# Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.")/Notes on the Genius of Robert Browning

NOTES ON THE GENIUS OF ROBERT BROWNING
I. Browning's Variety and Knowledge. Perhaps a reader looking for the first time through Browning's volumes would be first struck by the remarkable number and variety of his works, though these now cover a period of fifty years. On a somewhat closer acquaintance, this reader would surely be impressed with an ever-increasing astonishment at the prodigious amount and variety of knowledge brought to bear upon so vast a range of subjects. I mean not only, nor even mainly, knowledge of literature and art, but also what I may term knowledge of things in general. Marvellous as his acquirements in the former kinds must appear to one who, like myself, is neither scholar nor connoisseur, I am yet more overwhelmed by the immensity of his acquisitions in this other kind, by what Mr. Swinburne has happily summed up as "the inexhaustible stores of his ​perception," Not all of us have the opportunity of mastering the contents of libraries and museums and art-galleries; but all of us have the opportunity of mastering the common facts of nature and human life; yet it is precisely in these departments of knowledge that Browning's pre-eminence appears to me most decided. With the great majority of us the senses are dull, the perceptions slow and vague and confused; Browning drinks in the living world at every pore. There exist, in fact, some men so rarely endowed that their minds are as revolving mirrors, which, without effort, reflect clearly everything that passes before them and around them in the world of life, and without effort retain all the images constantly ready for use; while we ordinary men can only with fixed purpose and long endeavour catch and keep some very small fragments of the whole. Chaucer, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Goethe, Scott, Balzac, are familiar examples of this quietly rapacious, indefinitely capacious acquisitiveness, men of whom we can say, "They have learned everything and forgotten nothing;" and the star of Browning is of the first magnitude in this constellation.
2. Charge of Obscurity.—But we have heard of great scholars who could only communicate a plentiful lack of ideas in many languages, of very learned men who were simply Dryasdusts, of people with keen perceptiveness and tenacious memories, whose minds or nominds were of the Dame Quickly order; though I do not remember any combination of both the scholar and the keen retentive observer with the dullard. The heaped-up knowledge is as heaped-up fuel: the questions occur. Is the fire intense enough to kindle ​the whole mass through and through into clear glow of light and heat? or but strong enough to smoulder smokily under it? or so relatively weak as to be crushed out by it? Here the admirers of Browning directly join issue with the common critics, and the public led or misled by them, who assert that his fire is of the second or smoky species. As he himself puts it with humorous contempt in the Pacchiarotto (1876):—
I shall not attempt to argue this issue here, as Mr. Swinburne, in his excellent Critical Essay on George Chapman, has discussed it with admirable power and eloquence, and to my mind conclusively, in general vindication of the great poet against the small critics "as sweeps out his chimbly." I will venture to add but one remark of my own on this matter. Many years since, in 1864 or '65, I wrote: "Robert Browning, a true and splendid genius, though his vigorous and restless talents often overpower and run away with his genius, so that some of his creations are left but half-retrieved from chaos." This now seems to me put much too strongly, save perhaps in reference to "Sordello" and a very few of the minor poems but I ​still think that it points to a real fault in his art—a fault, however, be it observed, of overplus, not of insufficiency. Such overpowering talents are almost as rare as the sometimes overpowered genius. Landor, writing, it is true, about twenty years earlier, said similarly of Browning: "I only wish he would atticise a little. Few of the Athenians had such a quarry on their property, but they constructed better roads for the conveyance of the material." And such comments but mark what Coleridge has noted in a certain stage of the development of Shakespeare: "The intellectual power and the creative energy wrestle as in a war-embrace." And the wrestling is mighty when both the athletes are Titanic.
