An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry Part 7

If Browning's idea of the quickening, the regeneration, the rectification of personality, through a higher personality, be fully comprehended, his idea of the great function of Art, as an intermediate agency of personality, will become plain.

To emphasize the latter idea may be said to be the ultimate purpose of his masterpiece, 'The Ring and the Book'.

The complexity of the circ.u.mstances involved in the Roman murder case, adapts it admirably to the poet's purpose--namely, to exhibit the swervings of human judgment in spite of itself, and the conditions upon which the rectification of that judgment depends.

This must be taken, however, as only the articulation, the framework, of the great poem. It is richer in materials, of the most varied character, than any other long poem in existence.

To notice one feature of the numberless features of the poem, which might be noticed, Browning's deep and subtle insight into the genius of the Romish Church is shown in it more fully than in any other of his poems,--though special phases of that genius are distinctly exhibited in numerous poems: a remarkable one being 'The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's Church'.

It is questionable whether any work of any kind has ever exhibited that genius more fully and distinctly than 'The Ring and the Book'

exhibits it. The reader breathes throughout the ecclesiastical atmosphere of the Eternal City.

To return from this digression, the several monologues of which the poem consists, with the exception of those of the Canon Caponsacchi, Pompilia, and the Pope, are each curious and subtle and varied exponents of the workings, without the guidance of instinct at the heart, of the prepossessed, prejudiced intellect, and of the sources of its swerving into error. What is said of the "feel after the vanished truth" in the monologue ent.i.tled 'Half Rome'--the speaker being a jealous husband--will serve to characterize, in a general way, "the feel after truth"

exhibited in the other monologues: "honest enough, as the way is: all the same, harboring in the CENTRE OF ITS SENSE a hidden germ of failure, shy but sure, should neutralize that honesty and leave that feel for truth at fault, as the way is too. Some prepossession, such as starts amiss, by but a hair's-breadth at the shoulder-blade, the arm o' the feeler, dip he ne'er so brave; and so leads waveringly, lets fall wide o' the mark his finger meant to find, and fix truth at the bottom, that deceptive speck."

The poet could hardly have employed a more effective metaphor in which to embody the idea of mental swerving. The several monologues all going over the same ground, are artistically justified in their exhibiting, each of them, a quite distinct form of this swerving. For the ultimate purpose of the poet, it needed to be strongly emphasized. The student of the poem is amazed, long before he gets over all these monologues, at the Protean capabilities of the poet's own intellect.

It takes all conceivable att.i.tudes toward the case, and each seems to be a perfectly easy one.

These monologues all lead up to the great moral of the poem, which is explicitly set forth at the end, namely, "that our human speech is naught, our human testimony false, our fame and human estimation, words and wind. Why take the artistic way to prove so much? Because, it is the glory and good of Art, that Art remains the one way possible of speaking truth, to mouths like mine, at least. How look a brother in the face and say, Thy right is wrong, eyes hast thou yet art blind, thine ears are stuffed and stopped, despite their length: and, oh, the foolishness thou countest faith! Say this as silvery as tongue can troll--the anger of the man may be endured, the shrug, the disappointed eyes of him are not so bad to bear-- but here's the plague, that all this trouble comes of telling truth, which truth, by when it reaches him, looks false, seems to be just the thing it would supplant, nor recognizable by whom it left: while falsehood would have done the work of truth. But Art,-- wherein man nowise speaks to men, only to mankind,--Art may tell a truth obliquely, DO THE THING SHALL BREED THE THOUGHT", that is, bring what is IMPLICIT within the soul, into the right att.i.tude to become EXPLICIT--bring about a silent adjustment through sympathy induced by the concrete; in other words, prepare the way for the perception of the truth-- "do the thing shall breed the thought, nor wrong the thought missing the mediate word"; meaning, that Art, so to speak, is the word made flesh,--IS the truth, and, as Art, has nothing directly to do with the explicit. "So may you paint your picture, twice show truth, beyond mere imagery on the wall,-- so, note by note, bring music from your mind, deeper than ever the Andante dived,--so write a book shall mean beyond the facts, suffice the eye and save the soul beside."

