An Introduction to the Study of Browning.

by Arthur Symons.

PREFACE

This _Introduction to the Study of Browning_, which is now reprinted in a new form, revised throughout, and with everything relating to facts carefully brought up to date, has been for many years out of print. I wrote it as an act of homage to the poet whom I had worshipped from my boyhood; I meant it to be, in almost his own words, used of Sh.e.l.ley, some approach to "the signal service it was the dream of my boyhood to render to his fame and memory."

It was sufficiently rewarded by three things: first, by the generous praise of Walter Pater, in the _Guardian_, which led to the beginning of my friendship with him; then, by a single sentence from George Meredith, "You have done knightly service to a brave leader"; lastly, by a letter from Browning himself, in which he said: "How can I manage even to thank--much more praise--what, in its generosity of appreciation, makes the poorest recognition 'come too near the praising of myself'?"

I repeat these things now, because they seem to justify me in dragging back into sight a book written when I was very young, and, as I am only too conscious, lacking in many of the qualities which I have since acquired or developed. But, on going over it, I have found, for the most part, what seems to me a sound foundation, though little enough may be built on that foundation. I have revised many sentences, and a few opinions; but, while conscious that I should approach the whole subject now in a different way, I have found surprisingly few occasions for any fundamental or serious change of view. I am conscious how much I owed, at that time, to the most helpful and judicious friend whom I could possibly have had at my elbow, d.y.k.es Campbell. There are few pages of my ma.n.u.script which he did not read and criticise, and not a page of my proofs which he did not labour over as if it had been his own. He forced me to learn accuracy, he cut out my worst extravagances, he kept me sternly to my task. It was in writing this book under his encouragement and correction that I began to learn the first elements of literary criticism.

This new edition, then, of my book is new and yet the same. I have altered everything that seemed to require altering, and I have made the style a little more equable; but I have not, I hope, broken anywhere into a new key, or added any sort of decoration not in keeping with the original plainness of the stuff. When Pater said: "His book is, according to his intention, before all things a useful one," he expressed my wish in the matter; and also when he said: "His aim is to point his readers to the best, the indisputable, rather than to the dubious portions of his author's work." In the letter from which I have quoted, Browning said: "It does indeed strike me as wonderful that you should have given such patient attention to all those poems, and (if I dare say further) so thoroughly entered into--at any rate--the spirit in which they were written and the purpose they hoped to serve." If Browning really thought that, my purpose, certainly, had been accomplished.

_April 1906_.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

I have ever held that the rod with which popular fancy invests criticism is properly the rod of divination: a hazel-switch for the discovery of buried treasure, not a birch-twig for the castigation of offenders. It has therefore been my aim in the following pages to direct attention to the best, not to forage for the worst--the small faults which acquire prominence only by isolation--of the poet with whose writings I am concerned. I wish also to give information, more or less detailed, about each of Mr. Browning's works; information sufficient to the purpose I have in view, which is to induce those who have hitherto deprived themselves of a stimulating pleasure to deprive themselves of it no longer. Further, my aim is in no sense controversial. In a book whose sole purpose is to serve as an introduction to the study of a single one of our contemporary poets, I have consciously and carefully refrained from inst.i.tuting comparisons--which I deprecate as, to say the least, unnecessary--between the poet in question and any of the other eminent poets in whose time we have the honour of living.

I have to thank Mr. Browning for permission to reprint the interesting and now almost inaccessible prefaces to some of his earlier works, which will be found in Appendix II. I have also to thank Dr. Furnivall for permission to make use of his _Browning Bibliography_, and for other kind help. I wish to acknowledge my obligation to Mrs. Orr's _Handbook to Robert Browning's Works_, and to some of the Browning Society's papers, for helpful information and welcome light. Finally, I would tender my especial and grateful thanks to Mr. J. d.y.k.es Campbell, who has given me much kindly a.s.sistance.

_Sept. 15, 1886_.

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF BROWNING

The first and perhaps the final impression we receive from the work of Robert Browning is that of a great nature, an immense personality. The poet in him is made up of many men. He is dramatist, humorist, lyrist, painter, musician, philosopher and scholar, each in full measure, and he includes and dominates them all. In richness of nature, in scope and penetration of mind and vision, in energy of pa.s.sion and emotion, he is probably second among English poets to Shakespeare alone. In art, in the power or the patience of working his native ore, he is surpa.s.sed by many; but few have ever held so rich a mine in fee. So large, indeed, appear to be his natural endowments, that we cannot feel as if the whole vast extent of his work has come near to exhausting them.

