A \ B \ C \ D \ E \ F \ G \ H \ I \ J \ K \ L \ M \ N \ O \ P \ R \ S \ T \ U \ V \ W \Z

A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) by Mrs. Sutherland Orr

M >> Mrs. Sutherland Orr >> A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.)




It is almost superfluous to add that Mr. Browning's dramatic sympathies
and metaphysical or religious ideas constitute him an optimist. He
believes that no experience is wasted, and that all life is good in its
way. We also see that his optimism takes the individual and not the race
for its test and starting point; and that he places the tendency to good
in a _conscious_ creative power which is outside both, and which deals
directly with each separate human soul. But neither must we forget that
the creative purpose, as he conceives it, fulfils itself equally through
good and evil; so that he does not shrink from the contemplation of evil
or by any means always seek to extenuate it. He thinks of it
philosophically as a condition of good, or again, as an excess or a
distortion of what is good; but he can also think of it, in the natural
sense, as a distinct mode of being which a bad man may prefer for its
own sake, as a good man prefers its opposite, and may defend
accordingly. He would gladly admit that the coarser forms of evil are
passing away; and that it is the creative intention that they should do
so. Evil remains for him nevertheless essential to the variety, and
invested with the dignity of human life; and on no point does he detach
himself so clearly from the humanitarian optimist who regards evil and
its attendant sufferings as a mere disturbance to life. Even where
suffering is not caused by evil doing, he is helped over it by his
individual point of view; because this prevents his ever regarding it as
distinct from the personal compensations which it so often brings into
play. He cannot think of it in the mass; and here again his theism
asserts itself, though in a less obvious manner.

So much of Mr. Browning's moral influence lies in the hopeful religious
spirit which his works reveal, that it is important to understand how
elastic this is, and what seeming contradictions it is competent to
unite. The testimony of one poem might otherwise be set against that of
another with confusing results.

Mr. Browning's paternal grandfather was an Englishman of a west country
stock;[1] his paternal grandmother a Creole. The maternal grandfather
was a German from Hamburg named Wiedemann, an accomplished draughtsman
and musician.[2] The maternal grandmother was completely Scotch.

This pedigree throws a valuable light on the vigour and variety of Mr.
Browning's genius; for it shows that on the ground of heredity they are,
in great measure, accounted for. It contains almost the only facts of a
biographical nature which can be fitly introduced into the present work.


HIS CHOICE AND TREATMENT OF SUBJECT.

VERSIFICATION.

Mr. Browning's choice of subject is determined by his belief that
individual feeling and motive are the only true life: hence the only
true material of dramatic art. He rejects no incident which admits of
development on the side of feeling and motive. He accepts none which
cannot be so developed. His range of subject covers, therefore, a great
deal that is painful, but nothing that is simply repulsive: because the
poetry of human life, that is of individual experience, is absent from
nothing which he portrays.

His treatment of his subject is realistic in so far that it is always
picturesque. It raises a distinct image of the person or action he
intends to describe; but the image is, so to speak, always saturated
with thought: and I shall later have occasion to notice the false
impression of Mr. Browning's genius which this circumstance creates.
Details, which with realists of a narrower kind would give only a
physical impression of the scene described, serve in his case to build
up its mental impression. They create a mental or emotional atmosphere
which makes us vaguely feel the intention of the story as we travel
through it, and flashes it upon us as we look back. In "Red Cotton
Night-cap Country" (as we shall presently see) he dwells so
significantly on the peacefulness of the neighbourhood in which the
tragedy has occurred, that we feel in it the quiet which precedes the
storm, and which in some measure invites it. In one of the Idyls, "Ivan
Ivanovitch," he begins by describing the axe which will strike off the
woman's head, and raising a vague idea of its fitness for any possible
use. In another of them, "Martin Relph," the same process is carried on
in an opposite manner. We see a mental agony before we know its
substantial cause; and we only see the cause as reflected in it "Ned
Bratts," again, conveys in its first lines the sensation of a
tremendously hot day in which Nature seems to reel in a kind of riotous
stupefaction; and the grotesque tragedy on which the idyl turns, becomes
a matter of course. It would be easy to multiply examples.