And what is the inference the poet would have us draw from this pa.s.sage? It is, that the life and efficacy of Art depends on the personality of the artist, which "has informed, transpierced, thridded, and so thrown fast the facts else free, as right through ring and ring runs the djereed and binds the loose, one bar without a break." And it is really this fusion of the artist's soul, which kindles, quickens, INFORMS those who contemplate, respond to, reproduce sympathetically within themselves the greater spirit which attracts and absorbs their own.

The work of Art is apocalyptic of the artist's own personality.

It CANNOT be impersonal. As is the temper of his spirit, so is, MUST be, the temper of his Art product.* It is hard to believe, almost impossible to believe, that 't.i.tus Andronicus' could have been written by Shakespeare, the external testimony to the authors.h.i.+p, notwithstanding. Even if he had written it as a burlesque of such a play as Marlow's 'Jew of Malta', he could not have avoided some revelation of that sense of moral proportion which is omnipresent in his Plays. But I can find no Shakespeare in 't.i.tus Andronicus'.

Are we not certain what manner of man Shakespeare was from his Works (notwithstanding that critics are ever a.s.serting their impersonality) --far more certain than if his biography had been written by one who knew him all his life, and sustained to him the most intimate relations? We know Shakespeare--or he CAN be known, if the requisite conditions are met, better, perhaps, than any other great author that ever lived--know, in the deepest sense of the word, in a sense other than that in which we know Dr. Johnson, through Boswell's Biography. The moral proportion which is so signal a characteristic of his Plays could not have been imparted to them by the conscious intellect. It was SHED from his spiritual const.i.tution.

-- * "And long it was not after, when I was confirmed in this opinion, that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem."

--Milton's 'Apology for Sinectymnuus'.

By "speaking truth" in Art's way, Browning means, inducing a right ATt.i.tUDE toward, a full and free SYMPATHY with, the True, which is a far more important and effective way of speaking truth than delivering truth 'in re'. A work of Art, worthy of the name, need not be true to fact, but must be true in its spiritual att.i.tude, and being thus true, it will tend to induce a corresponding att.i.tude in those who do fealty to it. It will have the influence, though in an inferior degree, it may be, of a magnetic personality.

Personality is the ultimate source of spiritual quickening and adjustment. Literature and all forms of Art are but the intermediate agencies of personalities. The artist cannot be separated from his art. As is the artist so MUST be his art.

The 'aura', so to speak, of a great work of Art, must come from the artist's own personality. The spiritual worth of Shakespeare's 'Winter's Tale' is not at all impaired by the fact that Bohemia is made a maritime country, that Whitsun pastorals and Christian burial, and numerous other features of Shakespeare's own age, are introduced into pagan times, that Queen Hermione speaks of herself as a daughter of the Emperor of Russia, that her statue is represented as executed by Julio Romano, an Italian painter of the 16th century, that a puritan sings psalms to hornpipes, and, to crown all, that messengers are sent to consult the oracle of Apollo, at Delphi, which is represented as an island! All this jumble, this gallimaufry, I say, does not impair the spiritual worth of the play. As an Art-product, it invites a rectified att.i.tude toward the True and the Sweet.

If we look at the letter of the trial scene in 'The Merchant of Venice', it borders on the absurd; but if we look at its spirit, we see the Shakespearian att.i.tude of soul which makes for righteousness, for the righteousness which is inherent in the moral const.i.tution of the universe.

The inmost, secretest life of Shakespeare's Plays came from the personality, the inmost, secretest life, of the man Shakespeare.

We might, with the most alert sagacity, note and tabulate and aggregate his myriad phenomenal merits as a dramatic writer, but we might still be very far from that something back of them all, or rather that IMMANENT something, that mystery of personality, that microcosmos, that "inmost centre, where truth abides in fulness", as Browning makes Paracelsus characterize it, "const.i.tuting man's self, is what Is", as he makes the dying John characterize it, in 'A Death in the Desert', that "innermost of the inmost, most interior of the interne", as Mrs. Browning characterizes it, "the hidden Soul", as Dallas characterizes it, which is projected into, and const.i.tutes the soul of, the Plays, and which is reached through an unconscious and mystic sympathy on the part of him who habitually communes with and does fealty to them. That personality, that living force, co-operated spontaneously and unconsciously with the conscious powers, in the creative process; and when we enter into a sympathetic communion with the concrete result of that creative process, our own mysterious personalities, being essentially identical with, though less quickened than, Shakespeare's, respond, though it may be but feebly, to his. This response is the highest result of the study of Shakespeare's works.

