An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry Part 1

Introduction to Robert Browning.

by Hiram Corson.

PREFACE.

The purpose of the present volume is to afford some aid and guidance in the study of Robert Browning's Poetry, which, being the most complexly subjective of all English poetry, is, for that reason alone, the most difficult. And then the poet's favorite art-form, the dramatic, or, rather, psychologic, monologue, which is quite original with himself, and peculiarly adapted to the const.i.tution of his genius and to the revelation of themselves by the several "dramatis personae", presents certain structural difficulties, but difficulties which, with an increased familiarity, grow less and less. The exposition presented in the Introduction, of its const.i.tution and skilful management, and the Arguments given of the several poems included in the volume, will, it is hoped, reduce, if not altogether remove, the difficulties of this kind.

In the same section of the Introduction, certain peculiarities of the poet's diction, which sometimes give a check to the reader's understanding of a pa.s.sage, are presented and ill.u.s.trated.

I think it not necessary to offer any apology for my going all the way back to Chaucer, and noting the Ebb and Flow in English Poetry down to the present time, of the spirituality which const.i.tutes the real life of poetry, and which should, as far as possible, be brought to the consciousness and appreciation of students.

What I mean by spirituality is explained in my treatment of the subject. The degree to which poetry is quickened with it should always enter into an estimate of its absolute worth.

It is that, indeed, which const.i.tutes its absolute worth.

The weight of thought conveyed, whatever that be, will not compensate for the absence of it.

The study of poetry, in our inst.i.tutions of learning, so far as I have taken note of it, and the education induced thereby, are almost purely intellectual. The student's spiritual nature is left to take care of itself; and the consequence is that he becomes, at best, only a thinking and a.n.a.lyzing machine.

The spiritual claims of the study of poetry are especially demanded in the case of Browning's poetry. Browning is generally and truly regarded as the most intellectual of poets.

No poetry in English literature, or in any literature, is more charged with discursive thought than his. But he is, at the same time, the most spiritual and transcendental of poets, the "subtlest a.s.sertor of the Soul in Song". His thought is never an end to itself, but is always subservient to an ulterior spiritual end--always directed towards "a presentment of the correspondency of the universe to Deity, of the natural to the spiritual, and of the actual to the ideal"; and it is all-important that students should be awakened, and made, as far as possible, responsive to this spiritual end.

The sections of the Introduction on Personality and Art were read before the Browning Society of London, in June, 1882.

I have seen no reason for changing or modifying, in any respect, the views therein expressed.

The idea of personality as a quickening, regenerating power, and the idea of art as an intermediate agency of personality, are, perhaps, the most reiterated (implicitly, not explicitly) in Browning's poetry, and lead up to the dominant idea of Christianity, the idea of a Divine Personality; the idea that the soul, to use an expression from his earliest poem, 'Pauline', must "rest beneath some better essence than itself in weakness".

The notes to the poems will be found, I trust, to cover all points and features of the text which require explanation and elucidation.

I have not, at any rate, wittingly pa.s.sed by any real difficulties.

Whether my explanations and interpretations will in all cases be acceptable, remains to be seen.

Hiram Corson.

Cascadilla Cottage, Ithaca, N.Y.

September, 1886.

Note to the Second Edition.

In this edition, several errors of the first have been corrected.

For the notes on "fifty-part canon", p. 156, and "a certain precious little tablet", p. 232, I am indebted to Mr. Browning.

H. C.

{p. 156--in this etext, see line 322 of "The Flight of the d.u.c.h.ess", in the Poems section. p. 232--see Stanza 30 of "Old Pictures in Florence", also in the Poems section.}

Note to the Third Edition.

In this edition have been added, 'A Death in the Desert', with argument, notes, and commentary, a fac-simile of a letter from the poet, and a portrait copied from a photograph (the last taken of him) which he gave me when visiting him in Venice, a month before his death.

It may be of interest, and of some value, to many students of Browning's poetry, to know a reply he made, in regard to the expression in 'My Last d.u.c.h.ess', "I gave commands; then all smiles stopped together."

We were walking up and down the great hall of the Palazzo Rezzonico, when, in the course of what I was telling him about the study of his works in the United States, I alluded to the divided opinion as to the meaning of the above expression in 'My Last d.u.c.h.ess', some understanding that the commands were to put the d.u.c.h.ess to death, and others, as I have explained the expression on p. 87 of this volume (last paragraph). {For etext use, section III (Browning's Obscurity) of the Introduction, sixth paragraph before the end of the section.} He made no reply, for a moment, and then said, meditatively, "Yes, I meant that the commands were that she should be put to death."

And then, after a pause, he added, with a characteristic dash of expression, and as if the thought had just started in his mind, "Or he might have had her shut up in a convent." This was to me very significant. When he wrote the expression, "I gave commands", etc., he may not have thought definitely what the commands were, more than that they put a stop to the smiles of the sweet d.u.c.h.ess, which provoked the contemptible jealousy of the Duke. This was all his art purpose required, and his mind did not go beyond it.

I thought how many vain discussions take place in Browning Clubs, about little points which are outside of the range of the artistic motive of a composition, and how many minds are occupied with anything and everything under the sun, except the one thing needful (the artistic or spiritual motive), the result being "as if one should be ignorant of nothing concerning the scent of violets, except the scent itself."

H.C.

INTRODUCTION.

I. The Spiritual Ebb and Flow exhibited in English Poetry from Chaucer to Tennyson and Browning.

Literature, in its most restricted art-sense, is an expression in letters of the life of the spirit of man co-operating with the intellect. Without the co-operation of the spiritual man, the intellect produces only thought; and pure thought, whatever be the subject with which it deals, is not regarded as literature, in its strict sense. For example, Euclid's 'Elements', Newton's 'Principia', Spinoza's 'Ethica', and Kant's 'Critique of the Pure Reason', do not properly belong to literature.

