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TWO ESSAYS 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 I. 
 ROBERT BROWNING AND THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 AN ADDRESS BEFORE THE BROWNING SOCIETY OF PHILADELPHIA. 
 II. 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING AND THE ARABESQUE IN ART. 
 
 A LECTURE DELIVERED TO THE SENIOR CLASS IN ARTS OF THE 
 UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA. 
 
 FELIX e; schelling, a. m., 
 
 ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA. 
 
 ■1890. 
 
The following words were completed • some days before the recent 
 news of Mr. Browning's death. Of Mr. Browning, the man, it becomes 
 us not yet to speak ; the memory of him belongs to those into whose 
 personal grief it would be only an impertinence for a stranger to in- 
 quire. Time has not yet made the author's life the inheritance of the 
 public. Mr. Browning's life has been all that could be wished, and 
 here is neither time nor place for an obtrusive eulogy of that life. But 
 Robert Browning, the author, has been long the common property of us 
 all. His works have been so long before us, and his name has been so 
 lauded and linked with the immortals that have gone before, that death 
 can add little to an apotheosis already so complete. To speak of him 
 in praise or in dispraise has been long a fashion among us, and the ac- 
 cident of his recent demise can assuredly make no further utterance un- 
 fitting. It is yet too soon to attempt an estimate of this life of pro- 
 longed literary activity, or to seek for the explanation of a contemporary 
 reputation almost unexampled in the annals of literature ; but it can 
 never be impertinent to add — if not to the adulation that streams from a 
 thousand altars — at least a word to the better understanding of a figure, 
 which, however taste may change, must always be regarded as one of 
 the most prominent and interesting of our century. Moreover, the ex- . 
 traordinary prominence which Mr. Browning's followers have long 
 claimed for him, a claim which has sought to dethrone all the poets of 
 our tongue, save the prince of poets himself, is in itself a challenge to 
 all men to speak ; and if, as has been said, Mr. Browning has divided 
 the critics into two hostile camps, so portentous a power may well stand 
 for a subject of attention at any time. 
 
 (iii) 
 
1. 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING AND THE POETRY OF THE 
 FUTDRE. 
 
 There is, perhaps,, no more perilous position into which a man may 
 thrust himself, than to stand forth as a prophet. To acknowledge the 
 general prevalence of astigmatism and other visual disorders, but add 
 that they are confined to our neighbors ; to claim for ourselves not only 
 a clearer vision as to things past and present, but to arrogate an 
 ability to rend the shadowy veil of futurity, and foretell, to a nicety, 
 the trend of coming events : these are the perilous assumptions of the 
 prophet. It is not, therefore, as a prophet that I stand before you this 
 evening ; nor have I chosen my subject to the end of a miserable quibble 
 that the poetry of Mr. Browning is as comprehensible as the yet unwrit- 
 ten poetry of the future. The future is quite as impenetrable to me as 
 to most men. I would onjy look outward, towards the horizon, instead 
 of inward, at the minute and secret mechanism of the poet's brain. In 
 short, I would seek to gaze with you for a moment-^-using what glasses 
 we may — on that mighty firmament in which the creations of Robert 
 Browning move and have their being ; now shining as some bright par- 
 ticular star, and again wandering in courses as erratic as those of the 
 planets themselves. Without doubt here are many luminous points, 
 and the deeps, be they naught or the infinite assemblage of stars too 
 distant and too thickly clustered for average sight, are among the deeps 
 of infinity itself. 
 
 Far be it from me to deny the imperative necessity of minute and 
 critical reading. Above all things let us first read our authors and thus 
 lessen that greatest of the literary evils of our age, the reading about 
 books. And yet, perhaps, Mr. Browning has been, on the whole, far 
 too minutely read, to the exclusion of a more general estimate based 
 upon a broad comparison of his actual achievements with those of the 
 masters of English poetry. Let us, therefore, for the nonce, be not over 
 particular of quibbles, lest, in the deciphering of some curious hiero- 
 
 (S) 
 
6 ROBERT BROWNING AND THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 glyph carved on the threshhold of the temple, we lose sight of the 
 grandeur of its architectural proportions and never penetrate into the 
 arcana of its true significance. Let us do even more than this, and 
 withdraw from among the dwellings of that sculptured city, the works of 
 Robert Browning, with its minarets, its towers, its logical bulwarks, and 
 its fantastic /«(-««'«/ let us sit down in the calm of the evening, now 
 that the work is done, and, tracing its outlines against the setting sun, 
 try to get at the meaning of it all, and inquire if this city be really so 
 built as to live forever beside the literary splendors of other days ; or if 
 it shall, at some day, become Mke Nineveh, a fall and a mockery of that 
 which was, and of that which envious time has left no more. 
 
 There are great men who have succeeded by their adaptability, by 
 their versatility in seizing on the needs and tastes of their times and in 
 furnishing food for these needs and tastes. It is, perhaps, unnecessary 
 to say that many a little man has made his mark and lived his brief day 
 for the possession of this one quality. Another class, and one far dif- 
 ferent, consists of those, who by persistent effort and a commanding 
 quality of mind, have succeeded in impressing their peculiarities upon 
 the public, and in commanding attention, where the other class only so- 
 licited it. To the first class belong such men as Pope and Dryden, 
 and, in our own day, Longfellow, Tennyson, and such cultivators of that 
 tulip-garden, vers de socictc, as Austin Dobson, to mention only the 
 chief gardener : to the second, such men as Wagner in music, Millais 
 in art, and Hugo and Mr. Browning in poetry. These men are revolu- 
 tionists, gamblers for high stakes, whose success is immortality, whose 
 failure is oblivion. The other class may, some of them, remain content 
 with a qualified success : with the radical it is victory or death. His 
 victory means that he has succeeded in leading men to the conquest of 
 new intellectual provinces ; for there are conquests in art as in science, 
 and the secrets of nature and of human Ufe are often suddenly revealed 
 to the poet, where the man of science has labored with pick and scalpel 
 for ages in vain. Robert Browning belongs to the second and nobler 
 class ; it remains for us to inquire if this be a true prophet or some 
 false demiurge thundering in the tones of the real Jove. 
 
