CHESTERTON-ROBERT BROWING - BROWNING IN LATER LIFE
Mr. William Sharp, in his Life of Browning, quotes the remarks of
another critic to the following effect: "The poet's processes of
thought are scientific in their precision and analysis; the sudden
conclusion that he imposes upon them is transcendental and inept."
This is a very fair but a very curious example of the way in which
Browning is treated. For what is the state of affairs? A man publishes
a series of poems, vigorous, perplexing, and unique. The critics read
them, and they decide that he has failed as a poet, but that he is a
remarkable philosopher and logician. They then proceed to examine his
philosophy, and show with great triumph that it is unphilosophical,
and to examine his logic and show with great triumph that it is not
logical, but "transcendental and inept." In other words, Browning is
first denounced for being a logician and not a poet, and then
denounced for insisting on being a poet when they have decided that he
is to be a logician. It is just as if a man were to say first that a
garden was so neglected that it was only fit for a boys' playground,
and then complain of the unsuitability in a boys' playground of
rockeries and flower-beds.
As we find, after this manner, that Browning does not act
satisfactorily as that which we have decided that he shall be--a
logician--it might possibly be worth while to make another attempt to
see whether he may not, after all, be more valid than we thought as to
what he himself professed to be--a poet. And if we study this
seriously and sympathetically, we shall soon come to a conclusion. It
is a gross and complete slander upon Browning to say that his
processes of thought are scientific in their precision and analysis.
They are nothing of the sort; if they were, Browning could not be a
good poet. The critic speaks of the conclusions of a poem as
"transcendental and inept"; but the conclusions of a poem, if they are
not transcendental, must be inept. Do the people who call one of
Browning's poems scientific in its analysis realise the meaning of
what they say? One is tempted to think that they know a scientific
analysis when they see it as little as they know a good poem. The one
supreme difference between the scientific method and the artistic
method is, roughly speaking, simply this--that a scientific statement
means the same thing wherever and whenever it is uttered, and that an
artistic statement means something entirely different, according to
the relation in which it stands to its surroundings. The remark, let
us say, that the whale is a mammal, or the remark that sixteen ounces
go to a pound, is equally true, and means exactly the same thing,
whether we state it at the beginning of a conversation or at the end,
whether we print it in a dictionary or chalk it up on a wall. But if
we take some phrase commonly used in the art of literature--such a
sentence, for the sake of example, as "the dawn was breaking"--the
matter is quite different. If the sentence came at the beginning of a
short story, it might be a mere descriptive prelude. If it were the
last sentence in a short story, it might be poignant with some
peculiar irony or triumph. Can any one read Browning's great
monologues and not feel that they are built up like a good short
story, entirely on this principle of the value of language arising
from its arrangement. Take such an example as "Caliban upon Setebos,"
a wonderful poem designed to describe the way in which a primitive
nature may at once be afraid of its gods and yet familiar with them.
Caliban in describing his deity starts with a more or less natural and
obvious parallel between the deity and himself, carries out the
comparison with consistency and an almost revolting simplicity, and
ends in a kind of blasphemous extravaganza of anthropomorphism, basing
his conduct not merely on the greatness and wisdom, but also on the
manifest weaknesses and stupidities, of the Creator of all things.
Then suddenly a thunderstorm breaks over Caliban's island, and the
profane speculator falls flat upon his face--
"Lo! 'Lieth flat and loveth Setebos!
'Maketh his teeth meet through his upper lip,
Will let those quails fly, will not eat this month
One little mess of whelks, so he may 'scape!"
Surely it would be very difficult to persuade oneself that this
thunderstorm would have meant exactly the same thing if it had
occurred at the beginning of "Caliban upon Setebos." It does not mean
the same thing, but something very different; and the deduction from
this is the curious fact that Browning is an artist, and that
consequently his processes of thought are not "scientific in their
precision and analysis."
No criticism of Browning's poems can be vital, none in the face of the
poems themselves can be even intelligible, which is not based upon the
fact that he was successfully or otherwise a conscious and deliberate
artist. He may have failed as an artist, though I do not think so;
that is quite a different matter. But it is one thing to say that a
man through vanity or ignorance has built an ugly cathedral, and quite
another to say that he built it in a fit of absence of mind, and did
not know whether he was building a lighthouse or a first-class hotel.
