The Press Saturday, October 11, 1930. Browning.

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 20056, 11 October 1930, Page 16

The Press Saturday, October 11, 1930. Browning.

Tennyson was not dazzled by his own reputation. "I am up now," he said, "but ifc 'will not be long before I am u down." Few poets have fallen more swiftly. The revulsion against him was violent and contemptuous, so violent as to ejchaust itself and produce daring recent years a sort of calm, in which Mr Harold Nicolson and Mr Fausset have remeasured him with 0001, corrective irony; but as we listen to this startling discord of voices it is easy to forget that, in spite of it and heedless of it, thousands of readers have been tranquilly reading Tennyson, to their great pleasure and profit. What the professional critics eay gives a writer reputation, in a special sense, and may change it. What readers as a whole think of him, though they seldom express and still more rarely print their opinions, also makes his reputation. But the correspondence between the two is oftener faint and remote than close and firm. Perhaps, in the main, the silent judgment of the people is more conservative and equable. The two poets whom Palgrave excluded from the Golden Treasury, Blake and Donne, have lately been drawn to the centre of the stage by critics, editors, and publishers; but that they have now many more readers than when Palgrave ignored them, without protest from his fellow critics, or that their readers have a much wider knowledge and finer appreciation of them, is very doubtful. The reputation of Robert Browning is another example. Not many poets, it may be suspected, bind their readers as close as he and are as often sought by men and women who, knowing themselves, know what has lasting power to satisfy them. Yet the truth of this only modifies, it does not npset, the fact that Browning has slumped. He has not even, like Tennyson, swung back a little through the reaction against jeers too loud and rude. He is one of the three Victorians—Tennyson and Thomas Carlyle are the , others—against whom the taste and temper of this age have most sharply turned; and it is no mere coincidence that each of them constantly (though not with complete consistency) preached. In Browning's philosophy, in fact, Mr D. C. Somervell finds the chief cause of modern critical repugnance, which of course makes explicit what many readers vaguely feel. His essay, in Vol. XV. of the English Association's Essays and Studies, gives a most interesting account of the process through which Browning's reputation has passed and a sane estimate of its future. When Bordello put out the hopeful light kindled by Paracelsus, Browning spent twenty years in producing the poetry which was to establish him as " the popular " Browning of the earnest general "public." They were twenty years of neglect, relieved only by the admiration of a few, like Buskin, the second Lord Lytton, and Landor, who seized him well in the sonnet lines:

Since Chaucer was alive and hale No man hath walked along our road with step So active, so enquiring eye, and tongue So varied in discourse.

The astounding thing is that the public, who had rated him below his wife and far below Tennyson, generously and enthusiastically revised their estimate of him when he published— The Ring and the Boole. The reviewers began those comparisons with Shakespeare which have ever since been made, even by hostile critics, like George Santayana; but a much more convincing sign is the fact that, within a few years, the Chicago Railway Company began to print Browning every month as an appendix to their timetables, with a circulation of 10,000! In ISBI the Browning Society was formed: a solemn and indeed melancholy event, for, as Mr Somervell shrewdly says, "shots that have hit "Browning were apparently aimed at "the Browning Society." Among members and contributors were Bishop Westcott—who acknowledged his chief intellectual debt to St. John, Origen, and Browning—Nettleship, Bury, Cotter Morrison, Holman Hunt, Canon Farrar, and (rather oddly) Walter Raleigh, who hated, or grew to hate, literary solemnity. There was published about then Arthur Symons's still valuable appraisal, valuable for its substance and for its illumination of the contemporary, orthodox attitude. Browning inspired every sort of secular and religious teacher and preacher. He was the teaching and preaching of that day. Mr Chesterton's bold and penetrating study in the English Men of Letters Series (1903) lengthened his evening with a strange, strong light; and then the darkness of the Great War fell.

After the war he was not wanted. Mr F. L. Lucas, who belongs to Housman's Cambridge and to Housman's spirit, tells us why:

Something has cotrio between us today and Tennyson and Browning, the Jachin and Boaz of that Solomon's temple, the Victorian era. It is the Presence of a pontifical didacticism based upon a philpsophy we cannot share, which alloys their veritable gold No donbt there are still people ■who enjoy being slapped on the back because "'Morning's at seven" and "Heaven" rhymes with it; but in living poets that note is fortunately absent. . . The twentieth century baa not been particularly rich in good poets, even good minors; but at least tbev have not paraded that complacent and obtuse satisfaction with human life, which Browning once flaunted as fashionably as a white tie. Better any wormwood than that saccharine. ,

Here Mr Somervell makes his best point: it is that Browning's philosophy irritates Mr Lucas, the many, Mr Lucases, not because it is dead but because it is dying, because its failure is recent and still rankles. Neither the Laeretiast physios nor the Lueretiaiji

faith offends us. Milton's theology is dissolved in liis music. But Browning deceived Mr Lucas, or seemed to, and the disillusion is so bitter that Mr Lucas cannot even be fair. But it will not always be natural to look at Browning from the point of view of disillusion, ajid to look disgustedly away. Were Browning's " philosophy" of hopeful courage proved to be nothing but hopeless eowardice, a lie and an evasion—which, for all Mr Lucas may say, it is not—much would still remain. There would be Browning's mastery of blank verse, especially for dramatic, humorous, and conversational purposes; his extraordinary metrical fertility; a style which proves itself, like all good weapons, in use and durability; a descriptive power which draws some kinds of landscape with unsurpassed skill; humour, wit, and wisdom which those admire most who most nearly approach Browning in knowledge of life.; the invention and perfection of the short story in verse; and the achievement of one of the very few unchallengeably great "long" poems in English or indeed in any language. As for Browning's " message," if he can tell us nothing—though it is not necessarily a disgrace to be less wellinformed than Mr Lucas—he will again be heard; for, at the very least, he knew and expressed and not unintelligently annotated what the Victorians were thinking.

The Rakala Bridge. The proposal contained in the report of the Railways Commission that the Highways Fund should be debited with a substantial proportion of the cost of construction and maintenance of railway bridges used also for road traffic is not likely to be accepted without protest by the motoring organisations throughout New Zealand. It is, of course, fair that when two classes of users combine to secure a certain joint bridge service the cost should be equitably apportioned between the* two. The Commission's proposal, however, cannot be stated so simply, and indicates that the Railway Department may take advantage of its rights of ownership to impose its own terms for the use of railway bridges by motor traffic. It argues that if the railway bridges were not in existence the Highways Board would be, compelled to incur heavy expenditure in providing road bridges. The reply to that argument is that if railway bridges in the past had not been employed for a dual purpose, road bridges would have been built out of general funds, and the Railway Department would have no kind of claim on the Highways Fund on account of those bridges over which general traffic also passes. It must be remembered, too, that the rights of user over the combined bridges are not by any means equal, and that the value of the rights in each case differs accordingly. Canterbury is chiefly interested in the Rakaia bridge, which, according to the Commission's views and calculations, should be a charge upon the Highways Fund to the extent of over £SOOO per annum, to cover the estimated annual cost of providing for road traffic using the bridge, and a proportion of the fixed charges (interest, maintenance, and depreciation) on the main structure. If, therefore, the motorists are to be called upon to pay this sum annually for the present very restricted and uncomfortable use of a rather ancient railway structure, their money could be far better employed in providing interest and maintenance costs for a new bridge for road traffic only. There is still time of course for friendly negotiation when action is being taken on the Commission's recommendations. The two parties might find it to be to their mutual advantage to combine to build a new rail and traffic bridge over the Rakaia on terms clearly settled at the oiftset.