Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

THE CENTURY’S END: PROMISE OF PEACE

Passing onward from this mid-century phase of Browning’s interest in what I have called the battle of the mind and the spirit, we find him in his later poems taking up the subject in its broader aspects, more as he treated it in “Paracelsus,” yet with a marked difference in temper. God is no longer conceived of merely as a divine creator, joying in the wonder and beauty of his creations. The ideal of the artist has been modified by the observation of the thinker and the feeling induced by human rather than by artistic emotion. Life’s experiences have shown to the more humanly conscious Browning that the problem of evil is not one to be so easily dismissed. The scientist may point out that evil is but lack of development, and the lover and artist may exult when he sees the wonderful processes of nature and mind carrying forward development until he can picture a time when the evil shall become null and void, but the human, feeling being sees the misery and the unloveliness of evil. It does not satisfy him to know that it is lack of development or the outcome of lack of development, nor yet that it will grow less as time goes on he ponders the problem, “why is evil permitted, how is it to be harmonized with the existence of a universe planned upon a scheme which he believes to be the outcome of a source all-powerful and all-loving!”

About this problem and its corollary, the conception of the infinite, Browning’s latter-day thought revolves as it did in his middle years about the basis of religious belief.

It is one of the strange freaks of criticism that many admirers of Browning’s earlier work have failed to see the importance of his later poems, especially “Ferishtah’s Fancies,” and “The Parleyings,” not only as expressions of the poet’s own spiritual growth, but as showing his mental grasp of the problems which the advance of nineteenth-century scientific thought brought to the fore in the last days of the century.

The date at which various critics have declared that Browning ceased to write poetry might be considered an index of the time when that critic’s powers became atrophied. No less a person than Edmund Gosse is of the opinion that since 1868 the poet’s books were chiefly valuable as keeping alive popular interest in him, and as leading fresh generations of readers to what he had already published. Fortunately it has long been admitted that Homer sometimes nods, though not with such awful effect as was said to attend the nods of Jove. Hence, in spite of Mr. Gosse’s undoubted eminence as a critic, we may dare to assume that in this particular instance he fell into the ancient and distinguished trick of nodding.

If Mr. Gosse were right, it would practically put on a par with a mere advertising scheme many poems which have now become household favorites. Take, for example, “Hervé Riel.” Think of the blue-eyed Breton hero whom all the world has learned to love through Browning, tolerated simply as an index finger to “The Pied Piper of Hamelin.” Take, too, such poems, as “Donald.” This man’s dastardly sportsmanship is so vividly portrayed that it has the power to arouse strong emotion in strong men, who have been known literally to break down in the middle of it through excess of feeling; “Ivan Ivanovitch,” in which is embodied such fear and horror that weak hearts cannot stand the strain of hearing it read; the story of the dog Tray, who rescued a drowning doll with the same promptitude as he did a drowning child—at the relation of whose noble deeds the eyes of little children grow eager with excitement and sympathy. And where is there in any poet’s work a more vivid bit of tragedy than “A Forgiveness?”

And would not an unfillable gap be left in the ranks of our friends of the imaginative world if Balaustion were blotted out?—the exquisite lyric girl, brave, tender and with a mind in which wisdom and wit are fair play fellows.

As Carlyle might say, “Verily, verily, Mr. Gosse, thou hast out-Homered Homer, and thy nod hath taken upon itself very much the semblance of a snore.”

These and many others which might be mentioned since the date when Mr. Gosse autocratically put up the bars to the poet’s genius are now universally accepted. There are others, however, such as “The Red Cotton Night-cap Country,” “The Inn Album,” “Aristophanes’ Apology,” “Fifine at the Fair,” which are liable at any time to attacks from atrophied critics, and among these are the groups of poems which are to form the center of our present discussion.

Without particularizing either critics or criticism it may be said that criticism of these poems divides itself into the usual three branches—one which objects to their philosophy, one which objects to their art, one which finds them difficult of comprehension at all. This last criticism may easily be disposed of by admitting it is in part true. The mind whose highest reaches of poetic inspiration are ministered unto by such simple and easily understandable lyrics as “Twinkle, twinkle, little star,” might not at once grasp the significance of the Parleying with George Bubb Dodington. Indeed, it may be surmised that some minds might sing upon the starry heights with Hegel and fathom the equivalence of being and non-being, and yet be led into a slough of despond by this same cantankerous George.