Browning knew perfectly well what he was doing; and if the reader does
not like his art, at least the author did. The general sentiment
expressed in the statement that he did not care about form is simply
the most ridiculous criticism that could be conceived. It would be far
nearer the truth to say that he cared more for form than any other
English poet who ever lived. He was always weaving and modelling and
inventing new forms. Among all his two hundred to three hundred poems
it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that there are half as
many different metres as there are different poems.
The great English poets who are supposed to have cared more for form
than Browning did, cared less at least in this sense--that they were
content to use old forms so long as they were certain that they had
new ideas. Browning, on the other hand, no sooner had a new idea than
he tried to make a new form to express it. Wordsworth and Shelley were
really original poets; their attitude of thought and feeling marked
without doubt certain great changes in literature and philosophy.
Nevertheless, the "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" is a
perfectly normal and traditional ode, and "Prometheus Unbound" is a
perfectly genuine and traditional Greek lyrical drama. But if we study
Browning honestly, nothing will strike us more than that he really
created a large number of quite novel and quite admirable artistic
forms. It is too often forgotten what and how excellent these were.
The Ring and the Book, for example, is an illuminating departure in
literary method--the method of telling the same story several times
and trusting to the variety of human character to turn it into several
different and equally interesting stories. Pippa Passes, to take
another example, is a new and most fruitful form, a series of detached
dramas connected only by the presence of one fugitive and isolated
figure. The invention of these things is not merely like the writing
of a good poem--it is something like the invention of the sonnet or
the Gothic arch. The poet who makes them does not merely create
himself--he creates other poets. It is so in a degree long past
enumeration with regard to Browning's smaller poems. Such a pious and
horrible lyric as "The Heretic's Tragedy," for instance, is absolutely
original, with its weird and almost blood-curdling echo verses,
mocking echoes indeed--
"And dipt of his wings in Paris square,
They bring him now to lie burned alive.
[And wanteth there grace of lute or clavicithern,
ye shall say to confirm him who singeth--
We bring John now to be burned alive."
A hundred instances might, of course, be given. Milton's "Sonnet on
his Blindness," or Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," are both thoroughly
original, but still we can point to other such sonnets and other such
odes. But can any one mention any poem of exactly the same structural
and literary type as "Fears and Scruples," as "The Householder," as
"House" or "Shop," as "Nationality in Drinks," as "Sibrandus
Schafnaburgensis," as "My Star," as "A Portrait," as any of
"Ferishtah's Fancies," as any of the "Bad Dreams."
The thing which ought to be said about Browning by those who do not
enjoy him is simply that they do not like his form; that they have
studied the form, and think it a bad form. If more people said things
of this sort, the world of criticism would gain almost unspeakably in
clarity and common honesty. Browning put himself before the world as a
good poet. Let those who think he failed call him a bad poet, and
there will be an end of the matter. There are many styles in art which
perfectly competent aesthetic judges cannot endure. For instance, it
would be perfectly legitimate for a strict lover of Gothic to say that
one of the monstrous rococo altar-pieces in the Belgian churches with
bulbous clouds and oaken sun-rays seven feet long, was, in his
opinion, ugly. But surely it would be perfectly ridiculous for any one
to say that it had no form. A man's actual feelings about it might be
better expressed by saying that it had too much. To say that Browning
was merely a thinker because you think "Caliban upon Setebos" ugly, is
precisely as absurd as it would be to call the author of the old
Belgian altarpiece a man devoted only to the abstractions of religion.
The truth about Browning is not that he was indifferent to technical
beauty, but that he invented a particular kind of technical beauty to
which any one else is free to be as indifferent as he chooses.
There is in this matter an extraordinary tendency to vague and
unmeaning criticism. The usual way of criticising an author,
particularly an author who has added something to the literary forms
of the world, is to complain that his work does not contain something
which is obviously the speciality of somebody else. The correct thing
to say about Maeterlinck is that some play of his in which, let us
say, a princess dies in a deserted tower by the sea, has a certain
beauty, but that we look in vain in it for that robust geniality, that
really boisterous will to live which may be found in Martin
Chuzzlewit. The right thing to say about Cyrano de Bergerac is that
it may have a certain kind of wit and spirit, but that it really
throws no light on the duty of middle-aged married couples in Norway.
It cannot be too much insisted upon that at least three-quarters of
the blame and criticism commonly directed against artists and authors
falls under this general objection, and is essentially valueless.
Authors both great and small are, like everything else in existence,
upon the whole greatly under-rated. They are blamed for not doing, not
only what they have failed to do to reach their own ideal, but what
they have never tried to do to reach every other writer's ideal. If we
can show that Browning had a definite ideal of beauty and loyally
pursued it, it is not necessary to prove that he could have written
In Memoriam if he had tried.
