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III.

MR. BROWNING'S "OBSCURITY."

T was long the fashion- and that fashion has not yet passed away with skimming readers and perfunctory critics to charge Mr. Browning with being "wilfully obscure, unconscientiously careless, and perversely harsh."

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There are readers and readers. One class, constituting, perhaps, not more than one-tenth of one per cent, or a thousandth part of the whole number, "read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest"; the remaining ninety-nine and nine-tenths per cent, through a habit of loose and indiscriminate reading, are unequal to the sustained concentration of mind demanded by the higher poetry, the language of which is characterized by a severe economy of expression a closeness of texture, resulting from the elliptical energy of highly impassioned thought.

Reading is, perhaps, more superficial at the present day than it ever was before. There is an almost irresistible temptation to reverse the "multum legendum esse non multa" of Quintilian, overwhelmed as we are with books, magazines, and newspapers, which no man can number, and of which thousands and tens of thousands of minds endeavor to gobble up all they can; and yet, from want of all digestive and assimilating power, they are pitiably famished and deadened.

Sir John Lubbock has lately been interested in the preparation of a list of the best hundred books, and to that end has solicited the aid of a number of prominent scholars. Prof. Edward Dowden remarks thereupon, in an article on 'The Interpretation of Literature,' "It would have been more profitable for us had we been advised how to read any one of the hundred; for what, îndeed, does it matter whether we read the best books or the worst if we

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lack the power or the instinct or the skill by which to reach the heart of any of them? Books for most readers are, as Montaigne says, 'a languid pleasure'; and so they must be, unless they become living powers, with a summons or a challenge for our spirit, unless we embrace them or wrestle with them."

To return from this digression to the charge against Browning of obscurity. And, first, it should be said that Browning has so much material, such a large thought and passion capital, that we never find him making a little go a great way, by means of expression, or rather concealing the little by means of rhetorical tinsel. We can never justly demand of him what the Queen in 'Hamlet' demands of Polonius, "more matter with less art." His thought is wide-reaching and discursive, and the motions of his mind rapid and leaping. The connecting links of his thought have often to be supplied by an analytic reader whose mind is not up to the required tension to spring over the chasm. He shows great faith in his reader and "leaves the mere rude explicit details," as if he thought,

"'tis but brother's speech

We need, speech where an accent's change gives each

The other's soul." 1

A truly original writer like Browning, original, I mean, in his spiritual attitudes, is always more or less difficult to the uninitiated, for the reason that he demands of his reader new standpoints, new habits of thought and feeling; says, virtually, to his reader, MetavoЄîte; and until these new standpoints are taken, these new Μετανοεῖτε habits of thought and feeling induced, the difficulty, while appearing to the reader at the outset, to be altogether objective, will really be, to a great extent, subjective, that is, will be in himself. Goethe, in his 'Wahrheit und Dichtung,' says:

"Wer einem Autor Dunkelheit vorwerfen will, sollte erst sein eigenes Innere besuchen, ob es denn da auch recht hell ist. In der Dämmerung wird eine sehr deutliche Schrift unlesbar." 2

1'Sordello.'

2 He who would charge an author with obscurity, should first look into his own mind, to know whether it is quite clear there. In the dusk a very distinct handwriting becomes illegible."

And George Henry Lewes, in his 'Life of Goethe,' well says:

"A masterpiece excites no sudden enthusiasm; it must be studied much and long, before it is fully comprehended; we must grow up to it, for it will not descend to us. Its emphasis grows with familiarity. We never become disenchanted; we grow more and more awe-struck at its infinite wealth. We discover no trick, for there is none to discover. Homer, Shakespeare, Raphael, Beethoven, Mozart, never storm the judgment; but once fairly in possession, they retain it with unceasing influence."

