Shelburne Essays, Third Series

by Paul Elmer More

It might seem that enough had been said to explain why Browning is popular. The attitude of the ordinary intelligent reader toward him is, I presume, easily stated. A good many of Browning's mystifications, Sordello, for one, he simply refuses to bother himself with. Le jeu, he says candidly, ne vaut pas les chandelles. Other works he goes through with some impatience, but with an amount of exhilarating surprise sufficient to compensate for the annoyances. If he is trained in literary distinctions, he will be likely to lay down the book with the exclamation: C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la poésie! And probably such a distinction will not lessen his admiration; for it cannot be asserted too often that the reading public to-day is ready to accede to any legitimate demand on its analytical understanding, but that it responds sluggishly, or only spasmodically, to that readjustment of the emotions necessary for the sustained enjoyment of such a poem as Paradise Lost. But I suspect that we have not yet touched the real heart of the problem. All this does not explain that other phase of Browning's popularity, which depends upon anything but the common sense of the average reader; and, least of all, does it account for the library of books, of which Professor Herford's is the latest example. There is another public which craves a different food from the mere display of human nature; it is recruited largely by the women's clubs and by men who are unwilling or afraid to hold their minds in a state of self-centred expectancy toward the meaning of a civilisation shot through by threads of many ages and confused colours; it is kept in a state of excitation by critics who write lengthily and systematically of "joy in soul." Now there is a certain philosophy which is in a particular way adapted to such readers and writers. Its beginnings, no doubt, are rooted in the naturalism of Rousseau and the eighteenth century, but the flower of it belongs wholly to our own age. It is the philosophy whose purest essence may be found distilled in Browning's magical alembic, and a single drop of it will affect the brain of some people with a strange giddiness.

And here again I am tempted to abscond behind those blessed words Platonische Ideen and Begriffe, universalia ante rem and universalia post rem, which offer so convenient an escape from the difficulty of meaning what one says. It would be so easy with those counters of German metaphysicians and the schoolmen to explain how it is that Browning has a philosophy of generalised notions, and yet so often misses the form of generalisation special to the poet. The fact is his philosophy is not so much inherent in his writing as imposed on it from the outside. His theory of love does not expand like Dante's into a great vision of life wherein symbol and reality are fused together, but is added as a commentary on the action or situation. And on the other hand he does not accept the simple and pathetic incompleteness of life as a humbler poet might, but must try with his reason to reconcile it with an ideal system:

Over the ball of it,
Peering and prying,
How I see all of it,
Life there, outlying!
Roughness and smoothness,
Shine and defilement,
Grace and uncouthness:
One reconcilement.

Yet "ideal" and "reconcilement" are scarcely the words; for Browning's philosophy, when detached, as it may be, from its context, teaches just the acceptance of life in itself as needing no conversion into something beyond its own impulsive desires:

Let us not always say,
"Spite of this flesh to-day
I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole!"
As the bird wings and sings,
Let us cry, "All good things
Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!"

Passion to Shakespeare was the source of tragedy; there is no tragedy, properly speaking, in Browning, for the reason that passion is to him essentially good. By sheer bravado of human emotion we justify our existence, nay—

We have to live alone to set forth well
God's praise.

His notion of "moral strength," as Professor Santayana so forcibly says, "is a blind and miscellaneous vehemence."

But if all the passions have their own validity, one of them in particular is the power that moves through all and renders them all good:

In my own heart love had not been made wise
To trace love's faint beginnings in mankind,
To know even hate is but a mask of love's.