Northrop Frye’s Student Essays

3 Robert Browning: An Abstract Study

Frye wrote this paper during his fourth year at Victoria College (1932–33) for Professor Pelham Edgar. Frye’s transcript does not identify the particular English course in which he was enrolled, but it was almost certainly English 4f, “English Poetry of the Nineteenth Century.” Some of what Frye says about both Browning and romanticism is identical with material in his paper on romanticism (no. 2): it is not clear which paper was written first. Edgar’s marginal comments are recorded in the notes. Edgar occasionally put an “X” in the margin, representing perhaps points he wanted to discuss with Frye. The texts of NF’s quotations from Browning, including the punctuation, have been reconciled with those in Brownings’ The Poems, ed. John Pettigrew, 2 vols. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), and the line numbers are to the poems in that edition. The typescript is in the NFF, 1991, box 37, file 9.

The effect of the romantic revival on English literature was so powerful and widespread that no subsequent poet can be considered without some reference to it, so that all the poetry of the last century or so is to that extent postromantic.1 It is especially in dealing with the great names of the Victorian era that we cannot be too explicit in insisting that the social change, the most important since the great migrations, of which romanticism was merely one symbol, signified something more than merely the advent of the nineteenth century. The French Revolution was catastrophic evidence of a universal process which resulted in the final uprooting of the great city, the metropolis as distinct from the culture-town like Florence or Nuremberg, from its surroundings, the countryside. The outcome of this process is, of course, the establishment of a purely civic outlook in thought, which means, in philosophy, that intellect can no longer be pressed into the service of being,2 and, in the arts, that the great creative period of Western culture was over and the critical one had commenced. Along with the final exploitation of the major scale in music by Mozart, with the final overthrow of the Rembrandt “brown sauce” tradition in painting, comes the final expression of systematic philosophy in Kant, and the great name in the thought of the romantic era which followed him, Schopenhauer, bases his whole thesis on the concept of an intellect divorced from being or willing and grimly regarding it.3 Kant himself had shown that an intellectual proof of God’s existence was impossible and that conviction of it resided in the blood, not the brain. The nineteenth century, therefore, meant something entirely different by philosophy, religion, and creativeness in art than any previous age had meant.

We have to grasp this idea in its implications before we can see any underlying unity in Victorian culture similar to that of the precedent era of development. The preromantic period contains a number of lines of thought held together in coherence by a unifying religious spirit, bound by ontological lashings. Hence, a poet in such a time can, if he be great enough, feel that unity in the life he deals with, and can by attuning himself to the beat of his language attain to an instinct for giving it expression. But the view of the romantic is indirect and pictorial; he is a subjective idealist, not an objective one, and the divorce of the creative faculty from the creative spirit gives us that “art for art’s sake” conception which makes of the artist a watching critic, whose whole raison d’être, and, consequently, whose whole religion, consists in viewing the world from his standpoint, an attitude which extends itself to every department of life. In a systematic pursuit unity is, thus, given by consensus; it is not something which exists ab initio. The majority vote, which arose with romanticism and democracy, which replaced patronage by popularity and made the growth of science possible, was a sign that every aspect of thought was separating itself out from the rest, linked and not bound to them, that, consequently, every point of view was peculiar, and that the broad divisions of culture, arts included, were being shifted over to specific grounds of empiric positivism. Romantic pessimism, by finding solace in physical beauty, takes this attitude. Would you find out what God is? asks Wordsworth in effect. Then look around you. Do you wish to find truth? asks Keats. You can find it in beauty:

—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,

[Ode on a Grecian Urn, lines 49–50]

which is merely an application of Kant’s doctrine. Blake, holding fast to the thought of an earlier age, fought a dogged, hopeless battle against the “vegetable kingdom”4 and was ignored; the other romantics all outdid one another in their “treatment of nature.” Their whole view of poetry was as a matter of course pictorial—the view of the static and abstracted artist. Even the inner unity given by mystic introspection went by the boards—Shelley championed atheism, and all the attempts of the past to bring together the compulsions of logic, morals, and aesthetics fell to pieces. The fact that the age did not wish to recognize a necessary alliance of art with morals, for instance, was made manifest by popularity of the cheap cynicism of Byron,5 and the similar vogue of Scott reflected an impulse to widen the scope of history and see the past as pictorially as the present. With the great romantic poets even the technique was picturesque; the gorgeous sound patterns, Coleridge’s alliteration theories, Keats’s vowel arrangement, the caught-up, arrested rhythms, the revival of picture-forms like the sonnet and the Spenserian stanza, all testify to the idea of isolating for an instant and making visible the thrusting force and pulse of poetry. Exactly the same tendencies are shown in thought. Developments in German idealism, which worked out the romantic position systematically, were brought into England through the media of Coleridge and Carlyle, but the true inwardness of the English spirit is best shown in utilitarianism. Bentham, in consigning all previous philosophy to the ashcan,6 on the ground that it was not useful, simply means by doing so: Would you find the field of philosophy? Then look around you. Utilitarianism, as Bentham conceived it, is an empiric, not a systematic, ordering. It collapses at the first touch of the a priori any attempt to rationalize it, such as that of Mill, merely succeeding only7 in hedonizing and, thus, entirely destroying it. It faced, not inward to spiritual unity, but outward to reform. Would you find inward peace of soul and intellectual security? bellowed Carlyle. Then Work! Do Something! Newman expressed the Catholic contribution in similar terms, stressing the liberal and wide-ranging education.8 The greatest novelists, notably Dickens, took the same position, writing novels illustrative of a kind of naive delight in watching the endlessly varied forms taken by humanity. Thackeray alone, with his eighteenth-century complex, tried a more symbolic view,9 and brilliant sketching interspersed with irritating bursts of sermonizing are the result. The affinity of all this with the political, social, and economic make-up of the time is too obvious for comment.