And Professor Dowden, in the article from which I have just quoted, says:

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Approaching a great writer in this spirit of courageous and affectionate fraternity, we need all our forces and all our craft for the friendly encounter. If we love ease and lethargy, let us turn in good time and fly. The interpretation of literature, like the interpretation of Nature, is no mere record of facts; it is no catalogue of the items which make up a book—such catalogues and analyses of contents encumber our histories of literature with some of their dreariest pages. The interpretation of literature exhibits no series of dead items, but rather the life and power of one mind at play upon another mind duly qualified to receive and manifest these. Hence, one who would interpret the work of a master must summon up all his powers, and must be alive at as many points as possible. He who approaches his author as a whole, bearing upon life as a whole, is himself alive at the greatest possible number of points, will be the best and truest interpreter. For he will grasp what is central, and at the same time will be sensitive to the value of all details, which details he will perceive not isolated, but in connection with one another, and with the central life to which they belong and from which they proceed."

In his poem entitled 'Pacchiarotto, and how he worked in distemper,' Mr. Browning turns upon his critics, whom he characterizes as "the privileged fellows, in the drabs, blues, and yellows " (alluding to the covers of the leading British Reviews), and especially upon Alfred Austin, the author of that work of wholesale condemnation, 'The Poetry of the Period,' and gives them a

sound and well-deserved drubbing. At the close of the onset

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"Was it 'grammar' wherein you would 'coach' me —

You, - pacing in even that paddock

Of language allotted you ad hoc,

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With a clog at your fetlocks, — you— scorners

Of me free from all its four corners?

Was it 'clearness of words which convey thought?'

Ay, if words never needed enswathe aught

But ignorance, impudence, envy

And malice - what word-swathe would then vie
With yours for a clearness crystalline?

as noddle

But had you to put in one small line
Some thought big and bouncing-
Of goose, born to cackle and waddle

And bite at man's heel as goose-wont is,
Never felt plague its puny os frontis —

You'd know, as you hissed, spat and sputtered,

Clear 'quack-quack' is easily uttered!"

In a letter written to Mr. W. G. Kingsland, in 1868, Mr. Browning says:

"I can have little doubt that my writing has been in the main too hard for many I should have been pleased to communicate with; but I never designedly tried to puzzle people, as some of my critics have supposed. On the other hand, I never pretended to offer such literature as should be a substitute for a cigar or a game at dominoes to an idle man. So, perhaps, on the whole I get my deserts, and something over- not a crowd, but a few I value more." 1

It was never truer of any author than it is true of Browning, that Le style c'est l'homme; and Browning's style is an expression of the panther-restlessness and panther-spring of his impassioned intellect. The musing spirit of a Wordsworth or a Tennyson he partakes not of.

Mr. Richard Holt Hutton's characterization of the poet's style,

1 'Browning Society Papers,' III., p. 344.

as a

"crowded note-book style," is not a particularly happy one. In the passage which he cites from Sordello, to illustrate the "crowded note-book style," occurs the following parenthesis :

"(To be by him themselves made act,

Not watch Sordello acting each of them.)"

"What the parenthesis means," he says, “I have not the most distant notion. Mr. Browning might as well have said, 'to be by him her himself herself themselves made act,' etc., for any vestige of meaning I attach to this curious mob of pronouns and verbs. It is exactly like the short notes of a speech intended to be interpreted afterwards by one who had heard and understood it himself." 1

At first glance, this parenthesis is obscure; but the obscurity is not due to its being "exactly like the short notes of a speech," etc. It is due to what the "obscurity" of Mr. Browning's language, as language, is, in nine cases out of ten, due, namely, to the collocation of the words, not to an excessive economy of words. He often exercises a liberty in the collocation of his words which is beyond what an uninflected language like the English admits of, without more or less obscurity. There are difficult passages in Browning which, if translated into Latin, would present no difficulty at all; for in Latin, the relations of words are more independent of their collocation, being indicated by their inflections.

The meaning of the parenthesis is, and, independently of the context, a second glance takes it in (the wonder is, Mr. Hutton didn't take it in),

"To be themselves made by him [to] act,

Not each of them watch Sordello acting."

There are two or three characteristics of the poet's diction which may be noticed here:

1. The suppression of the relative, both nominative and accusative or dative, is not uncommon; and, until the reader becomes 1'Essays Theological and Literary.' Vol. II., 2d ed., rev. and enl., p. 175.

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