Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

His fate has been somewhat different from that of most poets. When his “Atalanta in Calydon” was published it was received with enthusiasm, but the volumes overweighted with eroticism which followed caused a fierce controversy, and many have not even yet discovered that this was only one phase of Swinburne’s art, and that, unfortunate as it is in many respects, it was a phase of the century’s life which must find its expression in art if that life is to be completely given, and that it was a passing phase Swinburne himself proved in the development of other phases shown in his interest in current political situations, his enthusiasm for Italy and his later expressions of high moral ideals, as well as in a quasi-religious attitude of mind, not so far from that of Emerson, himself, in which strong emphasis is placed upon the importance of the individual, and upon the unity of God and man.

There is moral courage and optimism in the face of doubt of a high order in the following lines:

—“Are ye not weary and faint not by the way
Seeing night by night devoured of day by day,
Seeing hour by hour consumed in sleepless fire?
Sleepless; and ye too, when shall ye, too sleep?
—We are weary in heart and head, in hands and feet,
And surely more than all things sleep were sweet,
Than all things save the inexorable desire
Which whoso knoweth shall neither faint nor weep.
“Is this so sweet that one were fain to follow?
Is this so sure when all men’s hopes are hollow,
Even this your dream, that by much tribulation
Ye shall make whole flawed hearts, and bowed necks straight?
—Nay though our life were blind, our death were fruitless,
Not therefore were the whole world’s high hope rootless;
But man to man, nation would turn to nation,
And the old life live, and the old great word be great.”

But Swinburne in his farthest reaches of pantheistic aspiration is to be seen in a poem like “Hertha”:

“I am that which began;
Out of me the years roll;
Out of me God and man;
I am equal and whole;
God changes, and man, and the form of them bodily; I am the soul.
“The tree many-rooted
That swells to the sky
With frondage red-fruited
The life-tree am I;
In the buds of your lives is the sap of my leaves; ye shall live and not die.
“But the Gods of your fashion
That take and that give,
In their pity and passion
That scourge and forgive,
They are worms that are bred in the bark that falls off; they shall die and not live.
“My own blood is what stanches
The wounds in my bark:
Stars caught in my branches
Make day of the dark,
And are worshipped as suns till the sunrise shall tread out their fires as a spark.”

Morris’s interpretation of pre-Raphaelite tenets took him into mediæval legend and the classics for his subject matter. In his first volume, “The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems,” he came into competition with Tennyson, who was at the same time issuing his Arthurian legends. The polish of Tennyson’s verse, as well as its symbolical meaning for the time, was more acceptable than the actual return to the nature of the fifteenth century, and this the first volume from a pre-Raphaelite was hardly noticed by the critics. Morris sulked within his literary tents for ten years before he again appeared, this time with “The Life and Death of Jason” (1867), which immediately became popular. Later came the “Earthly Paradise.” These tales, in verse noble and simple, in style recalling the tales of Chaucer, yet with a charm all their own, in which the real men and women of Chaucer give place to types, have been the delight of those who like to find in poetry a dreamland of romance where they may enjoy themselves far from the problems and toils of everyday life. He differs from all the other poets of this group in his lack of religious hope. His mind was of the type that could not stand up against the undermining influences of the age: hence world-weariness and despair are the constantly recurring notes.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Mrs. Browning far outdistanced her husband in the early days in popularity. She pleased the people by her social enthusiasm, a characteristic more marked in her verse than in that of any of the poets mentioned. The critics have found many faults in her style, mainly those growing out of an impassioned nature which carried her at times beyond the realm of perfectly balanced art. But even an English critic of the conservatism of Edmund Gosse could at last admit that “In some of her lyrics and more rarely in her sonnets she rose to heights of passionate humanity which place her only just below the great poets of her country.”

Contemporary criticism of “Aurora Leigh,” which was certainly a departure both in form and matter from the accepted standards, was, on the whole, just. The Quarterly Review in 1862 said of it: “This ‘Aurora Leigh’ is a great poem. It is a wonder of art. It will live. No large audience will it have, but it will have audience; and that is more than most poems have. To those who know what poetry is and in what struggles it is born—how the great thoughts justify themselves—this work will be looked upon as one of the wonders of the age.” Mrs. Browning resembles her husband in the fact that she does not fit into the main line of evolution of the romantic school, but is an individual manifestation of the romantic spirit, showing almost as great freedom from the trammels of accepted romanticism as Browning does.