ABSTRACT
Whether Mr. Browning keeps a Commonplace Book, we have no means of knowing; but we have every means of knowing that he thinks in prose, for the prose thoughts are there before us, gratuitously turned by some arbitrary whim, which we confess completely puzzles us, into metre. Mr. Browning is, as we have said, a profound thinker, and nearly all his thoughts have the quality of depth. Now, probably all thoughts to which this quality of depth can be ascribed, arrive at the portals of the brain in this prose-their natural vesture; whilst, on the contrary, lofty thoughts, their antitheses, usually enter it in the subtle garb of music. Here we have clear difference in kind; prose thoughts, so to speak, from below-poetical thoughts, so to speak, from above. If we suppose a permeable plane dividing these two regions of thought, we can easily understand how there comes to be what we may call a sliding scale of poets, and a sliding scale of philosophical thinkers; some of the latter, to whom the faculty of philosophising cannot be denied, being rather shallow-some of the former, whose claims to poetical status cannot fairly be questioned, not being very soaring; and we can further understand how the natural denizens of one sphere may ever and anon cross the permeable plane, invade the other sphere, and seem to belong to it in the sense in which foreigners belong to a country they are constantly visiting. But for all that there ever remains a substantial difference between the two spheres and between their respective native inhabitants, between the country of poetry and the country of prose, between poetical power and instinct and philosophical power and proclivity. Accordingly, where a man talks the language of the sphere to which he properly belongs-in other words, when a philosophical thinker publishes his thoughts in prose, or a poetical thinker addresses us in verse-our task is comparatively simple. All we have got to do is to decide whether the former be profound or shallow, and whether the latter have
claimant to the great inheritance of bardic fame, whose hands are the hands of Esau, but whose voice is the voice of Jacob. Several, whose eyes, like those of Isaac, are dim, and who therefore cannot see, admit the claim-hesitatingly, it is true, again like Isaac-of the hands, and accept him as a poet. But it is the true resonant voice, not the made-up delusive hand, which is the test of the singer; and to those whose sight is not dim, Mr. Browning is not a poet at all-save in the sense that all cultivated men and women of sensitive feelings are poets-but a deep thinker, a profound philosopher, a keen analyser, and a biting wit. With this key to what to most persons is a riddle-for, despite the importunate attempts of certain critics who, as we have already said, having placed Mr, Tennyson on a poetical pedestal considerably too high for him, are now beginning to waver in their extravagant creed, and are disposed to put him on one a trifle lower, placing Mr. Browning there instead, the general public has not yet become quite reconciled to the operation —we think we shall be able to rid them of their perplexities. At any rate, we will keep applying it as we go along. Let us revert to Paracelsus and take our start from it, as Mr. Browning himself did. His lyrical pieces apart-of which something anon-and the humouristic faculty which has since developed itself in him, Mr. Browning in Paracelsus is what Mr. Browning is in all the many socalled poetical works he has since given to the world. He is Mr. Browning, naturally not yet grown to his full size; not yet quite so deep, shrewd, obscure, fantastical, unmusical; but with the exceptions we have just made, what manner and matter of mental man he is may there be satisfactorily scrutinised. He is at his never-abandoned natural task of thinking deep thoughts in prose, and his artificial trick of turning them into verse. He is, as he imagines, working like a dramatist, just as he has since imagined himself to be working as a dramatist in such pieces as ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’, ‘Caliban on Setebos’, &c. Indeed, he has let us into the secret of his method in Sordello, written very shortly after Paracelsus, in the following lines; which we quote, though at the risk perhaps of most of our readers declaring that they have not the faintest notion as to what they mean:
How I rose, And how you have advanced! since evermore Yourselves effect what I was fain before Effect, what I supplied yourselves suggest, What I leave bare yourselves can now invest. How we attain to talk as brothers talk, In half-words, call things by half-names, no balk From discontinuing old aids. To-day
A touch less turn to insignificance, Those structures’ symmetry the Past has strewed The world with, once so bare. Leave the mere rudc Explicit details! ‘tis but brother’s speech We need, speech where an accent’s change gives each The other’s soul-no speech to understand By former audience: need was then to expand, Expatiate-hardly were we brothers! trueNor I lament my small remove from you, Nor reconstruct what stands already. Ends Accomplished turn to means: my art intends New structure from the ancient.
