Wilde, Browning, and the "New Obscurity"

Wilde, Browning, and the "New Obscurity" Leslie White University of New Orelans IN THE FAMOUS and frequently cited "Browning passage" in "The Critic as Artist," as well as in a series of texts both minor and central that precede and appear to lead inevitably to it, Wilde constructs a reading of Browning and his poetics that instantiates many of his own critical and aesthetic positions. In these texts, drawing on his study at Oxford of idealist thought (particularly that of Hegel), Wilde casts Browning as a philosophical ironist, the first to do so, situating Browning (and himself) firmly in the tradition of Romantic idealism. Further, in defending Browning against charges of obscurity, Wilde anticipates theoretical approaches to his poetry that have had and continue to have currency in our own century.1 Though a number of writers on both Browning and Wilde allude to the "Browning passage" (often merely to repeat the famous quip, "Meredith is a prose Browning and so is Browning"), only William Buckler has explored, too briefly but suggestively, the critical implications of Wilde's encomium to Browning's poetical iconoclasm.2 Buckler sees Browning as "a third critical presence" (behind Arnold and Pater) in the dialogue and, most importantly, "as a shaping influence on Wilde the critic." Wilde observes in Browning some of "the very qualities required of the 'highest' kind of critic": . . . uncompromising individualism; the targeting of how the mind works rather than what the mind concludes; emphasis on human life in its enormous variety and in its peculiarly concentrated moments, exceptional as well as representative and always intense; reliance on the imagination for elevating the quality of life evidenced by a faith in role-playing as one of the most trustworthy ways of revealing life's profounder realities; appreciation of the WHITE : WILDE & BROWNING materials of art and determination to get from them the aesthetic effects a unique personality wishes to achieve.3 Buckler also points to an important affinity between Wilde's moral and aesthetic philosophy, expressed through Gilbert, and Browning's·, a devotion , frequently documented in Browning criticism since Wilde, to such salient features of the idealist bearing as imperfection, incompleteness , and anticipation, to what Herbert Tucker has called "disclosure" and Clyde Ryals "becoming."4 But because Buckler's central concerns lie elsewhere—with, among other topics, arguing that Arnold is the "pervasive critical presence" in the dialogue and that Gilbert's argument for the critic as supreme artist self-destructs—he does not pursue this affinity between Browning and Wilde nor his earlier assertion of Browning 's influence on Wilde the critic. Browning is a pivotal figure, perhaps the "pervasive critical presence," in "The Critic as Artist," instrumental for Wilde in focusing and illustrating his own idealist aesthetic. Before I examine Wilde's reading of Browning in the last and most theoretically daring of his dialogues, however, it is necessary first to contextualize this reading by tracing its brief history through the various texts that adumbrate it, as well as to establish the relevant aspects of the literary climate Wilde entered and in which he produced these texts when he came to London from Oxford in 1878. When Wilde finally settled in London in that year, the "cultus of Browning," as William Rossetti described it, was moving from its underground status into full-blown Browning worship.5 The fame and approval so long denied Browning had finally come to him, sometimes manifesting itself in perplexing, even disconcerting ways. Flattered by but always a bit uneasy with the societies that formed to honor him and pore over his work, Browning was never able wholly to give his imprimatur to or disavow them.6 Approbation and near deification, however, were coincident with persistent charges of unintelligibility, an already tired (if not entirely inaccurate) objection that had dogged—and probably inspired—Browning at least since the "disaster" of Sordello. Browning 's reputation as a difficult, affected, often unreadable poet remained constant throughout his career and after and is too well known to require full rehearsal here. It is perhaps sufficient to recall that reviewers inveighed against his poetry's obscurity, often deeming it willfully so, declaring his work unpoetical, too like prose. This hostile...