Just as Browning's character is hard to identify so also are his poems difficult to
relate to the age in which they were written. Bishops and painters of the Renaissance,
physicians of the Roman Empire, musicians of eighteenth-century Germany?as we
explore this gallery of talking portraits we seem to be in a world of time long past,
remote from the world of steam engines and disputes about human beings' descent
from the ape. Yet our first impression is misleading. Many of these portraits explore
problems that confronted Browning's contemporaries, especially problems of faith
and doubt, of good and evil, and of the function of the artist in modern life. 'Caliban
upon Setebos,' for example, is a highly topical critique of Darwinism and of natural
(as opposed to supernatural) religions. Browning's own attitude toward these topics
is partially concealed because of his use of speakers and of settings from earlier ages,
yet we do encounter certain recurrent religious assumptions that we can safely assign
to the poet himself. The most recurrent is that God has created an imperfect world
as a kind of testing ground, a 'vale of soul-making,' as John Keats had said. It followed,
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for Browning's purposes, that the human soul must be immortal and that heaven itself be perfect. As Abt Vogler affirms: 'On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round.' Armed with such a faith, Browning sometimes gives the impression that he was himself untroubled by the doubts that gnawed at the hearts of Tennyson, Arnold, and other figures in the mid-Victorian period. Yet Browning's apparent optimism is consistently being tested by his bringing to light the evils of human nature. His gallery of villains?murderers, sadistic husbands, mean and petty manipulators? is an extraordinary one. Few writers, in fact, seem to have been more aware of the existence of evil.
A second aspect of Browning's poetry that separates it from the Victorian age is its style. The most representative Victorian poets such as Tennyson and Dante Gabriel Rossetti write in the manner of Keats, John Milton, and Edmund Spenser, and of classical poets such as Virgil. Theirs is the central stylistic tradition in English poetry, one that favors smoothly polished texture, elevated diction and subjects, and pleasing liquidity of sound. Browning draws from a different tradition, more colloquial and discordant, a tradition that includes the poetry of John Donne, the soliloquies of William Shakespeare, and certain features of the narrative style of Geoffrey Chaucer. Of most significance are Browning's affinities with Donne. Both poets sacrifice, on occasion, the pleasures of harmony and of a consistent elevation of tone by using a harshly discordant style and unexpected juxtapositions that startle us into an awareness of a world of everyday realities and trivialities. Readers who dislike this kind of poetry in Browning or in Donne argue that it suffers from prosiness. Oscar Wilde once described the novelist George Meredith as 'a prose Browning.' And so, he added, was Browning. Wilde's joke may help us to relate Browning to his contemporaries. For if Browning seems out of step with other Victorian poets, he is by no means out of step with his contemporaries in prose. The grotesque, which plays such a prominent role in the style and subject matter of Carlyle and Dickens and in the aesthetic theories of John Ruskin, is equally prominent in Browning's verse:
Fee, faw, fum! bubble and squeak! Blessedest Thursday's the fat of the week. Rumble and tumble, sleek and rough, Stinking and savory, smug and gruff.
Like Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (1833?34), these lines from 'Holy-Cross Day' (1855) present a situation of grave seriousness with noisy jocularity. It was fitting that Browning and Carlyle remained good friends, even though the elder writer kept urging Browning to give up verse in favor of prose.
The link between Browning and the Victorian prose writers is not limited to style. With the later generation of Victorian novelists, George Eliot, George Meredith, and Henry James, Browning shares a central preoccupation. Like Eliot in particular, he was interested in exposing the devious ways in which our minds work and the complexity of our motives. 'My stress lay on incidents in the development of a human soul,' he wrote; 'little else is worth study.' His psychological insights can be illustrated in poems such as 'The Bishop Orders His Tomb' (1845) and 'Andrea del Sarto' (1855). Although these are spoken monologues, not inner monologues in the manner of James Joyce, the insight into the workings of the mind is similarly acute. As in reading Joyce, we must be on our guard to follow the rapid shifts of the speaker's mental processes as jumps are made from one cluster of associations to another. A further challenge for the reader of Browning is to identify what has been left out. As was remarked in a letter by the 1890s poet Ernest Dowson, Browning's 'masterpieces in verse' demonstrate both 'subtlety' and 'the tact of omission.' 'My Last Duchess,' he added, 'is pure Henry James.'
But Browning's role as a forerunner of twentieth-century literature should not blind us to his essential Victorianism. Energy is the most characteristic aspect of his writing and of the man (Ivan Turgenev compared Browning's handshake to an electric shock).
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Gerard Manley Hopkins described Browning as 'a man bouncing up from table with his mouth full of bread and cheese and saying that he meant to stand no blasted nonsense.' This buoyancy imparts a creative vitality to all of Browning's writings.
Porphyria's Lover1
The rain set early in tonight, The sullen wind was soon awake, It tore the elm-tops down for spite, And did its worst to vex the lake: 5 I listened with heart fit to break. When glided in Porphyria; straight She shut the cold out and the storm, And kneeled and made the cheerless grate Blaze up, and all the cottage warm; 10 Which done, she rose, and from her form Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl, And laid her soiled gloves by, untied Her hat and let the damp hair fall, And, last, she sat down by my side is And called me. When no voice replied, She put my arm about her waist, And made her smooth white shoulder bare, And all her yellow hair displaced, And, stooping, made my cheek lie there, 20 And spread, o'er all, her yellow hair, Murmuring how she loved me?she Too weak, for all her heart's endeavor, To set its struggling passion free From pride, and vainer ties dissever, 25 And give herself to me forever. But passion sometimes would prevail, Nor could tonight's gay feast restrain A sudden thought of one so pale For love of her, and all in vain: 30 So, she was come through wind and rain. Be sure I looked up at her eyes Happy and proud; at last I knew Porphyria worshiped me: surprise Made my heart swell, and still it grew 35 While I
