Chapter VI: Part 6

While his work is instinct with sympathy for all classes and conditions of men, Browning does not feel the ills of life with the intensity of a Carlyle, nor its ugliness with the grief of a Ruskin, nor yet its lack of culture with the priggishness of an Arnold, nor would he stand in open spaces and preach discontent to the masses like Morris. Why? Because he from the first was made wise to see a good in evil, a hope in ill-success, to be proud of men's fallacies, their half reasons, their faint aspirings, upward tending all though weak, the lesson learned after weary experiences of life by Paracelsus. His thought was centered upon the worth of every human being to himself and for God. Earth is after all only a place to grow in and prepare one's self for lives to come, and failure here, so long as the fight has been bravely fought, is to be regarded with anything but regret, for it is through the failure that the vision of the future is made more sure.

What he finds true, as we saw, in the religious or philosophical world, he finds true in the moral world. Lack in human knowledge points the way to God; lack in human success points the way to immortality.

The meaning of this life in relation to a future life being so much more important than this life in itself, and man's individual development being so much more important than his social development, Browning naturally would not turn his attention upon those practical, social or governmental means by which even the chance for individual development must be secured. He is too much occupied with the larger questions. He is not even a middle-class idealist, dreaming dreams of future earthly bliss; he is the prophet of future existences.

Does his practical influence upon the social development of the century amount to nothing then? Not at all. He started out on his voyage through the century toward the democratic ideal in the good ship Individualism--the banner ship indeed. What he has emphasized upon this voyage is first the paramount worth of each and every human being, whether good or bad. Second, the possibility in every human being of conceiving an ideal, toward which by the exertion of his will power he should aspire, battling steadfastly against every obstruction that life throws in his course. Third, that even those who are incapable of formulating an ideal must be regarded as living out the truth of their natures and must therefore be treated with compassion. Fourth, that the highest function of the human soul is love, which expresses itself in many ways, but attains its full flowering only in the love of man and woman on a plane of spiritual exaltation, and that through this power of human love some glimpse of the divine is caught; therefore to this function of the soul it is of the utmost importance that human beings should be loyal and true, even if that loyalty and truth conflict with conventional ways of looking at life. Sailing in this good ship he also expresses his sympathy indirectly in his dramas and directly upon several occasions with the ideals of political freedom which during the century have been making progress toward democracy in the English Parliament through the legislation of the liberals, whose laws have brought a greater and greater measure of freedom to the middle classes and some measure of freedom to the working classes.

But it seems as if when nearing the end of the century Browning landed from his ship upon some high island and straining his eyes toward the horizon of the dawn of another life did not fully realize that there was another good ship, Socialism, struggling to reach the ideal of democracy, and now become the banner ship whose work is to sail out into the unknown, turbulent seas of the future, finding the path to another high island in order that the way may be made clear for the ship Individualism to continue her course to another stage in the voyage toward a perfect democracy. And as the new ship, Socialism, passes on its way it will do well to heed the vision of the poet seer, straining his eyes toward the dawn of other lives in other spheres, lest in the struggle and strain to bring about a more comfortable and beautiful life upon earth, the important truth be slighted that humanity has a higher destiny to fulfil than can be realized in the most Utopian dreams of an earthly democracy. This truth is in fact not only forgotten but is absolutely denied by many of the latter-day social reformers.

To sum up, I think one is justified in concluding that as a sympathizer with the liberal political tendencies of the nineteenth century Browning is of his age. In his quiescence upon the proletarian movement of the latter part of the nineteenth century he seems to have been left behind by his age. In his insistence upon the worth of the individual to himself and to God he is both of his age and beyond it. As has been said of philosophy, "It cannot give us bread but it can give us God, soul and immortality," so we may say of Browning, that though he did not raise up his voice in the cry of the proletarian for bread, he has insisted upon the truths of God, the soul and immortality.

V

ART SHIBBOLETHS

In the foregoing chapters the relations of the poet to the philosophical, religious, political, and social movements of the nineteenth century have been pointed out. In this and the next chapter some account of his relation to the artistic and literary ideals of the century will be attempted.

