House" or "Shop," as "Nationality in Drinks," as "Sibrandus +Schafnaburgensis," as "My Star," as "A Portrait," as any of +"Ferishtah's Fancies," as any of the "Bad Dreams." + +The thing which ought to be said about Browning by those who do not +enjoy him is simply that they do not like his form; that they have +studied the form, and think it a bad form. If more people said things +of this sort, the world of criticism would gain almost unspeakably in +clarity and common honesty. Browning put himself before the world as a +good poet. Let those who think he failed call him a bad poet, and +there will be an end of the matter. There are many styles in art which +perfectly competent æsthetic judges cannot endure. For instance, it +would be perfectly legitimate for a strict lover of Gothic to say that +one of the monstrous rococo altar-pieces in the Belgian churches with +bulbous clouds and oaken sun-rays seven feet long, was, in his +opinion, ugly. But surely it would be perfectly ridiculous for any one +to say that it had no form. A man's actual feelings about it might be +better expressed by saying that it had too much. To say that Browning +was merely a thinker because you think "Caliban upon Setebos" ugly, is +precisely as absurd as it would be to call the author of the old +Belgian altarpiece a man devoted only to the abstractions of religion. +The truth about Browning is not that he was indifferent to technical +beauty, but that he invented a particular kind of technical beauty to +which any one else is free to be as indifferent as he chooses. + +There is in this matter an extraordinary tendency to vague and +unmeaning criticism. The usual way of criticising an author, +particularly an author who has added something to the literary forms +of the world, is to complain that his work does not contain something +which is obviously the speciality of somebody else. The correct thing +to say about Maeterlinck is that some play of his in which, let us +say, a princess dies in a deserted tower by the sea, has a certain +beauty, but that we look in vain in it for that robust geniality, that +really boisterous will to live which may be found in _Martin +Chuzzlewit_. The right thing to say about _Cyrano de Bergerac_ is that +it may have a certain kind of wit and spirit, but that it really +throws no light on the duty of middle-aged married couples in Norway. +It cannot be too much insisted upon that at least three-quarters of +the blame and criticism commonly directed against artists and authors +falls under this general objection, and is essentially valueless. +Authors both great and small are, like everything else in existence, +upon the whole greatly under-rated. They are blamed for not doing, not +only what they have failed to do to reach their own ideal, but what +they have never tried to do to reach every other writer's ideal. If we +can show that Browning had a definite ideal of beauty and loyally +pursued it, it is not necessary to prove that he could have written +_In Memoriam_ if he had tried. + +Browning has suffered far more injustice from his admirers than from +his opponents, for his admirers have for the most part got hold of the +matter, so to speak, by the wrong end. They believe that what is +ordinarily called the grotesque style of Browning was a kind of +necessity boldly adopted by a great genius in order to express novel +and profound ideas. But this is an entire mistake. What is called +ugliness was to Browning not in the least a necessary evil, but a +quite unnecessary luxury, which he enjoyed for its own sake. For +reasons that we shall see presently in discussing the philosophical +use of the grotesque, it did so happen that Browning's grotesque style +was very suitable for the expression of his peculiar moral and +metaphysical view. But the whole mass of poems will be misunderstood +if we do not realise first of all that he had a love of the grotesque +of the nature of art for art's sake. Here, for example, is a short +distinct poem merely descriptive of one of those elfish German jugs in +which it is to be presumed Tokay had been served to him. This is the +whole poem, and a very good poem too-- + + "Up jumped Tokay on our table, + Like a pigmy castle-warder, + Dwarfish to see, but stout and able, + Arms and accoutrements all in order; + And fierce he looked North, then, wheeling South + Blew with his bugle a challenge to Drouth, + Cocked his flap-hat with the tosspot-feather, + Twisted his thumb in his red moustache, + Jingled his huge brass spurs together, + Tightened his waist with its Buda sash, + And then, with an impudence nought could abash, + Shrugged his hump-shoulder, to tell the beholder, + For twenty such knaves he would laugh but the bolder: + And so, with his sword-hilt gallantly jutting, + And dexter-hand on his haunch abutting, + Went the little man, Sir Ausbruch, strutting!" + +I suppose there are Browning students in existence who would think +that this poem contained something pregnant about the Temperance +question, or was a marvellously subtle analysis of the romantic +movement in Germany. But surely to most of us it is sufficiently +apparent that Browning was simply fashioning a ridiculous +knick-knack, exactly as if he were actually moulding one of these +preposterous German jugs. Now before studying the real character of +this Browningesque style, there is one general truth to be recognised +about Browning's work. It is this--that it is absolutely necessary to +remember that Browning had, like every other poet, his simple and +indisputable failures, and that it is one thing to speak of the +badness of his artistic failures, and quite another thing to speak of +the badness of his artistic aim. Browning's style may be a good style, +and yet exhibit many examples of a thoroughly bad use of it. On this +point there is indeed a singularly unfair system of judgment used by +the public towards the poets. It is very little realised that the vast +majority of great poets have written an enormous amount of very bad +poetry. The unfortunate Wordsworth is generally supposed to be almost +alone in this; but any one who thinks so can scarcely have read a +certain number of the minor poems of Byron and Shelley and Tennyson. + +Now it is only just to Browning that his more uncouth effusions should +not be treated as masterpieces by which he must stand or fall, but +treated simply as his failures. It is really true that such a line as + + "Irks fear the crop-full bird, frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?" + +is a very ugly and a very bad line. But it is quite equally true that +Tennyson's + + "And that good man, the clergyman, has told me words of peace," + +is a very ugly and a very bad line. But people do not say that this +proves that Tennyson was a mere crabbed controversialist and +metaphysician. They say that it is a bad example of Tennyson's form; +they do not say that it is a good example of Tennyson's indifference +to form. Upon the whole, Browning exhibits far fewer instances of this +failure in his own style than any other of the great poets, with the +exception of one or two like Spenser and Keats, who seem to have a +mysterious incapacity for writing bad poetry. But almost all original +poets, particularly poets who have invented an artistic style, are +subject to one most disastrous habit--the habit of writing imitations +of themselves. Every now and then in the works of the noblest +classical poets you will come upon passages which read like extracts +from an American book of parodies. Swinburne, for example, when he +wrote the couplet-- + + "From the lilies and languors of virtue + To the raptures and roses of vice," + +wrote what is nothing but a bad imitation of himself, an imitation +which seems indeed to have the wholly unjust and uncritical object of +proving that the Swinburnian melody is a mechanical scheme of initial +letters. Or again, Mr. Rudyard Kipling when he wrote the line-- + + "Or ride with the reckless seraphim on the rim of a red-maned star," + +was caricaturing himself in the harshest and least sympathetic spirit +of American humour. This tendency is, of course, the result of the +self-consciousness and theatricality of modern life in which each of +us is forced to conceive ourselves as part of a _dramatis personæ_ +and act perpetually in character. Browning sometimes yielded to this +temptation to be a great deal too like himself. + + "Will I widen thee out till thou turnest + From Margaret Minnikin mou' by God's grace, + To Muckle-mouth Meg in good earnest." + +This sort of thing is not to be defended in Browning any more than in +Swinburne. But, on the other hand, it is not to be attributed in +Swinburne to a momentary exaggeration, and in Browning to a vital +æsthetic deficiency. In the case of Swinburne, we all feel that the +question is not whether that particular preposterous couplet about +lilies and roses redounds to the credit of the Swinburnian style, but +whether it would be possible in any other style than the Swinburnian +to have written the Hymn to Proserpine. In the same way, the essential +issue about Browning as an artist is not whether he, in common with +Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, and Swinburne, sometimes wrote +bad poetry, but whether in any other style except Browning's you could +have achieved the precise artistic effect which is achieved by such +incomparable lyrics as "The Patriot" or "The Laboratory." The answer +must be in the negative, and in that answer lies the whole +justification of Browning as an artist. + +The question now arises, therefore, what was his conception of his +functions as an artist? We have already agreed that his artistic +originality concerned itself chiefly with the serious use of the +grotesque. It becomes necessary, therefore, to ask what is the serious +use of the grotesque, and what relation does the grotesque bear to the +eternal and fundamental elements in life? + +One of the most curious things to notice about popular æsthetic +criticism is the number of phrases it will be found to use which are +intended to express an æsthetic failure, and which express merely an +æsthetic variety. Thus, for instance, the traveller will often hear +the advice from local lovers of the picturesque, "The scenery round +such and such a place has no interest; it is quite flat." To disparage +scenery as quite flat is, of course, like disparaging a swan as quite +white, or an Italian sky as quite blue. Flatness is a sublime quality +in certain landscapes, just as rockiness is a sublime quality in +others. In the same way there are a great number of phrases commonly +used in order to disparage such writers as Browning which do not in +fact disparage, but merely describe them. One of the most +distinguished of Browning's biographers and critics says of him, for +example, "He has never meant to be rugged, but has become so in +striving after strength." To say that Browning never tried to be +rugged is to say that Edgar Allan Poe never tried to be gloomy, or +that Mr. W.S. Gilbert never tried to be extravagant. The whole issue +depends upon whether we realise the simple and essential fact that +ruggedness is a mode of art like gloominess or extravagance. Some +poems ought to be rugged, just as some poems ought to be smooth. When +we see a drift of stormy and fantastic clouds at sunset, we do not say +that the cloud is beautiful although it is ragged at the edges. When +we see a gnarled and sprawling oak, we do not say that it is fine +although it is twisted. When we see a mountain, we do not say that it +is impressive although it is rugged, nor do we say apologetically that +it never meant to be rugged, but became so in its striving after +strength. Now, to say that Browning's poems, artistically considered, +are fine although they are rugged, is quite as absurd as to say that a +rock, artistically considered, is fine although it is rugged. +Ruggedness being an essential quality in the universe, there is that +in man which responds to it as to the striking of any other chord of +the eternal harmonies. As the children of nature, we are akin not only +to the stars and flowers, but also to the toad-stools and the +monstrous tropical birds. And it is to be repeated as the essential of +the question that on this side of our nature we do emphatically love +the form of the toad-stools, and not merely some complicated botanical +and moral lessons which the philosopher may draw from them. For +example, just as there is such a thing as a poetical metre being +beautifully light or beautifully grave and haunting, so there is such +a thing as a poetical metre being beautifully rugged. In the old +ballads, for instance, every person of literary taste will be struck +by a certain attractiveness in the bold, varying, irregular verse-- + + "He is either himsell a devil frae hell, + Or else his mother a witch maun be; + I wadna have ridden that wan water + For a' the gowd in Christentie," + +is quite as pleasing to the ear in its own way as + + "There's a bower of roses by Bendemeer stream, + And the nightingale sings in it all the night long," + +is in another way. Browning had an unrivalled ear for this particular +kind of staccato music. The absurd notion that he had no sense of +melody in verse is only possible to people who think that there is no +melody in verse which is not an imitation of Swinburne. To give a +satisfactory idea of Browning's rhythmic originality would be +impossible without quotations more copious than entertaining. But the +essential point has been suggested. + + "They were purple of raiment and golden, + Filled full of thee, fiery with wine, + Thy lovers in haunts unbeholden, + In marvellous chambers of thine," + +is beautiful language, but not the only sort of beautiful language. +This, for instance, has also a tune in it-- + + "I--'next poet.' No, my hearties, + I nor am, nor fain would be! + Choose your chiefs and pick your parties, + Not one soul revolt to me! + * * * * * + Which of you did I enable + Once to slip inside my breast, + There to catalogue and label + What I like least, what love best, + Hope and fear, believe and doubt of, + Seek and shun, respect, deride, + Who has right to make a rout of + Rarities he found inside?" + +This quick, gallantly stepping measure also has its own kind of music, +and the man who cannot feel it can never have enjoyed the sound of +soldiers marching by. This, then, roughly is the main fact to remember +about Browning's poetical method, or about any one's poetical +method--that the question is not whether that method is the best in +the world, but the question whether there are not certain things which +can only be conveyed by that method. It is perfectly true, for +instance, that a really lofty and lucid line of Tennyson, such as-- + + "Thou art the highest, and most human too" +and + "We needs must love the highest when we see it" + +would really be made the worse for being translated into Browning. It +would probably become + + "High's human; man loves best, best visible," + +and would lose its peculiar clarity and dignity and courtly plainness. +But it is quite equally true that any really characteristic fragment +of Browning, if it were only the tempestuous scolding of the organist +in "Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha"-- + + "Hallo, you sacristan, show us a light there! + Down it dips, gone like a rocket. + What, you want, do you, to come unawares, + Sweeping the church up for first morning-prayers, + And find a poor devil has ended his cares + At the foot of your rotten-runged rat-riddled stairs? + Do I carry the moon in my pocket?" + +--it is quite equally true that this outrageous gallop of rhymes +ending with a frantic astronomical image would lose in energy and +spirit if it were written in a conventional and classical style, and +ran-- + + "What must I deem then that thou dreamest to find + Disjected bones adrift upon the stair + Thou sweepest clean, or that thou deemest that I + Pouch in my wallet the vice-regal sun?" + +Is it not obvious that this statelier version might be excellent +poetry of its kind, and yet would be bad exactly in so far as it was +good; that it would lose all the swing, the rush, the energy of the +preposterous and grotesque original? In fact, we may see how +unmanageable is this classical treatment of the essentially absurd in +Tennyson himself. The humorous passages in _The Princess_, though +often really humorous in themselves, always appear forced and feeble +because they have to be restrained by a certain metrical dignity, and +the mere idea of such restraint is incompatible with humour. If +Browning had written the passage which opens _The Princess_, +descriptive of the "larking" of the villagers in the magnate's park, +he would have spared us nothing; he would not have spared us the +shrill uneducated voices and the unburied bottles of ginger beer. He +would have crammed the poem with uncouth similes; he would have +changed the metre a hundred times; he would have broken into doggerel +and into rhapsody; but he would have left, when all is said and done, +as he leaves in that paltry fragment of the grumbling organist, the +impression of a certain eternal human energy. Energy and joy, the +father and the mother of the grotesque, would have ruled the poem. We +should have felt of that rowdy gathering little but the sensation of +which Mr. Henley writes-- + + "Praise the generous gods for giving, + In this world of sin and strife, + With some little time for living, + Unto each the joy of life," + +the thought that every wise man has when looking at a Bank Holiday +crowd at Margate. + +To ask why Browning enjoyed this perverse and fantastic style most +would be to go very deep into his spirit indeed, probably a great +deal deeper than it is possible to go. But it is worth while to +suggest tentatively the general function of the grotesque in art +generally and in his art in particular. There is one very curious idea +into which we have been hypnotised by the more eloquent poets, and +that is that nature in the sense of what is ordinarily called the +country is a thing entirely stately and beautiful as those terms are +commonly understood. The whole world of the fantastic, all things +top-heavy, lop-sided, and nonsensical are conceived as the work of +man, gargoyles, German jugs, Chinese pots, political caricatures, +burlesque epics, the pictures of Mr. Aubrey Beardsley and the puns of +Robert Browning. But in truth a part, and a very large part, of the +sanity and power of nature lies in the fact that out of her comes all +this instinct of caricature. Nature may present itself to the poet too +often as consisting of stars and lilies; but these are not poets who +live in the country; they are men who go to the country for +inspiration and could no more live in the country than they could go +to bed in Westminster Abbey. Men who live in the heart of nature, +farmers and peasants, know that nature means cows and pigs, and +creatures more humorous than can be found in a whole sketch-book of +Callot. And the element of the grotesque in art, like the element of +the grotesque in nature, means, in the main, energy, the energy which +takes its own forms and goes its own way. Browning's verse, in so far +as it is grotesque, is not complex or artificial; it is natural and in +the legitimate tradition of nature. The verse sprawls like the trees, +dances like the dust; it is ragged like the thunder-cloud, it is +top-heavy like the toadstool. Energy which disregards the standard of +classical art is in nature as it is in Browning. The same sense of the +uproarious force in things which makes Browning dwell on the oddity of +a fungus or a jellyfish makes him dwell on the oddity of a +philosophical idea. Here, for example, we have a random instance from +"The Englishman in Italy" of the way in which Browning, when he was +most Browning, regarded physical nature. + + "And pitch down his basket before us, + All trembling alive + With pink and grey jellies, your sea-fruit; + You touch the strange lumps, + And mouths gape there, eyes open, all manner + Of horns and of humps, + Which only the fisher looks grave at." + +Nature might mean flowers to Wordsworth and grass to Walt Whitman, but +to Browning it really meant such things as these, the monstrosities +and living mysteries of the sea. And just as these strange things +meant to Browning energy in the physical world, so strange thoughts +and strange images meant to him energy in the mental world. When, in +one of his later poems, the professional mystic is seeking in a +supreme moment of sincerity to explain that small things may be filled +with God as well as great, he uses the very same kind of image, the +image of a shapeless sea-beast, to embody that noble conception. + + "The Name comes close behind a stomach-cyst, + The simplest of creations, just a sac + That's mouth, heart, legs, and belly at once, yet lives + And feels, and could do neither, we conclude, + If simplified still further one degree." + + (SLUDGE.) + +These bulbous, indescribable sea-goblins are the first thing on which +the eye of the poet lights in looking on a landscape, and the last in +the significance of which he trusts in demonstrating the mercy of the +Everlasting. + +There is another and but slightly different use of the grotesque, but +which is definitely valuable in Browning's poetry, and indeed in all +poetry. To present a matter in a grotesque manner does certainly tend +to touch the nerve of surprise and thus to draw attention to the +intrinsically miraculous character of the object itself. It is +difficult to give examples of the proper use of grotesqueness without +becoming too grotesque. But we should all agree that if St. Paul's +Cathedral were suddenly presented to us upside down we should, for the +moment, be more surprised at it, and look at it more than we have done +all the centuries during which it has rested on its foundations. Now +it is the supreme function of the philosopher of the grotesque to make +the world stand on its head that people may look at it. If we say "a +man is a man" we awaken no sense of the fantastic, however much we +ought to, but if we say, in the language of the old satirist, "that +man is a two-legged bird, without feathers," the phrase does, for a +moment, make us look at man from the outside and gives us a thrill in +his presence. When the author of the Book of Job insists upon the +huge, half-witted, apparently unmeaning magnificence and might of +Behemoth, the hippopotamus, he is appealing precisely to this sense of +wonder provoked by the grotesque. "Canst thou play with him as with a +bird, canst thou bind him for thy maidens?" he says in an admirable +passage. The notion of the hippopotamus as a household pet is +curiously in the spirit of the humour of Browning. + +But when it is clearly understood that Browning's love of the +fantastic in style was a perfectly serious artistic love, when we +understand that he enjoyed working in that style, as a Chinese potter +might enjoy making dragons, or a mediæval mason making devils, there +yet remains something definite which must be laid to his account as a +fault. He certainly had a capacity for becoming perfectly childish in +his indulgence in ingenuities that have nothing to do with poetry at +all, such as puns, and rhymes, and grammatical structures that only +just fit into each other like a Chinese puzzle. Probably it was only +one of the marks of his singular vitality, curiosity, and interest in +details. He was certainly one of those somewhat rare men who are +fierily ambitious both in large things and in small. He prided himself +on having written _The Ring and the Book_, and he also prided himself +on knowing good wine when he tasted it. He prided himself on +re-establishing optimism on a new foundation, and it is to be +presumed, though it is somewhat difficult to imagine, that he prided +himself on such rhymes as the following in _Pacchiarotto_:-- + + "The wolf, fox, bear, and monkey, + By piping advice in one key-- + That his pipe should play a prelude + To something heaven-tinged not hell-hued, + Something not harsh but docile, + Man-liquid, not man-fossil." + +This writing, considered as writing, can only be regarded as a kind of +joke, and most probably Browning considered it so himself. It has +nothing at all to do with that powerful and symbolic use of the +grotesque which may be found in such admirable passages as this from +"Holy Cross Day":-- + + "Give your first groan--compunction's at work; + And soft! from a Jew you mount to a Turk. + Lo, Micah--the self-same beard on chin + He was four times already converted in!" + +This is the serious use of the grotesque. Through it passion and +philosophy are as well expressed as through any other medium. But the +rhyming frenzy of Browning has no particular relation even to the +poems in which it occurs. It is not a dance to any measure; it can +only be called the horse-play of literature. It may be noted, for +example, as a rather curious fact, that the ingenious rhymes are +generally only mathematical triumphs, not triumphs of any kind of +assonance. "The Pied Piper of Hamelin," a poem written for children, +and bound in general to be lucid and readable, ends with a rhyme which +it is physically impossible for any one to say:-- + + "And, whether they pipe us free, fróm rats or fróm mice, + If we've promised them aught, let us keep our promise!" + +This queer trait in Browning, his inability to keep a kind of demented +ingenuity even out of poems in which it was quite inappropriate, is a +thing which must be recognised, and recognised all the more because as +a whole he was a very perfect artist, and a particularly perfect +artist in the use of the grotesque. But everywhere when we go a little +below the surface in Browning we find that there was something in him +perverse and unusual despite all his working normality and +simplicity. His mind was perfectly wholesome, but it was not made +exactly like the ordinary mind. It was like a piece of strong wood +with a knot in it. + +The quality of what, can only be called buffoonery which is under +discussion is indeed one of the many things in which Browning was more +of an Elizabethan than a Victorian. He was like the Elizabethans in +their belief in the normal man, in their gorgeous and over-loaded +language, above all in their feeling for learning as an enjoyment and +almost a frivolity. But there was nothing in which he was so +thoroughly Elizabethan, and even Shakespearian, as in this fact, that +when he felt inclined to write a page of quite uninteresting nonsense, +he immediately did so. Many great writers have contrived to be +tedious, and apparently aimless, while expounding some thought which +they believed to be grave and profitable; but this frivolous stupidity +had not been found in any great writer since the time of Rabelais and +the time of the Elizabethans. In many of the comic scenes of +Shakespeare we have precisely this elephantine ingenuity, this hunting +of a pun to death through three pages. In the Elizabethan dramatists +and in Browning it is no doubt to a certain extent the mark of a real +hilarity. People must be very happy to be so easily amused. + +In the case of what is called Browning's obscurity, the question is +somewhat more difficult to handle. Many people have supposed Browning +to be profound because he was obscure, and many other people, hardly +less mistaken, have supposed him to be obscure because he was +profound. He was frequently profound, he was occasionally obscure, but +as a matter of fact the two have little or nothing to do with each +other. Browning's dark and elliptical mode of speech, like his love of +the grotesque, was simply a characteristic of his, a trick of is +temperament, and had little or nothing to do with whether what he was +expressing was profound or superficial. Suppose, for example, that a +person well read in English poetry but unacquainted with Browning's +style were earnestly invited to consider the following verse:-- + + "Hobbs hints blue--straight he turtle eats. + Nobbs prints blue--claret crowns his cup. + Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats-- + Both gorge. Who fished the murex up? + What porridge had John Keats?" + +The individual so confronted would say without hesitation that it must +indeed be an abstruse and indescribable thought which could only be +conveyed by remarks so completely disconnected. But the point of the +matter is that the thought contained in this amazing verse is not +abstruse or philosophical at all, but is a perfectly ordinary and +straightforward comment, which any one might have made upon an obvious +fact of life. The whole verse of course begins to explain itself, if +we know the meaning of the word "murex," which is the name of a +sea-shell, out of which was made the celebrated blue dye of Tyre. The +poet takes this blue dye as a simile for a new fashion in literature, +and points out that Hobbs, Nobbs, etc., obtain fame and comfort by +merely using the dye from the shell; and adds the perfectly natural +comment:-- + + "... Who fished the murex up? + What porridge had John Keats?" + +So that the verse is not subtle, and was not meant to be subtle, but +is a perfectly casual piece of sentiment at the end of a light poem. +Browning is not obscure because he has such deep things to say, any +more than he is grotesque because he has such new things to say. He is +both of these things primarily, because he likes to express himself in +a particular manner. The manner is as natural to him as a man's +physical voice, and it is abrupt, sketchy, allusive, and full of gaps. +Here comes in the fundamental difference between Browning and such a +writer as George Meredith, with whom the Philistine satirist would so +often in the matter of complexity class him. The works of George +Meredith are, as it were, obscure even when we know what they mean. +They deal with nameless emotions, fugitive sensations, subconscious +certainties and uncertainties, and it really requires a somewhat +curious and unfamiliar mode of speech to indicate the presence of +these. But the great part of Browning's actual sentiments, and almost +all the finest and most literary of them, are perfectly plain and +popular and eternal sentiments. Meredith is really a singer producing +strange notes and cadences difficult to follow because of the delicate +rhythm of the song he sings. Browning is simply a great demagogue, +with an impediment in his speech. Or rather, to speak more strictly, +Browning is a man whose excitement for the glory of the obvious is so +great that his speech becomes disjointed and precipitate: he becomes +eccentric through his advocacy of the ordinary, and goes mad for the +love of sanity. + +If Browning and George Meredith were each describing the same act, +they might both be obscure, but their obscurities would be entirely +different. Suppose, for instance, they were describing even so prosaic +and material an act as a man being knocked downstairs by another man +to whom he had given the lie, Meredith's description would refer to +something which an ordinary observer would not see, or at least could +not describe. It might be a sudden sense of anarchy in the brain of +the assaulter, or a stupefaction and stunned serenity in that of the +object of the assault. He might write, "Wainwood's 'Men vary in +veracity,' brought the baronet's arm up. He felt the doors of his +brain burst, and Wainwood a swift rushing of himself through air +accompanied with a clarity as of the annihilated." Meredith, in other +words, would speak queerly because he was describing queer mental +experiences. But Browning might simply be describing the material +incident of the man being knocked downstairs, and his description +would run:-- + + "What then? 'You lie' and doormat below stairs + Takes bump from back." + +This is not subtlety, but merely a kind of insane swiftness. Browning +is not like Meredith, anxious to pause and examine the sensations of +the combatants, nor does he become obscure through this anxiety. He is +only so anxious to get his man to the bottom of the stairs quickly +that he leaves out about half the story. + +Many who could understand that ruggedness might be an artistic +quality, would decisively, and in most cases rightly, deny that +obscurity could under any conceivable circumstances be an artistic +quality. But here again Browning's work requires a somewhat more +cautious and sympathetic analysis. There is a certain kind of +fascination, a strictly artistic fascination, which arises from a +matter being hinted at in such a way as to leave a certain tormenting +uncertainty even at the end. It is well sometimes to half understand a +poem in the same manner that we half understand the world. One of the +deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will +suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping +meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered +something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a +prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain +poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed +the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but +in this dazed and dramatic ignorance. + +But in truth it is very difficult to keep pace with all the strange +and unclassified artistic merits of Browning. He was always trying +experiments; sometimes he failed, producing clumsy and irritating +metres, top-heavy and over-concentrated thought. Far more often he +triumphed, producing a crowd of boldly designed poems, every one of +which taken separately might have founded an artistic school. But +whether successful or unsuccessful, he never ceased from his fierce +hunt after poetic novelty. He never became a conservative. The last +book he published in his life-time, _Parleyings with Certain People of +Importance in their Day_, was a new poem, and more revolutionary than +_Paracelsus_. This is the true light in which to regard Browning as an +artist. He had determined to leave no spot of the cosmos unadorned by +his poetry which he could find it possible to adorn. An admirable +example can be found in that splendid poem "Childe Roland to the Dark +Tower came." It is the hint of an entirely new and curious type of +poetry, the poetry of the shabby and hungry aspect of the earth +itself. Daring poets who wished to escape from conventional gardens +and orchards had long been in the habit of celebrating the poetry of +rugged and gloomy landscapes, but Browning is not content with this. +He insists upon celebrating the poetry of mean landscapes. That sense +of scrubbiness in nature, as of a man unshaved, had never been +conveyed with this enthusiasm and primeval gusto before. + + "If there pushed any ragged thistle-stalk + Above its mates, the head was chopped; the bents + Were jealous else. What made those holes and rents + In the dock's harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to baulk + All hope of greenness? 'tis a brute must walk + Pashing their life out, with a brute's intents." + +This is a perfect realisation of that eerie sentiment which comes upon +us, not so often among mountains and water-falls, as it does on some +half-starved common at twilight, or in walking down some grey mean +street. It is the song of the beauty of refuse; and Browning was the +first to sing it. Oddly enough it has been one of the poems about +which most of those pedantic and trivial questions have been asked, +which are asked invariably by those who treat Browning as a science +instead of a poet, "What does the poem of 'Childe Roland' mean?" The +only genuine answer to this is, "What does anything mean?" Does the +earth mean nothing? Do grey skies and wastes covered with thistles +mean nothing? Does an old horse turned out to graze mean nothing? If +it does, there is but one further truth to be added--that everything +means nothing. + + + + +CHAPTER VII + +_THE RING AND THE BOOK_ + + +When we have once realised the great conception of the plan of _The +Ring and the Book_, the studying of a single matter from nine +different stand-points, it becomes exceedingly interesting to notice +what these stand-points are; what figures Browning has selected as +voicing the essential and distinct versions of the case. One of the +ablest and most sympathetic of all the critics of Browning, Mr. +Augustine Birrell, has said in one place that the speeches of the two +advocates in _The Ring and the Book_ will scarcely be very interesting +to the ordinary reader. However that may be, there can be little doubt +that a great number of the readers of Browning think them beside the +mark and adventitious. But it is exceedingly dangerous to say that +anything in Browning is irrelevant or unnecessary. We are apt to go on +thinking so until some mere trifle puts the matter in a new light, and +the detail that seemed meaningless springs up as almost the central +pillar of the structure. In the successive monologues of his poem, +Browning is endeavouring to depict the various strange ways in which a +fact gets itself presented to the world. In every question there are +partisans who bring cogent and convincing arguments for the right +side; there are also partisans who bring cogent and convincing +arguments for the wrong side. But over and above these, there does +exist in every great controversy a class of more or less official +partisans who are continually engaged in defending each cause by +entirely inappropriate arguments. They do not know the real good that +can be said for the good cause, nor the real good that can be said for +the bad one. They are represented by the animated, learned, eloquent, +ingenious, and entirely futile and impertinent arguments of Juris +Doctor Bottinius and Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis. These two men +brilliantly misrepresent, not merely each other's cause, but their own +cause. The introduction of them is one of the finest and most artistic +strokes in _The Ring and the Book_. + +We can see the matter best by taking an imaginary parallel. Suppose +that a poet of the type of Browning lived some centuries hence and +found in some _cause célèbre_ of our day, such as the Parnell +Commission, an opportunity for a work similar in its design to _The +Ring and the Book_. The first monologue, which would be called +"Half-London," would be the arguments of an ordinary educated and +sensible Unionist who believed that there really was evidence that the +Nationalist movement in Ireland was rooted in crime and public panic. +The "Otherhalf-London" would be the utterance of an ordinary educated +and sensible Home Ruler, who thought that in the main Nationalism was +one distinct symptom, and crime another, of the same poisonous and +stagnant problem. The "Tertium Quid" would be some detached +intellectual, committed neither to Nationalism nor to Unionism, +possibly Mr. Bernard Shaw, who would make a very entertaining Browning +monologue. Then of course would come the speeches of the great actors +in the drama, the icy anger of Parnell, the shuffling apologies of +Pigott. But we should feel that the record was incomplete without +another touch which in practice has so much to do with the confusion +of such a question. Bottinius and Hyacinthus de Archangelis, the two +cynical professional pleaders, with their transparent assumptions and +incredible theories of the case, would be represented by two party +journalists; one of whom was ready to base his case either on the fact +that Parnell was a Socialist or an Anarchist, or an Atheist or a Roman +Catholic; and the other of whom was ready to base his case on the +theory that Lord Salisbury hated Parnell or was in league with him, or +had never heard of him, or anything else that was remote from the +world of reality. These are the kind of little touches for which we +must always be on the look-out in Browning. Even if a digression, or a +simile, or a whole scene in a play, seems to have no point or value, +let us wait a little and give it a chance. He very seldom wrote +anything that did not mean a great deal. + +It is sometimes curious to notice how a critic, possessing no little +cultivation and fertility, will, in speaking of a work of art, let +fall almost accidentally some apparently trivial comment, which +reveals to us with an instantaneous and complete mental illumination +the fact that he does not, so far as that work of art is concerned, in +the smallest degree understand what he is talking about. He may have +intended to correct merely some minute detail of the work he is +studying, but that single movement is enough to blow him and all his +diplomas into the air. These are the sensations with which the true +Browningite will regard the criticism made by so many of Browning's +critics and biographers about _The Ring and the Book_. That criticism +was embodied by one of them in the words "the theme looked at +dispassionately is unworthy of the monument in which it is entombed +for eternity." Now this remark shows at once that the critic does not +know what _The Ring and the Book_ means. We feel about it as we should +feel about a man who said that the plot of _Tristram Shandy_ was not +well constructed, or that the women in Rossetti's pictures did not +look useful and industrious. A man who has missed the fact that +_Tristram Shandy is_ a game of digressions, that the whole book is a +kind of practical joke to cheat the reader out of a story, simply has +not read _Tristram Shandy_ at all. The man who objects to the Rossetti +pictures because they depict a sad and sensuous day-dream, objects to +their existing at all. And any one who objects to Browning writing his +huge epic round a trumpery and sordid police-case has in reality +missed the whole length and breadth of the poet's meaning. The essence +of _The Ring and the Book_ is that it is the great epic of the +nineteenth century, because it is the great epic of the enormous +importance of small things. The supreme difference that divides _The +Ring and the Book_ from all the great poems of similar length and +largeness of design is precisely the fact that all these are about +affairs commonly called important, and _The Ring and the Book_ is +about an affair commonly called contemptible. Homer says, "I will show +you the relations between man and heaven as exhibited in a great +legend of love and war, which shall contain the mightiest of all +mortal warriors, and the most beautiful of all mortal women." The +author of the Book of Job says, "I will show you the relations between +man and heaven by a tale of primeval sorrows and the voice of God out +of a whirlwind." Virgil says, "I will show you the relations of man to +heaven by the tale of the origin of the greatest people and the +founding of the most wonderful city in the world." Dante says, "I will +show you the relations of man to heaven by uncovering the very +machinery of the spiritual universe, and letting you hear, as I have +heard, the roaring of the mills of God." Milton says, "I will show you +the relations of man to heaven by telling you of the very beginning of +all things, and the first shaping of the thing that is evil in the +first twilight of time." Browning says, "I will show you the relations +of man to heaven by telling you a story out of a dirty Italian book of +criminal trials from which I select one of the meanest and most +completely forgotten." Until we have realised this fundamental idea in +_The Ring and the Book_ all criticism is misleading. + +In this Browning is, of course, the supreme embodiment of his time. +The characteristic of the modern movements _par excellence_ is the +apotheosis of the insignificant. Whether it be the school of poetry +which sees more in one cowslip or clover-top than in forests and +waterfalls, or the school of fiction which finds something +indescribably significant in the pattern of a hearth-rug, or the tint +of a man's tweed coat, the tendency is the same. Maeterlinck stricken +still and wondering by a deal door half open, or the light shining out +of a window at night; Zola filling note-books with the medical +significance of the twitching of a man's toes, or the loss of his +appetite; Whitman counting the grass and the heart-shaped leaves of +the lilac; Mr. George Gissing lingering fondly over the third-class +ticket and the dilapidated umbrella; George Meredith seeing a soul's +tragedy in a phrase at the dinner-table; Mr. Bernard Shaw filling +three pages with stage directions to describe a parlour; all these +men, different in every other particular, are alike in this, that they +have ceased to believe certain things to be important and the rest to +be unimportant. Significance is to them a wild thing that may leap +upon them from any hiding-place. They have all become terribly +impressed with and a little bit alarmed at the mysterious powers of +small things. Their difference from the old epic poets is the whole +difference between an age that fought with dragons and an age that +fights with microbes. + +This tide of the importance of small things is flowing so steadily +around us upon every side to-day, that we do not sufficiently realise +that if there was one man in English literary history who might with +justice be called its fountain and origin, that man was Robert +Browning. When Browning arose, literature was entirely in the hands of +the Tennysonian poet. The Tennysonian poet does indeed mention +trivialities, but he mentions them when he wishes to speak trivially; +Browning mentions trivialities when he wishes to speak sensationally. +Now this sense of the terrible importance of detail was a sense which +may be said to have possessed Browning in the emphatic manner of a +demoniac possession. Sane as he was, this one feeling might have +driven him to a condition not far from madness. Any room that he was +sitting in glared at him with innumerable eyes and mouths gaping with +a story. There was sometimes no background and no middle distance in +his mind. A human face and the pattern on the wall behind it came +forward with equally aggressive clearness. It may be repeated, that if +ever he who had the strongest head in the world had gone mad, it would +have been through this turbulent democracy of things. If he looked at +a porcelain vase or an old hat, a cabbage, or a puppy at play, each +began to be bewitched with the spell of a kind of fairyland of +philosophers: the vase, like the jar in the _Arabian Nights_, to send +up a smoke of thoughts and shapes; the hat to produce souls, as a +conjuror's hat produces rabbits; the cabbage to swell and overshadow +the earth, like the Tree of Knowledge; and the puppy to go off at a +scamper along the road to the end of the world. Any one who has read +Browning's longer poems knows how constantly a simile or figure of +speech is selected, not among the large, well-recognised figures +common in poetry, but from some dusty corner of experience, and how +often it is characterised by smallness and a certain quaint exactitude +which could not have been found in any more usual example. Thus, for +instance, _Prince Hohenstiel--Schwangau_ explains the psychological +meaning of all his restless and unscrupulous activities by comparing +them to the impulse which has just led him, even in the act of +talking, to draw a black line on the blotting-paper exactly, so as to +connect two separate blots that were already there. This queer example +is selected as the best possible instance of a certain fundamental +restlessness and desire to add a touch to things in the spirit of +man. I have no doubt whatever that Browning thought of the idea after +doing the thing himself, and sat in a philosophical trance staring at +a piece of inked blotting-paper, conscious that at that moment, and in +that insignificant act, some immemorial monster of the mind, nameless +from the beginning of the world, had risen to the surface of the +spiritual sea. + +It is therefore the very essence of Browning's genius, and the very +essence of _The Ring and the Book_, that it should be the enormous +multiplication of a small theme. It is the extreme of idle criticism +to complain that the story is a current and sordid story, for the +whole object of the poem is to show what infinities of spiritual good +and evil a current and sordid story may contain. When once this is +realised, it explains at one stroke the innumerable facts about the +work. It explains, for example, Browning's detailed and picturesque +account of the glorious dust-bin of odds and ends for sale, out of +which he picked the printed record of the trial, and his insistence on +its cheapness, its dustiness, its yellow leaves, and its crabbed +Latin. The more soiled and dark and insignificant he can make the text +appear, the better for his ample and gigantic sermon. It explains +again the strictness with which Browning adhered to the facts of the +forgotten intrigue. He was playing the game of seeing how much was +really involved in one paltry fragment of fact. To have introduced +large quantities of fiction would not have been sportsmanlike. _The +Ring and the Book_ therefore, to re-capitulate the view arrived at so +far, is the typical epic of our age, because it expresses the richness +of life by taking as a text a poor story. It pays to existence the +highest of all possible compliments--the great compliment which +monarchy paid to mankind--the compliment of selecting from it almost +at random. + +But this is only the first half of the claim of _The Ring and the +Book_ to be the typical epic of modern times. The second half of that +claim, the second respect in which the work is representative of all +modern development, requires somewhat more careful statement. _The +Ring and the Book_ is of course, essentially speaking, a detective +story. Its difference from the ordinary detective story is that it +seeks to establish, not the centre of criminal guilt, but the centre +of spiritual guilt. But it has exactly the same kind of exciting +quality that a detective story has, and a very excellent quality it +is. But the element which is important, and which now requires +pointing out, is the method by which that centre of spiritual guilt +and the corresponding centre of spiritual rectitude is discovered. In +order to make clear the peculiar character of this method, it is +necessary to begin rather nearer the beginning, and to go back some +little way in literary history. + +I do not know whether anybody, including the editor himself, has ever +noticed a peculiar coincidence which may be found in the arrangement +of the lyrics in Sir Francis Palgrave's _Golden Treasury_. However +that may be, two poems, each of them extremely well known, are placed +side by side, and their juxtaposition represents one vast revolution +in the poetical manner of looking at things. The first is Goldsmith's +almost too well known + + "When lovely woman stoops to folly, + And finds too late that men betray, + What charm can soothe her melancholy? + What art can wash her guilt away?" + +Immediately afterwards comes, with a sudden and thrilling change of +note, the voice of Burns:-- + + "Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon, + How can ye bloom sae fair? + How can ye chant, ye little birds, + And I sae fu' of care? + + Thou'll break my heart, thou bonny bird, + That sings upon the bough, + Thou minds me of the happy days + When my fause Love was true." + +A man might read those two poems a great many times without happening +to realise that they are two poems on exactly the same subject--the +subject of a trusting woman deserted by a man. And the whole +difference--the difference struck by the very first note of the voice +of any one who reads them--is this fundamental difference, that +Goldsmith's words are spoken about a certain situation, and Burns's +words are spoken in that situation. + +In the transition from one of these lyrics to the other, we have a +vital change in the conception of the functions of the poet; a change +of which Burns was in many ways the beginning, of which Browning, in a +manner that we shall see presently, was the culmination. + +Goldsmith writes fully and accurately in the tradition of the old +historic idea of what a poet was. The poet, the _vates_, was the +supreme and absolute critic of human existence, the chorus in the +human drama; he was, to employ two words, which when analysed are the +same word, either a spectator or a seer. He took a situation, such as +the situation of a woman deserted by a man before-mentioned, and he +gave, as Goldsmith gives, his own personal and definite decision upon +it, entirely based upon general principles, and entirely from the +outside. Then, as in the case of _The Golden Treasury_, he has no +sooner given judgment than there comes a bitter and confounding cry +out of the very heart of the situation itself, which tells us things +which would have been quite left out of account by the poet of the +general rule. No one, for example, but a person who knew something of +the inside of agony would have introduced that touch of the rage of +the mourner against the chattering frivolity of nature, "Thou'll break +my heart, thou bonny bird." We find and could find no such touch in +Goldsmith. We have to arrive at the conclusion therefore, that the +_vates_ or poet in his absolute capacity is defied and overthrown by +this new method of what may be called the songs of experience. + +Now Browning, as he appears in _The Ring and the Book_, represents the +attempt to discover, not the truth in the sense that Goldsmith states +it, but the larger truth which is made up of all the emotional +experiences, such as that rendered by Burns. Browning, like Goldsmith, +seeks ultimately to be just and impartial, but he does it by +endeavouring to feel acutely every kind of partiality. Goldsmith +stands apart from all the passions of the case, and Browning includes +them all. If Browning were endeavouring to do strict justice in a case +like that of the deserted lady by the banks of Doon, he would not +touch or modify in the smallest particular the song as Burns sang it, +but he would write other songs, perhaps equally pathetic. A lyric or a +soliloquy would convince us suddenly by the mere pulse of its +language, that there was some pathos in the other actors in the drama; +some pathos, for example, in a weak man, conscious that in a +passionate ignorance of life he had thrown away his power of love, +lacking the moral courage to throw his prospects after it. We should +be reminded again that there was some pathos in the position, let us +say, of the seducer's mother, who had built all her hopes upon +developments which a mésalliance would overthrow, or in the position +of some rival lover, stricken to the ground with the tragedy in which +he had not even the miserable comfort of a _locus standi_. All these +characters in the story, Browning would realise from their own +emotional point of view before he gave judgment. The poet in his +ancient office held a kind of terrestrial day of judgment, and gave +men halters and haloes; Browning gives men neither halter nor halo, he +gives them voices. This is indeed the most bountiful of all the +functions of the poet, that he gives men words, for which men from the +beginning of the world have starved more than for bread. + +Here then we have the second great respect in which _The Ring and the +Book_ is the great epic of the age. It is the great epic of the age, +because it is the expression of the belief, it might almost be said, +of the discovery, that no man ever lived upon this earth without +possessing a point of view. No one ever lived who had not a little +more to say for himself than any formal system of justice was likely +to say for him. It is scarcely necessary to point out how entirely the +application of this principle would revolutionise the old heroic +epic, in which the poet decided absolutely the moral relations and +moral value of the characters. Suppose, for example, that Homer had +written the _Odyssey_ on the principle of _The Ring and the Book_, how +disturbing, how weird an experience it would be to read the story from +the point of view of Antinous! Without contradicting a single material +fact, without telling a single deliberate lie, the narrative would so +change the whole world around us, that we should scarcely know we were +dealing with the same place and people. The calm face of Penelope +would, it may be, begin to grow meaner before our eyes, like a face +changing in a dream. She would begin to appear as a fickle and selfish +woman, passing falsely as a widow, and playing a double game between +the attentions of foolish but honourable young men, and the fitful +appearances of a wandering and good-for-nothing sailor-husband; a man +prepared to act that most well-worn of melodramatic rôles, the +conjugal bully and blackmailer, the man who uses marital rights as an +instrument for the worse kind of wrongs. Or, again, if we had the +story of the fall of King Arthur told from the stand-point of Mordred, +it would only be a matter of a word or two; in a turn, in the +twinkling of an eye, we should find ourselves sympathising with the +efforts of an earnest young man to frustrate the profligacies of +high-placed paladins like Lancelot and Tristram, and ultimately +discovering, with deep regret but unshaken moral courage, that there +was no way to frustrate them, except by overthrowing the cold and +priggish and incapable egotist who ruled the country, and the whole +artificial and bombastic schemes which bred these moral evils. It +might be that in spite of this new view of the case, it would +ultimately appear that Ulysses was really right and Arthur was really +right, just as Browning makes it ultimately appear that Pompilia was +really right. But any one can see the enormous difference in scope and +difficulty between the old epic which told the whole story from one +man's point of view, and the new epic which cannot come to its +conclusion, until it has digested and assimilated views as paradoxical +and disturbing as our imaginary defence of Antinous and apologia of +Mordred. + +One of the most important steps ever taken in the history of the world +is this step, with all its various aspects, literary, political, and +social, which is represented by _The Ring and the Book_. It is the +step of deciding, in the face of many serious dangers and +disadvantages, to let everybody talk. The poet of the old epic is the +poet who had learnt to speak; Browning in the new epic is the poet who +has learnt to listen. This listening to truth and error, to heretics, +to fools, to intellectual bullies, to desperate partisans, to mere +chatterers, to systematic poisoners of the mind, is the hardest lesson +that humanity has ever been set to learn. _The Ring and the Book_ is +the embodiment of this terrible magnanimity and patience. It is the +epic of free speech. + +Free speech is an idea which has at present all the unpopularity of a +truism; so that we tend to forget that it was not so very long ago +that it had the more practical unpopularity which attaches to a new +truth. Ingratitude is surely the chief of the intellectual sins of +man. He takes his political benefits for granted, just as he takes +the skies and the seasons for granted. He considers the calm of a city +street a thing as inevitable as the calm of a forest clearing, whereas +it is only kept in peace by a sustained stretch and effort similar to +that which keeps up a battle or a fencing match. Just as we forget +where we stand in relation to natural phenomena, so we forget it in +relation to social phenomena. We forget that the earth is a star, and +we forget that free speech is a paradox. + +It is not by any means self-evident upon the face of it that an +institution like the liberty of speech is right or just. It is not +natural or obvious to let a man utter follies and abominations which +you believe to be bad for mankind any more than it is natural or +obvious to let a man dig up a part of the public road, or infect half +a town with typhoid fever. The theory of free speech, that truth is so +much larger and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, that it +is very much better at all costs to hear every one's account of it, is +a theory which has been justified upon the whole by experiment, but +which remains a very daring and even a very surprising theory. It is +really one of the great discoveries of the modern time; but, once +admitted, it is a principle that does not merely affect politics, but +philosophy, ethics, and finally poetry. + +Browning was upon the whole the first poet to apply the principle to +poetry. He perceived that if we wish to tell the truth about a human +drama, we must not tell it merely like a melodrama, in which the +villain is villainous and the comic man is comic. He saw that the +truth had not been told until he had seen in the villain the pure and +disinterested gentleman that most villains firmly believe themselves +to be, or until he had taken the comic man as seriously as it is the +custom of comic men to take themselves. And in this Browning is beyond +all question the founder of the most modern school of poetry. +Everything that was profound, everything, indeed, that was tolerable +in the aesthetes of 1880, and the decadent of 1890, has its ultimate +source in Browning's great conception that every one's point of view +is interesting, even if it be a jaundiced or a blood-shot point of +view. He is at one with the decadents, in holding that it is +emphatically profitable, that it is emphatically creditable, to know +something of the grounds of the happiness of a thoroughly bad man. +Since his time we have indeed been somewhat over-satisfied with the +moods of the burglar, and the pensive lyrics of the receiver of stolen +goods. But Browning, united with the decadents on this point, of the +value of every human testimony, is divided from them sharply and by a +chasm in another equally important point. He held that it is necessary +to listen to all sides of a question in order to discover the truth of +it. But he held that there was a truth to discover. He held that +justice was a mystery, but not, like the decadents, that justice was a +delusion. He held, in other words, the true Browning doctrine, that in +a dispute every one was to a certain extent right; not the decadent +doctrine that in so mad a place as the world, every one must be by the +nature of things wrong. + +Browning's conception of the Universe can hardly be better expressed +than in the old and pregnant fable about the five blind men who went +to visit an elephant. One of them seized its trunk, and asserted that +an elephant was a kind of serpent; another embraced its leg, and was +ready to die for the belief that an elephant was a kind of tree. In +the same way to the man who leaned against its side it was a wall; to +the man who had hold of its tail a rope, and to the man who ran upon +its tusk a particularly unpleasant kind of spear. This, as I have +said, is the whole theology and philosophy of Browning. But he differs +from the psychological decadents and impressionists in this important +point, that he thinks that although the blind men found out very +little about the elephant, the elephant was an elephant, and was there +all the time. The blind men formed mistaken theories because an +elephant is a thing with a very curious shape. And Browning firmly +believed that the Universe was a thing with a very curious shape +indeed. No blind poet could even imagine an elephant without +experience, and no man, however great and wise, could dream of God and +not die. But there is a vital distinction between the mystical view of +Browning, that the blind men are misled because there is so much for +them to learn, and the purely impressionist and agnostic view of the +modern poet, that the blind men were misled because there was nothing +for them to learn. To the impressionist artist of our time we are not +blind men groping after an elephant and naming it a tree or a serpent. +We are maniacs, isolated in separate cells, and dreaming of trees and +serpents without reason and without result. + + + + +CHAPTER VIII + +THE PHILOSOPHY OF BROWNING + + +The great fault of most of the appreciation of Browning lies in the +fact that it conceives the moral and artistic value of his work to lie +in what is called "the message of Browning," or "the teaching of +Browning," or, in other words, in the mere opinions of Browning. Now +Browning had opinions, just as he had a dress-suit or a vote for +Parliament. He did not hesitate to express these opinions any more +than he would have hesitated to fire off a gun, or open an umbrella, +if he had possessed those articles, and realised their value. For +example, he had, as his students and eulogists have constantly stated, +certain definite opinions about the spiritual function of love, or the +intellectual basis of Christianity. Those opinions were very striking +and very solid, as everything was which came out of Browning's mind. +His two great theories of the universe may be expressed in two +comparatively parallel phrases. The first was what may be called the +hope which lies in the imperfection of man. The characteristic poem of +"Old Pictures in Florence" expresses very quaintly and beautifully the +idea that some hope may always be based on deficiency itself; in other +words, that in so far as man is a one-legged or a one-eyed creature, +there is something about his appearance which indicates that he +should have another leg and another eye. The poem suggests admirably +that such a sense of incompleteness may easily be a great advance upon +a sense of completeness, that the part may easily and obviously be +greater than the whole. And from this Browning draws, as he is fully +justified in drawing, a definite hope for immortality and the larger +scale of life. For nothing is more certain than that though this world +is the only world that we have known, or of which we could even dream, +the fact does remain that we have named it "a strange world." In other +words, we have certainly felt that this world did not explain itself, +that something in its complete and patent picture has been omitted. +And Browning was right in saying that in a cosmos where incompleteness +implies completeness, life implies immortality. This then was the +first of the doctrines or opinions of Browning: the hope that lies in +the imperfection of man. The second of the great Browning doctrines +requires some audacity to express. It can only be properly stated as +the hope that lies in the imperfection of God. That is to say, that +Browning held that sorrow and self-denial, if they were the burdens of +man, were also his privileges. He held that these stubborn sorrows and +obscure valours might, to use a yet more strange expression, have +provoked the envy of the Almighty. If man has self-sacrifice and God +has none, then man has in the Universe a secret and blasphemous +superiority. And this tremendous story of a Divine jealousy Browning +reads into the story of the Crucifixion. If the Creator had not been +crucified He would not have been as great as thousands of wretched +fanatics among His own creatures. It is needless to insist upon this +point; any one who wishes to read it splendidly expressed need only be +referred to "Saul." But these are emphatically the two main doctrines +or opinions of Browning which I have ventured to characterise roughly +as the hope in the imperfection of man, and more boldly as the hope in +the imperfection of God. They are great thoughts, thoughts written by +a great man, and they raise noble and beautiful doubts on behalf of +faith which the human spirit will never answer or exhaust. But about +them in connection with Browning there nevertheless remains something +to be added. + +Browning was, as most of his upholders and all his opponents say, an +optimist. His theory, that man's sense of his own imperfection implies +a design of perfection, is a very good argument for optimism. His +theory that man's knowledge of and desire for self-sacrifice implies +God's knowledge of and desire for self-sacrifice is another very good +argument for optimism. But any one will make the deepest and blackest +and most incurable mistake about Browning who imagines that his +optimism was founded on any arguments for optimism. Because he had a +strong intellect, because he had a strong power of conviction, he +conceived and developed and asserted these doctrines of the +incompleteness of Man and the sacrifice of Omnipotence. But these +doctrines were the symptoms of his optimism, they were not its origin. +It is surely obvious that no one can be argued into optimism since no +one can be argued into happiness. Browning's optimism was not founded +on opinions which were the work of Browning, but on life which was +the work of God. One of Browning's most celebrated biographers has +said that something of Browning's theology must be put down to his +possession of a good digestion. The remark was, of course, like all +remarks touching the tragic subject of digestion, intended to be funny +and to convey some kind of doubt or diminution touching the value of +Browning's faith. But if we examine the matter with somewhat greater +care we shall see that it is indeed a thorough compliment to that +faith. Nobody, strictly speaking, is happier on account of his +digestion. He is happy because he is so constituted as to forget all +about it. Nobody really is convulsed with delight at the thought of +the ingenious machinery which he possesses inside him; the thing which +delights him is simply the full possession of his own human body. I +cannot in the least understand why a good digestion--that is, a good +body--should not be held to be as mystic a benefit as a sunset or the +first flower of spring. But there is about digestion this peculiarity +throwing a great light on human pessimism, that it is one of the many +things which we never speak of as existing until they go wrong. We +should think it ridiculous to speak of a man as suffering from his +boots if we meant that he had really no boots. But we do speak of a +man suffering from digestion when we mean that he suffers from a lack +of digestion. In the same way we speak of a man suffering from nerves +when we mean that his nerves are more inefficient than any one else's +nerves. If any one wishes to see how grossly language can degenerate, +he need only compare the old optimistic use of the word nervous, +which we employ in speaking of a nervous grip, with the new +pessimistic use of the word, which we employ in speaking of a nervous +manner. And as digestion is a good thing which sometimes goes wrong, +as nerves are good things which sometimes go wrong, so existence +itself in the eyes of Browning and all the great optimists is a good +thing which sometimes goes wrong. He held himself as free to draw his +inspiration from the gift of good health as from the gift of learning +or the gift of fellowship. But he held that such gifts were in life +innumerable and varied, and that every man, or at least almost every +man, possessed some window looking out on this essential excellence of +things. + +Browning's optimism then, since we must continue to use this somewhat +inadequate word, was a result of experience--experience which is for +some mysterious reason generally understood in the sense of sad or +disillusioning experience. An old gentleman rebuking a little boy for +eating apples in a tree is in the common conception the type of +experience. If he really wished to be a type of experience he would +climb up the tree himself and proceed to experience the apples. +Browning's faith was founded upon joyful experience, not in the sense +that he selected his joyful experiences and ignored his painful ones, +but in the sense that his joyful experiences selected themselves and +stood out in his memory by virtue of their own extraordinary intensity +of colour. He did not use experience in that mean and pompous sense in +which it is used by the worldling advanced in years. He rather used it +in that healthier and more joyful sense in which it is used at +revivalist meetings. In the Salvation Army a man's experiences mean +his experiences of the mercy of God, and to Browning the meaning was +much the same. But the revivalists' confessions deal mostly with +experiences of prayer and praise; Browning's dealt pre-eminently with +what may be called his own subject, the experiences of love. + +And this quality of Browning's optimism, the quality of detail, is +also a very typical quality. Browning's optimism is of that ultimate +and unshakeable order that is founded upon the absolute sight, and +sound, and smell, and handling of things. If a man had gone up to +Browning and asked him with all the solemnity of the eccentric, "Do +you think life is worth living?" it is interesting to conjecture what +his answer might have been. If he had been for the moment under the +influence of the orthodox rationalistic deism of the theologian he +would have said, "Existence is justified by its manifest design, its +manifest adaptation of means to ends," or, in other words, "Existence +is justified by its completeness." If, on the other hand, he had been +influenced by his own serious intellectual theories he would have +said, "Existence is justified by its air of growth and doubtfulness," +or, in other words, "Existence is justified by its incompleteness." +But if he had not been influenced in his answer either by the accepted +opinions, or by his own opinions, but had simply answered the question +"Is life worth living?" with the real, vital answer that awaited it in +his own soul, he would have said as likely as not, "Crimson toadstools +in Hampshire." Some plain, glowing picture of this sort left on his +mind would be his real verdict on what the universe had meant to him. +To his traditions hope was traced to order, to his speculations hope +was traced to disorder. But to Browning himself hope was traced to +something like red toadstools. His mysticism was not of that idle and +wordy type which believes that a flower is symbolical of life; it was +rather of that deep and eternal type which believes that life, a mere +abstraction, is symbolical of a flower. With him the great concrete +experiences which God made always come first; his own deductions and +speculations about them always second. And in this point we find the +real peculiar inspiration of his very original poems. + +One of the very few critics who seem to have got near to the actual +secret of Browning's optimism is Mr. Santayana in his most interesting +book _Interpretations of Poetry and Religion_. He, in contradistinction +to the vast mass of Browning's admirers, had discovered what was the +real root virtue of Browning's poetry; and the curious thing is, that +having discovered that root virtue, he thinks it is a vice. He +describes the poetry of Browning most truly as the poetry of +barbarism, by which he means the poetry which utters the primeval and +indivisible emotions. "For the barbarian is the man who regards his +passions as their own excuse for being, who does not domesticate them +either by understanding their cause, or by conceiving their ideal +goal." Whether this be or be not a good definition of the barbarian, +it is an excellent and perfect definition of the poet. It might, +perhaps, be suggested that barbarians, as a matter of fact, are +generally highly traditional and respectable persons who would not put +a feather wrong in their head-gear, and who generally have very few +feelings and think very little about those they have. It is when we +have grown to a greater and more civilised stature that we begin to +realise and put to ourselves intellectually the great feelings that +sleep in the depths of us. Thus it is that the literature of our day +has steadily advanced towards a passionate simplicity, and we become +more primeval as the world grows older, until Whitman writes huge and +chaotic psalms to express the sensations of a schoolboy out fishing, +and Maeterlinck embodies in symbolic dramas the feelings of a child in +the dark. + +Thus, Mr. Santayana is, perhaps, the most valuable of all the Browning +critics. He has gone out of his way to endeavour to realise what it is +that repels him in Browning, and he has discovered the fault which +none of Browning's opponents have discovered. And in this he has +discovered the merit which none of Browning's admirers have +discovered. Whether the quality be a good or a bad quality, Mr. +Santayana is perfectly right. The whole of Browning's poetry does rest +upon primitive feeling; and the only comment to be added is that so +does the whole of every one else's poetry. Poetry deals entirely with +those great eternal and mainly forgotten wishes which are the ultimate +despots of existence. Poetry presents things as they are to our +emotions, not as they are to any theory, however plausible, or any +argument, however conclusive. If love is in truth a glorious vision, +poetry will say that it is a glorious vision, and no philosophers will +persuade poetry to say that it is the exaggeration of the instinct of +sex. If bereavement is a bitter and continually aching thing, poetry +will say that it is so, and no philosophers will persuade poetry to +say that it is an evolutionary stage of great biological value. And +here comes in the whole value and object of poetry, that it is +perpetually challenging all systems with the test of a terrible +sincerity. The practical value of poetry is that it is realistic upon +a point upon which nothing else can be realistic, the point of the +actual desires of man. Ethics is the science of actions, but poetry is +the science of motives. Some actions are ugly, and therefore some +parts of ethics are ugly. But all motives are beautiful, or present +themselves for the moment as beautiful, and therefore all poetry is +beautiful. If poetry deals with the basest matter, with the shedding +of blood for gold, it ought to suggest the gold as well as the blood. +Only poetry can realise motives, because motives are all pictures of +happiness. And the supreme and most practical value of poetry is this, +that in poetry, as in music, a note is struck which expresses beyond +the power of rational statement a condition of mind, and all actions +arise from a condition of mind. Prose can only use a large and clumsy +notation; it can only say that a man is miserable, or that a man is +happy; it is forced to ignore that there are a million diverse kinds +of misery and a million diverse kinds of happiness. Poetry alone, with +the first throb of its metre, can tell us whether the depression is +the kind of depression that drives a man to suicide, or the kind of +depression that drives him to the Tivoli. Poetry can tell us whether +the happiness is the happiness that sends a man to a restaurant, or +the much richer and fuller happiness that sends him to church. + +Now the supreme value of Browning as an optimist lies in this that we +have been examining, that beyond all his conclusions, and deeper than +all his arguments, he was passionately interested in and in love with +existence. If the heavens had fallen, and all the waters of the earth +run with blood, he would still have been interested in existence, if +possible a little more so. He is a great poet of human joy for +precisely the reason of which Mr. Santayana complains: that his +happiness is primal, and beyond the reach of philosophy. He is +something far more convincing, far more comforting, far more +religiously significant than an optimist: he is a happy man. + +This happiness he finds, as every man must find happiness, in his own +way. He does not find the great part of his joy in those matters in +which most poets find felicity. He finds much of it in those matters +in which most poets find ugliness and vulgarity. He is to a +considerable extent the poet of towns. "Do you care for nature much?" +a friend of his asked him. "Yes, a great deal," he said, "but for +human beings a great deal more." Nature, with its splendid and +soothing sanity, has the power of convincing most poets of the +essential worthiness of things. There are few poets who, if they +escaped from the rowdiest waggonette of trippers, could not be quieted +again and exalted by dropping into a small wayside field. The +speciality of Browning is rather that he would have been quieted and +exalted by the waggonette. + +To Browning, probably the beginning and end of all optimism was to be +found in the faces in the street. To him they were all the masks of a +deity, the heads of a hundred-headed Indian god of nature. Each one of +them looked towards some quarter of the heavens, not looked upon by +any other eyes. Each one of them wore some expression, some blend of +eternal joy and eternal sorrow, not to be found in any other +countenance. The sense of the absolute sanctity of human difference +was the deepest of all his senses. He was hungrily interested in all +human things, but it would have been quite impossible to have said of +him that he loved humanity. He did not love humanity but men. His +sense of the difference between one man and another would have made +the thought of melting them into a lump called humanity simply +loathsome and prosaic. It would have been to him like playing four +hundred beautiful airs at once. The mixture would not combine all, it +would lose all. Browning believed that to every man that ever lived +upon this earth had been given a definite and peculiar confidence of +God. Each one of us was engaged on secret service; each one of us had +a peculiar message; each one of us was the founder of a religion. Of +that religion our thoughts, our faces, our bodies, our hats, our +boots, our tastes, our virtues, and even our vices, were more or less +fragmentary and inadequate expressions. + +In the delightful memoirs of that very remarkable man Sir Charles +Gavan Duffy, there is an extremely significant and interesting +anecdote about Browning, the point of which appears to have attracted +very little attention. Duffy was dining with Browning and John +Forster, and happened to make some chance allusion to his own +adherence to the Roman Catholic faith, when Forster remarked, half +jestingly, that he did not suppose that Browning would like him any +the better for that. Browning would seem to have opened his eyes with +some astonishment. He immediately asked why Forster should suppose +him hostile to the Roman Church. Forster and Duffy replied almost +simultaneously, by referring to "Bishop Blougram's Apology," which had +just appeared, and asking whether the portrait of the sophistical and +self-indulgent priest had not been intended for a satire on Cardinal +Wiseman. "Certainly," replied Browning cheerfully, "I intended it for +Cardinal Wiseman, but I don't consider it a satire, there is nothing +hostile about it." This is the real truth which lies at the heart of +what may be called the great sophistical monologues which Browning +wrote in later years. They are not satires or attacks upon their +subjects, they are not even harsh and unfeeling exposures of them. +They are defences; they say or are intended to say the best that can +be said for the persons with whom they deal. But very few people in +this world would care to listen to the real defence of their own +characters. The real defence, the defence which belongs to the Day of +Judgment, would make such damaging admissions, would clear away so +many artificial virtues, would tell such tragedies of weakness and +failure, that a man would sooner be misunderstood and censured by the +world than exposed to that awful and merciless eulogy. One of the most +practically difficult matters which arise from the code of manners and +the conventions of life, is that we cannot properly justify a human +being, because that justification would involve the admission of +things which may not conventionally be admitted. We might explain and +make human and respectable, for example, the conduct of some old +fighting politician, who, for the good of his party and his country, +acceded to measures of which he disapproved; but we cannot, because we +are not allowed to admit that he ever acceded to measures of which he +disapproved. We might touch the life of many dissolute public men with +pathos, and a kind of defeated courage, by telling the truth about the +history of their sins. But we should throw the world into an uproar if +we hinted that they had any. Thus the decencies of civilisation do not +merely make it impossible to revile a man, they make it impossible to +praise him. + +Browning, in such poems as "Bishop Blougram's Apology," breaks this +first mask of goodness in order to break the second mask of evil, and +gets to the real goodness at last; he dethrones a saint in order to +humanise a scoundrel. This is one typical side of the real optimism of +Browning. And there is indeed little danger that such optimism will +become weak and sentimental and popular, the refuge of every idler, +the excuse of every ne'er-do-well. There is little danger that men +will desire to excuse their souls before God by presenting themselves +before men as such snobs as Bishop Blougram, or such dastards as +Sludge the Medium. There is no pessimism, however stern, that is so +stern as this optimism, it is as merciless as the mercy of God. + +It is true that in this, as in almost everything else connected with +Browning's character, the matter cannot be altogether exhausted by +such a generalisation as the above. Browning's was a simple character, +and therefore very difficult to understand, since it was impulsive, +unconscious, and kept no reckoning of its moods. Probably in a great +many cases, the original impulse which led Browning to plan a +soliloquy was a kind of anger mixed with curiosity; possibly the first +charcoal sketch of Blougram was a caricature of a priest. Browning, +as we have said, had prejudices, and had a capacity for anger, and two +of his angriest prejudices were against a certain kind of worldly +clericalism, and against almost every kind of spiritualism. But as he +worked upon the portraits at least, a new spirit began to possess him, +and he enjoyed every spirited and just defence the men could make of +themselves, like triumphant blows in a battle, and towards the end +would come the full revelation, and Browning would stand up in the +man's skin and testify to the man's ideals. However this may be, it is +worth while to notice one very curious error that has arisen in +connection with one of the most famous of these monologues. + +When Robert Browning was engaged in that somewhat obscure quarrel with +the spiritualist Home, it is generally and correctly stated that he +gained a great number of the impressions which he afterwards embodied +in "Mr. Sludge the Medium." The statement so often made, particularly +in the spiritualist accounts of the matter, that Browning himself is +the original of the interlocutor and exposer of Sludge, is of course +merely an example of that reckless reading from which no one has +suffered more than Browning despite his students and societies. The +man to whom Sludge addresses his confession is a Mr. Hiram H. +Horsfall, an American, a patron of spiritualists, and, as it is more +than once suggested, something of a fool. Nor is there the smallest +reason to suppose that Sludge considered as an individual bears any +particular resemblance to Home considered as an individual. But +without doubt "Mr. Sludge the Medium" is a general statement of the +view of spiritualism at which Browning had arrived from his +acquaintance with Home and Home's circle. And about that view of +spiritualism there is something rather peculiar to notice. The poem, +appearing as it did at the time when the intellectual public had just +become conscious of the existence of spiritualism, attracted a great +deal of attention, and aroused a great deal of controversy. The +spiritualists called down thunder upon the head of the poet, whom they +depicted as a vulgar and ribald lampooner who had not only committed +the profanity of sneering at the mysteries of a higher state of life, +but the more unpardonable profanity of sneering at the convictions of +his own wife. The sceptics, on the other hand, hailed the poem with +delight as a blasting exposure of spiritualism, and congratulated the +poet on making himself the champion of the sane and scientific view of +magic. Which of these two parties was right about the question of +attacking the reality of spiritualism it is neither easy nor necessary +to discuss. For the simple truth, which neither of the two parties and +none of the students of Browning seem to have noticed, is that "Mr. +Sludge the Medium" is not an attack upon spiritualism. It would be a +great deal nearer the truth, though not entirely the truth, to call it +a justification of spiritualism. The whole essence of Browning's +method is involved in this matter, and the whole essence of Browning's +method is so vitally misunderstood that to say that "Mr. Sludge the +Medium" is something like a defence of spiritualism will bear on the +face of it the appearance of the most empty and perverse of paradoxes. +But so, when we have comprehended Browning's spirit, the fact will be +found to be. + +The general idea is that Browning must have intended "Sludge" for an +attack on spiritual phenomena, because the medium in that poem is made +a vulgar and contemptible mountebank, because his cheats are quite +openly confessed, and he himself put into every ignominious situation, +detected, exposed, throttled, horsewhipped, and forgiven. To regard +this deduction as sound is to misunderstand Browning at the very start +of every poem that he ever wrote. There is nothing that the man loved +more, nothing that deserves more emphatically to be called a +speciality of Browning, than the utterance of large and noble truths +by the lips of mean and grotesque human beings. In his poetry praise +and wisdom were perfected not only out of the mouths of babes and +sucklings, but out of the mouths of swindlers and snobs. Now what, as +a matter of fact, is the outline and development of the poem of +"Sludge"? The climax of the poem, considered as a work of art, is so +fine that it is quite extraordinary that any one should have missed +the point of it, since it is the whole point of the monologue. Sludge +the Medium has been caught out in a piece of unquestionable trickery, +a piece of trickery for which there is no conceivable explanation or +palliation which will leave his moral character intact. He is +therefore seized with a sudden resolution, partly angry, partly +frightened, and partly humorous, to become absolutely frank, and to +tell the whole truth about himself for the first time not only to his +dupe, but to himself. He excuses himself for the earlier stages of the +trickster's life by a survey of the border-land between truth and +fiction, not by any means a piece of sophistry or cynicism, but a +perfectly fair statement of an ethical difficulty which does exist. +There are some people who think that it must be immoral to admit that +there are any doubtful cases of morality, as if a man should refrain +from discussing the precise boundary at the upper end of the Isthmus +of Panama, for fear the inquiry should shake his belief in the +existence of North America. People of this kind quite consistently +think Sludge to be merely a scoundrel talking nonsense. It may be +remembered that they thought the same thing of Newman. It is actually +supposed, apparently in the current use of words, that casuistry is +the name of a crime; it does not appear to occur to people that +casuistry is a science, and about as much a crime as botany. This +tendency to casuistry in Browning's monologues has done much towards +establishing for him that reputation for pure intellectualism which +has done him so much harm. But casuistry in this sense is not a cold +and analytical thing, but a very warm and sympathetic thing. To know +what combination of excuse might justify a man in manslaughter or +bigamy, is not to have a callous indifference to virtue; it is rather +to have so ardent an admiration for virtue as to seek it in the +remotest desert and the darkest incognito. + +This is emphatically the case with the question of truth and falsehood +raised in "Sludge the Medium." To say that it is sometimes difficult +to tell at what point the romancer turns into the liar is not to state +a cynicism, but a perfectly honest piece of human observation. To +think that such a view involves the negation of honesty is like +thinking that red is green, because the two fade into each other in +the colours of the rainbow. It is really difficult to decide when we +come to the extreme edge of veracity, when and when not it is +permissible to create an illusion. A standing example, for instance, +is the case of the fairy-tales. We think a father entirely pure and +benevolent when he tells his children that a beanstalk grew up into +heaven, and a pumpkin turned into a coach. We should consider that he +lapsed from purity and benevolence if he told his children that in +walking home that evening he had seen a beanstalk grow half-way up the +church, or a pumpkin grow as large as a wheelbarrow. Again, few people +would object to that general privilege whereby it is permitted to a +person in narrating even a true anecdote to work up the climax by any +exaggerative touches which really tend to bring it out. The reason of +this is that the telling of the anecdote has become, like the telling +of the fairy-tale, almost a distinct artistic creation; to offer to +tell a story is in ordinary society like offering to recite or play +the violin. No one denies that a fixed and genuine moral rule could be +drawn up for these cases, but no one surely need be ashamed to admit +that such a rule is not entirely easy to draw up. And when a man like +Sludge traces much of his moral downfall to the indistinctness of the +boundary and the possibility of beginning with a natural extravagance +and ending with a gross abuse, it certainly is not possible to deny +his right to be heard. + +We must recur, however, to the question of the main development of the +Sludge self-analysis. He begins, as we have said, by urging a general +excuse by the fact that in the heat of social life, in the course of +telling tales in the intoxicating presence of sympathisers and +believers, he has slid into falsehood almost before he is aware of it. +So far as this goes, there is truth in his plea. Sludge might indeed +find himself unexpectedly justified if we had only an exact record of +how true were the tales told about Conservatives in an exclusive +circle of Radicals, or the stories told about Radicals in a circle of +indignant Conservatives. But after this general excuse, Sludge goes on +to a perfectly cheerful and unfeeling admission of fraud; this +principal feeling towards his victims is by his own confession a +certain unfathomable contempt for people who are so easily taken in. +He professes to know how to lay the foundations for every species of +personal acquaintanceship, and how to remedy the slight and trivial +slips of making Plato write Greek in naughts and crosses. + + "As I fear, sir, he sometimes used to do + Before I found the useful book that knows." + +It would be difficult to imagine any figure more indecently +confessional, more entirely devoid of not only any of the restraints +of conscience, but of any of the restraints even of a wholesome +personal conceit, than Sludge the Medium. He confesses not only fraud, +but things which are to the natural man more difficult to confess even +than fraud--effeminacy, futility, physical cowardice. And then, when +the last of his loathsome secrets has been told, when he has nothing +left either to gain or to conceal, then he rises up into a perfect +bankrupt sublimity and makes the great avowal which is the whole pivot +and meaning of the poem. He says in effect: "Now that my interest in +deceit is utterly gone, now that I have admitted, to my own final +infamy, the frauds that I have practised, now that I stand before you +in a patent and open villainy which has something of the +disinterestedness and independence of the innocent, now I tell you +with the full and impartial authority of a lost soul that I believe +that there is something in spiritualism. In the course of a thousand +conspiracies, by the labour of a thousand lies, I have discovered that +there is really something in this matter that neither I nor any other +man understands. I am a thief, an adventurer, a deceiver of mankind, +but I am not a disbeliever in spiritualism. I have seen too much for +that." This is the confession of faith of Mr. Sludge the Medium. It +would be difficult to imagine a confession of faith framed and +presented in a more impressive manner. Sludge is a witness to his +faith as the old martyrs were witnesses to their faith, but even more +impressively. They testified to their religion even after they had +lost their liberty, and their eyesight, and their right hands. Sludge +testifies to his religion even after he has lost his dignity and his +honour. + +It may be repeated that it is truly extraordinary that any one should +have failed to notice that this avowal on behalf of spiritualism is +the pivot of the poem. The avowal itself is not only expressed +clearly, but prepared and delivered with admirable rhetorical force:-- + + "Now for it, then! Will you believe me, though? + You've heard what I confess: I don't unsay + A single word: I cheated when I could, + Rapped with my toe-joints, set sham hands at work, + Wrote down names weak in sympathetic ink. + Rubbed odic lights with ends of phosphor-match, + And all the rest; believe that: believe this, + By the same token, though it seem to set + The crooked straight again, unsay the said, + Stick up what I've knocked down; I can't help that, + It's truth! I somehow vomit truth to-day. + This trade of mine--I don't know, can't be sure + But there was something in it, tricks and all!" + +It is strange to call a poem with so clear and fine a climax an attack +on spiritualism. To miss that climax is like missing the last sentence +in a good anecdote, or putting the last act of _Othello_ into the +middle of the play. Either the whole poem of "Sludge the Medium" means +nothing at all, and is only a lampoon upon a cad, of which the matter +is almost as contemptible as the subject, or it means this--that some +real experiences of the unseen lie even at the heart of hypocrisy, and +that even the spiritualist is at root spiritual. + +One curious theory which is common to most Browning critics is that +Sludge must be intended for a pure and conscious impostor, because +after his confession, and on the personal withdrawal of Mr. Horsfall, +he bursts out into horrible curses against that gentleman and cynical +boasts of his future triumphs in a similar line of business. Surely +this is to have a very feeble notion either of nature or art. A man +driven absolutely into a corner might humiliate himself, and gain a +certain sensation almost of luxury in that humiliation, in pouring out +all his imprisoned thoughts and obscure victories. For let it never be +forgotten that a hypocrite is a very unhappy man; he is a man who has +devoted himself to a most delicate and arduous intellectual art in +which he may achieve masterpieces which he must keep secret, fight +thrilling battles, and win hair's-breadth victories for which he +cannot have a whisper of praise. A really accomplished impostor is the +most wretched of geniuses; he is a Napoleon on a desert island. A man +might surely, therefore, when he was certain that his credit was gone, +take a certain pleasure in revealing the tricks of his unique trade, +and gaining not indeed credit, but at least a kind of glory. And in +the course of this self-revelation he would come at last upon that +part of himself which exists in every man--that part which does +believe in, and value, and worship something. This he would fling in +his hearer's face with even greater pride, and take a delight in +giving a kind of testimony to his religion which no man had ever given +before--the testimony of a martyr who could not hope to be a saint. +But surely all this sudden tempest of candour in the man would not +mean that he would burst into tears and become an exemplary ratepayer, +like a villain in the worst parts of Dickens. The moment the danger +was withdrawn, the sense of having given himself away, of having +betrayed the secret of his infamous freemasonry, would add an +indescribable violence and foulness to his reaction of rage. A man in +such a case would do exactly as Sludge does. He would declare his own +shame, declare the truth of his creed, and then, when he realised what +he had done, say something like this:-- + + "R-r-r, you brute-beast and blackguard! Cowardly scamp! + I only wish I dared burn down the house + And spoil your sniggering!" + +and so on, and so on. + +He would react like this; it is one of the most artistic strokes in +Browning. But it does not prove that he was a hypocrite about +spiritualism, or that he was speaking more truthfully in the second +outburst than in the first. Whence came this extraordinary theory that +a man is always speaking most truly when he is speaking most coarsely? +The truth about oneself is a very difficult thing to express, and +coarse speaking will seldom do it. + +When we have grasped this point about "Sludge the Medium," we have +grasped the key to the whole series of Browning's casuistical +monologues--_Bishop Blaugram's Apology, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, +Fra Lippo Lippi, Fifine at the Fair, Aristophanes' Apology_, and +several of the monologues in _The Ring and the Book_. They are all, +without exception, dominated by this one conception of a certain +reality tangled almost inextricably with unrealities in a man's mind, +and the peculiar fascination which resides in the thought that the +greatest lies about a man, and the greatest truths about him, may be +found side by side in the same eloquent and sustained utterance. + + "For Blougram, he believed, say, half he spoke." + +Or, to put the matter in another way, the general idea of these poems +is, that a man cannot help telling some truth even when he sets out to +tell lies. If a man comes to tell us that he has discovered perpetual +motion, or been swallowed by the sea-serpent, there will yet be some +point in the story where he will tell us about himself almost all that +we require to know. + +If any one wishes to test the truth, or to see the best examples of +this general idea in Browning's monologues, he may be recommended to +notice one peculiarity of these poems which is rather striking. As a +whole, these apologies are written in a particularly burly and even +brutal English. Browning's love of what is called the ugly is nowhere +else so fully and extravagantly indulged. This, like a great many +other things for which Browning as an artist is blamed, is perfectly +appropriate to the theme. A vain, ill-mannered, and untrustworthy +egotist, defending his own sordid doings with his own cheap and +weather-beaten philosophy, is very likely to express himself best in a +language flexible and pungent, but indelicate and without dignity. But +the peculiarity of these loose and almost slangy soliloquies is that +every now and then in them there occur bursts of pure poetry which are +like a burst of birds singing. Browning does not hesitate to put some +of the most perfect lines that he or anyone else have ever written in +the English language into the mouths of such slaves as Sludge and +Guido Franceschini. Take, for the sake of example, "Bishop Blougram's +Apology." The poem is one of the most grotesque in the poet's works. +It is intentionally redolent of the solemn materialism and patrician +grossness of a grand dinner-party _à deux_. It has many touches of an +almost wild bathos, such as the young man who bears the impossible +name of Gigadibs. The Bishop, in pursuing his worldly argument for +conformity, points out with truth that a condition of doubt is a +condition that cuts both ways, and that if we cannot be sure of the +religious theory of life, neither can we be sure of the material +theory of life, and that in turn is capable of becoming an uncertainty +continually shaken by a tormenting suggestion. We cannot establish +ourselves on rationalism, and make it bear fruit to us. Faith itself +is capable of becoming the darkest and most revolutionary of doubts. +Then comes the passage:-- + + "Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch, + A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, + A chorus ending from Euripides,-- + And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears + As old and new at once as Nature's self, + To rap and knock and enter in our soul, + Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring, + Round the ancient idol, on his base again,-- + The grand Perhaps!" + +Nobler diction and a nobler meaning could not have been put into the +mouth of Pompilia, or Rabbi Ben Ezra. It is in reality put into the +mouth of a vulgar, fashionable priest, justifying his own cowardice +over the comfortable wine and the cigars. + +Along with this tendency to poetry among Browning's knaves, must be +reckoned another characteristic, their uniform tendency to theism. +These loose and mean characters speak of many things feverishly and +vaguely; of one thing they always speak with confidence and composure, +their relation to God. It may seem strange at first sight that those +who have outlived the indulgence, and not only of every law, but of +every reasonable anarchy, should still rely so simply upon the +indulgence of divine perfection. Thus Sludge is certain that his life +of lies and conjuring tricks has been conducted in a deep and subtle +obedience to the message really conveyed by the conditions created by +God. Thus Bishop Blougram is certain that his life of panic-stricken +and tottering compromise has been really justified as the only method +that could unite him with God. Thus Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau is +certain that every dodge in his thin string of political dodges has +been the true means of realising what he believes to be the will of +God. Every one of these meagre swindlers, while admitting a failure in +all things relative, claims an awful alliance with the Absolute. To +many it will at first sight appear a dangerous doctrine indeed. But, +in truth, it is a most solid and noble and salutary doctrine, far less +dangerous than its opposite. Every one on this earth should believe, +amid whatever madness or moral failure, that his life and temperament +have some object on the earth. Every one on the earth should believe +that he has something to give to the world which cannot otherwise be +given. Every one should, for the good of men and the saving of his own +soul, believe that it is possible, even if we are the enemies of the +human race, to be the friends of God. The evil wrought by this +mystical pride, great as it often is, is like a straw to the evil +wrought by a materialistic self-abandonment. The crimes of the devil +who thinks himself of immeasurable value are as nothing to the crimes +of the devil who thinks himself of no value. With Browning's knaves we +have always this eternal interest, that they are real somewhere, and +may at any moment begin to speak poetry. We are talking to a peevish +and garrulous sneak; we are watching the play of his paltry features, +his evasive eyes, and babbling lips. And suddenly the face begins to +change and harden, the eyes glare like the eyes of a mask, the whole +face of clay becomes a common mouthpiece, and the voice that comes +forth is the voice of God, uttering His everlasting soliloquy. + + + + +INDEX + + +A + +_Agamemnon of Aeschylus, The_, 120. + +Alliance, The Holy, 89. + +"Andrea del Sarto," 83. + +_Aristophanes' Apology_, 120, 199. + +Arnold, Matthew, 41, 55, 56. + +_Asolando_, 132. + +Asolo (Italy), 42, 131. + +"At the Mermaid," 117. + +Austria, 88, 89. + + +B + +"Bad Dreams," 138. + +_Balaustion's Adventure_, 119-120. + +Barrett, Arabella, 74, 119. + +Barrett, Edward Moulton, 58 _seq._, 70, 73, 74, 76, 79. + +Beardsley, Mr. Aubrey, 149. + +_Bells and Pomegranates_, 105. + +"Ben Ezra," 23, 201. + +Birrell, Mr. Augustine, 160. + +"Bishop Blougram," 51, 189. + +_Bishop Blougram's Apology_, 188, 189, 199, 200. + +_Blot on the 'Scutcheon, A_, 53. + +Boyd, Mr., 62. + +Browning, Robert: birth and family history, 3; + theories as to his descent, 4-8; + a typical Englishman of the middle class, 9; + his immediate ancestors, 10 _seq._; + education, 12; + boyhood and youth, 17; + first poems, _Incondita_, 17; + romantic spirit, 18; + publication of _Pauline_, 20; + friendship with literary men, 21; + _Paracelsus_, 22; + introduction to literary world, 25; + his earliest admirers, 26; + friendship with Carlyle, 26; + _Strafford_, 27; + _Sordello_, 34; + _Pippa Passes_, 43; + _Dramatic Lyrics_, 45; + _The Return of the Druses_, 51; + _A Blot on the 'Scutcheon_, 53; + correspondence with Elizabeth Barrett, 62 _seq._; + their first meeting, 70; + marriage and elopement, 78, 79; + life in Italy, 81 _seq._; + love of Italy, 82, 85 _seq._; + sympathy with Italian Revolution, 90; + attitude towards spiritualism, 91 _seq._, 113, 190-199; + death of his wife, 103; + returns to England, 105; + _The Ring and the Book_, 110; + culmination of his literary fame, 110, 117; + life in society, 110; + elected Fellow of Balliol, 117; + honoured by the great Universities, 118; + _Balaustion's Adventure_, 119-120; + _Aristophanes' Apology_, 120; + _The Agamemnon of Aeschylus_, 120; + _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_, 121; + _Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country_, 122; + _Fifine at the Fair_, 124; + _The Inn Album_, 125; + _Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper_, 125; + _La Saisiaz_, 127; + _The Two Poets of Croisic_, 127; + _Dramatic Idylls_, 127; + _Jocoseria_, 127; + _Ferishtah's Fancies_, 127; + _Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day_, 128; + accepts post of Foreign Correspondent to the Royal Academy, 129; + goes to Llangollen with his sister, 130; + last journey to Italy, 130; + death at Venice, 132; + publication of _Asolando_, 132; + his conversation, 36; + vanity, 33, 36; + faults and virtues, 40, 55; + his interest in Art, 82 _seq._; + his varied accomplishments, 84-85; + personality and presence, 18, 33, 112 _seq._; + his prejudices, 113-116; + his occasional coarseness, 116; + politics, 86 _seq._; + Browning as a father, 105; + as dramatist, 52; + as a literary artist, 133 _seq._; + his use of the grotesque, 48, 140, 143, 148 _seq._; + his failures, 141; + artistic originality, 136, 143, 158; + keen sense of melody and rhythm, 145 _seq._; + ingenuity in rhyming, 152; + his buffoonery, 154; + obscurity, 154 _seq._; + his conception of the Universe, 175; + philosophy, 177 _seq._; + optimism, 179 _seq._; + his love poetry, 49; + his knaves, 51, 201-202; + the key to his casuistical monologues, 199. + +_Browning, Life of_ (Mrs. Orr), 92. + +Browning, Robert (father of the poet), 10, 119. + +Browning, Mrs., _née_ Wiedermann (mother), 11, 82. + +Browning, Anna (sister), 14, 105. + +Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (wife), +57 _seq._, 91-99, 101, 103, 116, 119, +129, 131. + +Browning Society, 129. + +Burns, Robert, 169-170. + +Byron, 11, 38, 141, 143. + +Byronism, 19, 117. + + +C + +"Caliban," 9, 120. + +"Caliban upon Setebos," 93, 135, 138. + +Camberwell, 3, 8, 19. + +"Caponsacchi," 108. + +Carlyle, Thomas, 12, 16, 17, 26, 55, 56, 87, 115. + +Carlyle, Mrs., 26. + +"Cavalier Tunes," 46. + +Cavour, 86, 90, 103. + +Charles I., 28, 29. + +Chaucer, 117. + +"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came," 159. + +_Christmas Eve_, 105. + +Church in Italy, The, 88. + +"Clive," 127. + +Clough, Arthur Hugh, 56. + +_Colombe's Birthday_, 32. + +Corelli, Miss Marie, 38. + +Cromwell, Oliver, 73. + + +D + +Darwin, 23, 39. + +Dickens, 16. + +"Djabal," 51, 52. + +Domett, Alfred, 21. + +"Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis," 161. + +_Dramatic Idylls_, 127. + +_Dramatic Lyrics_, 45-50. + +_Dramatis Personæ_, 105. + +Duffy, Sir Charles Gavan, 187, 188. + + +E + +_Edinburgh Review_, 122. + +"Englishman in Italy, The," 150. + + +F + +"Fears and Scruples," 126, 138. + +"Ferishtah's Fancies," 138. + +_Fifine at the Fair_, 9, 13, 51, 124, 199. + +Fitzgerald, Edward, 116, 131. + +_Flight of the Duchess, The_, 18. + +Florence, 81, 94. + +Forster, John, 26. + +Foster, John, 187, 188. + +Fox, Mr. Johnson, 20. + +Fox, Mrs. Bridell, 33. + +"Fra Lippo,", 51. + +_Fra Lippo Lippi_, 83, 199. + +French Revolution, 87. + +Furnivall, Dr., 7, 129. + + +G + +"Garden Fancies," 46. + +Garibaldi, 86, 89. + +Gilbert, W.S., 144. + +Gissing, Mr. George, 165. + +Gladstone, 117. + +_Golden Treasury_ (Palgrave), 168. + +Goldsmith, 169, 170. + +Gordon, General, 90. + +"Guido Franceschini," 106, 120, 200. + + +H + +Henley, Mr., 148. + +"Heretic's Tragedy, The," 137. + +Hickey, Miss E.H., 129. + +"Holy Cross Day," 153. + +Home, David (spiritualist), 93-97, 113, 190, 191. + +Home, David, _Memoirs_ of, 93 _seq._ + +Horne, 26. + +Houghton, Lord, 129. + +"House," 138. + +"Householder, The," 138. + +"How they brought the good News from Ghent to Aix," 46. + +_Hudibras_ (Butler), 57. + +Hugo, Victor, 17. + +Hunt, Leigh, 26. + + +I + +_Incondita_, 17. + +_Inn Album, The_, 125. + +_Instans Tyrannus_, 9. + +Italy, 85 _seq._ + +Italian Revolution, 88 _seq._ + +"Ivàn Ivànovitch," 127. + + +J + +Jameson, Mrs., 75. + +Jerrold, Douglas, 34. + +_Jocoseria_, 127. + +Jowett, Dr., 118. + +_Julius Cæsar_ (Shakespeare), 28. + +"Juris Doctor Bottinius," 161. + + +K + +Keats, 15, 16, 19, 137, 142. + +Kenyon, Mr., 22, 58, 69-70, 74, 76. + +_King Victor and King Charles_, 32. + +Kipling, Rudyard, 142. + +Kirkup, Seymour, 103. + + +L + +_L'Aiglon_, 28. + +"Laboratory, The," 47, 143. + +Landor, 26, 56, 93, 101-103. + +_La Saisiaz_, 127. + +_Letters, The Browning_, 63. + +Liberalism, 86. + +"Lines to Edward Fitzgerald," 131. + +Llangollen, 130. + +Lockhart, 112. + +"Lost Leader, The," 46. + +"Lover's Quarrel, A," 50. + +"Luigi," 45. + +Lytton, Lord (novelist), 91. + + +M + +Macready, 17, 27, 53. + +Maeterlinck, 164, 184. + +Manning, Cardinal, 91. + +Mary Queen of Scots, 29. + +"Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha," 147. + +"May and Death." 