 Chapter 5 Browning in Later Life, Part 2 His manner in society, as has been more than once indicated, was that of a man anxious, if anything, to avoid the air of intellectual immanence. Lockhart said briefly, I like Browning. He isn't at all like a damned literary man. He was, according to some, upon occasion, talkative and noisy to a fault. But there are two kinds of men who monopolize conversation. The first kind are those who like the sound of their own voice. The second are those who do not know what the sound of their own voice is like. Browning was one of the latter class. His volubility in speech had the same origin as his voluminousness and obscurity in literature. A kind of headlong humility. He cannot assuredly have been aware that he had talked people down or have wished to do so, for this would have been precisely a violation of the ideal of the man of the world. Ambition and even weakness that he had, he wished to be a man of the world, and he never in the full sense was one. He remained a little too much of a boy, a little too much even of a Puritan, and a little too much of what may be called a man of the universe, to be a man of the world. One of his faults probably was the thing roughly called prejudice. On the question, for example, of table-turning and psychic phenomena, he was in a certain degree fierce and irrational. He was not indeed, as we shall see when we come to study sludge the medium. Exactly prejudiced against spiritualism, but he was beyond all questions stubbornly prejudiced against spiritualists. Whether the medium, home, was or was not a scoundrel is somewhat difficult in our day to conjecture. But insofar as he claimed supernatural powers, he may have been an honest gentleman as ever lived, and even if we think that the moral atmosphere of home is that of a man of dubious character, we can still feel that Browning might have achieved his purpose without making it so obvious that he thought so. Some traces, again, though much fainter ones, may be found of something like a subconscious hostility to the Roman Church, or at least a less full comprehension of the grandeur of the Latin religious civilization, then might have been expected of a man of Browning's great imaginative tolerance. Aestheticism, Bohemianism, the irresponsibilities of the artist, the untidy morals of Grubb Street and the Latin Quarter, he hated with a consuming hatred. He was himself exact in everything, from his scholarship to his clothes, and even when he wore the loose white garments of the lounger in southern Europe, they were in their own way as precise as a dress-suit. This extra carefulness in all things he defended against the Kant of Bohemianism as the right attitude for the poet. When someone excused coarseness or negligence on the ground of genius, he said, that is an error, no bless oblige. Browning's prejudices, however, belonged altogether to that healthy order, which is characterized by a cheerful and satisfied ignorance. It never does a man any very great harm to hate a thing that he knows nothing about. It is the hating of a thing when we do know something about it which corrodes the character. We all have a dark feeling of resistance towards people we have never met, and a profound and manly dislike of the authors we have never read. It does not harm a man to be certain before opening the books that Whitman is an obscene renter, or that Stevenson is a mere trifler with style. It is the man who can think these things after he has read the books who must be in a fair way to mental perdition. Prejudice, in fact, is not so much the great intellectual sin as the thing which we may call, to coin a word, post-judice, not the bias before the fair trial, but the bias that remains afterwards. With Browning's swift and emphatic manner, the bias was almost always formed before he had gone into the matter. But almost all men he really knew he admired. Almost all the books he had really read he enjoyed. He stands preeminent among those great universalists who praised the ground they trod on, and commended existence like any other material in its samples. He had no kinship with those new and strange universalists of the type of Tolstoy, who praised existence to the inclusion of all the institutions they have lived under, and all the ties they have known. He thought the world good because he had found so many things that were good in it—religion, the nation, the family, the social class. He did not like the new humanitarian, think the world good because he had found so many things in it that were bad. As has been previously suggested, there was something very queer and dangerous that underlay all the good humor of Browning. If one of these idle prejudices were broken by better knowledge, he was all the better pleased. But if some of the prejudices that were really rooted in him were trodden on, even by accident, such as his aversion to loose artistic clicks, or his aversion to undignified publicity, his rage was something wholly transfiguring and alarming, something far removed from the shrill disapproval of Carlisle and Ruskin. It can only be said that he became a savage and not always a very agreeable or presentable savage. The indecent fury which danced upon the bones of Edward Fitzgerald was a thing which ought not to have astonished anyone who had known much of Browning's character or even of his work. Some unfortunate persons, on another occasion, had obtained some of Mrs. Browning's letter shortly after her death, and proposed to write a life founded upon them. They ought to have understood that Browning would probably disapprove, but if he talked to him about it, as he did to others, and it is exceedingly probable that he did, they must have thought he was mad, what I suffer with the paws of these black guards in my bowels you can fancy, he says. Again he writes, Think of this beast working away, not deeming my feelings or those of her family worthy of notice. It shall not be done if I can stop the scamp's navery along with his breath. Whether Browning actually resorted to this extreme course is unknown. Nothing is known except that he wrote a letter to the ambitious biographer which reduced him to silence, probably from stupefaction. The same peculiarity ought, as I have said, to have been apparent to anyone who knew anything of Browning's literary work. A great number of his poems are marked by a trait of which, by its nature, it is more or less impossible to give examples. Suffice it to say that it is truly extraordinary that poets like Swinburne, who seldom uses a gross word, should have been spoken of as if they had introduced moral license into Victorian poetry. But the nonconformist conscience has been doing to have passed Browning is something difficult to imagine. But the peculiarity of this occasional coarseness in his work is this, that it is always used to express a certain wholesome fury and contempt for things sickly or ungenerous or unmanly. The poet seems to feel that there are some things so contemptible that you can only speak of them in pot-house words. It would be idle and perhaps undesirable to give examples, but it may be noted that the same brutal physical metaphor is used by his Cap'n'Sachi about the people who could imagine Pompilia impure and by his Shakespeare in At the Mermaid about the claim of the Byronic poet to enter into the heart of humanity. In both cases Browning feels, and perhaps in a manner rightly, that the best thing we can do with a sentiment essentially base is to strip off its effectations and state it basely, and that the mud of Chaucer is a great deal better than the poison of stern. Here and again Browning is close to the average man, and to do the average man justice there is a great deal more of this Browning-esque hatred of Byronism in the brutality of his conversation than many people suppose. Which roughly, and as far as we can discover, was the man who, in the full summer and even the