Browning's England: A Study in English Influences in Browning - Helen Archibald Clarke

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it does ever spread

       Like a sea's arm as it goes rolling on,

       Being the pulse of some great country—so

       Wast thou to me, and art thou to the world!

       And I, perchance, half feel a strange regret

       That I am not what I have been to thee:

       Like a girl one has silently loved long

       In her first loneliness in some retreat,

       When, late emerged, all gaze and glow to view

       Her fresh eyes and soft hair and lips which bloom

       Like a mountain berry: doubtless it is sweet

       To see her thus adored, but there have been

       Moments when all the world was in our praise,

       Sweeter than any pride of after hours.

       Yet, sun-treader, all hail! From my heart's heart

       I bid thee hail! E'en in my wildest dreams,

       I proudly feel I would have thrown to dust

      4 The wreaths of fame which seemed o'erhanging me,

       To see thee for a moment as thou art."

      Browning was only fourteen when Shelley first came into his literary life. The story has often been told of how the young Robert, passing a bookstall one day spied in a box of second-hand volumes, a shabby little edition of Shelley advertised "Mr. Shelley's Atheistical Poems: very scarce." It seems almost incredible to us now that the name was an absolutely new one to him, and that only by questioning the bookseller did he learn that Shelley had written a number of volumes of poetry and that he was now dead. This accident was sufficient to inspire the incipient poet's curiosity, and he never rested until he was the owner of Shelley's works. They were hard to get hold of in those early days but the persistent searching of his mother finally unearthed them at Olliers' in Vere Street, London. She brought him also three volumes of Keats, who became a treasure second only to Shelley.

      Percy Bysshe Shelley

      "Sun-treader, life and light be thine forever."

      The question of Shelley's influence on Browning's art has been one often discussed. There are many traces of Shelleyan music and idea in his early poems "Pauline," "Paracelsus," and "Sordello," but no marked nor lasting impression was made upon Browning's development as a poet by Shelley. Upon5 Browning's personal development Shelley exerted a short-lived though somewhat intense influence. We see the young enthusiast professing the atheism of his idol as the liberal views of Shelley were then interpreted, and even becoming a vegetarian. As time went on the discipleship vanished, and in its place came the recognition on Browning's part of a poetic spirit akin yet different from his own. The last trace of the disciple appears in "Sordello" when the poet addresses Shelley among the audience of dead great ones he has mustered to listen to the story of Sordello:

      —"Stay—thou, spirit, come not near

       Now—not this time desert thy cloudy place

       To scare me, thus employed, with that pure face!

       I need not fear this audience, I make free

       With them, but then this is no place for thee!

       The thunder-phrase of the Athenian, grown

       Up out of memories of Marathon,

       Would echo like his own sword's grinding screech

       Braying a Persian shield—the silver speech

       Of Sidney's self, the starry paladin,

       Turn intense as a trumpet sounding in

       The Knights to tilt—wert thou to hear!"

      Shelley appears in the work of Browning once more in the prose essay on Shelley which was written to a volume of spurious letters of that poet published in 1851. In this is summed up in a masterful paragraph6 reflecting Browning's unusual penetration into the secret paths of the poetic mind, the characteristics of a poet of Shelley's order. The paragraph is as follows:

      "We turn with stronger needs to the genius of an opposite tendency—the subjective poet of modern classification. He, gifted like the objective poet, with the fuller perception of nature and man, is impelled to embody the thing he perceives, not so much with reference to the many below as to the One above him, the supreme Intelligence which apprehends all things in their absolute truth—an ultimate view ever aspired to, if but partially attained, by the poet's own soul. Not what man sees, but what God sees—the Ideas of Plato, seeds of creation lying burningly on the Divine Hand—it is toward these that he struggles. Not with the combination of humanity in action, but with the primal elements of humanity, he has to do; and he digs where he stands—preferring to seek them in his own soul as the nearest reflex of that absolute Mind, according to the intuitions of which he desires to perceive and speak. Such a poet does not deal habitually with the picturesque groupings and tempestuous tossings of the forest-trees, but with their roots and fibers naked to the chalk and stone. He7 does not paint pictures and hang them on the walls, but rather carries them on the retina of his own eyes: we must look deep into his human eyes, to see those pictures on them. He is rather a seer, accordingly, than a fashioner, and what he produces will be less a work than an effluence. That effluence cannot be easily considered in abstraction from his personality—being indeed the very radiance and aroma of his personality, projected from it but not separated. Therefore, in our approach to the poetry, we necessarily approach the personality of the poet; in apprehending it, we apprehend him, and certainly we cannot love it without loving him. Both for love's and for understanding's sake we desire to know him, and, as readers of his poetry, must be readers of his biography too."

      Finally, the little "Memorabilia" lyric gives a mood of cherished memory of the Sun-Treader, who beaconed him upon the heights in his youth, and has now become a molted eagle-feather held close to his heart.

      Keats' lesser but assured place in the poet's affections comes out in the pugnacious lyric, "Popularity," one of the old-time bits of ammunition shot from the guns of those who found Browning "obscure." The poem is an "apology" for any unappreciated poet with8 the true stuff in him, but the allusion to Keats shows him to have been the fuse that fired this mild explosion against the dullards who pass by unknowing and uncaring of a genius, though he pluck with one hand thoughts from the stars, and with the other fight off want.

       Table of Contents

      I

      Stand still, true poet that you are!

       I know you; let me try and draw you.

       Some night you'll fail us: when afar

       You rise, remember one man saw you,

       Knew you, and named a star!

      II

      My star, God's glow-worm! Why extend

       That loving hand of his which leads you,

       Yet locks you safe from end to end

       Of this dark world, unless he needs you,

       Just saves your light to spend?

      III

      His clenched hand shall unclose at last,

       I know, and let out all the beauty:

       My poet holds the future fast,

       Accepts the coming ages' duty,

       Their present for this past.

      IV

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