Robert Browning — Chapter 6 Part 3

the thought that every wise man has when looking at a Bank Holiday crowd at Margate.

To ask why Browning enjoyed this perverse and fantastic style most would be to go very deep into his spirit indeed, probably a great deal deeper than it is possible to go.

But it is worth while to suggest tentatively the general function of the grotesque in art generally and in his art in particular.

There is one very curious idea into which we have been hypnotised by the more eloquent poets, and that is that nature in the sense of what is ordinarily called the country is a thing entirely stately and beautiful as those terms are commonly understood.

The whole world of the fantastic, all things top-heavy, lop-sided, and nonsensical are conceived as the work of man, gargoyles, German jugs, Chinese pots, political caricatures, burlesque epics, the pictures of Mr. Aubrey Beardsley and the puns of Robert Browning.

But in truth a part, and a very large part, of the sanity and power of nature lies in the fact that out of her comes all this instinct of caricature.

Nature may present itself to the poet too often as consisting of stars and lilies; but these are not poets who live in the country; they are men who go to the country for inspiration and could no more live in the country than they could go to bed in Westminster Abbey.

Men who live in the heart of nature, farmers and peasants, know that nature means cows and pigs, and creatures more humorous than can be found in a whole sketch-book of Callot.

And the element of the grotesque in art, like the element of the grotesque in nature, means, in the main, energy, the energy which takes its own forms and goes its own way.

Browning's verse, in so far as it is grotesque, is not complex or artificial; it is natural and in the legitimate tradition of nature.

The verse sprawls like the trees, dances like the dust; it is ragged like the thunder-cloud, it is top-heavy like the toadstool.

Energy which disregards the standard of classical art is in nature as it is in Browning.

The same sense of the uproarious force in things which makes Browning dwell on the oddity of a fungus or a jellyfish makes him dwell on the oddity of a philosophical idea.

Here, for example, we have a random instance from "The Englishman in Italy" of the way in which Browning, when he was most Browning, regarded physical nature.

"And pitch down his basket before us, All trembling alive With pink and grey jellies, your sea-fruit;

You touch the strange lumps, And mouths gape there, eyes open, all manner Of horns and of humps, Which only the fisher looks grave at."

Nature might mean flowers to Wordsworth and grass to Walt Whitman, but to Browning it really meant such things as these, the monstrosities and living mysteries of the sea.

And just as these strange things meant to Browning energy in the physical world, so strange thoughts and strange images meant to him energy in the mental world.

When, in one of his later poems, the professional mystic is seeking in a supreme moment of sincerity to explain that small things may be filled with God as well as great, he uses the very same kind of image, the image of a shapeless sea-beast, to embody that noble conception.

"The Name comes close behind a stomach-cyst, The simplest of creations, just a sac That's mouth, heart, legs, and belly at once, yet lives And feels, and could do neither, we conclude, If simplified still further one degree."

(SLUDGE.

) These bulbous, indescribable sea-goblins are the first thing on which the eye of the poet lights in looking on a landscape, and the last in the significance of which he trusts in demonstrating the mercy of the Everlasting.

There is another and but slightly different use of the grotesque, but which is definitely valuable in Browning's poetry, and indeed in all poetry.

To present a matter in a grotesque manner does certainly tend to touch the nerve of surprise and thus to draw attention to the intrinsically miraculous character of the object itself.

It is difficult to give examples of the proper use of grotesqueness without becoming too grotesque.

But we should all agree that if St. Paul's Cathedral were suddenly presented to us upside down we should, for the moment, be more surprised at it, and look at it more than we have done all the centuries during which it has rested on its foundations.

Now it is the supreme function of the philosopher of the grotesque to make the world stand on its head that people may look at it.

If we say "a man is a man" we awaken no sense of the fantastic, however much we ought to, but if we say, in the language of the old satirist, "that man is a two-legged bird, without feathers," the phrase does, for a moment, make us look at man from the outside and gives us a thrill in his presence.

When the author of the Book of Job insists upon the huge, half-witted, apparently unmeaning magnificence and might of Behemoth, the hippopotamus, he is appealing precisely to this sense of wonder provoked by the grotesque.

"Canst thou play with him as with a bird, canst thou bind him for thy maidens?"

he says in an admirable passage.

The notion of the hippopotamus as a household pet is curiously in the spirit of the humour of Browning.

But when it is clearly understood that Browning's love of the fantastic in style was a perfectly serious artistic love, when we understand that he enjoyed working in that style, as a Chinese potter might enjoy making dragons, or a mediæval mason making devils, there yet remains something definite which must be laid to his account as a fault.

He certainly had a capacity for becoming perfectly childish in his indulgence in ingenuities that have nothing to do with poetry at all, such as puns, and rhymes, and grammatical structures that only just fit into each other like a Chinese puzzle.