As it is, he has written more than any other English poet with the exception of Shakespeare, and he comes very near the gigantic total of Shakespeare. Ma.s.s of work is of course in itself worth nothing without due quality; but there is no surer test nor any more fortunate concomitant of greatness than the union of the two. The highest genius is splendidly spendthrift; it is only the second order that needs to be n.i.g.g.ardly. Browning's works are not a mere collection of poems, they are a literature. And his literature is the richest of modern times. If "the best poetry is that which reproduces the most of life," his place is among the great poets of the world. In the vast extent of his work he has dealt with or touched on nearly every phase and feature of humanity, and his scope is bounded only by the soul's limits and the last reaches of life. But of all "Poetical Works," small or great, his is the most consistent in its unity. The manner has varied not a little, the comparative worth of individual poems is widely different, but from the first word to the last the att.i.tude is the same, the outlook on life the same, the conception of G.o.d and man, of the world and nature, always the same. This unity, though it may be deduced from, or at least accommodated to, a system of philosophical thought, is much more the outcome of a natural and inevitable bent. No great poet ever constructed his poems upon a theory, but a theory may often be very legitimately discovered in them. Browning, in his essay on Sh.e.l.ley, divides all poets into two cla.s.ses, subjective and objective, the Seer and the Maker. His own genius includes a large measure of them both; for it is equally strong on the dramatic and the metaphysical side. There are for him but two realities; and but two subjects, Life and Thought. On these are expended all his imagination and all his intellect, more consistently and in a higher degree than can be said of any English poet since the age of Elizabeth. Life and thought, the dramatic and the metaphysical, are not considered apart, but woven into one seamless tissue; and in regard to both he has one point of view and one manner of treatment. It is this that causes the unity which subsists throughout his work; and it is this, too, which distinguishes him among poets, and makes that originality by virtue of which he has been described as the most striking figure in our poetic literature.

Most poets endeavour to sink the individual in the universal; it is Browning's special distinction that when he is most universal he is most individual. As a thinker he conceives of humanity not as an aggregate, but as a collection of units. Most thinkers write and speak of man; Browning of men. With man as a species, with man as a society, he does not concern himself, but with individual man and man. Every man is for him an epitome of the universe, a centre of creation. Life exists for each as completely and separately as if he were the only inhabitant of our planet. In the religious sense this is the familiar Christian view; but Browning, while accepting, does not confine himself to, the religious sense. He conceives of each man as placed on the earth with a purpose of probation. Life is given him as a test of his quality; he is exposed to the chances and changes of existence, to the opposition and entanglement of circ.u.mstances, to evil, to doubt, to the influence of his fellow-men, and to the conflicting powers of his own soul; and he succeeds or fails, toward G.o.d, or as regards his real end and aim, according as he is true or false to his better nature, his conception of right. He is not to be judged by the vulgar standards of worldly success or unsuccess; not even by his actions, good or bad as they may seem to us, for action can never fully translate the thought or motive which lay at its root; success or unsuccess, the prime and final fact in life, lies between his soul and G.o.d. The poet, in Browning's view of him, is G.o.d's witness, and must see and speak for G.o.d. He must therefore conceive of each individual separately and distinctively, and he must see how each soul conceives of itself.

It is here that Browning parts company most decisively with all other poets who concern themselves exclusively with life, dramatic poets, as we call them; so that it seems almost necessary to invent some new term to define precisely his special att.i.tude. And hence it is that in his drama thought plays comparatively so large, and action comparatively so small, a part; hence, that action is valued only in so far as it reveals thought or motive, not for its own sake, as the crown and flower of these.

"To the motive, the endeavour, the heart's self His quick sense looks: he crowns and calls aright The soul o' the purpose, ere 'tis shaped as act, Takes flesh i' the world, and clothes itself a king."[1]

For his endeavour is not to set men in action for the pleasure of seeing them move; but to see and show, in their action and inaction alike, the real impulses of their being: to see how each soul conceives of itself.

This individuality of presentment is carried out equally in the domain of life and of thought; as each man lives, so he thinks and perceives, so he apprehends G.o.d and truth, for himself only. It is evident that this special standpoint will give not only a unity but an originality to the work of which it may be called the root; equally evident that it will demand a special method and a special instrument.

