Browning for beginners

Contents

Prokm

The Mission of the Poet .

Browning's Genesis and Environment Browning's Choice of Subjects .

II. The Mission Of The Poet

Before proceeding further with Browning I would like to offer some thoughts upon poetry in general, upon the mission of the poet. It is a long time since he, the poet, first raised his voice among men. He is the oldest representative of the world of letters, as the woman basket-maker or skin-dresser is the oldest representative of the world of industry. Before history was written, on rock's face or clay tablet, it flowed from his lips in verse; rude no doubt, but vigorous and picturesque, with flashes that illuminated, with passion that moved. The great chief or king — kinglet rather — had among his other followers the Bard, who glorified his martial deeds as the wine cup went round in the hall of feasting. Then as now the song joined with the red wine to lift men's hearts. This primitive poet's facts were probably half fictions, but we will allow them to have been so if they possessed verisimilitude, if they were symbolical, if they let the back-ground of reality shine through. Are the facts of the modern learned chronicler, even the most careful, beyond suspicion ? Nobody ever said that they were.

A great man of action called history, " a fable agreed upon," and a modern man of letters has alluded to, " that Mississippi of falsehoods styled history."

In these times there are those who affirm that the poet is nearing the end of his tether. As a person of distinction wielding power among men he is doomed to become extinct ; and even now possibly is on his last legs. Give him time and he will go the way of the megatherium and the dodo. The society verse maker and his kind will continue, it is thought, but the inspired singer who holds his reader as in the hollow of his hand will be seen no more. Everybody , has read Macaulay's well known passage in his essay on Milton :

"We think that as civilization advances, poetry

almost necessarily declines generalisation is

necessary to the advancement of knowledge ; but particularity is indispensable to the creation of the poet. In proportion as men know and think more they look less at individuals and more at classes. They therefore make better theories and worse poems."

And so on. It is a superficial view, both of poetry and the general evolution of mind, that is implied in this. In writing it Macaulay was no doubt voicing the spirit, or a spirit of his time, a spirit that has grown no less obstrusive since his day. We find it speaking through that distinctively modern writer Mr. Goldwin Smith, in one of the latest volumes — •" Guesses at the Riddle of Existence " — which he has published. It also speaks through the late Mr. Charles Pearson, inhis rather remarkable book, "National Life and Character,'' which a few years ago was in vogue. Mr. Pearson devotes several pages to the subject, and in what he says he agrees with the two writers I have named. But he makes an exception in favour of lyrical poetry, which for the present is growing richer and more various, he thinks ; though it too may soon be exhausted. The drama, however, is dying out, and this because passions are becoming not only weaker but commoner, and consequently less interesting. Whether weaker I do not know, but certainly they are becoming less individualistic in character. The solidarity of modern life, in which we are all held together as pebbles in the same stream, is destroying our idiosyncrasies. This of itself would limit the dramatist's opportunities. As coming upon the top of these theories to prove them there is the case of Darwin. The great scientist, devoted as he had been to poetry in his youth, was unable during the latter half of his life even to read it. Scientific specialism had lessened the magnitude of his nature, of his humanity, and he felt no interest in such matters. In a sense there was less of Darwin the old man than there had been of Darwin the young man. With characteristic modesty t^his is the view that he takes of the circumstance. His mind had become deteriorated, contracted, he indicates, but he had sufficient mind left to be aware of the fact. A good sign I should imagine. He says :

"Up to the age of thirty or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gi-ay,Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakspeare, especially in the historical plays. . . . But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry. I have tried lately to read Shakspeare and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. . . . My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of facts ; but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine would not I suppose have thus suffered ; and if I had to live my life again I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least every week ; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied might have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature."^

So far as this frank, rather sad confession has any bearing on the question whether poetry ought to continue — whether it has got uses, whether it aids our higher development — its testimony is strong for the affirmative. And the suggestion that systematic neglect of^oetry may even lead to moral deterioration raises problems of a far-reaching character.