full autumn of his intellectual powers, began to grow upon the consciousness of the English literary world about this time. For the first time friendship grew between him and the other great men of his time, Tennyson, for whom he then and always felt the best and most personal kind of admiration, came into his life, and along with him Gladstone and Francis Poulgrave, there began to crowd in upon him those honors whereby a man is to some extent made a classic in his lifetime, so that he is honored even if he is unread. He was made a fellow of Balliol in 1867, and the homage of the great universities continued thenceforth unceasingly until his death, despite many refusals on his part. He was unanimously elected Lord Rector of Glasgow University in 1875. He declined, owing to his deep and somewhat characteristic aversion to formal public speaking, and in 1877 he had to decline on similar grounds the similar offer from the university of St. Andrews. He was much at the English universities, was a friend of Dr. Jowett, and enjoyed the university life at the age of 63 in a way that he probably would not have enjoyed it if he had ever been to university. The great universities would not let him alone, to their great credit, and he became a D.C.L. of Cambridge in 1879 and a D.C.L. of Oxford in 1882. When he received these honors there were, of course, the traditional buffooneries of the undergraduates, and one of them dropped a red cotton nightcap neatly on his head as he passed under the gallery. Some indignant intellectuals wrote to him a protest against this affront, but Browning took the matter in the best and most characteristic way. "'You are far too hard,' he wrote in answer, on the very harmless drolleries of the young men. "'Indeed, there used to be a regularly appointed jester, Philius Terra,' he was called, whose business it was to jive and jeer at the honoured ones, by way of reminder that all human glories are merely gilded baubles and must not be fancied metal. In this there are other and deeper things characteristic of Browning beside his learning and humor. In discussing anything he must always fall back upon a great speculative and eternal idea. Even in the tomfoolery of a horde of undergraduates he can only see a symbol of the ancient office of ridicule in the scheme of morals. The young men themselves were probably unaware that they were the representatives of the Philius Terra. But the years during which Browning was thus reaping some of his late laurels began to be filled with incidents that reminded him how the years were passing over him. In June 20th, 1866, his father had died, a man of whom it is impossible to think without a certain emotion, a man who would live quietly and persistently for others, to whom Browning owed more than it is easy to guess, to whom we in all probability mainly owe Browning. In 1868 one of his closest friends, Arabella Barrett, the sister of his wife, died as her sister had done alone with Browning. Browning was not a superstitious man. He somewhat stormily prided himself on the contrary, but he notes at this time a dream which Arabella had of her in which she prophesied their meeting in five years. That is, of course, the meeting of Elizabeth and Arabella. His friend Milsan, to whom Sordello was dedicated, died in 1886. I never knew, said Browning, or ever shall know his like among men. But though both fame and growing isolation indicated that he was passing towards the evening of his days, though he bore traces of the progress in a milder attitude towards things and a greater preference for long exiles with those he loved, one thing continued in him with unconquerable energy. There was no diminution in the quantity, no abatement in the immense designs of his intellectual output. In 1871 he produced Bellos Gin's Adventure, a work exhibiting not only his genius in its highest condition of power, but something more exacting even than genius to a man of his mature and changed life. Immense investigation, prodigious memory, the thorough assimilation of the vast literature of a remote civilization. Bellos Gin's Adventure, which is, of course, the mere framework for an English version of the Asselstius of Europeides, is an illustration of one of Browning's finest traits, his immeasurable capacity for a classic admiration. Those who knew him tell us that in conversation he never revealed himself so impetuously or so brilliantly as when declaiming the poetry of others, and Bellos Gin's Adventure is a monument of this fiery self-forgetfulness. It is penetrated with the passionate desire to render Europeides worthily, and to that imitation are for the time being devoted all the gigantic powers which went to make the songs of Pippa and the last agony of Guido. Browning never put himself into anything more powerfully or more successfully, yet it is only an excellent translation. In the uncouth philosophy of Caliban, in the tangled ethics of sludge, in his wildest satire, in his most feather-headed lyric, Browning was never more thoroughly Browning than in this splendid and unselfish plagiarism. This revived excitement in Greek matters. His passionate love of the Greek language continued in him thus forward till his death. He published more than one poem on the drama of Hellas. Aristophanes' Apology came out in 1875, and the Egg Amendment of Aeschylus, another paraphrase in 1877. All three poems are marked by the same primary characteristic, the fact that the writer has literature of Athens literally at his fingers ends. He is intimate not only with their poetry and politics, but with their frivolity and their slang, and he knows not only Athenian wisdom, but Athenian folly, not only the beauty of Greece, but even its vulgarity. In fact, a page of Aristophanes' Apology is like a page of Aristophanes, dark with levity, and as obscure as a school men's treatise, with his load of jokes. CHAPTER V In 1871 also appeared Prince Homestyle Shwangau, Saviour of Society, one of the finest and most picturesque of all Browning's apologetic monologues. The figure is, of course, intended for Napoleon III, whose empire had just fallen, bringing down his country with it. The saying has been often quoted that Louis Napoleon deceived Europe twice, once when he made it think he was a noodle, and once when he made it think he was a statesman. It might be added that Europe was never quite just to him, and was deceived a third time, when it took him after his fall for an exploded bank and non-entity. Amid the general chorus of contempt which was raised over his weak and unscrupulous policy in later years, culminating in his great disaster, there are a few things finer than this attempt of Browning's to give the man a platform and let him speak for himself. It is the apology of a political adventurer and a political adventurer of a kind peculiarly open to popular condemnation. Mankind has always been somewhat inclined to forgive the adventurer who destroys or recreates. But there is nothing inspiring about the adventurer who merely preserves. We have sympathy with the rebel who aims at reconstruction, but there is something repugnant to the imagination in the rebel who rebels in the name of compromise. Browning had to defend, or rather to interpret, a man who kidnapped politicians in the night and deluged the Montmartre with blood not for an ideal, not for a reform, not precisely even for a cause, but simply for the establishment of a regime. He did these hideous things not so much that he might be able to do better ones, but that he and everyone else might be able to do nothing for twenty years. And Browning's contention, and a very plausible contention, is that the criminal believed that his crime would establish order and compromise, or in other words that he thought that nothing was the very best thing that he and his people could do. There is something peculiarly characteristic of Browning in thus selecting not only a political villain, but