Art. 7.-ROBERT BROWNING.

The Works of Robert Browning. Edited by F. G. Kenyon. Centenary edition. Ten volumes. London: Smith,

Elder and Co., 1912.

It is a hundred years since Browning was born, but less than half that time since his work began to find a place, create an influence, become a familiar and treasured possession, in the English mind. If we would review the meaning which it now has for us, it is obvious that the centenary of his birth is an altogether arbitrary moment to choose for the task. A completed century does indeed carry with it, by a long habit of association, a sort of moral meaning, of which we reasonably forget that it springs from nothing more moral than a mere system of notation; but our date, though it has thus a relation to Browning's biography, has none to the history of his work or his influence, the beginning of which can be fixed at no definite point. Yet the custom of considering a man's work on such an occasion has a certain convenience which is none the worse for being no more than practical. Although of Browning at any rate-who at fifty-five could still throw his challenge to the British public with no assurance that it would like him yet'-it cannot be said that his poetry has rested long enough in British memories for its place and quality to be now matters adjudged, there has been, even in his case, time for the evaporation of many misconceptions from which no critical sense (not to speak of the merely British) can free itself without help from time. Uncritical blame, unreasonable objections, dispose of themselves readily enough; but even the more baffling obscurations of praise-praise rightly addressed but spreading too wide, concealing its object, praise which bewildered by eddying altogether away from the mark, in some quite other direction-may well have been dispersed by now. It is certainly not for their much indebted successors to disparage the first of the faithful, the earliest tenders of the shrine, who indeed reacted in their own sense no more freely than was needed to put an end to neglect and repel prejudice. They produced a body of criticism and annotation which must help later critics at all points,

and not least where they least feel able to subscribe to it. At the same time, if Browning's centenary is a convenient moment at which to speak of his poetry, it is so because conditions, as they say of the weather, may be held to be now normal. Browning may be attacked or praised, but in either case the gusto born of the consciousness that we are opposing here a coterie, there the world at large, has long ceased to flutter the nerves of criticism. 'Pippa Passes,' 'Men and Women,' The Ring and the Book,' now belong to us all; and we may read them more simply at least, if not more searchingly, than was once possible. At any rate it is quite certain that we do read them, and that there will be a ready welcome for the new and handsome edition which is being issued under the superintendence of Mr F. G. Kenyon. The aspect of these volumes is as admirable as the tact which has gone to the making of the illustrative and biographical notes, few but fit, with which each is introduced. Our view of Browning has changed its angle in the twenty and more years since his death; but it has never shifted away from him, and we may try to summarise what we see.

The change of angle has, in the first place, certainly seemed to show us that Browning, 'ever a fighter' as he declared himself, was involved by fate in a more insidious conflict than he perceived, and that all unawares he failed to make good his position in it. The battle of life, as enacted on the surface, was a straightforward engagement enough; and indeed, to turn from the clash and clatter of the exhortations, the renunciations, the defiances voiced in so many of his poems, to the extraordinary felicity of his actual circumstances from first to last, is to feel that the vigorous rain of blows misses its echo on the defences of the adversary, for the sufficient reason that the adversary has never presented himself. Browning was armed and eager, but it so happened that there were no giants in his path to slay. Privation, or what to his simple demands would have been privation, never came near him. No necessity, no disability, not even any selfcontradiction of his own temperament, interfered with his life-long dedication to his proper work; the pang of expression thwarted, for whatever reason, seems to have heen quite unknown to him. He knew great sorrow, but

not the cruelties of sorrow bitter and unnatural. Within and without, his life was one of the most singularly fortunate that genius can ever have known. This must be insisted on, not in the least for the disparagement of his spirit and courage-for in spite of a little unnecessary bluster and a few protestations that might have been taken for granted, these had a soundness and sanity which disaster could only have tempered more finelybut in order to emphasise the point that his destiny might seem to have drawn aside and held back on purpose to give him room for a complete realisation of himself. Moreover, he was not of those who need pressure from without, some stricter schooling than uninterrupted liberty and felicity, to evoke the best of their mind and strength. His was a strength that could do no less than exercise itself to the full, a mind which, so far as concerned activity, was its own discipline. And besides, it is to be remarked that one dangerous indulgence was withheld until long past the time when it might have been a danger; and that was such a favouring audience as, for example, counted for so much in Tennyson's later development. Browning's originality flowed from the very first in such deeply-cut lines that indulgence of this kind would probably indeed never have affected him to his hurt; but the want of it may be noted as yet a further chance in favour of a serene unhampered use of his gift. Browning, if any poet who ever lived, could be himself.

