Brownings Shorter Poems | Page 4

past the threats and terrors of malignant
nature, and the despair from accumulated memories of failure; death
itself is described in Evelyn Hope_, in _Prospice_, in Rabbi Ben

Ezra_, as a phase, a transit of the soul, wherein the material aspects and
the physical terrors disappear. In Browning's poetry, the one real and
permanent thing is the world of ideas, the world of the spirit. He is in
this one of the truest Platonists of modern times.
To many young readers this method in art comes like a revelation.
Other poets also portray the souls of men; but Browning does it more
obviously, more intentionally, more insistently. It is well, therefore, to
have read Browning. To learn to read him aright is to enter the gateway
to other good and great poetry.
Out of this predominating interest in the souls of men, and out of his
intense intellectual activity and scientific curiosity, grows one of
Browning's greatest defects. He is often led too far afield, into
intricacies and anomalies of character beyond the range of common
experience and sympathy. The criminal, the "moral idiot," belong to the
alienist rather than to the poet. The abnormalities of nature have no
place in the world of great art; they do not echo the common experience
of mankind. Already the interest is decreasing in that part of his poetry
which deals with such themes. Bishop Blougram and Mr. Sludge will
not take place in the ranks of artistic creations. Nor can the poet's
"special pleading" for such types, however ingenious it may be,
whatever philanthropy of soul it may imply, be regarded as justification.
Sometimes, indeed, the poet is led by his sympathy and his intellectual
ingenuity into defences that are inconsistent with his own standards of
the true and the beautiful.
The trait in Browning which appeals to the largest number of readers is
his strenuous optimism. He will admit no evil or sorrow too great to be
borne, too irrational to have some ultimate purpose of beneficence.
"There shall never be one lost good," says Abt Vogler. The suicides in
the morgue only serve to call forth his declaration:--

"My own hope is, a sun will pierce
The thickest cloud earth ever
stretched;

That what began best can't end worst,
Nor what God blessed once,
prove accurst."
He has no fear of death; he will face it gladly, in confidence of the life
beyond. His Grammarian is content to assume an order of things which
will justify in the next life his ceaseless toil in this, merely to learn how
to live. Rabbi Ben Ezra's old age is serene in the hope of the continuity
of life and the eternal development of character; he finds life good, and
the plan of things perfect. In brief, Browning accepts life as it is, and
believes it good, piecing out his conception of the goodness of life by
drawing without limit upon his hopes of the other world. With the
exception of a few poems like Andrea del Sarto, this is the unbroken
tone of his poetry. Calvinism, asceticism, pessimism in any form, he
rejects. He sustains his position not by argument, but by hope and
assertion. It is a matter of temperament: he is optimistic because he was
born so. Different from the serene optimism of Shakespeare's later life,
in The Tempest_ and _The Winter's Tale, in that it is
not, like
Shakespeare's, born of long and deep suffering from the contemplation
of the tragedies of human life, it bears, in that degree, less of solace and
conviction.
To Browning's temperament, also, may be ascribed another prominent
trait in his work. He steadily asserts the right of the individual to live
out his own life, to be himself in fulfilling his desires and aspirations.
The Statue and the Bust is the famous exposition of this doctrine. It is a
teaching that neither the poet's optimism nor his acumen has justified in
the minds of men. It is a return to the unbridled freedom of nature
advocated by Whitman and Rousseau; an extreme assertion of the value
of the individual man, and of unregulated democracy; an outgrowth, it
may be, of the robustness and originality of Browning's nature, and
interesting--not as a clew to his life, which conformed to that of
organized society--but as a clew to his independence of classical and
conventional forms in the exercise of his art.

Creative energy Browning has in high degree. With the poet's insight
into character and motives, the poet's grasp of the essential laws of
human life, the poet's vividness of imagination, he has portrayed a host
of types distinct from each other, true to life, strongly marked and
consistent. With fine dramatic instinct he has shown these characters in
true relation to the facts of life and to each other.