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V.S. Pritchett on Browning
There are many reasons to read Browning. The distinguished author and critic, V.S. Pritchett, offers a few of them in his review of the landmark biography, The Ring and the Book, by William Irvine and Park Honan, which was published in 1974. Here's what he has to say:
"His [Browning's] words, his inverted phrases, his telescopings, his grotesqueries, are syntax as a stage cast: words are players. It is important that he spent many years writing tragedies and melodramas in verse in the hope that [actor/producer William] Macready would produce them. Of all the English poets of the 19th century Browning seemed the most likely to succeed on the stage. But ... his gifts were those of the novelist or the poet of monologue. There is a proliferation of brilliant detail, so that the small things and psychological dilemmas become more dramatic than the main drama. He adopts the point of view of characters unlike himself, and this putting on of another's voice and life depends on a certain bounding abruptness and on an acute sense of the mind's sensations....
"Difficult rather than obscure, simply because deviousness and the "impossible" perversely attracted him, Browning is one of those who, except in direct dramatic song, are traveling underground with torches of imagery in a mind that is often too continuously vivid. The effect is of broken mosaic, thought and feeling turned into broken-up things and events.... Another source of difficulty is that life is embedded in a dense texture of historical reading. So much of Browning was refracted through the medium of other arts, particularly music and painting, as well as through antiquarian vestiges....
"One can suspect that as a poet Browning was drawn to Elizabeth Barrett by her remarkable facility, by the lack of confusion in her feeling, even by the easy popular spontaneous throb of her colored verse. Invalidism had in fact matured her."
And here are some further thoughts from New York Browning Society President Emeritus, Bob Griffiths;
"Why Browning? I propose seven reasons - and these are hardly exhaustive:
1. He is a poet of questions and ambiguities, not finalities. His poetry reminds us that life is messy and complex, not cut and dried. Unlike today's self-appointed moral guardians, Browning reminds us that life does not reduce to either/or, black or white, but is a messy infinitude of grays. In none of his major work does Browning give us cut and dried, neatly tied-up answers. He places weighty issues on his poetic and philosophical scales, tips them back and forth, and finally allows them to arrive at some kind of uneasy balance. Indeed, Browning can be said to be a poet of unease: tension, conflict, paradox. He leaves us with the unresolvable untidiness of much of life. With Browning there is as much to "read" between the lines, in the spaces, and in what is left unsaid as there is in the words and lines themselves.
2. A poet of morality. He reminds us repeatedly that morality is a relativistic and slippery slope. Moralists then and now who focus solely on pelvic morality miss - or choose to ignore - larger and more consequential moral issues. Now as then, this is often done cynically and manipulatively. An oft-repeated point in Browning is that true morality is love for one another in the broadest and finest sense of that overused word. Selfless love, Golden Rule love, humankind striving to emulate God's love.
Browning's studies of evil are particularly sophisticated and multi-layered. Whether it's the soulless Duke in My Last Duchess, or the murdering lover of Porphyria, Guido Franceschini in The Ring and the Book, or the green-with-envy monk in Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, Browning shows us time and again that evil doesn't always announce itself with horns and cloven hooves - or bare midriffs. Evil is often at work in those who are in denial about what they're doing, or who justify their deeds, or who commit evil in the name of good. And evil is still more subtle and clever than that when it operates beneath a veneer of class, of position, of respectability, of wealth, of power, or of piety. Especially piety.
3. A poet of the subjective - perhaps the most subjective of his century. Browning's dramatic monologues, for instance, speak volumes about human character in a handful of lines. He wrote about "action in character rather than" the simpler "character in action."
4. A poet who challenges. On one level, he challenges us with his poetics and his erudition. On another, he challenges orthodoxy, received wisdom, moral blind spots, hypocrisy, doctrinal certainties, the arrogance and abuse of power. For example, Europe in the 19th century was flooded with revolutionary scientific discoveries, particularly from Charles Darwin. These discoveries, atop an Enlightenment tradition of skepticism and reason, ignited a blazing controversy with the Church and believers over Biblical credibility. Since the Bible was read literally, believers felt that the very foundations of their world were being attacked. But Browning called both sides to task on their absolutism, in such diverse poems as Caliban Upon Setebos and A Death in the Desert. Browning was able to honor both the sacred and the scientific, his faith intact. He did not accept the absolutist claims on either side of the debate - a debate that sadly drags on with absolutists today.
5. A spiritual poet. Browning, in his own words, puts "soul above intellect." One of the problems that contemporary critics have with RB is their inability or refusal to accept Browning's spirituality. They insist on dealing with him on purely intellectual terms - an approach doomed to failure. This was NOT a problem in 19th and early 20th-century criticism, which had no problem dealing with Browning's metaphysics and spirituality, but only with his poetics, rooted as the critics were in the language and technique of other 19th century poets. The issue today is to acknowledge the poet's spiritual and religious core, because he cannot otherwise be engaged and understood.
6. A poet of paradox. Andrea del Sarto: faultless and intellectual painter utterly in control of his medium and technique, whose work we admire rather than respond to - and whose life was a mess. Fra Lippo Lippi: a philandering monk who paints inspired and inspiring religious works using everyday people to represent the sublime rather than the idealized imaginings of his contemporaries.
7. An elusive poet. He resists easy categorization. Put RB in a box and label it and you will keep wrapping chains around it to keep him from bursting through.
All of these elements combine in Browning's monumental work, The Ring and the Book: 21,116 lines based on a 17th-century Italian murder case. It is one of literature's most exhaustive studies of human nature and contains sublime passages of poetry along with narrative and expository verse.
William Charles Macready (March 3, 1793-April 27, 1873)
V.S. Pritchett's essay, excerpted above, mentions Macready as the producer of Browning's plays. But Macready deserves to be remembered for other reasons; for more than half his life, he was an actor - a star, as we would say today, and a producer. Perhaps his greatest contribution was to lift the theatre and its people from the disreputability that had dogged the profession for centuries. Actors had no social status; they were considered by many to be rogues and vagabonds. Tennyson described Macready as "moral, grave, sublime," and the actor said that he wanted a theatre "in decorum and taste worthy of our country." (Byron said, "I suppose he asks five pounds a week more for his morality.)
The most poignant Macready/Browning connection was the poet's composition of The Pied Piper of Hamelin and The Cardinal and the Dog for Macready's ailing son to illustrate during his recuperation. The boy did indeed draw some pictures, and, happily, made a full recovery.
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