the results of this preoccupation with such subjects and of this manner of dealing with them may be recognized very easily in browning’s work.
first of all they turned him aside from becoming
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a great nature-poet, though he was well fitted to be one. it is not that he loves nature’s slow and solemn pageant less, but that he loves man’s quick and varied drama more. his landscapes are like scenery for the stage. they accompany the unfolding of the plot and change with it, but they do not influence it. his observation is as keen, as accurate as wordsworth’s or tennyson’s, but it is less steady, less patient, less familiar. it is the observation of one who passes through the country but does not stay to grow intimate with it. the forms of nature do not print themselves on his mind; they flash vividly before him, and come and go. usually it is some intense human feeling that makes the details of the landscape stand out so sharply. in pippa passes, it is in the ecstasy of love that ottima and sebald notice
“the garden’s silence: even the single bee
persisting in his toil, suddenly stopped,
and where he hid you only could surmise
by some campanula chalice set a-swing.”
it is the sense of guilty passion that makes the lightning-flashes, burning through the pine-forest, seem like dagger-strokes,—
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“as if god’s messenger through the closed wood screen
plunged and re-plunged his weapon at a venture,
feeling for guilty thee and me.”
in home thoughts from abroad, it is the exile’s deep homesickness that brings the quick, delicate vision before his eyes:
“oh, to be in england
now that april’s there,
and whoever wakes in england
sees, some morning, unaware,
that the lowest boughs and the brush-wood sheaf
round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
while the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
in england—now!”
but browning’s touches of nature are not always as happy as this. often he crowds the details too closely, and fails to blend them with the ground of the picture, so that the tonality is destroyed and the effect is distracting. the foreground is too vivid: the aerial perspective vanishes. there is an impressionism that obscures the reality. as amiel says: “under pretense that we want to study it more in detail, we pulverize the statue.”
browning is at his best as a nature-poet in sky-scapes,
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like the description of daybreak in pippa passes, the lunar rainbow in christmas eve, and the northern lights in easter day; and also in a kind of work which might be called symbolic landscape, where the imaginative vision of nature is made to represent a human experience. a striking example of this work is the scenery of childe roland, reflecting as in a glass the grotesque horrors of spiritual desolation. there is a passage in sordello which makes a fertile landscape, sketched in a few swift lines, the symbol of sordello’s luxuriant nature; and another in norbert’s speech, in in a balcony, which uses the calm self-abandonment of the world in the tranquil evening light as the type of the sincerity of the heart giving itself up to love. but perhaps as good an illustration as we can find of browning’s quality as a nature-poet, is a little bit of mystery called meeting at night.
“the gray sea and the long black land;
and the yellow half-moon, large and low;
and the startled little waves that leap
in fiery ringlets from their sleep,
as i gain the cove with pushing prow,
and quench its speed in the slushy sand.
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then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
three fields to cross till a farm appears;
a tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
and the blue spirt of a lighted match,
and a voice less loud, through its joys and fears,
than the two hearts beating each to each!”
this is the landscape of the drama.
a second result of browning’s preoccupation with dramatic psychology is the close concentration and “alleged obscurity” of his style. here again i evade the critical question whether the obscurity is real, or whether it is only a natural and admirable profundity to which an indolent reviewer has given a bad name. that is a question which posterity must answer. but for us the fact remains that some of his poetry is hard to read; it demands close attention and strenuous effort; and when we find a piece of it that goes very easily, like the pied piper of hamelin, how they brought the good news from ghent to aix, hervé riel, or the stirring cavalier tunes, we are conscious of missing the sense of strain which we have learned to associate with the reading of browning.
one reason for this is the predominance of
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curiosity over harmony in his disposition. he tries to express the inexpressible, to write the unwritable. as dr. johnson said of cowley, he has the habit “of pursuing his thoughts to the last ramifications, by which he loses the grandeur of generality.” another reason is the fluency, the fertility, the haste of his genius, and his reluctance, or inability, to put the brakes on his own productiveness.
it seems probable that if browning had been able to write more slowly and carefully he might have written with more lucidity. there was a time when he made a point of turning off a poem a day. it is doubtful whether the story of the ring and the book gains in clearness by being told by eleven different persons, all of them inclined to volubility.
