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“He didn’t give the universe us, He gave us the universe.” –Carter 12/28/11 12:25 am
(modified version: us=mankind)
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Monday, December 26, 2011
Robert Browning by G.K. Chesterton: Ch 8 "The Philosophy of Browning"
On "the hope which lies in the imperfection of man" and "Old Pictures in Florence":
"...some hope may always be based on deficiency itself; in other words, that in so far as man is a one-legged or a one-eyed creature, there is something about his appearance which indicates that he should have another leg and another eye...and from this Browning draws, as he is fully justified in drawing, a definite hope for immortality and the larger scale of life. For nothing is more certain that though this world is the only world that we have known, or of which we could even dream, the fact does remain that we have named it "a strange world." In other words, we have certainly felt that this world did not explain itself, that something in its complete and patent picture has been omitted. And B. was right in saying that in a cosmos where incompleteness implies completeness, life implies immortality. This then was the first of the doctrines or opinions of B., the hope that lies in the imperfection of man." 177-8
On Optimism:
"But any one will make the deepest and blackest and most incurable mistake about B. who imagines that his optimism was founded on any arguments for optimism. Because he had a strong intellect, because he had a strang power of conviction, he conceived and developed and asserted these doctrines of the incompleteness of Man and the sacrifice of Omnipotence. But these doctrines were the symptoms of his optimism, they were not its origin. It is surely obvious that no one can be argued into optimism since no one can be argued into happiness. B.'s optimism was not founded on opinions which were the work of Browning, but on life which was the work of God." 179-80
On the concrete vs. abstract world:
"His mysticism was not of that idle and wordy type which believes that a flower is symbolical of life; it was rather of that deep and eternal type which believes that life, a mere abstraction, is symbolical of a flower. With him the great concrete experiences which God made always come first; his own deductions and speculations about them always second. And in this point we find the real peculiar inspiration of his very original poems." 183
"To B., probably the beginning and end of all optimism, was to be found in the faces in the street. To him they were all masks of a deity, the heads of a hundred-headed Indian god of nature. Each one of them looked towards some quarter of the heavens, not looked upon by any other eyes. Each one of them wore some expression, some blend of eternal joy and eternal sorrow, not to be found in any other countenance. The sense of the absolute sanctity of human difference was the deepest of all his senses. He was hungrily interested in all human things, but it would have been quite impossible to have said of him that he loved humanity. He did not love humanity but men. His sense of the difference between one man and another would have made the thought of melting them into a lump called humanity simply loathsome and prosaic. It would have been to him like playing four hundred beautiful airs at once. The misture would not combine all, it would lose all. B. believed that to every man that ever lived upon this earth had been given a definite and peculiar confidence of God. Each one of us was engaged on secret service; each one of aus had a peculiar message; each one of us was the ofunder of a religion. Of that religion our thoughts, our faces, our bodies, our hats, our boots, our tastes, our virtues, and even our vices, were more or less fragmentary and inadequate expressions." 186-7
On Poetry:
"And here comes in the whole value and object of poetry, that it is perpetually challenging all systems with the test of a terrible sincerity. The practical value of poetry is that ist is realistic upon a point upon which nothing else can be realistic, the point of the acutal desires of man. Ethics is the science of actions, but poetry is the science of motives. Some actions are ugly, and therefore some parts of ethics are ugly. But all motives are beautiful, or present themselves for the moment as beautiful, and therefore all poetry is beautiful. If poetry deals with the basest matter, with the shedding of blood for gold, it ought to suggest the gold as well as the blood. Only poetry can realise motives, because motives are all pictures of happiness. And the supreme and most practical value of poetry is this, that in poetry, as in music, a note is struck which expresses beyond the power of rational statement a condition of mind, and all actions arise from a condition of mind. Prose can only use a large and clumsy notation; it can only say that a man is miserably, or athat a man is happy; it is forced to ignore that there are a million diverse kinds of misery and a million diverse kinds of happiness. Poetry alone, with the first throb of its metre, can tell us whether the depression is the kind of depression that drives a man to suicide , or the kind of depression that drives him to the Tivoli. Poetry can tell us whether the happiness is the happiness that sends a man to a restaurant, or the much richer and fuller happiness that sends him to church." 185
On judgment and self-analysis:
"But very few people in this world would care to listen to the real devence of their own characters. the real devenxe, the defence which belongs to the Day of Judgment, would make such damaging admissions, would clear away so many artificial virtues, would tell such tragedies of weakness and failure, that a man would sooner be misunderstood and censured by the world than exposed to that awful and merciless eulogy. One of the most practically difficult matters which arise from the code of manners and the conventions of life, is athat we cannot properly justify a human being, because that justification would involve the admission of things which may not conventionally be admitted...Thus the decencies of civilization do not merely make it impossible to revile a man, they make it impossible to praise him.
"B., in such poems as "Bishop Blougram's Apology," breaks this first mask of goodness in order to break the second mask of evil, and gets to the real goodness at last; he dethrones a saint in order to humanise a scoundrel. This is one typical side of the real optimism of B. And there is indeed little danger that such optimism will become weak and sentimental and popular, the refuge of every idler, the excuse of every ne'er-do'weel. There is little danger taht men will desire to excuse their sould before God by presenting themselves before men as ssuch snobs as Bishop Blougram, or such dastards as Sludge the Medium. There is no pessimism, however stern, that is so stern as this optimism; it is as merciless as the mercy of God." 188-9
On "Sludge the Medium":
"A man driven absolutely into a corner might humiliate himself, and gain a certain sensation almost of luxury in that humiliation, in pouring out all his imprisoned thoughts and obscure victories. For let it never be forgotten that a hypocrite is a very unhappy man; he is a man who has devoted himself to a most delicate and arduous intellectual art in which he may achieve masterpieces which he must keep secret, fight threlling battles, and win hair's-breadth victories for which he cannot have a whisper of praise. A really accomplished impostor is the most wretched of geniuses; he is a Napoleon on a desert island. A man might surely, therefore, when he was certian that his credit was gone, take a certain pleasure in revealing the tricks of his unique trade, and gaining not indeed credit, but at least a kind of glory."
