On spirits that had long been dead,
Spirits dried up and closely furled,
The freshness of the early world.”
But precious as such a service is and ever must be, it does not fill the whole need of man’s heart. There are times and moods in which it seems pale and ineffectual. The very contrast between its serenity, its assurance, its disembodied passion, its radiant asceticism, and the mixed lights, the broken music, the fluctuating faith, the confused conflict of actual life, seems like a discouragement. It calls us to go into a retreat, that we may find ourselves and renew our power to live. But there are natures which do not easily adapt themselves to a retreat,—natures which crave stimulus more than consolation, and look for a solution of life’s problem that can be worked out while they are in motion. They do not wish, perhaps they are not able, to withdraw themselves from active life even for the sake of seeing it more clearly.
Wordsworth’s world seems to them too bare, too still, too monotonous. The rugged and unpopulous mountains, the lonely lakes, the secluded vales, do not attract them as much as the fertile plain with its luxuriant vegetation, the whirling city, the crowded highways of trade and pleasure. Simplicity is strange to them; complexity is their native element. They want music, but they want it to go with them in the march, the parade, the festal procession. The poet for them must be in the world, though he need not be altogether of it. He must speak of the rich and varied life of man as one who knows its artificial as well as its natural elements,—palaces as well as cottages, courts as well as sheep-folds. Art and politics and literature and science and churchmanship and society,—all must be familiar to him, material to his art, significant to his interpretation. His message must be modern and militant. He must not disregard doubt and rebellion and discord, but take them into his poetry and transform them. He must front
“The cloud of mortal destiny,”
and make the most of the light that breaks through it. Such a poet is Robert Browning; and his poetry is the direct answer to at least one side of the modern Zeitgeist, restless, curious, self-conscious, energetic, the active, questioning spirit.
I
Browning’s poetic work-time covered a period of about fifty-six years, (1833-1889,) and during this time he published over thirty volumes of verse, containing more than two hundred and thirty poems, the longest, The Ring and the Book, extending to nearly twenty-one thousand lines. It was an immense output, greater I think, in mass, than that of almost any other English poet except Shakespeare. The mere fact of such productiveness is worth noting, because it is a proof of the activity of the poet’s mind, and also because it may throw some light upon certain peculiarities in the quality of his work.
Browning not only wrote much himself, he was also the cause of much writing in others. Commentaries, guide-books, handbooks, and expositions have grown up around his poetry so fast that the vines almost hide the trellis. The Browning Literature now demands not merely a shelf, but a whole case to itself in the library. It has come to such a pass that one must choose between reading the books that Browning wrote and the books that other people have written about Browning. Life is too short for both.