IV.

MR. BROWNING.*

MR.

R. BROWNING, though commanding a wider intellectual sweep of view than almost any artist of our day, is hardly a poet of European, even if of national celebrity, but rather the favourite of an intellectual sect; and this, not from any sectarian tendency in his poetry,-nothing could be more catholic,-but from the almost complete absence of that atmosphere of fascination about his verse, that melody of mind and speech, which is the main attraction of poetry to ordinary men, and but for which mere imaginative power, however great, would scarcely arrest their attention at all. Coleridge once defined poetry-very badly I conceive-> as "that species of composition which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species (having this object in common with it) it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part." Now Coleridge certainly did not intend to exclude Mr. Browning's works by anticipation from all claim to the title of poems; if he had lived to read Mr. Browning, Coleridge's profound, rich, and catholic

* "The Poetical Works of Robert Browning." 3 vols. Third edition. Chapman and Hall.

"The Ring and the Book." 4 vols. Smith and Elder, 1869.

imagination would scarcely have failed to appreciate fully the power and insight of the younger poet; but no definition of a poem could have been contrived more ingeniously calculated to exclude Mr. Browning's works from that class of composition. Most of Mr. Browning's poems might be described precisely "as proposing for their immediate object truth, not pleasure, and as aiming at such a satisfaction from the whole as is by no means compatible with any very distinct gratification from each component part." In other words, Mr. Browning's poems, though, when clearly apprehended, they seldom fail to give that higher kind of imaginative satisfaction which is one of the most enviable intellectual states, give a very moderate amount of immediate sensitive pleasure. There is little of the thrill through the brain, of the vibrating melodious sweetness, of the tranquillising harmony, of the atmosphere of loveliness, which one usually associates with the highest powers of poetical expression. And then, as to the relation of the whole to the part, which is Coleridge's second test of a poem, Mr. Browning's poems are not so organised that the parts give you any high gratification till you catch a view of his whole.

Coleridge says, that "the reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the solution, but by the pleasurable activity of the mind, excited by the attractions of the journey itself. Like the motion of a serpent, which the Egyptians made the emblem of intellectual power, or like the path of sound through the air, at every step he (the poet) pauses and half recedes, and from the retrogressive movement collects the force which again carries him onward." Nothing could be farther from describing the movement of Mr. Browning's poems. Instead of fascinating you with his harmony of movement, and gradually insinuating the drift and spirit

of the poem into your imagination, Mr. Browning rushes
upon you with a sort of intellectual douche, half stuns e
you with the abruptness of the shock, repeats the
application in a multitude of swift various jets from
unexpected points of the compass, and leaves you at
last giddy and wondering where you are, but with a
vague sense that, were you but properly prepared before-
hand, you would discern a real unity and power in
this intellectual water-spout, though its first descent >
only drenched and bewildered your imagination. Take
the following short poem for example, one of really
marvellous force, indeed of true genius, but which I pur-
posely decline to present with any further introduction
than Mr. Browning has himself accorded; in order to
illustrate this characteristic of his, that the whole must
be fairly grasped before any of the "component parts
are intelligible,-the component parts, indeed, being little
more than diminutive wholes, too diminutive in scale to
be clearly legible until you have seen the whole, whence
you go back to the component parts again with a key to
their meaning that at last gradually deciphers them

SOLILOQUY OF THE SPANISH CLOISTER.
"Gr-r-r-there go, my heart's abhorrence!
Water your damned flower-pots, do!

If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence,
God's blood, would not mine kill you!
What? your myrtle-bush wants trimming?
Oh, that rose has prior claims-
Needs its leaden vase filled brimming?
Hell dry you up with its flames!

At the meal we sit together:
Salve tibi! I must hear
Wise talk of the kind of weather,
Sort of season, time of year:
Not a plenteous cork-crop: scarcely

Dare we hope oak-galls, I doubt :

What's the Latin name for 'parsley'?

What's the Greek name for Swine's Snout?

:

Whew! We'll have our platter burnished,
Laid with care on our own shelf!
With a fire-new spoon we're furnished,
And a goblet for ourself.

Rinsed like something sacrificial
Ere 'tis fit to touch our chaps—
Marked with L. for our initial!
(He-he! There his lily snaps !)

Saint, forsooth! While brown Dolores
Squats outside the Convent bank,
With Sanchicha, telling stories,

Steeping tresses in the tank,

Blue-black, lustrous, thick like horsehairs, Can't I see his dead eye glow,

Bright as 'twere a Barbary corsair's?
(That is, if he'd let it show!)

When he finishes refection,
Knife and fork he never lays
Cross-wise, to my recollection,
As do I, in Jesu's praise.
I, the Trinity illustrate,

Drinking watered orange-pulp-
In three sips the Arian frustrate;
While he drains his at one gulp !

Oh, those melons! If he's able

We're to have a feast so nice!

One goes to the Abbot's table,
All of us get each a slice.
How go on your flowers? None double ;
Not one fruit-sort can you spy?
Strange! And I, too, at such trouble,
Keep them close-nipped on the sly?

There's a great text in Galatians,
Once you trip on it entails
Twenty-nine distinct damnations,
One sure, if another fails :
If I trip him just a-dying,

Sure of Heaven as sure as can be,
Spin him round and send him flying
Off to Hell, a Manichee?

Or, my scrofulous French novel
On grey paper with blunt type !
Simply glance at it, you grovel
Hand and foot in Belial's gripe :

When we have caught the idea that Mr. Browning is painting the jealous disgust and tricky spite felt by a passionate, sensual, self-indulging, superstitious monk for the pale, blameless, vegetating, contented sort of saint who takes kindly to gardening, and "talks crops' at the monastery table, we see how living and strongly conceived the picture is: but the wording, though vigorous, and one verse at least (that concerning Sanchicha) highly picturesque, is neither melodious nor even very lucid for its purpose; and the parts, as I said, are diminished images of the whole, and hence enigmatic till the whole has been two or three times read. Yet the average of the versification, and the verbal efficiency generally, in this little poem, are in power a good deal above those of most of the pieces called "lyrical," chiefly because it is lyrical only in name, and does not attempt to be in form much more than it really is in essence, a semi-dramatic fragment.

Mr. Browning's deficiency in the power of sensuous expression, and in the art of giving an independent interest and attractiveness to the component parts of his poems, as distinguished from the whole, is of course most strikingly seen in the deficiencies of his metre and rhyme, which are the natural gauge of poetic expressiveness and harmony of poetic structure. A metre that