Henry Van Dyke

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There is a striking contrast between the poetry of Browning and the poetry of Wordsworth; and this comes naturally from the difference between the two men in genius, temperament and life. I want to trace carefully and perhaps more clearly some of the lines of that difference. I do not propose to ask which of them ranks higher as poet. That seems to me a futile question. The contrast in kind interests me more than the comparison of degree. And this contrast, I think, can best be felt and understood through a closer knowledge of the central theme of each of the two poets.

Wordsworth is a poet of recovered joy. He brings consolation and refreshment to the heart,—consolation which is passive strength, refreshment which is peaceful energy. His poetry is addressed not to crowds, but to men standing alone, and feeling their loneliness most deeply when the crowd presses most tumultuously about them. He speaks to us one by one, distracted by the very excess of life, separated from humanity by the multitude of men, dazzled by the shifting variety of hues into which the eternal light is broken by the prism of the world,—one by one he accosts us, and leads us gently back, if we will follow him, into a more tranquil region and a serener air. There we find the repose of “a heart at leisure from itself.” There we feel the unity of man and nature, and of both in God. There we catch sight of those eternal stars of truth whose shining, though sometimes hidden, is never dimmed by the cloud-confusions of morality. Such is the mission of Wordsworth to the age. Matthew Arnold has described it with profound beauty.

“He found us when the age had bound

Our souls in its benumbing round,

He spoke, and loosed our heart in tears.

He laid us as we lay at birth

On the cool flowery lap of earth,

Smiles broke from us and we had ease,

The hills were round us, and the breeze

Went o’er the sun-lit fields again:

Our foreheads felt the wind and rain.

Our youth returned; for there was shed

On spirits that had long been dead,

Spirits dried up and closely furled,

The freshness of the early world.”

But precious as such a service is and ever must be, it does not fill the whole need of man’s heart. There are times and moods in which it seems pale and ineffectual. The very contrast between its serenity, its assurance, its disembodied passion, its radiant asceticism, and the mixed lights, the broken music, the fluctuating faith, the confused conflict of actual life, seems like a discouragement. It calls us to go into a retreat, that we may find ourselves and renew our power to live. But there are natures which do not easily adapt themselves to a retreat,—natures which crave stimulus more than consolation, and look for a solution of life’s problem that can be worked out while they are in motion. They do not wish, perhaps they are not able, to withdraw themselves from active life even for the sake of seeing it more clearly.

Wordsworth’s world seems to them too bare, too still, too monotonous. The rugged and unpopulous mountains, the lonely lakes, the secluded vales, do not attract them as much as the fertile plain with its luxuriant vegetation, the whirling city, the crowded highways of trade and pleasure. Simplicity is strange to them; complexity is their native element. They want music, but they want it to go with them in the march, the parade, the festal procession. The poet for them must be in the world, though he need not be altogether of it. He must speak of the rich and varied life of man as one who knows its artificial as well as its natural elements,—palaces as well as cottages, courts as well as sheep-folds. Art and politics and literature and science and churchmanship and society,—all must be familiar to him, material to his art, significant to his interpretation. His message must be modern and militant. He must not disregard doubt and rebellion and discord, but take them into his poetry and transform them. He must front

“The cloud of mortal destiny,”

and make the most of the light that breaks through it. Such a poet is Robert Browning; and his poetry is the direct answer to at least one side of the modern Zeitgeist, restless, curious, self-conscious, energetic, the active, questioning spirit.

I

Browning’s poetic work-time covered a period of about fifty-six years, (1833-1889,) and during this time he published over thirty volumes of verse, containing more than two hundred and thirty poems, the longest, The Ring and the Book, extending to nearly twenty-one thousand lines. It was an immense output, greater I think, in mass, than that of almost any other English poet except Shakespeare. The mere fact of such productiveness is worth noting, because it is a proof of the activity of the poet’s mind, and also because it may throw some light upon certain peculiarities in the quality of his work.

Browning not only wrote much himself, he was also the cause of much writing in others. Commentaries, guide-books, handbooks, and expositions have grown up around his poetry so fast that the vines almost hide the trellis. The Browning Literature now demands not merely a shelf, but a whole case to itself in the library. It has come to such a pass that one must choose between reading the books that Browning wrote and the books that other people have written about Browning. Life is too short for both.

