Robert Browning - Delphi Poets Series

by Robert Browning

  On the evening of Thursday, the 12th of December (1889), he was in bed, with exceeding weakness. In the centre of the lofty ceiling of the room in which he lay, and where it had been his wont to work, there is a painting by his son. It depicts an eagle struggling with a serpent, and is illustrative of a superb passage in Shelley’s “Revolt of Islam”. What memories, what deep thoughts, it must have suggested; how significant, to us, the circumstance! But weak as the poet was, he yet did not see the shadow which had begun to chill the hearts of the watchers. Shortly before the great bell of San Marco struck ten, he turned and asked if any news had come concerning “Asolando”, published that day. His son read him a telegram from the publishers, telling how great the demand was and how favourable were the advance-articles in the leading papers. The dying poet smiled and muttered, “How gratifying!” When the last toll of St. Mark’s had left a deeper stillness than before, those by the bedside saw a yet profounder silence on the face of him whom they loved.

  — — — —

  It is needless to dwell upon the grief everywhere felt and expressed for the irreparable loss. The magnificent closing lines of Shelley’s “Alastor” must have occurred to many a mourner; for gone, indeed, was “a surpassing Spirit”. The superb pomp of the Venetian funeral, the solemn grandeur of the interment in Westminster Abbey, do not seem worth recording: so insignificant are all these accidents of death made by the supreme fact itself. Yet it is fitting to know that Venice has never in modern times afforded a more impressive sight, than those craped processional gondolas following the high flower-strewn funeral-barge through the thronged waterways and out across the lagoon to the desolate Isle of the Dead: that London has rarely seen aught more solemn than the fog-dusked Cathedral spaces, echoing at first with the slow tramp of the pall-bearers, and then with the sweet aerial music swaying upward the loved familiar words of the `Lyric Voice’ hushed so long before. Yet the poet was as much honoured by those humble friends, Lambeth artisans and a few poor working-women, who threw sprays of laurel before the hearse — by that desolate, starving, woe-weary gentleman, shivering in his threadbare clothes, who seemed transfixed with a heart-wrung though silent emotion, ere he hurriedly drew from his sleeve a large white chrysanthemum, and throwing it beneath the coffin as it was lifted inward, disappeared in the crowd, which closed again like the sea upon this lost wandering wave.

  Who would not honour this mighty dead? All who could be present were there, somewhere in the ancient Abbey. One of the greatest, loved and admired by the dead poet, had already put the mourning of many into the lofty dignity of his verse: —

  ”Now dumb is he who waked the world to speak,

  And voiceless hands the world beside his bier,

  Our words are sobs, our cry of praise a tear:

  We are the smitten mortal, we the weak.

  We see a spirit on Earth’s loftiest peak

  Shine, and wing hence the way he makes more clear:

  See a great Tree of Life that never sere

  Dropped leaf for aught that age or storms might wreak:

  Such ending is not Death: such living shows

  What wide illumination brightness sheds

  From one big heart — to conquer man’s old foes:

  The coward, and the tyrant, and the force

  Of all those weedy monsters raising heads

  When Song is murk from springs of turbid source.”*

  — * George Meredith. —

  One word more of “light and fleeting shadow”. In the greatness of his nature he must be ranked with Milton, Defoe, and Scott. His very shortcomings, such as they were, were never baneful growths, but mere weeds, with a certain pleasant though pungent savour moreover, growing upon a rich, an exuberant soil. Pluck one of the least lovely — rather call it the unworthy arrow shot at the body of a dead comrade, so innocent of ill intent: yet it too has a beauty of its own, for the shaft was aflame from the fulness of a heart whose love had withstood the chill passage of the years.

  — — — —

  On the night of Browning’s death a new star suddenly appeared in Orion.* The coincidence is suggestive if we like to indulge in the fancy that in that constellation —

  ”No more subjected to the change or chance

  Of the unsteady planets — — ”

  gleam those other “abodes where the Immortals are.” Certainly, a wandering fire has passed away from us. Whither has it gone? To that new star in Orion: or whirled to remote silences in the trail of lost meteors? Whence, and for how long, will its rays reach our storm and gloom-beleaguered earth?

