An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry. Robert Browning

      The importance of Robert Browning’s poetry, as embodying the profoundest thought, the subtlest and most complex sentiment, and, above all, the most quickening spirituality of the age, has, as yet, notwithstanding the great increase within the last few years of devoted students, received but a niggardly recognition when compared with that received by far inferior contemporary poets. There are, however, many indications in the poetical criticism of the day that upon it will ere long be pronounced the verdict which is its due. And the founding of a society in England in 1881, “to gather together some at least of the many admirers of Robert Browning, for the study and discussion of his works, and the publication of papers on them, and extracts from works illustrating them” has already contributed much towards paying a long-standing debt.

      Mr. Browning’s earliest poems, ‘Pauline’ (he calls it in the preface to the reprint of it in 1868 “a boyish work”, though it exhibits the great basal thought of all his subsequent poetry), was published in 1833, since which time he has produced the largest body of poetry produced by any one poet in English literature; and the range of thought and passion which it exhibits is greater than that of any other poet, without a single exception, since the days of Shakespeare. And he is the most like Shakespeare in his deep interest in human nature in all its varieties of good and evil. Though endowed with a powerful, subtle, and restless intellect, he has throughout his voluminous poetry made the strongest protest that has been made in these days against mere intellect. And his poetry has, therefore, a peculiar value in an age like the present—an age exhibiting “a condition of humanity which has thrown itself wholly on its intellect and its genius in physics, and has done marvels in material science and invention, but at the expense of the interior divinity.” It is the human heart, that is, the intuitive, the non-discursive side of man, with its hopes and its prophetic aspirations, as opposed to the analytic, the discursive understanding, which is to him a subject of the deepest and most scrutinizing interest. He knows that its deepest depths are “deeper than did ever plummet sound”; but he also knows that it is in these depths that life’s greatest secrets must be sought. The philosophies excogitated by the insulated intellect help nothing toward even a glimpse of these secrets. In one of his later poems, that entitled ‘House’, he has intimated, and forcibly intimated, his sense of the impossibility of penetrating to the Holy of Holies of this wondrous human heart, though assured as he is that all our hopes in regard to the soul’s destiny are warmed and cherished by what radiates thence. He quotes, in the last stanza of this poem, from Wordsworth’s sonnet on the Sonnet, “With this same key Shakespeare unlocked his heart,” and then adds, “DID Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!”

      Mrs. Browning, in the Fifth Book of her ‘Aurora Leigh’, has given a full and very forcible expression to the feeling which has caused the highest dramatic genius of the present day to seek refuge in the poem and the novel. “I will write no plays; because the drama, less sublime in this, makes lower appeals, defends more menially, adopts the standard of the public taste to chalk its height on, wears a dog-chain round its regal neck, and learns to carry and fetch the fashions of the day, to please the day; …’Tis that, honoring to its worth the drama, I would fear to keep it down to the level of the footlights. … The growing drama has outgrown such toys of simulated stature, face, and speech, it also, peradventure, may outgrow the simulation of the painted scene, boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume; and TAKE FOR A WORTHIER STAGE, THE SOUL ITSELF, ITS SHIFTING FANCIES AND CELESTIAL LIGHTS, WITH ALL ITS GRAND ORCHESTRAL SILENCES TO KEEP THE PAUSES OF THE RHYTHMIC SOUNDS.”

      Robert Browning’s poetry is, in these days, the fullest realization of what is expressed in the concluding lines of this passage: he has taken for a worthier stage, the soul itself, its shifting fancies and celestial lights, more than any other poet of the age. And he has worked with a thought-and-passion capital greater than the combined thought-and-passion capital of the richest of his poetical contemporaries. And he has thought nobly of the soul, and has treated it as, in its essence, above the fixed and law-bound system of things which we call nature; in other words, he has treated it as supernatural. “Mind,” he makes the Pope say, in ‘The Ring and the Book’—and his poetry bears testimony to its being his own conviction and doctrine—“Mind is not matter, nor from matter, but above.” With every student of Browning, the recognition and acceptance of this must be his starting-point. Even that which impelled the old dog, in his poem entitled ‘Tray’ (‘Dramatic Lyrics’, First Series), to rescue the beggar child that fell into the river, and then to dive after the child’s doll, and bring it up, after a long stay under water, the poet evidently distinguishes from matter—regards as “not matter nor from matter, but above”:—

      “And so, amid the laughter gay,

       Trotted my hero off—old Tray—

       Till somebody, prerogatived

       With reason, reasoned: ‘Why he dived,

       His brain would show us, I should say.

       ‘John, go and catch—or, if needs be,

       Purchase that animal for me!

       By vivisection, at expense

       Of half-an-hour and eighteen pence,

       How brain secretes dog’s soul, we’ll see!”