Penguins on Parade: The Selected Browning!

Some Penguin Classics are, I bitterly concede, necessary compromises. Surely one such is the 1989 Selected Poems volume of Robert Browning, edited by Daniel Karlin, who rather optimistically writes in his Introduction that he “tried to strike a balance between the poems for which Browning is best known (but which are not always his best) and those my own taste leads me to recommend” – a wonderful editorial philosophy that’s only grown more forlorn in the last twenty-five years. Are any of Browning’s poems “best known” anymore, especially to the general reading public (To say nothing of the contemporary poetry-world, which is more ignorant of poetry’s long and rich history than the general public is – and proudly so)? He’s still taught to undergraduates, but in a sporadic and desultory way – not as a great poet but as a Victorian curiosity (or worse, a Victorian exemplar – something with which Karlin would be very familiar, since he also edited a great anthology of the period’s verse). Hell, even the intelligentsia of his own time often seemed eager to have done with him. When Henry James famously wrote about Browning’s memorial in Westminster Abbey “A good many oddities and a good many great writers have been entombed in the Abbey, but none of the odd ones have been so great and none of the great ones so odd,” he clearly meant his little apercu to be the final word ever written on the man.

To a certain extent, Browning brought on this kind of reaction himself. Even when the fame he’d sought his whole life finally came to him, he resisted it and suspected it and even mocked it (he had almost as sharp an ear for biting sarcasm as John Dryden, whose reputation has now fallen even lower than his own), as in the great “Mr Sludge, ‘The Medium’” – which Karlin includes in this little volume:

Dealers in common sense, set these at work,

What can they do without their helpful lies?

Each states the law and fact and face o’ the thing

Just as he’d have them, finds what he thinks fit,

Is blind to what missuits him, just records

What makes his case out, quite ignores the rest.

It’s a History of the world, the Lizard Age,

The Early Indians, the Old Country War,

Jerome Napoleon, whatsoever you please,

All as the author wants it. Such a scribe

You pay and praise for putting life in stones,

Fire into fog, making the past your world.

There’s plenty of ‘How did you contrive to grasp

The thread which led you through this labyrinth?

How build such solid fabric out of air?

How on so slight foundation found this tale,

Biography, narrative?’ Or, in other words,

‘How many lies did it require to make

The portly truth you here present us with?’

‘Oh,’ quoth the penman, purring at your praise,

”Tis fancy all; no particle of fact:

I was poor and threadbare when I wrote that book

“Bliss in the Golden City.” I, at Thebes?

We writers paint out of our heads, you see!”

Most of Browning’s best verse is cumulative; most of his best works are very long, book-length, and Karlin has set himself (wisely, I think) against trying to excerpt works that were so carefully wrought as wholes (although he’s successfully picked out some bits from Pippa Passes). He gives us many of the most widely-anthologized shorter poems, like “My Last Duchess,” “The Lost Leader,” “Love Among the Ruins,” and “A Toccata of Galuppi’s,” and he gives us slightly longer and stranger things like “Beatrice Signorini,” “Clive,” and “Ned Bratts” – and there are deceptively sweet and perfectly-contrived works like “Meeting at Night”:

I

The grey sea and the long black land;

And the yellow half-moon large and low;

And the startled little waves that leap

In fiery ringlets from their sleep,

As I gain the cove with pushing prow,

And quench its speed i’ the slushy sand.

II

Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;

Three fields to cross till a farm appears;

A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch

And blue spurt of a lighted match,

And a voice less loud through its joys and fears,

Than the two hearts beating each to each!

In all it’s a very skillfully-done volume, and it poses what I’ve always referred to as the Browning Challenge: take up this book or one like it (although I myself have never encountered a ‘selected Browning’ anywhere near as smart as this one), clear half an hour of all distractions (as the author did in order to write these verses for you), and read this verse. If at the end of that half-hour you don’t think better of Robert Browning the poet – if at the end of that half-hour you don’t want more of this very odd, very brilliant, and very sweetly playful poet, then Browning’s not for you. But you will want more, and thankfully, the mighty The Ring and the Book awaits you!