Victorian Poetry

Not considering the content matter, but looking alone at the way of writing, there is a clear resemblance between this celebrated passage from Browning and any characteristic example of Tennyson’s maturer manner. Tennyson might have hesitated at “red-ripe of the heart,” and have avoided the repetition of “blue” at the end of a line, but otherwise there is nothing either beyond or below his reach in Browning’s full-bodied and admirably balanced blank verse. Nor was Browning incapable of the richly-vestured lyric movement of which Tennyson was a master—as this from Paracelsus may show—

And then we pass from these, done so to speak by a master in the best manner of his age, to—

and we seem almost to be listening to a different voice. Many poets have written in more than one manner. Tennyson himself had his familiar style, the poem written in his old age to FitzGerald, for example, which is as distinct from his graver manner as was the Keats of the Mermaid lines from the Keats of the Odes, or Milton in the verses to Hobson the carrier from himself in Samson Agonistes. But in these other cases the more colloquial manner is deliberately assumed for some occasion of lowered poetic pressure, not in the least unworthy or trivial, but of less imaginative urgency than “this great argument,” while with Browning it becomes, no less than this greater ceremony, a serious poetic style, and one that as time went by more and more governed his practice. But Browning did not stay at the point indicated by “I want to know a butcher paints.” So far he was in some measure, and more than any other major poet, following the example of Byron, and replacing poetic elevation—using the word in its original sense—by a racy conversationalism. He was, fairly enough, basing his poetic style upon common idiom, but the common idiom of his use was rather evangelised into poetic efficiency than distilled into poetic purity. Before he could conceivably have written “blows out his brains upon the flute” Tennyson would have been seen consciously putting his singing robes aside, but it came from Browning in full dress. But the unequivocal use of witty tap-room rhetoric, or call it what you will, was not all, nor, be it said, was it in Browning’s handling an easy or undistinguished thing. This was in no sense mere reporting. Before the idiom got into his verse it was subjected to a very keen intellectual scrutiny and ordering, but when it did get there it was still far more recognisably itself than was common in poetry. When, however, we come upon such lines as—

which we frequently do, though this famous passage is admittedly an extreme case, we have to deal with something more than the direct removal of common idiom into verse. Apart from actual obscurity of meaning, we have here a poetic style that is strangely elusive in its origin. It is useless to dismiss it as being the mere vagary of a great but wilful poet. Browning in this and many similar passages was deliberately carrying out some technical purpose, and, directed by some instinct or another, was shaping his material as he wished, and not being beaten by it. At the beginning of this essay I suggested that Browning’s distinctive choice of diction was controlled by a feeling, dominating him more and more, that the poetical resources of the language along traditional lines were for the moment exhausted—clearly as he himself disproved the belief in such work as “O lyric love” and “And strew faint sweetness.” For the sake of convenience in this argument we may speak—quite arbitrarily I admit—of Browning’s three characteristics as Tennysonian, Byronic, and the specifically Browningesque,[5] not chronologically but in character. He was not exclusively engaged in any one of these at a given time, but taking the body of his mature work as a whole, it might be said that its common measure is the second of these manners, often brightened by an imaginative strain from the first, and sometimes complicated by the third. This range and variety in his verse remained strictly within his style—it was not a case of style too often subject to manneristic contortions, as has sometimes been suggested. Browning in his manner as well as in his investigation was a very cosmopolitan poet, and he could pass in a single poem from one decided accent to another without any sense of incongruity. This being so, it may be said that the “Browningesque” quality in my category is less typically Browning than the others; the definition should, perhaps, be qualified by adding that it is a quality that he brings from a source of his own unaided discovery into the texture of a style emphatically his own and yet inseparable from tradition. Shop, from which the painting butcher and rhyming baker come, shows the three strains blended into a perfectly satisfactory whole. This is the end of the poem.

Here we have the romantic richness, the direct conversational idiom, and the crabbed Hobbs-Nobbs figure all in one. And this last in Browning’s work was, I think, a further development of his dissatisfaction with the habit of verse as he found it in general use. If the “elevated” manner seemed to him to be exhausted, the colloquial manner that he adopted as an alternative may very well soon have seemed to him to be too flat and commonplace, to lack the spring of good poetic writing, and it was a natural thing for his genius to enliven it not by a return to the accepted manner only—though he did this as well—but also by inventing a new complex of the common idiom, fantastic, involved, and striking, if sometimes only by its oddity, yet always alert and personal. “I want to know a butcher paints” is the idiom of ordinary speech lifted bodily into poetry with the slightest of sea-changes; “O lyric love” is the same idiom ennobled and intensified, transfigured in the traditional way by a poetic master; in Nokes and Stokes and their azure feats is again the same idiom, but now vexed into an attitude, not in the least insincerely, but by a poet who has bravely but wilfully cut the old moorings and finds new ones very far to seek. Nothing could be less just than to accuse Browning of deliberate antics, but if, even for the most disinterested reasons, you forsake solid earth for the tight-rope you cannot help performing with the pole, and you are lucky if you get across even at that, which it must be allowed Browning generally did. I said that the stanzas from Shop showed the three strains in his style satisfactorily blended, but it would perhaps be nearer to the truth to say that they show them in close association, each contributing to a satisfactory whole, and kept by Browning’s art from striking any discord, shown by him, in short, equally to be natural and congruous elements in the unity of his style. As showing these elements more indistinguishably combined worked into one texture, three stanzas may be given from A Toccata of Galuppi’s—

It will, perhaps, be found that this composite style of Browning’s invention is of all in the Victorian age the one that has had most influence upon the poetry of our own time.