Every cultivated man or woman knew poems of his wife, Mrs. Barrett Browning-and she has written some fine poetry-yet, Robert Browning was supposed to be difficult and obscure, though I never could see any difficulty or obscurity. He was one of the bravest souls, and one of the most optimistic that I have ever met.
Think of the verses in Rabbi Ben Ezra:
Not on the vulgar mass
Called 'work,' must sentence pass,
Things done, that took the eye and had the price;
O'er which, from level stand,
The low world laid its hand,
Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice:
But all, the world's coarse thumb
And finger failed to plumb,
So passed in making up the main account;
All instincts immature,
All purposes unsure,
That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount:
Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into a narrow act,
Fancies that broke thro' language and escaped;
All I could never be,
All, men ignored in me,
This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.
Browning often spoke to me of the way he had been neglected and his work mis-seen, but always with a happy cheerfulness, as if it didn't matter. I remember one story he used to tell, that John Stuart Mill came across some of his early work, I think Bells and Pomegranates, and wrote to Browning, asking him, would he like him to review it in Tail's Magazine, which was then the chief literary organ. Of course Browning said he would be delighted and was very grateful.
Mill thereupon wrote to the editor, and the editor replied that of course he would be very glad to accept anything from the pen of Stuart Mill, but not a review of Bells and Pomegranates, because that had already been reviewed in a previous number of the magazine. Browning thereupon sent for the previous number of the magazine and found that the review in question was short if not sweet:
Bells and Pomegranates, by Robert Browning: Balderdash.
'It depended, you see,' said Browning, 'on what looked like the merest accident, whether the work of a new and as yet almost unknown writer should receive an eulogistic review from the pen of the first literary and philosophic critic of his day-a review which would have rendered him most powerful help, exactly at the time when it was most needed-or whether he should only receive one insolent epithet from some nameless nobody. I consider,' he added, 'that this so-called 'review' retarded any recognition of me by twenty years' delay.'
There are many things in life which I can never hope to understand, but the vagaries of popularity are to me among the most incomprehensible of mysteries. As I have said in another place, had I been asked who was the artist most certain to be popular in England, where the love of beauty is almost a religion, I should have said, Whistler, who never did anything which hadn't a touch of beauty in it, who was devoted to beauty, more even than to sublimity. But no, the English mocked him and wouldn't have him for twenty years. And it was Ruskin, who was transparently honest and filled with the same enthusiasm for beauty, who did Whistler the greatest injury.
In the same way, if I had been asked beforehand the poet who would most appeal to Englishmen, with their manful courage and optimistic view of life, I should have said Robert Browning; and Robert Browning went through life almost unknown to the end! Meredith, I think it is, who wrote of A song seraphically free From taint of personality.
But it was just the inevitable touch of personality that endeared Robert Browning to me.
It was in the early nineties that I came across a verse that started me on a new quest:
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower;
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
I was so startled that I had to get Blake at once, and I simply devoured him.
For months I used to annoy every one by reciting verses of his and declaring that he was the greatest spirit born in England since Shakespeare died.
His Garden of Love appealed to me intensely:
I went to the Garden of Love
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut And 'Thou shalt not' writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds.
And binding with briars my joys and desires.
I have already quoted dozens of Blake's verses in my books; again and again he gives expression to the very spirit of Jesus, and the greatest lines of natural magic in all English poetry are his. … Let the west wind sleep on The lake: speak silence with thy glimmering eyes And wash the dusk with silver.
His finest verses always make me feel that there will be greater men born into the world than any we know of.
As Blake himself wrote, his deepest words will.. still go on Till the heavens and earth are gone.
For above Time's troubled fountains,
On the great Atlantic mountains,
In my golden house on high,
There they shine eternally.
Talking once with Oscar Wilde and another friend, the topic came up of undiscovered beauties of high poetry. 'That's the best of winning a great reputation,' said Oscar; 'everything you do well is sure to be known.'
'I don't agree with you,' I objected; 'the finest things, even in Shakespeare, are unknown.'
Oscar laughed. 'Come, come! A wild paradox,' he expostulated.
'You have read the sonnets,' I went on; 'well, I don't believe you know the finest line in them.'
'Nonsense,' he exclaimed impatiently, 'everyone knows Shakespeare's best.
Why Wordsworth has gone through all the sonnets, pointing out the best and after that, there's no gleaning.'
'I don't believe that Wordsworth could see the best for himself,' I retorted.
'Your English moralizers like Wordsworth and Milton all have blind spots in them.'
'Not in poetry,' persisted Oscar. 'But what is your line?'
'My line,' I said, 'is finer than anything in Sophocles, more purely Greek, and curiously enough, it is in praise of beauty and is simply divine; 'beauty,'
Shakespeare says, 'Whose action is no stronger than a flower.' '
'Divine, indeed!' cried Oscar. 'But where does it come?'
I recited the verse. He was evidently puzzled a little at having overlooked the jewel for he said, 'I'll let you know tomorrow whether Wordsworth has missed that sonnet or not; I feel sure its very simplicity would have struck him.'
Next day he came to me laughing.
'Frank, it's absolutely astounding; you're right; Wordsworth quotes the very next sonnet, the 66th, but omits the 65th; it's incredible!'