 As may be readily surmised, the title of this paper was suggested by 
 a phrase not. long since upon our lips ; the music of the future suggests 
 the poetry of the future. Between the two men, Mr. Browning and 
 Richard Wagner, there has always seemed to me a pecuhar resem- 
 blance. Both belong to that resolute, unyielding stamp of genius that 
 cares little for the tastes of the age in which it lives, and yet repre- 
 sents, to an unusual degree, the tendencies of that age. Both have 
 
ROBERT BROWNING AND THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. 7 
 
 succeeded in gaining a large following, and both have required of their 
 votaries unconditional surrender, with the result that the very vices of 
 the art of each have been extolled into a shibboleth of artistic reform. 
 There is even a closer resemblance; if we will but seek it, in their very 
 methods of art. Each has proclaimed absolute freedom from former 
 rules and conventions, and each has carried his liberty to license, while 
 announcing this the only true and saving artistic faith. Although Mr. 
 Browning has not said it personally as did Wagner 'in his own case, at 
 least all believing Browningites must hold : There is but one Art, and 
 Browning is its Prophet ! Nay, some in their zeal go yet a step further 
 and proclaim ; Paracelsus, Silence or the Sword ! Neither the music 
 nor the poetry of the future is wanting in force, in self-confidence, or in 
 audacity ; all of which, however ludicrous in a paltry pretender, must 
 command our respect when coming from such a man as Robert Brown- 
 ing, for assuredly this is of that heroic stuff of which true prophets are 
 made. 
 
 Truly he has not the wisdom of his fathers who will venture into that 
 maelstrom of a much-vexed question : What is poetry ? And yet there 
 are some points, commonplaces of our literary creeds though they are, 
 the enunciation of which can alone define the position of any writer 
 upon this ever-fertile topic. 
 
 It is not among the canons of my faith " that metrical form is the sole 
 condition absolutely demanded of poetry." Vastly do I prefer Cole- 
 ridge's wise dictum, so threadbare from quotation and so constantly 
 forgotten : " Prose is the opposite, not of poetry, but of verse or metre." 
 To me, the chapters of Job or Isaiah, though I know them only in their 
 English dress, contain the essence of real poety. To use the words of 
 Mr. Frederic Harrison, ''We have the conception, the melody, the 
 winged words, and inimitable turns of phrase, which constitute the 
 highest poetry." The same is true of much of the impassioned and in- 
 spired work of Thomas Carlyle, whom at least one eminent critic has 
 called "perhaps our greatest poet." The same cannot be said of the 
 following : 
 
 " Leave uneffaced the crazy labyrinth 
 Of alteration and amendment, lines 
 Which every dabster felt in duty bound 
 To signalize his power of pen and ink 
 By adding to the plan once plain enough? 
 Why keep each fool's bequeathment, scratch and blur 
 Which overscrawl and underscore the piece; 
 Nay, strengthen them by touches of your own? 
 Well that's my mission, so I serve the world. 
 
8 ROBERT BROWNING AND THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 Figure as man o' the moment, — in default 
 Of somebody inspired to strike such change 
 Into society." 
 
 It is greatly to be feared that no toy-bladders of verse can suffice to 
 raise the bodily dimensions of Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau one inch 
 above the earth, and that his highness and his compatriots Mr. Sludge 
 and Bishop Blougram, must forever stalk irremediably along the level 
 stretches of prose. 
 
 Again, while there can be no question about Victor Hugo's regal 
 proclamation of the absolute freedom of art, there is, most unfortu- 
 nately, such a thing as a bad picture or a bad poem ; and that not be- 
 cause either transcends the limits of art, but because each fails to recog- 
 nize those 'principles by which art is art, and not something else. It is 
 not enough to demand of a poet that he be capable of a good work ; we 
 have a right to ask that he exercise his taste — if he have any — on the 
 inferior products of his mind, and that he have the ability to reject. It 
 is not enough to have written Lucy ; to have rejected and expunged 
 from his works Peter Bell and The Idiot Boy would have torn a sere 
 and yellow leaf from the wreath of immortal bays that crowns the brow 
 of Wordsworth. Far from wondering, with Charles Dickens, that the 
 poet Gray should " come walking down to posterity with so small a 
 volume under his arm," I honor this great poet for the possession of 
 that admirable trait, so rare among men of letters and so invaluable, the 
 power of self-criticism and selection. Gray has his reward, for he lives 
 to-day and will always live ; whilst many a poet, showing equal powers 
 at times, and in verse making up quite the bulk of Gray, wears — as Mr. 
 Gosse has irreverently said of poor Southey — " the dryest laurels that 
 ever flourished on the steeps of Parnassus." 
 
