R630530A. Poetical Works (1863), Vol. I (1863).
The Reader, 30 May 1863, pp. 523–524.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 385.
With the exception of Tennyson, Browning is our most remarkable living British poet. This, which has long been the opinion of our most thoughtful critics, is now generally admitted, or on a fair way to be so. There are, indeed, a great many, more especially among our younger readers, to whom Browning is still caviare. They vote him in the main unintelligible. They like one or two of his most sounding lyrics, such as his “Cavalier Tune”:—
Marching along, fifty-score strong,
Great-hearted gentlemen, singing this song;
but of his longer pieces they can make neither head nor tail. They complain of his obscurity, his over-subtlety, his out-of-the-wayness; and they are irritated by the frequent oddness, or, as they call it, unmusical harshness of his metres, rhythms, and rhymes. People who feel thus towards Browning are, we say, still a numerous class; and probably in no circle could you make the assertion that Tennyson and Browning are our chief living British poets without making one or two of those present gasp with surprise at such a conjunction of names. On the other hand, Browning has his sect of enthusiastic admirers, who, though they deprecate comparison between him and Tennyson as unnecessary, yet, if the comparison is forced upon them, will avow that they could give reasons for preferring Browning. On the whole, whether from the efforts of Browning’s admirers in disseminating their own faith in him, or, as is more probable, from the mere continued percolation of Browning’s poetry through society, here finding its way to new readers fit to appreciate it, there gradually educating others into a taste for itself, the state of things is now very much as we have represented; and it is not far from being a received tenet that, if any living British poet is to be named along with the Laureate as in some respects his co-equal in degree, though in kind very different, that poet is Browning. And yet it is everywhere felt that Browning is a very peculiar poet, and that his peculiarity is such that he is not, and probably never will be, so popular a poet as Tennyson—so noble a favourite of the universal, or even of the higher, heart of the nation—but will always appear rather as an eccentric neighbour of the central luminary, interesting to the majority for reasons of scientific curiosity, and, if more interesting to a small minority, then interesting to them on account of a certain harmony of his style of poetry with their temperaments.
It is difficult to define the peculiarity of Browning’s poetry in any one phrase. In general, however, what one is aware of in it is the presence throughout of an extraordinary alertness and activity of the purely intellectual or knowing faculty. Browning is really and generically a poet; imagination or ideality is, whether by nature or by choice and practice, the predominant mode of his genius—the form into which his collective powers are flung; and it would be unfair to say that he is one of those poets whose theory of poetry is that not uncommon but rather perverse one, that valuable or ingenious thought of any kind, expressed in verse, constitutes poetry. Verse may, indeed, be resorted to as a machinery promoting and inducing rich and subtle and exquisite intellection; and it may be maintained that there is room and use for a literature of subtle metrical intellection, according to such precedents as Donne’s poetry, even should the distinction be necessary between such a literature and poetry proper. But Browning does not require any such concession in his behalf. In one of his poems, reprinted in the present volume, he himself repudiates that theory of poetry which would make it consist merely in the metrical expression of what are called, in a special sense “thoughts” or reasonings. Arguing with a supposed brother-author who holds this doctrine, or is proceeding as if he did, and writing “A Poem of Transcendentalism: in Twelve Books,” he says:—
Stark-naked thought is in request enough:
Speak prose and hollo it till Europe hears!
The six-foot Swiss tube, braced about with bark,
Which helps the hunter’s voice from Alp to Alp—
Exchange our harp for that,—who hinders you?
But here’s your fault; grown men want thought, you think;
Thought’s what they mean by verse, and seek in verse:
Boys seek for images and melody,
Men must have reason—so, you aim at men.
Quite otherwise! Objects throng our youth, ’tis true;
We see and hear and do not wonder much:
If you could tell us what they mean, indeed!
As Swedish Bœhme never cared for plants
Until it happed, a-walking in the fields,
He noticed all at once that plants could speak,
Nay, turned with loosened tongue to talk with him.
That day the daisy had an eye indeed—
Colloquised with the cowslip on such themes!
We find them extant yet in Jacob’s prose.
But, by the time youth slips a stage or two,
While reading prose in that tough book he wrote,
(Collating and emendating the same
And settling on the sense most to our mind)
We shut the clasps and find life’s summer past.
