The Need for Disbelief: A Comment on Pippa Passes

THE NEED FOR DISBELIEF: A COMMENT ON PIPPA PASSES D. C. Wilkinson Browning is not a poet who has made any very strong appeal to modern sensibilities but this, naturally and rightly, has not prevented scholars and critics from trying to ascertain and place his contribution to Victorian Letters. Within the last six or seven years there have been at least three books devoted to the study of Browning: H. C. Duffin's Amphibian (1956), J. M. Cohen's Robert Browning (1952), W. C. DeVane's Browning Handbook (1955). There is a fourth work also, E. D. H. Johnson's The Alien Vision oj Victorian Poetry (1952), in which considerable space is allotted to the work of Browning. The need for accurate historical and biographical detail in all literary fields is certainly being met today by adventurous and diligent researchers both in the universities and outside them, but the need for stimulating, helpful, and scrupulous valuation of the poets' works seems as hard to come by as ever-to judge not only by these four works. The point in this instance can perhaps be illustrated by comparing the contents of Pippa Passes with the comments of some modern critics: by contrasting the action and dialogue with the sort of claims made for it, particularly in The Alien Vision and in the Handbook, where Pippa Passes is dealt with more fully. I would suggest at the outset that I think Mr. Johnson's essay on Browning is a most manful attempt to do the fullest possible justice to Browning as a thinker, and it will remain for me at any rate a useful reference book for the "growth of Browning's ideas," which have here been given order and shape in relation to his poetic output. I've a suspicion, though, that Mr. Johnson has a very much clearer view of what it was that Browning thought than Browning himself had, for Browning is seldom as cogent in his thinking as this critic of his-as a KINSON glance at the criticism will show. Mr. Johnson has also, I suggest, done more than justice to Browning as poet, which is a disservice. In this matter, too, I would say much the same of the other three Browning scholars-though of Mr. DeVane only when he undertakes to ascertain and place Browning's "contribution." At any rate, the general trend is to overestimate Pippa Passes: or to be so partial to what Pippa Passes ought to be as to miss what it is. Standards of comparison are either misapplied or in abeyance. The only explicit comparison is from the Handbook (p. 93): Perhaps it is worth noticing that the intensity of the emotional crises, as well as the language occasionally, shows that Browning had begun to study Shakespeare as a dramatic model. Three lines of King Lear (Act III, scene 2, lines 49- 51) are then quoted to support the statement: Let the great gods, That keep this dreadful pother o'er our heads, Find out their enemies now. . . . There is indeed some kind of similarity of image in the following extract from Pippa Passes: Buried in woods we lay. you recollect: Swift ran the searching tempest overhead; And ever and anon some bright white shaft Burnt tbro' the pine-tree roof, here burnt and there, As if God's messenger thro' the close wood screen Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture, Feeling for guilty thee and me. Similarity of image maybe, but Lear sees the storm as a symbol of a universal anguish and horror, while this other storm merely gives Ottima the opportnnity for enjoyable self-dramatization, where the whole universe is seen to be vainly in opposition to their "glorious guilt." The similarity is only a matter of the surface, really. It would in fact be a good day for Browning were Shakespeare to be left out of the account. Any valuation of Pippa Passes must of course offer some kind of analysis of the four critical scenes between Ottima and Sebald, Jules and Phene, Lnigi and his mother, and Monsignor the Cardinal and the Intendant. The scene between Ottima and Sebald has called forth most comment...