II.
Hence Browning, while a romantic in temper, was, in comparison with his predecessors, a thorough realist in method. All the Romantic poets of the previous generation had refused and decried some large portion of reality. Wordsworth had averted his ken from half [of] human fate; Keats and Shelley turned from the forlornness of human society as it was to the transfigured humanity of myth. All three were out of sympathy with civilisation; and their revolt went much deeper than a distaste for the types of men it bred. They attacked a triumphant age of reason in its central fastness, the brilliant analytic intelligence to which its triumphs were apparently due. Keats declaimed at cold philosophy which undid the rainbow's spells; Shelley repelled the claim of mere understanding to settle the merits of poetry; Wordsworth, the profoundest, though by no means the most cogent or connected, thinker of the three, denounced the "meddling intellect" which murders to dissect, and strove to strip language itself of every element of logic and fancy, as distortions of the truth, only to be uttered in the barest words, which comes to the heart that watches and receives. On all these issues Browning stands in sharp, if not quite absolute, contrast. "Barbarian," as he has been called, and as in a quite intelligible sense he was, he found his poetry pre-eminently among the pursuits, the passions, the interests and problems, of civilised men. His potent gift of imagination never tempted him, during his creative years, to assail the sufficiency of intellect, or to disparage the intellectual and "artificial" elements of speech; on the contrary, he appears from the outset employing in the service of poetry a discursive logic of unsurpassed swiftness and dexterity, and a vast heterogeneous army of words gathered, like a sudden levy, with [a] sole eye to their effective force, from every corner of civilised life, and wearing the motley of the most prosaic occupations. It was only in the closing years that he began to distrust the power of thought to get a grip upon reality. His delight in poetic argument is often doubtless that of the ironical casuist, looking on at the self-deceptions of a soul; but his interest in ideas was a rooted passion that gave a thoroughly new, and to many readers most unwelcome, "intellectuality" to the whole manner as well as substance of his poetic work.
While Browning thus, in Nietzsche's phrase, said "Yes" to many sides of existence which his Romantic predecessors repudiated or ignored, he had some very definite limitations of his own. He gathered into his verse crowded regions of experience which they neglected; but some very glorious avenues of poetry pursued by them he refused to explore. Himself the most ardent believer in the supernatural among all the great poets of his time, the supernatural, as such, has hardly any explicit place in his poetry. To the eternal beauty of myth and folk-lore,—dream-palaces "never built at all and therefore built for ever,"—all that province of the poetical realm which in the memorable partition of 1797 Coleridge had taken for his own, splendidly emulated by Shelley and by Keats, Browning the Platonist maintained on the whole the attitude of the utilitarian man of facts. "Fairy-poetry," he agreed with Elizabeth Barrett in 1845-46, was "impossible [in] the days of steam." With a faith in a transcendent divine world as assured as Dante's or Milton's, he did not aspire to "pass the flaming bounds of Space or Time," or "to possess the sun and stars." No reader of Gerard de Lairesse at one end of his career, or of the vision of Paracelsus at the other, or Childe Roland in the middle, can mistake the capacity; but habit is more trustworthy than an occasional tour de force; and Browning's imagination worked freely only when it bodied forth a life in accord with the waking experience of his own day. "A poet never dreams," said his philosophical Don Juan, "we prose folk always do"; and the epigram brilliantly announced the character of Browning's poetic world,—the world of prose illuminated through and through in every cranny and crevice by the keenest and most adventurous of exploring intellects.
In physical organisation Browning's endowment was decidedly of the kind which prompts men to "accept the universe" with joyful alacrity. Like his contemporary Victor Hugo, he was, after all reserves have been made, from first to last one of the healthiest and heartiest of men. If he lacked the burly stature and bovine appetite with which young Hugo a little scandalised the delicate sensibilities of French Romanticism, he certainly "came eating and drinking," and amply equipped with nerve and muscle, activity, accomplishment, social instinct, and savoir faire. The isolating loneliness of genius was checkmated by a profusion of [the] talents which put men en rapport with their kind. The reader of his biography is apt to miss in it the signs of that heroic or idealist detachment which he was never weary of extolling in his verse. He is the poet par excellence of the glory of failure and dissatisfaction: but his life was, in the main, that of one who succeeded and who was satisfied with his success. In the vast bulk of his writings we look in vain for the "broken arc," the "half-told tale," and it is characteristic that he never revised. Even after the great sorrow of his life, the mood of Prospice, though it may have underlain all his other moods, did not suppress or transform them; he "lived in the world and loved earth's way," and however assured that this earth is not his only sphere, did not wish
"the wings unfurled
That sleep in the worm, they say."
Whatever affinities Browning may have with the mystic or the symbolist for whom the whole sense-world is but the sign of spiritual realities, it is plain that this way of envisaging existence found little support in the character of his senses. He had not the brooding eye, beneath which, as it gazes, loveliness becomes far lovelier, but an organ aggressively alert, minutely inquisitive, circumstantially exact, which perceived the bearings of things, and explored their intricacies, noted how the mortar was tempered in the walls and if any struck a woman or beat a horse, but was as little prone to [transfigure] these or other things with the glamour of mysterious suggestion as the eye of Peter Bell himself. He lacked the stranger and subtler sensibilities of eye and ear, to which Nature poetry of the nineteenth century owes so much. His senses were efficient servants to an active brain, not magicians flinging dazzling spells into the air before him or mysterious music across his path. By a curious and not unimportant peculiarity he could see a remote horizon clearly with one eye, and read the finest print in twilight with the other; but he could not, like Wordsworth, hear the "sound of alien melancholy" given out from the mountains before a storm. The implicit realism of his eye and ear was fortified by acute tactual and muscular sensibilities. He makes us vividly aware of surface and texture, of space, solidity, shape. Matter with him is not the translucent, tenuous, half-spiritual substance of Shelley, but aggressively massive and opaque, tense with solidity. And he had in an eminent degree the quick and eager apprehension of space—relations which usually goes with these developed sensibilities of eye and muscle. There is a hint of it in an early anecdote. "Why, sir, you are quite a geographer!" he reported his mother to have said to him when, on his very first walk with her, he had given her an elaborate imaginary account of "his houses and estates."[62] But it was only late in life that this acute plasticity and concreteness of his sensibility found its [natural] outlet. When in their last winter at Rome (1860-61) he took to clay-modelling, it was with an exultant rapture which for the time thrust poetry into the shade. "The more tired he has been, and the more his back ached, poor fellow," writes his wife, "the more he has exulted and been happy—no, nothing ever made him so happy before."[63] This was the immense joy of one who has at length found the key after half a lifetime of trying at the lock.
[62] Mrs Orr, Life, p. 24.
[63] Mrs Browning's Letters, March 1861.