When we take two statements, one on each side of the cleavage, which seem to express similar attitudes, we find that, properly examined in their contexts, there is this same difference between them. The similarity of Browning’s “God’s in His Heaven—All’s right with the world!” to Pope’s “Whatever is, is right”10 has usually been put down to a smug optimism in both resolutely denying the importance or even existence of evil, pain, or sorrow. This attempt to make Pope and Browning a couple of addle-pated fools is not one that will commend itself to any qualified critic, the less so if it can be shown that the two epigrams do not even mean the same thing. Now when a great eighteenth-century intellect said anything like “Whatever is, is right,” he expressed that philosophical optimism which is the germ of Leibnitz, which dances and lilts all through Mozart, which lies at the immense still depths of the second part of Faust, and which even in Blake, with the grim two-handed engine of the guillotine already at the door, hangs like a curtain-drop behind the petty11 tyranny of Urizen. This was the last culminating effort of Western thought to overcome the blind life-force, to implicate the unique fact in the universal truth, to postulate a moral goodness as the controlling factor in the universe. Evil is not unreal, it is incidental, even necessary, to a higher good, and all things flow, in an inexorable Tightness, from the goodness of God. It is hardly too much to say that “Whatever is, is right” is the kernel of all Western metaphysics, and certainly it is at any rate a positive, intelligible meta-physical proposition. Now let us look at Browning. “God’s in His Heaven—All’s right with the world.” And how does Pippa lead up to this conclusion? By watching the day in the springtime, the lark, the snail on the thorn. Here is again the great romantic doctrine—truth is beauty, that is, truth can be tested and made manifest by beauty. Browning is here denying and negating the whole of metaphysics.

It will be objected, of course, that we have no right to wrench this couplet from its powerful dramatic context and hold it up as unadulterated Robert Browning. But it is so frequently the focal point of attacks on the poet that it is obviously regarded as such, and it may be as well for us to digress for a moment and show that the couplet is the clearest expression of an assumption underlying the whole of Browning’s poetry. That Browning meant precisely what he said here I think indubitable, not only from its repetition in so many other places, but from the context itself. Browning showed himself all through his life as one of the greatest lovers who ever lived and still remains unexcelled as a portrayer of love from the standpoint that love is a moral good and that the passions which pretend to override morality, therefore, end by trampling real love itself under foot. The opposed type of lover, who regards his love as something transcendent, sweeping aside everything in its path, is perhaps best represented in Antony and Cleopatra. Browning and Antony both have a tremendous reservoir of strength the other does not suspect, and so each looks on his opponent as fundamentally weak. Antony might despise Browning as a fearful prig, afraid to take the consequences of his love; Browning might point to the collapse of Antony’s empire as a sign of Antony’s weakness and lack of self-control. In any case, Ottima is Browning’s Cleopatra, a woman whose whole energy is centred in a passionate infatuation. Sebald, however, is not Antony, but a stolid German with a conscience. He cannot persuade himself that his action is right, and Pippa’s song strikes a responsive chord of feeling in him. He tests truth by beauty as he knows it, and under that test Ottima shrivels into a hag. Now this is logical enough, but it is Browning’s treatment of Ottima that reveals his attitude. When she hears Sebald turn on her, she breaks out into passionate reproaches. She is, in truth, a creature of passion, that is, as Browning sees it, fundamentally weak. She cannot bear to be despised: —“Speak to me, —not of me!”—and finally breaks down wailing helplessly, “You hate me then? You hate me then?” [Pippa Passes, pt. 1, lines 245, 257]. When Sebald goes, in the great sorrow and anguish of her soul she rises to her supreme crisis, which proves to be one of self-sacrifice: “Not me—to him, O God, be merciful!” [Pippa Passes, pt. 1, line 282]. Now it is at least probable that here Browning has underestimated her strength. Women of Ottima’s type care nothing for masculine courage in the conventional sense; they judge their lover in terms of how far he measures up to the love they bear him, and it is not easy to regard the Ottima-Cleopatra she-panther as otherwise than a creature of the most boundless egoism. When such a woman has to meet a crisis, she assembles together what is strongest in her—the fervour of her love transmuted to hate. One can imagine Cleopatra rising in a cold white fury to tell a quivering Antony what she thought of a poltroon who developed a conscience and deserted her like a prostitute because he had suddenly discovered the existence of God. Ottima might be capable of self-destruction, like Cleopatra (“I always meant to kill myself” [Pippa Passes, pt. 1, line 273]); hardly of self-abnegation. It is the awful finality of Pippa’s innocent song, first paralysing, then purging and transfiguring, the lovers, which makes it apparent that Browning sees a self-evident and powerful truth in it, striking Ottima and Sebald with all the force of its obvious Tightness, like oxygen on a man gasping under chloroform. The ironic expression of the same idea gives us Porphyria’s Lover, and the searing contempt of the last line of this poem is enough in itself to define Browning’s position.12

Voltaire, the great opponent of Leibnitz, who did so much to destroy the eighteenth century, once said: “If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent Him.”13 This is the cynical formulation of an idea which lies back of14 the vital impulses of the nineteenth. God’s in his heaven— that is not a reasoned conviction but an instinctive one rising from the necessity for a working hypothesis. Thought and action alike need a centre of gravity, and, that once established, the evils of the world do not appear as unreal, but neither do they appear inevitable or irremediable. All’s right with the world—it is on a sound basis fundamentally, and, if we work hard, we may arrive at a solution. In this is seen the cause of that smugness for which the Victorians have been so unsparingly attacked, arising in their15 turning around from intellectual doubts and forward to action—they prided themselves on being practical men, not dreamers. We are in perspective with regard to them; we have gone through the scepticism to which a concentration on the empiric invariably leads; we can see that positivism of this type bears the seeds of the pragmatism, toward which, as the final negation of the absolute, the thought of the whole time tended. Above all, we know where the economic and political side of this outlook has landed us. But we should not be blinded by the immaturity of the Victorians as compared to us. The immense strength and self-discipline of the age affords ample evidence that their gospel of action is worthy of a respectful approach.

