Mr. William Sharp, in his Life of Browning, quotes the remarks of another critic to the following effect: "The poet’s
processes of thought are scientific in their precision and analysis; the sudden conclusion that he imposes upon them is
transcendental and inept."
This is a very fair but a very curious example of the way in which Browning is treated. For what is the state of affairs? A
man publishes a series of poems, vigorous, perplexing, and unique. The critics read them, and they decide that he has
failed as a poet, but that he is a remarkable philosopher and logician. They then proceed to examine his philosophy, and
show with great triumph that it is unphilosophical, and to examine his logic and show with great triumph that it is not
logical, but "transcendental and inept." In other words, Browning is first denounced for being a logician and not a poet,
and then denounced for insisting on being a poet when they have decided that he is to be a logician. It is just as if a man
were to say first that a garden was so neglected that it was only fit for a boys' playground, and then complain of the
unsuitability in a boys' playground of rockeries and flower–beds.
As we find, after this manner, that Browning does not act satisfactorily as that which we have decided that he shall be
—a logician—it might possibly be worth while to make another attempt to see whether he may not, after all, be more valid
than we thought as to what he himself professed to be—a poet. And if we study this seriously and sympathetically, we
shall soon come to a conclusion. It is a gross and complete slander upon Browning to say that his processes of thought
are scientific in their precision and analysis. They are nothing of the sort; if they were, Browning could not be a good
poet. The critic speaks of the conclusions of a poem as "transcendental and inept"; but the conclusions of a poem, if they
are not transcendental, must be inept. Do the people who call one of Browning’s poems scientific in its analysis realise
the meaning of what they say? One is tempted to think that they know a scientific analysis when they see it as little as
they know a good poem. The one supreme difference between the scientific method and the artistic method is, roughly
speaking, simply this—that a scientific statement means the same thing wherever and whenever it is uttered, and that an
artistic statement means something entirely different, according to the relation in which it stands to its surroundings. The
remark, let us say, that the whale is a mammal, or the remark that sixteen ounces go to a pound, is equally true, and
means exactly the same thing, whether we state it at the beginning of a conversation or at the end, whether we print it in
a dictionary or chalk it up on a wall. But if we take some phrase commonly used in the art of literature—such a sentence,
for the sake of example, as "the dawn was breaking"—the matter is quite different. If the sentence came at the beginning
of a short story, it might be a mere descriptive prelude. If it were the last sentence in a short story, it might be poignant
with some peculiar irony or triumph. Can any one read Browning’s great monologues and not feel that they are built up
like a good short story, entirely on this principle of the value of language arising from its arrangement. Take such an
example as "Caliban upon Setebos," a wonderful poem designed to describe the way in which a primitive nature may at
once be afraid of its gods and yet familiar with them. Caliban in describing his deity starts with a more or less natural and
obvious parallel between the deity and himself, carries out the comparison with consistency and an almost revolting
simplicity, and ends in a kind of blasphemous extravaganza of anthropomorphism, basing his conduct not merely on the
greatness and wisdom, but also on the manifest weaknesses and stupidities, of the Creator of all things. Then suddenly
a thunderstorm breaks over Caliban’s island, and the profane speculator falls flat upon his face—
"Lo! 'Lieth flat and loveth Setebos!
'Maketh his teeth meet through his upper lip,
Will let those quails fly, will not eat this month
One little mess of whelks, so he may 'scape!"
Surely it would be very difficult to persuade oneself that this thunderstorm would have meant exactly the same thing if it
had occurred at the beginning of "Caliban upon Setebos." It does not mean the same thing, but something very different;
and the deduction from this is the curious fact that Browning is an artist, and that consequently his processes of thought
are not "scientific in their precision and analysis."
