Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats—
Both gorge. Who fished the murex up?
What porridge had John Keats?”
Sometimes the poem opens grotesquely, like Christmas Eve, and rises swiftly to a wonderful height of pure beauty and solemnity, dropping back into a grotesque at the end. But all this play of fancy must not be confused with the spirit of mockery or of levity. It is often characteristic of the most serious and earnest natures; it arises in fact from the restlessness of mind in the contemplation of evil, or from the perception of life’s difficulties and perplexities. Shakespeare was profoundly right in introducing the element of the grotesque into Hamlet, his most thoughtful tragedy. Browning is never really anything else but a serious thinker, passionately curious to solve the riddle of existence. Like his own Sordello he
“Gave to familiar things a face grotesque,
Only, pursuing through the mad burlesque,
A grave regard.”
We may sum up, then, what we have to say of Browning’s method and manner by recognizing that they belong together and have a mutual fitness and inevitableness. We may wish that he had attained to more lucidity and harmony of expression, but we should probably have had some difficulty in telling him precisely how to do it, and he would have been likely to reply with good humour as he did to Tennyson, “The people must take me as they find me.” If he had been less ardent in looking for subjects for his poetry, he might have given more care to the form of his poems. If he had cut fewer blocks, he might have finished more statues. The immortality of much of his work may be discounted by its want of perfect art,—the only true preservative of man’s handiwork. But the immortality of his genius is secure. He may not be ranked finally among the great masters of the art of poetry. But he certainly will endure as a mine for poets. They may stamp the coins more clearly and fashion the ornaments more delicately. But the gold is his. He was the prospector,—the first dramatic psychologist of modern life. The very imperfections of his work, in all its splendid richness and bewildering complexity, bear witness to his favourite doctrine that life itself is more interesting than art, and more glorious, because it is not yet perfect.
V
“The Glory of the Imperfect,”—that is a phrase which I read in a pamphlet by that fine old Grecian and noble Christian philosopher, George Herbert Palmer, many years ago. It seems to me to express the central meaning of Browning’s poetry.