ROBERT BROWNING

1812-1889

LITERARY history furnishes many examples of prosewriters who have employed their wits and pens in deciphering their own thoughts and emotions. Some among many are Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, Montaigne, Pascal, Rousseau, Sterne, perhaps Cervantes. We have to search before finding clear parallels in poetry. I do not mean that poets do not habitually light up their own minds for the delight and instruction of the public. That is of the essence of poetry. But they start by looking ahead, by trying to penetrate into other minds, and telling them what they, without knowing. it, think. Their discoveries outside they carry within. At their leisure they take their spoil to pieces, repair, add, embellish, reconstruct, and give forth transformed.

Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning are prominent among the Great in English verse for beginning and ending on their own ground. Like all they were ready to gather suggestions from elsewhere. They valued them as mere material for their personal use and enlightenment. So far the two are alike; and yet none could differ more in the manner of their self-revealing. The one is something between historian and advocate, the other an inspired diarist. The one passionately narrates and comments, passionately apologizes, pleads, and defends. The other remembers, compares, foresees, soliloquizes, and is at once wholly personal, and as absolutely impersonal. A complete

diagram of the working of Browning's mind might be drawn from his many successive volumes. Poets in general regard themselves as apostles commissioned to go out and teach. Being distinctively a poet, with a poet's idiosyncrasies, he did not refuse to let his voice be heard. He would not have denied that he rather preferred it as it sounded to an audience. But for the purpose disciples had to be at home with him. They had to listen, as, with entire dispassionateness, he conversed with himself aloud. His primary object was to tell himself what from day to day he thought. If readers in general did not follow, he might regret it or not. The accident did not lead him to change the form of his memoranda.

With this conception anybody who is sincerely anxious to profit by him has to begin. His way was to be for ever chasing, overtaking, catching at, the shadow of an idea flitting around; outside, it might be by choice, within. Having grasped it, he would order, frequently torture, it to declare its substance. When the thing, unaccustomed to be thus rudely catechized, stood mute, he set to work imagining all possible beings it might be. One by one he held them up before it, to see whether they recognized kinsmanship. Often he was left clasping still an inveterately unsubstantial shadow. He had to clothe it with flesh and blood from his own large, warm, breathing, very human soul.

For the public, when at a long last it came to be inquisitive about him, for students and disciples from the first and always, that was the sum of the whole. The very diverse classes of his ultimate readers were content, if at times bewildered, that it should be so. They wandered in the gardens of his spacious nature, surveying it through what were bars for most of them, after the 'manner of

visitors to the flowers and beasts in Regent's Park. They were interested to watch him whether at play or in earnest. I do not suppose that it was in the least his own point of view. The shadows were all palpable realities to him. If I may change the metaphor, he would not be aware that he had never removed the scaffolding from the buildings he had erected. It might be a complicated human fabric he had constructed out of casuistry, sensuality, love of imposture for its own sake as an art, the bases of the career of a charlatan like Paracelsus. Not a single prop or strut could be removed with safety. In tracking the strange fortunes of an Italian troubadour, warrior, master and victim of statecraft and lovecraft, such as the mysterious half mythological Sordello, of the Purgatorio, he had to retain as tight hold of every clue to the labyrinth as a medieval schoolman. The problems that he kept setting himself, at brief intervals, for upwards of half a century ! How deviously he wandered to find fresh enigmas; as, for instance, Which was the true Christopher Smart? 1 The solutions with which he attempted, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, to satisfy himself! The knots deliberately tied to be triumphantly, and as deliberately, loosened!

Poetry in his eyes was the science of life; and life mainly the life of a mind. That was life's essence without the accidents. The one proper instrument for operating upon it was introspection of, and by, the operator; as Matthew Arnold also found, though from a dissimilar point of view, and with recourse to very dissimilar processes. Melody, orthodox melody, Browning allowed, might serve as an auxiliary; its help was not so important that it was worth purchasing by sacrifices. Above all, nothing in an idea, a thought, a feeling, must be resigned in its favour. Poets are alleged to have pared down a thought for the

sake of a rhyme or rhythm. They have been said to be capable of letting a rhyme introduce a thought. Browning would have scorned to give up the least particle of an idea at the demand of diction. He never scrupled to manufacture terms and phrases as clothes for an idea. Rather than suffer rhyme to lead thought, he coined rhymes also. He may seem to be prolix. Again, it is thought which is to blame; some idea will have had to disentangle itself painfully from encumbering matter; or it is growing, and needs additional raiment in the shape of speech. Its parent never dreamt of refusing so natural, necessary, even laudable and decent, a demand.

The Ring and the Book reports in four volumes a criminal trial. That is the poem's outward guise. The reality is a microscopic analysis of the life-beats of a group of hearts. Measure its right to the space not by the crime, not by the hearts, but by the pulsations of the reporter's brain; and there is not a page too many. Voluminous, if not diffuse, rugged and harsh, not careful to render the ideas he supremely prized intelligible—much less, palatable—to the ordinary Englishman, he stands, in the mass of his work, altogether apart both from his contemporaries and his predecessors. With all their variances and contrarieties, the several schools of poetry may be said at least to have agreed as a rule upon a measure of complimentary respect for the understanding of their public. Foremost among the few dissidents stands the author of Sordello, Caliban upon Setebos, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Red Cotton Night-cap Country, Fifine at the Fair, The Inn Album, Jocoseria, Parleyings with Certain People, La Saisiaz, the two Poets of Croisic, and Asolando. No charge can be lodged against him of having pandered to the popular taste, or ignorance.

The complacency with which he launched upon literature this rapid succession of conundrums enraged the contemporaries of two-thirds of his career. He never appeared to be aware of the shocks he was administering. His general uncouthness seemed the more audacious in the face of a store of most tuneful occasional poems with which he interspersed his habitual experiments upon the endurance of readers. At will he showed that, when he chose, none could be more melodious than he. By turns he was gentle and fiery, able to unseal the fountain of laughter and the fountain of tears. He was majestic, terrible, simple, tender-even to imposture, if hungry-content, with a profound thought beneath, to be just graceful. With the sense upon us of the works by which apparently he meant his name to live, we ask, not so much why usually he clashes the harp-strings, as why the psychologist, the metaphysician has suddenly strayed into absolute singing. Was he moved by compassion for the bewildered and dazed critic? Was he himself weary of untunefulness? May it not have been that the music always underlay the philosophy, that the philosophy was always ready, in favouring circumstances, to break into song that life's 'scowl of cloud' hides behind it

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splendid, a star ? 2

I have been glancing through the lyrics scattered over many volumes. It would be hard to say where else can be found a more absolute combination of thought, sentiment, rhythm-or where more variety.

In The Lost Leader I read reproach, amazement, revolt, admiration, hope that he, the renegade, in fighting the followers he has deserted, will keep all the prowess which had won their worship-that he will repent in death-be theirs once more in Heaven-for they love him :