initial commit of ebook 14316HEADmain

1 files changed, 13488 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/old/14316.txt b/old/14316.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9fbfd67
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/14316.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,13488 @@
+Project Gutenberg's The Poetry Of Robert Browning, by Stopford A. Brooke
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Poetry Of Robert Browning
+
+Author: Stopford A. Brooke
+
+Release Date: December 10, 2004 [EBook #14316]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE POETRY OF ROBERT BROWNING ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram and the Online Distributed Proofreading
+Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE POETRY
+
+OF
+
+ROBERT BROWNING
+
+BY
+
+STOPFORD A. BROOKE
+
+AUTHOR OF "TENNYSON: HIS ART AND RELATION TO MODERN LIFE"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+LONDON
+
+ISBISTER AND COMPANY LIMITED
+
+1903
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & Co. London & Edinburgh
+
+_First Edition, September 1902_
+_Reprinted, October 1902_
+_Reprinted, January 1903_
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+I.     BROWNING AND TENNYSON
+
+II.    THE TREATMENT OF NATURE
+
+III.   THE TREATMENT OF NATURE
+
+IV.    BROWNING'S THEORY OF HUMAN LIFE--PAULINE AND PARACELSUS
+
+V.     THE POET OF ART
+
+VI.    SORDELLO
+
+VII.   BROWNING AND SORDELLO
+
+VIII.  THE DRAMAS
+
+IX.    POEMS OF THE PASSION OF LOVE
+
+X.     THE PASSIONS OTHER THAN LOVE
+
+XI.    IMAGINATIVE REPRESENTATIONS
+
+XII.   IMAGINATIVE REPRESENTATIONS--RENAISSANCE
+
+XIII.  WOMANHOOD IN BROWNING
+
+XIV.   WOMANHOOD IN BROWNING--(THE DRAMATIC LYRICS AND POMPILIA)
+
+XV.    BALAUSTION
+
+XVI.   THE RING AND THE BOOK
+
+XVII.  LATER POEMS
+
+XVIII. THE LAST POEMS
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  The publishers are indebted to Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co. on behalf
+  of the owner of the copyright for their permission to make extracts
+  from copyright poems for use in this volume
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+_BROWNING AND TENNYSON_
+
+
+Parnassus, Apollo's mount, has two peaks, and on these, for sixty years,
+from 1830 to 1890,[1] two poets sat, till their right to these lofty
+peaks became unchallenged. Beneath them, during these years, on the
+lower knolls of the mount of song, many new poets sang; with diverse
+instruments, on various subjects, and in manifold ways. They had their
+listeners; the Muses were also their visitants; but none of them
+ventured seriously to dispute the royal summits where Browning and
+Tennyson sat, and smiled at one another across the vale between.
+
+Both began together; and the impulses which came to them from the new
+and excited world which opened its fountains in and about 1832 continued
+to impel them till the close of their lives. While the poetic world
+altered around them, while two generations of poets made new schools of
+poetry, they remained, for the most part, unaffected by these schools.
+There is nothing of Arnold and Clough, of Swinburne, Rossetti or Morris,
+or of any of the others, in Browning or Tennyson. There is nothing even
+of Mrs. Browning in Browning. What changes took place in them were
+wrought, first, by the natural growth of their own character; secondly,
+by the natural development of their art-power; and thirdly, by the slow
+decaying of that power. They were, in comparison with the rest,
+curiously uninfluenced by the changes of the world around them. The main
+themes, with which they began, they retained to the end. Their methods,
+their instruments, their way of feeling into the world of man and of
+nature, their relation to the doctrines of God and of Man, did not,
+though on all these matters they held diverse views, alter with the
+alteration of the world. But this is more true of Browning than of
+Tennyson. The political and social events of those years touched
+Tennyson, as we see from _Maud_ and the _Princess_, but his way of
+looking at them was not the way of a contemporary. It might have been
+predicted from his previous career and work. Then the new movements of
+Science and Criticism which disturbed Clough and Arnold so deeply, also
+troubled Tennyson, but not half so seriously. He staggered for a time
+under the attack on his old conceptions, but he never yielded to it. He
+was angry with himself for every doubt that beset him, and angry with
+the Science and Criticism which disturbed the ancient ideas he was
+determined not to change. Finally, he rested where he had been when he
+wrote _In Memoriam_, nay more, where he had been when he began to write.
