Life of Robert Browning [23]
He then explains that he has composed a dramatic poem,
and not a drama in the accepted sense; that he has not set forth
the phenomena of the mind or the passions by the operation
of persons and events, or by recourse to an external machinery of incidents
to create and evolve the crisis sought to be produced. Instead of this,
he remarks, "I have ventured to display somewhat minutely the mood itself
in its rise and progress, and have suffered the agency,
by which it is influenced and determined, to be generally discernible
in its effects alone, and subordinate throughout, if not altogether excluded:
and this for a reason. I have endeavoured to write a poem, not a drama."
A little further, he states that a work like "Paracelsus" depends,
for its success, immediately upon the intelligence and sympathy of the reader:
"Indeed, were my scenes stars, it must be his co-operating fancy which,
supplying all chasms, shall connect the scattered lights
into one constellation -- a Lyre or a Crown."
In the concluding paragraph of this note there is a point of interest --
the statement of the author's hope that the readers of "Paracelsus" will not
"be prejudiced against other productions which may follow in a more popular,
and perhaps less difficult form." From this it might fairly be inferred
that Browning had not definitively adopted his characteristic method:
that he was far from unwilling to gain the general ear: and that he was alert
to the difficulties of popularisation of poetry written on lines
similar to those of "Paracelsus". Nor would this inference be wrong:
for, as a matter of fact, the poet, immediately upon the publication
of "Paracelsus", determined to devote himself to poetic work which
should have so direct a contact with actual life that its appeal should reach
even to the most uninitiate in the mysteries and delights of verse.
In his early years Browning had always a great liking for walking in the dark.
At Camberwell he was wont to carry this love to the point of losing
many a night's rest. There was, in particular, a wood near Dulwich,
whither he was wont to go. There he would walk swiftly and eagerly
along the solitary and lightless byways, finding a potent stimulus
to imaginative thought in the happy isolation thus enjoyed,
with all the concurrent delights of natural things, the wind moving
like a spirit through the tree-branches, the drifting of poignant fragrances,
even in winter-tide, from herb and sappy bark, imperceptible almost
by the alertest sense in the day's manifold detachments. At this time, too,
he composed much in the open air. This he rarely, if ever, did in later life.
Not only many portions of "Paracelsus", but several scenes in "Strafford",
were enacted first in these midnight silences of the Dulwich woodland. Here,
too, as the poet once declared, he came to know the serene beauty of dawn:
for every now and again, after having read late, or written long,
he would steal quietly from the house, and walk till the morning twilight
graded to the pearl and amber of the new day.
As in childhood the glow of distant London had affected him to a pleasure
that was not without pain, perhaps to a pain rather that was a fine delirium,
so in his early manhood the neighbourhood of the huge city, felt in those
midnight walks of his, and apprehended more by the transmutive shudder
of reflected glare thrown fadingly upward against the stars,
than by any more direct vision or even far-borne indeterminate hum,
dominated his imagination. At that distance, in those circumstances,
humanity became more human. And with the thought, the consciousness
of this imperative kinship, arose the vague desire, the high resolve
to be no curious dilettante in novel literary experiments, but to compel
an interpretative understanding of this complex human environment.
Those who knew the poet intimately are aware of the loving regard
he always had for those nocturnal experiences: but perhaps few recognise
how much we owe to the subtle influences of that congenial