IMAGERY IN BROWNING’S POETRY C. WILLARD SMITH: Associate Professor of English, Bucknell University

No matter what the nature of his investigation may be, the purpose of every student of literature is to enlarge his understanding of the poetry or prose which attracts his attention. If he succeeds in this purpose, he believes he can speak with greater assurance, even with a contagious emphasis, about the literature he has examined.

His investigations in many instances lead him to the past; so that his intellectual position in the contemporary world may seem, at first glance, rather awkward. But he takes this position deliberately, with the notion that an interpretation of the present is possible only when it is based upon an understanding of something that can be used as a fixed point of reference. Furthermore, if we stop to think of it, none of us has ever read a book which is actually contemporary, for such books are only those now in the process of being made.

The forms of literary study are various; they may be biographical, textual, historical, philosophical, linguistic, aesthetic, grammatical, corrective, editorial, or scientific. Of all the forms the scientific is perhaps the most difficult for the student of literature to carry on successfully, unless it be employed in the field of linguistic study. In recent years, however, the development of the science of psychology has seemed to set up a technique and a discipline which have appealed to some literary investigators as a method to be well used or flagrantly abused.

Among the various forms of literary study, the aesthetic has seemed to me very interesting. It is this method of investigation which requires the investigator to keep the fact in mind at all times that he is bent upon the examination of works of art, and that the creative personality behind these works is essentially an artist who uses words as his medium of expression. To be sure, there are certain forms of prose, and even poetry, which may be said to be more nearly the work of philosophers, political theorists, sociologists, historians, or critics, than the work of artists. The aesthetic method is indeed only one of several proper forms of literary study. Were it the only method to be employed, such conclusions as it might produce would lack the corrective inferences of other forms of analysis.

The poetry of Robert Browning has been examined by all the methods of literary scholarship and also by the "methods" which were employed by the Browning Societies of London, of Boston, and, for a time, of almost every other American community whose inhabitants sought to create an atmosphere of gentility.

Among Browning’s contemporaries there were two men who understood his poetry better than anyone else. It is interesting to note that their critical admiration for his work was based very largely upon aesthetic analysis. These men were Dante Gabriel Rossetti, poet and painter, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, poet and verbal musician. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was one of the very few men who realized the significance of Browning’s , who through reading that strange poem sensed in it the artistic qualities that distinguished Browning from all other English poets. One day after he had been reading , Rossetti found a book in the library of the British Museum. There was no name on the title-page save the title of the poem and the publisher's imprint. The poem was called . Rossetti was impressed by the literary style of the poem; it reminded him of . He wrote to Browning and learned that his aesthetic judgment had been, indeed, correct. , save for a few incidental pieces printed in periodicals of the day, was Robert Browning's first published poem.

When the muddle over the meaning of Browning’s was at its height, when on every hand the conventional critics were charging Browning with complete obscurity, it was Algernon Charles Swinburne who arose to the defense. This is what he said :

The difference between [the really obscure writer and Browning] is the difference between smoke and lightning, and it is far more difficult to pitch the tone of your thought in harmony with that of a foggy thinker than that of one whose thought is electric in its motion. Only random thinking and random writing produce obscurity. We find no obscurity in the lightning, whether it play about the heights of metaphysical speculation or the depths of character and motive. And thanks to this very quality of vivid spiritual illumination we are able to see with his eyes, or with the eyes of the living mask which he assumes for his momentary impersonation of saint or sophist, philosopher or malefactor; without accepting one conclusion, conceding one point, or condoning one crime. It is evident that to produce any such effect requires above all things brightness and de- cision as well as subtlety and pliancy of genius; and this is the supreme gift and distinctive faculty of Mr. Browning's mind. If indeed there be ever any likelihood of error in his exquisite analysis, he will doubtless be found to err rather through excess of light than through any touch of darkness.1

Following this suggestion of Swinburne I have examined this element of illumination, or of light, in Browning's poetry, fixing my attention particularly upon Browning's use of images of light; such as the sun, the stars, and those properties of nature which tend to break the white light of the sun into its various colors. In his youthful poem, , it is apparent that Browning had used these images to emphasize some of the most important points in the argument that he sought to present. He deliberately asso- ciated the personality of , the spirit of poetry, with an image of the star, and he called Shelley, with whose poetry he was then greatly enamoured, a "sun-treader”; he referred to the laws of God as a "lode star."

