To understand Henry James’s assertion that Browning was ‘a tremendous and incomparable modern’, it is necessary to understand the Victorian world as modern, as a dynamic, experimental, excitingly innovative age of achievements in exploration (internal and external) and advances in invention, but also as a time of doubts raised by experiments and enquiries. Browning himself is a prime innovator, an engineer of form, an explorer of history and the human heart, revolutionary in his art and of lasting importance in his achievements. One critic has suggested that Browning’s masterpiece, The Ring and the Book, may be viewed as a ‘heroic attempt to fuse Milton with Dickens, the modern novel with the epic poem’. Certainly, the comparison with Dickens is sustainable: Browning’s poetry is conspicuously democratic, rapid, colloquial, and modern in its preoccupation with individuals and the social, religious, and political systems in which they find themselves obliged to struggle, to progress throughout the history of humanity’s efforts to develop.
Words like ‘develop’ and ‘progress’ raise the matter of Browning’s optimism, which is usually taken at face value to mean his apparently consoling exclamations on the level of ‘God’s in his heaven—All’s right with the world’, ‘Oh, to be in England/Now that April’s there’, ‘Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp/Or what’s a heaven for?’, and so on. These are positive enough, and over-familiar to those who seek moral, theological, or nationalistic uplift from Browning. They have become the stuff of samplers and poker-work, tag lines expressive of a pious sentimentality (‘It was roses, roses all the way …’) he rarely intended, a jingoistic English nationalism (‘Oh, to be in England …’) he hardly felt, and a shining Candidean optimism (‘God’s in his heaven …’) that was the least of his philosophy. Browning’s poetry too often survives miserably as useful material to be raided and packaged for books of inspirational verse-in-snippets and comfortable quotations. This is a permanent fame, perhaps, but not Parnassian glory.
Browning’s optimism was a more robust and muscular characteristic, deriving not at all from sweet-natured sentimentality or rose-tinted romanticism. Rather, it was rooted in a profound, passionate realism—naturalism, some claim—and tremendous psychological analysis that looked unsparingly, with a clear eye, at the roots and shoots of good and evil. Unlike most Victorians, Robert Browning was more matter-of-factly medieval or ruthlessly Renaissance in his assessments and acceptance of matters from which fainter, or at least more emollient, spirits retreated and who drew a more or less banal moral satisfactory to the pious, who tended to prefer the possibility of redemption through suffering. For some readers, suffering was quite sufficient in itself—a just reward and retribution for the sin or moral failure, for example, of being poor.
Browning’s innate Puritanism, as Chesterton remarks, stood him in good stead, providing a firm foothold ‘on the dangerous edge of things’ while he investigated ‘The honest thief, the tender murderer.’ The early attempts of the Browning Society and others to construct a ‘philosophy’ for Browning, a redeeming and inspirational theological and ethical system to stand as firmly as that imposed by Leslie Stephen on Wordsworth, is bound to be suspect in specifics and should be distrusted in general.
That Browning was a lusty optimist is rarely doubted in the popular mind, but the evidence adduced to support the theory is too often selective and superficial. His optimism was in fact an appetite and enthusiasm for life in all its aspects, inclusive rather than exclusive, from the highest joy to the darkest trials. His optimism was an expression of endurance, of acceptance, of the vitality of living and loving, of finding value in the extraordinary individuality and oddity of men and women. Robert Browning is, in the judgement of G. K. Chesterton, ‘a poet of misconceptions, of failures, of abortive lives and loves, of the just-missed and the nearly fulfilled: a poet, in other words, of desire’. Ezra Pound insists on Browning’s poetic passion. Men and Women, the collection of poems that redeemed Browning from obscurity in middle-age, is a demotic, democratic piece of work that reflects his distance from his early reliance on the remote Romantic imagery of Shelley and adopts a firmer insistence on the mundane life of city streets and market-places.
This interest in the apparently tawdry, temporal life of fallible men and women somewhat disconcerted his more elevated, intellectual contemporaries. Of The Ring and the Book, George Eliot (who should have known better, and might have had more sympathy for the poem in her youth) commented: ‘It is not really anything more than a criminal trial, and without anything of the pathetic or awful psychological interest which is sometimes (though very rarely) to be found in such stories of crime. I deeply regret that he has spent his powers on a subject which seems to me unworthy of them.’ She was not the only contemporary critic to make such a point, or adopt such an aesthetic view: Thomas Carlyle declared the poem to be ‘all made out of an Old Bailey story that might have been told in ten lines and only wants forgetting’.
In short, Browning shocked his contemporaries. The shock consequent on his choice of subject matter was perhaps compounded by the novelty of his poetic approach to its treatment. Pippa Passes, startlingly unlike in form to anything contemporaneous in English poetry, is regarded by Chesterton, aside from ‘one or two by Walt Whitman’, as ‘the greatest poem ever written to express the sentiment of the pure love of humanity’. Like Whitman, Browning was responsive to the spirit of his age. For all his learning and his familiarity with the past, and for all his choice of antique subject matter and foreign locations, Browning is no funeral grammarian of a past culture, of spent history. His portrait of the Florentine artist Fra Lippo Lippi is as living, as vibrant, and as relevant as might be a current account of the life of the modern painters Francis Bacon or Damien Hirst. The speeches in The Ring and the Book might, with some adjustments, make a modern television or radio series examining a murder case from the points of view of all the protagonists. The form of serial views of one event was not new when Browning revived it from Greek classic models, but he infused it with modernity and it has since become a staple model for dramatists.
Browning did not bestride the peaks of poetry like a Colossus with a lofty and noble eye for the prospect at his feet. He rambled like a natural historian, peering and poking in holes and corners, describing minutely and drawing his particular conclusions; he visited the courtroom with a reporter’s notebook, and the morgue with the equipment of a forensic scientist. He was an entomologist of humanity in all its bizarre conditions of being. His great subjects were philosophy, religion, history, politics, poetry, art, and music—a few more than even Ezra Pound later marked out as the fit and proper preoccupations of serious poetry. They were all encompassed in Browning’s studies of modern society and the men and women of a universal humankind.
Browning’s poetry is often of a period, but in no sense is it period poetry, nor is Browning a period poet. In this he differs from the more consciously archaic writers and works of the Pre-Raphaelites who admired him, strove to imitate him, and embedded themselves in a literary aspic. Whereas his successors became conscious, perhaps dandified and decadent, Browning himself was largely and serenely unconscious, vigorous, and often matter-of-fact. He had principles and opinions, at first devoutly and latterly didactically held. But Browning was learned and assimilative rather than rigorously intellectual. His poetry suffers often from obscurities that puzzle intellectuals because Browning was, above all, a widely and profoundly literate, well-read man.
Once he had absorbed a fact or a thesis, he subsumed it in his mind where it found useful and congenial company. Joined with a mass of other facts and theses, it became so inextricably enmeshed with its fellows that, when it was eventually pulled out to illustrate, embellish, or point up a phrase in Browning’s work, it was comprehensible only—though not always afterwards, when he had done with it—to the mind of the poet. Being already so personally familiar with it, he thought nothing of its unfamiliarity to his readers. Chesterton regards this as the greatest compliment he could have paid the average reader. There are many who may feel too highly complimented. In this sense, his poetry is devoid of intellectual arrogance or one-upmanship. Perfectly innocently and without conscious affectation, Browning’s work arises from and is coloured with what Henry James identified as an ‘all-touching, all-trying spirit … permeated with accumulations and playing with knowledge’.
For all his modernity, now increasingly acknowledged and admired by literary critics,