し love. Within this range itself there is sufficient room for variety. But in the Soliloquy Browning goes to its opposite, hate (which he declares elsewhere, but does not show here, to be "but a mask of love"). The monk who utters the soliloquy is a man of vigorous mind and fiery passions, fanned to flame by the asceticism, the quiet tastes, the vapid conversation, and the feeble intellect of Brother Lawrence. Not a little of Browning's own sympathy goes with the speaker of the soliloquy. The difficulty generally felt in understanding Browning is associated, in the minds of most, probably, with the longer rather than with the shorter poems; and perhaps the superior popularity of Dramatic Romances and Dramatic Lyrics is partly due to the greater simplicity ensured, in some instances at least, by their shortness. The lyrical and semi-lyrical measures too have had some effect in holding in check the eccentricities of Browning's style. Yet even among those poems there are traces of what can only be regarded as wilful eccentricity. But for the best, and worst, example of this fault we have to look beyond the limits of the present period to Holy-Cross Day, first published in Men and Women. This piece sinks to offensive vulgarity. Browning clearly lacked on this side the power of self-criticism, and he had apparently no one who could and would tell him when he was going wrong, or no one with sufficient influence to persuade him. The fact is much to be regretted. Pieces of this kind, with enigmas like Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came, have helped to make Browning repellent to many, and have stood, perhaps more than anything else, in the way of his popularity. They are only one side of his work and not an important one, but still one which it is necessary to recognise. Such pieces, which after all are not numerous, might be ignored, though the tendency of readers is probably rather to insist upon them. But unfortunately the spirit they indicate is apt to insinuate itself into greater works, where the prevailing tone is very different. Thus, even in Browning's masterpiece, The Ring and the Book, the parts devoted to the two lawyers are much of this description. These parts are happily detachable, and so do less harm than they might have done. Still, the fact remains that the work as the poet conceived it included them. It needs a robust faith to believe that he judged well, or that what they add to the effect of the whole is not more than counterbalanced by the jar to the feelings in passing from Pompilia to Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis. Browning, it has been well said, had a Gothic mind. Artistic order in construction and classical finish in execution were alike foreign to him. Like the Gothic architects, he poured out the farrago of his imagination on whatever work he had in hand; and as they admitted the grotesque freely into their cathedrals, so did he into his most serious poems. But there are points of difference. The grotesque in Gothic architecture is only one element in many, and its effect is softened by its surroundings. In the poems of Browning just referred to it stands out too prominent, or else it is not prominent enough. The alternative would seem to be either that it should stand alone, or, if introduced into a serious poem, that it should be quite subordinated. Thus Browning's own Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister is a purely grotesque conception thoroughly well executed. But in the other cases the grotesque is not properly subordinated. There is in such cases a vital difference between architecture and literature. In architecture the eye takes in a great deal at a glance; and the effect of the fantastic ornamentation of the corbels and gargoyles is diminished and softened by the other parts of the building along with which they are seen. Language on the other hand produces its effect by successive impressions. The reader must indeed carry the whole in his mind, but at each point the sentence before him predominates over the rest. It follows from this that a grotesque element in literature takes a prominence it has not in architecture. It follows also that the use of the grotesque must in the former case be more carefully circumscribed. Browning seems sometimes to have forgotten this. He employs the grotesque with the utmost freedom; and unfortunately it does not always blend with the whole, but stands out distinct and incongruous. It may be said, with some degree of truth, that Shakespeare in his mingling of comedy with tragedy has done the same thing. The question is one of manner and circumstance: what is good in one case need not necessarily be good in another. In Shakespeare's plays as they have been handed down to us, reasonable criticism must conclude that there are cases of such mingling for which no higher reason can be assigned than a desire to please the pit. This is true of the porter's speech in Macbeth, which the fine taste of Coleridge rejected as spurious. When the inter mixture of comedy with tragedy has been critically approved it is because, as in the grave-digging scene in Hamlet, the comedy intensifies the tragedy, rather than disturbs