It is not necessary to say that there need be no ' Fragment of Autobiography.

conflict between poetry and science, as there is between science and religion. Rather as there used to be : for that conflict has now ceased, and wise persons declare it never should have been. For science and religion never were at variance, which I thoroughly believe ; but science and theology, what about them ? Poetry has no particular cosmological system to depend, no set of dogmas it is specially interested in, and upon which therefore its vitality — not to sayits very existence — depends. Its pursuit is as consonant with Copernicus and Darwin, as with the Bible and Calvin. More science will not give us less poetry but more, and poetry of a much grander quality. For science has not only enlarged the universe beyond what the old ages could have have dreamed, it has enlarged that part of it we name the unknown. The new word agnosticism, which is new because formerly it was not required, is a proof of this. The mind did not feel the need of such a word, and therefore did not create it. There is now a far wider region of twilight stretching on every side than there used to be ; and this is precisely the medium that invites imagination into activity. Further, the indescribable vastness of the universe, and the vastness of the problems that loom around, unsolved, insoluble, not only impress our minds, but impress them to the point of emotion. Are not these the very conditions that suit the poet ? that inspire him, that set thoughts even beyond his ken fermenting within him ? Never were external conditions so favourable to him before.

Never had he so vast a world of the known, and arising out of this such vast suggestions of the unknown, on which to exercise his art. It is precisely because science has revealed the world as so boundless that she helps him. Her work is to observe, to experiment, to classify, to turn what was ignorance or superstition into well defined knowledge. By all means let her go on with her work. For every square mile of space she conquers in this way she opens up new hundreds of square miles for the poet ; through which he may soar on free wing, with a great heart, joyfully bringing back news of what he finds. Consequently I anticipate mightier poets instead of meaner ones in the coming time ; I anticipate such showers of song falling upon the parched hearts of men as the earth has hardly yet seen : " Ay, the count Of mighty Poets is made up, the scroll Is folded by the muses ; the bright roll Is in Apollo's hand : our dazed eyes Have seen a new tinge in the western skies : The world has done its duty.

the sun of poesy is set."

Trust the poet, it is not. " Science destroys poetry only for a time, destroys it only till the heart bursts into mysticism and out of science brings poetry again." * The heart must burst into mysticism ; that is the incontrovertible, primordial, magnificent fact. The heart cannot help itself, the heart must obey its * Robertson of Brighton, own law. " Mysticism," says Mr. Balfour, " is a permanent element of the human understanding." And to take from it this element would be like taking from the swallow or the eagle its wings ; for it is the surest, most potent, most trustworthy means we possess of forward and upward movement. This is the meaning of the idea or doctrine which runs through Mr. Kidd's popular book, " Social Evolution," the idea, viz., that progress is essentially irrational. Is it not so? The greatest force, the most human force in us is a force we, are not rightly conscious of Reason has tried often to bring it under authority and set bounds to its working, but in vain. It is beyond reason, it is mightier than reason, it snaps its fingers at reason ; as well try to bind the wind with cords as bring this force under the self conscious understanding. The logician and scientist will sneer ; but let him sneer who wins — who has won in the past, and who possesses the promise of the future. Mr. Kidd says : " The central feature of human history, the meaning of which neither science nor philosophy has hitherto recognised, is apparently the struggle which man, throughout the whole period of his social development, has carried on to effect the subordination of his own reason.

As stated this is hardly correct. But perhaps Mr. Kidd meant it for a paradox. The struggle has rather been to assert his reason, in the face of that unnameable, that mystic force I have just referred to. Mr. Kidd succeeds better when he says : " One!|of the most remarkable features of the age we are entering on, will be the disillusionment we are likely to undergo in regard to the part the intellect is likely to play in human evolution." " The intellect," he continues, "is employed in developing ground which has been won for it by other forces. But it has by itself no power to occupy the ground ; it has not even the power to continue to hold it after it has been won, when these forces have spent and exhausted themselves."

This is perfectly true. The failure of Christian evidences to beget religious belief, the passion of faith, which they never did beget from the beginning, is an illustration of it. Take a thought from one of the poets, — fundamentally the same thought as Mr. Kidd's ; though the author appears to understand better what he is writing about :

" All thoughts that mould the age begin Deep down within the primitive soul, , And from the many slowly upward win To one who grasps the whole ;

In his wide brain the feeling deep

That struggled on the many's tongue Swells to a tide of thought, whose surges leap

O'er the weak thrones of wrong.

All thought begins in feeling, — wide

In the great mass its base is hid.

And narrowing up to thought, stands glorified,

A moveless pyramid.

