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| Portrait of Robert Browning by Dante Gabriel Rosetti (1855) |
[Image source:
The Fitzwilliam Museum]
This post compiles all the pieces that I've written about Browning. The two most substantial pieces appeared in
Intercapillary Space, so I've just given links to them.
*
Pauline: A Fragment
of a Confession (1833)
http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.co.uk/2007/04/robert-brownings-pauline.html
The name in the title
should perhaps be pronounced in the French manner, as Pauline apparently hails
from the Alps and her sole intervention (a footnote)
is in French. But I don't think I'll be trying this in public.
*
Strafford (1837)
*
"Bishop Blougram’s Apology" (published in Men and Women, 1855)
Of course you are remarking all this time
How narrowly and grossly I view life,
Respect the creature-comforts, care to rule
The masses, and regard complacently
‘The cabin’, in our old phrase. Well, I do.
The bishop is fascinated (in what is finally a generous way)
by his effect on the young man. Whom he doesn’t wholly understand, but he knows
that “life” is a revered word. He enjoys the words “narrowly” and “grossly”;
intended as criticisms of him, he smacks his lips over them. This is talk not
lecturing, so his sentence leaves its moorings - he obviously does not mean,
what he logically implies, “how narrowly and grossly I regard complacently...”
“in our old phrase” politely includes Gigadibs (he would
feel, “implicates”).
“Care to rule” is an odd phrase, perhaps a false note, but
it passes the crozier/crook under our nose.
***
Everyone who has done the canon knows a few things about
Browning. They know that he is copiously good. Also, that he isn’t good like
Shakespeare’s sonnets or Keats’ odes. (You can read Men and Women with
exuberant pleasure, but you don’t bother to learn any of his lines by heart.)
Finally, that apart from the copiously good there is also a more-than-copious
not-so-good, mainly in the last twenty years of his career, and there’s no
conceivable requirement to dip into it.
So finding yourself in company with a volume of late
Browning is a very liberating experience, though it is death to stay there.
*
Ferishtah’s Fancies (1884), published when the
author was 72, is in no way outstanding. The man who had produced a great
collection (Men and Women) was as interested as ever in the shape of a
collection, and this one is typically complex, the poems about the Persian
philosopher (a pleasant image of the ageing author) interspersed with slight
love-lyrics that play with the same themes. In the “Prologue” Browning supplies
us with the image of spitted ortolans separated from each other by bread and
sage-leaves.
Browning’s “poems” are, as Wilde acutely noted, a new kind
of form that is close to prose. Much of it is barely more exciting than prose:
Wholly distrust thy knowledge, then, and trust
As wholly love allied to ignorance!
There lies thy truth and safety. Love is praise,
And praise is love! Refine the same, contrive
An intellectual tribute – ignorance
Appreciating ere approbative
Of knowledge that is infinite? With us
The small, who use the knowledge of our kind
Greater than we, more wisely ignorance
Restricts its apprehension, sees and knows
No more than brain accepts in faith of sight,
Takes first what comes first, only sure so far.
It is, no doubt, rather frustrating that this is not “even”
very limpid prose. The last sentence in this passage draws a parallel between
the infinite knowledge of God and the merely “greater” knowledge of our more
skilled peers, but the parallel is hardly laid out to the eye, and the curious
expression “our kind greater than we” is a positive hindrance to understanding.
Yet this casualness of exposition is important. It took me several readings of Shah
Abbas to grasp exactly what the point of difference was between the two
speakers – this is because the speakers are not lecturing, and some things are
just implied in the tone. Towards the end of A Bean-stripe, a moving
conciseness is achieved by the speakers’ digressiveness; the proposed
discussion is in effect cancelled by the influx of solider things. From there I
quote some examples of the poetry that lies lurking in the seams of the
argument:
- Those Seven Thrones, Zurah’s beauty, weird Parwin!
Then let the stars thank me who apprehend
That such an one is white, such other blue!
But for my apprehension both were blank.