what would appear the most prosaic kind of villain. We scarcely ever find in Browning a defense of those obvious and easily defended publicans and sinners whose mingled virtues and vices are the stuff of romance and melodrama, the generous rake, the kindly drunkard, the strong man too great for parochial morals. He was in a yet more solitary sense, the friend of the outcast. He took in the sinners whom even sinners cast out. He went with a hypocrite, and had mercy on the Pharisee. How little this desire of Browning's to look for a moment at the man's life with the man's eyes was understood, may be gathered from the criticisms on Hohen's style Schwangau, which says Browning, the editor of the Edinburgh Review, calls my eulogym on the Second Empire, which is not any more than what another wiseacre affirms it to be, a scandalous attack on the old, constant friend of England. It is just what I imagine the man might, if he please, say for himself. In 1873 appeared Red Cotton, nightcap country, which if it be not absolutely one of the finest of Browning's poems is certainly one of the most magnificently Browning-esque. The origin of the name of the poem is probably well known. He was travelling along the Normandy coast, and discovered what he called, meek, hitherto unmarried bathing-places, best love of sea coast nook, full Normandy. Miss Thackeray, who was of the party, delighted Browning beyond measure by calling the sleepy old fishing district, white cotton nightcap country. It was exactly the kind of elfish phrase to which Browning had, it must always be remembered, a quite unconquerable attraction. The notion of a town asleep, where men and women walked about in nightcaps, a nation of synambulists, was the kind of thing that Browning in his heart loved better than paradise lost. Sometime afterwards he read in a newspaper a very painful story of profligacy and suicide, which greatly occupied the French journals in the year 1871, and which had taken place in the same district. It is worth noting that Browning was one of those wise men who can perceive the terrible and impressive poetry of the police news which is commonly treated as vulgarity, which is dreadful and may be undesirable, but it is certainly not vulgar. From the ring in the book to red cotton nightcap country, a great many of his works might be called magnificent detective stories. The story is somewhat ugly, and its power does not alter its ugliness, for power can only make ugliness uglier. And in this poem there is little or nothing of the revelation of that secret wealth of valor and patience in humanity which makes real and redeems the revelations of its secret vileness in the ring in the book. It almost looks at first sight as if Browning had for a moment surrendered the whole of his impregnable philosophical position and admitted the strange heresy that a human story can be sorted. But this view of the poem is, of course, a mistake. It was written in something which, for want of a more exact word, we must call one of the bitter moods of Browning. But the bitterness is entirely the product of a certain generous hostility against the class of morbidities which he really detested, sometimes more than they deserved. In this poem these principles of weakness and evil are embodied to him as the sicklier kind of Romanism, and the more sensual side of the French temperament. We must never forget what a great deal of the Puritan there remained in Browning to the end. This outburst of it is fierce and ironical, not in his best spirit. It says in effect, you call this a country of sleep. I call it a country of death. You call it a white cotton nightcap country. I call it a red cotton nightcap country. Shortly before this, in 1872, he had published Fafine at the Fair, which his principal biographer and one of his most uncompromising admirers calls a piece of perplexing cynicism. Perplexing him may be to some extent, for it was almost impossible to tell whether Browning would or would not be perplexing even in a love song or a postcard. But cynicism is a word that cannot possibly be applied with any propriety to anything that Browning ever wrote. Cynicism denotes that condition of mind in which we hold that life is in its nature mean and arid, and no soul contains genuine goodness, and no state of things genuine reliability. Fafine at the Fair, like Prince Hone's style, Shwangnau, is one of Browning's apologetic soliloquies, the soliloquy of an epicurean who seeks half-playfully to justify upon moral grounds an infidelity into which he afterwards actually falls. This causes, like all Browning's causists, is given many noble outbursts and sincere moments, and therefore apparently the poem is called cynical. It is difficult to understand what particular connection there is between seeing good in nobody and seeing good in even essential fool. Mr. Fafine at the Fair appeared in the in-album in 1875, a purely narrative work, chiefly interesting as exhibiting in yet another place one of Browning's vital characteristics, a pleasure in retelling and interpreting actual events of a sinister and criminal type, and after the in-album came what is perhaps the most preposterously individual thing he ever wrote. A Pashi Arato, and how he worked in Distemper, in 1876, it is impossible to call the work poetry, and it is very difficult indeed to know what to call it. Its chief characteristic is a kind of galloping energy, an energy that has nothing intellectual or even intelligible about it, a purely animal energy of words. Not only is it not beautiful, it is not even clever, and yet it carries the reader away as he might be carried away by romping children. It ends up with a valuable and largely unmeaning malediction upon the poet's critics, a malediction so outrageously good humored, that it does not take the trouble even to make itself clear to the objects of its wrath. One can compare the poem to nothing in heaven or earth except to the somewhat humorous, more or less benevolent and almost incomprehensible catalogues of curses and odes which may be heard from an intoxicated nanny. This is the kind of thing, and it goes on for pages. Long after the last of your number has ceased my front court to encumber, while treading down Rose and Runaculus, you tommy make room for your uncleus. Troop all of you, man or homunculus, quick march for Zion my housemaid. If one on your pates she's a sowsmaid, with what pan or pot, bowl or scuramis, first comes to her hand things where more amiss. I would not for worlds be your place in, recipients of slops from the basin, you jack-in-the-green leaf-and-twigishness won't save a dry thread on your prigishness. You can only call this, in the most literal sense of the word, a brute force of language. And, however, of this monstrosity among poems which gives its title to the volume, it contains some of the most beautiful verses that Browning ever wrote in that style of light philosophy in which he was unequaled. Nothing ever gave so perfectly and artistically what is too loosely talked about as a thrill, as the poem called Fears and Scruples, in which a man describes the mystifying conduct of an absent friend, and reserves to the last line the climax. Hush, I pray you, what if this friend happened to be God? It is the masterpiece of that excellent but much abused literary quality, sensationalism. The volume entitled Pasciarato, moreover, includes one or two of the most spirited poems on the subject of the poet in relation to publicity at the Mermaid House and shop. In spite of his increasing years, his book seemed, if anything, to come thicker and faster. Two were published in 1878, Los Saizíes, his great metaphysical poem on the conception of immortality, and that delightfully foppish fragment of the ancient regime, the two poets of Creusik. Those two poems would alone suffice to show that he had not forgotten the hard science of theology or the harder science of humor. Another