An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry. Robert Browning
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Название: An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry

Автор: Robert Browning

Издательство: Bookwire

Жанр: Языкознание

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isbn: 4057664654410

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СКАЧАТЬ bearing on man’s higher life, and which marks the height of the spiritual tide reached in his poetry, is, that the highest order of manhood is a well-poised, harmoniously operating duality of the active or intellectual or discursive, and the passive or spiritually sensitive. This is the idea which INFORMS his poem of ‘The Princess’. It is prominent in ‘In Memoriam’ and in ‘The Idylls of the King’. In ‘The Princess’, the Prince, speaking of the relations of the sexes, says:—

      “in the long years liker must they grow;

       The man be more of woman, she of man;

       He gain in sweetness and in moral height,

       Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world;

       She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care,

       Nor lose the childlike in the larger mind;

       Till at the last she set herself to man,

       Like perfect music unto noble words;

       And so these twain, upon the skirts of Time,

       Sit side by side, full-summ’d in all their powers,

       Dispensing harvest, sowing the To-be,

       Self-reverent each and reverencing each,

       Distinct in individualities,

       But like each other ev’n as those who love.

       Then comes the statelier Eden back to men:

       Then reign the world’s great bridals, chaste and calm:

       Then springs the crowning race of humankind.”

      To state briefly the cardinal Tennysonian idea, man must realize a WOMANLY MANLINESS, and woman a MANLY WOMANLINESS.

      Tennyson presents to us his ideal man in the 109th section of ‘In Memoriam’. It is descriptive of his friend, Arthur Henry Hallam. All that is most characteristic of Tennyson, even his Englishness, is gathered up in this poem of six stanzas. It is interesting to meet with such a representative and comprehensive bit in a great poet.

      “HEART-AFFLUENCE in discursive talk

       From household fountains never dry;

       The CRITIC CLEARNESS of an eye,

       That saw through all the Muses’ walk;

       SERAPHIC INTELLECT AND FORCE

       TO SEIZE AND THROW THE DOUBTS OF MAN;

       IMPASSIONED LOGIC, which outran

       The bearer in its fiery course;

       HIGH NATURE AMOROUS OF THE GOOD,

       BUT TOUCH’D WITH NO ASCETIC GLOOM;

       And passions pure in snowy bloom

       Through all the years of April blood.”

      The first two verses of this stanza also characterize the King Arthur of the ‘Idylls of the King’. *1* In the next stanza we have the poet’s institutional Englishness:—

      “A love of freedom rarely felt,

       Of freedom in her regal seat

       Of England; not the school-boy heat,

       The blind hysterics of the Celt;

       And MANHOOD FUSED WITH FEMALE GRACE *2*

       In such a sort, the child would twine

       A trustful hand, unask’d, in thine,

       And find his comfort in thy face;

       All these have been, and thee mine eyes

       Have look’d on; if they look’d in vain,

       My shame is greater who remain,

       Nor let thy wisdom make me wise.”

      —*1* See ‘The Holy Grail’, the concluding thirty-two verses, beginning: “And spake I not too truly, O my Knights”, and ending “ye have seen that ye have seen”.

      *2* The idea of ‘The Princess’. —

      Tennyson’s genius was early trained by the skeptical philosophy of the age. All his poetry shows this. The ‘In Memoriam’ may almost be said to be the poem of nineteenth century scepticism. To this scepticism he has applied an “all-subtilizing intellect”, and has translated it into the poetical “concrete”, with a rare artistic skill, and more than this, has subjected it to the spiritual instincts and apperceptions of the feminine side of his nature and made it vassal to a larger faith. But it is, after all, not the vital faith which Browning’s poetry exhibits, a faith PROCEEDING DIRECTLY FROM THE SPIRITUAL MAN. It is rather the faith expressed by Browning’s Bishop Blougram:—

      “With me faith means perpetual unbelief

       Kept quiet like the snake ’neath Michael’s foot,

       Who stands firm just because he feels it writhe.”

      And Tennyson, in picturing to us in the Idylls, the passage of the soul “from the great deep to the great deep”, appears to have felt it necessary to the completion of that picture (or why did he do it?), that he should bring out that doubt at the last moment. The dying Arthur is made to say:—

      “I am going a long way

       With these thou seest—if indeed I go

       (For all my mind is clouded with a doubt)—

       To the island-valley of Avilion”; etc.

      Tennyson’s poetry is, in fact, an expression of the highest sublimation of the scepticism which came out of the eighteenth century, which invoked the authority of the sensualistic philosophy of Locke, and has since been fostered by the science of the nineteenth; while Browning’s poetry is a decided protest against, and a reactionary product of, that scepticism, that infidel philosophy (infidel as to the transcendental), and has CLOSED with it and borne away the palm.

      The key-note of his poetry is struck in ‘Paracelsus’, published in 1835, in his twenty-third year, and, with the exception of ‘Pauline’ published in 1833, the earliest of his compositions: Paracelsus says (and he who knows Browning knows it to be substantially his own creed):—

      “Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise

       From outward things, whate’er you may believe:

       There is an inmost centre in us all,

       Where truth abides in fulness; and around

       Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in,

       This perfect, clear perception—which is truth;

       A baffling and perverting carnal mesh

       Blinds it, and makes all error: СКАЧАТЬ