Admitting that "Sordello" is very hard, if not obscure, I would observe that the difficulty is not so much in the mere language, as in the abrupt transitions, the rapid discursions, and the continual recondite allusions to matters with which very few readers can be familiar. The yet young fire, struggling with its enormous mass of gnarled and intertangled fuel, burns murkily with fitful sheets of splendid flame, and the mass of metal is not thoroughly fused for the mould; the result differing herein decisively from the magnificent Sordello of the Purgatorio (vi.), defined, solid, massive, as if cast colossal in bronze, the most superb figure, I think, in all Dante; him who leaps from his haughty impassibility to embrace Virgil at the one word "Mantuan," kindling the Florentine to the fulgurant invective, Ahi serva Italia; the Sordello of that noble passage, not to be rendered into English:—
Yet no good judge who watched how strenuously this still youthful genius was wrestling with the difficult and almost indomitable subject-matter of "Sordello" could help foreseeing its triumphant mastery over whatever it might undertake when its slow strong growth should be fully mature. To my mind this thorough maturity was reached in the two volumes of "Men and Women," published in 1855. There had been previous poems mature as well as great; but in this collection, distributed under various headings in the six-volume edition of 1868, I found, and find, all the leading pieces mature; the fire burns intensely clear, completely consuming its own smoke. ​To name a score of the fifty: "Karshish" and "Cleon," "Andrea del Sarto" and "Fra Lippo Lippi," "A Toccata of Galuppi's," "Bishop Blougram," "In a Balcony," "Childe Roland," "Two in the Campagna," "A Serenade at the Villa," "Memorabilia," "Respectability," "Instans Tyrannus," "Holy Cross Day," "The Statue and the Bust," "Evelyn Hope," "The Guardian Angel," "By the Fireside" (whose Greek promise has already been so amply fulfilled), "Any Wife to any Husband," "One Word More," and, higher than the rest, as its hero was higher than any of the people from the shoulders and upward, the complete "Saul;" these are not only noble in conception and aspiration, they are each in its befitting style consummate in achievement; not one of them unworthy of a great country's greatest living poet. Of the wonderful works that have followed I need not say anything here, not even of that stupendous masterpiece, "The Ring and the Book," concerning which I have recently had the opportunity of saying something elsewhere.
3. Charge of Harshness.—Allied to the common charge of obscurity is that of harshness, variously attributed to negligence, wilfulness, lack of inborn melody and harmony; or, as I have been somewhat surprised to hear pretty often, deliberate affectation, this last evil propensity being made responsible for the obscurity also. As to the negligence and wilfulness, Browning has himself told us that he has always done his best; and I, for one, would take his word, even did I not find it—as I do find it—manifestly confirmed by the sincerity, the earnestness, the ​thoroughness of all his work. As to the lack of innate melody and harmony, how can such a charge be maintained in the face of the poems just cited, not to mention others later and still greater? But let us distinguish. His strong, intensely original, and many-sided individuality has, among finer savours, a keen relish for the odd, the peculiar, the quaint, the grotesque; and when these offer themselves in the subject-matter, his guiding genius is apt to throw the reins on the necks of the vigorous talents and eager perceptions, which run risky riot in language as quaint and grotesque as the theme. Students will recall Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis, "Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha," "Old Pictures at Florence," the Lawyers in "The Ring and the Book." Let us admit further that, perhaps too often and inopportunely, a perplexing patter or harsh jingle has irresistible seduction for him. Thus, such lines as—
cruelly remind one of "Peter Piper picked a peck of pepper;" and the second, third, and fourth stanzas in "Mesmerism," clever and true as they are in themselves, appear to me not only incongruous with the main theme, but absolutely untrue in relation to the speaker, who, with his whole mind absorbed in his self-set task, would not have noticed the petty distractions they describe. For other instances I need but mention "Waring," "Christmas Eve," and the "Flight of the Duchess;" in which last splendidly original and vigorous poem, by the way, while much of the audacious grotesque of the diction is consonant ​with the rough forester who tells the story, much is quite incompatible with him.
In many of these cases it may be fairly contended on behalf of the poet, that he but asserts and vindicates his own artistic sovereignty over the subject by holding it aloof and beneath him, by now and then good-naturedly laughing at it, as Richter, I think, says one must be able to laugh at or sport with one's faith in order to really possess it.
But whatever may be the ultimate judgment on this matter, it may be fearlessly affirmed that whenever the subject is so great and solemn as to possess the poet, instead of him possessing it, be its supremacy of terror or pathos, beauty or awe, he ever rises in expression as in conception with his theme; and he has a most noble natural affinity with noble themes. Then not the mere talents or the piercing perceptions are in the ascendant, but the Divine genius holds imperial sway; then pure imagination, or imaginative reason, or imaginative passion, incarnates itself in its own proper language of majestic rhythm, tenderest melody, orchestral harmony—orchestral because comprehensive and manifold with the complex simplicity and integrity of a high organism. For the rest, we do not in the grandeur of fortress or cathedral look for the minute finish and polish of carvings in gems or ivory.
