Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

VI

CLASSIC SURVIVALS

Before passing in review Browning’s treatment of classical subjects as compared with the other great poets of the nineteenth century, it will be interesting to take a glimpse at his choice of subject-matter in general.

To compare Browning’s choice of subject-matter with that of other English poets is to strike at the very root of his position in the chain of literary development. Subject-matter is by no means simple in its nature, but as a musical sound is composed of vibrations within vibrations, so it is made up of the complex relations of body and spirit—the mere external facts of the story are blended with such philosophical undercurrent, or dramatic motif, or unfolding of the hidden springs of action as the poet is able to insinuate into it.

However far back one penetrates in the history of poetry, poets will be found depending largely upon previous sources, rather than upon their own creative genius, for the body of their subject-matter, until the question presents itself with considerable force as to who could have been the mysterious first poet who supplied plots to the rest of mankind. Conjecture is obliged to play a part here, as it does wherever human origins are in question. Doubtless, this first poet was no separate individual, but simply the elements man and nature, through whose action and reaction upon each other grew up story-forms, evidently compounded of human customs, and observed natural phenomena such as those we find in the great Hindu, Greek, and Teutonic classics, and which thus crystallized became great well-springs of inspiration for future generations of poets.

Each new poet, however, who is worthy of the name, sets up his own particular interplay with man and nature; and however much he may be indebted for his inspiration to past products of this universal law of action and reaction, he is bound to use them or interpret them in a manner colored by his own personal and peculiar relations with the universe.

In so doing he supplies the more important spiritual side of subject-matter and becomes in very truth the poet or maker, to that extent at least which Browning himself lays down as the province of art—namely, to arrange,

“Dissociate, redistribute, interchange
Part with part: lengthen, broaden
... simply what lay loose
At first lies firmly after, what design
Was faintly traced in hesitating line
Once on a time grows firmly resolute
Henceforth and evermore.”

Sometimes the poet’s power of arranging and redistributing and interchanging carries him upward into the realm of ideas alone, among which his imagination plays in absolute freedom; he throws over the results of man’s past dallyings with Nature and makes his own terms with her, and the result is an approach to absolute creation.

Except in the case of lyric poetry the instances where there have been no suggestions as to subject-matter are rare in comparison with those where the subject-matter has been derived from some source.