No criticism of Browning’s poems can be vital, none in the face of the poems themselves can be even intelligible, which
is not based upon the fact that he was successfully or otherwise a conscious and deliberate artist. He may have failed as
an artist, though I do not think so; that is quite a different matter. But it is one thing to say that a man through vanity or
ignorance has built an ugly cathedral, and quite another to say that he built it in a fit of absence of mind, and did not
know whether he was building a lighthouse or a first–class hotel. Browning knew perfectly well what he was doing; and if
the reader does not like his art, at least the author did. The general sentiment expressed in the statement that he did not
care about form is simply the most ridiculous criticism that could be conceived. It would be far nearer the truth to say that
he cared more for form than any other English poet who ever lived. He was always weaving and modelling and inventing
new forms. Among all his two hundred to three hundred poems it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that there are
half as many different metres as there are different poems.
The great English poets who are supposed to have cared more for form than Browning did, cared less at least in this
sense—that they were content to use old forms so long as they were certain that they had new ideas. Browning, on the
other hand, no sooner had a new idea than he tried to make a new form to express it. Wordsworth and Shelley were
really original poets; their attitude of thought and feeling marked without doubt certain great changes in literature and
philosophy. Nevertheless, the "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" is a perfectly normal and traditional ode, and
"Prometheus Unbound" is a perfectly genuine and traditional Greek lyrical drama. But if we study Browning honestly,
nothing will strike us more than that he really created a large number of quite novel and quite admirable artistic forms. It
is too often forgotten what and how excellent these were. The Ring and the Book, for example, is an illuminating
departure in literary method—the method of telling the same story several times and trusting to the variety of human
character to turn it into several different and equally interesting stories. Pippa Passes, to take another example, is a new
and most fruitful form, a series of detached dramas connected only by the presence of one fugitive and isolated figure.
The invention of these things is not merely like the writing of a good poem—it is something like the invention of the
sonnet or the Gothic arch. The poet who makes them does not merely create himself—he creates other poets. It is so in
a degree long past enumeration with regard to Browning’s smaller poems. Such a pious and horrible lyric as "The
Heretic’s Tragedy," for instance, is absolutely original, with its weird and almost blood–curdling echo verses, mocking
echoes indeed—
"And dipt of his wings in Paris square,
They bring him now to lie burned alive.
And wanteth there grace of lute or clavicithern,
ye shall say to confirm him who singeth—
We bring John now to be burned alive."
A hundred instances might, of course, be given. Milton’s "Sonnet on his Blindness," or Keats’s "Ode on a Grecian Urn,"
are both thoroughly original, but still we can point to other such sonnets and other such odes. But can any one mention
any poem of exactly the same structural and literary type as "Fears and Scruples," as "The Householder," as "House" or
"Shop," as "Nationality in Drinks," as "Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis," as "My Star," as "A Portrait," as any of "Ferishtah’s
Fancies," as any of the "Bad Dreams."
The thing which ought to be said about Browning by those who do not enjoy him is simply that they do not like his form;
that they have studied the form, and think it a bad form. If more people said things of this sort, the world of criticism would
gain almost unspeakably in clarity and common honesty. Browning put himself before the world as a good poet. Let
those who think he failed call him a bad poet, and there will be an end of the matter. There are many styles in art which
perfectly competent æsthetic judges cannot endure. For instance, it would be perfectly legitimate for a strict lover of
Gothic to say that one of the monstrous rococo altar–pieces in the Belgian churches with bulbous clouds and oaken
sun–rays seven feet long, was, in his opinion, ugly. But surely it would be perfectly ridiculous for any one to say that it
had no form. A man’s actual feelings about it might be better expressed by saying that it had too much. To say that
Browning was merely a thinker because you think "Caliban upon Setebos" ugly, is precisely as absurd as it would be to
call the author of the old Belgian altarpiece a man devoted only to the abstractions of religion. The truth about Browning
is not that he was indifferent to technical beauty, but that he invented a particular kind of technical beauty to which any
one else is free to be as indifferent as he chooses.