Affectation means Naturalness.—Lastly, as to the affectation, I have come to learn that it usually means, when objected, even by persons of superior intelligence, against any great artist of whatever kind, the direct contrary of what it is commonly supposed to mean. It means that he is supremely and exquisitely unaffected, being scrupulously true to his own individu​ality. It means that he wears the garb befitting his peculiar stature and complexion, and does not affect the passing fashions which uniform the undistinguished multitudes. If he is a writer or orator, it means that he stamps with vigorous clearness his own image and superscription on his word-mintage; affirming thus his true sovereign prerogative, instead of issuing the common currency with the common image and superscription half-effaced by multitudinous usage, not to speak of debasement by sweating and clipping—the demonetised, vulgarised vocabulary of the newspapers. .
Browning himself expresses just as much esteem for the public that accuses him of harshness as for the critics who accuse him of obscurity. In the Epilogue to the Pacchiarotto volume (1876), written in the same spirit as a certain famous high-minded Ode to Himself by Ben Jonson, he bursts out with jolly scorn:—
Yet he could write in the Preface to the "Selections," dated May, 1872: "Nor do I apprehend any more charges of being wilfully obscure, unconscientiously careless, or perversely harsh."
​4. Activity and Rapidity.—Let us now consider some of the dominant characteristics of this wonderful genius, as manifested in its slowly developed, long-enduring maturity.
First, one cannot help remarking the restless activity and almost unique rapidity of his intellect. Swift and keen as are his perceptions, his thoughts are swifter and keener yet. We ordinary readers are soon breathless in trying to keep up with them, and must be content to travel with relays, by easy stages, the journeys he makes at a single rush. As Mr. Swinburne excellently puts it, "He never thinks but at full speed; and the rate of his thought is to that of another man's as the speed of a railway to that of a waggon, or the speed of a telegraph to that of a railway." As I have had occasion to remark elsewhere, these analogies are peculiarly felicitous, inasmuch as the railway train not only runs ten times faster than the waggon, but also carries more than ten times the weight; the telegraph is not only incomparably swifter than the railway, but also incomparably more subtle and pregnant with intellect and emotion. The restless activity and rapidity and subtlety of intellect which confound the "general reader" (who has been termed the laziest and haziest of human animals), accustomed to the too-easy sauntering through popular novels and periodicals, are apt at first to perplex even the student, as perturbing the exquisite calm of the simply idyllic conceptions with which he has been familiarised by less intellectual poets. As our French neighbours say, "one must have the defect of one's qualities;" and in Browning these mental ​qualities or faculties are so pre-eminently rare and valuable, so delightful and informing and suggestive, that an intelligent and athletic student soon willingly surrenders the serenest tranquillity in order to pursue their subtle and multiplex workings, finding this pursuit an intellectual gymnastic of the most exhilarating as well as bracing character. But it must be always remembered that when Browning sets himself to a task of pure and lofty imaginativeness—as in the "Saul," the "Serenade at the Villa," the "Childe Roland," "Any Wife to Any Husband," "One Word More," or on a larger scale in the prevision of the tragedy of "The Ring and the Book," or the Caponsacchi, Pompilia, and Pope sections—his imagination, kindling in the measure of the greatness of its theme, and so (as I have said) kindling and glorifying his style, is as intense, solemn, steadfast, irresistibly dominant, I will dare to assert, as the noblest in all our noble literature.
Heine says in one of his rough jottings, "Shakespeare's big toe contained more poetry than all the Greek poets, with the exception of Aristophanes. The Greeks were great Artists, not Poets; they had more artistic sense than poetry." The same may be fairly said of many modern distinguished writers of verse, if poetry be regarded as the reflection at once intelligent and beautiful of the whole world of nature and human nature; or, lyrically, of the singer's whole inner nature in relation to the outer world, and not merely of certain choice "bits" or dreamy moods. Now, this comprehensiveness, this sleepless intimate interest in the whole world of life around him, both the interior and exterior life, in all their kinds and ​degrees, which we find supreme in Shakespeare, is to my apprehension equally supreme in Browning; and it embraces the past no less than the present, and, what is even more rare in one so learned, the present no less than the past. For the present, he himself specially notes it in "How it strikes a Contemporary;" and Landor long since noted it in the keen-eyed genial observer:—
For the past, Browning early avowed it in the personal digression in "Sordello":—
And as to the interior life, we have also his own avowal in the letter of dedication prefixed to "Sordello," twenty-five years after the poem was written:—
"The historical decoration was purposely of no more importance than a background requires; and my stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul; little else is worth study."
