Browning and His Century Part 11

"Words struggle with the weight So feebly of the False, thick element between Our soul, the True, and Truth! which, but that intervene False shows of things, were reached as easily by thought Reducible to word, and now by yearnings wrought Up with thy fine free force, oh Music, that canst thrill, Electrically win a pa.s.sage through the lid Of earthly sepulchre, our words may push against, Hardly transpierce as thou."

And again, in another pa.s.sage, he gives to music the power of conserving a mood of feeling, which in this case is not an exalted one, since it is one that chimes in with his own rather questionable feeling for Fifine, the fiz-gig. It is found in Schumann's "Carnival":

"Thought hankers after speech, while no speech may evince Feeling like music,--mine, o'er-burthened with each gift From every visitant, at last resolved to s.h.i.+ft Its burthen to the back of some musician dead And gone, who feeling once what I feel now, instead Of words, sought sounds, and saved forever, in the same, Truth that escapes prose,--nay, puts poetry to shame.

I read the note, I strike the Key, I bid _record_ The instrument--thanks greet the veritable word!

And not in vain I urge: 'O dead and gone away, a.s.sist who struggles yet, thy strength becomes my stay, Thy record serve as well to register--I felt And knew thus much of truth! With me, must knowledge melt Into surmise and doubt and disbelief unless Thy music rea.s.sure--I gave no idle guess, But gained a cert.i.tude I yet may hardly keep!

What care? since round is piled a monumental heap Of music that conserves the a.s.surance, thou as well Was certain of the same! thou, master of the spell, Mad'st moonbeams marble, didst _record_ what other men Feel only to forget!'"

The man in the case is merely an appreciator, not a creator, yet he experiences with equal force music's power as a recorder of feeling. He notes also that the feeling must appear from time to time in a new dress,

"the stuff that's made To furnish man with thought and feeling is purveyed Substantially the same from age to age, with change Of the outside only for successive feasters."

In this case, the old tunes have actually been worked over by the more modern composer whose form has not yet sufficiently gone by to fail of an immediate appeal to this person with feelings kindled by similar experiences. What the speaker in the poem perceives is not merely the fact of the feelings experienced but the power of the music to take him off upon a long train of more or less philosophical reasoning born of that very element of change. In this power of suggestiveness lies music's greater range of spiritual force even when the feeling expressed is not of the deepest.

If we look at his poems on painting, the same principles of art are insisted upon except that more emphasis is laid upon the positive value of the incompleteness of the form. In so far as painting or sculpture reaches a perfect unity of thought and form it loses its power of suggesting an infinite beauty beyond any that our earth-born race may express.

This in Browning's opinion is the limitation of Greek art. It touches perfection or completion in expression and in so doing limits its range to the brief pa.s.sion of a day. The effect of such art is to arouse a sort of despair, for it so far transcends merely human beauty that there seems nothing left to accomplish:

"So, testing your weakness by their strength, Your meagre charms by their rounded beauty Measured by Art in your breadth and length, You learned--to submit is a mortal's duty."

When such a deadlock as this is reached through the stultifying effect of an art expression which seems to have embodied all there is of pa.s.sion and physical beauty, the one way out is to turn away from the abject contemplation of such art and go back again to humanity itself, in whose widening nature may be discovered the promise of an eternity of progression. Therefore, "To cries of Greek art and what more wish you?"

the poet would have it that the early painters replied:

"To become now self-acquainters, And paint man, whatever the issue!

Make new hopes s.h.i.+ne through the flesh they fray, New fears aggrandize the rags and tatters: To bring the invisible full into play!

Let the visible go to the dogs--what matters?"

The revolution in art started by these early worthies had more of spiritual promise in it than the past perfection--"The first of the new, in our race's story, beats the last of the old."

His emphasis here upon the return to humanity in order to gain a new source of inspiration in art is further ill.u.s.trated in his att.i.tude toward the two painters which he portrays so splendidly: Fra Lippo Lippi, the realist, whose Madonnas looked like real women, and who has scandalized some critics on this account, and Andrea del Sarto, the faultless painter, who exclaims in despair as he gazes upon a picture by Raphael, in which he sees a fault to pardon in the drawing's line, an error that he could alter for the better, "But all the play, the insight and the stretch," beyond him.

The importance of basing art upon the study of the human body is later insisted upon in Francis Furini, not as an end in itself, but as the dwelling place of the soul. "Let my pictures prove I know," says Furini,

"Somewhat of what this fleshly frame of ours Or is or should be, how the soul empowers The body to reveal its every mood Of love and hate, pour forth its plenitude Of pa.s.sion."

The evolutionary ideal appears again in his utterances upon poetry, though when speaking of poetry it is the value of the subject matter and its intimate relation to the form upon which he dwells.