Mr. Browning's verse is also subordinate to this intellectual theory of
poetic art. It is uniformly inspired by the principle that sense should
not be sacrificed to sound: and this principle constitutes his chief
ground of divergence from other poets. It is a case of
divergence--nothing more: since he is too deeply a musician to be
indifferent to sound in verse, and since no other poet deserving the
name would willingly sacrifice sense to it. But while all agree in
admitting that sense and sound in poetry are the natural complement of
each other, each will be practically more susceptible to one than to the
other, and will unconsciously seek it at the expense of the other. With
all his love for music, Mr. Browning is more susceptible to sense than
to sound. He values though more than expression; matter, more than form;
and, judging him from a strictly poetic point of view, he has lost his
balance in this direction, as so many have lost it in the opposite one.
He has never ignored beauty, but he has neglected it in the desire for
significance. He has never meant to be rugged, but he has become so, in
the exercise of strength. He has never intended to be obscure, but he
has become so from the condensation of style which was the excess of
significance and of strength. Habit grows on us by degrees till its
slight invisible links form an iron chain, till it overweights its
object, and even ends in crushing it out of sight; and Mr. Browning has
illustrated this natural law. The self-enslavement was the more
inevitable in his case that he was not only an earnest worker, but a
solitary one. His genius[3] removed him from the first from that sphere
of popular sympathy in which the tendency to excess would have been
corrected; and the distance, like the mental habit which created it, was
self-increasing.

It is thus that Mr. Browning explains the eccentricities of his style;
and his friends know that beyond the point of explaining, he does not
defend them. He has never blamed his public for accusing him of
obscurity or ugliness He has only thought those wrong who taxed him with
being wilfully ugly or obscure. He began early to defy public opinion
because his best endeavours had failed to conciliate it; and he would
never conciliate it at the expense of what he believed to be the true
principles of his art. But his first and greatest failure from a popular
point of view was the result of his willingness to accept any judgment,
however unfavourable, which coincided with this belief.

"Paracelsus," had recently been published, and declared
"unintelligible;" and Mr. Browning was pondering this fact and
concluding that he had failed to be intelligible because he had been too
concise, when an extract from a letter of Miss Caroline Fox was
forwarded to him by the lady to whom it had been addressed. The writer
stated that John Sterling had tried to read the poem and been repelled
by its _verbosity_; and she ended with this question: "_doth he know
that Wordsworth will devote a fortnight or more to the discovery of the
single word that is the one fit for his sonnet_?"

Mr. Browning was not personally acquainted with either John Sterling or
Caroline Fox, and what he knew of the former as a poet did not, to his
mind, bear out this marked objection to wordiness. Still, he gave the
joint criticism all the weight it deserved; and much more than it
deserved in the case of Miss Fox, whom he imagined, from her
self-confident manner, to be a woman of a certain age, instead of a girl
some years younger than himself; and often, he tells us, during the
period immediately following, he contented himself with two words where
he would rather have used ten. The harsh and involved passages in
"Sordello," which add so much to the remoteness of its thought, were the
first consequence of this lesson. "Pauline" and "Paracelsus" had been
deeply musical, and the music came back to their author's verse with the
dramas, lyrics, and romances by which "Sordello" was followed. But the
dread of being diffuse had doubly rooted itself in his mind, and was to
bear fruit again as soon as the more historical or argumentative mood
should prevail.

The determination never to sacrifice sense to sound is the secret of
whatever repels us in Mr. Browning's verse, and also of whatever
attracts. Wherever in it sense keeps company with sound, we have a music
far deeper than can arise from mere sound, or even from a flow of real
lyric emotion, which has its only counterpart _in_ sound. It is in the
idea, and of it. It is the brain picture beating itself into words.

The technical rules by which Mr. Browning works, carry out his principle
to the fullest extent.

I. He uses the smallest number of words which his meaning allows; is
particularly sparing in adjectives.

II. He uses the largest _relative_ number of Saxon (therefore
picturesque) words.[4]

III. He uses monosyllabic words wherever this is possible.

IV. He farther condenses his style by abbreviations and omissions, of
which some are discarded, but all warranted by authority: "in," "on,"
and "of," for instance, become "i'," "o'," and "o'." Pronouns, articles,
conjunctions, and prepositions are, on the same principle, occasionally
left out.

