Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

All great poets lead the ordinary mind to unfamiliar regions of knowledge and thereby to fresh planes of enjoyment. That Browning has outdone all other poets in this particular should be to his honor, not to his dispraise.

In one very marked direction, however, he is not a perfect exemplar of his own theories—that is, he is not always consistently dramatic. He belongs to that order of poets described by himself in the Shelley Introduction as neither completely subjective nor completely objective, but with the two faculties at times running in upon each other. He is often absolutely objective in his expression of a mood or a feeling, but the moment the mood takes upon it the tinge of thought we begin to feel Browning himself.

The fundamental principles upon which he bases his own solution of the problems of existence are seen to crop out, colored, it is true, by the personality of the speaker, but yet traceable to their source in the mental make up of Browning himself. It may well be that Browning has come so near to the ultimate truth discoverable by man in his fundamental principles that they are actually universal truths, to be found lying deep down at the roots of all more partial expressions, just as gravitation, conservation of energy, evolution underlie every phenomena of nature, and therefore when a Pope in “The Ring and the Book,” a Prince Hohenstiel-Swangau, a Bishop Blougram, a Cleon or a John in “The Death in the Desert,” give utterance to their views upon life, they are bound to touch from one or another angle the basic principles of life common to all humanity as well as to the poet—the center within us all where “truth abides in fulness.”

This would seem an even more complete fusing of the two faculties in one poet than that spoken of by Browning, where a poet would issue successive works, in some of them the one faculty and in some of them the other faculty being supreme.

That Browning was, to a certain extent, a poet of this third order of which he prophesied is true, for he has written a number of poems like “La Saisiaz,” “Reverie,” various of his prologues and epilogues which are purely subjective in content. There are also subjective passages in the midst of other poems, like those in “Sordello,” “Prince Hohenstiel,” the “Parleyings,” etc. If we place such a poem as “Reverie” side by side with “Fra Lippo Lippi” we see well-nigh perfect illustrations of the two faculties as they existed in the one poet, Browning. On the other hand, in those poems where the thought, as I have said, suggests Browning, in the speech of his characters he has something of the quality of what Browning calls the subjective poet of modern classification. “Gifted like the objective poet, with the fuller perception of nature and man, he is impelled to embody the thing he perceives, not so much with reference to the many below as to the One above him, the supreme intelligence which apprehends all things in their absolute truth, an ultimate view ever aspired to, if but partially attained, by the poet’s soul.”

Browning may be said to have carried to its flood tide the “Liberal Movement in English Literature,” as Courthope calls it, inaugurated at the dawn of the century by the Lake School, which reacted against the correct school of Dryden and Pope. Along with the earlier poets of the century he shared lack of appreciation at the hands of critics in general. The critics had been bred in the school of the eighteenth century, and naturally would be incapable of understanding a man whose thought was permeated with the doctrines of evolution, then an unknown quantity except to the elect in scientific circles, and not to become the possession of the thinking world at large until beyond the middle of the century; whose soul was full of the ardor of democracy, shown not only in his choice and treatment of subjects, but in his reckless independence of all the shibboleths of the past; and whose liberalness in the treatment of moral and religious problems was such as to scandalize many in an age when the law forbade that a man should marry his deceased wife’s sister, and when the Higher Criticism of the Bible had not yet migrated to England from Germany; and, finally, whose style was everything that was atrocious because entirely different from anything they had seen before.

The century had to grow up to him. It is needless to say that it did so. Just as out of the turmoil of conflicting scientific and religious thought has emerged a serene belief in man’s spiritual destiny, so out of the turmoil of conflicting schools of criticism has arisen a perception of the value of the new, the original, the different in art. Critics begin to apply the principles of evolution to their criticism as Browning applied it to his art, with the result that they no longer measure by past standards of art but by relating the art to the life of the time in its various manifestations, not forgetting that the poet or the dramatist may have a further vision of what is to come than any other man of his age.

The people first, for the most part, found out that here in Browning’s work was a new force, and calmly formed themselves into groups to study what manner of force it might be, regardless of the sneers of newspaperdom and conventional academies. And gradually to the few appreciative critics of the early days have been added one authoritative voice after another until the chorus of praise has become a large one, and Browning, though later than any great poet of the century, is coming into his own.

In a certain chart of English literature with which I am acquainted, wherein the poets are graphically represented in mountain ranges with peaks of various heights, Tennyson is shown as the towering peak of the Victorian Era, while Browning is a sturdy but much lower peak with a blunted top. This is quite symbolic of the general attitude toward Browning at the end of the century, for, with all the appreciation, there has been on the part of authority a disinclination to assign to him the chief place among the poets of the Victorian Era. Courthope, who most of the time preserves a remarkable reticence upon Browning, voices this general attitude in a remark ventured upon in one of his lectures in 1900. He says:

“No one who is capable of appreciating genius will refuse to admire the powers of this poet, the extent of his sympathy and interest in external things, the boldness of his invention, the energy of his analysis, the audacity of his experiments. But so absolutely does he exclude all consideration for the reader from his choice of subject, so arbitrarily, in his treatment of his themes, does he compel his audience to place themselves at his own point of view, that the life of his art depends entirely upon his own individuality. Should future generations be less inclined than our own to surrender their imagination to his guidance, he will not be able to appeal to them through that element of life which lies in the Universal.”