+
+There were no such intervals in Browning's thought. One could scarcely
+say from his poetry, except in a very few places, that he was aware of
+the social changes of his time, or of the scientific and critical
+movement which, while he lived, so profoundly modified both theology and
+religion.[2] _Asolando_, in 1890, strikes the same chords, but more
+feebly, which _Paracelsus_ struck in 1835.
+
+But though, in this lofty apartness and self-unity, Browning and
+Tennyson may fairly be said to be at one, in themselves and in their
+song they were different. There could scarcely be two characters, two
+musics, two minds, two methods in art, two imaginations, more distinct
+and contrasted than those which lodged in these men--and the object of
+this introduction is to bring out this contrast, with the purpose of
+placing in a clearer light some of the peculiar elements in the poetry
+of Browning, and in his position as a poet.
+
+1. Their public fate was singularly different. In 1842 Tennyson, with
+his two volumes of Collected Poems, made his position. The _Princess_,
+in 1847, increased his reputation. In 1850, _In Memoriam_ raised him,
+it was said, above all the poets of his time, and the book was
+appreciated, read and loved by the greater part of the English-speaking
+world. The success and popular fame which now followed were well
+deserved and wisely borne. They have endured and will endure. A host of
+imitators, who caught his music and his manner, filled the groves and
+ledges which led up to the peak on which he lived. His side of Parnassus
+was thronged.
+
+It was quite otherwise with his brother-poet. Only a few clear-eyed
+persons cared to read _Paracelsus_, which appeared in 1835. _Strafford_,
+Browning's first drama, had a little more vogue; it was acted for a
+while. When _Sordello_, that strange child of genius, was born in 1840,
+those who tried to read its first pages declared they were
+incomprehensible. It seems that critics in those days had either less
+intelligence than we have, or were more impatient and less attentive,
+for not only _Sordello_ but even _In Memoriam_ was said to be
+exceedingly obscure.
+
+Then, from 1841 to 1846, Browning published at intervals a series of
+varied poems and dramas, under the title of _Bells and Pomegranates_.
+These, one might imagine, would have grasped the heart of any public
+which had a care for poetry. Among them were such diverse poems as
+_Pippa Passes_; _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_; _Saul_; _The Pied Piper of
+Hamelin_; _My Last Duchess_; _Waring_. I only mention a few (all different
+in note, subject and manner from one another), in order to mark the
+variety and range of imaginative power displayed in this wonderful set
+of little books. The Bells of poetry's music, hung side by side with
+the golden Pomegranates of thought, made the fringe of the robe of this
+high priest of song. Rarely have imagination and intellect, ideal faith
+and the sense which handles daily life, passion and quietude, the
+impulse and self-mastery of an artist, the joy of nature and the fates
+of men, grave tragedy and noble grotesque, been mingled together more
+fully--bells for the pleasure and fruit for the food of man.
+
+Yet, on the whole, they fell dead on the public. A few, however, loved
+them, and all the poems were collected in 1849. _In Memoriam_ and this
+Collected Edition of Browning issued almost together; but with how
+different a fate and fame we see most plainly in the fact that Browning
+can scarcely be said to have had any imitators. The groves and ledges of
+his side of Apollo's mountain were empty, save for a few enchanted
+listeners, who said: "This is our music, and here we build our tent."
+
+As the years went on, these readers increased in number, but even when
+the volumes entitled _Men and Women_ were published in 1855, and the
+_Dramatis Personae_ in 1864, his followers were but a little company. For
+all this neglect Browning cared as a bird cares who sings for the love
+of singing, and who never muses in himself whether the wood is full or
+not of listeners. Being always a true artist, he could not stop versing
+and playing; and not one grain of villain envy touched his happy heart
+when he looked across the valley to Tennyson. He loved his mistress Art,
+and his love made him always joyful in creating.