"...some hope may always be based on deficiency itself; in other words, that in so far as man is a one-legged or a one-eyed creature, there is something about his appearance which indicates that he should have another leg and another eye...and from this Browning draws, as he is fully justified in drawing, a definite hope for immortality and the larger scale of life. For nothing is more certain that though this world is the only world that we have known, or of which we could even dream, the fact does remain that we have named it "a strange world." In other words, we have certainly felt that this world did not explain itself, that something in its complete and patent picture has been omitted. And B. was right in saying that in a cosmos where incompleteness implies completeness, life implies immortality. This then was the first of the doctrines or opinions of B., the hope that lies in the imperfection of man." 177-8
On Optimism:
"But any one will make the deepest and blackest and most incurable mistake about B. who imagines that his optimism was founded on any arguments for optimism. Because he had a strong intellect, because he had a strang power of conviction, he conceived and developed and asserted these doctrines of the incompleteness of Man and the sacrifice of Omnipotence. But these doctrines were the symptoms of his optimism, they were not its origin. It is surely obvious that no one can be argued into optimism since no one can be argued into happiness. B.'s optimism was not founded on opinions which were the work of Browning, but on life which was the work of God." 179-80
On the concrete vs. abstract world:
"His mysticism was not of that idle and wordy type which believes that a flower is symbolical of life; it was rather of that deep and eternal type which believes that life, a mere abstraction, is symbolical of a flower. With him the great concrete experiences which God made always come first; his own deductions and speculations about them always second. And in this point we find the real peculiar inspiration of his very original poems." 183
"To B., probably the beginning and end of all optimism, was to be found in the faces in the street. To him they were all masks of a deity, the heads of a hundred-headed Indian god of nature. Each one of them looked towards some quarter of the heavens, not looked upon by any other eyes. Each one of them wore some expression, some blend of eternal joy and eternal sorrow, not to be found in any other countenance. The sense of the absolute sanctity of human difference was the deepest of all his senses. He was hungrily interested in all human things, but it would have been quite impossible to have said of him that he loved humanity. He did not love humanity but men. His sense of the difference between one man and another would have made the thought of melting them into a lump called humanity simply loathsome and prosaic. It would have been to him like playing four hundred beautiful airs at once. The misture would not combine all, it would lose all. B. believed that to every man that ever lived upon this earth had been given a definite and peculiar confidence of God. Each one of us was engaged on secret service; each one of aus had a peculiar message; each one of us was the ofunder of a religion. Of that religion our thoughts, our faces, our bodies, our hats, our boots, our tastes, our virtues, and even our vices, were more or less fragmentary and inadequate expressions." 186-7
On Poetry:
"And here comes in the whole value and object of poetry, that it is perpetually challenging all systems with the test of a terrible sincerity. The practical value of poetry is that ist is realistic upon a point upon which nothing else can be realistic, the point of the acutal desires of man. Ethics is the science of actions, but poetry is the science of motives. Some actions are ugly, and therefore some parts of ethics are ugly. But all motives are beautiful, or present themselves for the moment as beautiful, and therefore all poetry is beautiful. If poetry deals with the basest matter, with the shedding of blood for gold, it ought to suggest the gold as well as the blood. Only poetry can realise motives, because motives are all pictures of happiness. And the supreme and most practical value of poetry is this, that in poetry, as in music, a note is struck which expresses beyond the power of rational statement a condition of mind, and all actions arise from a condition of mind. Prose can only use a large and clumsy notation; it can only say that a man is miserably, or athat a man is happy; it is forced to ignore that there are a million diverse kinds of misery and a million diverse kinds of happiness. Poetry alone, with the first throb of its metre, can tell us whether the depression is the kind of depression that drives a man to suicide , or the kind of depression that drives him to the Tivoli. Poetry can tell us whether the happiness is the happiness that sends a man to a restaurant, or the much richer and fuller happiness that sends him to church." 185
On judgment and self-analysis:
"But very few people in this world would care to listen to the real devence of their own characters. the real devenxe, the defence which belongs to the Day of Judgment, would make such damaging admissions, would clear away so many artificial virtues, would tell such tragedies of weakness and failure, that a man would sooner be misunderstood and censured by the world than exposed to that awful and merciless eulogy. One of the most practically difficult matters which arise from the code of manners and the conventions of life, is athat we cannot properly justify a human being, because that justification would involve the admission of things which may not conventionally be admitted...Thus the decencies of civilization do not merely make it impossible to revile a man, they make it impossible to praise him.
"B., in such poems as "Bishop Blougram's Apology," breaks this first mask of goodness in order to break the second mask of evil, and gets to the real goodness at last; he dethrones a saint in order to humanise a scoundrel. This is one typical side of the real optimism of B. And there is indeed little danger that such optimism will become weak and sentimental and popular, the refuge of every idler, the excuse of every ne'er-do'weel. There is little danger taht men will desire to excuse their sould before God by presenting themselves before men as ssuch snobs as Bishop Blougram, or such dastards as Sludge the Medium. There is no pessimism, however stern, that is so stern as this optimism; it is as merciless as the mercy of God." 188-9
On "Sludge the Medium":
"A man driven absolutely into a corner might humiliate himself, and gain a certain sensation almost of luxury in that humiliation, in pouring out all his imprisoned thoughts and obscure victories. For let it never be forgotten that a hypocrite is a very unhappy man; he is a man who has devoted himself to a most delicate and arduous intellectual art in which he may achieve masterpieces which he must keep secret, fight threlling battles, and win hair's-breadth victories for which he cannot have a whisper of praise. A really accomplished impostor is the most wretched of geniuses; he is a Napoleon on a desert island. A man might surely, therefore, when he was certian that his credit was gone, take a certain pleasure in revealing the tricks of his unique trade, and gaining not indeed credit, but at least a kind of glory."
