English Literature
order,--of law in the physical world, producing evolution, and of law in
the spiritual world, working out the perfect man. _In Memoriam, Idylls of
the King, The Princess_,-here are three widely different poems; yet the
theme of each, so far as poetry is a kind of spiritual philosophy and
weighs its words before it utters them, is the orderly development of law
in the natural and in the spiritual world.
This certainly is a new doctrine in poetry, but the message does not end
here. Law implies a source, a method, an object. Tennyson, after facing his
doubts honestly and manfully, finds law even in the sorrows and losses of
humanity. He gives this law an infinite and personal source, and finds the
supreme purpose of all law to be a revelation of divine love. All earthly
love, therefore, becomes an image of the heavenly. What first perhaps
attracted readers to Tennyson, as to Shakespeare, was the character of his
women,--pure, gentle, refined beings, whom we must revere as our Anglo-
Saxon forefathers revered the women they loved. Like Browning, the poet had
loved one good woman supremely, and her love made clear the meaning of all
life. The message goes one step farther. Because law and love are in the
world, faith is the only reasonable attitude toward life and death, even
though we understand them not. Such, in a few words, seems to be Tennyson's
whole message and philosophy.
If we attempt now to fix Tennyson's permanent place in literature, as the
result of his life and work, we must apply to him the same test that we
applied to Milton and Wordsworth, and, indeed, to all our great poets, and
ask with the German critics, "What new thing has he said to the world or
even to his own country?" The answer is, frankly, that we do not yet know
surely; that we are still too near Tennyson to judge him impersonally. This
much, however, is clear. In a marvelously complex age, and amid a hundred
great men, he was regarded as a leader. For a full half century he was the
voice of England, loved and honored as a man and a poet, not simply by a
few discerning critics, but by a whole people that do not easily give their
allegiance to any one man. And that, for the present, is Tennyson's
sufficient eulogy.
ROBERT BROWNING (1812-1889)
How good is man's life, the mere living! how fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses for ever in joy!
In this new song of David, from Browning's _Saul_, we have a suggestion of
the astonishing vigor and hope that characterize all the works of Browning,
the one poet of the age who, after thirty years of continuous work, was
finally recognized and placed beside Tennyson, and whom future ages may
judge to be a greater poet,--perhaps, even, the greatest in our literature
since Shakespeare.
The chief difficulty in reading Browning is the obscurity of his style,
which the critics of half a century ago held up to ridicule. Their attitude
towards the poet's early work may be inferred from Tennyson's humorous
criticism of _Sordello_. It may be remembered that the first line of this
obscure poem is, "Who will may hear Sordello's story told"; and that the
last line is, "Who would has heard Sordello's story told." Tennyson
remarked that these were the only lines in the whole poem that he
understood, and that they were evidently both lies. If we attempt to
explain this obscurity, which puzzled Tennyson and many less friendly
critics, we find that it has many sources. First, the poet's thought is
often obscure, or else so extremely subtle that language expresses it
imperfectly,--
Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into a narrow act,
Fancies that broke through language and escaped.
Second, Browning is led from one thing to another by his own mental
associations, and forgets that the reader's associations may be of an
entirely different kind. Third, Browning is careless in his English, and
frequently clips his speech, giving us a series of ejaculations. As we do
not quite understand his processes of thought, we must stop between the
ejaculations to trace out the connections. Fourth, Browning's, allusions
are often far-fetched, referring to some odd scrap of information which he
has picked up in his wide reading, and the ordinary reader finds it
difficult to trace and understand them. Finally, Browning wrote too much
and revised too Little. The time which he should have given to making one
thought clear was used in expressing other thoughts that flitted through
his head like a flock of swallows. His field was the individual soul, never
exactly alike in any two men, and he sought to express the hidden motives
and principles which govern individual action. In this field he is like a
miner delving underground, sending up masses of mingled earth and ore; and
the reader must sift all this material to separate the gold from the dross.
Here, certainly, are sufficient reasons for Browning's obscurity; and we
must add the word that the fault seems unpardonable, for the simple reason
that Browning shows himself capable, at times, of writing directly,
melodiously, and with noble simplicity.
So much for the faults, which must be faced and overlooked before one finds
the treasure that is hidden in Browning's poetry. Of all the poets in our
literature, no other is so completely, so consciously, so magnificently a
teacher of men. He feels his mission of faith and courage in a world of
doubt and timidity. For thirty years he faced indifference or ridicule,
working bravely and cheerfully the while, until he made the world recognize
and follow him. The spirit of his whole life is well expressed in his
_Paracelsus_, written when he was only twenty-two years old:
I see my way as birds their trackless way.
I shall arrive,--what time, what circuit first,
I ask not; but unless God send his hail
Or blinding fire-balls, sleet or stifling snow,
In some time, his good time, I shall arrive;
He guides me and the bird. In his good time.
