Browning’s Lyrics and the Language of Periodical Criticism

Abstract

BROWNING'S LYRICS AND THE LANGUAGE OF PERIODICAL CRITICISM WILLIAM J. WHITLA York University (jen tlem en ," said Prince Albert at the Royal Academy Dinner on 3 May 18 51: the production of all works in art or poetry requires, in their conception and execution, not only an exercise of the intellect, skill and patience, but particularly a concurrent warmth of feeling, and a free flow of imagination. This renders them most tender plants ... An unkind word of criticism passes like a cold blast over their tender shoots, and shrivels them up, checking the flow of the sap which was rising to produce, perhaps, multitudes of flowers and fruit. But still criticism is absolutely necessary to the development of art, and the injudicious praise of an inferior work becomes an insult to superior genius.1 Punch demanded of the Prince: "What mistaken benevolence is this! ... We think it the especial duty of the critic, in order to test the vital strength of flowers in the bud, and fruit in the blossom, to drench them well with a solution of vitriol."2 Benevolence or vitriol. It must be doubted that Prince Albert's benevolent phrases "warmth of feeling" and "a free flow of imagination" would shrink a single Academic shoot: they, above all others, were well-rooted in England's artistic soil. But one might wonder how many Academicians would recognize the prince's general indebtedness to Wordsworth in such phrases from the preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800) as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" and "a certain colouring of imagination." However accept­ ing the Academy was to these pieties, critics in the popular press had fought over them, and, according to Mr. Punch, were still willing to fight. The con­ sort's Wordsworthian principles were both widely accepted and widely repudi­ ated. Three important areas of disagreement were the discreteness of genres, the nature of poetic thought, and the propriety of style. Several former students of F.E.L. Priestley have enlarged our understanding of Browning's position on some of these issues. David Shaw gave detailed treat­ ment to Browning's method of argument (certainly a large element of 'poetic thought') in The Dialectical Temper (Ithaca 1968). Donald Hair's Browning's English Studies in Canada, 1 , 2 (summer 1975) Experiments with Genre (Toronto 1972) deals with that crucial issue in the volumes between 1833 and 1864. Now appears Eleanor Cook's handsomely de­ signed and printed and intelligently argued volume on one genre, Browning's Lyrics: An Exploration (Toronto 1974). It comes trailing clouds of academic honours: in earlier form the first A.S.P. Woodhouse Prize, and awards from the Canada Council, the Humanities Research Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. No doubt it will win further critical laurels. In her preface Eleanor Cook says that her work became three things, "a handbook on the lyric," "a study of Browning's imagery in the lyric," and "an essay on Browning's poetics, chiefly as they bear on his lyrics." The book succeeds splendidly with respect to the first two goals, and, within the limits of her clear method, the third, much more difficult to accomplish, makes a welcome addition to our knowledge of Browning's practice and principles. As a "handbook" the study's major point is to concentrate our attention on Browning's best shorter poems, his "dramatic lyrics," not poems in which "the poet is overheard by the reader, but poems in which a speaker is overheard" (pp. xii-xiii). Eleanor Cook reads the lyrics in detail, moves away from them to other poems (including many longer ones), and relates the first discussion to similar or repeated images, themes, and structures. Not surprisingly, half of the book is devoted to the poems from Browning's two best collections, Men and Women (which itself has more than a hundred pages) and Dramatis Personae. The rest is given to aspects of Browning's theory of lyric as developed in his early long poems: Pauline ("the lyric as music"), Paracelsus ("the dramatic lyric"), and Sordello ("the lyric as sight"); to his early practice in the Bells and Pome­ granates volumes from Pippa Passes through Dramatic Lyrics; and...