Introduction to Robert Browning [36]
Praxed's Church', and not admit that Browning is a master of blank verse in its most difficult form -- a form far more difficult than that of the epic blank verse of Milton, or the Idyllic blank verse of Tennyson, argumentative and freighted with thought, and, at the same time, almost chatty, as it is, and bearing in its course exquisitely poetical conceptions. The same may be said of much of the verse of `The Ring and the Book', especially that of the monologues of the Canon Caponsacchi, Pompilia, the Pope, and Count Guido Franceschini. But this by the way.
'Cleon' belongs to a grand group of poems, in which Browning shows himself to be, as I've said, the most essentially Christian of living poets -- the poet who, more emphatically than any of his contemporaries have done, has enforced the importance, the indispensableness of a new birth, the being born from above (a'/nwqen) as the condition not only of soul vitality and progress, but also of intellectual rectitude. In this group of poems are embodied the profoundest principles of education -- principles which it behoves the present generation of educators to look well to. The acquisition of knowledge is a good thing, the sharpening of the intellect is a good thing, the cultivation of philosophy is a good thing; but there is something of infinitely more importance than all these -- it is, the rectification, the adjustment, through that mysterious operation we call sympathy, of the unconscious personality, the hidden soul, which co-operates with the active powers, with the conscious intellect, and, as this unconscious personality is rectified or unrectified, determines the active powers, the conscious intellect, for righteousness or unrighteousness.
The attentive reader of Browning's poetry must soon discover how remarkably homogeneous it is in spirit. There are many authors, and great authors too, the reading of whose collected works gives the impression of their having "tried their hand" at many things. No such impression is derivable from the voluminous poetry of Browning. Wide as is its range, one great and homogeneous spirit pervades and animates it all, from the earliest to the latest. No other living poet gives so decided an assurance of having a BURDEN to deliver. An appropriate general title to his works would be, `The Burden of Robert Browning to the 19th Century'. His earliest poems show distinctly his ATTITUDE toward things. We see in what direction the poet has set his face -- what his philosophy of life is, what soul-life means with him, what regeneration means, what edification means in its deepest sense of building up within us the spiritual temple. And if he had left this world after writing no more than those poems of his youth, `Pauline' and `Paracelsus', a very fair `ex-pede-Herculem' estimate might have been made of the possibilities which he has since so grandly realized.
III. Mr. Browning's "Obscurity".
It was long the FASHION -- and that fashion has not yet passed away -- with skimming readers and perfunctory critics to charge Mr. Browning with being "wilfully obscure, unconscientiously careless, and perversely harsh."
There are readers and readers. One class, constituting, perhaps, not more than one-tenth of one per cent, or a thousandth part of the whole number, "read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest"; the remaining ninety-nine and nine-tenths per cent, through a habit of loose and indiscriminate reading, are unequal to the sustained concentration of mind demanded by the higher poetry, the language of which is characterized by a severe economy of expression -- a closeness of texture, resulting from the elliptical energy of highly impassioned thought.
Reading is, perhaps, more superficial at the present day than it ever was before. There is an almost irresistible temptation to reverse the "multum legendum esse non multa" of Quintilian, overwhelmed as we are with books, magazines, and newspapers, which no man can number, and of which thousands and tens of thousands of minds endeavor to gobble up all they
'Cleon' belongs to a grand group of poems, in which Browning shows himself to be, as I've said, the most essentially Christian of living poets -- the poet who, more emphatically than any of his contemporaries have done, has enforced the importance, the indispensableness of a new birth, the being born from above (a'/nwqen) as the condition not only of soul vitality and progress, but also of intellectual rectitude. In this group of poems are embodied the profoundest principles of education -- principles which it behoves the present generation of educators to look well to. The acquisition of knowledge is a good thing, the sharpening of the intellect is a good thing, the cultivation of philosophy is a good thing; but there is something of infinitely more importance than all these -- it is, the rectification, the adjustment, through that mysterious operation we call sympathy, of the unconscious personality, the hidden soul, which co-operates with the active powers, with the conscious intellect, and, as this unconscious personality is rectified or unrectified, determines the active powers, the conscious intellect, for righteousness or unrighteousness.
The attentive reader of Browning's poetry must soon discover how remarkably homogeneous it is in spirit. There are many authors, and great authors too, the reading of whose collected works gives the impression of their having "tried their hand" at many things. No such impression is derivable from the voluminous poetry of Browning. Wide as is its range, one great and homogeneous spirit pervades and animates it all, from the earliest to the latest. No other living poet gives so decided an assurance of having a BURDEN to deliver. An appropriate general title to his works would be, `The Burden of Robert Browning to the 19th Century'. His earliest poems show distinctly his ATTITUDE toward things. We see in what direction the poet has set his face -- what his philosophy of life is, what soul-life means with him, what regeneration means, what edification means in its deepest sense of building up within us the spiritual temple. And if he had left this world after writing no more than those poems of his youth, `Pauline' and `Paracelsus', a very fair `ex-pede-Herculem' estimate might have been made of the possibilities which he has since so grandly realized.
III. Mr. Browning's "Obscurity".
It was long the FASHION -- and that fashion has not yet passed away -- with skimming readers and perfunctory critics to charge Mr. Browning with being "wilfully obscure, unconscientiously careless, and perversely harsh."
There are readers and readers. One class, constituting, perhaps, not more than one-tenth of one per cent, or a thousandth part of the whole number, "read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest"; the remaining ninety-nine and nine-tenths per cent, through a habit of loose and indiscriminate reading, are unequal to the sustained concentration of mind demanded by the higher poetry, the language of which is characterized by a severe economy of expression -- a closeness of texture, resulting from the elliptical energy of highly impassioned thought.
Reading is, perhaps, more superficial at the present day than it ever was before. There is an almost irresistible temptation to reverse the "multum legendum esse non multa" of Quintilian, overwhelmed as we are with books, magazines, and newspapers, which no man can number, and of which thousands and tens of thousands of minds endeavor to gobble up all they