Part 14 (1/2)
The coincidence is suggestive if we like to indulge in the fancy that in that constellation--
”No e or chance Of the unsteady planets----”
gleam those other ”abodes where the I fire has passed away froone? To that new star in Orion: or whirled to remote silences in the trail of lost , will its rays reach our storuered earth?
Such questions cannot ht, with that ardent flame, as we knew it here But this we know, it was indeed ”a central fire descending upon h touched with but a spark of the i testimony And what testimony! How heartfelt: happily also hoidespread, how electrically stimulative!
But the time must come when the poet's personality will have the re It is impossible for any student of literature, for any interested reader, not to indulge in some forecast as to what rank in the poetic hierarchy Robert Browning will ultinosticating the ultimate slow decadence, or slower rise, or, it may be, sustained suspension, of a poet's faht of presuo speculation, based upon coe, for an idle contentment with narrow horizons, were perhaps foolisher still But assuredly each must perforce be content with his own prevision None can answer yet for the generality, whose decisive franchise will elect a fit arbiter in due time
So, for myself, let me summarise what I have already written in several sections of this book, and particularly in the closing pages of Chapter VI There, it will be rehest achievement is in his second period--emphasis was laid on the pri compelled us to the assu the construction of a new definition In the light of this new definition I think Browning will ultied As the sculptor in ”Pippa Passes” was the predestinated novel thinker inhimself appears as the predestinated novel thinker in verse; the novel thinker, however, in degree, not in kind But I do not for a reatness is in his status as a thinker: even less, that the poet and the thinker are indissociable Many years ago Sainte-Beuve destroyed this shallow artifice of pseudo-criticism: ”Venir nous dire que tout poete de talent est, par essence, un grand _penseur_, et que tout vrai _penseur_ est necessairement artiste et poete, c'est une pretention insoutenable et que de's enormous influence upon the spiritual anditself to wise and beautiful issues--shall have lost much of its immediate import, there will still surely be discerned in his work a forain It is as the poet he will live: not ically, his attitude as 'thinker' is unimpressive It is the attitude, as I think some one has pointed out, of acquiescence with codified morality In one of his _Causeries_, the keen French critic quoted above has a reular aptness be repeated of Browning:--”His is the Hebrew genius extended, fecundated by Christianity, and open to all the acquisitions of the understanding, but retaining so its vast horizon precisely where its light ceases” Browning cannot, or will not, face the problem of the future except from the basis of assured continuity of individual existence He is so much in love with life, for life's sake, that he cannot even credit the possibility of incontinuity; his assurance of eternity in another world is at least in part due to his despair at not being eternal in this He is so sure, that the intellectually scrupulous detect the odours of hypotheses amid the sweet savour of indestructible assurance Schopenhauer says, in one of those recently-found Annotations of his which are so characteristic and so acute, ”that which is called 'mathe, or equilibriu would sometimes have us accept the evidence of his 'cane' as all-sufficient He does not entrench hi conventions: for he already finds himself within the fortified lines of convention, and remains there Thus is true what Mr Mortiard to the thought of the age is paradoxical, if not inconsistent He is in advance of it in every respect but one, the most important of all, the matter of fundamental principles; in these he is behind it His processes of thought are often scientific in their precision of analysis; the sudden conclusion which he i's conclusions, which hars, are sometimes so disastrously facile that they exercise an insurrectionary influence They occasionally suggest that wisdom of Gotham which is ever ready to postulate the certainty of a fulfilment because of the existence of a desire It is this that vitiates so nant in the lines of Abt Vogler--
”And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence For the fulness of the days?”--
but, unfortunately, the conclusion is, in itself, illogical
We are all familiar with, and in this book I have dwelt 's habitual attitude towards Death It is not a novel one
The frontage is not sopioneer, as the sedate assurance of 'the oldest inhabitant' It is of good hap, of welconificance: none the less there is an aspect of ourand absolute I cannot do better than quote Mr Mortimer's noteworthy words hereupon, in connection, 's artistic relation to sex, that other great Protagonist in the relentless duel of Humanity with Circumstance ”The final inductive hazard he declines for himself; his readers may take it if they will It is part of the insistent and perverse ingenuity which we display inelements of life Veil after veil is torn down, but seldom before another has been slipped behind it, until we acquiesce without a murmur in the concealment that we ourselves have made Two facts thus carefully shrouded from full vision by elaborate illusion conspicuously round in our lives--the life-giving and life-destroying elements, sex and Death
