Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

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 passage 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 passage in the third book the poet, speaking in person, gives illustrations 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 passage referred to in the “Introduction to the Shelley 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 passage in “Sordello,” he realizes, as perhaps he did not at that time, when he was himself breaking away from Shelley’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 circumstance. Far more rarely it happens that either is found so decidedly prominent and superior as to be pronounced comparatively pure: while of the perfect shield, 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 passions, 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 assumed wholes into parts of independent and unclassed 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 illustration 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 shibboleths which every genius is bent upon disregarding. When Spenser was inventing his stanza, verse critics were abject in their worship of hexameters, and their hatred of bald rhymes. Though these sticklers for classical 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 God’s name may not we as else the Greeks have the kingdom of our own language, and measure our accents by the sound, reserving quantity 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, shielded by any sort of shibboleth 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 mélange of nonsense, cockneyism, 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 classical and introduced with a rich musicalness that Shelley himself might have envied. The reminiscences of Shelley 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.