Nor is he far astray, who deems

That every hope, which rises and grows broad In the world's heart, by ordered impulse streams From the great heart of God." * The origin of the best and greatest in life is for ever a mystery. The plant that blooms glorious in the sunshine has not more certainly its roots in the dark underground than the highest in man has its source in depths of being which are unfathomable. " The primitive soul ! " says Lowell. Can we understand that ? can we analyze it ? can we turn it inside out and label its contents as we would turn inside out our pocket ? I think, never. Let the logician and the man of science do their best ; and let us hope that, in response to their efforts,

" Veil upon veil may lift ; " but even so, they will always discover that there is

" Veil upon veil behind.'' Then what are the facts of science when we have got them ? In answer take this sentence from the late Stanley Jevons, who as a scientific thinker was clear and penetrating : " I fear I have very imperfectly succeeded in expressing my strong conviction that before a rigorous logical scrutiny, the Reign of Law will prove to be an unverified hypothesis, the Uniformity of Nature an ambiguous expression, the certainty of our scientific inferences to a great extent a delusion." Other high authorities go the length of saying that so called scientific facts are but myths. Actually so.

* Russell Lowell.

Not myths of the most primitive kind, yet hardly differing from the primitive kind except in degree, full cousins to them at least. " I have ventured to ascribe (says Max Muller) even scientific words, such as light, warmth, electricity t9 the same class of unsound words, and I quite agree with R. Von Mayer, who declared that they were no better than the gods of Greece."* Is it madness to say so? Yes, but it is the madness that has method in it. Evermore do ourselves stand between our thought and the external fact, Kant's " Thing in itself" And evermore will stand, let the man of science and the man of commonsense rage heathen-like as much as they will.

Therefore no man is more sure of his position in the future than the poet, the man who feels the mystery of life and has been dowered with the genius to handle it. Mystery! it takes delicate handling, the most delicate that it has been given the finest order of human faculties to practise. Mystery must not be ardently pursued, as the lover pursues his mistress ; it must be simply waited on with all love and patience, with open eye and ear, with a heart subdued to take what comes, not asking whence or how it comes, and not knowing much about what it is. " The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh nor whether it goeth." , So is every truth that is born of the spirit.

The poet's art is the art of waiting. He who

* Max Muller. " Science of Mythology.''

bustles, and presses nature to let out her secret to him is no poet but a worldling. We shall see by-and-by that part of Browning's defect was due to his inability to wait. Poets have their seasons when they flower, but Browning would flower at all seasons, and as the result he has put forth some ill favoured blooms.

As a rule one of the first things a lecturer does is to define his subject. When he can attain to a good definition it gives his hearers a forecast of what is to come, and prepares them to understand it. But I doubt if any subject which it falls to the human mind to consider can be defined exhaustively ; though some subjects are more capable of definition than others. Among the former are the physical sciences, and certain of the sciences of mind, as logic. Among the latter we may name religion and poetry. Both of these are so much things from on high that they cannot be compassed by any definition which the subtlest intellect can frame. If you think they can, you do not understand their nature. If you are satisfied with any such definition, handy and compact, you are not doing them justice, and you are not doing justice to yourself If you imagine you have got them in such definition, as you have got certain elements in a box, you are mistaken. You have by no means got them ; you have missed their essence, it has escaped you, as balls of quicksilver escape your baffled fingers. The higher we rise amid life's phenomena the more does the mind feel itself at a loss in dealing with life. Take the piece of coal that just now is blazing on the fire, a scientific lecturer could in a short time give such an account of it as would make you feel when he had finished that you knew all about it. He could do the same with the iron of the grate that contains the coal. And much the same with this glass of water that has been placed before me. Your hand also, he could give a wonderfully exhaustive exposition of that. But if you asked him to tell you with an equal amount of detail what life is, what the soul is, what imagination is, he would if he were a wise man hesitate. He would feel you had fixed him at a point whence no sure, scientific step could be taken. After all that has been written about art, for instance, that specific product of the imagination, that Proteus which reveals itself in so many forms, as painting, poetry, architecture, music, who knows exactly what art is ? We can tell when it is present, whether in the book we read or in the picture on our wall, because it speaks to us and moves us. And we can tell when it is absent, or when only its counterfeit is present, because we are not moved ; but what in particular that magic is that does move us we cannot tell.

Let us be shy, therefore, in offering a definition of poetry ; as shy as Erasmus was with definitions in theology. -Suppose we try one, or what is an approximation to one, by a poet : (I quote from memory)

" Then came and lingered on my sight, Of fldwers and stars the bloom and light ; The glory of the earth and sun ; And these and poetry are one."