The more detailed the analysis of these images became, the more patently emerged the design of their structural relationship to the whole of , the more tantalizingly appeared the complexity of their interfusion with other images whose importance was often as great. Ordinarily, we are accustomed to say that Browning’s lacks even a fair degree of structural organization, that it is a confused, disorganized piece of work. But when we consider the evidence suggested by his deliberate use of these images, we can point, I think, to Browning's having either consciously or subconsciously assigned to these images a definitely structural function. We cannot explain away the unequal poetic quality of , but we can be certain that a fundamental design for the poem existed in Robert Browning's mind, however imperfectly he may have realized the merits of its artistic design in final composition. It is a design of images. We safely may conclude, therefore, that the unity of , such as it is, may be found more readily by an examination which assumes its imagery, rather than its logical division, to contain the elements of poetical structure and form.

We are accustomed, in working out the construction of a poem, to make logical order the criterion of our analysis. Usually there is enough of logical plan in a poem to make our task agreeable and our findings satisfactory, but, in the critical method which we thus employ, there is little that differentiates the process from the type of analysis we should apply to the scientific essay, in which we have every right to anticipate an abundance of logical "unity, coherence, and emphasis." It is quite possible that the discovery of the "outline” of a poem like might be accomplished more successfully in a manner similar to the one we should require for the examination of a painting or a piece of music, especially when the author happened to be a young man who, through inheritance and training, had already acquired a taste for, and a degree of proficiency in, drawing and musical composition.

The justification for the use of this method of analysis, if it is not proved by what has been said about , is that it is perhaps the only method of examination that shows Browning's to be actually intelligible. However, let us not become involved in at this moment, but move at once to a con>sideration of one of Browning’s most finished achievements, his poem, .

, published in in 1864, is generally recognized as one of Browning's finest poems. It is unique in that its style is the harmony of several modes and manners of expression. It is argumentative, lyric, dramatic, religious, mystical, and metaphysical, but, withal, predominantly contemplative. It aims to persuade the reader that music is superior to all other forms of artistic expression. Painting and poetry, great as they may be, are "but art in obedience to laws,” while music transcends the laws of art to become one with the laws of God:

But here [in music] is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can, Existent behind all laws that made them and, lo, they are!

The lyric tone of is produced by carefully wrought stanzas and verses. The poem is marked dramatically by Browning's having sought to identify his thesis with the character of a great musician, and by his having ostensibly written in accord- ance with the scheme of the dramatic monologue.

The religious temper of is manifest in the virtual identification of religion and music, or, in a larger sense, of religion and art. Abt Vogler, as he is here represented, like St. John in , attains to truth and beauty only through humbling himself in love before God and thus seeing ever more clearly the light of heaven:

And the emulous heaven yearned down, made effort to reach the earth, As the earth had done her best, in my passion, to scale the sky: Novel splendours burst forth, grew familiar and dwelt with mine, ..

There is no difficulty in interpreting lines such as these as an expression of the religious attitudes of the mystic, for the mystic, above all else, yearns for the dissolution of his own personality into unity with God. But there is a certain conscious reluctance in the character of Abt Vogler that checks his mystical enthusiasm just short of a complete self-effacement. Even in the lines quoted above the suggestion that heaven yearns downward to meet Abt Vogler’s passion "to scale the sky, together with the insistence on the word "mine,” is the sign of a personality which retains its individual integrity in spite of its moments of genuine humility. Abt Vogler, like Robert Browning, is a philosophical artist. He can withdraw from the excitement of his own argumentative, lyrical, and dramatic themes, or from the ardor of his religious and mystical beliefs, to consider and to meditate with metaphysical detachment. He can examine the effects of his musical improvisation upon himself; he can contemplate the probable impact of his art upon society. Finally, he can formulate certain philosophical opinions which give intellectual meaning to his experience:

There shall never be one lost good! What was, shallvlive as before; The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound; What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more; On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect round. The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky, Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard; Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by-and-by.