Probably it was only one of the marks of his singular vitality, curiosity, and interest in details.

He was certainly one of those somewhat rare men who are fierily ambitious both in large things and in small.

He prided himself on having written _The Ring and the Book_, and he also prided himself on knowing good wine when he tasted it.

He prided himself on re-establishing optimism on a new foundation, and it is to be presumed, though it is somewhat difficult to imagine, that he prided himself on such rhymes as the following in _Pacchiarotto_:-- "The wolf, fox, bear, and monkey, By piping advice in one key-- That his pipe should play a prelude To something heaven-tinged not hell-hued, Something not harsh but docile, Man-liquid, not man-fossil."

This writing, considered as writing, can only be regarded as a kind of joke, and most probably Browning considered it so himself.

It has nothing at all to do with that powerful and symbolic use of the grotesque which may be found in such admirable passages as this from "Holy Cross Day":-- "Give your first groan--compunction's at work;

And soft!

from a Jew you mount to a Turk.

Lo, Micah--the self-same beard on chin He was four times already converted in!"

This is the serious use of the grotesque.

Through it passion and philosophy are as well expressed as through any other medium.

But the rhyming frenzy of Browning has no particular relation even to the poems in which it occurs.

It is not a dance to any measure; it can only be called the horse-play of literature.

It may be noted, for example, as a rather curious fact, that the ingenious rhymes are generally only mathematical triumphs, not triumphs of any kind of assonance.

"The Pied Piper of Hamelin," a poem written for children, and bound in general to be lucid and readable, ends with a rhyme which it is physically impossible for any one to say:-- "And, whether they pipe us free, fróm rats or fróm mice, If we've promised them aught, let us keep our promise!"

This queer trait in Browning, his inability to keep a kind of demented ingenuity even out of poems in which it was quite inappropriate, is a thing which must be recognised, and recognised all the more because as a whole he was a very perfect artist, and a particularly perfect artist in the use of the grotesque.

But everywhere when we go a little below the surface in Browning we find that there was something in him perverse and unusual despite all his working normality and simplicity.

His mind was perfectly wholesome, but it was not made exactly like the ordinary mind.

It was like a piece of strong wood with a knot in it.

The quality of what, can only be called buffoonery which is under discussion is indeed one of the many things in which Browning was more of an Elizabethan than a Victorian.

He was like the Elizabethans in their belief in the normal man, in their gorgeous and over-loaded language, above all in their feeling for learning as an enjoyment and almost a frivolity.

But there was nothing in which he was so thoroughly Elizabethan, and even Shakespearian, as in this fact, that when he felt inclined to write a page of quite uninteresting nonsense, he immediately did so.

Many great writers have contrived to be tedious, and apparently aimless, while expounding some thought which they believed to be grave and profitable; but this frivolous stupidity had not been found in any great writer since the time of Rabelais and the time of the Elizabethans.

In many of the comic scenes of Shakespeare we have precisely this elephantine ingenuity, this hunting of a pun to death through three pages.

In the Elizabethan dramatists and in Browning it is no doubt to a certain extent the mark of a real hilarity.

People must be very happy to be so easily amused.

In the case of what is called Browning's obscurity, the question is somewhat more difficult to handle.

Many people have supposed Browning to be profound because he was obscure, and many other people, hardly less mistaken, have supposed him to be obscure because he was profound.

He was frequently profound, he was occasionally obscure, but as a matter of fact the two have little or nothing to do with each other.

Browning's dark and elliptical mode of speech, like his love of the grotesque, was simply a characteristic of his, a trick of is temperament, and had little or nothing to do with whether what he was expressing was profound or superficial.

Suppose, for example, that a person well read in English poetry but unacquainted with Browning's style were earnestly invited to consider the following verse:-- "Hobbs hints blue--straight he turtle eats.

Nobbs prints blue--claret crowns his cup.

Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats-- Both gorge.

Who fished the murex up?

What porridge had John Keats?"

The individual so confronted would say without hesitation that it must indeed be an abstruse and indescribable thought which could only be conveyed by remarks so completely disconnected.

But the point of the matter is that the thought contained in this amazing verse is not abstruse or philosophical at all, but is a perfectly ordinary and straightforward comment, which any one might have made upon an obvious fact of life.

The whole verse of course begins to explain itself, if we know the meaning of the word "murex," which is the name of a sea-shell, out of which was made the celebrated blue dye of Tyre.

The poet takes this blue dye as a simile for a new fashion in literature, and points out that Hobbs, Nobbs, etc. , obtain fame and comfort by merely using the dye from the shell; and adds the perfectly natural comment:-- "...

Who fished the murex up?

What porridge had John Keats?"

So that the verse is not subtle, and was not meant to be subtle, but is a perfectly casual piece of sentiment at the end of a light poem.