This is what a logician would call eminently unsatisfactory, disreputably vague; of the jelly-fish order, soft and sentimental with no back-bone. True. But it possesses suggestiveness, and is in the right direction. It puts the mind on a certain track, and leaves it to follow on and make what discoveries it may. Not burdening the mind, not fettering it with conditions, it allows it freedom to work in its own way and come to its own conclusion.

Coleridge justly says that a passage from Sir John Davies may with slight alteration be applied to the poetic imagination ; it is from his poem, " Of the Soule of Man And the Immortalitie Thereof;" one of the subtlest, beautifullest poems in the language, and as quaint as it is philosophical :

" Doubtless this could not bee ; but that she turnes Bodies to spirit by sublimation strange ; As fire converts to fire the things it burnes. As we our meats into our nature change.

From the grosse matter she abstracts the formes. And draws a kind of quintessence from things ; Which to her proper nature she transformes, To bear them light on her celestial wings."

Here is what a nameless Irishman writing to Tennyson said of music ; and it may be said with great fitness of poetry. " Music tells us of what in all our life we have never known, and never can know."* Such is poetry. It is a voice from our home in the infinite, speaking the language of the infinite, and keeping away into the infinite open for us ; a way that the positive sciences would close. Longfellow has written :

"As the winds come in the Spring, We know not from where ; As the stars come at evening From the depths of the air ;

So comes to the poet his songs.

All hitherward blown From the misty land that belongs

To the vast Unknown.

His and not his, are the lays

He sings : and their fame Is his, and not his ; and the praise,

And the pride of a name.

For voices pursue him by day.

And haunt him by night, And he listens and needs must obey,

When the angel says : " Write ! "

Seen in, this way poetry is something ethereal, mystical, and how shall we scientifically define that ?

*This sentiment is from Paul Richter, who addresses music : " Away ! away ! thou speakest to me of things which all my endless life I have not found, and shall not find."

It is not possible to define it ; and poets who understand their business have warned us against making the attempt. " Let me not dare," writes Walt Whitman, " here or anywhere to attempt any definition of Poetry, nor answer the question what it is. Like Religion, Love, Nature, while those terms are indispensable and we give a sufficiently accurate meaning to them, no definition that has ever been made, sufficiently encloses the name poetry," (" Democratic Vistas.") Wordsworth has attempted a definition which is a failure. He says : " Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge ; the impassioned expression on the countenance of science." This has been called by one who is himself a poet " The finest definition of poetry on record." Perhaps it is, Mr. W. Watson ought to know. But it is to me simply a mystical utterance, and conveys exact or positive knowledge about nothing. It is one proof more, if such were needed, of the impossibility of defining the indefinable. Goethe, as quoted by Matthew Arnold, is hardly less nebulous : " I deny poetry to be an art. Neither is it a science. Poetry is to be called neither art nor science, but genius ; " which can only be described as an explanation of the less obscure by the more obscure. There is less juggling, as well as more sanity and profundity in Niebuhr : " The possibility of poetic creation is an unfathomable enigma." Even so. The lower faculty never can rightly comprehend or expound the higher ; whence all the attempts of reason upon imagination, its attempts to explain what imagination is, and how it works must prove abortive.

Most of the above definitions are in the line of what Plato has written, and may have been drawn directly or indirectly from him. He has devoted a whole dialogue, though a short one, " Ion," to poets and poetry. And there he says that, " Not by art does the poet sing, but by power divine ; " which at once removes his singing beyond the ken of critical analysis ; its place is among the mysteries. But is Plato speaking seriously here? There is no doubt a little jest, a little irony, a little satirical playing with Ion the rhapsodist, who has the vanity of his profession ; but there is also an under-lying element of seriousness ; and we have almost cer- . tainly got Plato's real opinion on the poetic art here. It is true that in his " Republic" he delivers himself of some strong sayings against poets ; but his condemnation of them is only relative ; and he says of their art, of poesy, " Let us assure our sweet friend that we ourselves also are very susceptible of her charms." (Jowett's Plato)

All true poets have had a high conception of their mission, and have set a high ideal before them. They did not look upon themselves as " idle singers of an empty day ; " whose function it was to increase the sum of pleasure, and of pleasure only. Although that in itself would be no mean achievement. Hear Wordsworth again : " The Poet is the rock of defence for human nature ; an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love. In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs ; in spite of things silently gone out of mind, and things violently destroyed ; the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time." And hear again Walt Whitman, the most modern of the moderns ; to whom had poetry been played out, the Time Spirit, if we may be mystical, would have communicated the fact. Whitman says : " The profoundest service that poems or any other writings can do for their reader is not merely to satisfy the intellect or supply something polished and interesting, or even to depict great passions, or persons, or events, but to fill him with vigorous manliness, religiousness, and give him a good heart as a radical possession and habit."