collection followed in 1879. The first series of dramatic idols, which contained such masterpieces as Phydipis and Ivan Ivanovich, upon its heels in 1880 came the second series of dramatic idols, including Muleka and Clive. Possibly the two best stories in poetry told in the best manner of storytelling. Then only did the marvelous fountain begin to slacken in quantity, but never in quality. Ciacosaria did not appear until 1883. It contains, among other things, a castback to his very earliest manner in the lyric of Never the Time and the Place, which we may call the most lighthearted love song that was ever written by a man over seventy. In the next year appeared Verishtaís fancies, which exhibit some of his shrewdest cosmetic sagacity expressed in some of his quintess and most characteristic images. Here perhaps more than anywhere else we see that supreme peculiarity of browning, his sense of the symbolism of material trifles, enormous problems and yet more enormous answers about pain, prayer, destiny, liberty, and conscience, are suggested by cherries, by the sun, by a melon cellar, by an eagle flying in the sky, by a man tilling a plot of ground. It is his spirit of grotesque allegory which really characterizes browning among all other poets. Other poets might possibly have hit upon the same philosophical idea, some idea as deep as delicate and as spiritual, but it may be safely asserted that no other poet having thought of deep, delicate, and spiritual idea would call it a bean stripe, also apple-eating. Three more years passed and the last book which Browning published in his lifetime was Parliangís with certain people of importance in their day. A book which consists of apostrophes, amicable, furious, reverential, satirical emotion to a number of people of whom the vast majority, even of cultivated people, have never heard in their lives. Daniel Bartoli, Francis Ferrini, Gerard Larisse, and Charles Avison. This extraordinary knowledge of the fullness of history was a thing which never ceased to characterize browning, even when he was unfortunate in every other literary quality. A part altogether from every line he ever wrote it may fairly be said that no mind so rich as his ever carried its treasures to the grave. All these later poems are vigorous, learned, and full-blooded. They are thoroughly characteristic of their author. But nothing in them is quite so characteristic of their author as this fact, that when he had published all of them and was already near to his last day, he turned with the energy of a boy led out of school and began of all things in the world to rewrite and improve Pauline, the boyish poem that he had written fifty-five years before. Here was a man covered with glory and near to the doors of death, who was prepared to give himself the elaborate trouble of reconstructing the mood and rebuilding the verses of a long juvenile poem which had been forgotten for fifty years in the blaze of successive victories. It is such things as these which give to browning an interesting personality which is far beyond the more interest of genius. It was of such things that Elizabeth Barrett wrote in one of her best moments of insight, that his genius was the least important thing about him. During all these later years, browning's life had been a quiet and regular one. He always spent the winter in Italy and the summer in London, and carried his old love of precision to the extent of never failing day after day throughout the year to leave the house at the same time. He had by this time become far more of a public figure than he had ever been previously, both in England and Italy. In 1881, Dr. Furnival and Ms. E. H. Hickey founded the famous Browning Society. He became president of the new Shakespeare Society and of the Wordsworth Society. In 1886, on the death of Lord Houghton, he accepted the post of foreign correspondent to the Royal Academy. When he moved to Devere Gardens in 1887, he began to be evident that he was slowly breaking up. He still dined out constantly. He still attended every reception and private view. He still corresponded prodigiously and even added to his correspondence, and there is nothing more typical of him than that now, when he was almost already a classic, he answered any compliment with the most delightful vanity and embarrassment. In a letter to Mr. George Bainton, touching style, he makes a remark which is an excellent criticism on his whole literary career. I, myself, found many forgotten fields which have proved the richest of pastures. But despite his continued energy, his health was gradually growing worse. He was a strong man in a muscular and ordinarily in a physical sense, but he was also in a certain sense a nervous man, and may be said to have died of brain excitement prolonged through a lifetime. In these closing years he began to feel more constantly the necessity for rest. He and his sister went to live at a little hotel in Langolin, and spent hours together talking and drinking tea on the lawn. He himself writes in one of his quaint and poetic phrases that he had come to love these long contributories, another term of delightful weeks, each chipped with a sweet starry Sunday as the little church. For the first time and in the last two or three years he was really growing old. On one point he remained always a tranquil and unvarying decision. The pessimistic school of poetry was growing up all around him. The decadence with their belief that art was only accounting of the autumn leaves were approaching more and more towards their tired triumph and their tasteless popularity. But Browning would not, for one instant, take the scorn of them out of his voice. Death, death, it is this harping on death that I despise so much. In fiction, in poetry, French as well as English, and I am told in American also, in art and literature, the shadow of death, call it what you will, despair, negation, indifference, is upon us. But what fools who talk thus! Why Amico Mio you know as well as I that death is life, just as our daily, momentarily dying body is none the less alive and ever recruiting new forces of existence. Without death, which is our church yardy, crepe-like word for change, for growth, there could be no prolongation of that which we call life. Never say of me that I am dead. On August 13, 1888, he set out once more for Italy. The last of his innumerable voyages. During his last Italian period, he seems to have fallen back on very ultimate simplicities, chiefly Amir staring at nature. The family with whom he lived kept the Fox Club, and Browning would spend hours with it, watching its grotesque ways. When it escaped, he was characteristically enough delighted. The old man could be seen continually in the lanes round Oslo, peering at the hedges and whistling for the lizards. This serene and pastoral decline, surely the mildest of slopes into death, was suddenly diversified by a flash of something lying far below. Browning's eye fell upon a passage written by the distinguished Edward Feths Gerald, who had been dead for many years, in which Feths Gerald spoke in an uncomplimentary manner of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Browning immediately wrote the lines to Edward Feths Gerald and set the whole literary world in an uproar. The lines were bitter and excessive to have been written against any man, especially bitter and excessive to have been written against a man who was not alive to reply. And yet, when all is said, it is impossible not to feel a certain dark and indescribable pleasure in this last burst of the old barbaric energy. The mountain had been tilled and forested and laid out in gardens to the summit, but for one last night it had proved itself once more a volcano, and had lit up all the planes with its forgotten fire. And the blow, savage as it was, was dealt for that great central sanctity, the story of a man's youth. All that the old man would say in reply to every view of