Browning, Blougram, and Belief

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89), Victorian poet and contemporary of Robert Browning (1812–89), wrote "Seven Epigrams," the sixth of which reads:

By one of the old school who was bid to follow Mr. Browning's flights:

To rise you bid me with the lark:With me 'tis rising in the dark.¹

"Dark" in this telling couplet certainly means without inspiration, or even admiration. On another occasion, in a letter to Robert Bridges dated November 27, 1882, Hopkins explicates his poem "Walking by the Sea," later titled "The Sea and the Skylark," and says: "There is, you see, plenty meant; but the saying of it smells, I fear, of the lamp, of salad oil, and what is nastier, in one line somewhat of Robert Browning."² Hopkins critic Paul Mariani conjectures that in all likelihood the line was "Race wild reel round, crisp coil deal down to floor,"³ reminiscent of Browning's "Irks care the crop-full bird? Frets doubt the mawcrammed beast?" from "Rabbi Ben Ezra."⁴ Hopkins was put off by "the clogged consonantal tongue twisting," or what someone else has called Browning's "lumpy and gritty erudition."⁵ Hopkins eliminated the line in question from the final version of his poem.

Apart from Hopkins' usage, "dark" had the more widely held sense of "obscure meaning" when applied to Browning's poetry. An often repeated story from the Browning lore concerns "Sordello," perhaps the most boldly obscure of all his works. As the story goes, shortly after publication of "Sordello," Robert Browning at a social gathering was approached by one of his devoted admirers. "Mr. Browning," the lady began, "I dearly love your new poem, but I am having difficulty with these lines." At that point she produced the troubling passage for Browning to read. After briefly scanning the lines, Browning turned to the lady saying: "Madam, when those lines were written two knew their meaning, God and Browning. Now only God Knows."

Whether the story is true or apocryphal its point is accurate, for Browning "was addicted to touch-and-go allusions which demand extensive knowledge on the reader's part, to plunge in media res without preliminary description of character, place, or time, and above all to elliptical syntax and the sudden jump from thought to thought without benefit of connecting links."⁶ Such unconnected jumps prompted one of Browning's friends to protest his use of "hieroglyphics" and torn scraps of meaning that required his readers to fill in the gaps. His wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, observed: "A good deal of what is called obscurity in you, arises from a habit of very subtle association; so subtle, that you are probably unconscious of it … the effect of which is to throw together on the same level and in the same light, things of likeness and unlikeness—till the reader grows confused as I did."⁷

The critical negativism caused by these structural practices has been intensified by Browning's philosophical habit-of-mind repeatedly referred to as optimism. Browning's boisterous joy in life sprang from a passionate love of existence. He believed that every person has some window through which he or she can view the essential excellence of things and like Pippa can know that "God's in his heaven,—/All's right with the world!"⁸ All of this was so for Browning because he accepted life as he found it, inherently good even though at times it goes wrong. He, like Shakespeare, understood the weak, the erring, the self-deceiving, but the fact that the world is imperfect implies a design of perfection; incompleteness itself argues that there is a completeness. Thus, deficiency may always be the basis of hope and provides an excellent argument for an optimisim not founded on "opinions which were the work of Browning but on life which was the work of God."⁹

The critics who were contemptuous of these views because they (the critics) were complete skeptics or because they relied wholly on dogma called them (the views) sentimental and complacent optimism. Critics like G. K. Chesterton, on the...