In Browning we find a refined statement of their position.16 Browning is a poet of action and his view is fundamentally subjective, the world around and about him being his theme. Love, with Browning, is again the democratic consensus of romanticism mentioned above; love is focused on humanity with him, as with all the Victorians and their contemporary Comte. That is why he thought sexual love should culminate in marriage and why he was so opposed to any aspect of human passion which travestied or negatived this deep underlying love of mankind. Anyone with this feeling in him might override the law, which addresses itself to men negatively—an idea implied in The Statue and the Bust, but love itself cannot be unmoral; it is itself the highest form of morality. This consensus, which Whitman in one place sees as underlying all the philosophies and teachings of history, Christ, Buddha, and Socrates included, makes Browning an apologist of “common sense,” in every aspect of its meaning, who is bitterly opposed to the two static and quasi-misanthropic theories of life, the hedonistic and the mystical. We have said above that Mill’s neo-Epicureanism destroys the spirit of the utilitarians. In the same way the Grammarian would have forfeited his claim to true greatness had he adopted the more rationalized procedure, while the tired and disillusioned Bishop of St. Praxed’s, who quotes from the Book of Ecclesiastes and might well have written it, shows in his pathetic, broken death-song the utter barrenness and emptiness of his soul. To the epicure, as distinct from the Epicurean, Browning extended nothing but contempt, Rabbi Ben Ezra refusing to regard him as anything else but a fool. Again, the mystical introspectionist who shuts his eyes to his social existence Browning was inclined to regard with suspicion. He had no inherent sympathy with mysticism, paying very occasionally the perfunctory respect which poets tender it, but by no means ready to embrace its attitude. The purest mystic in Browning’s portrait gallery is Johannes Agricola, who gibbers in a madhouse.17 A mystic proper, as Plotinus saw, really works with a double mechanism; he has a soul which unifies the world into an idealistic pattern for himself, but he must also have a spirit which integrates that pattern into the absolute and universal.18 Consequently, he can exist only in an age in which the intellect is a mere creature of being, the important thing being the vital blood-feeling rather than the abstract vision. When these two factors fall apart, as they did with the romantic revival, mysticism disappears, along with the spirit, leaving the soul with its subjective idealism. The albatross is brought in by the Ancient Mariner, not altogether without a protesting squawk, to illustrate to the Wedding Guest that the post-romantic consensus extends itself to every sentient being,19 and that is about as near as any romantic gets to mysticism. Browning, with his contemporaries, conceived of the fact, the small thing, as something in itself.20 Symbolism vanished, and the men of his time, from the Grad-grinds to Carlyle, from the utilitarians to Shelley, possessed a voracious appetite for facts. Obviously the logical result of romantic egoism, or subjectivity, is antinomianism, and so the whole position rests, unconsciously as a rule, on an atheistic basis. Thus, does Browning, again unconsciously, push God out of his world. The symbolism of a small thing does not exist in it,21 but in its proximity to the God who is behind it. Sludge says, in an inspired moment:

We find great things are made of little things,

And little things go lessening till at last

Comes God behind them. Talk of mountains now?

We talk of mould that heaps the mountain, mites

That throng the mould, and God that makes the mites,

The Name comes close behind a stomach-cyst,

The simplest of creations, just a sac

That’s mouth, heart, legs and belly at once, yet lives

And feels, and could do neither, we conclude,

If simplified still further one degree:

The small becomes the dreadful and immense!

[Mr. Sludge, “The Medium,” lines 1112–22]

God is always just one step away. Again, if it be asked why we should insist on a working, active life, the answer is that God will find a use for it somehow. The reward, if it comes at all, will come after death, and some passages imply the idea of a continuous series of lives with the reward still in the middle distance. Life is a limit, and living consists in working within limitations. God, the infinite, is outside. The blinding light of heaven is too much for our view on earth22—Lazarus, having glimpsed it, is thereby permanently dead and cannot be brought to life again [John 11:1–46]—that, I think, is the meaning of the Epistle.23 With St. John the Evangelist death and the “universal prick of light” are synonymous.24 Victorian poetry is highly valetudinarian in spirit—a glance over the titles of Mrs. Hemans’s poems25 would give Peter Pan himself some uncomfortable moments—but Browning is diametrically opposed to the point of view presented in most of it. Death is to Browning too negative a word to have any meaning, and he can see nothing beyond death but more life. Here he is, of course, not opposing the Victorian spirit, but giving it clear expression. Browning, therefore, is an optimist in believing that imperfection of life implies perfection beyond it. The view is the same as that of Kent, which, being founded on an emotion, faces forward to his immediate successors [King Lear, 5.3.319b–22]. The end of the poem called Time’s Revenges gives it the negative statement: “There may be heaven; there must be hell” [line 65].

We must pass over the rest of this question, as the thesis that Browning is a poet of Victorianism is too trite to need further elaboration. It is equally easy, but much more significant, to take another step and say that he is the poet of Victorianism, a title often accorded to Tennyson, but not to anyone else. With the latter this holds good for external qualities rather than for the true inwardness of his poetry. Tennyson has probably not been given sufficient credit for his intellectual honesty; in any case he remained, if not actually a sceptic, certainly very dubious about the solidity of the Victorian position. As a result, his work has not the completeness of Browning; it changes and alters, as is natural with a poet who kept himself so keenly alive to all the movements of his time. His mind was not so large or comprehensive as Browning’s, perhaps, but what he had he held with clarity and restraint. The essence of Tennyson is his taste, and as far as viewing life is concerned, taste is a strictly personal, hence, a negative, quality. Tennyson, in short, is the abstract of Victorianism: Browning is the Victorian abstract of English literature. Now in every age there is one supreme 26 poet who, in remaining strictly a product of his era, expresses the whole inwardness and force of it, he having gathered it up into a serene and catholic soul. His greatness as a poet, thus, depends on the greatness of his age. Such were Chaucer to the Middle Ages, Shakespeare to the Elizabethans, Dryden to the Restoration, Pope to the Age of Anne, Crabbe to the Georgians, and Browning to the Victorians. Similarly there is an opponent figure each time, a voice crying, lonely and desperate, more mature and vigorous, perhaps, but more bitter and partial. Thus, we have the protestant Langland (I use the word in a general sense) opposed to Chaucer. Even against Shakespeare, writing in the supreme hour of England’s creative triumph, a powerful force lay undercurrent which was to find expression in Milton. Bunyan stands opposite Dryden, Swift opposite Pope, Blake opposite Crabbe. And as against Browning I think we could, knowing both the poet and his time, construct even out of pure theory a figure which would very closely resemble that of Thomas Carlyle.