Cannot I close my eyes and bid my brain
Make whites and blues, conceive without stars’ help,
New qualities of colour? Were my sight
Lost or misleading, would yon red – I judge
A ruby’s benefaction – stand for aught
But green from vulgar glass? Myself appraise
Lustre and lustre; should I overlook
Fomalhaut and declare some fen-fire king,
Who shall correct me, lend me eyes he trusts
No more than I trust mine?
Yet I think the most memorable lines are after all quieter
and close to prose.
Shelter, of some sort, no experienced chill
Warrants that I despair to find.
And there seems no reason why a valid art could not contain
this high proportion of prose-interest to poetry-interest. Obviously, though,
the arguments need to be grasped, so here are my brief summaries:
The Eagle: You should work for the world, and be a
“helpful strength”.
The Melon-Seller: Do not bewail a fall from grace,
but give thinks for your undeserved past happiness.
Shah Abbas: To be right-hearted, to be on the side of
God and virtue, is more important than strict belief.
The Family: To pray is human. To submit to God’s will
too easily may be less than human.
The Sun: In praising, we attribute a human aspect to
the divine.
Mihrab Shah: The existence of pain is necessary for
us to give thanks to God and love to each other.
A Camel-Driver: God does not punish like man may need
to.
Two Camels: Enjoy the good things in life – it makes
you more fit for work, and more aware of what joy is.
Cherries: Give praise for the smallest things, don’t
despise them for the greater things you hardly understand.
Plot-Culture: God does not need to spy on the details
of sensual love.
A Pillar at Sebzevar: Love is sure, knowledge is
uncertain.
A Bean-Stripe; also, Apple-Eating: This is the most
substantial poem in the collection; a discussion that begins with whether life
is good or bad; it sinks all in man’s impotence and God’s omnipotence, and in
the humbly optimistic faith of one who does not try to know too much.
Browning’s later career of course attracts the charge of
facile optimism, as well as that damning facility for verse. To do him justice, he is prepared to defend
the optimism. I don’t know why we should be so unforgiving to this aspect of
the late Victorian sages, when there is a clear line of descent to the scientific
writers of today, whose universal optimism is a matter of no note.
[nb this sentence was written with a memory of Gregg
Easterbrook’s remarkable A Moment on the Earth (1995) and Adam Philips’s
Darwin’s Worms (1999), where the blurb’s statement that the author
“unexpectedly finds much to celebrate” unwittingly emphasises just how
expected, in another sense, it all is.]
Browning was a happy poet. Of Browning’s optimism we can say
in reproof that he ignored – well, the Victorian slums, for instance. Yet he
saved Elizabeth Barrett; through egocentrism and ignorance, it may be, but I
don’t know that. I have to listen to his sanity, cheerfully selfish though it
may have been. It is the selfish and rich who are intelligent. Charity exacts a cost. If you love your
neighbour, as Browning perhaps did not do (I mean in a practical way), do not
suppose that you will write better, or even think better, as a result. On the
contrary, to fight evil is to court the probable infection of evil. You must do
it, if you’re going to do it, only because it’s right.
Did Browning, we may wonder, take drugs, or was it a natural
high? Was it just his temperament? In the Prologue to the Parleyings with
Certain People (1887), he puts it down to wine – this poem, which considers
his own cheerfulness, pursues many of the same themes as A Bean-Stripe.
*
Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their
Day (1887)
By the time of Men and Women (1855) Browning had
developed the form of the dramatic monologue (DM) to a stage where it
seems to us simply a natural form that we accept unquestioningly – and this was
a monumental achievement.
The problem arose when he tried to think about what he was
doing in an analytical way. He observed that the material of a DM was
highly partial, usually chosen by the speaker to defend his own way of life. In
The Ring and the Book (1868-69) he had the idea of composing a
multiplicity of DMs that all addressed the same material. This would
make clearer the partiality of each speaker; it would also supply a peculiarly
rich presentation of the material itself, presented from many different
viewpoints. But when we try to read the Ring and the Book we see that
the experiment fails. Because each speaker is made to go over the same ground,
s/he is inevitably compelled to rehearse long stretches of material that shed
no interesting light on her/his character. Nor does the story itself gain
greatly from this repetition; where slight contradictions appear, we are left
not with a deeper insight but merely with doubt.
