Past and future. ries obtained from her hands. The catholic thinker derives from the new-born hope and liberty of our own country the prediction of a jubilant and measureless art-revival, in which England and America shall labor hand to hand. If we have been children, guided by our elders, and taught to repeat lispingly their antiquated and timorous words, we boast that we have attained majority through fire and blood, and even now are learning to speak for ourselves. I believe that the day is not far distant when the fine and sensitive lyrical feeling of America will swell into floods of creative song. The most musical of England's younger poets those on whom her hopes depend are with us, and inscribe their works to the champions of freedom and equality in either world. Thus our progress may exert a reflex influence upon the mother-country; and to the land from which we inherit the wisdom of Shakespeare, the rapture of Milton, and Wordsworth's insight of natural things, our own shall return themes and forces that may animate a new-risen choir of her minstrels, while neither shall be forbidden to follow melodiously where the other may be inspired to lead. CHAPTER IX. ROBERT BROWNING. Browning: near Lon don, 1812. IN Na study of Browning, the most original and un-Robert equal of living poets, three features obviously born in present themselves. His dramatic gift, so rare in Camberwell, these times, calls for recognition and analysis; his method the eccentric quality of his expression constantly intrudes upon the reader; lastly, the moral of his verse warrants a closer examination than we give to the sentiments of a more conventional poet. My own perception of the spirit which his poetry, despite his assumption of a purely dramatic purpose, has breathed from the outset, is one which I shall endeavor to convey in simple and direct terms. Various other examples have served to illustrate the phases of a poet's life, but Browning arouses discussion with respect to the elements of poetry as an art. Hitherto I have given some account of an author's career and writings before proffering a critical estimate of the latter. But this man's genius is so peculiar, and he has been so isolated in style and purpose, that I know not how to speak of his works without first seeking a key to their interpretation, and hence must partially reverse the order hitherto pursued. Character of his dramatic gen ius. The true dramatic period. I. It is customary to call Browning a dramatist, and without doubt he represents the dramatic element, such as it is, of the recent English school. He counts among his admirers many intellectual persons, some of whom pronounce him the greatest dramatic poet since Shakespeare, and one has said that "it is to him we must pay homage for whatever is good, and great, and profound, in the second period of the Poetic Drama of England." This may be true; nevertheless, it also should be declared, with certain modifications, that Robert Browning, in the original sense of the term, is not a dramatic poet at all. Procter, in the preface to a collection of his own songs, remarks with precision and truth: "It is, in fact, this power of forgetting himself, and of imagining and fashioning characters different from his own, which constitutes the dramatic quality. A man who can set aside his own idiosyncrasy is half a dramatist.” Although Browning's earlier poems were in the form of plays, and have a dramatic purpose, they are at the opposite remove, in spirit and method, from the models of the true histrionic era, the work of Fletcher, Webster, and Shakespeare. They have the sacred rage and fire, but the flame is that of Browning, and not of the separate creations which he strives to inform. The early drama was the mouthpiece of a passionate and adventurous era. The stage bore to the modern novel and news period the relations of the HIS DRAMATIC GENIUS. time." It was a vital growth, sprung from the people, and having a reflex action upon their imagination and conduct. Even in Queen Anne's day the theatre was the meeting-place of wits, and, if the plays were meaner, it was because they copied the manners of an artificial world. But, in either case, the playwrights were in no more hazard of representing their own natures, in one rôle after another, than are the leader-writers in their versatile articles upon topics of our day. They invented a score of characters, or took them from real life, grouped them with consummate effect, placed them in dramatic situations, lightened tragedy with mirth, mellowed comedy with pathos, and produced a healthful and objective dramatic literature. They looked outward, not inward: their imagination was the richer for it, and of a more varied kind. stage. 295 The stage still has its office, but one more sub- The modern sidiary than of old. Our own age is no less stirring than was the true dramatic period, and is far more subtile in thought. But the poets fail to represent it objectively, and the drama does not act as a safetyvalve for the escape of surplus passion and desire. That office the novelists have undertaken, while the press brings its dramas to every fireside. Yet the form of the play still seems to a poet the most comprehensive mould in which to cast a masterpiece. It is a combination of scenic and plastic art; it includes monologue, dialogue, and song,- action and meditation, man and woman, the lover, the soldier, and the thinker, all vivified by the imagination, and each essential to the completeness of the whole. Even to poets like Byron, who have no perception of natures differing from their own, it has a fascination Browning's as a vehicle of expression, and the result is seen in "Sardanapalus" and "Cain." Hence the closet-drama; and although praiseworthy efforts, as in "Virginius and "Ion," have been made to revive the early method, these modern stage-plays often are unpoetical and tame. Most of what is excellent in our dramatic verse is to be found in plays that could not be successfully enacted. While Browning's earlier poems are in the dramatic subjectivity. form, his own personality is manifest in the speech and movement of almost every character of each piece. His spirit is infused, as if by metempsychosis, within them all, and 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 still is there. But while his characters have a common manner and diction, we become so wonted to the latter that it seems like a new dialect which we have mastered for the sake of its literature. This feeling is acquired after some acquaintance with his poems, and not upon a first or casual reading of them. The brief, separate pieces, which he terms "dramatic lyrics," are just as properly dramas as are many of his five-act plays. Several of the latter were intended for stage-production. In these we feel that the author's special genius is hampered, so that the student of Browning deems them less rich and rare than his strictly characteristic essays. Even in the most conventional, this poet cannot refrain from the long monologues, stilted action, and metaphysical discursion, which mark the closet-drama and unfit a composition for the stage. His chief success is in the portrayal of single characters and specific moods. |