Because the cleavage of romanticism draws a hard and fast line separating Browning from his predecessors and making him a figure homologous but not analogous to them, a critic among creators, so Carlyle, the protestant figure of the nineteenth century, is alone in looking back rather than forward. Hence, there is curious affinity between Carlyle and Browning. The poet was almost the only contemporary man of letters the philosopher had a good word for,27 and Carlyle was one of the two cranks (we shall come to the other later) whom Browning cultivated that28 the rest of the world had given up in despair.29 Now Carlyle is anything but a systematic philosopher; he is, primarily, a stylist. That is, his contribution to the thought of his time derives its value from the manner in which it is expressed. That is why I class him as a poet. He detested his own time and advocated a return to that religious grasp,30 binding all subordinate branches of knowledge together by its unity and comprehension of feeling, which the romantic revival and the greater change it signified had irrecoverably lost to humanity. And if we ask how his style, or manner, expresses this difference from his age, we shall find two curious facts. First, his view of history, that is, of life, is far more vivid than most other men’s, and his French Revolution remains unique among histories because it retains so powerful a grip on the drama of the situation. Secondly, his hero thesis is the only one of his time which shows a recurrent beat, or rhythm, in life; years of inertia punctuated by the energy of a hero, the spirit of a time accented by the great man. “All things are song,” says Sartor Resartus, and this is truly a musical picture of history.31

Carlyle, then, stands out from his time as one who wished it to recapture the creative spirit of the preromantic age by showing that that spirit was associated explicitly with a religious sense, implicitly with music and the drama. Now even a casual survey soon shows that the Victorians had no sympathy with either music or the drama, and that Browning is the exception proving the rule. The reason is obvious. The drama is the province of the creator; it is so purely objective an art that it takes a creative personality to abstract a symbolic order and unity from life, as a geometrical pattern is abstracted from space, and it takes something very like a mystic to give a picture in which each part falls into its right, its foreordained, its inevitable place. Tragedy of the Shakespearean sort, thus, belongs to preromanticism; we have instead the externalized tragedy of Hardy and the problematic tragedy of Ibsen, both of which are theoretical. The novel, on the other hand, is the province of the critic, for it stresses variety, held together by the projected personality of the novelist. Life here remains as it is, and the author moves through it watching. Similarly music is so objective and abstract an art that it is an intensely personalized one, and correspondingly the essay belongs to criticism.32 Thus, the Elizabethans, in an intensely creative age, left the essay in the Baconian stage of extended aphorism and the novel in a similarly primitive condition, reaching their heights in music and the drama, while the Victorians developed the novel and essay to the complete exclusion of the creative arts, which Browning alone held out for. This is why he has been called an Elizabethan figure among the men of his time. The Victorian theatre was in a disgraceful condition, dominated by proletarian mawkishness in its worst form; it was the heyday of cheap melodrama and of diaphragm-thumping Hamlets. Those who were interested in the drama as a living art had to subsist as best they could on mechanical toys imported from France. Robert Browning is the only literate 33 playwright we possess between Sheridan and the school which arose with Shaw, Jones, and Wilde. The Victorians, again, were almost uncannily tone-deaf. At least one of the choicest spirits of the century—Charles Lamb—had a positive distaste for music,34 a dislike we find repeated later in two of the most popular foreign authors—Dumas père, who is said to have “detested even bad music,” and Mark Twain, who hated it like a Philistine and an ignoramus.35 None of the novelists ever bring music in except Thackeray, who had an infallible instinct for liking the wrong things. You will find36 gypsies in Borrow, but no gypsy music. Even the poets, always excepting Browning, seem to think that to have music in one’s soul and to be moved with a concord of sweet sounds are the same thing, and nowhere, so far as I know, even in Tennyson or Coleridge, does music really become vital and alive. The great culture-men, from Ruskin and Arnold to Pater and Morris, never dream of placing music on a level with art, literature, or architecture, much less above them, where it belongs. What is even more important, the musical idols of the Victorians were Handel and Mendelssohn. Now Handel stands like a rock in a stream which has cut through the great contrapuntal gorge ending in Bach and is flowing past the meadows of the Augustans. Mendelssohn, too, is a point of repose in the development from classic to romantic. They are the only definitely static composers in music, and both have a peculiar quality of conservatism, even dogmatism, in them, which make them the only two figures which have really exerted a retarding and stultifying influence upon music.37 To prefer Handel to Bach, or Mendelssohn to Mozart, then, means something more than merely preferring an inferior man. It works out, in the long run, to extolling the antimusical over music.38

“He has plenty of music in him,” said Tennyson of Browning, “but he can’t get it out.”39 This remark is, as we have shown, profoundly true in one sense, but is liable to a gross misunderstanding, which, as a matter of fact, Tennyson probably fell into in making it. The connection between poetry and music has usually been approached from a literary angle, which makes for mere gush as far as the music is concerned. It is, of course, not very difficult for an intelligent person to get over the crude idea that a vowel is musical and a consonant not, nor will he long maintain that Italian is musical because it is full of vowels, or German harsh because it is full of consonants, in the face of the fact that the Germans have produced greater word-artists than the Italians, and more of them, to say nothing of musicians.40 What is more difficult to establish is that each art owes its individuality to its own inner organic construction; what particular sense it addresses itself to is incidental: the psychological and not the physical appeal defines it. Keats is said to be musical because of his mastery of sound, but his lines are sound patterns, and a pattern belongs to the arts of design. Pope has been called musical because he is smooth, but “smooth” is a metaphor derived from a tangible art, like sculpture. Neither quality has any reference to music; what is evidence of music in poetry is evidence of musical thought and organization. This is what we find in Browning, who thought musically as no other poet had done before him.