 Probably no one will gainsay the statement, that there are few poets 
 — even the greatest — ^who have not written unpoetical lines. Words- 
 worth has written a sufficient quantity of bad verses to furnish out the 
 travelling apparel of at least three third-rate bards ; the ambrosial locks 
 of Homer nod sometimes ; and there are execrable lines in Shakespeare 
 himself^though the Shakespearians get out of that difficulty by deny- 
 ing him their authorship. Perhaps no one will claim the lines from 
 Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, v^aQt&A above, as poetry ; and yet 'they 
 were taken at random from one of a class of Mr. Browning 's produc- 
 tions which exhibit many of his distinctive traits, perhaps at their best. 
 Let us try once more : 
 
ROBERT BROWNING AND THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. 9 
 
 " Here is a thing that happened. Like wild beasts whelped, for den, 
 In a wild part of North England, there lived once two wild men 
 Inhabiting one homestead, neither a hovel nor hut. 
 Time out of mind their birthright : father and son, these — but — 
 Such a son, such a father ! Most wildness by degrees 
 Softens away: yet, last of their line, the wildest and worst were these. 
 
 " Criminals, then ? Why, no : they did not murder and rob ; 
 
 But, give them a word, they returned a blow — old Halbert as young Hob : 
 
 Harsh and fierce of word, rough and savage of deed. 
 
 Hated or feared the more — who knows ? — the genuine wild-beast breed." 
 
 Verily this is a full realization of Wordsworth's doctrine, that the lan- 
 guage of verse and prose is identical ; and yet, even Wordsworth never 
 went to this length, for he required that the prose be good, and this is 
 very bad prose and much worse poetry. The shade of Lindley Murray 
 could scarcely parse the first stanza. But bear with one more quotation ; 
 this time from that facetiously entitled production, Red Cotton Night 
 Cap Country. 
 
 " ' Night-caps, night comfort of the human race : 
 Their usage may be growing obsolete, 
 Still, in the main, the institution stays. 
 And though yourself may possibly have lived. 
 And probably will die, undignified — 
 The Never-night-capped — more experienced folk 
 Laugh you back answer — What should Night-cap be 
 Save Night-cap pure and simple? Sorts of such? 
 Take cotton for the medium, cast an eye 
 This side to comfort, lambswool, or the like, 
 That side to frilly cambric costliness, 
 And all between proves Night-cap.' Add 
 ' Fiddle ! ' and I confess the argument." 
 
 This is but a scrap from a capacious garment of the same absurd cut 
 and pattern. The word "fiddle" comes like an inspiration, and affords 
 an excuse for a rambling jaunt into the realm of Fiddledom, in which 
 much quaint and useless knowledge of Guarnerius, Straduarius, Corelli, 
 is aired, with the fiddle show at South Kensington. There often come 
 moments to me after the reading of some such stuff as this, from the 
 hand of such a man, in which I pause and wonder if after all this be not 
 some huge Gargantuan life-joke which Mr. Browning has been playing 
 on us all, to test the limit of human capability. How will the twentieth 
 century man laugh — if contemplation of the protoplasm and social 
 statics has not taken all the laugh out of him— rhow will he fill his capa- 
 cious chest and laugh at the puerility of his forefathers, when he learns 
 that such stuff was once sagely considered in learned bodies in many 
 
lO ROBERT BROWNING AND THE POETRY OF THE FOTURE. 
 
 parts of the world, and as sagely compared with, the inimitable genuine 
 nonsense of Shakespeare ? Seriously, such stuff would not be tolerated 
 a moment in prose, or from any other hand. Verses like those quoted 
 (although the second extract is assuredly not wit) may be life, truth, logic, 
 metaphysics — anything you like, but poetry they are not; and that verse 
 should be their medium "is the merest accident, and one that must im- 
 pair their value as life, truth, metaphysics^ or what not. Let me not be 
 misunderstood. From those that love their Browning, I would seek to 
 take no jot or tittle of that love. All honor is due Robert Browning for 
 his truth, for his high ethics, and for his poetry, when he has vouch- 
 safed to write poetry. It would be absurd to impeach the genius of such 
 a man, or to express a doubt of his genuine poetic powers. Of both 
 there is sufficient evidence ; but this evidence is not to be found in the 
 bulk of his writings, and the bulk of Mr. Browning's writing is not 
 poetry. 
 
 Mr. Browning has been called the poet of psychology ; a combina- 
 tion of terms which, it is greatly to be feared, is likely to prove com- 
 parable to the old story of Pegasus yoked to a plow with some terrestrial 
 hack for a yoke-fellow. Mr. Lowell has given us in four words the re- 
 sult of Pope's similar attempt to drive his pseudo- Pegasus in harness 
 with the eighteenth-century philosophy of Bolingbroke : " careless think- 
 ing carefully versified" is all that is left of it. It is at least questionable 
 if the new yoke-fellows, poetry and psychology, are Hkely to prove much 
 happier. Leaving for the moment Mr. Browning's impracticable and 
 undramatic dramas, and his lyrics for the minority of which his name is 
 bound to remain among the chosen denizens of his country's Parnassus, 
 I wish to call your attention to a class of his productions, so original in 
 their nature, and so hybrid in their constitution, that the language in its 
 poverty has been compelled to coin a new word, " Browningesque," that 
 the thing might not remain nameless. All of these productions are 
 founded on the casuistical defense or attack of some psychological ques- 
 tion, by preference as ugly and forbidding as possible. All proceed by 
 the most probing method of analysis, under guise of interminable dia- 
 logue and monologue ; all contain little or no action, no more character- 
 ization than "you may taJie upon a knife's point to choke a daw withal ;" 
 but casuistry enough to furnish out a college' of Jesuit priests. More- 
 over,, they are always in verse, and expressed with that eccentricity and 
 grotesqueness of style that has given rise to the term above mentioned, 
 " Browningesque." 
 