V. He treats consonants as the backbone of the language, and hence, as
the essential feature in a rhyme; and never allows the repetition of a
consonant in a rhyme to be modified by a change in the preceding vowel,
or by the recurrence of the rhyming syllable in a different word--or the
repetition of a consonant in blank verse to create a half-consonance
resembling a rhyme: though other poets do not shrink from doing so.[5]

VI. He seldom dilutes his emphasis by double rhymes, reserving
these--especially when made up of combined words, and producing a
grotesque effect--for those cases in which the meaning is given with a
modifying colour: a satirical, or self-satirical, intention on the
writer's part. Strong instances of this occur in "The Flight of the
Duchess," "Christmas Eve," and "Pacchiarotto."

VII. He always uses the measure most appropriate to his subject, whether
it be the ten-syllabled blank verse which makes up "The Ring and the
Book," the separate dramatic monologues, and nearly all the dramas, or
the heroic rhymed verse which occurs in "Sordello" and "Fifine at the
Fair;" or one of the lyrical measures, of which his slighter poems
contain almost, if not quite, every known form.[6]

VIII. He takes no liberties with unusual measures; though he takes any
admissible liberty with the usual measures, which will interrupt their
monotony, and strengthen their effect.

IX. He eschews many vulgarisms or inaccuracies which custom has
sanctioned, both in prose and verse, such as, "thou _wert_;" "better
than _them_ all;" "he _need_ not;" "he _dare_ not." The universal "I
_had_ better;" "I _had_ rather," is abhorrent to him.[7]

X. No prosaic turns or tricks of language are ever associated in his
verse with a poetic mood.


THE CONTINUOUS CHARACTER OF HIS WORK.

The writer of a handbook to Mr. Browning's poetry must contend with
exceptional difficulties, growing out of what I have tried to describe
as the unity in variety of Mr. Browning's poetic life. This unity of
course impresses itself on his works; and in order to give a systematic
survey of them, we must treat as a collection of separate facts what is
really a living whole; and seek to give the impression of that whole by
a process of classification which cuts it up alive. Mr. Browning's work
is, to all intents and purposes, one group; and though we may divide and
subdivide it for purposes of illustration, the division will be always
more or less artificial, and, unless explained away, more or less
misleading. We cannot even divide it into periods, for if the first
three poems represent the author's intellectual youth, the remainder are
one long maturity; while even in these the poetic faculty shows itself
full-grown. We cannot trace in it the evidence of successive manners
like those of Raphael, or successive moods like those of Shakespeare;
or, if we do, this is neutralized by the simple fact that Mr. Browning's
productive career has been infinitely longer than was Raphael's, and
considerably so than Shakespeare's; and that changes which meant the
development of a genius in their case, mean the course of a life in his.

And this is the central fact of the case. Mr. Browning's work is
himself. His poetic genius was in advance of his general growth, but it
has been subject to no other law. "The Ring and the Book" was written at
what may be considered the turning-point of a human life. It was in some
degree a turning-point in the author's artistic career: for most of his
emotional poems were published before, and most of the argumentative
after it; and in this sense his work may be said to divide itself into
two. But the division is useless for our purpose. The Browning of the
second period is the Browning of the first, only in a more crystallized
form. No true boundary line can be drawn even here.

My endeavour will, therefore, be to bring the sense of this real
continuity into the divisions which I must impose on Mr. Browning's
work; and thus also to infuse something of his life into the meagre
statement of contents to which I am forced to reduce it. The few words
of explanation by which I preface each group may assist this end. At the
same time I shall resist all temptation to "bring out" what I have
indicated as Mr. Browning's leading ideas by headings, capitals,
italics, or any other artificial device whatever; as in so doing I
should destroy his emphasis and hinder the right reading, besides
effacing the usually dramatic character, of the individual poems. The
impressions I have received from the collective work will, I trust, be
confirmed by it.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: I stated in my first edition that Mr. Browning was
descended from the "Captain Micaiah Browning" who raised the siege of
Derry in 1689 by springing the boom across Lough Foyle, and perished in
the act (the incident being related in Macaulay's "History of England,"
vol. iv., pp. 244 and 245 of the edition of 1858). I am now told that
there is no evidence of this lineal descent, though there are
circumstances which point to some kind of relationship. Another probable
ancestor is Captain ---- Browning, who commanded the ship "Holy Ghost,"
which conveyed Henry V. to France before he fought the battle of
Agincourt; and in return for whose services two waves, said to represent
waves of the sea, were added to his coat of arms. The same arms were
worn by Captain Micaiah Browning, and are so by the present family.]

