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Arthur Symons - An Introduction to the Study of Browning

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AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF BROWNING

by

ARTHUR SYMONS

New Edition Revised and Enlarged







First Edition, 1906. Reprinted, 1916
London, Paris and Toronto J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd.
10-13 Bedford Street, W.C. 1916





_" ... Browning, a great poet, a very great poet indeed, as
the world will have to agree with us in thinking."_--LANDOR.




TO

GEORGE MEREDITH

NOVELIST AND POET

THIS LITTLE BOOK ON AN ILLUSTRIOUS CONTEMPORARY

IS WITH DEEP RESPECT AND ADMIRATION

INSCRIBED.




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 Shelley,
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, Dykes Campbell. There are few pages of my
manuscript 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 instituting 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. Dykes Campbell, who has
given me much kindly assistance.

_Sept. 15, 1886_.




CONTENTS


PAGE
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 1

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POEMS 33

APPENDIX:

I. A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ROBERT BROWNING 241

II. REPRINT OF DISCARDED PREFACES TO THE FIRST
EDITIONS OF SOME OF BROWNING'S WORKS 255

INDEX TO POEMS 261





ROBERT BROWNING

BORN MAY 7, 1812.

DIED DECEMBER 12, 1889.




GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS




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 passion 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 surpassed 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. Mass 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
niggardly. 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 attitude is the same, the outlook on life the
same, the conception of God 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 Shelley, divides all poets
into two classes, 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 circumstances, 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 God, 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 God. The poet, in Browning's view of him, is
God's witness, and must see and speak for God. 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 attitude. 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 God 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
illustrate 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 nobler 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 Advertisement 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
passions, 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 attitude, 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 Album_ 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 passion 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. Passing
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 passion 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 passion. 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 passages 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.

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