The dramatic poet, in the ordinary sense, in the sense in which we apply it to Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, aims at showing, by means of action, the development of character as it manifests itself to the world in deeds. His study is character, but it is character in action, considered only in connection with a particular grouping of events, and only so far as it produces or operates upon these. The processes are concealed from us, we see the result. In the very highest realisations of this dramatic power, and always in intention, we are presented with a perfect picture, in which every actor lives, and every word is audible; perfect, complete in itself, without explanation, without comment; a dogma incarnate, which we must accept as it is given us, and explain and ill.u.s.trate for ourselves. If we wish to know what this character or that thought or felt in his very soul, we may perhaps have data from which to construct a more or less probable hypothesis; but that is all. We are told nothing, we care to know nothing of what is going on in the thought; of the infinitely subtle meshes of motive or emotion which will perhaps find no direct outcome in speech, no direct manifestation in action, but by which the soul's life in reality subsists. This is not the intention: it is a spectacle of life we are beholding; and life is action.

But is there no other sense in which a poet may be dramatic, besides this sense of the acting drama? no new form possible, which

"Peradventure may outgrow, The simulation of the painted scene, Boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume, And take for a n.o.bler stage the soul itself, In shifting fancies and celestial lights, With all its grand orchestral silences, To keep the pauses of the rhythmic sounds."[2]

This new form of drama is the drama as we see it in Browning, a drama of the interior, a tragedy or comedy of the soul. Instead of a grouping of characters which shall act on one another to produce a certain result in action, we have a grouping of events useful or important only as they influence the character or the mind. This is very clearly explained in the original Advertis.e.m.e.nt to _Paracelsus_, where Browning tells us that his poem is an attempt

"to reverse the method usually adopted by writers whose aim it is to set forth any phenomenon of the mind or the pa.s.sions, by the operation of persons and events; and that, instead of having recourse to an external machinery of incidents to create and evolve the crisis I desire to produce, I have ventured to display somewhat minutely the mood itself in its rise and progress, and have suffered the agency by which it is influenced and determined, to be generally discernible in its effects alone, and subordinate throughout, if not altogether excluded."

In this way, by making the soul the centre of action, he is enabled (thinking himself into it, as all dramatists must do) to bring out its characteristics, to reveal its very nature. Suppose him to be attracted by some particular soul or by some particular act. The problem occupies him: the more abstruse and entangled the more attractive to him it is; he winds his way into the heart of it, or, we might better say, he picks to pieces the machinery. Presently he begins to reconstruct, before our eyes, the whole series of events, the whole substance of the soul, but, so to speak, turned inside out. We watch the workings of the mental machinery as it is slowly disclosed before us; we note the specialties of construction, its individual character, the interaction of parts, every secret of it. We thus come to see that, considered from the proper point of view, everything is clear, regular and explicable in however entangled an action, however obscure a soul; we see that what is external is perfectly natural when we can view its evolution from what is internal. It must not be supposed that Browning explains this to us in the manner of an anatomical lecturer; he makes every character explain itself by its own speech, and very often by speech that is or seems false and sophistical, so only that it is personal and individual, and explains, perhaps by exposing, its speaker.

This, then, is Browning's consistent mental att.i.tude, and his special method. But he has also a special instrument, the monologue. The drama of action demands a concurrence of several distinct personalities, influencing one another rapidly by word or deed, so as to bring about the catastrophe; hence the propriety of the dialogue. But the introspective drama, in which the design is to represent and reveal the individual, requires a concentration of interest, a focussing of light on one point, to the exclusion or subordination of surroundings; hence the propriety of the monologue, in which a single speaker or thinker can consciously or unconsciously exhibit his own soul. This form of monologue, learnt perhaps from Landor, who used it with little psychological intention, appears in almost the earliest of Browning's poems, and he has developed it more skilfully and employed it more consistently than any other writer. Even in works like _Sordello_ and _Red Cotton Night-cap Country_, which are thrown into the narrative form, many of the finest and most characteristic parts are in monologue; and _The Inn Alb.u.m_ is a series of slightly-linked dialogues which are only monologues in disguise. Nearly all the lyrics, romances, idyls, nearly all the miscellaneous poems, long and short, are monologues. And even in the dramas, as will be seen later, there is visible a growing tendency toward the monologue with its mental and individual, in place of the dialogue with its active and outer interest.