Browning's relation to the art of the century is, of course, twofold, dealing as it must with his own conceptions and criticisms of art as well as with the position of his own art in the poetic development of the century.

In order to understand more fully his own contribution to the developing literary standards of the century it may be well first to consider the fundamental principles of art laid down by him in various poems wherein he has deliberately dealt with the subject.

The poem in which he has most clearly formulated the general principles underlying the growth of art is the "Parleying" with Charles Avison. Though music is the special art under consideration, the rules of growth obtaining in that are equally applicable to other arts. They are found to be, as we should expect in Browning, a combination of the ideas of evolution and conservation. Though the standards of art change and develop, because as man's soul evolves, more complex forms are needed to express his deeper experiences, his wider vision, yet in each stage of the development there is an element of permanent beauty which by the aid of the historical sense man may continue to enjoy. That element of permanence exists when genuine feeling and aspiration find expression in forms of art. The element of change grows out of the fact that both the thought expressed and the form in which it is expressed are partial manifestations of the beauty or truth toward which feeling aspires; hence the need of fresh attempts to reach the infinite. The permanence of feeling, expressing itself in ever new forms, is brought out finely in this passage:

"Truths escape
Time's insufficient garniture: they fade,
They fall--those sheathings now grown sere, whose aid
Was infinite to truth they wrapped, saved fine
And free through march frost: May dews crystalline
Nourish truth merely,--does June boast the fruit
As--not new vesture merely but, to boot,
Novel creation? Soon shall fade and fall
Myth after myth--the husk-like lies I call
New truth's Corolla-safeguard."

In another passage is shown how the permanence of feeling conserves even the form, if we will bring ourselves into touch with it:

"Never dream
That what once lived shall ever die! They seem
Dead--do they? lapsed things lost in limbo? Bring
Our life to kindle theirs, and straight each king
Starts, you shall see, stands up."

This kindling of an old form with our own life is more difficult in the case of music than it is in painting or poetry, for in these we have a concrete form to deal with--a form which reflects the thought with much more definiteness than music is able to do. The strength and weakness, at once, of music is that it gives expression to subtler regions of thought and feeling than the other arts, at the same time that the form is more evanescent, because fashioned out of elements infinitely less related to nature than those of other art forms. In his poems on music, the poet always emphasizes these aspects of music. Its supremacy as a means of giving expression to the subtlest regions of feeling is dwelt upon in "Abt Vogler" and "Fifine at the Fair." The Abbe, from the standpoint of the creator of music, feels so strongly from the inside its power for expressing infinite aspiration that in his ecstasy he exclaims: "The rest may reason and welcome. 'Tis we musicians know." Upon the evanescence of the form peculiar emphasis is also laid in this poem, through the fact that the music is improvised. Yet even this fact does not mean the entire annihilation of the form. In the tenth stanza of the poem the idea of the permanence of the art form as well as of the feeling is expanded into a symbol of the immortality of all good:

"All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist;
Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist
When eternity confirms the conception of an hour,
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by-and-by."

The sophistical arguer in "Fifine" feels this same power of music to express thoughts not to be made palpable in any other manner.

"Words struggle with the weight
So feebly of the False, thick element between
Our soul, the True, and Truth! which, but that intervene
False shows of things, were reached as easily by thought
Reducible to word, and now by yearnings wrought
Up with thy fine free force, oh Music, that canst thrill,
Electrically win a passage through the lid
Of earthly sepulchre, our words may push against,
Hardly transpierce as thou."

