Browning could not go through the same phase of development, for in him the intellectual element from the first was even abnormally prominent. Yet in Browning too the influence of the time is felt. Christmas Eve and Easter Day (1850) handles topics to which he is perpetually recurring; but in it they are seen in a new light. The poet had heard the noise of the Tractarian controversy, and in Christmas Eve he passes in review the three principal phases of contemporary opinion regarding religion,—the evangelical, represented by the Nonconformist Chapel, the Catholic, represented by Rome, and the critical, represented by the German professor in his lecture-room. It is significant that while Browning can accept neither of the two former, he prefers both to the third. Both are intellectually indefensible, yet in both the vital thing, love, is present, while it is not to be found in the lecture-room. Both ‘poison the air for healthy breathing,’ but the critic ‘leaves no air to poison.’ There is throughout the poem an unquestionable bias towards finding as much true as will by any means pass muster with the intellect. Long afterwards, in La Saisiaz (1878), Browning handled the same problems in a more boldly speculative spirit, though still with the same bias. The difference is largely due to time; for before the date of La Saisiaz Browning had adopted a method more philosophical than artistic. But partly, perhaps, it was due to his wife, who was alive when Christmas Eve was written, and dead long before La Saisiaz.
In the period between these two poems the same problems were frequently in Browning’s mind, and no section of his work is richer in thought and poetic beauty than that which expresses them. In Karshish, with its vivid realisation of the mind of a thoughtful heathen longing for a faith, in A Death in the Desert, where the St. John is rather a man of the age of Strauss than of the first century, in The Pope and in Rabbi Ben Ezra, we have Browning’s deepest treatment of the problems which interested him most, and we have not that sacrifice of poetry to philosophy which mars La Saisiaz. We may say that about this time Browning discovered the vital interest of his generation, and discovered also where his own strength lay. The effect is seen in the uniform excellence of his work. The publications of the twenty years between 1850 and 1870, taken as a whole, certainly surpass what he had done before or what he did afterwards. Men and Women (1855) has been probably the most popular and the most widely read of all his writings; Dramatis Personæ (1864) is even richer in poetry, but has been commonly felt to be more difficult in thought; while The Ring and the Book (1868-1869) is by almost all competent judges pronounced his masterpiece.
The plan of The Ring and the Book, whereby the same story is told ten times over from ten different points of view, is defensible only on the ground that it succeeds. Nearly half the poem is hardly worth reading; yet the other half so splendidly redeems it that The Ring and the Book ranks among the great poems of modern times. The pictures of Caponsacchi, of Guido, of Pompilia and of the Pope are all great. Guido has the interest, unique in this poem, of appearing twice; and there is no better illustration of the subtlety of Browning’s thought than the difference between the Count, plausible, supple and polished, pleading for his life, and the man Guido, stripped of all but bare humanity, condemned to death, first desperately petitioning, then tearing off the veil of hypocrisy and uttering his terrible truths both about himself and the messengers who bear his sentence. Pompilia is Browning’s most perfect female character; but, though a beautiful creation, she illustrates one of the defects in his dramatic art. She speaks Browning’s speech, and she thinks his thought. Simple child as she is, there is a depth of philosophy in her utterances that is not in strict keeping with her character; and she, like all Browning’s men and women, uses the abrupt vivid language of the poet. Notwithstanding his almost passionate repudiation of the idea, Browning is a self-revealing poet; and nowhere does he reveal himself more than in the Pope, the greatest character in The Ring and the Book. In him the resemblance to Browning himself does not matter, it rather adds a new interest. The mind can conceive and picture nothing higher than its own ideal best; and the Pope is Browning’s ideal man, great in intellect, in morals and in faith. In two other cases, Rabbi Ben Ezra and A Death in the Desert, Browning has given similar glimpses of his own ideal, but they are less full than the view we get in The Pope.