Music contains two clashing elements, the rhythmic dance and the antirhythmic song. Our conception of it is so strongly rhythmic that composers do not find it difficult to bind the most lyrical idea into a metric unit, and there is always the discordant movement of the harmony to prevent any falling apart into chaos. The conflict is present even here, however, as we can see by the immense length of a Schubert symphony or the insistently beating figure recurrent under a Bach aria. But a poet, with only a single melodic movement to go on, is faced, if he naturally thinks rhythmically, with a prodigious difficulty. With the Elizabethans the rhythmic problem was just being enunciated in music itself by Byrd,41 and did not enter much into the poetry, which was mainly singing. This is the case even in Shakespeare. Hamlet marks the turn from the dramatic proper to the musical in his work. Julius Caesar is a drama; Coriolanus (the supreme example from this point of view) a secular oratorio. Plot and underplot are antithetical and contrasting in the histories; in King Lear they are contrapuntal. Romeo and Juliet moves to a dramatic climax; Macbeth sweeps to a point of repose. But the whole musical idea is vocal, as is natural in a drama, and the movement is even and flowing, not pounding or driving. In this, Shakespeare is a true contemporary of Palestrina. In Donne, the first “musician” of the Browning type, the rhythmic drive is pushed down and sublimated, just as the dancing man of the world was forced into the singing preacher. Hence, the fierce strugglings and conflicts in his poetry, the conceit spun out and elaborated through variation after variation, the song suddenly caught up short and pushed into a conclusion, passages of clanging cacophony suddenly punctured with a long slow line of crushing beauty. With Milton, the connection with the organ is too obvious to dwell upon, but the organ is a vocalized instrument and Milton remains what the organ is—the supreme master of dynamics, with a statically contrapuntal conception of music:

Untwisting all the chains that tie

The hidden soul of harmony. [L’Allegro, lines 143–4]

With the Restoration the Puritan iron finally entered the English soul, and a century of criticism followed which preferred the elephantine clump of a Davideis or a Cato to the whirling dissonances of Donne. The next “musician” is Burns, in whom the rhythmic impulse which produced Tarn O’Shanter and the Jolly Beggars was brought into the sharpest possible conflict with the songs. Some day a sympathetic critic may arise who will show us that the contention of these forces had at least as much as any whore to do with the poet’s tragic destruction, but, as Burns’s commentators are, of course, mainly Scotch Calvinists, the contingency seems remote.42

Browning’s whole concept of music is Handelian, he having been trained in that tradition and that of the vigorous and sprightly contemporaries of Handel, Scarlatti, for instance, or, more evidently, Galuppi. Like all frustrated musicians, he was afraid of Bach, and Hugues of Saxe-Gotha seems to me a polemic aimed not so much at contrapuntal pedantry as at the great contrapuntal tradition itself.43 And he does not seem to have the faintest idea where the music of his own time was going. As a result the musical impulse in him is almost purely rhythmic and instrumental. He finds Avison’s sturdy little march more appealing because of its rhythmic vitality than all the colour concepts of Wagner or Dvorak.44 Once we realize that his whole poetry, at least up to The Ring and the Book, contains a psychology really indigenous to this kind of music, nearly every feature, in fact nearly every mannerism, of his style can be brought into line with it.

With Browning poetry is not to be heard, still less looked at, in the sense of being lovingly dwelt upon. To read any poem of his in the same way one would read a Keats ode would be nonsense. Except for an occasional short lyric (which is often a recitative, like My Star) it is usually possible to affix a definite metronome mark, and if not, we are apt to feel that he has not a clear grip on his subject matter. Hence, his rhythmic originality—there is no question, with him, of elaboration inside a conventional form, and when he uses one he often hurries it into a most indecorous gait.45 Not only does he send the funeral cortège of the Grammarian scrambling up a steep hillside, but makes the heroic couplets of Sordello gallop through the blackness that envelops them at a speed far greater than anything in Dryden or Pope, who are admittedly “smoother.” Abt Vogler and Ixion are almost alone as examples of blank Alexandrines that really move. He never shrinks from writing vast quantities of doggerel—with a great poet the sign of vigour and impatience, and many of his mannerisms, such as the omission of the third person singular pronoun in Caliban upon Setebos, and his awe-inspiring contractions:

Monstr’-inform’-ingens-horrend-ous

Demoniaco-seraphic [Waring, lines 54–5]

make for speed. Poem after poem is written for the sheer exuberant love of rhythm—the Ghent to Aix Ride, the Cavalier Tunes, Through the Metidja all exhibit what Shaw has called “the naïve delight of pure oscillation,”46 and this delight is probably the inner meaning of the much quarrelled-over Last Ride Together.

Here can, I think, be found the key to Browning’s peculiar use of rhyme which Oscar Wilde found so inexplicable.47 Rhyme is the binding and linking rhythmic force which prevents the energy of movement from relapsing into chaos. In Browning’s music-poetry it is his bar line. Just as in music an increase of speed is counterbalanced by an increase of accent emphasis, so the rhymes get worse proportionately as the movement tends to run away with itself:

I could favour you with sundry touches

Of the paint-smutches with which the Duchess

Heightened the mellowness of her cheek’s yellowness

(To get on faster) until at last her

Cheek grew to be one master-plaster

Of mucus and fucus from mere use of ceruse:

In short, she grew from scalp to udder

Just the object to make you shudder.