the effect. Further, it should be noticed that the Elizabethan method, which in this respect is not Browning's method, almost necessitated the intermixture. The Elizabethan drama is a miniature picture of life, not of one phase or moment of life. Browning, on the contrary, habitually chooses some turning point or crisis. The very concentration of his method excludes the grotesque: except in very rare cases there can be no room for it. It is condemned, not for being what it is, but for being where it is. At the close of the period under discussion Browning was only thirty-four; yet he had already produced a body of work greater than many poets have written in an average life. His range is at least as remarkable. The variety even of form in his poetry is considerable, and the variety of substance is still greater. The poet had wide knowledge and was catholic in his interest. The mere geographical distribution of his subjects is worthy of notice. Strafford and A Blot in the 'Scutcheon are English, Paracelsus and Colombe's Birthday are German, The Return of the Druses is Eastern in more than the sense merely of locality; for the key to the character of Djabal, and therefore to the whole, is the mingling of a European or Western training with an Eastern heart and disposition. Djabal is, as he himself says in the end, spoilt by the equipoise of these two elements: "As a Frank schemer or an Arab mystic I had been something". But the one destroys the other. The equipoise however is not perfect. Rightly or wrongly, Browning paints the child of the East as conquering, so far as he does so, by the arts of the West. The mysticism becomes quite consciously part of the Frank scheming. But, like oil and water, the two never really mingle. Mr. Rudyard Kipling has since sung, Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet and Browning in The Return of the Druses takes the same view. But it is to Italy that by far the largest share of his attention is given. King Victor and King Charles, Luria, and A Soul's Tragedy all have their scene laid in Italy. So have the earlier works, Sordello and Pippa Passes; and so have many of the Dramatic Lyrics and Dramatic Romances. Browning said that as Queen Mary believed that the word "Calais" would be found written in her heart, so in his would be found "Italy"; and he proved the depth of his affection both by living in the country and by going to it again and again for his subjects. It has been thought that this partly explains his unpopularity in his own country; but we may doubt whether much if any of the unpopularity can be traced to that cause. Though Browning chose Italian subjects, the cast of his mind was not in the least Italian. Unfamiliarity with the history and the art amidst which he moves may have been felt at times as an obstacle to the full understanding of him, but rarely as the principal one. Very few of his poems are more generally liked than Andrea del Sarto, and it is at once Italian in scene and artistic in substance. The causes of the unpopularity are rather to be found in that perversity noticed above, and still more in the philosophic tone of his thought. These together left him in the year 1846, notwithstanding Paracelsus and the admirable dramatic monologues, a very weak competitor with Tennyson for fame. CHAPTER IV. THE SECOND PERIOD OF TENNYSON'S WORK. THE middle of the century was an eventful period in its literary history. It was marked in the case of Tennyson by the advance to longer and more ambitious works than he had hitherto attempted; in the case of Browning by the final recognition of the limits to his dramatic genius and his consequent concentration on forms better suited to him; and most of all by the first appearance of Matthew Arnold in the field of poetry. It will be convenient in the first place to follow the course of the writings of the two elder poets. The chronological list of Tennyson's principal poems, between the last of those already noticed and his new departure with Queen Mary in 1875, is as follows: The Princess, 1847; In Memoriam, 1850; Maud, 1855; Enoch Arden, 1864; and various parts of the Idylls of the King from 1859 onwards, the whole being still incomplete at the limit mentioned. A glance at this list reveals two points of difference between it and Tennyson's earlier work. In the first place, we notice that it is a period of long poems; and in the second place, which is indeed only the other side of this fact, that the lyrical element is now in the background. Not that Tennyson by any means abandoned the writing of lyrics during this period. Maud is a lyrical poem, and the beautiful songs in The Princess prove that the writer never, either before or since, was a more perfect master of the lyric strain. But the proportion which the lyrics bear to the whole work of this period is very different from that which they bear to the work of the earlier years. It might seem that Tennyson, having already proved his capacity to write short pieces exquisitely, was devoting himself to the task of establishing a reputation for constructive power. The view, if any one holds it, that no man can be a great poet who has not written a long poem, needs no refutation. |