A reason, if not a justification, for this growth of a locksmith literature about his work is undoubtedly to be found in what Mr. Augustine Birrell calls “The Alleged Obscurity of Mr. Browning’s Poetry.” The adjective in this happy title indicates one of the points in the voluminous discussion. Does the difficulty in understanding Browning lie in him, or in his readers? Is it an accidental defect of his style, or a valuable element of his art, or an inherent profundity of his subject that makes him hard to read? Or does the trouble reside altogether in the imagination of certain readers, or perhaps in their lack of it? This question was debated so seriously as to become at times almost personal and threaten the unity of households if not the peace of nations. Browning himself was accustomed to tell the story of a young man who could not read his poetry, falling deeply in love with a young woman who would hardly read anything else. She made it a condition of her favour that her lover should learn to love her poet, and therefore set the marriage day at a point beyond the time when the bridegroom could present himself before her with convincing evidence that he had perused the works of Browning down to the last line. Such was the strength of love that the condition was triumphantly fulfilled. The poet used to tell with humourous satisfaction that he assisted in person at the wedding of these two lovers whose happiness he had unconsciously delayed and accomplished.

But an incident like this does not contribute much to the settlement of the controversy which it illustrates. Love is a notorious miracle-worker. The question of Browning’s obscurity is still debatable; and whatever may be said on one side or the other, one fact must be recognized: it is not yet quite clear whether his poetry is clear or not.

To this fact I would trace the rise and flourishing of Browning Societies in considerable abundance, during the late Victorian Era, especially near Boston. The enterprise of reading and understanding Browning presented itself as an affair too large and difficult for the intellectual capital of any private person. Corporations were formed, stock companies of intelligence were promoted, for the purpose of working the field of his poetry. The task which daunted the solitary individual was courageously undertaken by phalanxes and cheerfully pursued in fellowship. Thus the obscurity, alleged or actual, of the poet’s writing, having been at first a hindrance, afterward became an advertisement to his fame. The charm of the enigma, the fascination of solving riddles, the pleasure of understanding something which other people at least professed to be unable to understand, entered distinctly into the growth of his popularity. A Browning cult, a Browning propaganda, came into being and toiled tremendously.

One result of the work of these clubs and societies is already evident: they have done much to remove the cause which called them into being. It is generally recognized that a considerable part of Browning’s poetry is not really so difficult after all. It can be read and enjoyed by any one whose mind is in working order. Those innocent and stupid Victorians were wrong about it. We alert and sagacious George-the-Fifthians need some tougher poetry to try our mettle. So I suppose the Browning Societies, having fulfilled their function, will gradually fade away,—or perhaps transfer their attention to some of those later writers who have put obscurity on a scientific basis and raised impenetrability to a fine art. Meantime I question whether all the claims which were made on behalf of Browning in the period of propaganda will be allowed at their face value. For example, that The Ring and the Book is “the greatest work of creative imagination that has appeared since the time of Shakespeare,”[10] and that A Grammarian’s Funeral is “the most powerful ode in English, the mightiest tribute ever paid to a man,”[11] and that Browning’s “style as it stands is God-made, not Browning-made,”[12] appear even now like drafts on glory which must be discounted before they are paid. Nor does it seem probable that the general proposition which was sometimes advanced by extreme Browningites, (and others,) to the effect that all great poetry ought to be hard to read, and that a poem which is easy cannot be great, will stand the test of time. Milton’s Comus, Gray’s Elegy, Wordsworth’s Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, Shelley’s Skylark, Keats’ Grecian Urn, and Tennyson’s Guinevere cannot be reduced to the rank of minor verse by such a formula.

And yet it must be said that the very extravagance of the claims which were made for Browning, the audacity of enthusiasm which he inspired in his expositors, is a proof of the reality and the potency of his influence. Men are not kindled where there is no fire. Men do not keep on guessing riddles unless the answers have some interest and value. A stock company cannot create a prophet out of straw. Browning must have had something important to say to the age, and he must have succeeded in saying it in a way which was suitable, in spite of its defects, to convey his message, else we may be sure his age never would have listened to him, even by select companies, nor discussed him, even in a partisan temper, nor felt his influence, even at second-hand.

What was it, then, that he had to say, and how did he say it? What was the theme of his poetry, what the method by which he found it, what the manner in which he treated it, and what the central element of his disposition by which the development of his genius was impelled and guided? These are the questions,—questions of fact rather than of theory,—that particularly interest me in regard to Browning. And I hope it may be possible to consider them from a somewhat fresh point of view, and without entering into disturbing and unprofitable comparisons of rank with Shakespeare and the other poets.

But there is no reason why the answers to these questions should be concealed until the end of the chapter. It may be better to state them now, in order that we may be able to test them as we go on, and judge whether they are justified and how far they need to be qualified. There is a particular reason for taking this course, in the fact that Browning changed very little in the process of growth. There were alterations in his style, but there was no real alteration in the man, nor in his poetry. His first theme was his last theme. His early manner of treatment was his latest manner of treatment. What he said at the beginning he said again at the end. With the greatest possible variety of titles he had but one main topic; with the widest imaginable range of subjects, he used chiefly one method and reached but one conclusion; with a nature of almost unlimited breadth he was always under control of one central impulse and loyal to one central quality. Let me try, then, to condense the general impression into a paragraph and take up the particulars afterwards, point by point.