+
+At last his time came, but it was not till nearly twenty years after
+the Collected Poems of 1849 that _The Ring and the Book_ astonished the
+reading public so much by its intellectual _tour de force_ that it was
+felt to be unwise to ignore Browning any longer. His past work was now
+discovered, read and praised. It was not great success or worldwide fame
+that he attained, but it was pleasant to him, and those who already
+loved his poems rejoiced with him. Before he died he was widely read,
+never so much as Tennyson, but far more than he had ever expected. It
+had become clear to all the world that he sat on a rival height with
+Tennyson, above the rest of his fellow-poets.
+
+Their public fate, then, was very different. Tennyson had fifty years of
+recognition, Browning barely ten. And to us who now know Browning this
+seems a strange thing. Had he been one of the smaller men, a modern
+specialist like Arnold or Rossetti, we could better understand it. But
+Browning's work was not limited to any particular or temporary phase of
+human nature. He set himself to represent, as far as he could, all types
+of human nature; and, more audacious still, types taken from many
+diverse ages, nations and climates. He told us of times and folk as far
+apart as Caliban and Cleon, as Karshish and Waring, as Balaustion and
+Fifine, as St. John and Bishop Blougram. The range and the contrasts of
+his subjects are equally great. And he did this work with a searching
+analysis, a humorous keenness, a joyous boldness, and an opulent
+imagination at once penetrative and passionate. When, then, we realise
+this as we realise it now, we are the more astonished that appreciation
+of him lingered so long. Why did it not come at first, and why did it
+come in the end?
+
+The first answer to that question is a general one. During the years
+between 1860 and 1890, and especially during the latter half of these
+years, science and criticism were predominant. Their determination to
+penetrate to the roots of things made a change in the general direction
+of thought and feeling on the main subjects of life. Analysis became
+dearer to men than synthesis, reasoning than imagination. Doubtful
+questions were submitted to intellectual decision alone. The
+Understanding, to its great surprise, was employed on the investigation
+of the emotions, and even the artists were drawn in this direction.
+They, too, began to dissect the human heart. Poets and writers of
+fiction, students of human nature, were keenly interested, not so much
+in our thoughts and feelings as in exposing how and why we thought or
+felt in this or that fashion. In such analysis they seemed to touch the
+primal sources of life. They desired to dig about the tree of humanity
+and to describe all the windings of its roots and fibres--not much
+caring whether they withered the tree for a time--rather than to
+describe and sing its outward beauty, its varied foliage, and its ruddy
+fruit. And this liking to investigate the hidden inwardness of
+motives--which many persons, weary of self-contemplation, wisely prefer
+to keep hidden--ran through the practice of all the arts. They became,
+on the whole, less emotional, more intellectual. The close marriage
+between passion and thought, without whose cohabitation no work of
+genius is born in the arts, was dissolved; and the intellect of the
+artist often worked by itself, and his emotion by itself. Some of the
+parthenogenetic children of these divorced powers were curious products,
+freaks, even monsters of literature, in which the dry, cynical, or
+vivisecting temper had full play, or the naked, lustful, or cruel
+exposure of the emotions in ugly, unnatural, or morbid forms was
+glorified. They made an impudent claim to the name of Art, but they were
+nothing better than disagreeable Science. But this was an extreme
+deviation of the tendency. The main line it took was not so detestable.
+It was towards the ruthless analysis of life, and of the soul of man; a
+part, in fact, of the general scientific movement. The outward forms of
+things charmed writers less than the motives which led to their making.
+The description of the tangled emotions and thoughts of the inner life,
+before any action took place, was more pleasurable to the writer, and
+easier, than any description of their final result in act. This was
+borne to a wearisome extreme in fiction, and in these last days a
+comfortable reaction from it has arisen. In poetry it did not last so
+long. Morris carried us out of it. But long before it began, long before
+its entrance into the arts, Browning, who on another side of his genius
+delighted in the representation of action, anticipated in poetry, and
+from the beginning of his career, twenty, even thirty years before it
+became pronounced in literature, this tendency to the intellectual
+analysis of human nature. When he began it, no one cared for it; and
+_Paracelsus, Sordello_ and the soul-dissecting poems in _Bells and
+Pomegranates_ fell on an unheeding world. But Browning did not heed the
+unheeding of the world. He had the courage of his aims in art, and while
+he frequently shaped in his verse the vigorous movement of life, even to
+its moments of fierce activity, he went on quietly, amid the silence of
+the world, to paint also the slowly interwoven and complex pattern of
+the inner life of men. And then, when the tendency of which I speak had
+collared the interest of society, society, with great and ludicrous
+amazement, found him out. "Here is a man," it said, "who has been doing
+in poetry for the last thirty years the very thing of which we are so
+fond, and who is doing it with delightful and varied subtlety. We will
+read him now." So Browning, anticipating by thirty years the drift of
+the world, was not read at first; but, afterwards, the world having
+reached him, he became a favoured poet.
