He sits upon his throne, eighty years of age and more, and hardly anyone questions his supremacy; he is the greatest English poet since Shakespeare, there is no living writer to be compared to him. We pity him, for after all, he is a great man, and has written great verse—“Ulysses,” for example, of which no one could ever wish to change a line. He has written lyrics of beauty and real eloquence. But now he sees the younger generation traveling another road from his, and he wonders and fears and storms and scolds. He is too clear-sighted not to see the wreck of his dreams—

Poor old voice of eighty crying after voices that have fled!

He looks about and sees modern capitalism—

Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the time, City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime?

It was no common Victorian who saw that at the age of eighty; and no fair critic will deny him credit for such lines. But the elderly poet-lord had no idea what to do about it, and capitalist society continued to nourish its secret disease, which twenty-two years after Tennyson’s death was to cover the whole earth with vomit.

CHAPTER LXX
HIGH-BROW SOCIETY

There was another poet who grew up in this unpromising Victorian England. His father and grandfather were bank officials, and he had a comfortable income. In his youth he was a dandy, with lemon-colored gloves and flowing poetical locks; he turned into a leading clubman and a prominent diner-out. He believed in the Church of England, and in those social conventions which guide the lives of English gentlemen; he refused to permit his wife to have anything to do with George Sand’s Bohemian set, and when she tried to investigate spiritualism he broke up the show.

And yet he managed to be a great and open-minded poet, and in many ways a revolutionary force. He had in him a core of sound instinct, a healthy belief in life and a trust in his own intellect. He fell in love with a lady poet by the name of Elizabeth Barrett, who was an invalid, kept in a kind of prison of duty by a tyrannical old father. The poet did not wait twenty years for her; he persuaded her to slip around the corner and marry him—a dreadful scandal in the polite world of England.

When I was a lad we did not have the word “high-brow”; its place was filled by the word “Browning.” Learned ladies and gentlemen had formed a “Browning Society,” and held solemn meetings in which they tried to find out what these poems were about. Apparently the task proved a difficult one, for they are at it still.

Now a poet may be obscure because he has something to say which is very profound; but there is little of that kind of obscurity in Robert Browning. When you decipher his message, it turns out to be something quite obvious, like the immortality of the soul, or the rights of love, or the fact that human motives are mixed. The cause of the obscurity is that the poet has invented a perverse way of telling these things; he likes to play around the outside of a subject, approach it from a dozen different angles, and set you the task of piecing the thing together from hints and glimpses.