yet browning’s poetry is not verbose. it is singularly condensed in the matter of language. he seems to have made his most arduous effort in this direction. after paracelsus had been published and pronounced “unintelligible,” he was inclined to think that there might be some fault of too great terseness in the style. but a letter from miss caroline fox was shown to him, in which that lady, (then
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very young,) took the opposite view and asked “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.” browning appears to have been impressed by this criticism; but he set himself to work upon it, not so much by way of selecting words as by way of compressing them. he put sordello into a world where many of the parts of speech are lacking and all are crowded. he learned to pack the largest, possible amount of meaning into the smallest possible space, as a hasty traveller packs his portmanteau. many small articles are crushed and crumpled out of shape. he adopted a system of elisions for the sake of brevity, and loved, as c. s. calverley said,
“to dock the smaller parts of speech
as we curtail th’ already curtailed cur.”
at the same time he seldom could resist the temptation to put in another thought, another simile, another illustration, although the poem might be already quite full. he called out, like the conductor of a street-car, “move up in front: room for one more!” he had little tautology of expression, but
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much of conception. a good critic says “browning condenses by the phrase, elaborates by the volume.”[15]
one consequence of this system of writing is that a great deal of browning’s poetry lends itself admirably to translation,—into english. the number of prose paraphrases of his poems is great, and so constantly increasing that it seems as if there must be a real demand for them. but coleridge, speaking of the qualities of a true poetic style, remarked: “whatever lines can be translated into other words of the same language without diminution of their significance, either in sense, or in association, or in any other feeling, are so far vicious in their diction.”
another very notable thing in browning’s poetry is his fertility and fluency of rhyme. he is probably the most rapid, ingenious, and unwearying rhymer among the english poets. there is a story that once, in company with tennyson, he was challenged to produce a rhyme for “rhinoceros,” and almost instantly accomplished the task with a verse in
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which the unwieldy quadruped kept time and tune with the phrase “he can toss eros.”[16] there are other tours de force almost as extraordinary in his serious poems. who but browning would have thought of rhyming “syntax” with “tin-tacks,” or “spare-rib” with “carib,” (flight of duchess) or “fra angelico’s” with “bellicose,” or “ghirlandajo” with “heigh-ho,” (old pictures in florence) or “expansive explosive” with “o danaides, o sieve!” (master hugues). rhyme, with most poets, acts as a restraint, a brake upon speech. but with browning it is the other way. his rhymes are like wild, frolicsome horses, leaping over the fences and carrying him into the widest digressions. many a couplet, many a stanza would not have been written but for the impulse of a daring, suggestive rhyme.
join to this love of somewhat reckless rhyming, his deep and powerful sense of humour, and you have the secret of his fondness for the grotesque. his poetry abounds in strange contrasts, sudden changes of mood, incongruous comparisons, and odd presentations of well-known subjects. sometimes
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the whole poem is written in this manner. the soliloquy in a spanish cloister, sibrandus schafnaburgensis, and caliban upon setebos, are poetic gargoyles. sometimes he begins seriously enough, as in the poem on keats, and closes with a bit of fantastic irony:
“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?”
sometimes the poem opens grotesquely, like christmas eve, and rises swiftly to a wonderful height of pure beauty and solemnity, dropping back into a grotesque at the end. but all this play of fancy must not be confused with the spirit of mockery or of levity. it is often characteristic of the most serious and earnest natures; it arises in fact from the restlessness of mind in the contemplation of evil, or from the perception of life’s difficulties and perplexities. shakespeare was profoundly right in introducing the element of the grotesque into hamlet, his most thoughtful tragedy. browning is never
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really anything else but a serious thinker, passionately curious to solve the riddle of existence. like his own sordello he
“gave to familiar things a face grotesque,
only, pursuing through the mad burlesque,
a grave regard.”
we may sum up, then, what we have to say of browning’s method and manner by recognizing that they belong together and have a mutual fitness and inevitableness. we may wish that he had attained to more lucidity and harmony of expression, but we should probably have had some difficulty in telling him precisely how to do it, and he would have been likely to reply with good humour as he did to tennyson, “the people must take me as they find me.” if he had been less ardent in looking for subjects for his poetry, he might have given more care to the form of his poems. if he had cut fewer blocks, he might have finished more statues. the immortality of much of his work may be discounted by its want of perfect art,—the only true preservative of man’s handiwork. but the immortality
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of his genius is secure. he may not be ranked finally among the great masters of the art of poetry. but he certainly will endure as a mine for poets. they may stamp the coins more clearly and fashion the ornaments more delicately. but the gold is his. he was the prospector,—the first dramatic psychologist of modern life. the very imperfections of his work, in all its splendid richness and bewildering complexity, bear witness to his favourite doctrine that life itself is more interesting than art, and more glorious, because it is not yet perfect.