21. + +Mazzini, 89. + +_Men and Women_, 105. + +Meredith, George, 156, 165. +Mill, John Stuart, 26, 56. + +Milsand, 119. + +Milton, 137. + +Monckton-Milnes, 26, 100. + +_Mr. Sludge the Medium_, 82, 96, 120, 190-199. + +"Muléykeh," 127. + +"My Star," 138. + + +N + +"Nationality in Drinks," 46, 138. + +Napoleon, 42, 89. + +Napoleon III., 56, 92, 121. + +"Never the Time and the Place," 127. + +Newman, Cardinal, 193. + +Norwood, 18. + + +O + +"Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" (Wordsworth), 136. + +"Ode on a Grecian Urn" (Keats), 137. + +"Old Masters in Florence," 177. + +"One Word More," 65. + +Orr, Mrs., 72. + + +P + +_Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper_, 125, 126, 152. + +_Paracelsus_, 22, 25, 26, 41, 47, 158. + +"Paracelsus," 24, 25. + +Painting, Poems on, 83. + +Palgrave, Francis, 117. + +Paris, 94. + +_Parleyings with certain Persons of Importance in their Day_, 22, 128, 158. + +_Pauline_, 20, 21, 37, 41, 51. + +"Pheidippides," 127. + +Phelps (actor), 53. + +"Pictor Ignotus," 83. + +"Pied Piper of Hamelin, The," 153. + +"Pippa," 45, 120. + +_Pippa Passes_, 18, 45, 47, 51, 137. + +Pisa, 81. + +Pius IX., Church under, 88. + +Plato, 21, 23. + +Poe, Edgar Allan, 144. + +Poetry, Pessimistic school of, 130. + +"Pompilia," 201. + +Pope, 11, 20, 57. + +"Portrait, A," 138. + +_Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_, 121-122. + +_Princess, The_ (Tennyson), 148. + +"Prometheus Unbound" (Shelley), 137. + +Prussia, 88, 89. + +Puritans, 30. + +Pym, 28, 30. + + +R + +"Rabbi Ben Ezra," 201. + +_Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country_, 122-124. + +_Return of the Druses, The_, 51-53. + +Revolution, + The French, 15; + Italian, 90. + +_Ring and the Book, The_, 85, 106, 109, 123, 137, 160-176. + +Ripert-Monclar, Comte de, 22, 93. + +Roman Church, 114, 187, 188. + +Rossetti, 163. + +Royalists, 30. + +Ruskin, 16, 55, 56, 91, 115. + +Russia, 88. + + +S + +Sand, George, 9, 94. + +Santayana's, Mr., _Interpretations of Poetry and Religion_, 183-186. + +"Sebald," 45. + +Shakespeare, 17, 57. + +Shakespeare Society, 129. + +Sharp, Mr. William, 133. + +Shaw, Mr. Bernard, 165. + +Shelley, 15, 16, 17,19, 56, 136, 141, 143. + +"Shop," 138. + +"Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis," 138. + +Silverthorne (Browning's cousin), 21. + +"Sludge," 51, 52, 150, 189, 200. + +Smith, Elder (publishers), 110. + +"Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, The," 47. + +"Sonnets from the Portuguese," 65. + +_Sordello_, 23, 34, 42. + +Speech, Free, 173. + +Spenser, 142. + +Spiritualism, 9, 91, 113, 190. + +"Statue and the Bust, The," 109. + +Sterne, 117. + +Stevenson, Robert Louis, 60, 114. + +_Straford_, 27 _seq._, 37. + +"Stafford," 28, 29, 30. + +Swinburne, 56, 116, 142,143. + + +T + + +_Tait's Magazine_, 20. + +Talfourd, Sergeant, 26. + +Tennyson, 27, 34, 55, 117, 141, 142, 143, 148. + +Thackeray, Miss, 123. + +"Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr," 46. + +_Time's Revenges_, 9, 93. + +Tolstoi, 115. + +_Tristram Shandy_ (Sterne), 163. + +_Two Poets of Croisic, The_, 127. + + +U + + +University College, 14. + +"Up jumped Tokay" (poem quoted), 140. + + +V + + +Venice, 131. + +Victor of Sardinia, King, 23. + +Vogler, Abt, 23. + + +W + + +_Water Babies_ (Kingsley), 8. + +Watts, Mr. G.F., 112. + +Whitman, Walt, 21, 43, 49, 114, 165, 184. + +"Why I am a Liberal" (sonnet), 86. + +Wiedermann, William, 12. + +Wiseman, Cardinal, 188. + +Wimbledon Common, 18. + +Wordsworth, 69, 136, 141, 143. + +Wordsworth Society, 129. + + +Y + +"Youth and Art," 50, 109. + + +Z + +Zola, 164. + + * * * * * + +ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS. + +NEW SERIES. + +_Crown 8vo. 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Chesterton. + </title> + <style type="text/css"> +/*<![CDATA[ XML blockout */ +<!-- + P { margin-top: .75em; + text-align: justify; + margin-bottom: .75em; + } + H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { + text-align: center; /* all headings centered */ + } + HR { width: 33%; + margin-top: 1em; + margin-bottom: 1em; + } + BODY{margin-left: 10%; + margin-right: 10%; + } + + ol {list-style-type: none; } + + .linenum {position: absolute; top: auto; left: 4%;} /* poetry number */ + .note {margin-left: 2em; margin-right: 2em; margin-bottom: 1em;} /* footnote */ + .blkquot {margin-left: 4em; margin-right: 4em;} /* block indent */ + .pagenum {position: absolute; left: 92%; font-size: smaller; text-align: right;} /* page numbers */ + .sidenote {width: 20%; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-left: 1em; font-size: smaller; float: right; clear: right;} + + .ind1 {display: block; margin-left: 2em;} + + .poem {margin-left:10%; margin-right:10%; text-align: left;} + .poem .stanza {margin: 1em 0em 1em 0em;} + .poem span {display: block; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;} + .poem span.i2 {display: block; margin-left: 2em;} + .poem span.i4 {display: block; margin-left: 4em;} + .poem span.i10 {display: block; margin-left: 10em;} + .poem .caesura {vertical-align: -200%;} + // --> + /* XML end ]]>*/ + </style> + </head> +<body> + + +<pre> + +The Project Gutenberg EBook of Robert Browning, by G. K. Chesterton + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Robert Browning + +Author: G. K. Chesterton + +Release Date: August 31, 2004 [EBook #13342] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROBERT BROWNING *** + + + + +Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Victoria Woosley and PG Distributed +Proofreaders + + + + + + +</pre> + +<br /><br /> +<h1>ROBERT BROWNING</h1> +<br /><br /> +<h3>BY</h3> + +<h2>G.K. CHESTERTON</h2> +<br /><br /> +<hr style="width: 100%" /> + +<h2>CONTENTS</h2> +<br /><br /> +<ol> + <li>CHAPTER I <a href="#CHAPTER_I">BROWNING IN EARLY LIFE</a></li> + <li>CHAPTER II <a href="#CHAPTER_II">EARLY WORKS</a></li> + <li>CHAPTER III <a href="#CHAPTER_III">BROWNING AND HIS MARRIAGE</a></li> + <li>CHAPTER IV <a href="#CHAPTER_IV">BROWNING IN ITALY</a></li> + <li>CHAPTER V <a href="#CHAPTER_V">BROWNING IN LATER LIFE</a></li> + <li>CHAPTER VI <a href="#CHAPTER_VI">BROWNING AS A LITERARY ARTIST</a></li> + <li>CHAPTER VII <a href="#CHAPTER_VII">"THE RING AND THE BOOK"</a></li> + <li>CHAPTER VIII <a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">THE PHILOSOPHY OF BROWNING</a></li> + <li><a href="#INDEX">INDEX</a></li> +</ol> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<a name="CHAPTER_I"></a><h2>CHAPTER I</h2> + +<h3>BROWNING IN EARLY LIFE</h3> + + +<p>On the subject of Browning's work innumerable things have been said +and remain to be said; of his life, considered as a narrative of +facts, there is little or nothing to say. It was a lucid and public +and yet quiet life, which culminated in one great dramatic test of +character, and then fell back again into this union of quietude and +publicity. And yet, in spite of this, it is a great deal more +difficult to speak finally about his life than about his work. His +work has the mystery which belongs to the complex; his life the much +greater mystery which belongs to the simple. He was clever enough to +understand his own poetry; and if he understood it, we can understand +it. But he was also entirely unconscious and impulsive, and he was +never clever enough to understand his own character; consequently we +may be excused if that part of him which was hidden from him is partly +hidden from us. The subtle man is always immeasurably easier to +understand than the natural man; for the subtle man keeps a diary of +his moods, he practises the art of self-analysis and self-revelation, +and can tell us how he came to feel this<a name="Page_2"></a> or to say that. But a man +like Browning knows no more about the state of his emotions than about +the state of his pulse; they are things greater than he, things +growing at will, like forces of Nature. There is an old anecdote, +probably apocryphal, which describes how a feminine admirer wrote to +Browning asking him for the meaning of one of his darker poems, and +received the following reply: "When that poem was written, two people +knew what it meant—God and Robert Browning. And now God only knows +what it means." This story gives, in all probability, an entirely +false impression of Browning's attitude towards his work. He was a +keen artist, a keen scholar, he could put his finger on anything, and +he had a memory like the British Museum Library. But the story does, +in all probability, give a tolerably accurate picture of Browning's +attitude towards his own emotions and his psychological type. If a man +had asked him what some particular allusion to a Persian hero meant he +could in all probability have quoted half the epic; if a man had asked +him which third cousin of Charlemagne was alluded to in <i>Sordello</i>, he +could have given an account of the man and an account of his father +and his grandfather. But if a man had asked him what he thought of +himself, or what were his emotions an hour before his wedding, he +would have replied with perfect sincerity that God alone knew.</p> + +<p>This mystery of the unconscious man, far deeper than any mystery of +the conscious one, existing as it does in all men, existed peculiarly +in Browning, because he was a very ordinary and spontaneous man. The +same thing exists to some extent in all history and all affairs. +Anything that is deliberate, twisted, created<a name="Page_3"></a> as a trap and a +mystery, must be discovered at last; everything that is done naturally +remains mysterious. It may be difficult to discover the principles of +the Rosicrucians, but it is much easier to discover the principles of +the Rosicrucians than the principles of the United States: nor has any +secret society kept its aims so quiet as humanity. The way to be +inexplicable is to be chaotic, and on the surface this was the quality +of Browning's life; there is the same difference between judging of +his poetry and judging of his life, that there is between making a map +of a labyrinth and making a map of a mist. The discussion of what some +particular allusion in <i>Sordello</i> means has gone on so far, and may go +on still, but it has it in its nature to end. The life of Robert +Browning, who combines the greatest brain with the most simple +temperament known in our annals, would go on for ever if we did not +decide to summarise it in a very brief and simple narrative.</p> + +<p>Robert Browning was born in Camberwell on May 7th 1812. His father and +grandfather had been clerks in the Bank of England, and his whole +family would appear to have belonged to the solid and educated middle +class—the class which is interested in letters, but not ambitious in +them, the class to which poetry is a luxury, but not a necessity.</p> + +<p>This actual quality and character of the Browning family shows some +tendency to be obscured by matters more remote. It is the custom of +all biographers to seek for the earliest traces of a family in distant +ages and even in distant lands; and Browning, as it happens, has given +them opportunities which tend to lead away the mind from the main +matter in hand. There is a<a name="Page_4"></a> tradition, for example, that men of his +name were prominent in the feudal ages; it is based upon little beyond +a coincidence of surnames and the fact that Browning used a seal with +a coat-of-arms. Thousands of middle-class men use such a seal, merely +because it is a curiosity or a legacy, without knowing or caring +anything about the condition of their ancestors in the Middle Ages. +Then, again, there is a theory that he was of Jewish blood; a view +which is perfectly conceivable, and which Browning would have been the +last to have thought derogatory, but for which, as a matter of fact, +there is exceedingly little evidence. The chief reason assigned by his +contemporaries for the belief was the fact that he was, without doubt, +specially and profoundly interested in Jewish matters. This +suggestion, worthless in any case, would, if anything, tell the other +way. For while an Englishman may be enthusiastic about England, or +indignant against England, it never occurred to any living Englishman +to be interested in England. Browning was, like every other +intelligent Aryan, interested in the Jews; but if he was related to +every people in which he was interested, he must have been of +extraordinarily mixed extraction. Thirdly, there is the yet more +sensational theory that there was in Robert Browning a strain of the +negro. The supporters of this hypothesis seem to have little in +reality to say, except that Browning's grandmother was certainly a +Creole. It is said in support of the view that Browning was singularly +dark in early life, and was often mistaken for an Italian. There does +not, however, seem to be anything particular to be deduced from this, +except that if he looked like an Italian, he must have looked +exceedingly unlike a negro.</p><a name="Page_5"></a> + +<p>There is nothing valid against any of these three theories, just as +there is nothing valid in their favour; they may, any or all of them, +be true, but they are still irrelevant. They are something that is in +history or biography a great deal worse than being false—they are +misleading. We do not want to know about a man like Browning, whether +he had a right to a shield used in the Wars of the Roses, or whether +the tenth grandfather of his Creole grandmother had been white or +black: we want to know something about his family, which is quite a +different thing. We wish to have about Browning not so much the kind +of information which would satisfy Clarencieux King-at-Arms, but the +sort of information which would satisfy us, if we were advertising for +a very confidential secretary, or a very private tutor. We should not +be concerned as to whether the tutor were descended from an Irish +king, but we should still be really concerned about his extraction, +about what manner of people his had been for the last two or three +generations. This is the most practical duty of biography, and this is +also the most difficult. It is a great deal easier to hunt a family +from tombstone to tombstone back to the time of Henry II. than to +catch and realise and put upon paper that most nameless and elusive of +all things—social tone.</p> + +<p>It will be said immediately, and must as promptly be admitted, that we +could find a biographical significance in any of these theories if we +looked for it. But it is, indeed, the sin and snare of biographers +that they tend to see significance in everything; characteristic +carelessness if their hero drops his pipe, and characteristic +carefulness if he picks it up again. It is true, assuredly, that all +the three races above named could be connected <a name="Page_6"></a>with Browning's +personality. If we believed, for instance, that he really came of a +race of mediæval barons, we should say at once that from them he got +his pre-eminent spirit of battle: we should be right, for every line +in his stubborn soul and his erect body did really express the +fighter; he was always contending, whether it was with a German theory +about the Gnostics, or with a stranger who elbowed his wife in a +crowd. Again, if we had decided that he was a Jew, we should point out +how absorbed he was in the terrible simplicity of monotheism: we +should be right, for he was so absorbed. Or again, in the case even of +the negro fancy; it would not be difficult for us to suggest a love of +colour, a certain mental gaudiness, a pleasure</p> + +<p class="note">"When reds and blues were indeed red and blue,"</p> + +<p>as he says in <i>The Ring and the Book</i>. We should be right; for there +really was in Browning a tropical violence of taste, an artistic +scheme compounded as it were, of orchids and cockatoos, which, amid +our cold English poets, seems scarcely European. All this is extremely +fascinating; and it may be true. But, as has above been suggested, +here comes in the great temptation of this kind of work, the noble +temptation to see too much in everything. The biographer can easily +see a personal significance in these three hypothetical nationalities. +But is there in the world a biographer who could lay his hand upon his +heart and say that he would not have seen as much significance in any +three other nationalities? If Browning's ancestors had been Frenchmen, +should we not have said that it was from them doubtless that he +inherited that logical agility <a name="Page_7"></a>which marks him among English poets? +If his grandfather had been a Swede, should we not have said that the +old sea-roving blood broke out in bold speculation and insatiable +travel? If his great-aunt had been a Red Indian, should we not have +said that only in the Ojibways and the Blackfeet do we find the +Browning fantasticality combined with the Browning stoicism? This +over-readiness to seize hints is an inevitable part of that secret +hero-worship which is the heart of biography. The lover of great men +sees signs of them long before they begin to appear on the earth, and, +like some old mythological chronicler, claims as their heralds the +storms and the falling stars.</p> + +<p>A certain indulgence must therefore be extended to the present writer +if he declines to follow that admirable veteran of Browning study, Dr. +Furnivall, into the prodigious investigations which he has been +conducting into the condition of the Browning family since the +beginning of the world. For his last discovery, the descent of +Browning from a footman in the service of a country magnate, there +seems to be suggestive, though not decisive evidence. But Browning's +descent from barons, or Jews, or lackeys, or black men, is not the +main point touching his family. If the Brownings were of mixed origin, +they were so much the more like the great majority of English +middle-class people. It is curious that the romance of race should be +spoken of as if it were a thing peculiarly aristocratic; that +admiration for rank, or interest in family, should mean only interest +in one not very interesting type of rank and family. The truth is that +aristocrats exhibit less of the romance of pedigree than any other +people in the world. For since it is their principle to marry only +within their <a name="Page_8"></a>own class and mode of life, there is no opportunity in +their case for any of the more interesting studies in heredity; they +exhibit almost the unbroken uniformity of the lower animals. It is in +the middle classes that we find the poetry of genealogy; it is the +suburban grocer standing at his shop door whom some wild dash of +Eastern or Celtic blood may drive suddenly to a whole holiday or a +crime. Let us admit then, that it is true that these legends of the +Browning family have every abstract possibility. But it is a far more +cogent and apposite truth that if a man had knocked at the door of +every house in the street where Browning was born, he would have found +similar legends in all of them. There is hardly a family in Camberwell +that has not a story or two about foreign marriages a few generations +back; and in all this the Brownings are simply a typical Camberwell +family. The real truth about Browning and men like him can scarcely be +better expressed than in the words of that very wise and witty story, +Kingsley's <i>Water Babies</i>, in which the pedigree of the Professor is +treated in a manner which is an excellent example of the wild common +sense of the book. "His mother was a Dutch woman, and therefore she +was born at Curaçoa (of course, you have read your geography and +therefore know why), and his father was a Pole, and therefore he was +brought up at Petropaulowski (of course, you have learnt your modern +politics, and therefore know why), but for all that he was as thorough +an Englishman as ever coveted his neighbour's goods."</p> + +<p>It may be well therefore to abandon the task of obtaining a clear +account of Brownings family, and endeavour to obtain, what is much +more important, a <a name="Page_9"></a>clear account of his home. For the great central +and solid fact, which these heraldic speculations tend inevitably to +veil and confuse, is that Browning was a thoroughly typical Englishman +of the middle class. He may have had alien blood, and that alien +blood, by the paradox we have observed, may have made him more +characteristically a native. A phase, a fancy, a metaphor may or may +not have been born of eastern or southern elements, but he was, +without any question at all, an Englishman of the middle class. +Neither all his liberality nor all his learning ever made him anything +but an Englishman of the middle class. He expanded his intellectual +tolerance until it included the anarchism of <i>Fifine at the Fair</i> and +the blasphemous theology of Caliban; but he remained himself an +Englishman of the middle class. He pictured all the passions of the +earth since the Fall, from the devouring amorousness of <i>Time's +Revenges</i> to the despotic fantasy of <i>Instans Tyrannus</i>; but he +remained himself an Englishman of the middle class. The moment that he +came in contact with anything that was slovenly, anything that was +lawless, in actual life, something rose up in him, older than any +opinions, the blood of generations of good men. He met George Sand and +her poetical circle and hated it, with all the hatred of an old city +merchant for the irresponsible life. He met the Spiritualists and +hated them, with all the hatred of the middle class for borderlands +and equivocal positions and playing with fire. His intellect went upon +bewildering voyages, but his soul walked in a straight road. He piled +up the fantastic towers of his imagination until they eclipsed the +planets; but the plan of the foundation on which he built was <a name="Page_10"></a>always +the plan of an honest English house in Camberwell. He abandoned, with +a ceaseless intellectual ambition, every one of the convictions of his +class; but he carried its prejudices into eternity.</p> + +<p>It is then of Browning as a member of the middle class, that we can +speak with the greatest historical certainty; and it is his immediate +forebears who present the real interest to us. His father, Robert +Browning, was a man of great delicacy of taste, and to all appearance +of an almost exaggerated delicacy of conscience. Every glimpse we have +of him suggests that earnest and almost worried kindliness which is +the mark of those to whom selfishness, even justifiable selfishness, +is really a thing difficult or impossible. In early life Robert +Browning senior was placed by his father (who was apparently a father +of a somewhat primitive, not to say barbaric, type) in an important +commercial position in the West Indies. He threw up the position +however, because it involved him in some recognition of slavery. +Whereupon his unique parent, in a transport of rage, not only +disinherited him and flung him out of doors, but by a superb stroke of +humour, which stands alone in the records of parental ingenuity, sent +him in a bill for the cost of his education. About the same time that +he was suffering for his moral sensibility he was also disturbed about +religious matters, and he completed his severance from his father by +joining a dissenting sect. He was, in short, a very typical example of +the serious middle-class man of the Wilberforce period, a man to whom +duty was all in all, and who would revolutionise an empire or a +continent for the satisfaction of a single moral scruple. Thus, while +he was Puritan at the core, not the ruthless Puritan of the +<a name="Page_11"></a>seventeenth, but the humanitarian Puritan of the eighteenth century, +he had upon the surface all the tastes and graces of a man of culture. +Numerous accomplishments of the lighter kind, such as drawing and +painting in water colours, he possessed; and his feeling for many +kinds of literature was fastidious and exact. But the whole was +absolutely redolent of the polite severity of the eighteenth century. +He lamented his son's early admiration for Byron, and never ceased +adjuring him to model himself upon Pope.</p> + +<p>He was, in short, one of the old-fashioned humanitarians of the +eighteenth century, a class which we may or may not have conquered in +moral theory, but which we most certainly have not conquered in moral +practice. Robert Browning senior destroyed all his fortunes in order +to protest against black slavery; white slavery may be, as later +economists tell us, a thing infinitely worse, but not many men destroy +their fortunes in order to protest against it. The ideals of the men +of that period appear to us very unattractive; to them duty was a kind +of chilly sentiment. But when we think what they did with those cold +ideals, we can scarcely feel so superior. They uprooted the enormous +Upas of slavery, the tree that was literally as old as the race of +man. They altered the whole face of Europe with their deductive +fancies. We have ideals that are really better, ideals of passion, of +mysticism, of a sense of the youth and adventurousness of the earth; +but it will be well for us if we achieve as much by our frenzy as they +did by their delicacies. It scarcely seems as if we were as robust in +our very robustness as they were robust in their sensibility.</p> + +<p>Robert Browning's mother was the daughter of<a name="Page_12"></a> William Wiedermann, a +German merchant settled in Dundee, and married to a Scotch wife. One +of the poet's principal biographers has suggested that from this union +of the German and Scotch, Browning got his metaphysical tendency; it +is possible; but here again we must beware of the great biographical +danger of making mountains out of molehills. What Browning's mother +unquestionably did give to him, was in the way of training—a very +strong religious habit, and a great belief in manners. Thomas Carlyle +called her "the type of a Scottish gentlewoman," and the phrase has a +very real significance to those who realise the peculiar condition of +Scotland, one of the very few European countries where large sections +of the aristocracy are Puritans; thus a Scottish gentlewoman combines +two descriptions of dignity at the same time. Little more is known of +this lady except the fact that after her death Browning could not bear +to look at places where she had walked.</p> + +<p>Browning's education in the formal sense reduces itself to a minimum. +In very early boyhood he attended a species of dame-school, which, +according to some of his biographers, he had apparently to leave +because he was too clever to be tolerable. However this may be, he +undoubtedly went afterwards to a school kept by Mr. Ready, at which +again he was marked chiefly by precocity. But the boy's education did +not in truth take place at any systematic seat of education; it took +place in his own home, where one of the quaintest and most learned and +most absurdly indulgent of fathers poured out in an endless stream +fantastic recitals from the Greek epics and mediæval chronicles. If we +test the matter by the test of actual schools and <a name="Page_13"></a>universities, +Browning will appear to be almost the least educated man in English +literary history. But if we test it by the amount actually learned, we +shall think that he was perhaps the most educated man that ever lived; +that he was in fact, if anything, overeducated. In a spirited poem he +has himself described how, when he was a small child, his father used +to pile up chairs in the drawing-room and call them the city of Troy. +Browning came out of the home crammed with all kinds of +knowledge—knowledge about the Greek poets, knowledge about the +Provençal Troubadours, knowledge about the Jewish Rabbis of the Middle +Ages. But along with all this knowledge he carried one definite and +important piece of ignorance, an ignorance of the degree to which such +knowledge was exceptional. He was no spoilt and self-conscious child, +taught to regard himself as clever. In the atmosphere in which he +lived learning was a pleasure, and a natural pleasure, like sport or +wine. He had in it the pleasure of some old scholar of the Renascence, +when grammar itself was as fresh as the flowers of spring. He had no +reason to suppose that every one did not join in so admirable a game. +His sagacious destiny, while giving him knowledge of everything else, +left him in ignorance of the ignorance of the world.</p> + +<p>Of his boyish days scarcely any important trace remains, except a kind +of diary which contains under one date the laconic statement, "Married +two wives this morning." The insane ingenuity of the biographer would +be quite capable of seeing in this a most suggestive foreshadowing of +the sexual dualism which is so ably defended in <i>Fifine at the Fair</i>. +A great part of his childhood was passed in the society of his only +<a name="Page_14"></a>sister Sariana; and it is a curious and touching fact that with her +also he passed his last days. From his earliest babyhood he seems to +have lived in a more or less stimulating mental atmosphere; but as he +emerged into youth he came under great poetic influences, which made +his father's classical poetic tradition look for the time insipid. +Browning began to live in the life of his own age.</p> + +<p>As a young man he attended classes at University College; beyond this +there is little evidence that he was much in touch with intellectual +circles outside that of his own family. But the forces that were +moving the literary world had long passed beyond the merely literary +area. About the time of Browning's boyhood a very subtle and profound +change was beginning in the intellectual atmosphere of such homes as +that of the Brownings. In studying the careers of great men we tend +constantly to forget that their youth was generally passed and their +characters practically formed in a period long previous to their +appearance in history. We think of Milton, the Restoration Puritan, +and forget that he grew up in the living shadow of Shakespeare and the +full summer of the Elizabethan drama. We realise Garibaldi as a sudden +and almost miraculous figure rising about fifty years ago to create +the new Kingdom of Italy, and we forget that he must have formed his +first ideas of liberty while hearing at his father's dinner-table that +Napoleon was the master of Europe. Similarly, we think of Browning as +the great Victorian poet, who lived long enough to have opinions on +Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bill, and forget that as a young man he +passed a bookstall and saw a volume ticketed "Mr. Shelley's Atheistic +Poem," and had to search even in <a name="Page_15"></a>his own really cultivated circle for +some one who could tell him who Mr. Shelley was. Browning was, in +short, born in the afterglow of the great Revolution.</p> + +<p>The French Revolution was at root a thoroughly optimistic thing. It +may seem strange to attribute optimism to anything so destructive; +but, in truth, this particular kind of optimism is inevitably, and by +its nature, destructive. The great dominant idea of the whole of that +period, the period before, during, and long after the Revolution, is +the idea that man would by his nature live in an Eden of dignity, +liberty and love, and that artificial and decrepit systems are keeping +him out of that Eden. No one can do the least justice to the great +Jacobins who does not realise that to them breaking the civilisation +of ages was like breaking the cords of a treasure-chest. And just as +for more than a century great men had dreamed of this beautiful +emancipation, so the dream began in the time of Keats and Shelley to +creep down among the dullest professions and the most prosaic classes +of society. A spirit of revolt was growing among the young of the +middle classes, which had nothing at all in common with the complete +and pessimistic revolt against all things in heaven or earth, which +has been fashionable among the young in more recent times. The +Shelleyan enthusiast was altogether on the side of existence; he +thought that every cloud and clump of grass shared his strict +republican orthodoxy. He represented, in short, a revolt of the normal +against the abnormal; he found himself, so to speak, in the heart of a +wholly topsy-turvy and blasphemous state of things, in which God was +rebelling against Satan. There began to arise about this time a race +of young <a name="Page_16"></a>men like Keats, members of a not highly cultivated middle +class, and even of classes lower, who felt in a hundred ways this +obscure alliance with eternal things against temporal and practical +ones, and who lived on its imaginative delight. They were a kind of +furtive universalist; they had discovered the whole cosmos, and they +kept the whole cosmos a secret. They climbed up dark stairs to meagre +garrets, and shut themselves in with the gods. Numbers of the great +men, who afterwards illuminated the Victorian era, were at this time +living in mean streets in magnificent daydreams. Ruskin was solemnly +visiting his solemn suburban aunts; Dickens was going to and fro in a +blacking factory; Carlyle, slightly older, was still lingering on a +poor farm in Dumfriesshire; Keats had not long become the assistant of +the country surgeon when Browning was a boy in Camberwell. On all +sides there was the first beginning of the æsthetic stir in the middle +classes which expressed itself in the combination of so many poetic +lives with so many prosaic livelihoods. It was the age of inspired +office-boys.</p> + +<p>Browning grew up, then, with the growing fame of Shelley and Keats, in +the atmosphere of literary youth, fierce and beautiful, among new +poets who believed in a new world. It is important to remember this, +because the real Browning was a quite different person from the grim +moralist and metaphysician who is seen through the spectacles of +Browning Societies and University Extension Lecturers. Browning was +first and foremost a poet, a man made to enjoy all things visible and +invisible, a priest of the higher passions. The misunderstanding that +has supposed him to be other than poetical, because his form was often +fanciful and <a name="Page_17"></a>abrupt, is really different from the misunderstanding +which attaches to most other poets. The opponents of Victor Hugo +called him a mere windbag; the opponents of Shakespeare called him a +buffoon. But the admirers of Hugo and Shakespeare at least knew +better. Now the admirers and opponents of Browning alike make him out +to be a pedant rather than a poet. The only difference between the +Browningite and the anti-Browningite, is that the second says he was +not a poet but a mere philosopher, and the first says he was a +philosopher and not a mere poet. The admirer disparages poetry in +order to exalt Browning; the opponent exalts poetry in order to +disparage Browning; and all the time Browning himself exalted poetry +above all earthly things, served it with single-hearted intensity, and +stands among the few poets who hardly wrote a line of anything else.</p> + +<p>The whole of the boyhood and youth of Robert Browning has as much the +quality of pure poetry as the boyhood and youth of Shelley. We do not +find in it any trace of the analytical Browning who is believed in by +learned ladies and gentlemen. How indeed would such sympathisers feel +if informed that the first poems that Browning wrote in a volume +called <i>Incondita</i> were noticed to contain the fault of "too much +splendour of language and too little wealth of thought"? They were +indeed Byronic in the extreme, and Browning in his earlier appearances +in society presents himself in quite a romantic manner. Macready, the +actor, wrote of him: "He looks and speaks more like a young poet than +any one I have ever seen." A picturesque tradition remains that Thomas +Carlyle, riding out upon one of his solitary gallops necessitated <a name="Page_18"></a>by +his physical sufferings, was stopped by one whom he described as a +strangely beautiful youth, who poured out to him without preface or +apology his admiration for the great philosopher's works. Browning at +this time seems to have left upon many people this impression of +physical charm. A friend who attended University College with him +says: "He was then a bright handsome youth with long black hair +falling over his shoulders." Every tale that remains of him in +connection with this period asserts and reasserts the completely +romantic spirit by which he was then possessed. He was fond, for +example, of following in the track of gipsy caravans, far across +country, and a song which he heard with the refrain, "Following the +Queen of the Gipsies oh!" rang in his ears long enough to express +itself in his soberer and later days in that splendid poem of the +spirit of escape and Bohemianism, <i>The Flight of the Duchess</i>. Such +other of these early glimpses of him as remain, depict him as striding +across Wimbledon Common with his hair blowing in the wind, reciting +aloud passages from Isaiah, or climbing up into the elms above Norwood +to look over London by night. It was when looking down from that +suburban eyrie over the whole confounding labyrinth of London that he +was filled with that great irresponsible benevolence which is the best +of the joys of youth, and conceived the idea of a perfectly +irresponsible benevolence in the first plan of <i>Pippa Passes</i>. At the +end of his father's garden was a laburnum "heavy with its weight of +gold," and in the tree two nightingales were in the habit of singing +against each other, a form of competition which, I imagine, has since +become less common in Camberwell. When Browning <a name="Page_19"></a>as a boy was +intoxicated with the poetry of Shelley and Keats, he hypnotised +himself into something approaching to a positive conviction that these +two birds were the spirits of the two great poets who had settled in a +Camberwell garden, in order to sing to the only young gentleman who +really adored and understood them. This last story is perhaps the most +typical of the tone common to all the rest; it would be difficult to +find a story which across the gulf of nearly eighty years awakens so +vividly a sense of the sumptuous folly of an intellectual boyhood. +With Browning, as with all true poets, passion came first and made +intellectual expression, the hunger for beauty making literature as +the hunger for bread made a plough. The life he lived in those early +days was no life of dull application; there was no poet whose youth +was so young. When he was full of years and fame, and delineating in +great epics the beauty and horror of the romance of southern Europe, a +young man, thinking to please him, said, "There is no romance now +except in Italy." "Well," said Browning, "I should make an exception +of Camberwell."</p> + +<p>Such glimpses will serve to indicate the kind of essential issue that +there was in the nature of things between the generation of Browning +and the generation of his father. Browning was bound in the nature of +things to become at the outset Byronic, and Byronism was not, of +course, in reality so much a pessimism about civilised things as an +optimism about savage things. This great revolt on behalf of the +elemental which Keats and Shelley represented was bound first of all +to occur. Robert Browning junior had to be a part of it, and Robert +Browning senior had to go back to his <a name="Page_20"></a>water colours and the faultless +couplets of Pope with the full sense of the greatest pathos that the +world contains, the pathos of the man who has produced something that +he cannot understand.</p> + +<p>The earliest works of Browning bear witness, without exception, to +this ardent and somewhat sentimental evolution. <i>Pauline</i> appeared +anonymously in 1833. It exhibits the characteristic mark of a juvenile +poem, the general suggestion that the author is a thousand years old. +Browning calls it a fragment of a confession; and Mr. Johnson Fox, an +old friend of Browning's father, who reviewed it for <i>Tait's +Magazine</i>, said, with truth, that it would be difficult to find +anything more purely confessional. It is the typical confession of a +boy laying bare all the spiritual crimes of infidelity and moral +waste, in a state of genuine ignorance of the fact that every one else +has committed them. It is wholesome and natural for youth to go about +confessing that the grass is green, and whispering to a priest +hoarsely that it has found a sun in heaven. But the records of that +particular period of development, even when they are as ornate and +beautiful as <i>Pauline</i>, are not necessarily or invariably wholesome +reading. The chief interest of <i>Pauline</i>, with all its beauties, lies +in a certain almost humorous singularity, the fact that Browning, of +all people, should have signalised his entrance into the world of +letters with a poem which may fairly be called morbid. But this is a +morbidity so general and recurrent that it may be called in a +contradictory phrase a healthy morbidity; it is a kind of intellectual +measles. No one of any degree of maturity in reading <i>Pauline</i> will be +quite so horrified at the sins of the young gentleman who tells the +story <a name="Page_21"></a>as he seems to be himself. It is the utterance of that bitter +and heartrending period of youth which comes before we realise the one +grand and logical basis of all optimism—the doctrine of original sin. +The boy at this stage being an ignorant and inhuman idealist, regards +all his faults as frightful secret malformations, and it is only later +that he becomes conscious of that large and beautiful and benignant +explanation that the heart of man is deceitful above all things and +desperately wicked. That Browning, whose judgment on his own work was +one of the best in the world, took this view of <i>Pauline</i> in after +years is quite obvious. He displayed a very manly and unique capacity +of really laughing at his own work without being in the least ashamed +of it. "This," he said of <i>Pauline</i>, "is the only crab apple that +remains of the shapely tree of life in my fool's paradise." It would +be difficult to express the matter more perfectly. Although <i>Pauline</i> +was published anonymously, its authorship was known to a certain +circle, and Browning began to form friendships in the literary world. +He had already become acquainted with two of the best friends he was +ever destined to have, Alfred Domett, celebrated in "The Guardian +Angel" and "Waring," and his cousin Silverthorne, whose death is +spoken of in one of the most perfect lyrics in the English language, +Browning's "May and Death." These were men of his own age, and his +manner of speaking of them gives us many glimpses into that splendid +world of comradeship which. Plato and Walt Whitman knew, with its +endless days and its immortal nights. Browning had a third friend +destined to play an even greater part in his life, but who belonged to +an older generation and a statelier school of manners and +<a name="Page_22"></a>scholarship. Mr. Kenyon was a schoolfellow of Browning's father, and +occupied towards his son something of the position of an irresponsible +uncle. He was a rotund, rosy old gentleman, fond of comfort and the +courtesies of life, but fond of them more for others, though much for +himself. Elizabeth Barrett in after years wrote of "the brightness of +his carved speech," which would appear to suggest that he practised +that urbane and precise order of wit which was even then +old-fashioned. Yet, notwithstanding many talents of this kind, he was +not so much an able man as the natural friend and equal of able men.</p> + +<p>Browning's circle of friends, however, widened about this time in all +directions. One friend in particular he made, the Comte de +Ripert-Monclar, a French Royalist with whom he prosecuted with renewed +energy his studies in the mediæval and Renaissance schools of +philosophy. It was the Count who suggested that Browning should write +a poetical play on the subject of Paracelsus. After reflection, +indeed, the Count retracted this advice on the ground that the history +of the great mystic gave no room for love. Undismayed by this terrible +deficiency, Browning caught up the idea with characteristic +enthusiasm, and in 1835 appeared the first of his works which he +himself regarded as representative—<i>Paracelsus</i>. The poem shows an +enormous advance in technical literary power; but in the history of +Browning's mind it is chiefly interesting as giving an example of a +peculiarity which clung to him during the whole of his literary life, +an intense love of the holes and corners of history. Fifty-two years +afterwards he wrote <i>Parleyings with certain Persons of Importance in +their Day</i>, the last poem published in <a name="Page_23"></a>his lifetime; and any reader +of that remarkable work will perceive that the common characteristic +of all these persons is not so much that they were of importance in +their day as that they are of no importance in ours. The same +eccentric fastidiousness worked in him as a young man when he wrote +<i>Paracelsus</i> and <i>Sordello</i>. Nowhere in Browning's poetry can we find +any very exhaustive study of any of the great men who are the +favourites of the poet and moralist. He has written about philosophy +and ambition and music and morals, but he has written nothing about +Socrates or Cæsar or Napoleon, or Beethoven or Mozart, or Buddha or +Mahomet. When he wishes to describe a political ambition he selects +that entirely unknown individual, King Victor of Sardinia. When he +wishes to express the most perfect soul of music, he unearths some +extraordinary persons called Abt Vogler and Master Hugues of +Saxe-Gotha. When he wishes to express the largest and sublimest scheme +of morals and religion which his imagination can conceive, he does not +put it into the mouth of any of the great spiritual leaders of +mankind, but into the mouth of an obscure Jewish Rabbi of the name of +Ben Ezra. It is fully in accordance with this fascinating craze of his +that when he wishes to study the deification of the intellect and the +disinterested pursuit of the things of the mind, he does not select +any of the great philosophers from Plato to Darwin, whose +investigations are still of some importance in the eyes of the world. +He selects the figure of all figures most covered with modern satire +and pity, the <i>à priori</i> scientist of the Middle Ages and the +Renaissance. His supreme type of the human intellect is neither the +academic nor the positivist, but the <a name="Page_24"></a>alchemist. It is difficult to +imagine a turn of mind constituting a more complete challenge to the +ordinary modern point of view. To the intellect of our time the wild +investigators of the school of Paracelsus seem to be the very crown +and flower of futility, they are collectors of straws and careful +misers of dust. But for all that Browning was right. Any critic who +understands the true spirit of mediæval science can see that he was +right; no critic can see how right he was unless he understands the +spirit of mediæval science as thoroughly as he did. In the character +of Paracelsus, Browning wished to paint the dangers and +disappointments which attend the man who believes merely in the +intellect. He wished to depict the fall of the logician; and with a +perfect and unerring instinct he selected a man who wrote and spoke in +the tradition of the Middle Ages, the most thoroughly and even +painfully logical period that the world has ever seen. If he had +chosen an ancient Greek philosopher, it would have been open to the +critic to have said that that philosopher relied to some extent upon +the most sunny and graceful social life that ever flourished. If he +had made him a modern sociological professor, it would have been +possible to object that his energies were not wholly concerned with +truth, but partly with the solid and material satisfaction of society. +But the man truly devoted to the things of the mind was the mediæval +magician. It is a remarkable fact that one civilisation does not +satisfy itself by calling another civilisation wicked—it calls it +uncivilised. We call the Chinese barbarians, and they call us +barbarians. The mediæval state, like China, was a foreign +civilisation, and this <a name="Page_25"></a>was its supreme characteristic, that it cared +for the things of the mind for their own sake. To complain of the +researches of its sages on the ground that they were not materially +fruitful, is to act as we should act in telling a gardener that his +roses were not as digestible as our cabbages. It is not only true that +the mediæval philosophers never discovered the steam-engine; it is +quite equally true that they never tried. The Eden of the Middle Ages +was really a garden, where each of God's flowers—truth and beauty and +reason—flourished for its own sake, and with its own name. The Eden +of modern progress is a kitchen garden.</p> + +<p>It would have been hard, therefore, for Browning to have chosen a +better example for his study of intellectual egotism than Paracelsus. +Modern life accuses the mediæval tradition of crushing the intellect; +Browning, with a truer instinct, accuses that tradition of +over-glorifying it. There is, however, another and even more important +deduction to be made from the moral of <i>Paracelsus</i>. The usual +accusation against Browning is that he was consumed with logic; that +he thought all subjects to be the proper pabulum of intellectual +disquisition; that he gloried chiefly in his own power of plucking +knots to pieces and rending fallacies in two; and that to this method +he sacrificed deliberately, and with complete self-complacency, the +element of poetry and sentiment. To people who imagine Browning to +have been this frigid believer in the intellect there is only one +answer necessary or sufficient. It is the fact that he wrote a play +designed to destroy the whole of this intellectualist fallacy at the +age of twenty-three.</p> + +<p><i>Paracelsus</i> was in all likelihood Browning's introduction to the +literary world. It was many years, and <a name="Page_26"></a>even many decades, before he +had anything like a public appreciation, but a very great part of the +minority of those who were destined to appreciate him came over to his +standard upon the publication of <i>Paracelsus</i>. The celebrated John +Forster had taken up <i>Paracelsus</i> "as a thing to slate," and had ended +its perusal with the wildest curiosity about the author and his works. +John Stuart Mill, never backward in generosity, had already interested +himself in Browning, and was finally converted by the same poem. Among +other early admirers were Landor, Leigh Hunt, Horne, Serjeant +Talfourd, and Monckton-Milnes. One man of even greater literary +stature seems to have come into Browning's life about this time, a man +for whom he never ceased to have the warmest affection and trust. +Browning was, indeed, one of the very few men of that period who got +on perfectly with Thomas Carlyle. It is precisely one of those little +things which speak volumes for the honesty and unfathomable good +humour of Browning, that Carlyle, who had a reckless contempt for most +other poets of his day, had something amounting to a real attachment +to him. He would run over to Paris for the mere privilege of dining +with him. Browning, on the other hand, with characteristic +impetuosity, passionately defended and justified Carlyle in all +companies. "I have just seen dear Carlyle," he writes on one occasion; +"catch me calling people dear in a hurry, except in a letter +beginning." He sided with Carlyle in the vexed question of the Carlyle +domestic relations, and his impression of Mrs. Carlyle was that she +was "a hard unlovable woman." As, however, it is on record that he +once, while excitedly explaining some point of <a name="Page_27"></a>mystical philosophy, +put down Mrs. Carlyle's hot kettle on the hearthrug, any frigidity +that he may have observed in her manner may possibly find a natural +explanation. His partisanship in the Carlyle affair, which was +characteristically headlong and human, may not throw much light on +that painful problem itself, but it throws a great deal of light on +the character of Browning, which was pugnaciously proud of its +friends, and had what may almost be called a lust of loyalty. Browning +was not capable of that most sagacious detachment which enabled +Tennyson to say that he could not agree that the Carlyles ought never +to have married, since if they had each married elsewhere there would +have been four miserable people instead of two.</p> + +<p>Among the motley and brilliant crowd with which Browning had now begun +to mingle, there was no figure more eccentric and spontaneous than +that of Macready the actor. This extraordinary person, a man living +from hand to mouth in all things spiritual and pecuniary, a man +feeding upon flying emotions, conceived something like an attraction +towards Browning, spoke of him as the very ideal of a young poet, and +in a moment of peculiar excitement suggested to him the writing of a +great play. Browning was a man fundamentally indeed more steadfast and +prosaic, but on the surface fully as rapid and easily infected as +Macready. He immediately began to plan out a great historical play, +and selected for his subject "Strafford."</p> + +<p>In Browning's treatment of the subject there is something more than a +trace of his Puritan and Liberal upbringing. It is one of the very +earliest of the <a name="Page_28"></a>really important works in English literature which +are based on the Parliamentarian reading of the incidents of the time +of Charles I. It is true that the finest element in the play is the +opposition between Strafford and Pym, an opposition so complete, so +lucid, so consistent, that it has, so to speak, something of the +friendly openness and agreement which belongs to an alliance. The two +men love each other and fight each other, and do the two things at the +same time completely. This is a great thing of which even to attempt +the description. It is easy to have the impartiality which can speak +judicially of both parties, but it is not so easy to have that larger +and higher impartiality which can speak passionately on behalf of both +parties. Nevertheless, it may be permissible to repeat that there is +in the play a definite trace of Browning's Puritan education and +Puritan historical outlook.</p> + +<p>For <i>Strafford</i> is, of course, an example of that most difficult of +all literary works—a political play. The thing has been achieved once +at least admirably in Shakespeare's <i>Julius Cæsar</i>, and something like +it, though from a more one-sided and romantic stand-point, has been +done excellently in <i>L'Aiglon</i>. But the difficulties of such a play +are obvious on the face of the matter. In a political play the +principal characters are not merely men. They are symbols, +arithmetical figures representing millions of other men outside. It +is, by dint of elaborate stage management, possible to bring a mob +upon the boards, but the largest mob ever known is nothing but a +floating atom of the people; and the people of which the politician +has to think does not consist of knots of rioters in the street, but +of some million absolutely <a name="Page_29"></a>distinct individuals, each sitting in his +own breakfast room reading his own morning paper. To give even the +faintest suggestion of the strength and size of the people in this +sense in the course of a dramatic performance is obviously impossible. +That is why it is so easy on the stage to concentrate all the pathos +and dignity upon such persons as Charles I. and Mary Queen of Scots, +the vampires of their people, because within the minute limits of a +stage there is room for their small virtues and no room for their +enormous crimes. It would be impossible to find a stronger example +than the case of <i>Strafford</i>. It is clear that no one could possibly +tell the whole truth about the life and death of Strafford, +politically considered, in a play. Strafford was one of the greatest +men ever born in England, and he attempted to found a great English +official despotism. That is to say, he attempted to found something +which is so different from what has actually come about that we can in +reality scarcely judge of it, any more than we can judge whether it +would be better to live in another planet, or pleasanter to have been +born a dog or an elephant. It would require enormous imagination to +reconstruct the political ideals of Strafford. Now Browning, as we all +know, got over the matter in his play, by practically denying that +Strafford had any political ideals at all. That is to say, while +crediting Strafford with all his real majesty of intellect and +character, he makes the whole of his political action dependent upon +his passionate personal attachment to the King. This is +unsatisfactory; it is in reality a dodging of the great difficulty of +the political play. That difficulty, in the case of any political +problem, <a name="Page_30"></a>is, as has been said, great. It would be very hard, for +example, to construct a play about Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bill. It +would be almost impossible to get expressed in a drama of some five +acts and some twenty characters anything so ancient and complicated as +that Irish problem, the roots of which lie in the darkness of the age +of Strongbow, and the branches of which spread out to the remotest +commonwealths of the East and West. But we should scarcely be +satisfied if a dramatist overcame the difficulty by ascribing Mr. +Gladstone's action in the Home Rule question to an overwhelming +personal affection for Mr. Healy. And in thus basing Strafford's +action upon personal and private reasons, Browning certainly does some +injustice to the political greatness, of Strafford. To attribute Mr. +Gladstone's conversion to Home Rule to an infatuation such as that +suggested above, would certainly have the air of implying that the +writer thought the Home Rule doctrine a peculiar or untenable one. +Similarly, Browning's choice of a motive for Strafford has very much +the air of an assumption that there was nothing to be said on public +grounds for Strafford's political ideal. Now this is certainly not the +case. The Puritans in the great struggles of the reign of Charles I. +may have possessed more valuable ideals than the Royalists, but it is +a very vulgar error to suppose that they were any more idealistic. In +Browning's play Pym is made almost the incarnation of public spirit, +and Strafford of private ties. But not only may an upholder of +despotism be public-spirited, but in the case of prominent upholders +of it like Strafford he generally is. Despotism indeed, and attempts +at despotism, like that of Strafford, are <a name="Page_31"></a>a kind of disease of public +spirit. They represent, as it were, the drunkenness of responsibility. +It is when men begin to grow desperate in their love for the people, +when they are overwhelmed with the difficulties and blunders of +humanity, that they fall back upon a wild desire to manage everything +themselves. Their faith in themselves is only a disillusionment with +mankind. They are in that most dreadful position, dreadful alike in +personal and public affairs—the position of the man who has lost +faith and not lost love. This belief that all would go right if we +could only get the strings into our own hands is a fallacy almost +without exception, but nobody can justly say that it is not +public-spirited. The sin and sorrow of despotism is not that it does +not love men, but that it loves them too much and trusts them too +little. Therefore from age to age in history arise these great +despotic dreamers, whether they be Royalists or Imperialists or even +Socialists, who have at root this idea, that the world would enter +into rest if it went their way and forswore altogether the right of +going its own way. When a man begins to think that the grass will not +grow at night unless he lies awake to watch it, he generally ends +either in an asylum or on the throne of an Emperor. Of these men +Strafford was one, and we cannot but feel that Browning somewhat +narrows the significance and tragedy of his place in history by making +him merely the champion of a personal idiosyncrasy against a great +public demand. Strafford was something greater than this; if indeed, +when we come to think of it, a man can be anything greater than the +friend of another man. But the whole question is interesting, because +Browning, although he <a name="Page_32"></a>never again attacked a political drama of such +palpable importance as <i>Strafford</i>, could never keep politics +altogether out of his dramatic work. <i>King Victor and King Charles</i>, +which followed it, is a political play, the study of a despotic +instinct much meaner than that of Strafford. <i>Colombe's Birthday</i>, +again, is political as well as romantic. Politics in its historic +aspect would seem to have had a great fascination for him, as indeed +it must have for all ardent intellects, since it is the one thing in +the world that is as intellectual as the <i>Encyclopædia Britannica</i> and +as rapid as the Derby.</p> + +<p>One of the favourite subjects among those who like to conduct long +controversies about Browning (and their name is legion) is the +question of whether Browning's plays, such as <i>Strafford</i>, were +successes upon the stage. As they are never agreed about what +constitutes a success on the stage, it is difficult to adjudge their +quarrels. But the general fact is very simple; such a play as +<i>Strafford</i> was not a gigantic theatrical success, and nobody, it is +to be presumed, ever imagined that it would be. On the other hand, it +was certainly not a failure, but was enjoyed and applauded as are +hundreds of excellent plays which run only for a week or two, as many +excellent plays do, and as all plays ought to do. Above all, the +definite success which attended the representation of <i>Strafford</i> from +the point of view of the more educated and appreciative was quite +enough to establish Browning in a certain definite literary position. +As a classical and established personality he did not come into his +kingdom for years and decades afterwards; not, indeed, until he was +near to entering upon the final rest. But as a detached and eccentric +personality, as a man who existed and who <a name="Page_33"></a>had arisen on the outskirts +of literature, the world began to be conscious of him at this time.</p> + +<p>Of what he was personally at the period that he thus became personally +apparent, Mrs. Bridell Fox has left a very vivid little sketch. She +describes how Browning called at the house (he was acquainted with her +father), and finding that gentleman out, asked with a kind of abrupt +politeness if he might play on the piano. This touch is very +characteristic of the mingled aplomb and unconsciousness of Browning's +social manner. "He was then," she writes, "slim and dark, and very +handsome, and—may I hint it?—just a trifle of a dandy, addicted to +lemon-coloured kid gloves and such things, quite the glass of fashion +and the mould of form. But full of 'ambition,' eager for success, +eager for fame, and, what is more, determined to conquer fame and to +achieve success." That is as good a portrait as we can have of the +Browning of these days—quite self-satisfied, but not self-conscious +young man; one who had outgrown, but only just outgrown, the pure +romanticism of his boyhood, which made him run after gipsy caravans +and listen to nightingales in the wood; a man whose incandescent +vitality, now that it had abandoned gipsies and not yet immersed +itself in casuistical poems, devoted itself excitedly to trifles, such +as lemon-coloured kid gloves and fame. But a man still above all +things perfectly young and natural, professing that foppery which +follows the fashions, and not that sillier and more demoralising +foppery which defies them. Just as he walked in coolly and yet +impulsively into a private drawing-room and offered to play, so he +walked at this time into the huge and crowded salon of European +literature and offered to sing.</p><a name="Page_34"></a> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<a name="CHAPTER_II"></a><h2>CHAPTER II</h2> + +<h2>EARLY WORKS</h2> + + +<p>In 1840 <i>Sordello</i> was published. Its reception by the great majority +of readers, including some of the ablest men of the time, was a +reception of a kind probably unknown in the rest of literary history, +a reception that was neither praise nor blame. It was perhaps best +expressed by Carlyle, who wrote to say that his wife had read +<i>Sordello</i> with great interest, and wished to know whether Sordello +was a man, or a city, or a book. Better known, of course, is the story +of Tennyson, who said that the first line of the poem—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"Who will, may hear Sordello's story told,"</p></div> + +<p>and the last line—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"Who would, has heard Sordello's story told,"</p></div> + +<p>were the only two lines in the poem that he understood, and they were +lies.</p> + +<p>Perhaps the best story, however, of all the cycle of Sordello legends +is that which is related of Douglas Jerrold. He was recovering from an +illness; and having obtained permission for the first time to read a +little during the day, he picked up a book from a pile beside the bed +and began <i>Sordello</i>. No sooner had he done so than he turned deadly +pale, put <a name="Page_35"></a>down the book, and said, "My God! I'm an idiot. My health +is restored, but my mind's gone. I can't understand two consecutive +lines of an English poem." He then summoned his family and silently +gave the book into their hands, asking for their opinion on the poem; +and as the shadow of perplexity gradually passed over their faces, he +heaved a sigh of relief and went to sleep. These stories, whether +accurate or no, do undoubtedly represent the very peculiar reception +accorded to <i>Sordello</i>, a reception which, as I have said, bears no +resemblance whatever to anything in the way of eulogy or condemnation +that had ever been accorded to a work of art before. There had been +authors whom it was fashionable to boast of admiring and authors whom +it was fashionable to boast of despising; but with <i>Sordello</i> enters +into literary history the Browning of popular badinage, the author +whom it is fashionable to boast of not understanding.</p> + +<p>Putting aside for the moment the literary qualities which are to be +found in the poem, when it becomes intelligible, there is one question +very relevant to the fame and character of Browning which is raised by +<i>Sordello</i> when it is considered, as most people consider it, as +hopelessly unintelligible. It really throws some light upon the reason +of Browning's obscurity. The ordinary theory of Browning's obscurity +is to the effect that it was a piece of intellectual vanity indulged +in more and more insolently as his years and fame increased. There are +at least two very decisive objections to this popular explanation. In +the first place, it must emphatically be said for Browning that in all +the numerous records and impressions of him throughout his long and +very public life, there is not one iota of <a name="Page_36"></a>evidence that he was a man +who was intellectually vain. The evidence is entirely the other way. +He was vain of many things, of his physical health, for example, and +even more of the physical health which he contrived to bestow for a +certain period upon his wife. From the records of his early dandyism, +his flowing hair and his lemon-coloured gloves, it is probable enough +that he was vain of his good looks. He was vain of his masculinity, +his knowledge of the world, and he was, I fancy, decidedly vain of his +prejudices, even, it might be said, vain of being vain of them. But +everything is against the idea that he was much in the habit of +thinking of himself in his intellectual aspect. In the matter of +conversation, for example, some people who liked him found him genial, +talkative, anecdotal, with a certain strengthening and sanative +quality in his mere bodily presence. Some people who did not like him +found him a mere frivolous chatterer, afflicted with bad manners. One +lady, who knew him well, said that, though he only met you in a crowd +and made some commonplace remark, you went for the rest of the day +with your head up. Another lady who did not know him, and therefore +disliked him, asked after a dinner party, "Who was that too-exuberant +financier?" These are the diversities of feeling about him. But they +all agree in one point—that he did not talk cleverly, or try to talk +cleverly, as that proceeding is understood in literary circles. He +talked positively, he talked a great deal, but he never attempted to +give that neat and æsthetic character to his speech which is almost +invariable in the case of the man who is vain of his mental +superiority. When he did impress people with mental gymnastics, it was +mostly in the form of pouring <a name="Page_37"></a>out, with passionate enthusiasm, whole +epics written by other people, which is the last thing that the +literary egotist would be likely to waste his time over. We have +therefore to start with an enormous psychological improbability that +Browning made his poems complicated from mere pride in his powers and +contempt of his readers.</p> + +<p>There is, however, another very practical objection to the ordinary +theory that Browning's obscurity was a part of the intoxication of +fame and intellectual consideration. We constantly hear the statement +that Browning's intellectual complexity increased with his later +poems, but the statement is simply not true. <i>Sordello</i>, to the +indescribable density of which he never afterwards even approached, +was begun before <i>Strafford</i>, and was therefore the third of his +works, and even if we adopt his own habit of ignoring <i>Pauline</i>, the +second. He wrote the greater part of it when he was twenty-four. It +was in his youth, at the time when a man is thinking of love and +publicity, of sunshine and singing birds, that he gave birth to this +horror of great darkness; and the more we study the matter with any +knowledge of the nature of youth, the more we shall come to the +conclusion that Browning's obscurity had altogether the opposite +origin to that which is usually assigned to it. He was not +unintelligible because he was proud, but unintelligible because he was +humble. He was not unintelligible because his thoughts were vague, but +because to him they were obvious.</p> + +<p>A man who is intellectually vain does not make himself +incomprehensible, because he is so enormously impressed with the +difference between his readers'<a name="Page_38"></a> intelligence and his own that he +talks down to them with elaborate repetition and lucidity. What poet +was ever vainer than Byron? What poet was ever so magnificently lucid? +But a young man of genius who has a genuine humility in his heart does +not elaborately explain his discoveries, because he does not think +that they are discoveries. He thinks that the whole street is humming +with his ideas, and that the postman and the tailor are poets like +himself. Browning's impenetrable poetry was the natural expression of +this beautiful optimism. <i>Sordello</i> was the most glorious compliment +that has ever been paid to the average man.</p> + +<p>In the same manner, of course, outward obscurity is in a young author +a mark of inward clarity. A man who is vague in his ideas does not +speak obscurely, because his own dazed and drifting condition leads +him to clutch at phrases like ropes and use the formulæ that every one +understands. No one ever found Miss Marie Corelli obscure, because she +believes only in words. But if a young man really has ideas of his +own, he must be obscure at first, because he lives in a world of his +own in which there are symbols and correspondences and categories +unknown to the rest of the world. Let us take an imaginary example. +Suppose that a young poet had developed by himself a peculiar idea +that all forms of excitement, including religious excitement, were a +kind of evil intoxication, he might say to himself continually that +churches were in reality taverns, and this idea would become so fixed +in his mind that he would forget that no such association existed in +the minds of others. And suppose that in pursuance of this general +idea, which is a <a name="Page_39"></a>perfectly clear and intellectual idea, though a very +silly one, he were to say that he believed in Puritanism without its +theology, and were to repeat this idea also to himself until it became +instinctive and familiar, such a man might take up a pen, and under +the impression that he was saying something figurative indeed, but +quite clear and suggestive, write some such sentence as this, "You +will not get the godless Puritan into your white taverns," and no one +in the length and breadth of the country could form the remotest +notion of what he could mean. So it would have been in any example, +for instance, of a man who made some philosophical discovery and did +not realise how far the world was from it. If it had been possible for +a poet in the sixteenth century to hit upon and learn to regard as +obvious the evolutionary theory of Darwin, he might have written down +some such line as "the radiant offspring of the ape," and the maddest +volumes of mediæval natural history would have been ransacked for the +meaning of the allusion. The more fixed and solid and sensible the +idea appeared to him, the more dark and fantastic it would have +appeared to the world. Most of us indeed, if we ever say anything +valuable, say it when we are giving expression to that part of us +which has become as familiar and invisible as the pattern on our wall +paper. It is only when an idea has become a matter of course to the +thinker that it becomes startling to the world.</p> + +<p>It is worth while to dwell upon this preliminary point of the ground +of Browning's obscurity, because it involves an important issue about +him. Our whole view of Browning is bound to be absolutely different, +and I think absolutely false, if we start with the conception <a name="Page_40"></a>that he +was what the French call an intellectual. If we see Browning with the +eyes of his particular followers, we shall inevitably think this. For +his followers are pre-eminently intellectuals, and there never lived +upon the earth a great man who was so fundamentally different from his +followers. Indeed, he felt this heartily and even humorously himself. +"Wilkes was no Wilkite," he said, "and I am very far from being a +Browningite." We shall, as I say, utterly misunderstand Browning at +every step of his career if we suppose that he was the sort of man who +would be likely to take a pleasure in asserting the subtlety and +abstruseness of his message. He took pleasure beyond all question in +himself; in the strictest sense of the word he enjoyed himself. But +his conception of himself was never that of the intellectual. He +conceived himself rather as a sanguine and strenuous man, a great +fighter. "I was ever," as he says, "a fighter." His faults, a certain +occasional fierceness and grossness, were the faults that are counted +as virtues among navvies and sailors and most primitive men. His +virtues, boyishness and absolute fidelity, and a love of plain words +and things are the virtues which are counted as vices among the +æsthetic prigs who pay him the greatest honour. He had his more +objectionable side, like other men, but it had nothing to do with +literary egotism. He was not vain of being an extraordinary man. He +was only somewhat excessively vain of being an ordinary one.</p> + +<p>The Browning then who published <i>Sordello</i> we have to conceive, not as +a young pedant anxious to exaggerate his superiority to the public, +but as a hot-headed, strong-minded, inexperienced, and essentially +humble <a name="Page_41"></a>man, who had more ideas than he knew how to disentangle from +each other. If we compare, for example, the complexity of Browning +with the clarity of Matthew Arnold, we shall realise that the cause +lies in the fact that Matthew Arnold was an intellectual aristocrat, +and Browning an intellectual democrat. The particular peculiarities of +<i>Sordello</i> illustrate the matter very significantly. A very great part +of the difficulty of <i>Sordello</i>, for instance, is in the fact that +before the reader even approaches to tackling the difficulties of +Browning's actual narrative, he is apparently expected to start with +an exhaustive knowledge of that most shadowy and bewildering of all +human epochs—the period of the Guelph and Ghibelline struggles in +mediæval Italy. Here, of course, Browning simply betrays that +impetuous humility which we have previously observed. His father was a +student of mediæval chronicles, he had himself imbibed that learning +in the same casual manner in which a boy learns to walk or to play +cricket. Consequently in a literary sense he rushed up to the first +person he met and began talking about Ecelo and Taurello Salinguerra +with about as much literary egotism as an English baby shows when it +talks English to an Italian organ grinder. Beyond this the poem of +<i>Sordello</i>, powerful as it is, does not present any very significant +advance in Browning's mental development on that already represented +by <i>Pauline</i> and <i>Paracelsus</i>. <i>Pauline, Paracelsus</i>, and <i>Sordello</i> +stand together in the general fact that they are all, in the excellent +phrase used about the first by Mr. Johnson Fox, "confessional." All +three are analyses of the weakness which every artistic temperament +finds in <a name="Page_42"></a>itself. Browning is still writing about himself, a subject +of which he, like all good and brave men, was profoundly ignorant. +This kind of self-analysis is always misleading. For we do not see in +ourselves those dominant traits strong enough to force themselves out +in action which our neighbours see. We see only a welter of minute +mental experiences which include all the sins that were ever committed +by Nero or Sir Willoughby Patterne. When studying ourselves, we are +looking at a fresco with a magnifying glass. Consequently, these early +impressions which great men have given of themselves are nearly always +slanders upon themselves, for the strongest man is weak to his own +conscience, and Hamlet flourished to a certainty even inside Napoleon. +So it was with Browning, who when he was nearly eighty was destined to +write with the hilarity of a schoolboy, but who wrote in his boyhood +poems devoted to analysing the final break-up of intellect and soul.</p> + +<p><i>Sordello</i>, with all its load of learning, and almost more oppressive +load of beauty, has never had any very important influence even upon +Browningites, and with the rest of the world the name has passed into +a jest. The most truly memorable thing about it was Browning's saying +in answer to all gibes and misconceptions, a saying which expresses +better than anything else what genuine metal was in him, "I blame no +one, least of all myself, who did my best then and since." This is +indeed a model for all men of letters who do not wish to retain only +the letters and to lose the man.</p> + +<p>When next Browning spoke, it was from a greater height and with a new +voice. His visit to Asolo, "his <a name="Page_43"></a>first love," as he said, "among +Italian cities," coincided with the stir and transformation in his +spirit and the breaking up of that splendid palace of mirrors in which +a man like Byron had lived and died. In 1841 <i>Pippa Passes</i> appeared, +and with it the real Browning of the modern world. He had made the +discovery which Byron never made, but which almost every young man +does at last make—the thrilling discovery that he is not Robinson +Crusoe. <i>Pippa Passes</i> is the greatest poem ever written, with the +exception of one or two by Walt Whitman, to express the sentiment of +the pure love of humanity. The phrase has unfortunately a false and +pedantic sound. The love of humanity is a thing supposed to be +professed only by vulgar and officious philanthropists, or by saints +of a superhuman detachment and universality. As a matter of fact, love +of humanity is the commonest and most natural of the feelings of a +fresh nature, and almost every one has felt it alight capriciously +upon him when looking at a crowded park or a room full of dancers. The +love of those whom we do not know is quite as eternal a sentiment as +the love of those whom we do know. In our friends the richness of life +is proved to us by what we have gained; in the faces in the street the +richness of life is proved to us by the hint of what we have lost. And +this feeling for strange faces and strange lives, when it is felt +keenly by a young man, almost always expresses itself in a desire +after a kind of vagabond beneficence, a desire to go through the world +scattering goodness like a capricious god. It is desired that mankind +should hunt in vain for its best friend as it would hunt for a +criminal; that he should be an anonymous Saviour, an unrecorded +Christ. Browning, like <a name="Page_44"></a>every one else, when awakened to the beauty +and variety of men, dreamed of this arrogant self-effacement. He has +written of himself that he had long thought vaguely of a being passing +through the world, obscure and unnameable, but moulding the destinies +of others to mightier and better issues. Then his almost faultless +artistic instinct came in and suggested that this being, whom he +dramatised as the work-girl, Pippa, should be even unconscious of +anything but her own happiness, and should sway men's lives with a +lonely mirth. It was a bold and moving conception to show us these +mature and tragic human groups all at the supreme moment eavesdropping +upon the solitude of a child. And it was an even more precise instinct +which made Browning make the errant benefactor a woman. A man's good +work is effected by doing what he does, a woman's by being what she +is.</p> + +<p>There is one other point about <i>Pippa Passes</i> which is worth a +moment's attention. The great difficulty with regard to the +understanding of Browning is the fact that, to all appearance, +scarcely any one can be induced to take him seriously as a literary +artist. His adversaries consider his literary vagaries a +disqualification for every position among poets; and his admirers +regard those vagaries with the affectionate indulgence of a circle of +maiden aunts towards a boy home for the holidays. Browning is supposed +to do as he likes with form, because he had such a profound scheme of +thought. But, as a matter of fact, though few of his followers will +take Browning's literary form seriously, he took his own literary form +very seriously. Now <i>Pippa Passes</i> is, among other things, eminently +remarkable as a very original artistic form, a series of <a name="Page_45"></a>disconnected +but dramatic scenes which have only in common the appearance of one +figure. For this admirable literary departure Browning, amid all the +laudations of his "mind" and his "message," has scarcely ever had +credit. And just as we should, if we took Browning seriously as a +poet, see that he had made many noble literary forms, so we should +also see that he did make from time to time certain definite literary +mistakes. There is one of them, a glaring one, in <i>Pippa Passes</i>; and, +as far as I know, no critic has ever thought enough of Browning as an +artist to point it out. It is a gross falsification of the whole +beauty of <i>Pippa Passes</i> to make the Monseigneur and his accomplice in +the last act discuss a plan touching the fate of Pippa herself. The +whole central and splendid idea of the drama is the fact that Pippa is +utterly remote from the grand folk whose lives she troubles and +transforms. To make her in the end turn out to be the niece of one of +them, is like a whiff from an Adelphi melodrama, an excellent thing in +its place, but destructive of the entire conception of Pippa. Having +done that, Browning might just as well have made Sebald turn out to be +her long lost brother, and Luigi a husband to whom she was secretly +married. Browning made this mistake when his own splendid artistic +power was only growing, and its merits and its faults in a tangle. But +its real literary merits and its real literary faults have alike +remained unrecognised under the influence of that unfortunate +intellectualism which idolises Browning as a metaphysician and +neglects him as a poet. But a better test was coming. Browning's +poetry, in the most strictly poetical sense, reached its flower in +<i>Dramatic Lyrics</i>, published in 1842. Here <a name="Page_46"></a>he showed himself a +picturesque and poignant artist in a wholly original manner. And the +two main characteristics of the work were the two characteristics most +commonly denied to Browning, both by his opponents and his followers, +passion and beauty; but beauty had enlarged her boundaries in new +modes of dramatic arrangement, and passion had found new voices in +fantastic and realistic verse. Those who suppose Browning to be a +wholly philosophic poet, number a great majority of his commentators. +But when we come to look at the actual facts, they are strangely and +almost unexpectedly otherwise.</p> + +<p>Let any one who believes in the arrogantly intellectual character of +Browning's poetry run through the actual repertoire of the <i>Dramatic +Lyrics</i>. The first item consists of those splendid war chants called +"Cavalier Tunes." I do not imagine that any one will maintain that +there is any very mysterious metaphysical aim in them. The second item +is the fine poem "The Lost Leader," a poem which expresses in +perfectly lucid and lyrical verse a perfectly normal and old-fashioned +indignation. It is the same, however far we carry the query. What +theory does the next poem, "How they brought the Good News from Ghent +to Aix," express, except the daring speculation that it is often +exciting to ride a good horse in Belgium? What theory does the poem +after that, "Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr," express, except that +it is also frequently exciting to ride a good horse in Africa? Then +comes "Nationality in Drinks," a mere technical oddity without a gleam +of philosophy; and after that those two entirely exquisite "Garden +Fancies," the first of which is devoted to the abstruse thesis that a +woman may be <a name="Page_47"></a>charming, and the second to the equally abstruse thesis +that a book may be a bore. Then comes "The Soliloquy of the Spanish +Cloister," from which the most ingenious "Browning student" cannot +extract anything except that people sometimes hate each other in +Spain; and then "The Laboratory," from which he could extract nothing +except that people sometimes hate each other in France. This is a +perfectly honest record of the poems as they stand. And the first +eleven poems read straight off are remarkable for these two obvious +characteristics—first, that they contain not even a suggestion of +anything that could be called philosophy; and second, that they +contain a considerable proportion of the best and most typical poems +that Browning ever wrote. It may be repeated that either he wrote +these lyrics because he had an artistic sense, or it is impossible to +hazard even the wildest guess as to why he wrote them.</p> + +<p>It is permissible to say that the <i>Dramatic Lyrics</i> represent the +arrival of the real Browning of literary history. It is true that he +had written already many admirable poems of a far more ambitious +plan—<i>Paracelsus</i> with its splendid version of the faults of the +intellectual, <i>Pippa Passes</i> with its beautiful deification of +unconscious influence. But youth is always ambitious and universal; +mature work exhibits more of individuality, more of the special type +and colour of work which a man is destined to do. Youth is universal, +but not individual. The genius who begins life with a very genuine and +sincere doubt whether he is meant to be an exquisite and idolised +violinist, or the most powerful and eloquent Prime Minister of modern +times, does at last end by making <a name="Page_48"></a>the discovery that there is, after +all, one thing, possibly a certain style of illustrating Nursery +Rhymes, which he can really do better than any one else. This was what +happened to Browning; like every one else, he had to discover first +the universe, and then humanity, and at last himself. With him, as +with all others, the great paradox and the great definition of life +was this, that the ambition narrows as the mind expands. In <i>Dramatic +Lyrics</i> he discovered the one thing that he could really do better +than any one else—the dramatic lyric. The form is absolutely +original: he had discovered a new field of poetry, and in the centre +of that field he had found himself.</p> + +<p>The actual quality, the actual originality of the form is a little +difficult to describe. But its general characteristic is the fearless +and most dexterous use of grotesque things in order to express sublime +emotions. The best and most characteristic of the poems are +love-poems; they express almost to perfection the real wonderland of +youth, but they do not express it by the ideal imagery of most poets +of love. The imagery of these poems consists, if we may take a rapid +survey of Browning's love poetry, of suburban streets, straws, +garden-rakes, medicine bottles, pianos, window-blinds, burnt cork, +fashionable fur coats. But in this new method he thoroughly expressed +the true essential, the insatiable realism of passion. If any one +wished to prove that Browning was not, as he is said to be, the poet +of thought, but pre-eminently one of the poets of passion, we could +scarcely find a better evidence of this profoundly passionate element +than Browning's astonishing realism in love poetry. There is nothing +so fiercely realistic as sentiment and emotion. Thought <a name="Page_49"></a>and the +intellect are content to accept abstractions, summaries, and +generalisations; they are content that ten acres of ground should be +called for the sake of argument X, and ten widows' incomes called for +the sake of argument Y; they are content that a thousand awful and +mysterious disappearances from the visible universe should be summed +up as the mortality of a district, or that ten thousand intoxications +of the soul should bear the general name of the instinct of sex. +Rationalism can live upon air and signs and numbers. But sentiment +must have reality; emotion demands the real fields, the real widows' +homes, the real corpse, and the real woman. And therefore Browning's +love poetry is the finest love poetry in the world, because it does +not talk about raptures and ideals and gates of heaven, but about +window-panes and gloves and garden walls. It does not deal much with +abstractions; it is the truest of all love poetry, because it does not +speak much about love. It awakens in every man the memories of that +immortal instant when common and dead things had a meaning beyond the +power of any dictionary to utter, and a value beyond the power of any +millionaire to compute. He expresses the celestial time when a man +does not think about heaven, but about a parasol. And therefore he is, +first, the greatest of love poets, and, secondly, the only optimistic +philosopher except Whitman.</p> + +<p>The general accusation against Browning in connection with his use of +the grotesque comes in very definitely here; for in using these homely +and practical images, these allusions, bordering on what many would +call the commonplace, he was indeed true to the actual and abiding +spirit of love. In that delightful <a name="Page_50"></a>poem "Youth and Art" we have the +singing girl saying to her old lover—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"No harm! It was not my fault<br /> +<span class="i2">If you never turned your eye's tail up</span> +As I shook upon E <i>in alt</i>,<br /> +<span class="i2">Or ran the chromatic scale up."</span></p></div> + +<p>This is a great deal more like the real chaff that passes between +those whose hearts are full of new hope or of old memory than half the +great poems of the world. Browning never forgets the little details +which to a man who has ever really lived may suddenly send an arrow +through the heart. Take, for example, such a matter as dress, as it is +treated in "A Lover's Quarrel."</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"See, how she looks now, dressed<br /> +In a sledging cap and vest!<br /> +<span class="i2">'Tis a huge fur cloak—</span> +<span class="i2">Like a reindeer's yoke</span> +Falls the lappet along the breast:<br /> +Sleeves for her arms to rest,<br /> +Or to hang, as my Love likes best."</p></div> + +<p>That would almost serve as an order to a dressmaker, and is therefore +poetry, or at least excellent poetry of this order. So great a power +have these dead things of taking hold on the living spirit, that I +question whether any one could read through the catalogue of a +miscellaneous auction sale without coming upon things which, if +realised for a moment, would be near to the elemental tears. And if +any of us or all of us are truly optimists, and believe as Browning +did, that existence has a value wholly inexpressible, we are most +truly compelled to that sentiment not by any argument or triumphant +justification of the cosmos, <a name="Page_51"></a>but by a few of these momentary and +immortal sights and sounds, a gesture, an old song, a portrait, a +piano, an old door.</p> + +<p>In 1843 appeared that marvellous drama <i>The Return of the Druses</i>, a +work which contains more of Browning's typical qualities exhibited in +an exquisite literary shape, than can easily be counted. We have in +<i>The Return of the Druses</i> his love of the corners of history, his +interest in the religious mind of the East, with its almost terrifying +sense of being in the hand of heaven, his love of colour and verbal +luxury, of gold and green and purple, which made some think he must be +an Oriental himself. But, above all, it presents the first rise of +that great psychological ambition which Browning was thenceforth to +pursue. In <i>Pauline</i> and the poems that follow it, Browning has only +the comparatively easy task of giving an account of himself. In <i>Pippa +Passes</i> he has the only less easy task of giving an account of +humanity. In <i>The Return of the Druses</i> he has for the first time the +task which is so much harder than giving an account of humanity—the +task of giving an account of a human being. Djabal, the great Oriental +impostor, who is the central character of the play, is a peculiarly +subtle character, a compound of blasphemous and lying assumptions of +Godhead with genuine and stirring patriotic and personal feelings: he +is a blend, so to speak, of a base divinity and of a noble humanity. +He is supremely important in the history of Browning's mind, for he is +the first of that great series of the apologiæ of apparently evil men, +on which the poet was to pour out so much of his imaginative +wealth—Djabal, Fra Lippo, Bishop Blougram, Sludge, Prince +Hohenstiel-Schwangau, and the hero of <i>Fifine at the Fair</i>.</p><a name="Page_52"></a> + +<p>With this play, so far as any point can be fixed for the matter, he +enters for the first time on the most valuable of all his labours—the +defence of the indefensible. It may be noticed that Browning was not +in the least content with the fact that certain human frailties had +always lain more or less under an implied indulgence; that all human +sentiment had agreed that a profligate might be generous, or that a +drunkard might be high-minded. He was insatiable: he wished to go +further and show in a character like Djabal that an impostor might be +generous and that a liar might be high-minded. In all his life, it +must constantly be remembered, he tried always the most difficult +things. Just as he tried the queerest metres and attempted to manage +them, so he tried the queerest human souls and attempted to stand in +their place. Charity was his basic philosophy; but it was, as it were, +a fierce charity, a charity that went man-hunting. He was a kind of +cosmic detective who walked into the foulest of thieves' kitchens and +accused men publicly of virtue. The character of Djabal in <i>The Return +of the Druses</i> is the first of this long series of forlorn hopes for +the relief of long surrendered castles of misconduct. As we shall see, +even realising the humanity of a noble impostor like Djabal did not +content his erratic hunger for goodness. He went further again, and +realised the humanity of a mean impostor like Sludge. But in all +things he retained this essential characteristic, that he was not +content with seeking sinners—he sought the sinners whom even sinners +cast out.</p> + +<p>Browning's feeling of ambition in the matter of the drama continued to +grow at this time. It must be remembered that he had every natural +<a name="Page_53"></a>tendency to be theatrical, though he lacked the essential lucidity. +He was not, as a matter of fact, a particularly unsuccessful +dramatist; but in the world of abstract temperaments he was by nature +an unsuccessful dramatist. He was, that is to say, a man who loved +above all things plain and sensational words, open catastrophes, a +clear and ringing conclusion to everything. But it so happened, +unfortunately, that his own words were not plain; that his +catastrophes came with a crashing and sudden unintelligibleness which +left men in doubt whether the thing were a catastrophe or a great +stroke of good luck; that his conclusion, though it rang like a +trumpet to the four corners of heaven, was in its actual message quite +inaudible. We are bound to admit, on the authority of all his best +critics and admirers, that his plays were not failures, but we can all +feel that they should have been. He was, as it were, by nature a +neglected dramatist. He was one of those who achieve the reputation, +in the literal sense, of eccentricity by their frantic efforts to +reach the centre.