The Parleyings, too, have the air of being composed
in response to an over-schematic idea. The speaker is Browning, and the
“people” (they are all men, by the way) are brought in to inspire his
meditations on a number of interlinked themes. These, we might suppose, are the
sort of thought-processes that precede the composition of DMs. But in
the Parleyings, instead of progressing to writing the DMs,
Browning versifies the notes. In principle, and occasionally in practice, this
allows him to introduce frankly contemporary material – instead of composing a
historical fiction, he can openly ponder the relevance of the past to his
present. But this constitutes a loss of belief in poetry – what we value in the
younger Browning is not his ideas, but his fiction.
(My prose – your poetry I dare not give,
purpling too much my mere grey argument)
he writes, as an aside, in Christopher Smart – and
these are among the more memorable lines, because one tends to concede the
rightness of Browning’s choice of colours. Yet the Parleyings deserve
some attention.
Apollo and the Fates: A Prologue. (The meter is similar to the Epilogue;
galloping stanzas rhyming ababb where a is normally
disyllabic.) Apollo visits the Fates to
plead for the life of Admetus. They scornfully point out that the life of man
is mere misery; happiness only an illusion. Apollo persuades them to drink
wine, man’s consolation, and they become temporarily merry, and applaud man’s
potential and stubborn survival – “no defeat but a triumph”. But then a mysterious “explosion at the
earth’s centre” sobers them. Man is fated, they re-assert. But they grant
Apollo’s plea for Admetus if anyone, for love’s sake, will offer to die for
him. Apollo agrees, and sees his relatives contending for the honour. And sees
Admetus refuse them – he’d rather die. The Fates laugh, interpreting this as a
confirmation of their argument and a thwarting of Apollo’s plan. Our own
response is more ambiguous, of course.
Bernard de Mandeville. The central part of the poem is (I find)
extremely obscurely expressed, but the basic argument is clear. A “parlous
friend” asks for one plain demonstration that God is on the side of good.
Browning argues by analogy; it’s impossible to comprehend the sun doing good,
but thanks to Prometheus we have the little gift of fire and with it can do
good ourselves. Not intellectual knowledge which fails before immensities, but
our mere senses and our practical application, are enough to supply the faith
that is wanted. [The poem’s drift became somewhat clearer once I looked up
Mandeville, and learned that his idea was that in society individual evil such
as pride and avarice led to the common good – for instance, by boosting the
economy. It was an argument whose sources can be guessed at, for instance, in
the medieval poem Wynnere and Wastoure – but after Mandeville it became
dominant in economic thinking. Browning considers only the moral aspect, and
seems to approve of it.]
Daniel Bartoli.
Largely devoted to the story of a woman who gives up a great Duke’s love
so that he can retain his political power. Browning finds “saintship” in this
worldly chronicle (not in a legendary) – he means the woman’s, though her life
is not religious. He even finds something to please him in the duke, who tamely
goes along with this (i.e. gives her up) – at least he too was once devoted to
love, and though now a mere ghost of his past idealism, might rise again to
that splendour.
Christopher Smart.
Browning wonders why Smart produced only one inspired work (i.e. the
Song to David). Browning seems to approve Smart’s humility in retiring to
commonplace once the visionary experience had passed away, and contrasts him
with those who seek “the end ere the beginning”. But the last section is
confusing.
George Bubb Dodington. Concerned with statesmanship,
and the politician’s habit of feathering his own nest. Browning decides (for
the sake of argument) to accept this selfish motive as valid, but criticizes
GBD for advising the statesman to adopt a sham zeal which will deceive no-one.
Suggests that the statesman should go further and create in us a sense of awe
by revealing his blatant lack of human conscience; behaviour which might
persuade us, perhaps, that he is mystifyingly superhuman and thus merits our
subservience. In George Bubb Dodington it’s quite clear that Browning
doesn’t mean what he’s saying – this is an example of what (I think) is meant
by Browning’s “casuistry”.
