MALCOLM HICKS 73

Through a glass very darkly: contemporary criticism on Robert Browning

Reviewing books - rather than writing them - is a particularly hazardous occtpation. To be a fool in your own right is bad enough, but to feel the need to call others ridiculous you need to be doubly sure of your ground. Gener- ally speaking, however, it is a relief to find that the problem is not an extreme one: there is something to praise, something to blame; and both the proof and the pleasure of showing how much your are equal to the task rests in the apparently easy display of your own cleverness and sophistication at the expense of those under scrutiny.

A not entirely cynical attitude - yet in ConfrontingRobert Browning: a Col- lection of Crifical Essays edited by Harold Bloom and Adrienne Munich (Prentice-Hall, Inc., Twentieth Century Views Series, f 6.45 hardback, f 3.20 paperback) all nice distinctions dissolve. Indeed, feeling more like David tak- ing on Goliath than one rushing in where others would tread more cauti- ously, let me say at once that, with one or two merciful exceptions, this vol- ume comprises claptrap the like of which I cannot recall ever having had the misfortune to encounter. The galling thing is that it cannot be left to sink into the oblivion it deserves. Part of a well-established series designed, however awkwardly, for the impressionable student market, and presided over by Bloom whose display seeks the obeisance of a 4 it can look forward to a wide audience. So no matter how daunting, any modest opportunity to try and limit its effects must not be passed over.

It is appropriate to start with senior editor Bloom, his policies and con- tributions. In a series which purports to ’present the best in contemporary critical opinion on major authors, providing a twentieth century perspective on their changing status in an era of profound revaluation’ it is outrageous to find that Bloom has assembled pieces published for the first time from aco- lytes Loy D. Martin, Anne Wordsworth, co-editor Adrienne Munich (and Leslie Brisman). With the confidence of a Dr Johnson, yet with precious little of his good sense and humility, Bloom presides and decides - and how curi- ous it is that so many of the contributions seek to enhance his own reputa- tion. The volume is dedicated to the late doyen of Browning studies, W. C. DeVane, the significant ’precursof (to apply the Bloom terminology) with whom our editor, aggravated by ’belatedness’, seems to be caught up in ‘precise agon’ in an attempt to wrest the laurels from DeVane’s head to his

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own. Victory is impertinently taken for granted at the close with a twelve- page monologue supposedly spoken by Browning a month before his death in 1889, written by Richard Howard and dedicated to - you’ve guessed it - Harold Bloom. The usual apparatus follows: a strangely selected ’Chronology of important dates’, which gets Red Cotton Night-Cap Country wrong and misses out the long, late work Aristophanes’ Apology; then notes on the contributors, and a bibliography which dangerously misdates Clyde de L. Ryals’s Browning’s Later Poetry: 1 871-1889, and significantly includes the one other work of the decade contending with Bloom’s collection for pre- tentiousness, William E. Harrold’s The Variance and the Unify: a study of the Complementary [not ’A Commentary on the Complimentary’] Poems of Robert Browning. While alluding to typographical errors, a volume which comes with a review request unsexing Ms Munich does not promise well, and addi- tional faults which either escaped or were beneath notice were found on pages 18, 52, 69, 72, 104-5, 143, 1 6 4 5 , 179 and 186.

Flashy, sloppy (witness, for example, his varieties of the ’Sublime/ sublime’), both in the ’Introduction: reading Browning‘ and the footnoteless piece lifted out of his Poetry and Repression: Revisionismfrom Blake to Stevens, Bloom’s cascade of recherche and obsolescent terms, his neologisms, misuse of words, his potted psychology and irresponsibly superficial parade of learning - all come down to a clotted version of ’sources and influences’ with the spectre of Shelley seen everywhere, and the pursuit reverently and relentlessly taken up by his minions. What about Carlyle, say, and Brown- ing‘s relation to his age in general? But why bother when, via Shelley, Bloom is provided with a sufficiently flexible excuse for scant reference to whatever he thinks might impress his reader - like our learning early on how Brown- ing upstages Shelley and the whole of creation:

The notorious optimism [scotched long ago, I imagined] begins to look rather acosmic and atemporal, so that the hope celebrated is much less Pauline than it isGnostic. The faith demystifies as a Gnostic elitist knowledge of Browning’s own divine spark, which turns out to be prior to and higher than the natural creation. Most bewilderingly, the love that Browning exalts becomes suspect, not because of its manifest Oedipal intensity, but because something in it is very close to a solipsistic transport, to a wholly self-delighting joy.