</p> + +<p><i>A Blot on the 'Scutcheon</i> followed <i>The Return of the Druses</i>. In +connection with the performance of this very fine play a quarrel arose +which would not be worth mentioning if it did not happen to illustrate +the curious energetic simplicity of Browning's character. Macready, +who was in desperately low financial circumstances at this time, tried +by every means conceivable to avoid playing the part; he dodged, he +shuffled, he tried every evasion that occurred to him, but it never +occurred to Browning to see what he meant. He pushed off the part upon +Phelps, and Browning was contented; he resumed it, and Browning was +only <a name="Page_54"></a>discontented on behalf of Phelps. The two had a quarrel; they +were both headstrong, passionate men, but the quarrel dealt entirely +with the unfortunate condition of Phelps. Browning beat down his own +hat over his eyes; Macready flung Browning's manuscript with a slap +upon the floor. But all the time it never occurred to the poet that +Macready's conduct was dictated by anything so crude and simple as a +desire for money. Browning was in fact by his principles and his +ideals a man of the world, but in his life far otherwise. That worldly +ease which is to most of us a temptation was to him an ideal. He was +as it were a citizen of the New Jerusalem who desired with perfect +sanity and simplicity to be a citizen of Mayfair. There was in him a +quality which can only be most delicately described; for it was a +virtue which bears a strange resemblance to one of the meanest of +vices. Those curious people who think the truth a thing that can be +said violently and with ease, might naturally call Browning a snob. He +was fond of society, of fashion and even of wealth: but there is no +snobbery in admiring these things or any things if we admire them for +the right reasons. He admired them as worldlings cannot admire them: +he was, as it were, the child who comes in with the dessert. He bore +the same relation to the snob that the righteous man bears to the +Pharisee: something frightfully close and similar and yet an +everlasting opposite.</p><a name="Page_55"></a> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<a name="CHAPTER_III"></a><h2>CHAPTER III</h2> + +<h2>BROWNING AND HIS MARRIAGE</h2> + + +<p>Robert Browning had his faults, and the general direction of those +faults has been previously suggested. The chief of his faults, a +certain uncontrollable brutality of speech and gesture when he was +strongly roused, was destined to cling to him all through his life, +and to startle with the blaze of a volcano even the last quiet years +before his death. But any one who wishes to understand how deep was +the elemental honesty and reality of his character, how profoundly +worthy he was of any love that was bestowed upon him, need only study +one most striking and determining element in the question—Browning's +simple, heartfelt, and unlimited admiration for other people. He was +one of a generation of great men, of great men who had a certain +peculiar type, certain peculiar merits and defects. Carlyle, Tennyson, +Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, were alike in being children of a very +strenuous and conscientious age, alike in possessing its earnestness +and air of deciding great matters, alike also in showing a certain +almost noble jealousy, a certain restlessness, a certain fear of other +influences. Browning alone had no fear; he welcomed, evidently without +the least affectation, all the influences of his day. A very +interesting letter of his remains in which he describes <a name="Page_56"></a>his pleasure +in a university dinner. "Praise," he says in effect, "was given very +deservedly to Matthew Arnold and Swinburne, and to that pride of +Oxford men, Clough." The really striking thing about these three names +is the fact that they are united in Browning's praise in a way in +which they are by no means united in each other's. Matthew Arnold, in +one of his extant letters, calls Swinburne "a young pseudo-Shelley," +who, according to Arnold, thinks he can make Greek plays good by +making them modern. Mr. Swinburne, on the other hand, has summarised +Clough in a contemptuous rhyme:—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"There was a bad poet named Clough,<br /> +Whom his friends all united to puff.<br /> +But the public, though dull,<br /> +Has not quite such a skull<br /> +As belongs to believers in Clough."<br /></p></div> + +<p>The same general fact will be found through the whole of Browning's +life and critical attitude. He adored Shelley, and also Carlyle who +sneered at him. He delighted in Mill, and also in Ruskin who rebelled +against Mill. He excused Napoleon III. and Landor who hurled +interminable curses against Napoleon. He admired all the cycle of +great men who all contemned each other. To say that he had no streak +of envy in his nature would be true, but unfair; for there is no +justification for attributing any of these great men's opinions to +envy. But Browning was really unique, in that he had a certain +spontaneous and unthinking tendency to the admiration of others. He +admired another poet as he admired a fading sunset or a chance spring +leaf. He no more thought whether he could be as good as that man in +that department <a name="Page_57"></a>than whether he could be redder than the sunset or +greener than the leaf of spring. He was naturally magnanimous in the +literal sense of that sublime word; his mind was so great that it +rejoiced in the triumphs of strangers. In this spirit Browning had +already cast his eyes round in the literary world of his time, and had +been greatly and justifiably struck with the work of a young lady +poet, Miss Barrett.</p> + +<p>That impression was indeed amply justified. In a time when it was +thought necessary for a lady to dilute the wine of poetry to its very +weakest tint, Miss Barrett had contrived to produce poetry which was +open to literary objection as too heady and too high-coloured. When +she erred it was through an Elizabethan audacity and luxuriance, a +straining after violent metaphors. With her reappeared in poetry a +certain element which had not been present in it since the last days +of Elizabethan literature, the fusion of the most elementary human +passion with something which can only be described as wit, a certain +love of quaint and sustained similes, of parallels wildly logical, and +of brazen paradox and antithesis. We find this hot wit, as distinct +from the cold wit of the school of Pope, in the puns and buffooneries +of Shakespeare. We find it lingering in <i>Hudibras</i>, and we do not find +it again until we come to such strange and strong lines as these of +Elizabeth Barrett in her poem on Napoleon:—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"Blood fell like dew beneath his sunrise—sooth,<br /> +But glittered dew-like in the covenanted<br /> +And high-rayed light. He was a despot—granted,<br /> +But the [Greek: autos] of his autocratic mouth<br /> +Said 'Yea' i' the people's French! He magnified<br /> +The image of the freedom he denied."<br /> +</p></div> +<a name="Page_58"></a> + +<p>Her poems are full of quaint things, of such things as the eyes in the +peacock fans of the Vatican, which she describes as winking at the +Italian tricolor. She often took the step from the sublime to the +ridiculous: but to take this step one must reach the sublime. +Elizabeth Barrett contrived to assert, what still needs but then +urgently needed assertion, the fact that womanliness, whether in life +or poetry, was a positive thing, and not the negative of manliness. +Her verse at its best was quite as strong as Browning's own, and very +nearly as clever. The difference between their natures was a +difference between two primary colours, not between dark and light +shades of the same colour.</p> + +<p>Browning had often heard not only of the public, but of the private +life of this lady from his father's friend Kenyon. The old man, who +was one of those rare and valuable people who have a talent for +establishing definite relationships with people after a comparatively +short intercourse, had been appointed by Miss Barrett as her "fairy +godfather." He spoke much about her to Browning, and of Browning to +her, with a certain courtly garrulity which was one of his talents. +And there could be little doubt that the two poets would have met long +before had it not been for certain peculiarities in the position of +Miss Barrett. She was an invalid, and an invalid of a somewhat unique +kind, and living beyond all question under very unique circumstances.</p> + +<p>Her father, Edward Moulton Barrett, had been a landowner in the West +Indies, and thus, by a somewhat curious coincidence, had borne a part +in the same social system which stung Browning's father into revolt +and renunciation. The parts played by Edward<a name="Page_59"></a> Barrett, however, though +little or nothing is known of it, was probably very different. He was +a man Conservative by nature, a believer in authority in the nation +and the family, and endowed with some faculties for making his +conceptions prevail. He was an able man, capable in his language of a +certain bitter felicity of phrase. He was rigidly upright and +responsible, and he had a capacity for profound affection. But +selfishness of the most perilous sort, an unconscious selfishness, was +eating away his moral foundations, as it tends to eat away those of +all despots. His most fugitive moods changed and controlled the whole +atmosphere of the house, and the state of things was fully as +oppressive in the case of his good moods as in the case of his bad +ones. He had, what is perhaps the subtlest and worst spirit of +egotism, not that spirit merely which thinks that nothing should stand +in the way of its ill-temper, but that spirit which thinks that +nothing should stand in the way of its amiability. His daughters must +be absolutely at his beck and call, whether it was to be brow-beaten +or caressed. During the early years of Elizabeth Barrett's life, the +family had lived in the country, and for that brief period she had +known a more wholesome life than she was destined ever to know again +until her marriage long afterwards. She was not, as is the general +popular idea, absolutely a congenital invalid, weak, and almost +moribund from the cradle. In early girlhood she was slight and +sensitive indeed, but perfectly active and courageous. She was a good +horsewoman, and the accident which handicapped her for so many years +afterwards happened to her when she was riding. The injury to her +spine, however, <a name="Page_60"></a>will be found, the more we study her history, to be +only one of the influences which were to darken those bedridden years, +and to have among them a far less important place than has hitherto +been attached to it. Her father moved to a melancholy house in Wimpole +Street; and his own character growing gloomier and stranger as time +went on, he mounted guard over his daughter's sickbed in a manner +compounded of the pessimist and the disciplinarian. She was not +permitted to stir from the sofa, often not even to cross two rooms to +her bed. Her father came and prayed over her with a kind of melancholy +glee, and with the avowed solemnity of a watcher by a deathbed. She +was surrounded by that most poisonous and degrading of all +atmospheres—a medical atmosphere. The existence of this atmosphere +has nothing to do with the actual nature or prolongation of disease. A +man may pass three hours out of every five in a state of bad health, +and yet regard, as Stevenson regarded, the three hours as exceptional +and the two as normal. But the curse that lay on the Barrett household +was the curse of considering ill-health the natural condition of a +human being. The truth was that Edward Barrett was living emotionally +and æsthetically, like some detestable decadent poet, upon his +daughter's decline. He did not know this, but it was so. Scenes, +explanations, prayers, fury, and forgiveness had become bread and meat +for which he hungered; and when the cloud was upon his spirit, he +would lash out at all things and every one with the insatiable cruelty +of the sentimentalist.</p> + +<p>It is wonderful that Elizabeth Barrett was not made <a name="Page_61"></a>thoroughly morbid +and impotent by this intolerable violence and more intolerable +tenderness. In her estimate of her own health she did, of course, +suffer. It is evident that she practically believed herself to be +dying. But she was a high-spirited woman, full of that silent and +quite unfathomable kind of courage which is only found in women, and +she took a much more cheerful view of death than her father did of +life. Silent rooms, low voices, lowered blinds, long days of +loneliness, and of the sickliest kind of sympathy, had not tamed a +spirit which was swift and headlong to a fault. She could still own +with truth the magnificent fact that her chief vice was impatience, +"tearing open parcels instead of untying them;" looking at the end of +books before she had read them was, she said, incurable with her. It +is difficult to imagine anything more genuinely stirring than the +achievement of this woman, who thus contrived, while possessing all +the excuses of an invalid, to retain some of the faults of a tomboy.</p> + +<p>Impetuosity, vividness, a certain absoluteness and urgency in her +demands, marked her in the eyes of all who came in contact with her. +In after years, when Browning had experimentally shaved his beard off, +she told him with emphatic gestures that it must be grown again "that +minute." There we have very graphically the spirit which tears open +parcels. Not in vain, or as a mere phrase, did her husband after her +death describe her as "all a wonder and a wild desire."</p> + +<p>She had, of course, lived her second and real life in literature and +the things of the mind, and this in a very genuine and strenuous +sense. Her mental occupations were not mere mechanical accomplishments +almost <a name="Page_62"></a>as colourless as the monotony they relieved, nor were they +coloured in any visible manner by the unwholesome atmosphere in which +she breathed. She used her brains seriously; she was a good Greek +scholar, and read Æschylus and Euripides unceasingly with her blind +friend, Mr. Boyd; and she had, and retained even to the hour of her +death, a passionate and quite practical interest in great public +questions. Naturally she was not uninterested in Robert Browning, but +it does not appear that she felt at this time the same kind of fiery +artistic curiosity that he felt about her. He does appear to have felt +an attraction, which may almost be called mystical, for the +personality which was shrouded from the world by such sombre curtains. +In 1845 he addressed a letter to her in which he spoke of a former +occasion on which they had nearly met, and compared it to the +sensation of having once been outside the chapel of some marvellous +illumination and found the door barred against him. In that phrase it +is easy to see how much of the romantic boyhood of Browning remained +inside the resolute man of the world into which he was to all external +appearance solidifying. Miss Barrett replied to his letters with +charming sincerity and humour, and with much of that leisurely +self-revelation which is possible for an invalid who has nothing else +to do. She herself, with her love of quiet and intellectual +companionship, would probably have been quite happy for the rest of +her life if their relations had always remained a learned and +delightful correspondence. But she must have known very little of +Robert Browning if she imagined he would be contented with this airy +and bloodless tie. At all times of his life he was <a name="Page_63"></a>sufficiently fond +of his own way; at this time he was especially prompt and impulsive, +and he had always a great love for seeing and hearing and feeling +people, a love of the physical presence of friends, which made him +slap men on the back and hit them in the chest when he was very fond +of them. The correspondence between the two poets had not long begun +when Browning suggested something which was almost a blasphemy in the +Barrett household, that he should come and call on her as he would on +any one else. This seems to have thrown her into a flutter of fear and +doubt. She alleges all kinds of obstacles, the chief of which were her +health and the season of the year and the east winds. "If my truest +heart's wishes avail," replied Browning obstinately, "you shall laugh +at east winds yet as I do."</p> + +<p>Then began the chief part of that celebrated correspondence which has +within comparatively recent years been placed before the world. It is +a correspondence which has very peculiar qualities and raises many +profound questions.</p> + +<p>It is impossible to deal at any length with the picture given in these +remarkable letters of the gradual progress and amalgamation of two +spirits of great natural potency and independence, without saying at +least a word about the moral question raised by their publication and +the many expressions of disapproval which it entails. To the mind of +the present writer the whole of such a question should be tested by +one perfectly clear intellectual distinction and comparison. I am not +prepared to admit that there is or can be, properly speaking, in the +world anything that is too sacred to be known. That spiritual beauty +and spiritual truth are in their <a name="Page_64"></a>nature communicable, and that they +should be communicated, is a principle which lies at the root of every +conceivable religion. Christ was crucified upon a hill, and not in a +cavern, and the word Gospel itself involves the same idea as the +ordinary name of a daily paper. Whenever, therefore, a poet or any +similar type of man can, or conceives that he can, make all men +partakers in some splendid secret of his own heart, I can imagine +nothing saner and nothing manlier than his course in doing so. Thus it +was that Dante made a new heaven and a new hell out of a girl's nod in +the streets of Florence. Thus it was that Paul founded a civilisation +by keeping an ethical diary. But the one essential which exists in all +such cases as these is that the man in question believes that he can +make the story as stately to the whole world as it is to him, and he +chooses his words to that end. Yet when a work contains expressions +which have one value and significance when read by the people to whom +they were addressed, and an entirely different value and significance +when read by any one else, then the element of the violation of +sanctity does arise. It is not because there is anything in this world +too sacred to tell. It is rather because there are a great many things +in this world too sacred to parody. If Browning could really convey to +the world the inmost core of his affection for his wife, I see no +reason why he should not. But the objection to letters which begin "My +dear Ba," is that they do not convey anything of the sort. As far as +any third person is concerned, Browning might as well have been +expressing the most noble and universal sentiment in the dialect of +the Cherokees. Objection to the publication of such passages as that, +in short, is <a name="Page_65"></a>not the fact that they tell us about the love of the +Brownings, but that they do not tell us about it.</p> + +<p>Upon this principle it is obvious that there should have been a +selection among the Letters, but not a selection which should exclude +anything merely because it was ardent and noble. If Browning or Mrs. +Browning had not desired any people to know that they were fond of +each other, they would not have written and published "One Word More" +or "The Sonnets from the Portuguese." Nay, they would not have been +married in a public church, for every one who is married in a church +does make a confession of love of absolutely national publicity, and +tacitly, therefore, repudiates any idea that such confessions are too +sacred for the world to know. The ridiculous theory that men should +have no noble passions or sentiments in public may have been designed +to make private life holy and undefiled, but it has had very little +actual effect except to make public life cynical and preposterously +unmeaning. But the words of a poem or the words of the English +Marriage Service, which are as fine as many poems, is a language +dignified and deliberately intended to be understood by all. If the +bride and bridegroom in church, instead of uttering those words, were +to utter a poem compounded of private allusions to the foibles of Aunt +Matilda, or of childish secrets which they would tell each other in a +lane, it would be a parallel case to the publication of some of the +Browning Letters. Why the serious and universal portions of those +Letters could not be published without those which are to us idle and +unmeaning it is difficult to understand. Our wisdom, whether expressed +in private or public, belongs to the world, but our folly belongs to +those we love.</p><a name="Page_66"></a> + +<p>There is at least one peculiarity in the Browning Letters which tends +to make their publication far less open to objection than almost any +other collection of love letters which can be imagined. The ordinary +sentimentalist who delights in the most emotional of magazine +interviews, will not be able to get much satisfaction out of them, +because he and many persons more acute will be quite unable to make +head or tail of three consecutive sentences. In this respect it is the +most extraordinary correspondence in the world. There seem to be only +two main rules for this form of letter-writing: the first is, that if +a sentence can begin with a parenthesis it always should; and the +second is, that if you have written from a third to half of a sentence +you need never in any case write any more. It would be amusing to +watch any one who felt an idle curiosity as to the language and +secrets of lovers opening the Browning Letters. He would probably come +upon some such simple and lucid passage as the following: "I ought to +wait, say a week at least, having killed all your mules for you, +before I shot down your dogs.... But not being Phoibos Apollon, you +are to know further that when I <i>did</i> think I might go modestly on ... +[Greek: ômoi], let me get out of this slough of a simile, never mind +with what dislocated ankles."</p> + +<p>What our imaginary sentimentalist would make of this tender passage it +is difficult indeed to imagine. The only plain conclusion which +appears to emerge from the words is the somewhat curious one—that +Browning was in the habit of taking a gun down to Wimpole Street and +of demolishing the live stock on those somewhat unpromising premises. +Nor will he be any better enlightened if he turns to the reply of +Miss<a name="Page_67"></a> Barrett, which seems equally dominated with the great central +idea of the Browning correspondence that the most enlightening +passages in a letter consist of dots. She replies in a letter +following the above: "But if it could be possible that you should mean +to say you would show me. . . . Can it be? or am I reading this 'Attic +contraction' quite the wrong way. You see I am afraid of the +difference between flattering myself and being flattered . . . the +fatal difference. And now will you understand that I should be too +overjoyed to have revelations from the Portfolio . . . however +incarnated with blots and pen scratches . . . to be able to ask +impudently of them now? Is that plain?" Most probably she thought it +was.</p> + +<p>With regard to Browning himself this characteristic is comparatively +natural and appropriate. Browning's prose was in any case the most +roundabout affair in the world. Those who knew him say that he would +often send an urgent telegram from which it was absolutely impossible +to gather where the appointment was, or when it was, or what was its +object. This fact is one of the best of all arguments against the +theory of Browning's intellectual conceit. A man would have to be +somewhat abnormally conceited in order to spend sixpence for the +pleasure of sending an unintelligible communication to the dislocation +of his own plans. The fact was, that it was part of the machinery of +his brain that things came out of it, as it were, backwards. The words +"tail foremost" express Browning's style with something more than a +conventional accuracy. The tail, the most insignificant part of an +animal, is also often the most animated and fantastic. An utterance of +Browning is often like a strange animal walking <a name="Page_68"></a>backwards, who +flourishes his tail with such energy that every one takes it for his +head. He was in other words, at least in his prose and practical +utterances, more or less incapable of telling a story without telling +the least important thing first. If a man who belonged to an Italian +secret society, one local branch of which bore as a badge an +olive-green ribbon, had entered his house, and in some sensational +interview tried to bribe or blackmail him, he would have told the +story with great energy and indignation, but he would have been +incapable of beginning with anything except the question of the colour +of olives. His whole method was founded both in literature and life +upon the principle of the "ex pede Herculem," and at the beginning of +his description of Hercules the foot appears some sizes larger than +the hero. It is, in short, natural enough that Browning should have +written his love letters obscurely, since he wrote his letters to his +publisher and his solicitor obscurely. In the case of Mrs. Browning it +is somewhat more difficult to understand. For she at least had, beyond +all question, a quite simple and lucent vein of humour, which does not +easily reconcile itself with this subtlety. But she was partly under +the influence of her own quality of passionate ingenuity or emotional +wit of which we have already taken notice in dealing with her poems, +and she was partly also no doubt under the influence of Browning. +Whatever was the reason, their correspondence was not of the sort +which can be pursued very much by the outside public. Their letters +may be published a hundred times over, they still remain private. They +write to each other in a language of their own, an almost +exasperatingly impressionist <a name="Page_69"></a>language, a language chiefly consisting +of dots and dashes and asterisks and italics, and brackets and notes +of interrogation. Wordsworth when he heard afterwards of their +eventual elopement said with that slight touch of bitterness he always +used in speaking of Browning, "So Robert Browning and Miss Barrett +have gone off together. I hope they understand each other—nobody else +would." It would be difficult to pay a higher compliment to a +marriage. Their common affection for Kenyon was a great element in +their lives and in their correspondence. "I have a convenient theory +to account for Mr. Kenyon," writes Browning mysteriously, "and his +otherwise unaccountable kindness to me." "For Mr. Kenyon's kindness," +retorts Elizabeth Barrett, "no theory will account. I class it with +mesmerism for that reason." There is something very dignified and +beautiful about the simplicity of these two poets vying with each +other in giving adequate praise to the old dilettante, of whom the +world would never have heard but for them. Browning's feeling for him +was indeed especially strong and typical. "There," he said, pointing +after the old man as he left the room, "there goes one of the most +splendid men living—a man so noble in his friendship, so lavish in +his hospitality, so large-hearted and benevolent, that he deserves to +be known all over the world as 'Kenyon the Magnificent.'" There is +something thoroughly worthy of Browning at his best in this feeling, +not merely of the use of sociability, or of the charm of sociability, +but of the magnificence, the heroic largeness of real sociability. +Being himself a warm champion of the pleasures of society, he saw in +Kenyon a kind of poetic genius for the thing, a mission <a name="Page_70"></a>of +superficial philanthropy. He is thoroughly to be congratulated on the +fact that he had grasped the great but now neglected truth, that a man +may actually be great, yet not in the least able.</p> + +<p>Browning's desire to meet Miss Barrett was received on her side, as +has been stated, with a variety of objections. The chief of these was +the strangely feminine and irrational reason that she was not worth +seeing, a point on which the seeker for an interview might be +permitted to form his own opinion. "There is nothing to see in me; nor +to hear in me.—I never learned to talk as you do in London; although +I can admire that brightness of carved speech in Mr. Kenyon and +others. If my poetry is worth anything to any eye, it is the flower of +me. I have lived most and been most happy in it, and so it has all my +colours; the rest of me is nothing but a root, fit for the ground and +dark." The substance of Browning's reply was to the effect, "I will +call at two on Tuesday."</p> + +<p>They met on May 20, 1845. A short time afterwards he had fallen in +love with her and made her an offer of marriage. To a person in the +domestic atmosphere of the Barretts, the incident would appear to have +been paralysing. "I will tell you what I once said in jest ..." she +writes, "If a prince of El Dorado should come with a pedigree of +lineal descent from some signory in the moon in one hand and a ticket +of good behaviour from the nearest Independent chapel in the +other!—'Why, even <i>then</i>,' said my sister Arabel, 'it would not +<i>do</i>.' And she was right; we all agreed that she was right."</p> + +<p>This may be taken as a fairly accurate description of the real state +of Mr. Barrett's mind on one subject.<a name="Page_71"></a> It is illustrative of the very +best and breeziest side of Elizabeth Barrett's character that she +could be so genuinely humorous over so tragic a condition of the human +mind.</p> + +<p>Browning's proposals were, of course, as matters stood, of a character +to dismay and repel all those who surrounded Elizabeth Barrett. It was +not wholly a matter of the fancies of her father. The whole of her +family, and most probably the majority of her medical advisers, did +seriously believe at this time that she was unfit to be moved, to say +nothing of being married, and that a life passed between a bed and a +sofa, and avoiding too frequent and abrupt transitions even from one +to the other, was the only life she could expect on this earth. Almost +alone in holding another opinion and in urging her to a more vigorous +view of her condition, stood Browning himself. "But you are better," +he would say; "you look so and speak so." Which of the two opinions +was right is of course a complex medical matter into which a book like +this has neither the right nor the need to enter. But this much may be +stated as a mere question of fact. In the summer of 1846 Elizabeth +Barrett was still living under the great family convention which +provided her with nothing but an elegant deathbed, forbidden to move, +forbidden to see proper daylight, forbidden to receive a friend lest +the shock should destroy her suddenly. A year or two later, in Italy, +as Mrs. Browning, she was being dragged up hill in a wine hamper, +toiling up to the crests of mountains at four o'clock in the morning, +riding for five miles on a donkey to what she calls "an inaccessible +volcanic ground not far from the stars." It is perfectly incredible +that any one so ill as her family believed her to be <a name="Page_72"></a>should have +lived this life for twenty-four hours. Something must be allowed for +the intoxication of a new tie and a new interest in life. But such +exaltations can in their nature hardly last a month, and Mrs. Browning +lived for fifteen years afterwards in infinitely better health than +she had ever known before. In the light of modern knowledge it is not +very difficult or very presumptuous, of us to guess that she had been +in her father's house to some extent inoculated with hysteria, that +strange affliction which some people speak of as if it meant the +absence of disease, but which is in truth the most terrible of all +diseases. It must be remembered that in 1846 little or nothing was +known of spine complaints such as that from which Elizabeth Barrett +suffered, less still of the nervous conditions they create, and least +of all of hysterical phenomena. In our day she would have been ordered +air and sunlight and activity, and all the things the mere idea of +which chilled the Barretts with terror. In our day, in short, it would +have been recognised that she was in the clutch of a form of neurosis +which exhibits every fact of a disease except its origin, that strange +possession which makes the body itself a hypocrite. Those who +surrounded Miss Barrett knew nothing of this, and Browning knew +nothing of it; and probably if he knew anything, knew less than they +did. Mrs. Orr says, probably with a great deal of truth, that of +ill-health and its sensations he remained "pathetically ignorant" to +his dying day. But devoid as he was alike of expert knowledge and +personal experience, without a shadow of medical authority, almost +without anything that can be formally called a right to his opinion, +he was, and remained, <a name="Page_73"></a>right. He at least saw, he indeed alone saw, to +the practical centre of the situation. He did not know anything about +hysteria or neurosis, or the influence of surroundings, but he knew +that the atmosphere of Mr. Barrett's house was not a fit thing for any +human being, alive, dying, or dead. His stand upon this matter has +really a certain human interest, since it is an example of a thing +which will from time to time occur, the interposition of the average +man to the confounding of the experts. Experts are undoubtedly right +nine times out of ten, but the tenth time comes, and we find in +military matters an Oliver Cromwell who will make every mistake known +to strategy and yet win all his battles, and in medical matters a +Robert Browning whose views have not a technical leg to stand on and +are entirely correct.</p> + +<p>But while Browning was thus standing alone in his view of the matter, +while Edward Barrett had to all appearance on his side a phalanx of +all the sanities and respectabilities, there came suddenly a new +development, destined to bring matters to a crisis indeed, and to +weigh at least three souls in the balance. Upon further examination of +Miss Barrett's condition, the physicians had declared that it was +absolutely necessary that she should be taken to Italy. This may, +without any exaggeration, be called the turning-point and the last +great earthly opportunity of Barrett's character. He had not +originally been an evil man, only a man who, being stoical in +practical things, permitted himself, to his great detriment, a +self-indulgence in moral things. He had grown to regard his pious and +dying daughter as part of the furniture of the house and of the +universe. And as long as the great mass of authorities <a name="Page_74"></a>were on his +side, his illusion was quite pardonable. His crisis came when the +authorities changed their front, and with one accord asked his +permission to send his daughter abroad. It was his crisis, and he +refused.</p> + +<p>He had, if we may judge from what we know of him, his own peculiar and +somewhat detestable way of refusing. Once when his daughter had asked +a perfectly simple favour in a matter of expediency, permission, that +is, to keep her favourite brother with her during an illness, her +singular parent remarked that "she might keep him if she liked, but +that he had looked for greater self-sacrifice." These were the weapons +with which he ruled his people. For the worst tyrant is not the man +who rules by fear; the worst tyrant is he who rules by love and plays +on it as on a harp. Barrett was one of the oppressors who have +discovered the last secret of oppression, that which is told in the +fine verse of Swinburne:—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"The racks of the earth and the rods<br /> +Are weak as the foam on the sands;<br /> +The heart is the prey for the gods,<br /> +Who crucify hearts, not hands."</p></div> + +<p>He, with his terrible appeal to the vibrating consciences of women, +was, with regard to one of them, very near to the end of his reign. +When Browning heard that the Italian journey was forbidden, he +proposed definitely that they should marry and go on the journey +together.</p> + +<p>Many other persons had taken cognisance of the fact, and were active +in the matter. Kenyon, the gentlest and most universally complimentary +of mortals, had marched into the house and given Arabella Barrett, +<a name="Page_75"></a>the sister of the sick woman, his opinion of her father's conduct +with a degree of fire and frankness which must have been perfectly +amazing in a man of his almost antiquated social delicacy. Mrs. +Jameson, an old and generous friend of the family, had immediately +stepped in and offered to take Elizabeth to Italy herself, thus +removing all questions of expense or arrangement. She would appear to +have stood to her guns in the matter with splendid persistence and +magnanimity. She called day after day seeking for a change of mind, +and delayed her own journey to the continent more than once. At +length, when it became evident that the extraction of Mr. Barrett's +consent was hopeless, she reluctantly began her own tour in Europe +alone. She went to Paris, and had not been there many days, when she +received a formal call from Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett +Browning, who had been married for some days. Her astonishment is +rather a picturesque thing to think about.</p> + +<p>The manner in which this sensational elopement, which was, of course, +the talk of the whole literary world, had been effected, is narrated, +as every one knows, in the Browning Letters. Browning had decided that +an immediate marriage was the only solution; and having put his hand +to the plough, did not decline even when it became obviously necessary +that it should be a secret marriage. To a man of his somewhat stormily +candid and casual disposition this necessity of secrecy was really +exasperating; but every one with any imagination or chivalry will +rejoice that he accepted the evil conditions. He had always had the +courage to tell the truth; and now it was demanded of him to have the +greater courage to tell a lie, and he told <a name="Page_76"></a>it with perfect +cheerfulness and lucidity. In thus disappearing surreptitiously with +an invalid woman he was doing something against which there were +undoubtedly a hundred things to be said, only it happened that the +most cogent and important thing of all was to be said for it.</p> + +<p>It is very amusing, and very significant in the matter of Browning's +character, to read the accounts which he writes to Elizabeth Barrett +of his attitude towards the approaching <i>coup de théâtre</i>. In one +place he says, suggestively enough, that he does not in the least +trouble about the disapproval of her father; the man whom he fears as +a frustrating influence is Kenyon. Mr. Barrett could only walk into +the room and fly into a passion; and this Browning could have received +with perfect equanimity. "But," he says, "if Kenyon knows of the +matter, I shall have the kindest and friendliest of explanations (with +his arm on my shoulder) of how I am ruining your social position, +destroying your health, etc., etc." This touch is very suggestive of +the power of the old worldling, who could manoeuvre with young people +as well as Major Pendennis. Kenyon had indeed long been perfectly +aware of the way in which things were going; and the method he adopted +in order to comment on it is rather entertaining. In a conversation +with Elizabeth Barrett, he asked carelessly whether there was anything +between her sister and a certain Captain Cooke. On receiving a +surprised reply in the negative, he remarked apologetically that he +had been misled into the idea by the gentleman calling so often at the +house. Elizabeth Barrett knew perfectly well what he meant; but the +logical allusiveness of the attack reminds one of a fragment of some +Meredithian comedy.</p><a name="Page_77"></a> + +<p>The manner in which Browning bore himself in this acute and +necessarily dubious position is, perhaps, more thoroughly to his +credit than anything else in his career. He never came out so well in +all his long years of sincerity and publicity as he does in this one +act of deception. Having made up his mind to that act, he is not +ashamed to name it; neither, on the other hand, does he rant about it, +and talk about Philistine prejudices and higher laws and brides in the +sight of God, after the manner of the cockney decadent. He was +breaking a social law, but he was not declaring a crusade against +social laws. We all feel, whatever may be our opinions on the matter, +that the great danger of this kind of social opportunism, this pitting +of a private necessity against a public custom, is that men are +somewhat too weak and self-deceptive to be trusted with such a power +of giving dispensations to themselves. We feel that men without +meaning to do so might easily begin by breaking a social by-law and +end by being thoroughly anti-social. One of the best and most striking +things to notice about Robert Browning is the fact that he did this +thing considering it as an exception, and that he contrived to leave +it really exceptional. It did not in the least degree break the +rounded clearness of his loyalty to social custom. It did not in the +least degree weaken the sanctity of the general rule. At a supreme +crisis of his life he did an unconventional thing, and he lived and +died conventional. It would be hard to say whether he appears the more +thoroughly sane in having performed the act, or in not having allowed +it to affect him.</p> + +<p>Elizabeth Barrett gradually gave way under the obstinate and almost +monotonous assertion of Browning <a name="Page_78"></a>that this elopement was the only +possible course of action. Before she finally agreed, however, she did +something, which in its curious and impulsive symbolism, belongs +almost to a more primitive age. The sullen system of medical seclusion +to which she had long been subjected has already been described. The +most urgent and hygienic changes were opposed by many on the ground +that it was not safe for her to leave her sofa and her sombre room. On +the day on which it was necessary for her finally to accept or reject +Browning's proposal, she called her sister to her, and to the +amazement and mystification of that lady asked for a carriage. In this +she drove into Regent's Park, alighted, walked on to the grass, and +stood leaning against a tree for some moments, looking round her at +the leaves and the sky. She then entered the cab again, drove home, +and agreed to the elopement. This was possibly the best poem that she +ever produced.</p> + +<p>Browning arranged the eccentric adventure with a great deal of +prudence and knowledge of human nature. Early one morning in September +1846 Miss Barrett walked quietly out of her father's house, became +Mrs. Robert Browning in a church in Marylebone, and returned home +again as if nothing had happened. In this arrangement Browning showed +some of that real insight into the human spirit which ought to make a +poet the most practical of all men. The incident was, in the nature of +things, almost overpoweringly exciting to his wife, in spite of the +truly miraculous courage with which she supported it; and he desired, +therefore, to call in the aid of the mysteriously tranquillising +effect of familiar scenes and faces. One <a name="Page_79"></a>trifling incident is worth +mentioning which is almost unfathomably characteristic of Browning. It +has already been remarked in these pages that he was pre-eminently one +of those men whose expanding opinions never alter by a hairsbreadth +the actual ground-plan of their moral sense. Browning would have felt +the same things right and the same things wrong, whatever views he had +held. During the brief and most trying period between his actual +marriage and his actual elopement, it is most significant that he +would not call at the house in Wimpole Street, because he would have +been obliged to ask if Miss Barrett was disengaged. He was acting a +lie; he was deceiving a father; he was putting a sick woman to a +terrible risk; and these things he did not disguise from himself for a +moment, but he could not bring himself to say two words to a +maidservant. Here there may be partly the feeling of the literary man +for the sacredness of the uttered word, but there is far more of a +certain rooted traditional morality which it is impossible either to +describe or to justify. Browning's respectability was an older and +more primeval thing than the oldest and most primeval passions of +other men. If we wish to understand him, we must always remember that +in dealing with any of his actions we have not to ask whether the +action contains the highest morality, but whether we should have felt +inclined to do it ourselves.</p> + +<p>At length the equivocal and exhausting interregnum was over. Mrs. +Browning went for the second time almost on tiptoe out of her father's +house, accompanied only by her maid and her dog, which was only just +successfully prevented from barking. Before the end of the day in all +probability Barrett had discovered <a name="Page_80"></a>that his dying daughter had fled +with Browning to Italy.</p> + +<p>They never saw him again, and hardly more than a faint echo came to +them of the domestic earthquake which they left behind them. They do +not appear to have had many hopes, or to have made many attempts at a +reconciliation. Elizabeth Barrett had discovered at last that her +father was in truth not a man to be treated with; hardly, perhaps, +even a man to be blamed. She knew to all intents and purposes that she +had grown up in the house of a madman.</p><a name="Page_81"></a> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<a name="CHAPTER_IV"></a><h2>CHAPTER IV</h2> + +<h2>BROWNING IN ITALY</h2> + + +<p>The married pair went to Pisa in 1846, and moved soon afterwards to +Florence. Of the life of the Brownings in Italy there is much perhaps +to be said in the way of description and analysis, little to be said +in the way of actual narrative. Each of them had passed through the +one incident of existence. Just as Elizabeth Barrett's life had before +her marriage been uneventfully sombre, now it was uneventfully happy. +A succession of splendid landscapes, a succession of brilliant +friends, a succession of high and ardent intellectual interests, they +experienced; but their life was of the kind that if it were told at +all, would need to be told in a hundred volumes of gorgeous +intellectual gossip. How Browning and his wife rode far into the +country, eating strawberries and drinking milk out of the basins of +the peasants; how they fell in with the strangest and most picturesque +figures of Italian society; how they climbed mountains and read books +and modelled in clay and played on musical instruments; how Browning +was made a kind of arbiter between two improvising Italian bards; how +he had to escape from a festivity when the sound of Garibaldi's hymn +brought the knocking of the Austrian police; these are the things of +which his life is full, trifling <a name="Page_82"></a>and picturesque things, a series of +interludes, a beautiful and happy story, beginning and ending nowhere. +The only incidents, perhaps, were the birth of their son and the death +of Browning's mother in 1849.</p> + +<p>It is well known that Browning loved Italy; that it was his adopted +country; that he said in one of the finest of his lyrics that the name +of it would be found written on his heart. But the particular +character of this love of Browning for Italy needs to be understood. +There are thousands of educated Europeans who love Italy, who live in +it, who visit it annually, who come across a continent to see it, who +hunt out its darkest picture and its most mouldering carving; but they +are all united in this, that they regard Italy as a dead place. It is +a branch of their universal museum, a department of dry bones. There +are rich and cultivated persons, particularly Americans, who seem to +think that they keep Italy, as they might keep an aviary or a +hothouse, into which they might walk whenever they wanted a whiff of +beauty. Browning did not feel at all in this manner; he was +intrinsically incapable of offering such an insult to the soul of a +nation. If he could not have loved Italy as a nation, he would not +have consented to love it as an old curiosity shop. In everything on +earth, from the Middle Ages to the amoeba, who is discussed at such +length in "Mr. Sludge the Medium," he is interested in the life in +things. He was interested in the life in Italian art and in the life +in Italian politics.</p> + +<p>Perhaps the first and simplest example that can be given of this +matter is in Browning's interest in art. He was immeasurably +fascinated at all times by painting and sculpture, and his sojourn in +Italy gave him, <a name="Page_83"></a>of course, innumerable and perfect opportunities for +the study of painting and sculpture. But his interest in these studies +was not like that of the ordinary cultured visitor to the Italian +cities. Thousands of such visitors, for example, study those endless +lines of magnificent Pagan busts which are to be found in nearly all +the Italian galleries and museums, and admire them, and talk about +them, and note them in their catalogues, and describe them in their +diaries. But the way in which they affected Browning is described very +suggestively in a passage in the letters of his wife. She describes +herself as longing for her husband to write poems, beseeching him to +write poems, but finding all her petitions useless because her husband +was engaged all day in modelling busts in clay and breaking them as +fast as he made them. This is Browning's interest in art, the interest +in a living thing, the interest in a growing thing, the insatiable +interest in how things are done. Every one who knows his admirable +poems on painting—"Fra Lippo Lippi" and "Andrea del Sarto" and +"Pictor Ignotus"—will remember how fully they deal with +technicalities, how they are concerned with canvas, with oil, with a +mess of colours. Sometimes they are so technical as to be mysterious +to the casual reader. An extreme case may be found in that of a lady I +once knew who had merely read the title of "Pacchiarotto and how he +worked in distemper," and thought that Pacchiarotto was the name of a +dog, whom no attacks of canine disease could keep from the fulfilment +of his duty. These Browning poems do not merely deal with painting; +they smell of paint. They are the works of a man to whom art is not +what it is to so many of the non-professional <a name="Page_84"></a>lovers of art, a thing +accomplished, a valley of bones: to him it is a field of crops +continually growing in a busy and exciting silence. Browning was +interested, like some scientific man, in the obstetrics of art. There +is a large army of educated men who can talk art with artists; but +Browning could not merely talk art with artists—he could talk shop +with them. Personally he may not have known enough about painting to +be more than a fifth-rate painter, or enough about the organ to be +more than a sixth-rate organist. But there are, when all is said and +done, some things which a fifth-rate painter knows which a first-rate +art critic does not know; there are some things which a sixth-rate +organist knows which a first-rate judge of music does not know. And +these were the things that Browning knew.</p> + +<p>He was, in other words, what is called an amateur. The word amateur +has come by the thousand oddities of language to convey an idea of +tepidity; whereas the word itself has the meaning of passion. Nor is +this peculiarity confined to the mere form of the word; the actual +characteristic of these nameless dilettanti is a genuine fire and +reality. A man must love a thing very much if he not only practises it +without any hope of fame or money, but even practises it without any +hope of doing it well. Such a man must love the toils of the work more +than any other man can love the rewards of it. Browning was in this +strict sense a strenuous amateur. He tried and practised in the course +of his life half a hundred things at which he can never have even for +a moment expected to succeed. The story of his life is full of absurd +little ingenuities, such as the discovery of a way of making pictures +by <a name="Page_85"></a>roasting brown paper over a candle. In precisely the same spirit +of fruitless vivacity, he made himself to a very considerable extent a +technical expert in painting, a technical expert in sculpture, a +technical expert in music. In his old age, he shows traces of being so +bizarre a thing as an abstract police detective, writing at length in +letters and diaries his views of certain criminal cases in an Italian +town. Indeed, his own <i>Ring and the Book</i> is merely a sublime +detective story. He was in a hundred things this type of man; he was +precisely in the position, with a touch of greater technical success, +of the admirable figure in Stevenson's story who said, "I can play the +fiddle nearly well enough to earn a living in the orchestra of a penny +gaff, but not quite."</p> + +<p>The love of Browning for Italian art, therefore, was anything but an +antiquarian fancy; it was the love of a living thing. We see the same +phenomenon in an even more important matter—the essence and +individuality of the country itself.</p> + +<p>Italy to Browning and his wife was not by any means merely that +sculptured and ornate sepulchre that it is to so many of those +cultivated English men and women who live in Italy and enjoy and +admire and despise it. To them it was a living nation, the type and +centre of the religion and politics of a continent; the ancient and +flaming heart of Western history, the very Europe of Europe. And they +lived at the time of the most moving and gigantic of all dramas—the +making of a new nation, one of the things that makes men feel that +they are still in the morning of the earth. Before their eyes, with +every circumstance of energy and mystery, was passing the panorama <a name="Page_86"></a>of +the unification of Italy, with the bold and romantic militarism of +Garibaldi, the more bold and more romantic diplomacy of Cavour. They +lived in a time when affairs of State had almost the air of works of +art; and it is not strange that these two poets should have become +politicians in one of those great creative epochs when even the +politicians have to be poets.</p> + +<p>Browning was on this question and on all the questions of continental +and English politics a very strong Liberal. This fact is not a mere +detail of purely biographical interest, like any view he might take of +the authorship of the "Eikon Basilike" or the authenticity of the +Tichborne claimant. Liberalism was so inevitably involved in the +poet's whole view of existence, that even a thoughtful and imaginative +Conservative would feel that Browning was bound to be a Liberal. His +mind was possessed, perhaps even to excess, by a belief in growth and +energy and in the ultimate utility of error. He held the great central +Liberal doctrine, a belief in a certain destiny of the human spirit +beyond, and perhaps even independent of, our own sincerest +convictions. The world was going right he felt, most probably in his +way, but certainly in its own way. The sonnet which he wrote in later +years, entitled "Why I am a Liberal," expresses admirably this +philosophical root of his politics. It asks in effect how he, who had +found truth in so many strange forms after so many strange wanderings, +can be expected to stifle with horror the eccentricities of others. A +Liberal may be defined approximately as a man who, if he could by +waving his hand in a dark room, stop the mouths of all the deceivers +of mankind <a name="Page_87"></a>for ever, would not wave his hand. Browning was a Liberal +in this sense.</p> + +<p>And just as the great Liberal movement which followed the French +Revolution made this claim for the liberty and personality of human +beings, so it made it for the liberty and personality of nations. It +attached indeed to the independence of a nation something of the same +wholly transcendental sanctity which humanity has in all legal systems +attached to the life of a man. The grounds were indeed much the same; +no one could say absolutely that a live man was useless, and no one +could say absolutely that a variety of national life was useless or +must remain useless to the world. Men remembered how often barbarous +tribes or strange and alien Scriptures had been called in to revive +the blood of decaying empires and civilisations. And this sense of the +personality of a nation, as distinct from the personalities of all +other nations, did not involve in the case of these old Liberals +international bitterness; for it is too often forgotten that +friendship demands independence and equality fully as much as war. But +in them it led to great international partialities, to a great system, +as it were, of adopted countries which made so thorough a Scotchman as +Carlyle in love with Germany, and so thorough an Englishman as +Browning in love with Italy.</p> + +<p>And while on the one side of the struggle was this great ideal of +energy and variety, on the other side was something which we now find +it difficult to realise or describe. We have seen in our own time a +great reaction in favour of monarchy, aristocracy, and +ecclesiasticism, a reaction almost entirely noble in its instinct, and +dwelling almost entirely on the best <a name="Page_88"></a>periods and the best qualities +of the old <i>régime</i>. But the modern man, full of admiration for the +great virtue of chivalry which is at the heart of aristocracies, and +the great virtue of reverence which is at the heart of ceremonial +religion, is not in a position to form any idea of how profoundly +unchivalrous, how astonishingly irreverent, how utterly mean, and +material, and devoid of mystery or sentiment were the despotic systems +of Europe which survived, and for a time conquered, the Revolution. +The case against the Church in Italy in the time of Pio Nono was not +the case which a rationalist would urge against the Church of the time +of St. Louis, but diametrically the opposite case. Against the +mediæval Church it might be said that she was too fantastic, too +visionary, too dogmatic about the destiny of man, too indifferent to +all things but the devotional side of the soul. Against the Church of +Pio Nono the main thing to be said was that it was simply and +supremely cynical; that it was not founded on the unworldly instinct +for distorting life, but on the worldly counsel to leave life as it +is; that it was not the inspirer of insane hopes, of reward and +miracle, but the enemy, the cool and sceptical enemy, of hope of any +kind or description. The same was true of the monarchical systems of +Prussia and Austria and Russia at this time. Their philosophy was not +the philosophy of the cavaliers who rode after Charles I. or Louis +XIII. It was the philosophy of the typical city uncle, advising every +one, and especially the young, to avoid enthusiasm, to avoid beauty, +to regard life as a machine, dependent only upon the two forces of +comfort and fear. That was, there can be little doubt, the real reason +of the fascination of the Napoleon legend—that <a name="Page_89"></a>while Napoleon was a +despot like the rest, he was a despot who went somewhere and did +something, and defied the pessimism of Europe, and erased the word +"impossible." One does not need to be a Bonapartist to rejoice at the +way in which the armies of the First Empire, shouting their songs and +jesting with their colonels, smote and broke into pieces the armies of +Prussia and Austria driven into battle with a cane.</p> + +<p>Browning, as we have said, was in Italy at the time of the break-up of +one part of this frozen continent of the non-possumus, Austria's hold +in the north of Italy was part of that elaborate and comfortable and +wholly cowardly and unmeaning compromise, which the Holy Alliance had +established, and which it believed without doubt in its solid unbelief +would last until the Day of Judgment, though it is difficult to +imagine what the Holy Alliance thought would happen then. But almost +of a sudden affairs had begun to move strangely, and the despotic +princes and their chancellors discovered with a great deal of +astonishment that they were not living in the old age of the world, +but to all appearance in a very unmanageable period of its boyhood. In +an age of ugliness and routine, in a time when diplomatists and +philosophers alike tended to believe that they had a list of all human +types, there began to appear men who belonged to the morning of the +world, men whose movements have a national breadth and beauty, who act +symbols and become legends while they are alive. Garibaldi in his red +shirt rode in an open carriage along the front of a hostile fort +calling to the coachman to drive slower, and not a man dared fire a +shot at him. Mazzini poured out upon Europe a new mysticism of +humanity and liberty, and was willing, like some <a name="Page_90"></a>passionate Jesuit of +the sixteenth century, to become in its cause either a philosopher or +a criminal. Cavour arose with a diplomacy which was more thrilling and +picturesque than war itself. These men had nothing to do with an age +of the impossible. They have passed, their theories along with them, +as all things pass; but since then we have had no men of their type +precisely, at once large and real and romantic and successful. Gordon +was a possible exception. They were the last of the heroes.</p> + +<p>When Browning was first living in Italy, a telegram which had been +sent to him was stopped on the frontier and suppressed on account of +his known sympathy with the Italian Liberals. It is almost impossible +for people living in a commonwealth like ours to understand how a +small thing like that will affect a man. It was not so much the +obvious fact that a great practical injury was really done to him; +that the telegram might have altered all his plans in matters of vital +moment. It was, over and above that, the sense of a hand laid on +something personal and essentially free. Tyranny like this is not the +worst tyranny, but it is the most intolerable. It interferes with men +not in the most serious matters, but precisely in those matters in +which they most resent interference. It may be illogical for men to +accept cheerfully unpardonable public scandals, benighted educational +systems, bad sanitation, bad lighting, a blundering and inefficient +system of life, and yet to resent the tearing up of a telegram or a +post-card; but the fact remains that the sensitiveness of men is a +strange and localised thing, and there is hardly a man in the world +who would not rather be ruled by despots chosen by lot and live in a +city like a mediæval<a name="Page_91"></a> Ghetto, than be forbidden by a policeman to +smoke another cigarette, or sit up a quarter of an hour later; hardly +a man who would not feel inclined in such a case to raise a rebellion +for a caprice for which he did not really care a straw. Unmeaning and +muddle-headed tyranny in small things, that is the thing which, if +extended over many years, is harder to bear and hope through than the +massacres of September. And that was the nightmare of vexatious +triviality which was lying over all the cities of Italy that were +ruled by the bureaucratic despotisms of Europe. The history of the +time is full of spiteful and almost childish struggles—struggles +about the humming of a tune or the wearing of a colour, the arrest of +a journey, or the opening of a letter. And there can be little doubt +that Browning's temperament under these conditions was not of the kind +to become more indulgent, and there grew in him a hatred of the +Imperial and Ducal and Papal systems of Italy, which sometimes passed +the necessities of Liberalism, and sometimes even transgressed its +spirit. The life which he and his wife lived in Italy was +extraordinarily full and varied, when we consider the restrictions +under which one at least of them had always lain. They met and took +delight, notwithstanding their exile, in some of the most interesting +people of their time—Ruskin, Cardinal Manning, and Lord Lytton. +Browning, in a most characteristic way, enjoyed the society of all of +them, arguing with one, agreeing with another, sitting up all night by +the bedside of a third.</p> + +<p>It has frequently been stated that the only difference that ever +separated Mr. and Mrs. Browning was upon the question of spiritualism. +That statement must, of <a name="Page_92"></a>course, be modified and even contradicted if +it means that they never differed; that Mr. Browning never thought an +<i>Act of Parliament</i> good when Mrs. Browning thought it bad; that Mr. +Browning never thought bread stale when Mrs. Browning thought it new. +Such unanimity is not only inconceivable, it is immoral; and as a +matter of fact, there is abundant evidence that their marriage +constituted something like that ideal marriage, an alliance between +two strong and independent forces. They differed, in truth, about a +great many things, for example, about Napoleon III. whom Mrs. Browning +regarded with an admiration which would have been somewhat beyond the +deserts of Sir Galahad, and whom Browning with his emphatic Liberal +principles could never pardon for the <i>Coup d'État</i>. If they differed +on spiritualism in a somewhat more serious way than this, the reason +must be sought in qualities which were deeper and more elemental in +both their characters than any mere matter of opinion. Mrs. Orr, in +her excellent <i>Life of Browning</i>, states that the difficulty arose +from Mrs. Browning's firm belief in psychical phenomena and Browning's +absolute refusal to believe even in their possibility. Another writer +who met them at this time says, "Browning cannot believe, and Mrs. +Browning cannot help believing." This theory, that Browning's aversion +to the spiritualist circle arose from an absolute denial of the +tenability of such a theory of life and death, has in fact often been +repeated. But it is exceedingly difficult to reconcile it with +Browning's character. He was the last man in the world to be +intellectually deaf to a hypothesis merely because it was odd. He had +friends whose opinions covered every description of madness from the +French legitimism <a name="Page_93"></a>of De Ripert-Monclar to the Republicanism of +Landor. Intellectually he may be said to have had a zest for heresies. +It is difficult to impute an attitude of mere impenetrable negation to +a man who had expressed with sympathy the religion of "Caliban" and +the morality of "Time's Revenges." It is true that at this time of the +first popular interest in spiritualism a feeling existed among many +people of a practical turn of mind, which can only be called a +superstition against believing in ghosts. But, intellectually +speaking, Browning would probably have been one of the most tolerant +and curious in regard to the new theories, whereas the popular version +of the matter makes him unusually intolerant and negligent even for +that time. The fact was in all probability that Browning's aversion to +the spiritualists had little or nothing to do with spiritualism. It +arose from quite a different side of his character—his uncompromising +dislike of what is called Bohemianism, of eccentric or slovenly +cliques, of those straggling camp followers of the arts who exhibit +dubious manners and dubious morals, of all abnormality and of all +irresponsibility. Any one, in fact, who wishes to see what it was that +Browning disliked need only do two things. First, he should read the +<i>Memoirs</i> of David Home, the famous spiritualist medium with whom +Browning came in contact. These <i>Memoirs</i> constitute a more thorough +and artistic self-revelation than any monologue that Browning ever +wrote. The ghosts, the raps, the flying hands, the phantom voices are +infinitely the most respectable and infinitely the most credible part +of the narrative. But the bragging, the sentimentalism, the moral and +intellectual foppery of the composition is everywhere, culminating +perhaps in the disgusting passage in <a name="Page_94"></a>which Home describes Mrs. +Browning as weeping over him and assuring him that all her husband's +actions in the matter have been adopted against her will. It is in +this kind of thing that we find the roots of the real anger of +Browning. He did not dislike spiritualism, but spiritualists. The +second point on which any one wishing to be just in the matter should +cast an eye, is the record of the visit which Mrs. Browning insisted +on making while on their honeymoon in Paris to the house of George +Sand. Browning felt, and to some extent expressed, exactly the same +aversion to his wife mixing with the circle of George Sand which he +afterwards felt at her mixing with the circle of Home. The society was +"of the ragged red, diluted with the low theatrical, men who worship +George Sand, <i>à genou bas</i> between an oath and an ejection of saliva." +When we find that a man did not object to any number of Jacobites or +Atheists, but objected to the French Bohemian poets and to the early +occultist mediums as friends for his wife, we shall surely be fairly +right in concluding that he objected not to an opinion, but to a +social tone. The truth was that Browning had a great many admirably +Philistine feelings, and one of them was a great relish for his +responsibilities towards his wife. He enjoyed being a husband. This is +quite a distinct thing from enjoying being a lover, though it will +scarcely be found apart from it. But, like all good feelings, it has +its possible exaggerations, and one of them is this almost morbid +healthiness in the choice of friends for his wife.</p> + +<p>David Home, the medium, came to Florence about 1857. Mrs. Browning +undoubtedly threw herself into psychical experiments with great ardour +at first, and<a name="Page_95"></a> Browning, equally undoubtedly, opposed, and at length +forbade, the enterprise. He did not do so however until he had +attended one <i>séance</i> at least, at which a somewhat ridiculous event +occurred, which is described in Home's <i>Memoirs</i> with a gravity even +more absurd than the incident. Towards the end of the proceedings a +wreath was placed in the centre of the table, and the lights being +lowered, it was caused to rise slowly into the air, and after hovering +for some time, to move towards Mrs. Browning, and at length to alight +upon her head. As the wreath was floating in her direction, her +husband was observed abruptly to cross the room and stand beside her. +One would think it was a sufficiently natural action on the part of a +man whose wife was the centre of a weird and disturbing experiment, +genuine or otherwise. But Mr. Home gravely asserts that it was +generally believed that Browning had crossed the room in the hope that +the wreath would alight on his head, and that from the hour of its +disobliging refusal to do so dated the whole of his goaded and +malignant aversion to spiritualism. The idea of the very conventional +and somewhat bored Robert Browning running about the room after a +wreath in the hope of putting his head into it, is one of the genuine +gleams of humour in this rather foolish affair. Browning could be +fairly violent, as we know, both in poetry and conversation; but it +would be almost too terrible to conjecture what he would have felt and +said if Mr. Home's wreath had alighted on his head.</p> + +<p>Next day, according to Home's account, he called on the hostess of the +previous night in what the writer calls "a ridiculous state of +excitement," and told her apparently that she must excuse him if he +and his wife <a name="Page_96"></a>did not attend any more gatherings of the kind. What +actually occurred is not, of course, quite easy to ascertain, for the +account in Home's <i>Memoirs</i> principally consists of noble speeches +made by the medium which would seem either to have reduced Browning to +a pulverised silence, or else to have failed to attract his attention. +But there can be no doubt that the general upshot of the affair was +that Browning put his foot down, and the experiments ceased. There can +be little doubt that he was justified in this; indeed, he was probably +even more justified if the experiments were genuine psychical +mysteries than if they were the <i>hocus-pocus</i> of a charlatan. He knew +his wife better than posterity can be expected to do; but even +posterity can see that she was the type of woman so much adapted to +the purposes of men like Home as to exhibit almost invariably either a +great craving for such experiences or a great terror of them. Like +many geniuses, but not all, she lived naturally upon something like a +borderland; and it is impossible to say that if Browning had not +interposed when she was becoming hysterical she might not have ended +in an asylum.</p> + +<p>The whole of this incident is very characteristic of Browning; but the +real characteristic note in it has, as above suggested, been to some +extent missed. When some seven years afterwards he produced "Mr. +Sludge the Medium," every one supposed that it was an attack upon +spiritualism and the possibility of its phenomena. As we shall see +when we come to that poem, this is a wholly mistaken interpretation of +it. But what is really curious is that most people have assumed that a +dislike of Home's investigations implies <a name="Page_97"></a>a theoretic disbelief in +spiritualism. It might, of course, imply a very firm and serious +belief in it. As a matter of fact it did not imply this in Browning, +but it may perfectly well have implied an agnosticism which admitted +the reasonableness of such things. Home was infinitely less dangerous +as a dexterous swindler than he was as a bad or foolish man in +possession of unknown or ill-comprehended powers. It is surely curious +to think that a man must object to exposing his wife to a few +conjuring tricks, but could not be afraid of exposing her to the loose +and nameless energies of the universe.</p> + +<p>Browning's theoretic attitude in the matter was, therefore, in all +probability quite open and unbiassed. His was a peculiarly hospitable +intellect. If any one had told him of the spiritualist theory, or +theories a hundred times more insane, as things held by some sect of +Gnostics in Alexandria, or of heretical Talmudists at Antwerp, he +would have delighted in those theories, and would very likely have +adopted them. But Greek Gnostics and Antwerp Jews do not dance round a +man's wife and wave their hands in her face and send her into swoons +and trances about which nobody knows anything rational or scientific. +It was simply the stirring in Browning of certain primal masculine +feelings far beyond the reach of argument—things that lie so deep +that if they are hurt, though there may be no blame and no anger, +there is always pain. Browning did not like spiritualism to be +mentioned for many years.</p> + +<p>Robert Browning was unquestionably a thoroughly conventional man. +There are many who think this element of conventionality altogether +regrettable and <a name="Page_98"></a>disgraceful; they have established, as it were, a +convention of the unconventional. But this hatred of the conventional +element in the personality of a poet is only possible to those who do +not remember the meaning of words. Convention means only a coming +together, an agreement; and as every poet must base his work upon an +emotional agreement among men, so every poet must base his work upon a +convention. Every art is, of course, based upon a convention, an +agreement between the speaker and the listener that certain objections +shall not be raised. The most realistic art in the world is open to +realistic objection. Against the most exact and everyday drama that +ever came out of Norway it is still possible for the realist to raise +the objection that the hero who starts a subject and drops it, who +runs out of a room and runs back again for his hat, is all the time +behaving in a most eccentric manner, considering that he is doing +these things in a room in which one of the four walls has been taken +clean away and been replaced by a line of footlights and a mob of +strangers. Against the most accurate black-and-white artist that human +imagination can conceive it is still to be admitted that he draws a +black line round a man's nose, and that that line is a lie. And in +precisely the same fashion a poet must, by the nature of things, be +conventional. Unless he is describing an emotion which others share +with him, his labours will be utterly in vain. If a poet really had an +original emotion; if, for example, a poet suddenly fell in love with +the buffers of a railway train, it would take him considerably more +time than his allotted three-score years and ten to communicate his +feelings.</p><a name="Page_99"></a> + +<p>Poetry deals with primal and conventional things—the hunger for +bread, the love of woman, the love of children, the desire for +immortal life. If men really had new sentiments, poetry could not deal +with them. If, let us say, a man did not feel a bitter craving to eat +bread; but did, by way of substitute, feel a fresh, original craving +to eat brass fenders or mahogany tables, poetry could not express him. +If a man, instead of falling in love with a woman, fell in love with a +fossil or a sea anemone, poetry could not express him. Poetry can only +express what is original in one sense—the sense in which we speak of +original sin. It is original, not in the paltry sense of being new, +but in the deeper sense of being old; it is original in the sense that +it deals with origins.</p> + +<p>All artists, who have any experience of the arts, will agree so far, +that a poet is bound to be conventional with regard to matters of art. +Unfortunately, however, they are the very people who cannot, as a +general rule, see that a poet is also bound to be conventional in +matters of conduct. It is only the smaller poet who sees the poetry of +revolt, of isolation, of disagreement; the larger poet sees the poetry +of those great agreements which constitute the romantic achievement of +civilisation. Just as an agreement between the dramatist and the +audience is necessary to every play; just as an agreement between the +painter and the spectators is necessary to every picture, so an +agreement is necessary to produce the worship of any of the great +figures of morality—the hero, the saint, the average man, the +gentleman. Browning had, it must thoroughly be realised, a real +pleasure in these great agreements, these great conventions. He +delighted, with a true <a name="Page_100"></a>poetic delight, in being conventional. Being +by birth an Englishman, he took pleasure in being an Englishman; being +by rank a member of the middle class, he took a pride in its ancient +scruples and its everlasting boundaries. He was everything that he was +with a definite and conscious pleasure—a man, a Liberal, an +Englishman, an author, a gentleman, a lover, a married man.</p> + +<p>This must always be remembered as a general characteristic of +Browning, this ardent and headlong conventionality. He exhibited it +pre-eminently in the affair of his elopement and marriage, during and +after the escape of himself and his wife to Italy. He seems to have +forgotten everything, except the splendid worry of being married. He +showed a thoroughly healthy consciousness that he was taking up a +responsibility which had its practical side. He came finally and +entirely out of his dreams. Since he had himself enough money to live +on, he had never thought of himself as doing anything but writing +poetry; poetry indeed was probably simmering and bubbling in his head +day and night. But when the problem of the elopement arose he threw +himself with an energy, of which it is pleasant to read, into every +kind of scheme for solidifying his position. He wrote to Monckton +Milnes, and would appear to have badgered him with applications for a +post in the British Museum. "I will work like a horse," he said, with +that boyish note, which, whenever in his unconsciousness he strikes +it, is more poetical than all his poems. All his language in this +matter is emphatic; he would be "glad and proud," he says, "to have +any minor post" his friend could obtain for him. He offered to read +for the Bar, and probably began doing <a name="Page_101"></a>so. But all this vigorous and +very creditable materialism was ruthlessly extinguished by Elizabeth +Barrett. She declined altogether even to entertain the idea of her +husband devoting himself to anything else at the expense of poetry. +Probably she was right and Browning wrong, but it was an error which +every man would desire to have made.</p> + +<p>One of the qualities again which make Browning most charming, is the +fact that he felt and expressed so simple and genuine a satisfaction +about his own achievements as a lover and husband, particularly in +relation to his triumph in the hygienic care of his wife. "If he is +vain of anything," writes Mrs. Browning, "it is of my restored +health." Later, she adds with admirable humour and suggestiveness, +"and I have to tell him that he really must not go telling everybody +how his wife walked here with him, or walked there with him, as if a +wife with two feet were a miracle in Nature." When a lady in Italy +said, on an occasion when Browning stayed behind with his wife on the +day of a picnic, that he was "the only man who behaved like a +Christian to his wife," Browning was elated to an almost infantile +degree. But there could scarcely be a better test of the essential +manliness and decency of a man than this test of his vanities. +Browning boasted of being domesticated; there are half a hundred men +everywhere who would be inclined to boast of not being domesticated. +Bad men are almost without exception conceited, but they are commonly +conceited of their defects.</p> + +<p>One picturesque figure who plays a part in this portion of the +Brownings' life in Italy is Walter Savage Landor. Browning found him +living with some of his <a name="Page_102"></a>wife's relations, and engaged in a continuous +and furious quarrel with them, which was, indeed, not uncommonly the +condition of that remarkable man when living with other human beings. +He had the double arrogance which is only possible to that old and +stately but almost extinct blend—the aristocratic republican. Like an +old Roman senator, or like a gentleman of the Southern States of +America, he had the condescension of a gentleman to those below him, +combined with the jealous self-assertiveness of a Jacobin to those +above. The only person who appears to have been able to manage him and +bring out his more agreeable side was Browning. It is, by the way, one +of the many hints of a certain element in Browning which can only be +described by the elementary and old-fashioned word goodness, that he +always contrived to make himself acceptable and even lovable to men of +savage and capricious temperament, of detached and erratic genius, who +could get on with no one else. Carlyle, who could not get a bitter +taste off his tongue in talking of most of his contemporaries, was +fond of Browning. Landor, who could hardly conduct an ordinary +business interview without beginning to break the furniture, was fond +of Browning. These are things which speak more for a man than many +people will understand. It is easy enough to be agreeable to a circle +of admirers, especially feminine admirers, who have a peculiar talent +for discipleship and the absorption of ideas. But when a man is loved +by other men of his own intellectual stature and of a wholly different +type and order of eminence, we may be certain that there was something +genuine about him, and something far more important than anything +intellectual. Men do not like another <a name="Page_103"></a>man because he is a genius, +least of all when they happen to be geniuses themselves. This general +truth about Browning is like hearing of a woman who is the most famous +beauty in a city, and who is at the same time adored and confided in +by all the women who live there.</p> + +<p>Browning came to the rescue of the fiery old gentleman, and helped by +Seymour Kirkup put him under very definite obligations by a course of +very generous conduct. He was fully repaid in his own mind for his +trouble by the mere presence and friendship of Landor, for whose +quaint and volcanic personality he had a vast admiration, compounded +of the pleasure of the artist in an oddity and of the man in a hero. +It is somewhat amusing and characteristic that Mrs. Browning did not +share this unlimited enjoyment of the company of Mr. Landor, and +expressed her feelings in her own humorous manner. She writes, "Dear, +darling Robert amuses me by talking of his gentleness and sweetness. A +most courteous and refined gentleman he is, of course, and very +affectionate to Robert (as he ought to be), but of self-restraint he +has not a grain, and of suspicion many grains. What do you really say +to dashing down a plate on the floor when you don't like what's on it? +Robert succeeded in soothing him, and the poor old lion is very quiet +on the whole, roaring softly to beguile the time in Latin alcaics +against his wife and Louis Napoleon."</p> + +<p>One event alone could really end this endless life of the Italian +Arcadia. That event happened on June 29, 1861. Robert Browning's wife +died, stricken by the death of her sister, and almost as hard (it is a +characteristic touch) by the death of Cavour. She died alone <a name="Page_104"></a>in the +room with Browning, and of what passed then, though much has been +said, little should be. He, closing the door of that room behind him, +closed a door in himself, and none ever saw Browning upon earth again +but only a splendid surface.</p><a name="Page_105"></a> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<a name="CHAPTER_V"></a><h2>CHAPTER V</h2> + +<h2>BROWNING IN LATER LIFE</h2> + + +<p>Browning's confidences, what there were of them, immediately after his +wife's death were given to several women-friends; all his life, +indeed, he was chiefly intimate with women. The two most intimate of +these were his own sister, who remained with him in all his later +years, and the sister of his wife, who seven years afterwards passed +away in his presence as Elizabeth had done. The other letters, which +number only one or two, referring in any personal manner to his +bereavement are addressed to Miss Haworth and Isa Blagden. He left +Florence and remained for a time with his father and sister near +Dinard. Then he returned to London and took up his residence in +Warwick Crescent. Naturally enough, the thing for which he now chiefly +lived was the education of his son, and it is characteristic of +Browning that he was not only a very indulgent father, but an +indulgent father of a very conventional type: he had rather the +chuckling pride of the city gentleman than the educational gravity of +the intellectual.</p> + +<p>Browning was now famous, <i>Bells and Pomegranates, Men and Women, +Christmas Eve</i>, and <i>Dramatis Personæ</i> had successively glorified his +Italian period. But he was already brooding half-unconsciously on more +<a name="Page_106"></a>famous things. He has himself left on record a description of the +incident out of which grew the whole impulse and plan of his greatest +achievement. In a passage marked with all his peculiar sense of +material things, all that power of writing of stone or metal or the +fabric of drapery, so that we seem to be handling and smelling them, +he has described a stall for the selling of odds and ends of every +variety of utility and uselessness:—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p><span class="i10">"picture frames</span> +White through the worn gilt, mirror-sconces chipped,<br /> +Bronze angel-heads once knobs attached to chests,<br /> +(Handled when ancient dames chose forth brocade)<br /> +Modern chalk drawings, studies from the nude,<br /> +Samples of stone, jet, breccia, porphyry<br /> +Polished and rough, sundry amazing busts<br /> +In baked earth, (broken, Providence be praised!)<br /> +A wreck of tapestry proudly-purposed web<br /> +When reds and blues were indeed red and blue,<br /> +Now offer'd as a mat to save bare feet<br /> +(Since carpets constitute a cruel cost).</p> +<hr style="width: 45%;" /><br /> +<p>Vulgarised Horace for the use of schools,<br /> +'The Life, Death, Miracles of Saint Somebody,<br /> +Saint Somebody Else, his Miracles, Death, and Life'—<br /> +With this, one glance at the lettered back of which,<br /> +And 'Stall,' cried I; a <i>lira</i> made it mine."<br /> +</p></div> + + +<p>This sketch embodies indeed the very poetry of <i>débris</i>, and comes +nearer than any other poem has done to expressing the pathos and +picturesqueness of a low-class pawnshop. "This," which Browning bought +for a lira out of this heap of rubbish, was, of course, the old Latin +record of the criminal case of Guido Franceschini, tried for the +murder of his wife Pompilia <a name="Page_107"></a>in the year 1698. And this again, it is +scarcely necessary to say, was the ground-plan and motive of <i>The Ring +and the Book</i>.</p> + +<p>Browning had picked up the volume and partly planned the poem during +his wife's lifetime in Italy. But the more he studied it, the more the +dimensions of the theme appeared to widen and deepen; and he came at +last, there can be little doubt, to regard it definitely as his +<i>magnum opus</i> to which he would devote many years to come. Then came +the great sorrow of his life, and he cast about him for something +sufficiently immense and arduous and complicated to keep his brain +going like some huge and automatic engine. "I mean to keep writing," +he said, "whether I like it or not." And thus finally he took up the +scheme of the Franceschini story, and developed it on a scale with a +degree of elaboration, repetition, and management, and inexhaustible +scholarship which was never perhaps before given in the history of the +world to an affair of two or three characters. Of the larger literary +and spiritual significance of the work, particularly in reference to +its curious and original form of narration, I shall speak +subsequently. But there is one peculiarity about the story which has +more direct bearing on Browning's life, and it appears singular that +few, if any, of his critics have noticed it. This peculiarity is the +extraordinary resemblance between the moral problem involved in the +poem if understood in its essence, and the moral problem which +constituted the crisis and centre of Browning's own life. Nothing, +properly speaking, ever happened to Browning after his wife's death; +and his greatest work during that time was the telling, under alien +symbols and the veil <a name="Page_108"></a>of a wholly different story, the inner truth +about his own greatest trial and hesitation. He himself had in this +sense the same difficulty as Caponsacchi, the supreme difficulty of +having to trust himself to the reality of virtue not only without the +reward, but even without the name of virtue. He had, like Caponsacchi, +preferred what was unselfish and dubious to what was selfish and +honourable. He knew better than any man that there is little danger of +men who really know anything of that naked and homeless responsibility +seeking it too often or indulging it too much. The conscientiousness +of the law-abider is nothing in its terrors to the conscientiousness +of the conscientious law-breaker. Browning had once, for what he +seriously believed to be a greater good, done what he himself would +never have had the cant to deny, ought to be called deceit and +evasion. Such a thing ought never to come to a man twice. If he finds +that necessity twice, he may, I think, be looked at with the beginning +of a suspicion. To Browning it came once, and he devoted his greatest +poem to a suggestion of how such a necessity may come to any man who +is worthy to live.</p> + +<p>As has already been suggested, any apparent danger that there may be +in this excusing of an exceptional act is counteracted by the perils +of the act, since it must always be remembered that this kind of act +has the immense difference from all legal acts—that it can only be +justified by success. If Browning had taken his wife to Paris, and she +had died in an hotel there, we can only conceive him saying, with the +bitter emphasis of one of his own lines, "How should I have borne me, +please?" Before and after this event his life was as <a name="Page_109"></a>tranquil and +casual a one as it would be easy to imagine; but there always remained +upon him something which was felt by all who knew him in after +years—the spirit of a man who had been ready when his time came, and +had walked in his own devotion and certainty in a position counted +indefensible and almost along the brink of murder. This great moral of +Browning, which may be called roughly the doctrine of the great hour, +enters, of course, into many poems besides <i>The Ring and the Book</i>, +and is indeed the mainspring of a great part of his poetry taken as a +whole. It is, of course, the central idea of that fine poem, "The +Statue and the Bust," which has given a great deal of distress to a +great many people because of its supposed invasion of recognised +morality. It deals, as every one knows, with a Duke Ferdinand and an +elopement which he planned with the bride of one of the Riccardi. The +lovers begin by deferring their flight for various more or less +comprehensible reasons of convenience; but the habit of shrinking from +the final step grows steadily upon them, and they never take it, but +die, as it were, waiting for each other. The objection that the act +thus avoided was a criminal one is very simply and quite clearly +answered by Browning himself. His case against the dilatory couple is +not in the least affected by the viciousness of their aim. His case is +that they exhibited no virtue. Crime was frustrated in them by +cowardice, which is probably the worse immorality of the two. The same +idea again may be found in that delightful lyric "Youth and Art," +where a successful cantatrice reproaches a successful sculptor with +their failure to understand each other in their youth and poverty.</p><a name="Page_110"></a> + +<div class="poem"><p>"Each life unfulfilled, you see;<br /> +It hangs still, patchy and scrappy:<br /> +We have not sighed deep, laughed free,<br /> +Starved, feasted, despaired,—been happy."<br /> +</p></div> + +<p>And this conception of the great hour, which breaks out everywhere in +Browning, it is almost impossible not to connect with his own internal +drama. It is really curious that this correspondence has not been +insisted on. Probably critics have been misled by the fact that +Browning in many places appears to boast that he is purely dramatic, +that he has never put himself into his work, a thing which no poet, +good or bad, who ever lived could possibly avoid doing.</p> + +<p>The enormous scope and seriousness of <i>The Ring and the Book</i> occupied +Browning for some five or six years, and the great epic appeared in +the winter of 1868. Just before it was published Smith and Elder +brought out a uniform edition of all Browning's works up to that time, +and the two incidents taken together may be considered to mark the +final and somewhat belated culmination of Browning's literary fame. +The years since his wife's death, that had been covered by the writing +of <i>The Ring and the Book</i>, had been years of an almost feverish +activity in that and many other ways. His travels had been restless +and continued, his industry immense, and for the first time he began +that mode of life which afterwards became so characteristic of +him—the life of what is called society. A man of a shallower and more +sentimental type would have professed to find the life of +dinner-tables and soirées vain and unsatisfying to a poet, and +especially to a poet in mourning. But if there is one thing more than +another which is stirring and honourable about Browning, it is <a name="Page_111"></a>the +entire absence in him of this cant of dissatisfaction. He had the one +great requirement of a poet—he was not difficult to please. The life +of society was superficial, but it is only very superficial people who +object to the superficial. To the man who sees the marvellousness of +all things, the surface of life is fully as strange and magical as its +interior; clearness and plainness of life is fully as mysterious as +its mysteries. The young man in evening dress, pulling on his gloves, +is quite as elemental a figure as any anchorite, quite as +incomprehensible, and indeed quite as alarming.</p> + +<p>A great many literary persons have expressed astonishment at, or even +disapproval of, this social frivolity of Browning's. Not one of these +literary people would have been shocked if Browning's interest in +humanity had led him into a gambling hell in the Wild West or a low +tavern in Paris; but it seems to be tacitly assumed that fashionable +people are not human at all. Humanitarians of a material and dogmatic +type, the philanthropists and the professional reformers go to look +for humanity in remote places and in huge statistics. Humanitarians of +a more vivid type, the Bohemian artists, go to look for humanity in +thieves' kitchens and the studios of the Quartier Latin. But +humanitarians of the highest type, the great poets and philosophers, +do not go to look for humanity at all. For them alone among all men +the nearest drawing-room is full of humanity, and even their own +families are human. Shakespeare ended his life by buying a house in +his own native town and talking to the townsmen. Browning was invited +to a great many conversaziones and private views, and did not pretend +that they bored him. In a letter belonging to this <a name="Page_112"></a>period of his life +he describes his first dinner at one of the Oxford colleges with an +unaffected delight and vanity, which reminds the reader of nothing so +much as the pride of the boy-captain of a public school if he were +invited to a similar function and received a few compliments. It may +be indeed that Browning had a kind of second youth in this +long-delayed social recognition, but at least he enjoyed his second +youth nearly as much as his first, and it is not every one who can do +that.</p> + +<p>Of Browning's actual personality and presence in this later middle age +of his, memories are still sufficiently clear. He was a middle-sized, +well set up, erect man, with somewhat emphatic gestures, and, as +almost all testimonies mention, a curiously strident voice. The beard, +the removal of which his wife had resented with so quaint an +indignation, had grown again, but grown quite white, which, as she +said when it occurred, was a signal mark of the justice of the gods. +His hair was still fairly dark, and his whole appearance at this time +must have been very well represented by Mr. G.F. Watts's fine portrait +in the National Portrait Gallery. The portrait bears one of the many +testimonies which exist to Mr. Watts's grasp of the essential of +character, for it is the only one of the portraits of Browning in +which we get primarily the air of virility, even of animal virility, +tempered but not disguised, with a certain touch of the pallor of the +brain-worker. He looks here what he was—a very healthy man, too +scholarly to live a completely healthy life.</p> + +<p>His manner in society, as has been more than once indicated, was that +of a man anxious, if anything, to avoid the air of intellectual +eminence. Lockhart said <a name="Page_113"></a>briefly, "I like Browning; he isn't at all +like a damned literary man." He was, according to some, upon occasion, +talkative and noisy to a fault; but there are two kinds of men who +monopolise conversation. The first kind are those who like the sound +of their own voice; the second are those who do not know what the +sound of their own voice is like. Browning was one of the latter +class. His volubility in speech had the same origin as his +voluminousness and obscurity in literature—a kind of headlong +humility. He cannot assuredly have been aware that he talked people +down or have wished to do so. For this would have been precisely a +violation of the ideal of the man of the world, the one ambition and +even weakness that he had. He wished to be a man of the world, and he +never in the full sense was one. He remained a little too much of a +boy, a little too much even of a Puritan, and a little too much of +what may be called a man of the universe, to be a man of the world.</p> + +<p>One of his faults probably was the thing roughly called prejudice. On +the question, for example, of table-turning and psychic phenomena he +was in a certain degree fierce and irrational. He was not indeed, as +we shall see when we come to study "Sludge the Medium," exactly +prejudiced against spiritualism. But he was beyond all question +stubbornly prejudiced against spiritualists. Whether the medium Home +was or was not a scoundrel it is somewhat difficult in our day to +conjecture. But in so far as he claimed supernatural powers, he may +have been as honest a gentleman as ever lived. And even if we think +that the moral atmosphere of Home is that of a man of dubious +character, we can still feel that<a name="Page_114"></a> Browning might have achieved his +purpose without making it so obvious that he thought so. Some traces +again, though much fainter ones, may be found of something like a +subconscious hostility to the Roman Church, or at least a less full +comprehension of the grandeur of the Latin religious civilisation than +might have been expected of a man of Browning's great imaginative +tolerance. Æstheticism, Bohemianism, the irresponsibilities of the +artist, the untidy morals of Grub Street and the Latin Quarter, he +hated with a consuming hatred. He was himself exact in everything, +from his scholarship to his clothes; and even when he wore the loose +white garments of the lounger in Southern Europe, they were in their +own way as precise as a dress suit. This extra carefulness in all +things he defended against the cant of Bohemianism as the right +attitude for the poet. When some one excused coarseness or negligence +on the ground of genius, he said, "That is an error: Noblesse oblige."</p> + +<p>Browning's prejudices, however, belonged altogether to that healthy +order which is characterised by a cheerful and satisfied ignorance. It +never does a man any very great harm to hate a thing that he knows +nothing about. It is the hating of a thing when we do know something +about it which corrodes the character. We all have a dark feeling of +resistance towards people we have never met, and a profound and manly +dislike of the authors we have never read. It does not harm a man to +be certain before opening the books that Whitman is an obscene ranter +or that Stevenson is a mere trifler with style. It is the man who can +think these things after he has read the books who must be in a fair +way to mental perdition. Prejudice, <a name="Page_115"></a>in fact, is not so much the great +intellectual sin as a thing which we may call, to coin a word, +"postjudice," not the bias before the fair trial, but the bias that +remains afterwards. With Browning's swift and emphatic nature the bias +was almost always formed before he had gone into the matter. But +almost all the men he really knew he admired, almost all the books he +had really read he enjoyed. He stands pre-eminent among those great +universalists who praised the ground they trod on and commended +existence like any other material, in its samples. He had no kinship +with those new and strange universalists of the type of Tolstoi who +praise existence to the exclusion of all the institutions they have +lived under, and all the ties they have known. He thought the world +good because he had found so many things that were good in +it—religion, the nation, the family, the social class. He did not, +like the new humanitarian, think the world good because he had found +so many things in it that were bad.</p> + +<p>As has been previously suggested, there was something very queer and +dangerous that underlay all the good humour of Browning. If one of +these idle prejudices were broken by better knowledge, he was all the +better pleased. But if some of the prejudices that were really rooted +in him were trodden on, even by accident, such as his aversion to +loose artistic cliques, or his aversion to undignified publicity, his +rage was something wholly transfiguring and alarming, something far +removed from the shrill disapproval of Carlyle and Ruskin. It can only +be said that he became a savage, and not always a very agreeable or +presentable savage. The indecent fury which danced upon <a name="Page_116"></a>the bones of +Edward Fitzgerald was a thing which ought not to have astonished any +one who had known much of Browning's character or even of his work. +Some unfortunate persons on another occasion had obtained some of Mrs. +Browning's letters shortly after her death, and proposed to write a +<i>Life</i> founded upon them. They ought to have understood that Browning +would probably disapprove; but if he talked to them about it, as he +did to others, and it is exceedingly probable that he did, they must +have thought he was mad. "What I suffer with the paws of these +black-guards in my bowels you can fancy," he says. Again he writes: +"Think of this beast working away, not deeming my feelings, or those +of her family, worthy of notice. It shall not be done if I can stop +the scamp's knavery along with his breath." Whether Browning actually +resorted to this extreme course is unknown; nothing is known except +that he wrote a letter to the ambitious biographer which reduced him +to silence, probably from stupefaction.