ABSTRACT
It is about time that we began to do justice to Robert Browning. A nation should be able to make up its mind on the merits and demerits of its leaders in the course of thirty years. Thirty years have passed since Robert Browning’s first volume of poems was published; and thirty years ago he was almost as widely known as he is to-day. He is like to share the fate of Milton, and of several other Englishmen,—and women too.… Browning’s is, indeed, a curious fame. No one (except an unfrequent traveller, who remembers somewhat sadly now the kindly greetings which met him within that pleasant English household ‘at Florence, on the hill of Bellosguardo’) knows him personally: his works are read by an insignificant minority, few of whom profess to understand a tithe of what they read; only here and there do you meet vigorous and somewhat disagreeable people, addicted to sarcasm and other evil courses, who take him as a kind of tonic (he braces the nerves, they say, and rids them of mental effeminacy), and who fancy that an age which has Robert Browning and the Bible cannot be so very badly off after all. I confess that this profound neglect and unpopularity has always rather surprised me. One who understands the people of England is of course prepared for many anomalous and inexplicable phenomena. Trial by jury is the palladium of our liberties; yet an English or Scotch jury (not to speak of an Irish) is the very last tribunal to which a wise man would be inclined to submit his cause. ‘May God send thee a good deliverance’ is not by any means the language of hope, when addressed to a friend who has to undergo this ordeal. The verdicts of the English public are often in like manner very incomprehensible; yet it is difficult to account for Browning’s prolonged unpopularity. For he has many of the qualities which recommend a poet to the people. He is a master of the passions. His humour is bright and keen. He has a fine eye for colour. There is a rich and daring melody in his verse. He observes with minute and absolute fidelity. He is
Yet his unpopularity may be accounted for. He is not the poet to be perused with profit in the nursery or in a railway-carriage. He does not relish a platitude as Mr. Longfellow does, nor does his verse move with the same supple smoothness and graceful facility. He is not a rhetorician, like Lord Macaulay. Unlike Pope’s, his couplet does not carry a sting in its tail. He does not care to be ‘effective.’ ‘Point’ is not his strong point. His meaning, besides, does not always lie on the surface. It has to be sought with diligence and close attention. Thus, to those who read while they run, he is commonly obscure, and often incomprehensible. He is never insipid, but-brusque, quaint, rugged, intricately ingenious, involved, ironical-he perplexes the dull and startles the timid.…
Yet these defects have been exaggerated, and are not wilful. The occasional obscurity of his language, and the irregularity of the poetic forms which he uses, cannot be attributed to affectation. They are the natural and appropriate garniture of a peculiar and complex genius. As a thinker, he is essentially original. The Two Voices-Tennyson’s most directly philosophical poem-is composed of a series of rather commonplace rcflections,—profusely adorned, no doubt. It is like a common water-jug, stuck all over with gems and precious stones. No very intricate speculations, no very keen doubts, find expression in that elaboratelypolished verse. Mr. Browning does not only adorn,—he originates as well. His imagination flashes light into the dark places. The chasing is rich indeed,—but the pitcher has been designed by Cellini. Paracelsus and Christmas Eve deal with the weighty issues of the life-divine and human. Paracelsus (on which I would willingly linger, as in many respects the most remarkable of Mr. Browning’s works, but time fails me) is the record of high hopes defeated, of lofty purposes thwarted, of pure aspirations and an unselfish ambition rendered fruitless. Caricatures of religious fanaticism, coarse, but vigorous and vivacious as Hogarth’s, pictures of material nature, pure as summer dawn, frescoes of judgment, heavy with the gloom and pomp of the Sistine, are grotesquely bound up together in Christmas Eve. Throughout that singular poem, in verse that halts, and stumbles, and aspires, the poet strives to read, honestly, patiently, courageously, humbly, ‘the riddle of the painful earthy.’