The clew to Browning’s mind, it seems to me, is vivid and inexhaustible curiosity, dominated by a strangely steady optimism. His topic is not the soul, in the abstract, but souls in the concrete. His chosen method is that of spiritual drama, and for the most part, monodrama. His manner is the intense, subtle, passionate style of psychological realism. His message, uttered through the lips of a hundred imaginary characters, but always with his own accent,—his message is “the Glory of the Imperfect.”

ROBERT BROWNING.

Painted by G. F. Watts.

From a photograph, copyright by Hollyer, London.

II

The best criticisms of the poets have usually come from other poets, and often in the form of verse. Landor wrote of Browning,

This is a thumb-nail sketch of Browning’s personality,—not complete, but very lifelike. And when we add to it Landor’s prose saying that “his is the surest foot since Chaucer’s, that has waked the echoes from the difficult places of poetry and of life” we have a sufficiently plain clew to the unfolding of Browning’s genius. Unwearying activity, intense curiosity, variety of expression, and a predominant interest in the difficult places of poetry and of life,—these were the striking characteristics of his mind. In his heart a native optimism, an unconquerable hopefulness, was the ruling factor. But of that I shall not speak until later, when we come to consider his message. For the present we are looking simply for the mainspring of his immense intellectual energy.

When I say that the clew to Browning’s mind is to be found in his curiosity, I do not mean inquisitiveness, but a very much larger and nobler quality, for which we have no good word in English,—something which corresponds with the German Wissbegier, as distinguished from Neugier: an ardent desire to know things as they are, to penetrate as many as possible of the secrets of actual life. This, it seems to me, is the key to Browning’s intellectual disposition. He puts it into words in his first poem Pauline, where he makes the nameless hero speak of his life as linked to

Paracelsus is only an expansion of this theme in the biography of a soul. In Fra Lippo Lippi the painter says:

No poet was ever more interested in life than Browning, and whatever else may be said of his poetry it must be admitted that it is very interesting. He touches all sides of human activity and peers into the secret places of knowledge. He enters into the life of musicians in Abt Vogler, Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha, A Toccata of Galuppi’s, and Charles Avison; into the life of painters in Andrea del Sarto, Pictor Ignotus, Fra Lippo Lippi, Old Pictures in Florence, Gerard de Lairesse, Pacchiarotto and How He Worked in Distemper, and Francis Furini; into the life of scholars in A Grammarian’s Funeral and Fust and his Friends; into the life of politicians in Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau and George Bubb Dodington; into the life of ecclesiastics in the Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, Bishop Blougram’s Apology, The Bishop orders his Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church, and The Ring and the Book; and he makes excursions into all kinds of byways and crooked corners of life in such poems as Mr. Sludge, the Medium, Porphyria’s Lover, Mesmerism, Johannes Agricola in Meditation, Pietro of Abano, Ned Bratts, Jochanan Hakkadosh, and so forth.

Merely to read a list of such titles is to have evidence of Browning’s insatiable curiosity. It is evident also that he has a fondness for out-of-the-way places. He wants to know, even more than he wants to enjoy. If Wordsworth is the poet of the common life, Browning is the poet of the uncommon life. Extraordinary situations and eccentric characters attract him. Even when he is looking at some familiar scene, at some commonplace character, his effort is to discover something that shall prove that it is not familiar, not commonplace,—a singular detail, a striking feature, a mark of individuality. This gives him more pleasure than any distant vision of an abstraction or a general law.

One consequence of this penetrating, personal quality of mind is that Browning’s pages teem with portraits of men and women, which are like sculptures and paintings of the Renaissance. They are more individual than they are typical. There is a peculiarity about each one of them which almost makes us forget to ask whether they have any general relation and value. The presentations are so sharp and vivid that their representative quality is lost.

If Wordsworth is the Millet of poetry, Browning is the Holbein or the Denner. He never misses the mole, the wrinkle, the twist of the eyebrow, which makes the face stand out alone, the sudden touch of self-revelation which individualizes the character. Thus we find in Browning’s poetry few types of humanity, but plenty of men.

Yet he seldom, if ever, allows us to forget the background of society. His figures are far more individual than Wordsworth’s, but far less solitary. Behind each of them we feel the world out of which they have come and to which they belong. There is a sense of crowded life surging through his poetry. The city, with all that it means, is not often completely out of view. “Shelley’s characters,” says a thoughtful essayist, “are creatures of wave and sky; Wordsworth’s of green English fields; Browning’s move in the house, the palace, the street.”[13] In many of them, even when they are soliloquizing, there is a curious consciousness of opposition, of conflict. They seem to be defending themselves against unseen adversaries, justifying their course against the judgment of absent critics. Thus Bishop Blougram while he talks over the walnuts and the wine to Mr. Gigadibs, the sceptical hack-writer, has a worldful of religious conservatives and radicals in his eye and makes his half-cynical, wholly militant, apology for agnostic orthodoxy to them. The old huntsman, in The Flight of the Duchess, is maintaining the honour of his fugitive mistress against the dried-up, stiff, conventional society from which she has eloped with the Gypsies. Andrea del Sarto, looking at the soulless fatal beauty of his Lucrezia, and meditating on the splendid failure of his art, cries out to Rafael and Michelangelo and all his compeers to understand and judge him.

Even when Browning writes of romantic love, (one of his two favourite subjects), he almost always heightens its effect by putting it in relief against the ignorance, the indifference, the busyness, or the hostility of the great world. In Cristina and Evelyn Hope half the charm of the passion lies in the feeling that it means everything to the lover though no one else in the world may know of its existence. Porphyria’s Lover, in a fit of madness, kills his mistress to keep her from going back to the world which would divide them. The sweet searching melody of In a Gondola plays itself athwart a sullen distant accompaniment of Venetian tyranny and ends with a swift stroke of vengeance from the secret Three.

Take, for an example of Browning’s way of enhancing love by contrast, that most exquisite and subtle lyric called Love Among the Ruins.

III

“Love is best!” That is one of the cardinal points of Browning’s creed. He repeats it in a hundred ways: tragically in A Blot in the ’Scutcheon; sentimentally in A Lover’s Quarrel, Two in the Campagna, The Last Ride Together; heroically in Colombe’s Birthday; in the form of a paradox in The Statue and the Bust; as a personal experience in By the Fireside, One Word More, and at the end of the prelude to The Ring and the Book.

But it must be confessed that he does not often say it as clearly, as quietly, as beautifully as in Love Among the Ruins. For his chosen method is dramatic and his natural manner is psychological. So ardently does he follow this method, so entirely does he give himself up to this manner that his style

In the dedicatory note to Sordello, written in 1863, he says “My stress lay in the incidents in the development of a soul; little else is worth study.” He felt intensely

In One Word More he describes his own poetry with keen insight:

It is a mistake to say that Browning is a metaphysical poet: he is a psychological poet. His interest does not lie in the abstract problems of time and space, mind and matter, divinity and humanity. It lies in the concrete problems of opportunity and crisis, flesh and spirit, man the individual and God the person. He is an anatomist of souls.

But his way of finding out this personal equation is not by observation and reflection. It is by throwing himself into the character and making it reveal itself by intricate self-analysis or by impulsive action. What his poetry lacks is the temperate zone. He has the arctic circle of intellect and the tropics of passion. But he seldom enters the intermediate region of sentiment, reflection, sympathy, equable and prolonged feeling. Therefore it is that few of his poems have the power of “sinking inward from thought to thought” as Wordsworth’s do. They surprise us, rouse us, stimulate us, more than they rest us. He does not penetrate with a mild and steady light through the portals of the human heart, making them transparent. He flings them wide open suddenly, and often the gates creak on their hinges. He is forever tying Gordian knots in the skein of human life and cutting them with the sword of swift action or intense passion. His psychological curiosity creates the difficulties, his intuitive optimism solves them.

IV

The results of this preoccupation with such subjects and of this manner of dealing with them may be recognized very easily in Browning’s work.

First of all they turned him aside from becoming a great Nature-poet, though he was well fitted to be one. It is not that he loves Nature’s slow and solemn pageant less, but that he loves man’s quick and varied drama more. His landscapes are like scenery for the stage. They accompany the unfolding of the plot and change with it, but they do not influence it. His observation is as keen, as accurate as Wordsworth’s or Tennyson’s, but it is less steady, less patient, less familiar. It is the observation of one who passes through the country but does not stay to grow intimate with it. The forms of nature do not print themselves on his mind; they flash vividly before him, and come and go. Usually it is some intense human feeling that makes the details of the landscape stand out so sharply. In Pippa Passes, it is in the ecstasy of love that Ottima and Sebald notice

It is the sense of guilty passion that makes the lightning-flashes, burning through the pine-forest, seem like dagger-strokes,—

In Home Thoughts from Abroad, it is the exile’s deep homesickness that brings the quick, delicate vision before his eyes:

But Browning’s touches of nature are not always as happy as this. Often he crowds the details too closely, and fails to blend them with the ground of the picture, so that the tonality is destroyed and the effect is distracting. The foreground is too vivid: the aerial perspective vanishes. There is an impressionism that obscures the reality. As Amiel says: “Under pretense that we want to study it more in detail, we pulverize the statue.”

Browning is at his best as a Nature-poet in sky-scapes, like the description of daybreak in Pippa Passes, the lunar rainbow in Christmas Eve, and the Northern Lights in Easter Day; and also in a kind of work which might be called symbolic landscape, where the imaginative vision of nature is made to represent a human experience. A striking example of this work is the scenery of Childe Roland, reflecting as in a glass the grotesque horrors of spiritual desolation. There is a passage in Sordello which makes a fertile landscape, sketched in a few swift lines, the symbol of Sordello’s luxuriant nature; and another in Norbert’s speech, in In a Balcony, which uses the calm self-abandonment of the world in the tranquil evening light as the type of the sincerity of the heart giving itself up to love. But perhaps as good an illustration as we can find of Browning’s quality as a Nature-poet, is a little bit of mystery called Meeting at Night.

This is the landscape of the drama.

A second result of Browning’s preoccupation with dramatic psychology is the close concentration and “alleged obscurity” of his style. Here again I evade the critical question whether the obscurity is real, or whether it is only a natural and admirable profundity to which an indolent reviewer has given a bad name. That is a question which Posterity must answer. But for us the fact remains that some of his poetry is hard to read; it demands close attention and strenuous effort; and when we find a piece of it that goes very easily, like The Pied Piper of Hamelin, How They brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix, HervÉ Riel, or the stirring Cavalier Tunes, we are conscious of missing the sense of strain which we have learned to associate with the reading of Browning.

One reason for this is the predominance of curiosity over harmony in his disposition. He tries to express the inexpressible, to write the unwritable. As Dr. Johnson said of Cowley, he has the habit “of pursuing his thoughts to the last ramifications, by which he loses the grandeur of generality.” Another reason is the fluency, the fertility, the haste of his genius, and his reluctance, or inability, to put the brakes on his own productiveness.

It seems probable that if Browning had been able to write more slowly and carefully he might have written with more lucidity. There was a time when he made a point of turning off a poem a day. It is doubtful whether the story of The Ring and the Book gains in clearness by being told by eleven different persons, all of them inclined to volubility.

Yet Browning’s poetry is not verbose. It is singularly condensed in the matter of language. He seems to have made his most arduous effort in this direction. After Paracelsus had been published and pronounced “unintelligible,” he was inclined to think that there might be some fault of too great terseness in the style. But a letter from Miss Caroline Fox was shown to him, in which that lady, (then very young,) took the opposite view and asked “doth he know that Wordsworth will devote a fortnight or more to the discovery of the single word that is the one fit for his sonnet.” Browning appears to have been impressed by this criticism; but he set himself to work upon it, not so much by way of selecting words as by way of compressing them. He put Sordello into a world where many of the parts of speech are lacking and all are crowded. He learned to pack the largest, possible amount of meaning into the smallest possible space, as a hasty traveller packs his portmanteau. Many small articles are crushed and crumpled out of shape. He adopted a system of elisions for the sake of brevity, and loved, as C. S. Calverley said,

At the same time he seldom could resist the temptation to put in another thought, another simile, another illustration, although the poem might be already quite full. He called out, like the conductor of a street-car, “Move up in front: room for one more!” He had little tautology of expression, but much of conception. A good critic says “Browning condenses by the phrase, elaborates by the volume.”[15]

One consequence of this system of writing is that a great deal of Browning’s poetry lends itself admirably to translation,—into English. The number of prose paraphrases of his poems is great, and so constantly increasing that it seems as if there must be a real demand for them. But Coleridge, speaking of the qualities of a true poetic style, remarked: “Whatever lines can be translated into other words of the same language without diminution of their significance, either in sense, or in association, or in any other feeling, are so far vicious in their diction.”

Another very notable thing in Browning’s poetry is his fertility and fluency of rhyme. He is probably the most rapid, ingenious, and unwearying rhymer among the English poets. There is a story that once, in company with Tennyson, he was challenged to produce a rhyme for “rhinoceros,” and almost instantly accomplished the task with a verse in which the unwieldy quadruped kept time and tune with the phrase “he can toss Eros.”[16] There are other tours de force almost as extraordinary in his serious poems. Who but Browning would have thought of rhyming “syntax” with “tin-tacks,” or “spare-rib” with “Carib,” (Flight of Duchess) or “Fra Angelico’s” with “bellicose,” or “Ghirlandajo” with “heigh-ho,” (Old Pictures in Florence) or “expansive explosive” with “O Danaides, O Sieve!” (Master Hugues). Rhyme, with most poets, acts as a restraint, a brake upon speech. But with Browning it is the other way. His rhymes are like wild, frolicsome horses, leaping over the fences and carrying him into the widest digressions. Many a couplet, many a stanza would not have been written but for the impulse of a daring, suggestive rhyme.