Browning's aim, then, being to see how each soul conceives of itself, and to exhibit its essential qualities, yet without complication of incident, it is his frequent practice to reveal the soul to itself by the application of a sudden test, which shall condense the long trial of years into a single moment, and so "flash the truth out by one blow." To this practice we owe his most vivid and notable work. "The poetry of Robert Browning," says Pater, "is pre-eminently the poetry of situations." He selects a character, no matter how uninteresting in itself, and places it in some situation where its vital essence may become apparent, in some crisis of conflict or opportunity. The choice of good or evil is open to it, and in perhaps a single moment its fate will be decided. When a soul plays dice with the devil there is only a second in which to win or lose; but the second may be worth an eternity.

These moments of intense significance, these tremendous spiritual crises, are struck out in Browning's poetry with a clearness and sharpness of outline that no other poet has achieved. "To realise such a situation, to define in a chill and empty atmosphere the focus where rays, in themselves pale and impotent, unite and begin to burn, the artist has to employ the most cunning detail, to complicate and refine upon thought and pa.s.sion a thousand fold.... Yet, in spite of this intricacy, the poem has the clear ring of a central motive; we receive from it the impression of one imaginative tone, of a single creative act."[3]

It is as a result of this purpose, in consonance with this practice, that we get in Browning's works so large a number of distinct human types, and so great a variety of surroundings in which they are placed.

Only in Shakespeare can we find anything like the same variety of distinct human characters, vital creations endowed with thoughtful life; and not even, perhaps, in Shakespeare, such novelty and variety of _milieu_. There is scarcely a salient epoch in the history of the modern world which he has not touched, always with the same vital and instinctive sympathy based on profound and accurate knowledge. Pa.s.sing by the legendary and remote ages and civilisations of East and West, he has painted the first dawn of the modern spirit in the Athens of Socrates and Euripides, revealed the whole temper and tendency of the twilight age between Paganism and Christianity, and recorded the last utterance of the last apostle of the now-conquering creed; he has distilled the very essence of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the very essence of the modern world. The men and women who live and move in that new world of his creation are as varied as life itself; they are kings and beggars, saints and lovers, great captains, poets, painters, musicians, priests and popes, Jews, gipsies and dervishes, street-girls, princesses, dancers with the wicked witchery of the daughter of Herodias, wives with the devotion of the wife of Brutus, joyous girls and malevolent greybeards, statesmen, cavaliers, soldiers of humanity, tyrants and bigots, ancient sages and modern spiritualists, heretics, scholars, scoundrels, devotees, rabbis, persons of quality and men of low estate, men and women as multiform as nature or society has made them. He has found and studied humanity, not only in English towns and villages, in the glare of gaslight and under the open sky, but on the Roman Campagna, in Venetian gondolas, in Florentine streets, on the Boulevards of Paris and in the Prado of Madrid, in the snow-bound forests of Russia, beneath the palms of Persia and upon Egyptian sands, on the coasts of Normandy and the salt plains of Brittany, among Druses and Arabs and Syrians, in brand-new Boston and amidst the ruins of Thebes. But this infinite variety has little in it of mere historic or social curiosity. I do not think Browning has ever set himself the task of recording the legend of the ages, though to some extent he has done it. The instinct of the poet seizes on a type of character, the eye of the painter perceives the shades and shapes of line and colour and form required to give it picturesque prominence, and the learning of the scholar then sets up a fragment of the broken past, or re-fashions a portion of the living present, as an appropriate and harmonious scene or background. The statue is never dwarfed by the pedestal.

