BOOKS.

MR. STOPFORD BROOKE'S BROWNING STTJDIES.t THE reckless praising of indifferent books is the great weak- ness of modern literary criticism, and this fault is not mended by occasional and uninstructed onslaughts made for variety's sake on good books. The need for sternness in criticism, for discrimination, and for the enunciation of principles that shall guide the appetite of the immense reading public of the present day is obvious for many reasons, but perhaps for none more than this, that rare books of supereacellent quality are submerged in the neglect of contemporary literature that must obtain in an age when anything is good enough to be praised. This volume dealing with the poetry of Mr. Robert Browning is an instance of a book that requires special and peculiar notice at the hands of the public by reason of its high literary value, its acute insight into the principles of literary production, and its judicial estimate of one of the greatest of our poets; but we doubt if it will receive such notice, since the cheapening of praise has dulled the public taste for work • Copyright in the U.S.A.

t The Poetry of Robert Brotening. By Stopford A. Brooke. London : Isbister and Co. 1.10e. ed.]

of the highest quality. Mr. Stopford Brooke is an acute and subtle, but also a laborious, thinker; he disdains any of the base currency of phrase and ephemeral fashions of style that are useful in securing a circulation ; he writes in lucid and un- mistakable English ; and he is here dealing with an author who requires elucidation, criticism, and condemnation as well as praise. We take it that Mr. Browning and the British public (who loved him not) are fortunate in securing these lofty and untrammelled studies in literary criticism, which deal with the work of the poet through the agency of first principles. The eighteen critical essays contained in this fascinating volume of five hundred pages exhibit in close analysis the attitude of the poet towards Nature, human life, art, love, and the other

passions; lay before us in elaborate detail the great poems, " Sordello," "The Ring and the Book," and "Balaustion"; and

help us to realise the wealth of poetic nature that evolved those marvellous "imaginative representations" (such as " Caliban on Setebos ") and those dramatic romances (such as the "Flight of the Duchess") which are, and must ever be, the despair of all lesser poets and the joy of all poetic natures.

It will be convenient to consider some of Mr. Stopford Brooke's views on those matters, and to see how far the views of the critic are open to criticism. In order to do so effectively it will be well to set out carefully the points on which he finds that his poet is open both to adverse criticism and stern con- demnation :-

"His composition was rarely sufficiently careful. It was broken

up, overcrowded His freedom ran into undue license ; and he seems to be over-conscious, even proud, of his fantastical way

of writing. His individuality runs riot in his style He had not enough reverence for his art, and little for the public.

It is all very well for his students to say that he is not obscure; he is. . It is by his style. By that he makes what is easy difficult. . . . . No sensible person would have asked Browning to change his style, but would have asked him not to

exaggerate it into its defects. . . . Browning was far too care- less of his melody. He frequently sacrificed it, and needlessly, to his thought."

So much for style, melody, and composition. In a consider- able portion of his work the poet sacrificed one or other, or all, of these to the untempered whimsicalities of his poetic per- sonality. Of that there can be no doubt. But the work left

when the deliberately marred poetry is omitted is still vast in bulk and exquisite in quality. So far, then, in the matter of general adverse criticism we are with Mr. Stopford Brooke. We are again with hint for the most part in his severe attack on Browning's purely intellectual poetry. We are inclined to

admit that intellectual argumentative poetry is not really poetry at all, and that the brilliant cleverness of work like

"Mr. Sludge the Medium," "Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, the Saviour of Society," and "Bishop Blougram's Apology" are the work of a scientific philosopher, and not of an artist. As Mr. Stopford Brooke says, "poetry claims to see and feel the truth at once. When the poet does not assert that claim, and act on it, he is becoming faithless to his art." It is indeed remarkable that Browning should have been able,

in spite of this growing fault, to make "The Ring and the Book" the great poem that it indubitably is. This work was, as his critic points out, the turning-point of the poet's career. In it the struggle between pure intellect and true poetic imagination is in progress, and after its publication the intellect for a time possessed unbridled freedom, and pure poetry with its handmaid Nature is forgotten. To a great extent this is true, though we think the break with Nature was not so absolute as Mr. Stopford Brooke asserts. Even "Red Cotton Night-Cap Country" has passages of natural poetry. The little village, "best loved of sea-coast-nook-ful Normandy," is sketched with a poet's hand; while the "Inn Album," in which the poet has wilfully flung aside his singing' robes, opens with a wonderful sketch of English scenery :—

" He leans into a living glory-bath Of air and light where seems to float and move

The wooded watered country, hill and dale And steel-bright thread of stream, a-smoke with mist, A-sparkle with May-morning, diamond drift 0' the sun-touched dew."

The critic surely should have quoted this in his summary of the somewhat few direct references to English scenery in Browning's poetry. Such references are perhaps more

frequent than Mr. Stopford Brooke thinks. He quotes a late- passage from the "Inn Album" "which is interesting because

it is the third, and only the third, reference to English scenery in the multitude of Browning's verses. The first is in . Pauline'; the second is that poem, 'Oh, to be in

England." This seems to us wrong. " Pauline " is English all through, and the above passage is noteworthy. The very apparent break with Nature in these poems, more- over, seems rather to lie in the universal depths of human nature than in the shortcomings of this particular poet. It is youth and age that babble of green fields, and we find that even so supremely poetic a nature as that of Mr. Ruskin abandoned in middle life all things for social science. The same fact is almost certainly true of Shakespeare himself, and, we believe, of every great poet.