Join to this love of somewhat reckless rhyming, his deep and powerful sense of humour, and you have the secret of his fondness for the grotesque. His poetry abounds in strange contrasts, sudden changes of mood, incongruous comparisons, and odd presentations of well-known subjects. Sometimes the whole poem is written in this manner. The Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister, Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis, and Caliban upon Setebos, are poetic gargoyles. Sometimes he begins seriously enough, as in the poem on Keats, and closes with a bit of fantastic irony:

Sometimes the poem opens grotesquely, like Christmas Eve, and rises swiftly to a wonderful height of pure beauty and solemnity, dropping back into a grotesque at the end. But all this play of fancy must not be confused with the spirit of mockery or of levity. It is often characteristic of the most serious and earnest natures; it arises in fact from the restlessness of mind in the contemplation of evil, or from the perception of life’s difficulties and perplexities. Shakespeare was profoundly right in introducing the element of the grotesque into Hamlet, his most thoughtful tragedy. Browning is never really anything else but a serious thinker, passionately curious to solve the riddle of existence. Like his own Sordello he

We may sum up, then, what we have to say of Browning’s method and manner by recognizing that they belong together and have a mutual fitness and inevitableness. We may wish that he had attained to more lucidity and harmony of expression, but we should probably have had some difficulty in telling him precisely how to do it, and he would have been likely to reply with good humour as he did to Tennyson, “The people must take me as they find me.” If he had been less ardent in looking for subjects for his poetry, he might have given more care to the form of his poems. If he had cut fewer blocks, he might have finished more statues. The immortality of much of his work may be discounted by its want of perfect art,—the only true preservative of man’s handiwork. But the immortality of his genius is secure. He may not be ranked finally among the great masters of the art of poetry. But he certainly will endure as a mine for poets. They may stamp the coins more clearly and fashion the ornaments more delicately. But the gold is his. He was the prospector,—the first dramatic psychologist of modern life. The very imperfections of his work, in all its splendid richness and bewildering complexity, bear witness to his favourite doctrine that life itself is more interesting than art, and more glorious, because it is not yet perfect.

V

“The Glory of the Imperfect,”—that is a phrase which I read in a pamphlet by that fine old Grecian and noble Christian philosopher, George Herbert Palmer, many years ago. It seems to me to express the central meaning of Browning’s poetry.

He is the poet of aspiration and endeavour; the prophet of a divine discontent. All things are precious to him, not in themselves, but as their defects are realized, as man uses them, and presses through them, towards something higher and better. Hope is man’s power: and the things hoped for must be as yet unseen. Struggle is man’s life; and the purpose of life is not merely education, but a kind of progressive creation of the soul.

The world presents itself to him, as the Germans say, Im Werden. It is a world of potencies, working itself out. Existence is not the mere fact of being, but the vital process of becoming. The glory of man lies in his power to realize this process in his mind and to fling himself into it with all his will. If he tries to satisfy himself with things as they are, like the world-wedded soul in Easter Eve, he fails. If he tries to crowd the infinite into the finite, like Paracelsus, he fails. He must make his dissatisfaction his strength. He must accept the limitations of his life, not in the sense of submitting to them, but as Jacob wrestled with the angel, in order to win, through conflict, a new power, a larger blessing. His ardent desires and longings and aspirations, yes, even his defeats and disappointments and failures, are the stuff out of which his immortal destiny is weaving itself. The one thing that life requires of him is to act with ardour, to go forward resolutely, to “burn his way through the world”; and the great lesson which it teaches him is this:

Browning was very much needed in the Nineteenth Century as the antidote, or perhaps it would be more just to say, as the complement to Carlyle. For Carlyle’s prophecy, with all its moral earnestness, its virility, its indomitable courage, had in it a ground-tone of despair. It was the battle-cry of a forlorn hope. Man must hate shams intensely, must seek reality passionately, must do his duty desperately; but he can never tell why. The reason of things is inscrutable: the eternal Power that rules things is unknowable. Carlyle, said Mazzini, “has a constant disposition to crush the human by comparing him with God.” But Browning has an unconquerable disposition to elevate the human by joining him to God. The power that animates and governs the world is Divine; man cannot escape from it nor overcome it. But the love that stirs in man’s heart is also Divine; and if man will follow it, it shall lead him to that height where he shall see that Power is Love.

Browning’s optimism is fundamental. Originally a matter of temperament, perhaps, as it is expressed in At the Mermaid,—

primarily the spontaneous tone of a healthy, happy nature, it became the chosen key-note of all his music, and he works it out through a hundred harmonies and discords. He is “sure of goodness as of life.” He does not ask “How came good into the world?” For that, after all, is the pessimistic question; it assumes that the ground of things is evil and the good is the breaking of the rule. He asks instead “How came evil into the world?” That is the optimistic question; as long as a man puts it in that form he is an optimist at heart; he takes it for granted that good is the native element and evil is the intruder; there must be a solution of the problem whether he can find it or not; the rule must be superior to, and triumphant over, the exception; the meaning and purpose of evil must somehow, some time, be proved subordinate to good.

