Browning has nowhere else expounded so fully his ideas about the aims of his own art. It lay in the peculiar "dramatic" quality of his mind to express himself freely only in situations not his own. Hence, while he does not altogether avoid the poet as a character, his poets are drawn with a curious externality and detachment. It is in his musicians, his painters, his grammarians, that the heart and passion of Browning the poet really live. He is the poet of musicians and of painters, the poet of lawyers and physicians and Rabbis, [and] of scores of callings which never had a poet before; but he is not the poets' poet. In the Transcendentalism, however, after tilting with gay irony at the fault of over-much argument in poetry, which the world ascribed to his own, he fixes in a splendid image the magic which it fitfully yet consummately illustrates. The reading public which entertained any opinion about him at all was inclined to take him for another Boehme, "with a tougher book and subtler meanings of what roses say." A few knew that they had to deal, not less, with a "stout Mage like him of Halberstadt," 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."
The portrait of the poet of Valladolid, on the other hand (How it Strikes a Contemporary), is not so much a study of a poet as of popular misconception and obtuseness. A grotesquely idle legend of the habits of the "Corregidor" flourishes among the good folks of Valladolid; the speaker himself, who desires to do him justice, is a plain, shrewd, but unimaginative observer ("I never wrote a line of verse, did you?"), and makes us acquainted with everything but the inner nature of the man. We see the corregidor in the streets, in his chamber, at his frugal supper and "decent cribbage" with his maid, but never at his verse. We see the alert objective eye of this man with the "scrutinizing hat," who
"stood and watched the cobbler at his trade, ...
If any beat a horse, you felt he saw,
If any cursed a woman, he took note,"—
and all this, for Browning, went to the making of the poet, but we get no inkling of the process itself. Browning had, in his obscure as in his famous days, peculiar opportunities of measuring the perversities of popular repute. Later on, in the heyday of his renown, he chaffed its critical dispensers in his most uproarious vein in Pacchiarotto. The Popularity stanzas present us with a theory of it conveyed in that familiar manner of mingled poetry and grotesqueness which was one of the obstacles to his own.
There is, however, among these fifty men and women one true and sublime poet,—the dying "Grammarian," who applies the alchemy of a lofty imagination to the dry business of verbal erudition.
"He said, 'What's time? Leave Now for dogs and apes!
Man has Forever.'"
This is one of the half-dozen lyrics which enshrine in noble and absolutely individual form the central core of Browning's passion and thought. Even the verse, with its sequence of smooth-flowing iambics broken by the leap of the dactyl, and the difficult double rhyme, sustains the mood of victorious but not lightly won serenity of soul—"too full for sound and foam." It is, among songs over the dead, what Rabbi ben Ezra and Prospice are among the songs which face and grapple with death; the fittest requiem to follow such deaths as [those.] Like Ben Ezra, the Grammarian "trusts death," and stakes his life on the trust:—
"He ventured neck or nothing—heaven's success
Found, or earth's failure:
'Wilt thou trust death or not?' He answered, 'Yes:
Hence with life's pale lure!'"
To ordinary eyes he spends his days grovelling among the dust and dregs of erudition; but it is the grovelling of a builder at work upon a fabric so colossally planned that life is fitly spent in laying the foundations. He was made in the large mould of the gods,—born with "thy face and throat, Lyric Apollo,"—and the disease which crippled and silenced him in middle life could only alter the tasks on which he wreaked his mind. And now that he is dead, he passes, as by right, to the fellowship of the universe—of the sublime things of nature.