And again, in another passage, he gives to music the power of conserving a mood of feeling, which in this case is not an exalted one, since it is one that chimes in with his own rather questionable feeling for Fifine, the fiz-gig. It is found in Schumann's "Carnival":

"Thought hankers after speech, while no speech may evince
Feeling like music,--mine, o'er-burthened with each gift
From every visitant, at last resolved to shift
Its burthen to the back of some musician dead
And gone, who feeling once what I feel now, instead
Of words, sought sounds, and saved forever, in the same,
Truth that escapes prose,--nay, puts poetry to shame.
I read the note, I strike the Key, I bid _record_
The instrument--thanks greet the veritable word!
And not in vain I urge: 'O dead and gone away,
Assist who struggles yet, thy strength becomes my stay,
Thy record serve as well to register--I felt
And knew thus much of truth! With me, must knowledge melt
Into surmise and doubt and disbelief unless
Thy music reassure--I gave no idle guess,
But gained a certitude I yet may hardly keep!
What care? since round is piled a monumental heap
Of music that conserves the assurance, thou as well
Was certain of the same! thou, master of the spell,
Mad'st moonbeams marble, didst _record_ what other men
Feel only to forget!'"

The man in the case is merely an appreciator, not a creator, yet he experiences with equal force music's power as a recorder of feeling. He notes also that the feeling must appear from time to time in a new dress,

"the stuff that's made
To furnish man with thought and feeling is purveyed
Substantially the same from age to age, with change
Of the outside only for successive feasters."

In this case, the old tunes have actually been worked over by the more modern composer whose form has not yet sufficiently gone by to fail of an immediate appeal to this person with feelings kindled by similar experiences. What the speaker in the poem perceives is not merely the fact of the feelings experienced but the power of the music to take him off upon a long train of more or less philosophical reasoning born of that very element of change. In this power of suggestiveness lies music's greater range of spiritual force even when the feeling expressed is not of the deepest.

If we look at his poems on painting, the same principles of art are insisted upon except that more emphasis is laid upon the positive value of the incompleteness of the form. In so far as painting or sculpture reaches a perfect unity of thought and form it loses its power of suggesting an infinite beauty beyond any that our earth-born race may express.

This in Browning's opinion is the limitation of Greek art. It touches perfection or completion in expression and in so doing limits its range to the brief passion of a day. The effect of such art is to arouse a sort of despair, for it so far transcends merely human beauty that there seems nothing left to accomplish:

"So, testing your weakness by their strength,
Your meagre charms by their rounded beauty
Measured by Art in your breadth and length,
You learned--to submit is a mortal's duty."

When such a deadlock as this is reached through the stultifying effect of an art expression which seems to have embodied all there is of passion and physical beauty, the one way out is to turn away from the abject contemplation of such art and go back again to humanity itself, in whose widening nature may be discovered the promise of an eternity of progression. Therefore, "To cries of Greek art and what more wish you?" the poet would have it that the early painters replied:

"To become now self-acquainters,
And paint man, whatever the issue!
Make new hopes shine through the flesh they fray,
New fears aggrandize the rags and tatters:
To bring the invisible full into play!
Let the visible go to the dogs--what matters?"

The revolution in art started by these early worthies had more of spiritual promise in it than the past perfection--"The first of the new, in our race's story, beats the last of the old."

His emphasis here upon the return to humanity in order to gain a new source of inspiration in art is further illustrated in his attitude toward the two painters which he portrays so splendidly: Fra Lippo Lippi, the realist, whose Madonnas looked like real women, and who has scandalized some critics on this account, and Andrea del Sarto, the faultless painter, who exclaims in despair as he gazes upon a picture by Raphael, in which he sees a fault to pardon in the drawing's line, an error that he could alter for the better, "But all the play, the insight and the stretch," beyond him.

The importance of basing art upon the study of the human body is later insisted upon in Francis Furini, not as an end in itself, but as the dwelling place of the soul. "Let my pictures prove I know," says Furini,

"Somewhat of what this fleshly frame of ours
Or is or should be, how the soul empowers
The body to reveal its every mood
Of love and hate, pour forth its plenitude
Of passion."

The evolutionary ideal appears again in his utterances upon poetry, though when speaking of poetry it is the value of the subject matter and its intimate relation to the form upon which he dwells.

The little poem "Popularity" shows as clearly as any the importance which he attaches to a new departure in poetic expression, besides giving vent to his scorn of the multitude which sees nothing in the work of the innovator but which is ready at a later date to laud his imitators. Any minor poet, for that matter, any Nokes or Stokes who merely prints blue according to the poetic conventions of the past, possessing not a suspicion of the true inspiration which goes to the making of a poet of the new order, is more acceptable to an unseeing public than him with power to fish "the murex up" that contains the precious drop of royal blue.