The characteristic of which I have been speaking (the persistent care for the individual and personal, as distinguished from the universal and general) while it is the secret of his finest achievements, and rightly his special charm, is of all things the most alien to the ordinary conceptions of poetry, and the usual preferences for it. The popularity of rare and delicate poetry, which condescends to no cheap bids for it, poetry like Tennyson's, for instance, is largely due to the very quality which Browning's finest characteristic excludes from his. Compare, altogether apart from the worth and workmanship, one of Tennyson's with one of Browning's best lyrics. The perfection of the former consists in the exquisite way in which it expresses feelings common to all. The perfection of the latter consists in the intensity of its expression of a single moment of pa.s.sion or emotion, one peculiar to a single personality, and to that personality only at a single moment. To appreciate it we must enter keenly and instantaneously into the imaginary character at its imagined crisis; and, even when this is easiest to do, it is evident that there must be more difficulty in doing it (for it requires a certain exertion) than in merely letting the mind lie at rest, accepting and absorbing. And the difficulty is increased when we remember another of Browning's characteristics, closely allied to this, and, indeed, resulting from it: his preference for the unusual and complex rather than the simple and ordinary. People prefer to read about characters which they can understand at first sight, with which they can easily sympathise. A dramatist, who insists on presenting them with complex and exceptional characters, studies of the good in evil and the evil in good, representations of states of mind which are not habitual to them, or which they find it difficult to realise in certain lights, can never obtain so quick or so hearty a recognition as one who deals with great actions, large and clear characters, familiar motives.

When the head has to be exercised before the heart, there is chilling of sympathy.

Allied to Browning's originality in temper, topic, treatment and form, is his originality in style; an originality which is again due, in large measure, to the same prevailing cause. His style is vital, his verse moves to the throbbing of an inner organism, not to the pulsations of a machine. He prefers, as indeed all true poets do, but more exclusively than any other poet, sense to sound, thought to expression. In his desire of condensation he employs as few words as are consistent with the right expression of his thought; he rejects superfluous adjectives, and all stop-gap words. He refuses to use words for words' sake: he declines to interrupt conversation with a display of fireworks: and as a result it will be found that his finest effects of versification correspond with his highest achievements in imagination and pa.s.sion. As a dramatic poet he is obliged to modulate and moderate, sometimes almost to vulgarise, his style and diction for the proper expression of some particular character, in whose mouth exquisite turns of phrase and delicate felicities of rhythm would be inappropriate. He will not _let himself go_ in the way of easy floridity, as writers may whose themes are more "ideal." And where many writers would attempt merely to simplify and sweeten verse, he endeavours to give it fuller expressiveness, to give it strength and newness. It follows that Browning's verse is not so uniformly melodious as that of many other poets. Where it seems to him necessary to sacrifice one of the two, sense or sound, he has never hesitated which to sacrifice. But while he has certainly failed in some of his works, or in some pa.s.sages of them, to preserve the due balance, while he has at times undoubtedly sacrificed sound too liberally to the claims of sense, the extent of this sacrifice is very much less than is generally supposed. The notion, only too general, expressed by such a phrase as "his habitual rudeness of versification" (used by no unfavourable _Edinburgh_ reviewer in 1869) is one of the most singularly erroneous perversions of popular prejudice that have ever called for correction at the hands of serious criticism.

Browning is far indeed from paying no attention, or little, to metre and versification. Except in some of his later blank verse, and in a few other cases, his very errors are just as often the result of hazardous experiments as of carelessness and inattention. In one very important matter, that of rhyme, he is perhaps the greatest master in our language; in single and double, in simple and grotesque alike, his rhymes are as accurate as they are ingenious. His lyrical poems contain more structural varieties of form than those of any preceding English poet, not excepting Sh.e.l.ley. His blank verse at its best is more vital in quality than that of any modern poet. And both in rhymed and in blank verse he has written pa.s.sages which for almost every technical quality are hardly to be surpa.s.sed in the language.

That Browning's style should have changed in the course of years is only natural, and its development has been in the natural (if not always in the best) direction. "The later manner of a painter or poet," says F.W.H. Myers in his essay on Virgil, "generally differs from his earlier manner in much the same way. We observe in him a certain impatience of the rules which have guided him to excellence, a certain desire to use his materials more freely, to obtain bolder and newer effects." These tendencies and others of the kind are specially manifest in Browning, as they must be in a writer of strongly marked originality; for originality always strengthens with use, and often hardens to eccentricity, as we may observe in the somewhat parallel case of Carlyle. We find as a consequence that a great deal of his later poetry is much less attractive and much less artistically perfect than his earlier work, while just those failings to which his principles of poetic art rendered him liable become more and more frequent and prominent. But, good or bad, it has grown with his growth, and we can conceive him saying, with Aurora Leigh,

"So life, in deepening with me, deepened all The course I took, the work I did. Indeed The academic law convinced of sin; The critics cried out on the falling off, Regretting the first manner. But I felt My heart's life throbbing in my verse to show It lived, it also--certes incomplete, Disordered with all Adam in the blood, But even its very tumours, warts and wens, Still organised by and implying life."[4]

It has been, as a rule, strangely overlooked, though it is a matter of the first moment, that Browning's poems are in the most precise sense _works of art_, and this in a very high degree, positive and relative, if we understand by a "work of art" a poem which attains its end and fulfils its purpose completely, and which has a worthy end and plain purpose to attain.