Browning has suffered far more injustice from his admirers than from
his opponents, for his admirers have for the most part got hold of the
matter, so to speak, by the wrong end. They believe that what is
ordinarily called the grotesque style of Browning was a kind of
necessity boldly adopted by a great genius in order to express novel
and profound ideas. But this is an entire mistake. What is called
ugliness was to Browning not in the least a necessary evil, but a
quite unnecessary luxury, which he enjoyed for its own sake. For
reasons that we shall see presently in discussing the philosophical
use of the grotesque, it did so happen that Browning's grotesque style
was very suitable for the expression of his peculiar moral and
metaphysical view. But the whole mass of poems will be misunderstood
if we do not realise first of all that he had a love of the grotesque
of the nature of art for art's sake. Here, for example, is a short
distinct poem merely descriptive of one of those elfish German jugs in
which it is to be presumed Tokay had been served to him. This is the
whole poem, and a very good poem too--
"Up jumped Tokay on our table,
Like a pigmy castle-warder,
Dwarfish to see, but stout and able,
Arms and accoutrements all in order;
And fierce he looked North, then, wheeling South
Blew with his bugle a challenge to Drouth,
Cocked his flap-hat with the tosspot-feather,
Twisted his thumb in his red moustache,
Jingled his huge brass spurs together,
Tightened his waist with its Buda sash,
And then, with an impudence nought could abash,
Shrugged his hump-shoulder, to tell the beholder,
For twenty such knaves he would laugh but the bolder:
And so, with his sword-hilt gallantly jutting,
And dexter-hand on his haunch abutting,
Went the little man, Sir Ausbruch, strutting!"
I suppose there are Browning students in existence who would think
that this poem contained something pregnant about the Temperance
question, or was a marvellously subtle analysis of the romantic
movement in Germany. But surely to most of us it is sufficiently
apparent that Browning was simply fashioning a ridiculous
knick-knack, exactly as if he were actually moulding one of these
preposterous German jugs. Now before studying the real character of
this Browningesque style, there is one general truth to be recognised
about Browning's work. It is this--that it is absolutely necessary to
remember that Browning had, like every other poet, his simple and
indisputable failures, and that it is one thing to speak of the
badness of his artistic failures, and quite another thing to speak of
the badness of his artistic aim. Browning's style may be a good style,
and yet exhibit many examples of a thoroughly bad use of it. On this
point there is indeed a singularly unfair system of judgment used by
the public towards the poets. It is very little realised that the vast
majority of great poets have written an enormous amount of very bad
poetry. The unfortunate Wordsworth is generally supposed to be almost
alone in this; but any one who thinks so can scarcely have read a
certain number of the minor poems of Byron and Shelley and Tennyson.
Now it is only just to Browning that his more uncouth effusions should
not be treated as masterpieces by which he must stand or fall, but
treated simply as his failures. It is really true that such a line as
"Irks fear the crop-full bird, frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?"
is a very ugly and a very bad line. But it is quite equally true that
Tennyson's
"And that good man, the clergyman, has told me words of peace,"
is a very ugly and a very bad line. But people do not say that this
proves that Tennyson was a mere crabbed controversialist and
metaphysician. They say that it is a bad example of Tennyson's form;
they do not say that it is a good example of Tennyson's indifference
to form. Upon the whole, Browning exhibits far fewer instances of this
failure in his own style than any other of the great poets, with the
exception of one or two like Spenser and Keats, who seem to have a
mysterious incapacity for writing bad poetry. But almost all original
poets, particularly poets who have invented an artistic style, are
subject to one most disastrous habit--the habit of writing imitations
of themselves. Every now and then in the works of the noblest
classical poets you will come upon passages which read like extracts
from an American book of parodies. Swinburne, for example, when he
wrote the couplet--
"From the lilies and languors of virtue
To the raptures and roses of vice,"
wrote what is nothing but a bad imitation of himself, an imitation
which seems indeed to have the wholly unjust and uncritical object of
proving that the Swinburnian melody is a mechanical scheme of initial
letters. Or again, Mr. Rudyard Kipling when he wrote the line--
"Or ride with the reckless seraphim on the rim of a red-maned star,"
was caricaturing himself in the harshest and least sympathetic spirit
of American humour. This tendency is, of course, the result of the
self-consciousness and theatricality of modern life in which each of
us is forced to conceive ourselves as part of a dramatis personae
and act perpetually in character. Browning sometimes yielded to this
temptation to be a great deal too like himself.