the question was, I felt as if she had died yesterday. Towards December of 1889 he moved to Venice, where he fell ill. He took very little food. It was indeed one of his peculiar small fads that men should not take food when they are ill, a matter in which he maintained that the animals were more sagacious. He asserted vigorously that this somewhat singular regimen would pull him through, talked about his plans, and appeared cheerful. Gradually, however, the talking became more infrequent. The cheerfulness passed into a kind of placidity, and without any particular crisis or sign of the end, Robert Browning died on December 12, 1889. The body was taken on board ship by the Venice Municipal Guard and received by the Royal Italian Marines. He was buried in the poet's corner of Westminster Abbey, the choir singing his wife's poem. He giveth his beloved sleep. On the day that he died, Esolando was published. Robert Browning by G. K. Chesterton Section 17, Chapter 6, Browning as a Literary Artist Part 1 Mr. William Sharpe, 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 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 boy's playground, and then complain of the unsuitability in a boy's playground of the rockeries and flower-bits. As we find after this manner that Browning does not act satisfactorily as that which we have decided he shall be, a logician, it might possibly be worthwhile 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 people who call one of Browning's poems scientific in its analysis realize 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 stated at the beginning of a conversation or at the end, whether we printed it in a dictionary or chalked it up on a wall. But if we take some phrase commonly used in the art of literature as 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 merely descriptive prelude. If it were the last sentence and a short story, it might be pointed with some peculiar irony or triumph. Can anyone read Browning's great monologues and not feel 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 Cedipus, 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 a consistency and at 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 love Cedipus, make his teeth meet through his upper lip. We'll let those quails fly, we'll not eat this month. One little mess of welks, so he may escape. 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 Cedipus. 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 even be 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 quite 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 modeling 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 meters 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. Wordsworths 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 a 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 pious and horrible lyric as The Heretic's Tragedy, for instance, is absolutely original, with his weird and almost blood-curdling echo verses mocking echoes indeed. And dipped of his wings in para-square they bring him now to lie burned alive, and want to there the grace of loot or clavathon, 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 sonnets on his blindness or Keith'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 one mention any poem of exactly the same structural and literary type as fears and scruples, as householder, as house, or shop, as nationality in drinks, as Cybrandt's Schafenbergens' is, as my star, as a portrait, as any of ferrishta'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 is 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 altarpieces 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 anyone to say that it had no form. A man's actual feeling 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 Sedebos, 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 anyone 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 criticizing 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 specialty of somebody else. The correct thing to say about Materlink 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 Cheslowit. 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 artist and authors, falls under this general objection, and it is essentially valueless. Authors both great and small are, like everything else in existence, upon the whole greatly underrated. 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, 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 unnecessary 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 realize, 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 OK had been served to him. This is the whole poem and a very good poem, too. Up jumped OK on our table, like a pygmy castle water, dwarfish to sea but stout and able, arms and accoutrements all in order, and fierce he looked north, then wheeling south, blue with his bugle a challenge to drowth. Cocked his flap hat with the toss-pot feather, twisted his thumb in his red mustache, jingled his huge brass spurs together, tightened his waist with his Buddha sash, and then, with an impudence, not could a bash, shrugged his hump's shoulder to tell the beholder. For twenty such knaves he would laugh but the boulder, and so with his sword-hilt gallantly jutting, and dexter hand on his haunch a-butting, went the little man, Sir Augebush, strutting. I suppose there are browning students in existence who would think that this poem contains something pregnant about the temperance question, or was a marvelously 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 molding one of these preposterous German jugs. Now before studying the real character of this browning-esque style, there is one general truth to be recognized 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 style may be a good style, and yet exhibit many examples of a thoroughly bad use of it. In this point there is indeed a singularly unfair system of judgment used by the public towards the poets. It is very little realized 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 anyone who thinks so can scarcely have read a certain number of the minor poems of Byron and Shelley and Tennyson. The end of Section 17. It is only just a 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, Erk's fear, the cropful bird, frets doubt, the maw-crammed beast, is a very ugly and a very bad line, but it is quite eagerly true that Tennyson's, and that good man, the clergyman, has told me words of peace, is a very ugly and 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, the exception of one or two like Spencer 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 langurs 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 Swinburnean 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 main-star, was charactering himself in the harshest and least sympathetic spirit of American humor. This Tennessee is, of course, the result of the self-conscious and theatricality of modern life, in which each of us is forced to conceive ourselves as part of a dramatist persona and act perpetually in character. Browning sometimes yields to this temptation, to be a great deal too like himself. Will I widen thee out till thou turnest, from Margaret's Minnican Mow-by-God's Grace, to Muckle-mouth-Meg-in-Good-Ernest? 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 particularly preposterous couplet about lilies and roses read downs to the credit of the Swinburnean style, but whether it would be possible in any other style than the Swinburnean to have written a hymn to prosper on. 