</p> + +<p>The same peculiarity ought, as I have said, to have been apparent to +any one who knew anything of Browning's literary work. A great number +of his poems are marked by a trait of which by its nature it is more +or less impossible to give examples. Suffice it to say that it is +truly extraordinary that poets like Swinburne (who seldom uses a gross +word) should have been spoken of as if they had introduced moral +license into Victorian poetry. What the Non-conformist conscience has +been doing to have passed Browning is something difficult to imagine. +But the peculiarity of this occasional coarseness in his work is +this—that it is always used to express a certain wholesome <a name="Page_117"></a>fury and +contempt for things sickly, or ungenerous, or unmanly. The poet seems +to feel that there are some things so contemptible that you can only +speak of them in pothouse words. It would be idle, and perhaps +undesirable, to give examples; but it may be noted that the same +brutal physical metaphor is used by his Caponsacchi about the people +who could imagine Pompilia impure and by his Shakespeare in "At the +Mermaid," about the claim of the Byronic poet to enter into the heart +of humanity. In both cases Browning feels, and perhaps in a manner +rightly, that the best thing we can do with a sentiment essentially +base is to strip off its affectations and state it basely, and that +the mud of Chaucer is a great deal better than the poison of Sterne. +Herein again Browning is close to the average man; and to do the +average man justice, there is a great deal more of this Browningesque +hatred of Byronism in the brutality of his conversation than many +people suppose.</p> + +<p>Such, roughly and as far as we can discover, was the man who, in the +full summer and even the full autumn of his intellectual powers, began +to grow upon the consciousness of the English literary world about +this time. For the first time friendship grew between him and the +other great men of his time. Tennyson, for whom he then and always +felt the best and most personal kind of admiration, came into his +life, and along with him Gladstone and Francis Palgrave. There began +to crowd in upon him those honours whereby a man is to some extent +made a classic in his lifetime, so that he is honoured even if he is +unread. He was made a Fellow of Balliol in 1867, and the homage of the +great universities continued thenceforth unceasingly <a name="Page_118"></a>until his death, +despite many refusals on his part. He was unanimously elected Lord +Rector of Glasgow University in 1875. He declined, owing to his deep +and somewhat characteristic aversion to formal public speaking, and in +1877 he had to decline on similar grounds the similar offer from the +University of St. Andrews. He was much at the English universities, +was a friend of Dr. Jowett, and enjoyed the university life at the age +of sixty-three in a way that he probably would not have enjoyed it if +he had ever been to a university. The great universities would not let +him alone, to their great credit, and he became a D.C.L. of Cambridge +in 1879, and a D.C.L. of Oxford in 1882. When he received these +honours there were, of course, the traditional buffooneries of the +undergraduates, and one of them dropped a red cotton night-cap neatly +on his head as he passed under the gallery. Some indignant +intellectuals wrote to him to protest against this affront, but +Browning took the matter in the best and most characteristic way. "You +are far too hard," he wrote in answer, "on the very harmless +drolleries of the young men. Indeed, there used to be a regularly +appointed jester, 'Filius Terrae' he was called, whose business it was +to gibe and jeer at the honoured ones by way of reminder that all +human glories are merely gilded baubles and must not be fancied +metal." In this there are other and deeper things characteristic of +Browning besides his learning and humour. In discussing anything, he +must always fall back upon great speculative and eternal ideas. Even +in the tomfoolery of a horde of undergraduates he can only see a +symbol of the ancient office of ridicule in the scheme of morals. The +young men themselves were probably <a name="Page_119"></a>unaware that they were the +representatives of the "Filius Terrae."</p> + +<p>But the years during which Browning was thus reaping some of his late +laurels began to be filled with incidents that reminded him how the +years were passing over him. On June 20, 1866, his father had died, a +man of whom it is impossible to think without a certain emotion, a man +who had lived quietly and persistently for others, to whom Browning +owed more than it is easy to guess, to whom we in all probability +mainly owe Browning. In 1868 one of his closest friends, Arabella +Barrett, the sister of his wife, died, as her sister had done, alone +with Browning. Browning was not a superstitious man; he somewhat +stormily prided himself on the contrary; but he notes at this time "a +dream which Arabella had of Her, in which she prophesied their meeting +in five years," that is, of course, the meeting of Elizabeth and +Arabella. His friend Milsand, to whom <i>Sordello</i> was dedicated, died +in 1886. "I never knew," said Browning, "or ever shall know, his like +among men." But though both fame and a growing isolation indicated +that he was passing towards the evening of his days, though he bore +traces of the progress, in a milder attitude towards things, and a +greater preference for long exiles with those he loved, one thing +continued in him with unconquerable energy—there was no diminution in +the quantity, no abatement in the immense designs of his intellectual +output.</p> + +<p>In 1871 he produced <i>Balaustion's Adventure</i>, a work exhibiting not +only his genius in its highest condition of power, but something more +exacting even than genius to a man of his mature and changed life, +immense investigation, prodigious memory, the thorough <a name="Page_120"></a>assimilation +of the vast literature of a remote civilisation. <i>Balaustion's +Adventure</i>, which is, of course, the mere framework for an English +version of the Alcestis of Euripides, is an illustration of one of +Browning's finest traits, his immeasurable capacity for a classic +admiration. Those who knew him tell us that in conversation he never +revealed himself so impetuously or so brilliantly as when declaiming +the poetry of others; and <i>Balaustion's Adventure</i> is a monument of +this fiery self-forgetfulness. It is penetrated with the passionate +desire to render Euripides worthily, and to that imitation are for the +time being devoted all the gigantic powers which went to make the +songs of Pippa and the last agony of Guido. Browning never put himself +into anything more powerfully or more successfully; yet it is only an +excellent translation. In the uncouth philosophy of Caliban, in the +tangled ethics of Sludge, in his wildest satire, in his most +feather-headed lyric, Browning was never more thoroughly Browning than +in this splendid and unselfish plagiarism. This revived excitement in +Greek matters; "his passionate love of the Greek language" continued +in him thenceforward till his death. He published more than one poem +on the drama of Hellas. <i>Aristophanes' Apology</i> came out in 1875, and +<i>The Agamemnon of Æschylus</i>, another paraphrase, in 1877. All three +poems are marked by the same primary characteristic, the fact that the +writer has the literature of Athens literally at his fingers' ends. He +is intimate not only with their poetry and politics, but with their +frivolity and their slang; he knows not only Athenian wisdom, but +Athenian folly; not only the beauty of Greece, but even its vulgarity. +In fact, a page of <i>Aristophanes' Apology</i> is like a page of<a name="Page_121"></a> +Aristophanes, dark with levity and as obscure as a schoolman's +treatise, with its load of jokes.</p> + +<p>In 1871 also appeared <i>Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau: Saviour of +Society</i>, one of the finest and most picturesque of all Browning's +apologetic monologues. The figure is, of course, intended for Napoleon +III., whose Empire had just fallen, bringing down his country with it. +The saying has been often quoted that Louis Napoleon deceived Europe +twice—once when he made it think he was a noodle, and once when he +made it think he was a statesman. It might be added that Europe was +never quite just to him, and was deceived a third time, when it took +him after his fall for an exploded mountebank and nonentity. Amid the +general chorus of contempt which was raised over his weak and +unscrupulous policy in later years, culminating in his great disaster, +there are few things finer than this attempt of Browning's to give the +man a platform and let him speak for himself. It is the apologia of a +political adventurer, and a political adventurer of a kind peculiarly +open to popular condemnation. Mankind has always been somewhat +inclined to forgive the adventurer who destroys or re-creates, but +there is nothing inspiring about the adventurer who merely preserves. +We have sympathy with the rebel who aims at reconstruction, but there +is something repugnant to the imagination in the rebel who rebels in +the name of compromise. Browning had to defend, or rather to +interpret, a man who kidnapped politicians in the night and deluged +the Montmartre with blood, not for an ideal, not for a reform, not +precisely even for a cause, but simply for the establishment of a +<i>régime</i>. He did these hideous things not so much that he might <a name="Page_122"></a>be +able to do better ones, but that he and every one else might be able +to do nothing for twenty years; and Browning's contention, and a very +plausible contention, is that the criminal believed that his crime +would establish order and compromise, or, in other words, that he +thought that nothing was the very best thing he and his people could +do. There is something peculiarly characteristic of Browning in thus +selecting not only a political villain, but what would appear the most +prosaic kind of villain. We scarcely ever find in Browning a defence +of those obvious and easily defended publicans and sinners whose +mingled virtues and vices are the stuff of romance and melodrama—the +generous rake, the kindly drunkard, the strong man too great for +parochial morals. He was in a yet more solitary sense the friend of +the outcast. He took in the sinners whom even sinners cast out. He +went with the hypocrite and had mercy on the Pharisee.</p> + +<p>How little this desire of Browning's, to look for a moment at the +man's life with the man's eyes, was understood, may be gathered from +the criticisms on <i>Hohenstiel-Schwangau</i>, which, says Browning, "the +Editor of the <i>Edinburgh Review</i> calls my eulogium on the Second +Empire, which it is not, any more than what another wiseacre affirms +it to be, a scandalous attack on the old constant friend of England. +It is just what I imagine the man might, if he pleased, say for +himself."</p> + +<p>In 1873 appeared <i>Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country</i>, which, if it be not +absolutely one of the finest of Browning's poems, is certainly one of +the most magnificently Browningesque. The origin of the name of the +poem is probably well known. He was travelling <a name="Page_123"></a>along the Normandy +coast, and discovered what he called</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"Meek, hitherto un-Murrayed bathing-places,<br /> +Best loved of sea-coast-nook-full Normandy!"<br /> +</p></div> + +<p>Miss Thackeray, who was of the party, delighted Browning beyond +measure by calling the sleepy old fishing district "White Cotton +Night-Cap Country." It was exactly the kind of elfish phrase to which +Browning had, it must always be remembered, a quite unconquerable +attraction. The notion of a town of sleep, where men and women walked +about in nightcaps, a nation of somnambulists, was the kind of thing +that Browning in his heart loved better than <i>Paradise Lost</i>. Some +time afterwards he read in a newspaper a very painful story of +profligacy and suicide which greatly occupied the French journals in +the year 1871, and which had taken place in the same district. It is +worth noting that Browning was one of those wise men who can perceive +the terrible and impressive poetry of the police-news, which is +commonly treated as vulgarity, which is dreadful and may be +undesirable, but is certainly not vulgar. From <i>The Ring and the Book</i> +to <i>Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country</i> a great many of his works might be +called magnificent detective stories. The story is somewhat ugly, and +its power does not alter its ugliness, for power can only make +ugliness uglier. And in this poem there is little or nothing of the +revelation of that secret wealth of valour and patience in humanity +which makes real and redeems the revelation of its secret vileness in +<i>The Ring and the Book</i>. It almost looks at first sight as if Browning +had for a moment surrendered the <a name="Page_124"></a>whole of his impregnable +philosophical position and admitted the strange heresy that a human +story can be sordid. But this view of the poem is, of course, a +mistake. It was written in something which, for want of a more exact +word, we must call one of the bitter moods of Browning; but the +bitterness is entirely the product of a certain generous hostility +against the class of morbidities which he really detested, sometimes +more than they deserved. In this poem these principles of weakness and +evil are embodied to him as the sicklier kind of Romanism, and the +more sensual side of the French temperament. We must never forget what +a great deal of the Puritan there remained in Browning to the end. +This outburst of it is fierce and ironical, not in his best spirit. It +says in effect, "You call this a country of sleep, I call it a country +of death. You call it 'White Cotton Night-Cap Country'; I call it 'Red +Cotton Night-Cap Country.'"</p> + +<p>Shortly before this, in 1872, he had published <i>Fifine at the Fair</i>, +which his principal biographer, and one of his most uncompromising +admirers, calls a piece of perplexing cynicism. Perplexing it may be +to some extent, for it was almost impossible to tell whether Browning +would or would not be perplexing even in a love-song or a post-card. +But cynicism is a word that cannot possibly be applied with any +propriety to anything that Browning ever wrote. Cynicism denotes that +condition of mind in which we hold that life is in its nature mean and +arid; that no soul contains genuine goodness, and no state of things +genuine reliability. <i>Fifine at the Fair</i>, like <i>Prince +Hohenstiel-Schwangau</i>, is one of Browning's apologetic +soliloquies—the <a name="Page_125"></a>soliloquy of an epicurean who seeks half-playfully +to justify upon moral grounds an infidelity into which he afterwards +actually falls. This casuist, like all Browning's casuists, is given +many noble outbursts and sincere moments, and therefore apparently the +poem is called cynical. It is difficult to understand what particular +connection there is between seeing good in nobody and seeing good even +in a sensual fool.</p> + +<p>After <i>Fifine at the Fair</i> appeared the <i>Inn Album</i>, in 1875, a purely +narrative work, chiefly interesting as exhibiting in yet another place +one of Browning's vital characteristics, a pleasure in retelling and +interpreting actual events of a sinister and criminal type; and after +the <i>Inn Album</i> came what is perhaps the most preposterously +individual thing he ever wrote, <i>Of Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in +Distemper</i>, in 1876. It is impossible to call the work poetry, and it +is very difficult indeed to know what to call it. Its chief +characteristic is a kind of galloping energy, an energy that has +nothing intellectual or even intelligible about it, a purely animal +energy of words. Not only is it not beautiful, it is not even clever, +and yet it carries the reader away as he might be carried away by +romping children. It ends up with a voluble and largely unmeaning +malediction upon the poet's critics, a malediction so outrageously +good-humoured that it does not take the trouble even to make itself +clear to the objects of its wrath. One can compare the poem to nothing +in heaven or earth, except to the somewhat humorous, more or less +benevolent, and most incomprehensible catalogues of curses and oaths +which may be heard from an intoxicated navvy. This is the kind of +thing, and it goes on for pages:—</p><a name="Page_126"></a> + +<div class="poem"><p>"Long after the last of your number<br /> +Has ceased my front-court to encumber<br /> +While, treading down rose and ranunculus,<br /> +You <i>Tommy-make-room-for-your-uncle</i>-us!<br /> +Troop, all of you man or homunculus,<br /> +Quick march! for Xanthippe, my housemaid,<br /> +If once on your pates she a souse made<br /> +With what, pan or pot, bowl or <i>skoramis</i>,<br /> +First comes to her hand—things were more amiss!<br /> +I would not for worlds be your place in—<br /> +Recipient of slops from the basin!<br /> +You, Jack-in-the-Green, leaf-and-twiggishness<br /> +Won't save a dry thread on your priggishness!"<br /></p></div> + +<p>You can only call this, in the most literal sense of the word, the +brute-force of language.</p> + +<p>In spite however of this monstrosity among poems, which gives its +title to the volume, it contains some of the most beautiful verses +that Browning ever wrote in that style of light philosophy in which he +was unequalled. Nothing ever gave so perfectly and artistically what +is too loosely talked about as a thrill, as the poem called "Fears and +Scruples," in which a man describes the mystifying conduct of an +absent friend, and reserves to the last line the climax—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p><span class="i10">"Hush, I pray you!</span> +What if this friend happen to be—God."<br /></p></div> + +<p>It is the masterpiece of that excellent but much-abused literary +quality, Sensationalism.</p> + +<p>The volume entitled <i>Pacchiarotto</i>, moreover, includes one or two of +the most spirited poems on the subject of the poet in relation to +publicity—"At the Mermaid," "House," and "Shop."</p> + +<p>In spite of his increasing years, his books seemed <a name="Page_127"></a>if anything to +come thicker and faster. Two were published in 1878—<i>La Saisiaz</i>, his +great metaphysical poem on the conception of immortality, and that +delightfully foppish fragment of the <i>ancien régime</i>, <i>The Two Poets +of Croisic</i>. Those two poems would alone suffice to show that he had +not forgotten the hard science of theology or the harder science of +humour. Another collection followed in 1879, the first series of +<i>Dramatic Idylls</i>, which contain such masterpieces as "Pheidippides" +and "Ivàn Ivànovitch." Upon its heels, in 1880, came the second series +of <i>Dramatic Idylls</i>, including "Muléykeh" and "Clive," possibly the +two best stories in poetry, told in the best manner of story-telling. +Then only did the marvellous fountain begin to slacken in quantity, +but never in quality. <i>Jocoseria</i> did not appear till 1883. It +contains among other things a cast-back to his very earliest manner in +the lyric of "Never the Time and the Place," which we may call the +most light-hearted love-song that was ever written by a man over +seventy. In the next year appeared <i>Ferishtah's Fancies</i>, which +exhibit some of his shrewdest cosmic sagacity, expressed in some of +his quaintest and most characteristic images. Here perhaps more than +anywhere else we see that supreme peculiarity of Browning—his sense +of the symbolism of material trifles. Enormous problems, and yet more +enormous answers, about pain, prayer, destiny, liberty, and conscience +are suggested by cherries, by the sun, by a melon-seller, by an eagle +flying in the sky, by a man tilling a plot of ground. It is this +spirit of grotesque allegory which really characterises Browning among +all other poets. Other poets might possibly have hit upon the same +philosophical <a name="Page_128"></a>idea—some idea as deep, as delicate, and as spiritual. +But it may be safely asserted that no other poet, having thought of a +deep, delicate, and spiritual idea, would call it "A Bean Stripe; also +Apple Eating."</p> + +<p>Three more years passed, and the last book which Browning published in +his lifetime was <i>Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in +their Day</i>, a book which consists of apostrophes, amicable, furious, +reverential, satirical, emotional to a number of people of whom the +vast majority even of cultivated people have never heard in their +lives—Daniel Bartoli, Francis Furini, Gerard de Lairesse, and Charles +Avison. This extraordinary knowledge of the fulness of history was a +thing which never ceased to characterise Browning even when he was +unfortunate in every other literary quality. Apart altogether from +every line he ever wrote, it may fairly be said that no mind so rich +as his ever carried its treasures to the grave. All these later poems +are vigorous, learned, and full-blooded. They are thoroughly +characteristic of their author. But nothing in them is quite so +characteristic of their author as this fact, that when he had +published all of them, and was already near to his last day, he turned +with the energy of a boy let out of school, and began, of all things +in the world, to re-write and improve "Pauline," the boyish poem that +he had written fifty-five years before. Here was a man covered with +glory and near to the doors of death, who was prepared to give himself +the elaborate trouble of reconstructing the mood, and rebuilding the +verses of a long juvenile poem which had been forgotten for fifty +years in the blaze of successive victories. It is such things as these +which give to Browning an interest of personality which is far beyond +<a name="Page_129"></a>the more interest of genius. It was of such things that Elizabeth +Barrett wrote in one of her best moments of insight—that his genius +was the least important thing about him.</p> + +<p>During all these later years, Browning's life had been a quiet and +regular one. He always spent the winter in Italy and the summer in +London, and carried his old love of precision to the extent of never +failing day after day throughout the year to leave the house at the +same time. He had by this time become far more of a public figure than +he had ever been previously, both in England and Italy. In 1881, Dr. +Furnivall and Miss E.H. Hickey founded the famous "Browning Society." +He became President of the new "Shakespeare Society" and of the +"Wordsworth Society." In 1886, on the death of Lord Houghton, he +accepted the post of Foreign Correspondent to the Royal Academy. When +he moved to De Vere Gardens in 1887, it began to be evident that he +was slowly breaking up. He still dined out constantly; he still +attended every reception and private view; he still corresponded +prodigiously, and even added to his correspondence; and there is +nothing more typical of him than that now, when he was almost already +a classic, he answered any compliment with the most delightful vanity +and embarrassment. In a letter to Mr. George Bainton, touching style, +he makes a remark which is an excellent criticism on his whole +literary career: "I myself found many forgotten fields which have +proved the richest of pastures." But despite his continued energy, his +health was gradually growing worse. He was a strong man in a muscular, +and ordinarily in a physical sense, but he was also in a certain sense +a <a name="Page_130"></a>nervous man, and may be said to have died of brain-excitement +prolonged through a lifetime. In these closing years he began to feel +more constantly the necessity for rest. He and his sister went to live +at a little hotel in Llangollen, and spent hours together talking and +drinking tea on the lawn. He himself writes in one of his quaint and +poetic phrases that he had come to love these long country retreats, +"another term of delightful weeks, each tipped with a sweet starry +Sunday at the little church." For the first time, and in the last two +or three years, he was really growing old. On one point he maintained +always a tranquil and unvarying decision. The pessimistic school of +poetry was growing up all round him; the decadents, with their belief +that art was only a counting of the autumn leaves, were approaching +more and more towards their tired triumph and their tasteless +popularity. But Browning would not for one instant take the scorn of +them out of his voice. "Death, death, it is this harping on death that +I despise so much. In fiction, in poetry, French as well as English, +and I am told in American also, in art and literature, the shadow of +death, call it what you will, despair, negation, indifference, is upon +us. But what fools who talk thus! Why, <i>amico mio</i>, you know as well +as I, that death is life, just as our daily momentarily dying body is +none the less alive, and ever recruiting new forces of existence. +Without death, which is our church-yardy crape-like word for change, +for growth, there could be no prolongation of that which we call life. +Never say of me that I am dead."</p> + +<p>On August 13, 1888, he set out once more for Italy, the last of his +innumerable voyages. During his <a name="Page_131"></a>last Italian period he seems to have +fallen back on very ultimate simplicities, chiefly a mere staring at +nature. The family with whom he lived kept a fox cub, and Browning +would spend hours with it watching its grotesque ways; when it +escaped, he was characteristically enough delighted. The old man could +be seen continually in the lanes round Asolo, peering into hedges and +whistling for the lizards.</p> + +<p>This serene and pastoral decline, surely the mildest of slopes into +death, was suddenly diversified by a flash of something lying far +below. Browning's eye fell upon a passage written by the distinguished +Edward Fitzgerald, who had been dead for many years, in which +Fitzgerald spoke in an uncomplimentary manner of Elizabeth Barrett +Browning. Browning immediately wrote the "Lines to Edward Fitzgerald," +and set the whole literary world in an uproar. The lines were bitter +and excessive to have been written against any man, especially bitter +and excessive to have been written against a man who was not alive to +reply. And yet, when all is said, it is impossible not to feel a +certain dark and indescribable pleasure in this last burst of the old +barbaric energy. The mountain had been tilled and forested, and laid +out in gardens to the summit; but for one last night it had proved +itself once more a volcano, and had lit up all the plains with its +forgotten fire. And the blow, savage as it was, was dealt for that +great central sanctity—the story of a man's youth. All that the old +man would say in reply to every view of the question was, "I felt as +if she had died yesterday."</p> + +<p>Towards December of 1889 he moved to Venice, where he fell ill. He +took very little food; it was <a name="Page_132"></a>indeed one of his peculiar small fads +that men should not take food when they are ill, a matter in which he +maintained that the animals were more sagacious. He asserted +vigorously that this somewhat singular regimen would pull him through, +talked about his plans, and appeared cheerful. Gradually, however, the +talking became more infrequent, the cheerfulness passed into a kind of +placidity; and without any particular crisis or sign of the end, +Robert Browning died on December 12, 1889. The body was taken on board +ship by the Venice Municipal Guard, and received by the Royal Italian +marines. He was buried in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey, the +choir singing his wife's poem, "He giveth His beloved sleep." On the +day that he died <i>Asolando</i> was published.</p><a name="Page_133"></a> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<a name="CHAPTER_VI"></a><h2>CHAPTER VI</h2> + +<h2>BROWNING AS A LITERARY ARTIST</h2> + +<p>Mr. William Sharp, in his <i>Life</i> of Browning, quotes the remarks of +another critic to the following effect: "The poet's processes of +thought are scientific in their precision and analysis; the sudden +conclusion that he imposes upon them is transcendental and inept."</p> + +<p>This is a very fair but a very curious example of the way in which +Browning is treated. For what is the state of affairs? A man publishes +a series of poems, vigorous, perplexing, and unique. The critics read +them, and they decide that he has failed as a poet, but that he is a +remarkable philosopher and logician. They then proceed to examine his +philosophy, and show with great triumph that it is unphilosophical, +and to examine his logic and show with great triumph that it is not +logical, but "transcendental and inept." In other words, Browning is +first denounced for being a logician and not a poet, and then +denounced for insisting on being a poet when they have decided that he +is to be a logician. It is just as if a man were to say first that a +garden was so neglected that it was only fit for a boys' playground, +and then complain of the unsuitability in a boys' playground of +rockeries and flower-beds.</p> + +<p>As we find, after this manner, that Browning does <a name="Page_134"></a>not act +satisfactorily as that which we have decided that he shall be—a +logician—it might possibly be worth while to make another attempt to +see whether he may not, after all, be more valid than we thought as to +what he himself professed to be—a poet. And if we study this +seriously and sympathetically, we shall soon come to a conclusion. It +is a gross and complete slander upon Browning to say that his +processes of thought are scientific in their precision and analysis. +They are nothing of the sort; if they were, Browning could not be a +good poet. The critic speaks of the conclusions of a poem as +"transcendental and inept"; but the conclusions of a poem, if they are +not transcendental, must be inept. Do the people who call one of +Browning's poems scientific in its analysis realise the meaning of +what they say? One is tempted to think that they know a scientific +analysis when they see it as little as they know a good poem. The one +supreme difference between the scientific method and the artistic +method is, roughly speaking, simply this—that a scientific statement +means the same thing wherever and whenever it is uttered, and that an +artistic statement means something entirely different, according to +the relation in which it stands to its surroundings. The remark, let +us say, that the whale is a mammal, or the remark that sixteen ounces +go to a pound, is equally true, and means exactly the same thing, +whether we state it at the beginning of a conversation or at the end, +whether we print it in a dictionary or chalk it up on a wall. But if +we take some phrase commonly used in the art of literature—such a +sentence, for the sake of example, as "the dawn was breaking"—the +matter is quite different. If the <a name="Page_135"></a>sentence came at the beginning of a +short story, it might be a mere descriptive prelude. If it were the +last sentence in a short story, it might be poignant with some +peculiar irony or triumph. Can any one read Browning's great +monologues and not feel that they are built up like a good short +story, entirely on this principle of the value of language arising +from its arrangement. Take such an example as "Caliban upon Setebos," +a wonderful poem designed to describe the way in which a primitive +nature may at once be afraid of its gods and yet familiar with them. +Caliban in describing his deity starts with a more or less natural and +obvious parallel between the deity and himself, carries out the +comparison with consistency and an almost revolting simplicity, and +ends in a kind of blasphemous extravaganza of anthropomorphism, basing +his conduct not merely on the greatness and wisdom, but also on the +manifest weaknesses and stupidities, of the Creator of all things. +Then suddenly a thunderstorm breaks over Caliban's island, and the +profane speculator falls flat upon his face—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"Lo! 'Lieth flat and loveth Setebos!<br /> +'Maketh his teeth meet through his upper lip,<br /> +Will let those quails fly, will not eat this month<br /> +One little mess of whelks, so he may 'scape!"</p></div> + +<p>Surely it would be very difficult to persuade oneself that this +thunderstorm would have meant exactly the same thing if it had +occurred at the beginning of "Caliban upon Setebos." It does not mean +the same thing, but something very different; and the deduction from +this is the curious fact that Browning is an artist, and that +consequently his processes of thought are not "scientific in their +precision and analysis."</p><a name="Page_136"></a> + +<p>No criticism of Browning's poems can be vital, none in the face of the +poems themselves can be even intelligible, which is not based upon the +fact that he was successfully or otherwise a conscious and deliberate +artist. He may have failed as an artist, though I do not think so; +that is quite a different matter. But it is one thing to say that a +man through vanity or ignorance has built an ugly cathedral, and quite +another to say that he built it in a fit of absence of mind, and did +not know whether he was building a lighthouse or a first-class hotel. +Browning knew perfectly well what he was doing; and if the reader does +not like his art, at least the author did. The general sentiment +expressed in the statement that he did not care about form is simply +the most ridiculous criticism that could be conceived. It would be far +nearer the truth to say that he cared more for form than any other +English poet who ever lived. He was always weaving and modelling and +inventing new forms. Among all his two hundred to three hundred poems +it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that there are half as +many different metres as there are different poems.</p> + +<p>The great English poets who are supposed to have cared more for form +than Browning did, cared less at least in this sense—that they were +content to use old forms so long as they were certain that they had +new ideas. Browning, on the other hand, no sooner had a new idea than +he tried to make a new form to express it. Wordsworth and Shelley were +really original poets; their attitude of thought and feeling marked +without doubt certain great changes in literature and philosophy. +Nevertheless, the "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" is a +perfectly normal and traditional ode, <a name="Page_137"></a>and "Prometheus Unbound" is a +perfectly genuine and traditional Greek lyrical drama. But if we study +Browning honestly, nothing will strike us more than that he really +created a large number of quite novel and quite admirable artistic +forms. It is too often forgotten what and how excellent these were. +<i>The Ring and the Book</i>, for example, is an illuminating departure in +literary method—the method of telling the same story several times +and trusting to the variety of human character to turn it into several +different and equally interesting stories. <i>Pippa Passes</i>, to take +another example, is a new and most fruitful form, a series of detached +dramas connected only by the presence of one fugitive and isolated +figure. The invention of these things is not merely like the writing +of a good poem—it is something like the invention of the sonnet or +the Gothic arch. The poet who makes them does not merely create +himself—he creates other poets. It is so in a degree long past +enumeration with regard to Browning's smaller poems. Such a pious and +horrible lyric as "The Heretic's Tragedy," for instance, is absolutely +original, with its weird and almost blood-curdling echo verses, +mocking echoes indeed—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"And dipt of his wings in Paris square,<br /> +<span class="i2">They bring him now to lie burned alive.</span> +<br /> +<span class="i2"><i>[And wanteth there grace of lute or clavicithern,</i></span> +<span class="i4"><i>ye shall say to confirm him who singeth</i>—</span> +<br /> +<span class="i2">We bring John now to be burned alive."</span></p></div> + +<p>A hundred instances might, of course, be given. Milton's "Sonnet on +his Blindness," or Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," are both thoroughly +original, but still we can point to other such sonnets and other such +odes. But can any one mention any poem of exactly the same <a name="Page_138"></a>structural +and literary type as "Fears and Scruples," as "The Householder," as +"House" or "Shop," as "Nationality in Drinks," as "Sibrandus +Schafnaburgensis," as "My Star," as "A Portrait," as any of +"Ferishtah's Fancies," as any of the "Bad Dreams."</p> + +<p>The thing which ought to be said about Browning by those who do not +enjoy him is simply that they do not like his form; that they have +studied the form, and think it a bad form. If more people said things +of this sort, the world of criticism would gain almost unspeakably in +clarity and common honesty. Browning put himself before the world as a +good poet. Let those who think he failed call him a bad poet, and +there will be an end of the matter. There are many styles in art which +perfectly competent æsthetic judges cannot endure. For instance, it +would be perfectly legitimate for a strict lover of Gothic to say that +one of the monstrous rococo altar-pieces in the Belgian churches with +bulbous clouds and oaken sun-rays seven feet long, was, in his +opinion, ugly. But surely it would be perfectly ridiculous for any one +to say that it had no form. A man's actual feelings about it might be +better expressed by saying that it had too much. To say that Browning +was merely a thinker because you think "Caliban upon Setebos" ugly, is +precisely as absurd as it would be to call the author of the old +Belgian altarpiece a man devoted only to the abstractions of religion. +The truth about Browning is not that he was indifferent to technical +beauty, but that he invented a particular kind of technical beauty to +which any one else is free to be as indifferent as he chooses.</p> + +<p>There is in this matter an extraordinary tendency to vague and +unmeaning criticism. The usual way of <a name="Page_139"></a>criticising an author, +particularly an author who has added something to the literary forms +of the world, is to complain that his work does not contain something +which is obviously the speciality of somebody else. The correct thing +to say about Maeterlinck is that some play of his in which, let us +say, a princess dies in a deserted tower by the sea, has a certain +beauty, but that we look in vain in it for that robust geniality, that +really boisterous will to live which may be found in <i>Martin +Chuzzlewit</i>. The right thing to say about <i>Cyrano de Bergerac</i> is that +it may have a certain kind of wit and spirit, but that it really +throws no light on the duty of middle-aged married couples in Norway. +It cannot be too much insisted upon that at least three-quarters of +the blame and criticism commonly directed against artists and authors +falls under this general objection, and is essentially valueless. +Authors both great and small are, like everything else in existence, +upon the whole greatly under-rated. They are blamed for not doing, not +only what they have failed to do to reach their own ideal, but what +they have never tried to do to reach every other writer's ideal. If we +can show that Browning had a definite ideal of beauty and loyally +pursued it, it is not necessary to prove that he could have written +<i>In Memoriam</i> if he had tried.</p> + +<p>Browning has suffered far more injustice from his admirers than from +his opponents, for his admirers have for the most part got hold of the +matter, so to speak, by the wrong end. They believe that what is +ordinarily called the grotesque style of Browning was a kind of +necessity boldly adopted by a great genius in order to express novel +and profound ideas. But this is an entire mistake. What is called +ugliness was to<a name="Page_140"></a> Browning not in the least a necessary evil, but a +quite unnecessary luxury, which he enjoyed for its own sake. For +reasons that we shall see presently in discussing the philosophical +use of the grotesque, it did so happen that Browning's grotesque style +was very suitable for the expression of his peculiar moral and +metaphysical view. But the whole mass of poems will be misunderstood +if we do not realise first of all that he had a love of the grotesque +of the nature of art for art's sake. Here, for example, is a short +distinct poem merely descriptive of one of those elfish German jugs in +which it is to be presumed Tokay had been served to him. This is the +whole poem, and a very good poem too—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"Up jumped Tokay on our table,<br /> +Like a pigmy castle-warder,<br /> +Dwarfish to see, but stout and able,<br /> +Arms and accoutrements all in order;<br /> +And fierce he looked North, then, wheeling South<br /> +Blew with his bugle a challenge to Drouth,<br /> +Cocked his flap-hat with the tosspot-feather,<br /> +Twisted his thumb in his red moustache,<br /> +Jingled his huge brass spurs together,<br /> +Tightened his waist with its Buda sash,<br /> +And then, with an impudence nought could abash,<br /> +Shrugged his hump-shoulder, to tell the beholder,<br /> +For twenty such knaves he would laugh but the bolder:<br /> +And so, with his sword-hilt gallantly jutting,<br /> +And dexter-hand on his haunch abutting,<br /> +Went the little man, Sir Ausbruch, strutting!"</p></div> + +<p>I suppose there are Browning students in existence who would think +that this poem contained something pregnant about the Temperance +question, or was a marvellously subtle analysis of the romantic +movement in Germany. But surely to most of us it is sufficiently +<a name="Page_141"></a>apparent that Browning was simply fashioning a ridiculous +knick-knack, exactly as if he were actually moulding one of these +preposterous German jugs. Now before studying the real character of +this Browningesque style, there is one general truth to be recognised +about Browning's work. It is this—that it is absolutely necessary to +remember that Browning had, like every other poet, his simple and +indisputable failures, and that it is one thing to speak of the +badness of his artistic failures, and quite another thing to speak of +the badness of his artistic aim. Browning's style may be a good style, +and yet exhibit many examples of a thoroughly bad use of it. On this +point there is indeed a singularly unfair system of judgment used by +the public towards the poets. It is very little realised that the vast +majority of great poets have written an enormous amount of very bad +poetry. The unfortunate Wordsworth is generally supposed to be almost +alone in this; but any one who thinks so can scarcely have read a +certain number of the minor poems of Byron and Shelley and Tennyson.</p> + +<p>Now it is only just to Browning that his more uncouth effusions should +not be treated as masterpieces by which he must stand or fall, but +treated simply as his failures. It is really true that such a line as</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"Irks fear the crop-full bird, frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?"</p></div> + +<p>is a very ugly and a very bad line. But it is quite equally true that +Tennyson's</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"And that good man, the clergyman, has told me words of peace,"</p></div> + +<p>is a very ugly and a very bad line. But people do not <a name="Page_142"></a>say that this +proves that Tennyson was a mere crabbed controversialist and +metaphysician. They say that it is a bad example of Tennyson's form; +they do not say that it is a good example of Tennyson's indifference +to form. Upon the whole, Browning exhibits far fewer instances of this +failure in his own style than any other of the great poets, with the +exception of one or two like Spenser and Keats, who seem to have a +mysterious incapacity for writing bad poetry. But almost all original +poets, particularly poets who have invented an artistic style, are +subject to one most disastrous habit—the habit of writing imitations +of themselves. Every now and then in the works of the noblest +classical poets you will come upon passages which read like extracts +from an American book of parodies. Swinburne, for example, when he +wrote the couplet—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"From the lilies and languors of virtue<br /> +To the raptures and roses of vice,"</p></div> + +<p>wrote what is nothing but a bad imitation of himself, an imitation +which seems indeed to have the wholly unjust and uncritical object of +proving that the Swinburnian melody is a mechanical scheme of initial +letters. Or again, Mr. Rudyard Kipling when he wrote the line—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"Or ride with the reckless seraphim on the rim of a red-maned star,"</p></div> + +<p>was caricaturing himself in the harshest and least sympathetic spirit +of American humour. This tendency is, of course, the result of the +self-consciousness and theatricality of modern life in which each of +us is forced to conceive ourselves as part of a <i>dramatis personæ</i> +and act perpetually in character. Browning <a name="Page_143"></a>sometimes yielded to this +temptation to be a great deal too like himself.</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"Will I widen thee out till thou turnest<br /> +From Margaret Minnikin mou' by God's grace,<br /> +To Muckle-mouth Meg in good earnest."</p></div> + +<p>This sort of thing is not to be defended in Browning any more than in +Swinburne. But, on the other hand, it is not to be attributed in +Swinburne to a momentary exaggeration, and in Browning to a vital +æsthetic deficiency. In the case of Swinburne, we all feel that the +question is not whether that particular preposterous couplet about +lilies and roses redounds to the credit of the Swinburnian style, but +whether it would be possible in any other style than the Swinburnian +to have written the Hymn to Proserpine. In the same way, the essential +issue about Browning as an artist is not whether he, in common with +Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, and Swinburne, sometimes wrote +bad poetry, but whether in any other style except Browning's you could +have achieved the precise artistic effect which is achieved by such +incomparable lyrics as "The Patriot" or "The Laboratory." The answer +must be in the negative, and in that answer lies the whole +justification of Browning as an artist.</p> + +<p>The question now arises, therefore, what was his conception of his +functions as an artist? We have already agreed that his artistic +originality concerned itself chiefly with the serious use of the +grotesque. It becomes necessary, therefore, to ask what is the serious +use of the grotesque, and what relation does the grotesque bear to the +eternal and fundamental elements in life?</p><a name="Page_144"></a> + +<p>One of the most curious things to notice about popular æsthetic +criticism is the number of phrases it will be found to use which are +intended to express an æsthetic failure, and which express merely an +æsthetic variety. Thus, for instance, the traveller will often hear +the advice from local lovers of the picturesque, "The scenery round +such and such a place has no interest; it is quite flat." To disparage +scenery as quite flat is, of course, like disparaging a swan as quite +white, or an Italian sky as quite blue. Flatness is a sublime quality +in certain landscapes, just as rockiness is a sublime quality in +others. In the same way there are a great number of phrases commonly +used in order to disparage such writers as Browning which do not in +fact disparage, but merely describe them. One of the most +distinguished of Browning's biographers and critics says of him, for +example, "He has never meant to be rugged, but has become so in +striving after strength." To say that Browning never tried to be +rugged is to say that Edgar Allan Poe never tried to be gloomy, or +that Mr. W.S. Gilbert never tried to be extravagant. The whole issue +depends upon whether we realise the simple and essential fact that +ruggedness is a mode of art like gloominess or extravagance. Some +poems ought to be rugged, just as some poems ought to be smooth. When +we see a drift of stormy and fantastic clouds at sunset, we do not say +that the cloud is beautiful although it is ragged at the edges. When +we see a gnarled and sprawling oak, we do not say that it is fine +although it is twisted. When we see a mountain, we do not say that it +is impressive although it is rugged, nor do we say apologetically that +it never meant to be rugged, but became so in its striving after +strength. Now, to <a name="Page_145"></a>say that Browning's poems, artistically considered, +are fine although they are rugged, is quite as absurd as to say that a +rock, artistically considered, is fine although it is rugged. +Ruggedness being an essential quality in the universe, there is that +in man which responds to it as to the striking of any other chord of +the eternal harmonies. As the children of nature, we are akin not only +to the stars and flowers, but also to the toad-stools and the +monstrous tropical birds. And it is to be repeated as the essential of +the question that on this side of our nature we do emphatically love +the form of the toad-stools, and not merely some complicated botanical +and moral lessons which the philosopher may draw from them. For +example, just as there is such a thing as a poetical metre being +beautifully light or beautifully grave and haunting, so there is such +a thing as a poetical metre being beautifully rugged. In the old +ballads, for instance, every person of literary taste will be struck +by a certain attractiveness in the bold, varying, irregular verse—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"He is either himsell a devil frae hell,<br /> +Or else his mother a witch maun be;<br /> +I wadna have ridden that wan water<br /> +For a' the gowd in Christentie,"</p></div> + +<p>is quite as pleasing to the ear in its own way as</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"There's a bower of roses by Bendemeer stream,<br /> +And the nightingale sings in it all the night long,"</p></div> + +<p>is in another way. Browning had an unrivalled ear for this particular +kind of staccato music. The absurd notion that he had no sense of +melody in verse is only possible to people who think that there is no +melody in <a name="Page_146"></a>verse which is not an imitation of Swinburne. To give a +satisfactory idea of Browning's rhythmic originality would be +impossible without quotations more copious than entertaining. But the +essential point has been suggested.</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"They were purple of raiment and golden,<br /> +Filled full of thee, fiery with wine,<br /> +Thy lovers in haunts unbeholden,<br /> +In marvellous chambers of thine,"</p></div> + +<p>is beautiful language, but not the only sort of beautiful language. +This, for instance, has also a tune in it—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"I—'next poet.' No, my hearties,<br /> +I nor am, nor fain would be!<br /> +Choose your chiefs and pick your parties,<br /> +Not one soul revolt to me!</p></div> +<hr style="width: 45%;" /> +<div class="poem"><p>Which of you did I enable<br /> +Once to slip inside my breast,<br /> +There to catalogue and label<br /> +What I like least, what love best,<br /> +Hope and fear, believe and doubt of,<br /> +Seek and shun, respect, deride,<br /> +Who has right to make a rout of<br /> +Rarities he found inside?"</p></div> + +<p>This quick, gallantly stepping measure also has its own kind of music, +and the man who cannot feel it can never have enjoyed the sound of +soldiers marching by. This, then, roughly is the main fact to remember +about Browning's poetical method, or about any one's poetical +method—that the question is not whether that method is the best in +the world, but the question whether there are not certain things which +can only be conveyed by <a name="Page_147"></a>that method. It is perfectly true, for +instance, that a really lofty and lucid line of Tennyson, such as—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"Thou art the highest, and most human too"</p></div> + +<p>and</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"We needs must love the highest when we see it"</p></div> + +<p>would really be made the worse for being translated into Browning. It +would probably become</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"High's human; man loves best, best visible,"</p></div> + +<p>and would lose its peculiar clarity and dignity and courtly plainness. +But it is quite equally true that any really characteristic fragment +of Browning, if it were only the tempestuous scolding of the organist +in "Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha"—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"Hallo, you sacristan, show us a light there!<br /> +Down it dips, gone like a rocket.<br /> +What, you want, do you, to come unawares,<br /> +>Sweeping the church up for first morning-prayers,<br /> +And find a poor devil has ended his cares<br /> +At the foot of your rotten-runged rat-riddled stairs?<br /> +Do I carry the moon in my pocket?"</p></div> + +<p>—it is quite equally true that this outrageous gallop of rhymes +ending with a frantic astronomical image would lose in energy and +spirit if it were written in a conventional and classical style, and +ran—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"What must I deem then that thou dreamest to find<br /> +Disjected bones adrift upon the stair<br /> +Thou sweepest clean, or that thou deemest that I<br /> +Pouch in my wallet the vice-regal sun?"</p></div> + +<p>Is it not obvious that this statelier version might be excellent +poetry of its kind, and yet would be bad <a name="Page_148"></a>exactly in so far as it was +good; that it would lose all the swing, the rush, the energy of the +preposterous and grotesque original? In fact, we may see how +unmanageable is this classical treatment of the essentially absurd in +Tennyson himself. The humorous passages in <i>The Princess</i>, though +often really humorous in themselves, always appear forced and feeble +because they have to be restrained by a certain metrical dignity, and +the mere idea of such restraint is incompatible with humour. If +Browning had written the passage which opens <i>The Princess</i>, +descriptive of the "larking" of the villagers in the magnate's park, +he would have spared us nothing; he would not have spared us the +shrill uneducated voices and the unburied bottles of ginger beer. He +would have crammed the poem with uncouth similes; he would have +changed the metre a hundred times; he would have broken into doggerel +and into rhapsody; but he would have left, when all is said and done, +as he leaves in that paltry fragment of the grumbling organist, the +impression of a certain eternal human energy. Energy and joy, the +father and the mother of the grotesque, would have ruled the poem. We +should have felt of that rowdy gathering little but the sensation of +which Mr. Henley writes—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"Praise the generous gods for giving,<br /> +In this world of sin and strife,<br /> +With some little time for living,<br /> +Unto each the joy of life,"</p></div> + +<p>the thought that every wise man has when looking at a Bank Holiday +crowd at Margate.</p> + +<p>To ask why Browning enjoyed this perverse and fantastic style most +would be to go very deep into his <a name="Page_149"></a>spirit indeed, probably a great +deal deeper than it is possible to go. But it is worth while to +suggest tentatively the general function of the grotesque in art +generally and in his art in particular. There is one very curious idea +into which we have been hypnotised by the more eloquent poets, and +that is that nature in the sense of what is ordinarily called the +country is a thing entirely stately and beautiful as those terms are +commonly understood. The whole world of the fantastic, all things +top-heavy, lop-sided, and nonsensical are conceived as the work of +man, gargoyles, German jugs, Chinese pots, political caricatures, +burlesque epics, the pictures of Mr. Aubrey Beardsley and the puns of +Robert Browning. But in truth a part, and a very large part, of the +sanity and power of nature lies in the fact that out of her comes all +this instinct of caricature. Nature may present itself to the poet too +often as consisting of stars and lilies; but these are not poets who +live in the country; they are men who go to the country for +inspiration and could no more live in the country than they could go +to bed in Westminster Abbey. Men who live in the heart of nature, +farmers and peasants, know that nature means cows and pigs, and +creatures more humorous than can be found in a whole sketch-book of +Callot. And the element of the grotesque in art, like the element of +the grotesque in nature, means, in the main, energy, the energy which +takes its own forms and goes its own way. Browning's verse, in so far +as it is grotesque, is not complex or artificial; it is natural and in +the legitimate tradition of nature. The verse sprawls like the trees, +dances like the dust; it is ragged like the thunder-cloud, it is +top-heavy like the toadstool.<a name="Page_150"></a> Energy which disregards the standard of +classical art is in nature as it is in Browning. The same sense of the +uproarious force in things which makes Browning dwell on the oddity of +a fungus or a jellyfish makes him dwell on the oddity of a +philosophical idea. Here, for example, we have a random instance from +"The Englishman in Italy" of the way in which Browning, when he was +most Browning, regarded physical nature.</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"And pitch down his basket before us,<br /> +All trembling alive<br /> +With pink and grey jellies, your sea-fruit;<br /> +You touch the strange lumps,<br /> +And mouths gape there, eyes open, all manner<br /> +Of horns and of humps,<br /> +Which only the fisher looks grave at."</p></div> + +<p>Nature might mean flowers to Wordsworth and grass to Walt Whitman, but +to Browning it really meant such things as these, the monstrosities +and living mysteries of the sea. And just as these strange things +meant to Browning energy in the physical world, so strange thoughts +and strange images meant to him energy in the mental world. When, in +one of his later poems, the professional mystic is seeking in a +supreme moment of sincerity to explain that small things may be filled +with God as well as great, he uses the very same kind of image, the +image of a shapeless sea-beast, to embody that noble conception.</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"The Name comes close behind a stomach-cyst,<br /> +The simplest of creations, just a sac<br /> +That's mouth, heart, legs, and belly at once, yet lives<br /> +And feels, and could do neither, we conclude,<br /> +If simplified still further one degree."</p></div> + +<p><span style="margin-left: 12em;">(SLUDGE.)</span></p><a name="Page_151"></a> + +<p>These bulbous, indescribable sea-goblins are the first thing on which +the eye of the poet lights in looking on a landscape, and the last in +the significance of which he trusts in demonstrating the mercy of the +Everlasting.</p> + +<p>There is another and but slightly different use of the grotesque, but +which is definitely valuable in Browning's poetry, and indeed in all +poetry. To present a matter in a grotesque manner does certainly tend +to touch the nerve of surprise and thus to draw attention to the +intrinsically miraculous character of the object itself. It is +difficult to give examples of the proper use of grotesqueness without +becoming too grotesque. But we should all agree that if St. Paul's +Cathedral were suddenly presented to us upside down we should, for the +moment, be more surprised at it, and look at it more than we have done +all the centuries during which it has rested on its foundations. Now +it is the supreme function of the philosopher of the grotesque to make +the world stand on its head that people may look at it. If we say "a +man is a man" we awaken no sense of the fantastic, however much we +ought to, but if we say, in the language of the old satirist, "that +man is a two-legged bird, without feathers," the phrase does, for a +moment, make us look at man from the outside and gives us a thrill in +his presence. When the author of the Book of Job insists upon the +huge, half-witted, apparently unmeaning magnificence and might of +Behemoth, the hippopotamus, he is appealing precisely to this sense of +wonder provoked by the grotesque. "Canst thou play with him as with a +bird, canst thou bind him for thy maidens?" he says in an admirable +passage. The notion of the hippopotamus as a household <a name="Page_152"></a>pet is +curiously in the spirit of the humour of Browning.</p> + +<p>But when it is clearly understood that Browning's love of the +fantastic in style was a perfectly serious artistic love, when we +understand that he enjoyed working in that style, as a Chinese potter +might enjoy making dragons, or a mediæval mason making devils, there +yet remains something definite which must be laid to his account as a +fault. He certainly had a capacity for becoming perfectly childish in +his indulgence in ingenuities that have nothing to do with poetry at +all, such as puns, and rhymes, and grammatical structures that only +just fit into each other like a Chinese puzzle. Probably it was only +one of the marks of his singular vitality, curiosity, and interest in +details. He was certainly one of those somewhat rare men who are +fierily ambitious both in large things and in small. He prided himself +on having written <i>The Ring and the Book</i>, and he also prided himself +on knowing good wine when he tasted it. He prided himself on +re-establishing optimism on a new foundation, and it is to be +presumed, though it is somewhat difficult to imagine, that he prided +himself on such rhymes as the following in <i>Pacchiarotto</i>:—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"The wolf, fox, bear, and monkey,<br /> +By piping advice in one key—<br /> +That his pipe should play a prelude<br /> +To something heaven-tinged not hell-hued,<br /> +Something not harsh but docile,<br /> +Man-liquid, not man-fossil."</p></div> + +<p>This writing, considered as writing, can only be regarded as a kind of +joke, and most probably Browning considered it so himself. It has +nothing at <a name="Page_153"></a>all to do with that powerful and symbolic use of the +grotesque which may be found in such admirable passages as this from +"Holy Cross Day":—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"Give your first groan—compunction's at work;<br /> +And soft! from a Jew you mount to a Turk.<br /> +Lo, Micah—the self-same beard on chin<br /> +He was four times already converted in!"</p></div> + +<p>This is the serious use of the grotesque. Through it passion and +philosophy are as well expressed as through any other medium. But the +rhyming frenzy of Browning has no particular relation even to the +poems in which it occurs. It is not a dance to any measure; it can +only be called the horse-play of literature. It may be noted, for +example, as a rather curious fact, that the ingenious rhymes are +generally only mathematical triumphs, not triumphs of any kind of +assonance. "The Pied Piper of Hamelin," a poem written for children, +and bound in general to be lucid and readable, ends with a rhyme which +it is physically impossible for any one to say:—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"And, whether they pipe us free, fróm rats or fróm mice,<br /> +If we've promised them aught, let us keep our promise!"</p></div> + +<p>This queer trait in Browning, his inability to keep a kind of demented +ingenuity even out of poems in which it was quite inappropriate, is a +thing which must be recognised, and recognised all the more because as +a whole he was a very perfect artist, and a particularly perfect +artist in the use of the grotesque. But everywhere when we go a little +below the surface in Browning we find that there was something in him +perverse and unusual despite all his working normality <a name="Page_154"></a>and +simplicity. His mind was perfectly wholesome, but it was not made +exactly like the ordinary mind. It was like a piece of strong wood +with a knot in it.</p> + +<p>The quality of what, can only be called buffoonery which is under +discussion is indeed one of the many things in which Browning was more +of an Elizabethan than a Victorian. He was like the Elizabethans in +their belief in the normal man, in their gorgeous and over-loaded +language, above all in their feeling for learning as an enjoyment and +almost a frivolity. But there was nothing in which he was so +thoroughly Elizabethan, and even Shakespearian, as in this fact, that +when he felt inclined to write a page of quite uninteresting nonsense, +he immediately did so. Many great writers have contrived to be +tedious, and apparently aimless, while expounding some thought which +they believed to be grave and profitable; but this frivolous stupidity +had not been found in any great writer since the time of Kabelais and +the time of the Elizabethans. In many of the comic scenes of +Shakespeare we have precisely this elephantine ingenuity, this hunting +of a pun to death through three pages. In the Elizabethan dramatists +and in Browning it is no doubt to a certain extent the mark of a real +hilarity. People must be very happy to be so easily amused.</p> + +<p>In the case of what is called Browning's obscurity, the question is +somewhat more difficult to handle. Many people have supposed Browning +to be profound because he was obscure, and many other people, hardly +less mistaken, have supposed him to be obscure because he was +profound. He was frequently profound, he was occasionally obscure, but +as a matter <a name="Page_155"></a>of fact the two have little or nothing to do with each +other. Browning's dark and elliptical mode of speech, like his love of +the grotesque, was simply a characteristic of his, a trick of is +temperament, and had little or nothing to do with whether what he was +expressing was profound or superficial. Suppose, for example, that a +person well read in English poetry but unacquainted with Browning's +style were earnestly invited to consider the following verse:—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"Hobbs hints blue—straight he turtle eats.<br /> +<span class="i2">Nobbs prints blue—claret crowns his cup.</span> +Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats—<br /> +<span class="i2">Both gorge. Who fished the murex up?</span> +What porridge had John Keats?"</p></div> + +<p>The individual so confronted would say without hesitation that it must +indeed be an abstruse and indescribable thought which could only be +conveyed by remarks so completely disconnected. But the point of the +matter is that the thought contained in this amazing verse is not +abstruse or philosophical at all, but is a perfectly ordinary and +straightforward comment, which any one might have made upon an obvious +fact of life. The whole verse of course begins to explain itself, if +we know the meaning of the word "murex," which is the name of a +sea-shell, out of which was made the celebrated blue dye of Tyre. The +poet takes this blue dye as a simile for a new fashion in literature, +and points out that Hobbs, Nobbs, etc., obtain fame and comfort by +merely using the dye from the shell; and adds the perfectly natural +comment:—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"... Who fished the murex up?<br /> +What porridge had John Keats?"</p></div><a name="Page_156"></a> + +<p>So that the verse is not subtle, and was not meant to be subtle, but +is a perfectly casual piece of sentiment at the end of a light poem. +Browning is not obscure because he has such deep things to say, any +more than he is grotesque because he has such new things to say. He is +both of these things primarily, because he likes to express himself in +a particular manner. The manner is as natural to him as a man's +physical voice, and it is abrupt, sketchy, allusive, and full of gaps. +Here comes in the fundamental difference between Browning and such a +writer as George Meredith, with whom the Philistine satirist would so +often in the matter of complexity class him. The works of George +Meredith are, as it were, obscure even when we know what they mean. +They deal with nameless emotions, fugitive sensations, subconscious +certainties and uncertainties, and it really requires a somewhat +curious and unfamiliar mode of speech to indicate the presence of +these. But the great part of Browning's actual sentiments, and almost +all the finest and most literary of them, are perfectly plain and +popular and eternal sentiments. Meredith is really a singer producing +strange notes and cadences difficult to follow because of the delicate +rhythm of the song he sings. Browning is simply a great demagogue, +with an impediment in his speech. Or rather, to speak more strictly, +Browning is a man whose excitement for the glory of the obvious is so +great that his speech becomes disjointed and precipitate: he becomes +eccentric through his advocacy of the ordinary, and goes mad for the +love of sanity.</p> + +<p>If Browning and George Meredith were each describing the same act, +they might both be obscure, <a name="Page_157"></a>but their obscurities would be entirely +different. Suppose, for instance, they were describing even so prosaic +and material an act as a man being knocked downstairs by another man +to whom he had given the lie, Meredith's description would refer to +something which an ordinary observer would not see, or at least could +not describe. It might be a sudden sense of anarchy in the brain of +the assaulter, or a stupefaction and stunned serenity in that of the +object of the assault. He might write, "Wainwood's 'Men vary in +veracity,' brought the baronet's arm up. He felt the doors of his +brain burst, and Wainwood a swift rushing of himself through air +accompanied with a clarity as of the annihilated." Meredith, in other +words, would speak queerly because he was describing queer mental +experiences. But Browning might simply be describing the material +incident of the man being knocked downstairs, and his description +would run:—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"What then? 'You lie' and doormat below stairs<br /> +Takes bump from back."</p></div> + +<p>This is not subtlety, but merely a kind of insane swiftness. Browning +is not like Meredith, anxious to pause and examine the sensations of +the combatants, nor does he become obscure through this anxiety. He is +only so anxious to get his man to the bottom of the stairs quickly +that he leaves out about half the story.</p> + +<p>Many who could understand that ruggedness might be an artistic +quality, would decisively, and in most cases rightly, deny that +obscurity could under any conceivable circumstances be an artistic +quality. But here again Browning's work requires a somewhat more +cautious and sympathetic analysis. There is a certain <a name="Page_158"></a>kind of +fascination, a strictly artistic fascination, which arises from a +matter being hinted at in such a way as to leave a certain tormenting +uncertainty even at the end. It is well sometimes to half understand a +poem in the same manner that we half understand the world. One of the +deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will +suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping +meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered +something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a +prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain +poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed +the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but +in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.</p> + +<p>But in truth it is very difficult to keep pace with all the strange +and unclassified artistic merits of Browning. He was always trying +experiments; sometimes he failed, producing clumsy and irritating +metres, top-heavy and over-concentrated thought. Far more often he +triumphed, producing a crowd of boldly designed poems, every one of +which taken separately might have founded an artistic school. But +whether successful or unsuccessful, he never ceased from his fierce +hunt after poetic novelty. He never became a conservative. The last +book he published in his life-time, <i>Parleyings with Certain People of +Importance in their Day</i>, was a new poem, and more revolutionary than +<i>Paracelsus</i>. This is the true light in which to regard Browning as an +artist. He had determined to leave no spot of the cosmos unadorned by +his poetry which he could find it possible to adorn. An admirable +example can be found in that splendid poem "Childe<a name="Page_159"></a> Roland to the Dark +Tower came." It is the hint of an entirely new and curious type of +poetry, the poetry of the shabby and hungry aspect of the earth +itself. Daring poets who wished to escape from conventional gardens +and orchards had long been in the habit of celebrating the poetry of +rugged and gloomy landscapes, but Browning is not content with this. +He insists upon celebrating the poetry of mean landscapes. That sense +of scrubbiness in nature, as of a man unshaved, had never been +conveyed with this enthusiasm and primeval gusto before.</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"If there pushed any ragged thistle-stalk<br /> +<span class="i2">Above its mates, the head was chopped; the bents</span> +<span class="i2">Were jealous else. What made those holes and rents</span> +In the dock's harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to baulk<br /> +All hope of greenness? 'tis a brute must walk<br /> +<span class="i2">Pashing their life out, with a brute's intents."</span></p></div> + +<p>This is a perfect realisation of that eerie sentiment which comes upon +us, not so often among mountains and water-falls, as it does on some +half-starved common at twilight, or in walking down some grey mean +street. It is the song of the beauty of refuse; and Browning was the +first to sing it. Oddly enough it has been one of the poems about +which most of those pedantic and trivial questions have been asked, +which are asked invariably by those who treat Browning as a science +instead of a poet, "What does the poem of 'Childe Roland' mean?" The +only genuine answer to this is, "What does anything mean?" Does the +earth mean nothing? Do grey skies and wastes covered with thistles +mean nothing? Does an old horse turned out to graze mean nothing? If +it does, there is but one further truth to be added—that everything +means nothing.</p><a name="Page_160"></a> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<a name="CHAPTER_VII"></a><h2>CHAPTER VII</h2> + +<h2><i>THE RING AND THE BOOK</i></h2> + +<p>When we have once realised the great conception of the plan of <i>The +Ring and the Book</i>, the studying of a single matter from nine +different stand-points, it becomes exceedingly interesting to notice +what these stand-points are; what figures Browning has selected as +voicing the essential and distinct versions of the case. One of the +ablest and most sympathetic of all the critics of Browning, Mr. +Augustine Birrell, has said in one place that the speeches of the two +advocates in <i>The Ring and the Book</i> will scarcely be very interesting +to the ordinary reader. However that may be, there can be little doubt +that a great number of the readers of Browning think them beside the +mark and adventitious. But it is exceedingly dangerous to say that +anything in Browning is irrelevant or unnecessary. We are apt to go on +thinking so until some mere trifle puts the matter in a new light, and +the detail that seemed meaningless springs up as almost the central +pillar of the structure. In the successive monologues of his poem, +Browning is endeavouring to depict the various strange ways in which a +fact gets itself presented to the world. In every question there are +partisans who bring cogent and convincing arguments for the right +side; there are also partisans who bring <a name="Page_161"></a>cogent and convincing +arguments for the wrong side. But over and above these, there does +exist in every great controversy a class of more or less official +partisans who are continually engaged in defending each cause by +entirely inappropriate arguments. They do not know the real good that +can be said for the good cause, nor the real good that can be said for +the bad one. They are represented by the animated, learned, eloquent, +ingenious, and entirely futile and impertinent arguments of Juris +Doctor Bottinius and Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis. These two men +brilliantly misrepresent, not merely each other's cause, but their own +cause. The introduction of them is one of the finest and most artistic +strokes in <i>The Ring and the Book</i>.</p> + +<p>We can see the matter best by taking an imaginary parallel. Suppose +that a poet of the type of Browning lived some centuries hence and +found in some <i>cause célèbre</i> of our day, such as the Parnell +Commission, an opportunity for a work similar in its design to <i>The +Ring and the Book</i>. The first monologue, which would be called +"Half-London," would be the arguments of an ordinary educated and +sensible Unionist who believed that there really was evidence that the +Nationalist movement in Ireland was rooted in crime and public panic. +The "Otherhalf-London" would be the utterance of an ordinary educated +and sensible Home Ruler, who thought that in the main Nationalism was +one distinct symptom, and crime another, of the same poisonous and +stagnant problem. The "Tertium Quid" would be some detached +intellectual, committed neither to Nationalism nor to Unionism, +possibly Mr. Bernard Shaw, who would make a very entertaining Browning +<a name="Page_162"></a>monologue. Then of course would come the speeches of the great actors +in the drama, the icy anger of Parnell, the shuffling apologies of +Pigott. But we should feel that the record was incomplete without +another touch which in practice has so much to do with the confusion +of such a question. Bottinius and Hyacinthus de Archangelis, the two +cynical professional pleaders, with their transparent assumptions and +incredible theories of the case, would be represented by two party +journalists; one of whom was ready to base his case either on the fact +that Parnell was a Socialist or an Anarchist, or an Atheist or a Roman +Catholic; and the other of whom was ready to base his case on the +theory that Lord Salisbury hated Parnell or was in league with him, or +had never heard of him, or anything else that was remote from the +world of reality. These are the kind of little touches for which we +must always be on the look-out in Browning. Even if a digression, or a +simile, or a whole scene in a play, seems to have no point or value, +let us wait a little and give it a chance. He very seldom wrote +anything that did not mean a great deal.</p> + +<p>It is sometimes curious to notice how a critic, possessing no little +cultivation and fertility, will, in speaking of a work of art, let +fall almost accidentally some apparently trivial comment, which +reveals to us with an instantaneous and complete mental illumination +the fact that he does not, so far as that work of art is concerned, in +the smallest degree understand what he is talking about. He may have +intended to correct merely some minute detail of the work he is +studying, but that single movement is enough to blow him and all his +diplomas into the air. These are the sensations <a name="Page_163"></a>with which the true +Browningite will regard the criticism made by so many of Browning's +critics and biographers about <i>The Ring and the Book</i>. That criticism +was embodied by one of them in the words "the theme looked at +dispassionately is unworthy of the monument in which it is entombed +for eternity." Now this remark shows at once that the critic does not +know what <i>The Ring and the Book</i> means. We feel about it as we should +feel about a man who said that the plot of <i>Tristram Shandy</i> was not +well constructed, or that the women in Rossetti's pictures did not +look useful and industrious. A man who has missed the fact that +<i>Tristram Shandy is</i> a game of digressions, that the whole book is a +kind of practical joke to cheat the reader out of a story, simply has +not read <i>Tristram Shandy</i> at all. The man who objects to the Rossetti +pictures because they depict a sad and sensuous day-dream, objects to +their existing at all. And any one who objects to Browning writing his +huge epic round a trumpery and sordid police-case has in reality +missed the whole length and breadth of the poet's meaning. The essence +of <i>The Ring and the Book</i> is that it is the great epic of the +nineteenth century, because it is the great epic of the enormous +importance of small things. The supreme difference that divides <i>The +Ring and the Book</i> from all the great poems of similar length and +largeness of design is precisely the fact that all these are about +affairs commonly called important, and <i>The Ring and the Book</i> is +about an affair commonly called contemptible. Homer says, "I will show +you the relations between man and heaven as exhibited in a great +legend of love and war, which shall contain the mightiest of all +<a name="Page_164"></a>mortal warriors, and the most beautiful of all mortal women." The +author of the Book of Job says, "I will show you the relations between +man and heaven by a tale of primeval sorrows and the voice of God out +of a whirlwind." Virgil says, "I will show you the relations of man to +heaven by the tale of the origin of the greatest people and the +founding of the most wonderful city in the world." Dante says, "I will +show you the relations of man to heaven by uncovering the very +machinery of the spiritual universe, and letting you hear, as I have +heard, the roaring of the mills of God." Milton says, "I will show you +the relations of man to heaven by telling you of the very beginning of +all things, and the first shaping of the thing that is evil in the +first twilight of time." Browning says, "I will show you the relations +of man to heaven by telling you a story out of a dirty Italian book of +criminal trials from which I select one of the meanest and most +completely forgotten." Until we have realised this fundamental idea in +<i>The Ring and the Book</i> all criticism is misleading.</p> + +<p>In this Browning is, of course, the supreme embodiment of his time. +The characteristic of the modern movements <i>par excellence</i> is the +apotheosis of the insignificant. Whether it be the school of poetry +which sees more in one cowslip or clover-top than in forests and +waterfalls, or the school of fiction which finds something +indescribably significant in the pattern of a hearth-rug, or the tint +of a man's tweed coat, the tendency is the same. Maeterlinck stricken +still and wondering by a deal door half open, or the light shining out +of a window at night; Zola filling note-books with the medical +significance of the twitching <a name="Page_165"></a>of a man's toes, or the loss of his +appetite; Whitman counting the grass and the heart-shaped leaves of +the lilac; Mr. George Gissing lingering fondly over the third-class +ticket and the dilapidated umbrella; George Meredith seeing a soul's +tragedy in a phrase at the dinner-table; Mr. Bernard Shaw filling +three pages with stage directions to describe a parlour; all these +men, different in every other particular, are alike in this, that they +have ceased to believe certain things to be important and the rest to +be unimportant. Significance is to them a wild thing that may leap +upon them from any hiding-place. They have all become terribly +impressed with and a little bit alarmed at the mysterious powers of +small things. Their difference from the old epic poets is the whole +difference between an age that fought with dragons and an age that +fights with microbes.</p> + +<p>This tide of the importance of small things is flowing so steadily +around us upon every side to-day, that we do not sufficiently realise +that if there was one man in English literary history who might with +justice be called its fountain and origin, that man was Robert +Browning. When Browning arose, literature was entirely in the hands of +the Tennysonian poet. The Tennysonian poet does indeed mention +trivialities, but he mentions them when he wishes to speak trivially; +Browning mentions trivialities when he wishes to speak sensationally. +Now this sense of the terrible importance of detail was a sense which +may be said to have possessed Browning in the emphatic manner of a +demoniac possession. Sane as he was, this one feeling might have +driven him to a condition not far <a name="Page_166"></a>from madness. Any room that he was +sitting in glared at him with innumerable eyes and mouths gaping with +a story. There was sometimes no background and no middle distance in +his mind. A human face and the pattern on the wall behind it came +forward with equally aggressive clearness. It may be repeated, that if +ever he who had the strongest head in the world had gone mad, it would +have been through this turbulent democracy of things. If he looked at +a porcelain vase or an old hat, a cabbage, or a puppy at play, each +began to be bewitched with the spell of a kind of fairyland of +philosophers: the vase, like the jar in the <i>Arabian Nights</i>, to send +up a smoke of thoughts and shapes; the hat to produce souls, as a +conjuror's hat produces rabbits; the cabbage to swell and overshadow +the earth, like the Tree of Knowledge; and the puppy to go off at a +scamper along the road to the end of the world. Any one who has read +Browning's longer poems knows how constantly a simile or figure of +speech is selected, not among the large, well-recognised figures +common in poetry, but from some dusty corner of experience, and how +often it is characterised by smallness and a certain quaint exactitude +which could not have been found in any more usual example. Thus, for +instance, <i>Prince Hohenstiel—Schwangau</i> explains the psychological +meaning of all his restless and unscrupulous activities by comparing +them to the impulse which has just led him, even in the act of +talking, to draw a black line on the blotting-paper exactly, so as to +connect two separate blots that were already there. This queer example +is selected as the best possible instance of a certain fundamental +restlessness and <a name="Page_167"></a>desire to add a touch to things in the spirit of +man. I have no doubt whatever that Browning thought of the idea after +doing the thing himself, and sat in a philosophical trance staring at +a piece of inked blotting-paper, conscious that at that moment, and in +that insignificant act, some immemorial monster of the mind, nameless +from the beginning of the world, had risen to the surface of the +spiritual sea.</p> + +<p>It is therefore the very essence of Browning's genius, and the very +essence of <i>The Ring and the Book</i>, that it should be the enormous +multiplication of a small theme. It is the extreme of idle criticism +to complain that the story is a current and sordid story, for the +whole object of the poem is to show what infinities of spiritual good +and evil a current and sordid story may contain. When once this is +realised, it explains at one stroke the innumerable facts about the +work. It explains, for example, Browning's detailed and picturesque +account of the glorious dust-bin of odds and ends for sale, out of +which he picked the printed record of the trial, and his insistence on +its cheapness, its dustiness, its yellow leaves, and its crabbed +Latin. The more soiled and dark and insignificant he can make the text +appear, the better for his ample and gigantic sermon. It explains +again the strictness with which Browning adhered to the facts of the +forgotten intrigue. He was playing the game of seeing how much was +really involved in one paltry fragment of fact. To have introduced +large quantities of fiction would not have been sportsmanlike. <i>The +Ring and the Book</i> therefore, to re-capitulate the view arrived at so +far, is the typical epic of our age, because it expresses the richness +of life by taking as a text <a name="Page_168"></a>a poor story. It pays to existence the +highest of all possible compliments—the great compliment which +monarchy paid to mankind—the compliment of selecting from it almost +at random.</p> + +<p>But this is only the first half of the claim of <i>The Ring and the +Book</i> to be the typical epic of modern times. The second half of that +claim, the second respect in which the work is representative of all +modern development, requires somewhat more careful statement. <i>The +Ring and the Book</i> is of course, essentially speaking, a detective +story. Its difference from the ordinary detective story is that it +seeks to establish, not the centre of criminal guilt, but the centre +of spiritual guilt. But it has exactly the same kind of exciting +quality that a detective story has, and a very excellent quality it +is. But the element which is important, and which now requires +pointing out, is the method by which that centre of spiritual guilt +and the corresponding centre of spiritual rectitude is discovered. In +order to make clear the peculiar character of this method, it is +necessary to begin rather nearer the beginning, and to go back some +little way in literary history.</p> + +<p>I do not know whether anybody, including the editor himself, has ever +noticed a peculiar coincidence which may be found in the arrangement +of the lyrics in Sir Francis Palgrave's <i>Golden Treasury</i>. However +that may be, two poems, each of them extremely well known, are placed +side by side, and their juxtaposition represents one vast revolution +in the poetical manner of looking at things. The first is Goldsmith's +almost too well known<a name="Page_169"></a> + +<div class="poem"><p>"When lovely woman stoops to folly,<br /> +And finds too late that men betray,<br /> +What charm can soothe her melancholy?<br /> +What art can wash her guilt away?"</p></div> + +<p>Immediately afterwards comes, with a sudden and thrilling change of +note, the voice of Burns:—</p> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"><p>"Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon,<br /> +<span class="i2">How can ye bloom sae fair?</span> +How can ye chant, ye little birds,<br /> +<span class="i2">And I sae fu' of care?</span></p> +</div><div class="stanza"> +<p>Thou'll break my heart, thou bonny bird,<br /> +<span class="i2">That sings upon the bough,</span> +Thou minds me of the happy days<br /> +<span class="i2">When my fause Love was true."</span></p></div></div> + +<p>A man might read those two poems a great many times without happening +to realise that they are two poems on exactly the same subject—the +subject of a trusting woman deserted by a man. And the whole +difference—the difference struck by the very first note of the voice +of any one who reads them—is this fundamental difference, that +Goldsmith's words are spoken about a certain situation, and Burns's +words are spoken in that situation.</p> + +<p>In the transition from one of these lyrics to the other, we have a +vital change in the conception of the functions of the poet; a change +of which Burns was in many ways the beginning, of which Browning, in a +manner that we shall see presently, was the culmination.</p> + +<p>Goldsmith writes fully and accurately in the tradition of the old +historic idea of what a poet was. The poet, the <i>vates</i>, was the +supreme and absolute critic of human existence, the chorus in the +human drama; he <a name="Page_170"></a>was, to employ two words, which when analysed are the +same word, either a spectator or a seer. He took a situation, such as +the situation of a woman deserted by a man before-mentioned, and he +gave, as Goldsmith gives, his own personal and definite decision upon +it, entirely based upon general principles, and entirely from the +outside. Then, as in the case of <i>The Golden Treasury</i>, he has no +sooner given judgment than there comes a bitter and confounding cry +out of the very heart of the situation itself, which tells us things +which would have been quite left out of account by the poet of the +general rule. No one, for example, but a person who knew something of +the inside of agony would have introduced that touch of the rage of +the mourner against the chattering frivolity of nature, "Thou'll break +my heart, thou bonny bird." We find and could find no such touch in +Goldsmith. We have to arrive at the conclusion therefore, that the +<i>vates</i> or poet in his absolute capacity is defied and overthrown by +this new method of what may be called the songs of experience.</p> + +<p>Now Browning, as he appears in <i>The Ring and the Book</i>, represents the +attempt to discover, not the truth in the sense that Goldsmith states +it, but the larger truth which is made up of all the emotional +experiences, such as that rendered by Burns. Browning, like Goldsmith, +seeks ultimately to be just and impartial, but he does it by +endeavouring to feel acutely every kind of partiality. Goldsmith +stands apart from all the passions of the case, and Browning includes +them all. If Browning were endeavouring to do strict justice in a case +like that of the deserted lady by the banks of Doon, he would not +touch or <a name="Page_171"></a>modify in the smallest particular the song as Burns sang it, +but he would write other songs, perhaps equally pathetic. A lyric or a +soliloquy would convince us suddenly by the mere pulse of its +language, that there was some pathos in the other actors in the drama; +some pathos, for example, in a weak man, conscious that in a +passionate ignorance of life he had thrown away his power of love, +lacking the moral courage to throw his prospects after it. We should +be reminded again that there was some pathos in the position, let us +say, of the seducer's mother, who had built all her hopes upon +developments which a mésalliance would overthrow, or in the position +of some rival lover, stricken to the ground with the tragedy in which +he had not even the miserable comfort of a <i>locus standi</i>. All these +characters in the story, Browning would realise from their own +emotional point of view before he gave judgment. The poet in his +ancient office held a kind of terrestrial day of judgment, and gave +men halters and haloes; Browning gives men neither halter nor halo, he +gives them voices. This is indeed the most bountiful of all the +functions of the poet, that he gives men words, for which men from the +beginning of the world have starved more than for bread.</p> + +<p>Here then we have the second great respect in which <i>The Ring and the +Book</i> is the great epic of the age. It is the great epic of the age, +because it is the expression of the belief, it might almost be said, +of the discovery, that no man ever lived upon this earth without +possessing a point of view. No one ever lived who had not a little +more to say for himself than any formal system of justice was likely +to say for him. It is scarcely necessary to point out how entirely the +<a name="Page_172"></a>application of this principle would revolutionise the old heroic +epic, in which the poet decided absolutely the moral relations and +moral value of the characters. Suppose, for example, that Homer had +written the <i>Odyssey</i> on the principle of <i>The Ring and the Book</i>, how +disturbing, how weird an experience it would be to read the story from +the point of view of Antinous! Without contradicting a single material +fact, without telling a single deliberate lie, the narrative would so +change the whole world around us, that we should scarcely know we were +dealing with the same place and people. The calm face of Penelope +would, it may be, begin to grow meaner before our eyes, like a face +changing in a dream. She would begin to appear as a fickle and selfish +woman, passing falsely as a widow, and playing a double game between +the attentions of foolish but honourable young men, and the fitful +appearances of a wandering and good-for-nothing sailor-husband; a man +prepared to act that most well-worn of melodramatic rôles, the +conjugal bully and blackmailer, the man who uses marital rights as an +instrument for the worse kind of wrongs. Or, again, if we had the +story of the fall of King Arthur told from the stand-point of Mordred, +it would only be a matter of a word or two; in a turn, in the +twinkling of an eye, we should find ourselves sympathising with the +efforts of an earnest young man to frustrate the profligacies of +high-placed paladins like Lancelot and Tristram, and ultimately +discovering, with deep regret but unshaken moral courage, that there +was no way to frustrate them, except by overthrowing the cold and +priggish and incapable egotist who ruled the country, and the whole +artificial and bombastic schemes which <a name="Page_173"></a>bred these moral evils. It +might be that in spite of this new view of the case, it would +ultimately appear that Ulysses was really right and Arthur was really +right, just as Browning makes it ultimately appear that Pompilia was +really right. But any one can see the enormous difference in scope and +difficulty between the old epic which told the whole story from one +man's point of view, and the new epic which cannot come to its +conclusion, until it has digested and assimilated views as paradoxical +and disturbing as our imaginary defence of Antinous and apologia of +Mordred.</p> + +<p>One of the most important steps ever taken in the history of the world +is this step, with all its various aspects, literary, political, and +social, which is represented by <i>The Ring and the Book</i>. It is the +step of deciding, in the face of many serious dangers and +disadvantages, to let everybody talk. The poet of the old epic is the +poet who had learnt to speak; Browning in the new epic is the poet who +has learnt to listen. This listening to truth and error, to heretics, +to fools, to intellectual bullies, to desperate partisans, to mere +chatterers, to systematic poisoners of the mind, is the hardest lesson +that humanity has ever been set to learn. <i>The Ring and the Book</i> is +the embodiment of this terrible magnanimity and patience. It is the +epic of free speech.</p> + +<p>Free speech is an idea which has at present all the unpopularity of a +truism; so that we tend to forget that it was not so very long ago +that it had the more practical unpopularity which attaches to a new +truth. Ingratitude is surely the chief of the intellectual sins of +man. He takes his political benefits for granted, <a name="Page_174"></a>just as he takes +the skies and the seasons for granted. He considers the calm of a city +street a thing as inevitable as the calm of a forest clearing, whereas +it is only kept in peace by a sustained stretch and effort similar to +that which keeps up a battle or a fencing match. Just as we forget +where we stand in relation to natural phenomena, so we forget it in +relation to social phenomena. We forget that the earth is a star, and +we forget that free speech is a paradox.</p> + +<p>It is not by any means self-evident upon the face of it that an +institution like the liberty of speech is right or just. It is not +natural or obvious to let a man utter follies and abominations which +you believe to be bad for mankind any more than it is natural or +obvious to let a man dig up a part of the public road, or infect half +a town with typhoid fever. The theory of free speech, that truth is so +much larger and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, that it +is very much better at all costs to hear every one's account of it, is +a theory which has been justified upon the whole by experiment, but +which remains a very daring and even a very surprising theory. It is +really one of the great discoveries of the modern time; but, once +admitted, it is a principle that does not merely affect politics, but +philosophy, ethics, and finally poetry.</p> + +<p>Browning was upon the whole the first poet to apply the principle to +poetry. He perceived that if we wish to tell the truth about a human +drama, we must not tell it merely like a melodrama, in which the +villain is villainous and the comic man is comic. He saw that the +truth had not been told until he had seen in the <a name="Page_175"></a>villain the pure and +disinterested gentleman that most villains firmly believe themselves +to be, or until he had taken the comic man as seriously as it is the +custom of comic men to take themselves. And in this Browning is beyond +all question the founder of the most modern school of poetry. +Everything that was profound, everything, indeed, that was tolerable +in the aesthetes of 1880, and the decadent of 1890, has its ultimate +source in Browning's great conception that every one's point of view +is interesting, even if it be a jaundiced or a blood-shot point of +view. He is at one with the decadents, in holding that it is +emphatically profitable, that it is emphatically creditable, to know +something of the grounds of the happiness of a thoroughly bad man. +Since his time we have indeed been somewhat over-satisfied with the +moods of the burglar, and the pensive lyrics of the receiver of stolen +goods. But Browning, united with the decadents on this point, of the +value of every human testimony, is divided from them sharply and by a +chasm in another equally important point. He held that it is necessary +to listen to all sides of a question in order to discover the truth of +it. But he held that there was a truth to discover. He held that +justice was a mystery, but not, like the decadents, that justice was a +delusion. He held, in other words, the true Browning doctrine, that in +a dispute every one was to a certain extent right; not the decadent +doctrine that in so mad a place as the world, every one must be by the +nature of things wrong.</p> + +<p>Browning's conception of the Universe can hardly be better expressed +than in the old and pregnant fable about the five blind men who went +to visit an elephant.<a name="Page_176"></a> One of them seized its trunk, and asserted that +an elephant was a kind of serpent; another embraced its leg, and was +ready to die for the belief that an elephant was a kind of tree. In +the same way to the man who leaned against its side it was a wall; to +the man who had hold of its tail a rope, and to the man who ran upon +its tusk a particularly unpleasant kind of spear. This, as I have +said, is the whole theology and philosophy of Browning. But he differs +from the psychological decadents and impressionists in this important +point, that he thinks that although the blind men found out very +little about the elephant, the elephant was an elephant, and was there +all the time. The blind men formed mistaken theories because an +elephant is a thing with a very curious shape. And Browning firmly +believed that the Universe was a thing with a very curious shape +indeed. No blind poet could even imagine an elephant without +experience, and no man, however great and wise, could dream of God and +not die. But there is a vital distinction between the mystical view of +Browning, that the blind men are misled because there is so much for +them to learn, and the purely impressionist and agnostic view of the +modern poet, that the blind men were misled because there was nothing +for them to learn. To the impressionist artist of our time we are not +blind men groping after an elephant and naming it a tree or a serpent. +We are maniacs, isolated in separate cells, and dreaming of trees and +serpents without reason and without result.