Well - in what ways can Browning‘s poetics beparticularly and consistently related to that vast and varied complex of theological speculation practised by theGnostics, who flourished in early Christian times? A beginning might usefully have been made in relating Browning‘s faith, independent of ‘the natural creation’, to his age’s anxiety in finding that all the ’facts’ that once testified to Godhead were no longer tenable (see, for just one example ‘Development‘ in the Asolanh volume). These are the ’familiaf matters

Through a glass very darkly 75

touched on by Killham in his article; but they prove a far too mundane launching point for Bloom as off he skims from this - for him - relatively lucid and modest premise through Gnosticism, the Lurianic Kabbalah (hardly the 'model' he evokes it as), the Lucretian universe . . . To call him to account from an admittedly slender knowledge of these things - but thorough enough to be irritated by this parade - to callshim to account would only be playing at his own game and sucumbing to the kind of vanity that I mentioned at the end of my first paragraph. On the rare occasions when it is possible to 'have at him' to any advantage he proves curiously awry: Brown- ing's 'splendidly outrageous aggressivity [ sic]' in the unnamed, undated passage he quotes from thePacchiarotto volume is as much to be explained in terms of the-general lack of public favour that the ageing poet's complex work, ' "Autumn's heady drink" ', was once more beginning to suffer, as an 'introxication of belatedness' vis-d-vis Milton. The Miltonic reference is first and foremost a pointer towards the largely unregarded and, I think, mis- understood reworking of Milton, The Inn Album, published a year earlier in 1875 which Bloom fails to mention.

Flights of fancy apart, perhaps a sample of his style will more efficiently show the man - if he has not been encountered already - than any further comments on my part. Apropos A Toccata of Galuppi's:

Has the monologist quested afterGaluppi's truth, only to end up in a vastation of his own comforting evasions of the truth? That would be the canonical read- ing. but it would overliteralize a metaleptic fuguration [sic] that knowingly has chosen not to attempt a reversal of time. When the speaker ends by feeling 'chilly and grown old,' then he has introjected Galuppi's world and Galuppi's music, and projected his own compromise formations. But this is an i!lusio, a metaleptic figuration that is on the verge of becoming an opening irony or reaction - formation again, that is, rejoining the tone of jocular evasion that began the poem.

No one has ever pretended that Browning is not a difficult poet - despite Bloom's disdain, which he expresses more than once, for the 'canonical' readings - but his own practice in the complementary opaque is his own - and Browning's - worst enemy. As he says of Browning, 'He is a great lover - but primarily of himself' and those who follow him; yet if there is any redemption for this volume, it is to be sought in the clear-headed contibu- tions of the 'canonized' John Killham and Robert Langbaum.

A blessing in some disguise, Adrienne Munich's piece shows she has not quite mastered the Master's dazzle, and it remains a clever enough version of the 'sources and influences' formula. Sifting the Shelleyan legacy she is at her best on 'Appollo and the Fates' in the Pdeyings volume. Anne Words- worth tries hard, co-ordinating 'Harold Bloom's theory of poetry' in a

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'psycho-aesthetics' with 'Lacan's account of "the pacifymg Apollonian effect of painting" ', with Browning getting confused in a mess of neolog- isms. But the truly pathetic piece is Loy D. Martin's, 'The inside of time: an essay on the dramatic monologue'. A reasonable talent for intelligent obser- vation is warped by a lumpish application of structuralist methods to reveal that poems give the impression of being parts of a continuous process (neg- lecting en route (p. 76), where concentrating on that famous poem that centres upon a picture, My last Duchess, to pay what should have been due deference to the early and influential work of the eighteenth-century critic Gotthold Lessing).

Leslie Brisman's analysis of By the Fireside, with its Shelleyan resonances, gains much by tempering cleverness with caution; while Ridenour's 'Four modes in the poetry of Robert Browning' smacks once more of the pretentious - complete with unhelpful references to Richard Strauss - and directs us to previous expositions and analyses which are nowhere to be found in the text. John Hollander's achievement is to tell us modestly enough of poet Browning's singularly rich appreciation of music, with one awful sentence relating to the 'discourse' in the 'Parleying with Charles Avison', that should certainly have been re-worked 'It is a moralization of the ruins of the simplistic ancestors of those structural and harmonic com- plexities of a later age which themselves have caused the crumbling'.