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 of 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. As for instance the traveler 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 riders 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 Allen Poe never tried to be gloomy or that Mr. W. S. Gilbert never tried to be extravagant. The whole issue depends upon whether we realize 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 are artistically considered are fine, although they are rugged is quite as absurd 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 toadstools 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 toadstools 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 meter being beautifully light or beautifully grave and haunting, so there is such a thing as a poetical meter 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 himself or a devil from hell, or else his mother's of which one be. I wouldn't have ridden that one water, or the goud in christeny. It is quite as pleasing to the ear in its own way as there is a bower of roses by Ben Demer's stream, and the nightingale sings in it all the night long, is in another way. Browning had an unrivaled 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 the fiery with wine, thy lovers and haunts unbeholden, and marvelous chambers of thine. It is beautiful language, but not the only sort of beautiful language. This, for instance, also has a tune in it. I, an ex-poet, know my hearties. I know Rem nor Fane would be. Choose your chiefs and pick your parties. Not one soul revolt to me. Which of you did I enable? Wants to slip inside my breast, there to catalog and label what I like least, what love best, hope and fear, believe and doubt of, seek and shun respective ride, who has right to make a rout of, rarities he found inside. This quick, glantly stepping measure also has its own kind of music, and a man who cannot feel it can never have enjoyed the sound of soldiers marching by. This then roughly is the main fact to remember of Browning's poetical method or about anyone's poetical method, that the question is not whether that method is the best in the world, but the question is 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, Highest human, man loves best, best visible, and would lose its peculiar clarity and dignity and courtly plainliness. But it is quite equally true, that any really characteristic fragment of Browning, if it were only the tepensuous scolding of the organist in Master Hughes of Saxgotha. Hello, you sacriston, show us a light there. Down at dips gone like a rocket. What want do you, to come unawares, sweeping the church shop for the first morning prayers, and find a poor devil has ended his cares, at the foot of your rotten, wrung, 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 an energy in spirit if it were written in a conventional and classical style and rain. What must I deem then, what thou dreamest to find? Dejected bones adrift upon the stair. Thou sweepest clean, or that thou deemest that I, pouch in my wallet, the vice regal son? It is not obvious that this stately aversion 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 unimaginable 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 humor. If Browning had written the passage which opens the Princess, descriptive of the larking of the villagers in the magnate's lark, 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 meter 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. The father and the mother of the grotesque would have ruled the poem. We should have felt that of the 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, end of section 18. 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 worthwhile 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 hypnotized 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 beautifully as those terms are commonly understood. The whole world of the fantastic, all things top-heavy, lopsided, and nonsensical, are conceived as the work of man. Gargoyles, German jugs, Chinese pots, political characters, burlesque epics, the pictures of Mr. Obi 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 they 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 sketchbook of Calott. 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, insofar as it is grotesque, is not complex or artificial. It is natural and in the legitimate tradition of nature. Diverse sprawls like the trees, dances like the dust. It is ragged like the thundercloud, 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 the things which make browning dwell on the oddity of a fungus or a jellyfish, make 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 gray jellies, your sea fruit, you touch the strange lumps, the mouthscape there, eyes open, all manner of horns and humps, which only the fisher looks gave at. Here might mean flowers to Wordsworths and grass to all 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 in 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 the stomach cyst, the simplest of creatures, just a sack. 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 serene 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 Ceterist, that man is a two-legged bird without feathers, the phrase does for a moment make us look at a 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 humor 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 medieval 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 indulgences 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 fireily 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 Pasciarato, 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-hewed, 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 is 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, compunctions at work, and soft from adieu humant 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 could 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 Hamlin, a poem written for children and bound in general to be lucid and readable, ends with a rhyme which is physically impossible for anyone to say. And whether they pipe us free from rats or from mice, if we promise them ought, 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 the thing which much be recognized. And recognized 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, and it was like a piece of strongwood 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 Elizabethan than a Victorian. He was like the Elizabethans in their belief in the normal man, in their gorgeous and overloaded 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 Shakespearean, as in this fact, that when he felt inclined to write a page of quite uninteresting nonsense, he immediately did so. Any 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 writers since the time of Ravallet 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 its 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. Hobbes hints blue, straight he turtle eats. Nobs prints blue, Clarrick crowns his cup. Ducks out dare stokes in azure feats. Both gorge, who fished the mirakes up. What porridge had John Keats? The individual so confronted would say without hesitation that it must indeed be an obtuse and indescribable thought which could only be conveyed by remark so completely disconnected. But the point of the matter is that the thought contained in this amazing verse is not obtuse or philosophical at all, but it 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 seashell, 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 Hobbes, Nobs, etc., obtained 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 it 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, elusive, 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. Both 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 precipitant. 