THE POETRY OF ROBERT BROWNING.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XVII, Issue 44, 21 February 1890, Page 23

THE POETRY OF ROBERT BROWNING.

(From tbe Pilot.)

The death of Robert Browning, at Venice, December 12, coincidently with the publication of his last volume, " Asolando," holds for a time at flood admiration for a poet whose cultus was phenomenally slow in rising, and hai apparently reached the tarn of the tide. " The greatest poet of our time — one of the greatest of all time — unequalled since Shakespeare— the supreme poet of spiritual life," are a few of the extravagances of a premature literary canonisation which sober, critical second thought will not absolutely confirm.

Yet he is a great poet, overtopping even Tennyson in originality and intellectual strength. Only genius of the first order could have compelled a hearing for the thoughts which it pleased him to body forth in form so uncouth and even repellant. His literary bids of prolixity, obscurity, and graceless expression, undiminished in his later works, are more repellant for being conscious and impertinent. The poet, contemptuously sure of the allegiance of his followers, threw them a stone for bread, and laughed to see them smacking their lips on it. ■' How mystical ! " cries one, over a passage whose right descriptive term is meaningless. " How luminous I " cries another, before a thought hardly discernible in the intricacies of its verbal entanglement. Luminous ?— as the stars one sees at the blow of a bludgeon.

After all possible deductions for defects of nature and perverse affectations, Robert. Browning still holds his place sscurely among the world's great poets, de could be — and he has been — strong, lucid, musical as Tennyson himself. Note " Herve Riel," the " Cavalier Tones," " How They Brought tbe Good News from Ghent to Aix," " The Lost Leader," " Tbe Toccata of Gallupi's," "In a Gondola," " Evelyn Hope," and scores of love lyrics, independent poems, or snatches of song, interluding his so-called dramas.

For Browning, like Byron, and for the same reason, was not a dramatist in the true sense of the word. Both poets lacked objectivity. The characters in Browning's dramas are not Browning's creations. They are each and every one Browning ; as " Manfred," " Cain," " Bardanapalus," and the rest are only Byron in masquerade. Several of Browning's dramas were produced on the London stage 1 "Strafford," with Mncready in the title role ; " Colombo's Birthday," with Charlotte Cushman as the heroine. Both of them, nevertheless, were failures. " A Blot on the ' bcutcheon " fared better. Coldly received at first, it is now one of tbe strongest plays in Lawrence Barrett's repertory. " Pippa Passes," •• A Blot on the ' Scutcheon," and " Colombe's Birthday " must rank as Browning's dramatic masterpieces ; as bis " Men and Women," written in 1855, when its author was at hie prime, ia his representative book. Men and women, iudeed, attract nim more than does nature — as they did that greatest of women-poets who was his wife— and he is at his best in the portrayal of their passions. Was even a woman's heart more skilfully vivisected than that of the queen in "In a Balcony." He is as trne to life in the every -day woman's tragedy, " In a Year "—" —

Never any more While I live, Need I hope to see his face As before-^

Once our love grown chill, Mine may strive ; Bitterly we re-embrace, Single still. Was it something said Something doneVexed him ? Was it touch of hand, Tarn of head ? Strange I That very way Love began ; I as little understand Love's decay.

Or •• Any Wife to Any Husband," or •• A Woman's Last Word." " A Lover's Quarrel " would be a rare gem, were it not for some flawi of grotesquery with which he wantonly defaces it. These itanzas, however, are a taste of his lyrical quality at his best :— Dearest, three months ago, When we loved each other so. Lived and loved the same Till an evening came When a shaft from the devil's bow Pierced to our ingle-glow, And the friends were friend and foe.

Not from the heart beneath — ' Twas a bubble born of breath, Neither sneer nor vaunt, Nor reproach nor tauut, See a word, how it severeth 1 Ob, power of life and death In tbe tongue, as the Preacher saith I Love, if you knew the light That your soul casts in my eight, How I look to you For the pure and true, And the beauteous and the right,— Bear with a moment's spite When a mere mote threats the white !

Foul be the world so fair More or less, how can I care ? 'Tis the world the same For my praise or blame, And endurance is easy there, Wrong in one thing rare—

Ob, it is hard to bear 1

From the moral standpoint much of Browning's passional and emotional poetry is as censurable as any produced by the poets avowedly of the "fleshly" school, and as Stedman puts it, "that many complacent English and American readers do not recognise this, speaks volumes either for their stupidity or their inward sympathy in a creed which they profess to abhor."

But Browning bas a moral and spiritual value in a day of agnostic poets and prosists, for his ever recurrent note, strong unfaltering, triumph of belief in God and immortality. Resisting tbe temptation to quote " Pros pice," with every ont else, we take from among many this from " Rabbi Ben Ezra" : — Grow old along with me ! The best is jet to be. The last of life for whicb the first was made : Our times are in His hand Who saith : " A whole I planned, Youth shows but half ; trust God : See all, nor be afraid." This from " Abt Vogler " : ~ All we have willed, or boped, or di earned of good shall exist Not its semblance, but itself ; no beauty, nor good, nor power Whose voice bas gone forth, but each survives for tbe melodist, When Eternity affirms the conceptions of an hour. The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky, Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard ;

Enough that He beard it once ; we shall hear it by-and-bye.

For a last word, let us set against hasty, current estimates, with their half concious insincerity and deference to a fashion, the same judgment of one of the foremost of modern critics, himself a true poet, Edmund Clarence Steadman. It was written, it is true, fourteen years ago ; but the poet of " Sordello " and " The Ring and the Book,"—" Fifine at the Fair," nnd " Pippa Paeses," indicate extremes of his weakness and his strength — bas produced nothing since which, in either direction, chlls for a modification of the judgment. He calls Browning " tbe poet of psychology " — the most intellectual of poets — the most original and unequal of the poets of the time.

The population of Rome now numbers 401,044 souls. Russia pleads guilty to the charge of being " balf-civilised " by tbe action of tbe Imperial Academy of Arts at St. Petersburg*), in voting to exclude Jews from membeis. Outraged Art cries shame on such a vote. — Pilot. Here is a very fine sample of the productions of American life, as shaped by the public school system, telegraphed from Wooster, Ohio : " Hattie Sang and Minnie Snyder, aged 16, were to-day sentenced to

two years' imprisonment in the penetentiary. Recently they broke

into and robbed a store, and on being asked for an explanation said ,Athey wanted to do ' something devilish.' " — New York Freeman. In Cambridge, Mass., two weeks ago, a young coloured woman of distinguished ability, Miss Maiia Louiae Baldwin, was appointed principal of tbe Agassiz Public School. This is the way the coloured question is being settled in the North ; and it is tbe way the South must look forward to settling it. No barrier shall be raised against any American citizen on account of tbe colour of his skin.— Pilot.