  — * Mrs. Orr disputes this statement. — A. L., 1996.

  ”The alleged fact is disproved by the statement of the Astronomer Royal,

  to whom it has been submitted; but it would have been

  a beautiful symbol of translation, such as affectionate fancy

  might gladly cherish if it were true.” — Mrs. Sutherland Orr,

  ”Life and Letters of Robert Browning” (1891).

  —

  Such questions cannot meanwhile be solved. Our eyes are still confused with the light, with that ardent flame, as we knew it here. But this we know, it was indeed “a central fire descending upon many altars.” These, though touched with but a spark of the immortal principle, bear enduring testimony. And what testimony! How heartfelt: happily also how widespread, how electrically stimulative!

  But the time must come when the poet’s personality will have the remoteness of tradition: when our perplexed judgments will be as a tale of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It is impossible for any student of literature, for any interested reader, not to indulge in some forecast as to what rank in the poetic hierarchy Robert Browning will ultimately occupy. The commonplace as to the impossibility of prognosticating the ultimate slow decadence, or slower rise, or, it may be, sustained suspension, of a poet’s fame, is often insincere, and but an excuse of indolence. To dogmatise were the height of presumption as well as of folly: but to forego speculation, based upon complete present knowledge, for an idle contentment with narrow horizons, were perhaps foolisher still. But assuredly each must perforce be content with his own prevision. None can answer yet for the generality, whose decisive franchise will elect a fit arbiter in due time.

  So, for myself, let me summarise what I have already written in several sections of this book, and particularly in the closing pages of Chapter 6. There, it will be remembered — after having found that Browning’s highest achievement is in his second period — emphasis was laid on the primary importance of his life-work in its having compelled us to the assumption of a fresh critical standpoint involving the construction of a new definition. In the light of this new definition I think Browning will ultimately be judged. As the sculptor in “Pippa Passes” was the predestinated novel thinker in marble, so Browning himself appears as the predestinated novel thinker in verse; the novel thinker, however, in degree, not in kind. But I do not for a moment believe that his greatness is in his status as a thinker: even less, that the poet and the thinker are indissociable. Many years ago Sainte-Beuve destroyed this shallow artifice of pseudo-criticism: “Venir nous dire que tout poe”te de talent est, par essence, un grand PENSEUR, et que tout vrai PENSEUR est ne/cessairement artiste et poe”te, c’est une pre/tention insoutenable et que de/ment a chaque instant la re/alite/.”

  When Browning’s enormous influence upon the spiritual and mental life of our day — an influence ever shaping itself to wise and beautiful issues — shall have lost much of its immediate import, there will still surely be discerned in his work a formative energy whose resultant is pure poetic gain. It is as the poet he will live: not merely as the “novel thinker in verse”. Logically, his attitude as `thinker’ is unimpressive. It is the attitude, as I think some one has pointed out, of acquiescence with codified morality. In one of his `Causeries’, the keen French critic quoted above has a remark upon the great Bossuet, which may with singular aptness be repeated of Browning: — “His
is the Hebrew genius extended, fecundated by Christianity, and open to all the acquisitions of the understanding, but retaining some degree of sovereign interdiction, and closing its vast horizon precisely where its light ceases.” Browning cannot, or will not, face the problem of the future except from the basis of assured continuity of individual existence. He is so much in love with life, for life’s sake, that he cannot even credit the possibility of incontinuity; his assurance of eternity in another world is at least in part due to his despair at not being eternal in this. He is so sure, that the intellectually scrupulous detect the odours of hypotheses amid the sweet savour of indestructible assurance. Schopenhauer says, in one of those recently-found Annotations of his which are so characteristic and so acute, “that which is called `mathematical certainty’ is the cane of a blind man without a dog, or equilibrium in darkness.” Browning would sometimes have us accept the evidence of his `cane’ as all-sufficient. He does not entrench himself among conventions: for he already finds himself within the fortified lines of convention, and remains there. Thus is true what Mr. Mortimer says in a recent admirable critique — “His position in regard to the thought of the age is paradoxical, if not inconsistent. He is in advance of it in every respect but one, the most important of all, the matter of fundamental principles; in these he is behind it. His processes of thought are often scientific in their precision of analysis; the sudden conclusion which he imposes upon them is transcendental and inept.” Browning’s conclusions, which harmonise so well with our haphazard previsionings, are sometimes so disastrously facile that they exercise an insurrectionary influence. They occasionally suggest that wisdom of Gotham which is ever ready to postulate the certainty of a fulfilment because of the existence of a desire. It is this that vitiates so much of his poetic reasoning. Truth may ring regnant in the lines of Abt Vogler —