[Footnote 2: Wiedemann is the second baptismal name of Mr. Browning's
son; and, in his infantine mouth, it became (we do not exactly guess
how), the "Penini," shortened into "Pen," which some ingenious
interpreters have derived from the word "Apennine."]

[Footnote 3: And--we are bound to admit--the singular literary
obtuseness of the England of fifty years ago.]

[Footnote 4: A distinguished American philologist, the late George P.
Marsh, has declared that he exceeds all other modern English writers in
his employment of them.]

[Footnote 5: In "In Memoriam" we have such rhymes as:--

{now {curse {mourn {good {light {report
{low {horse {turn {blood {delight {port

In the blank verse of "The Princess," and of "Enoch Arden" such
assonances as:--

{sun {lost {whom {wand
{noon {burst {seem {hand.

{known {clipt {word
{down {kept {wood, etc.

I take these instances from the works of so acknowledged a master of
verse as Mr. Tennyson, rather than from those of a smaller poet who
would be no authority on the subject, because they thus serve to show
that the poetic ear may have different kinds as well as degrees of
sensibility, and must, in every case, be accepted as, to some extent, a
law to itself.]

[Footnote 6: "La Saisiaz," for instance, is written in the same measure
as "Locksley Hall," fifteen syllables, divided by a pause, into groups
of four trochees, and of three and a half--the last syllable forming the
rhyme. It is admirably suited to the sustained and incisive manner in
which the argument is carried on. "Ixion" in "Jocoseria," is in
alternate hexameter and pentameter, which the author also employs here
for the only time; it imitates the turning of the wheel on which Ixion
is bound. "Pheidippides" is in a measure of Mr. Browning's own, composed
of dactyls and spondees, each line ending with a half foot or pause. It
gives the impression of firm, continuous, and rhythmic motion, and is
generally fitted to convey the exalted sentiment and heroic character of
the poem.

In his translation of the "Agamemnon," Mr. Browning has used the double
ending continuously, so as to reproduce the extended measure of the
Greek iambic trimeter.]

[Footnote 7: As objection has been taken to the opinions conveyed in
this paragraph, and Mr. Browning's authority has been even, in a manner,
invoked against them, I subjoin by his desire the accompanying note. The
question of what is, or is not, a vicious locution is not essential to
the purposes of the book; but it is essential that I should not be
supposed to have misstated Mr. Browning's views on any point on which I
could so easily ascertain them.

"I make use of 'wast' for the second person of the perfect-indicative,
and 'wert' for the present-potential, simply to be understood; as I
should hardly be if I substituted the latter for the former, and
therewith ended my phrase. 'Where wert thou, brother, those three days,
had He not raised thee?' means one thing, and 'Where wast thou when He
did so?' means another. That there is precedent in plenty for this and
many similar locutions ambiguous, or archaic, or vicious, I am well
aware, and that, on their authority, I _be_ wrong, the illustrious poet
_be_ right, and you, our critic, _was_ and shall continue to be my
instructor as to 'every thing that pretty _bin_.' As regards my
objection to the slovenly 'I had' for 'I'd,' instead of the proper 'I
would,' I shall not venture to supplement what Landor has magisterially
spoken on the subject. An adverb adds to, and does not, by its omission,
alter into nonsense the verb it qualifies. 'I would rather speak than be
silent, better criticize than learn' are forms structurally regular:
what meaning is in 'I had speak, had criticize'? Then, I am blamed for
preferring the indicative to what I suppose may be the potential mood in
the case of 'need' and 'dare'--just that unlucky couple: by all means go
on and say 'He need help, he dare me to fight,' and so pair off with 'He
need not beg, he dare not reply,' forms which may be expected to
pullulate in this morning's newspaper.

"VENICE, Oct. 25, 1885."

"R. B."
]




I.

INTRODUCTORY GROUP.

"PAULINE," "PARACELSUS," "SORDELLO."