More than one significant hint may be gleaned from his verse in regard to his opinion upon the formal side of the poet's art. In "Transcendentalism" he has his fling at the didactic poet who pleases to speak naked thoughts instead of draping them in sights and sounds, for "song" is the art of the poet. Some stout mage like him of Halberstadt has his admiration, who with a

"'Look you!' vents a brace of rhymes,
And in there breaks the sudden rose herself,
Over us, under, round us every side,
Nay, in and out the tables and the chairs
And musty volumes, Boehme's book and all,--
Buries us with a glory young once more,
Pouring heaven into this shut house of life."

He was equally averse to an ornate classical embellishment of a latter day subject or to a looking at nature through mythopoeic Greek eyes. This is driven home in the splendid fooling in "Gerard de Lairesse" where the poet himself indulges by way of a joke in some high-flown classical imagery in derision of the style of Lairesse and hints covertly probably at the nineteenth-century masters of classical resuscitation, in subject matter and allusion, Swinburne and Morris. Reacting to soberer mood, he reiterates his belief in the utter deadness of Greek ideals of art, speaking with a strength of conviction so profound as to make one feel that here at least Browning suffered from a decided limitation, all the more strange, too, when one considers his own masterly treatment of Greek subjects. To the poets whose poetic creed is

"Dream afresh old godlike shapes,
Recapture ancient fable that escapes,
Push back reality, repeople earth
With vanished falseness, recognize no worth
In fact new-born unless 'tis rendered back
Pallid by fancy, as the western rack
Of fading cloud bequeaths the lake some gleam
Of its gone glory!"

he would reply,

"Let things be--not seem,
I counsel rather,--do, and nowise dream!
Earth's young significance is all to learn;
The dead Greek lore lies buried in the urn
Where who seeks fire finds ashes. Ghost, forsooth!
What was the best Greece babbled of as truth?
A shade, a wretched nothing,--sad, thin, drear,

* * * * *

Sad school
Was Hades! Gladly,--might the dead but slink
To life back,--to the dregs once more would drink
Each interloper, drain the humblest cup
Fate mixes for humanity."

The rush onward to the supreme is uppermost in the poet's mind in this poem. Though he does indulge in the refrain that there shall never be one lost good echoing the thought in "Charles Avison," the climax of his mood is in the contemplation of the evolutionary force of the soul which must leave Greek art behind and find new avenues of beauty:

"The Past indeed
Is past, gives way before Life's best and last
The all-including Future! What were life
Did soul stand still therein, forego her strife
Through the ambiguous Present to the goal
Of some all-reconciling Future? Soul,
Nothing has been which shall not bettered be
Hereafter,--leave the root, by law's decree
Whence springs the ultimate and perfect tree!
Busy thee with unearthing root? Nay, climb--
Quit trunk, branch, leaf and flower--reach, rest sublime
Where fruitage ripens in the blaze of day."

When it comes to the subject matter of poetry, Browning constantly insists that it should be the study of the human soul. A definite statement as to the range of subjects under this general material of poetry is put forth very early in his poetical career in "Paracelsus" and it is all-inclusive. It is the passage where Aprile describes how universal he wished to make his sympathy as a poet. No one is to be left out of his all-embracing democracy.

Such, then, are his general principles in regard to poetic development and subject matter. These do not touch upon the question so often discussed of the relative value of the subjective as against the objective poet. This point the poet considers in "Sordello," where he throws in his weight on the side of the objective poet. In the passage in the third book the poet, speaking in person, gives illustrations of three sorts of poetic composition: the dramatic, the descriptive and the meditative; the first belongs to the objective, the second, not distinctively to either, and the third to the subjective manner of writing. The dramatic method is the most forceful, for it imparts the gift of seeing to others, while the descriptive and meditative merely tell what they saw, or, worse still, talk about it.