Robert Browning by G.K. Chesterton: Ch 7 "The Ring and the Book"
On The Ring and the Book and empathetic p.o.v.
"The poet in his ancient office held a kind of terrestrial day of judgment, and gave men halters and halos; Browning gives men neither halter how hole, he gives them voices. This is indeed the most bountiful of all the functions of the poet, that he gives men words, for which men from the beginning of the world have starved more than for bread. Here then we have the second great respect in which The Ring and the Book is the great epic of the age. It is the g.e. of the a., because it is the expression of the belief, it might almost be said of the discovery, that no man ever lived upon this earth without possessing a point of view." 171
"It is the step of deciding, in the face of many serious dangers and disadvantages, to let everybody talk. The poet of the old epic is the poet who had learnt to speak; B. in the new epic is the poet who has learnt to listen. This listening to truth and error, to heretics, to fools, to intellectual bullies, to desperate partisans, to mere chatterers, to systematic poisoners of the mind, is the hardest lesson that humanity has ever been set to learn. T.R.andT.B. is the embodiment of this terribly magnanimity and patience. It is the epic of free speech.
Free speech is an idea which has at present all the unpopularity of a truism; so that we tend to forget that it was not so very long ago that it had the more practical unpopularity which attaches to a new truth. Ingratitude is surely the chief of the intellectual sins of man. He takes his political benefits for granted, just as he takes the skies and the seasons for granted. He considers the calm of a city street a thing as inevitable as the calm of a forest clearing, whereas it is only kept in peace by a sustained stretch and effort similar to tthat which keeps up a battle or a fencing match. Just as we forget where we stand in relation to natural phenomena, so we forget it in relation to social phenomena. We forget that the earth is a star, and we forget that free speech is a paradoox.
It is not by any means self-evident upon the face of it that an institution like the liberty of speech is right or just. It is not natural or obvious to let a man utter follies and abominations which you believe to be bad for mankind nay more than it is natural or obvious to let a man dig up a part of the public road, or infect half a town with typhoid fever. The theory of free speech, that truth is so much larger and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, that it is very much better at all costs to hear every one's account of it, is a theory which has been justified upon the whole by experiment, but which remains a very daring and even a very surprising theory. It is really on eof the great discoveries of the modern time, but once admitted it is a principle that does not merely affect politics, but philosophy, ethics, and finally poetry." 173-4
"The poet in his ancient office held a kind of terrestrial day of judgment, and gave men halters and halos; Browning gives men neither halter how hole, he gives them voices. This is indeed the most bountiful of all the functions of the poet, that he gives men words, for which men from the beginning of the world have starved more than for bread. Here then we have the second great respect in which The Ring and the Book is the great epic of the age. It is the g.e. of the a., because it is the expression of the belief, it might almost be said of the discovery, that no man ever lived upon this earth without possessing a point of view." 171
"It is the step of deciding, in the face of many serious dangers and disadvantages, to let everybody talk. The poet of the old epic is the poet who had learnt to speak; B. in the new epic is the poet who has learnt to listen. This listening to truth and error, to heretics, to fools, to intellectual bullies, to desperate partisans, to mere chatterers, to systematic poisoners of the mind, is the hardest lesson that humanity has ever been set to learn. T.R.andT.B. is the embodiment of this terribly magnanimity and patience. It is the epic of free speech.
Free speech is an idea which has at present all the unpopularity of a truism; so that we tend to forget that it was not so very long ago that it had the more practical unpopularity which attaches to a new truth. Ingratitude is surely the chief of the intellectual sins of man. He takes his political benefits for granted, just as he takes the skies and the seasons for granted. He considers the calm of a city street a thing as inevitable as the calm of a forest clearing, whereas it is only kept in peace by a sustained stretch and effort similar to tthat which keeps up a battle or a fencing match. Just as we forget where we stand in relation to natural phenomena, so we forget it in relation to social phenomena. We forget that the earth is a star, and we forget that free speech is a paradoox.