+
+However, fond as he was of metaphysical analysis, he did not fall into
+the extremes into which other writers carried it, _Paracelsus_ is,
+indeed, entirely concerned with the inner history of a soul, but
+_Sordello_ combines with a similar history a tale of political and
+warlike action in which men and women, like Salinguerra and Palma, who
+live in outward work rather than in inward thought, are described; while
+in poems like _Pippa Passes_ and some of the Dramas, emotion and
+thought, intimately interwoven, are seen blazing, as it were, into a
+lightning of swift deeds. Nor are other poems wanting, in which, not
+long analysis, but short passion, fiery outbursts of thought, taking
+immediate form, are represented with astonishing intensity.
+
+2. This second remarkable power of his touches the transition which has
+begun to carry us, in the last few years, from the subjective to the
+objective in art. The time came, and quite lately, when art, weary of
+intellectual and minute investigation, turned to realise, not the long
+inward life of a soul with all its motives laid bare, but sudden moments
+of human passion, swift and unoutlined impressions on the senses, the
+moody aspects of things, flared-out concentrations of critical hours of
+thought and feeling which years perhaps of action and emotion had
+brought to the point of eruption. Impressionism was born in painting,
+poetry, sculpture and music.
+
+It was curious that, when we sought for a master who had done this in
+the art of poetry, we found that Browning--who had in long poems done
+the very opposite of impressionism--had also, in a number of short
+poems, anticipated impressionist art by nearly forty years. _Porphyria's
+Lover_, many a scene in _Sordello_, _My Last Duchess_, _The Laboratory_,
+_Home Thoughts from Abroad_, are only a few out of many. It is pleasant
+to think of the ultimate appearance of Waring, flashed out for a moment
+on the sea, only to disappear. In method, swiftness and colour, but done
+in verse, it is an impressionist picture, as vivid in transient scenery
+as in colour. He did the same sort of work in poems of nature, of human
+life, of moments of passion, of states of the soul. That is another
+reason why he was not read at first, and why he is read now. He was
+impressionist long before Impressionism arrived. When it arrived he was
+found out. And he stood alone, for Tennyson is never impressionist, and
+never could have been. Neither was Swinburne nor Arnold, Morris nor
+Rossetti.
+
+3. Again, in the leisured upper ranges of thought and emotion, and in
+the extraordinary complexity of human life which arose, first, out of
+the more intimate admixture of all classes in our society; and secondly,
+out of the wider and more varied world-life which increased means of
+travel and knowledge afforded to men, Tennyson's smooth, melodious,
+simple development of art-subjects did not represent the clashing
+complexity of human life, whether inward in the passions, the intellect
+or the soul, or in the active movement of the world. And the other poets
+were equally incapable of representing this complexity of which the
+world became clearly conscious. Arnold tried to express its beginnings,
+and failed, because he tried to explain instead of representing them. He
+wrote about them; he did not write them down. Nor did he really belong
+to this novel, quick, variegated, involved world which was so pleased
+with its own excitement and entanglement. He was the child of a world
+which was then passing away, out of which life was fading, which was
+tired like Obermann, and sought peace in reflective solitudes. Sometimes
+he felt, as in _The New Age_, the pleasure of the coming life of the
+world, but he was too weary to share in it, and he claimed quiet. But
+chiefly he saw the disturbance, the unregulated life; and, unable to
+realise that it was the trouble and wildness of youth, he mistook it for
+the trouble of decay. He painted it as such. But it was really young,
+and out of it broke all kinds of experiments in social, religious,
+philosophical and political thought, such as we have seen and read of
+for the last thirty years. Art joined in the experiments of this
+youthful time. It opened a new fountain and sent forth from it another
+stream, to echo this attempting, clanging and complicated society; and
+this stream did not flow like a full river, making large or sweet
+melody, but like a mountain torrent thick with rocks, the thunderous
+whirlpools of whose surface were white with foam. Changing and
+sensational scenery haunted its lower banks where it became dangerously
+navigable. Strange boats, filled with outlandish figures, who played on
+unknown instruments, and sang of deeds and passions remote from common
+life, sailed by on its stormy waters. Few were the concords, many the
+discords, and some of the discords were never resolved. But in one case
+at least--in the case of Browning's poetry, and in very many cases in
+the art of music--out of the discords emerged at last a full melody of
+steady thought and controlled emotion as (to recapture my original
+metaphor) the rude, interrupted music of the mountain stream reaches
+full and concordant harmony when it flows in peace through the meadows
+of the valley.
