Robert Browning — Chapter 6 Part 2

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 have felt of that rowdy gathering little but the sensation of which Mr. Henley writes-- "Praise the generous gods for giving, In this world of sin and strife, With some little time for living, Unto each the joy of life,"