It is a significant fact that Shakespearian critics and editors, for nearly two centuries, have been a 'genus irritabile', to which genus Shakespeare himself certainly did not belong.

The explanation may partly be, that they have been too much occupied with the LETTER, and have fretted their nerves in angry dispute about readings and interpretations; as theologians have done in their study of the sacred records, instead of endeavoring to reach, through the letter, the personality of which the letter is but a manifestation more or less imperfect. To KNOW a personality is, of course, a spiritual knowledge--the result of sympathy, that is, spiritual responsiveness. Intellectually it is but little more important to know one rather than another personality.

The highest worth of all great works of genius is due to the fact that they are apocalyptic of great personalities.

Art says, as the Divine Person said, whose personality and the personalities fas.h.i.+oned after it, have transformed and moulded the ages, "Follow me!" Deep was the meaning wrapt up in this command: it was, Do as I do, live as I live, not from an intellectual perception of the principles involved in my life, but through a full sympathy, through the awakening, vitalizing, actuating power of the incarnate Word.

Art also says, as did the voice from the wilderness, inadequately translated, "REPENT ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand". (Metanoei^te h'/ggike gar h' Basilei/a tw^n ou'ranw^n.) Rather, be transformed, or, as De Quincey puts it, "Wheel into a new centre your spiritual system; GEOCENTRIC has that system been up to this hour--that is, having earth and the earthly for its starting-point; henceforward make it HELIOCENTRIC (that is, with the sun, or the heavenly, for its principle of motion)."

The poetry of Browning everywhere says this, and says it more emphatically than that of any other poet in our literature.

It says everywhere, that not through knowledge, not through a sharpened intellect, but through repentance, in the deeper sense to which I have just alluded, through conversion, through wheeling into a new centre its spiritual system, the soul attains to saving truth.

Salvation with him means that revelation of the soul to itself, that awakening, quickening, actuating, att.i.tude-adjusting, of the soul, which sets it gravitating toward the Divine.

Browning's idea of Conversion is, perhaps, most distinctly expressed in a pa.s.sage in the Monologue of the Canon Caponsacchi, in 'The Ring and the Book', wherein he sets forth the circ.u.mstances under which his soul was wheeled into a new centre, after a life of dalliance and elegant folly, and made aware of "the marvellous dower of the life it was gifted and filled with". He has been telling the judges, before whom he has been summoned, the story of the letters forged by Guido to entrap him and Pompilia, and of his having seen "right through the thing that tried to pa.s.s for truth and solid, not an empty lie". The conclusion and the resolve he comes to, are expressed in the soliloquy which he repeats to the judges, as having uttered at the time: "So, he not only forged the words for her but words for me, made letters he called mine: what I sent, he retained, gave these in place, all by the mistress messenger! As I recognized her, at potency of truth, so she, by the crystalline soul, knew me, never mistook the signs.

Enough of this--let the wraith go to nothingness again, here is the orb, have only thought for her!" What follows admits us to the very HEART of Browning's poetry--admits us to the great Idea which is almost, in these days, strange to say, peculiarly his-- which no other poet, certainly, of this intellectual, a.n.a.lytic, scientific age, with its "patent, truth-extracting processes", has brought out with the same degree of distinctness--the great Idea which may be variously characterized as that of soul-kindling, soul-quickening, adjustment of soul-att.i.tude, regeneration, conversion, through PERSONALITY--a kindling, quickening, adjustment, regeneration, conversion in which THOUGHT is not even a coefficient.

As expressed in Sordello, "Divest mind of e'en thought, and lo, G.o.d's unexpressed will dawns above us!" "Thought?" the Canon goes on to say, "Thought? nay, Sirs, what shall follow was not thought: I have thought sometimes, and thought long and hard.

