R630300A. Selections (1863).
The Critic, March 1863, pp. 273–274.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 385.
A story is told concerning the late Mr. Douglas Jerrold, which may serve to illustrate the reason why Robert Browning, confessedly one of the most powerful poets of the day, is by common consent the least popular. Worn out and wearied by the incessant labours of journalism, Jerrold had taken a holiday; and was resting on his sofa one day, when a packet of books was brought to him. Listlessly opening the first that came to hand, he commenced its perusal. His wife, who sat opposite, saw an expression of wonder and bewilderment stealing over his face. The plain fact was that Jerrold could not in the least understand what he was reading. A man who lives by his brain is naturally apt to be somewhat nervous as to its health; and the sudden terror startled Jerrold that his own was radically diseased. Impatiently he passed the volume to his wife, and asked her what she thought of it. She read for an instant or two, the keen eyes of her husband watching her intently all the while, and she exclaimed: “Why, my dear, I can’t understand a word of it!” “Then I’m not mad!” cried Jerrold in delight. The obscurity was not in his own intellect; it was in the book itself. That book was Mr. Robert Browning’s “Sordello,” a poem of which it may be affirmed with considerable confidence that no man ever yet did understand it, and that very few have ever tried to do so. Ugo Foscolo alleged as one of the reasons why Petrarca was not appreciated in England, the general ignorance of the language; and it may safely be asserted that if Mr. Browning is not popular, it is partly because he is sometimes unintelligible. It would scarcely be accurate, indeed, to say that he is unpopular; he is ignored. He has never succeeded even in becoming widely disliked. It becomes a matter of some interest to investigate the causes which have condemned his books to a hermit-like existence. The reasons are not far to seek. Mr. Browning has never chosen to contend for a popular favour, which can be very easily obtained, but the actual and permanent value of which is somewhat questionable. The work that he has done has, from the beginning, been of a rare order of excellence; but its merits have often been recondite and esoteric. There is a certain poetry which he who runs may read; but its two most popular representatives are Mr. Tupper and the ingenious gentleman who conveys, in lines of doubtful rhythm, but of great arithmetical accuracy, the instructions necessary for self-measurement. It is a mournful but an indubitable fact that the majority of the reading public would prefer to do its thinking by deputy. Let a poet appear who takes good care never to startle the prejudices of the crowd; let his lines possess that clearness which an intrinsically shallow thought will generally have; let him be, at the same time, dulcet, deferential, and decorous; and he is tolerably certain to find audience fit—and not few. A stronger man will, by reason even of his very strength, have longer to wait for popularity. His earnestness will shock the indifferent; his robust vigour of brain will repel the weak; his profundity of thought will disturb the frivolous. Dispite all this, many a man has achieved a wide and general success whose powers would not bear comparison with those of our poet. Mr. Browning, almost as if he had been anxious, in the mere wilfulness of strength, to place fresh obstacles in his own path to that acceptance which is sometimes mistaken for fame, has usually chosen themes and subjects with which only the more cultivated portion of the public are at all familiar. These subjects, also, have generally been foreign. For years he has expatriated himself. His sympathies have been far more deeply engaged with Italy than with England. He would turn instinctively from thinking of the rough gambols of a group of flaxen-haired boys upon a Kentish green, to pace, in a meditative mood, up and down the dim cloisters of an Italian church. The toils and the trials, the sufferings and the sins, of old Italian painters interest him far more deeply than the actual, busy, bustling, stirring, and striving life of modern Englishmen. Let no one venture to say that this springs from any inability of his to deal strongly and triumphantly with the latter. Robert Browning is no mere dreamer. The mere dreamer delights in adjectives; Browning’s poems absolutely bristle with noun-substantives. He has a knowledge of handicrafts and tools, of timber and masonry, which sometimes makes us fancy that we are reading not Browning but Balzac. It is simply the fact that Italy is the land of his choice, of his adoption, and of his love. Hence it comes that a poet who might have explained to us Richard Savage or Thomas Chatterton has preferred to delineate Fra Lippo Lippi. He might have given us the soul-tragedy of Haydon; but Andrea del Sarto interests him more. It is not for us to quarrel with the artist’s choice. We might have wished, indeed, that it had been otherwise; and that he had chosen to represent, as no one could have better done, the perplexities, aspirations, agonies, achievements, of his own countrymen. It is probably best as it is. [p. 274→]
We have endeavoured to indicate some of the causes which have hindered Mr. Browning from being popular; it remains for us to show why we think it desirable that he should yet become so. We will not dwell upon that subtle and far-reaching brain of his; we will not even insist upon the scholarship, ripe and accurate and comprehensive, which distinguishes him from so many of the half-taught rhymesters of our age. The one point which we wish to press home upon the minds of those who may have heard Mr. Browning spoken of as being a merely mystical dreamer is, that he is really the most intensely dramatic and realistic poet of the day. He is almost singular in his accuracy; he almost repels you by his literal truthfulness. His dramatic faculty is not of the mimetic order. It does not depend upon imitative tricks of style, or upon reproductions of bygone phraseology. He works from within outwards, entering, as by some subtle sympathy, into the very nature of his subject, his metrical embodiment of which will be simply a growth from roots thus struck. Marvellous indeed is the gallery of portraits which he has limned. Fra Lippo Lippi, staggering home and much in fear of the watch; King Saul, agonising in the darkness of his tent; Andrea del Sarto, mournfully sitting with his worthless wife as the evening shadows darken around Fiesole. These are but a few instances, taken almost at random, of his power. As two poems which should be read in connection by any one who wishes to form an estimate of his breadth and comprehensiveness, let us mention the “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” and “Bishop Blougram’s Apology.” Mark in both how thoroughly and completely he identifies himself with the character. The petty jealousies of monastic life—the hatreds that spring up in the convent—have never been so wonderfully suggested in such few words as in the first poem; and all the zealots and fanatics who are accustomed to sneer at princes of the Roman Church as being necessarily impostors, may perhaps learn from “Blougram” how far below the big man’s elevation their little poisoned darts must fall. In pictures of scenery, as in sketches of character, Browning is still essentially dramatic. He does not merely string together an inventory of natural objects, his accessories have a meaning. He subordinates nature to man. Only in so far as they bear, directly or indirectly, upon human life, have the features of the landscape, the sights and sounds of nature, meaning for him. He never sinks the dramatist in the scene-painter, and never overloads his work with what Lamennais called “a sterile abundance of details.”
The volume of “Selections” from his works, recently published, is likely to educate many into an appreciation of his writings who would never have the courage to study his longer poems. Mannerisms, many of them very unpleasant, may for a time repel the reader. Let him not be disheartened, for the reward will be well worthy of the exertion. It may be difficult to read Robert Browning; but the man who has done so with enjoyment has added not inconsiderably to his own powers. The discipline may seem difficult; let it be judged by its results.
Reviewed:
Selections (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1863.
___________________