+
+These complex and intercleaving conditions of thought and passion into
+which society had grown Browning represented from almost the beginning
+of his work. When society became conscious of them--there it found him.
+And, amazed, it said, "Here is a man who forty years ago lived in the
+midst of our present life and wrote about it." They saw the wild, loud
+complexity of their world expressed in his verse; and yet were dimly
+conscious, to their consolation, that he was aware of a central peace
+where the noise was quieted and the tangle unravelled.
+
+For Browning not only represented this discordant, varied hurly-burly of
+life, but also, out of all the discords which he described, and which,
+when he chose, even his rhythms and word-arrangements realised in sound,
+he drew a concordant melody at last, and gave to a world, troubled with
+itself, the hope of a great concent into which all the discords ran, and
+where they were resolved. And this hope for the individual and the race
+was one of the deepest elements in Browning's religion. It was also the
+hope of Tennyson, but Tennyson was often uncertain of it, and bewailed
+the uncertainty. Browning was certain of his hope, and for the most part
+resolved his discords. Even when he did not resolve them, he firmly
+believed that they would be resolved. This, his essential difference
+from the other poets of the last fifty years, marks not only his
+apartness from the self-ignorance of English society, and the
+self-sceptical scepticism which arises from that self-ignorance, but
+also how steadily assured was the foundation of his spiritual life. In
+the midst of the shifting storms of doubt and trouble, of mockery,
+contradiction, and assertion on religious matters, he stood unremoved.
+Whatever men may think of his faith and his certainties, they reveal the
+strength of his character, the enduring courage of his soul, and the
+inspiring joyousness that, born of his strength, characterised him to
+the last poem he wrote. While the other poets were tossing on the sea of
+unresolved Question, he rested, musing and creating, on a green island
+whose rocks were rooted on the ocean-bed, and wondered, with the smiling
+tolerance of his life-long charity, how his fellows were of so little
+faith, and why the sceptics made so much noise. He would have reversed
+the Psalmist's cry. He would have said, "Thou art not cast down, O my
+soul; thou art not disquieted within me. Thou hast hoped in God, who is
+the light of thy countenance, and thy God."
+
+At first the world, enamoured of its own complex discords, and pleased,
+like boys in the street, with the alarms it made, only cared for that
+part of Browning which represented the tangle and the clash, and ignored
+his final melody. But of late it has begun, tired of the restless
+clatter of intellectual atoms, to desire to hear, if possible, the
+majestic harmonies in which the discords are resolved. And at this point
+many at present and many more in the future will find their poetic and
+religious satisfaction in Browning. At the very end, then, of the
+nineteenth century, in a movement which had only just begun, men said to
+themselves, "Browning felt beforehand what we are beginning to hope for,
+and wrote of it fifty, even sixty years ago. No one cared then for him,
+but we care now."