</p><a name="Page_177"></a> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<a name="CHAPTER_VIII"></a><h2>CHAPTER VIII</h2> + +<h2>THE PHILOSOPHY OF BROWNING</h2> + + +<p>The great fault of most of the appreciation of Browning lies in the +fact that it conceives the moral and artistic value of his work to lie +in what is called "the message of Browning," or "the teaching of +Browning," or, in other words, in the mere opinions of Browning. Now +Browning had opinions, just as he had a dress-suit or a vote for +Parliament. He did not hesitate to express these opinions any more +than he would have hesitated to fire off a gun, or open an umbrella, +if he had possessed those articles, and realised their value. For +example, he had, as his students and eulogists have constantly stated, +certain definite opinions about the spiritual function of love, or the +intellectual basis of Christianity. Those opinions were very striking +and very solid, as everything was which came out of Browning's mind. +His two great theories of the universe may be expressed in two +comparatively parallel phrases. The first was what may be called the +hope which lies in the imperfection of man. The characteristic poem of +"Old Pictures in Florence" expresses very quaintly and beautifully the +idea that some hope may always be based on deficiency itself; in other +words, that in so far as man is a one-legged or a one-eyed creature, +<a name="Page_178"></a>there is something about his appearance which indicates that he +should have another leg and another eye. The poem suggests admirably +that such a sense of incompleteness may easily be a great advance upon +a sense of completeness, that the part may easily and obviously be +greater than the whole. And from this Browning draws, as he is fully +justified in drawing, a definite hope for immortality and the larger +scale of life. For nothing is more certain than that though this world +is the only world that we have known, or of which we could even dream, +the fact does remain that we have named it "a strange world." In other +words, we have certainly felt that this world did not explain itself, +that something in its complete and patent picture has been omitted. +And Browning was right in saying that in a cosmos where incompleteness +implies completeness, life implies immortality. This then was the +first of the doctrines or opinions of Browning: the hope that lies in +the imperfection of man. The second of the great Browning doctrines +requires some audacity to express. It can only be properly stated as +the hope that lies in the imperfection of God. That is to say, that +Browning held that sorrow and self-denial, if they were the burdens of +man, were also his privileges. He held that these stubborn sorrows and +obscure valours might, to use a yet more strange expression, have +provoked the envy of the Almighty. If man has self-sacrifice and God +has none, then man has in the Universe a secret and blasphemous +superiority. And this tremendous story of a Divine jealousy Browning +reads into the story of the Crucifixion. If the Creator had not been +crucified He would not have been as <a name="Page_179"></a>great as thousands of wretched +fanatics among His own creatures. It is needless to insist upon this +point; any one who wishes to read it splendidly expressed need only be +referred to "Saul." But these are emphatically the two main doctrines +or opinions of Browning which I have ventured to characterise roughly +as the hope in the imperfection of man, and more boldly as the hope in +the imperfection of God. They are great thoughts, thoughts written by +a great man, and they raise noble and beautiful doubts on behalf of +faith which the human spirit will never answer or exhaust. But about +them in connection with Browning there nevertheless remains something +to be added.</p> + +<p>Browning was, as most of his upholders and all his opponents say, an +optimist. His theory, that man's sense of his own imperfection implies +a design of perfection, is a very good argument for optimism. His +theory that man's knowledge of and desire for self-sacrifice implies +God's knowledge of and desire for self-sacrifice is another very good +argument for optimism. But any one will make the deepest and blackest +and most incurable mistake about Browning who imagines that his +optimism was founded on any arguments for optimism. Because he had a +strong intellect, because he had a strong power of conviction, he +conceived and developed and asserted these doctrines of the +incompleteness of Man and the sacrifice of Omnipotence. But these +doctrines were the symptoms of his optimism, they were not its origin. +It is surely obvious that no one can be argued into optimism since no +one can be argued into happiness. Browning's optimism was not founded +on <a name="Page_180"></a>opinions which were the work of Browning, but on life which was +the work of God. One of Browning's most celebrated biographers has +said that something of Browning's theology must be put down to his +possession of a good digestion. The remark was, of course, like all +remarks touching the tragic subject of digestion, intended to be funny +and to convey some kind of doubt or diminution touching the value of +Browning's faith. But if we examine the matter with somewhat greater +care we shall see that it is indeed a thorough compliment to that +faith. Nobody, strictly speaking, is happier on account of his +digestion. He is happy because he is so constituted as to forget all +about it. Nobody really is convulsed with delight at the thought of +the ingenious machinery which he possesses inside him; the thing which +delights him is simply the full possession of his own human body. I +cannot in the least understand why a good digestion—that is, a good +body—should not be held to be as mystic a benefit as a sunset or the +first flower of spring. But there is about digestion this peculiarity +throwing a great light on human pessimism, that it is one of the many +things which we never speak of as existing until they go wrong. We +should think it ridiculous to speak of a man as suffering from his +boots if we meant that he had really no boots. But we do speak of a +man suffering from digestion when we mean that he suffers from a lack +of digestion. In the same way we speak of a man suffering from nerves +when we mean that his nerves are more inefficient than any one else's +nerves. If any one wishes to see how grossly language can degenerate, +he need only compare the old optimistic <a name="Page_181"></a>use of the word nervous, +which we employ in speaking of a nervous grip, with the new +pessimistic use of the word, which we employ in speaking of a nervous +manner. And as digestion is a good thing which sometimes goes wrong, +as nerves are good things which sometimes go wrong, so existence +itself in the eyes of Browning and all the great optimists is a good +thing which sometimes goes wrong. He held himself as free to draw his +inspiration from the gift of good health as from the gift of learning +or the gift of fellowship. But he held that such gifts were in life +innumerable and varied, and that every man, or at least almost every +man, possessed some window looking out on this essential excellence of +things.</p> + +<p>Browning's optimism then, since we must continue to use this somewhat +inadequate word, was a result of experience—experience which is for +some mysterious reason generally understood in the sense of sad or +disillusioning experience. An old gentleman rebuking a little boy for +eating apples in a tree is in the common conception the type of +experience. If he really wished to be a type of experience he would +climb up the tree himself and proceed to experience the apples. +Browning's faith was founded upon joyful experience, not in the sense +that he selected his joyful experiences and ignored his painful ones, +but in the sense that his joyful experiences selected themselves and +stood out in his memory by virtue of their own extraordinary intensity +of colour. He did not use experience in that mean and pompous sense in +which it is used by the worldling advanced in years. He rather used it +in that healthier and more joyful sense in which it is used at +revivalist meetings. In the<a name="Page_182"></a> Salvation Army a man's experiences mean +his experiences of the mercy of God, and to Browning the meaning was +much the same. But the revivalists' confessions deal mostly with +experiences of prayer and praise; Browning's dealt pre-eminently with +what may be called his own subject, the experiences of love.</p> + +<p>And this quality of Browning's optimism, the quality of detail, is +also a very typical quality. Browning's optimism is of that ultimate +and unshakeable order that is founded upon the absolute sight, and +sound, and smell, and handling of things. If a man had gone up to +Browning and asked him with all the solemnity of the eccentric, "Do +you think life is worth living?" it is interesting to conjecture what +his answer might have been. If he had been for the moment under the +influence of the orthodox rationalistic deism of the theologian he +would have said, "Existence is justified by its manifest design, its +manifest adaptation of means to ends," or, in other words, "Existence +is justified by its completeness." If, on the other hand, he had been +influenced by his own serious intellectual theories he would have +said, "Existence is justified by its air of growth and doubtfulness," +or, in other words, "Existence is justified by its incompleteness." +But if he had not been influenced in his answer either by the accepted +opinions, or by his own opinions, but had simply answered the question +"Is life worth living?" with the real, vital answer that awaited it in +his own soul, he would have said as likely as not, "Crimson toadstools +in Hampshire." Some plain, glowing picture of this sort left on his +mind would be his real verdict on what the universe had meant to him. +To his traditions hope was traced to <a name="Page_183"></a>order, to his speculations hope +was traced to disorder. But to Browning himself hope was traced to +something like red toadstools. His mysticism was not of that idle and +wordy type which believes that a flower is symbolical of life; it was +rather of that deep and eternal type which believes that life, a mere +abstraction, is symbolical of a flower. With him the great concrete +experiences which God made always come first; his own deductions and +speculations about them always second. And in this point we find the +real peculiar inspiration of his very original poems.</p> + +<p>One of the very few critics who seem to have got near to the actual +secret of Browning's optimism is Mr. Santayana in his most interesting +book <i>Interpretations of Poetry and Religion</i>. He, in +contradistinction to the vast mass of Browning's admirers, had +discovered what was the real root virtue of Browning's poetry; and the +curious thing is, that having discovered that root virtue, he thinks +it is a vice. He describes the poetry of Browning most truly as the +poetry of barbarism, by which he means the poetry which utters the +primeval and indivisible emotions. "For the barbarian is the man who +regards his passions as their own excuse for being, who does not +domesticate them either by understanding their cause, or by conceiving +their ideal goal." Whether this be or be not a good definition of the +barbarian, it is an excellent and perfect definition of the poet. It +might, perhaps, be suggested that barbarians, as a matter of fact, are +generally highly traditional and respectable persons who would not put +a feather wrong in their head-gear, and who generally have very few +feelings and think very little about those they have. It is when we +have <a name="Page_184"></a>grown to a greater and more civilised stature that we begin to +realise and put to ourselves intellectually the great feelings that +sleep in the depths of us. Thus it is that the literature of our day +has steadily advanced towards a passionate simplicity, and we become +more primeval as the world grows older, until Whitman writes huge and +chaotic psalms to express the sensations of a schoolboy out fishing, +and Maeterlinck embodies in symbolic dramas the feelings of a child in +the dark.</p> + +<p>Thus, Mr. Santayana is, perhaps, the most valuable of all the Browning +critics. He has gone out of his way to endeavour to realise what it is +that repels him in Browning, and he has discovered the fault which +none of Browning's opponents have discovered. And in this he has +discovered the merit which none of Browning's admirers have +discovered. Whether the quality be a good or a bad quality, Mr. +Santayana is perfectly right. The whole of Browning's poetry does rest +upon primitive feeling; and the only comment to be added is that so +does the whole of every one else's poetry. Poetry deals entirely with +those great eternal and mainly forgotten wishes which are the ultimate +despots of existence. Poetry presents things as they are to our +emotions, not as they are to any theory, however plausible, or any +argument, however conclusive. If love is in truth a glorious vision, +poetry will say that it is a glorious vision, and no philosophers will +persuade poetry to say that it is the exaggeration of the instinct of +sex. If bereavement is a bitter and continually aching thing, poetry +will say that it is so, and no philosophers will persuade poetry to +say that it is an <a name="Page_185"></a>evolutionary stage of great biological value. And +here comes in the whole value and object of poetry, that it is +perpetually challenging all systems with the test of a terrible +sincerity. The practical value of poetry is that it is realistic upon +a point upon which nothing else can be realistic, the point of the +actual desires of man. Ethics is the science of actions, but poetry is +the science of motives. Some actions are ugly, and therefore some +parts of ethics are ugly. But all motives are beautiful, or present +themselves for the moment as beautiful, and therefore all poetry is +beautiful. If poetry deals with the basest matter, with the shedding +of blood for gold, it ought to suggest the gold as well as the blood. +Only poetry can realise motives, because motives are all pictures of +happiness. And the supreme and most practical value of poetry is this, +that in poetry, as in music, a note is struck which expresses beyond +the power of rational statement a condition of mind, and all actions +arise from a condition of mind. Prose can only use a large and clumsy +notation; it can only say that a man is miserable, or that a man is +happy; it is forced to ignore that there are a million diverse kinds +of misery and a million diverse kinds of happiness. Poetry alone, with +the first throb of its metre, can tell us whether the depression is +the kind of depression that drives a man to suicide, or the kind of +depression that drives him to the Tivoli. Poetry can tell us whether +the happiness is the happiness that sends a man to a restaurant, or +the much richer and fuller happiness that sends him to church.</p> + +<p>Now the supreme value of Browning as an optimist lies in this that we +have been examining, that beyond <a name="Page_186"></a>all his conclusions, and deeper than +all his arguments, he was passionately interested in and in love with +existence. If the heavens had fallen, and all the waters of the earth +run with blood, he would still have been interested in existence, if +possible a little more so. He is a great poet of human joy for +precisely the reason of which Mr. Santayana complains: that his +happiness is primal, and beyond the reach of philosophy. He is +something far more convincing, far more comforting, far more +religiously significant than an optimist: he is a happy man.</p> + +<p>This happiness he finds, as every man must find happiness, in his own +way. He does not find the great part of his joy in those matters in +which most poets find felicity. He finds much of it in those matters +in which most poets find ugliness and vulgarity. He is to a +considerable extent the poet of towns. "Do you care for nature much?" +a friend of his asked him. "Yes, a great deal," he said, "but for +human beings a great deal more." Nature, with its splendid and +soothing sanity, has the power of convincing most poets of the +essential worthiness of things. There are few poets who, if they +escaped from the rowdiest waggonette of trippers, could not be quieted +again and exalted by dropping into a small wayside field. The +speciality of Browning is rather that he would have been quieted and +exalted by the waggonette.</p> + +<p>To Browning, probably the beginning and end of all optimism was to be +found in the faces in the street. To him they were all the masks of a +deity, the heads of a hundred-headed Indian god of nature. Each one of +them looked towards some quarter of the heavens, not looked upon by +any other eyes. Each one of them <a name="Page_187"></a>wore some expression, some blend of +eternal joy and eternal sorrow, not to be found in any other +countenance. The sense of the absolute sanctity of human difference +was the deepest of all his senses. He was hungrily interested in all +human things, but it would have been quite impossible to have said of +him that he loved humanity. He did not love humanity but men. His +sense of the difference between one man and another would have made +the thought of melting them into a lump called humanity simply +loathsome and prosaic. It would have been to him like playing four +hundred beautiful airs at once. The mixture would not combine all, it +would lose all. Browning believed that to every man that ever lived +upon this earth had been given a definite and peculiar confidence of +God. Each one of us was engaged on secret service; each one of us had +a peculiar message; each one of us was the founder of a religion. Of +that religion our thoughts, our faces, our bodies, our hats, our +boots, our tastes, our virtues, and even our vices, were more or less +fragmentary and inadequate expressions.</p> + +<p>In the delightful memoirs of that very remarkable man Sir Charles +Gavan Duffy, there is an extremely significant and interesting +anecdote about Browning, the point of which appears to have attracted +very little attention. Duffy was dining with Browning and John +Forster, and happened to make some chance allusion to his own +adherence to the Roman Catholic faith, when Forster remarked, half +jestingly, that he did not suppose that Browning would like him any +the better for that. Browning would seem to have opened his eyes with +some astonishment. He immediately asked why<a name="Page_188"></a> Forster should suppose +him hostile to the Roman Church. Forster and Duffy replied almost +simultaneously, by referring to "Bishop Blougram's Apology," which had +just appeared, and asking whether the portrait of the sophistical and +self-indulgent priest had not been intended for a satire on Cardinal +Wiseman. "Certainly," replied Browning cheerfully, "I intended it for +Cardinal Wiseman, but I don't consider it a satire, there is nothing +hostile about it." This is the real truth which lies at the heart of +what may be called the great sophistical monologues which Browning +wrote in later years. They are not satires or attacks upon their +subjects, they are not even harsh and unfeeling exposures of them. +They are defences; they say or are intended to say the best that can +be said for the persons with whom they deal. But very few people in +this world would care to listen to the real defence of their own +characters. The real defence, the defence which belongs to the Day of +Judgment, would make such damaging admissions, would clear away so +many artificial virtues, would tell such tragedies of weakness and +failure, that a man would sooner be misunderstood and censured by the +world than exposed to that awful and merciless eulogy. One of the most +practically difficult matters which arise from the code of manners and +the conventions of life, is that we cannot properly justify a human +being, because that justification would involve the admission of +things which may not conventionally be admitted. We might explain and +make human and respectable, for example, the conduct of some old +fighting politician, who, for the good of his party and his country, +acceded to measures of which he disapproved; but we cannot, because we +are not <a name="Page_189"></a>allowed to admit that he ever acceded to measures of which he +disapproved. We might touch the life of many dissolute public men with +pathos, and a kind of defeated courage, by telling the truth about the +history of their sins. But we should throw the world into an uproar if +we hinted that they had any. Thus the decencies of civilisation do not +merely make it impossible to revile a man, they make it impossible to +praise him.</p> + +<p>Browning, in such poems as "Bishop Blougram's Apology," breaks this +first mask of goodness in order to break the second mask of evil, and +gets to the real goodness at last; he dethrones a saint in order to +humanise a scoundrel. This is one typical side of the real optimism of +Browning. And there is indeed little danger that such optimism will +become weak and sentimental and popular, the refuge of every idler, +the excuse of every ne'er-do-well. There is little danger that men +will desire to excuse their souls before God by presenting themselves +before men as such snobs as Bishop Blougram, or such dastards as +Sludge the Medium. There is no pessimism, however stern, that is so +stern as this optimism, it is as merciless as the mercy of God.</p> + +<p>It is true that in this, as in almost everything else connected with +Browning's character, the matter cannot be altogether exhausted by +such a generalisation as the above. Browning's was a simple character, +and therefore very difficult to understand, since it was impulsive, +unconscious, and kept no reckoning of its moods. Probably in a great +many cases, the original impulse which led Browning to plan a +soliloquy was a kind of anger mixed with curiosity; possibly the first +<a name="Page_190"></a>charcoal sketch of Blougram was a caricature of a priest. Browning, +as we have said, had prejudices, and had a capacity for anger, and two +of his angriest prejudices were against a certain kind of worldly +clericalism, and against almost every kind of spiritualism. But as he +worked upon the portraits at least, a new spirit began to possess him, +and he enjoyed every spirited and just defence the men could make of +themselves, like triumphant blows in a battle, and towards the end +would come the full revelation, and Browning would stand up in the +man's skin and testify to the man's ideals. However this may be, it is +worth while to notice one very curious error that has arisen in +connection with one of the most famous of these monologues.</p> + +<p>When Robert Browning was engaged in that somewhat obscure quarrel with +the spiritualist Home, it is generally and correctly stated that he +gained a great number of the impressions which he afterwards embodied +in "Mr. Sludge the Medium." The statement so often made, particularly +in the spiritualist accounts of the matter, that Browning himself is +the original of the interlocutor and exposer of Sludge, is of course +merely an example of that reckless reading from which no one has +suffered more than Browning despite his students and societies. The +man to whom Sludge addresses his confession is a Mr. Hiram H. +Horsfall, an American, a patron of spiritualists, and, as it is more +than once suggested, something of a fool. Nor is there the smallest +reason to suppose that Sludge considered as an individual bears any +particular resemblance to Home considered as an individual. But +without doubt "Mr. Sludge the Medium" is a general <a name="Page_191"></a>statement of the +view of spiritualism at which Browning had arrived from his +acquaintance with Home and Home's circle. And about that view of +spiritualism there is something rather peculiar to notice. The poem, +appearing as it did at the time when the intellectual public had just +become conscious of the existence of spiritualism, attracted a great +deal of attention, and aroused a great deal of controversy. The +spiritualists called down thunder upon the head of the poet, whom they +depicted as a vulgar and ribald lampooner who had not only committed +the profanity of sneering at the mysteries of a higher state of life, +but the more unpardonable profanity of sneering at the convictions of +his own wife. The sceptics, on the other hand, hailed the poem with +delight as a blasting exposure of spiritualism, and congratulated the +poet on making himself the champion of the sane and scientific view of +magic. Which of these two parties was right about the question of +attacking the reality of spiritualism it is neither easy nor necessary +to discuss. For the simple truth, which neither of the two parties and +none of the students of Browning seem to have noticed, is that "Mr. +Sludge the Medium" is not an attack upon spiritualism. It would be a +great deal nearer the truth, though not entirely the truth, to call it +a justification of spiritualism. The whole essence of Browning's +method is involved in this matter, and the whole essence of Browning's +method is so vitally misunderstood that to say that "Mr. Sludge the +Medium" is something like a defence of spiritualism will bear on the +face of it the appearance of the most empty and perverse of paradoxes. +But so, when we have <a name="Page_192"></a>comprehended Browning's spirit, the fact will be +found to be.</p> + +<p>The general idea is that Browning must have intended "Sludge" for an +attack on spiritual phenomena, because the medium in that poem is made +a vulgar and contemptible mountebank, because his cheats are quite +openly confessed, and he himself put into every ignominious situation, +detected, exposed, throttled, horsewhipped, and forgiven. To regard +this deduction as sound is to misunderstand Browning at the very start +of every poem that he ever wrote. There is nothing that the man loved +more, nothing that deserves more emphatically to be called a +speciality of Browning, than the utterance of large and noble truths +by the lips of mean and grotesque human beings. In his poetry praise +and wisdom were perfected not only out of the mouths of babes and +sucklings, but out of the mouths of swindlers and snobs. Now what, as +a matter of fact, is the outline and development of the poem of +"Sludge"? The climax of the poem, considered as a work of art, is so +fine that it is quite extraordinary that any one should have missed +the point of it, since it is the whole point of the monologue. Sludge +the Medium has been caught out in a piece of unquestionable trickery, +a piece of trickery for which there is no conceivable explanation or +palliation which will leave his moral character intact. He is +therefore seized with a sudden resolution, partly angry, partly +frightened, and partly humorous, to become absolutely frank, and to +tell the whole truth about himself for the first time not only to his +dupe, but to himself. He excuses himself for the earlier stages of the +trickster's life by a survey <a name="Page_193"></a>of the border-land between truth and +fiction, not by any means a piece of sophistry or cynicism, but a +perfectly fair statement of an ethical difficulty which does exist. +There are some people who think that it must be immoral to admit that +there are any doubtful cases of morality, as if a man should refrain +from discussing the precise boundary at the upper end of the Isthmus +of Panama, for fear the inquiry should shake his belief in the +existence of North America. People of this kind quite consistently +think Sludge to be merely a scoundrel talking nonsense. It may be +remembered that they thought the same thing of Newman. It is actually +supposed, apparently in the current use of words, that casuistry is +the name of a crime; it does not appear to occur to people that +casuistry is a science, and about as much a crime as botany. This +tendency to casuistry in Browning's monologues has done much towards +establishing for him that reputation for pure intellectualism which +has done him so much harm. But casuistry in this sense is not a cold +and analytical thing, but a very warm and sympathetic thing. To know +what combination of excuse might justify a man in manslaughter or +bigamy, is not to have a callous indifference to virtue; it is rather +to have so ardent an admiration for virtue as to seek it in the +remotest desert and the darkest incognito.</p> + +<p>This is emphatically the case with the question of truth and falsehood +raised in "Sludge the Medium." To say that it is sometimes difficult +to tell at what point the romancer turns into the liar is not to state +a cynicism, but a perfectly honest piece of human observation. To +think that such a view involves the <a name="Page_194"></a>negation of honesty is like +thinking that red is green, because the two fade into each other in +the colours of the rainbow. It is really difficult to decide when we +come to the extreme edge of veracity, when and when not it is +permissible to create an illusion. A standing example, for instance, +is the case of the fairy-tales. We think a father entirely pure and +benevolent when he tells his children that a beanstalk grew up into +heaven, and a pumpkin turned into a coach. We should consider that he +lapsed from purity and benevolence if he told his children that in +walking home that evening he had seen a beanstalk grow half-way up the +church, or a pumpkin grow as large as a wheelbarrow. Again, few people +would object to that general privilege whereby it is permitted to a +person in narrating even a true anecdote to work up the climax by any +exaggerative touches which really tend to bring it out. The reason of +this is that the telling of the anecdote has become, like the telling +of the fairy-tale, almost a distinct artistic creation; to offer to +tell a story is in ordinary society like offering to recite or play +the violin. No one denies that a fixed and genuine moral rule could be +drawn up for these cases, but no one surely need be ashamed to admit +that such a rule is not entirely easy to draw up. And when a man like +Sludge traces much of his moral downfall to the indistinctness of the +boundary and the possibility of beginning with a natural extravagance +and ending with a gross abuse, it certainly is not possible to deny +his right to be heard.</p> + +<p>We must recur, however, to the question of the main development of the +Sludge self-analysis. He begins, as we have said, by urging a general +excuse by the <a name="Page_195"></a>fact that in the heat of social life, in the course of +telling tales in the intoxicating presence of sympathisers and +believers, he has slid into falsehood almost before he is aware of it. +So far as this goes, there is truth in his plea. Sludge might indeed +find himself unexpectedly justified if we had only an exact record of +how true were the tales told about Conservatives in an exclusive +circle of Radicals, or the stories told about Radicals in a circle of +indignant Conservatives. But after this general excuse, Sludge goes on +to a perfectly cheerful and unfeeling admission of fraud; this +principal feeling towards his victims is by his own confession a +certain unfathomable contempt for people who are so easily taken in. +He professes to know how to lay the foundations for every species of +personal acquaintanceship, and how to remedy the slight and trivial +slips of making Plato write Greek in naughts and crosses.</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"As I fear, sir, he sometimes used to do<br /> +Before I found the useful book that knows."</p></div> + +<p>It would be difficult to imagine any figure more indecently +confessional, more entirely devoid of not only any of the restraints +of conscience, but of any of the restraints even of a wholesome +personal conceit, than Sludge the Medium. He confesses not only fraud, +but things which are to the natural man more difficult to confess even +than fraud—effeminacy, futility, physical cowardice. And then, when +the last of his loathsome secrets has been told, when he has nothing +left either to gain or to conceal, then he rises up into a perfect +bankrupt sublimity and makes the great avowal which is the whole pivot +and meaning of the poem.<a name="Page_196"></a> He says in effect: "Now that my interest in +deceit is utterly gone, now that I have admitted, to my own final +infamy, the frauds that I have practised, now that I stand before you +in a patent and open villainy which has something of the +disinterestedness and independence of the innocent, now I tell you +with the full and impartial authority of a lost soul that I believe +that there is something in spiritualism. In the course of a thousand +conspiracies, by the labour of a thousand lies, I have discovered that +there is really something in this matter that neither I nor any other +man understands. I am a thief, an adventurer, a deceiver of mankind, +but I am not a disbeliever in spiritualism. I have seen too much for +that." This is the confession of faith of Mr. Sludge the Medium. It +would be difficult to imagine a confession of faith framed and +presented in a more impressive manner. Sludge is a witness to his +faith as the old martyrs were witnesses to their faith, but even more +impressively. They testified to their religion even after they had +lost their liberty, and their eyesight, and their right hands. Sludge +testifies to his religion even after he has lost his dignity and his +honour.</p> + +<p>It may be repeated that it is truly extraordinary that any one should +have failed to notice that this avowal on behalf of spiritualism is +the pivot of the poem. The avowal itself is not only expressed +clearly, but prepared and delivered with admirable rhetorical force:—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"Now for it, then! Will you believe me, though?<br /> +You've heard what I confess: I don't unsay<br /> +A single word: I cheated when I could,<br /> +Rapped with my toe-joints, set sham hands at work,<br /> +Wrote down names weak in sympathetic ink.<br /><a name="Page_197"></a> +Rubbed odic lights with ends of phosphor-match,<br /> +And all the rest; believe that: believe this,<br /> +By the same token, though it seem to set<br /> +The crooked straight again, unsay the said,<br /> +Stick up what I've knocked down; I can't help that,<br /> +It's truth! I somehow vomit truth to-day.<br /> +This trade of mine—I don't know, can't be sure<br /> +But there was something in it, tricks and all!"</p></div> + +<p>It is strange to call a poem with so clear and fine a climax an attack +on spiritualism. To miss that climax is like missing the last sentence +in a good anecdote, or putting the last act of <i>Othello</i> into the +middle of the play. Either the whole poem of "Sludge the Medium" means +nothing at all, and is only a lampoon upon a cad, of which the matter +is almost as contemptible as the subject, or it means this—that some +real experiences of the unseen lie even at the heart of hypocrisy, and +that even the spiritualist is at root spiritual.</p> + +<p>One curious theory which is common to most Browning critics is that +Sludge must be intended for a pure and conscious impostor, because +after his confession, and on the personal withdrawal of Mr. Horsfall, +he bursts out into horrible curses against that gentleman and cynical +boasts of his future triumphs in a similar line of business. Surely +this is to have a very feeble notion either of nature or art. A man +driven absolutely into a corner might humiliate himself, and gain a +certain sensation almost of luxury in that humiliation, in pouring out +all his imprisoned thoughts and obscure victories. For let it never be +forgotten that a hypocrite is a very unhappy man; he is a man who has +devoted himself to a most delicate and arduous intellectual art in +which he may achieve masterpieces which he must keep secret, fight +thrilling <a name="Page_198"></a>battles, and win hair's-breadth victories for which he +cannot have a whisper of praise. A really accomplished impostor is the +most wretched of geniuses; he is a Napoleon on a desert island. A man +might surely, therefore, when he was certain that his credit was gone, +take a certain pleasure in revealing the tricks of his unique trade, +and gaining not indeed credit, but at least a kind of glory. And in +the course of this self-revelation he would come at last upon that +part of himself which exists in every man—that part which does +believe in, and value, and worship something. This he would fling in +his hearer's face with even greater pride, and take a delight in +giving a kind of testimony to his religion which no man had ever given +before—the testimony of a martyr who could not hope to be a saint. +But surely all this sudden tempest of candour in the man would not +mean that he would burst into tears and become an exemplary ratepayer, +like a villain in the worst parts of Dickens. The moment the danger +was withdrawn, the sense of having given himself away, of having +betrayed the secret of his infamous freemasonry, would add an +indescribable violence and foulness to his reaction of rage. A man in +such a case would do exactly as Sludge does. He would declare his own +shame, declare the truth of his creed, and then, when he realised what +he had done, say something like this:—</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"R-r-r, you brute-beast and blackguard! Cowardly scamp!<br /> +I only wish I dared burn down the house<br /> +And spoil your sniggering!"</p></div> + +<p>and so on, and so on.</p> + +<p>He would react like this; it is one of the most artistic strokes in +Browning. But it does not prove that he was a hypocrite about +spiritualism, or that he <a name="Page_199"></a>was speaking more truthfully in the second +outburst than in the first. Whence came this extraordinary theory that +a man is always speaking most truly when he is speaking most coarsely? +The truth about oneself is a very difficult thing to express, and +coarse speaking will seldom do it.</p> + +<p>When we have grasped this point about "Sludge the Medium," we have +grasped the key to the whole series of Browning's casuistical +monologues—<i>Bishop Blaugram's Apology, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, +Fra Lippo Lippi, Fifine at the Fair, Aristophanes' Apology</i>, and +several of the monologues in <i>The Ring and the Book</i>. They are all, +without exception, dominated by this one conception of a certain +reality tangled almost inextricably with unrealities in a man's mind, +and the peculiar fascination which resides in the thought that the +greatest lies about a man, and the greatest truths about him, may be +found side by side in the same eloquent and sustained utterance.</p> + +<div class="poem"><p>"For Blougram, he believed, say, half he spoke."</p></div> + +<p>Or, to put the matter in another way, the general idea of these poems +is, that a man cannot help telling some truth even when he sets out to +tell lies. If a man comes to tell us that he has discovered perpetual +motion, or been swallowed by the sea-serpent, there will yet be some +point in the story where he will tell us about himself almost all that +we require to know.</p> + +<p>If any one wishes to test the truth, or to see the best examples of +this general idea in Browning's monologues, he may be recommended to +notice one peculiarity of these poems which is rather striking. As a +whole, these apologies are written in a particularly burly and even +brutal English. Browning's <a name="Page_200"></a>love of what is called the ugly is nowhere +else so fully and extravagantly indulged. This, like a great many +other things for which Browning as an artist is blamed, is perfectly +appropriate to the theme. A vain, ill-mannered, and untrustworthy +egotist, defending his own sordid doings with his own cheap and +weather-beaten philosophy, is very likely to express himself best in a +language flexible and pungent, but indelicate and without dignity. But +the peculiarity of these loose and almost slangy soliloquies is that +every now and then in them there occur bursts of pure poetry which are +like a burst of birds singing. Browning does not hesitate to put some +of the most perfect lines that he or anyone else have ever written in +the English language into the mouths of such slaves as Sludge and +Guido Franceschini. Take, for the sake of example, "Bishop Blougram's +Apology." The poem is one of the most grotesque in the poet's works. +It is intentionally redolent of the solemn materialism and patrician +grossness of a grand dinner-party <i>à deux</i>. It has many touches of an +almost wild bathos, such as the young man who bears the impossible +name of Gigadibs. The Bishop, in pursuing his worldly argument for +conformity, points out with truth that a condition of doubt is a +condition that cuts both ways, and that if we cannot be sure of the +religious theory of life, neither can we be sure of the material +theory of life, and that in turn is capable of becoming an uncertainty +continually shaken by a tormenting suggestion. We cannot establish +ourselves on rationalism, and make it bear fruit to us. Faith itself +is capable of becoming the darkest and most revolutionary of doubts. +Then comes the passage:—</p><a name="Page_201"></a> + +<div class="poem"><p>"Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch,<br /> +A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death,<br /> +A chorus ending from Euripides,—<br /> +And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears<br /> +As old and new at once as Nature's self,<br /> +To rap and knock and enter in our soul,<br /> +Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring,<br /> +Round the ancient idol, on his base again,—<br /> +The grand Perhaps!"</p></div> + +<p>Nobler diction and a nobler meaning could not have been put into the +mouth of Pompilia, or Rabbi Ben Ezra. It is in reality put into the +mouth of a vulgar, fashionable priest, justifying his own cowardice +over the comfortable wine and the cigars.</p> + +<p>Along with this tendency to poetry among Browning's knaves, must be +reckoned another characteristic, their uniform tendency to theism. +These loose and mean characters speak of many things feverishly and +vaguely; of one thing they always speak with confidence and composure, +their relation to God. It may seem strange at first sight that those +who have outlived the indulgence, and not only of every law, but of +every reasonable anarchy, should still rely so simply upon the +indulgence of divine perfection. Thus Sludge is certain that his life +of lies and conjuring tricks has been conducted in a deep and subtle +obedience to the message really conveyed by the conditions created by +God. Thus Bishop Blougram is certain that his life of panic-stricken +and tottering compromise has been really justified as the only method +that could unite him with God. Thus Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau is +certain that every dodge in his thin string of political dodges has +been the true means of realising what he believes to be the <a name="Page_202"></a>will of +God. Every one of these meagre swindlers, while admitting a failure in +all things relative, claims an awful alliance with the Absolute. To +many it will at first sight appear a dangerous doctrine indeed. But, +in truth, it is a most solid and noble and salutary doctrine, far less +dangerous than its opposite. Every one on this earth should believe, +amid whatever madness or moral failure, that his life and temperament +have some object on the earth. Every one on the earth should believe +that he has something to give to the world which cannot otherwise be +given. Every one should, for the good of men and the saving of his own +soul, believe that it is possible, even if we are the enemies of the +human race, to be the friends of God. The evil wrought by this +mystical pride, great as it often is, is like a straw to the evil +wrought by a materialistic self-abandonment. The crimes of the devil +who thinks himself of immeasurable value are as nothing to the crimes +of the devil who thinks himself of no value. With Browning's knaves we +have always this eternal interest, that they are real somewhere, and +may at any moment begin to speak poetry. We are talking to a peevish +and garrulous sneak; we are watching the play of his paltry features, +his evasive eyes, and babbling lips. And suddenly the face begins to +change and harden, the eyes glare like the eyes of a mask, the whole +face of clay becomes a common mouthpiece, and the voice that comes +forth is the voice of God, uttering His everlasting soliloquy.<a name="Page_203"></a> </p> + +<br /> + +<a id="INDEX" name="INDEX"></a><h2>INDEX</h2> + + +<b>A</b> + +<p><i>Agamemnon of Aeschylus, The</i>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a></p> + +<p>Alliance, The Holy, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>. + +<p>"Andrea del Sarto," <a href="#Page_83">83</a></p> + +<p><i>Aristophanes' Apology</i>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>.</p> + +<p>Arnold, Matthew, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Asolando</i>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>.</p> + +<p>Asolo (Italy), <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>.</p> + +<p>"At the Mermaid," <a href="#Page_117">117</a>.</p> + +<p>Austria, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>B</b> + +<p>"Bad Dreams," <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Balaustion's Adventure</i>, <a href="#Page_119">119-120</a>.</p> + +<p>Barrett, Arabella, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>.</p> + +<p>Barrett, Edward Moulton, <a href="#Page_58">58</a> <i>seq.</i>, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>.</p> + +<p>Beardsley, Mr. Aubrey, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Bells and Pomegranates</i>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>.</p> + +<p>"Ben Ezra," <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>.</p> + +<p>Birrell, Mr. Augustine, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>.</p> + +<p>"Bishop Blougram," <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Bishop Blougram's Apology</i>, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Blot on the 'Scutcheon, A</i>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>.</p> + +<p>Boyd, Mr., <a href="#Page_62">62</a>.</p> + +<p>Browning, Robert: + <span class="ind1"> birth and family history, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> theories as to his descent, <a href="#Page_4">4-8</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> a typical Englishman of the middle class, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> his immediate ancestors, <a href="#Page_10">10</a> <i>seq.</i>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> education, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> boyhood and youth, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> first poems, <i>Incondita</i>, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> romantic spirit, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> publication of <i>Pauline</i>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> friendship with literary men, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>Paracelsus</i>, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> introduction to literary world, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> his earliest admirers, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> friendship with Carlyle, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>Strafford</i>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>Sordello</i>, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>Pippa Passes</i>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>Dramatic Lyrics</i>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>The Return of the Druses</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>A Blot on the 'Scutcheon</i>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> correspondence with Elizabeth Barrett, <a href="#Page_62">62</a> <i>seq.</i>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> their first meeting, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> marriage and elopement, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> life in Italy, <a href="#Page_81">81</a> <i>seq.</i>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> love of Italy, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a> <i>seq.</i>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> sympathy with Italian Revolution, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> attitude towards spiritualism, <a href="#Page_91">91</a> <i>seq.</i>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190-199</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> death of his wife, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> returns to England, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>The Ring and the Book</i>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> culmination of his literary fame, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> life in society, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> elected Fellow of Balliol, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> honoured by the great Universities, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>Balaustion's Adventure</i>, <a href="#Page_119">119-120</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>Aristophanes' Apology</i>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>The Agamemnon of Aeschylus</i>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau</i>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country</i>, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>Fifine at the Fair</i>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>The Inn Album</i>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper</i>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>La Saisiaz</i>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>The Two Poets of Croisic</i>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>Dramatic Idylls</i>, 127;</span> + <span class="ind1"><a name="Page_204"></a> <i>Jocoseria</i>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>Ferishtah's Fancies</i>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> <i>Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day</i>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> accepts post of Foreign Correspondent to the Royal Academy, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>; </span> + <span class="ind1"> goes to Llangollen with his sister, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> last journey to Italy, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> death at Venice, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> publication of <i>Asolando</i>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> his conversation, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> vanity, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> faults and virtues, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> his interest in Art, <a href="#Page_82">82</a> <i>seq.</i>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> his varied accomplishments, <a href="#Page_84">84-85</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> personality and presence, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a> <i>seq.</i>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> his prejudices, <a href="#Page_113">113-116</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> his occasional coarseness, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> politics, <a href="#Page_86">86</a> <i>seq.</i>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> Browning as a father, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> as dramatist, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> as a literary artist, <a href="#Page_133">133</a> <i>seq.</i>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> his se of the grotesque, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a> <i>seq.</i>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> his failures, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> artistic originality, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, 158;</span> + <span class="ind1"> keen sense of melody and rhythm, <a href="#Page_145">145</a> <i>seq.</i>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> ingenuity in rhyming, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> his buffoonery, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> obscurity, <a href="#Page_154">154</a> <i>seq.</i>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> his conception of the Universe, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> philosophy, <a href="#Page_177">177</a> <i>seq.</i>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> optimism, <a href="#Page_179">179</a> <i>seq.</i>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> his love poetry, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> his knaves, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_201">201-202</a>;</span> + <span class="ind1"> the key to his casuistical monologues, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>.</span> +</p> + +<p><i>Browning, Life of</i> (Mrs. Orr), <a href="#Page_92">92</a>.</p> + +<p>Browning, Robert (father of the poet), <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>.</p> + +<p>Browning, Mrs., <i>née</i> Wiedermann (mother), <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>.</p> + +<p>Browning, Anna (sister), <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>.</p> + +<p>Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (wife), <a href="#Page_57">57</a> <i>seq.</i>, <a href="#Page_91">91-99</a>, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, +119, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>.</p> + +<p>Browning Society, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.</p> + +<p>Burns, Robert, <a href="#Page_169">169-170</a>.</p> + +<p>Byron, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>.</p> + +<p>Byronism, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>C</b> + +<p>"Caliban," <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>.</p> + +<p>"Caliban upon Setebos," <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</p> + +<p>Camberwell, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>.</p> + +<p>"Caponsacchi," <a href="#Page_108">108</a>.</p> + +<p>Carlyle, Thomas, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>.</p> + +<p>Carlyle, Mrs., <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.</p> + +<p>"Cavalier Tunes," <a href="#Page_46">46</a>.</p> + +<p>Cavour, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>.</p> + +<p>Charles I., <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>.</p> + +<p>Chaucer, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>.</p> + +<p>"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came," <a href="#Page_159">159</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Christmas Eve</i>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>.</p> + +<p>Church in Italy, The, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>.</p> + +<p>"Clive," <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.</p> + +<p>Clough, Arthur Hugh, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Colombe's Birthday</i>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.</p> + +<p>Corelli, Miss Marie, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>.</p> + +<p>Cromwell, Oliver, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>D</b> + +<p>Darwin, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>.</p> + +<p>Dickens, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>.</p> + +<p>"Djabal," <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>.</p> + +<p>Domett, Alfred, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.</p> + +<p>"Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis," <a href="#Page_161">161</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Dramatic Idylls</i>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Dramatic Lyrics</i>, <a href="#Page_45">45-50</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Dramatis Personæ</i>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>.</p> + +<p>Duffy, Sir Charles Gavan, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>.</p> + + +<b>E</b> + +<p><i>Edinburgh Review</i>, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>.</p> + +<p>"Englishman in Italy, The," <a href="#Page_150">150</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>F</b> + +<p>"Fears and Scruples," <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</p> + +<p>"Ferishtah's Fancies," <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Fifine at the Fair</i>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>.</p> + +<p>Fitzgerald, Edward, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>.</p><a name="Page_205"></a> + +<p><i>Flight of the Duchess, The</i>, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>.</p> + +<p>Florence, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>.</p> + +<p>Forster, John, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.</p> + +<p>Foster, John, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>.</p> + +<p>Fox, Mr. Johnson, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>.</p> + +<p>Fox, Mrs. Bridell, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>.</p> + +<p>"Fra Lippo,", <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Fra Lippo Lippi</i>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>.</p> + +<p>French Revolution, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>.</p> + +<p>Furnivall, Dr., <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>G</b> + +<p>"Garden Fancies," <a href="#Page_46">46</a>.</p> + +<p>Garibaldi, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>.</p> + +<p>Gilbert, W.S., <a href="#Page_144">144</a>.</p> + +<p>Gissing, Mr. George, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>.</p> + +<p>Gladstone, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Golden Treasury</i> (Palgrave), <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.</p> + +<p>Goldsmith, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>.</p> + +<p>Gordon, General, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>.</p> + +<p>"Guido Franceschini," <a href="#Page_106">106</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>H</b> + +<p>Henley, Mr., <a href="#Page_148">148</a>.</p> + +<p>"Heretic's Tragedy, The," <a href="#Page_137">137</a>.</p> + +<p>Hickey, Miss E.H., <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.</p> + +<p>"Holy Cross Day," <a href="#Page_153">153</a>.</p> + +<p>Home, David (spiritualist), <a href="#Page_93">93-97</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>.</p> + +<p>Home, David, <i>Memoirs</i> of, <a href="#Page_93">93</a> <i>seq.</i></p> + +<p>Horne, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.</p> + +<p>Houghton, Lord, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.</p> + +<p>"House," <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</p> + +<p>"Householder, The," <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</p> + +<p>"How they brought the good News from Ghent to Aix," <a href="#Page_46">46</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Hudibras</i> (Butler), <a href="#Page_57">57</a>.</p> + +<p>Hugo, Victor, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>.</p> + +<p>Hunt, Leigh, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>I</b> + +<p><i>Incondita</i>, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Inn Album, The</i>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Instans Tyrannus</i>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>.</p> + +<p>Italy, <a href="#Page_85">85</a> <i>seq.</i></p> + +<p>Italian Revolution, <a href="#Page_88">88</a> <i>seq.</i></p> + +<p>"Ivàn Ivànovitch," <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>J</b> + +<p>Jameson, Mrs., <a href="#Page_75">75</a>.</p> + +<p>Jerrold, Douglas, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Jocoseria</i>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.</p> + +<p>Jowett, Dr., <a href="#Page_118">118</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Julius Cæsar</i> (Shakespeare), <a href="#Page_28">28</a>.</p> + +<p>"Juris Doctor Bottinius," <a href="#Page_161">161</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>K</b> + +<p>Keats, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>.</p> + +<p>Kenyon, Mr., <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_69">69-70</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>.</p> + +<p><i>King Victor and King Charles</i>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.</p> + +<p>Kipling, Rudyard, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>.</p> + +<p>Kirkup, Seymour, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>L</b> + +<p><i>L'Aiglon</i>, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>.</p> + +<p>"Laboratory, The," <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>.</p> + +<p>Landor, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_101">101-103</a>.</p> + +<p><i>La Saisiaz</i>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Letters, The Browning</i>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>.</p> + +<p>Liberalism, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>.</p> + +<p>"Lines to Edward Fitzgerald," <a href="#Page_131">131</a>.</p> + +<p>Llangollen, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>.</p> + +<p>Lockhart, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>.</p> + +<p>"Lost Leader, The," <a href="#Page_46">46</a>.</p> + +<p>"Lover's Quarrel, A," <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.</p> + +<p>"Luigi," <a href="#Page_45">45</a>.</p> + +<p>Lytton, Lord (novelist), <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>M</b> + +<p>Macready, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>.</p> + +<p>Maeterlinck, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>.</p> + +<p>Manning, Cardinal, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.</p> + +<p>Mary Queen of Scots, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>.</p> + +<p>"Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha," <a href="#Page_147">147</a>.</p> + +<p>"May and Death." <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.</p> + +<p>Mazzini, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Men and Women</i>, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>.</p> + +<p>Meredith, George, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>.</p> +<a name="Page_206"></a> +<p>Mill, John Stuart, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>.</p> + +<p>Milsand, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>.</p> + +<p>Milton, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>.</p> + +<p>Monckton-Milnes, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Mr. Sludge the Medium</i>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190-199</a>.</p> + +<p>"Muléykeh," <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.</p> + +<p>"My Star," <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>N</b> + +<p>"Nationality in Drinks," <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</p> + +<p>Napoleon, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>.</p> + +<p>Napoleon III., <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>.</p> + +<p>"Never the Time and the Place," <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.</p> + +<p>Newman, Cardinal, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>.</p> + +<p>Norwood, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>O</b> + +<p>"Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" (Wordsworth), <a href="#Page_136">136</a>.</p> + +<p>"Ode on a Grecian Urn" (Keats), <a href="#Page_137">137</a>.</p> + +<p>"Old Masters in Florence," <a href="#Page_177">177</a>.</p> + +<p>"One Word More," <a href="#Page_65">65</a>.</p> + +<p>Orr, Mrs., <a href="#Page_72">72</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>P</b> + +<p><i>Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper</i>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Paracelsus</i>, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>.</p> + +<p>"Paracelsus," <a href="#Page_24">24</a>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.</p> + +<p>Painting, Poems on, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>.</p> + +<p>Palgrave, Francis, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>.</p> + +<p>Paris, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Parleyings with certain Persons of Importance in their Day</i>, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, + <a href="#Page_158">158</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Pauline</i>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</p> + +<p>"Pheidippides," <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.</p> + +<p>Phelps (actor), <a href="#Page_53">53</a>.</p> + +<p>"Pictor Ignotus," <a href="#Page_83">83</a>.</p> + +<p>"Pied Piper of Hamelin, The," <a href="#Page_153">153</a>.</p> + +<p>"Pippa," <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Pippa Passes</i>, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>.</p> + +<p>Pisa, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>.</p> + +<p>Pius IX., Church under, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>.</p> + +<p>Plato, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>.</p> + +<p>Poe, Edgar Allan, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>.</p> + +<p>Poetry, Pessimistic school of, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>.</p> + +<p>"Pompilia," <a href="#Page_201">201</a>.</p> + +<p>Pope, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>.</p> + +<p>"Portrait, A," <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau</i>, <a href="#Page_121">121-122</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Princess, The</i> (Tennyson), <a href="#Page_148">148</a>.</p> + +<p>"Prometheus Unbound" (Shelley), <a href="#Page_137">137</a>.</p> + +<p>Prussia, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>.</p> + +<p>Puritans, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>.</p> + +<p>Pym, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>R</b> + +<p>"Rabbi Ben Ezra," <a href="#Page_201">201</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country</i>, <a href="#Page_122">122-124</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Return of the Druses, The</i>, <a href="#Page_51">51-53</a>.</p> + +<p>Revolution,<br /> +<span class="ind1">The French, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>;</span> +<span class="ind1">Italian, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>.</span></p> + +<p><i>Ring and the Book, The</i>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160-176</a>.</p> + +<p>Ripert-Monclar, Comte de, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>.</p> + +<p>Roman Church, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>.</p> + +<p>Rossetti, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>.</p> + +<p>Royalists, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>.</p> + +<p>Ruskin, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>.</p> + +<p>Russia, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>S</b> + +<p>Sand, George, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>.</p> + +<p>Santayana's, Mr., <i>Interpretations of Poetry and Religion</i>, <a href="#Page_183">183-186</a>.</p> + +<p>"Sebald," <a href="#Page_45">45</a>.</p> + +<p>Shakespeare, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>.</p> + +<p>Shakespeare Society, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.</p> + +<p>Sharp, Mr. William, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>.</p> + +<p>Shaw, Mr. Bernard, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>.</p> + +<p>Shelley, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>,19, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>.</p> + +<p>"Shop," <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</p><a name="Page_207"></a> + +<p>"Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis," <a href="#Page_138">138</a>.</p> + +<p>Silverthorne (Browning's cousin), <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.</p> + +<p>"Sludge," <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>.</p> + +<p>Smith, Elder (publishers), <a href="#Page_110">110</a>.</p> + +<p>"Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, The," <a href="#Page_47">47</a>.</p> + +<p>"Sonnets from the Portuguese," <a href="#Page_65">65</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Sordello</i>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>.</p> + +<p>Speech, Free, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>.</p> + +<p>Spenser, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>.</p> + +<p>Spiritualism, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>.</p> + +<p>"Statue and the Bust, The," <a href="#Page_109">109</a>.</p> + +<p>Sterne, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>.</p> + +<p>Stevenson, Robert Louis, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Straford</i>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a> <i>seq.</i>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>.</p> + +<p>"Stafford," <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>.</p> + +<p>Swinburne, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>,143.</p> +<br /> + +<b>T</b> +<br /> + +<p><i>Tait's Magazine</i>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>.</p> + +<p>Talfourd, Sergeant, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.</p> + +<p>Tennyson, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>.</p> + +<p>Thackeray, Miss, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>.</p> + +<p>"Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr," <a href="#Page_46">46</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Time's Revenges</i>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>.</p> + +<p>Tolstoi, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Tristram Shandy</i> (Sterne), <a href="#Page_163">163</a>.</p> + +<p><i>Two Poets of Croisic, The</i>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>U</b> +<br /> + +<p>University College, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>.</p> + +<p>"Up jumped Tokay" (poem quoted), <a href="#Page_140">140</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>V</b> +<br /> + +<p>Venice, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>.</p> + +<p>Victor of Sardinia, King, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>.</p> + +<p>Vogler, Abt, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>W</b> +<br /> + +<p><i>Water Babies</i> (Kingsley), <a href="#Page_8">8</a>.</p> + +<p>Watts, Mr. G.F., <a href="#Page_112">112</a>.</p> + +<p>Whitman, Walt, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>.</p> + +<p>"Why I am a Liberal" (sonnet), <a href="#Page_86">86</a>.</p> + +<p>Wiedermann, William, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.</p> + +<p>Wiseman, Cardinal, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>.</p> + +<p>Wimbledon Common, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>.</p> + +<p>Wordsworth, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>.</p> + +<p>Wordsworth Society, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>Y</b> + +<p>"Youth and Art," <a href="#Page_50">50</a>, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>.</p> +<br /> + +<b>Z</b> + +<p>Zola, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>.</p><a name="Page_208"></a><a name="Page_209"></a> + +<br /> + +<h3>English Men of Letters.</h3> + +<p>NEW SERIES.</p> + +<p><i>Crown 8vo. Gilt tops. Flat backs. 2s. net each.</i></p> + +<p><b>GEORGE ELIOT</b>. By Sir LESLIE STEPHEN, K.C.B.</p> +<p><b>RUSKIN</b>. By FREDERIC HARRISON.</p> +<p><b>TENNYSON</b>. By Sir ALFRED LYALL.</p> +<p><b>RICHARDSON</b>. By AUSTIN DOBSON.</p> +<p><b>BROWNING</b>. By G.K. CHESTERTON.</p> +<p><b>CRABBE</b>. By the Rev. Canon AINGER.</p> +<p><b>JANE AUSTEN</b>. By the Rev. Canon BEECHING.</p> +<p><b>HOBBES</b>. By Sir LESLIE STEPHEN, K.C.B.</p> +<p><b>ADAM SMITH</b>. By FRANCIS W. HIRST.</p> +<p><b>SYDNEY SMITH</b>. By GEORGE W.E. RUSSELL.</p> +<p><b>FANNY BURNEY</b>. By AUSTIN DOBSON.</p> +<p><b>JEREMY TAYLOR</b>. By EDMUND GOSSE.</p> +<p><b>ANDREW MARVELL</b>. By AUGUSTINE BIRRELL, K.C.</p> +<p><b>DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI</b>. By A.C. BENSON.</p> +<p><b>MARIA EDGEWORTH</b>. By the Hon. EMILY LAWLESS.</p> +<p><b>MRS. GASKELL</b>. By CLEMENT SHORTER.</p> +<p><b>THOMAS MOORE</b>. By STEPHEN GWYNN.</p> +<br /> + +<p>RE-ISSUE OF THE ORIGINAL SERIES</p> + +<p><i>Library Edition. Uniform with the above. 2s. net each.</i></p> +<p><b>ADDISON</b>. By W.J. COURTHOPE. </p> +<p><b>BACON</b>. By Dean CHURCH. </p> +<p><b>BENTLEY</b>. By Sir RICHARD JEBB. </p> +<p><b>BUNYAN</b>. By J.A. FROUDE. +<p><b>BURKE</b>. By JOHN MORLEY. </p> +<p><b>BURNS</b>. By Principal SHAIRP. +<p><b>BYRON</b>. By Professor NICHOL. </p> +<p><b>CARLYLE</b>. By Professor NICHOL. +<p><b>CHAUCER</b>. By Dr. A.W. WARD. </p> +<p><b>COLERIDGE</b>. By H.D. TRAILL. +<p><b>COWPER</b>. By GOLDWIN SMITH. </p> +<p><b>DEFOE</b>. By W. MINTO. +<p><b>DEQUINCEY</b>. By Prof. MASSON. </p> +<p><b>DICKENS</b>. By Dr. A.W. WARD. +<p><b>DRYDEN</b>. By Prof. SAINTSBURY. </p> +<p><b>FIELDING</b>. By AUSTIN DOBSON. +<p><b>GIBBON</b>. By J.C. MORISON. </p> +<p><b>GOLDSMITH</b>. By W. BLACK. </p> +<p><b>GRAY</b>. By EDMUND GOSSE. </p> +<p><b>HAWTHORNE</b>. By HENRY JAMES. </p> +<p><b>HUME</b>. By Prof. HUXLEY, F.R.S. </p> +<p><b>JOHNSON</b>. By Sir LESLIE STEPHEN, K.C.B. </p> +<p><b>KEATS</b>. By SIDNEY COLVIN. </p> +<p><b>LAMB, CHARLES</b>. By Canon AINGER. </p> +<p><b>LANDOR</b>. By SIDNEY COLVIN. </p> +<p><b>LOCKE</b>. By THOMAS FOWLER. </p> +<p><b>MACAULAY</b>. By J.C. MORISON. </p> +<p><b>MILTON</b>. By MARK PATTISON. </p> +<p><b>POPE</b>. By Sir LESLIE STEPHEN, K.C.B. </p> +<p><b>SCOTT</b>. By R.H. HUTTON. </p> +<p><b>SHELLEY</b>. By J.A. SYMONDS. </p> +<p><b>SHERIDAN</b>. By Mrs. OLIPHANT. </p> +<p><b>SIDNEY</b>. By J.A. SYMONDS. </p> +<p><b>SOUTHEY</b>. By Prof. DOWDEN. </p> +<p><b>SPENSER</b>. By Dean CHURCH. </p> +<p><b>STERNE</b>. By H.D. TRAILL. </p> +<p><b>SWIFT</b>. By Sir LESLIE STEPHEN, K.C.B. </p> +<p><b>THACKERAY</b>. By ANTHONY TROLLOPE. </p> +<p><b>WORDSWORTH</b>. By F.W.H. MYERS.</p> + +<p>MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD., LONDON.<a name="Page_210"></a> </p> +<br /> + +<h3>English Men of Action Series.</h3> + +<p>Crown 8vo. Cloth. With Portraits. 2s. 6d. each.</p> +<br /> +<p><b>CAMPBELL (COLIN).</b> By ARCHIBALD FORBES. </p> +<p><b>CLIVE.</b> By Sir CHARLES WILSON. </p> +<p><b>COOK</b> (Captain). By Sir WALTER BESANT. </p> +<p><b>DAMPIER.</b> By W. CLARK RUSSELL. </p> +<p><b>DRAKE.</b> By JULIAN CORBETT. </p> +<p><b>DUNDONALD.</b> By the Hon. J.W. FORTESCUE. </p> +<p><b>GORDON</b>(General). By Sir W. BUTLER.</p> +<p><b>HASTINGS</b> (Warren). By Sir A. LYALL. </p> +<p><b>HAVELOCK</b> (Sir Henry). By A. FORBES. </p> +<p><b>HENRY V.</b> By the Rev. A.J. CHURCH. </p> +<p><b>LAWRENCE</b> (Lord). By Sir RICHARD TEMPLE. </p> +<p><b>LIVINGSTONE.</b> By THOMAS HUGHES. </p> +<p><b>MONK.</b> By JULIAN CORBETT. </p> +<p><b>MONTROSE.</b> By MOWBRAY MORRIS. </p> +<p><b>NAPIER</b> (Sir Charles). By Colonel Sir W. BUTLER. </p> +<p><b>NELSON.</b> By Prof. J.K. LAUGHTON. </p> +<p><b>PETERBOROUGH.</b> By W. STEBBING. </p> +<p><b>RODNEY.</b> By DAVID HANNAY. </p> +<p><b>STRAFFORD.</b> By H.D. TRAILL. </p> +<p><b>WARWICK,</b> the King-Maker By C.W. OMAN. </p> +<p><b>WELLINGTON.</b> By GEORGE HOOPER. </p> +<p><b>WOLFE.</b> By A.G. BRADLEY. </p> + +<h3>TWELVE ENGLISHMEN STATESMEN.</h3> + +<p>Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. each.</p> + +<p>* *<br /> + * <i>A Series of Short Biographies, not designed to be a complete roll +of famous Statesmen, but to present in historic order the lives and +work of those leading actors in our affairs who by their direct +influence have left an abiding mark on the policy, the institutions, +and the position of Great Britain among States</i>.</p> +<br /> + +<p><b>WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR.</b> By EDWARD A. FREEMAN, D.C.L., LL.D., late +Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford.</p> + +<p><b>HENRY II.</b> By Mrs. J.R. GREEN.</p> + +<p><b>EDWARD I.</b> By T.F. TOUT, M.A., Professor of History, The Owens +College, Manchester.</p> + +<p><b>HENRY VII.</b> By JAMES GAIRDNER. <b>CARDINAL WOLSEY.</b> By Bishop +CREIGHTON, D.D., late Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the +University of Cambridge.</p> + +<p><b>ELIZABETH.</b> By E.S. BEESLY, M.A., Professor of Modern History, +University College, London.</p> + +<p><b>OLIVER CROMWELL.</b> By FREDERIC HARRISON.</p> + +<p><b>WILLIAM III.</b> By H.D. TRAILL.</p> + +<p><b>WALPOLE.</b> By JOHN MORLEY.</p> + +<p><b>CHATHAM.</b> By JOHN MORLEY. [<i>In preparation</i></p> + +<p><b>PITT.</b> By Lord ROSEBERY.</p> + +<p><b>PEEL.</b> By J.R. THURSFIELD, M.A., late Fellow of Jesus College, +Oxford.</p><a name="Page_211"></a> + + + + + + + + +<pre> + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Robert Browning, by G. K. 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You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Robert Browning + +Author: G. K. Chesterton + +Release Date: August 31, 2004 [EBook #13342] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROBERT BROWNING *** + + + + +Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Victoria Woosley and PG Distributed +Proofreaders + + + + + + + + ROBERT BROWNING + + + BY + + G.K. CHESTERTON + + + + + CONTENTS + + CHAPTER I +BROWNING IN EARLY LIFE 1 + + CHAPTER II +EARLY WORKS 34 + + CHAPTER III +BROWNING AND HIS MARRIAGE 55 + + CHAPTER IV +BROWNING IN ITALY 81 + + CHAPTER V +BROWNING IN LATER LIFE 105 + + CHAPTER VI +BROWNING AS A LITERARY ARTIST 133 + + CHAPTER VII +"THE RING AND THE BOOK" 160 + + CHAPTER VIII +THE PHILOSOPHY OF BROWNING 177 + +INDEX 203 + + + + + +ROBERT BROWNING + + + + +CHAPTER I + +BROWNING IN EARLY LIFE + + +On the subject of Browning's work innumerable things have been said +and remain to be said; of his life, considered as a narrative of +facts, there is little or nothing to say. It was a lucid and public +and yet quiet life, which culminated in one great dramatic test of +character, and then fell back again into this union of quietude and +publicity. And yet, in spite of this, it is a great deal more +difficult to speak finally about his life than about his work. His +work has the mystery which belongs to the complex; his life the much +greater mystery which belongs to the simple. He was clever enough to +understand his own poetry; and if he understood it, we can understand +it. But he was also entirely unconscious and impulsive, and he was +never clever enough to understand his own character; consequently we +may be excused if that part of him which was hidden from him is partly +hidden from us. The subtle man is always immeasurably easier to +understand than the natural man; for the subtle man keeps a diary of +his moods, he practises the art of self-analysis and self-revelation, +and can tell us how he came to feel this or to say that. But a man +like Browning knows no more about the state of his emotions than about +the state of his pulse; they are things greater than he, things +growing at will, like forces of Nature. There is an old anecdote, +probably apocryphal, which describes how a feminine admirer wrote to +Browning asking him for the meaning of one of his darker poems, and +received the following reply: "When that poem was written, two people +knew what it meant--God and Robert Browning. And now God only knows +what it means." This story gives, in all probability, an entirely +false impression of Browning's attitude towards his work. He was a +keen artist, a keen scholar, he could put his finger on anything, and +he had a memory like the British Museum Library. But the story does, +in all probability, give a tolerably accurate picture of Browning's +attitude towards his own emotions and his psychological type. If a man +had asked him what some particular allusion to a Persian hero meant he +could in all probability have quoted half the epic; if a man had asked +him which third cousin of Charlemagne was alluded to in _Sordello_, he +could have given an account of the man and an account of his father +and his grandfather. But if a man had asked him what he thought of +himself, or what were his emotions an hour before his wedding, he +would have replied with perfect sincerity that God alone knew. + +This mystery of the unconscious man, far deeper than any mystery of +the conscious one, existing as it does in all men, existed peculiarly +in Browning, because he was a very ordinary and spontaneous man. The +same thing exists to some extent in all history and all affairs. +Anything that is deliberate, twisted, created as a trap and a +mystery, must be discovered at last; everything that is done naturally +remains mysterious. It may be difficult to discover the principles of +the Rosicrucians, but it is much easier to discover the principles of +the Rosicrucians than the principles of the United States: nor has any +secret society kept its aims so quiet as humanity. The way to be +inexplicable is to be chaotic, and on the surface this was the quality +of Browning's life; there is the same difference between judging of +his poetry and judging of his life, that there is between making a map +of a labyrinth and making a map of a mist. The discussion of what some +particular allusion in _Sordello_ means has gone on so far, and may go +on still, but it has it in its nature to end. The life of Robert +Browning, who combines the greatest brain with the most simple +temperament known in our annals, would go on for ever if we did not +decide to summarise it in a very brief and simple narrative. + +Robert Browning was born in Camberwell on May 7th 1812. His father and +grandfather had been clerks in the Bank of England, and his whole +family would appear to have belonged to the solid and educated middle +class--the class which is interested in letters, but not ambitious in +them, the class to which poetry is a luxury, but not a necessity. + +This actual quality and character of the Browning family shows some +tendency to be obscured by matters more remote. It is the custom of +all biographers to seek for the earliest traces of a family in distant +ages and even in distant lands; and Browning, as it happens, has given +them opportunities which tend to lead away the mind from the main +matter in hand. There is a tradition, for example, that men of his +name were prominent in the feudal ages; it is based upon little beyond +a coincidence of surnames and the fact that Browning used a seal with +a coat-of-arms. Thousands of middle-class men use such a seal, merely +because it is a curiosity or a legacy, without knowing or caring +anything about the condition of their ancestors in the Middle Ages. +Then, again, there is a theory that he was of Jewish blood; a view +which is perfectly conceivable, and which Browning would have been the +last to have thought derogatory, but for which, as a matter of fact, +there is exceedingly little evidence. The chief reason assigned by his +contemporaries for the belief was the fact that he was, without doubt, +specially and profoundly interested in Jewish matters. This +suggestion, worthless in any case, would, if anything, tell the other +way. For while an Englishman may be enthusiastic about England, or +indignant against England, it never occurred to any living Englishman +to be interested in England. Browning was, like every other +intelligent Aryan, interested in the Jews; but if he was related to +every people in which he was interested, he must have been of +extraordinarily mixed extraction. Thirdly, there is the yet more +sensational theory that there was in Robert Browning a strain of the +negro. The supporters of this hypothesis seem to have little in +reality to say, except that Browning's grandmother was certainly a +Creole. It is said in support of the view that Browning was singularly +dark in early life, and was often mistaken for an Italian. There does +not, however, seem to be anything particular to be deduced from this, +except that if he looked like an Italian, he must have looked +exceedingly unlike a negro. + +There is nothing valid against any of these three theories, just as +there is nothing valid in their favour; they may, any or all of them, +be true, but they are still irrelevant. They are something that is in +history or biography a great deal worse than being false--they are +misleading. We do not want to know about a man like Browning, whether +he had a right to a shield used in the Wars of the Roses, or whether +the tenth grandfather of his Creole grandmother had been white or +black: we want to know something about his family, which is quite a +different thing. We wish to have about Browning not so much the kind +of information which would satisfy Clarencieux King-at-Arms, but the +sort of information which would satisfy us, if we were advertising for +a very confidential secretary, or a very private tutor. We should not +be concerned as to whether the tutor were descended from an Irish +king, but we should still be really concerned about his extraction, +about what manner of people his had been for the last two or three +generations. This is the most practical duty of biography, and this is +also the most difficult. It is a great deal easier to hunt a family +from tombstone to tombstone back to the time of Henry II. than to +catch and realise and put upon paper that most nameless and elusive of +all things--social tone. + +It will be said immediately, and must as promptly be admitted, that we +could find a biographical significance in any of these theories if we +looked for it. But it is, indeed, the sin and snare of biographers +that they tend to see significance in everything; characteristic +carelessness if their hero drops his pipe, and characteristic +carefulness if he picks it up again. It is true, assuredly, that all +the three races above named could be connected with Browning's +personality. If we believed, for instance, that he really came of a +race of mediaeval barons, we should say at once that from them he got +his pre-eminent spirit of battle: we should be right, for every line +in his stubborn soul and his erect body did really express the +fighter; he was always contending, whether it was with a German theory +about the Gnostics, or with a stranger who elbowed his wife in a +crowd. Again, if we had decided that he was a Jew, we should point out +how absorbed he was in the terrible simplicity of monotheism: we +should be right, for he was so absorbed. Or again, in the case even of +the negro fancy; it would not be difficult for us to suggest a love of +colour, a certain mental gaudiness, a pleasure + + "When reds and blues were indeed red and blue," + +as he says in _The Ring and the Book_. We should be right; for there +really was in Browning a tropical violence of taste, an artistic +scheme compounded as it were, of orchids and cockatoos, which, amid +our cold English poets, seems scarcely European. All this is extremely +fascinating; and it may be true. But, as has above been suggested, +here comes in the great temptation of this kind of work, the noble +temptation to see too much in everything. The biographer can easily +see a personal significance in these three hypothetical nationalities. +But is there in the world a biographer who could lay his hand upon his +heart and say that he would not have seen as much significance in any +three other nationalities? If Browning's ancestors had been Frenchmen, +should we not have said that it was from them doubtless that he +inherited that logical agility which marks him among English poets? +If his grandfather had been a Swede, should we not have said that the +old sea-roving blood broke out in bold speculation and insatiable +travel? If his great-aunt had been a Red Indian, should we not have +said that only in the Ojibways and the Blackfeet do we find the +Browning fantasticality combined with the Browning stoicism? This +over-readiness to seize hints is an inevitable part of that secret +hero-worship which is the heart of biography. The lover of great men +sees signs of them long before they begin to appear on the earth, and, +like some old mythological chronicler, claims as their heralds the +storms and the falling stars. + +A certain indulgence must therefore be extended to the present writer +if he declines to follow that admirable veteran of Browning study, Dr. +Furnivall, into the prodigious investigations which he has been +conducting into the condition of the Browning family since the +beginning of the world. For his last discovery, the descent of +Browning from a footman in the service of a country magnate, there +seems to be suggestive, though not decisive evidence. But Browning's +descent from barons, or Jews, or lackeys, or black men, is not the +main point touching his family. If the Brownings were of mixed origin, +they were so much the more like the great majority of English +middle-class people. It is curious that the romance of race should be +spoken of as if it were a thing peculiarly aristocratic; that +admiration for rank, or interest in family, should mean only interest +in one not very interesting type of rank and family. The truth is that +aristocrats exhibit less of the romance of pedigree than any other +people in the world. For since it is their principle to marry only +within their own class and mode of life, there is no opportunity in +their case for any of the more interesting studies in heredity; they +exhibit almost the unbroken uniformity of the lower animals. It is in +the middle classes that we find the poetry of genealogy; it is the +suburban grocer standing at his shop door whom some wild dash of +Eastern or Celtic blood may drive suddenly to a whole holiday or a +crime. Let us admit then, that it is true that these legends of the +Browning family have every abstract possibility. But it is a far more +cogent and apposite truth that if a man had knocked at the door of +every house in the street where Browning was born, he would have found +similar legends in all of them. There is hardly a family in Camberwell +that has not a story or two about foreign marriages a few generations +back; and in all this the Brownings are simply a typical Camberwell +family. The real truth about Browning and men like him can scarcely be +better expressed than in the words of that very wise and witty story, +Kingsley's _Water Babies_, in which the pedigree of the Professor is +treated in a manner which is an excellent example of the wild common +sense of the book. "His mother was a Dutch woman, and therefore she +was born at Curacoa (of course, you have read your geography and +therefore know why), and his father was a Pole, and therefore he was +brought up at Petropaulowski (of course, you have learnt your modern +politics, and therefore know why), but for all that he was as thorough +an Englishman as ever coveted his neighbour's goods." + +It may be well therefore to abandon the task of obtaining a clear +account of Brownings family, and endeavour to obtain, what is much +more important, a clear account of his home. For the great central +and solid fact, which these heraldic speculations tend inevitably to +veil and confuse, is that Browning was a thoroughly typical Englishman +of the middle class. He may have had alien blood, and that alien +blood, by the paradox we have observed, may have made him more +characteristically a native. A phase, a fancy, a metaphor may or may +not have been born of eastern or southern elements, but he was, +without any question at all, an Englishman of the middle class. +Neither all his liberality nor all his learning ever made him anything +but an Englishman of the middle class. He expanded his intellectual +tolerance until it included the anarchism of _Fifine at the Fair_ and +the blasphemous theology of Caliban; but he remained himself an +Englishman of the middle class. He pictured all the passions of the +earth since the Fall, from the devouring amorousness of _Time's +Revenges_ to the despotic fantasy of _Instans Tyrannus_; but he +remained himself an Englishman of the middle class. The moment that he +came in contact with anything that was slovenly, anything that was +lawless, in actual life, something rose up in him, older than any +opinions, the blood of generations of good men. He met George Sand and +her poetical circle and hated it, with all the hatred of an old city +merchant for the irresponsible life. He met the Spiritualists and +hated them, with all the hatred of the middle class for borderlands +and equivocal positions and playing with fire. His intellect went upon +bewildering voyages, but his soul walked in a straight road. He piled +up the fantastic towers of his imagination until they eclipsed the +planets; but the plan of the foundation on which he built was always +the plan of an honest English house in Camberwell. He abandoned, with +a ceaseless intellectual ambition, every one of the convictions of his +class; but he carried its prejudices into eternity. + +It is then of Browning as a member of the middle class, that we can +speak with the greatest historical certainty; and it is his immediate +forebears who present the real interest to us. His father, Robert +Browning, was a man of great delicacy of taste, and to all appearance +of an almost exaggerated delicacy of conscience. Every glimpse we have +of him suggests that earnest and almost worried kindliness which is +the mark of those to whom selfishness, even justifiable selfishness, +is really a thing difficult or impossible. In early life Robert +Browning senior was placed by his father (who was apparently a father +of a somewhat primitive, not to say barbaric, type) in an important +commercial position in the West Indies. He threw up the position +however, because it involved him in some recognition of slavery. +Whereupon his unique parent, in a transport of rage, not only +disinherited him and flung him out of doors, but by a superb stroke of +humour, which stands alone in the records of parental ingenuity, sent +him in a bill for the cost of his education. About the same time that +he was suffering for his moral sensibility he was also disturbed about +religious matters, and he completed his severance from his father by +joining a dissenting sect. He was, in short, a very typical example of +the serious middle-class man of the Wilberforce period, a man to whom +duty was all in all, and who would revolutionise an empire or a +continent for the satisfaction of a single moral scruple. Thus, while +he was Puritan at the core, not the ruthless Puritan of the +seventeenth, but the humanitarian Puritan of the eighteenth century, +he had upon the surface all the tastes and graces of a man of culture. +Numerous accomplishments of the lighter kind, such as drawing and +painting in water colours, he possessed; and his feeling for many +kinds of literature was fastidious and exact. But the whole was +absolutely redolent of the polite severity of the eighteenth century. +He lamented his son's early admiration for Byron, and never ceased +adjuring him to model himself upon Pope. + +He was, in short, one of the old-fashioned humanitarians of the +eighteenth century, a class which we may or may not have conquered in +moral theory, but which we most certainly have not conquered in moral +practice. Robert Browning senior destroyed all his fortunes in order +to protest against black slavery; white slavery may be, as later +economists tell us, a thing infinitely worse, but not many men destroy +their fortunes in order to protest against it. The ideals of the men +of that period appear to us very unattractive; to them duty was a kind +of chilly sentiment. But when we think what they did with those cold +ideals, we can scarcely feel so superior. They uprooted the enormous +Upas of slavery, the tree that was literally as old as the race of +man. They altered the whole face of Europe with their deductive +fancies. We have ideals that are really better, ideals of passion, of +mysticism, of a sense of the youth and adventurousness of the earth; +but it will be well for us if we achieve as much by our frenzy as they +did by their delicacies. It scarcely seems as if we were as robust in +our very robustness as they were robust in their sensibility. + +Robert Browning's mother was the daughter of William Wiedermann, a +German merchant settled in Dundee, and married to a Scotch wife. One +of the poet's principal biographers has suggested that from this union +of the German and Scotch, Browning got his metaphysical tendency; it +is possible; but here again we must beware of the great biographical +danger of making mountains out of molehills. What Browning's mother +unquestionably did give to him, was in the way of training--a very +strong religious habit, and a great belief in manners. Thomas Carlyle +called her "the type of a Scottish gentlewoman," and the phrase has a +very real significance to those who realise the peculiar condition of +Scotland, one of the very few European countries where large sections +of the aristocracy are Puritans; thus a Scottish gentlewoman combines +two descriptions of dignity at the same time. Little more is known of +this lady except the fact that after her death Browning could not bear +to look at places where she had walked. + +Browning's education in the formal sense reduces itself to a minimum. +In very early boyhood he attended a species of dame-school, which, +according to some of his biographers, he had apparently to leave +because he was too clever to be tolerable. However this may be, he +undoubtedly went afterwards to a school kept by Mr. Ready, at which +again he was marked chiefly by precocity. But the boy's education did +not in truth take place at any systematic seat of education; it took +place in his own home, where one of the quaintest and most learned and +most absurdly indulgent of fathers poured out in an endless stream +fantastic recitals from the Greek epics and mediaeval chronicles. If we +test the matter by the test of actual schools and universities, +Browning will appear to be almost the least educated man in English +literary history. But if we test it by the amount actually learned, we +shall think that he was perhaps the most educated man that ever lived; +that he was in fact, if anything, overeducated. In a spirited poem he +has himself described how, when he was a small child, his father used +to pile up chairs in the drawing-room and call them the city of Troy. +Browning came out of the home crammed with all kinds of +knowledge--knowledge about the Greek poets, knowledge about the +Provencal Troubadours, knowledge about the Jewish Rabbis of the Middle +Ages. But along with all this knowledge he carried one definite and +important piece of ignorance, an ignorance of the degree to which such +knowledge was exceptional. He was no spoilt and self-conscious child, +taught to regard himself as clever. In the atmosphere in which he +lived learning was a pleasure, and a natural pleasure, like sport or +wine. He had in it the pleasure of some old scholar of the Renascence, +when grammar itself was as fresh as the flowers of spring. He had no +reason to suppose that every one did not join in so admirable a game. +His sagacious destiny, while giving him knowledge of everything else, +left him in ignorance of the ignorance of the world. + +Of his boyish days scarcely any important trace remains, except a kind +of diary which contains under one date the laconic statement, "Married +two wives this morning." The insane ingenuity of the biographer would +be quite capable of seeing in this a most suggestive foreshadowing of +the sexual dualism which is so ably defended in _Fifine at the Fair_. +A great part of his childhood was passed in the society of his only +sister Sariana; and it is a curious and touching fact that with her +also he passed his last days. From his earliest babyhood he seems to +have lived in a more or less stimulating mental atmosphere; but as he +emerged into youth he came under great poetic influences, which made +his father's classical poetic tradition look for the time insipid. +Browning began to live in the life of his own age. + +As a young man he attended classes at University College; beyond this +there is little evidence that he was much in touch with intellectual +circles outside that of his own family. But the forces that were +moving the literary world had long passed beyond the merely literary +area. About the time of Browning's boyhood a very subtle and profound +change was beginning in the intellectual atmosphere of such homes as +that of the Brownings. In studying the careers of great men we tend +constantly to forget that their youth was generally passed and their +characters practically formed in a period long previous to their +appearance in history. We think of Milton, the Restoration Puritan, +and forget that he grew up in the living shadow of Shakespeare and the +full summer of the Elizabethan drama. We realise Garibaldi as a sudden +and almost miraculous figure rising about fifty years ago to create +the new Kingdom of Italy, and we forget that he must have formed his +first ideas of liberty while hearing at his father's dinner-table that +Napoleon was the master of Europe. Similarly, we think of Browning as +the great Victorian poet, who lived long enough to have opinions on +Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bill, and forget that as a young man he +passed a bookstall and saw a volume ticketed "Mr. Shelley's Atheistic +Poem," and had to search even in his own really cultivated circle for +some one who could tell him who Mr. Shelley was. Browning was, in +short, born in the afterglow of the great Revolution. + +The French Revolution was at root a thoroughly optimistic thing. It +may seem strange to attribute optimism to anything so destructive; +but, in truth, this particular kind of optimism is inevitably, and by +its nature, destructive. The great dominant idea of the whole of that +period, the period before, during, and long after the Revolution, is +the idea that man would by his nature live in an Eden of dignity, +liberty and love, and that artificial and decrepit systems are keeping +him out of that Eden. No one can do the least justice to the great +Jacobins who does not realise that to them breaking the civilisation +of ages was like breaking the cords of a treasure-chest. And just as +for more than a century great men had dreamed of this beautiful +emancipation, so the dream began in the time of Keats and Shelley to +creep down among the dullest professions and the most prosaic classes +of society. A spirit of revolt was growing among the young of the +middle classes, which had nothing at all in common with the complete +and pessimistic revolt against all things in heaven or earth, which +has been fashionable among the young in more recent times. The +Shelleyan enthusiast was altogether on the side of existence; he +thought that every cloud and clump of grass shared his strict +republican orthodoxy. He represented, in short, a revolt of the normal +against the abnormal; he found himself, so to speak, in the heart of a +wholly topsy-turvy and blasphemous state of things, in which God was +rebelling against Satan. There began to arise about this time a race +of young men like Keats, members of a not highly cultivated middle +class, and even of classes lower, who felt in a hundred ways this +obscure alliance with eternal things against temporal and practical +ones, and who lived on its imaginative delight. They were a kind of +furtive universalist; they had discovered the whole cosmos, and they +kept the whole cosmos a secret. They climbed up dark stairs to meagre +garrets, and shut themselves in with the gods. Numbers of the great +men, who afterwards illuminated the Victorian era, were at this time +living in mean streets in magnificent daydreams. Ruskin was solemnly +visiting his solemn suburban aunts; Dickens was going to and fro in a +blacking factory; Carlyle, slightly older, was still lingering on a +poor farm in Dumfriesshire; Keats had not long become the assistant of +the country surgeon when Browning was a boy in Camberwell. On all +sides there was the first beginning of the aesthetic stir in the middle +classes which expressed itself in the combination of so many poetic +lives with so many prosaic livelihoods. It was the age of inspired +office-boys. + +Browning grew up, then, with the growing fame of Shelley and Keats, in +the atmosphere of literary youth, fierce and beautiful, among new +poets who believed in a new world. It is important to remember this, +because the real Browning was a quite different person from the grim +moralist and metaphysician who is seen through the spectacles of +Browning Societies and University Extension Lecturers. Browning was +first and foremost a poet, a man made to enjoy all things visible and +invisible, a priest of the higher passions. The misunderstanding that +has supposed him to be other than poetical, because his form was often +fanciful and abrupt, is really different from the misunderstanding +which attaches to most other poets. The opponents of Victor Hugo +called him a mere windbag; the opponents of Shakespeare called him a +buffoon. But the admirers of Hugo and Shakespeare at least knew +better. Now the admirers and opponents of Browning alike make him out +to be a pedant rather than a poet. The only difference between the +Browningite and the anti-Browningite, is that the second says he was +not a poet but a mere philosopher, and the first says he was a +philosopher and not a mere poet. The admirer disparages poetry in +order to exalt Browning; the opponent exalts poetry in order to +disparage Browning; and all the time Browning himself exalted poetry +above all earthly things, served it with single-hearted intensity, and +stands among the few poets who hardly wrote a line of anything else. + +The whole of the boyhood and youth of Robert Browning has as much the +quality of pure poetry as the boyhood and youth of Shelley. We do not +find in it any trace of the analytical Browning who is believed in by +learned ladies and gentlemen. How indeed would such sympathisers feel +if informed that the first poems that Browning wrote in a volume +called _Incondita_ were noticed to contain the fault of "too much +splendour of language and too little wealth of thought"? They were +indeed Byronic in the extreme, and Browning in his earlier appearances +in society presents