See, how she looks now, drest
In a sledging-cap and vest.
'Tis a huge fur cloak—
Like a reindeer's yoke
Falls the lappet along the breast:
Sleeves for her arms to rest,
Or to hang, as my love likes best.
These few examples will serve to show that the essential principles of Browning's realism and Wordsworth's are the same. Browning, like Wordsworth, claimed for poetry a greater licence both in subject matter and in form, but he went farther than Wordsworth in both. Wordsworth took for his new subjects the humble joys and sorrows of the poor—but all was fish that came to Browning's net. Any psychological situation, any out-of-the-way corner of human experience, became in his hands matter for poetry. Then as to form, Wordsworth merely refrained from the conventional language of poetry, but Browning boldly used language that was frankly unpoetical—uncouth, unmusical, rough, rhyming grotesquely, accented outrageously. Perhaps his most important advance on Wordsworth was in the use of the dramatic form—nearly all Browning's poems of the sort described are dramatic monologues—for when the speaker is professedly not the poet, we are less inclined to find an incongruity in unpoetical language. Browning, by adopting the dramatic form, gets at things from the subjective point of view, from the inside. Wordsworth tried to describe them objectively from the point of view of a spectator.
Browning, then, practically discovered a new poetical form which enabled him to bring within the scope of poetical treatment subjects never so treated before. He found a new field for poetry and found new forms to suit it. He entered land which Wordsworth had only beheld from afar, and which, indeed, Wordsworth never could have entered.
Browning saw that familiar objects, everyday doings and sayings, commonplace happenings which seem to the ordinary observer prosaic and barren, are, to the poet, pregnant with underlying emotion.
Ordinary poetry deals with the obviously poetical things, or converts the everyday things of life into poetry by depriving them of some of their actuality. Browning contrives to give us things as they are, with all the harshness and crudeness of real life, and yet to make us feel the underlying element of poetry. About his most brutally realistic poem, there is a subtle atmosphere of emotion.
Browning, like Shakespeare, dares to place side by side the grotesque, the beautiful, the tragic, the ludicrous. He can do it by virtue of his unassuming form. Take, for example, Old Pictures in Florence. There we get the dirt of the old streets, the very must and smell of the second-hand dealer's stores, the filthy canvas and peeling fresco, but we get also the tragedy of the wronged Old Masters, and a noble conception of the development of art.
In Bishop Blougram we get the wine, the nuts, the plausible conversation, but we get also the spectacle, pregnant with emotional possibilities, of two human midgets in the presence of the Almighty, the one daring lightly to compound with his Maker, the other lightly to deny Him.
The value of this inquiry, if it have any value, is to show that those poetical forms which are often assumed to be due to a radical defect in Browning's work as poetry, were really a deliberate artistic method, deliberate in the sense that Carlyle's style is deliberate. The style, with both Carlyle and Browning, is indeed the man, but each had to find the style which would express him best. Carlyle, in his early work, wrote like Macaulay; Browning, in his early work, wrote like Shelley. And whenever Browning, in his later poems, met with a subject capable of conventional poetical treatment, he did not hesitate so to treat it.
I need only instance such poems as Saul, Abt Vogler, The Guardian Angel, and Prospice. I shall quote the last of these poems:
Fear death?—to feel the fog in my throat,
The mist in my face,
When the snows begin, and the blasts denote
I am nearing the place,
The power of the night, the press of the storm,
The post of the foe;
Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,
Yet the strong man must go;
For the journey is done and the summit attained,
And the barriers fall,
Though a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained,
The reward of it all.
I was ever a fighter, so—one fight more,
The best and the last!
I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore,
And bade me creep past.
No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers,
The heroes of old,
Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears
Of pain, darkness, and cold.
For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,
The black minute's at end,
And the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave,
Shall dwindle, shall blend,
Shall change, shall become a peace out of pain,
Then a light, then thy breast,
O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be at rest!