+
+Again, though he thus anticipated the movements of the world, he did
+not, like the other poets, change his view about Nature, Man and God. He
+conceived that view when he was young, and he did not alter it. Hence,
+he did not follow or reflect from year to year the opinions of his time
+on these great matters. When _Paracelsus_ was published in 1835 Browning
+had fully thought out, and in that poem fully expressed, his theory of
+God's relation to man, and of man's relation to the universe around him,
+to his fellow men, and to the world beyond. It was a theory which was
+original, if any theory can be so called. At least, its form, as he
+expressed it, was clearly original. Roughly sketched in _Pauline_, fully
+rounded in _Paracelsus_, it held and satisfied his mind till the day of
+his death. But Tennyson had no clear theory about Man or Nature or God
+when he began, nor was he afterwards, save perhaps when he wrote the
+last stanzas of _In Memoriam_, a fully satisfied citizen of the city
+that has foundations. He believed in that city, but he could not always
+live in it. He grew into this or that opinion about the relations of God
+and man, and then grew out of it. He held now this, now that view of
+nature, and of man in contact with nature. There was always battle in
+his soul; although he won his brittle in the end, he had sixty years of
+war. Browning was at peace, firm-fixed. It is true the inward struggle
+of Tennyson enabled him to image from year to year his own time better
+than Browning did. It is true this struggle enabled him to have great
+variety in his art-work when it was engaged with the emotions which
+belong to doubt and faith; but it also made him unable to give to his
+readers that sense of things which cannot be shaken, of faith in God and
+in humanity wholly independent, in its depths, of storms on the surface
+of this mortal life, which was one of Browning's noblest legacies to
+that wavering, faithless, pessimistic, analysis-tormented world through
+which we have fought our way, and out of which we are emerging.
+
+4. The danger in art, or for an artist, of so settled a theory is that
+in expression it tends to monotony; and sometimes, when we find almost
+every poem of Browning's running up into his theory, we arrive at the
+borders of the Land of Weary-men. But he seems to have been aware of
+this danger, and to have conquered it. He meets it by the immense
+variety of the subjects he chooses, and of the scenery in which he
+places them. I do not think he ever repeats any one of his examples,
+though he always repeats his theory. And the pleasant result is that we
+can either ignore the theory if we like, or rejoice over its universal
+application, or, beyond it altogether, be charmed and excited by the
+fresh examples alone. And they are likely to charm, at least by variety,
+for they are taken from all ages of history; from as many diverse phases
+of human act, character and passion as there are poems which concern
+them; from many periods of the arts; from most of the countries of
+Europe, from France, Germany, Spain, Italy, (rarely from England,) with
+their specialised types of race and of landscape; and from almost every
+class of educated modern society. Moreover, he had a guard within his
+own nature against the danger of this monotony. It was the youthful
+freshness with which, even in advanced age, he followed his rapid
+impulses to art-creation. No one was a greater child than he in the
+quickness with which he received a sudden call to poetry from passing
+events or scenes, and in the eagerness with which he seized them as
+subjects. He took the big subjects now and then which the world expects
+to be taken, and treated them with elaborate thought and steadfast
+feeling, but he was more often like the girl in his half-dramatic poem,
+whom the transient occurrences and sights of the day touched into song.
+He picked up his subjects as a man culls flowers in a mountain walk,
+moved by an ever-recurring joy and fancy in them--a book on a stall, a
+bust in an Italian garden, a face seen at the opera, the market chatter
+of a Tuscan town, a story told by the roadside in Brittany, a picture in
+some Accademia--so that, though the ground-thought might incur the
+danger of dulness through repetition, the joy of the artist so filled
+the illustration, and his freshness of invention was so delighted with
+itself, that even to the reader the theory seemed like a new star.
+
+In this way he kept the use of having an unwavering basis of thought
+which gave unity to his sixty years of work, and yet avoided the peril
+of monotony. An immense diversity animated his unity, filled it with
+gaiety and brightness, and secured impulsiveness of fancy. This also
+differentiates him from Tennyson, who often wanted freshness; who very
+rarely wrote on a sudden impulse, but after long and careful thought; to
+whose seriousness we cannot always climb with pleasure; who played so
+little with the world. These defects in Tennyson had the excellences
+which belong to them in art, just as these excellences in Browning had,
+in art, their own defects. We should be grateful for the excellences,
+and not trouble ourselves about the defects. However, neither the
+excellences nor the defects concern us in the present discussion. It is
+the contrast between the two men on which we dwell.
