The poetry of Robert Browning

by Stopford A. Brooke

Nobly, nobly Cape Saint Vincent to the North-west died away;

Sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz Bay;

Bluish 'mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar lay;

In the dimmest North-east distance dawned Gibraltar grand and gray;

"Here and here did England help me: how can I help England?"—say.

Whoso turns as I, this evening, turn to God to praise and pray,

While Jove's planet rises yonder, silent over Africa.

It is a little thing, and when it leaves the sunset it is poor. And there is twice the fervour of its sunset in the description of the sunrise at Asolo in Pippa Passes.

Again, there is scarcely a trace in his work of any vital interest in the changes of thought and feeling in England during the sixty years of his life, such as appear everywhere in Tennyson. No one would know from his poetry (at least until the very end of his life, when he wrote Francis Furini) that the science of life and its origins had been revolutionised in the midst of his career, or, save in A Death in the Desert, that the whole aspect of theology had been altered, or that the democratic movement had taken so many new forms. He showed to these English struggles neither attraction nor repulsion. They scarcely existed for him—transient elements of the world, merely national, not universal. Nor did the literature or art of his own country engage him half so much as the literature and art of Italy. He loved both. Few were better acquainted with English poetry, or reverenced it more; but he loved it, not because it was English, but of that world of imagination which has no special country. He cared also for English art, but he gave all his personal love to the art of Italy. Nor does he write, as Tennyson loved to do, of the daily life of the English farmer, squire, miller and sailor, and of English sweet-hearting, nor of the English park and brook and village-green and their indwellers, but of the work-girl at Asolo, and the Spanish monk in his garden, and the Arab riding through the desert, and of the Duchess and her servant flying through the mountains of Moldavia, and of the poor painters at Fano and Florence, and of the threadbare poet at Valladolid, and of the peasant-girl who fed the Tuscan outlaw, and of the poor grammarian who died somewhere in Germany (as I think Browning meant it), and of the Jews at Rome, and of the girl at Pornic with the gold hair and the peasant's hand, and of a hundred others, none of whom are English. All his common life, all his love-making, sorrow and joy among the poor, are outside this country, with perhaps two exceptions; and neither of these has the English note which sounds so soft and clear in Tennyson. This is curious enough, and it is probably one of the reasons why English people for a long time would have so little to do with him. All the same, he was himself woven of England even more than of Italy. The English elements in his character and work are more than the Italian. His intellect was English, and had the English faults as well as the English excellences. His optimism was English; his steadfast fighting quality, his unyielding energy, his directness, his desire to get to the root of things, were English. His religion was the excellent English compromise or rather balance of dogma, practice and spirituality which laymen make for their own life. His bold sense of personal freedom was English. His constancy to his theories, whether of faith or art, was English; his roughness of form was positively early Teutonic.

Then his wit, his esprit,[3] his capacity for induing he skin and the soul of other persons at remote times of history; his amazing inventiveness and the ease of it, at which point he beats Tennyson out of the field; his play, so high fantastical, with his subjects, and the way in which the pleasure he took in this play overmastered his literary self-control; his fantastic games with metre and with rhyme, his want of reverence for the rules of his art; his general lawlessness, belong to one side, but to one side only, of the Celtic nature. But the ardour of the man, the pathos of his passion and the passion of his pathos, his impulse towards the infinite and the constant rush he made into its indefinite realms; the special set of his imagination towards the fulfillment of perfection in Love; his vision of Nature as in colour, rather than in light and shade; his love of beauty and the kind of beauty that he loved; his extraordinary delight in all kinds of art as the passionate shaping of part of the unapproachable Beauty—these were all old Italian.