Surely this is of far more vital importance than the mere melodiousness of single lines, or a metre of unvarying sweetness bearing gently along in its placid course (as a stream the leaf or twig fallen into it from above) some tiny thought or finikin fragment of emotion. Matthew Arnold, who was both poet and critic, has told us with emphasis of "the necessity of accurate construction, and the subordinate character of expression."[5] His next words, though bearing a slightly different signification, may very legitimately be applied to Browning. Arnold tells us "how unspeakably superior is the effect of the one moral impression left by a great action treated as a whole, to the effect produced by the most striking single thought or by the happiest image."

For "a great action," read "an adequate subject," and the words define and defend Browning's principle and practice exactly. There is no characteristic of his work more evident, none more admirable or more rare, than the unity, the compactness and completeness, the skill and care in construction and definiteness in impression, of each poem. I do not know any contemporary of whom this may more truly be said. The a.s.sertion will be startling, no doubt, to those who are accustomed to think of Browning (as people once thought of Shakespeare) as a poet of great gifts but little skill; as a giant, but a clumsy giant; as what the French call a _nature_, an almost unconscious force, expending itself at random, without rule or measure. But take, for example, the series of _Men and Women_, as originally published, read poem after poem (there are fifty to choose from) and scrutinise each separately; see what was the writer's intention, and observe how far he has fulfilled it, how far he has succeeded in conveying to your mind a distinct and sharply-cut impression. You will find that whatever be the subject, whatever the style, whether in your eyes the former be mistaken, the latter perverse, the poem itself, within its recognised limits, is designed, constructed and finished with the finest skill of the draughtsman or the architect. You will find that the impression you have received from the whole is single and vivid, and, while you may not perceive it, it will generally be the case that certain details at which your fastidiousness cries out, certain uncouthnesses, as you fancy, are perfectly appropriate and in their place, and have contributed to the perfection of the _ensemble_.

A word may here be said in reference to the charge of "obscurity,"

which, from the time when Browning's earliest poem was disposed of by a complacent critic in the single phrase, "A piece of pure bewilderment,"

has been hurled at each succeeding poem with re-iterate vigour of virulence. The charge of "pure bewilderment" is about as reasonable as the charge of "habitual rudeness of versification." It is a fashion.

People abuse their "Browning" as they abuse their "Bradshaw," though all that is wanting, in either case, is a little patience and a little common sense. Browning might say, as his wife said in an early preface, "I never mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry, nor leisure for the hour of the poet;" as indeed he has himself said, to much the same effect, in a letter printed many years ago: "I never pretended to offer such literature as should be a subst.i.tute for a cigar or a game at dominoes to an idle man." But he has not made anything like such a demand on the reader's faculties as people, _not_ readers, seem to suppose. _Sordello_ is difficult, _Prince Hohenstiel-Schw.a.n.gau_ is difficult, so, perhaps, in parts, is _Fifine at the Fair_; so, too, on account of its unfamiliar allusions, is _Aristophanes' Apology_; and a few smaller poems, here and there, remotely argumentative or specially complex in psychology, are difficult. But really these are about all to which such a term as "unintelligible," so freely and recklessly flung about, could with the faintest show of reason be applied by any reasonable being. In the 21,116 lines which form Browning's longest work and masterpiece, the "psychological epic" of _The Ring and the Book_, I am inclined to think it possible that a careful scrutiny might reveal 116 which an ordinary reader would require to read twice. Anything more clear than the work as a whole it would be difficult to find. It is much easier to follow than _Paradise Lost_; the _Agamemnon_ is rather less easy to follow than _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_.