himself in quite a romantic manner. Macready, the +actor, wrote of him: "He looks and speaks more like a young poet than +any one I have ever seen." A picturesque tradition remains that Thomas +Carlyle, riding out upon one of his solitary gallops necessitated by +his physical sufferings, was stopped by one whom he described as a +strangely beautiful youth, who poured out to him without preface or +apology his admiration for the great philosopher's works. Browning at +this time seems to have left upon many people this impression of +physical charm. A friend who attended University College with him +says: "He was then a bright handsome youth with long black hair +falling over his shoulders." Every tale that remains of him in +connection with this period asserts and reasserts the completely +romantic spirit by which he was then possessed. He was fond, for +example, of following in the track of gipsy caravans, far across +country, and a song which he heard with the refrain, "Following the +Queen of the Gipsies oh!" rang in his ears long enough to express +itself in his soberer and later days in that splendid poem of the +spirit of escape and Bohemianism, _The Flight of the Duchess_. Such +other of these early glimpses of him as remain, depict him as striding +across Wimbledon Common with his hair blowing in the wind, reciting +aloud passages from Isaiah, or climbing up into the elms above Norwood +to look over London by night. It was when looking down from that +suburban eyrie over the whole confounding labyrinth of London that he +was filled with that great irresponsible benevolence which is the best +of the joys of youth, and conceived the idea of a perfectly +irresponsible benevolence in the first plan of _Pippa Passes_. At the +end of his father's garden was a laburnum "heavy with its weight of +gold," and in the tree two nightingales were in the habit of singing +against each other, a form of competition which, I imagine, has since +become less common in Camberwell. When Browning as a boy was +intoxicated with the poetry of Shelley and Keats, he hypnotised +himself into something approaching to a positive conviction that these +two birds were the spirits of the two great poets who had settled in a +Camberwell garden, in order to sing to the only young gentleman who +really adored and understood them. This last story is perhaps the most +typical of the tone common to all the rest; it would be difficult to +find a story which across the gulf of nearly eighty years awakens so +vividly a sense of the sumptuous folly of an intellectual boyhood. +With Browning, as with all true poets, passion came first and made +intellectual expression, the hunger for beauty making literature as +the hunger for bread made a plough. The life he lived in those early +days was no life of dull application; there was no poet whose youth +was so young. When he was full of years and fame, and delineating in +great epics the beauty and horror of the romance of southern Europe, a +young man, thinking to please him, said, "There is no romance now +except in Italy." "Well," said Browning, "I should make an exception +of Camberwell." + +Such glimpses will serve to indicate the kind of essential issue that +there was in the nature of things between the generation of Browning +and the generation of his father. Browning was bound in the nature of +things to become at the outset Byronic, and Byronism was not, of +course, in reality so much a pessimism about civilised things as an +optimism about savage things. This great revolt on behalf of the +elemental which Keats and Shelley represented was bound first of all +to occur. Robert Browning junior had to be a part of it, and Robert +Browning senior had to go back to his water colours and the faultless +couplets of Pope with the full sense of the greatest pathos that the +world contains, the pathos of the man who has produced something that +he cannot understand. + +The earliest works of Browning bear witness, without exception, to +this ardent and somewhat sentimental evolution. _Pauline_ appeared +anonymously in 1833. It exhibits the characteristic mark of a juvenile +poem, the general suggestion that the author is a thousand years old. +Browning calls it a fragment of a confession; and Mr. Johnson Fox, an +old friend of Browning's father, who reviewed it for _Tait's +Magazine_, said, with truth, that it would be difficult to find +anything more purely confessional. It is the typical confession of a +boy laying bare all the spiritual crimes of infidelity and moral +waste, in a state of genuine ignorance of the fact that every one else +has committed them. It is wholesome and natural for youth to go about +confessing that the grass is green, and whispering to a priest +hoarsely that it has found a sun in heaven. But the records of that +particular period of development, even when they are as ornate and +beautiful as _Pauline_, are not necessarily or invariably wholesome +reading. The chief interest of _Pauline_, with all its beauties, lies +in a certain almost humorous singularity, the fact that Browning, of +all people, should have signalised his entrance into the world of +letters with a poem which may fairly be called morbid. But this is a +morbidity so general and recurrent that it may be called in a +contradictory phrase a healthy morbidity; it is a kind of intellectual +measles. No one of any degree of maturity in reading _Pauline_ will be +quite so horrified at the sins of the young gentleman who tells the +story as he seems to be himself. It is the utterance of that bitter +and heartrending period of youth which comes before we realise the one +grand and logical basis of all optimism--the doctrine of original sin. +The boy at this stage being an ignorant and inhuman idealist, regards +all his faults as frightful secret malformations, and it is only later +that he becomes conscious of that large and beautiful and benignant +explanation that the heart of man is deceitful above all things and +desperately wicked. That Browning, whose judgment on his own work was +one of the best in the world, took this view of _Pauline_ in after +years is quite obvious. He displayed a very manly and unique capacity +of really laughing at his own work without being in the least ashamed +of it. "This," he said of _Pauline_, "is the only crab apple that +remains of the shapely tree of life in my fool's paradise." It would +be difficult to express the matter more perfectly. Although _Pauline_ +was published anonymously, its authorship was known to a certain +circle, and Browning began to form friendships in the literary world. +He had already become acquainted with two of the best friends he was +ever destined to have, Alfred Domett, celebrated in "The Guardian +Angel" and "Waring," and his cousin Silverthorne, whose death is +spoken of in one of the most perfect lyrics in the English language, +Browning's "May and Death." These were men of his own age, and his +manner of speaking of them gives us many glimpses into that splendid +world of comradeship which. Plato and Walt Whitman knew, with its +endless days and its immortal nights. Browning had a third friend +destined to play an even greater part in his life, but who belonged to +an older generation and a statelier school of manners and +scholarship. Mr. Kenyon was a schoolfellow of Browning's father, and +occupied towards his son something of the position of an irresponsible +uncle. He was a rotund, rosy old gentleman, fond of comfort and the +courtesies of life, but fond of them more for others, though much for +himself. Elizabeth Barrett in after years wrote of "the brightness of +his carved speech," which would appear to suggest that he practised +that urbane and precise order of wit which was even then +old-fashioned. Yet, notwithstanding many talents of this kind, he was +not so much an able man as the natural friend and equal of able men. + +Browning's circle of friends, however, widened about this time in all +directions. One friend in particular he made, the Comte de +Ripert-Monclar, a French Royalist with whom he prosecuted with renewed +energy his studies in the mediaeval and Renaissance schools of +philosophy. It was the Count who suggested that Browning should write +a poetical play on the subject of Paracelsus. After reflection, +indeed, the Count retracted this advice on the ground that the history +of the great mystic gave no room for love. Undismayed by this terrible +deficiency, Browning caught up the idea with characteristic +enthusiasm, and in 1835 appeared the first of his works which he +himself regarded as representative--_Paracelsus_. The poem shows an +enormous advance in technical literary power; but in the history of +Browning's mind it is chiefly interesting as giving an example of a +peculiarity which clung to him during the whole of his literary life, +an intense love of the holes and corners of history. Fifty-two years +afterwards he wrote _Parleyings with certain Persons of Importance in +their Day_, the last poem published in his lifetime; and any reader +of that remarkable work will perceive that the common characteristic +of all these persons is not so much that they were of importance in +their day as that they are of no importance in ours. The same +eccentric fastidiousness worked in him as a young man when he wrote +_Paracelsus_ and _Sordello_. Nowhere in Browning's poetry can we find +any very exhaustive study of any of the great men who are the +favourites of the poet and moralist. He has written about philosophy +and ambition and music and morals, but he has written nothing about +Socrates or Caesar or Napoleon, or Beethoven or Mozart, or Buddha or +Mahomet. When he wishes to describe a political ambition he selects +that entirely unknown individual, King Victor of Sardinia. When he +wishes to express the most perfect soul of music, he unearths some +extraordinary persons called Abt Vogler and Master Hugues of +Saxe-Gotha. When he wishes to express the largest and sublimest scheme +of morals and religion which his imagination can conceive, he does not +put it into the mouth of any of the great spiritual leaders of +mankind, but into the mouth of an obscure Jewish Rabbi of the name of +Ben Ezra. It is fully in accordance with this fascinating craze of his +that when he wishes to study the deification of the intellect and the +disinterested pursuit of the things of the mind, he does not select +any of the great philosophers from Plato to Darwin, whose +investigations are still of some importance in the eyes of the world. +He selects the figure of all figures most covered with modern satire +and pity, the _a priori_ scientist of the Middle Ages and the +Renaissance. His supreme type of the human intellect is neither the +academic nor the positivist, but the alchemist. It is difficult to +imagine a turn of mind constituting a more complete challenge to the +ordinary modern point of view. To the intellect of our time the wild +investigators of the school of Paracelsus seem to be the very crown +and flower of futility, they are collectors of straws and careful +misers of dust. But for all that Browning was right. Any critic who +understands the true spirit of mediaeval science can see that he was +right; no critic can see how right he was unless he understands the +spirit of mediaeval science as thoroughly as he did. In the character +of Paracelsus, Browning wished to paint the dangers and +disappointments which attend the man who believes merely in the +intellect. He wished to depict the fall of the logician; and with a +perfect and unerring instinct he selected a man who wrote and spoke in +the tradition of the Middle Ages, the most thoroughly and even +painfully logical period that the world has ever seen. If he had +chosen an ancient Greek philosopher, it would have been open to the +critic to have said that that philosopher relied to some extent upon +the most sunny and graceful social life that ever flourished. If he +had made him a modern sociological professor, it would have been +possible to object that his energies were not wholly concerned with +truth, but partly with the solid and material satisfaction of society. +But the man truly devoted to the things of the mind was the mediaeval +magician. It is a remarkable fact that one civilisation does not +satisfy itself by calling another civilisation wicked--it calls it +uncivilised. We call the Chinese barbarians, and they call us +barbarians. The mediaeval state, like China, was a foreign +civilisation, and this was its supreme characteristic, that it cared +for the things of the mind for their own sake. To complain of the +researches of its sages on the ground that they were not materially +fruitful, is to act as we should act in telling a gardener that his +roses were not as digestible as our cabbages. It is not only true that +the mediaeval philosophers never discovered the steam-engine; it is +quite equally true that they never tried. The Eden of the Middle Ages +was really a garden, where each of God's flowers--truth and beauty and +reason--flourished for its own sake, and with its own name. The Eden +of modern progress is a kitchen garden. + +It would have been hard, therefore, for Browning to have chosen a +better example for his study of intellectual egotism than Paracelsus. +Modern life accuses the mediaeval tradition of crushing the intellect; +Browning, with a truer instinct, accuses that tradition of +over-glorifying it. There is, however, another and even more important +deduction to be made from the moral of _Paracelsus_. The usual +accusation against Browning is that he was consumed with logic; that +he thought all subjects to be the proper pabulum of intellectual +disquisition; that he gloried chiefly in his own power of plucking +knots to pieces and rending fallacies in two; and that to this method +he sacrificed deliberately, and with complete self-complacency, the +element of poetry and sentiment. To people who imagine Browning to +have been this frigid believer in the intellect there is only one +answer necessary or sufficient. It is the fact that he wrote a play +designed to destroy the whole of this intellectualist fallacy at the +age of twenty-three. + +_Paracelsus_ was in all likelihood Browning's introduction to the +literary world. It was many years, and even many decades, before he +had anything like a public appreciation, but a very great part of the +minority of those who were destined to appreciate him came over to his +standard upon the publication of _Paracelsus_. The celebrated John +Forster had taken up _Paracelsus_ "as a thing to slate," and had ended +its perusal with the wildest curiosity about the author and his works. +John Stuart Mill, never backward in generosity, had already interested +himself in Browning, and was finally converted by the same poem. Among +other early admirers were Landor, Leigh Hunt, Horne, Serjeant +Talfourd, and Monckton-Milnes. One man of even greater literary +stature seems to have come into Browning's life about this time, a man +for whom he never ceased to have the warmest affection and trust. +Browning was, indeed, one of the very few men of that period who got +on perfectly with Thomas Carlyle. It is precisely one of those little +things which speak volumes for the honesty and unfathomable good +humour of Browning, that Carlyle, who had a reckless contempt for most +other poets of his day, had something amounting to a real attachment +to him. He would run over to Paris for the mere privilege of dining +with him. Browning, on the other hand, with characteristic +impetuosity, passionately defended and justified Carlyle in all +companies. "I have just seen dear Carlyle," he writes on one occasion; +"catch me calling people dear in a hurry, except in a letter +beginning." He sided with Carlyle in the vexed question of the Carlyle +domestic relations, and his impression of Mrs. Carlyle was that she +was "a hard unlovable woman." As, however, it is on record that he +once, while excitedly explaining some point of mystical philosophy, +put down Mrs. Carlyle's hot kettle on the hearthrug, any frigidity +that he may have observed in her manner may possibly find a natural +explanation. His partisanship in the Carlyle affair, which was +characteristically headlong and human, may not throw much light on +that painful problem itself, but it throws a great deal of light on +the character of Browning, which was pugnaciously proud of its +friends, and had what may almost be called a lust of loyalty. Browning +was not capable of that most sagacious detachment which enabled +Tennyson to say that he could not agree that the Carlyles ought never +to have married, since if they had each married elsewhere there would +have been four miserable people instead of two. + +Among the motley and brilliant crowd with which Browning had now begun +to mingle, there was no figure more eccentric and spontaneous than +that of Macready the actor. This extraordinary person, a man living +from hand to mouth in all things spiritual and pecuniary, a man +feeding upon flying emotions, conceived something like an attraction +towards Browning, spoke of him as the very ideal of a young poet, and +in a moment of peculiar excitement suggested to him the writing of a +great play. Browning was a man fundamentally indeed more steadfast and +prosaic, but on the surface fully as rapid and easily infected as +Macready. He immediately began to plan out a great historical play, +and selected for his subject "Strafford." + +In Browning's treatment of the subject there is something more than a +trace of his Puritan and Liberal upbringing. It is one of the very +earliest of the really important works in English literature which +are based on the Parliamentarian reading of the incidents of the time +of Charles I. It is true that the finest element in the play is the +opposition between Strafford and Pym, an opposition so complete, so +lucid, so consistent, that it has, so to speak, something of the +friendly openness and agreement which belongs to an alliance. The two +men love each other and fight each other, and do the two things at the +same time completely. This is a great thing of which even to attempt +the description. It is easy to have the impartiality which can speak +judicially of both parties, but it is not so easy to have that larger +and higher impartiality which can speak passionately on behalf of both +parties. Nevertheless, it may be permissible to repeat that there is +in the play a definite trace of Browning's Puritan education and +Puritan historical outlook. + +For _Strafford_ is, of course, an example of that most difficult of +all literary works--a political play. The thing has been achieved once +at least admirably in Shakespeare's _Julius Caesar_, and something like +it, though from a more one-sided and romantic stand-point, has been +done excellently in _L'Aiglon_. But the difficulties of such a play +are obvious on the face of the matter. In a political play the +principal characters are not merely men. They are symbols, +arithmetical figures representing millions of other men outside. It +is, by dint of elaborate stage management, possible to bring a mob +upon the boards, but the largest mob ever known is nothing but a +floating atom of the people; and the people of which the politician +has to think does not consist of knots of rioters in the street, but +of some million absolutely distinct individuals, each sitting in his +own breakfast room reading his own morning paper. To give even the +faintest suggestion of the strength and size of the people in this +sense in the course of a dramatic performance is obviously impossible. +That is why it is so easy on the stage to concentrate all the pathos +and dignity upon such persons as Charles I. and Mary Queen of Scots, +the vampires of their people, because within the minute limits of a +stage there is room for their small virtues and no room for their +enormous crimes. It would be impossible to find a stronger example +than the case of _Strafford_. It is clear that no one could possibly +tell the whole truth about the life and death of Strafford, +politically considered, in a play. Strafford was one of the greatest +men ever born in England, and he attempted to found a great English +official despotism. That is to say, he attempted to found something +which is so different from what has actually come about that we can in +reality scarcely judge of it, any more than we can judge whether it +would be better to live in another planet, or pleasanter to have been +born a dog or an elephant. It would require enormous imagination to +reconstruct the political ideals of Strafford. Now Browning, as we all +know, got over the matter in his play, by practically denying that +Strafford had any political ideals at all. That is to say, while +crediting Strafford with all his real majesty of intellect and +character, he makes the whole of his political action dependent upon +his passionate personal attachment to the King. This is +unsatisfactory; it is in reality a dodging of the great difficulty of +the political play. That difficulty, in the case of any political +problem, is, as has been said, great. It would be very hard, for +example, to construct a play about Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bill. It +would be almost impossible to get expressed in a drama of some five +acts and some twenty characters anything so ancient and complicated as +that Irish problem, the roots of which lie in the darkness of the age +of Strongbow, and the branches of which spread out to the remotest +commonwealths of the East and West. But we should scarcely be +satisfied if a dramatist overcame the difficulty by ascribing Mr. +Gladstone's action in the Home Rule question to an overwhelming +personal affection for Mr. Healy. And in thus basing Strafford's +action upon personal and private reasons, Browning certainly does some +injustice to the political greatness, of Strafford. To attribute Mr. +Gladstone's conversion to Home Rule to an infatuation such as that +suggested above, would certainly have the air of implying that the +writer thought the Home Rule doctrine a peculiar or untenable one. +Similarly, Browning's choice of a motive for Strafford has very much +the air of an assumption that there was nothing to be said on public +grounds for Strafford's political ideal. Now this is certainly not the +case. The Puritans in the great struggles of the reign of Charles I. +may have possessed more valuable ideals than the Royalists, but it is +a very vulgar error to suppose that they were any more idealistic. In +Browning's play Pym is made almost the incarnation of public spirit, +and Strafford of private ties. But not only may an upholder of +despotism be public-spirited, but in the case of prominent upholders +of it like Strafford he generally is. Despotism indeed, and attempts +at despotism, like that of Strafford, are a kind of disease of public +spirit. They represent, as it were, the drunkenness of responsibility. +It is when men begin to grow desperate in their love for the people, +when they are overwhelmed with the difficulties and blunders of +humanity, that they fall back upon a wild desire to manage everything +themselves. Their faith in themselves is only a disillusionment with +mankind. They are in that most dreadful position, dreadful alike in +personal and public affairs--the position of the man who has lost +faith and not lost love. This belief that all would go right if we +could only get the strings into our own hands is a fallacy almost +without exception, but nobody can justly say that it is not +public-spirited. The sin and sorrow of despotism is not that it does +not love men, but that it loves them too much and trusts them too +little. Therefore from age to age in history arise these great +despotic dreamers, whether they be Royalists or Imperialists or even +Socialists, who have at root this idea, that the world would enter +into rest if it went their way and forswore altogether the right of +going its own way. When a man begins to think that the grass will not +grow at night unless he lies awake to watch it, he generally ends +either in an asylum or on the throne of an Emperor. Of these men +Strafford was one, and we cannot but feel that Browning somewhat +narrows the significance and tragedy of his place in history by making +him merely the champion of a personal idiosyncrasy against a great +public demand. Strafford was something greater than this; if indeed, +when we come to think of it, a man can be anything greater than the +friend of another man. But the whole question is interesting, because +Browning, although he never again attacked a political drama of such +palpable importance as _Strafford_, could never keep politics +altogether out of his dramatic work. _King Victor and King Charles_, +which followed it, is a political play, the study of a despotic +instinct much meaner than that of Strafford. _Colombe's Birthday_, +again, is political as well as romantic. Politics in its historic +aspect would seem to have had a great fascination for him, as indeed +it must have for all ardent intellects, since it is the one thing in +the world that is as intellectual as the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ and +as rapid as the Derby. + +One of the favourite subjects among those who like to conduct long +controversies about Browning (and their name is legion) is the +question of whether Browning's plays, such as _Strafford_, were +successes upon the stage. As they are never agreed about what +constitutes a success on the stage, it is difficult to adjudge their +quarrels. But the general fact is very simple; such a play as +_Strafford_ was not a gigantic theatrical success, and nobody, it is +to be presumed, ever imagined that it would be. On the other hand, it +was certainly not a failure, but was enjoyed and applauded as are +hundreds of excellent plays which run only for a week or two, as many +excellent plays do, and as all plays ought to do. Above all, the +definite success which attended the representation of _Strafford_ from +the point of view of the more educated and appreciative was quite +enough to establish Browning in a certain definite literary position. +As a classical and established personality he did not come into his +kingdom for years and decades afterwards; not, indeed, until he was +near to entering upon the final rest. But as a detached and eccentric +personality, as a man who existed and who had arisen on the outskirts +of literature, the world began to be conscious of him at this time. + +Of what he was personally at the period that he thus became personally +apparent, Mrs. Bridell Fox has left a very vivid little sketch. She +describes how Browning called at the house (he was acquainted with her +father), and finding that gentleman out, asked with a kind of abrupt +politeness if he might play on the piano. This touch is very +characteristic of the mingled aplomb and unconsciousness of Browning's +social manner. "He was then," she writes, "slim and dark, and very +handsome, and--may I hint it?--just a trifle of a dandy, addicted to +lemon-coloured kid gloves and such things, quite the glass of fashion +and the mould of form. But full of 'ambition,' eager for success, +eager for fame, and, what is more, determined to conquer fame and to +achieve success." That is as good a portrait as we can have of the +Browning of these days--quite self-satisfied, but not self-conscious +young man; one who had outgrown, but only just outgrown, the pure +romanticism of his boyhood, which made him run after gipsy caravans +and listen to nightingales in the wood; a man whose incandescent +vitality, now that it had abandoned gipsies and not yet immersed +itself in casuistical poems, devoted itself excitedly to trifles, such +as lemon-coloured kid gloves and fame. But a man still above all +things perfectly young and natural, professing that foppery which +follows the fashions, and not that sillier and more demoralising +foppery which defies them. Just as he walked in coolly and yet +impulsively into a private drawing-room and offered to play, so he +walked at this time into the huge and crowded salon of European +literature and offered to sing. + + + + +CHAPTER II + +EARLY WORKS + + +In 1840 _Sordello_ was published. Its reception by the great majority +of readers, including some of the ablest men of the time, was a +reception of a kind probably unknown in the rest of literary history, +a reception that was neither praise nor blame. It was perhaps best +expressed by Carlyle, who wrote to say that his wife had read +_Sordello_ with great interest, and wished to know whether Sordello +was a man, or a city, or a book. Better known, of course, is the story +of Tennyson, who said that the first line of the poem-- + + "Who will, may hear Sordello's story told," + +and the last line-- + + "Who would, has heard Sordello's story told," + +were the only two lines in the poem that he understood, and they were +lies. + +Perhaps the best story, however, of all the cycle of Sordello legends +is that which is related of Douglas Jerrold. He was recovering from an +illness; and having obtained permission for the first time to read a +little during the day, he picked up a book from a pile beside the bed +and began _Sordello_. No sooner had he done so than he turned deadly +pale, put down the book, and said, "My God! I'm an idiot. My health +is restored, but my mind's gone. I can't understand two consecutive +lines of an English poem." He then summoned his family and silently +gave the book into their hands, asking for their opinion on the poem; +and as the shadow of perplexity gradually passed over their faces, he +heaved a sigh of relief and went to sleep. These stories, whether +accurate or no, do undoubtedly represent the very peculiar reception +accorded to _Sordello_, a reception which, as I have said, bears no +resemblance whatever to anything in the way of eulogy or condemnation +that had ever been accorded to a work of art before. There had been +authors whom it was fashionable to boast of admiring and authors whom +it was fashionable to boast of despising; but with _Sordello_ enters +into literary history the Browning of popular badinage, the author +whom it is fashionable to boast of not understanding. + +Putting aside for the moment the literary qualities which are to be +found in the poem, when it becomes intelligible, there is one question +very relevant to the fame and character of Browning which is raised by +_Sordello_ when it is considered, as most people consider it, as +hopelessly unintelligible. It really throws some light upon the reason +of Browning's obscurity. The ordinary theory of Browning's obscurity +is to the effect that it was a piece of intellectual vanity indulged +in more and more insolently as his years and fame increased. There are +at least two very decisive objections to this popular explanation. In +the first place, it must emphatically be said for Browning that in all +the numerous records and impressions of him throughout his long and +very public life, there is not one iota of evidence that he was a man +who was intellectually vain. The evidence is entirely the other way. +He was vain of many things, of his physical health, for example, and +even more of the physical health which he contrived to bestow for a +certain period upon his wife. From the records of his early dandyism, +his flowing hair and his lemon-coloured gloves, it is probable enough +that he was vain of his good looks. He was vain of his masculinity, +his knowledge of the world, and he was, I fancy, decidedly vain of his +prejudices, even, it might be said, vain of being vain of them. But +everything is against the idea that he was much in the habit of +thinking of himself in his intellectual aspect. In the matter of +conversation, for example, some people who liked him found him genial, +talkative, anecdotal, with a certain strengthening and sanative +quality in his mere bodily presence. Some people who did not like him +found him a mere frivolous chatterer, afflicted with bad manners. One +lady, who knew him well, said that, though he only met you in a crowd +and made some commonplace remark, you went for the rest of the day +with your head up. Another lady who did not know him, and therefore +disliked him, asked after a dinner party, "Who was that too-exuberant +financier?" These are the diversities of feeling about him. But they +all agree in one point--that he did not talk cleverly, or try to talk +cleverly, as that proceeding is understood in literary circles. He +talked positively, he talked a great deal, but he never attempted to +give that neat and aesthetic character to his speech which is almost +invariable in the case of the man who is vain of his mental +superiority. When he did impress people with mental gymnastics, it was +mostly in the form of pouring out, with passionate enthusiasm, whole +epics written by other people, which is the last thing that the +literary egotist would be likely to waste his time over. We have +therefore to start with an enormous psychological improbability that +Browning made his poems complicated from mere pride in his powers and +contempt of his readers. + +There is, however, another very practical objection to the ordinary +theory that Browning's obscurity was a part of the intoxication of +fame and intellectual consideration. We constantly hear the statement +that Browning's intellectual complexity increased with his later +poems, but the statement is simply not true. _Sordello_, to the +indescribable density of which he never afterwards even approached, +was begun before _Strafford_, and was therefore the third of his +works, and even if we adopt his own habit of ignoring _Pauline_, the +second. He wrote the greater part of it when he was twenty-four. It +was in his youth, at the time when a man is thinking of love and +publicity, of sunshine and singing birds, that he gave birth to this +horror of great darkness; and the more we study the matter with any +knowledge of the nature of youth, the more we shall come to the +conclusion that Browning's obscurity had altogether the opposite +origin to that which is usually assigned to it. He was not +unintelligible because he was proud, but unintelligible because he was +humble. He was not unintelligible because his thoughts were vague, but +because to him they were obvious. + +A man who is intellectually vain does not make himself +incomprehensible, because he is so enormously impressed with the +difference between his readers' intelligence and his own that he +talks down to them with elaborate repetition and lucidity. What poet +was ever vainer than Byron? What poet was ever so magnificently lucid? +But a young man of genius who has a genuine humility in his heart does +not elaborately explain his discoveries, because he does not think +that they are discoveries. He thinks that the whole street is humming +with his ideas, and that the postman and the tailor are poets like +himself. Browning's impenetrable poetry was the natural expression of +this beautiful optimism. _Sordello_ was the most glorious compliment +that has ever been paid to the average man. + +In the same manner, of course, outward obscurity is in a young author +a mark of inward clarity. A man who is vague in his ideas does not +speak obscurely, because his own dazed and drifting condition leads +him to clutch at phrases like ropes and use the formulae that every one +understands. No one ever found Miss Marie Corelli obscure, because she +believes only in words. But if a young man really has ideas of his +own, he must be obscure at first, because he lives in a world of his +own in which there are symbols and correspondences and categories +unknown to the rest of the world. Let us take an imaginary example. +Suppose that a young poet had developed by himself a peculiar idea +that all forms of excitement, including religious excitement, were a +kind of evil intoxication, he might say to himself continually that +churches were in reality taverns, and this idea would become so fixed +in his mind that he would forget that no such association existed in +the minds of others. And suppose that in pursuance of this general +idea, which is a perfectly clear and intellectual idea, though a very +silly one, he were to say that he believed in Puritanism without its +theology, and were to repeat this idea also to himself until it became +instinctive and familiar, such a man might take up a pen, and under +the impression that he was saying something figurative indeed, but +quite clear and suggestive, write some such sentence as this, "You +will not get the godless Puritan into your white taverns," and no one +in the length and breadth of the country could form the remotest +notion of what he could mean. So it would have been in any example, +for instance, of a man who made some philosophical discovery and did +not realise how far the world was from it. If it had been possible for +a poet in the sixteenth century to hit upon and learn to regard as +obvious the evolutionary theory of Darwin, he might have written down +some such line as "the radiant offspring of the ape," and the maddest +volumes of mediaeval natural history would have been ransacked for the +meaning of the allusion. The more fixed and solid and sensible the +idea appeared to him, the more dark and fantastic it would have +appeared to the world. Most of us indeed, if we ever say anything +valuable, say it when we are giving expression to that part of us +which has become as familiar and invisible as the pattern on our wall +paper. It is only when an idea has become a matter of course to the +thinker that it becomes startling to the world. + +It is worth while to dwell upon this preliminary point of the ground +of Browning's obscurity, because it involves an important issue about +him. Our whole view of Browning is bound to be absolutely different, +and I think absolutely false, if we start with the conception that he +was what the French call an intellectual. If we see Browning with the +eyes of his particular followers, we shall inevitably think this. For +his followers are pre-eminently intellectuals, and there never lived +upon the earth a great man who was so fundamentally different from his +followers. Indeed, he felt this heartily and even humorously himself. +"Wilkes was no Wilkite," he said, "and I am very far from being a +Browningite." We shall, as I say, utterly misunderstand Browning at +every step of his career if we suppose that he was the sort of man who +would be likely to take a pleasure in asserting the subtlety and +abstruseness of his message. He took pleasure beyond all question in +himself; in the strictest sense of the word he enjoyed himself. But +his conception of himself was never that of the intellectual. He +conceived himself rather as a sanguine and strenuous man, a great +fighter. "I was ever," as he says, "a fighter." His faults, a certain +occasional fierceness and grossness, were the faults that are counted +as virtues among navvies and sailors and most primitive men. His +virtues, boyishness and absolute fidelity, and a love of plain words +and things are the virtues which are counted as vices among the +aesthetic prigs who pay him the greatest honour. He had his more +objectionable side, like other men, but it had nothing to do with +literary egotism. He was not vain of being an extraordinary man. He +was only somewhat excessively vain of being an ordinary one. + +The Browning then who published _Sordello_ we have to conceive, not as +a young pedant anxious to exaggerate his superiority to the public, +but as a hot-headed, strong-minded, inexperienced, and essentially +humble man, who had more ideas than he knew how to disentangle from +each other. If we compare, for example, the complexity of Browning +with the clarity of Matthew Arnold, we shall realise that the cause +lies in the fact that Matthew Arnold was an intellectual aristocrat, +and Browning an intellectual democrat. The particular peculiarities of +_Sordello_ illustrate the matter very significantly. A very great part +of the difficulty of _Sordello_, for instance, is in the fact that +before the reader even approaches to tackling the difficulties of +Browning's actual narrative, he is apparently expected to start with +an exhaustive knowledge of that most shadowy and bewildering of all +human epochs--the period of the Guelph and Ghibelline struggles in +mediaeval Italy. Here, of course, Browning simply betrays that +impetuous humility which we have previously observed. His father was a +student of mediaeval chronicles, he had himself imbibed that learning +in the same casual manner in which a boy learns to walk or to play +cricket. Consequently in a literary sense he rushed up to the first +person he met and began talking about Ecelo and Taurello Salinguerra +with about as much literary egotism as an English baby shows when it +talks English to an Italian organ grinder. Beyond this the poem of +_Sordello_, powerful as it is, does not present any very significant +advance in Browning's mental development on that already represented +by _Pauline_ and _Paracelsus_. _Pauline, Paracelsus_, and _Sordello_ +stand together in the general fact that they are all, in the excellent +phrase used about the first by Mr. Johnson Fox, "confessional." All +three are analyses of the weakness which every artistic temperament +finds in itself. Browning is still writing about himself, a subject +of which he, like all good and brave men, was profoundly ignorant. +This kind of self-analysis is always misleading. For we do not see in +ourselves those dominant traits strong enough to force themselves out +in action which our neighbours see. We see only a welter of minute +mental experiences which include all the sins that were ever committed +by Nero or Sir Willoughby Patterne. When studying ourselves, we are +looking at a fresco with a magnifying glass. Consequently, these early +impressions which great men have given of themselves are nearly always +slanders upon themselves, for the strongest man is weak to his own +conscience, and Hamlet flourished to a certainty even inside Napoleon. +So it was with Browning, who when he was nearly eighty was destined to +write with the hilarity of a schoolboy, but who wrote in his boyhood +poems devoted to analysing the final break-up of intellect and soul. + +_Sordello_, with all its load of learning, and almost more oppressive +load of beauty, has never had any very important influence even upon +Browningites, and with the rest of the world the name has passed into +a jest. The most truly memorable thing about it was Browning's saying +in answer to all gibes and misconceptions, a saying which expresses +better than anything else what genuine metal was in him, "I blame no +one, least of all myself, who did my best then and since." This is +indeed a model for all men of letters who do not wish to retain only +the letters and to lose the man. + +When next Browning spoke, it was from a greater height and with a new +voice. His visit to Asolo, "his first love," as he said, "among +Italian cities," coincided with the stir and transformation in his +spirit and the breaking up of that splendid palace of mirrors in which +a man like Byron had lived and died. In 1841 _Pippa Passes_ appeared, +and with it the real Browning of the modern world. He had made the +discovery which Byron never made, but which almost every young man +does at last make--the thrilling discovery that he is not Robinson +Crusoe. _Pippa Passes_ is the greatest poem ever written, with the +exception of one or two by Walt Whitman, to express the sentiment of +the pure love of humanity. The phrase has unfortunately a false and +pedantic sound. The love of humanity is a thing supposed to be +professed only by vulgar and officious philanthropists, or by saints +of a superhuman detachment and universality. As a matter of fact, love +of humanity is the commonest and most natural of the feelings of a +fresh nature, and almost every one has felt it alight capriciously +upon him when looking at a crowded park or a room full of dancers. The +love of those whom we do not know is quite as eternal a sentiment as +the love of those whom we do know. In our friends the richness of life +is proved to us by what we have gained; in the faces in the street the +richness of life is proved to us by the hint of what we have lost. And +this feeling for strange faces and strange lives, when it is felt +keenly by a young man, almost always expresses itself in a desire +after a kind of vagabond beneficence, a desire to go through the world +scattering goodness like a capricious god. It is desired that mankind +should hunt in vain for its best friend as it would hunt for a +criminal; that he should be an anonymous Saviour, an unrecorded +Christ. Browning, like every one else, when awakened to the beauty +and variety of men, dreamed of this arrogant self-effacement. He has +written of himself that he had long thought vaguely of a being passing +through the world, obscure and unnameable, but moulding the destinies +of others to mightier and better issues. Then his almost faultless +artistic instinct came in and suggested that this being, whom he +dramatised as the work-girl, Pippa, should be even unconscious of +anything but her own happiness, and should sway men's lives with a +lonely mirth. It was a bold and moving conception to show us these +mature and tragic human groups all at the supreme moment eavesdropping +upon the solitude of a child. And it was an even more precise instinct +which made Browning make the errant benefactor a woman. A man's good +work is effected by doing what he does, a woman's by being what she +is. + +There is one other point about _Pippa Passes_ which is worth a +moment's attention. The great difficulty with regard to the +understanding of Browning is the fact that, to all appearance, +scarcely any one can be induced to take him seriously as a literary +artist. His adversaries consider his literary vagaries a +disqualification for every position among poets; and his admirers +regard those vagaries with the affectionate indulgence of a circle of +maiden aunts towards a boy home for the holidays. Browning is supposed +to do as he likes with form, because he had such a profound scheme of +thought. But, as a matter of fact, though few of his followers will +take Browning's literary form seriously, he took his own literary form +very seriously. Now _Pippa Passes_ is, among other things, eminently +remarkable as a very original artistic form, a series of disconnected +but dramatic scenes which have only in common the appearance of one +figure. For this admirable literary departure Browning, amid all the +laudations of his "mind" and his "message," has scarcely ever had +credit. And just as we should, if we took Browning seriously as a +poet, see that he had made many noble literary forms, so we should +also see that he did make from time to time certain definite literary +mistakes. There is one of them, a glaring one, in _Pippa Passes_; and, +as far as I know, no critic has ever thought enough of Browning as an +artist to point it out. It is a gross falsification of the whole +beauty of _Pippa Passes_ to make the Monseigneur and his accomplice in +the last act discuss a plan touching the fate of Pippa herself. The +whole central and splendid idea of the drama is the fact that Pippa is +utterly remote from the grand folk whose lives she troubles and +transforms. To make her in the end turn out to be the niece of one of +them, is like a whiff from an Adelphi melodrama, an excellent thing in +its place, but destructive of the entire conception of Pippa. Having +done that, Browning might just as well have made Sebald turn out to be +her long lost brother, and Luigi a husband to whom she was secretly +married. Browning made this mistake when his own splendid artistic +power was only growing, and its merits and its faults in a tangle. But +its real literary merits and its real literary faults have alike +remained unrecognised under the influence of that unfortunate +intellectualism which idolises Browning as a metaphysician and +neglects him as a poet. But a better test was coming. Browning's +poetry, in the most strictly poetical sense, reached its flower in +_Dramatic Lyrics_, published in 1842. Here he showed himself a +picturesque and poignant artist in a wholly original manner. And the +two main characteristics of the work were the two characteristics most +commonly denied to Browning, both by his opponents and his followers, +passion and beauty; but beauty had enlarged her boundaries in new +modes of dramatic arrangement, and passion had found new voices in +fantastic and realistic verse. Those who suppose Browning to be a +wholly philosophic poet, number a great majority of his commentators. +But when we come to look at the actual facts, they are strangely and +almost unexpectedly otherwise. + +Let any one who believes in the arrogantly intellectual character of +Browning's poetry run through the actual repertoire of the _Dramatic +Lyrics_. The first item consists of those splendid war chants called +"Cavalier Tunes." I do not imagine that any one will maintain that +there is any very mysterious metaphysical aim in them. The second item +is the fine poem "The Lost Leader," a poem which expresses in +perfectly lucid and lyrical verse a perfectly normal and old-fashioned +indignation. It is the same, however far we carry the query. What +theory does the next poem, "How they brought the Good News from Ghent +to Aix," express, except the daring speculation that it is often +exciting to ride a good horse in Belgium? What theory does the poem +after that, "Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr," express, except that +it is also frequently exciting to ride a good horse in Africa? Then +comes "Nationality in Drinks," a mere technical oddity without a gleam +of philosophy; and after that those two entirely exquisite "Garden +Fancies," the first of which is devoted to the abstruse thesis that a +woman may be charming, and the second to the equally abstruse thesis +that a book may be a bore. Then comes "The Soliloquy of the Spanish +Cloister," from which the most ingenious "Browning student" cannot +extract anything except that people sometimes hate each other in +Spain; and then "The Laboratory," from which he could extract nothing +except that people sometimes hate each other in France. This is a +perfectly honest record of the poems as they stand. And the first +eleven poems read straight off are remarkable for these two obvious +characteristics--first, that they contain not even a suggestion of +anything that could be called philosophy; and second, that they +contain a considerable proportion of the best and most typical poems +that Browning ever wrote. It may be repeated that either he wrote +these lyrics because he had an artistic sense, or it is impossible to +hazard even the wildest guess as to why he wrote them. + +It is permissible to say that the _Dramatic Lyrics_ represent the +arrival of the real Browning of literary history. It is true that he +had written already many admirable poems of a far more ambitious +plan--_Paracelsus_ with its splendid version of the faults of the +intellectual, _Pippa Passes_ with its beautiful deification of +unconscious influence. But youth is always ambitious and universal; +mature work exhibits more of individuality, more of the special type +and colour of work which a man is destined to do. Youth is universal, +but not individual. The genius who begins life with a very genuine and +sincere doubt whether he is meant to be an exquisite and idolised +violinist, or the most powerful and eloquent Prime Minister of modern +times, does at last end by making the discovery that there is, after +all, one thing, possibly a certain style of illustrating Nursery +Rhymes, which he can really do better than any one else. This was what +happened to Browning; like every one else, he had to discover first +the universe, and then humanity, and at last himself. With him, as +with all others, the great paradox and the great definition of life +was this, that the ambition narrows as the mind expands. In _Dramatic +Lyrics_ he discovered the one thing that he could really do better +than any one else--the dramatic lyric. The form is absolutely +original: he had discovered a new field of poetry, and in the centre +of that field he had found himself. + +The actual quality, the actual originality of the form is a little +difficult to describe. But its general characteristic is the fearless +and most dexterous use of grotesque things in order to express sublime +emotions. The best and most characteristic of the poems are +love-poems; they express almost to perfection the real wonderland of +youth, but they do not express it by the ideal imagery of most poets +of love. The imagery of these poems consists, if we may take a rapid +survey of Browning's love poetry, of suburban streets, straws, +garden-rakes, medicine bottles, pianos, window-blinds, burnt cork, +fashionable fur coats. But in this new method he thoroughly expressed +the true essential, the insatiable realism of passion. If any one +wished to prove that Browning was not, as he is said to be, the poet +of thought, but pre-eminently one of the poets of passion, we could +scarcely find a better evidence of this profoundly passionate element +than Browning's astonishing realism in love poetry. There is nothing +so fiercely realistic as sentiment and emotion. Thought and the +intellect are content to accept abstractions, summaries, and +generalisations; they are content that ten acres of ground should be +called for the sake of argument X, and ten widows' incomes called for +the sake of argument Y; they are content that a thousand awful and +mysterious disappearances from the visible universe should be summed +up as the mortality of a district, or that ten thousand intoxications +of the soul should bear the general name of the instinct of sex. +Rationalism can live upon air and signs and numbers. But sentiment +must have reality; emotion demands the real fields, the real widows' +homes, the real corpse, and the real woman. And therefore Browning's +love poetry is the finest love poetry in the world, because it does +not talk about raptures and ideals and gates of heaven, but about +window-panes and gloves and garden walls. It does not deal much with +abstractions; it is the truest of all love poetry, because it does not +speak much about love. It awakens in every man the memories of that +immortal instant when common and dead things had a meaning beyond the +power of any dictionary to utter, and a value beyond the power of any +millionaire to compute. He expresses the celestial time when a man +does not think about heaven, but about a parasol. And therefore he is, +first, the greatest of love poets, and, secondly, the only optimistic +philosopher except Whitman. + +The general accusation against Browning in connection with his use of +the grotesque comes in very definitely here; for in using these homely +and practical images, these allusions, bordering on what many would +call the commonplace, he was indeed true to the actual and abiding +spirit of love. In that delightful poem "Youth and Art" we have the +singing girl saying to her old lover-- + + "No harm! It was not my fault + If you never turned your eye's tail up + As I shook upon E _in alt_, + Or ran the chromatic scale up." + +This is a great deal more like the real chaff that passes between +those whose hearts are full of new hope or of old memory than half the +great poems of the world. Browning never forgets the little details +which to a man who has ever really lived may suddenly send an arrow +through the heart. Take, for example, such a matter as dress, as it is +treated in "A Lover's Quarrel." + + "See, how she looks now, dressed + In a sledging cap and vest! + 'Tis a huge fur cloak-- + Like a reindeer's yoke + Falls the lappet along the breast: + Sleeves for her arms to rest, + Or to hang, as my Love likes best." + +That would almost serve as an order to a dressmaker, and is therefore +poetry, or at least excellent poetry of this order. So great a power +have these dead things of taking hold on the living spirit, that I +question whether any one could read through the catalogue of a +miscellaneous auction sale without coming upon things which, if +realised for a moment, would be near to the elemental tears. And if +any of us or all of us are truly optimists, and believe as Browning +did, that existence has a value wholly inexpressible, we are most +truly compelled to that sentiment not by any argument or triumphant +justification of the cosmos, but by a few of these momentary and +immortal sights and sounds, a gesture, an old song, a portrait, a +piano, an old door. + +In 1843 appeared that marvellous drama _The Return of the Druses_, a +work which contains more of Browning's typical qualities exhibited in +an exquisite literary shape, than can easily be counted. We have in +_The Return of the Druses_ his love of the corners of history, his +interest in the religious mind of the East, with its almost terrifying +sense of being in the hand of heaven, his love of colour and verbal +luxury, of gold and green and purple, which made some think he must be +an Oriental himself. But, above all, it presents the first rise of +that great psychological ambition which Browning was thenceforth to +pursue. In _Pauline_ and the poems that follow it, Browning has only +the comparatively easy task of giving an account of himself. In _Pippa +Passes_ he has the only less easy task of giving an account of +humanity. In _The Return of the Druses_ he has for the first time the +task which is so much harder than giving an account of humanity--the +task of giving an account of a human being. Djabal, the great Oriental +impostor, who is the central character of the play, is a peculiarly +subtle character, a compound of blasphemous and lying assumptions of +Godhead with genuine and stirring patriotic and personal feelings: he +is a blend, so to speak, of a base divinity and of a noble humanity. +He is supremely important in the history of Browning's mind, for he is +the first of that great series of the apologiae of apparently evil men, +on which the poet was to pour out so much of his imaginative +wealth--Djabal, Fra Lippo, Bishop Blougram, Sludge, Prince +Hohenstiel-Schwangau, and the hero of _Fifine at the Fair_. + +With this play, so far as any point can be fixed for the matter, he +enters for the first time on the most valuable of all his labours--the +defence of the indefensible. It may be noticed that Browning was not +in the least content with the fact that certain human frailties had +always lain more or less under an implied indulgence; that all human +sentiment had agreed that a profligate might be generous, or that a +drunkard might be high-minded. He was insatiable: he wished to go +further and show in a character like Djabal that an impostor might be +generous and that a liar might be high-minded. In all his life, it +must constantly be remembered, he tried always the most difficult +things. Just as he tried the queerest metres and attempted to manage +them, so he tried the queerest human souls and attempted to stand in +their place. Charity was his basic philosophy; but it was, as it were, +a fierce charity, a charity that went man-hunting. He was a kind of +cosmic detective who walked into the foulest of thieves' kitchens and +accused men publicly of virtue. The character of Djabal in _The Return +of the Druses_ is the first of this long series of forlorn hopes for +the relief of long surrendered castles of misconduct. As we shall see, +even realising the humanity of a noble impostor like Djabal did not +content his erratic hunger for goodness. He went further again, and +realised the humanity of a mean impostor like Sludge. But in all +things he retained this essential characteristic, that he was not +content with seeking sinners--he sought the sinners whom even sinners +cast out. + +Browning's feeling of ambition in the matter of the drama continued to +grow at this time. It must be remembered that he had every natural +tendency to be theatrical, though he lacked the essential lucidity. +He was not, as a matter of fact, a particularly unsuccessful +dramatist; but in the world of abstract temperaments he was by nature +an unsuccessful dramatist. He was, that is to say, a man who loved +above all things plain and sensational words, open catastrophes, a +clear and ringing conclusion to everything. But it so happened, +unfortunately, that his own words were not plain; that his +catastrophes came with a crashing and sudden unintelligibleness which +left men in doubt whether the thing were a catastrophe or a great +stroke of good luck; that his conclusion, though it rang like a +trumpet to the four corners of heaven, was in its actual message quite +inaudible. We are bound to admit, on the authority of all his best +critics and admirers, that his plays were not failures, but we can all +feel that they should have been. He was, as it were, by nature a +neglected dramatist. He was one of those who achieve the reputation, +in the literal sense, of eccentricity by their frantic efforts to +reach the centre. + +_A Blot on the 'Scutcheon_ followed _The Return of the Druses_. In +connection with the performance of this very fine play a quarrel arose +which would not be worth mentioning if it did not happen to illustrate +the curious energetic simplicity of Browning's character. Macready, +who was in desperately low financial circumstances at this time, tried +by every means conceivable to avoid playing the part; he dodged, he +shuffled, he tried every evasion that occurred to him, but it never +occurred to Browning to see what he meant. He pushed off the part upon +Phelps, and Browning was contented; he resumed it, and Browning was +only discontented on behalf of Phelps. The two had a quarrel; they +were both headstrong, passionate men, but the quarrel dealt entirely +with the unfortunate condition of Phelps. Browning beat down his own +hat over his eyes; Macready flung Browning's manuscript with a slap +upon the floor. But all the time it never occurred to the poet that +Macready's conduct was dictated by anything so crude and simple as a +desire for money. Browning was in fact by his principles and his +ideals a man of the world, but in his life far otherwise. That worldly +ease which is to most of us a temptation was to him an ideal. He was +as it were a citizen of the New Jerusalem who desired with perfect +sanity and simplicity to be a citizen of Mayfair. There was in him a +quality which can only be most delicately described; for it was a +virtue which bears a strange resemblance to one of the meanest of +vices. Those curious people who think the truth a thing that can be +said violently and with ease, might naturally call Browning a snob. He +was fond of society, of fashion and even of wealth: but there is no +snobbery in admiring these things or any things if we admire them for +the right reasons. He admired them as worldlings cannot admire them: +he was, as it were, the child who comes in with the dessert. He bore +the same relation to the snob that the righteous man bears to the +Pharisee: something frightfully close and similar and yet an +everlasting opposite. + + + + +CHAPTER III + +BROWNING AND HIS MARRIAGE + + +Robert Browning had his faults, and the general direction of those +faults has been previously suggested. The chief of his faults, a +certain uncontrollable brutality of speech and gesture when he was +strongly roused, was destined to cling to him all through his life, +and to startle with the blaze of a volcano even the last quiet years +before his death. But any one who wishes to understand how deep was +the elemental honesty and reality of his character, how profoundly +worthy he was of any love that was bestowed upon him, need only study +one most striking and determining element in the question--Browning's +simple, heartfelt, and unlimited admiration for other people. He was +one of a generation of great men, of great men who had a certain +peculiar type, certain peculiar merits and defects. Carlyle, Tennyson, +Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, were alike in being children of a very +strenuous and conscientious age, alike in possessing its earnestness +and air of deciding great matters, alike also in showing a certain +almost noble jealousy, a certain restlessness, a certain fear of other +influences. Browning alone had no fear; he welcomed, evidently without +the least affectation, all the influences of his day. A very +interesting letter of his remains in which he describes his pleasure +in a university dinner. "Praise," he says in effect, "was given very +deservedly to Matthew Arnold and Swinburne, and to that pride of +Oxford men, Clough." The really striking thing about these three names +is the fact that they are united in Browning's praise in a way in +which they are by no means united in each other's. Matthew Arnold, in +one of his extant letters, calls Swinburne "a young pseudo-Shelley," +who, according to Arnold, thinks he can make Greek plays good by +making them modern. Mr. Swinburne, on the other hand, has summarised +Clough in a contemptuous rhyme:-- + + "There was a bad poet named Clough, + Whom his friends all united to puff. + But the public, though dull, + Has not quite such a skull + As belongs to believers in Clough." + +The same general fact will be found through the whole of Browning's +life and critical attitude. He adored Shelley, and also Carlyle who +sneered at him. He delighted in Mill, and also in Ruskin who rebelled +against Mill. He excused Napoleon III. and Landor who hurled +interminable curses against Napoleon. He admired all the cycle of +great men who all contemned each other. To say that he had no streak +of envy in his nature would be true, but unfair; for there is no +justification for attributing any of these great men's opinions to +envy. But Browning was really unique, in that he had a certain +spontaneous and unthinking tendency to the admiration of others. He +admired another poet as he admired a fading sunset or a chance spring +leaf. He no more thought whether he could be as good as that man in +that department than whether he could be redder than the sunset or +greener than the leaf of spring. He was naturally magnanimous in the +literal sense of that sublime word; his mind was so great that it +rejoiced in the triumphs of strangers. In this spirit Browning had +already cast his eyes round in the literary world of his time, and had +been greatly and justifiably struck with the work of a young lady +poet, Miss Barrett. + +That impression was indeed amply justified. In a time when it was +thought necessary for a lady to dilute the wine of poetry to its very +weakest tint, Miss Barrett had contrived to produce poetry which was +open to literary objection as too heady and too high-coloured. When +she erred it was through an Elizabethan audacity and luxuriance, a +straining after violent metaphors. With her reappeared in poetry a +certain element which had not been present in it since the last days +of Elizabethan literature, the fusion of the most elementary human +passion with something which can only be described as wit, a certain +love of quaint and sustained similes, of parallels wildly logical, and +of brazen paradox and antithesis. We find this hot wit, as distinct +from the cold wit of the school of Pope, in the puns and buffooneries +of Shakespeare. We find it lingering in _Hudibras_, and we do not find +it again until we come to such strange and strong lines as these of +Elizabeth Barrett in her poem on Napoleon:-- + + "Blood fell like dew beneath his sunrise--sooth, + But glittered dew-like in the covenanted + And high-rayed light. He was a despot--granted, + But the [Greek: autos] of his autocratic mouth + Said 'Yea' i' the people's French! He magnified + The image of the freedom he denied." + +Her poems are full of quaint things, of such things as the eyes in the +peacock fans of the Vatican, which she describes as winking at the +Italian tricolor. She often took the step from the sublime to the +ridiculous: but to take this step one must reach the sublime. +Elizabeth Barrett contrived to assert, what still needs but then +urgently needed assertion, the fact that womanliness, whether in life +or poetry, was a positive thing, and not the negative of manliness. +Her verse at its best was quite as strong as Browning's own, and very +nearly as clever. The difference between their natures was a +difference between two primary colours, not between dark and light +shades of the same colour. + +Browning had often heard not only of the public, but of the private +life of this lady from his father's friend Kenyon. The old man, who +was one of those rare and valuable people who have a talent for +establishing definite relationships with people after a comparatively +short intercourse, had been appointed by Miss Barrett as her "fairy +godfather." He spoke much about her to Browning, and of Browning to +her, with a certain courtly garrulity which was one of his talents. +And there could be little doubt that the two poets would have met long +before had it not been for certain peculiarities in the position of +Miss Barrett. She was an invalid, and an invalid of a somewhat unique +kind, and living beyond all question under very unique circumstances. + +Her father, Edward Moulton Barrett, had been a landowner in the West +Indies, and thus, by a somewhat curious coincidence, had borne a part +in the same social system which stung Browning's father into revolt +and renunciation. The parts played by Edward Barrett, however, though +little or nothing is known of it, was probably very different. He was +a man Conservative by nature, a believer in authority in the nation +and the family, and endowed with some faculties for making his +conceptions prevail. He was an able man, capable in his language of a +certain bitter felicity of phrase. He was rigidly upright and +responsible, and he had a capacity for profound affection. But +selfishness of the most perilous sort, an unconscious selfishness, was +eating away his moral foundations, as it tends to eat away those of +all despots. His most fugitive moods changed and controlled the whole +atmosphere of the house, and the state of things was fully as +oppressive in the case of his good moods as in the case of his bad +ones. He had, what is perhaps the subtlest and worst spirit of +egotism, not that spirit merely which thinks that nothing should stand +in the way of its ill-temper, but that spirit which thinks that +nothing should stand in the way of its amiability. His daughters must +be absolutely at his beck and call, whether it was to be brow-beaten +or caressed. During the early years of Elizabeth Barrett's life, the +family had lived in the country, and for that brief period she had +known a more wholesome life than she was destined ever to know again +until her marriage long afterwards. She was not, as is the general +popular idea, absolutely a congenital invalid, weak, and almost +moribund from the cradle. In early girlhood she was slight and +sensitive indeed, but perfectly active and courageous. She was a good +horsewoman, and the accident which handicapped her for so many years +afterwards happened to her when she was riding. The injury to her +spine, however, will be found, the more we study her history, to be +only one of the influences which were to darken those bedridden years, +and to have among them a far less important place than has hitherto +been attached to it. Her father moved to a melancholy house in Wimpole +Street; and his own character growing gloomier and stranger as time +went on, he mounted guard over his daughter's sickbed in a manner +compounded of the pessimist and the disciplinarian. She was not +permitted to stir from the sofa, often not even to cross two rooms to +her bed. Her father came and prayed over her with a kind of melancholy +glee, and with the avowed solemnity of a watcher by a deathbed. She +was surrounded by that most poisonous and degrading of all +atmospheres--a medical atmosphere. The existence of this atmosphere +has nothing to do with the actual nature or prolongation of disease. A +man may pass three hours out of every five in a state of bad health, +and yet regard, as Stevenson regarded, the three hours as exceptional +and the two as normal. But the curse that lay on the Barrett household +was the curse of considering ill-health the natural condition of a +human being. The truth was that Edward Barrett was living emotionally +and aesthetically, like some detestable decadent poet, upon his +daughter's decline. He did not know this, but it was so. Scenes, +explanations, prayers, fury, and forgiveness had become bread and meat +for which he hungered; and when the cloud was upon his spirit, he +would lash out at all things and every one with the insatiable cruelty +of the sentimentalist. + +It is wonderful that Elizabeth Barrett was not made thoroughly morbid +and impotent by this intolerable violence and more intolerable +tenderness. In her estimate of her own health she did, of course, +suffer. It is evident that she practically believed herself to be +dying. But she was a high-spirited woman, full of that silent and +quite unfathomable kind of courage which is only found in women, and +she took a much more cheerful view of death than her father did of +life. Silent rooms, low voices, lowered blinds, long days of +loneliness, and of the sickliest kind of sympathy, had not tamed a +spirit which was swift and headlong to a fault. She could still own +with truth the magnificent fact that her chief vice was impatience, +"tearing open parcels instead of untying them;" looking at the end of +books before she had read them was, she said, incurable with her. It +is difficult to imagine anything more genuinely stirring than the +achievement of this woman, who thus contrived, while possessing all +the excuses of an invalid, to retain some of the faults of a tomboy. + +Impetuosity, vividness, a certain absoluteness and urgency in her +demands, marked her in the eyes of all who came in contact with her. +In after years, when Browning had experimentally shaved his beard off, +she told him with emphatic gestures that it must be grown again "that +minute." There we have very graphically the spirit which tears open +parcels. Not in vain, or as a mere phrase, did her husband after her +death describe her as "all a wonder and a wild desire." + +She had, of course, lived her second and real life in literature and +the things of the mind, and this in a very genuine and strenuous +sense. Her mental occupations were not mere mechanical accomplishments +almost as colourless as the monotony they relieved, nor were they +coloured in any visible manner by the unwholesome atmosphere in which +she breathed. She used her brains seriously; she was a good Greek +scholar, and read AEschylus and Euripides unceasingly with her blind +friend, Mr. Boyd; and she had, and retained even to the hour of her +death, a passionate and quite practical interest in great public +questions. Naturally she was not uninterested in Robert Browning, but +it does not appear that she felt at this time the same kind of fiery +artistic curiosity that he felt about her. He does appear to have felt +an attraction, which may almost be called mystical, for the +personality which was shrouded from the world by such sombre curtains. +In 1845 he addressed a letter to her in which he spoke of a former +occasion on which they had nearly met, and compared it to the +sensation of having once been outside the chapel of some marvellous +illumination and found the door barred against him. In that phrase it +is easy to see how much of the romantic boyhood of Browning remained +inside the resolute man of the world into which he was to all external +appearance solidifying. Miss Barrett replied to his letters with +charming sincerity and humour, and with much of that leisurely +self-revelation which is possible for an invalid who has nothing else +to do. She herself, with her love of quiet and intellectual +companionship, would probably have been quite happy for the rest of +her life if their relations had always remained a learned and +delightful correspondence. But she must have known very little of +Robert Browning if she imagined he would be contented with this airy +and bloodless tie. At all times of his life he was sufficiently fond +of his own way; at this time he was especially prompt and impulsive, +and he had always a great love for seeing and hearing and feeling +people, a love of the physical presence of friends, which made him +slap men on the back and hit them in the chest when he was very fond +of them. The correspondence between the two poets had not long begun +when Browning suggested something which was almost a blasphemy in the +Barrett household, that he should come and call on her as he would on +any one else. This seems to have thrown her into a flutter of fear and +doubt. She alleges all kinds of obstacles, the chief of which were her +health and the season of the year and the east winds. "If my truest +heart's wishes avail," replied Browning obstinately, "you shall laugh +at east winds yet as I do." + +Then began the chief part of that celebrated correspondence which has +within comparatively recent years been placed before the world. It is +a correspondence which has very peculiar qualities and raises many +profound questions. + +It is impossible to deal at any length with the picture given in these +remarkable letters of the gradual progress and amalgamation of two +spirits of great natural potency and independence, without saying at +least a word about the moral question raised by their publication and +the many expressions of disapproval which it entails. To the mind of +the present writer the whole of such a question should be tested by +one perfectly clear intellectual distinction and comparison. I am not +prepared to admit that there is or can be, properly speaking, in the +world anything that is too sacred to be known. That spiritual beauty +and spiritual truth are in their nature communicable, and that they +should be communicated, is a principle which lies at the root of every +conceivable religion. Christ was crucified upon a hill, and not in a +cavern, and the word Gospel itself involves the same idea as the +ordinary name of a daily paper. Whenever, therefore, a poet or any +similar type of man can, or conceives that he can, make all men +partakers in some splendid secret of his own heart, I can imagine +nothing saner and nothing manlier than his course in doing so. Thus it +was that Dante made a new heaven and a new hell out of a girl's nod in +the streets of Florence. Thus it was that Paul founded a civilisation +by keeping an ethical diary. But the one essential which exists in all +such cases as these is that the man in question believes that he can +make the story as stately to the whole world as it is to him, and he +chooses his words to that end. Yet when a work contains expressions +which have one value and significance when read by the people to whom +they were addressed, and an entirely different value and significance +when read by any one else, then the element of the violation of +sanctity does arise. It is not because there is anything in this world +too sacred to tell. It is rather because there are a great many things +in this world too sacred to parody. If Browning could really convey to +the world the inmost core of his affection for his wife, I see no +reason why he should not. But the objection to letters which begin "My +dear Ba," is that they do not convey anything of the sort. As far as +any third person is concerned, Browning might as well have been +expressing the most noble and universal sentiment in the dialect of +the Cherokees. Objection to the publication of such passages as that, +in short, is not the fact that they tell us about the love of the +Brownings, but that they do not tell us about it. + +Upon this principle it is obvious that there should have been a +selection among the Letters, but not a selection which should exclude +anything merely because it was ardent and noble. If Browning or Mrs. +Browning had not desired any people to know that they were fond of +each other, they would not have written and published "One Word More" +or "The Sonnets from the Portuguese." Nay, they would not have been +married in a public church, for every one who is married in a church +does make a confession of love of absolutely national publicity, and +tacitly, therefore, repudiates any idea that such confessions are too +sacred for the world to know. The ridiculous theory that men should +have no noble passions or sentiments in public may have been designed +to make private life holy and undefiled, but it has had very little +actual effect except to make public life cynical and preposterously +unmeaning. But the words of a poem or the words of the English +Marriage Service, which are as fine as many poems, is a language +dignified and deliberately intended to be understood by all. If the +bride and bridegroom in church, instead of uttering those words, were +to utter a poem compounded of private allusions to the foibles of Aunt +Matilda, or of childish secrets which they would tell each other in a +lane, it would be a parallel case to the publication of some of the +Browning Letters. Why the serious and universal portions of those +Letters could not be published without those which are to us idle and +unmeaning it is difficult to understand. Our wisdom, whether expressed +in private or public, belongs to the world, but our folly belongs to +those we love. + +There is at least one peculiarity in the Browning Letters which tends +to make their publication far less open to objection than almost any +other collection of love letters which can be imagined. The ordinary +sentimentalist who delights in the most emotional of magazine +interviews, will not be able to get much satisfaction out of them, +because he and many persons more acute will be quite unable to make +head or tail of three consecutive sentences. In this respect it is the +most extraordinary correspondence in the world. There seem to be only +two main rules for this form of letter-writing: the first is, that if +a sentence can begin with a parenthesis it always should; and the +second is, that if you have written from a third to half of a sentence +you need never in any case write any more. It would be amusing to +watch any one who felt an idle curiosity as to the language and +secrets of lovers opening the Browning Letters. He would probably come +upon some such simple and lucid passage as the following: "I ought to +wait, say a week at least, having killed all your mules for you, +before I shot down your dogs.... But not being Phoibos Apollon, you +are to know further that when I _did_ think I might go modestly on ... +[Greek: omoi], let me get out of this slough of a simile, never mind +with what dislocated ankles." + +What our imaginary sentimentalist would make of this tender passage it +is difficult indeed to imagine. The only plain conclusion which +appears to emerge from the words is the somewhat curious one--that +Browning was in the habit of taking a gun down to Wimpole Street and +of demolishing the live stock on those somewhat unpromising premises. +Nor will he be any better enlightened if he turns to the reply of +Miss Barrett, which seems equally dominated with the great central +idea of the Browning correspondence that the most enlightening +passages in a letter consist of dots. She replies in a letter +following the above: "But if it could be possible that you should mean +to say you would show me. . . . Can it be? or am I reading this 'Attic +contraction' quite the wrong way. You see I am afraid of the +difference between flattering myself and being flattered . . . the +fatal difference. And now will you understand that I should be too +overjoyed to have revelations from the Portfolio . . . however +incarnated with blots and pen scratches . . . to be able to ask +impudently of them now? Is that plain?" Most probably she thought it +was. + +With regard to Browning himself this characteristic is comparatively +natural and appropriate. Browning's prose was in any case the most +roundabout affair in the world. Those who knew him say that he would +often send an urgent telegram from which it was absolutely impossible +to gather where the appointment was, or when it was, or what was its +object. This fact is one of the best of all arguments against the +theory of Browning's intellectual conceit. A man would have to be +somewhat abnormally conceited in order to spend sixpence for the +pleasure of sending an unintelligible communication to the dislocation +of his own plans. The fact was, that it was part of the machinery of +his brain that things came out of it, as it were, backwards. The words +"tail foremost" express Browning's style with something more than a +conventional accuracy. The tail, the most insignificant part of an +animal, is also often the most animated and fantastic. An utterance of +Browning is often like a strange animal walking backwards, who +flourishes his tail with such energy that every one takes it for his +head. He was in other words, at least in his prose and practical +utterances, more or less incapable of telling a story without telling +the least important thing first. If a man who belonged to an Italian +secret society, one local branch of which bore as a badge an +olive-green ribbon, had entered his house, and in some sensational +interview tried to bribe or blackmail him, he would have told the +story with great energy and indignation, but he would have been +incapable of beginning with anything except the question of the colour +of olives. His whole method was founded both in literature and life +upon the principle of the "ex pede Herculem," and at the beginning of +his description of Hercules the foot appears some sizes larger than +the hero. It is, in short, natural enough that Browning should have +written his love letters obscurely, since he wrote his letters to his +publisher and his solicitor obscurely. In the case of Mrs. Browning it +is somewhat more difficult to understand. For she at least had, beyond +all question, a quite simple and lucent vein of humour, which does not +easily reconcile itself with this subtlety. But she was partly under +the influence of her own quality of passionate ingenuity or emotional +wit of which we have already taken notice in dealing with her poems, +and she was partly also no doubt under the influence of Browning. +Whatever was the reason, their correspondence was not of the sort +which can be pursued very much by the outside public. Their letters +may be published a hundred times over, they still remain private. They +write to each other in a language of their own, an almost +exasperatingly impressionist language, a language chiefly consisting +of dots and dashes and asterisks and italics, and brackets and notes +of interrogation. Wordsworth when he heard afterwards of their +eventual elopement said with that slight touch of bitterness he always +used in speaking of Browning, "So Robert Browning and Miss Barrett +have gone off together. I hope they understand each other--nobody else +would." It would be difficult to pay a higher compliment to a +marriage. Their common affection for Kenyon was a great element in +their lives and in their correspondence. "I have a convenient theory +to account for Mr. Kenyon," writes Browning mysteriously, "and his +otherwise unaccountable kindness to me." "For Mr. Kenyon's kindness," +retorts Elizabeth Barrett, "no theory will account. I class it with +mesmerism for that reason." There is something very dignified and +beautiful about the simplicity of these two poets vying with each +other in giving adequate praise to the old dilettante, of whom the +world would never have heard but for them. Browning's feeling for him +was indeed especially strong and typical. "There," he said, pointing +after the old man as he left the room, "there goes one of the most +splendid men living--a man so noble in his friendship, so lavish in +his hospitality, so large-hearted and benevolent, that he deserves to +be known all over the world as 'Kenyon the Magnificent.'" There is +something thoroughly worthy of Browning at his best in this feeling, +not merely of the use of sociability, or of the charm of sociability, +but of the magnificence, the heroic largeness of real sociability. +Being himself a warm champion of the pleasures of society, he saw in +Kenyon a kind of poetic genius for the thing, a mission of +superficial philanthropy. He is thoroughly to be congratulated on the +fact that he had grasped the great but now neglected truth, that a man +may actually be great, yet not in the least able. + +Browning's desire to meet Miss Barrett was received on her side, as +has been stated, with a variety of objections. The chief of these was +the strangely feminine and irrational reason that she was not worth +seeing, a point on which the seeker for an interview might be +permitted to form his own opinion. "There is nothing to see in me; nor +to hear in me.--I never learned to talk as you do in London; although +I can admire that brightness of carved speech in Mr. Kenyon and +others. If my poetry is worth anything to any eye, it is the flower of +me. I have lived most and been most happy in it, and so it has all my +colours; the rest of me is nothing but a root, fit for the ground and +dark." The substance of Browning's reply was to the effect, "I will +call at two on Tuesday." + +They met on May 20, 1845. A short time afterwards he had fallen in +love with her and made her an offer of marriage. To a person in the +domestic atmosphere of the Barretts, the incident would appear to have +been paralysing. "I will tell you what I once said in jest ..." she +writes, "If a prince of El Dorado should come with a pedigree of +lineal descent from some signory in the moon in one hand and a ticket +of good behaviour from the nearest Independent chapel in the +other!--'Why, even _then_,' said my sister Arabel, 'it would not +_do_.' And she was right; we all agreed that she was right." + +This may be taken as a fairly accurate description of the real state +of Mr. Barrett's mind on one subject. It is illustrative of the very +best and breeziest side of Elizabeth Barrett's character that she +could be so genuinely humorous over so tragic a condition of the human +mind. + +Browning's proposals were, of course, as matters stood, of a character +to dismay and repel all those who surrounded Elizabeth Barrett. It was +not wholly a matter of the fancies of her father. The whole of her +family, and most probably the majority of her medical advisers, did +seriously believe at this time that she was unfit to be moved, to say +nothing of being married, and that a life passed between a bed and a +sofa, and avoiding too frequent and abrupt transitions even from one +to the other, was the only life she could expect on this earth. Almost +alone in holding another opinion and in urging her to a more vigorous +view of her condition, stood Browning himself. "But you are better," +he would say; "you look so and speak so." Which of the two opinions +was right is of course a complex medical matter into which a book like +this has neither the right nor the need to enter. But this much may be +stated as a mere question of fact. In the summer of 1846 Elizabeth +Barrett was still living under the great family convention which +provided her with nothing but an elegant deathbed, forbidden to move, +forbidden to see proper daylight, forbidden to receive a friend lest +the shock should destroy her suddenly. A year or two later, in Italy, +as Mrs. Browning, she was being dragged up hill in a wine hamper, +toiling up to the crests of mountains at four o'clock in the morning, +riding for five miles on a donkey to what she calls "an inaccessible +volcanic ground not far from the stars." It is perfectly incredible +that any one so ill as her family believed her to be should have +lived this life for twenty-four hours. Something must be allowed for +the intoxication of a new tie and a new interest in life. But such +exaltations can in their nature hardly last a month, and Mrs. Browning +lived for fifteen years afterwards in infinitely better health than +she had ever known before. In the light of modern knowledge it is not +very difficult or very presumptuous, of us to guess that she had been +in her father's house to some extent inoculated with hysteria, that +strange affliction which some people speak of as if it meant the +absence of disease, but which is in truth the most terrible of all +diseases. It must be remembered that in 1846 little or nothing was +known of spine complaints such as that from which Elizabeth Barrett +suffered, less still of the nervous conditions they create, and least +of all of hysterical phenomena. In our day she would have been ordered +air and sunlight and activity, and all the things the mere idea of +which chilled the Barretts with terror. In our day, in short, it would +have been recognised that she was in the clutch of a form of neurosis +which exhibits every fact of a disease except its origin, that strange +possession which makes the body itself a hypocrite. Those who +surrounded Miss Barrett knew nothing of this, and Browning knew +nothing of it; and probably if he knew anything, knew less than they +did. Mrs. Orr says, probably with a great deal of truth, that of +ill-health and its sensations he remained "pathetically ignorant" to +his dying day. But devoid as he was alike of expert knowledge and +personal experience, without a shadow of medical authority, almost +without anything that can be formally called a right to his opinion, +he was, and remained, right. He at least saw, he indeed alone saw, to +the practical centre of the situation. He did not know anything about +hysteria or neurosis, or the influence of surroundings, but he knew +that the atmosphere of Mr. Barrett's house was not a fit thing for any +human being, alive, dying, or dead. His stand upon this matter has +really a certain human interest, since it is an example of a thing +which will from time to time occur, the interposition of the average +man to the confounding of the experts. Experts are undoubtedly right +nine times out of ten, but the tenth time comes, and we find in +military matters an Oliver Cromwell who will make every mistake known +to strategy and yet win all his battles, and in medical matters a +Robert Browning whose views have not a technical leg to stand on and +are entirely correct. + +But while Browning was thus standing alone in his view of the matter, +while Edward Barrett had to all appearance on his side a phalanx of +all the sanities and respectabilities, there came suddenly a new +development, destined to bring matters to a crisis indeed, and to +weigh at least three souls in the balance. Upon further examination of +Miss Barrett's condition, the physicians had declared that it was +absolutely necessary that she should be taken to Italy. This may, +without any exaggeration, be called the turning-point and the last +great earthly opportunity of Barrett's character. He had not +originally been an evil man, only a man who, being stoical in +practical things, permitted himself, to his great detriment, a +self-indulgence in moral things. He had grown to regard his pious and +dying daughter as part of the furniture of the house and of the +universe. And as long as the great mass of authorities were on his +side, his illusion was quite pardonable. His crisis came when the +authorities changed their front, and with one accord asked his +permission to send his daughter abroad. It was his crisis, and he +refused. + +He had, if we may judge from what we know of him, his own peculiar and +somewhat detestable way of refusing. Once when his daughter had asked +a perfectly simple favour in a matter of expediency, permission, that +is, to keep her favourite brother with her during an illness, her +singular parent remarked that "she might keep him if she liked, but +that he had looked for greater self-sacrifice." These were the weapons +with which he ruled his people. For the worst tyrant is not the man +who rules by fear; the worst tyrant is he who rules by love and plays +on it as on a harp. Barrett was one of the oppressors who have +discovered the last secret of oppression, that which is told in the +fine verse of Swinburne:-- + + "The racks of the earth and the rods + Are weak as the foam on the sands; + The heart is the prey for the gods, + Who crucify hearts, not hands." + +He, with his terrible appeal to the vibrating consciences of women, +was, with regard to one of them, very near to the end of his reign. +When Browning heard that the Italian journey was forbidden, he +proposed definitely that they should marry and go on the journey +together. + +Many other persons had taken cognisance of the fact, and were active +in the matter. Kenyon, the gentlest and most universally complimentary +of mortals, had marched into the house and given Arabella Barrett, +the sister of the sick woman, his opinion of her father's conduct +with a degree of fire and frankness which must have been perfectly +amazing in a man of his almost antiquated social delicacy. Mrs. +Jameson, an old and generous friend of the family, had immediately +stepped in and offered to take Elizabeth to Italy herself, thus +removing all questions of expense or arrangement. She would appear to +have stood to her guns in the matter with splendid persistence and +magnanimity. She called day after day seeking for a change of mind, +and delayed her own journey to the continent more than once. At +length, when it became evident that the extraction of Mr. Barrett's +consent was hopeless, she reluctantly began her own tour in Europe +alone. She went to Paris, and had not been there many days, when she +received a formal call from Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett +Browning, who had been married for some days. Her astonishment is +rather a picturesque thing to think about. + +The manner in which this sensational elopement, which was, of course, +the talk of the whole literary world, had been effected, is narrated, +as every one knows, in the Browning Letters. Browning had decided that +an immediate marriage was the only solution; and having put his hand +to the plough, did not decline even when it became obviously necessary +that it should be a secret marriage. To a man of his somewhat stormily +candid and casual disposition this necessity of secrecy was really +exasperating; but every one with any imagination or chivalry will +rejoice that he accepted the evil conditions. He had always had the +courage to tell the truth; and now it was demanded of him to have the +greater courage to tell a lie, and he told it with perfect +cheerfulness and lucidity. In thus disappearing surreptitiously with +an invalid woman he was doing something against which there were +undoubtedly a hundred things to be said, only it happened that the +most cogent and important thing of all was to be said for it. + +It is very amusing, and very significant in the matter of Browning's +character, to read the accounts which he writes to Elizabeth Barrett +of his attitude towards the approaching _coup de theatre_. In one +place he says, suggestively enough, that he does not in the least +trouble about the disapproval of her father; the man whom he fears as +a frustrating influence is Kenyon. Mr. Barrett could only walk into +the room and fly into a passion; and this Browning could have received +with perfect equanimity. "But," he says, "if Kenyon knows of the +matter, I shall have the kindest and friendliest of explanations (with +his arm on my shoulder) of how I am ruining your social position, +destroying your health, etc., etc." This touch is very suggestive of +the power of the old worldling, who could manoeuvre with young people +as well as Major Pendennis. Kenyon had indeed long been perfectly +aware of the way in which things were going; and the method he adopted +in order to comment on it is rather entertaining. In a conversation +with Elizabeth Barrett, he asked carelessly whether there was anything +between her sister and a certain Captain Cooke. On receiving a +surprised reply in the negative, he remarked apologetically that he +had been misled into the idea by the gentleman calling so often at the +house. Elizabeth Barrett knew perfectly well what he meant; but the +logical allusiveness of the attack reminds one of a fragment of some +Meredithian comedy. + +The manner in which Browning bore himself in this acute and +necessarily dubious position is, perhaps, more thoroughly to his +credit than anything else in his career. He never came out so well in +all his long years of sincerity and publicity as he does in this one +act of deception. Having made up his mind to that act, he is not +ashamed to name it; neither, on the other hand, does he rant about it, +and talk about Philistine prejudices and higher laws and brides in the +sight of God, after the manner of the cockney decadent. He was +breaking a social law, but he was not declaring a crusade against +social laws. We all feel, whatever may be our opinions on the matter, +that the great danger of this kind of social opportunism, this pitting +of a private necessity against a public custom, is that men are +somewhat too weak and self-deceptive to be trusted with such a power +of giving dispensations to themselves. We feel that men without +meaning to do so might easily begin by breaking a social by-law and +end by being thoroughly anti-social. One of the best and most striking +things to notice about Robert Browning is the fact that he did this +thing considering it as an exception, and that he contrived to leave +it really exceptional. It did not in the least degree break the +rounded clearness of his loyalty to social custom. It did not in the +least degree weaken the sanctity of the general rule. At a supreme +crisis of his life he did an unconventional thing, and he lived and +died conventional. It would be hard to say whether he appears the more +thoroughly sane in having performed the act, or in not having allowed +it to affect him. + +Elizabeth Barrett gradually gave way under the obstinate and almost +monotonous assertion of Browning that this elopement was the only +possible course of action. Before she finally agreed, however, she did +something, which in its curious and impulsive symbolism, belongs +almost to a more primitive age. The sullen system of medical seclusion +to which she had long been subjected has already been described. The +most urgent and hygienic changes were opposed by many on the ground +that it was not safe for her to leave her sofa and her sombre room. On +the day on which it was necessary for her finally to accept or reject +Browning's proposal, she called her sister to her, and to the +amazement and mystification of that lady asked for a carriage. In this +she drove into Regent's Park, alighted, walked on to the grass, and +stood leaning against a tree for some moments, looking round her at +the leaves and the sky. She then entered the cab again, drove home, +and agreed to the elopement. This was possibly the best poem that she +ever produced. + +Browning arranged the eccentric adventure with a great deal of +prudence and knowledge of human nature. Early one morning in September +1846 Miss Barrett walked quietly out of her father's house, became +Mrs. Robert Browning in a church in Marylebone, and returned home +again as if nothing had happened. In this arrangement Browning showed +some of that real insight into the human spirit which ought to make a +poet the most practical of all men. The incident was, in the nature of +things, almost overpoweringly exciting to his wife, in spite of the +truly miraculous courage with which she supported it; and he desired, +therefore, to call in the aid of the mysteriously tranquillising +effect of familiar scenes and faces. One trifling incident is worth +mentioning which is almost unfathomably characteristic of Browning. It +has already been remarked in these pages that he was pre-eminently one +of those men whose expanding opinions never alter by a hairsbreadth +the actual ground-plan of their moral sense. Browning would have felt +the same things right and the same things wrong, whatever views he had +held. During the brief and most trying period between his actual +marriage and his actual elopement, it is most significant that he +would not call at the house in Wimpole Street, because he would have +been obliged to ask if Miss Barrett was disengaged. He was acting a +lie; he was deceiving a father; he was putting a sick woman to a +terrible risk; and these things he did not disguise from himself for a +moment, but he could not bring himself to say two words to a +maidservant. Here there may be partly the feeling of the literary man +for the sacredness of the uttered word, but there is far more of a +certain rooted traditional morality which it is impossible either to +describe or to justify. Browning's respectability was an older and +more primeval thing than the oldest and most primeval passions of +other men. If we wish to understand him, we must always remember that +in dealing with any of his actions we have not to ask whether the +action contains the highest morality, but whether we should have felt +inclined to do it ourselves. + +At length the equivocal and exhausting interregnum was over. Mrs. +Browning went for the second time almost on tiptoe out of her father's +house, accompanied only by her maid and her dog, which was only just +successfully prevented from barking. Before the end of the day in all +probability Barrett had discovered that his dying daughter had fled +with Browning to Italy. + +They never saw him again, and hardly more than a faint echo came to +them of the domestic earthquake which they left behind them. They do +not appear to have had many hopes, or to have made many attempts at a +reconciliation. Elizabeth Barrett had discovered at last that her +father was in truth not a man to be treated with; hardly, perhaps, +even a man to be blamed. She knew to all intents and purposes that she +had grown up