Recent Browning Studies

RECENT BROWNING STUDIES" Kant's dictum holds a special truth for critics of Robert Browning: "concepts without percepts are empty/' he warns, and "percepts without concepts are blind." If illusions of order in Browning's large and complicated canon are often the result of empty theorizing, submission to detail too often produces a myopic criticism that rambles aimlessly through vast tracts of material with no coherent theory to develop. The problem is only partly solved in two recent books on Browning: Roma A. King, Jr.'s, The Focusing Artifice: The Poetry of Robert Brawning and Mary Rose Sullivan's Brawning's Voices in The Ring and the Book: A Study in Method and Meaning. Though both books make solid contributions, King's study would gain from more of Sullivan's formal analysis, and Sullivan's work would benefit from more of King's generalizing power. With so prolific, diverse, and difficult a poet as Browning, a proper balance of the two approaches seems at times impossible to achieve. In the first four chapters of The Focusing Artifice Professor King's comprehensive treatment does not allow him to develop his insights with as much rigour as he displays in the last three chapters of his book. Though he finds Sordello one of Browning's four most Significant poems, he devotes less space to it than to Pippa Passes, and never seems to make up his mind whether its failures are "illustrative" or real. To win assent to his claims Professor King requires more submission to poetic detail and more analysis of the kind that he provides in The Bow and the Lyre. His recurrent assertion that Browning rejects the idea of a transcendent God Cpo xvii) and views religious truth as a subjective projection cpp. 119, 165) overlooks too much evidence. Close attention to "Abt Vogler," "Saul," and The Ring and the Book indicates a radically different pattern: a collaboration between man and an external God, in which intellectual and emotional power reinforce each other, and the mind returns from revelation to reRection in a progressive enrichment. King's attempt to read Browning as Camus and to see Guido as a kind of seventeenth-century Meursault does not persuade me. The existential thesis is not inherently improbable, but King fails to submerge himself in the most obvious qualities of Guido's style, which emphasize, not the Count's humanity, but his depravity. As M. H. Abrams observes, "the necessary, though not sufficient, condition for good criticism remains what it always has been: a keen eye for the obvious." Professor King drops fascinating hints about the "circular" or "vertical" form of Browning's plays and the fragmentation of a hero into multiple characters. But in the first four ""Roma A. King, Jr., The Focusing Artifice: The Poetry of Robert Browning. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press 1968. Pp. xiv, 288. $7.50; Mary Rose Sullivan, Browning's Voices in the Ring and the Book: A Study in Method. and Meaning. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1969, Pp. viii, 226. $7.50j Elvan Kintner, ed., The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett BaTTett 1845-1846. 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass.; The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Pp. xliv, 568; viii, 1119. $33.00. 290 W. DAVID SHAW chapters he either fails to develop his promising leads or else asserts as facts a number of controversial points. It is finally a question, I suppose, of audience: just what kind of reader is Professor King addressing? Whereas the first four chapters seem to be a handbook for the layman, the chapters on Browning's late poetry are presumably written for the specialist. Whether or not all readers have the same degree of admiration for Browning's late poems, Professor King never sinks into loose generalities when dealing with them. His analytic mind is generally at work with specific poems and problems: the movement between argument and vision in the "Parleyings," the use of "surmise" in La Saisiaz, the metaphysics of seduction in Fifine at the Fair. King enriches even the most forbidding of Browning's late poems, and when he condemns a work like Red Cotton Night-Cap Country he gives critical reasons. Even in...