Further indications of his allegiance to the dramatic form of poetry as the supreme one are found in his poems inspired by Shakespeare, "House" and "Shop," but we must turn to a pregnant bit of his prose in order to find his exact feeling upon the relations of the subjective and objective poet, together with a clear conception of what he meant by a dramatic poet, which was something more than Shakespeare's "holding the mirror up to nature." In his view the dramatic poet must have the vision of the seer as well as the penetration of a psychologist. He must hold the mirror up not only to nature, regarded as phenomena, but to the human soul, and he must perceive the relation of that human soul to the universal. He must in fact plunge beneath the surface of actions and events and bring forth to the light the psychic and cosmic causes of these things. The passage referred to in the "Introduction to the Shelley Letters" points out how in the evolution of poetry there will be the play and interplay of the subjective and the objective faculties upon each other, with the probable result of the arising of poets who will combine the two sorts of faculty. While Browning's own sympathy with the dramatic poet is as fully evident here as in the passage in "Sordello," he realizes, as perhaps he did not at that time, when he was himself breaking away from Shelley's influence, the value of the subjective method in carrying on the process of poetic evolution:

"It would be idle to inquire, of these two kinds of poetic faculty in
operation, which is the higher or even rarer endowment. If the
subjective might seem to be the ultimate requirement of every age,
the objective, in the strictest state, must still retain its original
value. For it is with this word, as starting-point and basis alike,
that we shall always have to concern ourselves: the world is not to be
learned and thrown aside, but reverted to and relearned. The spiritual
comprehension may be infinitely subtilized, but the raw material it
operates upon must remain. There may be no end of the poets who
communicate to us what they see in an object with reference to their
own individuality; what it was before they saw it, in reference to the
aggregate human mind, will be as desirable to know as ever. Nor is
there any reason why these two modes of poetic faculty may not issue
hereafter from the same poet in successive perfect works, examples of
which, according to what are now considered the exigencies of art, we
have hitherto possessed in distinct individuals only. A mere running
in of the one faculty upon the other is, of course, the ordinary
circumstance. Far more rarely it happens that either is found so
decidedly prominent and superior as to be pronounced comparatively
pure: while of the perfect shield, with the gold and the silver side
set up for all comers to challenge, there has yet been no instance. A
tribe of successors (Homerides), working more or less in the same
spirit, dwell on his discoveries and reinforce his doctrine; till, at
unawares, the world is found to be subsisting wholly on the shadow of
a reality, on sentiments diluted from passions, on the tradition of a
fact, the convention of a moral, the straw of last year's harvest.
Then is the imperative call for the appearance of another sort of
poet, who shall at once replace this intellectual rumination of food
swallowed long ago, by a supply of the fresh and living swathe;
getting at new substance by breaking up the assumed wholes into parts
of independent and unclassed value, careless of the unknown laws for
recombining them (it will be the business of yet another poet to
suggest those hereafter), prodigal of objects for men's outer and not
inner sight; shaping for their uses a new and different creation from
the last, which it displaces by the right of life over death,--to
endure until, in the inevitable process, its very sufficiency to
itself shall require, at length, an exposition of its affinity to
something higher--when the positive yet conflicting facts shall again
precipitate themselves under a harmonizing law, and one more degree
will be apparent for a poet to climb in that mighty ladder, of which,
however cloud-involved and undefined may glimmer the topmost step, the
world dares no longer doubt that its gradations ascend."

If we measure Browning's own work by the poetic standards which he has himself set up in the course of that work, it is quite evident that he has on the whole lived up to them. He has shown himself to be an illustration of the evolutionary principles in which he believes by breaking away from all previous standards of taste in poetry. The history of poetry in England has shown this to be a distinctive characteristic of all the greatest English poets. From Shakespeare down they have one and all run afoul of the critics whose special province seems to be to set up literary shibboleths which every genius is bent upon disregarding. When Spenser was inventing his stanza, verse critics were abject in their worship of hexameters, and their hatred of bald rhymes. Though these sticklers for classical forms could see clearly enough that Spenser was possessed of genius, they yet lamented the blindness of one, who might have written hexameters, perversely exclaiming "Why a God's name may not we as else the Greeks have the kingdom of our own language, and measure our accents by the sound, reserving quantity to the verse?" When Milton appears and finds blank verse the medium best suited to his subject, he comes up against the rhyming standards of his day and is forced to submit to the indignity of having his "Paradise Lost" "tagged with rhymes," as he expresses it, by Dryden, who graciously devoted his powers of rhyme to an improved version of the poem. Milton was actually obliged to defend himself in his preface to "Paradise Lost" for using blank verse, as Browning defends himself in the Epilogue to "Pacchiarotto and How We Worked in Distemper" for writing "strong" verse instead of the "sweet" verse the critics demand of him.