There is in this matter an extraordinary tendency to vague and unmeaning criticism. The usual way of criticising an
author, particularly an author who has added something to the literary forms of the world, is to complain that his work
does not contain something which is obviously the speciality of somebody else. The correct thing to say about
Maeterlinck is that some play of his in which, let us say, a princess dies in a deserted tower by the sea, has a certain
beauty, but that we look in vain in it for that robust geniality, that really boisterous will to live which may be found in
Martin Chuzzlewit. The right thing to say about Cyrano de Bergerac is that it may have a certain kind of wit and spirit, but
that it really throws no light on the duty of middle–aged married couples in Norway. It cannot be too much insisted upon
that at least three–quarters of the blame and criticism commonly directed against artists and authors falls under this
general objection, and is essentially valueless. Authors both great and small are, like everything else in existence, upon
the whole greatly under–rated. They are blamed for not doing, not only what they have failed to do to reach their own
ideal, but what they have never tried to do to reach every other writer’s ideal. If we can show that Browning had a definite
ideal of beauty and loyally pursued it, it is not necessary to prove that he could have written In Memoriam if he had tried.
Browning has suffered far more injustice from his admirers than from his opponents, for his admirers have for the most
part got hold of the matter, so to speak, by the wrong end. They believe that what is ordinarily called the grotesque style
of Browning was a kind of necessity boldly adopted by a great genius in order to express novel and profound ideas. But
this is an entire mistake. What is called ugliness was to Browning not in the least a necessary evil, but a quite
unnecessary luxury, which he enjoyed for its own sake. For reasons that we shall see presently in discussing the
philosophical use of the grotesque, it did so happen that Browning’s grotesque style was very suitable for the expression
of his peculiar moral and metaphysical view. But the whole mass of poems will be misunderstood if we do not realise first
of all that he had a love of the grotesque of the nature of art for art’s sake. Here, for example, is a short distinct poem
merely descriptive of one of those elfish German jugs in which it is to be presumed Tokay had been served to him. This
is the whole poem, and a very good poem too—
"Up jumped Tokay on our table,
Like a pigmy castle–warder,
Dwarfish to see, but stout and able,
Arms and accoutrements all in order;
And fierce he looked North, then, wheeling South
Blew with his bugle a challenge to Drouth,
Cocked his flap–hat with the tosspot–feather,
Twisted his thumb in his red moustache,
Jingled his huge brass spurs together,
Tightened his waist with its Buda sash,
And then, with an impudence nought could abash,
Shrugged his hump–shoulder, to tell the beholder,
For twenty such knaves he would laugh but the bolder:
And so, with his sword–hilt gallantly jutting,
And dexter–hand on his haunch abutting,
Went the little man, Sir Ausbruch, strutting!"
I suppose there are Browning students in existence who would think that this poem contained something pregnant
about the Temperance question, or was a marvellously subtle analysis of the romantic movement in Germany. But surely
to most of us it is sufficiently apparent that Browning was simply fashioning a ridiculous knick–knack, exactly as if he
were actually moulding one of these preposterous German jugs. Now before studying the real character of this
Browningesque style, there is one general truth to be recognised about Browning’s work. It is this—that it is absolutely
necessary to remember that Browning had, like every other poet, his simple and indisputable failures, and that it is one
thing to speak of the badness of his artistic failures, and quite another thing to speak of the badness of his artistic aim.
Browning’s style may be a good style, and yet exhibit many examples of a thoroughly bad use of it. On this point there is
indeed a singularly unfair system of judgment used by the public towards the poets. It is very little realised that the vast
majority of great poets have written an enormous amount of very bad poetry. The unfortunate Wordsworth is generally
supposed to be almost alone in this; but any one who thinks so can scarcely have read a certain number of the minor
poems of Byron and Shelley and Tennyson.
Now it is only just to Browning that his more uncouth effusions should not be treated as masterpieces by which he must
stand or fall, but treated simply as his failures. It is really true that such a line as
"Irks fear the crop–full bird, frets doubt the maw–crammed beast?"