in the house of a madman. + + + + +CHAPTER IV + +BROWNING IN ITALY + + +The married pair went to Pisa in 1846, and moved soon afterwards to +Florence. Of the life of the Brownings in Italy there is much perhaps +to be said in the way of description and analysis, little to be said +in the way of actual narrative. Each of them had passed through the +one incident of existence. Just as Elizabeth Barrett's life had before +her marriage been uneventfully sombre, now it was uneventfully happy. +A succession of splendid landscapes, a succession of brilliant +friends, a succession of high and ardent intellectual interests, they +experienced; but their life was of the kind that if it were told at +all, would need to be told in a hundred volumes of gorgeous +intellectual gossip. How Browning and his wife rode far into the +country, eating strawberries and drinking milk out of the basins of +the peasants; how they fell in with the strangest and most picturesque +figures of Italian society; how they climbed mountains and read books +and modelled in clay and played on musical instruments; how Browning +was made a kind of arbiter between two improvising Italian bards; how +he had to escape from a festivity when the sound of Garibaldi's hymn +brought the knocking of the Austrian police; these are the things of +which his life is full, trifling and picturesque things, a series of +interludes, a beautiful and happy story, beginning and ending nowhere. +The only incidents, perhaps, were the birth of their son and the death +of Browning's mother in 1849. + +It is well known that Browning loved Italy; that it was his adopted +country; that he said in one of the finest of his lyrics that the name +of it would be found written on his heart. But the particular +character of this love of Browning for Italy needs to be understood. +There are thousands of educated Europeans who love Italy, who live in +it, who visit it annually, who come across a continent to see it, who +hunt out its darkest picture and its most mouldering carving; but they +are all united in this, that they regard Italy as a dead place. It is +a branch of their universal museum, a department of dry bones. There +are rich and cultivated persons, particularly Americans, who seem to +think that they keep Italy, as they might keep an aviary or a +hothouse, into which they might walk whenever they wanted a whiff of +beauty. Browning did not feel at all in this manner; he was +intrinsically incapable of offering such an insult to the soul of a +nation. If he could not have loved Italy as a nation, he would not +have consented to love it as an old curiosity shop. In everything on +earth, from the Middle Ages to the amoeba, who is discussed at such +length in "Mr. Sludge the Medium," he is interested in the life in +things. He was interested in the life in Italian art and in the life +in Italian politics. + +Perhaps the first and simplest example that can be given of this +matter is in Browning's interest in art. He was immeasurably +fascinated at all times by painting and sculpture, and his sojourn in +Italy gave him, of course, innumerable and perfect opportunities for +the study of painting and sculpture. But his interest in these studies +was not like that of the ordinary cultured visitor to the Italian +cities. Thousands of such visitors, for example, study those endless +lines of magnificent Pagan busts which are to be found in nearly all +the Italian galleries and museums, and admire them, and talk about +them, and note them in their catalogues, and describe them in their +diaries. But the way in which they affected Browning is described very +suggestively in a passage in the letters of his wife. She describes +herself as longing for her husband to write poems, beseeching him to +write poems, but finding all her petitions useless because her husband +was engaged all day in modelling busts in clay and breaking them as +fast as he made them. This is Browning's interest in art, the interest +in a living thing, the interest in a growing thing, the insatiable +interest in how things are done. Every one who knows his admirable +poems on painting--"Fra Lippo Lippi" and "Andrea del Sarto" and +"Pictor Ignotus"--will remember how fully they deal with +technicalities, how they are concerned with canvas, with oil, with a +mess of colours. Sometimes they are so technical as to be mysterious +to the casual reader. An extreme case may be found in that of a lady I +once knew who had merely read the title of "Pacchiarotto and how he +worked in distemper," and thought that Pacchiarotto was the name of a +dog, whom no attacks of canine disease could keep from the fulfilment +of his duty. These Browning poems do not merely deal with painting; +they smell of paint. They are the works of a man to whom art is not +what it is to so many of the non-professional lovers of art, a thing +accomplished, a valley of bones: to him it is a field of crops +continually growing in a busy and exciting silence. Browning was +interested, like some scientific man, in the obstetrics of art. There +is a large army of educated men who can talk art with artists; but +Browning could not merely talk art with artists--he could talk shop +with them. Personally he may not have known enough about painting to +be more than a fifth-rate painter, or enough about the organ to be +more than a sixth-rate organist. But there are, when all is said and +done, some things which a fifth-rate painter knows which a first-rate +art critic does not know; there are some things which a sixth-rate +organist knows which a first-rate judge of music does not know. And +these were the things that Browning knew. + +He was, in other words, what is called an amateur. The word amateur +has come by the thousand oddities of language to convey an idea of +tepidity; whereas the word itself has the meaning of passion. Nor is +this peculiarity confined to the mere form of the word; the actual +characteristic of these nameless dilettanti is a genuine fire and +reality. A man must love a thing very much if he not only practises it +without any hope of fame or money, but even practises it without any +hope of doing it well. Such a man must love the toils of the work more +than any other man can love the rewards of it. Browning was in this +strict sense a strenuous amateur. He tried and practised in the course +of his life half a hundred things at which he can never have even for +a moment expected to succeed. The story of his life is full of absurd +little ingenuities, such as the discovery of a way of making pictures +by roasting brown paper over a candle. In precisely the same spirit +of fruitless vivacity, he made himself to a very considerable extent a +technical expert in painting, a technical expert in sculpture, a +technical expert in music. In his old age, he shows traces of being so +bizarre a thing as an abstract police detective, writing at length in +letters and diaries his views of certain criminal cases in an Italian +town. Indeed, his own _Ring and the Book_ is merely a sublime +detective story. He was in a hundred things this type of man; he was +precisely in the position, with a touch of greater technical success, +of the admirable figure in Stevenson's story who said, "I can play the +fiddle nearly well enough to earn a living in the orchestra of a penny +gaff, but not quite." + +The love of Browning for Italian art, therefore, was anything but an +antiquarian fancy; it was the love of a living thing. We see the same +phenomenon in an even more important matter--the essence and +individuality of the country itself. + +Italy to Browning and his wife was not by any means merely that +sculptured and ornate sepulchre that it is to so many of those +cultivated English men and women who live in Italy and enjoy and +admire and despise it. To them it was a living nation, the type and +centre of the religion and politics of a continent; the ancient and +flaming heart of Western history, the very Europe of Europe. And they +lived at the time of the most moving and gigantic of all dramas--the +making of a new nation, one of the things that makes men feel that +they are still in the morning of the earth. Before their eyes, with +every circumstance of energy and mystery, was passing the panorama of +the unification of Italy, with the bold and romantic militarism of +Garibaldi, the more bold and more romantic diplomacy of Cavour. They +lived in a time when affairs of State had almost the air of works of +art; and it is not strange that these two poets should have become +politicians in one of those great creative epochs when even the +politicians have to be poets. + +Browning was on this question and on all the questions of continental +and English politics a very strong Liberal. This fact is not a mere +detail of purely biographical interest, like any view he might take of +the authorship of the "Eikon Basilike" or the authenticity of the +Tichborne claimant. Liberalism was so inevitably involved in the +poet's whole view of existence, that even a thoughtful and imaginative +Conservative would feel that Browning was bound to be a Liberal. His +mind was possessed, perhaps even to excess, by a belief in growth and +energy and in the ultimate utility of error. He held the great central +Liberal doctrine, a belief in a certain destiny of the human spirit +beyond, and perhaps even independent of, our own sincerest +convictions. The world was going right he felt, most probably in his +way, but certainly in its own way. The sonnet which he wrote in later +years, entitled "Why I am a Liberal," expresses admirably this +philosophical root of his politics. It asks in effect how he, who had +found truth in so many strange forms after so many strange wanderings, +can be expected to stifle with horror the eccentricities of others. A +Liberal may be defined approximately as a man who, if he could by +waving his hand in a dark room, stop the mouths of all the deceivers +of mankind for ever, would not wave his hand. Browning was a Liberal +in this sense. + +And just as the great Liberal movement which followed the French +Revolution made this claim for the liberty and personality of human +beings, so it made it for the liberty and personality of nations. It +attached indeed to the independence of a nation something of the same +wholly transcendental sanctity which humanity has in all legal systems +attached to the life of a man. The grounds were indeed much the same; +no one could say absolutely that a live man was useless, and no one +could say absolutely that a variety of national life was useless or +must remain useless to the world. Men remembered how often barbarous +tribes or strange and alien Scriptures had been called in to revive +the blood of decaying empires and civilisations. And this sense of the +personality of a nation, as distinct from the personalities of all +other nations, did not involve in the case of these old Liberals +international bitterness; for it is too often forgotten that +friendship demands independence and equality fully as much as war. But +in them it led to great international partialities, to a great system, +as it were, of adopted countries which made so thorough a Scotchman as +Carlyle in love with Germany, and so thorough an Englishman as +Browning in love with Italy. + +And while on the one side of the struggle was this great ideal of +energy and variety, on the other side was something which we now find +it difficult to realise or describe. We have seen in our own time a +great reaction in favour of monarchy, aristocracy, andecclesiasticism, +a reaction almost entirely noble in its instinct, and dwelling almost +entirely on the best periods and the best qualities of the old +_regime_. But the modern man, full of admiration for the great virtue +of chivalry which is at the heart of aristocracies, and the great +virtue of reverence which is at the heart of ceremonial religion, is +not in a position to form any idea of how profoundly unchivalrous, how +astonishingly irreverent, how utterly mean, and material, and devoid +of mystery or sentiment were the despotic systems of Europe which +survived, and for a time conquered, the Revolution. The case against +the Church in Italy in the time of Pio Nono was not the case which a +rationalist would urge against the Church of the time of St. Louis, +but diametrically the opposite case. Against the mediaeval Church it +might be said that she was too fantastic, too visionary, too dogmatic +about the destiny of man, too indifferent to all things but the +devotional side of the soul. Against the Church of Pio Nono the main +thing to be said was that it was simply and supremely cynical; that it +was not founded on the unworldly instinct for distorting life, but on +the worldly counsel to leave life as it is; that it was not the +inspirer of insane hopes, of reward and miracle, but the enemy, the +cool and sceptical enemy, of hope of any kind or description. The same +was true of the monarchical systems of Prussia and Austria and Russia +at this time. Their philosophy was not the philosophy of the cavaliers +who rode after Charles I. or Louis XIII. It was the philosophy of the +typical city uncle, advising every one, and especially the young, to +avoid enthusiasm, to avoid beauty, to regard life as a machine, +dependent only upon the two forces of comfort and fear. That was, +there can be little doubt, the real reason of the fascination of the +Napoleon legend--that while Napoleon was a despot like the rest, he +was a despot who went somewhere and did something, and defied the +pessimism of Europe, and erased the word "impossible." One does not +need to be a Bonapartist to rejoice at the way in which the armies of +the First Empire, shouting their songs and jesting with their +colonels, smote and broke into pieces the armies of Prussia and +Austria driven into battle with a cane. + +Browning, as we have said, was in Italy at the time of the break-up of +one part of this frozen continent of the non-possumus, Austria's hold +in the north of Italy was part of that elaborate and comfortable and +wholly cowardly and unmeaning compromise, which the Holy Alliance had +established, and which it believed without doubt in its solid unbelief +would last until the Day of Judgment, though it is difficult to +imagine what the Holy Alliance thought would happen then. But almost +of a sudden affairs had begun to move strangely, and the despotic +princes and their chancellors discovered with a great deal of +astonishment that they were not living in the old age of the world, +but to all appearance in a very unmanageable period of its boyhood. In +an age of ugliness and routine, in a time when diplomatists and +philosophers alike tended to believe that they had a list of all human +types, there began to appear men who belonged to the morning of the +world, men whose movements have a national breadth and beauty, who act +symbols and become legends while they are alive. Garibaldi in his red +shirt rode in an open carriage along the front of a hostile fort +calling to the coachman to drive slower, and not a man dared fire a +shot at him. Mazzini poured out upon Europe a new mysticism of +humanity and liberty, and was willing, like some passionate Jesuit of +the sixteenth century, to become in its cause either a philosopher or +a criminal. Cavour arose with a diplomacy which was more thrilling and +picturesque than war itself. These men had nothing to do with an age +of the impossible. They have passed, their theories along with them, +as all things pass; but since then we have had no men of their type +precisely, at once large and real and romantic and successful. Gordon +was a possible exception. They were the last of the heroes. + +When Browning was first living in Italy, a telegram which had been +sent to him was stopped on the frontier and suppressed on account of +his known sympathy with the Italian Liberals. It is almost impossible +for people living in a commonwealth like ours to understand how a +small thing like that will affect a man. It was not so much the +obvious fact that a great practical injury was really done to him; +that the telegram might have altered all his plans in matters of vital +moment. It was, over and above that, the sense of a hand laid on +something personal and essentially free. Tyranny like this is not the +worst tyranny, but it is the most intolerable. It interferes with men +not in the most serious matters, but precisely in those matters in +which they most resent interference. It may be illogical for men to +accept cheerfully unpardonable public scandals, benighted educational +systems, bad sanitation, bad lighting, a blundering and inefficient +system of life, and yet to resent the tearing up of a telegram or a +post-card; but the fact remains that the sensitiveness of men is a +strange and localised thing, and there is hardly a man in the world +who would not rather be ruled by despots chosen by lot and live in a +city like a mediaeval Ghetto, than be forbidden by a policeman to +smoke another cigarette, or sit up a quarter of an hour later; hardly +a man who would not feel inclined in such a case to raise a rebellion +for a caprice for which he did not really care a straw. Unmeaning and +muddle-headed tyranny in small things, that is the thing which, if +extended over many years, is harder to bear and hope through than the +massacres of September. And that was the nightmare of vexatious +triviality which was lying over all the cities of Italy that were +ruled by the bureaucratic despotisms of Europe. The history of the +time is full of spiteful and almost childish struggles--struggles +about the humming of a tune or the wearing of a colour, the arrest of +a journey, or the opening of a letter. And there can be little doubt +that Browning's temperament under these conditions was not of the kind +to become more indulgent, and there grew in him a hatred of the +Imperial and Ducal and Papal systems of Italy, which sometimes passed +the necessities of Liberalism, and sometimes even transgressed its +spirit. The life which he and his wife lived in Italy was +extraordinarily full and varied, when we consider the restrictions +under which one at least of them had always lain. They met and took +delight, notwithstanding their exile, in some of the most interesting +people of their time--Ruskin, Cardinal Manning, and Lord Lytton. +Browning, in a most characteristic way, enjoyed the society of all of +them, arguing with one, agreeing with another, sitting up all night by +the bedside of a third. + +It has frequently been stated that the only difference that ever +separated Mr. and Mrs. Browning was upon the question of spiritualism. +That statement must, of course, be modified and even contradicted if +it means that they never differed; that Mr. Browning never thought an +_Act of Parliament_ good when Mrs. Browning thought it bad; that Mr. +Browning never thought bread stale when Mrs. Browning thought it new. +Such unanimity is not only inconceivable, it is immoral; and as a +matter of fact, there is abundant evidence that their marriage +constituted something like that ideal marriage, an alliance between +two strong and independent forces. They differed, in truth, about a +great many things, for example, about Napoleon III. whom Mrs. Browning +regarded with an admiration which would have been somewhat beyond the +deserts of Sir Galahad, and whom Browning with his emphatic Liberal +principles could never pardon for the _Coup d'Etat_. If they differed +on spiritualism in a somewhat more serious way than this, the reason +must be sought in qualities which were deeper and more elemental in +both their characters than any mere matter of opinion. Mrs. Orr, in +her excellent _Life of Browning_, states that the difficulty arose +from Mrs. Browning's firm belief in psychical phenomena and Browning's +absolute refusal to believe even in their possibility. Another writer +who met them at this time says, "Browning cannot believe, and Mrs. +Browning cannot help believing." This theory, that Browning's aversion +to the spiritualist circle arose from an absolute denial of the +tenability of such a theory of life and death, has in fact often been +repeated. But it is exceedingly difficult to reconcile it with +Browning's character. He was the last man in the world to be +intellectually deaf to a hypothesis merely because it was odd. He had +friends whose opinions covered every description of madness from the +French legitimism of De Ripert-Monclar to the Republicanism of +Landor. Intellectually he may be said to have had a zest for heresies. +It is difficult to impute an attitude of mere impenetrable negation to +a man who had expressed with sympathy the religion of "Caliban" and +the morality of "Time's Revenges." It is true that at this time of the +first popular interest in spiritualism a feeling existed among many +people of a practical turn of mind, which can only be called a +superstition against believing in ghosts. But, intellectually +speaking, Browning would probably have been one of the most tolerant +and curious in regard to the new theories, whereas the popular version +of the matter makes him unusually intolerant and negligent even for +that time. The fact was in all probability that Browning's aversion to +the spiritualists had little or nothing to do with spiritualism. It +arose from quite a different side of his character--his uncompromising +dislike of what is called Bohemianism, of eccentric or slovenly +cliques, of those straggling camp followers of the arts who exhibit +dubious manners and dubious morals, of all abnormality and of all +irresponsibility. Any one, in fact, who wishes to see what it was that +Browning disliked need only do two things. First, he should read the +_Memoirs_ of David Home, the famous spiritualist medium with whom +Browning came in contact. These _Memoirs_ constitute a more thorough +and artistic self-revelation than any monologue that Browning ever +wrote. The ghosts, the raps, the flying hands, the phantom voices are +infinitely the most respectable and infinitely the most credible part +of the narrative. But the bragging, the sentimentalism, the moral and +intellectual foppery of the composition is everywhere, culminating +perhaps in the disgusting passage in which Home describes Mrs. +Browning as weeping over him and assuring him that all her husband's +actions in the matter have been adopted against her will. It is in +this kind of thing that we find the roots of the real anger of +Browning. He did not dislike spiritualism, but spiritualists. The +second point on which any one wishing to be just in the matter should +cast an eye, is the record of the visit which Mrs. Browning insisted +on making while on their honeymoon in Paris to the house of George +Sand. Browning felt, and to some extent expressed, exactly the same +aversion to his wife mixing with the circle of George Sand which he +afterwards felt at her mixing with the circle of Home. The society was +"of the ragged red, diluted with the low theatrical, men who worship +George Sand, _a genou bas_ between an oath and an ejection of saliva." +When we find that a man did not object to any number of Jacobites or +Atheists, but objected to the French Bohemian poets and to the early +occultist mediums as friends for his wife, we shall surely be fairly +right in concluding that he objected not to an opinion, but to a +social tone. The truth was that Browning had a great many admirably +Philistine feelings, and one of them was a great relish for his +responsibilities towards his wife. He enjoyed being a husband. This is +quite a distinct thing from enjoying being a lover, though it will +scarcely be found apart from it. But, like all good feelings, it has +its possible exaggerations, and one of them is this almost morbid +healthiness in the choice of friends for his wife. + +David Home, the medium, came to Florence about 1857. Mrs. Browning +undoubtedly threw herself into psychical experiments with great ardour +at first, and Browning, equally undoubtedly, opposed, and at length +forbade, the enterprise. He did not do so however until he had +attended one _seance_ at least, at which a somewhat ridiculous event +occurred, which is described in Home's _Memoirs_ with a gravity even +more absurd than the incident. Towards the end of the proceedings a +wreath was placed in the centre of the table, and the lights being +lowered, it was caused to rise slowly into the air, and after hovering +for some time, to move towards Mrs. Browning, and at length to alight +upon her head. As the wreath was floating in her direction, her +husband was observed abruptly to cross the room and stand beside her. +One would think it was a sufficiently natural action on the part of a +man whose wife was the centre of a weird and disturbing experiment, +genuine or otherwise. But Mr. Home gravely asserts that it was +generally believed that Browning had crossed the room in the hope that +the wreath would alight on his head, and that from the hour of its +disobliging refusal to do so dated the whole of his goaded and +malignant aversion to spiritualism. The idea of the very conventional +and somewhat bored Robert Browning running about the room after a +wreath in the hope of putting his head into it, is one of the genuine +gleams of humour in this rather foolish affair. Browning could be +fairly violent, as we know, both in poetry and conversation; but it +would be almost too terrible to conjecture what he would have felt and +said if Mr. Home's wreath had alighted on his head. + +Next day, according to Home's account, he called on the hostess of the +previous night in what the writer calls "a ridiculous state of +excitement," and told her apparently that she must excuse him if he +and his wife did not attend any more gatherings of the kind. What +actually occurred is not, of course, quite easy to ascertain, for the +account in Home's _Memoirs_ principally consists of noble speeches +made by the medium which would seem either to have reduced Browning to +a pulverised silence, or else to have failed to attract his attention. +But there can be no doubt that the general upshot of the affair was +that Browning put his foot down, and the experiments ceased. There can +be little doubt that he was justified in this; indeed, he was probably +even more justified if the experiments were genuine psychical +mysteries than if they were the _hocus-pocus_ of a charlatan. He knew +his wife better than posterity can be expected to do; but even +posterity can see that she was the type of woman so much adapted to +the purposes of men like Home as to exhibit almost invariably either a +great craving for such experiences or a great terror of them. Like +many geniuses, but not all, she lived naturally upon something like a +borderland; and it is impossible to say that if Browning had not +interposed when she was becoming hysterical she might not have ended +in an asylum. + +The whole of this incident is very characteristic of Browning; but the +real characteristic note in it has, as above suggested, been to some +extent missed. When some seven years afterwards he produced "Mr. +Sludge the Medium," every one supposed that it was an attack upon +spiritualism and the possibility of its phenomena. As we shall see +when we come to that poem, this is a wholly mistaken interpretation of +it. But what is really curious is that most people have assumed that a +dislike of Home's investigations implies a theoretic disbelief in +spiritualism. It might, of course, imply a very firm and serious +belief in it. As a matter of fact it did not imply this in Browning, +but it may perfectly well have implied an agnosticism which admitted +the reasonableness of such things. Home was infinitely less dangerous +as a dexterous swindler than he was as a bad or foolish man in +possession of unknown or ill-comprehended powers. It is surely curious +to think that a man must object to exposing his wife to a few +conjuring tricks, but could not be afraid of exposing her to the loose +and nameless energies of the universe. + +Browning's theoretic attitude in the matter was, therefore, in all +probability quite open and unbiassed. His was a peculiarly hospitable +intellect. If any one had told him of the spiritualist theory, or +theories a hundred times more insane, as things held by some sect of +Gnostics in Alexandria, or of heretical Talmudists at Antwerp, he +would have delighted in those theories, and would very likely have +adopted them. But Greek Gnostics and Antwerp Jews do not dance round a +man's wife and wave their hands in her face and send her into swoons +and trances about which nobody knows anything rational or scientific. +It was simply the stirring in Browning of certain primal masculine +feelings far beyond the reach of argument--things that lie so deep +that if they are hurt, though there may be no blame and no anger, +there is always pain. Browning did not like spiritualism to be +mentioned for many years. + +Robert Browning was unquestionably a thoroughly conventional man. +There are many who think this element of conventionality altogether +regrettable and disgraceful; they have established, as it were, a +convention of the unconventional. But this hatred of the conventional +element in the personality of a poet is only possible to those who do +not remember the meaning of words. Convention means only a coming +together, an agreement; and as every poet must base his work upon an +emotional agreement among men, so every poet must base his work upon a +convention. Every art is, of course, based upon a convention, an +agreement between the speaker and the listener that certain objections +shall not be raised. The most realistic art in the world is open to +realistic objection. Against the most exact and everyday drama that +ever came out of Norway it is still possible for the realist to raise +the objection that the hero who starts a subject and drops it, who +runs out of a room and runs back again for his hat, is all the time +behaving in a most eccentric manner, considering that he is doing +these things in a room in which one of the four walls has been taken +clean away and been replaced by a line of footlights and a mob of +strangers. Against the most accurate black-and-white artist that human +imagination can conceive it is still to be admitted that he draws a +black line round a man's nose, and that that line is a lie. And in +precisely the same fashion a poet must, by the nature of things, be +conventional. Unless he is describing an emotion which others share +with him, his labours will be utterly in vain. If a poet really had an +original emotion; if, for example, a poet suddenly fell in love with +the buffers of a railway train, it would take him considerably more +time than his allotted three-score years and ten to communicate his +feelings. + +Poetry deals with primal and conventional things--the hunger for +bread, the love of woman, the love of children, the desire for +immortal life. If men really had new sentiments, poetry could not deal +with them. If, let us say, a man did not feel a bitter craving to eat +bread; but did, by way of substitute, feel a fresh, original craving +to eat brass fenders or mahogany tables, poetry could not express him. +If a man, instead of falling in love with a woman, fell in love with a +fossil or a sea anemone, poetry could not express him. Poetry can only +express what is original in one sense--the sense in which we speak of +original sin. It is original, not in the paltry sense of being new, +but in the deeper sense of being old; it is original in the sense that +it deals with origins. + +All artists, who have any experience of the arts, will agree so far, +that a poet is bound to be conventional with regard to matters of art. +Unfortunately, however, they are the very people who cannot, as a +general rule, see that a poet is also bound to be conventional in +matters of conduct. It is only the smaller poet who sees the poetry of +revolt, of isolation, of disagreement; the larger poet sees the poetry +of those great agreements which constitute the romantic achievement of +civilisation. Just as an agreement between the dramatist and the +audience is necessary to every play; just as an agreement between the +painter and the spectators is necessary to every picture, so an +agreement is necessary to produce the worship of any of the great +figures of morality--the hero, the saint, the average man, the +gentleman. Browning had, it must thoroughly be realised, a real +pleasure in these great agreements, these great conventions. He +delighted, with a true poetic delight, in being conventional. Being +by birth an Englishman, he took pleasure in being an Englishman; being +by rank a member of the middle class, he took a pride in its ancient +scruples and its everlasting boundaries. He was everything that he was +with a definite and conscious pleasure--a man, a Liberal, an +Englishman, an author, a gentleman, a lover, a married man. + +This must always be remembered as a general characteristic of +Browning, this ardent and headlong conventionality. He exhibited it +pre-eminently in the affair of his elopement and marriage, during and +after the escape of himself and his wife to Italy. He seems to have +forgotten everything, except the splendid worry of being married. He +showed a thoroughly healthy consciousness that he was taking up a +responsibility which had its practical side. He came finally and +entirely out of his dreams. Since he had himself enough money to live +on, he had never thought of himself as doing anything but writing +poetry; poetry indeed was probably simmering and bubbling in his head +day and night. But when the problem of the elopement arose he threw +himself with an energy, of which it is pleasant to read, into every +kind of scheme for solidifying his position. He wrote to Monckton +Milnes, and would appear to have badgered him with applications for a +post in the British Museum. "I will work like a horse," he said, with +that boyish note, which, whenever in his unconsciousness he strikes +it, is more poetical than all his poems. All his language in this +matter is emphatic; he would be "glad and proud," he says, "to have +any minor post" his friend could obtain for him. He offered to read +for the Bar, and probably began doing so. But all this vigorous and +very creditable materialism was ruthlessly extinguished by Elizabeth +Barrett. She declined altogether even to entertain the idea of her +husband devoting himself to anything else at the expense of poetry. +Probably she was right and Browning wrong, but it was an error which +every man would desire to have made. + +One of the qualities again which make Browning most charming, is the +fact that he felt and expressed so simple and genuine a satisfaction +about his own achievements as a lover and husband, particularly in +relation to his triumph in the hygienic care of his wife. "If he is +vain of anything," writes Mrs. Browning, "it is of my restored +health." Later, she adds with admirable humour and suggestiveness, +"and I have to tell him that he really must not go telling everybody +how his wife walked here with him, or walked there with him, as if a +wife with two feet were a miracle in Nature." When a lady in Italy +said, on an occasion when Browning stayed behind with his wife on the +day of a picnic, that he was "the only man who behaved like a +Christian to his wife," Browning was elated to an almost infantile +degree. But there could scarcely be a better test of the essential +manliness and decency of a man than this test of his vanities. +Browning boasted of being domesticated; there are half a hundred men +everywhere who would be inclined to boast of not being domesticated. +Bad men are almost without exception conceited, but they are commonly +conceited of their defects. + +One picturesque figure who plays a part in this portion of the +Brownings' life in Italy is Walter Savage Landor. Browning found him +living with some of his wife's relations, and engaged in a continuous +and furious quarrel with them, which was, indeed, not uncommonly the +condition of that remarkable man when living with other human beings. +He had the double arrogance which is only possible to that old and +stately but almost extinct blend--the aristocratic republican. Like an +old Roman senator, or like a gentleman of the Southern States of +America, he had the condescension of a gentleman to those below him, +combined with the jealous self-assertiveness of a Jacobin to those +above. The only person who appears to have been able to manage him and +bring out his more agreeable side was Browning. It is, by the way, one +of the many hints of a certain element in Browning which can only be +described by the elementary and old-fashioned word goodness, that he +always contrived to make himself acceptable and even lovable to men of +savage and capricious temperament, of detached and erratic genius, who +could get on with no one else. Carlyle, who could not get a bitter +taste off his tongue in talking of most of his contemporaries, was +fond of Browning. Landor, who could hardly conduct an ordinary +business interview without beginning to break the furniture, was fond +of Browning. These are things which speak more for a man than many +people will understand. It is easy enough to be agreeable to a circle +of admirers, especially feminine admirers, who have a peculiar talent +for discipleship and the absorption of ideas. But when a man is loved +by other men of his own intellectual stature and of a wholly different +type and order of eminence, we may be certain that there was something +genuine about him, and something far more important than anything +intellectual. Men do not like another man because he is a genius, +least of all when they happen to be geniuses themselves. This general +truth about Browning is like hearing of a woman who is the most famous +beauty in a city, and who is at the same time adored and confided in +by all the women who live there. + +Browning came to the rescue of the fiery old gentleman, and helped by +Seymour Kirkup put him under very definite obligations by a course of +very generous conduct. He was fully repaid in his own mind for his +trouble by the mere presence and friendship of Landor, for whose +quaint and volcanic personality he had a vast admiration, compounded +of the pleasure of the artist in an oddity and of the man in a hero. +It is somewhat amusing and characteristic that Mrs. Browning did not +share this unlimited enjoyment of the company of Mr. Landor, and +expressed her feelings in her own humorous manner. She writes, "Dear, +darling Robert amuses me by talking of his gentleness and sweetness. A +most courteous and refined gentleman he is, of course, and very +affectionate to Robert (as he ought to be), but of self-restraint he +has not a grain, and of suspicion many grains. What do you really say +to dashing down a plate on the floor when you don't like what's on it? +Robert succeeded in soothing him, and the poor old lion is very quiet +on the whole, roaring softly to beguile the time in Latin alcaics +against his wife and Louis Napoleon." + +One event alone could really end this endless life of the Italian +Arcadia. That event happened on June 29, 1861. Robert Browning's wife +died, stricken by the death of her sister, and almost as hard (it is a +characteristic touch) by the death of Cavour. She died alone in the +room with Browning, and of what passed then, though much has been +said, little should be. He, closing the door of that room behind him, +closed a door in himself, and none ever saw Browning upon earth again +but only a splendid surface. + + + + +CHAPTER V + +BROWNING IN LATER LIFE + + +Browning's confidences, what there were of them, immediately after his +wife's death were given to several women-friends; all his life, +indeed, he was chiefly intimate with women. The two most intimate of +these were his own sister, who remained with him in all his later +years, and the sister of his wife, who seven years afterwards passed +away in his presence as Elizabeth had done. The other letters, which +number only one or two, referring in any personal manner to his +bereavement are addressed to Miss Haworth and Isa Blagden. He left +Florence and remained for a time with his father and sister near +Dinard. Then he returned to London and took up his residence in +Warwick Crescent. Naturally enough, the thing for which he now chiefly +lived was the education of his son, and it is characteristic of +Browning that he was not only a very indulgent father, but an +indulgent father of a very conventional type: he had rather the +chuckling pride of the city gentleman than the educational gravity of +the intellectual. + +Browning was now famous, _Bells and Pomegranates, Men and Women, +Christmas Eve_, and _Dramatis Personae_ had successively glorified his +Italian period. But he was already brooding half-unconsciously on more +famous things. He has himself left on record a description of the +incident out of which grew the whole impulse and plan of his greatest +achievement. In a passage marked with all his peculiar sense of +material things, all that power of writing of stone or metal or the +fabric of drapery, so that we seem to be handling and smelling them, +he has described a stall for the selling of odds and ends of every +variety of utility and uselessness:-- + + "picture frames + White through the worn gilt, mirror-sconces chipped, + Bronze angel-heads once knobs attached to chests, + (Handled when ancient dames chose forth brocade) + Modern chalk drawings, studies from the nude, + Samples of stone, jet, breccia, porphyry + Polished and rough, sundry amazing busts + In baked earth, (broken, Providence be praised!) + A wreck of tapestry proudly-purposed web + When reds and blues were indeed red and blue, + Now offer'd as a mat to save bare feet + (Since carpets constitute a cruel cost). + * * * * * + Vulgarised Horace for the use of schools, + 'The Life, Death, Miracles of Saint Somebody, + Saint Somebody Else, his Miracles, Death, and Life'-- + With this, one glance at the lettered back of which, + And 'Stall,' cried I; a _lira_ made it mine." + +This sketch embodies indeed the very poetry of _debris_, and comes +nearer than any other poem has done to expressing the pathos and +picturesqueness of a low-class pawnshop. "This," which Browning bought +for a lira out of this heap of rubbish, was, of course, the old Latin +record of the criminal case of Guido Franceschini, tried for the +murder of his wife Pompilia in the year 1698. And this again, it is +scarcely necessary to say, was the ground-plan and motive of _The Ring +and the Book_. + +Browning had picked up the volume and partly planned the poem during +his wife's lifetime in Italy. But the more he studied it, the more the +dimensions of the theme appeared to widen and deepen; and he came at +last, there can be little doubt, to regard it definitely as his +_magnum opus_ to which he would devote many years to come. Then came +the great sorrow of his life, and he cast about him for something +sufficiently immense and arduous and complicated to keep his brain +going like some huge and automatic engine. "I mean to keep writing," +he said, "whether I like it or not." And thus finally he took up the +scheme of the Franceschini story, and developed it on a scale with a +degree of elaboration, repetition, and management, and inexhaustible +scholarship which was never perhaps before given in the history of the +world to an affair of two or three characters. Of the larger literary +and spiritual significance of the work, particularly in reference to +its curious and original form of narration, I shall speak +subsequently. But there is one peculiarity about the story which has +more direct bearing on Browning's life, and it appears singular that +few, if any, of his critics have noticed it. This peculiarity is the +extraordinary resemblance between the moral problem involved in the +poem if understood in its essence, and the moral problem which +constituted the crisis and centre of Browning's own life. Nothing, +properly speaking, ever happened to Browning after his wife's death; +and his greatest work during that time was the telling, under alien +symbols and the veil of a wholly different story, the inner truth +about his own greatest trial and hesitation. He himself had in this +sense the same difficulty as Caponsacchi, the supreme difficulty of +having to trust himself to the reality of virtue not only without the +reward, but even without the name of virtue. He had, like Caponsacchi, +preferred what was unselfish and dubious to what was selfish and +honourable. He knew better than any man that there is little danger of +men who really know anything of that naked and homeless responsibility +seeking it too often or indulging it too much. The conscientiousness +of the law-abider is nothing in its terrors to the conscientiousness +of the conscientious law-breaker. Browning had once, for what he +seriously believed to be a greater good, done what he himself would +never have had the cant to deny, ought to be called deceit and +evasion. Such a thing ought never to come to a man twice. If he finds +that necessity twice, he may, I think, be looked at with the beginning +of a suspicion. To Browning it came once, and he devoted his greatest +poem to a suggestion of how such a necessity may come to any man who +is worthy to live. + +As has already been suggested, any apparent danger that there may be +in this excusing of an exceptional act is counteracted by the perils +of the act, since it must always be remembered that this kind of act +has the immense difference from all legal acts--that it can only be +justified by success. If Browning had taken his wife to Paris, and she +had died in an hotel there, we can only conceive him saying, with the +bitter emphasis of one of his own lines, "How should I have borne me, +please?" Before and after this event his life was as tranquil and +casual a one as it would be easy to imagine; but there always remained +upon him something which was felt by all who knew him in after +years--the spirit of a man who had been ready when his time came, and +had walked in his own devotion and certainty in a position counted +indefensible and almost along the brink of murder. This great moral of +Browning, which may be called roughly the doctrine of the great hour, +enters, of course, into many poems besides _The Ring and the Book_, +and is indeed the mainspring of a great part of his poetry taken as a +whole. It is, of course, the central idea of that fine poem, "The +Statue and the Bust," which has given a great deal of distress to a +great many people because of its supposed invasion of recognised +morality. It deals, as every one knows, with a Duke Ferdinand and an +elopement which he planned with the bride of one of the Riccardi. The +lovers begin by deferring their flight for various more or less +comprehensible reasons of convenience; but the habit of shrinking from +the final step grows steadily upon them, and they never take it, but +die, as it were, waiting for each other. The objection that the act +thus avoided was a criminal one is very simply and quite clearly +answered by Browning himself. His case against the dilatory couple is +not in the least affected by the viciousness of their aim. His case is +that they exhibited no virtue. Crime was frustrated in them by +cowardice, which is probably the worse immorality of the two. The same +idea again may be found in that delightful lyric "Youth and Art," +where a successful cantatrice reproaches a successful sculptor with +their failure to understand each other in their youth and poverty. + + "Each life unfulfilled, you see; + It hangs still, patchy and scrappy: + We have not sighed deep, laughed free, + Starved, feasted, despaired,--been happy." + +And this conception of the great hour, which breaks out everywhere in +Browning, it is almost impossible not to connect with his own internal +drama. It is really curious that this correspondence has not been +insisted on. Probably critics have been misled by the fact that +Browning in many places appears to boast that he is purely dramatic, +that he has never put himself into his work, a thing which no poet, +good or bad, who ever lived could possibly avoid doing. + +The enormous scope and seriousness of _The Ring and the Book_ occupied +Browning for some five or six years, and the great epic appeared in +the winter of 1868. Just before it was published Smith and Elder +brought out a uniform edition of all Browning's works up to that time, +and the two incidents taken together may be considered to mark the +final and somewhat belated culmination of Browning's literary fame. +The years since his wife's death, that had been covered by the writing +of _The Ring and the Book_, had been years of an almost feverish +activity in that and many other ways. His travels had been restless +and continued, his industry immense, and for the first time he began +that mode of life which afterwards became so characteristic of +him--the life of what is called society. A man of a shallower and more +sentimental type would have professed to find the life of +dinner-tables and soirees vain and unsatisfying to a poet, and +especially to a poet in mourning. But if there is one thing more than +another which is stirring and honourable about Browning, it is the +entire absence in him of this cant of dissatisfaction. He had the one +great requirement of a poet--he was not difficult to please. The life +of society was superficial, but it is only very superficial people who +object to the superficial. To the man who sees the marvellousness of +all things, the surface of life is fully as strange and magical as its +interior; clearness and plainness of life is fully as mysterious as +its mysteries. The young man in evening dress, pulling on his gloves, +is quite as elemental a figure as any anchorite, quite as +incomprehensible, and indeed quite as alarming. + +A great many literary persons have expressed astonishment at, or even +disapproval of, this social frivolity of Browning's. Not one of these +literary people would have been shocked if Browning's interest in +humanity had led him into a gambling hell in the Wild West or a low +tavern in Paris; but it seems to be tacitly assumed that fashionable +people are not human at all. Humanitarians of a material and dogmatic +type, the philanthropists and the professional reformers go to look +for humanity in remote places and in huge statistics. Humanitarians of +a more vivid type, the Bohemian artists, go to look for humanity in +thieves' kitchens and the studios of the Quartier Latin. But +humanitarians of the highest type, the great poets and philosophers, +do not go to look for humanity at all. For them alone among all men +the nearest drawing-room is full of humanity, and even their own +families are human. Shakespeare ended his life by buying a house in +his own native town and talking to the townsmen. Browning was invited +to a great many conversaziones and private views, and did not pretend +that they bored him. In a letter belonging to this period of his life +he describes his first dinner at one of the Oxford colleges with an +unaffected delight and vanity, which reminds the reader of nothing so +much as the pride of the boy-captain of a public school if he were +invited to a similar function and received a few compliments. It may +be indeed that Browning had a kind of second youth in this +long-delayed social recognition, but at least he enjoyed his second +youth nearly as much as his first, and it is not every one who can do +that. + +Of Browning's actual personality and presence in this later middle age +of his, memories are still sufficiently clear. He was a middle-sized, +well set up, erect man, with somewhat emphatic gestures, and, as +almost all testimonies mention, a curiously strident voice. The beard, +the removal of which his wife had resented with so quaint an +indignation, had grown again, but grown quite white, which, as she +said when it occurred, was a signal mark of the justice of the gods. +His hair was still fairly dark, and his whole appearance at this time +must have been very well represented by Mr. G.F. Watts's fine portrait +in the National Portrait Gallery. The portrait bears one of the many +testimonies which exist to Mr. Watts's grasp of the essential of +character, for it is the only one of the portraits of Browning in +which we get primarily the air of virility, even of animal virility, +tempered but not disguised, with a certain touch of the pallor of the +brain-worker. He looks here what he was--a very healthy man, too +scholarly to live a completely healthy life. + +His manner in society, as has been more than once indicated, was that +of a man anxious, if anything, to avoid the air of intellectual +eminence. Lockhart said briefly, "I like Browning; he isn't at all +like a damned literary man." He was, according to some, upon occasion, +talkative and noisy to a fault; but there are two kinds of men who +monopolise conversation. The first kind are those who like the sound +of their own voice; the second are those who do not know what the +sound of their own voice is like. Browning was one of the latter +class. His volubility in speech had the same origin as his +voluminousness and obscurity in literature--a kind of headlong +humility. He cannot assuredly have been aware that he talked people +down or have wished to do so. For this would have been precisely a +violation of the ideal of the man of the world, the one ambition and +even weakness that he had. He wished to be a man of the world, and he +never in the full sense was one. He remained a little too much of a +boy, a little too much even of a Puritan, and a little too much of +what may be called a man of the universe, to be a man of the world. + +One of his faults probably was the thing roughly called prejudice. On +the question, for example, of table-turning and psychic phenomena he +was in a certain degree fierce and irrational. He was not indeed, as +we shall see when we come to study "Sludge the Medium," exactly +prejudiced against spiritualism. But he was beyond all question +stubbornly prejudiced against spiritualists. Whether the medium Home +was or was not a scoundrel it is somewhat difficult in our day to +conjecture. But in so far as he claimed supernatural powers, he may +have been as honest a gentleman as ever lived. And even if we think +that the moral atmosphere of Home is that of a man of dubious +character, we can still feel that Browning might have achieved his +purpose without making it so obvious that he thought so. Some traces +again, though much fainter ones, may be found of something like a +subconscious hostility to the Roman Church, or at least a less full +comprehension of the grandeur of the Latin religious civilisation than +might have been expected of a man of Browning's great imaginative +tolerance. AEstheticism, Bohemianism, the irresponsibilities of the +artist, the untidy morals of Grub Street and the Latin Quarter, he +hated with a consuming hatred. He was himself exact in everything, +from his scholarship to his clothes; and even when he wore the loose +white garments of the lounger in Southern Europe, they were in their +own way as precise as a dress suit. This extra carefulness in all +things he defended against the cant of Bohemianism as the right +attitude for the poet. When some one excused coarseness or negligence +on the ground of genius, he said, "That is an error: Noblesse oblige." + +Browning's prejudices, however, belonged altogether to that healthy +order which is characterised by a cheerful and satisfied ignorance. It +never does a man any very great harm to hate a thing that he knows +nothing about. It is the hating of a thing when we do know something +about it which corrodes the character. We all have a dark feeling of +resistance towards people we have never met, and a profound and manly +dislike of the authors we have never read. It does not harm a man to +be certain before opening the books that Whitman is an obscene ranter +or that Stevenson is a mere trifler with style. It is the man who can +think these things after he has read the books who must be in a fair +way to mental perdition. Prejudice, in fact, is not so much the great +intellectual sin as a thing which we may call, to coin a word, +"postjudice," not the bias before the fair trial, but the bias that +remains afterwards. With Browning's swift and emphatic nature the bias +was almost always formed before he had gone into the matter. But +almost all the men he really knew he admired, almost all the books he +had really read he enjoyed. He stands pre-eminent among those great +universalists who praised the ground they trod on and commended +existence like any other material, in its samples. He had no kinship +with those new and strange universalists of the type of Tolstoi who +praise existence to the exclusion of all the institutions they have +lived under, and all the ties they have known. He thought the world +good because he had found so many things that were good in +it--religion, the nation, the family, the social class. He did not, +like the new humanitarian, think the world good because he had found +so many things in it that were bad. + +As has been previously suggested, there was something very queer and +dangerous that underlay all the good humour of Browning. If one of +these idle prejudices were broken by better knowledge, he was all the +better pleased. But if some of the prejudices that were really rooted +in him were trodden on, even by accident, such as his aversion to +loose artistic cliques, or his aversion to undignified publicity, his +rage was something wholly transfiguring and alarming, something far +removed from the shrill disapproval of Carlyle and Ruskin. It can only +be said that he became a savage, and not always a very agreeable or +presentable savage. The indecent fury which danced upon the bones of +Edward Fitzgerald was a thing which ought not to have astonished any +one who had known much of Browning's character or even of his work. +Some unfortunate persons on another occasion had obtained some of Mrs. +Browning's letters shortly after her death, and proposed to write a +_Life_ founded upon them. They ought to have understood that Browning +would probably disapprove; but if he talked to them about it, as he +did to others, and it is exceedingly probable that he did, they must +have thought he was mad. "What I suffer with the paws of these +black-guards in my bowels you can fancy," he says. Again he writes: +"Think of this beast working away, not deeming my feelings, or those +of her family, worthy of notice. It shall not be done if I can stop +the scamp's knavery along with his breath." Whether Browning actually +resorted to this extreme course is unknown; nothing is known except +that he wrote a letter to the ambitious biographer which reduced him +to silence, probably from stupefaction. + +The same peculiarity ought, as I have said, to have been apparent to +any one who knew anything of Browning's literary work. A great number +of his poems are marked by a trait of which by its nature it is more +or less impossible to give examples. Suffice it to say that it is +truly extraordinary that poets like Swinburne (who seldom uses a gross +word) should have been spoken of as if they had introduced moral +license into Victorian poetry. What the Non-conformist conscience has +been doing to have passed Browning is something difficult to imagine. +But the peculiarity of this occasional coarseness in his work is +this--that it is always used to express a certain wholesome fury and +contempt for things sickly, or ungenerous, or unmanly. The poet seems +to feel that there are some things so contemptible that you can only +speak of them in pothouse words. It would be idle, and perhaps +undesirable, to give examples; but it may be noted that the same +brutal physical metaphor is used by his Caponsacchi about the people +who could imagine Pompilia impure and by his Shakespeare in "At the +Mermaid," about the claim of the Byronic poet to enter into the heart +of humanity. In both cases Browning feels, and perhaps in a manner +rightly, that the best thing we can do with a sentiment essentially +base is to strip off its affectations and state it basely, and that +the mud of Chaucer is a great deal better than the poison of Sterne. +Herein again Browning is close to the average man; and to do the +average man justice, there is a great deal more of this Browningesque +hatred of Byronism in the brutality of his conversation than many +people suppose. + +Such, roughly and as far as we can discover, was the man who, in the +full summer and even the full autumn of his intellectual powers, began +to grow upon the consciousness of the English literary world about +this time. For the first time friendship grew between him and the +other great men of his time. Tennyson, for whom he then and always +felt the best and most personal kind of admiration, came into his +life, and along with him Gladstone and Francis Palgrave. There began +to crowd in upon him those honours whereby a man is to some extent +made a classic in his lifetime, so that he is honoured even if he is +unread. He was made a Fellow of Balliol in 1867, and the homage of the +great universities continued thenceforth unceasingly until his death, +despite many refusals on his part. He was unanimously elected Lord +Rector of Glasgow University in 1875. He declined, owing to his deep +and somewhat characteristic aversion to formal public speaking, and in +1877 he had to decline on similar grounds the similar offer from the +University of St. Andrews. He was much at the English universities, +was a friend of Dr. Jowett, and enjoyed the university life at the age +of sixty-three in a way that he probably would not have enjoyed it if +he had ever been to a university. The great universities would not let +him alone, to their great credit, and he became a D.C.L. of Cambridge +in 1879, and a D.C.L. of Oxford in 1882. When he received these +honours there were, of course, the traditional buffooneries of the +undergraduates, and one of them dropped a red cotton night-cap neatly +on his head as he passed under the gallery. Some indignant +intellectuals wrote to him to protest against this affront, but +Browning took the matter in the best and most characteristic way. "You +are far too hard," he wrote in answer, "on the very harmless +drolleries of the young men. Indeed, there used to be a regularly +appointed jester, 'Filius Terrae' he was called, whose business it was +to gibe and jeer at the honoured ones by way of reminder that all +human glories are merely gilded baubles and must not be fancied +metal." In this there are other and deeper things characteristic of +Browning besides his learning and humour. In discussing anything, he +must always fall back upon great speculative and eternal ideas. Even +in the tomfoolery of a horde of undergraduates he can only see a +symbol of the ancient office of ridicule in the scheme of morals. The +young men themselves were probably unaware that they were the +representatives of the "Filius Terrae." + +But the years during which Browning was thus reaping some of his late +laurels began to be filled with incidents that reminded him how the +years were passing over him. On June 20, 1866, his father had died, a +man of whom it is impossible to think without a certain emotion, a man +who had lived quietly and persistently for others, to whom Browning +owed more than it is easy to guess, to whom we in all probability +mainly owe Browning. In 1868 one of his closest friends, Arabella +Barrett, the sister of his wife, died, as her sister had done, alone +with Browning. Browning was not a superstitious man; he somewhat +stormily prided himself on the contrary; but he notes at this time "a +dream which Arabella had of Her, in which she prophesied their meeting +in five years," that is, of course, the meeting of Elizabeth and +Arabella. His friend Milsand, to whom _Sordello_ was dedicated, died +in 1886. "I never knew," said Browning, "or ever shall know, his like +among men." But though both fame and a growing isolation indicated +that he was passing towards the evening of his days, though he bore +traces of the progress, in a milder attitude towards things, and a +greater preference for long exiles with those he loved, one thing +continued in him with unconquerable energy--there was no diminution in +the quantity, no abatement in the immense designs of his intellectual +output. + +In 1871 he produced _Balaustion's Adventure_, a work exhibiting not +only his genius in its highest condition of power, but something more +exacting even than genius to a man of his mature and changed life, +immense investigation, prodigious memory, the thorough assimilation +of the vast literature of a remote civilisation. _Balaustion's +Adventure_, which is, of course, the mere framework for an English +version of the Alcestis of Euripides, is an illustration of one of +Browning's finest traits, his immeasurable capacity for a classic +admiration. Those who knew him tell us that in conversation he never +revealed himself so impetuously or so brilliantly as when declaiming +the poetry of others; and _Balaustion's Adventure_ is a monument of +this fiery self-forgetfulness. It is penetrated with the passionate +desire to render Euripides worthily, and to that imitation are for the +time being devoted all the gigantic powers which went to make the +songs of Pippa and the last agony of Guido. Browning never put himself +into anything more powerfully or more successfully; yet it is only an +excellent translation. In the uncouth philosophy of Caliban, in the +tangled ethics of Sludge, in his wildest satire, in his most +feather-headed lyric, Browning was never more thoroughly Browning than +in this splendid and unselfish plagiarism. This revived excitement in +Greek matters; "his passionate love of the Greek language" continued +in him thenceforward till his death. He published more than one poem +on the drama of Hellas. _Aristophanes' Apology_ came out in 1875, and +_The Agamemnon of AEschylus_, another paraphrase, in 1877. All three +poems are marked by the same primary characteristic, the fact that the +writer has the literature of Athens literally at his fingers' ends. He +is intimate not only with their poetry and politics, but with their +frivolity and their slang; he knows not only Athenian wisdom, but +Athenian folly; not only the beauty of Greece, but even its vulgarity. +In fact, a page of _Aristophanes' Apology_ is like a page of +Aristophanes, dark with levity and as obscure as a schoolman's +treatise, with its load of jokes. + +In 1871 also appeared _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau: Saviour of +Society_, one of the finest and most picturesque of all Browning's +apologetic monologues. The figure is, of course, intended for Napoleon +III., whose Empire had just fallen, bringing down his country with it. +The saying has been often quoted that Louis Napoleon deceived Europe +twice--once when he made it think he was a noodle, and once when he +made it think he was a statesman. It might be added that Europe was +never quite just to him, and was deceived a third time, when it took +him after his fall for an exploded mountebank and nonentity. Amid the +general chorus of contempt which was raised over his weak and +unscrupulous policy in later years, culminating in his great disaster, +there are few things finer than this attempt of Browning's to give the +man a platform and let him speak for himself. It is the apologia of a +political adventurer, and a political adventurer of a kind peculiarly +open to popular condemnation. Mankind has always been somewhat +inclined to forgive the adventurer who destroys or re-creates, but +there is nothing inspiring about the adventurer who merely preserves. +We have sympathy with the rebel who aims at reconstruction, but there +is something repugnant to the imagination in the rebel who rebels in +the name of compromise. Browning had to defend, or rather to +interpret, a man who kidnapped politicians in the night and deluged +the Montmartre with blood, not for an ideal, not for a reform, not +precisely even for a cause, but simply for the establishment of a +_regime_. He did these hideous things not so much that he might be +able to do better ones, but that he and every one else might be able +to do nothing for twenty years; and Browning's contention, and a very +plausible contention, is that the criminal believed that his crime +would establish order and compromise, or, in other words, that he +thought that nothing was the very best thing he and his people could +do. There is something peculiarly characteristic of Browning in thus +selecting not only a political villain, but what would appear the most +prosaic kind of villain. We scarcely ever find in Browning a defence +of those obvious and easily defended publicans and sinners whose +mingled virtues and vices are the stuff of romance and melodrama--the +generous rake, the kindly drunkard, the strong man too great for +parochial morals. He was in a yet more solitary sense the friend of +the outcast. He took in the sinners whom even sinners cast out. He +went with the hypocrite and had mercy on the Pharisee. + +How little this desire of Browning's, to look for a moment at the +man's life with the man's eyes, was understood, may be gathered from +the criticisms on _Hohenstiel-Schwangau_, which, says Browning, "the +Editor of the _Edinburgh Review_ calls my eulogium on the Second +Empire, which it is not, any more than what another wiseacre affirms +it to be, a scandalous attack on the old constant friend of England. +It is just what I imagine the man might, if he pleased, say for +himself." + +In 1873 appeared _Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country_, which, if it be not +absolutely one of the finest of Browning's poems, is certainly one of +the most magnificently Browningesque. The origin of the name of the +poem is probably well known. He was travelling along the Normandy +coast, and discovered what he called + + "Meek, hitherto un-Murrayed bathing-places, + Best loved of sea-coast-nook-full Normandy!" + +Miss Thackeray, who was of the party, delighted Browning beyond +measure by calling the sleepy old fishing district "White Cotton +Night-Cap Country." It was exactly the kind of elfish phrase to which +Browning had, it must always be remembered, a quite unconquerable +attraction. The notion of a town of sleep, where men and women walked +about in nightcaps, a nation of somnambulists, was the kind of thing +that Browning in his heart loved better than _Paradise Lost_. Some +time afterwards he read in a newspaper a very painful story of +profligacy and suicide which greatly occupied the French journals in +the year 1871, and which had taken place in the same district. It is +worth noting that Browning was one of those wise men who can perceive +the terrible and impressive poetry of the police-news, which is +commonly treated as vulgarity, which is dreadful and may be +undesirable, but is certainly not vulgar. From _The Ring and the Book_ +to _Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country_ a great many of his works might be +called magnificent detective stories. The story is somewhat ugly, and +its power does not alter its ugliness, for power can only make +ugliness uglier. And in this poem there is little or nothing of the +revelation of that secret wealth of valour and patience in humanity +which makes real and redeems the revelation of its secret vileness in +_The Ring and the Book_. It almost looks at first sight as if Browning +had for a moment surrendered the whole of his impregnable +philosophical position and admitted the strange heresy that a human +story can be sordid. But this view of the poem is, of course, a +mistake. It was written in something which, for want of a more exact +word, we must call one of the bitter moods of Browning; but the +bitterness is entirely the product of a certain generous hostility +against the class of morbidities which he really detested, sometimes +more than they deserved. In this poem these principles of weakness and +evil are embodied to him as the sicklier kind of Romanism, and the +more sensual side of the French temperament. We must never forget what +a great deal of the Puritan there remained in Browning to the end. +This outburst of it is fierce and ironical, not in his best spirit. It +says in effect, "You call this a country of sleep, I call it a country +of death. You call it 'White Cotton Night-Cap Country'; I call it 'Red +Cotton Night-Cap Country.'" + +Shortly before this, in 1872, he had published _Fifine at the Fair_, +which his principal biographer, and one of his most uncompromising +admirers, calls a piece of perplexing cynicism. Perplexing it may be +to some extent, for it was almost impossible to tell whether Browning +would or would not be perplexing even in a love-song or a post-card. +But cynicism is a word that cannot possibly be applied with any +propriety to anything that Browning ever wrote. Cynicism denotes that +condition of mind in which we hold that life is in its nature mean and +arid; that no soul contains genuine goodness, and no state of things +genuine reliability. _Fifine at the Fair_, like _Prince +Hohenstiel-Schwangau_, is one of Browning's apologetic +soliloquies--the soliloquy of an epicurean who seeks half-playfully +to justify upon moral grounds an infidelity into which he afterwards +actually falls. This casuist, like all Browning's casuists, is given +many noble outbursts and sincere moments, and therefore apparently the +poem is called cynical. It is difficult to understand what particular +connection there is between seeing good in nobody and seeing good even +in a sensual fool. + +After _Fifine at the Fair_ appeared the _Inn Album_, in 1875, a purely +narrative work, chiefly interesting as exhibiting in yet another place +one of Browning's vital characteristics, a pleasure in retelling and +interpreting actual events of a sinister and criminal type; and after +the _Inn Album_ came what is perhaps the most preposterously +individual thing he ever wrote, _Of Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in +Distemper_, in 1876. It is impossible to call the work poetry, and it +is very difficult indeed to know what to call it. Its chief +characteristic is a kind of galloping energy, an energy that has +nothing intellectual or even intelligible about it, a purely animal +energy of words. Not only is it not beautiful, it is not even clever, +and yet it carries the reader away as he might be carried away by +romping children. It ends up with a voluble and largely unmeaning +malediction upon the poet's critics, a malediction so outrageously +good-humoured that it does not take the trouble even to make itself +clear to the objects of its wrath. One can compare the poem to nothing +in heaven or earth, except to the somewhat humorous, more or less +benevolent, and most incomprehensible catalogues of curses and oaths +which may be heard from an intoxicated navvy. This is the kind of +thing, and it goes on for pages:-- + + "Long after the last of your number + Has ceased my front-court to encumber + While, treading down rose and ranunculus, + You _Tommy-make-room-for-your-uncle_-us! + Troop, all of you man or homunculus, + Quick march! for Xanthippe, my housemaid, + If once on your pates she a souse made + With what, pan or pot, bowl or _skoramis_, + First comes to her hand--things were more amiss! + I would not for worlds be your place in-- + Recipient of slops from the basin! + You, Jack-in-the-Green, leaf-and-twiggishness + Won't save a dry thread on your priggishness!" + +You can only call this, in the most literal sense of the word, the +brute-force of language. + +In spite however of this monstrosity among poems, which gives its +title to the volume, it contains some of the most beautiful verses +that Browning ever wrote in that style of light philosophy in which he +was unequalled. Nothing ever gave so perfectly and artistically what +is too loosely talked about as a thrill, as the poem called "Fears and +Scruples," in which a man describes the mystifying conduct of an +absent friend, and reserves to the last line the climax-- + + "Hush, I pray you! + What if this friend happen to be--God." + +It is the masterpiece of that excellent but much-abused literary +quality, Sensationalism. + +The volume entitled _Pacchiarotto_, moreover, includes one or two of +the most spirited poems on the subject of the poet in relation to +publicity--"At the Mermaid," "House," and "Shop." + +In spite of his increasing years, his books seemed if anything to +come thicker and faster. Two were published in 1878--_La Saisiaz_, his +great metaphysical poem on the conception of immortality, and that +delightfully foppish fragment of the _ancien regime_, _The Two Poets +of Croisic_. Those two poems would alone suffice to show that he had +not forgotten the hard science of theology or the harder science of +humour. Another collection followed in 1879, the first series of +_Dramatic Idylls_, which contain such masterpieces as "Pheidippides" +and "Ivan Ivanovitch." Upon its heels, in 1880, came the second series +of _Dramatic Idylls_, including "Muleykeh" and "Clive," possibly the +two best stories in poetry, told in the best manner of story-telling. +Then only did the marvellous fountain begin to slacken in quantity, +but never in quality. _Jocoseria_ did not appear till 1883. It +contains among other things a cast-back to his very earliest manner in +the lyric of "Never the Time and the Place," which we may call the +most light-hearted love-song that was ever written by a man over +seventy. In the next year appeared _Ferishtah's Fancies_, which +exhibit some of his shrewdest cosmic sagacity, expressed in some of +his quaintest and most characteristic images. Here perhaps more than +anywhere else we see that supreme peculiarity of Browning--his sense +of the symbolism of material trifles. Enormous problems, and yet more +enormous answers, about pain, prayer, destiny, liberty, and conscience +are suggested by cherries, by the sun, by a melon-seller, by an eagle +flying in the sky, by a man tilling a plot of ground. It is this +spirit of grotesque allegory which really characterises Browning among +all other poets. Other poets might possibly have hit upon the same +philosophical idea--some idea as deep, as delicate, and as spiritual. +But it may be safely asserted that no other poet, having thought of a +deep, delicate, and spiritual idea, would call it "A Bean Stripe; also +Apple Eating." + +Three more years passed, and the last book which Browning published in +his lifetime was _Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in +their Day_, a book which consists of apostrophes, amicable, furious, +reverential, satirical, emotional to a number of people of whom the +vast majority even of cultivated people have never heard in their +lives--Daniel Bartoli, Francis Furini, Gerard de Lairesse, and Charles +Avison. This extraordinary knowledge of the fulness of history was a +thing which never ceased to characterise Browning even when he was +unfortunate in every other literary quality. Apart altogether from +every line he ever wrote, it may fairly be said that no mind so rich +as his ever carried its treasures to the grave. All these later poems +are vigorous, learned, and full-blooded. They are thoroughly +characteristic of their author. But nothing in them is quite so +characteristic of their author as this fact, that when he had +published all of them, and was already near to his last day, he turned +with the energy of a boy let out of school, and began, of all things +in the world, to re-write and improve "Pauline," the boyish poem that +he had written fifty-five years before. Here was a man covered with +glory and near to the doors of death, who was prepared to give himself +the elaborate trouble of reconstructing the mood, and rebuilding the +verses of a long juvenile poem which had been forgotten for fifty +years in the blaze of successive victories. It is such things as these +which give to Browning an interest of personality which is far beyond +the more interest of genius. It was of such things that Elizabeth +Barrett wrote in one of her best moments of insight--that his genius +was the least important thing about him. + +During all these later years, Browning's life had been a quiet and +regular one. He always spent the winter in Italy and the summer in +London, and carried his old love of precision to the extent of never +failing day after day throughout the year to leave the house at the +same time. He had by this time become far more of a public figure than +he had ever been previously, both in England and Italy. In 1881, Dr. +Furnivall and Miss E.H. Hickey founded the famous "Browning Society." +He became President of the new "Shakespeare Society" and of the +"Wordsworth Society." In 1886, on the death of Lord Houghton, he +accepted the post of Foreign Correspondent to the Royal Academy. When +he moved to De Vere Gardens in 1887, it began to be evident that he +was slowly breaking up. He still dined out constantly; he still +attended every reception and private view; he still corresponded +prodigiously, and even added to his correspondence; and there is +nothing more typical of him than that now, when he was almost already +a classic, he answered any compliment with the most delightful vanity +and embarrassment. In a letter to Mr. George Bainton, touching style, +he makes a remark which is an excellent criticism on his whole +literary career: "I myself found many forgotten fields which have +proved the richest of pastures." But despite his continued energy, his +health was gradually growing worse. He was a strong man in a muscular, +and ordinarily in a physical sense, but he was also in a certain sense +a nervous man, and may be said to have died of brain-excitement +prolonged through a lifetime. In these closing years he began to feel +more constantly the necessity for rest. He and his sister went to live +at a little hotel in Llangollen, and spent hours together talking and +drinking tea on the lawn. He himself writes in one of his quaint and +poetic phrases that he had come to love these long country retreats, +"another term of delightful weeks, each tipped with a sweet starry +Sunday at the little church." For the first time, and in the last two +or three years, he was really growing old. On one point he maintained +always a tranquil and unvarying decision. The pessimistic school of +poetry was growing up all round him; the decadents, with their belief +that art was only a counting of the autumn leaves, were approaching +more and more towards their tired triumph and their tasteless +popularity. But Browning would not for one instant take the scorn of +them out of his voice. "Death, death, it is this harping on death that +I despise so much. In fiction, in poetry, French as well as English, +and I am told in American also, in art and literature, the shadow of +death, call it what you will, despair, negation, indifference, is upon +us. But what fools who talk thus! Why, _amico mio_, you know as well +as I, that death is life, just as our daily momentarily dying body is +none the less alive, and ever recruiting new forces of existence. +Without death, which is our church-yardy crape-like word for change, +for growth, there could be no prolongation of that which we call life. +Never say of me that I am dead." + +On August 13, 1888, he set out once more for Italy, the last of his +innumerable voyages. During his last Italian period he seems to have +fallen back on very ultimate simplicities, chiefly a mere staring at +nature. The family with whom he lived kept a fox cub, and Browning +would spend hours with it watching its grotesque ways; when it +escaped, he was characteristically enough delighted. The old man could +be seen continually in the lanes round Asolo, peering into hedges and +whistling for the lizards. + +This serene and pastoral decline, surely the mildest of slopes into +death, was suddenly diversified by a flash of something lying far +below. Browning's eye fell upon a passage written by the distinguished +Edward Fitzgerald, who had been dead for many years, in which +Fitzgerald spoke in an uncomplimentary manner of Elizabeth Barrett +Browning. Browning immediately wrote the "Lines to Edward Fitzgerald," +and set the whole literary world in an uproar. The lines were bitter +and excessive to have been written against any man, especially bitter +and excessive to have been written against a man who was not alive to +reply. And yet, when all is said, it is impossible not to feel a +certain dark and indescribable pleasure in this last burst of the old +barbaric energy. The mountain had been tilled and forested, and laid +out in gardens to the summit; but for one last night it had proved +itself once more a volcano, and had lit up all the plains with its +forgotten fire. And the blow, savage as it was, was dealt for that +great central sanctity--the story of a man's youth. All that the old +man would say in reply to every view of the question was, "I felt as +if she had died yesterday." + +Towards December of 1889 he moved to Venice, where he fell ill. He +took very little food; it was indeed one of his peculiar small fads +that men should not take food when they are ill, a matter in which he +maintained that the animals were more sagacious. He asserted +vigorously that this somewhat singular regimen would pull him through, +talked about his plans, and appeared cheerful. Gradually, however, the +talking became more infrequent, the cheerfulness passed into a kind of +placidity; and without any particular crisis or sign of the end, +Robert Browning died on December 12, 1889. The body was taken on board +ship by the Venice Municipal Guard, and received by the Royal Italian +marines. He was buried in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey, the +choir singing his wife's poem, "He giveth His beloved sleep." On the +day that he died _Asolando_ was published. + + + + +CHAPTER VI + +BROWNING AS A LITERARY ARTIST + + +Mr. William Sharp, in his _Life_ of Browning, quotes the remarks of +another critic to the following effect: "The poet's processes of +thought are scientific in their precision and analysis; the sudden +conclusion that he imposes upon them is transcendental and inept." + +This is a very fair but a very curious example of the way in which +Browning is treated. For what is the state of affairs? A man publishes +a series of poems, vigorous, perplexing, and unique. The critics read +them, and they decide that he has failed as a poet, but that he is a +remarkable philosopher and logician. They then proceed to examine his +philosophy, and show with great triumph that it is unphilosophical, +and to examine his logic and show with great triumph that it is not +logical, but "transcendental and inept." In other words, Browning is +first denounced for being a logician and not a poet, and then +denounced for insisting on being a poet when they have decided that he +is to be a logician. It is just as if a man were to say first that a +garden was so neglected that it was only fit for a boys' playground, +and then complain of the unsuitability in a boys' playground of +rockeries and flower-beds. + +As we find, after this manner, that Browning does not act +satisfactorily as that which we have decided that he shall be--a +logician--it might possibly be worth while to make another attempt to +see whether he may not, after all, be more valid than we thought as to +what he himself professed to be--a poet. And if we study this +seriously and sympathetically, we shall soon come to a conclusion. It +is a gross and complete slander upon Browning to say that his +processes of thought are scientific in their precision and analysis. +They are nothing of the sort; if they were, Browning could not be a +good poet. The critic speaks of the conclusions of a poem as +"transcendental and inept"; but the conclusions of a poem, if they are +not transcendental, must be inept. Do the people who call one of +Browning's poems scientific in its analysis realise the meaning of +what they say? One is tempted to think that they know a scientific +analysis when they see it as little as they know a good poem. The one +supreme difference between the scientific method and the artistic +method is, roughly speaking, simply this--that a scientific statement +means the same thing wherever and whenever it is uttered, and that an +artistic statement means something entirely different, according to +the relation in which it stands to its surroundings. The remark, let +us say, that the whale is a mammal, or the remark that sixteen ounces +go to a pound, is equally true, and means exactly the same thing, +whether we state it at the beginning of a conversation or at the end, +whether we print it in a dictionary or chalk it up on a wall. But if +we take some phrase commonly used in the art of literature--such a +sentence, for the sake of example, as "the dawn was breaking"--the +matter is quite different. If the sentence came at the beginning of a +short story, it might be a mere descriptive prelude. If it were the +last sentence in a short story, it might be poignant with some +peculiar irony or triumph. Can any one read Browning's great +monologues and not feel that they are built up like a good short +story, entirely on this principle of the value of language arising +from its arrangement. Take such an example as "Caliban upon Setebos," +a wonderful poem designed to describe the way in which a primitive +nature may at once be afraid of its gods and yet familiar with them. +Caliban in describing his deity starts with a more or less natural and +obvious parallel between the deity and himself, carries out the +comparison with consistency and an almost revolting simplicity, and +ends in a kind of blasphemous extravaganza of anthropomorphism, basing +his conduct not merely on the greatness and wisdom, but also on the +manifest weaknesses and stupidities, of the Creator of all things. +Then suddenly a thunderstorm breaks over Caliban's island, and the +profane speculator falls flat upon his face-- + + "Lo! 'Lieth flat and loveth Setebos! + 'Maketh his teeth meet through his upper lip, + Will let those quails fly, will not eat this month + One little mess of whelks, so he may 'scape!" + +Surely it would be very difficult to persuade oneself that this +thunderstorm would have meant exactly the same thing if it had +occurred at the beginning of "Caliban upon Setebos." It does not mean +the same thing, but something very different; and the deduction from +this is the curious fact that Browning is an artist, and that +consequently his processes of thought are not "scientific in their +precision and analysis." + +No criticism of Browning's poems can be vital, none in the face of the +poems themselves can be even intelligible, which is not based upon the +fact that he was successfully or otherwise a conscious and deliberate +artist. He may have failed as an artist, though I do not think so; +that is quite a different matter. But it is one thing to say that a +man through vanity or ignorance has built an ugly cathedral, and quite +another to say that he built it in a fit of absence of mind, and did +not know whether he was building a lighthouse or a first-class hotel. +Browning knew perfectly well what he was doing; and if the reader does +not like his art, at least the author did. The general sentiment +expressed in the statement that he did not care about form is simply +the most ridiculous criticism that could be conceived. It would be far +nearer the truth to say that he cared more for form than any other +English poet who ever lived. He was always weaving and modelling and +inventing new forms. Among all his two hundred to three hundred poems +it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that there are half as +many different metres as there are different poems. + +The great English poets who are supposed to have cared more for form +than Browning did, cared less at least in this sense--that they were +content to use old forms so long as they were certain that they had +new ideas. Browning, on the other hand, no sooner had a new idea than +he tried to make a new form to express it. Wordsworth and Shelley were +really original poets; their attitude of thought and feeling marked +without doubt certain great changes in literature and philosophy. +Nevertheless, the "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" is a +perfectly normal and traditional ode, and "Prometheus Unbound" is a +perfectly genuine and traditional Greek lyrical drama. But if we study +Browning honestly, nothing will strike us more than that he really +created a large number of quite novel and quite admirable artistic +forms. It is too often forgotten what and how excellent these were. +_The Ring and the Book_, for example, is an illuminating departure in +literary method--the method of telling the same story several times +and trusting to the variety of human character to turn it into several +different and equally interesting stories. _Pippa Passes_, to take +another example, is a new and most fruitful form, a series of detached +dramas connected only by the presence of one fugitive and isolated +figure. The invention of these things is not merely like the writing +of a good poem--it is something like the invention of the sonnet or +the Gothic arch. The poet who makes them does not merely create +himself--he creates other poets. It is so in a degree long past +enumeration with regard to Browning's smaller poems. Such a pious and +horrible lyric as "The Heretic's Tragedy," for instance, is absolutely +original, with its weird and almost blood-curdling echo verses, +mocking echoes indeed-- + + "And dipt of his wings in Paris square, + They bring him now to lie burned alive. + + _[And wanteth there grace of lute or clavicithern, + ye shall say to confirm him who singeth_-- + + We bring John now to be burned alive." + +A hundred instances might, of course, be given. Milton's "Sonnet on +his Blindness," or Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," are both thoroughly +original, but still we can point to other such sonnets and other such +odes. But can any one mention any poem of exactly the same structural +and literary type as "Fears and Scruples," as "The Householder," as +"House" or "Shop," as "Nationality in Drinks," as "Sibrandus +Schafnaburgensis," as "My Star," as "A Portrait," as any of +"Ferishtah's Fancies," as any of the "Bad Dreams." + +The thing which ought to be said about Browning by those who do not +enjoy him is simply that they do not like his form; that they have +studied the form, and think it a bad form. If more people said things +of this sort, the world of criticism would gain almost unspeakably in +clarity and common honesty. Browning put himself before the world as a +good poet. Let those who think he failed call him a bad poet, and +there will be an end of the matter. There are many styles in art which +perfectly competent aesthetic judges cannot endure. For instance, it +would be perfectly legitimate for a strict lover of Gothic to say that +one of the monstrous rococo altar-pieces in the Belgian churches with +bulbous clouds and oaken sun-rays seven feet long, was, in his +opinion, ugly. But surely it would be perfectly ridiculous for any one +to say that it had no form. A man's actual feelings about it might be +better expressed by saying that it had too much. To say that Browning +was merely a thinker because you think "Caliban upon Setebos" ugly, is +precisely as absurd as it would be to call the author of the old +Belgian altarpiece a man devoted only to the abstractions of religion. +The truth about Browning is not that he was indifferent to technical +beauty, but that he invented a particular kind of technical beauty to +which any one else is free to be as indifferent as he chooses. + +There is in this matter an extraordinary tendency to vague and +unmeaning criticism. The usual way of criticising an author, +particularly an author who has added something to the literary forms +of the world, is to complain that his work does not contain something +which is obviously the speciality of somebody else. The correct thing +to say about Maeterlinck is that some play of his in which, let us +say, a princess dies in a deserted tower by the sea, has a certain +beauty, but that we look in vain in it for that robust geniality, that +really boisterous will to live which may be found in _Martin +Chuzzlewit_. The right thing to say about _Cyrano de Bergerac_ is that +it may have a certain kind of wit and spirit, but that it really +throws no light on the duty of middle-aged married couples in Norway. +It cannot be too much insisted upon that at least three-quarters of +the blame and criticism commonly directed against artists and authors +falls under this general objection, and is essentially valueless. +Authors both great and small are, like everything else in existence, +upon the whole greatly under-rated. They are blamed for not doing, not +only what they have failed to do to reach their own ideal, but what +they have never tried to do to reach every other writer's ideal. If we +can show that Browning had a definite ideal of beauty and loyally +pursued it, it is not necessary to prove that he could have written +_In Memoriam_ if he had tried. + +Browning has suffered far more injustice from his admirers than from +his opponents, for his admirers have for the most part got hold of the +matter, so to speak, by the wrong end. They believe that what is +ordinarily called the grotesque style of Browning was a kind of +necessity boldly adopted by a great genius in order to express novel +and profound ideas. But this is an entire mistake. What is called +ugliness was to Browning not in the least a necessary evil, but a +quite unnecessary luxury, which he enjoyed for its own sake. For +reasons that we shall see presently in discussing the philosophical +use of the grotesque, it did so happen that Browning's grotesque style +was very suitable for the expression of his peculiar moral and +metaphysical view. But the whole mass of poems will be misunderstood +if we do not realise first of all that he had a love of the grotesque +of the nature of art for art's sake. Here, for example, is a short +distinct poem merely descriptive of one of those elfish German jugs in +which it is to be presumed Tokay had been served to him. This is the +whole poem, and a very good poem too-- + + "Up jumped Tokay on our table, + Like a pigmy castle-warder, + Dwarfish to see, but stout and able, + Arms and accoutrements all in order; + And fierce he looked North, then, wheeling South + Blew with his bugle a challenge to Drouth, + Cocked his flap-hat with the tosspot-feather, + Twisted his thumb in his red moustache, + Jingled his huge brass spurs together, + Tightened his waist with its Buda sash, + And then, with an impudence nought could abash, + Shrugged his hump-shoulder, to tell the beholder, + For twenty such knaves he would laugh but the bolder: + And so, with his sword-hilt gallantly jutting, + And dexter-hand on his haunch abutting, + Went the little man, Sir Ausbruch, strutting!" + +I suppose there are Browning students in existence who would think +that this poem contained something pregnant about the Temperance +question, or was a marvellously subtle analysis of the romantic +movement in Germany. But surely to most of us it is sufficiently +apparent that Browning was simply fashioning a ridiculous +knick-knack, exactly as if he were actually moulding one of these +preposterous German jugs. Now before studying the real character of +this Browningesque style, there is one general truth to be recognised +about Browning's work. It is this--that it is absolutely necessary to +remember that Browning had, like every other poet, his simple and +indisputable failures, and that it is one thing to speak of the +badness of his artistic failures, and quite another thing to speak of +the badness of his artistic aim. Browning's style may be a good style, +and yet exhibit many examples of a thoroughly bad use of it. On this +point there is indeed a singularly unfair system of judgment used by +the public towards the poets. It is very little realised that the vast +majority of great poets have written an enormous amount of very bad +poetry. The unfortunate Wordsworth is generally supposed to be almost +alone in this; but any one who thinks so can scarcely have read a +certain number of the minor poems of Byron and Shelley and Tennyson. + +Now it is only just to Browning that his more uncouth effusions should +not be treated as masterpieces by which he must stand or fall, but +treated simply as his failures. It is really true that such a line as + + "Irks fear the crop-full bird, frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?" + +is a very ugly and a very bad line. But it is quite equally true that +Tennyson's + + "And that good man, the clergyman, has told me words of peace," + +is a very ugly and a very bad line. But people do not say that this +proves that Tennyson was a mere crabbed controversialist and +metaphysician. They say that it is a bad example of Tennyson's form; +they do not say that it is a good example of Tennyson's indifference +to form. Upon the whole, Browning exhibits far fewer instances of this +failure in his own style than any other of the great poets, with the +exception of one or two like Spenser and Keats, who seem to have a +mysterious incapacity for writing bad poetry. But almost all original +poets, particularly poets who have invented an artistic style, are +subject to one most disastrous habit--the habit of writing imitations +of themselves. Every now and then in the works of the noblest +classical poets you will come upon passages which read like extracts +from an American book of parodies. Swinburne, for example, when he +wrote the couplet-- + + "From the lilies and languors of virtue + To the raptures and roses of vice," + +wrote what is nothing but a bad imitation of himself, an imitation +which seems indeed to have the wholly unjust and uncritical object of +proving that the Swinburnian melody is a mechanical scheme of initial +letters. Or again, Mr. Rudyard Kipling when he wrote the line-- + + "Or ride with the reckless seraphim on the rim of a red-maned star," + +was caricaturing himself in the harshest and least sympathetic spirit +of American humour. This tendency is, of course, the result of the +self-consciousness and theatricality of modern life in which each of +us is forced to conceive ourselves as part of a _dramatis personae_ +and act perpetually in character. Browning sometimes yielded to this +temptation to be a great deal too like himself. + + "Will I widen thee out till thou turnest + From Margaret Minnikin mou' by God's grace, + To Muckle-mouth Meg in good earnest." + +This sort of thing is not to be defended in Browning any more than in +Swinburne. But, on the other hand, it is not to be attributed in +Swinburne to a momentary exaggeration, and in Browning to a vital +aesthetic deficiency. In the case of Swinburne, we all feel that the +question is not whether that particular preposterous couplet about +lilies and roses redounds to the credit of the Swinburnian style, but +whether it would be possible in any other style than the Swinburnian +to have written the Hymn to Proserpine. In the same way, the essential +issue about Browning as an artist is not whether he, in common with +Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, and Swinburne, sometimes wrote +bad poetry, but whether in any other style except Browning's you could +have achieved the precise artistic effect which is achieved by such +incomparable lyrics as "The Patriot" or "The Laboratory." The answer +must be in the negative, and in that answer lies the whole +justification of Browning as an artist. + +The question now arises, therefore, what was his conception of his +functions as an artist? We have already agreed that his artistic +originality concerned itself chiefly with the serious use of the +grotesque. It becomes necessary, therefore, to ask what is the serious +use of the grotesque, and what relation does the grotesque bear to the +eternal and fundamental elements in life? + +One of the most curious things to notice about popular aesthetic +criticism is the number of phrases it will be found to use which are +intended to express an aesthetic failure, and which express merely an +aesthetic variety. Thus, for instance, the traveller will often hear +the advice from local lovers of the picturesque, "The scenery round +such and such a place has no interest; it is quite flat." To disparage +scenery as quite flat is, of course, like disparaging a swan as quite +white, or an Italian sky as quite blue. Flatness is a sublime quality +in certain landscapes, just as rockiness is a sublime quality in +others. In the same way there are a great number of phrases commonly +used in order to disparage such writers as Browning which do not in +fact disparage, but merely describe them. One of the most +distinguished of Browning's biographers and critics says of him, for +example, "He has never meant to be rugged, but has become so in +striving after strength." To say that Browning never tried to be +rugged is to say that Edgar Allan Poe never tried to be gloomy, or +that Mr. W.S. Gilbert never tried to be extravagant. The whole issue +depends upon whether we realise the simple and essential fact that +ruggedness is a mode of art like gloominess or extravagance. Some +poems ought to be rugged, just as some poems ought to be smooth. When +we see a drift of stormy and fantastic clouds at sunset, we do not say +that the cloud is beautiful although it is ragged at the edges. When +we see a gnarled and sprawling oak, we do not say that it is fine +although it is twisted. When we see a mountain, we do not say that it +is impressive although it is rugged, nor do we say apologetically that +it never meant to be rugged, but became so in its striving after +strength. Now, to say that Browning's poems, artistically considered, +are fine although they are rugged, is quite as absurd as to say that a +rock, artistically