+
+5. The next point of contrast, which will further illustrate why
+Browning was not read of old but is now read, has to do with historical
+criticism. There arose, some time ago, as part of the scientific and
+critical movement of the last forty years, a desire to know and record
+accurately the early life of peoples, pastoral, agricultural and in
+towns, and the beginning of their arts and knowledges; and not only
+their origins, but the whole history of their development. A close,
+critical investigation was made of the origins of each people; accurate
+knowledge, derived from contemporary documents, of their life, laws,
+customs and language was attained; the facts of their history were
+separated from their mythical and legendary elements; the dress, the
+looks of men, the climate of the time, the physical aspects of their
+country--all the skeleton of things was fitted together, bone to bone.
+And for a good while this merely critical school held the field. It did
+admirable and necessary work.
+
+But when it was done, art claimed its place in this work. The desire
+sprang up among historians to conceive all this history in the
+imagination, to shape vividly its scenery, to animate and individualise
+its men and women, to paint the life of the human soul in it, to clothe
+it in flesh and blood, to make its feet move and its eyes flash--but to
+do all these things within the limits of the accurate knowledge which
+historical criticism had defined. "Let us saturate ourselves," said the
+historians, "with clear knowledge of the needful facts, and then,
+without violation of our knowledge, imagine the human life, the
+landscape, the thinking and feeling of a primaeval man, of his early
+religion, of his passions; of Athens when the Persian came, of Rome when
+the Republic was passing into the Empire, of a Provincial in Spain or
+Britain, of a German town in the woods by the river. Let us see in
+imagination as well as in knowledge an English settlement on the Welsh
+border, an Italian mediaeval town when its art was being born, a Jewish
+village when Christ wandered into its streets, a musician or a painter's
+life at a time when Greek art was decaying, or when a new impulse like
+the Renaissance or the French Revolution came upon the world." When that
+effort of the historians had established itself, and we have seen it
+from blossoming to fruitage, people began to wonder that no poet had
+ever tried to do this kind of work. It seemed eminently fitted for a
+poet's hand, full of subjects alluring to the penetrative imagination.
+It needed, of course, some scholarship, for it demanded accuracy in its
+grasp of the main ideas of the time to be represented; but that being
+given, immense opportunities remained for pictures of human life, full
+of colour, thought and passions; for subtle and brilliant
+representations of the eternal desires and thinkings of human nature as
+they were governed by the special circumstances of the time in which the
+poem was placed; and for the concentration into a single poem, gathered
+round one person, of the ideas whose new arrival formed a crisis in the
+history of art.
+
+Men looked for this in Tennyson and did not find it. His Greek and
+mediaeval poems were modernised. Their imaginative work was uncritical.
+But when the historians and the critics of art and of religious
+movements happened at last to look into Browning, they discovered, to
+their delight and wonder, that he had been doing, with a curious
+knowledge, this kind of work for many years. He had anticipated the
+results of that movement of the imagination in historical work which did
+not exist when he began to write; he had worked that mine, and the
+discovery of this made another host of people readers of his poetry.
+
+We need scarcely give examples of this. _Sordello_, in 1840 (long before
+the effort of which we speak began), was such a poem--the history of a
+specialised soul, with all its scenery and history vividly mediaeval.
+Think of the _Spanish Cloister_, _The Laboratory_, _A Grammarian's
+Funeral_, the _Bishop orders his Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church_, poems,
+each of which paints an historical period or a vivid piece of its life.
+Think of _The Ring and the Book_, with all the world of Rome painted to
+the life, and all the soul of the time!
+
+The same kind of work was done for phases and periods of the arts from
+Greek times to the Renaissance, I may even say, from the Renaissance to
+the present day. _Balaustion's Prologue_ concentrates the passage of
+dramatic poetry from Sophocles to Euripides. _Aristophanes' Apology_
+realises the wild licence in which art and freedom died in Athens--their
+greatness in their ruin--and the passionate sorrow of those who loved
+what had been so beautiful. _Cleon_ takes us into a later time when men
+had ceased to be original, and life and art had become darkened by the
+pain of the soul. We pass on to two different periods of the
+Renaissance in _Fra Lippo Lippi_ and in _Andrea del Sarto_, and are
+carried further through the centuries of art when we read _Abt Vogler_
+and _A Toccata of Galuppi's_. Each of these poems is a concentrated,
+accurate piece of art-history, with the addition to it of the human
+soul.