(The Flight of the Duchess, [lines 825–32])

It is not difficult to shudder, but it is easy to see how the increase of rhyme shows how the speaker is holding in his exasperation and forcing himself not to break out. Similarly the upward strain and fatigue of the Grammarian’s procession is shown in an alternating series of single and double rhymes. The reverse use is shown to better advantage in one of the slowest and most reflective of Browning’s poems, Love Among the Ruins. I have spoken above of the uniform figure underlying a Bach aria, and I do not think it too fanciful to compare this method of treatment to that of the poem in question, in which the dreamlike haze of the subject matter is regularly brought up standing, as it were, by the beat of the rhyme scheme.48 Sometimes, as with the monstrosity called Pacchiarotto or The Glove, the rhyme is something in itself to listen to,49 just as we tap our feet to jazz or a light opera when the musical idea bores us—a use found more clearly in Swinburne’s work than here. But it should be noted as well how many of the Victorians, such as Hood and Gilbert, support a tendency to get the rhymes over with and out of the language for good and all. Whitman may ignore rhyme, but a poem like the Bridge of Sighs reduces it to absurdity.50

This pulsing musical quality obviously leads to an outstanding virtue and vice, the virtue concentration, the vice obscurity. The terrific condensation of the whole Renaissance into the dying Bishop of St. Praxed’s, the whole of Hellenism into Cleon, are large examples of close packing of thought, and, long-winded as Browning is, he is not so diffuse or prolix as is often imagined, and it is by no means easy to cut him intelligently. In miniature, we often come upon sudden flashes of inspiration in which an epic is compressed into a terse phrase or two. A long and dreary tragedy is implicit in the climax of My Last Duchess:

… This grew; I gave commands;

Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands

As if alive, [lines 45–7]

A whole Dutch painting is in this:

An hour they sat in council,

At length the Mayor broke silence. (The Pied Piper of Hamelin, [lines 35–6])

Obscurity arises in several ways. First, and most evidently, from an overconcentration. A musically thinking poet is hampered by the comparative slowness of the monodic form of poetry, and much of Browning’s most inscrutable work bears distinct evidence of his having tried to say four or five things at once. Frequently it is when he is most earnest, even most vociferous, that he is least intelligible. Again, it certainly cannot be denied that his preoccupation with rhyme occasionally goes far to extinguish the reason:

And after, for pastime,

If June be refulgent

With flowers in completeness,

All petals, no prickles,

Delicious as trickles

Of wine poured at mass-time,—

And choose One indulgent

To redness and sweetness:

Or if, with experience of man and of spider,

June use my June-lightning, the strong insect-ridder,

And stop the fresh film-work,—why, June will consider.

(Another Way of Love, [lines 23–33])

Obscurity through allusiveness is not so often met with. Browning may be said to have started the tendency toward immense curious erudition continued through Swinburne and Morris to Eliot, Joyce, Pound, the French post-Baudelaire school, and others—a sort of recrudescence of the spirits of Donne and Rabelais, to both of whom Browning was extensively indebted. With Browning allusions are caught up and swept forward so fast that they are often lost in transit, so to speak, if hardly to an extent which would justify a glossary similar to that of The Waste Land.51 Here belongs, too, the violence and flash of his figures, of which examples are well known. Thus, all his obscurity (the amount of it has been greatly exaggerated, and in any case Browning himself is crystalline compared to most of his commentators) results from the welding together of a musical style and a poetic mould. The irritation of Browning at requests of earnest devotees for “explanations” is easily understood. The unit of his thought was not the concept in the abstract—if it were, he would have written prose, and I sincerely hope it is obvious from what has preceded that his literary expression would have to be poetic.52 Oscar Wilde’s clever-clever epigram in this connection53 will not bear sustained investigation any longer than the rest of Wilde’s epigrams, or a soap bubble. In prose the idea, or subject, is microcosmic; it exists in itself and forces everything else into line with it. In poetry it is cosmic, the rhythmic beat of its formulation being its essence. So it obviously was to Browning, and prosaic minds who inquired, just as Philistines always do, with a nervous and excited eagerness, “Yes, but what does it mean?” thereby achieving an easy conquest of it, could hardly be regarded as spirits kindred to the poet.

But the motive force in music is not purely rhythmic. Modern music is motivated as well by a progression of discords perpetually moving toward a point of repose, or resolution in a final concord. This is what lies back of54 much of Browning’s cacophony. For legitimate discord does often become cacophonous in poetry, due to the resistant force of words. Not that Browning deliberately chooses sharp piercing words as Milton chooses resounding mellow ones, but he often produces that effect:

While, look but once from your farthest bound

At me so deep in the dust and dark,

No sooner the old hope goes to ground

Than a new one, straight to the self-same mark,

I shape me—

Ever

Removed! (Life in a Love, [lines 16–22])

A diction like this naturally conspires to aid rhythm and speed. This discordance (the above is not quoted as an example of ugliness but of sharp, incisive, staccato diction) extends itself to subject matter. If I were asked to name the two poems in English which were most clearly triumphs of rhythmic music, I should probably name the Jolly Beggars and the Heretic’s Tragedy, and it would be difficult to find grimmer or more repellent subjects.55 Much of the grotesquerie in Browning, the occasional touch of vigorous coarseness, which in a less squeamish age would have resembled more closely that of Chaucer, Rabelais, Shakespeare, or Swift, and much of his love for the strange and recondite, which gives him his modulations, can be traced back here,56 and, once arrived at this position, it will seem the less fantastic to recognize an element of suspended resolution into a full close in his defence of the ultimately indefensible— Bishop Blougram, Sludge, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau,57 and the rest. His fondness for the theme with variations, from his boyish plan of which Pauline was (and fortunately remains) a fragment to The Ring and the Book, is clearer.58 Paracelsus is developed in a kind of sonata form, and A Soul’s Tragedy reminds one rather of a sonatina. Chesterton, in his essay on Browning, complains of Pippa being suddenly thrust as a participant into one of the intrigues she should visit as an impersonal, even a disembodied, spirit.59 The criticism would hold good were it not that the impingement of Pippa upon the final scene constitutes the stretto of a fugue which—but we had better return to more solid ground.

