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Browning's Music Poems: Fancy and Fact

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

George M. Ridenour
George M. Ridenour*
Affiliation:
Haverford College, Haverford, Penn
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Extract

Browning is one of Shelley's main heirs in the nineteenth century. As a boy he had worshipped Shelley, who is the most obvious single influence in both Pauline (pub. 1833) and Paracelsus (pub. 1835), his earliest published works. He grew uneasy about the relationship later, but he never stopped being in important ways a poet in the tradition of Shelley. One of the enduring likenesses between them is the way both use their strong sense of the weakness of language in developing the meaning of poems. Shelley uses it most fully in Epipsyckidion, where it serves a vision of the inadequacy of all human satisfactions. His solution is to set up a number of more or less satisfactory terms, calling attention to the fact that no one of them will do, and that they all together “do” only in special ways. This corresponds in language to the tendency to resist restrictions on personal relationships that appears in the Shelleyan “harem.” The solution in both cases can be awkward, but in the case of language, at any rate, the awkwardness is part of the meaning.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 78 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1963 , pp. 369 - 377
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1963

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References

1 Fifine may be to some extent an answer to Epipsyckidion. Cf. H. C. Dufnn, Amphibian: a Reconsideration of Browning (London, 1956), p. 243.

2 There are interesting brief comments on this subject in Park Honan's Browning's Characters (New Haven, 1961), pp. 36–37, 142.

3 Milton Wilson, Shelley's Later Poetry (New York, 1959), p. 224.

4 This point was first developed by William C. DeVane, in his Browning's Parleyings (New Haven, 1927), esp. pp. 257–259. The whole section on “Charles Avison” should be consulted.

5 All quotations from Browning are from the Centenary ed. of the Works, ed. F. G. Kenyon (London, 1912).

6 Cf. Browning's discussion of “Art's response / To earth's despair” in the parleying “With Christopher Smart” (ll. 52–53). (I do not think it has been pointed out that the Chapel image, of which the lines quoted are a part, has its source in Byron's stanzas on St. Peter's and the Vatican in Childe Harold iv.155–163.)

7 Cf. DeVane, Handbook (New York, 1955), p. 221.

8 Since writing this I have been struck by the similarity in conception of Alain Resnais' film “Last Year at Marienbad.” Resnais develops a similar opposition in Baroque art between the illusionistic palace interior (German) and the geometrical French garden, both real and unreal, in different ways.

9 See the discussion by C. Willard Smith, Broivning's Star-Imagery (Princeton, 1941), pp. 182–187. Smith finds more humility in the poem than I can make out.

10 As Mrs. Orr puts it: “The effect was incommensurate with the cause; they had nothing in common with each other.” Handbook (London, 1907), p. 245.

11 Robert Browning and Julia Wedgwood (letters), ed. Richard Curie (New York, 1937), pp. 29–34. The relevant letters are from July 1864. “Abt Vogler,” to which they seem to refer, had appeared late in May of that year.

12 Coleridge composes the contradictory materials of “Kubla Khan” into a song that makes no claim to be anything else. It is the poet, by virtue of his special integration, who can form such wholes (last six lines). In “Christabel” the fragmentation and morbidity of the poem's world are harmonized and purified by the grace and purity of its music, as Bard Bracy speaks of purifying the wood with his song (ll. 560–563). But these are special cases even for Coleridge. The distinction between what a poet writes and what he thinks he is writing is a real one, but it does not always mean the same thing. With Browning it would be unwise to suppose that we can always penetrate directly to what he is saying and ignore what he thinks he is saying. He may be more unorthodox than he thought, but that he thought he was not is sometimes part of what he is saying.

13 The experience is found in Shelley, but his version is harder to label. See Benziger (below, n. 15).

Each Art a-strain
Would stay the apparition,—nor in vain:
The Poet's word-mesh, Painter's sure and swift
Colour-and-line-throw …
Outdo
Both of them, Music! Dredging deeper yet,
Drag into day,—by sound, thy master-net,—
The abysmal bottom-growth ….(11. 217–220, 234–237)

15 In the chapter on Browning in his Images of Eternity (Carbondale, Ill., 1962), p. 184, James Benziger calls attention to the poet's own speculations in this regard in his drama Luria.

16 Pompilia speaks in this manner of herself:

I am held up, amid the nothingness,
By one or two truths only—thence I hang,
And there I live,—the rest is death or dream,
All but those points of my support. (vii.603–606)

The arguments of the lawyers, similarly, are “suspended” between the visions of Pompilia and the Pope.

17 See William C. DeVane, “The Virgin and the Dragon,” Yale Review, xxxvii (1947), 33–46.

18 The most useful discussion of Browning's attitude towards the Christian revelation is that by William O. Raymond, “Browning and Higher Criticism,” in The Infinite Moment (Toronto, 1950), pp. 19–51. There is also an important series of papers by H. B. Charlton, all in the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library: xxii (1938), 98–121; xxiii (1939), 33–67; xxvii (1942–43), 36–69, 271–307; xxxv (1952–53), 349–384. Charlton describes Browning's views as rather simple and fixed. His valuable discussion of the “truth” of The Ring and the Book appears in the same periodical, xxviii (1944), 43–57.

19 The difference in context demonstrates the pervasiveness of the notion. For comment on Browning's principle of “repetition of the miracle” see Raymond (above, n. 18), pp. 37–38, 47–48. Sarah Youngblood is listed as having read a paper on “‘The Repetition of the Miracle’ in the Ring and the Book” at a meeting of the Midwest Modern Language Association (April 1960). PMLA [Supplement] lxxvi (Sept. 1961), 3.

My babe nor was, nor is, nor yet shall be
Count Guido Franceschini's child at all—
Only his mother's, born of love not hate! (vii. 1762–64)
I never realized God's birth before—
How He grew likest God in being born.
This time I felt like Mary, had my babe
Lying a little on my breast like hers. (vii.1690–93)

21 The interests of this essay are shared by a number of modern readers of Browning. There are versions, for example, in the “relativism” of Robert Langbaum's The Poetry of Experience (London, 1957), the “perspectivism” of Wylie Sypher's introduction to the Norton edition of The Ring and the Book (New York, 1961), and the “pluralism” of E. D. H. Johnson's “The Pluralistic Universe of Robert Browning,” University of Toronto Quarterly, xxxi (1961), 20–41. To these should be added the personalist stress in the section on Browning in Johnson's The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry (Princeton, 1952), and found also in Sypher and Langbaum. (My attention has been called to a discussion of fact and fancy in The Ring and the Book that ran in the Victorian Newsletter from Spring 1959 to Spring 1960. The participants were Paul A. Cundiff, Donald Smalley, and Robert Langbaum.)