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

      What is said in this passage is applicable to the record we have of Christ’s life upon earth. Christianity has only to a very limited extent been perpetuated through the letter of the New Testament. It has been perpetuated chiefly through transmissions of personalities, through apostolic succession, in a general sense, and through embodiments of his spirit in art and literature—“the stateman’s great word”, “the poet’s sweet comment”. Were it not for this transmission of the quickening power of personality, the New Testament would be to a great extent a dead letter. It owes its significance to the quickened spirit which is brought to the reading of it. The personality of Christ could not be, through a plastic sympathy, moulded out of the New Testament records, without the aid of intermediate personalities.

      The Messianic idea was not peculiar to the Jewish race—the idea of a Person gathering up within himself, in an effective fulness and harmony, the restorative elements of humanity, which have lost their power through dispersion and consequent obscuration. There have been Messiahs of various orders and ranks in every age—great personalities that have realized to a greater or less extent (though there has been but one, the God-Man, who fully realized), the spiritual potentialities in man, that have stood upon the sharpest heights as beacons to their fellows. In the individual the species has, as it were, been gathered up, epitomized, and intensified, and he has thus been a prophecy, and to some extent a fulfilment of human destiny.

      “A poet must be earth’s ESSENTIAL king”, as Sordello asserts, and he is that by virtue of his exerting or shedding the influence of his essential personality. “If caring not to exert the proper essence of his royalty, he, the poet, trifle malapert with accidents instead—good things assigned as heralds of a better thing behind”—he is “deposed from his kingly throne, and his glory is taken from him”. Of himself, Sordello says: “The power he took most pride to test, whereby all forms of life had been professed at pleasure, forms already on the earth, was but a means of power beyond, whose birth should, in its novelty, be kingship’s proof. Now, whether he came near or kept aloof the several forms he longed to imitate, not there the kingship lay, he sees too late. Those forms, unalterable first as last, proved him her copier, not the protoplast of nature: what could come of being free by action to exhibit tree for tree, bird, beast, for beast and bird, or prove earth bore one veritable man or woman more? Means to an end such proofs are: what the end?”

      The answer given involves the great Browning idea of the quickening power of personality: “Let essence, whatsoe’er it be, extend—never contract!”

      By “essence” we must understand that which “constitutes man’s self, is what Is”, as the dying John, in ‘A Death in the Desert’, expresses it—that which backs the active powers and the conscious intellect, “subsisting whether they assist or no”.

      “Let essence, whatsoe’er it be, extend—never contract!” Sordello says. “Already you include the multitude”; that is, you gather up in yourself, in an effective fulness and harmony, what lies scattered and ineffective in the multitude; “then let the mulitude include yourself”; that is, be substantiated, essenced with yourself; “and the result were new: themselves before, the multitude turn YOU” (become yourself). “This were to live and move and have, in them, your being, and secure a diadem you should transmit (because no cycle yearns beyond itself, but on itself returns) when the full sphere in wane, the world o’erlaid long since with you, shall have in turn obeyed some orb still prouder, some displayer, still more potent than the last, of human will, and some new king depose the old.”

      This is a most important passage to get hold of in studying Browning. It may be said to gather up Browning’s philosophy of life in a nutshell.

      There’s a passage to the same effect in ‘Balaustion’s Adventure’, in regard to the transmission of the poet’s essence. The enthusiastic Rhodian girl, Balaustion, after she has told the play of Euripides, years after her adventure, to her four friends, Petale, Phullis, Charope, and Chrusion, says:—

      “I think I see how … you, I, or any one, might mould a new Admetos, new Alkestis. Ah, that brave bounty of poets, the one royal race that ever was, or will be, in this world! They give no gift that bounds itself, and ends i’ the giving and the taking: theirs so breeds i’ the heart and soul of the taker, so transmutes the man who only was a man before, that he grows god-like in his turn, can give—he also: share the poet’s privilege, bring forth new good, new beauty from the old. As though the cup that gave the wine, gave too the god’s prolific giver of the grape, that vine, was wont to find out, fawn around his footstep, springing still to bless the dearth, at bidding of a Mainad.”

3. Art as an Intermediate Agency of Personality.

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      If Browning’s idea of the quickening, the regeneration, the rectification of personality, through a higher personality, be fully comprehended, his idea of the great function of Art, as an intermediate agency of personality, will become plain. To emphasize the latter idea may be said to be the ultimate purpose of his masterpiece, ‘The Ring and the Book’.

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

      This must be taken, however, as only the articulation, the framework, of the great poem. It is richer in materials, of the most varied character, than any other long poem in existence. To notice one feature of the numberless features of the poem, which might be noticed, Browning’s deep and subtle insight into the genius of the Romish Church is shown in it more fully than in any other of his poems—though special phases of that genius are distinctly exhibited in numerous poems: a remarkable one being ‘The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church’. It is questionable whether any work of any kind has ever exhibited that genius more fully and distinctly than ‘The Ring and the Book’ exhibits it. The reader breathes throughout the ecclesiastical atmosphere of the Eternal City.

      To return from this digression, the several monologues of which the poem consists, with the exception of those of the Canon Caponsacchi, Pompilia, and the Pope, are each curious and subtle and varied exponents of the workings, without the guidance of instinct at the heart, of the prepossessed, prejudiced intellect, and of the sources of its swerving into error. What is said of the “feel after the vanished truth” in the monologue entitled ‘Half Rome’—the speaker being a jealous husband—will serve to characterize, in a general way, “the feel after truth” exhibited in the other monologues: “honest enough, as the way is: all the same, harboring in the CENTRE OF ITS SENSE a hidden germ of failure, shy but sure, should neutralize that honesty and leave that feel for truth at fault, as the way is too. Some prepossession, such as starts amiss, by but a hair’s-breadth at the shoulder-blade, the arm o’ the feeler, dip he ne’er so brave; and so leads waveringly, lets fall wide o’ the mark his finger meant to find, and fix truth at the bottom, that deceptive speck.”

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

      These monologues all lead up to the great moral of the poem, which is explicitly set forth at the end, namely, “that our human speech is naught, our human testimony false, our fame and