 Here are some of the subjects of these "poems : " Fifine, "a defense 
 of inconstancy or the right of experiment in love ; " Prince Hohemtiel- 
 
ROBERT BROWNING AND THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. II 
 
 Schwangau, "a defense of the doctrine of expediency;" Bishop Blou- 
 gram's Apology, "a. defense of religious conformity, in those cases in 
 which the doctrines to which we conform exceed onjs powers of behef ; " 
 Sludge the Medium, a defense of charlatanism in America, with ana- 
 chronisms enough to make the sea coast of Bohemia a trifling offense. 
 To these may be added discussions of the deeper issues of skepticism 
 and faith, arguments as to the existence of God and the soul, Mr. Brown- 
 ing's opinion of Italian art, Mr. Browning's opinion of German music, 
 Mr. Browning's opinion of medieval architecture, the Greek Comic 
 Drama, moral responsibility, justifiable homicide, and what not — all in 
 verse, and in a masquerade of characters, all speaking the one, the odd, 
 the unmistakable language of their puppet-master ; or, as Mr, Stedman 
 has so admirably put it : "his spirit infused, as if by metempsychosiis, 
 within them all, forces each to assume a strange Pentecostal tone, which 
 we discover to be that of the poet himself. Bass, treble, or recitative 
 — whether in pleading, invective, or banter — the voice is still there." 
 
 The brief epitomes of contents given above, save for a comment or 
 two,, are not mine. They are quoted in the words of Mrs. Sunderland 
 Orr, who, as all know, with Mr. Browning's consent and approval, has 
 pubHshed a Handbook or guide through the intricacies of the author's 
 works, that zealous ignorance may not lose itself too utterly in the laba- 
 rynthine aberrations Of psycho-poetics. Consider these subjects one 
 moment with their convolutions and their involutions of subtlety, their 
 ragged, inartistic style, their eccentric and grotesque treatment — and ask 
 yourself, even if your definition of poetry include all the sciences, if this 
 is poetry, the same divine art as that of Spenser, Milton and Shelley ? A 
 book of rugged, prose essays on such subjects as these, from the hands 
 of such a thinker as Mr. Browning, would have been a far more valuable 
 contribution to the literature of his country than these interminable par- 
 leyings in verse. Give such subjects to any of the score or two of English 
 poets that rank between Shakespeare and Mr. Browning, and he can not 
 make poetry out of them ; give ^uch subjects to Shakespeare himself, 
 and he will not make poetry out of them. Nay, the master, a wiser 
 than Mr. Browning, leaves psycho-poetics to the nineteenth centry, and 
 troubles us not at all with Falstaff and Doll Tearsheet bandying rhymes, 
 but rises and descends with his subjects, choosing his medium of ex- 
 pression with the unerring tact of a true artist. Think what a problem 
 Mr. Browning set himself, and then wonder, if you can, at his failure. 
 A subject taken in all its difficulty, a medium of expression the most un- 
 fitted to that subject, we cannot be surprised that we have eontoTtion, 
 rough, unpoetical, if often telling strokes. No instrument can produce 
 
12 ROBERT BROWNING AND THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. 
 
 music under such circumstances ; it must produce something, and dis- 
 cord is the result. 
 
 None the least remarkable thing about Mr. Browning, however, is the 
 fact that he is far from devoid of that power of selection, the want of 
 which accounts for so much of the Wordsworthian low countries. The 
 brain that has produced these abuses of genius, has also given us many 
 a gem in setting of pure gold. Who does not know Pippa Passes, Fra 
 Lippo Lippi, In a Balcony, Evelyn Hope ? the last deserving of a place 
 beside Wordsworth's Lucy, Landor's Rose Aylmer and Lamb's Hester. 
 Mr. Browining wilfully chose his course, and like Wagner, as wilfully 
 remained in it. Stopping but a step short of Wagner's denial of his first 
 bom, Mr. Browning wished mainly to be known by that in which he was 
 grotesque and original, and not by that wherein he has carried forward 
 the stately flow of English poetry. Time emphasized Mr. Browning's 
 character in all its elemental roughness ; and irreverence for the funda- 
 mental canons of his art, crude realism and wanton, stuttering verbiage 
 have ruined one of the greatest minds, in its natural endowments, that 
 our century has produced. Mr. Browning belongs to the class of liter- 
 ary innovators, a class that has not infrequently included men of 
 the highest artistic genius. The world has a constant need for the re- 
 former, whether he seek to lead us along the lines of radical advance, or 
 head an unusual conservative opposition. In motion alone is life, and 
 there is no man who so deserves our veneration — I had almost said 
 worship — as he, who, true to the verity that speaks within, seeks to en- 
 large man's intellectual horizon by a tilt against the conventions of his 
 age. These are the true knights-errant ; and though some of them do 
 tilt against windmills, many are the venomous dragons of artistic pre- 
 judice overthrown by their valor. 
 
 Mr. Browning, like Wagner, has attempted a huge experiment in art, 
 and by his transcendent personal force has succeeded in winning con- 
 temporary public approbation. His powerful personality is no more, 
 and with the fallen champion, the cause is lost. But in his failure con- 
 sists the vindication of true art. As a philosopher, as a "thinker," Mr. 
 Browning has done much, and that with a weapon which we had thought 
 hung up to rust since the days of Alexander Pope. What such a man 
 as Mr. Browning might have accomplished with the unerring needle-gun 
 of a Matthew Arnold, it is bootless to inquire. But that the bulk of 
 Mr. Browning's writings, whatever else they may be, when judged by 
 any reasonable standard, are not poetry — this I can not but feel myself 
 entirely justified in maintaining. A century hence, Mr. Browning will 
 be known to the hterature of his country for the genuine blossoms of 
 
ROBERT BROWNING AND THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE. 1 3 
 
 poetic thought that have from time to time sprang unsought and untilled 
 from the rocky soil of his brain, whilst his psychological monstrosities 
 will sink into that oblivion which is kindred to much of the cabalistic 
 utterance in which their hideousness is expressed. 
 