Then, who helps more, pray, to repair our loss—
Another Bœhme with a tougher book
And subtler meaning of what roses say,—
Or some stout Mage like him of Halberstadt,
John, who made things Bœhme wrote thoughts about?
He with a “look you!” vents a brace of rhymes,
And in there breaks the sudden rose herself,
Over us, under, round us every side,
Nay, in and out the tables and the chairs
And musty volumes, Bœhme’s book and all,—
Buries us with a glory, young once more,
Pouring Heaven into this shut house of life.
So come, the harp back to your heart again!
Now—notwithstanding that, at first sight, this passage is but the expression in verse of a critical conclusion, and therefore an exemplification of the very theory it repudiates—there is no competent reader of Browning’s poetry but will admit that, in most of it, the imagination or creative faculty is paramount, and he does aim, like John of Halberstadt, at “making things,” and causing “the sudden rose herself” to break in upon us. And yet it remains true that no reader of Browning’s poetry but will observe, as its peculiarity, the extraordinary amount of intellection in it—nimble intellection, subtle intellection, out-of-the-way intellection, obscure intellection. The truth is, Browning’s imagination is ruled by an extraordinary intellectual inquisitiveness. In that portion of the intellect which is popularly, as well as phrenologically, distinguished as the perceptive faculties, he seems, as his poetry exhibits him, preternaturally acute and restless. One would say that, in a scene or situation, nothing escapes him—form, sound, colour, look, gesture, the flutter of a wing, a shadow over a field, or a twitch of human movement. He is the most wide-awake, and the most sharp-sighted of poets. To this add, however, an equal or almost equal reflective curiosity—desire to know more about things than appears, to penetrate to their reasons and causes. In the phrase “intellectual inquisitiveness” we include both these elements as characteristics of Browning’s poetical genius. In no great poet, indeed, is powerful operation either of the perceptive or of the reflective intellect wanting; but there are few of whom that precise combination of perceptive acuteness and reflective pertinacity which we seek to indicate by the term “intellectual inquisitiveness” could be predicated so emphatically as of Browning. In Tennyson we have powerful intellect; and his In Memoriam, besides all else that it is felt to be, is the deepest and most extreme metaphysical treatise of this age. But Tennyson’s mode of intellect in his poetry is not of the kind that, choosing one’s words, one would call “intellectual inquisitiveness.” It is rather intellectual pondering, deep intellectual rumination—the action of a great mind, all eye and ear to what is around it, but, as it were, itself in heavy stationary repose, and receiving what is rolled into it, and then farther rolling within itself all the suggested problems. In Browning’s mind, on the other hand, we see more of the restlessness of quest. It is on the alert; it moves about; it zig-zags rapidly, and darts lightly hither and thither, to any distance from its original station, on errands of closer inspection and examination of what may have caught its attention.
It is not always fair to quote a poet’s descriptions as applicable to himself; but, in a very striking poem in the present volume, Mr. Browning has made that very quality of “intellectual inquisitiveness,” which we have singled out as characteristic of himself as a poet, the most notable quality, to common appearance at least, in a certain ideal poet. The piece is entitled “How it Strikes a Contemporary,” and describes an imaginary poet in a Spanish town as he appeared to his fellow-townsmen. For the somewhat slow Spanish gravity suggested in the description substitute an English briskness, and you have the identical “intellectual inquisitiveness” which we find in Browning’s own genius:—
I only knew one poet in my life:
And this, or something like it, was his way.
You saw go up and down Valladolid
A man of mark, to know next time you saw.
. . . . . .
He walked and tapped the pavement with his cane,
Scenting the world, looking it full in face,
An old dog, bald and blindish, at his heels.
They turned up, now, the alley by the church,
That leads nowhither; now, they breathed themselves
On the main promenade just at the wrong time:
You’d come upon his scrutinizing hat,
Making a peaked shade blacker than itself
Against the single window spared some house
Intact yet with its mouldered Moorish work,—
Or else surprise the ferule of his stick
Trying the mortar’s temper ’tween the chinks
Of some new shop a-building French and fine.
He stood and watched the cobbler at his trade,
The man who slices lemons into drink,
The coffee-roaster’s brasier, and the boys
That volunteer to help him turn its winch.