Browning is not obscure because he has such deep things to say, any more than he is grotesque because he has such new things to say.

He is both of these things primarily, because he likes to express himself in a particular manner.

The manner is as natural to him as a man's physical voice, and it is abrupt, sketchy, allusive, and full of gaps.

Here comes in the fundamental difference between Browning and such a writer as George Meredith, with whom the Philistine satirist would so often in the matter of complexity class him.

The works of George Meredith are, as it were, obscure even when we know what they mean.

They deal with nameless emotions, fugitive sensations, subconscious certainties and uncertainties, and it really requires a somewhat curious and unfamiliar mode of speech to indicate the presence of these.

But the great part of Browning's actual sentiments, and almost all the finest and most literary of them, are perfectly plain and popular and eternal sentiments.

Meredith is really a singer producing strange notes and cadences difficult to follow because of the delicate rhythm of the song he sings.

Browning is simply a great demagogue, with an impediment in his speech.

Or rather, to speak more strictly, Browning is a man whose excitement for the glory of the obvious is so great that his speech becomes disjointed and precipitate: he becomes eccentric through his advocacy of the ordinary, and goes mad for the love of sanity.

If Browning and George Meredith were each describing the same act, they might both be obscure, but their obscurities would be entirely different.

Suppose, for instance, they were describing even so prosaic and material an act as a man being knocked downstairs by another man to whom he had given the lie, Meredith's description would refer to something which an ordinary observer would not see, or at least could not describe.

It might be a sudden sense of anarchy in the brain of the assaulter, or a stupefaction and stunned serenity in that of the object of the assault.

He might write, "Wainwood's 'Men vary in veracity,' brought the baronet's arm up.

He felt the doors of his brain burst, and Wainwood a swift rushing of himself through air accompanied with a clarity as of the annihilated."

Meredith, in other words, would speak queerly because he was describing queer mental experiences.

But Browning might simply be describing the material incident of the man being knocked downstairs, and his description would run:-- "What then?

'You lie' and doormat below stairs Takes bump from back."

This is not subtlety, but merely a kind of insane swiftness.

Browning is not like Meredith, anxious to pause and examine the sensations of the combatants, nor does he become obscure through this anxiety.

He is only so anxious to get his man to the bottom of the stairs quickly that he leaves out about half the story.

Many who could understand that ruggedness might be an artistic quality, would decisively, and in most cases rightly, deny that obscurity could under any conceivable circumstances be an artistic quality.

But here again Browning's work requires a somewhat more cautious and sympathetic analysis.

There is a certain kind of fascination, a strictly artistic fascination, which arises from a matter being hinted at in such a way as to leave a certain tormenting uncertainty even at the end.

It is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world.

One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it.

There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things.

There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.

But in truth it is very difficult to keep pace with all the strange and unclassified artistic merits of Browning.

He was always trying experiments; sometimes he failed, producing clumsy and irritating metres, top-heavy and over-concentrated thought.

Far more often he triumphed, producing a crowd of boldly designed poems, every one of which taken separately might have founded an artistic school.

But whether successful or unsuccessful, he never ceased from his fierce hunt after poetic novelty.

He never became a conservative.

The last book he published in his life-time, _Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day_, was a new poem, and more revolutionary than _Paracelsus_.

This is the true light in which to regard Browning as an artist.

He had determined to leave no spot of the cosmos unadorned by his poetry which he could find it possible to adorn.

An admirable example can be found in that splendid poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came."

It is the hint of an entirely new and curious type of poetry, the poetry of the shabby and hungry aspect of the earth itself.

Daring poets who wished to escape from conventional gardens and orchards had long been in the habit of celebrating the poetry of rugged and gloomy landscapes, but Browning is not content with this.

He insists upon celebrating the poetry of mean landscapes.

That sense of scrubbiness in nature, as of a man unshaved, had never been conveyed with this enthusiasm and primeval gusto before.

"If there pushed any ragged thistle-stalk Above its mates, the head was chopped; the bents Were jealous else.

What made those holes and rents In the dock's harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to baulk All hope of greenness?

'tis a brute must walk Pashing their life out, with a brute's intents."

This is a perfect realisation of that eerie sentiment which comes upon us, not so often among mountains and water-falls, as it does on some half-starved common at twilight, or in walking down some grey mean street.

It is the song of the beauty of refuse; and Browning was the first to sing it.

Oddly enough it has been one of the poems about which most of those pedantic and trivial questions have been asked, which are asked invariably by those who treat Browning as a science instead of a poet, "What does the poem of 'Childe Roland' mean?"

The only genuine answer to this is, "What does anything mean?"

Does the earth mean nothing?

Do grey skies and wastes covered with thistles mean nothing?

Does an old horse turned out to graze mean nothing?

If it does, there is but one further truth to be added--that everything means nothing.

CHAPTER VII