Mark, that " vigorous manliness," " religiousness," " a good heart" are declared to be the great ends of poetry and the poet. This shows that in Whitman's conception, — as in Carlyle's, as in Emerson's, as in every man's who has thought seriously about him — the poet is a prophet. Goethe must have been thinking so when he wrote : " The proper gain to our higher nature lies alone in the ideal, which proceeds from the heart of the poet." Here is Carlyle's confession : " An irreligious poet is a monster.'' And here is Emerson's : " Poetry is a lonely faith, a lonely protest, in the uproar of atheism." Here is that of another American, which I quote for its pure imaginative beauty, the beauty with which the weird genius of Hawthorne could clothe his subject : " The world assumed another and a better aspect from the hour that the poet blessed it with his happy eyes. The Creator had bestowed him as the last best touch to his own handiwork. Creation was not finished till the poet came to interpret and so complete it." And why should I not quote Browning ?

" Ah, that brave Bounty of poets, the one royal race That ever was, or will be, in this world ! They give no gift that bounds itself and ends I' the giving and the taking — theirs so breeds I' the heart and soul o' the taker, so transmutes The man who only was a man before That he grows Godlike in his turn, can give^ He also ; share the poet's privilege, Bring forth new good, new beauty from the old."

Finally Tennyson : " The thoughts of the poet enrich the blood of the world."

How is it that the poet can do all this ? how comes he to be such a master, such a magician ? It is hard to say how, except it be that, to borrow again from Browning, his thoughts are always, " as never thought before," as new born. There lies a great part of the secret of his power. His word is a word of freshness and life :

" As proud pied April drest in all his trim, He puts a spirit of youth in everything."

Wherever there is free, joyous life, unjaded, unpolluted, flowing fresh from the mystic fountains, it lays its spell upon us. We are dominated and cease to be our own ; we become its, we abandon ourselves to it, we take deep draughts of it, like tired travellers at wells in the desert. What would we not give for more life? This is all our desire, the ultimate object behind every immediate object of our endeavour, the harvest for which we labour, the pearl of great price for which we pray. We take money with us and go into the marts of fashion to buy it. We seek for it in intoxicants. We launch out in adventure, and hope to find it in hunting the lion or tracking the unknown river to its source. Surely it is in the breath of the Western pine forests, thinks the youth, and he goes to the pine forests in search of it. Civilization has tired man, jaded him, and he needs something primal — auroral, dewy — to renew his humanity. Give me more life, he exclaims, or I die ; give me fresh and strong life, cool and beautiful, blown from the heart of Nature, wherewith to tonic my spirit ! Richard Jefferies' prayer is unconsciously struggling within him, beating at the bars for utterance : the unspoken prayer of us all, with our passion for excitement, our clamour of desire :

" Give me fulness of life like to the sea and the sun, to the earth and the air ; give me fulness of physical life, mind equal to and beyond their fulness ; give me a greatness and perfection of soul higher than all things, give me my inexpressible desire which swells in me like a tide, give it to me with all the force of the sea. ... If I had the strength of the ocean and of the earth, the burning vigour of the sun implanted in my limbs, it would hardly sufifice to satisfy the measureless desire of life which possesses me. ... I prayed with the glowing clouds at sunset, and the soft light of the first star coming through the violet sky. At night with the stars according to their season. . . . All the glory of the sunrise filled me with broader and furnacelike vehemence of prayer. That I might have the deepest of soul life, the deepest of all, deeper than all this greatness of the visible universe, and even, of the invisible : that I might have a fulness of soul life till now unknown, and utterly beyond my own conception." What a vast, awe inspiring prayer it is ! something primal and abysmal, a cry out of the deeps that are in man ; a new, almost terrible revelation to us of ourselves, of underlying potencies undeclared as yet. For freshness, for strength, for passion as of the central fires, for height and breadth and depth, for grandeur of sweep, and for remorselessness of longing has it ever been equalled ? Could we find a mightier, more intense prayer in the history of the soul ? And it is the prayer of .an " infidel."' Which shows how little theological belief or unbelief has to do with that which is the object of all the great religions, the awakening of a desire for soul life ; and the satisfying of this desire. " I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly," said He whom we call, and rightly, the Saviour.