  ”And what is our failure here but a triumph’s evidence

  For the fulness of the days?” —

  but, unfortunately, the conclusion is, in itself, illogical.

  We are all familiar with, and in this book I have dwelt more than once upon, Browning’s habitual attitude towards Death. It is not a novel one. The frontage is not so much that of the daring pioneer, as the sedate assurance of `the oldest inhabitant’. It is of good hap, of welcome significance: none the less there is an aspect of our mortality of which the poet’s evasion is uncompromising and absolute. I cannot do better than quote Mr. Mortimer’s noteworthy words hereupon, in connection, moreover, with Browning’s artistic relation to Sex, that other great Protagonist in the relentless duel of Humanity with Circumstance. “The final inductive hazard he declines for himself; his readers may take it if they will. It is part of the insistent and perverse ingenuity which we display in masking with illusion the more disturbing elements of life. Veil after veil is torn down, but seldom before another has been slipped behind it, until we acquiesce without a murmur in the concealment that we ourselves have made. Two facts thus carefully shrouded from full vision by elaborate illusion conspicuously round in our lives — the life-giving and life-destroying elements, Sex and Death. We are compelled to occasional physiologic and economic discussion of the one, but we shrink from recognising the full extent to which it bases the whole social fabric, carefully concealing its insurrections, and ignoring or misreading their lessons. The other, in certain aspects, we are compelled to face, but to do it we tipple on illusions, from our cradle upwards, in dread of the coming grave, purchasing a drug for our poltroonery at the expense of our sanity. We uphold our wayward steps with the promises and the commandments for crutches, but on either side of us trudge the shadow Death and the bacchanal Sex, and we mumble prayers against the one, while we scourge ourselves for leering at the other. On one only of these can Browning be said to have spoken with novel force — the relations of sex, which he has treated with a subtlety and freedom, and often with a beauty, unapproached since Goethe. On the problem of Death, except in masquerade of robes and wings, his eupeptic temperament never allowed him to dwell. He sentimentalised where Shakespeare thought.” Browning’s whole attitude to the Hereafter is different from that of Tennyson only in that the latter `faintly’, while he strenuously, “trusts the larger hope.” To him all credit, that, standing upon the frontiers of the Past, he can implicitly trust the Future.

  ”High-hearted surely he;

  But bolder they who first off-cast

  Their moorings from the habitable Past.”

  The teacher may be forgotten, the prophet may be hearkened to no more, but a great poet’s utterance is never temporal, having that in it which conserves it against the antagonism of time, and the ebb and flow of literary ideals. What range, what extent of genius! As Mr. Frederick Wedmore has well said, `Browning is not a book — he is a literature.’

  But that he will “stand out gigantic” in MASS of imperishable work, in that far-off day, I for one cannot credit. His poetic shortcomings seem too essential to permit of this. That fatal excess of cold over emotive thought, of thought that, however profound, incisive, or scrupulously clear, is not yet impassioned, is a fundamental defect of his. It is the very impetuosity of this mental energy to which is due the miscalled obscurity of much of Browning’s work — miscalled, because, however remote in his allusions, however pedantic even, he is never obscure in his thought. His is that “palace infinite which darkens with excess of light.” But mere excess in itself is nothing more than symptomatic. Browning has suffered more from intellectual exploitation than any writer. It is a ruinous process — for the poet. “He so well repays intelligent study.” That is it, unfortunately. There are many, like the old Scotch lady who attempted to read Carlyle’s `French Revolution’, who think they have become “daft” when they encounter a passage such as, for example,

  ”Rivals, who . . .