"Will I widen thee out till thou turnest
From Margaret Minnikin mou' by God's grace,
To Muckle-mouth Meg in good earnest."
This sort of thing is not to be defended in Browning any more than in
Swinburne. But, on the other hand, it is not to be attributed in
Swinburne to a momentary exaggeration, and in Browning to a vital
aesthetic deficiency. In the case of Swinburne, we all feel that the
question is not whether that particular preposterous couplet about
lilies and roses redounds to the credit of the Swinburnian style, but
whether it would be possible in any other style than the Swinburnian
to have written the Hymn to Proserpine. In the same way, the essential
issue about Browning as an artist is not whether he, in common with
Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, and Swinburne, sometimes wrote
bad poetry, but whether in any other style except Browning's you could
have achieved the precise artistic effect which is achieved by such
incomparable lyrics as "The Patriot" or "The Laboratory." The answer
must be in the negative, and in that answer lies the whole
justification of Browning as an artist.
The question now arises, therefore, what was his conception of his
functions as an artist? We have already agreed that his artistic
originality concerned itself chiefly with the serious use of the
grotesque. It becomes necessary, therefore, to ask what is the serious
use of the grotesque, and what relation does the grotesque bear to the
eternal and fundamental elements in life?
One of the most curious things to notice about popular aesthetic
criticism is the number of phrases it will be found to use which are
intended to express an aesthetic failure, and which express merely an
aesthetic variety. Thus, for instance, the traveller will often hear
the advice from local lovers of the picturesque, "The scenery round
such and such a place has no interest; it is quite flat." To disparage
scenery as quite flat is, of course, like disparaging a swan as quite
white, or an Italian sky as quite blue. Flatness is a sublime quality
in certain landscapes, just as rockiness is a sublime quality in
others. In the same way there are a great number of phrases commonly
used in order to disparage such writers as Browning which do not in
fact disparage, but merely describe them. One of the most
distinguished of Browning's biographers and critics says of him, for
example, "He has never meant to be rugged, but has become so in
striving after strength." To say that Browning never tried to be
rugged is to say that Edgar Allan Poe never tried to be gloomy, or
that Mr. W.S. Gilbert never tried to be extravagant. The whole issue
depends upon whether we realise the simple and essential fact that
ruggedness is a mode of art like gloominess or extravagance. Some
poems ought to be rugged, just as some poems ought to be smooth. When
we see a drift of stormy and fantastic clouds at sunset, we do not say
that the cloud is beautiful although it is ragged at the edges. When
we see a gnarled and sprawling oak, we do not say that it is fine
although it is twisted. When we see a mountain, we do not say that it
is impressive although it is rugged, nor do we say apologetically that
it never meant to be rugged, but became so in its striving after
strength. Now, to say that Browning's poems, artistically considered,
are fine although they are rugged, is quite as absurd as to say that a
rock, artistically considered, is fine although it is rugged.
Ruggedness being an essential quality in the universe, there is that
in man which responds to it as to the striking of any other chord of
the eternal harmonies. As the children of nature, we are akin not only
to the stars and flowers, but also to the toad-stools and the
monstrous tropical birds. And it is to be repeated as the essential of
the question that on this side of our nature we do emphatically love
the form of the toad-stools, and not merely some complicated botanical
and moral lessons which the philosopher may draw from them. For
example, just as there is such a thing as a poetical metre being
beautifully light or beautifully grave and haunting, so there is such
a thing as a poetical metre being beautifully rugged. In the old
ballads, for instance, every person of literary taste will be struck
by a certain attractiveness in the bold, varying, irregular verse--
"He is either himsell a devil frae hell,
Or else his mother a witch maun be;
I wadna have ridden that wan water
For a' the gowd in Christentie,"
is quite as pleasing to the ear in its own way as
"There's a bower of roses by Bendemeer stream,
And the nightingale sings in it all the night long,"
is in another way. Browning had an unrivalled ear for this particular
kind of staccato music. The absurd notion that he had no sense of
melody in verse is only possible to people who think that there is no
melody in verse which is not an imitation of Swinburne. To give a
satisfactory idea of Browning's rhythmic originality would be
impossible without quotations more copious than entertaining. But the
essential point has been suggested.
"They were purple of raiment and golden,
Filled full of thee, fiery with wine,
Thy lovers in haunts unbeholden,
In marvellous chambers of thine,"
is beautiful language, but not the only sort of beautiful language.
This, for instance, has also a tune in it--
"I--'next poet.' No, my hearties,
I nor am, nor fain would be!