This leads us to Browning's treatment of Nature, a subject on which we find ourselves in some disagreement with Mr. Stopford Brooke, who considers that Nature and this poet "are sometimes at one, and sometimes at two; but seldom the first, and generally the second The universe of what we call matter in all its forms, which is the definition of Nature as I speak of it here, is one form to Browning of the creative joy of God; we are another form of the same joy." The phenomena of Nature stand apart from us: "They live their own vast, indifferent life ; and we see, like spectators, what they are doing, and we do not understand what we see." In a word, Browning did not believe at all, while Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Tennyson seriously believed, in the subjectivity of Nature. That Mr. Stopford Brooke makes out a strong case for Browning's belief in the separateness of Nature from man goes without saying; but we are not convinced. The poet's mind was impregnated with Jewish philosophy, and this stands out in considerable contrast against the Kantian and Berkeleian philosophy that so strongly coloured English poetry of the nineteenth century. But we submit that the contra st between the two philosophies is more apparent than real. "They shall perish, but thou shalt endure," seems the common ground of all philosophies that contrast Nature and the personality of man, whether the phenomena of Nature be regarded either subjectively or objectively. The uses of Nature to man, the way in which Nature shall help forward the soul of man, underlie the conception of Nature that all the great poets have given us. In order to make this conception live the poets have chosen different formulae ; but the root idea is the same. "Memora- bilia," which at first sight seems to make out Mr. Stopford Brooke's case, is really against it. The great drear moor yields its handbreadth of usefulness. Then, and not till then, the poet can forget "the blank miles round about." "A Grammarian's Funeral" emphasises the same point. The man who decided not to Live but Know must dwell upon the summit :— " Here—here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form, Lightnings are loosened, Stars come and go ! Let joy break with the storm, Peace let the dew send !

Lofty designs must close in like effects : Loftily lying, Leave him—still loftier than the world suspects, Living and dying."

There, we believe, is the poet's philosophy of Nature. Nature is the mechanism of God to project the soul "on its lone way,"— "As the bird wings and sings, Let us cry 'All good things Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, Than flesh helps soul! " We have discussed Browning's attitude towards Nature at some, though necessarily quite insufficient, length, as we believe that it is the particular attitude that we have indicated Which will secure him an impregnable position as one of the greatest of the English poets. He is one of the two or three great poets who have seen the relationship of God, Nature, and human life largely and sanely. In this he approaches nearer to Shakespeare—nearer despite his defects of style and form and melody—than any other poet has done. In his extraordinary power of recreating a past epoch, and of actually mating livid Personalities that in very deed breathe and

move, he was beyond all doubt a poet, a maker. "It is by this combination of the subjective and objective imagination," laYs Mr. Stopford Brooke, "that he draws into some dim aPProach to Shakespeare" No historian . or novelist has ever made the dawn of the Renalss. ance, the Renaissance itself and its developments, live in the waY that Robert Browning has done. Most histories of the Renaissance and George Eliot's Romola by contrast prove this. Mr. Stopford Brooke shows how in " Sordello" the poet has made the men and women and the moving scene of the early thirteenth century throb with life once more. As we read Browning we find that this was no exceptional case. "He could place us with ease and truth at Corinth, Athens, or Rome, in Paris, Vienna, or London; and wherever we go with him we are at home." In poem after poem we follow the growth of the Renaissance. In the " Grammarian " and in " Fra Lippo Lippi " the dawn came up from the night with a cleansing wind. With "Andrea del Sarto " we see the prime noon reached and passed, and when "the Bishop orders his tomL at St. Praxed's Church," when Galuppi plays his Toccata at Venice, we know that for the time the work of the Grammarian and Lippo Lippi is done and seemingly marred. The reforms of the sixteenth century peer out in the meditation of Johannes Agricola. Slowly the poet moves down into modern times with his gallery of portraits and his ever-glowing picture of the age. All through, the theme is man,—led, punished, raised by Nature, and so made fit foi God.

That Browning will be more and more read as days go by we have little doubt. His extraordinary gifts of portraiture, his piercing insight into the workings of the human soul, his love of, his belief in, humanity, his unfaltering faith in the immortality of man and in the perfect love and justice of God, appeal to us all in a way that makes us turn to him despite the many thousands of lines that he left un- blotted or unpolished, despite his disregard of that mechanism of art which, when he chose, he used with such effect. The man who teaches us in all sincerity to welcome each rebuff of life, to look always, not down, but up ; who insists that "man partly is and wholly hopes to be," and believes in no mute immortality, but that we shall "fight on, fare ever there as here," is a man too near the divine aspirations of mankind for man to forget him. Therefore we welcome Mr. Stopford Brooke's admirable analysis and stirring criticism of Browning's incomparable work, and venture to express the hope that having now completed full and elaborate studies of Tennyson and Browning, he will filch time from his other work to give the world some generalised essays on the functions of criticism.