It is not by any means self-evident upon the face of it that an institution like the liberty of speech is right or just. It is not natural or obvious to let a man utter follies and abominations which you believe to be bad for mankind nay more than it is natural or obvious to let a man dig up a part of the public road, or infect half a town with typhoid fever. The theory of free speech, that truth is so much larger and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, that it is very much better at all costs to hear every one's account of it, is a theory which has been justified upon the whole by experiment, but which remains a very daring and even a very surprising theory. It is really on eof the great discoveries of the modern time, but once admitted it is a principle that does not merely affect politics, but philosophy, ethics, and finally poetry." 173-4
Saturday, December 24, 2011
Robert Browning by G.K. Chesterton: Ch 6 "Browning as a Literary Artist"
from "Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha":
"What, you want, do you, to come unawares,
Sweeping the church up for first morning-prayers,
And find a poor devil has ended his cares
At the foot of your rotten-runged rat-riddled stairs?" qtd on 147
On the grotesque:
"There is one very curious idea into which we have been hypnotised by the more eloquent poets, and that is that nature in the sense of what is ordinarily called the country is a thing entirely stately and beautifulas those termsare commonly understood. The whole world of the fantastic, all things top-heavy, lop-sided, and nonsensical are conceived as the work of man, gargoyles, German jugs, Chinese pots, political caricatures, burlesque epics, the pictures of Mr. Aubrey Beardsley and the puns of Robert Browning But in truth a part, and a very large part, of the sanity and power of nature lies in the fact that out of her comes all this instinct of caricature. Nature may present itself to the poet too often as consisting of stars and lilies; but these are not poets who live the country; they are men who go to the country for inspiration and could no more live in the country than they could go to bed in Westminster Abbey. Men who live int he heart of nature, farmers and peasants, know that nature means cows and piges, and creatures more humorous than can be found in whole sketch-book of Callot. And the element of the grotesque in nature, means, in the main, energy, the energy which takes its own forms and goes its own way. Browning's verse, in so far as it is grotesque, is not complex or artificial; it is natural and in the legitimate traditions of nature. The verse sprawls like the trees, dances like the dust; it is ragged like the thunder-cloud, it is top-heavy, like the toadstool." 149
"Now it is the supreme function of the philosopher of the grotesque to make the world stand on its head that people may look at it. If we say "a man is a man" we awaken no sense of the fantastic, however much we ought to, but if we say, in the language of hte old satirist, "that man is a two-legged bird, without feathers," the phrase does, for a moment, make us look at man from the outside and give us a thrill in his presence." 151
On Shakespeare and the Elizabethans:
"In many of the comic scenes of Shakespeare we ahave precisely this elephantine ingenuity, this hunting of a pun to death through three pages...People must be very happy to be so easily amused." 154
On Browning's obscurity (still):
"Browning is a man whose excitement for the glory of the obvious is so great that his speech becomes disjointed and precipitate: he becomes eccentric through his advocacy of the ordinary, and goes mad for the love of sanity." 156
On ignorance:
"It is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world. One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods, is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certian poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance." 158
On "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came":
"This is a perfect realisation of that eerie sentiment which comes upon us, not so often among mountains and water-falls, as it does on some half-starved common at twilight, or in walking down some grey mean street. It is the song of hte beauty of refuse; and Browning was the first to sing it. Oddly enough it has been one of the poems about which most of those pedantic and trivial questions have been asked, which are askend invariably by those who treat Browning as a science instead of a poet, "What does the poem of Childe Roland mean?" The only genuine answer to this is, "What does anything mean?" Does the earth mean nothing? Do grey skies and wastes covered with thistles mean nothing? Does an old horse turned out to graze mean nothing? If it does, there is but one further truth to be added--that everything means nothing." 159
"What, you want, do you, to come unawares,
Sweeping the church up for first morning-prayers,
And find a poor devil has ended his cares
At the foot of your rotten-runged rat-riddled stairs?" qtd on 147
On the grotesque:
"There is one very curious idea into which we have been hypnotised by the more eloquent poets, and that is that nature in the sense of what is ordinarily called the country is a thing entirely stately and beautifulas those termsare commonly understood. The whole world of the fantastic, all things top-heavy, lop-sided, and nonsensical are conceived as the work of man, gargoyles, German jugs, Chinese pots, political caricatures, burlesque epics, the pictures of Mr. Aubrey Beardsley and the puns of Robert Browning But in truth a part, and a very large part, of the sanity and power of nature lies in the fact that out of her comes all this instinct of caricature. Nature may present itself to the poet too often as consisting of stars and lilies; but these are not poets who live the country; they are men who go to the country for inspiration and could no more live in the country than they could go to bed in Westminster Abbey. Men who live int he heart of nature, farmers and peasants, know that nature means cows and piges, and creatures more humorous than can be found in whole sketch-book of Callot. And the element of the grotesque in nature, means, in the main, energy, the energy which takes its own forms and goes its own way. Browning's verse, in so far as it is grotesque, is not complex or artificial; it is natural and in the legitimate traditions of nature. The verse sprawls like the trees, dances like the dust; it is ragged like the thunder-cloud, it is top-heavy, like the toadstool." 149
"Now it is the supreme function of the philosopher of the grotesque to make the world stand on its head that people may look at it. If we say "a man is a man" we awaken no sense of the fantastic, however much we ought to, but if we say, in the language of hte old satirist, "that man is a two-legged bird, without feathers," the phrase does, for a moment, make us look at man from the outside and give us a thrill in his presence." 151
On Shakespeare and the Elizabethans:
"In many of the comic scenes of Shakespeare we ahave precisely this elephantine ingenuity, this hunting of a pun to death through three pages...People must be very happy to be so easily amused." 154
On Browning's obscurity (still):
"Browning is a man whose excitement for the glory of the obvious is so great that his speech becomes disjointed and precipitate: he becomes eccentric through his advocacy of the ordinary, and goes mad for the love of sanity." 156
On ignorance:
"It is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world. One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods, is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certian poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance." 158
On "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came":
"This is a perfect realisation of that eerie sentiment which comes upon us, not so often among mountains and water-falls, as it does on some half-starved common at twilight, or in walking down some grey mean street. It is the song of hte beauty of refuse; and Browning was the first to sing it. Oddly enough it has been one of the poems about which most of those pedantic and trivial questions have been asked, which are askend invariably by those who treat Browning as a science instead of a poet, "What does the poem of Childe Roland mean?" The only genuine answer to this is, "What does anything mean?" Does the earth mean nothing? Do grey skies and wastes covered with thistles mean nothing? Does an old horse turned out to graze mean nothing? If it does, there is but one further truth to be added--that everything means nothing." 159
Saturday, December 3, 2011
Robert Browning by G.K. Chesterton: Ch 5 "Browning in Later Life"
"The life of society was superficial, but it is only very superficial people who object ot hte superficial. To the man who sees the marvelousness of all things, the surface of life is fully as strange and magical as its interior; clearness and plainnessof life is fully as mysterious as its mysteries. The young man in evening dress, pulling on his gloves, is quite as elemental a figure as any anchorite, quite as incomprehensible, and indeed quite as alarming." 111
"Humanitarians of a material and dogmatic type, the philanthropists and the professional reformers go to look for humanity in remote places and in huge statistics. Humanitarians of a more vivid type, the Bohemian artists, go to look for humanity in thieves' kitchens and the studios of the Quartier Latin. But humanitarians of the highest type, the gret poets and philosophers, do not go to look for humanity at all. For them alone among all men the nearest drawing-room is full of humanity, and even their own families are human." 111
"...there are two kinds of men who monopolise conversation. The first kind are those who like the sound of their own voice; the second are those who do not know what the sound of their own voice is like." 113
"It never does a man any very great harm to hate a thing that he knows nothing about. It is the hating of a thing when we do know something about it which corrodes the character. We all have a dark feeling of resistance towards people we have never met, and a profound and manly dislike of the authors we have never read. It does not harm a man to be certain before opening the books that Whitman is an obscene ranter or that Stevenson is a mere trifler with style. It is the man who can think these things after he has read the books who must be in a fair way to mental perdition. Prejudice, in fact, is not so much the great intellectual sin as a thing which we may call, to coin a word, "postjudice," not the bias before the fair trial, but the bias that remains afterwards. With Browning's swift and emphatic nature the bias was almost always formed before he had gone into the matter. But almost all the men he really knew he admired, almost all the books he had really read he enjoyed. He stands preeminent among those great universalists who praised the ground they trod on and commended existence like and other matieral, in its samples." 114-5
"Humanitarians of a material and dogmatic type, the philanthropists and the professional reformers go to look for humanity in remote places and in huge statistics. Humanitarians of a more vivid type, the Bohemian artists, go to look for humanity in thieves' kitchens and the studios of the Quartier Latin. But humanitarians of the highest type, the gret poets and philosophers, do not go to look for humanity at all. For them alone among all men the nearest drawing-room is full of humanity, and even their own families are human." 111
"...there are two kinds of men who monopolise conversation. The first kind are those who like the sound of their own voice; the second are those who do not know what the sound of their own voice is like." 113
"It never does a man any very great harm to hate a thing that he knows nothing about. It is the hating of a thing when we do know something about it which corrodes the character. We all have a dark feeling of resistance towards people we have never met, and a profound and manly dislike of the authors we have never read. It does not harm a man to be certain before opening the books that Whitman is an obscene ranter or that Stevenson is a mere trifler with style. It is the man who can think these things after he has read the books who must be in a fair way to mental perdition. Prejudice, in fact, is not so much the great intellectual sin as a thing which we may call, to coin a word, "postjudice," not the bias before the fair trial, but the bias that remains afterwards. With Browning's swift and emphatic nature the bias was almost always formed before he had gone into the matter. But almost all the men he really knew he admired, almost all the books he had really read he enjoyed. He stands preeminent among those great universalists who praised the ground they trod on and commended existence like and other matieral, in its samples." 114-5
Robert Browning by G.K. Chesterton: Ch 4 "Browning in Italy" 2.0
On ignoble, unchivalrous monarchies:
"That was, there can be little doubt, the real reason of the fascination of the Napoleon legend--that while Napoleon was a despot like the rest, he was a despot who went somewhere and did something, and devied the pessimism of Europe, and erased the word "impossible." One does not need to be a Bonapartis torejoice at the way in which the armies of the First Empire, shouting their songs and jesting with their colonels, smote and broke into pieces the armies of Prussia and Austria driven into battle with a cane." 89
On Browning's aversion to spiritualism (or spiritualists):
Memoirs of David Home
"He enjoyed being a husband. This is quite a distinct thing from enjoying being a lover, though it will scarcely be gound apart from it." 94
"Home was infinitely less dangerous as a dexterous swindler than he was as a bad or foolish man in possession of unknown or ill-comprehended powers. It is surely curious to thing that a man must object to exposing his wife to a few conjuring tricks, but could not be afraid of exposing her to the lose and nameless energies of the universe." 97
On the conventionality of Browning:
"Poetry deals with primal and conventional things--the hunger for bread, the love of woman, the love of children, the desire for immportal life. If men really had new sentiments, poetry could not deal with them." 99
"He was everything that he was with a definite and conscious pleasure--a man, a Liberal, an Englishman, an author, a gentleman, a lover, a married man." 100
"Browning boasted of being domesticated; there are half a hundred men everywhere who would be inclined to boast of not being domesticated. Bad men are almost without exception conceited, but they are commonly conceited of their defects." 101
On me:
"It is easy enough to be agreeable to a circle of admirers, especially feminine admirers, who have a peculiar talent for discipleship and the absorption of ideas. But when a man is loved by other men of his own intellectual stature and of a wholly different type and order of eminence, we may be certain that there was something genuine about him, and something far more important than anything intellectual. Men do not like another man because he is a genius, least of all when they happen to be geniuses themselves. This general truth about Browning is like hearing of a woman who is the most famous beauty in a city, and who is at the same time adored and confided in by all the women who live there." 102-3
"That was, there can be little doubt, the real reason of the fascination of the Napoleon legend--that while Napoleon was a despot like the rest, he was a despot who went somewhere and did something, and devied the pessimism of Europe, and erased the word "impossible." One does not need to be a Bonapartis torejoice at the way in which the armies of the First Empire, shouting their songs and jesting with their colonels, smote and broke into pieces the armies of Prussia and Austria driven into battle with a cane." 89
On Browning's aversion to spiritualism (or spiritualists):
Memoirs of David Home
"He enjoyed being a husband. This is quite a distinct thing from enjoying being a lover, though it will scarcely be gound apart from it." 94
"Home was infinitely less dangerous as a dexterous swindler than he was as a bad or foolish man in possession of unknown or ill-comprehended powers. It is surely curious to thing that a man must object to exposing his wife to a few conjuring tricks, but could not be afraid of exposing her to the lose and nameless energies of the universe." 97
On the conventionality of Browning:
"Poetry deals with primal and conventional things--the hunger for bread, the love of woman, the love of children, the desire for immportal life. If men really had new sentiments, poetry could not deal with them." 99
"He was everything that he was with a definite and conscious pleasure--a man, a Liberal, an Englishman, an author, a gentleman, a lover, a married man." 100
"Browning boasted of being domesticated; there are half a hundred men everywhere who would be inclined to boast of not being domesticated. Bad men are almost without exception conceited, but they are commonly conceited of their defects." 101
On me:
"It is easy enough to be agreeable to a circle of admirers, especially feminine admirers, who have a peculiar talent for discipleship and the absorption of ideas. But when a man is loved by other men of his own intellectual stature and of a wholly different type and order of eminence, we may be certain that there was something genuine about him, and something far more important than anything intellectual. Men do not like another man because he is a genius, least of all when they happen to be geniuses themselves. This general truth about Browning is like hearing of a woman who is the most famous beauty in a city, and who is at the same time adored and confided in by all the women who live there." 102-3
Questions 1
The authorship of the "Eikon Basilike"
The authenticity of the Tichborne claimant
Pio Nono
Garibaldi and Mazzini and Cavour
The authenticity of the Tichborne claimant
Pio Nono
Garibaldi and Mazzini and Cavour
Robert Browning by G.K. Chesterton: Ch 4 "Browning in Italy"
"She describes herself as longing for her husband to write poems, beseeching him to write poems, but finding all her petitions useless because her husband was engaged all day in modelling busts in lcay and breaking them as fast as he made them. This is Browning's interest in art, the interest in a living thing, the interest in a growing thing, the insatiable interest in how things are done." 83
"These Browning poems do not merely deal with painting; they smell of paint. They are the works of a man to whom art is not what it is to so many of the non-professional lovers of art, a thing accomplished, a valley of bones: to him it is a field of crops continually growing in a busy and exciting silence." 83-4
"He was, in other words, what is called an amatuer. The word amateur has come by the thousand oddities of language to convey an idea of tepidity; whereas the word itself has the meaning of passion. Nor is this peculiarity confined to the mere form of the word; the actual characteristic of these nameless dilettanti is a genuine fire and reality. A amn mustlove a thing very much if he not only practises it without any hope of fame or money, but even practises it without any hope of doing it well. Such a man must love the toils of the work more than any other man can love the rewards of it." 84
On Italy:
"To them it was a living nation, the type and centre of the religion and politics of a continent; the ancient and flaming heart of Western history, the very Europe of Europe." 85
On Italy's unification:
"They lived in a time when affairs of State had allmost the air of works of art; an it is not strange that these two poets should have become politicians in one of those great creative epochs when even the politicians have to be poets." 86
"These Browning poems do not merely deal with painting; they smell of paint. They are the works of a man to whom art is not what it is to so many of the non-professional lovers of art, a thing accomplished, a valley of bones: to him it is a field of crops continually growing in a busy and exciting silence." 83-4
"He was, in other words, what is called an amatuer. The word amateur has come by the thousand oddities of language to convey an idea of tepidity; whereas the word itself has the meaning of passion. Nor is this peculiarity confined to the mere form of the word; the actual characteristic of these nameless dilettanti is a genuine fire and reality. A amn mustlove a thing very much if he not only practises it without any hope of fame or money, but even practises it without any hope of doing it well. Such a man must love the toils of the work more than any other man can love the rewards of it." 84
On Italy:
"To them it was a living nation, the type and centre of the religion and politics of a continent; the ancient and flaming heart of Western history, the very Europe of Europe." 85
On Italy's unification:
"They lived in a time when affairs of State had allmost the air of works of art; an it is not strange that these two poets should have become politicians in one of those great creative epochs when even the politicians have to be poets." 86
Robert Browning by G.K. Chesterton: Ch 3 "Browning and His Marriage"
On the publishing of the Brownings' letters:
"I am not prepared to admit that there is or can be, properly speaking, in the world anything that is too sacred ot be known. That spiritual beauty and spiritual truth are in their nature communicable, and that they should be communicated, is a principle which lies at the root of every conceivable religion. Christ was crucified upon a hiss, and not in a cavern, and the word Gospel itself involves the same idea sa the ordianry name of a daily paper." 63-4
"THe ridiculous theory that men shouldhave no noble passions or sentiments in public may have been designed to make private life holy and undefiled, but it has had very little actual effect except to make public life cynical and preposterously unmeaning." 65
"Our wisdom, whether expressed in private or public, belongs to the world, but our folly belongs to those we love." 65
From one of R.B.'s letters to E.B.:
"let me get out of this slough of a simile, never mind with what dislocated ankles." 66
On friend Kenyon:
"He is thoroughly to be congratulated on the fact that he had grasped the great but now neglected truth, that a man may actually be great, yet not in the least able." 70
On the elopement:
"He had always had the courage to tell the truth; and not it was demanded of him to have the greater courage to tell a lie..." 75