By the time the nineteenth century dawns the critics are safely intrenched in the editorial den, from which, shielded by any sort of shibboleth they can get hold of, they may hurl forth their projectiles upon the unoffending head of the genius, who, with no chance of firing back in the open arena of the magazine, must either suffer in silence or take refuge in sarcastic slurs upon his critics in his poetry, for here lies the only chance of getting even without waiting for the whirligig of time to bring the public round to a recognition of the fact that he is the one who has in very truth, "fished the murex up."

The caliber of man who could speak of "The Ode to Immortality" as "a most illegible and unintelligible poem," or who wonders that any man in his senses could put his name to such a rhapsody as "Endymion," or who dismissed "Prometheus Unbound" with the remark that it was a _melange_ of nonsense, cockneyism, poverty and pedantry, would hardly be expected to welcome "Sordello" with effusion. Even very intelligent people cracked unseemly jokes upon the appearance of "Sordello," and what wonder, for Browning's British instinct for freedom carried him in this poem to the most extreme lengths. In "Pauline" he had allied himself with things familiar to the English reader of poetry. Many of the allusions are classical and introduced with a rich musicalness that Shelley himself might have envied. The reminiscences of Shelley would also come within the intellectual acreage of most of the cultured people of the time. And even in "Paracelsus," despite the unfamiliarity of the subject, there was music and imagery such as to link the art with the admired poetic art of the day, but in "Sordello" all bounds are broken.

No one but a delver in the byways of literature could, at that time, have been expected to know anything about Sordello; no one but a historian could have been expected to know about the complicated struggles of the Guelfs and the Ghibellines; no one but a philosopher about the tendencies, both political and literary, manifesting themselves in the direction of the awakening of democratic ideals in these pre-Dantean days; no one but a psychologist about the tortuous windings of Sordello's mind.

Only by special searching into all these regions of knowledge can one to-day gain a complete grasp of the situation. He must patiently tread all the paths that Browning trod before he can enter into sympathy with the poet. Then he will crack no more jokes, but he will marvel at the mind which could wield all this knowledge with such consummate familiarity; he will grow ecstatic over the splendors of the poem, and will regret its redundancy not of diction so much but of detail and its amazing lack of organic unity.

No one but a fanatic could claim that "Sordello" is a success as an organic work of art. While the poet had a mastery of knowledge, thought and feeling, he did not have sufficient mastery of his own form to weld these together into a harmonious and convincing whole, such mastery as he, for example, shows in "The Ring and the Book," though even in that there is some survival of the old redundancy.

One feels when considering "Sordello" as a whole as if gazing upon a picture in which the perspective and the high lights and the shadows are not well related to each other. As great an abundance of detail is expended upon the less important as upon the more important fact, and while the details may be interesting enough in themselves, they dislodge more important affairs from the center of consciousness. It is, not to be too flippant, something like Alice's game of croquet in "Through the Looking Glass." When the hedgehog ball is nicely rolled up ready to be struck, the flamingo mallet walks off somewhere else.

There, then, in "Sordello" is perhaps the most remarkable departure from the accepted in poetic art that an Englishman has ever attempted. In its elements of failure, however, it gave "a triumph's evidence," to use the poet's own phrase, "of the fulness of the days." In this poem he had thrown down the gauntlet. His subject matter was not to be like that of any other poet, nor was his form to be like that of any other poet. He discarded the flowing music of "Pauline" and of "Paracelsus." His allusions were no longer to be classic, but to be directly related to whatever subject he had in hand; his style was also to be forth-right and related to his subject, strong, idiomatic, rugged, even jolting if need be, or noble, sweeping along in large rhythms or couched in rare forms of symbolism, but, whatever it was to be, always different from what had been.