 If Robert Browning has succeeded as a poet by successive failures, 
 he will ultimately fail through the very height of his success. We 
 English-speaking nations are not so unpoetical a race that we can rest 
 content with such hybri4 forms of art. A reaction must and will set 
 in — a reaction that will establish the independence and purity of art. 
 The poetry of the future will not consist of psycho-poetics. 
 
11. 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING AND THE ARABESP IN ART. 
 
 It is, perhaps, but just that I offer you some explanation of a title 
 so unusual as that which forms the heading of this lecture, especially of 
 the word Arabesque, and of my linking of it with the name of Mr. 
 Browning. The Arabesque, it will be remembered, was an elaborate 
 style of ornamentation used among the earlier Saracens or Arabs, in 
 which the most indulgent play of the fancy was permitted, except that a 
 literal interpretation of the second commandment forbade the represen- 
 tation of a living creature therein. By a figure of speech which, it is 
 to be hoped, may not be regarded as too h)fperbolic, I wish to apply 
 this term to the verse of Robert Browning, who, whether for a fashion- 
 able cult of the moment or for an eternity of fame, has certainly written 
 much which is not in " the likeness of any form that is in heaven above, 
 or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth." 
 
 The dangers that attend any contemporary estimate of an author's 
 work need call for only a passing mention here ; the passions and pre- 
 judices, the personal equation of both author and critic, the fashion of 
 the movement — all may affect our verdict on such a question. Contem- 
 porary fame is the creature of circumstance ; it is posterity alone that 
 can weigh, consider, and estimate the result, not because of superior 
 wisdom, but because of greater dispassionateness, and that broader 
 view which the eminence of time alone can afford. John Lyly, whose 
 enthusiastic contemporaries declared that he had "done for English 
 what Tully had done for the Latin tongue," is now chiefly remembered 
 — ^whether justly or not — as the author of a species of Hterary foppery 
 as superfluous to genuine style as the Elizabethan ruff must have been" 
 to personal comfort ; and Waller, " the greatest lyric poet that England 
 has produced," is scarcely now esteemed to a degree at all warranted 
 by so grandiloquent a title. Many an author has ridden forward to a 
 regal popularity on the crest of the wave of the Zeitgeist; and many 
 another has been carried beneath in the undertow of prejudice, to re- 
 main forgotten until a wiser and less passionate age has discovered the 
 
 (14) 
 
ROBERT BROWNING AND THE ARABESQUE IN ART. 15 
 
 worth that was in him. On the other hand, it would be far from fair 
 not to acknowledge that a contemporary estimate is not to be despised, 
 as contemporary praise generally indicates at least that quality of mind 
 that can command attention. There are men with whom we may be at 
 odds on all essential questions, but who none the less challenge a re- 
 spectful hearing ; men whose theories we deny, but whose abilities and 
 achievements we cannot but admire. Mr. Browning is a man of com- 
 manding literary presence, a man of the strongest personality ; and it is 
 more than likely that not only his success, but many of his Hmitations 
 are due to this supereminent quality. Our purpose is simply to inquire 
 into the nature of Mr. Browning's style as a poet, and to see if it be 
 possible to find therein some reasonable explanation, not only of his 
 unexampled notability, but likewise of the extreme distaste and dislike 
 with which he imbues many whose right to an opinion is at least equal 
 to that of their brother critics who are in the fashion. 
 
 In one of the most admirable of his wholly admirable essays, the late 
 Mr. Bagehot enumerates three principal modes of art : " the pure, which 
 is sometimes, but not wisely, called the classical ; the ornate, which is 
 also tiniversally called romantic ; the grotesque, which might be called 
 the mediaeval." Pure literature " describes the type in its simplicity ; it is 
 that art which works with the fewest strokes, in which a complete effect 
 is produced by detail so rare and so harmonized as to escape us." 
 Every stroke must make for the main design. The accessories are 
 sometimes said to be invisible, because the appendages are so choice 
 that the shape only is perceived. "Wordsworth at his best, and Milton 
 with exceptions and conditions," are the best exponents of thisymode in 
 English literature ; while, if we would know pure art in perfection, we 
 must seek it in Homer and Sophocles. Hartley Coleridge's beautiful 
 lyric, She is not Fair to Outward View, or Wordsworth's famous 
 sonnet on Westminster Bridge, neither of which need be quoted here, 
 may be taken as admirable specimens of the pure in art. It is, perhaps, 
 needless to remark that the besetting sins of the pure style are conven- 
 tionality and baldness, from neither of which vices is its great English 
 exponent, Wordsworth, wholly free. 
 
 Ornate art, while it too "aims at giving a delineation of the typical idea 
 in its perfection and its fullness, * * • wishes to surround the type 
 with the greatest number of circumstances which it will bear. * * * 
 It works not by choice and selection, but by accumulation and aggrega- 
 tion. Nothing is described as it is ; everything has about it an atmos 
 phere of something else." As an instance, take the following extract 
 from Lord Tennyson's Enoch Arden : 
 
1 6 ROBERT BROWNING AND THE ARABESQUE IN ART. 
 
