Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

The writer of the century whose experience as a novelist almost paralleled that of Browning as poet was Meredith. Because of his psychological analysis and the so-called obscurity of his style, he waited many years for recognition and finally was accepted as one of the most remarkable novelists of the age. His poetry, showing similar tendencies, and overshadowed by his novels, has not yet emerged into the light of universal appreciation. One finds it even ignored altogether in the most recent books of English literature, yet he is the author of one of the most remarkable series of sonnets in the English language, “Modern Love,” presenting, as it does, a vivid picture of domestic decadence which forms a strange contrast to Rossetti’s sonnets, “The House of Life,” indicating how many and various have been the forces at work during the nineteenth century in the disintegrating and molding of social ideals. Meredith writes of “Hiding the Skeleton”.

“At dinner she is hostess, I am host.
Went the feast ever cheerfuller? She keeps
The topic over intellectual deeps
In buoyancy afloat. They see no ghost.
With sparkling surface-eyes we ply the ball:
It is in truth a most contagious game;
Hiding the Skeleton shall be its name.
Such play as this the devils might appall,
But here’s the greater wonder; in that we,
Enamor’d of our acting and our wits,
Admire each other like true hypocrites.
Warm-lighted glances, Love’s Ephemeral,
Shoot gayly o’er the dishes and the wine.
We waken envy of our happy lot.
Fast sweet, and golden, shows our marriage-knot.
Dear guests, you now have seen Love’s corpse-light shine!”

Rossetti writes “Lovesight”:

“When do I see thee most, beloved one?
When in the light the spirits of mine eyes
Before thy face, their altar, solemnize
The worship of that Love through thee made known?
Or when, in the dusk hours (we two alone),
Close-kiss’d and eloquent of still replies
Thy twilight—hidden glimmering visage lies,
And my soul only sees thy soul its own?
O love, my love! if I no more should see
Thyself, nor on the earth the shadow of thee,
Nor image of thine eyes in any spring,—
How then should sound upon Life’s darkening slope,
The ground-whirl of the perish’d leaves of Hope,
The wind of Death’s imperishable wing?”

Browning’s criticism of painting was evidently much influenced by the pre-Raphaelites. Their admiration for the painters who preceded Raphael, revealing as it did to them an art not satisfied with itself, but reaching after higher things, and earnestly seeking to interpret nature and human life, is echoed in his “Old Pictures in Florence,” which was written but six years after Hunt, Millais, and Rossetti formed their brotherhood. In poetry, they did not eschew classical subjects, as Browning did for the most part, but they treated these subjects in a romantic spirit, and so removed them from the sort of strictures that Browning made upon the perfection of Greek art.

From this summary of the chief lines of literary development in the nineteenth century it will be seen, not only what a marvelous age it has been for the flowering of individualism in literary invention, but how Browning has surpassed all the other poets of note in the wideness of his departure from accepted standards, and how helpless the earlier critics were in the face of this departure, because of their dependence always upon critical shibboleths—in other words, of principles not sufficiently universal—as their means of measuring a poet’s greatness. Tennyson and the pre-Raphaelites won their popularity sooner among critics because they followed logically in the line of development inaugurated by the earlier poets, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, etc., whose poetry had already done some good work in breaking down the school of Dryden and Pope, though it succeeded only in erecting another standard not sufficiently universal to include Browning. The evolution of art forms, a principle so clearly understood, as we have shown by Browning, has never become a guiding one with critics, though Mr. Gosse in his “Modern English Literature” has expressed a wish that the principle of evolution might be adapted to criticism. He has evidently felt how hopeless is the task of appraising poets by the old individualistic method, which, as he says, has been in favor for at least a century. It possesses, he declares, considerable effectiveness in adroit hands, but is, after all, an adaptation of the old theory of the unalterable type, merely substituting for the one authority of the ancients an equal rigidity in a multitude of isolated modern instances. For this inflexible style of criticism he proposes that a scientific theory shall be adopted which shall enable us at once to take an intelligent pleasure in Pope and in Wordsworth, in Spenser and in Swift. He writes:

“Herbert Spencer has, with infinite courage, opened the entire world of phenomena to the principles of evolution, but we seem slow to admit them into the little province of æsthetics. We cling to the individualist manner, to that intense eulogy which concentrates its rays on the particular object of notice and relegates all others to proportional obscurity. There are critics of considerable acumen and energy who seem to know no other mode of nourishing a talent or a taste than that which is pursued by the cultivators of gigantic gooseberries. They do their best to nip off all other buds, that the juices of the tree of fame may be concentrated on their favorite fruit. Such a plan may be convenient for the purposes of malevolence, and in earlier times our general ignorance of the principles of growth might well excuse it. But it is surely time that we should recognize only two criteria of literary judgment. The first is primitive, and merely clears the ground of rubbish; it is, Does the work before us, or the author, perform what he sets out to perform with a distinguished skill in the direction in which his powers are exercised? If not, he interests the higher criticism not at all; but if yes, then follows the second test: Where, in the vast and ever-shifting scheme of literary evolution, does he take his place, and in what relation does he stand, not to those who are least like him, but to those who are of his own kith and kin?”

George Meredith

With such principles of criticism as this, the public would sooner be brought to an appreciation of all that is best worth while in literature, instead of being taken, as it too often is, upon a wrong scent to worship at the shrine of the Nokes and Stokes, who simply print blue and eat the turtles.