This philosophical mood is by no means confined to the lines just quoted; it is present throughout the poem. It is the unifying mood of the poem, for it produces a harmony of many moods into an "enveloping” tone of contemplative serenity. No less complex than its characteristic "tone” is the design of .- Its several structural phenomena are difficult to specify. Its logical divisions merge with an imagistic pattern equally important to the turn of the argument, and, while the poem rises with the cumulative insistence of the formal fugue, the impression of the freedom of improvisation remains. In the last section of the poem the lyric stanza-form, though strictly maintained, does not limit the broad sweep of philosophical conclusions. Even the lineaments of a chronological outline are faintly visible in the narrative of Abt Vogler’s experience. There is every reason to assume, therefore, that the twelve stanzas of , as well as any single poem that Browning has written, combine and concentrate the many stylistic modes, and the several most characteristic themes of Browning’s poetry.

Looking back for the moment to the intense struggles of , and comparing them with the quiet contemplation of , it is possible to see at least the philosophical answer to a former problem. The youth who wrote was oppressed with the fundamental conflict between artistic compression and spiritual expansion; the man who wrote , and perhaps no other poem quite its equal in composure, has resolved the conflict and given it a philosophical solution:

Give me the keys. I feel for the common chord again, Sliding by semitones, till I sink to the minor,—yes, And I blunt it into a ninth, and I stand on alien ground, Surveying awhile the heights I rolled from into the deep; Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting-place is found, The C Major of this life: so, now I will try to sleep.

The importance of is implied in the statements of the paragraphs just concluded, but its relationships to the examination of Browning's use of images of light is even more specific. The poem as a whole is a significant image of Browning’s conception of the artist’s creative experience. Aesthetically considered, this poem is a statement of many of Browning's most cherished opinions. It states his conception of the superiority of music to all other forms of art, and in a larger sense it implies that music is but the symbol of all great artistic achievement, as distinguished from the nearly great or imitative.

In his analysis of Abt Vogler’s methods of improvisation, Browning has expressed his idea of the process of creation. The artist begins with a conception of structure (the temple, or the palace of the first part of the poem) and proceeds to marshal the "keys” of his imagination to build ("Bidding my organ obey, calling its keys to their work”). When the foundations have been laid and the substantial outlines of his structure (or genre) have been established, the artist becomes preoccupied with the injecton of life and light into a form as yet inert.

Up, the pinnacled glory reached, and the pride of my soul was in sight. In sight? Not half! for it seemed, it was certain, to match man's birth, Nature in turn conceived, obeying an impulse as I; And the emulous heaven yearned down, made effort to reach the earth, As the earth had done her best, in my passion, to scale the sky: Novel splendors burst forth, grew familiar and dwelt with mine, Not a point nor peak but found and fixed its wandering star; Meteor-moons, balls of blaze: and they did not pale nor pine, For earth had attained to heaven, there was no more near nor far.

This is the element of creation which is called "inspiration.” It is the result, according to Browning, of the artist's effort to reach heaven, an "emulous heaven” which yearns down to "reach the earth"; so that no peak of the artist's aspiration but finds and transfixes "its wandering star.

Finally comes realization—the achievement of total form at its best, a form which is responsive to the laws of God, rather than to the laws of man; to universal law, rather than to the conventions of art; the achievement of the soul, as distinct from the achievement of the mind.

VI All through my keys that gave their sounds to a wish of my soul, All through my soul that praised as its wish flowed visibly forth, All through music and me! For think, had I painted the whole, Why, there it had stood, to see, nor the process so wonder-worth: Had I written the same, made verse—still, effect proceeds from cause, Ye know why the forms are fair, ye hear how the tale is told; It is all triumphant art, but art in obedience to laws, Painter and poet are proud in the artist—liest enrolled: VII But here is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can, Existent behind all laws, that made them and, lo, they are! And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man, That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star. Consider it well: each tone of our scale in itself is nought; It is everywhere in the world—loud, soft, and all is said: Give it to me to use! I mix it with two in my thought: And, there! Ye have heard and seen: consider and bow the head!

The "painter and the poet are proud" of their achievements, proud of their abilities to master the laws of triumphant art; the musician is humble, "consider and bow the head," for he has been mastered by the law of God, privileged beyond all other artists to discover the origin of beauty and truth.

It is hardly necessary to note that both the musician's resolution to inform his conception of structure with light and life, and the realization of his achievement of perfect, consummate form have been marked by the images of light, particularly by the image of the star. No ideas in Browning’s poetry have been more consistently represented by the image of the star, his favorite image of light, than these: spiritual resolution, and the attainment of perfection. Other ideas which have been so marked have been, indeed, aspects of these two, or their opposites, transfixed by the false, the mythological, the fanciful, and the eclipsed stars of unclarified, or, unworthy presumption.