I have stood before, gone round a serious thing, tasked my whole mind to touch it and clasp it close, . . . G.o.d and man, and what duty I owe both,--I dare say I have confronted these in thought: but no such faculty helped here. I put forth no thought,--powerless, all that night I paced the city: it was the first Spring.

By the INVASION I LAY Pa.s.sIVE TO, in rushed new things, the old were rapt away; alike abolished--the imprisonment of the outside air, the inside weight o' the world that pulled me down.

Death meant, to spurn the ground, soar to the sky,--die well and you do that. The very immolation made the bliss; death was the heart of life, and all the harm my folly had crouched to avoid, now proved a veil hiding all gain my wisdom strove to grasp.

. . . Into another state, under new rule I knew myself was pa.s.sing swift and sure; whereof the initiatory pang approached, felicitous annoy, as bitter-sweet as when the virgin band, the victors chaste, feel at the end the earthy garments drop, and rise with something of a rosy shame into immortal nakedness: so I lay, and let come the proper throe would thrill into the ecstasy and out-throb pain. I' the gray of the dawn it was I found myself facing the pillared front o' the Pieve--mine, my church: it seemed to say for the first time, 'But am not I the Bride, the mystic love o' the Lamb, who took thy plighted troth, my priest, to fold thy warm heart on my heart of stone and freeze thee nor unfasten any more? This is a fleshly woman,--let the free bestow their life blood, thou art pulseless now!' . . . Now, when I found out first that life and death are means to an end, that pa.s.sion uses both, indisputably mistress of the man whose form of wors.h.i.+p is self-sacrifice--now, from the stone lungs sighed the scrannel voice, 'Leave that live pa.s.sion, come be dead with me!'

As if, i' the fabled garden, I had gone on great adventure, plucked in ignorance hedge-fruit, and feasted to satiety, laughing at such high fame for hips and haws, and scorned the achievement: then come all at once o' the prize o' the place, the thing of perfect gold, the apple's self: and, scarce my eye on that, was 'ware as well of the sevenfold dragon's watch. Sirs, I obeyed. Obedience was too strange,--this new thing that had been STRUCK INTO ME BY THE LOOK OF THE LADY, to dare disobey the first authoritative word. 'Twas G.o.d's. I had been LIFTED TO THE LEVEL OF HER, could take such sounds into my sense.

I said, 'We two are cognizant o' the Master now; it is she bids me bow the head: how true, I am a priest! I see the function here; I thought the other way self-sacrifice: this is the true, seals up the perfect sum. I pay it, sit down, silently obey.'"

Numerous and varied expressions of the idea of conversion set forth in this pa.s.sage, occur in Browning's poetry, evidencing his deep sense of this great and indispensable condition of soul-life, of being born anew (or from above, as it should be rendered in the Gospel, a'/nwqen, that is, through the agency of a higher personality), in order to see the kingdom of G.o.d-- evidencing his conviction that "the kingdom of G.o.d cometh not with observation: for lo! the kingdom of G.o.d is within you."

In the poem ent.i.tled 'Cristina', the speaker is made to say,--

"Oh, we're sunk enough here, G.o.d knows! but not quite so sunk that moments, Sure tho' seldom, are denied us, when the spirit's true endowments Stand out plainly from its false ones, and apprise it if pursuing Or the right way or the wrong way, to its triumph or undoing.

There are flashes struck from midnights, there are fire-flames noon-days kindle, Whereby piled-up honors perish, whereby swollen ambitions dwindle, While just this or that poor impulse, which for once had play unstifled, Seems the sole work of a life-time that away the rest have trifled."

And again, when the Pope in 'The Ring and the Book' has come to the decision to sign the death-warrant of Guido and his accomplices, he says: "For the main criminal I have no hope except in such a SUDDENNESS OF FATE. I stood at Naples once, a night so dark I could have scarce conjectured there was earth anywhere, sky or sea or world at all: but the night's black was burst through by a blaze-- thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore, through her whole length of mountain visible: there lay the city thick and plain with spires, and, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea. SO MAY THE TRUTH BE FLASHED OUT BY ONE BLOW, AND GUIDO SEE, ONE INSTANT, AND BE SAVED. Else I avert my face, nor follow him into that sad obscure sequestered state where G.o.d UNMAKES BUT TO REMAKE the soul he else made first in vain; which must not be. Enough, for I may die this very night: and how should I dare die, this man let live? Carry this forthwith to the Governor!"