That is Browning’s position:

The way in which he justifies this position is characteristic of the man. His optimism is far less defensive than it is militant. He never wavers from his intuitive conviction that “the world means good.” He follows this instinct as a soldier follows his banner, into whatever difficulties and conflicts it may lead him, and fights his way out, now with the weapons of philosophy, now with the bare sword of faith.

VI

It might seem at first as if it were unfair to attempt any estimate of the philosophic and religious teaching of a poet like Browning, whose method we have already recognized as dramatic. Can we ascribe to the poet himself the opinions which he puts into the mouths of his characters? Can we hold him responsible for the sentiments which are expressed by the actors on his stage?

Certainly this objection must be admitted as a restraint in the interpretation of his poetry. We are not to take all that his characters say, literally and directly, as his own belief, any more than we are to read the speeches of Satan, and Eliphaz, and Bildad, and Zophar, in the Book of Job, as utterances of the spirit of inspiration. But just as that great dramatic Scripture, dealing with the problems of evil and suffering and sovereignty, does contain a doctrine and convey a lesson, so the poetry of Browning, taken as a whole, utters a distinct and positive prophetic message.

In the first place, many of the poems are evidently subjective, written without disguise in the first person. Among these we may consider My Star; By the Fireside; One Word More; the Epilogues to Dramatis PersonÆ and Pachiarrotto and Ferishtah’s Fancies; the introduction and the close of The Ring and the Book; Christmas Eve and Easter Day; the ending of the poem called Gold Hair, and of A Death in the Desert, and of Bishop Blougram’s Apology; Prospice and Reverie. In the second place we must remember Goethe’s dictum: “Every author in some degree, pourtrays himself in his works, even be it against his will.” Even when Browning is writing dramatically, he cannot conceal his sympathy. The masks are thin. His eyes shine through. “His own personality,” says Mr. Stedman, “is manifest in the speech and movement of almost every character of each piece. His spirit is infused as if by metempsychosis, within them all, and forces each to assume a strange Pentecostal tone, which we discover to be that of the poet himself.” Thus it is not impossible, nor even difficult, to reach a fair estimate of his ethical and religious teaching and discover its principal elements.

1. First among these I would put a great confidence in God. Browning is the most theological of modern poets. The epithet which was applied to Spinoza might well be transferred to him. He is a “God-intoxicated” man. But in a very different sense, for whereas the philosopher felt God as an idea, the poet feels Him intensely as a person. The song which he puts into the lips of the unconscious heroine in Pippa Passes,—

is the recurrent theme of his poetry. He cries with Paracelsus,

Even when his music is broken and interrupted by discords, when it seems to dissolve and fade away as all human work, in its outward form, dissolves and fades, he turns, as Abt Vogler turns from his silent organ, to God;

In Rabbi Ben Ezra he takes up the ancient figure of the potter and the clay and uses it to express his boundless trust in God.

The characteristic mark of Browning’s view of God is that it is always taken from the side of humanity. The Perfect Glory is the correlative of the glory of the imperfect. The Divine Love is the answer to the human longing. God is, because man needs Him. From this point of view it almost seems, as a brilliant essayist has said, as if “In Browning, God is adjective to man.”[18]

But it may be said in answer, that, at least for man, this is the only point of view that is accessible. We can never leave our own needs behind us, however high we may try to climb. Certainly if we succeed in forgetting them for a moment, in that very moment we have passed out of the region of poetry, which is the impassioned interpretation of man’s heart.

2. The second element of power in Browning’s poetry is that he sees in the personal Christ the very revelation of God that man’s heart most needs and welcomes. Nowhere else in all the range of modern poetry has this vision been expressed with such spiritual ardour, with such poignant joy. We must turn back to the pages of Isaiah to find anything to equal the Messianic rapture of the minstrel in Saul.

We must look into the Christ-filled letters of St. Paul to find the attractions of the Crucified One uttered as powerfully as they are in the Epistle of Karshish.

It is idle to assert that these are only dramatic presentations of the Christian faith. No poet could have imagined such utterances without feeling their significance; and the piercing splendour of their expression discloses his sympathy. He reveals it yet more unmistakably in Christmas Eve, (strophe XVII) and in Easter Day, (strophe XXX.) In the Epilogue to Dramatis PersonÆ it flashes out clearly. The second speaker, as Renan, has bewailed the vanishing of the face of Christ from the sorrowful vision of the race. The third speaker, the poet himself, answers:

“That face,” said Browning to a friend, “that face is the face of Christ: that is how I feel Him.”

Surely this is the religious message that the world most needs to-day. More and more everything in Christianity hangs upon the truth of the Incarnation. The alternative declares itself. Either no God whom we can know and love at all, or God personally manifest in Christ!