is a very ugly and a very bad line. But it is quite equally true that Tennyson’s
"And that good man, the clergyman, has told me words of peace,"
is a very ugly and a very bad line. But people do not say that this proves that Tennyson was a mere crabbed
controversialist and metaphysician. They say that it is a bad example of Tennyson’s form; they do not say that it is a
good example of Tennyson’s indifference to form. Upon the whole, Browning exhibits far fewer instances of this failure in
his own style than any other of the great poets, with the exception of one or two like Spenser and Keats, who seem to
have a mysterious incapacity for writing bad poetry. But almost all original poets, particularly poets who have invented an
artistic style, are subject to one most disastrous habit—the habit of writing imitations of themselves. Every now and then
in the works of the noblest classical poets you will come upon passages which read like extracts from an American book
of parodies. Swinburne, for example, when he wrote the couplet—
"From the lilies and languors of virtue
To the raptures and roses of vice,"
wrote what is nothing but a bad imitation of himself, an imitation which seems indeed to have the wholly unjust and
uncritical object of proving that the Swinburnian melody is a mechanical scheme of initial letters. Or again, Mr. Rudyard
Kipling when he wrote the line—
"Or ride with the reckless seraphim on the rim of a red–maned star,"
was caricaturing himself in the harshest and least sympathetic spirit of American humour. This tendency is, of course,
the result of the self–consciousness and theatricality of modern life in which each of us is forced to conceive ourselves
as part of a dramatis personæ and act perpetually in character. Browning sometimes yielded to this temptation to be a
great deal too like himself.
"Will I widen thee out till thou turnest
From Margaret Minnikin mou' by God’s grace,
To Muckle–mouth Meg in good earnest."
This sort of thing is not to be defended in Browning any more than in Swinburne. But, on the other hand, it is not to be
attributed in Swinburne to a momentary exaggeration, and in Browning to a vital æsthetic deficiency. In the case of
Swinburne, we all feel that the question is not whether that particular preposterous couplet about lilies and roses
redounds to the credit of the Swinburnian style, but whether it would be possible in any other style than the Swinburnian
to have written the Hymn to Proserpine. In the same way, the essential issue about Browning as an artist is not whether
he, in common with Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, and Swinburne, sometimes wrote bad poetry, but whether in
any other style except Browning’s you could have achieved the precise artistic effect which is achieved by such
incomparable lyrics as "The Patriot" or "The Laboratory." The answer must be in the negative, and in that answer lies the
whole justification of Browning as an artist.
The question now arises, therefore, what was his conception of his functions as an artist? We have already agreed that
his artistic originality concerned itself chiefly with the serious use of the grotesque. It becomes necessary, therefore, to
ask what is the serious use of the grotesque, and what relation does the grotesque bear to the eternal and fundamental
elements in life?
One of the most curious things to notice about popular æsthetic criticism is the number of phrases it will be found to
use which are intended to express an æsthetic failure, and which express merely an æsthetic variety. Thus, for instance,
the traveller will often hear the advice from local lovers of the picturesque, "The scenery round such and such a place
has no interest; it is quite flat." To disparage scenery as quite flat is, of course, like disparaging a swan as quite white, or
an Italian sky as quite blue. Flatness is a sublime quality in certain landscapes, just as rockiness is a sublime quality in
others. In the same way there are a great number of phrases commonly used in order to disparage such writers as
Browning which do not in fact disparage, but merely describe them. One of the most distinguished of Browning’s
biographers and critics says of him, for example, "He has never meant to be rugged, but has become so in striving after
strength." To say that Browning never tried to be rugged is to say that Edgar Allan Poe never tried to be gloomy, or that
Mr. W.S. Gilbert never tried to be extravagant. The whole issue depends upon whether we realise the simple and
essential fact that ruggedness is a mode of art like gloominess or extravagance. Some poems ought to be rugged, just as
some poems ought to be smooth. When we see a drift of stormy and fantastic clouds at sunset, we do not say that the
cloud is beautiful although it is ragged at the edges. When we see a gnarled and sprawling oak, we do not say that it is
fine although it is twisted. When we see a mountain, we do not say that it is impressive although it is rugged, nor do we
say apologetically that it never meant to be rugged, but became so in its striving after strength. Now, to say that
Browning’s poems, artistically considered, are fine although they are rugged, is quite as absurd as to say that a rock,
artistically considered, is fine although it is rugged. Ruggedness being an essential quality in the universe, there is that in
man which responds to it as to the striking of any other chord of the eternal harmonies. As the children of nature, we are
akin not only to the stars and flowers, but also to the toad–stools and the monstrous tropical birds. And it is to be
repeated as the essential of the question that on this side of our nature we do emphatically love the form of the toad–
stools, and not merely some complicated botanical and moral lessons which the philosopher may draw from them. For
example, just as there is such a thing as a poetical metre being beautifully light or beautifully grave and haunting, so
there is such a thing as a poetical metre being beautifully rugged. In the old ballads, for instance, every person of literary
taste will be struck by a certain attractiveness in the bold, varying, irregular verse—
"He is either himsell a devil frae hell,
Or else his mother a witch maun be;
I wadna have ridden that wan water
For a' the gowd in Christentie,"
is quite as pleasing to the ear in its own way as
"There’s a bower of roses by Bendemeer stream,
And the nightingale sings in it all the night long,"
is in another way. Browning had an unrivalled ear for this particular kind of staccato music. The absurd notion that he
had no sense of melody in verse is only possible to people who think that there is no melody in verse which is not an
imitation of Swinburne. To give a satisfactory idea of Browning’s rhythmic originality would be impossible without
quotations more copious than entertaining. But the essential point has been suggested.