The selection by Browning of the experience of improvisation as the clearest pattern of the process of artistic creation is a stroke of genius. Improvisation is the act of composing, rather than the act of recording the finished composition. Improvisation is expression in its purest form, untrammeled by the laws of popular appeal, unrestricted by the canons of criticism, unthwarted by notions of sale and exchange, totally free from preconceived ideas of artistic form. It is an affair which concerns only the artist and the source of all truth and beauty; it is Man and God becoming one and the same personality:

But God has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear; The rest may reason and welcome: ’tis we musicians know.

It is the mystical and the mysterious experience of creation which Browning seeks to emphasize as the distinguishing ability of every great artist. The rest is the intellectual and the technical labor of modulating experiences of this kind into the "C Major of this life":

Give me the keys. I feel for the common chord again, Sliding by semitones, till I sink to the minor,—yes, And I blunt it into the ninth. and I stand on alien ground, Surveying awhile the heights I rolled from into the deep; Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting-place is found, The C Major of this life: so, now I will try to sleep.

The evidence before us constitutes an interesting pattern of aesthetic practice, and its statement in the most philosophically and emotionally composed poem that Browning has written warrants our assuming it to be the design for poetry which he considered noblest and best.

Browning’s favorite image of light, the star, like his suns, moons, meteors, and rainbows, is profoundly associated with the dominant motives of Browning's genius. When the uses of the star are compared with the uses of other images of light, it becomes clear that the source of all Browning's imagery of light was a spiritual, rather than a realistic vision of the white light of eternal truth. It was this vision which sprang naturally, but with severe effort, from a mind which was preoccupied with the quest of ultimate reality. In his poetry it broke into a thousand heavenly forms of stars, suns, moons, rainbows, and meteors; and when it reached the earth, into reflections upon the face of the waters, into all the colors of the spectrum, upon plant and rock, animal and insect. All Nature, heaven and earth, was seen in the poet’s imagination to partake of the great white light beyond. Therefore, not only light, but the clouds, the mists, and the fogs of earth became important to the poet's description, for in them he saw the vision of forces which fought to obscure the white light of heaven. Furthermore, he saw in the powerfully clear colors of Nature a vision of the enticing loveliness which often distracted man's attention from the God beyond Nature. He did not deny their beauty, he almost adored it, but he strove to remember always that it was the pure white light that he was seeking. Even the clear points of the distant stars, he thought, might frequently delude man’s thinking, because of the misleading clarity implicit in their remoteness.

It is clear that the vision of white light is something that Browning saw only in his imagination. Nature gave him hints and suggestions which he transformed into the conviction that beyond stars and sun existed the eternal light of truth. Nature might reflect the light of truth, but only because Nature had been created by the power of God, whence came all original beauty. Of itself Nature is careless of man’s welfare, disinterested, impersonal. Nature affects man's actions only when man wills to see in Nature a reflection of ultimate truth and power. The star itself is not an influence upon the poet, except as he may have the power to see the star in its relationship to the white light of his imagination:

.... light had birth ere moons and suns, Flowing through space a river alone, Till chaos burst and blank the spheres were strown Hither and thither, foundering and blind: When into each of them rushed light—

It was a poet’s rather than a scientist’s attitude towards nature which made Browning feel that here in the vast world, spreading out at man’s feet or sweeping above him in the heavens, were the perfect images, the metaphors, the pictures of the mind of man; its pleasant streams of sparkling conversation, its luxuriant foliage of imagination, its secret caves of hidden forces, its terrifying cataracts of despair, its grotesque monsters of troubled thought, its supreme rainbows of hope, its suns of overwhelming generosity, its sudden meteors of momentary realization; its fixed stars of intellectual decision—a poet’s world, a sidelong look at the picturesque universe which never turned the heart to stone or loaded the mind with cold, unimaginative fact.

For Browning Nature is an ever-present though incomplete manifestation of ultimate beauty, ultimate perfection, ultimate unity, truth, and wisdom. In the poet's imagination the objects of Nature are images of this conviction. As they are used in his poetry, the sun and stars become effective images only because Browning has willed to see beyond their physical radiance. They are thus loaded with the fact of his imagination; each has been made over, transformed from a physical object into a sign of spiritual reality, and charged with the energy of a deep conviction.