"I am not prepared to admit that there is or can be, properly speaking, in the world anything that is too sacred ot be known. That spiritual beauty and spiritual truth are in their nature communicable, and that they should be communicated, is a principle which lies at the root of every conceivable religion. Christ was crucified upon a hiss, and not in a cavern, and the word Gospel itself involves the same idea sa the ordianry name of a daily paper." 63-4
"THe ridiculous theory that men shouldhave no noble passions or sentiments in public may have been designed to make private life holy and undefiled, but it has had very little actual effect except to make public life cynical and preposterously unmeaning." 65
"Our wisdom, whether expressed in private or public, belongs to the world, but our folly belongs to those we love." 65
From one of R.B.'s letters to E.B.:
"let me get out of this slough of a simile, never mind with what dislocated ankles." 66
On friend Kenyon:
"He is thoroughly to be congratulated on the fact that he had grasped the great but now neglected truth, that a man may actually be great, yet not in the least able." 70
On the elopement:
"He had always had the courage to tell the truth; and not it was demanded of him to have the greater courage to tell a lie..." 75
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Robert Browning by G.K. Chesterton: Ch 2 "Early Works" 3.0
On Dramatic Lyrics:
"But youth is always ambitious and universal; mature work exhibits more of individuality, more of the special type and colour of work which a man is destined to do. Youth is universal, but not individual. The genius who begins life with a very genuine and sincere doubt whether he is meant to be an exquisite and idolised violinist, or the most powerful and eloquent Prime Minister of modern times, does at last end by making the discovery that there is, after all, one thing, possibly a certain style of illustrating Nursery Rhymes, which he can really do better than any one else. This was what happened to Browning; like every one else, he had to discover first the universe, and then humanity, and at last himself. With him, as with all others, the great paradox and the great definition of life was this, that the ambition narrows as the mind expands. In Dramatic Lyrics he discovered the one thing that he could really do better than any one else--the dramatic lyric. The form is absolutely original: he had discovered a new field of poetry, and in the centre of that field he had found himself." 48
On The Return of the Druses:
"Just as he tried the queerest metres and attempted to manage them, so he tried the queerest human souls and attempted to stand in their place. Charity was his basic philosohpy; but it was, as it were, a fierce charity, a charity that went man-hunting. He was a kind of cosmic detective who walked into the foulest of thieves' kitchens and accused men publicly of virtue." 52
"But youth is always ambitious and universal; mature work exhibits more of individuality, more of the special type and colour of work which a man is destined to do. Youth is universal, but not individual. The genius who begins life with a very genuine and sincere doubt whether he is meant to be an exquisite and idolised violinist, or the most powerful and eloquent Prime Minister of modern times, does at last end by making the discovery that there is, after all, one thing, possibly a certain style of illustrating Nursery Rhymes, which he can really do better than any one else. This was what happened to Browning; like every one else, he had to discover first the universe, and then humanity, and at last himself. With him, as with all others, the great paradox and the great definition of life was this, that the ambition narrows as the mind expands. In Dramatic Lyrics he discovered the one thing that he could really do better than any one else--the dramatic lyric. The form is absolutely original: he had discovered a new field of poetry, and in the centre of that field he had found himself." 48
On The Return of the Druses:
"Just as he tried the queerest metres and attempted to manage them, so he tried the queerest human souls and attempted to stand in their place. Charity was his basic philosohpy; but it was, as it were, a fierce charity, a charity that went man-hunting. He was a kind of cosmic detective who walked into the foulest of thieves' kitchens and accused men publicly of virtue." 52
Robert Browning by G.K. Chesterton: Ch 2 "Early Works" 2.0
On Pippa Passes:
"In 1841 Pippa Passes appeared, and with it the real Browning of the modern world. He had made the discovery which Byron never made, but whihc almost every young man does at last make--the thrilling discovery that he is not Robinson Crusoe. Pippa Passes is the greates poem ever written, with the exception of one or two by Walt Whitman, to express the sentiment of the pure love of humanity. The phrase has unfortunately a false and pedantic sound. The love of humanity is a thing supposed to be professed only by vulgar and officious philanthropists, or by saints of a superhuman detachment and universality. As a matter of fact, love of humanity is the commonests and most natural of the feelings of a fresh nature, and almost everyone has felt it alight capriciously upon him when looking at a crowded park or a room full of dancers. The love of those whom we do not know is quite as eternal a sentiment as the love of those whom we do know. In our friends the richness of life is proved to us by what we have gained; in the faces in the street the richness of life is proved to us by the hint of what we have lost. And this feeling for strange faces and strange lives, when it is felt keenly by a young man, almost always expresses itself in a desire after a kind of vagabond beneficence, a desire to go through tht world scattering goodness like a capricious god." 43
"In 1841 Pippa Passes appeared, and with it the real Browning of the modern world. He had made the discovery which Byron never made, but whihc almost every young man does at last make--the thrilling discovery that he is not Robinson Crusoe. Pippa Passes is the greates poem ever written, with the exception of one or two by Walt Whitman, to express the sentiment of the pure love of humanity. The phrase has unfortunately a false and pedantic sound. The love of humanity is a thing supposed to be professed only by vulgar and officious philanthropists, or by saints of a superhuman detachment and universality. As a matter of fact, love of humanity is the commonests and most natural of the feelings of a fresh nature, and almost everyone has felt it alight capriciously upon him when looking at a crowded park or a room full of dancers. The love of those whom we do not know is quite as eternal a sentiment as the love of those whom we do know. In our friends the richness of life is proved to us by what we have gained; in the faces in the street the richness of life is proved to us by the hint of what we have lost. And this feeling for strange faces and strange lives, when it is felt keenly by a young man, almost always expresses itself in a desire after a kind of vagabond beneficence, a desire to go through tht world scattering goodness like a capricious god." 43
Robert Browning by G.K. Chesterton: Ch 2 "Early Works"
On Sordello:
"Better known, of course, is the story of Tennyson who said that the first line of the poem--
'Who will, may hear Sordello's story told,'
and the last line--
'Who would has heard Sordello's told,'
were the only two lines in the poem that he understood and they were lies.