"They were purple of raiment and golden,
Filled full of thee, fiery with wine,
Thy lovers in haunts unbeholden,
In marvellous chambers of thine,"
is beautiful language, but not the only sort of beautiful language. This, for instance, has also a tune in it—
"I—'next poet.' No, my hearties,
I nor am, nor fain would be!
Choose your chiefs and pick your parties,
Not one soul revolt to me!
Which of you did I enable
Once to slip inside my breast,
There to catalogue and label
What I like least, what love best,
Hope and fear, believe and doubt of,
Seek and shun, respect, deride,
Who has right to make a rout of
Rarities he found inside?"
This quick, gallantly stepping measure also has its own kind of music, and the man who cannot feel it can never have
enjoyed the sound of soldiers marching by. This, then, roughly is the main fact to remember about Browning’s poetical
method, or about any one’s poetical method—that the question is not whether that method is the best in the world, but
the question whether there are not certain things which can only be conveyed by that method. It is perfectly true, for
instance, that a really lofty and lucid line of Tennyson, such as—
"Thou art the highest, and most human too"
and
"We needs must love the highest when we see it"
would really be made the worse for being translated into Browning. It would probably become
"High’s human; man loves best, best visible,"
and would lose its peculiar clarity and dignity and courtly plainness. But it is quite equally true that any really
characteristic fragment of Browning, if it were only the tempestuous scolding of the organist in "Master Hugues of Saxe–
Gotha"—
"Hallo, you sacristan, show us a light there!
Down it dips, gone like a rocket.
What, you want, do you, to come unawares,
Sweeping the church up for first morning–prayers,
And find a poor devil has ended his cares
At the foot of your rotten–runged rat–riddled stairs?
Do I carry the moon in my pocket?"
—it is quite equally true that this outrageous gallop of rhymes ending with a frantic astronomical image would lose in
energy and spirit if it were written in a conventional and classical style, and ran—
"What must I deem then that thou dreamest to find
Disjected bones adrift upon the stair
Thou sweepest clean, or that thou deemest that I
Pouch in my wallet the vice–regal sun?"
Is it not obvious that this statelier version might be excellent poetry of its kind, and yet would be bad exactly in so far as
it was good; that it would lose all the swing, the rush, the energy of the preposterous and grotesque original? In fact, we
may see how unmanageable is this classical treatment of the essentially absurd in Tennyson himself. The humorous
passages in The Princess, though often really humorous in themselves, always appear forced and feeble because they
have to be restrained by a certain metrical dignity, and the mere idea of such restraint is incompatible with humour. If
Browning had written the passage which opens The Princess, descriptive of the "larking" of the villagers in the magnate’s
park, he would have spared us nothing; he would not have spared us the shrill uneducated voices and the unburied
bottles of ginger beer. He would have crammed the poem with uncouth similes; he would have changed the metre a
hundred times; he would have broken into doggerel and into rhapsody; but he would have left, when all is said and done,
as he leaves in that paltry fragment of the grumbling organist, the impression of a certain eternal human energy. Energy
and joy, the father and the mother of the grotesque, would have ruled the poem. We should