Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

There are comparatively few cases where he has taken a complete story and developed its spiritual possibilities without much change in external detail, but how adequate his art was to such ends, “The Ring and the Book,” “Inn Album,” “Two Poets of Croisic,” “Red Cotton Nightcap Country,” the historical dramas of “Strafford,” and “King Victor and King Charles” fully prove, including, as they do, some of his finest masterpieces.

History and story have furnished many of the incidents which he has worked up in his dramatic lyrics and romances like “Clive,” “Hervé Riel,” “Donald,” etc. There remains, however, a large number of poems containing some of Browning’s loveliest work in which the subject-matter is, as far as we know, the creation of pure, unadulterated fancy. “A Blot in the ’Scutcheon,” “In a Balcony,” “Colombe’s Birthday,” “Childe Roland,” “James Lee’s Wife” are some of them. Even in this rapid survey of the field the fact is patent that Browning’s range of subject-matter is infinitely wider and his method of developing it far more varied than has been that of any other English poet. He seems the first to have completely shaken himself free from the trammels of classic or mediæval literature. There are no echoes of Arthur and his Knights in his poetry, the shadows of the Greek gods and goddesses exert no spell—except in the few instances when he deliberately chose a Greek subject.

The fact that Browning was so free from classical influence in the great body of his work as compared with the other chief poets of the nineteenth century gives an especial interest to those poems in which he chose classical themes for his subjects. There are not more than ten all told, and one of these is a translation, yet they represent some of his finest and most original work, for Browning could not touch a classical theme without infusing into it that grasp and insight peculiar to his own genius.

His first and most conventionally classical poem is the fragment in “Men and Women,” “Artemis Prologizes,” written in 1842. It was to have been the introduction to a long poem telling of the mad love of Hippolytus for a nymph of Artemis, after that goddess had brought about his resuscitation. It has been suggested by Mr. Boynton in an interesting paper that Browning shows traces of the influence of Landor in his poetry. This fragment certainly furnishes argument for this opinion, though it has a strength of diction along with its Greek severity and terseness of style which leads to the conclusion that the influence came from the fountain head of Greek poetry itself rather than through the lesser muse of this nineteenth-century Greek.

The poem is said to have been begun on a sick-bed and when the poet recovered he had forgotten or lost interest in his plans. This is to be regretted for if he had continued as he began, the poem would have stood unique in his work as a true survival of Greek subject wedded with classical form and style, and would certainly have challenged comparison with the best work done in this field by Landor or Swinburne, who tell over the classical stories or even invent new episodes, but, when all is said, do not write as if they were actually themselves Greeks.

There is no other instance in Browning of such a survival. In his other poems on Greek subjects it is Browning bringing Greek life to our ken with wonderful distinctness, but doing it according to his own accustomed poetical methods, or, as in “Ixion,” a Greek story has been used as a symbol for the inculcating of a philosophy which is largely Browning’s own.

In spite of the fact that he has turned to Greece so seldom for inspiration, his Greek poems range from such stirring pictures of Greek life and feeling as one gets in the splendid dramatic idyl “Pheidippides,” based on a historical incident, through the imaginary “Cleon,” in which is found the sublimated essence of Greek philosophical thought at the time of Christ—thought, weary of law and beauty, longing for a fresh inspiration, knowing not what, and unable to perceive it in the new ideal of love being taught by the Christians—to “Aristophanes’ Apology,” in which the Athens of his day, with its literary and political factions, is presented with a force and analysis which place it second only to “The Ring and the Book.”

This poem taken, with Balaustion, gives the reader not only a comprehensive view of the historical atmosphere of the time but indirectly shows the poet’s own attitude toward the literary war between Euripides and Aristophanes. So different are Browning’s Greek poems from all other poems upon classical subjects that it will be interesting to dwell upon the most important of them at greater length than has been deemed necessary in the case of the more widely known and read of the poems.

“Cleon” links itself with the nineteenth century, because of its dealing with the problem of immortality, a problem which has been ever present in the mind of the century. Cleon has, beside that type of synthetic mind which belongs to a ripe phase of civilization. Though he is a Greek and a pagan, he stretches hands across the centuries to men of the type of Morris or Matthew Arnold. He is the latest child of his own time, the heir of all the ages during which Greece had developed its æsthetic perfection, discovered the inadequacy of its established religion, come through its philosophers and poets to a perception of the immortality of the soul, and sunk again to a skepticism which had no vision of personal immortality at least, though among the stoics there were some who believed in an absorption into divine being. Cleon would fain believe in personal immortality but cannot, and, like Matthew Arnold, believes in facing death imperturbably.

In “Balaustion’s Adventure” a historical tradition is used as the central episode of the poem, but life and romance are given to it by the creation of the heroine, Balaustion, a young Greek woman whose fascinating personality dominates the whole poem. She was a Rhodian, else her freedom of action and speech might seem too modern, but among the islands of Greece, at least at the time of Euripides, there still survived that attitude toward woman which we see reflected in the Homeric epics. Away from Athens, too, Euripides was a power; hence his defence is put into the mouth of one not an Athenian. She had saved a shipload of Athenian sympathizers by reciting Euripides when they were in danger from the hostile Syracusans.