considered, is fine although it is rugged. +Ruggedness being an essential quality in the universe, there is that +in man which responds to it as to the striking of any other chord of +the eternal harmonies. As the children of nature, we are akin not only +to the stars and flowers, but also to the toad-stools and the +monstrous tropical birds. And it is to be repeated as the essential of +the question that on this side of our nature we do emphatically love +the form of the toad-stools, and not merely some complicated botanical +and moral lessons which the philosopher may draw from them. For +example, just as there is such a thing as a poetical metre being +beautifully light or beautifully grave and haunting, so there is such +a thing as a poetical metre being beautifully rugged. In the old +ballads, for instance, every person of literary taste will be struck +by a certain attractiveness in the bold, varying, irregular verse-- + + "He is either himsell a devil frae hell, + Or else his mother a witch maun be; + I wadna have ridden that wan water + For a' the gowd in Christentie," + +is quite as pleasing to the ear in its own way as + + "There's a bower of roses by Bendemeer stream, + And the nightingale sings in it all the night long," + +is in another way. Browning had an unrivalled ear for this particular +kind of staccato music. The absurd notion that he had no sense of +melody in verse is only possible to people who think that there is no +melody in verse which is not an imitation of Swinburne. To give a +satisfactory idea of Browning's rhythmic originality would be +impossible without quotations more copious than entertaining. But the +essential point has been suggested. + + "They were purple of raiment and golden, + Filled full of thee, fiery with wine, + Thy lovers in haunts unbeholden, + In marvellous chambers of thine," + +is beautiful language, but not the only sort of beautiful language. +This, for instance, has also a tune in it-- + + "I--'next poet.' No, my hearties, + I nor am, nor fain would be! + Choose your chiefs and pick your parties, + Not one soul revolt to me! + * * * * * + Which of you did I enable + Once to slip inside my breast, + There to catalogue and label + What I like least, what love best, + Hope and fear, believe and doubt of, + Seek and shun, respect, deride, + Who has right to make a rout of + Rarities he found inside?" + +This quick, gallantly stepping measure also has its own kind of music, +and the man who cannot feel it can never have enjoyed the sound of +soldiers marching by. This, then, roughly is the main fact to remember +about Browning's poetical method, or about any one's poetical +method--that the question is not whether that method is the best in +the world, but the question whether there are not certain things which +can only be conveyed by that method. It is perfectly true, for +instance, that a really lofty and lucid line of Tennyson, such as-- + + "Thou art the highest, and most human too" +and + "We needs must love the highest when we see it" + +would really be made the worse for being translated into Browning. It +would probably become + + "High's human; man loves best, best visible," + +and would lose its peculiar clarity and dignity and courtly plainness. +But it is quite equally true that any really characteristic fragment +of Browning, if it were only the tempestuous scolding of the organist +in "Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha"-- + + "Hallo, you sacristan, show us a light there! + Down it dips, gone like a rocket. + What, you want, do you, to come unawares, + Sweeping the church up for first morning-prayers, + And find a poor devil has ended his cares + At the foot of your rotten-runged rat-riddled stairs? + Do I carry the moon in my pocket?" + +--it is quite equally true that this outrageous gallop of rhymes +ending with a frantic astronomical image would lose in energy and +spirit if it were written in a conventional and classical style, and +ran-- + + "What must I deem then that thou dreamest to find + Disjected bones adrift upon the stair + Thou sweepest clean, or that thou deemest that I + Pouch in my wallet the vice-regal sun?" + +Is it not obvious that this statelier version might be excellent +poetry of its kind, and yet would be bad exactly in so far as it was +good; that it would lose all the swing, the rush, the energy of the +preposterous and grotesque original? In fact, we may see how +unmanageable is this classical treatment of the essentially absurd in +Tennyson himself. The humorous passages in _The Princess_, though +often really humorous in themselves, always appear forced and feeble +because they have to be restrained by a certain metrical dignity, and +the mere idea of such restraint is incompatible with humour. If +Browning had written the passage which opens _The Princess_, +descriptive of the "larking" of the villagers in the magnate's park, +he would have spared us nothing; he would not have spared us the +shrill uneducated voices and the unburied bottles of ginger beer. He +would have crammed the poem with uncouth similes; he would have +changed the metre a hundred times; he would have broken into doggerel +and into rhapsody; but he would have left, when all is said and done, +as he leaves in that paltry fragment of the grumbling organist, the +impression of a certain eternal human energy. Energy and joy, the +father and the mother of the grotesque, would have ruled the poem. We +should have felt of that rowdy gathering little but the sensation of +which Mr. Henley writes-- + + "Praise the generous gods for giving, + In this world of sin and strife, + With some little time for living, + Unto each the joy of life," + +the thought that every wise man has when looking at a Bank Holiday +crowd at Margate. + +To ask why Browning enjoyed this perverse and fantastic style most +would be to go very deep into his spirit indeed, probably a great +deal deeper than it is possible to go. But it is worth while to +suggest tentatively the general function of the grotesque in art +generally and in his art in particular. There is one very curious idea +into which we have been hypnotised by the more eloquent poets, and +that is that nature in the sense of what is ordinarily called the +country is a thing entirely stately and beautiful as those terms are +commonly understood. The whole world of the fantastic, all things +top-heavy, lop-sided, and nonsensical are conceived as the work of +man, gargoyles, German jugs, Chinese pots, political caricatures, +burlesque epics, the pictures of Mr. Aubrey Beardsley and the puns of +Robert Browning. But in truth a part, and a very large part, of the +sanity and power of nature lies in the fact that out of her comes all +this instinct of caricature. Nature may present itself to the poet too +often as consisting of stars and lilies; but these are not poets who +live in the country; they are men who go to the country for +inspiration and could no more live in the country than they could go +to bed in Westminster Abbey. Men who live in the heart of nature, +farmers and peasants, know that nature means cows and pigs, and +creatures more humorous than can be found in a whole sketch-book of +Callot. And the element of the grotesque in art, like the element of +the grotesque in nature, means, in the main, energy, the energy which +takes its own forms and goes its own way. Browning's verse, in so far +as it is grotesque, is not complex or artificial; it is natural and in +the legitimate tradition of nature. The verse sprawls like the trees, +dances like the dust; it is ragged like the thunder-cloud, it is +top-heavy like the toadstool. Energy which disregards the standard of +classical art is in nature as it is in Browning. The same sense of the +uproarious force in things which makes Browning dwell on the oddity of +a fungus or a jellyfish makes him dwell on the oddity of a +philosophical idea. Here, for example, we have a random instance from +"The Englishman in Italy" of the way in which Browning, when he was +most Browning, regarded physical nature. + + "And pitch down his basket before us, + All trembling alive + With pink and grey jellies, your sea-fruit; + You touch the strange lumps, + And mouths gape there, eyes open, all manner + Of horns and of humps, + Which only the fisher looks grave at." + +Nature might mean flowers to Wordsworth and grass to Walt Whitman, but +to Browning it really meant such things as these, the monstrosities +and living mysteries of the sea. And just as these strange things +meant to Browning energy in the physical world, so strange thoughts +and strange images meant to him energy in the mental world. When, in +one of his later poems, the professional mystic is seeking in a +supreme moment of sincerity to explain that small things may be filled +with God as well as great, he uses the very same kind of image, the +image of a shapeless sea-beast, to embody that noble conception. + + "The Name comes close behind a stomach-cyst, + The simplest of creations, just a sac + That's mouth, heart, legs, and belly at once, yet lives + And feels, and could do neither, we conclude, + If simplified still further one degree." + + (SLUDGE.) + +These bulbous, indescribable sea-goblins are the first thing on which +the eye of the poet lights in looking on a landscape, and the last in +the significance of which he trusts in demonstrating the mercy of the +Everlasting. + +There is another and but slightly different use of the grotesque, but +which is definitely valuable in Browning's poetry, and indeed in all +poetry. To present a matter in a grotesque manner does certainly tend +to touch the nerve of surprise and thus to draw attention to the +intrinsically miraculous character of the object itself. It is +difficult to give examples of the proper use of grotesqueness without +becoming too grotesque. But we should all agree that if St. Paul's +Cathedral were suddenly presented to us upside down we should, for the +moment, be more surprised at it, and look at it more than we have done +all the centuries during which it has rested on its foundations. Now +it is the supreme function of the philosopher of the grotesque to make +the world stand on its head that people may look at it. If we say "a +man is a man" we awaken no sense of the fantastic, however much we +ought to, but if we say, in the language of the old satirist, "that +man is a two-legged bird, without feathers," the phrase does, for a +moment, make us look at man from the outside and gives us a thrill in +his presence. When the author of the Book of Job insists upon the +huge, half-witted, apparently unmeaning magnificence and might of +Behemoth, the hippopotamus, he is appealing precisely to this sense of +wonder provoked by the grotesque. "Canst thou play with him as with a +bird, canst thou bind him for thy maidens?" he says in an admirable +passage. The notion of the hippopotamus as a household pet is +curiously in the spirit of the humour of Browning. + +But when it is clearly understood that Browning's love of the +fantastic in style was a perfectly serious artistic love, when we +understand that he enjoyed working in that style, as a Chinese potter +might enjoy making dragons, or a mediaeval mason making devils, there +yet remains something definite which must be laid to his account as a +fault. He certainly had a capacity for becoming perfectly childish in +his indulgence in ingenuities that have nothing to do with poetry at +all, such as puns, and rhymes, and grammatical structures that only +just fit into each other like a Chinese puzzle. Probably it was only +one of the marks of his singular vitality, curiosity, and interest in +details. He was certainly one of those somewhat rare men who are +fierily ambitious both in large things and in small. He prided himself +on having written _The Ring and the Book_, and he also prided himself +on knowing good wine when he tasted it. He prided himself on +re-establishing optimism on a new foundation, and it is to be +presumed, though it is somewhat difficult to imagine, that he prided +himself on such rhymes as the following in _Pacchiarotto_:-- + + "The wolf, fox, bear, and monkey, + By piping advice in one key-- + That his pipe should play a prelude + To something heaven-tinged not hell-hued, + Something not harsh but docile, + Man-liquid, not man-fossil." + +This writing, considered as writing, can only be regarded as a kind of +joke, and most probably Browning considered it so himself. It has +nothing at all to do with that powerful and symbolic use of the +grotesque which may be found in such admirable passages as this from +"Holy Cross Day":-- + + "Give your first groan--compunction's at work; + And soft! from a Jew you mount to a Turk. + Lo, Micah--the self-same beard on chin + He was four times already converted in!" + +This is the serious use of the grotesque. Through it passion and +philosophy are as well expressed as through any other medium. But the +rhyming frenzy of Browning has no particular relation even to the +poems in which it occurs. It is not a dance to any measure; it can +only be called the horse-play of literature. It may be noted, for +example, as a rather curious fact, that the ingenious rhymes are +generally only mathematical triumphs, not triumphs of any kind of +assonance. "The Pied Piper of Hamelin," a poem written for children, +and bound in general to be lucid and readable, ends with a rhyme which +it is physically impossible for any one to say:-- + + "And, whether they pipe us free, from rats or from mice, + If we've promised them aught, let us keep our promise!" + +This queer trait in Browning, his inability to keep a kind of demented +ingenuity even out of poems in which it was quite inappropriate, is a +thing which must be recognised, and recognised all the more because as +a whole he was a very perfect artist, and a particularly perfect +artist in the use of the grotesque. But everywhere when we go a little +below the surface in Browning we find that there was something in him +perverse and unusual despite all his working normality and +simplicity. His mind was perfectly wholesome, but it was not made +exactly like the ordinary mind. It was like a piece of strong wood +with a knot in it. + +The quality of what, can only be called buffoonery which is under +discussion is indeed one of the many things in which Browning was more +of an Elizabethan than a Victorian. He was like the Elizabethans in +their belief in the normal man, in their gorgeous and over-loaded +language, above all in their feeling for learning as an enjoyment and +almost a frivolity. But there was nothing in which he was so +thoroughly Elizabethan, and even Shakespearian, as in this fact, that +when he felt inclined to write a page of quite uninteresting nonsense, +he immediately did so. Many great writers have contrived to be +tedious, and apparently aimless, while expounding some thought which +they believed to be grave and profitable; but this frivolous stupidity +had not been found in any great writer since the time of Rabelais and +the time of the Elizabethans. In many of the comic scenes of +Shakespeare we have precisely this elephantine ingenuity, this hunting +of a pun to death through three pages. In the Elizabethan dramatists +and in Browning it is no doubt to a certain extent the mark of a real +hilarity. People must be very happy to be so easily amused. + +In the case of what is called Browning's obscurity, the question is +somewhat more difficult to handle. Many people have supposed Browning +to be profound because he was obscure, and many other people, hardly +less mistaken, have supposed him to be obscure because he was +profound. He was frequently profound, he was occasionally obscure, but +as a matter of fact the two have little or nothing to do with each +other. Browning's dark and elliptical mode of speech, like his love of +the grotesque, was simply a characteristic of his, a trick of is +temperament, and had little or nothing to do with whether what he was +expressing was profound or superficial. Suppose, for example, that a +person well read in English poetry but unacquainted with Browning's +style were earnestly invited to consider the following verse:-- + + "Hobbs hints blue--straight he turtle eats. + Nobbs prints blue--claret crowns his cup. + Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats-- + Both gorge. Who fished the murex up? + What porridge had John Keats?" + +The individual so confronted would say without hesitation that it must +indeed be an abstruse and indescribable thought which could only be +conveyed by remarks so completely disconnected. But the point of the +matter is that the thought contained in this amazing verse is not +abstruse or philosophical at all, but is a perfectly ordinary and +straightforward comment, which any one might have made upon an obvious +fact of life. The whole verse of course begins to explain itself, if +we know the meaning of the word "murex," which is the name of a +sea-shell, out of which was made the celebrated blue dye of Tyre. The +poet takes this blue dye as a simile for a new fashion in literature, +and points out that Hobbs, Nobbs, etc., obtain fame and comfort by +merely using the dye from the shell; and adds the perfectly natural +comment:-- + + "... Who fished the murex up? + What porridge had John Keats?" + +So that the verse is not subtle, and was not meant to be subtle, but +is a perfectly casual piece of sentiment at the end of a light poem. +Browning is not obscure because he has such deep things to say, any +more than he is grotesque because he has such new things to say. He is +both of these things primarily, because he likes to express himself in +a particular manner. The manner is as natural to him as a man's +physical voice, and it is abrupt, sketchy, allusive, and full of gaps. +Here comes in the fundamental difference between Browning and such a +writer as George Meredith, with whom the Philistine satirist would so +often in the matter of complexity class him. The works of George +Meredith are, as it were, obscure even when we know what they mean. +They deal with nameless emotions, fugitive sensations, subconscious +certainties and uncertainties, and it really requires a somewhat +curious and unfamiliar mode of speech to indicate the presence of +these. But the great part of Browning's actual sentiments, and almost +all the finest and most literary of them, are perfectly plain and +popular and eternal sentiments. Meredith is really a singer producing +strange notes and cadences difficult to follow because of the delicate +rhythm of the song he sings. Browning is simply a great demagogue, +with an impediment in his speech. Or rather, to speak more strictly, +Browning is a man whose excitement for the glory of the obvious is so +great that his speech becomes disjointed and precipitate: he becomes +eccentric through his advocacy of the ordinary, and goes mad for the +love of sanity. + +If Browning and George Meredith were each describing the same act, +they might both be obscure, but their obscurities would be entirely +different. Suppose, for instance, they were describing even so prosaic +and material an act as a man being knocked downstairs by another man +to whom he had given the lie, Meredith's description would refer to +something which an ordinary observer would not see, or at least could +not describe. It might be a sudden sense of anarchy in the brain of +the assaulter, or a stupefaction and stunned serenity in that of the +object of the assault. He might write, "Wainwood's 'Men vary in +veracity,' brought the baronet's arm up. He felt the doors of his +brain burst, and Wainwood a swift rushing of himself through air +accompanied with a clarity as of the annihilated." Meredith, in other +words, would speak queerly because he was describing queer mental +experiences. But Browning might simply be describing the material +incident of the man being knocked downstairs, and his description +would run:-- + + "What then? 'You lie' and doormat below stairs + Takes bump from back." + +This is not subtlety, but merely a kind of insane swiftness. Browning +is not like Meredith, anxious to pause and examine the sensations of +the combatants, nor does he become obscure through this anxiety. He is +only so anxious to get his man to the bottom of the stairs quickly +that he leaves out about half the story. + +Many who could understand that ruggedness might be an artistic +quality, would decisively, and in most cases rightly, deny that +obscurity could under any conceivable circumstances be an artistic +quality. But here again Browning's work requires a somewhat more +cautious and sympathetic analysis. There is a certain kind of +fascination, a strictly artistic fascination, which arises from a +matter being hinted at in such a way as to leave a certain tormenting +uncertainty even at the end. It is well sometimes to half understand a +poem in the same manner that we half understand the world. One of the +deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will +suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping +meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered +something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a +prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain +poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed +the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but +in this dazed and dramatic ignorance. + +But in truth it is very difficult to keep pace with all the strange +and unclassified artistic merits of Browning. He was always trying +experiments; sometimes he failed, producing clumsy and irritating +metres, top-heavy and over-concentrated thought. Far more often he +triumphed, producing a crowd of boldly designed poems, every one of +which taken separately might have founded an artistic school. But +whether successful or unsuccessful, he never ceased from his fierce +hunt after poetic novelty. He never became a conservative. The last +book he published in his life-time, _Parleyings with Certain People of +Importance in their Day_, was a new poem, and more revolutionary than +_Paracelsus_. This is the true light in which to regard Browning as an +artist. He had determined to leave no spot of the cosmos unadorned by +his poetry which he could find it possible to adorn. An admirable +example can be found in that splendid poem "Childe Roland to the Dark +Tower came." It is the hint of an entirely new and curious type of +poetry, the poetry of the shabby and hungry aspect of the earth +itself. Daring poets who wished to escape from conventional gardens +and orchards had long been in the habit of celebrating the poetry of +rugged and gloomy landscapes, but Browning is not content with this. +He insists upon celebrating the poetry of mean landscapes. That sense +of scrubbiness in nature, as of a man unshaved, had never been +conveyed with this enthusiasm and primeval gusto before. + + "If there pushed any ragged thistle-stalk + Above its mates, the head was chopped; the bents + Were jealous else. What made those holes and rents + In the dock's harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to baulk + All hope of greenness? 'tis a brute must walk + Pashing their life out, with a brute's intents." + +This is a perfect realisation of that eerie sentiment which comes upon +us, not so often among mountains and water-falls, as it does on some +half-starved common at twilight, or in walking down some grey mean +street. It is the song of the beauty of refuse; and Browning was the +first to sing it. Oddly enough it has been one of the poems about +which most of those pedantic and trivial questions have been asked, +which are asked invariably by those who treat Browning as a science +instead of a poet, "What does the poem of 'Childe Roland' mean?" The +only genuine answer to this is, "What does anything mean?" Does the +earth mean nothing? Do grey skies and wastes covered with thistles +mean nothing? Does an old horse turned out to graze mean nothing? If +it does, there is but one further truth to be added--that everything +means nothing. + + + + +CHAPTER VII + +_THE RING AND THE BOOK_ + + +When we have once realised the great conception of the plan of _The +Ring and the Book_, the studying of a single matter from nine +different stand-points, it becomes exceedingly interesting to notice +what these stand-points are; what figures Browning has selected as +voicing the essential and distinct versions of the case. One of the +ablest and most sympathetic of all the critics of Browning, Mr. +Augustine Birrell, has said in one place that the speeches of the two +advocates in _The Ring and the Book_ will scarcely be very interesting +to the ordinary reader. However that may be, there can be little doubt +that a great number of the readers of Browning think them beside the +mark and adventitious. But it is exceedingly dangerous to say that +anything in Browning is irrelevant or unnecessary. We are apt to go on +thinking so until some mere trifle puts the matter in a new light, and +the detail that seemed meaningless springs up as almost the central +pillar of the structure. In the successive monologues of his poem, +Browning is endeavouring to depict the various strange ways in which a +fact gets itself presented to the world. In every question there are +partisans who bring cogent and convincing arguments for the right +side; there are also partisans who bring cogent and convincing +arguments for the wrong side. But over and above these, there does +exist in every great controversy a class of more or less official +partisans who are continually engaged in defending each cause by +entirely inappropriate arguments. They do not know the real good that +can be said for the good cause, nor the real good that can be said for +the bad one. They are represented by the animated, learned, eloquent, +ingenious, and entirely futile and impertinent arguments of Juris +Doctor Bottinius and Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis. These two men +brilliantly misrepresent, not merely each other's cause, but their own +cause. The introduction of them is one of the finest and most artistic +strokes in _The Ring and the Book_. + +We can see the matter best by taking an imaginary parallel. Suppose +that a poet of the type of Browning lived some centuries hence and +found in some _cause celebre_ of our day, such as the Parnell +Commission, an opportunity for a work similar in its design to _The +Ring and the Book_. The first monologue, which would be called +"Half-London," would be the arguments of an ordinary educated and +sensible Unionist who believed that there really was evidence that the +Nationalist movement in Ireland was rooted in crime and public panic. +The "Otherhalf-London" would be the utterance of an ordinary educated +and sensible Home Ruler, who thought that in the main Nationalism was +one distinct symptom, and crime another, of the same poisonous and +stagnant problem. The "Tertium Quid" would be some detached +intellectual, committed neither to Nationalism nor to Unionism, +possibly Mr. Bernard Shaw, who would make a very entertaining Browning +monologue. Then of course would come the speeches of the great actors +in the drama, the icy anger of Parnell, the shuffling apologies of +Pigott. But we should feel that the record was incomplete without +another touch which in practice has so much to do with the confusion +of such a question. Bottinius and Hyacinthus de Archangelis, the two +cynical professional pleaders, with their transparent assumptions and +incredible theories of the case, would be represented by two party +journalists; one of whom was ready to base his case either on the fact +that Parnell was a Socialist or an Anarchist, or an Atheist or a Roman +Catholic; and the other of whom was ready to base his case on the +theory that Lord Salisbury hated Parnell or was in league with him, or +had never heard of him, or anything else that was remote from the +world of reality. These are the kind of little touches for which we +must always be on the look-out in Browning. Even if a digression, or a +simile, or a whole scene in a play, seems to have no point or value, +let us wait a little and give it a chance. He very seldom wrote +anything that did not mean a great deal. + +It is sometimes curious to notice how a critic, possessing no little +cultivation and fertility, will, in speaking of a work of art, let +fall almost accidentally some apparently trivial comment, which +reveals to us with an instantaneous and complete mental illumination +the fact that he does not, so far as that work of art is concerned, in +the smallest degree understand what he is talking about. He may have +intended to correct merely some minute detail of the work he is +studying, but that single movement is enough to blow him and all his +diplomas into the air. These are the sensations with which the true +Browningite will regard the criticism made by so many of Browning's +critics and biographers about _The Ring and the Book_. That criticism +was embodied by one of them in the words "the theme looked at +dispassionately is unworthy of the monument in which it is entombed +for eternity." Now this remark shows at once that the critic does not +know what _The Ring and the Book_ means. We feel about it as we should +feel about a man who said that the plot of _Tristram Shandy_ was not +well constructed, or that the women in Rossetti's pictures did not +look useful and industrious. A man who has missed the fact that +_Tristram Shandy is_ a game of digressions, that the whole book is a +kind of practical joke to cheat the reader out of a story, simply has +not read _Tristram Shandy_ at all. The man who objects to the Rossetti +pictures because they depict a sad and sensuous day-dream, objects to +their existing at all. And any one who objects to Browning writing his +huge epic round a trumpery and sordid police-case has in reality +missed the whole length and breadth of the poet's meaning. The essence +of _The Ring and the Book_ is that it is the great epic of the +nineteenth century, because it is the great epic of the enormous +importance of small things. The supreme difference that divides _The +Ring and the Book_ from all the great poems of similar length and +largeness of design is precisely the fact that all these are about +affairs commonly called important, and _The Ring and the Book_ is +about an affair commonly called contemptible. Homer says, "I will show +you the relations between man and heaven as exhibited in a great +legend of love and war, which shall contain the mightiest of all +mortal warriors, and the most beautiful of all mortal women." The +author of the Book of Job says, "I will show you the relations between +man and heaven by a tale of primeval sorrows and the voice of God out +of a whirlwind." Virgil says, "I will show you the relations of man to +heaven by the tale of the origin of the greatest people and the +founding of the most wonderful city in the world." Dante says, "I will +show you the relations of man to heaven by uncovering the very +machinery of the spiritual universe, and letting you hear, as I have +heard, the roaring of the mills of God." Milton says, "I will show you +the relations of man to heaven by telling you of the very beginning of +all things, and the first shaping of the thing that is evil in the +first twilight of time." Browning says, "I will show you the relations +of man to heaven by telling you a story out of a dirty Italian book of +criminal trials from which I select one of the meanest and most +completely forgotten." Until we have realised this fundamental idea in +_The Ring and the Book_ all criticism is misleading. + +In this Browning is, of course, the supreme embodiment of his time. +The characteristic of the modern movements _par excellence_ is the +apotheosis of the insignificant. Whether it be the school of poetry +which sees more in one cowslip or clover-top than in forests and +waterfalls, or the school of fiction which finds something +indescribably significant in the pattern of a hearth-rug, or the tint +of a man's tweed coat, the tendency is the same. Maeterlinck stricken +still and wondering by a deal door half open, or the light shining out +of a window at night; Zola filling note-books with the medical +significance of the twitching of a man's toes, or the loss of his +appetite; Whitman counting the grass and the heart-shaped leaves of +the lilac; Mr. George Gissing lingering fondly over the third-class +ticket and the dilapidated umbrella; George Meredith seeing a soul's +tragedy in a phrase at the dinner-table; Mr. Bernard Shaw filling +three pages with stage directions to describe a parlour; all these +men, different in every other particular, are alike in this, that they +have ceased to believe certain things to be important and the rest to +be unimportant. Significance is to them a wild thing that may leap +upon them from any hiding-place. They have all become terribly +impressed with and a little bit alarmed at the mysterious powers of +small things. Their difference from the old epic poets is the whole +difference between an age that fought with dragons and an age that +fights with microbes. + +This tide of the importance of small things is flowing so steadily +around us upon every side to-day, that we do not sufficiently realise +that if there was one man in English literary history who might with +justice be called its fountain and origin, that man was Robert +Browning. When Browning arose, literature was entirely in the hands of +the Tennysonian poet. The Tennysonian poet does indeed mention +trivialities, but he mentions them when he wishes to speak trivially; +Browning mentions trivialities when he wishes to speak sensationally. +Now this sense of the terrible importance of detail was a sense which +may be said to have possessed Browning in the emphatic manner of a +demoniac possession. Sane as he was, this one feeling might have +driven him to a condition not far from madness. Any room that he was +sitting in glared at him with innumerable eyes and mouths gaping with +a story. There was sometimes no background and no middle distance in +his mind. A human face and the pattern on the wall behind it came +forward with equally aggressive clearness. It may be repeated, that if +ever he who had the strongest head in the world had gone mad, it would +have been through this turbulent democracy of things. If he looked at +a porcelain vase or an old hat, a cabbage, or a puppy at play, each +began to be bewitched with the spell of a kind of fairyland of +philosophers: the vase, like the jar in the _Arabian Nights_, to send +up a smoke of thoughts and shapes; the hat to produce souls, as a +conjuror's hat produces rabbits; the cabbage to swell and overshadow +the earth, like the Tree of Knowledge; and the puppy to go off at a +scamper along the road to the end of the world. Any one who has read +Browning's longer poems knows how constantly a simile or figure of +speech is selected, not among the large, well-recognised figures +common in poetry, but from some dusty corner of experience, and how +often it is characterised by smallness and a certain quaint exactitude +which could not have been found in any more usual example. Thus, for +instance, _Prince Hohenstiel--Schwangau_ explains the psychological +meaning of all his restless and unscrupulous activities by comparing +them to the impulse which has just led him, even in the act of +talking, to draw a black line on the blotting-paper exactly, so as to +connect two separate blots that were already there. This queer example +is selected as the best possible instance of a certain fundamental +restlessness and desire to add a touch to things in the spirit of +man. I have no doubt whatever that Browning thought of the idea after +doing the thing himself, and sat in a philosophical trance staring at +a piece of inked blotting-paper, conscious that at that moment, and in +that insignificant act, some immemorial monster of the mind, nameless +from the beginning of the world, had risen to the surface of the +spiritual sea. + +It is therefore the very essence of Browning's genius, and the very +essence of _The Ring and the Book_, that it should be the enormous +multiplication of a small theme. It is the extreme of idle criticism +to complain that the story is a current and sordid story, for the +whole object of the poem is to show what infinities of spiritual good +and evil a current and sordid story may contain. When once this is +realised, it explains at one stroke the innumerable facts about the +work. It explains, for example, Browning's detailed and picturesque +account of the glorious dust-bin of odds and ends for sale, out of +which he picked the printed record of the trial, and his insistence on +its cheapness, its dustiness, its yellow leaves, and its crabbed +Latin. The more soiled and dark and insignificant he can make the text +appear, the better for his ample and gigantic sermon. It explains +again the strictness with which Browning adhered to the facts of the +forgotten intrigue. He was playing the game of seeing how much was +really involved in one paltry fragment of fact. To have introduced +large quantities of fiction would not have been sportsmanlike. _The +Ring and the Book_ therefore, to re-capitulate the view arrived at so +far, is the typical epic of our age, because it expresses the richness +of life by taking as a text a poor story. It pays to existence the +highest of all possible compliments--the great compliment which +monarchy paid to mankind--the compliment of selecting from it almost +at random. + +But this is only the first half of the claim of _The Ring and the +Book_ to be the typical epic of modern times. The second half of that +claim, the second respect in which the work is representative of all +modern development, requires somewhat more careful statement. _The +Ring and the Book_ is of course, essentially speaking, a detective +story. Its difference from the ordinary detective story is that it +seeks to establish, not the centre of criminal guilt, but the centre +of spiritual guilt. But it has exactly the same kind of exciting +quality that a detective story has, and a very excellent quality it +is. But the element which is important, and which now requires +pointing out, is the method by which that centre of spiritual guilt +and the corresponding centre of spiritual rectitude is discovered. In +order to make clear the peculiar character of this method, it is +necessary to begin rather nearer the beginning, and to go back some +little way in literary history. + +I do not know whether anybody, including the editor himself, has ever +noticed a peculiar coincidence which may be found in the arrangement +of the lyrics in Sir Francis Palgrave's _Golden Treasury_. However +that may be, two poems, each of them extremely well known, are placed +side by side, and their juxtaposition represents one vast revolution +in the poetical manner of looking at things. The first is Goldsmith's +almost too well known + + "When lovely woman stoops to folly, + And finds too late that men betray, + What charm can soothe her melancholy? + What art can wash her guilt away?" + +Immediately afterwards comes, with a sudden and thrilling change of +note, the voice of Burns:-- + + "Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon, + How can ye bloom sae fair? + How can ye chant, ye little birds, + And I sae fu' of care? + + Thou'll break my heart, thou bonny bird, + That sings upon the bough, + Thou minds me of the happy days + When my fause Love was true." + +A man might read those two poems a great many times without happening +to realise that they are two poems on exactly the same subject--the +subject of a trusting woman deserted by a man. And the whole +difference--the difference struck by the very first note of the voice +of any one who reads them--is this fundamental difference, that +Goldsmith's words are spoken about a certain situation, and Burns's +words are spoken in that situation. + +In the transition from one of these lyrics to the other, we have a +vital change in the conception of the functions of the poet; a change +of which Burns was in many ways the beginning, of which Browning, in a +manner that we shall see presently, was the culmination. + +Goldsmith writes fully and accurately in the tradition of the old +historic idea of what a poet was. The poet, the _vates_, was the +supreme and absolute critic of human existence, the chorus in the +human drama; he was, to employ two words, which when analysed are the +same word, either a spectator or a seer. He took a situation, such as +the situation of a woman deserted by a man before-mentioned, and he +gave, as Goldsmith gives, his own personal and definite decision upon +it, entirely based upon general principles, and entirely from the +outside. Then, as in the case of _The Golden Treasury_, he has no +sooner given judgment than there comes a bitter and confounding cry +out of the very heart of the situation itself, which tells us things +which would have been quite left out of account by the poet of the +general rule. No one, for example, but a person who knew something of +the inside of agony would have introduced that touch of the rage of +the mourner against the chattering frivolity of nature, "Thou'll break +my heart, thou bonny bird." We find and could find no such touch in +Goldsmith. We have to arrive at the conclusion therefore, that the +_vates_ or poet in his absolute capacity is defied and overthrown by +this new method of what may be called the songs of experience. + +Now Browning, as he appears in _The Ring and the Book_, represents the +attempt to discover, not the truth in the sense that Goldsmith states +it, but the larger truth which is made up of all the emotional +experiences, such as that rendered by Burns. Browning, like Goldsmith, +seeks ultimately to be just and impartial, but he does it by +endeavouring to feel acutely every kind of partiality. Goldsmith +stands apart from all the passions of the case, and Browning includes +them all. If Browning were endeavouring to do strict justice in a case +like that of the deserted lady by the banks of Doon, he would not +touch or modify in the smallest particular the song as Burns sang it, +but he would write other songs, perhaps equally pathetic. A lyric or a +soliloquy would convince us suddenly by the mere pulse of its +language, that there was some pathos in the other actors in the drama; +some pathos, for example, in a weak man, conscious that in a +passionate ignorance of life he had thrown away his power of love, +lacking the moral courage to throw his prospects after it. We should +be reminded again that there was some pathos in the position, let us +say, of the seducer's mother, who had built all her hopes upon +developments which a mesalliance would overthrow, or in the position +of some rival lover, stricken to the ground with the tragedy in which +he had not even the miserable comfort of a _locus standi_. All these +characters in the story, Browning would realise from their own +emotional point of view before he gave judgment. The poet in his +ancient office held a kind of terrestrial day of judgment, and gave +men halters and haloes; Browning gives men neither halter nor halo, he +gives them voices. This is indeed the most bountiful of all the +functions of the poet, that he gives men words, for which men from the +beginning of the world have starved more than for bread. + +Here then we have the second great respect in which _The Ring and the +Book_ is the great epic of the age. It is the great epic of the age, +because it is the expression of the belief, it might almost be said, +of the discovery, that no man ever lived upon this earth without +possessing a point of view. No one ever lived who had not a little +more to say for himself than any formal system of justice was likely +to say for him. It is scarcely necessary to point out how entirely the +application of this principle would revolutionise the old heroic +epic, in which the poet decided absolutely the moral relations and +moral value of the characters. Suppose, for example, that Homer had +written the _Odyssey_ on the principle of _The Ring and the Book_, how +disturbing, how weird an experience it would be to read the story from +the point of view of Antinous! Without contradicting a single material +fact, without telling a single deliberate lie, the narrative would so +change the whole world around us, that we should scarcely know we were +dealing with the same place and people. The calm face of Penelope +would, it may be, begin to grow meaner before our eyes, like a face +changing in a dream. She would begin to appear as a fickle and selfish +woman, passing falsely as a widow, and playing a double game between +the attentions of foolish but honourable young men, and the fitful +appearances of a wandering and good-for-nothing sailor-husband; a man +prepared to act that most well-worn of melodramatic roles, the +conjugal bully and blackmailer, the man who uses marital rights as an +instrument for the worse kind of wrongs. Or, again, if we had the +story of the fall of King Arthur told from the stand-point of Mordred, +it would only be a matter of a word or two; in a turn, in the +twinkling of an eye, we should find ourselves sympathising with the +efforts of an earnest young man to frustrate the profligacies of +high-placed paladins like Lancelot and Tristram, and ultimately +discovering, with deep regret but unshaken moral courage, that there +was no way to frustrate them, except by overthrowing the cold and +priggish and incapable egotist who ruled the country, and the whole +artificial and bombastic schemes which bred these moral evils. It +might be that in spite of this new view of the case, it would +ultimately appear that Ulysses was really right and Arthur was really +right, just as Browning makes it ultimately appear that Pompilia was +really right. But any one can see the enormous difference in scope and +difficulty between the old epic which told the whole story from one +man's point of view, and the new epic which cannot come to its +conclusion, until it has digested and assimilated views as paradoxical +and disturbing as our imaginary defence of Antinous and apologia of +Mordred. + +One of the most important steps ever taken in the history of the world +is this step, with all its various aspects, literary, political, and +social, which is represented by _The Ring and the Book_. It is the +step of deciding, in the face of many serious dangers and +disadvantages, to let everybody talk. The poet of the old epic is the +poet who had learnt to speak; Browning in the new epic is the poet who +has learnt to listen. This listening to truth and error, to heretics, +to fools, to intellectual bullies, to desperate partisans, to mere +chatterers, to systematic poisoners of the mind, is the hardest lesson +that humanity has ever been set to learn. _The Ring and the Book_ is +the embodiment of this terrible magnanimity and patience. It is the +epic of free speech. + +Free speech is an idea which has at present all the unpopularity of a +truism; so that we tend to forget that it was not so very long ago +that it had the more practical unpopularity which attaches to a new +truth. Ingratitude is surely the chief of the intellectual sins of +man. He takes his political benefits for granted, just as he takes +the skies and the seasons for granted. He considers the calm of a city +street a thing as inevitable as the calm of a forest clearing, whereas +it is only kept in peace by a sustained stretch and effort similar to +that which keeps up a battle or a fencing match. Just as we forget +where we stand in relation to natural phenomena, so we forget it in +relation to social phenomena. We forget that the earth is a star, and +we forget that free speech is a paradox. + +It is not by any means self-evident upon the face of it that an +institution like the liberty of speech is right or just. It is not +natural or obvious to let a man utter follies and abominations which +you believe to be bad for mankind any more than it is natural or +obvious to let a man dig up a part of the public road, or infect half +a town with typhoid fever. The theory of free speech, that truth is so +much larger and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, that it +is very much better at all costs to hear every one's account of it, is +a theory which has been justified upon the whole by experiment, but +which remains a very daring and even a very surprising theory. It is +really one of the great discoveries of the modern time; but, once +admitted, it is a principle that does not merely affect politics, but +philosophy, ethics, and finally poetry. + +Browning was upon the whole the first poet to apply the principle to +poetry. He perceived that if we wish to tell the truth about a human +drama, we must not tell it merely like a melodrama, in which the +villain is villainous and the comic man is comic. He saw that the +truth had not been told until he had seen in the villain the pure and +disinterested gentleman that most villains firmly believe themselves +to be, or until he had taken the comic man as seriously as it is the +custom of comic men to take themselves. And in this Browning is beyond +all question the founder of the most modern school of poetry. +Everything that was profound, everything, indeed, that was tolerable +in the aesthetes of 1880, and the decadent of 1890, has its ultimate +source in Browning's great conception that every one's point of view +is interesting, even if it be a jaundiced or a blood-shot point of +view. He is at one with the decadents, in holding that it is +emphatically profitable, that it is emphatically creditable, to know +something of the grounds of the happiness of a thoroughly bad man. +Since his time we have indeed been somewhat over-satisfied with the +moods of the burglar, and the pensive lyrics of the receiver of stolen +goods. But Browning, united with the decadents on this point, of the +value of every human testimony, is divided from them sharply and by a +chasm in another equally important point. He held that it is necessary +to listen to all sides of a question in order to discover the truth of +it. But he held that there was a truth to discover. He held that +justice was a mystery, but not, like the decadents, that justice was a +delusion. He held, in other words, the true Browning doctrine, that in +a dispute every one was to a certain extent right; not the decadent +doctrine that in so mad a place as the world, every one must be by the +nature of things wrong. + +Browning's conception of the Universe can hardly be better expressed +than in the old and pregnant fable about the five blind men who went +to visit an elephant. One of them seized its trunk, and asserted that +an elephant was a kind of serpent; another embraced its leg, and was +ready to die for the belief that an elephant was a kind of tree. In +the same way to the man who leaned against its side it was a wall; to +the man who had hold of its tail a rope, and to the man who ran upon +its tusk a particularly unpleasant kind of spear. This, as I have +said, is the whole theology and philosophy of Browning. But he differs +from the psychological decadents and impressionists in this important +point, that he thinks that although the blind men found out very +little about the elephant, the elephant was an elephant, and was there +all the time. The blind men formed mistaken theories because an +elephant is a thing with a very curious shape. And Browning firmly +believed that the Universe was a thing with a very curious shape +indeed. No blind poet could even imagine an elephant without +experience, and no man, however great and wise, could dream of God and +not die. But there is a vital distinction between the mystical view of +Browning, that the blind men are misled because there is so much for +them to learn, and the purely impressionist and agnostic view of the +modern poet, that the blind men were misled because there was nothing +for them to learn. To the impressionist artist of our time we are not +blind men groping after an elephant and naming it a tree or a serpent. +We are maniacs, isolated in separate cells, and dreaming of trees and +serpents without reason and without result. + + + + +CHAPTER VIII + +THE PHILOSOPHY OF BROWNING + + +The great fault of most of the appreciation of Browning lies in the +fact that it conceives the moral and artistic value of his work to lie +in what is called "the message of Browning," or "the teaching of +Browning," or, in other words, in the mere opinions of Browning. Now +Browning had opinions, just as he had a dress-suit or a vote for +Parliament. He did not hesitate to express these opinions any more +than he would have hesitated to fire off a gun, or open an umbrella, +if he had possessed those articles, and realised their value. For +example, he had, as his students and eulogists have constantly stated, +certain definite opinions about the spiritual function of love, or the +intellectual basis of Christianity. Those opinions were very striking +and very solid, as everything was which came out of Browning's mind. +His two great theories of the universe may be expressed in two +comparatively parallel phrases. The first was what may be called the +hope which lies in the imperfection of man. The characteristic poem of +"Old Pictures in Florence" expresses very quaintly and beautifully the +idea that some hope may always be based on deficiency itself; in other +words, that in so far as man is a one-legged or a one-eyed creature, +there is something about his appearance which indicates that he +should have another leg and another eye. The poem suggests admirably +that such a sense of incompleteness may easily be a great advance upon +a sense of completeness, that the part may easily and obviously be +greater than the whole. And from this Browning draws, as he is fully +justified in drawing, a definite hope for immortality and the larger +scale of life. For nothing is more certain than that though this world +is the only world that we have known, or of which we could even dream, +the fact does remain that we have named it "a strange world." In other +words, we have certainly felt that this world did not explain itself, +that something in its complete and patent picture has been omitted. +And Browning was right in saying that in a cosmos where incompleteness +implies completeness, life implies immortality. This then was the +first of the doctrines or opinions of Browning: the hope that lies in +the imperfection of man. The second of the great Browning doctrines +requires some audacity to express. It can only be properly stated as +the hope that lies in the imperfection of God. That is to say, that +Browning held that sorrow and self-denial, if they were the burdens of +man, were also his privileges. He held that these stubborn sorrows and +obscure valours might, to use a yet more strange expression, have +provoked the envy of the Almighty. If man has self-sacrifice and God +has none, then man has in the Universe a secret and blasphemous +superiority. And this tremendous story of a Divine jealousy Browning +reads into the story of the Crucifixion. If the Creator had not been +crucified He would not have been as great as thousands of wretched +fanatics among His own creatures. It is needless to insist upon this +point; any one who wishes to read it splendidly expressed need only be +referred to "Saul." But these are emphatically the two main doctrines +or opinions of Browning which I have ventured to characterise roughly +as the hope in the imperfection of man, and more boldly as the hope in +the imperfection of God. They are great thoughts, thoughts written by +a great man, and they raise noble and beautiful doubts on behalf of +faith which the human spirit will never answer or exhaust. But about +them in connection with Browning there nevertheless remains something +to be added. + +Browning was, as most of his upholders and all his opponents say, an +optimist. His theory, that man's sense of his own imperfection implies +a design of perfection, is a very good argument for optimism. His +theory that man's knowledge of and desire for self-sacrifice implies +God's knowledge of and desire for self-sacrifice is another very good +argument for optimism. But any one will make the deepest and blackest +and most incurable mistake about Browning who imagines that his +optimism was founded on any arguments for optimism. Because he had a +strong intellect, because he had a strong power of conviction, he +conceived and developed and asserted these doctrines of the +incompleteness of Man and the sacrifice of Omnipotence. But these +doctrines were the symptoms of his optimism, they were not its origin. +It is surely obvious that no one can be argued into optimism since no +one can be argued into happiness. Browning's optimism was not founded +on opinions which were the work of Browning, but on life which was +the work of God. One of Browning's most celebrated biographers has +said that something of Browning's theology must be put down to his +possession of a good digestion. The remark was, of course, like all +remarks touching the tragic subject of digestion, intended to be funny +and to convey some kind of doubt or diminution touching the value of +Browning's faith. But if we examine the matter with somewhat greater +care we shall see that it is indeed a thorough compliment to that +faith. Nobody, strictly speaking, is happier on account of his +digestion. He is happy because he is so constituted as to forget all +about it. Nobody really is convulsed with delight at the thought of +the ingenious machinery which he possesses inside him; the thing which +delights him is simply the full possession of his own human body. I +cannot in the least understand why a good digestion--that is, a good +body--should not be held to be as mystic a benefit as a sunset or the +first flower of spring. But there is about digestion this peculiarity +throwing a great light on human pessimism, that it is one of the many +things which we never speak of as existing until they go wrong. We +should think it ridiculous to speak of a man as suffering from his +boots if we meant that he had really no boots. But we do speak of a +man suffering from digestion when we mean that he suffers from a lack +of digestion. In the same way we speak of a man suffering from nerves +when we mean that his nerves are more inefficient than any one else's +nerves. If any one wishes to see how grossly language can degenerate, +he need only compare the old optimistic use of the word nervous, +which we employ in speaking of a nervous grip, with the new +pessimistic use of the word, which we employ in speaking of a nervous +manner. And as digestion is a good thing which sometimes goes wrong, +as nerves are good things which sometimes go wrong, so existence +itself in the eyes of Browning and all the great optimists is a good +thing which sometimes goes wrong. He held himself as free to draw his +inspiration from the gift of good health as from the gift of learning +or the gift of fellowship. But he held that such gifts were in life +innumerable and varied, and that every man, or at least almost every +man, possessed some window looking out on this essential excellence of +things. + +Browning's optimism then, since we must continue to use this somewhat +inadequate word, was a result of experience--experience which is for +some mysterious reason generally understood in the sense of sad or +disillusioning experience. An old gentleman rebuking a little boy for +eating apples in a tree is in the common conception the type of +experience. If he really wished to be a type of experience he would +climb up the tree himself and proceed to experience the apples. +Browning's faith was founded upon joyful experience, not in the sense +that he selected his joyful experiences and ignored his painful ones, +but in the sense that his joyful experiences selected themselves and +stood out in his memory by virtue of their own extraordinary intensity +of colour. He did not use experience in that mean and pompous sense in +which it is used by the worldling advanced in years. He rather used it +in that healthier and more joyful sense in which it is used at +revivalist meetings. In the Salvation Army a man's experiences mean +his experiences of the mercy of God, and to Browning the meaning was +much the same. But the revivalists' confessions deal mostly with +experiences of prayer and praise; Browning's dealt pre-eminently with +what may be called his own subject, the experiences of love. + +And this quality of Browning's optimism, the quality of detail, is +also a very typical quality. Browning's optimism is of that ultimate +and unshakeable order that is founded upon the absolute sight, and +sound, and smell, and handling of things. If a man had gone up to +Browning and asked him with all the solemnity of the eccentric, "Do +you think life is worth living?" it is interesting to conjecture what +his answer might have been. If he had been for the moment under the +influence of the orthodox rationalistic deism of the theologian he +would have said, "Existence is justified by its manifest design, its +manifest adaptation of means to ends," or, in other words, "Existence +is justified by its completeness." If, on the other hand, he had been +influenced by his own serious intellectual theories he would have +said, "Existence is justified by its air of growth and doubtfulness," +or, in other words, "Existence is justified by its incompleteness." +But if he had not been influenced in his answer either by the accepted +opinions, or by his own opinions, but had simply answered the question +"Is life worth living?" with the real, vital answer that awaited it in +his own soul, he would have said as likely as not, "Crimson toadstools +in Hampshire." Some plain, glowing picture of this sort left on his +mind would be his real verdict on what the universe had meant to him. +To his traditions hope was traced to order, to his speculations hope +was traced to disorder. But to Browning himself hope was traced to +something like red toadstools. His mysticism was not of that idle and +wordy type which believes that a flower is symbolical of life; it was +rather of that deep and eternal type which believes that life, a mere +abstraction, is symbolical of a flower. With him the great concrete +experiences which God made always come first; his own deductions and +speculations about them always second. And in this point we find the +real peculiar inspiration of his very original poems. + +One of the very few critics who seem to have got near to the actual +secret of Browning's optimism is Mr. Santayana in his most interesting +book _Interpretations of Poetry and Religion_. He, in contradistinction +to the vast mass of Browning's admirers, had discovered what was the +real root virtue of Browning's poetry; and the curious thing is, that +having discovered that root virtue, he thinks it is a vice. He +describes the poetry of Browning most truly as the poetry of +barbarism, by which he means the poetry which utters the primeval and +indivisible emotions. "For the barbarian is the man who regards his +passions as their own excuse for being, who does not domesticate them +either by understanding their cause, or by conceiving their ideal +goal." Whether this be or be not a good definition of the barbarian, +it is an excellent and perfect definition of the poet. It might, +perhaps, be suggested that barbarians, as a matter of fact, are +generally highly traditional and respectable persons who would not put +a feather wrong in their head-gear, and who generally have very few +feelings and think very little about those they have. It is when we +have grown to a greater and more civilised stature that we begin to +realise and put to ourselves intellectually the great feelings that +sleep in the depths of us. Thus it is that the literature of our day +has steadily advanced towards a passionate simplicity, and we become +more primeval as the world grows older, until Whitman writes huge and +chaotic psalms to express the sensations of a schoolboy out fishing, +and Maeterlinck embodies in symbolic dramas the feelings of a child in +the dark. + +Thus, Mr. Santayana is, perhaps, the most valuable of all the Browning +critics. He has gone out of his way to endeavour to realise what it is +that repels him in Browning, and he has discovered the fault which +none of Browning's opponents have discovered. And in this he has +discovered the merit which none of Browning's admirers have +discovered. Whether the quality be a good or a bad quality, Mr. +Santayana is perfectly right. The whole of Browning's poetry does rest +upon primitive feeling; and the only comment to be added is that so +does the whole of every one else's poetry. Poetry deals entirely with +those great eternal and mainly forgotten wishes which are the ultimate +despots of existence. Poetry presents things as they are to our +emotions, not as they are to any theory, however plausible, or any +argument, however conclusive. If love is in truth a glorious vision, +poetry will say that it is a glorious vision, and no philosophers will +persuade poetry to say that it is the exaggeration of the instinct of +sex. If bereavement is a bitter and continually aching thing, poetry +will say that it is so, and no philosophers will persuade poetry to +say that it is an evolutionary stage of great biological value. And +here comes in the whole value and object of poetry, that it is +perpetually challenging all systems with the test of a terrible +sincerity. The practical value of poetry is that it is realistic upon +a point upon which nothing else can be realistic, the point of the +actual desires of man. Ethics is the science of actions, but poetry is +the science of motives. Some actions are ugly, and therefore some +parts of ethics are ugly. But all motives are beautiful, or present +themselves for the moment as beautiful, and therefore all poetry is +beautiful. If poetry deals with the basest matter, with the shedding +of blood for gold, it ought to suggest the gold as well as the blood. +Only poetry can realise motives, because motives are all pictures of +happiness. And the supreme and most practical value of poetry is this, +that in poetry, as in music, a note is struck which expresses beyond +the power of rational statement a condition of mind, and all actions +arise from a condition of mind. Prose can only use a large and clumsy +notation; it can only say that a man is miserable, or that a man is +happy; it is forced to ignore that there are a million diverse kinds +of misery and a million diverse kinds of happiness. Poetry alone, with +the first throb of its metre, can tell us whether the depression is +the kind of depression that drives a man to suicide, or the kind of +depression that drives him to the Tivoli. Poetry can tell us whether +the happiness is the happiness that sends a man to a restaurant, or +the much richer and fuller happiness that sends him to church. + +Now the supreme value of Browning as an optimist lies in this that we +have been examining, that beyond all his conclusions, and deeper than +all his arguments, he was passionately interested in and in love with +existence. If the heavens had fallen, and all the waters of the earth +run with blood, he would still have been interested in existence, if +possible a little more so. He is a great poet of human joy for +precisely the reason of which Mr. Santayana complains: that his +happiness is primal, and beyond the reach of philosophy. He is +something far more convincing, far more comforting, far more +religiously significant than an optimist: he is a happy man. + +This happiness he finds, as every man must find happiness, in his own +way. He does not find the great part of his joy in those matters in +which most poets find felicity. He finds much of it in those matters +in which most poets find ugliness and vulgarity. He is to a +considerable extent the poet of towns. "Do you care for nature much?" +a friend of his asked him. "Yes, a great deal," he said, "but for +human beings a great deal more." Nature, with its splendid and +soothing sanity, has the power of convincing most poets of the +essential worthiness of things. There are few poets who, if they +escaped from the rowdiest waggonette of trippers, could not be quieted +again and exalted by dropping into a small wayside field. The +speciality of Browning is rather that he would have been quieted and +exalted by the waggonette. + +To Browning, probably the beginning and end of all optimism was to be +found in the faces in the street. To him they were all the masks of a +deity, the heads of a hundred-headed Indian god of nature. Each one of +them looked towards some quarter of the heavens, not looked upon by +any other eyes. Each one of them wore some expression, some blend of +eternal joy and eternal sorrow, not to be found in any other +countenance. The sense of the absolute sanctity of human difference +was the deepest of all his senses. He was hungrily interested in all +human things, but it would have been quite impossible to have said of +him that he loved humanity. He did not love humanity but men. His +sense of the difference between one man and another would have made +the thought of melting them into a lump called humanity simply +loathsome and prosaic. It would have been to him like playing four +hundred beautiful airs at once. The mixture would not combine all, it +would lose all. Browning believed that to every man that ever lived +upon this earth had been given a definite and peculiar confidence of +God. Each one of us was engaged on secret service; each one of us had +a peculiar message; each one of us was the founder of a religion. Of +that religion our thoughts, our faces, our bodies, our hats, our +boots, our tastes, our virtues, and even our vices, were more or less +fragmentary and inadequate expressions. + +In the delightful memoirs of that very remarkable man Sir Charles +Gavan Duffy, there is an extremely significant and interesting +anecdote about Browning, the point of which appears to have attracted +very little attention. Duffy was dining with Browning and John +Forster, and happened to make some chance allusion to his own +adherence to the Roman Catholic faith, when Forster remarked, half +jestingly, that he did not suppose that Browning would like him any +the better for that. Browning would seem to have opened his eyes with +some astonishment. He immediately asked why Forster should suppose +him hostile to the Roman Church. Forster and Duffy replied almost +simultaneously, by referring to "Bishop Blougram's Apology," which had +just appeared, and asking whether the portrait of the sophistical and +self-indulgent priest had not been intended for a satire on Cardinal +Wiseman. "Certainly," replied Browning cheerfully, "I intended it for +Cardinal Wiseman, but I don't consider it a satire, there is nothing +hostile about it." This is the real truth which lies at the heart of +what may be called the great sophistical monologues which Browning +wrote in later years. They are not satires or attacks upon their +subjects, they are not even harsh and unfeeling exposures of them. +They are defences; they say or are intended to say the best that can +be said for the persons with whom they deal. But very few people in +this world would care to listen to the real defence of their own +characters. The real defence, the defence which belongs to the Day of +Judgment, would make such damaging admissions, would clear away so +many artificial virtues, would tell such tragedies of weakness and +failure, that a man would sooner be misunderstood and censured by the +world than exposed to that awful and merciless eulogy. One of the most +practically difficult matters which arise from the code of manners and +the conventions of life, is that we cannot properly justify a human +being, because that justification would involve the admission of +things which may not conventionally be admitted. We might explain and +make human and respectable, for example, the conduct of some old +fighting politician, who, for the good of his party and his country, +acceded to measures of which he disapproved; but we cannot, because we +are not allowed to admit that he ever acceded to measures of which he +disapproved. We might touch the life of many dissolute public men with +pathos, and a kind of defeated courage, by telling the truth about the +history of their sins. But we should throw the world into an uproar if +we hinted that they had any. Thus the decencies of civilisation do not +merely make it impossible to revile a man, they make it impossible to +praise him. + +Browning, in such poems as "Bishop Blougram's Apology," breaks this +first mask of goodness in order to break the second mask of evil, and +gets to the real goodness at last; he dethrones a saint in order to +humanise a scoundrel. This is one typical side of the real optimism of +Browning. And there is indeed little danger that such optimism will +become weak and sentimental and popular, the refuge of every idler, +the excuse of every ne'er-do-well. There is little danger that men +will desire to excuse their souls before God by presenting themselves +before men as such snobs as Bishop Blougram, or such dastards as +Sludge the Medium. There is no pessimism, however stern, that is so +stern as this optimism, it is as merciless as the mercy of God. + +It is true that in this, as in almost everything else connected with +Browning's character, the matter cannot be altogether exhausted by +such a generalisation as the above. Browning's was a simple character, +and therefore very difficult to understand, since it was impulsive, +unconscious, and kept no reckoning of its moods. Probably in a great +many cases, the original impulse which led Browning to plan a +soliloquy was a kind of anger mixed with curiosity; possibly the first +charcoal sketch of Blougram was a caricature of a priest. Browning, +as we have said, had prejudices, and had a capacity for anger, and two +of his angriest prejudices were against a certain kind of worldly +clericalism, and against almost every kind of spiritualism. But as he +worked upon the portraits at least, a new spirit began to possess him, +and he enjoyed every spirited and just defence the men could make of +themselves, like triumphant blows in a battle, and towards the end +would come the full revelation, and Browning would stand up in the +man's skin and testify to the man's ideals. However this may be, it is +worth while to notice one very curious error that has arisen in +connection with one of the most famous of these monologues. + +When Robert Browning was engaged in that somewhat obscure quarrel with +the spiritualist Home, it is generally and correctly stated that he +gained a great number of the impressions which he afterwards embodied +in "Mr. Sludge the Medium." The statement so often made, particularly +in the spiritualist accounts of the matter, that Browning himself is +the original of the interlocutor and exposer of Sludge, is of course +merely an example of that reckless reading from which no one has +suffered more than Browning despite his students and societies. The +man to whom Sludge addresses his confession is a Mr. Hiram H. +Horsfall, an American, a patron of spiritualists, and, as it is more +than once suggested, something of a fool. Nor is there the smallest +reason to suppose that Sludge considered as an individual bears any +particular resemblance to Home considered as an individual. But +without doubt "Mr. Sludge the Medium" is a general statement of the +view of spiritualism at which Browning had arrived from his +acquaintance with Home and Home's circle. And about that view of +spiritualism there is something rather peculiar to notice. The poem, +appearing as it did at the time when the intellectual public had just +become conscious of the existence of spiritualism, attracted a great +deal of attention, and aroused a great deal of controversy. The +spiritualists called down thunder upon the head of the poet, whom they +depicted as a vulgar and ribald lampooner who had not only committed +the profanity of sneering at the mysteries of a higher state of life, +but the more unpardonable profanity of sneering at the convictions of +his own wife. The sceptics, on the other hand, hailed the poem with +delight as a blasting exposure of spiritualism, and congratulated the +poet on making himself the champion of the sane and scientific view of +magic. Which of these two parties was right about the question of +attacking the reality of spiritualism it is neither easy nor necessary +to discuss. For the simple truth, which neither of the two parties and +none of the students of Browning seem to have noticed, is that "Mr. +Sludge the Medium" is not an attack upon spiritualism. It would be a +great deal nearer the truth, though not entirely the truth, to call it +a justification of spiritualism. The whole essence of Browning's +method is involved in this matter, and the whole essence of Browning's +method is so vitally misunderstood that to say that "Mr. Sludge the +Medium" is something like a defence of spiritualism will bear on the +face of it the appearance of the most empty and perverse of paradoxes. +But so, when we have comprehended Browning's spirit, the fact will be +found to be. + +The general idea is that Browning must have intended "Sludge" for an +attack on spiritual phenomena, because the medium in that poem is made +a vulgar and contemptible mountebank, because his cheats are quite +openly confessed, and he himself put into every ignominious situation, +detected, exposed, throttled, horsewhipped, and forgiven. To regard +this deduction as sound is to misunderstand Browning at the very start +of every poem that he ever wrote. There is nothing that the man loved +more, nothing that deserves more emphatically to be called a +speciality of Browning, than the utterance of large and noble truths +by the lips of mean and grotesque human beings. In his poetry praise +and wisdom were perfected not only out of the mouths of babes and +sucklings, but out of the mouths of swindlers and snobs. Now what, as +a matter of fact, is the outline and development of the poem of +"Sludge"? The climax of the poem, considered as a work of art, is so +fine that it is quite extraordinary that any one should have missed +the point of it, since it is the whole point of the monologue. Sludge +the Medium has been caught out in a piece of unquestionable trickery, +a piece of trickery for which there is no conceivable explanation or +palliation which will leave his moral character intact. He is +therefore seized with a sudden resolution, partly angry, partly +frightened, and partly humorous, to become absolutely frank, and to +tell the whole truth about himself for the first time not only to his +dupe, but to himself. He excuses himself for the earlier stages of the +trickster's life by a survey of the border-land between truth and +fiction, not by any means a piece of sophistry or cynicism, but a +perfectly fair statement of an ethical difficulty which does exist. +There are some people who think that it must be immoral to admit that +there are any doubtful cases of morality, as if a man should refrain +from discussing the precise boundary at the upper end of the Isthmus +of Panama, for fear the inquiry should shake his belief in the +existence of North America. People of this kind quite consistently +think Sludge to be merely a scoundrel talking nonsense. It may be +remembered that they thought the same thing of Newman. It is actually +supposed, apparently in the current use of words, that casuistry is +the name of a crime; it does not appear to occur to people that +casuistry is a science, and about as much a crime as botany. This +tendency to casuistry in Browning's monologues has done much towards +establishing for him that reputation for pure intellectualism which +has done him so much harm. But casuistry in this sense is not a cold +and analytical thing, but a very warm and sympathetic thing. To know +what combination of excuse might justify a man in manslaughter or +bigamy, is not to have a callous indifference to virtue; it is rather +to have so ardent an admiration for virtue as to seek it in the +remotest desert and the darkest incognito. + +This is emphatically the case with the question of truth and falsehood +raised in "Sludge the Medium." To say that it is sometimes difficult +to tell at what point the romancer turns into the liar is not to state +a cynicism, but a perfectly honest piece of human observation. To +think that such a view involves the negation of honesty is like +thinking that red is green, because the two fade into each other in +the colours of the rainbow. It is really difficult to decide when we +come to the extreme edge of veracity, when and when not it is +permissible to create an illusion. A standing example, for instance, +is the case of the fairy-tales. We think a father entirely pure and +benevolent when he tells his children that a beanstalk grew up into +heaven, and a pumpkin turned into a coach. We should consider that he +lapsed from purity and benevolence if he told his children that in +walking home that evening he had seen a beanstalk grow half-way up the +church, or a pumpkin grow as large as a wheelbarrow. Again, few people +would object to that general privilege whereby it is permitted to a +person in narrating even a true anecdote to work up the climax by any +exaggerative touches which really tend to bring it out. The reason of +this is that the telling of the anecdote has become, like the telling +of the fairy-tale, almost a distinct artistic creation; to offer to +tell a story is in ordinary society like offering to recite or play +the violin. No one denies that a fixed and genuine moral rule could be +drawn up for these cases, but no one surely need be ashamed to admit +that such a rule is not entirely easy to draw up. And when a man like +Sludge traces much of his moral downfall to the indistinctness of the +boundary and the possibility of beginning with a natural extravagance +and ending with a gross abuse, it certainly is not possible to deny +his right to be heard. + +We must recur, however, to the question of the main development of the +Sludge self-analysis. He begins, as we have said, by urging a general +excuse by the fact that in the heat of social life, in the course of +telling tales in the intoxicating presence of sympathisers and +believers, he has slid into falsehood almost before he is aware of it. +So far as this goes, there is truth in his plea. Sludge might indeed +find himself unexpectedly justified if we had only an exact record of +how true were the tales told about Conservatives in an exclusive +circle of Radicals, or the stories told about Radicals in a circle of +indignant Conservatives. But after this general excuse, Sludge goes on +to a perfectly cheerful and unfeeling admission of fraud; this +principal feeling towards his victims is by his own confession a +certain unfathomable contempt for people who are so easily taken in. +He professes to know how to lay the foundations for every species of +personal acquaintanceship, and how to remedy the slight and trivial +slips of making Plato write Greek in naughts and crosses. + + "As I fear, sir, he sometimes used to do + Before I found the useful book that knows." + +It would be difficult to imagine any figure more indecently +confessional, more entirely devoid of not only any of the restraints +of conscience, but of any of the restraints even of a wholesome +personal conceit, than Sludge the Medium. He confesses not only fraud, +but things which are to the natural man more difficult to confess even +than fraud--effeminacy, futility, physical cowardice. And then, when +the last of his loathsome secrets has been told, when he has nothing +left either to gain or to conceal, then he rises up into a perfect +bankrupt sublimity and makes the great avowal which is the whole pivot +and meaning of the poem. He says in effect: "Now that my interest in +deceit is utterly gone, now that I have admitted, to my own final +infamy, the frauds that I have practised, now that I stand before you +in a patent and open villainy which has something of the +disinterestedness and independence of the innocent, now I tell you +with the full and impartial authority of a lost soul that I believe +that there is something in spiritualism. In the course of a thousand +conspiracies, by the labour of a thousand lies, I have discovered that +there is really something in this matter that neither I nor any other +man understands. I am a thief, an adventurer, a deceiver of mankind, +but I am not a disbeliever in spiritualism. I have seen too much for +that." This is the confession of faith of Mr. Sludge the Medium. It +would be difficult to imagine a confession of faith framed and +presented in a more impressive manner. Sludge is a witness to his +faith as the old martyrs were witnesses to their faith, but even more +impressively. They testified to their religion even after they had +lost their liberty, and their eyesight, and their right hands. Sludge +testifies to his religion even after he has lost his dignity and his +honour. + +It may be repeated that it is truly extraordinary that any one should +have failed to notice that this avowal on behalf of spiritualism is +the pivot of the poem. The avowal itself is not only expressed +clearly, but prepared and delivered with admirable rhetorical force:-- + + "Now for it, then! Will you believe me, though? + You've heard what I confess: I don't unsay + A single word: I cheated when I could, + Rapped with my toe-joints, set sham hands at work, + Wrote down names weak in sympathetic ink. + Rubbed odic lights with ends of phosphor-match, + And all the rest; believe that: believe this, + By the same token, though it seem to set + The crooked straight again, unsay the said, + Stick up what I've knocked down; I can't help that, + It's truth! I somehow vomit truth to-day. + This trade of mine--I don't know, can't be sure + But there was something in it, tricks and all!" + +It is strange to call a poem with so clear and fine a climax an attack +on spiritualism. To miss that climax is like missing the last sentence +in a good anecdote, or putting the last act of _Othello_ into the +middle of the play. Either the whole poem of "Sludge the Medium" means +nothing at all, and is only a lampoon upon a cad, of which the matter +is almost as contemptible as the subject, or it means this--that some +real experiences of the unseen lie even at the heart of hypocrisy, and +that even the spiritualist is at root spiritual. + +One curious theory which is common to most Browning critics is that +Sludge must be intended for a pure and conscious impostor, because +after his confession, and on the personal withdrawal of Mr. Horsfall, +he bursts out into horrible curses against that gentleman and cynical +boasts of his future triumphs in a similar line of business. Surely +this is to have a very feeble notion either of nature or art. A man +driven absolutely into a corner might humiliate himself, and gain a +certain sensation almost of luxury in that humiliation, in pouring out +all his imprisoned thoughts and obscure victories. For let it never be +forgotten that a hypocrite is a very unhappy man; he is a man who has +devoted himself to a most delicate and arduous intellectual art in +which he may achieve masterpieces which he must keep secret, fight +thrilling battles, and win hair's-breadth victories for which he +cannot have a whisper of praise. A really accomplished impostor is the +most wretched of geniuses; he is a Napoleon on a desert island. A man +might surely, therefore, when he was certain that his credit was gone, +take a certain pleasure in revealing the tricks of his unique trade, +and gaining not indeed credit, but at least a kind of glory. And in +the course of this self-revelation he would come at last upon that +part of himself which exists in every man--that part which does +believe in, and value, and worship something. This he would fling in +his hearer's face with even greater pride, and take a delight in +giving a kind of testimony to his religion which no man had ever given +before--the testimony of a martyr who could not hope to be a saint. +But surely all this sudden tempest of candour in the man would not +mean that he would burst into tears and become an exemplary ratepayer, +like a villain in the worst parts of Dickens. The moment the danger +was withdrawn, the sense of having given himself away, of having +betrayed the secret of his infamous freemasonry, would add an +indescribable violence and foulness to his reaction of rage. A man in +such a case would do exactly as Sludge does. He would declare his own +shame, declare the truth of his creed, and then, when he realised what +he had done, say something like this:-- + + "R-r-r, you brute-beast and blackguard! Cowardly scamp! + I only wish I dared burn down the house + And spoil your sniggering!" + +and so on, and so on. + +He would react like this; it is one of the most artistic strokes in +Browning. But it does not prove that he was a hypocrite about +spiritualism, or that he was speaking more truthfully in the second +outburst than in the first. Whence came this extraordinary theory that +a man is always speaking most truly when he is speaking most coarsely? +The truth about oneself is a very difficult thing to express, and +coarse speaking will seldom do it. + +When we have grasped this point about "Sludge the Medium," we have +grasped the key to the whole series of Browning's casuistical +monologues--_Bishop Blaugram's Apology, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, +Fra Lippo Lippi, Fifine at the Fair, Aristophanes' Apology_, and +several of the monologues in _The Ring and the Book_. They are all, +without exception, dominated by this one conception of a certain +reality tangled almost inextricably with unrealities in a man's mind, +and the peculiar fascination which resides in the thought that the +greatest lies about a man, and the greatest truths about him, may be +found side by side in the same eloquent and sustained utterance. + + "For Blougram, he believed, say, half he spoke." + +Or, to put the matter in another way, the general idea of these poems +is, that a man cannot help telling some truth even when he sets out to +tell lies. If a man comes to tell us that he has discovered perpetual +motion, or been swallowed by the sea-serpent, there will yet be some +point in the story where he will tell us about himself almost all that +we require to know. + +If any one wishes to test the truth, or to see the best examples of +this general idea in Browning's monologues, he may be recommended to +notice one peculiarity of these poems which is rather striking. As a +whole, these apologies are written in a particularly burly and even +brutal English. Browning's love of what is called the ugly is nowhere +else so fully and extravagantly indulged. This, like a great many +other things for which Browning as an artist is blamed, is perfectly +appropriate to the theme. A vain, ill-mannered, and untrustworthy +egotist, defending his own sordid doings with his own cheap and +weather-beaten philosophy, is very likely to express himself best in a +language flexible and pungent, but indelicate and without dignity. But +the peculiarity of these loose and almost slangy soliloquies is that +every now and then in them there occur bursts of pure poetry which are +like a burst of birds singing. Browning does not hesitate to put some +of the most perfect lines that he or anyone else have ever written in +the English language into the mouths of such slaves as Sludge and +Guido Franceschini. Take, for the sake of example, "Bishop Blougram's +Apology." The poem is one of the most grotesque in the poet's works. +It is intentionally redolent of the solemn materialism and patrician +grossness of a grand dinner-party _a deux_. It has many touches of an +almost wild bathos, such as the young man who bears the impossible +name of Gigadibs. The Bishop, in pursuing his worldly argument for +conformity, points out with truth that a condition of doubt is a +condition that cuts both ways, and that if we cannot be sure of the +religious theory of life, neither can we be sure of the material +theory of life, and that in turn is capable of becoming an uncertainty +continually shaken by a tormenting suggestion. We cannot establish +ourselves on rationalism, and make it bear fruit to us. Faith itself +is capable of becoming the darkest and most revolutionary of doubts. +Then comes the passage:-- + + "Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch, + A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, + A chorus ending from Euripides,-- + And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears + As old and new at once as Nature's self, + To rap and knock and enter in our soul, + Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring, + Round the ancient idol, on his base again,-- + The grand Perhaps!" + +Nobler diction and a nobler meaning could not have been put into the +mouth of Pompilia, or Rabbi Ben Ezra. It is in reality put into the +mouth of a vulgar, fashionable priest, justifying his own cowardice +over the comfortable wine and the cigars. + +Along with this tendency to poetry among Browning's knaves, must be +reckoned another characteristic, their uniform tendency to theism. +These loose and mean characters speak of many things feverishly and +vaguely; of one thing they always speak with confidence and composure, +their relation to God. It may seem strange at first sight that those +who have outlived the indulgence, and not only of every law, but of +every reasonable anarchy, should still rely so simply upon the +indulgence of divine perfection. Thus Sludge is certain that his life +of lies and conjuring tricks has been conducted in a deep and subtle +obedience to the message really conveyed by the conditions created by +God. Thus Bishop Blougram is certain that his life of panic-stricken +and tottering compromise has been really justified as the only method +that could unite him with God. Thus Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau is +certain that every dodge in his thin string of political dodges has +been the true means of realising what he believes to be the will of +God. Every one of these meagre swindlers, while admitting a failure in +all things relative, claims an awful alliance with the Absolute. To +many it will at first sight appear a dangerous doctrine indeed. But, +in truth, it is a most solid and noble and salutary doctrine, far less +dangerous than its opposite. Every one on this earth should believe, +amid whatever madness or moral failure, that his life and temperament +have some object on the earth. Every one on the earth should believe +that he has something to give to the world which cannot otherwise be +given. Every one should, for the good of men and the saving of his own +soul, believe that it is possible, even if we are the enemies of the +human race, to be the friends of God. The evil wrought by this +mystical pride, great as it often is, is like a straw to the evil +wrought by a materialistic self-abandonment. The crimes of the devil +who thinks himself of immeasurable value are as nothing to the crimes +of the devil who thinks himself of no value. With Browning's knaves we +have always this eternal interest, that they are real somewhere, and +may at any moment begin to speak poetry. We are talking to a peevish +and garrulous sneak; we are watching the play of his paltry features, +his evasive eyes, and babbling lips. And suddenly the face begins to +change and harden, the eyes glare like the eyes of a mask, the whole +face of clay becomes a common mouthpiece, and the voice that comes +forth is the voice of God, uttering His everlasting soliloquy. + + + + +INDEX + + +A + +_Agamemnon of Aeschylus, The_, 120. + +Alliance, The Holy, 89. + +"Andrea del Sarto," 83. + +_Aristophanes' Apology_, 120, 199. + +Arnold, Matthew, 41, 55, 56. + +_Asolando_, 132. + +Asolo (Italy), 42, 131. + +"At the Mermaid," 117. + +Austria, 88, 89. + + +B + +"Bad Dreams," 138. + +_Balaustion's Adventure_, 119-120. + +Barrett, Arabella, 74, 119. + +Barrett, Edward Moulton, 58 _seq._, 70, 73, 74, 76, 79. + +Beardsley, Mr. Aubrey, 149. + +_Bells and Pomegranates_, 105. + +"Ben Ezra," 23, 201. + +Birrell, Mr. Augustine, 160. + +"Bishop Blougram," 51, 189. + +_Bishop Blougram's Apology_, 188, 189, 199, 200. + +_Blot on the 'Scutcheon, A_, 53. + +Boyd, Mr., 62. + +Browning, Robert: birth and family history, 3; + theories as to his descent, 4-8; + a typical Englishman of the middle class, 9; + his immediate ancestors, 10 _seq._; + education, 12; + boyhood and youth, 17; + first poems, _Incondita_, 17; + romantic spirit, 18; + publication of _Pauline_, 20; + friendship with literary men, 21; + _Paracelsus_, 22; + introduction to literary world, 25; + his earliest admirers, 26; + friendship with Carlyle, 26; + _Strafford_, 27; + _Sordello_, 34; + _Pippa Passes_, 43; + _Dramatic Lyrics_, 45; + _The Return of the Druses_, 51; + _A Blot on the 'Scutcheon_, 53; + correspondence with Elizabeth Barrett, 62 _seq._; + their first meeting, 70; + marriage and elopement, 78, 79; + life in Italy, 81 _seq._; + love of Italy, 82, 85 _seq._; + sympathy with Italian Revolution, 90; + attitude towards spiritualism, 91 _seq._, 113, 190-199; + death of his wife, 103; + returns to England, 105; + _The Ring and the Book_, 110; + culmination of his literary fame, 110, 117; + life in society, 110; + elected Fellow of Balliol, 117; + honoured by the great Universities, 118; + _Balaustion's Adventure_, 119-120; + _Aristophanes' Apology_, 120; + _The Agamemnon of Aeschylus_, 120; + _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_, 121; + _Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country_, 122; + _Fifine at the Fair_, 124; + _The Inn Album_, 125; + _Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper_, 125; + _La Saisiaz_, 127; + _The Two Poets of Croisic_, 127; + _Dramatic Idylls_, 127; + _Jocoseria_, 127; + _Ferishtah's Fancies_, 127; + _Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day_, 128; + accepts post of Foreign Correspondent to the Royal Academy, 129; + goes to Llangollen with his sister, 130; + last journey to Italy, 130; + death at Venice, 132; + publication of _Asolando_, 132; + his conversation, 36; + vanity, 33, 36; + faults and virtues, 40, 55; + his interest in Art, 82 _seq._; + his varied accomplishments, 84-85; + personality and presence, 18, 33, 112 _seq._; + his prejudices, 113-116; + his occasional coarseness, 116; + politics, 86 _seq._; + Browning as a father, 105; + as dramatist, 52; + as a literary artist, 133 _seq._; + his use of the grotesque, 48, 140, 143, 148 _seq._; + his failures, 141; + artistic originality, 136, 143, 158; + keen sense of melody and rhythm, 145 _seq._; + ingenuity in rhyming, 152; + his buffoonery, 154; + obscurity, 154 _seq._; + his conception of the Universe, 175; + philosophy, 177 _seq._; + optimism, 179 _seq._; + his love poetry, 49; + his knaves, 51, 201-202; + the key to his casuistical monologues, 199. + +_Browning, Life of_ (Mrs. Orr), 92. + +Browning, Robert (father of the poet), 10, 119. + +Browning, Mrs., _nee_ Wiedermann (mother), 11, 82. + +Browning, Anna (sister), 14, 105. + +Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (wife), +57 _seq._, 91-99, 101, 103, 116, 119, +129, 131. + +Browning Society, 129. + +Burns, Robert, 169-170. + +Byron, 11, 38, 141, 143. + +Byronism, 19, 117. + + +C + +"Caliban," 9, 120. + +"Caliban upon Setebos," 93, 135, 138. + +Camberwell, 3, 8, 19. + +"Caponsacchi," 108. + +Carlyle, Thomas, 12, 16, 17, 26, 55, 56, 87, 115. + +Carlyle, Mrs., 26. + +"Cavalier Tunes," 46. + +Cavour, 86, 90, 103. + +Charles I., 28, 29. + +Chaucer, 117. + +"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came," 159. + +_Christmas Eve_, 105. + +Church in Italy, The, 88. + +"Clive," 127. + +Clough, Arthur Hugh, 56. + +_Colombe's Birthday_, 32. + +Corelli, Miss Marie, 38. + +Cromwell, Oliver, 73. + + +D + +Darwin, 23, 39. + +Dickens, 16. + +"Djabal," 51, 52. + +Domett, Alfred, 21. + +"Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis," 161. + +_Dramatic Idylls_, 127. + +_Dramatic Lyrics_, 45-50. + +_Dramatis Personae_, 105. + +Duffy, Sir Charles Gavan, 187, 188. + + +E + +_Edinburgh Review_, 122. + +"Englishman in Italy, The," 150. + + +F + +"Fears and Scruples," 126, 138. + +"Ferishtah's Fancies," 138. + +_Fifine at the Fair_, 9, 13, 51, 124, 199. + +Fitzgerald, Edward, 116, 131. + +_Flight of the Duchess, The_, 18. + +Florence, 81, 94. + +Forster, John, 26. + +Foster, John, 187, 188. + +Fox, Mr. Johnson, 20. + +Fox, Mrs. Bridell, 33. + +"Fra Lippo,", 51. + +_Fra Lippo Lippi_, 83, 199. + +French Revolution, 87. + +Furnivall, Dr., 7, 129. + + +G + +"Garden Fancies," 46. + +Garibaldi, 86, 89. + +Gilbert, W.S., 144. + +Gissing, Mr. George, 165. + +Gladstone, 117. + +_Golden Treasury_ (Palgrave), 168. + +Goldsmith, 169, 170. + +Gordon, General, 90. + +"Guido Franceschini," 106, 120, 200. + + +H + +Henley, Mr., 148. + +"Heretic's Tragedy, The," 137. + +Hickey, Miss E.H., 129. + +"Holy Cross Day," 153. + +Home, David (spiritualist), 93-97, 113, 190, 191. + +Home, David, _Memoirs_ of, 93 _seq._ + +Horne, 26. + +Houghton, Lord, 129. + +"House," 138. + +"Householder, The," 138. + +"How they brought the good News from Ghent to Aix," 46. + +_Hudibras_ (Butler), 57. + +Hugo, Victor, 17. + +Hunt, Leigh, 26. + + +I + +_Incondita_, 17. + +_Inn Album, The_, 125. + +_Instans Tyrannus_, 9. + +Italy, 85 _seq._ + +Italian Revolution, 88 _seq._ + +"Ivan Ivanovitch," 127. + + +J + +Jameson, Mrs., 75. + +Jerrold, Douglas, 34. + +_Jocoseria_, 127. + +Jowett, Dr., 118. + +_Julius Caesar_ (Shakespeare), 28. + +"Juris Doctor Bottinius," 161. + + +K + +Keats, 15, 16, 19, 137, 142. + +Kenyon, Mr., 22, 58, 69-70, 74, 76. + +_King Victor and King Charles_, 32. + +Kipling, Rudyard, 142. + +Kirkup, Seymour, 103. + + +L + +_L'Aiglon_, 28. + +"Laboratory, The," 47, 143. + +Landor, 26, 56, 93, 101-103. + +_La Saisiaz_, 127. + +_Letters, The Browning_, 63. + +Liberalism, 86. + +"Lines to Edward Fitzgerald," 131. + +Llangollen, 130. + +Lockhart, 112. + +"Lost Leader, The," 46. + +"Lover's Quarrel, A," 50. + +"Luigi," 45. + +Lytton, Lord (novelist), 91. + + +M + +Macready, 17, 27, 53. + +Maeterlinck, 164, 184. + +Manning, Cardinal, 91. + +Mary Queen of Scots, 29. + +"Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha," 147. + +"May and Death." 21. + +Mazzini, 89. + +_Men and Women_, 105. + +Meredith, George, 156, 165. +Mill, John Stuart, 26, 56. + +Milsand, 119. + +Milton, 137. + +Monckton-Milnes, 26, 100. + +_Mr. Sludge the Medium_, 82, 96, 120, 190-199. + +"Muleykeh," 127. + +"My Star," 138. + + +N + +"Nationality in Drinks," 46, 138. + +Napoleon, 42, 89. + +Napoleon III., 56, 92, 121. + +"Never the Time and the Place," 127. + +Newman, Cardinal, 193. + +Norwood, 18. + + +O + +"Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" (Wordsworth), 136. + +"Ode on a Grecian Urn" (Keats), 137. + +"Old Masters in Florence," 177. + +"One Word More," 65. + +Orr, Mrs., 72. + + +P + +_Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper_, 125, 126, 152. + +_Paracelsus_, 22, 25, 26, 41, 47, 158. + +"Paracelsus," 24, 25. + +Painting, Poems on, 83. + +Palgrave, Francis, 117. + +Paris, 94. + +_Parleyings with certain Persons of Importance in their Day_, 22, 128, 158. + +_Pauline_, 20, 21, 37, 41, 51. + +"Pheidippides," 127. + +Phelps (actor), 53. + +"Pictor Ignotus," 83. + +"Pied Piper of Hamelin, The," 153. + +"Pippa," 45, 120. + +_Pippa Passes_, 18, 45, 47, 51, 137. + +Pisa, 81. + +Pius IX., Church under, 88. + +Plato, 21, 23. + +Poe, Edgar Allan, 144. + +Poetry, Pessimistic school of, 130. + +"Pompilia," 201. + +Pope, 11, 20, 57. + +"Portrait, A," 138. + +_Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_, 121-122. + +_Princess, The_ (Tennyson), 148. + +"Prometheus Unbound" (Shelley), 137. + +Prussia, 88, 89. + +Puritans, 30. + +Pym, 28, 30. + + +R + +"Rabbi Ben Ezra," 201. + +_Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country_, 122-124. + +_Return of the Druses, The_, 51-53. + +Revolution, + The French, 15; + Italian, 90. + +_Ring and the Book, The_, 85, 106, 109, 123, 137, 160-176. + +Ripert-Monclar, Comte de, 22, 93. + +Roman Church, 114, 187, 188. + +Rossetti, 163. + +Royalists, 30. + +Ruskin, 16, 55, 56, 91, 115. + +Russia, 88. + + +S + +Sand, George, 9, 94. + +Santayana's, Mr., _Interpretations of Poetry and Religion_, 183-186. + +"Sebald," 45. + +Shakespeare, 17, 57. + +Shakespeare Society, 129. + +Sharp, Mr. William, 133. + +Shaw, Mr. Bernard, 165. + +Shelley, 15, 16, 17,19, 56, 136, 141, 143. + +"Shop," 138. + +"Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis," 138. + +Silverthorne (Browning's cousin), 21. + +"Sludge," 51, 52, 150, 189, 200. + +Smith, Elder (publishers), 110. + +"Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, The," 47. + +"Sonnets from the Portuguese," 65. + +_Sordello_, 23, 34, 42. + +Speech, Free, 173. + +Spenser, 142. + +Spiritualism, 9, 91, 113, 190. + +"Statue and the Bust, The," 109. + +Sterne, 117. + +Stevenson, Robert Louis, 60, 114. + +_Straford_, 27 _seq._, 37. + +"Stafford," 28, 29, 30. + +Swinburne, 56, 116, 142,143. + + +T + + +_Tait's Magazine_, 20. + +Talfourd, Sergeant, 26. + +Tennyson, 27, 34, 55, 117, 141, 142, 143, 148. + +Thackeray, Miss, 123. + +"Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr," 46. + +_Time's Revenges_, 9, 93. + +Tolstoi, 115. + +_Tristram Shandy_ (Sterne), 163. + +_Two Poets of Croisic, The_, 127. + + +U + + +University College, 14. + +"Up jumped Tokay" (poem quoted), 140. + + +V + + +Venice, 131. + +Victor of Sardinia, King, 23. + +Vogler, Abt, 23. + + +W + + +_Water Babies_ (Kingsley), 8. + +Watts, Mr. G.F., 112. + +Whitman, Walt, 21, 43, 49, 114, 165, 184. + +"Why I am a Liberal" (sonnet), 86. + +Wiedermann, William, 12. + +Wiseman, Cardinal, 188. + +Wimbledon Common, 18. + +Wordsworth, 69, 136, 141, 143. + +Wordsworth Society, 129. + + +Y + +"Youth and Art," 50, 109. + + +Z + +Zola, 164. + + * * * * * + +ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS. + +NEW SERIES. + +_Crown 8vo. 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