Choose your chiefs and pick your parties,
Not one soul revolt to me!
* * * * *
Which of you did I enable
Once to slip inside my breast,
There to catalogue and label
What I like least, what love best,
Hope and fear, believe and doubt of,
Seek and shun, respect, deride,
Who has right to make a rout of
Rarities he found inside?"
This quick, gallantly stepping measure also has its own kind of music,
and the man who cannot feel it can never have enjoyed the sound of
soldiers marching by. This, then, roughly is the main fact to remember
about Browning's poetical method, or about any one's poetical
method--that the question is not whether that method is the best in
the world, but the question whether there are not certain things which
can only be conveyed by that method. It is perfectly true, for
instance, that a really lofty and lucid line of Tennyson, such as--
"Thou art the highest, and most human too"
and
"We needs must love the highest when we see it"
would really be made the worse for being translated into Browning. It
would probably become
"High's human; man loves best, best visible,"
and would lose its peculiar clarity and dignity and courtly plainness.
But it is quite equally true that any really characteristic fragment
of Browning, if it were only the tempestuous scolding of the organist
in "Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha"--
"Hallo, you sacristan, show us a light there!
Down it dips, gone like a rocket.
What, you want, do you, to come unawares,
Sweeping the church up for first morning-prayers,
And find a poor devil has ended his cares
At the foot of your rotten-runged rat-riddled stairs?
Do I carry the moon in my pocket?"
--it is quite equally true that this outrageous gallop of rhymes
ending with a frantic astronomical image would lose in energy and
spirit if it were written in a conventional and classical style, and
ran--
"What must I deem then that thou dreamest to find
Disjected bones adrift upon the stair
Thou sweepest clean, or that thou deemest that I
Pouch in my wallet the vice-regal sun?"
Is it not obvious that this statelier version might be excellent
poetry of its kind, and yet would be bad exactly in so far as it was
good; that it would lose all the swing, the rush, the energy of the
preposterous and grotesque original? In fact, we may see how
unmanageable is this classical treatment of the essentially absurd in
Tennyson himself. The humorous passages in The Princess, though
often really humorous in themselves, always appear forced and feeble
because they have to be restrained by a certain metrical dignity, and
the mere idea of such restraint is incompatible with humour. If
Browning had written the passage which opens The Princess,
descriptive of the "larking" of the villagers in the magnate's park,
he would have spared us nothing; he would not have spared us the
shrill uneducated voices and the unburied bottles of ginger beer. He
would have crammed the poem with uncouth similes; he would have
changed the metre a hundred times; he would have broken into doggerel
and into rhapsody; but he would have left, when all is said and done,
as he leaves in that paltry fragment of the grumbling organist, the
impression of a certain eternal human energy. Energy and joy, the
father and the mother of the grotesque, would have ruled the poem. We
should have felt of that rowdy gathering little but the sensation of
which Mr. Henley writes--
"Praise the generous gods for giving,
In this world of sin and strife,
With some little time for living,
Unto each the joy of life,"
the thought that every wise man has when looking at a Bank Holiday
crowd at Margate.
To ask why Browning enjoyed this perverse and fantastic style most
would be to go very deep into his spirit indeed, probably a great
deal deeper than it is possible to go. But it is worth while to
suggest tentatively the general function of the grotesque in art
generally and in his art in particular. There is one very curious idea
into which we have been hypnotised by the more eloquent poets, and
that is that nature in the sense of what is ordinarily called the
country is a thing entirely stately and beautiful as those terms are
commonly understood. The whole world of the fantastic, all things
top-heavy, lop-sided, and nonsensical are conceived as the work of
man, gargoyles, German jugs, Chinese pots, political caricatures,
burlesque epics, the pictures of Mr. Aubrey Beardsley and the puns of
Robert Browning. But in truth a part, and a very large part, of the
sanity and power of nature lies in the fact that out of her comes all
this instinct of caricature. Nature may present itself to the poet too
often as consisting of stars and lilies; but these are not poets who
live in the country; they are men who go to the country for
inspiration and could no more live in the country than they could go
to bed in Westminster Abbey. Men who live in the heart of nature,
farmers and peasants, know that nature means cows and pigs, and
creatures more humorous than can be found in a whole sketch-book of
Callot. And the element of the grotesque in art, like the element of
the grotesque in nature, means, in the main, energy, the energy which
takes its own forms and goes its own way. Browning's verse, in so far
as it is grotesque, is not complex or artificial; it is natural and in
the legitimate tradition of nature. The verse sprawls like the trees,
dances like the dust; it is ragged like the thunder-cloud, it is
top-heavy like the toadstool. Energy which disregards the standard of
classical art is in nature as it is in Browning. The same sense of the
uproarious force in things which makes Browning dwell on the oddity of
a fungus or a jellyfish makes him dwell on the oddity of a
philosophical idea. Here, for example, we have a random instance from
"The Englishman in Italy" of the way in which Browning, when he was
most Browning, regarded physical nature.