To Browning’s middle period belong likewise many of his love-poems, and these are unique in the English language. Others, like Shakespeare and Burns and Shelley, have given a more purely captivating expression to the ardour of love; no one else has so worked out its philosophy. Not that Browning’s poems are deficient in feeling; the expressions of his own love for his wife, ‘O lyric love’ and One Word More, would suffice to refute such a criticism. But he prefers to take an aspect of passion and to explain it by the way of thought. He is analytical. The best example is James Lee’s Wife, which goes through a whole drama of passion, and might be described, like Tennyson’s Maud, as ‘a lyrical mono-drama.’ This, for good or evil, is another method from that of ‘Take, oh take those lips away,’ or ‘I arise from dreams of thee,’ or ‘Of a’ the airts.’ There is both gain and loss in Browning’s way of treatment. On the one hand, the lyric strain is less pure. If poetry ought to be ‘simple, sensuous and impassioned,’ and it has been generally thought that lyric poetry in particular should be so, then is Browning’s less in harmony with the ideal. On the other hand, because his is a new way Browning impresses the reader with his originality; and because it is a thoughtful way he has a wide range. Moreover, it is a purifying and ennobling way. No poet free, as Browning is, from the taint of asceticism has ever treated the passion of love in a manner so little physical as he. There are in his works errors of taste that cause a shudder; but they are not here.
It was likewise during this period that Browning was at his dramatic best. Nearly all his best pieces are dramatic in conception, though sometimes, as in the love-poems, we are confined to single aspects of character. Not to speak of the great figures of The Ring and the Book, there is ample variety in Men and Women and in Dramatis Personæ. There are few figures more clearly drawn or more easily remembered than Andrea del Sarto; and My Last Duchess is equally fine. In these two pieces Browning has succeeded better than elsewhere in keeping himself in the background. Fra Lippo Lippi has likewise the stamp of dramatic truth, and is rich in humour; and Bishop Blougram is at once an excellent character, and, though a satirical conception, the mouthpiece of some serious thought.
In the last twenty years of his life Browning, on the whole, appears at his worst. We have seen how the development of Tennyson, though not unattended with loss, carried with it much compensating gain. There are some indications that Tennyson felt the influence of his great contemporary. The metrical effects of his later poems, as well as the studies of character, are sometimes suggestive of Browning. It would have been well if Browning had in turn borrowed a few hints from Tennyson; but unfortunately he went steadily along his own course, bringing into ever greater prominence characteristics that rather needed repression. He should have nourished the artistic rather than the intellectual element. Instead, the former dwindled and the latter grew; and some of his later writings may be not unfairly described as merely treatises in verse. Such is Fifine at the Fair (1872); such is La Saisiaz (1878); such are many parts of Ferishtah’s Fancies (1884), and of the Parleyings with Certain People of Importance (1887). Such too is Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau (1871); for there the dramatic conception of Louis Napoleon is smothered beneath the arguments of the Saviour of Society. In all of these the philosophy overloads the poetry, a state of matters all the less satisfactory because the philosophy itself is not so sound as that of the earlier periods.
There is nevertheless some fine work belonging to this late period. The translations from the Greek are interesting; but their value is outweighed by that of the beautiful romance of Balaustion, in which they are set, and by the discussion of the principles of art in Aristophanes’ Apology (1875). Still better is The Inn Album (1875), remarkable for the magnificent character of the heroine, and for some of the most powerful reasoning to be found in Browning’s works. His last volume, Asolando (1889), will always have a special interest for its publication coincidently with his death; and it illustrates how his favourite ideas remained fixed to the end. There is nothing more characteristic of him than the thought that evil is necessary to the evolution of good. We can trace this all through his work. It is present in Sordello, where we find evil described as ‘the scheme by which, through ignorance, good labours to exist;’ and the poet even modifies the prayer, ‘Lead us not into temptation,’ because, if we are strong enough to overcome it, the temptation will only do us good. It is indeed Bishop Blougram whom he causes to speak of ‘the blessed evil;’ but Browning could consistently have used the phrase himself. Nowhere is this doctrine, at first so strange, yet so suggestive, more fully and clearly expressed than in the poem Rephan in Asolando. Earth is superior to Rephan just because evil blended with good is better than ‘a neutral best,’ and it is progress to move from the sphere where wrong is impossible to one where through the risk of evil, and often through evil itself, a higher good may be attained.
Browning’s last word to the world, the epilogue to Asolando, is most distinctive of his style and tone of thought. He held throughout a steady optimism, all the more cheering because it is the optimism of a man of wide knowledge of the world, and one who has looked evil in the face. The note is never clearer than in the epilogue, where he describes himself as
‘One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.
‘No, at noonday in the bustle of man’s work-time
Greet the unseen with a cheer!
Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be,
Strive and thrive! Cry, “Speed,—fight on, fare ever
There as here.”’
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
(1806-1861).