The little poem "Popularity" shows as clearly as any the importance which he attaches to a new departure in poetic expression, besides giving vent to his scorn of the mult.i.tude which sees nothing in the work of the innovator but which is ready at a later date to laud his imitators. Any minor poet, for that matter, any Nokes or Stokes who merely prints blue according to the poetic conventions of the past, possessing not a suspicion of the true inspiration which goes to the making of a poet of the new order, is more acceptable to an unseeing public than him with power to fish "the murex up" that contains the precious drop of royal blue.

More than one significant hint may be gleaned from his verse in regard to his opinion upon the formal side of the poet's art. In "Transcendentalism"

he has his fling at the didactic poet who pleases to speak naked thoughts instead of draping them in sights and sounds, for "song" is the art of the poet. Some stout mage like him of Halberstadt has his admiration, who with a

"'Look you!' vents a brace of rhymes, And in there breaks the sudden rose herself, Over us, under, round us every side, Nay, in and out the tables and the chairs And musty volumes, Boehme's book and all,-- Buries us with a glory young once more, Pouring heaven into this shut house of life."

He was equally averse to an ornate cla.s.sical embellishment of a latter day subject or to a looking at nature through mythopoeic Greek eyes. This is driven home in the splendid fooling in "Gerard de Lairesse" where the poet himself indulges by way of a joke in some high-flown cla.s.sical imagery in derision of the style of Lairesse and hints covertly probably at the nineteenth-century masters of cla.s.sical resuscitation, in subject matter and allusion, Swinburne and Morris. Reacting to soberer mood, he reiterates his belief in the utter deadness of Greek ideals of art, speaking with a strength of conviction so profound as to make one feel that here at least Browning suffered from a decided limitation, all the more strange, too, when one considers his own masterly treatment of Greek subjects. To the poets whose poetic creed is

"Dream afresh old G.o.dlike shapes, Recapture ancient fable that escapes, Push back reality, repeople earth With vanished falseness, recognize no worth In fact new-born unless 'tis rendered back Pallid by fancy, as the western rack Of fading cloud bequeaths the lake some gleam Of its gone glory!"

he would reply,

"Let things be--not seem, I counsel rather,--do, and nowise dream!

Earth's young significance is all to learn; The dead Greek lore lies buried in the urn Where who seeks fire finds ashes. Ghost, forsooth!

What was the best Greece babbled of as truth?

A shade, a wretched nothing,--sad, thin, drear,

Sad school Was Hades! Gladly,--might the dead but slink To life back,--to the dregs once more would drink Each interloper, drain the humblest cup Fate mixes for humanity."

The rush onward to the supreme is uppermost in the poet's mind in this poem. Though he does indulge in the refrain that there shall never be one lost good echoing the thought in "Charles Avison," the climax of his mood is in the contemplation of the evolutionary force of the soul which must leave Greek art behind and find new avenues of beauty:

"The Past indeed Is past, gives way before Life's best and last The all-including Future! What were life Did soul stand still therein, forego her strife Through the ambiguous Present to the goal Of some all-reconciling Future? Soul, Nothing has been which shall not bettered be Hereafter,--leave the root, by law's decree Whence springs the ultimate and perfect tree!

Busy thee with unearthing root? Nay, climb-- Quit trunk, branch, leaf and flower--reach, rest sublime Where fruitage ripens in the blaze of day."

When it comes to the subject matter of poetry, Browning constantly insists that it should be the study of the human soul. A definite statement as to the range of subjects under this general material of poetry is put forth very early in his poetical career in "Paracelsus" and it is all-inclusive.

It is the pa.s.sage where Aprile describes how universal he wished to make his sympathy as a poet. No one is to be left out of his all-embracing democracy.

Such, then, are his general principles in regard to poetic development and subject matter. These do not touch upon the question so often discussed of the relative value of the subjective as against the objective poet. This point the poet considers in "Sordello," where he throws in his weight on the side of the objective poet. In the pa.s.sage in the third book the poet, speaking in person, gives ill.u.s.trations of three sorts of poetic composition: the dramatic, the descriptive and the meditative; the first belongs to the objective, the second, not distinctively to either, and the third to the subjective manner of writing. The dramatic method is the most forceful, for it imparts the gift of seeing to others, while the descriptive and meditative merely tell what they saw, or, worse still, talk about it.

Further indications of his allegiance to the dramatic form of poetry as the supreme one are found in his poems inspired by Shakespeare, "House"

and "Shop," but we must turn to a pregnant bit of his prose in order to find his exact feeling upon the relations of the subjective and objective poet, together with a clear conception of what he meant by a dramatic poet, which was something more than Shakespeare's "holding the mirror up to nature." In his view the dramatic poet must have the vision of the seer as well as the penetration of a psychologist. He must hold the mirror up not only to nature, regarded as phenomena, but to the human soul, and he must perceive the relation of that human soul to the universal. He must in fact plunge beneath the surface of actions and events and bring forth to the light the psychic and cosmic causes of these things. The pa.s.sage referred to in the "Introduction to the Sh.e.l.ley Letters" points out how in the evolution of poetry there will be the play and interplay of the subjective and the objective faculties upon each other, with the probable result of the arising of poets who will combine the two sorts of faculty.