  Tuned, from Bocafoli’s stark-naked psalms,

  To Plara’s sonnets spoilt by toying with,

  `As knops that stud some almug to the pith

  Pricked for gum, wry thence, and crinkled worse

  Than pursed eyelids of a river-horse

  Sunning himself o’ the slime when whirrs the breeze —

  GAD-FLY, that is.’“

  The old lady persevered with Carlyle, and, after a few days, found “she was nae sae daft, but that she had tackled a varra dee-fee-cult author.” What would even that indomitable student have said to the above quotation, and to the poem whence it comes? To many it is not the poetry, but the difficulties, that are the attraction. They rejoice, after long and frequent dippings, to find their plummet, almost lost in remote depths, touch bottom. Enough `meaning’ has been educed from `Childe Roland’, to cite but one instance, to start a School of Philosophy with: though it so happens that the poem is an imaginative fantasy, written in one day. Worse still, it was not inspired by the mystery of existence, but by `a red horse with a glaring eye standing behind a dun one on a piece of tapestry that used to hang in the poet’s drawing-room.’* Of all his faults, however, the worst is that jugglery, that inferior legerdemain, with the elements of the beautiful in verse: most obvious in “Sordello”, in portions of “The Ring and the Book”, and in so many of the later poems. These inexcusable violations are like the larvae within certain vegetable growths: soon or late they will destroy their environment before they perish themselves. Though possessive above all others of that science of the percipient in the allied arts of painting and music, wherein he found the unconventional Shelley so missuaded by convention, he seemed ever more alert to the substance than to the manner of poetry. In a letter of Mrs. Browning’s she alludes to a friend’s “melodious feeling” for poetry. Possibly the phrase was accidental, but it is significant. To inhale the vital air of poetry we must love it, not merely find it “interesting”, “suggestive”, “soothing”, “stimulative”: in a word, we must have a “melodious feeling” for poetry before we can deeply enjoy it. Browning, who has so often educed from his lyre melodies and harmonies of transcendent, though nove
l, beauty, was too frequently, during composition, without this melodious feeling of which his wife speaks. The distinction between literary types such as Browning or Balzac on the one hand, and Keats or Gustave Flaubert on the other, is that with the former there exists a reverence for the vocation and a relative indifference to the means, in themselves — and, with the latter, a scrupulous respect for the mere means as well as for that to which they conduce. The poet who does not love words for themselves, as an artist loves any chance colour upon his palette, or as the musician any vagrant tone evoked by a sudden touch in idleness or reverie, has not entered into the full inheritance of the sons of Apollo. The writer cannot aim at beauty, that which makes literature and art, without this heed — without, rather, this creative anxiety: for it is certainly not enough, as some one has said, that language should be used merely for the transportation of intelligence, as a wheelbarrow carries brick. Of course, Browning is not persistently neglectful of this fundamental necessity for the literary artist. He is often as masterly in this as in other respects. But he is not always, not often enough, alive to the paramount need. He writes with “the verse being as the mood it paints:” but, unfortunately, the mood is often poetically unformative. He had no passion for the quest for seductive forms. Too much of his poetry has been born prematurely. Too much of it, indeed, has not died and been born again — for all immortal verse is a poetic resurrection. Perfect poetry is the deathless part of mortal beauty. The great artists never perpetuate gross actualities, though they are the supreme realists. It is Schiller, I think, who says in effect, that to live again in the serene beauty of art, it is needful that things should first die in reality. Thus Browning’s dramatic method, even, is sometimes disastrous in its untruth, as in Caliban’s analytical reasoning — an initial absurdity, as Mr. Berdoe has pointed out, adding epigrammatically, `Caliban is a savage, with the introspective powers of a Hamlet, and the theology of an evangelical Churchman.’ Not only Caliban, but several other of Browning’s personages (Aprile, Eglamour, etc.) are what Goethe calls `schwankende Gestalten’, mere “wavering images”.