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 be both obscure. But their obscurities would be entirely different. Suppose for instance they were describing even so prosaic and material in act as a man's 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. You 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, Wayneward's men, in veracity, brought the baronet's arm up. He felt the doors of his brain burst, and Wayneward, a swift rushing of himself through the air, accompanied with a clarity as of the annihilated. Meredith in other words would speak clearly 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 dormant 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 his 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 in artistic quality would decisively and in most cases rightly deny that obscurity could, under any conceivable circumstances, be in 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 these 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 meters, 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 lifetime, Parlaying's with certain people of importance in their day, was a new poem and more revolutionary than Paraselsus. This is the true light in which to regard Browning as an artist. He had determined to leave no spot of the cosmos on adorn by his poetry, which he could find it possible to adorn. An admirable example can be found in that splendid poem, Child Rowland to the Dark Tower Came. It is the hints 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, of a man unshaved, has 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 wrents in the dock's harsh shored leaves, bruised as to balk, all hope of greenness as a brute must walk, patching their life out with a brute's intents. This is the perfect realization of that eerie sentiment which comes upon us not so often among mountains and waterfalls, as it does on some half-starved common at twilight, or in walking down some gray 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 Child Rowland mean? The only genuine answer to this is, what does anything mean? Does the earth mean anything? Do gray 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. OF CHAPTER VII THE RING AND THE BOOK PART I When we have once realized the great conception of the plan of the ring and the book, the studying of a single matter from nine different standpoints, it becomes exceedingly interesting to notice what these standpoints are, what figures Browning has selected as voicing the essential and distinct versions of the case. One of the ableist and most sympathetic of all the critics of Browning, Mr. Augustine Burrell, has said in one place that the speeches of the two advocates in the ring and the book will scarcely be very interesting to the ordinary reader. However that may be, there can be little doubt that a great number of the readers of Browning think them beside the mark and adventitious. But it is exceedingly dangerous to say that anything in Browning is irrelevant or unnecessary. We are apt to go on thinking so, until some mere trifle puts the matter in a new light, and the detail that seemed meaningless springs up as almost the central pillar of the structure. In the successive monologues of his poem, Browning is endeavoring to depict the various strange ways in which a fact gets itself presented to the world. In every question there are partisans who bring cogent and convincing arguments for the right side. There are also partisans who bring cogent and convincing arguments for the wrong side. But over and above these, there does exist in every great controversy a class of more or less official partisans, who are continually engaged in defending each cause by entirely inappropriate arguments. They do not know the real good that can be said for the good cause, nor the real good that can be said for the bad one. They are represented by the animated, learned, eloquent, ingenious and entirely futile and impertinent arguments of Juris Dr. Botinius and Dominus Hyacinthus D. Archangelus. These two men brilliantly misrepresent not merely each other's cause, but their own cause. The introduction of them is one of the finest and most artistic strokes in the ring and the book. We can see the matter best by taking an imaginary parallel. Suppose that a poet of the type of Browning lives some centuries hence and found in some cause celebra of our day, such as the Parnell Commission, an opportunity for a work similar in its design to the ring and the book. The first monologue, which would be called Half London, would be the arguments of an ordinary educated and sensible unionist who believed that there really was evidence that the nationalist movement in Ireland was routine crime and public panic. The other Half London would be the utterance of an ordinary educated and sensible home-ruler who thought that in the main nationalism was one distinct symptom and crime another of the same poisonous and stagnant problem. The tertium quid would be some detached intellectual committed neither to nationalism nor to unionism, possibly Mr. Bernard Shaw, who would make a very entertaining Browning monologue. Then of course would come the speeches of the great actors in the drama, the icy anger of Parnell, the shuffling apologies of P.O., but we should feel that the record was incomplete without another touch which in practice has so much to do with the confusion of such a question. Bautinius and Hyacinthus the Archangelus, the two cynical professional pleaders, with their transparent assumptions and incredible theories of the case, would be represented by two party journalists, one of whom was ready to base his case either on the fact that Parnell was a socialist or an anarchist or an atheist or a Roman Catholic, and the other of whom was ready to base his case on the theory that Lord Salisbury hated Parnell or was in league with him or had never heard of him or anything else that was remote from the world of reality. These are the kind of little touches for which we must always be on the lookout in Browning. Even if a digression, or simile, or a whole scene in a play seems to have no point or value, let us wait a little and give it a chance. He very seldom wrote anything that did not mean a great deal. It is sometimes curious to notice how a critic possessing no little cultivation and fertility will, in speaking of a work of art, let fall almost accidentally some apparently trivial comment, which reveals to us, with an instantaneous and complete mental illumination, the fact that he does not, so far as that work of art is concerned, in the smallest degree, understand what he is talking about. He may have intended to correct merely some minute detail of the work he is studying, but that single movement is enough to blow him and all his diplomas into the air. These are the sensations with which the true Browningite will regard the criticism made by so many of Browning's critics and biographers about the ring and the book. That criticism was embodied by one of them in the words, The theme looked at dispassionately is unworthy of the monument in which it is entombed for eternity. Now this remark shows at once that the critic does not know what the ring and the book means. We feel about it, as we should feel about a man who said that the plot of Tristum Shandy was not well constructed, or that the woman in Rosetta's pictures did not look useful and industrious. A man who has missed the fact that Tristum Shandy is a game of digressions, that the whole book is a kind of practical joke to cheat the reader out of a story, simply has not read Tristum Shandy at all. The man who objects to Rosetti pictures because they depict a sad and sensuous daydream, objects to their existing at all, and anyone who objects to Browning writing his huge epic round a trumpery and sorted police case has in reality missed the whole length and breadth of the poet's meaning. The essence of the ring and the book is that it is the great epic of the nineteenth century because it is the great epic of the enormous importance of small things. The supreme difference that divides the ring and the book from all the great poems of similar length and largeness of design is precisely the fact that all these are about affairs commonly called important, and the ring and the book is about an affair commonly called contemptible. Homer says, I will show you the relations between man and heaven as exhibited in a great legend