Life of Robert Browning [13]
earliest record of these utterances
is that which appeared in the `Century Magazine' in 1881.
From this source, and from what the poet himself said at various times
and in various ways, we know that just about the time Balzac,
after years of apparently waste labour, was beginning to forecast
the Titanic range of the `Comedie Humaine', Browning planned
"a series of monodramatic epics, narratives of the life of typical souls --
a gigantic scheme at which a Victor Hugo or a Lope de Vega
would start back aghast."
Already he had set himself to the analysis of the human soul
in its manifold aspects, already he had recognised that for him at least
there was no other study worthy of a lifelong devotion.
In a sense he has fulfilled this early dream: at any rate
we have a unique series of monodramatic poems, illustrative of typical souls.
In another sense, the major portion of Browning's life-work is, collectively,
one monodramatic "epic". He is himself a type of the subtle, restless,
curious, searching modern age of which he is the profoundest interpreter.
Through a multitude of masks he, the typical soul, speaks,
and delivers himself of a message which could not be presented
emphatically enough as the utterance of a single individual.
He is a true dramatic poet, though not in the sense in which Shakespeare is.
Shakespeare and his kindred project themselves into the lives
of their imaginary personages: Browning pays little heed to external life,
or to the exigencies of action, and projects himself
into the minds of his characters.
In a word, Shakespeare's method is to depict a human soul in action,
with all the pertinent play of circumstance, while Browning's is to portray
the processes of its mental and spiritual development: as he said
in his dedicatory preface to "Sordello", "little else is worth study."
The one electrifies us with the outer and dominant actualities;
the other flashes upon our mental vision the inner, complex,
shaping potentialities. The one deals with life dynamically,
the other with life as Thought. Both methods are compassed by art.
Browning, who is above all modern writers the poet of dramatic situations,
is surpassed by many of inferior power in continuity of dramatic sequence.
His finest work is in his dramatic poems, rather than in his dramas.
He realised intensely the value of quintessential moments,
as when the Prefect in "The Return of the Druses" thrusts aside the arras,
muttering that for the first time he enters without a sense of imminent doom,
"no draught coming as from a sepulchre" saluting him,
while that moment the dagger of the assassin plunges to his heart:
or, further in the same poem, when Anael, coming to denounce Djabal
as an impostor, is overmastered by her tyrannic love, and falls dead
with the too bitter freight of her emotion, though not till
she has proclaimed him the God by her single worshipping cry, `Hakeem!' --
or, once more, in "The Ring and the Book", where, with the superbest close
of any dramatic poem in our literature, the wretched Guido,
at the point of death, cries out in the last extremity
not upon God or the Virgin, but upon his innocent and murdered wife --
"Abate, -- Cardinal, -- Christ, -- Maria, -- God, . . .
Pompilia, will you let them murder me?" Thus we can imagine Browning,
with his characteristic perception of the profound significance
of a circumstance or a single word even, having written of the knocking
at the door in "Macbeth", or having used, with all its marvellous
cumulative effect, the word `wrought' towards the close of "Othello",
when the Moor cries in his bitterness of soul, "But being wrought,
perplext in the extreme": we can imagine this, and yet could not credit
the suggestion that even the author of "The Ring and the Book"
could by any possibility have composed the two most moving tragedies
writ in our tongue.
In the late autumn of 1832 Browning wrote a poem of singular
promise and beauty, though immature in thought and crude in expression.*
Thirty-four years later he included
is that which appeared in the `Century Magazine' in 1881.
From this source, and from what the poet himself said at various times
and in various ways, we know that just about the time Balzac,
after years of apparently waste labour, was beginning to forecast
the Titanic range of the `Comedie Humaine', Browning planned
"a series of monodramatic epics, narratives of the life of typical souls --
a gigantic scheme at which a Victor Hugo or a Lope de Vega
would start back aghast."
Already he had set himself to the analysis of the human soul
in its manifold aspects, already he had recognised that for him at least
there was no other study worthy of a lifelong devotion.
In a sense he has fulfilled this early dream: at any rate
we have a unique series of monodramatic poems, illustrative of typical souls.
In another sense, the major portion of Browning's life-work is, collectively,
one monodramatic "epic". He is himself a type of the subtle, restless,
curious, searching modern age of which he is the profoundest interpreter.
Through a multitude of masks he, the typical soul, speaks,
and delivers himself of a message which could not be presented
emphatically enough as the utterance of a single individual.
He is a true dramatic poet, though not in the sense in which Shakespeare is.
Shakespeare and his kindred project themselves into the lives
of their imaginary personages: Browning pays little heed to external life,
or to the exigencies of action, and projects himself
into the minds of his characters.
In a word, Shakespeare's method is to depict a human soul in action,
with all the pertinent play of circumstance, while Browning's is to portray
the processes of its mental and spiritual development: as he said
in his dedicatory preface to "Sordello", "little else is worth study."
The one electrifies us with the outer and dominant actualities;
the other flashes upon our mental vision the inner, complex,
shaping potentialities. The one deals with life dynamically,
the other with life as Thought. Both methods are compassed by art.
Browning, who is above all modern writers the poet of dramatic situations,
is surpassed by many of inferior power in continuity of dramatic sequence.
His finest work is in his dramatic poems, rather than in his dramas.
He realised intensely the value of quintessential moments,
as when the Prefect in "The Return of the Druses" thrusts aside the arras,
muttering that for the first time he enters without a sense of imminent doom,
"no draught coming as from a sepulchre" saluting him,
while that moment the dagger of the assassin plunges to his heart:
or, further in the same poem, when Anael, coming to denounce Djabal
as an impostor, is overmastered by her tyrannic love, and falls dead
with the too bitter freight of her emotion, though not till
she has proclaimed him the God by her single worshipping cry, `Hakeem!' --
or, once more, in "The Ring and the Book", where, with the superbest close
of any dramatic poem in our literature, the wretched Guido,
at the point of death, cries out in the last extremity
not upon God or the Virgin, but upon his innocent and murdered wife --
"Abate, -- Cardinal, -- Christ, -- Maria, -- God, . . .
Pompilia, will you let them murder me?" Thus we can imagine Browning,
with his characteristic perception of the profound significance
of a circumstance or a single word even, having written of the knocking
at the door in "Macbeth", or having used, with all its marvellous
cumulative effect, the word `wrought' towards the close of "Othello",
when the Moor cries in his bitterness of soul, "But being wrought,
perplext in the extreme": we can imagine this, and yet could not credit
the suggestion that even the author of "The Ring and the Book"
could by any possibility have composed the two most moving tragedies
writ in our tongue.
In the late autumn of 1832 Browning wrote a poem of singular
promise and beauty, though immature in thought and crude in expression.*
Thirty-four years later he included