 " While Enoch was abroad on wrathful seas, 
 Or often journeying landward; for in truth 
 Enoch's white horse, and Enoch's ocean spoil 
 In ocean-smelling osier, and his face. 
 Rough-reddened with a thousand winter gal^s, 
 Not only to the market cross is known, 
 But in the leafy lanes behind the down. 
 Far as the portal-warding lion-whelp, 
 And peacock yew-tree of the lonely Hall, 
 Whose Friday fare was Enoch's ministering. 
 
 Here fish become " ocean spoil" or " Friday fare ;" an ill-smelling 
 basket, an "ocean-smelling osier;" " rough- reddened with a thousand 
 winter gales" expresses tanned, and " ministering" is certainly a fine 
 word for selling. " Portal-warding lion-whelp" and the "peacock yew- 
 tree" are assuredly picturesque details, but entirely extraneous to the 
 main idea, which, robbed of all fine phrases, is simply, when Enoch was 
 not at sea catching fish, he peddled them ashore. This illustration is an 
 extreme one. When not overdone, as, for instance, in Keats's exquisite 
 Eve of Saint Agnes, ornate art is perfectly legitimate. Shakespeare 
 himself is its greatest exponent, as he is at other times the greatest ex- 
 ponent of the pure. And, indeed, it may be said that the extreme of 
 the ornate was the besetting sin of the Elizabethan age, as it is largely 
 of our own. The vices of the ornate include indefiniteness and ob- 
 scurity, almost all rhetorical exaggerations and plethora of treatment, 
 and that striving after effect that, ignoring the rules of any art, leads to 
 grotesqueness. Finally, ornate art runs the risk of giving undue im- 
 portance to mere manual dexterity. 
 
 As a result, pure art is most concerned with the subject, ornate art 
 with its treatment. In the first the artist is lost, in the second the con- 
 sciousness of effort becomes apparent. It is perhaps a matter of small 
 moment as to who wrote Homer. The chaste and perfect flower of 
 pure art is before us, whether its petals opened under the quickening 
 rays of a single sun or under a conjunction of propitious planetary in- 
 fluences. But when it comes to the consideration of a minutely deline- 
 ated pile of tunnies in a fishmonger's shop, a dead pheasant or hare, 
 nay, a bottle or discarded cigar-stump, the question at once arises, who 
 has painted this thing so cleverly? 
 
 Grotesque art " takes the type, so to say, in all its difficulties. It gives 
 a representation of it in its minimum development, amid the circum- 
 stances least favorable to it, just where it is encumbered with incongru- 
 ities. * * It deals, to use the language of science, not with normal 
 types, but with abnormal specimens ; to use the language of old philos- 
 
ROBERT BROWNING AND THE ARABESQUE IN ART, J 7 
 
 ophy, not with what nature is striving to be, but with what by some lapse 
 she has happened to become." Grotesque art should, therefore, rather 
 be regarded as a vice of the ornate than a legitimate form of art. Al- 
 though the Arabesque originated in the principle that all natural images 
 be excluded, in the hands of a later school (to quote the substance of 
 the remarks of an eminent authority), this principle was soon lost sight 
 of, and birds, animals, human figures and chimeras, or, indeed, any .ob- 
 jects that, might take the fancy of the artist, were lavishly employed, and 
 the work became " extravagant in composition, ludicrous, and sometimes 
 aesthetically offensive." An ornamentation that arises, not naturally, out 
 of the subject, but is loaded upon it extraneously, an ornamentation 
 pushed to the extreme until the subject is lost in the treatment, to the 
 unnatural, to distortion, to the grotesque — this is what is meant by, the 
 term Arabesque. Mr. Browning proceeds not, as the Moorish artist did, 
 upon a set avoidance of reality ; but, with the later school, so weighs 
 down reality with abstraction, distortion, and subtilty that even his " ugly 
 realism " can not bring him back to nature. The choice, for instance, of 
 Caliban, not for contrast among other dramatic figures, but as the portrait- 
 subject of a poem, is grotesque. Mr. Browning's psychological treatment 
 of that subject combines grotesque realism with the Arabesque creation 
 of a scene and of circumstances utterly unnatural and unreal. 
 
 Out of the works of Mr. Browning no better historical example of the 
 Arabesque treatment of a theme is to be found than the excesses of that 
 school of poets which Dr. Johnson, not so very unwisely, called " the 
 Metaphysical School." Take Dr. Donne's "abstruse and profound" re- 
 flection upon man as a microcosm : — ' T', 
 
 " If men be worlds, then is in every one 
 Something to answer in some proportion 
 All the world's riches; and in good men, this 
 Virtue, our form's form, and our soul's soul, is : " 
 
 in which we have the "metaphysical ; " or the famous figure of the com- 
 passes from the same poet's Valediction Forbidding Mourning, in which, 
 speaking of the souls of two lovers, he says : ' 
 
 " If they be two, they are two so , , . 
 
 As stiff twin compasses are two ; 
 Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show 
 
 To move, but doth if th' other do, 
 And though it in the centre sit. 
 
 Yet when the other far doth roam, 
 It leans and hearkens after it. 
 
 And grows erect as that comes home. 
 
1 8 ROBERT BROWNING AND THE ARABESQUE IN ART. 
 
 Such wilt thou be to me, who must, 
 
 Like th' other foot, obliquely run. 
 Thy firmness makes my circles just, • 
 
 And makes me,end where I begun." 
 
 If you jilease, these quotations from Donne are only quaint and 
 " learfled " conceits ; add tq the mixture large draughts of ugly modem 
 realism, and the grotesque or Arabesque in art is complete. 
 