It is a curious fact that while the main exotic influence on Coleridge was German, his poetry is remarkably Italian, what with his prepossession with broad, open vowels, his dexterous lulling of consonants to sleep, as it were, by alliteration, his Latin locutions and inversions. Conversely, while Browning’s inspiration is largely Italian, his diction is unmistakably Germanic. Germany and Italy seem to be complementary as far as England is concerned, the reason possibly being that the German genius is musical, the Italian pictorial. German is, as hinted above, a musically rhythmic language, Italian lazy and full of vowels—melodious. Italy’s most characteristic contribution to music is melody and song—the antirhythmic characteristics. The melody is the static quality in music, the element which gives it the caught-up, arrested quality of rhythm in painting. Italian poetry is picturesque, evolving the sonnet, the frame of a picture, and the terza rima, the web of a pageanted tapestry, which Browning used only twice, in the Statue and the Bust and Jochanan Hakkadosh.60 German art, on the other hand, is shown at its best in the hard-bitten and intensely musical etchings of Dürer. Hence, Browning’s style is forced into a hard guttural sweeping succession of consonants, just as Burns was forced back into the Scotch dialect, finding eighteenth-century English too ponderous a vehicle. The Germanic influence in English poetry makes for a straightforward, colloquial utterance, German syntax being very similar to ours in its abrupt force-fulness, which with us has to be toned down by the quieter Latin strain. This gives us the bite and grip of concrete nouns and transitive verbs, a rapid staccato speaking style, and the other characteristics of Browning which are too well known to need detailed discussion. The German tendency in writers whose style most reminds us of Browning, such as Carlyle and Meredith, is more evident.

The centre of gravity in the music which formed Browning’s background is the harpsichord, and that is to Browning what the organ is to Milton. There is no more shading to be gotten 61 out of him than out of that instrument—there is little beyond the piano of Andrea del Sarto and the forte of Caponsacchi. A rhythmic sense is not conducive to a careful choice of words—hence, there are few, if any, gradations of tone in Browning, apart, of course, from the natural gathering together of the dramatic subject matter. Milton knows that a vowel produces sound while a consonant merely modifies it, and can, consequently, get a thunderous crescendo by simply moving a few consonants out of the way:

Hitherto, lords, what your commands impos’d

I have perform’d, as reason was, obeying,

Not without wonder or delight beheld:

Now of my own accord such other trial

I mean to show you of my strength, yet greater;

As with amaze shall strike all who behold.62

But Browning is not an organist, nor has he the resources of orchestration we find in Shakespeare, who gives us everything from the husky insidious breathings of Caliban to the wild screaming wails of the ghost in Hamlet. Browning’s uniformity of tempo and close unity of thought are eighteenth-century characteristics in music—there are no sudden breaks or contrasts beyond a natural change from loud to soft (e.g., in The Bishop Orders His Tomb), no extremes of slowness, andante usually being about the limit both in Browning and the music we refer to, but there is an intense concentration and economy of structure in each. Nor should be overlooked the connection between the vigorous full closes in the music and the last lines of Browning’s poems, which usually contain a distinct quality of “resolution,” ranging from the lilting pathetic piquancy of “But then, how it was sweet!” in the poem called Confessions [line 36] to the magnificent coda of Guido’s death-speech.63

After The Ring and the Book Browning lapses into pure criticism, and the musical impulse largely subsides. The immense translations and narratives owe their vitality to a sort of mechanical propulsion. The force of the colloquial utterance persists, the metric and rhyming technique still holds, but the exuberance is gone, and the last half of his poetry, from this point of view, largely subsists on the momentum supplied from the first half. All through this later part of his work he is feeling his way toward conventionality, toward the oracular pronouncement, toward the subjectivity for which he so admired Shelley, toward a facility in narrative which does not appear in his prime, unless in a subordinate position, because it means that the poet has to draw on some other source of motive energy. There is no doubt a biographical significance in this, with which we are not concerned, but it is certain that while the volumes from Balaustion’s Adventure to the Asolando lyrics contain some of the finest gems of poetry, they are for the average educated man of today mainly uncut gems. This is a great mistake, of course, for many other qualities given by maturity help to atone for the loss of buoyancy, but that peculiar tang about Browning which makes him Browning is not found with the same pungency, and to deal with this part of his work is to deal with more abstract poetry. The more he strives toward the subjective viewpoint, in fact, the less important his personality becomes.

For music is itself intensely personal and creative, as any objective or abstract art, lifted bodily as it were from life, must needs be. It is not for nothing that the professional musician is the most conceited of men, and if Schubert was the “only modest musician on record,” it is surely because in him alone, due to lack of systematic training, is there marked evidence of the conflict of instrumental rhythm and song.64 Therefore, if one thinks musically, one had better write music, because the medium of words is inseparable from a garrulity and didacticism of idea which detracts from the dignity and profundity of the artist. Or, to put it in English, a poet who thinks like a rhythmic musician must talk very fast and must always be saying something. Music and metaphysics go hand in hand, and the two poets of this type in our language, Donne and Browning, are alike full of conceptual aridness. The egoist talks faster and more musically—that is, more rhythmically and energetically— than anyone else. Shaw, the individualist, writes prose which is precipitous compared to that of, say, Pater, the retiring scholar. Swinburne is swifter than Arnold, Anatole France than Sainte-Beuve or Renan, and so on. It is usually assumed that because Browning had a message and a definite body of teaching, he adopted a vigorous and staccato utterance to give it clear expression. Obviously it would be just as easy to say that because he was inherently a stylist of vigorous and staccato tendencies, he adopted a definite philosophical attitude to preach in terms of that style. And, obviously again, it would be much too easy to prove a causal connection either way, and it is apparent that assuming the priority of matter over manner, or vice versa, reflects only an individual preference. Victorian criticism, of course, which made even Shakespeare a super-Polonius, was strongly on the side of sententiousness—hence, the Browning Society.65 The contemporary attitude would probably be that a man who is a prophet or preacher very seldom writes anything, let alone cryptograms like Sordello or Numpholeptos for the exercising of an esoteric brain.66 If the most valuable thing in Browning were his “teachings” or, worse still, “message,” he would disappear from literature as completely as Savonarola has disappeared from theology.