These three poems are Mr. Browning's first, and they are also, as I have
said, the one partial exception to the unity and continuousness of his
work; they have, at least, one common characteristic which detaches them
from the remainder of it. Each is in its different way the study of a
human spirit, too ambitious to submit to the limits of human existence,
and which learns humility in its unsuccessful conflict with them. This
ambition is of its nature poetic, and seems so much in harmony with Mr.
Browning's mind--young and untutored by experience as it then was, full
of the consciousness of its own powers as it must have been--that it is
difficult not to recognize in it a phase of his own intellectual life.
But if it was so, it is one which he had already outgrown, or lived much
more in fancy than in fact. His sympathy with the ambition of Paracelsus
and Sordello is steadily counteracted by his judgment of it; and we are
only justified in asserting what is beyond dispute: that these poems
represent an introductory phase of the author's imagination, one which
begins and ends in them. The mind of his men and women will be exercised
on many things, but never again so much upon itself. The vivid sense of
their personality will be less in their minds than in his own.


"PAULINE." (1832.)

This poem is, as its title declares, a fragment of a confession. The
speaker is a man, probably still young; and Pauline, the name of the
lady who receives the confession, and is supposed to edit it. It is not,
however, "fragmentary" in the sense of revealing only a small part of
the speaker's life, or of only recording isolated acts, from which the
life may be built up. Its fragmentary character lies in this: that,
while very explicit as a record of feeling and motive, it is entirely
vague in respect to acts. It is an elaborate retrospect of successive
mental states, big with the sense of corresponding misdeeds; and
pointing among these to some glaring infidelities to Pauline, the man's
constant love and friend; but on the whole conveying nothing beyond an
impression of youthful excesses, and of an extreme and fantastic
self-consciousness which has inspired these excesses, and which now
magnifies and distorts them.

An ultra-consciousness of self is in fact the key-note of the whole
mental situation. Pauline's lover has been a prey to the spiritual
ambition so distinctly illustrated in these three first poems; and,
unlike Paracelsus and Sordello, he has given it no outlet in unselfish
aims. His life has not been wholly misspent; he is a poet and a student;
he has had dreams of human good; he has reverenced great men: and never
quite lost the faith in God, and the sense of nearness to Him; and he
alleges some of these facts in deprecation of his too harsh verdict upon
himself. But his ultimate object has been always the gratification of
Self--the ministering to its pleasures and to its powers; and this
egotism has become narrower and more consuming, till the thirst for even
momentary enjoyment has banished the very belief in higher things. The
belief returns, and we leave him at the close of his confession
exhausted by the mental fever, but released from it--new-born to a
better life; though how and why this has happened is again part of the
mystery of the case. "Pauline" is _the_ one of Mr. Browning's longer
poems of which no intelligible abstract is possible: a circumstance the
more striking that it is perfectly transparent, as well as truly
poetical, so far as its language is concerned.

The defects and difficulties of "Pauline" are plainly admitted in an
editor's note, written in French, and signed by this name; and which,
proceeding as it does from the author himself, supplies a valuable
comment on the work.

"I much fear that my poor friend will not be always perfectly understood
in what remains to be read of this strange fragment, but it is less
calculated than any other part to explain what of its nature can never
be anything but dream and confusion. I do not know moreover whether in
striving at a better connection of certain parts, one would not run the
risk of detracting from the only merit to which so singular a production
can pretend: that of giving a tolerably precise idea of the manner
(_genre_) which it can merely indicate. This unpretending opening, this
stir of passion, which first increases, and then gradually subsides,
these transports of the soul, this sudden return upon himself, and above
all, my friend's quite peculiar turn of mind, have made alterations
almost impossible. The reasons which he elsewhere asserts, and others
still more cogent have secured my indulgence for this paper, which
otherwise I should have advised him to throw into the fire. I believe
none the less in the great principle of all composition--in that
principle of Shakespeare, of Raphael, and of Beethoven, according to
which concentration of ideas is due much more to their conception than
to their execution; I have every reason to fear that the first of these
qualities is still foreign to my friend, and I much doubt whether
redoubled labour would enable him to acquire the second. It would be
best to burn this; but what can I do?"

* * * * *

We might infer from this, as from his subsequent introduction, that Mr.
Browning disclaimed all that is extravagant in the poem, and laid it
simply to the charge of the imaginary person it is intended to depict:
but that he has also prefaced it with a curious Latin quotation which
identifies that person with himself.[8]

Copyright (c) 2007. bestextbooks.com. All rights reserved.

Various - "Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 1, 1892"

Fergus Hume - "Red Money"

Kenneth Morris - "The Crest Wave of Evolution"

T. H. Huxley - "Collected Essays, Volume V"