When one has marvelled one's fill at the professor's phrases and misunderstandings, however, one is compelled to admit that he has written what is probably the best popular introduction to Browning in existence.
Professor Phelps's book is one of those rare essays in popular criticism which will introduce an average reader to a world of new excitements. One of its chief virtues is that it is an anthology as well as a commentary. It contains more than fifty complete poems of Browning quoted in the body of the book. And these include, not merely short poems like Meeting at Night, but long poems, such as Andrea del Sarto, Caliban on Setebos, and Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. This is the right kind of introduction to a great author. The poet is allowed as far as possible to be his own interpreter.
At the outset Professor Phelps quotes in full Transcendentalism and How it Strikes a Contemporary as Browning's confession of his aims as an artist. The first of these is Browning's most energetic assertion that the poet is no philosopher concerned with ideas rather than with things—with abstractions rather than with actions. His disciples have written a great many books that seem to reduce him from a poet to a philosopher, and one cannot protest too vehemently against this dulling of an imagination richer than a child's in adventures and in the passion for the detailed and the concrete. In Transcendentalism he bids a younger poet answer whether there is more help to be got from Jacob Boehme with his subtle meanings:—
Or some stout Mage like him of Halberstadt,
John, who made things Boehme wrote thoughts about.
With how magnificent an image he then justifies the poet of "things" as compared with the philosopher of "thoughts":—
He with a "look you!" vents a brace of rhymes,
And in there breaks the sudden rose herself,
Over us, under, round us every side,
Nay, in and out the tables and the chairs
And musty volumes, Boehme's book and all—
Buries us with a glory, young once more,
Pouring heaven into this poor house of life.
One of the things one constantly marvels at as one reads Browning is the splendid aestheticism with which he lights up prosaic words and pedestrian details with beauty.
The truth is, if we do not realize that he is a great singer and a great painter as well as a, great humorist and realist, we shall have read him in vain. No doubt his phrases are often as grotesque as jagged teeth, as when the mourners are made to say in A Grammarian's Funeral:—
Look out if yonder be not day again.
Rimming the rock-row!
Reading the second of these lines one feels as if one of the mourners had stubbed his foot against a sharp stone on the mountain-path. And yet, if Browning invented a harsh speech of his own far common use, he uttered it in all the varied rhythms of genius and passion. There may often be no music in the individual words, but there is always in the poems as a whole a deep undercurrent of music as from some hidden river. His poems have the movement of living things. They are lacking only in smooth and static loveliness. They are full of the hoof-beats of Pegasus.