BOOKS
A prose Browning
John Stewart Collis
To start with we can say at once that Mr Donald Thomas has here given us the Works as well as the Man. Too often in biography the work is hidden by the man, and the man by the myth. The worst case is that of the Brontes where a kind of monster stands between us and their work — a Brontesaurus. The Bloomsbury group has also suffered, and the members will never be able to keep the Woolf from the door. Too much has been written about Words- worth and his group. Browning has fared better, and he has achieved the bonus of having the great G. K. Chesterton on his side (in the English Men of Letters series).
Mr Thomas's study, which is immensely thorough in its searching detail, is unusual in this respect — that we see Browning, not plain but highly-coloured, as he was seen by his contemporaries. It is no mean achieve- ment. If we read carefully we live with him and his work during the 19th century, so different from our own. It was marvellous in those days to be a talented literary man, even when only a promising one. You didn't have to be readable at first. No one could read Sartor Resartus, but that was no hindrance to Carlyle's popularity in the salons. The fact that Browning sold only one copy of his first book didn't matter; and though only two lines of his Sordello were understood, the first line which read — `Who will, may hear Sordello's story told,' and the last line which read — `Who would, has heard Sordello's story told,' (both statements untrue, declared Tenny- son), this didn't prevent Browning from be- ing accepted as a literary lion who roared with great effect.
Mr Thomas takes us through the whole of Browning's life: the qualities he inherited from his parents, his education, his early reading, his prodigious cleverness and frightening energy, his friendships, his celebrated love story, his reputation as a diner-out, and much else besides, all linked with his work as it was published. Mr Thomas is soaked in Browning but he makes no attempt to tone down his faults. This is what Miss Gladstone had to say: `He talks everybody down with his dreadful voice, and always places his person in such disagreeable proximity with yours and puffs and blows and spits in your face. I tried to think of Abt Vogler but it was of no use he couldn't ever have written it.' There is much evidence in support of this, and also of his monologues that monopolised con- versation, and of unseemly rages against anyone who dared to disparage his poetry. There was much that was savage and un- civilised about Browning, and much of the pettiness and egotism of the spoilt child. But of course that is only part of the truth, otherwise he would not have kept many life-long devoted friends, including Carlyle (though perhaps not Jane Carlyle, who ask- ed whether Sordello was a man, or a city, or a book).
It is the measure of how little we can judge any human being, that we would not expect such a man to be a good husband: indeed we would assume the reverse. Yet he
turned out to be one of the most noble husbands on record. We may note two facts mentioned by Mr Thomas, for they tell us a lot. When the Brownings returned to England, after five years in Italy, the first thing that he did was `to go to St Marylebone and, kneeling, to kiss the stones of the church in which he had mar- ried his wife.' After her death, he found himself one day on the same boat as Tenny- son when crossing the Channel. He could not speak to his friend, but sought out a corner of the ship, pulling his hat down low enough to conceal his face. The point about Mr Thomas's subtitle — `A Life Within a Life' — is to suggest two Brownings, the public show-off, and the private solitary. But since most people are two people at the least, we need scarcely press the point. After Elizabeth's death he dined out every night. But before their marriage he had been just as gregarious, and a dandy with a fancy waistcoat and white gloves. His mar- riage provided an interregnum. His wife complained that he never went out at all and that she could not persuade him to replace his shabby shoes.
Mr Thomas tells us a surprising fact relating to Browning's method of composi- tion in 1852. At that time, at the age of 40,
he was so dissatisfied with his literary out" put while in Florence that he determined, come what might, that he would write a poem every day. A painter can make resolu- tions of that kind: Turner can go abroad and return with hundreds of marvellous sketches. A poet would be lucky if he had created three good poems, if any at all. Yet we come in for a surprise with regard to Browning on this occasion. His New Year Resolution in 1852 produced, on 1 January, Women and Roses; on 2 January Love Among the Ruins; and, on 3 January, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Catne- The first is a pleasing piece of verse which could be set to music; the third is a typical example of Browning's illusive allusion which leaves the unlearned reader flounder- ing; the second, Love Among the Ruins, Is one of the greatest poems in English literature.
There is the problem of Brownings famous erudition. Mr Thomas realises that it is a problem and he notes how Ruskin recognised that his poem The Bishop Orders his Tomb at St Praxed's Church sums up the whole of the Renaissance spirit in the same number of lines as he had taken pages in The Stones of Venice, but adding' `the worst of it is that this concentrated writing needs so much solution before the reader can fairly get the good of it, that people's patience fails them, and they Bole the thing up as' insoluble.' Precisely. Browning did not know how In use his learning. There is nothing new about poets being learned. All great poets are trn mensely learned — it is a necessary part of their stock-in-trade. But they do not parade it. The truly notable point about the learn• ing of Browning is not its existence, 1101 even its extent, still less its accuracy, but the fact that is was united with an extremely retentive memory — which can be a dangerous faculty. Homer and Shakespeare and Keats do not impress us by their learn- ing; they were like workers in the diamond mines of Golconda: they sought only Or jewels. Browning's absorbent memory was, like a sponge that sucked up diamonds and mud alike, and squeezed them out alike. His learning was thus more conspicuous but less admirable.
The result is that most of Browning can only be appreciated by learned and clever people. But there is a residue of great poems which the rest of us can enjoy. rile, Lost Leader is one of them. We are carrleo away by the amazing felicity of its literary assault. But as applied to Wordsworth it Is shocking. No one seems to mind this, least, of all Mr Thomas, I fear. 'The spectre 0' the renegade romantic and revolutionary' laden with the honours of treason, was to be exorcised five years before Words' worth's death in The Lost Leader.' I call that monstrous! There was Wordsworth, the only English poet who cared enough about politics to go to France during the French Revolution and was nearly killed by Robespierre in the streets of Paris. Later' when the• revolutionaries were cutting 01t each other's heads and Napoleon was talc'
ing over, he revised his utopian hopes. Then think of Browning, the rich playboy and Political clown, daring to make any com- ment whatsoever!
Yet Mr Thomas's study is so thorough an appraisal that we can discern where praise is applicable. We can see that Browning was a great force, and makes, with Tennyson, one of those complementary doubles that keep cropping up, like Plato and Aristotle, Voltaire and Rousseau, Wellington and Napoleon, Bach and Handel, St Francis and St Dominic — antitheses yet comple- tions, utterly different but the same thing.
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