He glanced o’er books on stalls with half an eye,
And fly-leaf ballads on the vendor’s string,
And broad-edge old-print posters by the wall.
He took such cognisance of men and things,
If any beat a horse, you felt he saw;
If any cursed a woman, he took note;
Yet stared at nobody,—they stared at him,
And found, less to their pleasure than surprise,
He seemed to know them and expect as much.
If we have conveyed what we mean by “intellectual inquisitiveness” as the ruling agent in Mr. Browning’s exercises of his imagination as a poet, we shall have some approach to an explanation of those obvious features of his poetry which, on the one hand, constitute his special excellencies in the eyes of those whom he fascinates most; and, on the other hand, form, in their excess, the reasons that make so much of him caviare to the general. [p. 524→]
An inquisitive intellect, as distinct from a pondering or ruminating intellect, is one that will often leave the beaten track of themes, objects, and circumstances, and betake itself to unexplored regions and bye-ways. Now, one of the most obvious remarks with respect to Mr. Browning’s poetry is that, in an unusually large proportion of it, the themes, the scenery, the whole colouring and circumstance, are continental or foreign. English, in mind and genius, as he is, he is fond of seeking his themes and the suggestions for his imagination, whether from nature or from life, in southern lands, more sunny, and tawny, and gaudy than England—in the lands along the margin of the Mediterranean, and, above all, in Italy:—
What I love best in all the world,
Is, a castle, precipice-encurled,
In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine.
Or look for me, old fellow of mine,
(If I get my head from out the mouth
O’ the grave, and loose my spirit’s bands,
And come again to the land of lands)—
In a sea-side house to the farther South,
Where the baked cicalas die of drouth,
And one sharp tree—’tis a cypress—stands,
By the many hundred years red-rusted,
Rough iron-spiked, ripe fruit-o’er-crusted,
My sentinel to guard the sands
To the water’s edge. For, what expands
Before the house, but the great opaque
Blue breadth of sea without a break?
While, in the house, for ever crumbles
Some fragment of the frescoed walls,
From blisters where a scorpion sprawls.
A girl bare-footed brings, and tumbles
Down on the pavement, green-flesh melons,
And says there’s news to-day—the king
Was shot at, touched in the liver-wing,
Goes with his Bourbon arm in a sling:
—She hopes they have not caught the felons.
Italy, my Italy!
Queen Mary’s saying serves for me—
(When fortune’s malice
Lost her Calais)
Open my heart and you will see
Graved inside of it, “Italy.”
Such lovers old are I and she;
So it always was, so shall ever be!
Of course this is said vicariously; and Mr. Browning is by no means exclusively a poet of Italian, or Spanish, or round-the-Mediterranean circumstance. Of course, also, so far as he does, in any unusual degree, tend, for his themes, and scenery, and circumstance of nature and life, to those foreign climes, it may be accounted for not wholly by his intellectual inquisitiveness and consequent disposition to voyage and roam, but, in part at least, by the fact that much of his life has, by natural accident, been spent in these foreign lands, and especially in Italy, and that his imagination is steeped in recollections of them. But it is not only that much of the natural scenery and the social circumstance of Mr. Browning’s poetry is from foreign contemporary lands—that his Botany, his Zoology, his Meteorology, &c., are, in large proportion, foreign; it is that, in History and Chronology also, where he may have been freer to choose, he prefers the bye-ways. His favourite tract of time, his chief hunting-ground for his subjects, is the Mediæval past, but also when he deals with present life and fact, and with present British life and fact (which he does not unfrequently, and always with original effect), one is still struck with his tendency to the bye-ways. When it is not the bye-ways of Geography, or the bye-ways of Chronology that he tends to, it is the bye-ways and obscurer parts of the present encyclopædia of human knowledge. He is a most scholarly and learned poet; and he will take a theme from some little-known part of the History of Music, or Painting, or Architecture, or the Science of Magic, or what not, and will revel in that theme with an amount of knowledge and a gusto in minutiæ little short of the professional and the technical.