Perhaps the best story, however, of all the cycle of Sordello legends is that which is related of Douglas Jerrold. He was recovering from an illness; and having obtained permission for the first time to read a little during the day, he picked up a book from a pile beside the bed and began to read Sordello. No sooner had he done so than he turned deadly pale, put down the book, and said, 'My God! I'm an idiot. My health is restored, but my mind's gone. I can't understand two consecutive lines of an English poem.'" p 34-5
On his obscurity:
"But they all agree in one point--that he did not talk cleverly, or try to talk cleverly, as that proceeding is understood in literary circles. He talked positively, he talked a great deal, but he never attempted to give that neat and aesthetic character to his speech which is almost invariable in the case of the man who is vain of his mental superiority." p 36
" He was not unintelligible because he was proud, but unintelligible because he was humble. He was not unintelligible because his thoughts were vague, but because to him they were obvious [...] A young man of genius who has a genuine humility in his heart does not elaborately explain his discoveries, because he does not hink that they are discoveries. He thinks that the whole street is humming with his ideas, and that the postman and the tailor are poets like himself. Browning's impenetrable poetry was the natural expressssion of this beautiful optimmism. Sordello was the most glorious compliment that has ever been paid to the average man." 37-38
"He was not vain of being an extraordinary man. He was only somewhat excessively vain of being an ordinary one." 40
"If we compare, for example, the complexity of Browning with the clarity of Matthew Arnold, we shall realise that the cause lies in the fact that Matthew Arnold was an intellectual aristocrat, and Browning an intellectual democrat." 41
"His father was a student of mediaeval chronicles, he had himself imbibed that learning in the same casual manner in which a boy learns to walk or to play cricket. Consequently in a literary sense he rushed up to the first person he met and began talking about Ecelo and Taurello Salinguerra with about as much literary egotism as an English baby shows when it talks English to an Italian organ grinder." 41
"This kind of self-analysis is always misleading. For we do not see in ouselves those dominant traits strong enough to force themselves out in action which our neighbors see. We see only a welter of minute mental experiences which include all the sins that were ever committed by Nero or Sir Willoughby Patterne. When studying ourselves, we are looking at a fresco with a magnifying glass. Consequently, these early impressions which great men have given of themselves are nearly always slanders upon themselves, for the strongest man is weak to his own conscience, and Hamlet fourished to a certainty even inside Napoleon." 42
"Better known, of course, is the story of Tennyson who said that the first line of the poem--
'Who will, may hear Sordello's story told,'
and the last line--
'Who would has heard Sordello's told,'
were the only two lines in the poem that he understood and they were lies.
Perhaps the best story, however, of all the cycle of Sordello legends is that which is related of Douglas Jerrold. He was recovering from an illness; and having obtained permission for the first time to read a little during the day, he picked up a book from a pile beside the bed and began to read Sordello. No sooner had he done so than he turned deadly pale, put down the book, and said, 'My God! I'm an idiot. My health is restored, but my mind's gone. I can't understand two consecutive lines of an English poem.'" p 34-5
On his obscurity:
"But they all agree in one point--that he did not talk cleverly, or try to talk cleverly, as that proceeding is understood in literary circles. He talked positively, he talked a great deal, but he never attempted to give that neat and aesthetic character to his speech which is almost invariable in the case of the man who is vain of his mental superiority." p 36
" He was not unintelligible because he was proud, but unintelligible because he was humble. He was not unintelligible because his thoughts were vague, but because to him they were obvious [...] A young man of genius who has a genuine humility in his heart does not elaborately explain his discoveries, because he does not hink that they are discoveries. He thinks that the whole street is humming with his ideas, and that the postman and the tailor are poets like himself. Browning's impenetrable poetry was the natural expressssion of this beautiful optimmism. Sordello was the most glorious compliment that has ever been paid to the average man." 37-38
"He was not vain of being an extraordinary man. He was only somewhat excessively vain of being an ordinary one." 40
"If we compare, for example, the complexity of Browning with the clarity of Matthew Arnold, we shall realise that the cause lies in the fact that Matthew Arnold was an intellectual aristocrat, and Browning an intellectual democrat." 41
"His father was a student of mediaeval chronicles, he had himself imbibed that learning in the same casual manner in which a boy learns to walk or to play cricket. Consequently in a literary sense he rushed up to the first person he met and began talking about Ecelo and Taurello Salinguerra with about as much literary egotism as an English baby shows when it talks English to an Italian organ grinder." 41
"This kind of self-analysis is always misleading. For we do not see in ouselves those dominant traits strong enough to force themselves out in action which our neighbors see. We see only a welter of minute mental experiences which include all the sins that were ever committed by Nero or Sir Willoughby Patterne. When studying ourselves, we are looking at a fresco with a magnifying glass. Consequently, these early impressions which great men have given of themselves are nearly always slanders upon themselves, for the strongest man is weak to his own conscience, and Hamlet fourished to a certainty even inside Napoleon." 42
Robert Browning by G.K. Chesterton: Ch 1 "Browning in Early Life"
On Strafford:
"It is when men begin to grow desperate in their love for the people, when they are overwhelmed with the difficulties and blunders of humanity, that they fall back upon a wild desire to manage everything themselves. Their faith in themselves is only a disillusionmnet with mankind. They are in that most dreadful position, dreadful alike in personal and public affairs--the position of the man who has lost faith and not lost love. This belief that all would go right if we could only get the strings into our own hands is a fallacy almost without exception, but nubody can justly say that it is not public-spirited. The sin and sorrow of despotism is not that it does not love men, but that it loves them too much and trusts them too little." p 31
"It is when men begin to grow desperate in their love for the people, when they are overwhelmed with the difficulties and blunders of humanity, that they fall back upon a wild desire to manage everything themselves. Their faith in themselves is only a disillusionmnet with mankind. They are in that most dreadful position, dreadful alike in personal and public affairs--the position of the man who has lost faith and not lost love. This belief that all would go right if we could only get the strings into our own hands is a fallacy almost without exception, but nubody can justly say that it is not public-spirited. The sin and sorrow of despotism is not that it does not love men, but that it loves them too much and trusts them too little." p 31
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