As I have hinted, the centre of response belongs to those well-tried critics of the type which Bloom generically dismisses, Messrs Killham and Lang- baum. Killham offers a plausible and comprehensive account of The Ring and the Book (where, incidentally, Carlyle gets a look in) which questions 'mod- em', relativist readings; and the lucid Langbaum speaks of Browning's use of myth in coalescing his historical and psychological interests. (Where, incidentally, Carlyle should have got a look in: 'Browning's idea of progress would seem to prevent a complete reliance on mythical pattern. For Yeats, the symbols and myths are permanent, and the ideas about them change. But for Browning, the myths change; myths are the progressively changing symbolic language for the same continuing idea'. Browning has something in common, it seems, with the Clothes Philosophy of Sartor Resurfus.)

Leslie Brisman remarks that 'As students of poetry we hold the faith that finished poems can be analyzed to reveal more of the poet than ostensibly meets the eye'; yet this cannot license, nor one or two sustained passages of responsible evaluation outweigh, the overwhelming sense of the specula- tive and the self-indulgent that infects this volume, for which its senior editor must assume the largest part of the blame. In place of what it claims to provide, a combination of 'the traditional and contemporary approaches to literary criticism', we have the gospel according to Bloom, with the sop or

Through a glass very darkly 77

two to the ‘traditional’ ironically proving to be the most nourishing morsels in the collection.

For the genuine product that this collection pretends to be we have to backtrack to the middle 1960s, to Robert Browning: a collection of Critical Essays edited by Philip Drew, with its various and valuable contributions sensibly divided into near contemporary general appraisals of the late poet, and later revaluations (before and after 1914) and studies of single poems in a range which extends from 1890 to 1963. Or from the same period there is Boyd Litzinger‘s and K. L. Knicherbocker‘s The Browning Critics, with a spread (1891-1964) of distinguished essays combining the best of detailed and general approaches. Since then, with their different emphases, we have seen Litzinger‘s and Donald Smalley’s edition of criticism contemporary with Browning‘s career in the familiar Critical Heritage series (1970); and Isobel Armstrong‘s helpful collection, Robert Browning: Writers and their Background (1974). In an age of fevered critical activity much has been done since the mid-l960s, and the time is ripe for another judicious selection from out the mass. But a combination of contemporary and traditional approaches, as it is styled on the cover of Bloom’s edition, simply does not apply. Browning criticism has remained conservative: it has taken little note of, say, developments in structuralist or Marxist literary theory. Bloom, it seems, sensing the stasis, has sought to thrust us forward along with his dis- ciples under the banner of his own idiosyncrasies. Not that one would want a tired repetitivenes, of course, but, along with other neglected worthies, it is significant that the only critic who features in the aforementioned collections - including the editors - who reappears in A Collection of Critical Essays is Robert Langbaum.

In elaborating upon Browning‘s relationship with ’precursor‘ Shelley, Bloom’s cleverly tentative speculation (for what more can it be?) soon radi- ates with all his usual confidence:

But ambivalence is not the only matrix from which the anxiety of influence rises. There is perhaps a darker source in the guilt or shame of identlfying the precursor with the ego-ideal, and then living on in the sense of having bet- rayed that identification by one‘s own failure to have become oneself, by a real- ization that the ephebe has betrayed his own integrity, and betrayed also the covenant that first bound him to the precursor. That guilt unmistakably was Browning’s, as Betty Miller and others have shown, and so the burden of belatedness was replaced in Browning by a burden of dissimulation, a lying- against-the self, rather than a lying-against-time.

It is understandable enough that Betty Miller’s ‘brilliant‘ (I suppose Bloom would call it, ‘psycho-biography) Robert Browning: a Portrait, should be excepted from that mass of ‘inadequate criticism’ which the poet has inspired. And remember Brisman’s credo: ‘AS students of poetry we hold

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the faith [a splendid irony!] that finished poems can be analyzed to reveal more of the poet than ostensibly meets the eye.' 'Students of poetry' indeed, without being in any way inflexible, are obliged to focus their interest upon the poem. The reverse process leads us to Bloom's questioning why he is 'obsessed by the Childe Roland poem, what does it mean to be obsessed by that poem?' - to 'a kind of critical self-analysis' and, with an attempt to avoid the charge of self-indulgence which should fool few of us, to his ask- ing 'Is there a way to make [previous] questions centre upon critical analysis rather than upon psychic self-analysis?' Then on, on, to the so-called redemption - to a characteristic parade of all those heady defects I men- tioned long ago. But enough, lacking true comprehensiveness in the obses- sion with Shelley and Bloom's 'theories', this volume must be eclipsed. To appropriate one of his misappropriations, before this precocious 'ephebe' assumes full command of the Browning camp some mightier scholar had better declare 'his precise agon' and bring him low in the interests of responsible literary criticism.

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