Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

To the present writer this seems simply like a confession on Courthope’s part that he was unable to perceive in Browning the elements of the Universal which are most assuredly there, and which were fully recognized by a Scotch writer, Dawson, at the same time that Courthope was questioning his power to hold coming generations.

“The fashions of the world may change,” writes Dawson, “and the old doubts may wear themselves out and sink like shadows out of sight in the morning of a stronger faith; but even so the world will still turn to the finer poems of Browning for intellectual stimulus, for the purification of pity and of pathos, for the exaltation of hope.

“Or if the darkness still thickens, all the more will men turn to this strong man of the race, who has wrestled and prevailed; who has illumined with imaginative insight the deepest problems of the ages; who has made his poetry not merely the vehicle of pathos, passion, tenderness, fancy, and imagination, but also of the most robust and masculine thought. He has written lyrics which must charm all who love, epics which must move all who act, songs which must cheer all who suffer, poems which must fascinate all who think; and when ‘Time hath sundered shell from pearl,’ however stern may be the scrutiny, it may be said that there will remain enough of Robert Browning to give him rank among the greatest of poets, and secure for him the sure reward of fame.”

But it is to France we must go for the surest authoritative note—that land of the Academy and correct taste which hums and hahs over its own Immortals in proverbially unpenetrating conclave. No less a man than Taine declares that Browning stands first among English poets—“the most excellent where excellence is greatness, the most gifted where genius is a common dower.”

While there can be no doubt that Browning outdid all the other great poets of his time in “azure feats,” in developing an absolutely self-centered ideal of art, which is yet so true to the ultimate tendencies of the century, indeed to those of all time, for evolution and democracy are henceforth the torch-bearers of the human soul—each of the other half-dozen or so greatest poets had distinct and independent individualities which were more nearly the outcome of the current tendencies of the time than Browning’s.

Alfred Tennyson

Tennyson was equally familiar with the thought and much more familiar with the politics of the day, but there is an infinite difference in their attitude. Browning, if I may be excused for quoting one of Shakespeare’s most abused phrases, rides over the century like a “naked new-born babe striding the blast.” Tennyson ambles through it on a palfrey which has a tendency to flounder into every slough of despond it comes to. This may seem to be putting it rather too strongly, but is it not true? Browning has the vision belonging to the latest child of time. He never follows; he leads. With his eyes fixed upon a far-off future where man shall be man at last, he faces every problem with the intrepidity of an Œdipus confronting the Sphynx. The mystery of its riddles has no terrors for him. It is given to him as to few others to see the ineffable beauty of life’s mystery, the promise it holds out of eternal joy. While he frequently discourses upon the existence of evil, he never for a moment admits any doubt into his own utmost soul of the beneficent part evil is meant to play in the molding of human destinies. Mr. Santayana has called him a barbarous poet. In a certain sense he is, if to be born among the first on a new plane of psychic perception where of no account become the endless metaphysical meanderings of the intellect, which cry “proof, proof, where there can be no proof,” is barbarous. It was doubtless largely owing to this power of vision reminding us again somewhat of the child’s in Maeterlinck’s “Les Aveugles” which kept Browning from tinkering in the half-measures of the political leaders of his time. His plane is not unlike that of his own Lazarus, about whom the Arab physician says:

“The man is witless of the size, the sum,
The value in proportion of all things,
Or whether it be little or be much.
Discourse to him of prodigious armament
Assembled to besiege his city now,
And of the passing of a mule with gourds—
’Tis one! Then take it on the other side,
Speak of some trifling fact,—he will gaze rapt
With stupor at its very littleness,
(For as I see) as if in that indeed
He caught prodigious import, whole results;
And so will turn to us the bystanders
In ever the same stupor (note this point)
That we, too, see not with his opened eyes.”

The import of an event is everything. Large imports may lurk more surely in the awakening of some obscure soul than in the pageantry of law bringing a tardy and wholly inadequate measure of justice to humanity. Though Tennyson talks of the “far-off divine event” he has no burning conviction of it and does not ride toward it with triumph in his eye and flaming joy in his soul. As he ambles along, steeping himself in the science of the time, its revelations make him nervous; he falls into doubt from which he can only extricate himself by holding on to belief, a very different thing from Browning’s vision.