A STUDY OF BROWNING.*
In this volume, Mr. Nettleship has reprinted his papers on Browning, first published many years ago, and has added to them a considerable number of other Essays and Thoughts,. devoted to the study of some of the later poems which had not been published when the book first appeared. The book, it need scarcely be said, is the work of an ardent admirer. Mr. Nettleship tells us that it is " as a dearer tribute from my soul to his," that it has been written, and certainly there can be no doubt as to the sincerity of his gratitude and enthusiasm. But, unfortunately, other gifts are needed in order to produce good literary criticism, and for want of them Mr. Nettleship's work too often falls far short of excellence. To begin with, the limits within which he has set himself to work, give an unsatisfactory incompleteness to the book. He tells us in his Introduction that his purpose is not " to enter into any criticism in the ordinary sense of the word ;" instead of that it has seemed to him "more important to evolve thoughts than to trace beauties or faults of construction—more useful to discover lessons for actual life than to examine historical evidences." This he speaks of elsewhere as " interpretation."
Inadequate as such a one-sided treatment of a great poet must obviously be, if Mr. Nettleship had set himself with in- sight and discrimination and self-repression to give a clearly thought-oat account of the main lines of Browning's moral teaching, and had insisted on the courage and spiritual dis- cernment which make it always so impressive, he might have done considerable service. Much, too, might have been done by a careful analysis of difficult passages, and by an unravelling of the obscure forms of expression in which Browning so often loves to wrap up his meaning, to have cleared the path of unpractised readers from some of the hindrances which make
• Robert Browning Essays and Thoughts. By J. T. Nettleship. Elkin Mathowa.
progress so difficult. There are many passages in Bordello, for instance, where a careful line for line reproduction of the con- densed and involved phraseology into clear and intelligible English, might be of real assistance in setting free the imprisoned meaning, and so giving people a better chance of appreciating the power of that very remarkable but desperately difficult poem.
But " interpretation " of this unpretending and useful kind
finds little place in the volume before us. With all his admira- tion, Mr. Nettleship seems to lack the power needed to deal with a mind of depth and originality such as Browning's. We gain from the essays no really clear and coherent picture of the character and ruling principles which stamp his work as a whole, or of the unity of thought and purpose, which, however varying in its manner of expression, may be traced in so remarkable a way throughout his whole poetical career. Instead of this, certain poems are somewhat arbitrarily selected, as containing great spiritual significance, and these are used as texts on which to hang long discourses, whose aim would often seem rather to be to give expression to Mr. Nettleship's own personal opinions and convictions, or to the suggestions which his mind has gained from study of the poems, than to draw out the poet's most valuable and characteristic teaching. This personal element is a constant and irritating feature of the book. The reader's attention is constantly being drawn from the poems themselves, by long digressions which are offered as "the results of earnest thought," or as " a tentative interpretation," or as " a suggested inner meaning developed," or as " con- clusions " to which Mr. Nettleship " by loving consideration" has been " led irresistibly." In one case a digression, lasting for seventeen pages, is attached to the essay on " Saul," in which Mr. Nettleship gives us a study of what he calls " the development of the spirit of prayer," which he traces through Abraham—whose character he describes as marked by a " radiant vitality "—Jacob, and Moses, to its highest point in David and Christ. As far as we can see, it has not the slightest bearing on the poem itself, and a careful con- sideration has not enabled us to find any link which might serve to connect it, in any reasonable way, with the essay. We must protest, too, in passing, against the error of taste, to say the least of it, which can allow Mr. Nettleship, in another essay, to use such a phrase as " the wife of God, whom we call Nature," or to speak of his belief in " a God, inscrutable, passionate, ever-labouring."
A few instances will show more plainly the character of his method of interpretation. Any one who has read the poem " Waring" will remember the vivid and suggestive sketch of character which it contains. This is how Mr. Nettleship fills in some of the outlines :—
" Slighted from his earliest boyhood, he [`Waring'] very early cast aside what he called the trammels of conventionality; wandering whither he would, he soon overcame or silenced the remonstrances of a fond mother—of aunts or sisters who found him incorrigible, nay, most likely, saw nothing in him except a very awkward creature, perpetually in everybody's way Early in life he thought he saw what was wrong in the world ; with the confidence of youth, day by day, he would strike out, in his woodland walks, utopian plans, whereby perhaps artists should be made rich and appreciated (for he must have had an artist's nature), armies should be re-organised, monarchies overthrown, the poor made well off, republics raised into being, education enforced, game laws, excise laws, monopolies, sunk in an ocean of freedom."
But it is only by reading the poem and its paraphrase together, that any adequate idea of the strange results possible from "earnest study" can be gained. Again, the danger of treating a poem as if it were a sermon whose aim should be to produce as large a quantity of moral teaching as possible, is illustrated throughout the essay on that weird and nightmare- like poem, " Childe Rolande." One bit of it, with its serious working out of allegory and lesson, is too quaint to be omitted : " One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare, Stood stupified, however he came there : Thrust out past service from the devil's stud !"
" The blind horse he sees : What does that teach P Alas, it reminds him, not of past labour, and rest duly earned, but of sin, and suffering earned by sin, because the man has lost his faith.
That stiff blind horse : is it not also an image to him, if he will know it, of what he may yet come to if he lets his aspirations sink, and allows failure to weigh him down into a mere daily drudge P" We are not surprised that even Mr. Nettleship felt some hesitation as he set himself to search for the "second mean- ings " and the " hidden lessons," of which this is a specimen. In " Saul" the faults of interpretation are of a graver kind. It is surely misleading in the extreme, and calculated only to obscure the beauty and character of the poem, to attach this pretentious comment to the following lines :— " And I first played the tune all our sheep know, as, one after one, So docile they come to the pen-door, till folding be done."
"Thus he calls to the wretch's [Saul's] mind that as sheep must follow their shepherd at the end of a day, so must man follow his shepherd, Nature, at the end of a long sin. For a long sin ended in lethargy is the end of a day in man's intellectual life : he has sucked out of that sin all the good which is necessary to give him
the lesson of life which that sin is intended to teach the great fatalist work is done for that time he must now come quietly back to chew the cud of that terrible meal, and let Nature do her work, and give him her nourishment therefrom."
As interpretation, this seems to us to be entirely false, to say nothing of the contrast it offers to the simplicity and beauty which mark the poem itself.
Of the remaining papers which make up the book it is impossible to speak at all fully. Some of them are little more than paraphrases, or "prose translations," of certain poems- " Fifine at the Fair," " Christmas Eve and Easter Day," " A Death in the Desert," and " Parleyings with Certain People of Importance." There may be readers who would find such a rendering of poetry helpful, though, to our minds, it would be more likely to give them a distaste for it ; but even these paraphrases, full as they are, do not undertake to clear up the obscurity of detached lines, or to disentangle the con- struction of involved sentences, which is where, for the most part, the real difficulty of understanding Browning lies. For the rest, there is little calling for notice in the detached and dis- jointed sketches which profess to deal more generally with certain aspects of Browning's teaching. Scattered through them may be found occasional bits of suggestive or appreciative comment, but as a rule they are too slight to be of any real interest. There is, however, one essay which we ought not to omit to notice, " On the Erroneous Study of Browning," in which Mr. Nettleship very sensibly protests against the fashion of those critics who seek to read their own meaning into the poet's work. He says sternly of this,—" All such attempts, by conscientious students of Browning, to read the writer's own theological or other views into poems dealing with portrait drama pure, should be gibbeted as high as Haman : they are poisoning the wells." His warning is useful, and is often much needed ; but it would often apply more closely than he seems quite aware of to the work to which we have just been calling attention.
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