While Browning's own sympathy with the dramatic poet is as fully evident here as in the pa.s.sage in "Sordello," he realizes, as perhaps he did not at that time, when he was himself breaking away from Sh.e.l.ley's influence, the value of the subjective method in carrying on the process of poetic evolution:

"It would be idle to inquire, of these two kinds of poetic faculty in operation, which is the higher or even rarer endowment. If the subjective might seem to be the ultimate requirement of every age, the objective, in the strictest state, must still retain its original value. For it is with this word, as starting-point and basis alike, that we shall always have to concern ourselves: the world is not to be learned and thrown aside, but reverted to and relearned. The spiritual comprehension may be infinitely subtilized, but the raw material it operates upon must remain. There may be no end of the poets who communicate to us what they see in an object with reference to their own individuality; what it was before they saw it, in reference to the aggregate human mind, will be as desirable to know as ever. Nor is there any reason why these two modes of poetic faculty may not issue hereafter from the same poet in successive perfect works, examples of which, according to what are now considered the exigencies of art, we have hitherto possessed in distinct individuals only. A mere running in of the one faculty upon the other is, of course, the ordinary circ.u.mstance. Far more rarely it happens that either is found so decidedly prominent and superior as to be p.r.o.nounced comparatively pure: while of the perfect s.h.i.+eld, with the gold and the silver side set up for all comers to challenge, there has yet been no instance. A tribe of successors (Homerides), working more or less in the same spirit, dwell on his discoveries and reinforce his doctrine; till, at unawares, the world is found to be subsisting wholly on the shadow of a reality, on sentiments diluted from pa.s.sions, on the tradition of a fact, the convention of a moral, the straw of last year's harvest.

Then is the imperative call for the appearance of another sort of poet, who shall at once replace this intellectual rumination of food swallowed long ago, by a supply of the fresh and living swathe; getting at new substance by breaking up the a.s.sumed wholes into parts of independent and uncla.s.sed value, careless of the unknown laws for recombining them (it will be the business of yet another poet to suggest those hereafter), prodigal of objects for men's outer and not inner sight; shaping for their uses a new and different creation from the last, which it displaces by the right of life over death,--to endure until, in the inevitable process, its very sufficiency to itself shall require, at length, an exposition of its affinity to something higher--when the positive yet conflicting facts shall again precipitate themselves under a harmonizing law, and one more degree will be apparent for a poet to climb in that mighty ladder, of which, however cloud-involved and undefined may glimmer the topmost step, the world dares no longer doubt that its gradations ascend."

If we measure Browning's own work by the poetic standards which he has himself set up in the course of that work, it is quite evident that he has on the whole lived up to them. He has shown himself to be an ill.u.s.tration of the evolutionary principles in which he believes by breaking away from all previous standards of taste in poetry. The history of poetry in England has shown this to be a distinctive characteristic of all the greatest English poets. From Shakespeare down they have one and all run afoul of the critics whose special province seems to be to set up literary s.h.i.+bboleths which every genius is bent upon disregarding. When Spenser was inventing his stanza, verse critics were abject in their wors.h.i.+p of hexameters, and their hatred of bald rhymes. Though these sticklers for cla.s.sical forms could see clearly enough that Spenser was possessed of genius, they yet lamented the blindness of one, who might have written hexameters, perversely exclaiming "Why a G.o.d's name may not we as else the Greeks have the kingdom of our own language, and measure our accents by the sound, reserving quant.i.ty to the verse?" When Milton appears and finds blank verse the medium best suited to his subject, he comes up against the rhyming standards of his day and is forced to submit to the indignity of having his "Paradise Lost" "tagged with rhymes," as he expresses it, by Dryden, who graciously devoted his powers of rhyme to an improved version of the poem. Milton was actually obliged to defend himself in his preface to "Paradise Lost" for using blank verse, as Browning defends himself in the Epilogue to "Pacchiarotto and How We Worked in Distemper" for writing "strong" verse instead of the "sweet" verse the critics demand of him.

By the time the nineteenth century dawns the critics are safely intrenched in the editorial den, from which, s.h.i.+elded by any sort of s.h.i.+bboleth they can get hold of, they may hurl forth their projectiles upon the unoffending head of the genius, who, with no chance of firing back in the open arena of the magazine, must either suffer in silence or take refuge in sarcastic slurs upon his critics in his poetry, for here lies the only chance of getting even without waiting for the whirligig of time to bring the public round to a recognition of the fact that he is the one who has in very truth, "fished the murex up."