All he required at the time when "Sordello" appeared was to find that form in which he could so unify his powers that his poems would gain the organic completeness necessary to a work of art. No matter what new regions an artist may push into he must discover the law of being of this new region. Unless he does, his art will not convince, but the moment he does, all that was not convincing falls into its right place. He becomes the master of his art, and relates the new elements in such a way that their rightness and their beauty, if not immediately recognized, are sure sooner or later to be recognized by the evolving appreciator, who is the necessary complement, by the way, of the evolving artist. Before "Sordello" Browning had tried three other forms; the subjective narrative in "Pauline," the dramatic poem in "Paracelsus," a regular drama in "Strafford," which however runs partly parallel with "Sordello" in composition. He had also done two or three short dramatic monologues.

He evidently hoped that the regular drama would prove to be the form most congenial to him, for he kept on persistently in that form for nearly ten years, wrote much magnificent poetry in it and at times attained a grandeur of dramatic utterance hardly surpassed except in the master of all dramatists, Shakespeare. But while he has attained a very genuine success in this form, it is not the success of the popular acting drama. His dramas are to-day probably being left farther and farther aside every moment in the present exaggerated demands for characters in action, or perhaps it might be nearer the truth to say clothes horses in action. Besides, the drama of action in character, which is the type of drama introduced into English literature by Browning, has reached a more perfect development in other hands. Ibsen's dramas are preeminently dramas of action in character, but the action moves with such rapidity that the audience is almost cheated into thinking they are the old thing over again--that is, dramas of characters in action.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tennyson was equally familiar with the thought and much more familiar with the politics of the day, but there is an infinite difference in their attitude. Browning, if I may be excused for quoting one of Shakespeare's most abused phrases, rides over the century like a "naked new-born babe striding the blast." Tennyson ambles through it on a palfrey which has a tendency to flounder into every slough of despond it comes to. This may seem to be putting it rather too strongly, but is it not true? Browning has the vision belonging to the latest child of time. He never follows; he leads. With his eyes fixed upon a far-off future where man shall be _man_ at last, he faces every problem with the intrepidity of an Oedipus confronting the Sphynx. The mystery of its riddles has no terrors for him. It is given to him as to few others to see the ineffable beauty of life's mystery, the promise it holds out of eternal joy. While he frequently discourses upon the existence of evil, he never for a moment admits any doubt into his own utmost soul of the beneficent part evil is meant to play in the molding of human destinies. Mr. Santayana has called him a barbarous poet. In a certain sense he is, if to be born among the first on a new plane of psychic perception where of no account become the endless metaphysical meanderings of the intellect, which cry "proof, proof, where there can be no proof," is barbarous. It was doubtless largely owing to this power of vision reminding us again somewhat of the child's in Maeterlinck's "Les Aveugles" which kept Browning from tinkering in the half-measures of the political leaders of his time. His plane is not unlike that of his own Lazarus, about whom the Arab physician says:

"The man is witless of the size, the sum,
The value in proportion of all things,
Or whether it be little or be much.
Discourse to him of prodigious armament
Assembled to besiege his city now,
And of the passing of a mule with gourds--
'Tis one! Then take it on the other side,
Speak of some trifling fact,--he will gaze rapt
With stupor at its very littleness,
(For as I see) as if in that indeed
He caught prodigious import, whole results;
And so will turn to us the bystanders
In ever the same stupor (note this point)
That we, too, see not with his opened eyes."

The import of an event is everything. Large imports may lurk more surely in the awakening of some obscure soul than in the pageantry of law bringing a tardy and wholly inadequate measure of justice to humanity. Though Tennyson talks of the "far-off divine event" he has no burning conviction of it and does not ride toward it with triumph in his eye and flaming joy in his soul. As he ambles along, steeping himself in the science of the time, its revelations make him nervous; he falls into doubt from which he can only extricate himself by holding on to belief, a very different thing from Browning's vision.

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

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