And yet, for all that, one needs only to re-read his work, only to feel its matchless energy, its various power, its swift and sudden beauty, close in upon the mind and call out with undiminished keenness the old responses; no less unmistakable, in the end, than its power and virtue is the sense that it has not in fact developed in harmony with itself. There was an undertow the effect of which can be discerned here and there throughout his work, and which finally mastered and redirected the conflicting impulse that was surely more thoroughly and originally his own. Browning had little to fear from any confessed hostility of fate; but fate had planned a more ingenious device than an open attack. This prodigal, restless, inquisitive mind, passionately awake, instantly appreciative of the gifts of life, was thrown into a time when appreciation, curiosity, creative energy, could indeed find

as ample material and as free a play as at any moment in history, but always on a condition liable in the circumstances to be very dangerous to them. The condition was that they should justify themselves to the age's rather vulgar conception of moral and material usefulness-a condition, as it is not now the mode to question, entirely rational in itself, but which presupposes a more disciplined self-criticism than was abroad at that remarkable moment.

Browning, while it would have been impossible for open pressure to have deflected him from what he proposed to do, was by the very nature of his endowment particularly exposed to the invisible pressure of the moral atmosphere in which he might find himself. All his affinities brought him out into the open. Far from taking shelter from life, he had not even his back to the wall; he stood forward with life all round him. He flung his mind wide to it and absorbed it, delighted with its staring colours, fascinated by its grotesque shapes and contrasts. These he could deal with, we know how consummately; but with the rest he appropriated moral and intellectual standards which needed a different treatment, one which it was not in him to give. He could not criticise them; that is why we are able to say that the first impulse we distinguished, the impulse to fasten, in an ecstasy of perception, on things seen, and to represent them in all their sharpness, was more truly characteristic. When he became a moralist he could only bring to the task the same energy; and all his acuteness in disentangling the moods of men and women, all his quickness in seizure and presentation, availed nothing beside the fact that, though he could dramatise their application, he could not really criticise the standards themselves which were offered him. Anarchy in the ideal world troubled him as little (or rather pleased him as much) as the fantastic jumble of objects displayed in the market-place, when June was the month, Lorenzo named the Square'; indeed they both affected him in much the same way. As he stands before the booths, we may feel with him the easy sweep of vision with which he takes in the scattered unrelated fragments, and the glow of exhilaration with which they are noted, absorbed, fastened in the brain. Their trivial incongruity is a

stimulus and a challenge, a brisk crossplay of suggestion, where the delight lies, not in the quality of the suggestion, but in the sense of the rapid brushing of all manner of unexpected points of life. So in the world of ideas his delight was in the process itself, in the mercurial dance of thought, till thought will accept no other fulfilment than to go dancing on for ever. Thus Browning could be satisfied with the self-stultifying conclusion that energy was its own end and conflict its own eternal reward. He could celebrate the antagonism between good and evil without caring for the implication that, if it is the fight itself which is the one essential, the names of the antagonists could be exchanged without spoiling the moral.

Browning, in short, was a spiritual adventurer born out of due time. His rich endowment, the seething flood of originality which was set in such contrast with the broadly civilised tradition that Keats had established and Tennyson was already adorning, seems designed for a different opportunity than that which it received. In these days, when we are forbidden to use the old labels which were once so helpful, when no edges may remain definite and no classification unqualified, it is possibly rash to speak of the Renaissance as a time when an exceptional burst of sight and sound gave, for those who were fit for it, a unique opportunity for seeing and hearing. Let us at least make the claim that, if ever there was a time resembling in this respect our oldfashioned idea of the Renaissance, that would have been the moment for Browning as for no other poet since Shakespeare. To picture a world of new learning, with possibilities of spiritual flight suddenly thrown open in every direction, new discoveries with the turning of a page, new castles of imagination at the hearing of a word, new sympathies and curiosities at the chance sight of a face, is to feel that among poets of later times it is Browning whom we would set there if we could, he who would respond to it most freely and reproduce it most worthily. At such a moment there could be little time for sitting in judgment or weighing moral values. To represent would be the only preoccupation, the only regret that the stream passed so swiftly that the spectator could not make sure of missing nothing. Browning's quick