"And pitch down his basket before us,
All trembling alive
With pink and grey jellies, your sea-fruit;
You touch the strange lumps,
And mouths gape there, eyes open, all manner
Of horns and of humps,
Which only the fisher looks grave at."
Nature might mean flowers to Wordsworth and grass to Walt Whitman, but
to Browning it really meant such things as these, the monstrosities
and living mysteries of the sea. And just as these strange things
meant to Browning energy in the physical world, so strange thoughts
and strange images meant to him energy in the mental world. When, in
one of his later poems, the professional mystic is seeking in a
supreme moment of sincerity to explain that small things may be filled
with God as well as great, he uses the very same kind of image, the
image of a shapeless sea-beast, to embody that noble conception.
"The Name comes close behind a stomach-cyst,
The simplest of creations, just a sac
That's mouth, heart, legs, and belly at once, yet lives
And feels, and could do neither, we conclude,
If simplified still further one degree."
These bulbous, indescribable sea-goblins are the first thing on which
the eye of the poet lights in looking on a landscape, and the last in
the significance of which he trusts in demonstrating the mercy of the
Everlasting.
There is another and but slightly different use of the grotesque, but
which is definitely valuable in Browning's poetry, and indeed in all
poetry. To present a matter in a grotesque manner does certainly tend
to touch the nerve of surprise and thus to draw attention to the
intrinsically miraculous character of the object itself. It is
difficult to give examples of the proper use of grotesqueness without
becoming too grotesque. But we should all agree that if St. Paul's
Cathedral were suddenly presented to us upside down we should, for the
moment, be more surprised at it, and look at it more than we have done
all the centuries during which it has rested on its foundations. Now
it is the supreme function of the philosopher of the grotesque to make
the world stand on its head that people may look at it. If we say "a
man is a man" we awaken no sense of the fantastic, however much we
ought to, but if we say, in the language of the old satirist, "that
man is a two-legged bird, without feathers," the phrase does, for a
moment, make us look at man from the outside and gives us a thrill in
his presence. When the author of the Book of Job insists upon the
huge, half-witted, apparently unmeaning magnificence and might of
Behemoth, the hippopotamus, he is appealing precisely to this sense of
wonder provoked by the grotesque. "Canst thou play with him as with a
bird, canst thou bind him for thy maidens?" he says in an admirable
passage. The notion of the hippopotamus as a household pet is
curiously in the spirit of the humour of Browning.
But when it is clearly understood that Browning's love of the
fantastic in style was a perfectly serious artistic love, when we
understand that he enjoyed working in that style, as a Chinese potter
might enjoy making dragons, or a mediaeval mason making devils, there
yet remains something definite which must be laid to his account as a
fault. He certainly had a capacity for becoming perfectly childish in
his indulgence in ingenuities that have nothing to do with poetry at
all, such as puns, and rhymes, and grammatical structures that only
just fit into each other like a Chinese puzzle. Probably it was only
one of the marks of his singular vitality, curiosity, and interest in
details. He was certainly one of those somewhat rare men who are
fierily ambitious both in large things and in small. He prided himself
on having written The Ring and the Book, and he also prided himself
on knowing good wine when he tasted it. He prided himself on
re-establishing optimism on a new foundation, and it is to be
presumed, though it is somewhat difficult to imagine, that he prided
himself on such rhymes as the following in Pacchiarotto:--
"The wolf, fox, bear, and monkey,
By piping advice in one key--
That his pipe should play a prelude
To something heaven-tinged not hell-hued,
Something not harsh but docile,
Man-liquid, not man-fossil."
This writing, considered as writing, can only be regarded as a kind of
joke, and most probably Browning considered it so himself. It has
nothing at all to do with that powerful and symbolic use of the
grotesque which may be found in such admirable passages as this from
"Holy Cross Day":--
"Give your first groan--compunction's at work;
And soft! from a Jew you mount to a Turk.
Lo, Micah--the self-same beard on chin
He was four times already converted in!"