3. The third religious element in Browning’s poetry is his faith that this life is a probation, a discipline for the future. He says, again and again,

The glory of the imperfect lies in the power of progress, “man’s distinctive mark.” And progress comes by conflict; conflict with falsehood and ignorance,—

and conflict with evil,—

The poet is always calling us to be glad we are engaged in such a noble strife.

Now this is fine doctrine, lofty, strenuous, stimulating. It appeals to the will, which is man’s central power. It proclaims the truth that virtue must be active in its essence though it may also be passive in its education, positive in its spirit and negative only by contrast.

But it is in the working out of this doctrine into an ethical system that Browning enters upon dangerous ground, and arrives at results which seem to obscure the clearness, and to threaten the stability of the moral order, by which alone, if the world’s greatest teachers have been right, the ultimate good of humanity can be attained. Here, it seems to me, his teaching, especially in its latter utterances, is often confused, turbulent, misleading. His light is mixed with darkness. He seems almost to say that it matters little which way we go, provided only we go.

He overlooks the deep truth that there is an activity of the soul in self-restraint as well as in self-assertion. It takes as much courage to dare not to do evil as it does to dare to do good. The hero is sometimes the man who stands still. Virtue is noblest when it is joined to virility. But virility alone is not virtue nor does it always lead to moral victory. Sometimes it leads straight towards moral paralysis, death, extinction. Browning fails to see this, because his method is dramatic and because he dramatizes through himself. He puts himself into this or the other character, and works himself out through it, preserving still in himself, though all unconsciously, the soul of something good. Thus he does not touch that peculiar deadening of spiritual power which is one result of the unrestrained following of impulse and passion. It is this defect in his vision of life that leads to the dubious and interrogatory moral of such a poem as The Statue and the Bust.

Browning values the individual so much that he lays all his emphasis upon the development of stronger passions and aspirations, the unfolding of a more vivid and intense personality, and has comparatively little stress to lay upon the larger thought of the progress of mankind in harmony and order. Indeed he poetizes so vigorously against the conventional judgments of society that he often seems to set himself against the moral sentiments on which those conventional judgments, however warped, ultimately rest. “Over and over again in Browning’s poetry,” says a penetrating critic, “we meet with this insistence on the value of moments of high excitement, of intense living, of full experience of pleasure, even though such moments be of the essence of evil and fruitful in all dark consequences.”

Take for example his treatment of love. He is right in saying “Love is best.” But is he right in admitting, even by inference, that love has a right to take its own way of realizing itself? Can love be at its best unless it is obedient to law? Does it not make its truest music when it keeps its place in the harmony of purity and peace and good living? Surely the wild and reckless view of love as its own law which seems to glimmer through the unconsumed smoke of Browning’s later poems, such as Fifine at the Fair, The Inn Album, and Red Cotton Nightcap Country, needs correction by a true flash of insight like that which we find in two lines of One Word More:

Browning was at times misled by a perilous philosophy into a position where the vital distinction between good and evil dissolved away in a cloud of unreality. In Ferishtah’s Fancies and Parleyings with Certain People of Importance, any one who has the patience to read them will find himself in a nebulous moral world. The supposed necessity of showing that evil is always a means to good tempts to the assertion that it has no other reality. Perhaps it is altogether an illusion, needed to sting us into conflict, but really non-existent. Perhaps it is only the shadow cast by the good,—or “the silence implying sound.” Perhaps it is good in disguise, not yet developed from the crawling worm into the creature with wings. After this fashion the whimsical dervish Ferishtah strews his beans upon the table.

Certainly if this were the essence of Browning’s poetry the best safeguard against its falsehood would be its own weakness. Such a message, if this were all, could never attract many hearers, nor inspire those whom it attracted. Effort, struggle, noble conflict would be impossible in a world where there were no moral certainties or realities, but all men felt that they were playing at a stupid game like the Caucus race in Alice in Wonderland, where everything went round in a circle and every runner received a prize.

But in fact these elements of weakness in Browning’s work, as it seems to me, do not belong to his true poetry. They are expressed, generally, in his most obfuscated style, and at a prohibitory length. They are embodied in poems which no one is likely to read for fun, and few are capable of learning by heart.

But when we go back to his best work we find another spirit, we hear another message. Clear, resonant, trumpet-like his voice calls to us proclaiming the glorious possibilities of this imperfect life. Only do not despair; only do not sink down into conventionality, indifference, mockery, cynicism; only rise and hope and go forward out of the house of bondage into the land of liberty. True, the prophecy is not complete. But it is inspiring. He does not teach us how to live. But he does tell us to live,—with courage, with love to man, with trust in God,—and he bids us find life glorious, because it is still imperfect and therefore full of promise.