Francis Furini. FF was a painter-priest who painted
nudes as well as religious subjects and who, according to legend, requested on
his death-bed that his works be destroyed. But Browning refuses to credit this
legend – assumes that Francis was a defender of the noble profession of art.
Imagines him addressing the sceptical evolutionists and other speculators –
putting forward the nobility of the body and man’s own desire for righteousness
as signs of the innate goodness of the world. This “starting from what we know”
links up with Christopher Smart and with Ferishtah’s optimism; it’s a
fairly plain statement of what Browning himself had, it seems, come to think of
as his “philosophy”.
Gerard de Lairesse. A fanciful and mythological
writer, because he became blind? But Browning tries to achieve an insight into
the world that is based only on sober sense and not on fancy. The centrepiece
of the poem is a lengthy description of a day, from dawn to dusk, peopled by
Lairesse-style imaginings – but Browning calls it “fooling”. Browning
criticizes the “Greek” (perhaps Platonic) despair of the world – everything
merely a shade. His joy in the actual.
Charles Avison. An organist of Newcastle, who composed a simple march.
Browning considers music, an art whose expression of the soul exceeds any
other, but which is necessarily transient, displaced by what follows it, so
that the music of Avison’s time has no inspiring power for us moderns (e.g. of
Browning’s time) who have Wagner and Brahms. And yet the fading is not
inglorious. “Soon shall fade and fall / Myth after myth – the husk-like lies I
call / New truth’s corolla-safeguard: Autumn comes, / So much the better!”
Fust and his Friends: An Epilogue The friends, a conventional and benighted
crew, come to Fust’s study – he is discovered, a “lost wretch” apparently sunk
in despair. They conclude that he has made a pact with the devil. But Fust
proudly demonstrates his astonishing invention – a printing press. Fust praises
its power for spreading the truth, the faultless multiplication of a psalm. But
asked why then he was found in such a woebegone attitude, he confesses his fear
of how the press could be used to multiply falsehood. The friends agree – what
if another Huss should make use of it? “I foresee such a man”, Fust agrees
(i.e. Luther). The basic connection with
the Prologue is the concern (ultimately optimistic) with man’s potential for
both good and evil. [Fust was also of interest to Jonathan Oldbuck – see The
Antiquary, Ch XI. Scott has the astrologer Galeotti deliver a similar
effusion on the ambiguous powers of the printing-press in Quentin Durward,
Ch XIII.]
In writing up these notes (which I think ought to be useful,
since few will trouble to read such a book) I have injured my vanity, both by
admitting that some passages defeat me and also by revealing to a better reader
– who I hope may enlighten me – where I’ve unwittingly missed the drift. It can
be infuriatingly difficult to follow the argument. Often I am in doubt who is
speaking, and whether they are expressing their own beliefs, or putting a case,
or surmising or burlesquing someone else’s argument. Often the point at issue
is bafflingly buried in the mass of common ground.
It’s easy to see why modernist poets who followed in
Browning’s paths decided to drop the interconnecting links between
“presentations” (such as a description of the dawn (Gerard de Lairesse)
or a visit to a great house (Christopher Smart) or a bird picking at a
thread (Charles Avison) and allowed the reader to do the work of
inferring a connection between the materials. One can perhaps interpret the
unresolvable pseudo-argument of Ashbery’s poetry as a reaction against these
disjunct and imagistic “presentations”, in a certain way readmitting the
“process” that we meet with in the Parleyings*. Browning’s subjects are of such a kind that
argument is in any case necessarily hazy and/or mercurial. It comes quite close
itself to being pseudo-argument, except that there is a repetitious chiming of
certain abstract words (such as will and beauty) which had a positive meaning
for Browning because of his religion and his culture.
*Note.
This has been noticed before, e.g. by Peter Porter.
[2001, 2002, 2007, 2009]
Labels: John Ashbery, Robert Browning