From all this it results that Mr. Browning is and ever must be, in a large proportion of his poetry, though happily not in all, caviare to the general, and the poet more particularly of a rather select and highly-cultured order of readers. It may be argued also that it is a necessary result of his intellectual inquisitiveness, and of his consequent tendency to roam and zigzag, and rapidly explore bye-ways, that, as compared with such a poet as Tennyson, there is less in him of that deep, permanent, elemental song—the song of life and love and death, and all the physical and human generalities—which a man perhaps learns best to chaunt by remaining passively anchored at home in dear familiar ground, and letting novelties and varieties be rolled to him thither, rather than gone in quest of, and which song also it is that always, wheresoever and amid whatsoever it is heard, imparts the grand tone to literature, and rouses and melts the heart of the select and of the people alike. On the other hand, Mr. Browning’s admirers may plead, in behalf of his poetry, its extraordinary richness in information, its beneficial effects on the intellect by the sheer profusion of new and curious detail which it brings before one—a profusion like that of one of our richest modern Pre-Raphaelite pictures; and they may also plead, and prove their plea by instances, that, with all this artistic richness, and this incessant stimulation of the curiosity and the reason, Mr. Browning is not deficient in the true poet’s power over the deep elementary emotions, but does every now and then touch the simple lute or blow the bugle-blast. They may even maintain that, for cultured and highly instructed readers in the present day, there is special need of a poet whose manner it is to involve the melodies that move the heart in such florid profusion of curious intellectual harmonies.
A thorough criticism of Mr. Browning’s poetry should include much more than we have here said; but the remarks we have made are especially appropriate to the present first volume of the new edition of his collected works. In this volume are contained the pieces, none of them very long, which were published in two volumes in 1855, under the title of “Men and Women”—these pieces, however, being redistributed, and mixed or associated with a republication of the earlier short pieces which appeared first in 1842 and 1845 under the titles of “Dramatic Lyrics” and “Dramatic Romances.” We cannot conceive a better introduction to Mr. Browning’s poetry than through such a volume. All readers will find something to like and admire in it; and it will educate into a proper expectation of the larger and more elaborate and more difficult poems which are to follow. The extracts we have made, being made for a special expository purpose, by no means fairly represent the splendid variety of matter to be found in the volume. Here, among some eighty pieces in all, will be found such popular pieces as the “Cavalier Tunes,” “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” “How they brought the good news from Ghent to Aix,” and “Up at a Villa—Down in the City.” Here will be found that matchless piece of modern social satire and psychological analysis, “Bishop Blougram’s Apology.” Here will be found those wonderful sketches from the history of art and science, “Fra Lippo Lippi,” “Andrea Del Sarto,” “The Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician,” “A Toccata of Galuppi’s,” and “Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha.” Here will be found that piece of a ghastly symbolic phantasy, as powerful as any in Spenser, which, on the whole, we think the greatest thing in the volume, kind being considered as well as execution—“Childe Roland to the dark tower came;” and here, also, will be found that strange little piece, “A Grammarian’s Funeral,” which is also one of our especial favourites. The pupils of a great, dead grammarian, of the time of the revival of learning in Europe, are carrying his body with pain and effort up the winding path leading to the top of the high hill where they mean to bury him; and, as they go, they sing of the greatness and the perseverance of their master, and how he grappled with knowledge to the day of his death, even when motion and the use of his limbs had forsaken him. Here is the end of their song as they are reaching the mountain-top:—
So, with the throttling hands of Death at strife,
Ground he at grammar;
Still, thro’ the rattle, parts of speech were rife:
While he could stammer
He settled Hoti’s business—let it be!—
Properly based Oun—
Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De,
Dead from the waist down.
Well, here’s the platform, here’s the proper place.
Hail to your purlieus
All ye highflyers of the feathered race,
Swallows and curlews!
Here’s the top-peak! the multitude below
Live, for they can, there.
This man decided not to Live but Know—
Bury this man there?
Here—here’s his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form,
Lightnings are loosened,
Stars come and go! let joy break with the storm,
Peace let the dew send!
Lofty designs must close in like effects:
Loftily lying.
Leave him—still loftier than the world suspects,
Living and dying.
All over Britain, wherever people have still to make acquaintance with the poetry of Robert Browning, let there be an immediate demand for this volume, in preparation for its successors.
Reviewed:
Selections (RB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1863.
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