Reginald Bateman, Teacher and Soldier / A Memorial Volume of Selections from His Lectures and Other Writings

by Reginald Bateman

Let us analyse it. Whence did the difficulty arise? Evidently not from the language. It was from the fact that we did not know what went before; that from what is given us here, a mere scrap of experience, we had to construct the whole; and from the fact that we had to follow a sequence of thoughts suggested by circumstances unknown to us, instead of, as is usual in poetry, a series of actions or events which serve as a backbone or substructure for the thought.

Herein lie the two main difficulties of appreciating that large class of Browning poetry known under the heading, dramatic monologues.

They are dramatic because they are spoken not in the person of the author, but in that of some imaginary character, whose personality the author assumes, but they differ from drama, as it is generally understood, first, because they are monologues, not dialogues; secondly, the circumstances, occasions, and settings of the monologues, instead of being suggested at the outset, are only indicated from time to time, and have to be picked up as we go along; thirdly, we have to follow a sequence of thoughts without any help from accompanying events or actions; and lastly, we are given no information, except incidentally, as to what goes before and comes after.

In other dramatic monologues of Browning the problem becomes more complicated, first, from the fact that in most of them he attempts to reveal a character, not merely a psychological situation, as in A Woman's Last Word; secondly, from the extraordinary variety of the characters he attempts to present.

The characters into whose mouths Browning puts his poems are a very varied assortment. In one poem, perhaps, it is a Greek philosopher who speaks, in the next a modern English divine; now it is an Italian duke of the sixteenth century, and now an Italian patriot of the nineteenth century. Each of these personages has a definite atmosphere and a typical environment, and that atmosphere and environment we must construct for ourselves before we can appreciate the poem properly.

Take, for example, the two poems, Fra Lippo Lippi and Andrea del Sarto. Each of these deals not only with the character and some of the history of an individual Italian painter, but sets forth in addition a particular phase in the development of Italian art, and at the same time gives us an insight into Browning's theory of art. To appreciate these poems, then, we must know something of the history of the historic personages who are represented as speaking, something of the Italy of their time; we must know in outline at least something of the history of Italian art, and have some knowledge of the technicalities of painting. Very many of Browning's poems are concerned with periods and personages about whom the ordinary reader knows nothing, hence the absolute need of some sort of a commentary, or of constant recourse to an encyclopaedia in reading him.

There is another difficulty connected with Browning's favourite form, the dramatic monologue. Most of these poems are only scraps of experience; we get no information, except by hints, of what has gone before; we are equally left to guess what comes after. The problem before us is something like that of reconstructing a whole conversation of which we have overheard only a small part.

Again, many of the poems do not describe a series of events, but only a series of thoughts or reflections. Hence there is nothing or very little to guide us in grasping the connection between the various parts of the poem, and many of the poems have to be read and re-read many times before the meaning begins to dawn on us.

In A Woman's Last Word there is not a single difficult phrase. The whole difficulty arises from the fact that it is a scrap, and from the fact that it is a series of thoughts without any action to thread them together and to make them definite.

Browning's poems are sometimes difficult to read because the ideas which he is expressing are profound and difficult to grasp; but far more often they are difficult because of his extraordinary way of expressing perfectly simple and easy ideas.