But we need neither the testimony of others nor his own avowals on these points, so conspicuously illustrated throughout his books. For the past, besides the greatest, from Paracelsus through "The Ring and the Book" to "Aristophanes' Apology," we ​have in addition to poems already mentioned such pieces as "The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's" (in which Ruskin finds embodied the very spirit of the Renascence;—I would modify, of one phase, and that the least noble, of it), "The Grammarian's Funeral" (embodying another and far nobler phase), "Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha," "Pictor Ignotus," "Old Pictures at Florence," "The Heretic's Tragedy"—which, as the cheerful case of burning the Grand Master of the Templars alive, an astonishing Edinburgh reviewer complained was not rendered in a pleasing manner! For the present, we have such pieces as "The Lost Leader," "The Italian in England" and "The Englishman in Italy," the noble "Home Thoughts from the Sea," "Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr," the unique "Waring," "Mesmerism," "Bishop Blougram," "Caliban on Setebos," "Sludge the Medium," in addition to such longer works as "Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day," "Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau," "Red-Cotton Nightcap-Country," "The Inn Album." And throughout all we have ever the dominant theme of the development or revelation of human souls; naturally most wonderful, and to myself simply overwhelming, in his immense masterpiece, "The Ring and the Book." In his power of transcendent analysis interfused with the power of synthetic exposition, so that we have no dissection of corpses, but an intellectual and moral vivisection, whose subjects grow the more living in their reality the more keenly the scalpel cuts into them, the more thoroughly they are anatomised, I know not of any contemporaries who can be compared with him save Balzac, Victor Hugo, ​Gustave Flaubert (in "Madame Bovary"), George Meredith (as in "Emilia in England," and "The Egoist"). Carlyle, in his "French Revolution," delights in sneering at "Victorious Analysis;" here is Victorious Analysis in a very real sense commanding the extreme opposite of sneers.
5. Manliness.—Further, Browning's passion is as intense, noble, and manly as his intellect is profound and subtle and therefore original. I would especially insist on its manliness, because our present literature abounds in so-called passion, which is but half-sincere or wholly insincere sentimentalism, if it be not thinly disguised prurient lust, and in so-called pathos, which is maudlin to nauseousness. The great unappreciated poet last cited has defined passion as noble strength on fire; and this is the true passion of great natures and great poets; while sentimentalism is ignoble weakness dallying with fire; and mere lust, even in novels written by "ladies" for Society with the capital S, is mere brutishness. Browning's passion is of utter self-sacrifice, self-annihilation, self-vindicated by its irresistible intensity. So we read it in "Time's Revenges," so in the scornful condemnation of the weak lovers in "The Statue and the Bust," so in "In a Balcony," and "Two in the Campagna," with its—
Is the love rejected, unreturned? No weak and mean upbraidings of the beloved, no futile complaints; a solemn resignation to immitigable Fate; intense gratitude for inspiring love to the unloving beloved. ​So in "A Serenade at the Villa;"so in "One Way of Love," with its—
So in "The Last Ride Together," with its—
With a masculine soul for passion, a masculine intellect for thought, and a masculine genius for imagination, all on a vast scale, and all fused together in one intense fire when the theme is great and imperious, we have the highest results of which poetry is capable; and such results I recognise in the noblest poems and passages of Browning as authentic and impressive as in the noblest in our literature; supreme by magnificence of scope in his supreme work, "The Ring and the Book," but stamped with the same sterling mint-mark in many of the shorter pieces in addition to those already cited, and expressed in his own person in that surpassing "One Word More," to E. B. B. alive. which summed up the "Men and ​Women," and the fervent invocations to E. B. B. dead, which open and close "The Ring and the Book." Never surely nobler love through life and death than that which inspired these in the man, and the "Sonnets from the Portuguese" in the woman.
6. Vitality.—Browning's immense range and depth of sympathy or geniality, which has been rightly con- sidered as of the essence of great genius, is naturally united if not identical with an intense and exuberant vitality, that "manly relish of life" which Lamb so well notes in Fielding; and this is all the more remarkable in these days, when so much of our poetic literature, whether in verse or prose, is, like Hamlet, "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought," or altogether divorced and alien from the real living world. It does not come home to men's business and bosoms, so its cultivators and students are but a very small class apart, and, it must be admitted, not generally of robust natures. For myself, I have frequently been constrained to reflect, How small and weak are the singing birds! Browning, on the contrary, is one of the most robust of natures; nothing alive, or that has lived, is indifferent to him; there is no problem of life or death with which he fears to grapple; he has vital affinities with all things; and his genius appears but to grow in geniality, in hearty and manly relish of life, as he grows in age. He has, indeed, accumulated such inexhaustible stores of knowledge and thought that he seems of late years more and more hurrying to disburthen himself ere the inevitable end shall arrive. For his indestructible vital interest in the living world and hearty relish of life, take "At the Mermaid," in the Pacchiarotto ​volume of 1876 (a volume I refer to specially because in it he speaks more in his own person than he permitted himself to do in any preceding book):—
And more recently still, in "The Two Poets of Croisic," 1878:—
A test fatal to the supremacy of not a few of the very greatest, as Jesus, Dante, Shakespeare, Pascal, Burns, Shelley, Keats, Leopardi, but which certainly reveals the nature of the poet who chooses it.
