"And after, for pastime,
If June be refulgent
With flowers in completeness,
All petals, no prickles,
Delicious as trickles
Of wine poured at mass-time,
And choose One indulgent
To redness and sweetness;
Or if with experience of man and of spider,
She use my June lightning, the strong insect-ridder
To stop the fresh spinning,--why June will consider."
He comes up gasping, and more than ever persuaded that Browning's poetry is a mass of inconglomerate nonsense, which nobody understands--least of all members of the Browning Society.
We need be at no pains to find a meaning for everything Mr. Browning has written. But when all is said and done--when these few freaks of a crowded brain are thrown overboard to the sharks of verbal criticism who feed on such things--Mr. Browning and his great poetical achievement remain behind to be dealt with and accounted for. We do not get rid of the Laureate by quoting:--
"O darling room, my heart's delight,
Dear room, the apple of my sight,
With thy two couches soft and white
There is no room so exquisite--
No little room so warm and bright
Wherein to read, wherein to write;"
or of Wordsworth by quoting:--
"At this, my boy hung down his head:
He blushed with shame, nor made reply,
And five times to the child I said,
"'Why, Edward? tell me why?'"
or of Keats by remembering that he once addressed a young lady as follows:--
"O come, Georgiana! the rose is full blown,
The riches of Flora are lavishly strown:
The air is all softness and crystal the streams,
The west is resplendently clothèd in beams."
The strength of a rope may be but the strength of its weakest part; but poets are to be judged in their happiest hours, and in their greatest works.
The second period of Mr. Browning's poetry demands a different line of argument; for it is, in my judgment, folly to deny that he has of late years written a great deal which makes very difficult reading indeed. No doubt you may meet people who tell you that they read 'The Ring and the Book' for the first time without much mental effort; but you will do well not to believe them. These poems are difficult--they cannot help being so. What is 'The Ring and the Book'? A huge novel in twenty thousand lines--told after the method not of Scott but of Balzac; it tears the hearts out of a dozen characters; it tells the same story from ten different points of view. It is loaded with detail of every kind and description: you are let off nothing. As with a schoolboy's life at a large school, if he is to enjoy it at all, he must fling himself into it, and care intensely about everything--so the reader of 'The Ring and the Book' must be interested in everybody and everything, down to the fact that the eldest daughter of the counsel for the prosecution of Guido is eight years old on the very day he is writing his speech, and that he is going to have fried liver and parsley for his supper.