34-2
NOTES AND QUERIES. [ii s. v. MAT . 1912.
He knew better,/ perhaps, than any other
poet ever did the worth, the depth, of a
mood, an hour ; and into the very being
of a man or woman, caught thus in a chosen
hour of intense reflection, of feeling usually
retrospective rather than immediate, he
could astonishingly transform himself. Prac-
tically all his best-known and greatest poems
are the product of his genius working in this
particular way.
His imagination being of this order, and busied thus with the profounder depths of personality, it is not surprising to find that the relation of human personality to the unseen is always present to him. He sometimes evinces an apprehension of this that is almost mystical, as when he speaks of " a Hand always above my shoulder," and in the working out of the great simile of the cup in ' Rabbi Ben Ezra '- " to slake Thy thirst. ' ' Tn what he discerned of it lay his message to the world already often recounted. However much in practical life he may have enjoyed and prized the success that came to him and the comfort of being well-to-do, intellectually he was always clear-sighted about such things. He had an almost Dantesque realization of the hatefulness of avarice : in none of his work is moral horror so acute as in ' Gold Hair.' His detachment was of the type which, raised to a higher poM-er and carried into everyday affairs, makes the saint. I believe it is true to say that of his greater contemporaries Newman alone had just this peculiar gift. But here, too, the differ- ence between imagination and experience makes itself felt. Thus no one has seen the glory of failure more truly and finely than Browning saw it, yet somehow also he betrays that fundamentally he is theorizing : he has not been through it or not through any distressing external instance of it - himself. This is not meant as disparage- ment ; on the contrary, given his tempera- ment, it was probably a necessary condition of his achieving just what he did. The poet, to be efficacious, is hardly bound to follow Plato's advice to the physician, and himself endure all the troubles he sings of ; they might all too likely disable him, spoil his song. Indeed, the aloofness of Browning is of itself a charm his poetry not always specially conspicuous for charm could ill bear to lose. He was set from the first, as it were, in a hitherto undiscovered angle, and his descriptions of the world seen thence make it appear a novel place. We are told that he tempts to imitation, yet can hardly be imitated ; and in both cases
it is the strangeness of the angle from which
he sees things that does it. It is a matter
that goes beyond the use of words ; it is
that we cannot hitch ourselves quite up
into his standpoint, or only for the moment-
while he grips us.
Inevitably he sees people all separate as one and one and one ; and inevitably, without making them all selfish, he does make them all solitary at the core, and egoistic self-explaining, self-admiring, self- pitying. Oddly enough, in ' The Ring and the Book' the only character which, virtuous or vicious, has not this self for centre, is Dominus Hyacinthus de I'Arch- angelis, whose thoughts rush off to his- Cinuccio in every breathing-space as readily as Pompilia's do, not to Caponsacchi or her babe, but to what she has felt about her babe or about Caponsacchi. Lovely as she is, I believe a discerning reader might have guessed that Pompilia had never passed Mrs. Browning's criticism ! It is through the strength and peculiar character of this individualistic tendency that, as it seems to me, Browning will first come to be realized by us as belonging to a bygone generation^ We may have writers to the full as indi- vidualistic as he, but they will become they are already becoming more and more influenced by socialistic tendencies, and thereby compelled, whether in sympathy or even in violent antagonism, to interpret their characters by means of these, to bring the two into some sort of relation. The- attitude towards religion, the comparative emphasis on different vices and virtues, above all the ironies of lyric and dramatic poetry, will thereby be changed.
If we grow in part estranged from Brow n- ing's view of men we shall assuredly retain our affection for what he made us see in nature, and our delighted possession of those " moments " in his work when what he said and what he saw were fused into a perfection of unity which few who strove to say so much have achieved. Is there any record of how far Browning thought in words ? On the whole and more and more apparently so as we pass from the earlier to the later his work looks like that of a mind in which the first jet of thought, however small and simple, is not a sentence or an exclamation, but an abruptly visualized picture, diagram, or, better, symbol. Then comes the difficulty, sometimes the immense difficulty, of translat- ing it into words. That in certain states of nervousness he had no command of words we know from his inability to make any sort of public speech a circumstance which,