That there is some excuse for the accusation, no one would or could deny. But it is only the excuse of a misconception. Browning is a thinker of extraordinary depth and subtlety; his themes are seldom superficial, often very remote, and his thought is, moreover, as swift as it is subtle. To a dull reader there is little difference between cloudy and fiery thought; the one is as much too bright for him as the other is too dense. Of all thinkers in poetry, Browning is the most swift and fiery. "If there is any great quality," says Mr. Swinburne, in those n.o.ble pages in which he has so generously and triumphantly vindicated his brother-poet from this very charge of obscurity--

"If there is any great quality more perceptible than another in Mr. Browning's intellect, it is his decisive and incisive faculty of thought, his sureness and intensity of perception, his rapid and trenchant resolution of aim. To charge him with obscurity is about as accurate as to call Lynceus purblind, or complain of the sluggish action of the telegraphic wire.

He is something too much the reverse of obscure; he is too brilliant and subtle for the ready reader of a ready writer to follow with any certainty the track of an intelligence which moves with such incessant rapidity, or even to realise with what spider-like swiftness and sagacity his building spirit leaps and lightens to and fro and backward and forward, as it lives along the animated line of its labour, springs from thread to thread, and darts from centre to circ.u.mference of the glittering and quivering web of living thought, woven from the inexhaustible stores of his perception, and kindled from the inexhaustible fire of his imagination. He never thinks but at full speed; and the rate of his thought is to that of another man's as the speed of a railway to that of a waggon, or the speed of a telegraph to that of a railway."[6]

Moreover, while a writer who deals with easy themes has no excuse if he is not pellucid at a glance, one who employs his intellect and imagination on high and hard questions has a right to demand a corresponding closeness of attention, and a right to say, with Bishop Butler, in answer to a similar complaint: "It must be acknowledged that some of the following discourses are very abstruse and difficult; or, if you please, obscure; but I must take leave to add that those alone are judges whether or no, and how far this is a fault, who are judges whether or no, and how far it might have been avoided--those only who will be at the trouble to understand what is here said, and to see how far the things here insisted upon, and not other things, might have been put in a plainer manner."[7]

There is another popular misconception to which also a word in pa.s.sing may as well be devoted. This is the idea that Browning's personality is apt to get confused with his characters', that his men and women are not separate creations, projected from his brain into an independent existence, but mere masks or puppets through whose mouths he speaks.

This fallacy arises from the fact that not a few of his imaginary persons express themselves in a somewhat similar fashion; or, as people too rashly say, "talk like Browning." The explanation of this apparent paradox, so far as it exists, is not far to seek. All art is a compromise, and all dramatic speech is in fact impossible. No persons in real life would talk as Shakespeare or any other great dramatist makes them talk. Nor do the characters of Shakespeare talk like those of any other great dramatist, except in so far as later playwrights have consciously imitated Shakespeare. Every dramatic writer has his own style, and in this style, subject to modification, all his characters speak. Just as a soul, born out of eternity into time, takes on itself the impress of earth and the manners of human life, so a dramatic creation, pure essence in the shaping imagination of the poet, takes on itself, in its pa.s.sage into life, something of the impress of its abode.

"The poet, in short, endows his creations with his own attributes; he enables them to utter their feelings as if they themselves were poets, thus giving a true voice even to that intensity of pa.s.sion which in real life often hinders expression."[8] If this fact is recognised (that dramatic speech is not real speech, but poetical speech, and poetical speech infused with the individual style of each individual dramatist, modulated, indeed, but true to one keynote) then it must be granted that Browning has as much right to his own style as other dramatists have to theirs, and as little right as they to be accused on that account of putting his personality into his work. But as Browning's style is very p.r.o.nounced and original, it is more easily recognisable than that of most dramatists (so far, no doubt, a defect[9]) and for this reason it has come to seem relatively more prominent than it really is. This consideration, and not any confusion of ident.i.ty, is the cause of whatever similarity of speech exists between Browning and his characters, or between individual characters. The similarity is only skin-deep. Take a convenient instance, _The Ring and the Book_. I have often seen it stated that the nine tellings of the story are all told in the same style, that all the speakers, Guido and Pompilia, the Pope and Tertium Quid alike, speak like Browning. I cannot see it. On the contrary, I have been astonished, in reading and re-reading the poem, at the variety, the difference, the wonderful individuality in each speaker's way of telling the same story; at the profound art with which the rhythm, the metaphors, the very details of language, no less than the broad distinctions of character and the subtle indications of bias, are adapted and converted into harmony. A certain general style, a certain general manner of expression, are common to all, as is also the case in, let us say, _The Tempest_. But what distinction, what variation of tone, what delicacy and expressiveness of modulation! As a simple matter of fact, few writers have ever had a greater flexibility of style than Browning.