 It is curious to note the ebb and flow of these various principles in 
 6ur literature ; how the flood of ornate art, setting in with the Italian 
 Renaissance, reached its full by the end of Elizabeth's reign, to overflow 
 in the Fletchers and Herberts, the Donnes and Crashaws of the succeed- 
 ing reigns ; tiow the ebb setting in with Waller — if Mr. Gosse will have 
 it so — left bare the sterile sands, or stood in brackish shallows from 
 Addison to Akenside. How Wordsworth distinguished between the 
 .false and the true classicism or purity of style, although not entirely free 
 from the faults he so much reprobated in others ; and how the advanc- 
 ing tide of the ornate, under the influence of Tennyson, has, in our. own 
 day, swept all before it, whilst Mr. Browning has made it a veritable 
 spring-tide for us, and drowned out many a struggling flower of classi- 
 cism. 
 
 But does Mr. Browning really treat his subjects in this Arabesque and 
 unnatural way ? Is Mr. Browning really grotesque ? There are people to 
 whom he is at all times perfectly perspicuous, just as there are people — 
 and they must be the same — to whom Shakespeare is always at his best, 
 and to whom the Apocalypse is so simple as scarcely to admit of any 
 difierence of explanation. To such and to others, who, like Chinese 
 devotees, from long gazing upon the bizarre and contorted figure of some 
 favorite Joss, have come to regard it as the visible embodiment of alj 
 god-like perfection, it may be necessary to explain. In turning over the 
 leaves of Mr. Browning's books our attention is arrested by such titles as 
 these, Artemis Prologuizes, Prince Hohensteil-Schwangau, Red Cotton 
 Night Cap Country, with his rambling dedication about night caps, fid- 
 dleSi and other things equally poetical. Or to descend from the general 
 to the particular, take this concrete example, from Holy Cross Day, "on 
 which the Jews were forced to attend an annual Christian sermon in 
 Rome ; " these are the remarks : 
 
 " Fee, faw, fum ! Bubble and squeak ! 
 Blessedest Thursday's the fat of the week. 
 Rumble and tumble, sleek and rough, 
 Stinking and savory, snug and grufi^ 
 Take the church-road, for the bell's due chime 
 Give us the summons — 'tis sermon time. 
 
ROBERT BROWNING AND THE ARABESQUE IN ART. 1 9 
 
 " Boh, here's Barnabas ! Job, that's you? 
 Up stumps Solomon — bustling too ? 
 Shame, man ! greedy beyond your years 
 To handsel the bishop's shaving shears? 
 Fair play's a jewel ! leave friends in the lurch? 
 Stand on a line ere you start for church. 
 
 " Higgledy piggledy, packed We lie, 
 Rats in a hamper, swine in a stye. 
 Wasps in a bottle, frogs in a sieve, 
 "Worms in a carcase, fleas in a sleeve.. 
 Hist ! square shoulders, settle your thmnbs 
 And buzz for the bishop — here he_comes." 
 
 As another instance, we have Shakespea'te represented as talking 
 thus: 
 
 i " I ? — who never once have wished 
 
 Death before the day- appointed : 
 Lived and liked, not poohed and pished ! 
 
 " Ah, but so I shall not enter 
 
 ■Scroll in hand, the common heart — 
 Stopped at surface : since at centre 
 ■t Song should reach Weltschmerz, yua^A-ixsiSxV" 
 
 Even Shakespeare's German critics, who claim most things about him, 
 to the very shape of his head, have never made him speak German, 
 It was reserved for the master of the Arabesque to set aside Shake- 
 speare's " httle Latin and less Greek," and present to us the incongru- 
 ity of a subject of Queen Elizabeth quoting ffom a foreign language 
 with which he was unacquainted to express a nineteenth century idea, 
 and obligingly translating it that the simplest Browning novitiate might 
 know what was meant thereby. Finally, is the following poetical or 
 grotesque? 
 
 " What gimcracks, genuine Japanese : 
 Gape-jaw and goggle-ey, the frog, 
 Dragons, owls, monkeys, beetles, geese; 
 Some crush-nosed human-hearted dog : 
 Queer names, too, such a catalogue." 
 
 One is well tempted to echo the last line. 
 
 If we except Jonathan Swift, never has a great writer exhibited such 
 a taste for "ugly reality" as has Mr. Browning. Mr. Browning is much 
 of a realist, in the bad sense of that word ; although he has escaped, by 
 reason of the age and the country in which he lived, the more degrad-, 
 ing tendencies of a certain foreign pseudo-literature. In the words of a 
 
20 ROBERT BROWNING AND THE ARABESQUE IN ART. 
 
 recent critic, " possibly hardly one of his most considerable efforts can be 
 found which is not great, because of its odd mixture. He puts together 
 what no one else would have put together, and produces on our minds 
 a result which no one else would have produced or tried to produce." 
 The artist, whether he work in the pure or in the ornate, selects from 
 among his materials, and is not squeamish, 'if he can heighten an effect 
 by legitimate shadow. The master of the grotesque selects too ; but he 
 selects the ugly, the gnarled and the knotted, deUghting to Umit his art 
 by difficult conditions and to smother his inspiration in fruitless psycho- 
 logical problems. Grant that Mr. Browning has, indeed, demonstrated 
 that, in some exceedingly rare cases, the grotesque may be used as a 
 legitimate form of ajt, that The Pied Piper of Hamelin is a real tri- 
 umph of the grotesque, and that Mr. Browning's works are not devoid 
 of other felicitous examples ; yet, none the less, a moment's considera- 
 tion of the nature of Arabesque treatment and the grotesque in art is 
 quite sufficient to convince any candid observer of its essential unfitness 
 as a method of all work. The admiration excited by a tour de force, 
 whether in verse or elsewhere, is not of the same character as that ex- 
 cited by arousing and stimulating the sense of the beautiful. The 
 moment that the . artist's dexterity becomes a matter of consideration, 
 the moment we begin to think of his originality, his logic or his philoso- 
 phy, .the moment, -in short, that the appeal is made to the purely intel- 
 lectual powers of analysis and synthesis, and the only emotion excited is 
 that of wonder at the author's temerity or cleverness — that moment art 
 a^ art is degraded, and soon ceases to be. 
 