He is not, like so many others, an entertaining poet. One cannot read him
after dinner, or when settled in a comfortable easy-chair. One must sit up,
and think, and be alert when he reads Browning. If we accept these
conditions, we shall probably find that Browning is the most stimulating
poet in our language. His influence upon our life is positive and
tremendous. His strength, his joy of life, his robust faith, and his
invincible optimism enter into us, making us different and better men after
reading him. And perhaps the best thing he can say of Browning is that his
thought is slowly but surely taking possession of all well-educated men and
women.
LIFE. Browning's father was outwardly a business man, a clerk for fifty
years in the Bank of England; inwardly he was an interesting combination of
the scholar and the artist, with the best tastes of both. His mother was a
sensitive, musical woman, evidently very lovely in character, the daughter
of a German shipowner and merchant who had settled in Scotland. She was of
Celtic descent, and Carlyle describes her as the true type of a Scottish
gentlewoman. From his neck down, Browning was the typical Briton,--short,
stocky, large-chested, robust; but even in the lifeless portrait his face
changes as we view it from different angles. Now it is like an English
business man, now like a German scientist, and now it has a curious
suggestion of Uncle Remus,--these being, no doubt, so many different
reflections of his mixed and unremembered ancestors.
He was born in Camberwell, on the outskirts of London, in 1812. From his
home and from his first school, at Peckham, he could see London; and the
city lights by night and the smoky chimneys by day had the same powerful
fascination for the child that the woods and fields and the beautiful
country had for his friend Tennyson. His schooling was short and desultory,
his education being attended to by private tutors and by his father, who
left the boy largely to follow his own inclination. Like the young Milton,
Browning was fond of music, and in many of his poems, especially in "Abt
Vogler" and "A Toccata of Galuppi's," he interprets the musical temperament
better, perhaps, than any other writer in our literature. But unlike
Milton, through whose poetry there runs a great melody, music seems to have
had no consistent effect upon his verse, which is often so jarring that one
must wonder how a musical ear could have endured it.
Like Tennyson, this boy found his work very early, and for fifty years
hardly a week passed that he did not write poetry. He began at six to
produce verses, in imitation of Byron; but fortunately this early work has
been lost. Then he fell under the influence of Shelley, and his first known
work, _Pauline_ (1833), must be considered as a tribute to Shelley and his
poetry. Tennyson's earliest work, _Poems by Two Brothers_, had been
published and well paid for, five years before; but Browning could find no
publisher who would even consider _Pauline_, and the work was published by
means of money furnished by an indulgent relative. This poem received scant
notice from the reviewers, who had pounced like hawks on a dovecote upon
Tennyson's first two modest volumes. Two years later appeared _Paracelsus_,
and then his tragedy _Strafford_ was put upon the stage; but not till
_Sordello_ was published, in 1840, did he attract attention enough to be
denounced for the obscurity and vagaries of his style. Six years later, in
1846, he suddenly became famous, not because he finished in that year his
_Bells and Pomegranates_ (which is Browning's symbolic name for "poetry and
thought" or "singing and sermonizing"), but because he eloped with the best
known literary woman in England, Elizabeth Barrett, whose fame was for many
years, both before and after her marriage, much greater than Browning's,
and who was at first considered superior to Tennyson. Thereafter, until his
own work compelled attention, he was known chiefly as the man who married
Elizabeth Barrett. For years this lady had been an almost helpless invalid,
and it seemed a quixotic thing when Browning, having failed to gain her
family's consent to the marriage, carried her off romantically. Love and
Italy proved better than her physicians, and for fifteen years Browning and
his wife lived an ideally happy life in Pisa and in Florence. The exquisite
romance of their love is preserved in Mrs. Browning's _Sonnets from the
Portuguese_, and in the volume of _Letters_ recently published,--wonderful
letters, but so tender and intimate that it seems almost a sacrilege for
inquisitive eyes to read them.
Mrs. Browning died in Florence in 1861. The loss seemed at first too much
to bear, and Browning fled with his son to England. For the remainder of
his life he lived alternately in London and in various parts of Italy,
especially at the Palazzo Rezzonico, in Venice, which is now an object of
pilgrimage to almost every tourist who visits the beautiful city. Wherever
he went he mingled with men and women, sociable, well dressed, courteous,
loving crowds and popular applause, the very reverse of his friend
Tennyson. His earlier work had been much better appreciated in America than
in England; but with the publication of _The Ring and the Book_, in 1868,
he was at last recognized by his countrymen as one of the greatest of
English poets. He died in Venice, on December 12, 1889, the same day that
saw the publication of his last work, _Asolando_. Though Italy offered him
an honored resting place, England claimed him for her own, and he lies
buried beside Tennyson in Westminster Abbey. The spirit of his whole life
is magnificently expressed in his own lines, in the Epilogue of his last
book:
One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward,