Robert Browning’s Language by Donald S. Hair

ESC 27, 2001 In this way, we can proceed at a leisurely pace, assimilate his in­ formation in small doses, and always retain the thread of his ar­ gument. He builds his case carefully, solidly, step by step. There are inevitably repetitions and cross-references—even, occasion­ ally, some necessary chronological wobbles—but Bevis does his best to ensure that we keep our bearings. We emerge from a reading of The Road to Egdon Heath with a sense that pieces of information, many of which we already knew, have fallen into place to reveal a surprisingly clear design. We realize that the “gaunt waste in Thule” had attracted in­ dividual and scattered admiration for many centuries but that, until the development ofscientific understanding ofthe vastness of space and time, with the corresponding collapse of hitherto unchallenged religious certainties, such attitudes could not be­ come widely accessible or psychologically congenial. Although the majority of Bevis’s examples belong to Eu­ rope, he devotes several chapters to New-World writing, and discusses a number of Canadian texts, especially accounts of exploration and travel. The road to Egdon Heath, we find, can involve diversions to the Northwest Passage and the Macken­ zie River. Canadianists should, I think, examine this book with care, for it places our exploration-texts within a broader context than that in which they are usually discussed. This is an admirable and important book that no serious student of literature can afford to ignore. It is a model of schol­ arly elucidation and discretion. (I must, however, register my sadness at the ignorant misspelling “dessication” throughout [28, 267; cf. 318]. A press ofthe calibre ofMcGill-Queen’sshould know better.) W. J. KEITH / U niversity of Toronto Donald S. Hair. Robert Browning’s Language. Toronto: Univer­ sity of Toronto Press, 1999. 326. $55.00 cloth. A worthy sequel to his authoritative study of Tennyson’s lan­ guage, Donald Hair’s new book on Browning has its distant genesis in a question posed by Northrop Frye about the na­ ture of Browning’s verbal universe. Not only has Hair provided 514 REVIEWS a wide-ranging answer to Frye’s question. He has also written the kind of book that all inquiries into Browning’s language— from Walter Bagehot’s nineteenth-century study of the poet’s grotesque diction to Isobel Armstrong’s recent study of his Ben­ thamite fictions—exist to express. Hair advances Browning scholarship in three important ways. His study of the books that Browning owned and read and the sermons he heard is more intelligent and sustained than any previous study. The range of styles and poems Hair consid­ ers —from the early Pauline to the late Asolando — is also more inclusive than their treatment elsewhere. Finally, by carefully analyzing conflicting intellectual traditions, empirical and ide­ alist, Hair’s book helps resolve some of the contradictions that have always puzzled students of the poet’s difficult language and thought. Robert Browning’s Language makes splendidly resourceful use of sermons by Canon Henry Melvill and Reverend George Clayton, and ofbooks that Browning read in his father’s library, especially John Collard’s Epitome of Logic and Frances Quar­ les’s Emblems Divine and Moral. Hair brilliantly demonstrates how Quarles’s emblem of the fool who tries to blow out the light of the sun with a bellows is a source of many tropes that Browning uses to dramatize an abuse both of human words and the Logos. Equally illuminating is Hair’s treatment of Brown­ ing’s important distinction between proofs and probabilities in the Christian apologetics of such poems as “Bishop Blougram’s Apology” and La Saisiaz. The force of probability is often asso­ ciated too exclusively with John Henry Newman’s Oxford ser­ mons and Bishop Butler’s Analogy of Religion. Hair corrects this mistake by reminding us of the importance of probabil­ ity in Levi Hedge’s Elements of Logick, in Collard’s treatise of logic, and ultimately in the empirical theory of logic developed by Locke in the fourth book of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The analysis of Locke’s theory of ideas and of his insistence on the limits of language is unsurpassed. Except...

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