The kind of poetry to which I refer is one which is frequent in Browning, and which, in fact, has often been regarded as not poetry at all—I mean such utterly unpretentious, prosaic, uncouth, rough, or at times even grotesque verse as we find in poems like Bishop Blougram's Apology, Mr. Sludge the Medium, Old Pictures in Florence, Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha, much of The Ring and the Book, and Browning's later work generally. Such verse produces the effect of an exact reproduction of the actual. It is so realistic that it seems at times lacking in art.
No work which is an exact, or nearly exact, reproduction of the actual can be a work of art. A work of art is based on man's experience of what is, but is always modified and altered by his conception of what ought to be.
It was here that Wordsworth failed. His realistic poetry is too close to the actual. The intensely realistic effect of Browning's poems is an illusion; otherwise his claim to be a poetic artist disappears in so far as these poems are concerned.
I wish to indicate the nature of these effects, and to inquire how far Browning was anticipated by Wordsworth.
Wordsworth was perhaps the chief representative of the Romantic School—the title given to the group of poets who dominated English Literature at the commencement of the nineteenth century. The spirit of the age to which their work gave expression was one of question and revolt, the spirit which found its most remarkable political expression in the French Revolution. Question of established beliefs, revolt against established rules and conventions, was the keynote of literary as well as of social and political life.
The attitude of the Romantic School is indicated by its name. Romance is that element in literature which appeals to the sense of the marvellous in man, which awakens his capacity for wonder. In the eighteenth century, under the régime of Pope and the Classical School, wonder had been dead. It was an age of acceptance and submission; acceptance of certain definite conventions, submission to certain fixed rules. Correctness was more desired than imagination, and polish than originality.
It was against the barren conventions and narrow outlook of the Classical School that Wordsworth and his fellows revolted. The spirit of wonder toward Nature and toward Man sprang into new life.
My meaning will be illustrated by the following lines:
A primrose by a river's brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more.
They might have been written of Pope. What was the primrose to Wordsworth?