Some eminent Victorians: Personal recollections in the world of art and letters

by J. Comyns Carr

At the time when I first met Tennyson, I think Robert Browning had won my larger admiration. I thought him then the greater poet of the two—I no longer think so now; and the very qualities which so strongly attracted me as a youth have since proved in themselves to be the source of my altered judgment. It seems like a paradox, but I believe it to be none the less true, that it is the intellectual quality in verse that first most strongly attracts the younger student of poetry. So at least it was in my case. The complexity of thought, even the obscurity of expression which marks so much of Browning’s work, had for me then the strongest fascination. That half-rebel note in his style, with its defiant scorn of all accepted models of musical form and rhythmical expression, was in itself an added allurement to the poet’s untiring intellectual agility of which the rugged verse was but the chosen garment. And although the spell he then exercised over my imagination still in some degree survives, I find myself now asking of poetry less and less for any ordered philosophy of life, and more and more for life itself. The most nobly directed gospel that seeks an altered world counts for little in a poet’s equipment beside the passionate vision of the world as it is with its unchanging heritage of joy and pain. So at least it seems to me now and, with my modified judgment as to what rightly constitutes the substantive part of poetry, has come an ever-growing delight in the formal beauty of its expression. The two elements are indeed indissolubly bound together. There is no high music in verse that is not linked with sense, no thought that is rightly a poet’s thought that may not find its fitting melody. And it is because Tennyson, despite his confessed limitations on the side of passion, more constantly than his fellows held fast to the true office of the poet, that he stands among them all as their undisputed master.

In every art the last word is simplicity. There is no phase of thought or feeling rightly admissible into the domain of poetry that the might of genius may not force to simple utterance. It is this which constitutes the final triumph of all the greatest wizards of our tongue, of Shakespeare as of Milton; of Wordsworth no less than of Keats. All of them found a way to wed the subtlest music with the simplest speech, striving with ever-increasing severity for that chastened perfection of form which stands as the last and the surest test of the presence of supreme poetic genius.

So much cannot be said of Browning. There is enough and to spare in the great body of his work to leave his position as a poet unassailed, but there is more to prove that, beside the purely poetic impulse, there were other forces working in his nature, which, in so far as they prevail, must tend to rob the result of that faultless music which alone

Hollyer

ROBERT BROWNING

From the painting by G. F. Watts, R.A., in the National Portrait Gallery.

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can give to verse its final right of survival. This is doubtless true also of Wordsworth, but in his case the good and the bad are easily separable, and the good at its best is flawless. But with Browning the conflicting elements of his genius are so closely locked together that the task of selection is not so easy, and the triumph, even when it has to be acknowledged, is not so secure.