​7. Christianity—Finally, I must not fail to note, as one of the most remarkable characteristics of his genius, his profound, passionate, living, triumphant faith in Christ, and in the immortality and ultimate redemption of every human soul in and through Christ. For the last point I need but cite "Apparent Failure," where, referring to the three suicides whose corpses he once gazed upon in the Paris Morgue, he declares:—
"I thought, and think, their sin's atoned;"
and concludes:—
Thoroughly familiar with all modern doubts and disbeliefs, he tramples them all under foot, clinging to the Cross; and this with the full co-operation of his fearless reason, not in spite of it and by its absolute surrender or suppression. A most interesting and valuable essay might be written by an impartial and competent student on the problem, How can Browning be a Christian? but this is scarcely the place for such a discussion. I am not here to argue matters of religion; I am simply taking account of an indubitable and in the highest degree noteworthy fact. It may be objected that if the processes by which he attains and justifies his belief are essential to the belief, there can be but very few real Christian ​believers, since scarcely one man in ten thousand could master these processes, much less originate them; but the objection would equally apply in the case of any profound and subtle thinker and his doctrines in any department of thought. For us ordinary men the cardinal fact is, that such and such a theory or doctrine was found probable, tenable, reasonable, or irresistible, by such and such a profound and subtle and dauntless and sincere thinker. The wise and the simple, nay, the various wise and the various simple, never tread the same path to the same goal; but for common purposes we must class together all those who do reach the same goal; and each goal, be it Christianity, or Copernicanism, or Comtism, is entitled to respect in proportion to the aggregate worth (not number) of those who have reached and rested in it.
In Browning we find reverence and audacity co-equal and co-efficient; and doubtless many timid Christians have been shocked by his free handling of their religion in the "Christmas Eve" and the "Easter-Day;" but candid Non-Christians (among whom I am fain to be classed) cannot but recognise and esteem the fearless and fervent Christianity of those poems, cannot but thoroughly admit the great poet's burning sincerity when he cries at the close of the former: —
There is indeed one remarkable passage in one of his latest works, "La Saisiaz" (1878), wherein he plunges into the unfathomable abyss of the Everlasting No; but from this he retrieves himself with triumphant emphasis in the Everlasting Yes. For the rest, the devout and hopeful Christian faith, explicitly or implicitly affirmed in such poems as "Saul," "Karshish," "Cleon," "Caliban upon Setebos," "A Death in the Desert," "Instans Tyrannus," "Rabbi Ben Ezra," "Prospice," the "Epilogue," and throughout that stupendous monumental work, "The Ring and the Book," must surely be clear as noonday to even the most purblind vision.
To summarise: I look up to Browning as one of the very few men known to me by their works who, with most cordial energy and invincible resolution, have lived thoroughly throughout the whole of their being, to the uttermost verge of all their capacities, in his case truly colossal; lived and wrought thoroughly in sense and soul and intellect; lived at home in all realms of nature and human nature, art and literature: whereas nearly all of us are really alive in but a small portion of our so much smaller beings, and drag wearily toward the grave our for the most part dead selves, dead from the suicidal poison of misuse and atrophy of disuse. Confident and rejoicing in the storm and stress of the struggle, he has conquered ​life instead of being conquered by it; a victory so rare as to be almost unique, especially among poets in these latter days. When the end comes, which must come, he can well say with his friend Landor, that "indomitable old Roman":—
And further, in the consummation of the faith of a lifetime, sing to the world:—
And to his Belovèd gone before:—
* ↑ Read at the Third Meeting of the Browning Society, on Friday, January 27, 1882.
* ↑ Mr. J. T. Nettleship gives a very careful analysis of it in his volume.
* ↑ Gentleman's Magazine, December 1881.
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