of love and war which shall contain the mightiest of all mortal warriors and the most beautiful of all mortal women. The author of the book of Job says, I will show you the relations between man and heaven by a tale of primeval sorrows and the voice of God out of a whirlwind. Virgil says, I will show you the relations of man to heaven by the tale of the origin of the greatest people and the founding of the most wonderful city in the world. Dante says, I will show you the relations of man to heaven by uncovering the very machinery of the spiritual universe and letting you hear, as I have heard, the roaring of the mills of God. Milton says, I will show you the relations of man to heaven by telling you of the very beginning of all things and the first shaping of the thing that is evil in the first twilight of time. Browning says, I will show you the relations of man to heaven by telling you a story out of a dirty Italian book of criminal trials from which I selected one of the meanest and most completely forgotten. Until we have realized this fundamental idea in the ring in the book, all criticism is misleading. In this, Browning is, of course, the supreme embodiment of his time. The characteristic of the modern movements par excellence is the apotheosis of the insignificant. Whether it be the school of poetry which sees more in one cow's lip or clover top than in forests and waterfalls, or the school of fiction which finds something indescribably significant in the pattern of a hearth rug or the tint of a man's tweed coat, the tendency is the same. Mater Link stricken still and wandering by a deal door half open, or the light shining out of a window at night, Zola filling notebooks with the medical significance of the twitching of a man's toes or the loss of his appetite. Whitman counting the grass and the heart-shaped leaves of the lilock, Mr. George Gissing lingering fondly over the third class ticket and the dilapidated umbrella, George Meredith seeing a soul's tragedy in a phrase at the dinner table. Mr. Bernard Shaw filling three pages with stage directions to describe a parlor. All these men, different in every other particular, are alike in this, that they have ceased to believe certain things to be important and the rest to be unimportant. Significance is to them a wild thing that may leap upon them from any hiding place. They have all become terribly impressed with and a little bit alarmed at the mysterious powers of small things. Their difference from the old epic poets is the whole difference between an age that fought with dragons and an age that fights with microbes. This tide of the importance of small things is flowing so steadily around us, upon every side today, that we do not sufficiently realize that if there was one man in English literary history who might with justice be called its fountain and origin, that man was Robert Browning. When Browning arose, literature was entirely in the hands of the Tennisonian poet. The Tennisonian poet does indeed mention trivialities, but he mentions them when he wishes to speak trivially. Browning mentions trivialities when he wishes to speak sensationally. Now this sense of the terrible importance of detail was a sense which may be said to have possessed Browning in the emphatic manner of a demoniac possession. Saying as he was, this one feeling might have driven him to a condition not far from madness. Any room that he was sitting in glared at him with innumerable eyes and a mild scaping with a story. There was sometimes no background and no middle distance in his mind. A human face and the pattern on the wall behind it came forward with equally aggressive clearness. It may be repeated that if ever he, who had the strongest head in the world, had gone mad, it would have been through this turbulent democracy of things. If he looked at a porcelain vase or an old hat, a cabbage or a puppy at play, each began to be bewitched with the spell of a kind of fairyland of philosophers. The vase, like the jar in the Arabian knights, to send up a smoke of thoughts and shapes, the hat to produce souls as a conjurer's hat produces rabbits. The cabbage to swell and overshadow the earth, like the tree of knowledge, and the puppy to go off at a scamper along the road to the end of the world. Anyone who has read Browning's longer poems knows how constantly a simile or figure of speech is selected, not among the large, well-recognized figures common in poetry, but from some dusty corner of experience, and how often it is characterized by smallness and a certain quaint exactitude which could not have been found in any more usual example. Thus, for instance, Prince Honestyle Schweinow explains the psychological meaning of all his restless and unscrupulous activities by comparing them to the impulse which has just led him, even in the act of talking, to draw a black line on the blotting paper exactly, so as to connect two separate blots that were already there. This queer example is selected as the best possible instance of a certain fundamental restlessness and desire to add a touch to things in the spirit of man. I have no doubt whatever, the Browning thought of the idea after doing the thing himself, and sat in a philosophical trance staring at a piece of ink blotting paper, conscious that at the moment, and in that insignificant act, some immemorial monster of the mind, nameless from the beginning of the world, had risen to the surface of the spiritual sea. It is therefore the very essence of Browning's genius, and the very essence of the ring and the book, that it should be the enormous multiplication of a small theme. It is the extreme of idle criticism to explain that the story is a current and sorted story. For the whole object of the poem is to show what infinities of spiritual good and evil a current and sorted story may contain. When once this is realized, it explains at one stroke the innumerable facts about the work. It explains, for example, Browning's detailed and picturesque account of the glorious dustbin of odds and ends for sale, out of which he picked the printed record of the trial and his insistence on its cheapness and its dustiness, its yellow leaves, and its crab dilatant. The more soiled and dark and insignificant he can make the text appear, the better for his ample and gigantic sermon. It explains again the strictness with which Browning adhered to the facts of the forgotten intrigue. He was playing the game of seeing how much was really involved in one paltry fragment of fact. To have introduced large quantities of fiction would not have been sportsman-like. The ring of the book, therefore, to recapitulate the view arrived at so far, is the typical epic of our age, because it expresses the richness of life by taking as a text a poor story. It pays to existence the highest of all possible compliments, the great compliment which monarchy paid to mankind, the compliment of selecting from it almost at random. But this is only the first half of the claim of the ring in the book to be the typical epic of modern times. The second half of that claim, the second respect in which the work is representative of all modern development, requires somewhat more careful statement. The ring and the book is, of course, essentially speaking, a detective story. Its difference from the ordinary detective story is that it seeks to establish not the center of criminal guilt, but the center of spiritual guilt. But it has exactly the same kind of exciting quality that a detective story has, and a very excellent quality it is. But the element, which is important, and which now requires pointing out, is the method by which that center of spiritual guilt and the corresponding center of spiritual rectitude is discovered. In order to make clear the peculiar character of this method, it is necessary to begin rather nearer the beginning and to go back some little way into literary history. End of Part 1. End of Section 20.