Music is a creative art, which if the creation be excluded becomes the essay, and Browning did indubitably, in his style, confound the creativeness of a musical sense with its counterpart, treating music, in short, like an essayist. Similarly, if creation be extracted from the drama and criticism substituted, we have the novel, and it is even more obvious how he treated the drama like a novelist. Chesterton, with a flash of insight rare in a writer on Browning, has remarked that if Browning’s plays were not failures, at any rate they should have been, as he seems to have been born to dramatic failure.67 Music and the68 drama are ensemble performances (even if it is only an ensemble of ten fingers) for audiences; they belong to organic growth. The novel and the essay (note the necessity for the definite article!) are solo performances for an audience considered as of separate units; they are written by critics for critics. Browning’s music is not the music of the bard, to be heard and applauded; it must be studied and carefully thought out, and Browning’s plays are not for the stage, but for the study.

A curious likeness has been shown to exist between Browning and Brahms, and certainly Brahms remains supreme as the critical composer of the time; in him as in no one else is the music made essay. Wagner, the postromantic subjectivist, achieved a tremendous reputation by his attempt to show that music and the drama are, after all, the highest forms of art, and the greatest artist is he who synthesizes them. But he succeeded only in mixing them, and Brahms remains the leading interpreter of his time. With Brahms stands Browning as the dramatist made novelist, and The Ring and the Book is from this point of view his most significant work.

In Browning the dramatic emphasis is on variety. Every character he created is a thing in himself considered without essential relation to anyone else. This is why the natural form of dramatic expression for Browning is the monologue. The Ring and the Book has been spoken of above as a colossal theme with variations. Obviously it is a drama in its essence; it has nothing to do with epics, and its having a theme fore-shadows the difference between the postromantic and preromantic drama. The former is a diatribe balanced by the differing attitudes of the characters; in the latter the balance exists between the characters themselves. The true historical significance of the work now becomes a little clearer. It really sums up Browning’s career and everything he signifies; what came after was pure repetition; one reason, no doubt, for the slackening of vitality. A Shakespearean drama, or the Canterbury Tales,69 is shaped like this: , the dots representing characters; The Ring and the Book, or a Shaw play, is shaped thus: , the circle in the centre being the theme, which, of course, exists only in relation to its author. A little imagination soon shows that the circle is the symbol of objectivity, the radiating figure subjectivity. The Ring and the Book stands at the head of modern drama, and the evolutionary problem belongs to Darwin, How did these characters arrive at their present attitudes? not to Leibnitz, whose type of approach would be, How do these characters develop through time as organic units? Hence, the logical complete form of one is the sphere, held together dynamically, and of the other the ring, held statically. This is, therefore, the source of Browning’s symbolization. His “Ring” is Rome-work, modern, made to match “Etrurian circlets” [The Ring and the Book, 1:3].

Robert Browning was thoroughly a man of his time, and he never thought of the poet as anything else than that critical subjective observer, which he certainly was in that time. The essay on Shelley, Browning’s only important prose work, states quite definitely that this is the bard’s function.70 One of his chief admirations was for Landor, who, as no one else, made subjectivity dogmatic.71 The artist who sees life whole, in the catch phrase, the great dramatist, is, philosophically, a mystic turned inside out. When the nineteenth century came, the unity in life necessary for this attitude disappeared, and its various aspects fell apart into their several constituents. Hence, when the poets turned to life, they were thrown on their own resources, so to speak, and could give only a personal impression of the world. Here is the cause of the romantic escape from life. Wordsworth, for instance, never attained that instinct of comprehension which the great dramatists Chaucer and Shakespeare possess. He tells what he sees and what he thinks, but he does not show us the pulse of the world beating; he does not even feel the world of nature as an entity. Whitman, again, a pioneer in his own tradition in which aggressiveness, not to say vulgarity, is implicit, accepts his position gladly. In this he is considerably further away than his English contemporaries from the preromantic attitude. He may say that a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels [Song of Myself, st. 31, line 669], but take this earthquake and fire and set it beside the still small voice in the Auguries of Innocence, and it becomes evident that, while Blake is not necessarily a “greater” poet than Whitman, he arrives much more easily at this position. Even lesser men like Cowper and Gray, puny figures certainly compared to the American, can show by the delicate shading of a line or two a readier sense of coherence. Tennyson, gazing at the flower in the crannied wall and realizing that if he could see the symbolism implicit in it he could have that sense, has too much self-respect to try to persuade himself that he can.72 Now I am not claiming that every minor poet up to the romantic revival had something that no major poet beyond it possessed, but I do say that, taking the greatest names from each side, the earlier have an objective (or projective) sense of idealism which in the later is subjectified. This does not imply that there need be any deterioration in quality as between Blake, the mystic, say, and Whitman, the “answerer.”73 But a poet like Browning, who by his dramatic-musical nature was impelled to the same universal portraiture as Shakespeare, will find himself at a disadvantage if he is a contemporary of Tennyson.

This, then, is the source of the conflict in Browning’s soul. He did not reach the heights, first of Chaucer or Shakespeare, because his whole view and comprehension of poetry was focused on the subjectivists, like Shelley and Keats. Nor, secondly, did he reach the heights of the latter two, because his whole poetic instinct was that of the earlier. The humour of the man who gave us Falstaff does not reappear in English poetry until the time of the man who gave us Dominus Hyacinthus.74 No other poet since Shakespeare had so comprehensive a grasp of life; no other poet since Milton had such immense powers of technique and intellectual construction. He had it “in him” to rank with the greatest, but the necessity for expressing and giving voice to his own age baffled him. Hamlet exists; he is not a mask over Shakespeare, but strip the disguise from any portrait in Browning and the poet is there, the emperor descending into the arena.

It is probable that critical opinion of Browning will steadily rise. An age which does not need to react against Victorianism because they are not so unfortunate as to have been caught in its backwash is due to come up eventually. Self-conscious criticism, from which Browning has always suffered, must sometime disappear, when he will be subjected to a rigorous and dispassionate test, which there is no doubt of his ability to endure. The further time moves away from the Victorians, the greener and fresher they will appear, and new values and new pleasures are sure continually to develop. At the end, when English becomes a long-dead language, it is not difficult to imagine a professor in the remote future, who does not altogether understand the true genius of our tongue, saying: “This man was the greatest of all, for the qualities of the other great ones are combined and blended in him.”