Browning is the most essentially Christian of living poets.

Though he rarely speaks 'in propria persona' in his poetry, any one who has gone over it all, can have no doubt as to his own most vital beliefs. What the Beauty-loving Soul in Tennyson's 'Palace of Art' say of herself, cannot be suspected even, of Browning:--

"I take possession of man's mind and deed.

I care not what the sects may brawl.

I sit as G.o.d holding no form of creed, But contemplating all."

Religion with him is, indeed, the all-in-all; but not any particular form of it as a finality. This is not a world for finalities of any kind, as he constantly teaches us: it is a world of broken arcs, not of perfect rounds.

Formulations of some kind he would, no doubt, admit there must be, as in everything else; but with him all formulations and tabulations of beliefs, especially such as "make square to a finite eye the circle of infinity", *1* are, at the best, only PROVISIONAL, and, at the worst, lead to spiritual standstill, spiritual torpor, "a ghastly smooth life, dead at heart." *2* The essential nature of Christianity is contrary to special prescription, do this or do that, believe this or believe that. Christ gave no recipes.

Christianity is with Browning, and this he sets forth again and again, a LIFE, quickened and motived and nourished by the Personality of Christ.

And all that he says of this Personality can be accepted by every Christian, whatever theological view he may entertain of Christ.

Christ's teachings he regards but as INCIDENTS of that Personality, and the records we have of his sayings and doings, but a fragment, a somewhat distorted one, it may be, out of which we must, by a mystic and plastic sympathy, {*} aided by the Christ spirit which is immanent in the Christian world, mould the Personality, and do fealty to it. The Christian must endeavor to be able to say, with the dying John, in Browning's 'Death in the Desert', "To me that story,--ay, that Life and Death of which I wrote 'it was'-- to me, it is."

-- *1* 'Christmas Eve'.

*2* 'Easter Day'.

{*} 'plastic' in the 1800's sense of 'pliable', not 'fake'.--A.L.

The poem ent.i.tled 'Christmas Eve' contains the fullest and most explicit expression, in Browning, of his idea of the personality of Christ, as being the all-in-all of Christianity.

"The truth in G.o.d's breast Lies trace for trace upon ours impressed: Though He is so bright and we so dim, We are made in His image to witness Him: And were no eye in us to tell, Instructed by no inner sense, The light of Heaven from the dark of h.e.l.l, That light would want its evidence,-- Though Justice, Good, and Truth, were still Divine, if, by some demon's will, Hatred and wrong had been proclaimed Law through the worlds, and Right misnamed, No mere exposition of morality Made or in part or in totality, Should win you to give it wors.h.i.+p, therefore: And if no better proof you will care for, --Whom do you count the worst man upon earth?

Be sure, he knows, in his conscience, more Of what Right is, than arrives at birth In the best man's acts that we bow before: And thence I conclude that the real G.o.d-function Is to furnish a motive and injunction For practising what we know already.

And such an injunction and such a motive As the G.o.d in Christ, do you waive, and 'heady, High-minded', hang your tablet votive Outside the fane on a finger-post?

Morality to the uttermost, Supreme in Christ as we all confess, Why need WE prove would avail no jot To make Him G.o.d, if G.o.d he were not?

Where is the point where Himself lays stress?

Does the precept run 'Believe in Good, In Justice, Truth, now understood For the first time'?--or 'Believe in ME, Who lived and died, yet essentially Am Lord of Life'?* Whoever can take The same to his heart and for mere love's sake Conceive of the love,--that man obtains A new truth; no conviction gains Of an old one only, made intense By a fresh appeal to his faded sense."

-- * "Subsists no law of life outside of life."

"The Christ himself had been no Lawgiver, Unless he had given the LIFE, too, with the law."

Mrs. Browning's 'Aurora Leigh'.