Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher | Page 5

system, by means of the
principle from which he makes his departure.
The first of these difficulties arises from the extent and variety of his
work. He was prodigal of poetic ideas, and wrote for fifty years on
nature, art, and man, like a magnificent spendthrift of spiritual treasures.
So great a store of knowledge lay at his hand, so real and informed with
sympathy, that we can scarcely find any great literature which he has
not ransacked, any phase of life which is not represented in his poems.
All kinds of men and women, in every station in life, and at every stage
of evil and goodness, crowd his pages. There are few forms of human
character he has not studied, and each individual he has so caught at the
supreme moment of his life, and in the hardest stress of circumstance,

that the inmost working of his nature is revealed. The wealth is
bewildering, and it is hard to follow the central thought, "the imperial
chord, which steadily underlies the accidental mists of music springing
thence."[A]
[Footnote A: Fifine at the Fair.]
A second and still graver difficulty lies in the fact that his poetry, as he
repeatedly insisted, is "always dramatic in principle, and so many
utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine."[B] In his earlier
works, especially, Browning is creative rather than reflective, a Maker
rather than a Seer; and his creations stand aloof from him, working out
their fate in an outer world. We often lose the poet in the imaginative
characters, into whom he penetrates with his keen artistic intuition, and
within whom he lies as a necessity revealing itself in their actions and
words. It is not easy anywhere to separate the elements, so that we can
say with certainty, "Here I catch the poet, there lies his material." The
identification of the work and worker is too intimate, and the
realization of the imaginary personage is too complete.
[Footnote B: Pref. to Pauline, 1888.]
In regard to the dramatic interpretation of his poetry, Browning has
manifested a peculiar sensitiveness. In his Preface to Pauline and in
several of his poems--notably The Mermaid, the House, and the
_Shop_--he explicitly cuts himself free from his work. He knew that
direct self-revealment on the part of the poet violates the spirit of the
drama. "With this same key Shakespeare unlocked his heart," said
Wordsworth; "Did Shakespeare?" characteristically answers Browning,
"If so, the less Shakespeare he!" And of himself he asks:
"Which of you did I enable Once to slip inside my breast, There to
catalogue and label What I like least, what love best, Hope and fear,
believe and doubt of, Seek and shun, respect--deride? Who has right to
make a rout of Rarities he found inside?"[A]
[Footnote A: At the Mermaid.]

He repudiates all kinship with Byron and his subjective ways, and
refuses to be made king by the hands which anointed him. "He will not
give his woes an airing, and has no plague that claims respect." Both as
man and poet, in virtue of the native, sunny, outer-air healthiness of his
character, every kind of subjectivity is repulsive to him. He hands to his
readers "his work, his scroll, theirs to take or leave: his soul he proffers
not." For him "shop was shop only"; and though he dealt in gems, and
throws
"You choice of jewels, every one, Good, better, best, star, moon, and
sun,"[A]
[Footnote A: Shop.]
he still lived elsewhere, and had "stray thoughts and fancies fugitive"
not meant for the open market. The poems in which Browning has
spoken without the disguise of another character are very few. There
are hardly more than two or three of much importance which can be
considered as directly reflecting his own ideas, namely, Christmas Eve
and _Easter Day, La Saisiaz_, and _One Word More_--unless, spite of
the poet's warning, we add Pauline.
But, although the dramatic element in Browning's poetry renders it
difficult to construct his character from his works, while this is
comparatively easy in the case of Wordsworth or Byron; and although
it throws a shade of uncertainty on every conclusion we might draw as
to any specific doctrine held by him, still Browning lives in a certain
atmosphere, and looks at his characters through a medium, whose
subtle influence makes all his work indisputably his. The light he
throws on his men and women is not the unobtrusive light of day,
which reveals objects, but not itself. Though a true dramatist, he is not
objective like Shakespeare and Scott, whose characters seem never to
have had an author. The reader feels, rather, that Browning himself
attends him through all the sights and wonders of the world of man; he
never escapes the sense of the presence of the poet's