 When the time shall come, and come it will, a poet, worthy that 
 august title, will arise, to show us that novelty, beauty, originality, may all 
 combine with simpUcity to produce the highest art. But the time is not 
 yet,' and, for the present, hterary contortionists and poetical jugglers 
 please us the more. It is not every one that can juggle three apples or 
 four open knife-blades in one hand ; yet any man can walk. True, but is 
 it every man that can walk with the step of a god ? However, let us not 
 despair : there is need of even the juggler ; and when a man of real 
 force undertakes the trade — much as we may regret the degradation — 
 there is much tobe learned. What Mr. Browning has not succeeded 
 in doing in the realms of the Arabesque is presumably beyond the power 
 of man. Where he has failed, no smaller man dare ever hope for suc- 
 cess : and some things have thus been demonstrated impossible. 
 
 For Mr. Browning's lofty ethics and fervor of heart, I have nothing 
 but praise ; for his poetry — upon the rare occasions when he has written 
 poetry — nothing but admiration. The essential falsity of his fundamen- 
 
ROBERT BROWNING AND THE ARABESQUE IN ART. 2 1 
 
 tal doctrines of art has unhappily perverted one Of the first minds of 
 our century. . , , , 
 
 The answer to our inquiry then is this 'r the extreme distaste and dis- 
 like with which the works of Mr. Btowning inspire the minewity — if it is 
 actually the minority— is .due to a false method of art, employed, for the 
 most part, on subjects in their nature essentially inartistic. There may 
 be much ^reason for excusing the wretchedness of a sermon for its ortho- 
 doxy and evident piety. But sound philosophy cannot save inartistic 
 verse from' being bad poetry; That sort of thing caniiot apply to art, 
 wherein a bad workman, be he such from ignorance or willful^ intent, 
 must forever- forfeit the- wages of immortality^ Mr.Browning has not 
 claimed to be simply a teacher; by the choice of his medium of ex- 
 pression, he lays claim to the title, artist^ awhile wantonly disobeying the 
 rules of his art. 
 
 On the other hand, the causes of Mr. Browning's popularity are 
 neither few nor far to seek. The character of our age makes for 
 Browning, as it did for Carlyle and Emerson. As a transcendentalist, 
 Mr. Browning is a leader of the intellectual revolt against the materi- 
 alism of our daily life. He does not, hke Shelley, transport us into the 
 empyrean to breathe with him the pure aether of angels ; but recogniz- 
 ing that some difficulties attend upon earthly lungs in such lofty altitudes, 
 has pursued precisely the opposite method, and has been justly desig- 
 nated as " an idealist working by contraries." In this he falls iii thor- 
 oughly with the character of an age that dehghts in the abstract in form 
 of the concrete. An age that can admire " poems " made up of soul- 
 probing analysis, dismally deep psychology, and versf s bristUng with 
 syllogisms, naturally admires Mr. Browning, and delights to inform us 
 that he is the most learned of poets. Alas, perchance therefore the less 
 inspired. 
 
 But there are other reasons besides Mr. Browning's touch with the 
 spirit of the time, which space can permit me to little more than name. 
 We are all tired of nature : we know so much more about her proto- 
 plastic involutions and evolutions than did our ancestors ; we want new 
 combinations, odd conceptions, curious and bold conjunctions of thought. 
 Never has the perennial passion for the odd and unusual been satiated 
 as Mr. Browning has satiated it. Again, the prevailing unacquaintance 
 with our greater classics at first hand, that results from the necessity 
 which the average reader feels of keeping up with the times, has materi- 
 ally abetted this morbid craving for novelty, and left many of Mr. 
 Browning's readers devoid of any real artistic standard by which to 
 judge their favorite's merits. Perhaps not a few of us, too, are like the 
 
22 ROBERT BROWNING AND THE ARABESQUE IN ART. 
 
 Ettrick Shepherd, who confessed : " I like to use a word I dinna ken 
 the meaning o'." Finally let it be whispered, and not bruited much 
 about, some of this great poet's devotees do not read their Browning : 
 a matter more commendable to their taste than to their sincerity. 
 
 Saving admiration for a vigorous and somewhat earthy form of trans- 
 cendentalism, there is not one of these motives which can be construed 
 into a sufficient excuse for this cult. What can we hope of an art that 
 struts thus in borrowed plumes, mistrustful of her own divine nature ? 
 What can we hope- of. an artistic cult that sets up such hybrid forms for 
 worship ? When I think of the irreverence that would dethrone the im- 
 mortals and place the master of the Arabesque on a pedestal, the peer 
 of Shakespeare, I can not but fear lest some incensed prophet sh^U 
 come down from Sinai to shiver, in his wrath, the tables of all true 
 poetic law. 
 
Cornell University Library 
 4238.S32 
 
 Two essays on Robert Browning. 
 
 3 1924 013 445 048