This is the serious use of the grotesque. Through it passion and
philosophy are as well expressed as through any other medium. But the
rhyming frenzy of Browning has no particular relation even to the
poems in which it occurs. It is not a dance to any measure; it can
only be called the horse-play of literature. It may be noted, for
example, as a rather curious fact, that the ingenious rhymes are
generally only mathematical triumphs, not triumphs of any kind of
assonance. "The Pied Piper of Hamelin," a poem written for children,
and bound in general to be lucid and readable, ends with a rhyme which
it is physically impossible for any one to say:--
"And, whether they pipe us free, from rats or from mice,
If we've promised them aught, let us keep our promise!"
This queer trait in Browning, his inability to keep a kind of demented
ingenuity even out of poems in which it was quite inappropriate, is a
thing which must be recognised, and recognised all the more because as
a whole he was a very perfect artist, and a particularly perfect
artist in the use of the grotesque. But everywhere when we go a little
below the surface in Browning we find that there was something in him
perverse and unusual despite all his working normality and
simplicity. His mind was perfectly wholesome, but it was not made
exactly like the ordinary mind. It was like a piece of strong wood
with a knot in it.
The quality of what, can only be called buffoonery which is under
discussion is indeed one of the many things in which Browning was more
of an Elizabethan than a Victorian. He was like the Elizabethans in
their belief in the normal man, in their gorgeous and over-loaded
language, above all in their feeling for learning as an enjoyment and
almost a frivolity. But there was nothing in which he was so
thoroughly Elizabethan, and even Shakespearian, as in this fact, that
when he felt inclined to write a page of quite uninteresting nonsense,
he immediately did so. Many great writers have contrived to be
tedious, and apparently aimless, while expounding some thought which
they believed to be grave and profitable; but this frivolous stupidity
had not been found in any great writer since the time of Rabelais and
the time of the Elizabethans. In many of the comic scenes of
Shakespeare we have precisely this elephantine ingenuity, this hunting
of a pun to death through three pages. In the Elizabethan dramatists
and in Browning it is no doubt to a certain extent the mark of a real
hilarity. People must be very happy to be so easily amused.
In the case of what is called Browning's obscurity, the question is
somewhat more difficult to handle. Many people have supposed Browning
to be profound because he was obscure, and many other people, hardly
less mistaken, have supposed him to be obscure because he was
profound. He was frequently profound, he was occasionally obscure, but
as a matter of fact the two have little or nothing to do with each
other. Browning's dark and elliptical mode of speech, like his love of
the grotesque, was simply a characteristic of his, a trick of is
temperament, and had little or nothing to do with whether what he was
expressing was profound or superficial. Suppose, for example, that a
person well read in English poetry but unacquainted with Browning's
style were earnestly invited to consider the following verse:--
"Hobbs hints blue--straight he turtle eats.
Nobbs prints blue--claret crowns his cup.
Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats--
Both gorge. Who fished the murex up?
What porridge had John Keats?"
The individual so confronted would say without hesitation that it must
indeed be an abstruse and indescribable thought which could only be
conveyed by remarks so completely disconnected. But the point of the
matter is that the thought contained in this amazing verse is not
abstruse or philosophical at all, but is a perfectly ordinary and
straightforward comment, which any one might have made upon an obvious
fact of life. The whole verse of course begins to explain itself, if
we know the meaning of the word "murex," which is the name of a
sea-shell, out of which was made the celebrated blue dye of Tyre. The
poet takes this blue dye as a simile for a new fashion in literature,
and points out that Hobbs, Nobbs, etc., obtain fame and comfort by
merely using the dye from the shell; and adds the perfectly natural
comment:--
"... Who fished the murex up?
What porridge had John Keats?"
So that the verse is not subtle, and was not meant to be subtle, but
is a perfectly casual piece of sentiment at the end of a light poem.
Browning is not obscure because he has such deep things to say, any
more than he is grotesque because he has such new things to say. He is
both of these things primarily, because he likes to express himself in
a particular manner. The manner is as natural to him as a man's
physical voice, and it is abrupt, sketchy, allusive, and full of gaps.
Here comes in the fundamental difference between Browning and such a
writer as George Meredith, with whom the Philistine satirist would so
often in the matter of complexity class him. The works of George
Meredith are, as it were, obscure even when we know what they mean.