(By the "spiritual" I would be understood to mean the whole domain of the emotional, the susceptible or impressible, the sympathetic, the intuitive; in short, that mysterious something in the const.i.tution of man by and through which he holds relations.h.i.+p with the essential spirit of things, as opposed to the phenomenal of which the senses take cognizance.)

The term literature is sometimes extended in meaning (and it may be so extended), to include all that has been committed to letters, on all subjects. There is no objection to such extension in ordinary speech, no more than there is to that of the signification of the word, "beauty" to what is purely abstract. We speak, for example, of the beauty of a mathematical demonstration; but beauty, in its strictest sense, is that which appeals to the spiritual nature, and must, therefore, be concrete, personal, not abstract. Art beauty is the embodiment, adequate, effective embodiment, of co-operative intellect and spirit,-- "the accommodation," in Bacon's words, "of the shows of things to the desires of the mind."

It follows that the relative merit and importance of different periods of a literature should be determined by the relative degrees of spirituality which these different periods exhibit.

The intellectual power of two or more periods, as exhibited in their literatures, may show no marked difference, while the spiritual vitality of these same periods may very distinctly differ. And if it be admitted that literature proper is the product of co-operative intellect and spirit (the latter being always an indispensable factor, though there can be no high order of literature that is not strongly articulated, that is not well freighted, with thought), it follows that the periods of a literature should be determined by the ebb and flow of spiritual life which they severally register, rather than by any other considerations. There are periods which are characterized by a "blindness of heart", an inactive, quiescent condition of the spirit, by which the intellect is more or less divorced from the essential, the eternal, and it directs itself to the shows of things. Such periods may embody in their literatures a large amount of thought,--thought which is conversant with the externality of things; but that of itself will not const.i.tute a n.o.ble literature, however perfect the forms in which it may be embodied, and the general sense of the civilized world, independently of any theories of literature, will not regard such a literature as n.o.ble. It is made up of what must be, in time, superseded; it has not a sufficiently large element of the essential, the eternal, which can be reached only through the a.s.similating life of the spirit. The spirit may be so "cabined, cribbed, confined" as not to come to any consciousness of itself; or it may be so set free as to go forth and recognize its kins.h.i.+p, respond to the spiritual world outside of itself, and, by so responding, KNOW what merely intellectual philosophers call the UNKNOWABLE.

To turn now to the line of English poets who may be said to have pa.s.sed the torch of spiritual life, from lifted hand to hand, along the generations. And first is

"the morning star of song, who made His music heard below:

"Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath Preluded those melodious bursts that fill The s.p.a.cious times of great Elizabeth With sounds that echo still."

Chaucer exhibits, in a high degree, this life of the spirit, and it is the secret of the charm which his poetry possesses for us after a lapse of five hundred years. It vitalizes, warms, fuses, and imparts a lightsomeness to his verse; it creeps and kindles beneath the tissues of his thought. When we compare Dryden's modernizations of Chaucer with the originals, we see the difference between the verse of a poet, with a healthy vitality of spirit, and, through that healthy vitality of spirit, having secret dealings with things, and verse which is largely the product of the rhetorical or literary faculty. We do not feel, when reading the latter, that any unconscious might co-operated with the conscious powers of the writer. But we DO feel this when we read Chaucer's verse.

All of the Canterbury Tales have originals or a.n.a.logues, most of which have been reproduced by the London Chaucer Society.

Not one of the tales is of Chaucer's own invention. And yet they may all be said to be original, in the truest, deepest sense of the word.

They have been vitalized from the poet's own soul. He has infused his own personality, his own spirit-life, into his originals; he has "created a soul under the ribs of death." It is this infused vitality which will const.i.tute the charm of the Canterbury Tales for all generations of English speaking and English reading people. This life of the spirit, of which I am speaking, as distinguished from the intellect, is felt, though much less distinctly, in a contemporary work, 'The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman'.

What the author calls "KIND WIT", that is, "natural intelligence", has, generally, the ascendency. We meet, however, with powerful pa.s.sages, wherein the thoughts are aglow with the warmth from the writer's inner spirit. He shows at times the moral indignation of a Hebrew prophet.

The 'Confessio Amantis' of John Gower, another contemporary work, exhibits comparatively little of the life of the spirit, either in its verse or in its thought. The thought rarely pa.s.ses the limit of natural intelligence. The stories, which the poet drew from the 'Gesta Romanorum' and numerous other sources, can hardly be said to have been BORN AGAIN. The verse is smooth and fluent, but the reader feels it to be the product of literary skill.

It wants what can be imparted only by an unconscious might back of the consciously active and trained powers. It is this unconscious might which John Keats, in his 'Sleep and Poetry', speaks of as "might half slumbering on its own right arm", and which every reader, with the requisite susceptibility, can always detect in the verse of a true poet.

In the interval between Chaucer and Spenser, this life of the spirit is not distinctly marked in any of its authors, not excepting even Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, whose sad fate gave a fact.i.tious interest to his writings. It is more noticeable in Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst's 'Induction to the Mirror for Magistrates', which, in the words of Hallam, "forms a link which unites the school of Chaucer and Lydgate to the 'Faerie Queene'."

The Rev. James Byrne, of Trinity College, Dublin, in his lecture on 'The Influence of National Character on English Literature', remarks of Spenser: "After that dark period which separated him from Chaucer, after all the desolation of the Wars of the Roses, and all the deep trials of the Reformation, he rose on England as if, to use an image of his own,

"'At last the golden orientall gate Of greatest heaven gan to open fayre, And Phoebus, fresh as brydegrome to his mate, Came dauncing forth, shaking his deawie hayre, And hurled his glistering beams through gloomy ayre.'