The caliber of man who could speak of "The Ode to Immortality" as "a most illegible and unintelligible poem," or who wonders that any man in his senses could put his name to such a rhapsody as "Endymion," or who dismissed "Prometheus Unbound" with the remark that it was a _melange_ of nonsense, c.o.c.kneyism, poverty and pedantry, would hardly be expected to welcome "Sordello" with effusion. Even very intelligent people cracked unseemly jokes upon the appearance of "Sordello," and what wonder, for Browning's British instinct for freedom carried him in this poem to the most extreme lengths. In "Pauline" he had allied himself with things familiar to the English reader of poetry. Many of the allusions are cla.s.sical and introduced with a rich musicalness that Sh.e.l.ley himself might have envied. The reminiscences of Sh.e.l.ley would also come within the intellectual acreage of most of the cultured people of the time. And even in "Paracelsus," despite the unfamiliarity of the subject, there was music and imagery such as to link the art with the admired poetic art of the day, but in "Sordello" all bounds are broken.

No one but a delver in the byways of literature could, at that time, have been expected to know anything about Sordello; no one but a historian could have been expected to know about the complicated struggles of the Guelfs and the Ghibellines; no one but a philosopher about the tendencies, both political and literary, manifesting themselves in the direction of the awakening of democratic ideals in these pre-Dantean days; no one but a psychologist about the tortuous windings of Sordello's mind.

Only by special searching into all these regions of knowledge can one to-day gain a complete grasp of the situation. He must patiently tread all the paths that Browning trod before he can enter into sympathy with the poet. Then he will crack no more jokes, but he will marvel at the mind which could wield all this knowledge with such consummate familiarity; he will grow ecstatic over the splendors of the poem, and will regret its redundancy not of diction so much but of detail and its amazing lack of organic unity.

No one but a fanatic could claim that "Sordello" is a success as an organic work of art. While the poet had a mastery of knowledge, thought and feeling, he did not have sufficient mastery of his own form to weld these together into a harmonious and convincing whole, such mastery as he, for example, shows in "The Ring and the Book," though even in that there is some survival of the old redundancy.

One feels when considering "Sordello" as a whole as if gazing upon a picture in which the perspective and the high lights and the shadows are not well related to each other. As great an abundance of detail is expended upon the less important as upon the more important fact, and while the details may be interesting enough in themselves, they dislodge more important affairs from the center of consciousness. It is, not to be too flippant, something like Alice's game of croquet in "Through the Looking Gla.s.s." When the hedgehog ball is nicely rolled up ready to be struck, the flamingo mallet walks off somewhere else.

There, then, in "Sordello" is perhaps the most remarkable departure from the accepted in poetic art that an Englishman has ever attempted. In its elements of failure, however, it gave "a triumph's evidence," to use the poet's own phrase, "of the fulness of the days." In this poem he had thrown down the gauntlet. His subject matter was not to be like that of any other poet, nor was his form to be like that of any other poet. He discarded the flowing music of "Pauline" and of "Paracelsus." His allusions were no longer to be cla.s.sic, but to be directly related to whatever subject he had in hand; his style was also to be forth-right and related to his subject, strong, idiomatic, rugged, even jolting if need be, or n.o.ble, sweeping along in large rhythms or couched in rare forms of symbolism, but, whatever it was to be, always different from what had been.

All he required at the time when "Sordello" appeared was to find that form in which he could so unify his powers that his poems would gain the organic completeness necessary to a work of art. No matter what new regions an artist may push into he must discover the law of being of this new region. Unless he does, his art will not convince, but the moment he does, all that was not convincing falls into its right place. He becomes the master of his art, and relates the new elements in such a way that their rightness and their beauty, if not immediately recognized, are sure sooner or later to be recognized by the evolving appreciator, who is the necessary complement, by the way, of the evolving artist. Before "Sordello" Browning had tried three other forms; the subjective narrative in "Pauline," the dramatic poem in "Paracelsus," a regular drama in "Strafford," which however runs partly parallel with "Sordello" in composition. He had also done two or three short dramatic monologues.

He evidently hoped that the regular drama would prove to be the form most congenial to him, for he kept on persistently in that form for nearly ten years, wrote much magnificent poetry in it and at times attained a grandeur of dramatic utterance hardly surpa.s.sed except in the master of all dramatists, Shakespeare. But while he has attained a very genuine success in this form, it is not the success of the popular acting drama.

His dramas are to-day probably being left farther and farther aside every moment in the present exaggerated demands for characters in action, or perhaps it might be nearer the truth to say clothes horses in action.

Besides, the drama of action in character, which is the type of drama introduced into English literature by Browning, has reached a more perfect development in other hands. Ibsen's dramas are preeminently dramas of action in character, but the action moves with such rapidity that the audience is almost cheated into thinking they are the old thing over again--that is, dramas of characters in action.