They deal with nameless emotions, fugitive sensations, subconscious
certainties and uncertainties, and it really requires a somewhat
curious and unfamiliar mode of speech to indicate the presence of
these. But the great part of Browning's actual sentiments, and almost
all the finest and most literary of them, are perfectly plain and
popular and eternal sentiments. Meredith is really a singer producing
strange notes and cadences difficult to follow because of the delicate
rhythm of the song he sings. Browning is simply a great demagogue,
with an impediment in his speech. Or rather, to speak more strictly,
Browning is a man whose excitement for the glory of the obvious is so
great that his speech becomes disjointed and precipitate: he becomes
eccentric through his advocacy of the ordinary, and goes mad for the
love of sanity.
If Browning and George Meredith were each describing the same act,
they might both be obscure, but their obscurities would be entirely
different. Suppose, for instance, they were describing even so prosaic
and material an act as a man being knocked downstairs by another man
to whom he had given the lie, Meredith's description would refer to
something which an ordinary observer would not see, or at least could
not describe. It might be a sudden sense of anarchy in the brain of
the assaulter, or a stupefaction and stunned serenity in that of the
object of the assault. He might write, "Wainwood's 'Men vary in
veracity,' brought the baronet's arm up. He felt the doors of his
brain burst, and Wainwood a swift rushing of himself through air
accompanied with a clarity as of the annihilated." Meredith, in other
words, would speak queerly because he was describing queer mental
experiences. But Browning might simply be describing the material
incident of the man being knocked downstairs, and his description
would run:--
"What then? 'You lie' and doormat below stairs
Takes bump from back."
This is not subtlety, but merely a kind of insane swiftness. Browning
is not like Meredith, anxious to pause and examine the sensations of
the combatants, nor does he become obscure through this anxiety. He is
only so anxious to get his man to the bottom of the stairs quickly
that he leaves out about half the story.
Many who could understand that ruggedness might be an artistic
quality, would decisively, and in most cases rightly, deny that
obscurity could under any conceivable circumstances be an artistic
quality. But here again Browning's work requires a somewhat more
cautious and sympathetic analysis. There is a certain kind of
fascination, a strictly artistic fascination, which arises from a
matter being hinted at in such a way as to leave a certain tormenting
uncertainty even at the end. It is well sometimes to half understand a
poem in the same manner that we half understand the world. One of the
deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will
suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping
meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered
something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a
prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain
poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed
the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but
in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.
But in truth it is very difficult to keep pace with all the strange
and unclassified artistic merits of Browning. He was always trying
experiments; sometimes he failed, producing clumsy and irritating
metres, top-heavy and over-concentrated thought. Far more often he
triumphed, producing a crowd of boldly designed poems, every one of
which taken separately might have founded an artistic school. But
whether successful or unsuccessful, he never ceased from his fierce
hunt after poetic novelty. He never became a conservative. The last
book he published in his life-time, Parleyings with Certain People of
Importance in their Day, was a new poem, and more revolutionary than
Paracelsus. This is the true light in which to regard Browning as an
artist. He had determined to leave no spot of the cosmos unadorned by
his poetry which he could find it possible to adorn. An admirable
example can be found in that splendid poem "Childe Roland to the Dark
Tower came." It is the hint of an entirely new and curious type of
poetry, the poetry of the shabby and hungry aspect of the earth
itself. Daring poets who wished to escape from conventional gardens
and orchards had long been in the habit of celebrating the poetry of
rugged and gloomy landscapes, but Browning is not content with this.
He insists upon celebrating the poetry of mean landscapes. That sense
of scrubbiness in nature, as of a man unshaved, had never been
conveyed with this enthusiasm and primeval gusto before.
"If there pushed any ragged thistle-stalk
Above its mates, the head was chopped; the bents
Were jealous else. What made those holes and rents
In the dock's harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to baulk
All hope of greenness? 'tis a brute must walk
Pashing their life out, with a brute's intents."
This is a perfect realisation of that eerie sentiment which comes upon
us, not so often among mountains and water-falls, as it does on some
half-starved common at twilight, or in walking down some grey mean
street. It is the song of the beauty of refuse; and Browning was the
first to sing it. Oddly enough it has been one of the poems about
which most of those pedantic and trivial questions have been asked,
which are asked invariably by those who treat Browning as a science
instead of a poet, "What does the poem of 'Childe Roland' mean?" The
only genuine answer to this is, "What does anything mean?" Does the
earth mean nothing? Do grey skies and wastes covered with thistles
mean nothing? Does an old horse turned out to graze mean nothing? If
it does, there is but one further truth to be added--that everything
means nothing.
CHESTERTON-ROBERT BROWING - BROWNING IN LATER LIFE