He is an enormously learned person, and has rummaged in a thousand old dust-bins of history, and acquired a million details of names and places and things; he pays you the generally quite undeserved compliment of assuming that you know all this as well as he does. If he wishes to tell you about some unknown musician in the court of some obscure Renaissance ruler, he will begin by talking about a ring this musician used to wear, and the first dozen lines of the poem will depend upon an ancient Greek legend concerning the stone that is in the ring. If you don’t know the legend about the stone in the ring of the musician in the court of the Renaissance ruler, why then the opening of the poem has no meaning to you, and the Browning Society might hold a hundred sessions on the subject without making head or tail of it. Such writing is simply a bad joke; it is one of the many forms of leisure-class art perversions.

When Browning chooses to write real poetry, he can make it just as simple and as melodious as Tennyson’s, and far more passionate. He invented a new and fascinating poetical form, the dramatic lyric, or dramatic soliloquy. He will take some strange and complicated character, whom he has picked up in the junk-rooms of the past, and let this character start to talk and reveal himself to you—not merely the things he wants you to know, but the things he is trying to hide from you, and which he lets slip between the lines. Thus we have Mr. Sludge, the spiritualist medium, who would have converted Mrs. Browning if the poet had not kicked him out of the house. Thus we have Bishop Blougram, an elegant and thoroughly modern Catholic prelate, discussing with an intimate friend over the wine and cigars the delicate question of how he justifies himself for feeding base superstition to the people, who want it and can’t get along without it.

Browning knew how to be direct, when his feelings were deeply enough stirred. He was direct when he dealt with the old poet Wordsworth and his apostasy from the cause of freedom. Anyone can understand the title, “The Lost Leader,” and the opening lines

Just for a handful of silver he left us,
Just for a riband to stick in his coat.

Likewise, when the Brownings went to Italy and took fire at the struggle of the Italian people for freedom, everybody understood the poetry they wrote home; even the Austrian police understood it, for they opened Browning’s mail, to his furious indignation. Likewise, when Mrs. Browning died and some persons proposed to write her biography without her husband’s permission, the husband was able to make known his opposition. He spoke of “the paws of these blackguards in my bowels,” and said he would “stop the scamp’s knavery along with his breath.”

For his master-work, to which he devoted his later years, Browning made a peculiar selection. It was a time when democracy was breaking into the world of culture, in spite of all the opposition of academic authority. We shall find poets and novelists in every country persisting in dealing with vulgar reality, instead of with mythological demigods and romantic conquerors. Browning went for his story to an old scandal pamphlet he picked up in a second-hand bookshop of Florence. He might as well have picked up a scrap of a Hearst newspaper from the gutter, for it dealt with a sensational murder story, what is called a “crime of passion.” An elderly merchant in Rome had killed his wife, and at his trial he proved that she had run away with a young priest. The priest maintained that the elopement had been a chaste one; he was trying to save the girl from the cruelty of her husband.

Browning, in telling the story, adopts the ultra-modern device of the open forum: all sides shall have a hearing. In “The Ring and the Book” you read nine long narratives of the same events. You hear Half Rome, which sides with the husband; then you hear the Other Half Rome, which sides with the wife. You hear the husband, the wife, the young priest, the lawyers for each side, and the pope, rendering judgment. When you get through with all this reading you have learned several important lessons: you have learned that life is a complicated thing, and truth very difficult to arrive at; you have learned that good and evil live side by side in the same human heart; you have learned to think for yourself, and not to believe everything you hear; finally, you have learned that the most sordid human events offer a potential literary masterpiece—requiring only a man of genius to penetrate the hearts of the persons involved!

CHAPTER LXXI
OFFICIAL PESSIMISM

In this writer’s youth, when he was struggling to earn a living in New York, there was one magazine which was open to new ideas, the “Independent.” Its literary editor was Paul Elmer More, and he gave me a chance to write book reviews for him—and then, alas! decided that he could find other people whose writing he preferred. Mr. More evolved into a critic, and has published I don’t know how many volumes of what he calls the “Shelburne Essays.” Up to a few years ago, when Professor Sherman made his appearance, I used to say that More was the one literary conservative in America who was not intellectually contemptible; the one man who combined scholarship with a perfectly definite and consistent point of view, no sentimentality, and no water-tight compartments in his brain.

In the third volume of the “Shelburne Essays” Mr. More has one dealing with Byron’s “Don Juan.” I smile when I reflect with what contempt Mr. More would greet the proposition that he should read a modern writer as slangy, as licentious, and as popular as Byron! But “Don Juan” was written a hundred years ago; so it is a “classic,” and Mr. More greets its author as the last of the great pessimists, one who had the wit to recognize the futility of human life, and the courage to speak his conclusions plainly.