We are coic and econo the full extent to which it bases the whole social fabric carefully concealing its insurrections, and ignoring ortheir lessons The other, in certain aspects, we are compelled to face, but to do it we tipple on illusions, fro a drug for our poltroonery at the expense of our sanity We uphold our ard steps with the promises and the coe the shadow Death and the bacchanal sex, and we e ourselves for leering at the other On one only of these can Browning be said to have spoken with novel force--the relations of sex, which he has treated with a subtlety and freedom, and often with a beauty, unapproached since Goethe On the probles, his eupeptic temperament never allowed hiht” Browning's whole attitude to the Hereafter is different from that of Tennyson only in that the latter 'faintly,' while he strenuously, ”trusts the larger hope” To hi upon the frontiers of the Past, he can ih-hearted surely he; But bolder they who first off-cast Their s frootten, the prophet reat poet's utterance is never teonise, what extent of genius! As Mr Frederick Wed is not a book--he is a literature'
But that he will ”stand out gigantic” in _mass_ of imperishable work, in that far-off day, I for one cannot credit His poetic shortcos seem too essential to perht, of thought that, however profound, incisive, or scrupulously clear, is not yet impassioned, is a fundamental defect of his It is the very iy to which is due the 's work--miscalled, because, however remote in his allusions, however pedantic even, he is never obscure in his thought His is that ”palace infinite which darkens with excess of light” Buthas suffered more from intellectual exploitation than any writer It is a ruinous process--for the poet ”He so well repays intelligent study” That is it, unfortunately There are many, like the old Scotch lady who attempted to read Carlyle's _French Revolution_, who think they have becoe such as, for example,
”Rivals, who
Tuned, from Bocafoli's stark-naked psal with, 'As knops that stud soum, wry thence, and crinkled worse 'Than pursed eyelids of a river-horse 'Sunning himself o' the slime hirrs the breeze-- _Gad-fly,_ that is”
The old lady persevered with Carlyle, and, after a few days, found ”she was nae sae daft, but that she had tackled a varra dee-fee-cult author”
What would even that indomitable student have said to the above quotation, and to the poem whence it comes? To many it is not the poetry, but the difficulties, that are the attraction They rejoice, after long and frequent dippings, to find their pluh '' has been educed from 'Childe Roland,' to cite but one instance, to start a School of Philosophy with: though it so happens that the poeinative fantasy, written in one day Worse still, it was not inspired by theeye standing behind a dun one on a piece of tapestry that used to hang in the poet's drawing-roolery, that inferior legerdemain, with the elements of the beautiful in verse:and the Book,” and in so many of the later poems These inexcusable violations are like the larvae within certain vegetable growths: soon or late they will destroy their environh possessive above all others of that science of the percipient in the allied arts of painting and music, wherein he found the unconventional Shelley so missuaded by convention, he seemed ever more alert to the substance than to the 's she alludes to a friend's ”” for poetry Possibly the phrase was accidental, but it is significant To inhale the vital air of poetry we estive,”
”soothing,” ”sti”
for poetry before we can deeply enjoy it Browning, who has so often educed froh novel, beauty, was too frequently, during co of which his wife speaks The distinction between literary types such as Browning or Balzac on the one hand, and Keats or Gustave Flaubert on the other, is that with the former there exists a reverence for the vocation and a relative indifference to the means, in themselves--and, with the latter, a scrupulous respect for the mere means as well as for that to which they conduce The poet who does not love words for themselves, as an artist loves any chance colour upon his palette, or as the rant tone evoked by a sudden touch in idleness or reverie, has not entered into the full inheritance of the sons of Apollo The writer cannot aim at beauty, that which makes literature and art, without this heed--without, rather, this creative anxiety: for it is certainly not enough, as soe should be used ence, as a wheelbarrow carries brick Of course, Browning is not persistently neglectful of this fundamental necessity for the literary artist He is often as masterly in this as in other respects But he is not always, not often enough, alive to the para as the mood it paints:” but, unfortunately, the mood is often poetically unformative He had no passion for the quest for seductive forms Too much of his poetry has been born prematurely Too ain--for all immortal verse is a poetic resurrection Perfect poetry is the deathless part of ross actualities, though they are the supreme realists It is Schiller, I think, who says in effect, that to live again in the serene beauty of art, it is needful that things should first die in reality Thus Browning's dramatic method, even, is sometimes disastrous in its untruth, as in Caliban's analytical reasoning--an initial absurdity, as Mr Berdoe has pointed out, adding epigrae, with the introspective powers of a Haelical Church's personages (Aprile, Eglamour, etc) are what Goethe calls _schwankende Gestalten_, es”
[Footnote 28: One account says 'Childe Roland' ritten in three days; another, that it was co's rapidity in composition was extraordinary ”The Return of the Druses” ritten in five days, an act a day; so, also, was the ”Blot on the 'Scutcheon”]
Montaigne, in one of his essays, says that to stop gracefully is sure proof of high race in a horse: certainly to stop in ti enius was too impetuous for the minuter technicalities of that elaborate _art_ so needful in the building up of reater than Poe declared that ”what distinguishes the artist frohest sense; that power of execution which creates, forhts, not the richness of iery, not the abundance of illustration” assuredly, no ”new definition” can be an effective one which conflicts with Goethe's incontrovertible dictu been adainst the uncritical outcry against Browning's musical incapacity
A deficiency is not incapacity, otherwise Coleridge, at his highest the most perfect of our poets, would be lowly estimated