+
+Periods and phases of religious history are equally realised. _Caliban
+upon Setebos_ begins the record--that philosophic savage who makes his
+God out of himself. Then follows study after study, from _A Death in the
+Desert_ to _Bishop Blougram's Apology_. Some carry us from early
+Christianity through the mediaeval faith; others lead us through the
+Paganism of the Renaissance and strange shows of Judaism to Browning's
+own conception of religion in the present day contrasted with those of
+the popular religion in _Christmas-Day and Easter-Day_.
+
+Never, in poetry, was the desire of the historical critic for accuracy
+of fact and portraiture, combined with vivid presentation of life, so
+fully satisfied. No wonder Browning was not read of old; but it is no
+wonder, when the new History was made, when he was once found out, that
+he passed from a few to a multitude of readers.
+
+6. Another contrast appears at the very beginning of their career.
+Tennyson, in his two earliest books in 1830 and 1833, though clearly
+original in some poems, had clinging round his singing robes some of the
+rags of the past. He wrote partly in the weak and sentimental strain of
+the poets between 1822 and 1832. Browning, on the contrary, sprang at
+once into an original poetic life of his own. _Pauline_ was unfinished,
+irregular in form, harsh, abrupt, and overloaded, but it was also
+entirely fresh and distinct. The influence of Shelley echoes in it, but
+much more in admiration than in imitation of him. The matter, the spirit
+of the poem were his own, and the verse-movement was his own. Had
+Browning been an imitator, the first thing he would have imitated would
+have been the sweet and rippling movement of Shelley's melodies. But the
+form of his verse, such as it was, arose directly out of his own nature
+and was as original as his matter. Tennyson grew into originality,
+Browning leaped into it; born, not of other poets, but of his own will.
+He begat himself. It had been better for his art, so far as technical
+excellence is concerned, had he studied and imitated at first the
+previous masters. But he did not; and his dominant individuality, whole
+in itself and creating its own powers, separates him at the very
+beginning from Tennyson.
+
+7. Tennyson became fully original, but he always admitted, and sometimes
+encouraged in himself, a certain vein of conventionality. He kept the
+opinions of the past in the matter of caste. He clung to certain
+political and social maxims, and could not see beyond them. He sometimes
+expressed them as if they were freshly discovered truths or direct
+emanations from the Deity of England. He belonged to a certain type of
+English society, and he rarely got out of it in his poetry. He inhabited
+a certain Park of morals, and he had no sympathy with any self-ethical
+life beyond its palings. What had been, what was proper and recognised,
+somewhat enslaved in Tennyson that distinctiveness and freedom of
+personality which is of so much importance in poetry, and which, had it
+had more liberty in Tennyson, would have made him a still greater poet
+than he was.
+
+Browning, on the other hand--much more a person in society than
+Tennyson, much more a man of the world, and obeying in society its
+social conventions more than Tennyson--never allowed this to touch his
+poems. As the artist, he was quite free from the opinions, maxims, and
+class conventions of the past or the present. His poetry belongs to no
+special type of society, to no special nationality, to no separate creed
+or church, to no settled standard of social morality. What his own
+thought and emotion urged him to say, he said with an absolute
+carelessness of what the world would say. And in this freedom he
+preceded and prophesied the reaction of the last years of the nineteenth
+century against the tyranny of maxims and conventions in society, in
+morals, and in religion. That reaction has in many ways been carried
+beyond the proper limits of what is just and beautiful. But these
+excesses had to be, and the world is beginning to avoid them. What
+remains is the blessing of life set free, not altogether from the use of
+conventions, but from their tyranny and oppression, and lifted to a
+higher level, where the test of what is right and fitting in act, and
+just in thought, is not the opinion of society, but that Law of Love
+which gives us full liberty to develop our own nature and lead our own
+life in the way we think best independent of all conventions, provided
+we do not injure the life of others, or violate any of the great moral
+and spiritual truths by obedience to which the progress of mankind is
+promoted and secured. Into that high and free region of thought and
+action Browning brought us long ago. Tennyson did not, save at intervals
+when the poet over-rode the man. This differentiates the men. But it
+also tells us why Browning was not read fifty years ago, when social
+conventions were tyrannous and respectability a despot, and why he has
+been read for the last fifteen years and is read now.
+
+8. There is another contrast between these poets. It is quite clear that
+Tennyson was a distinctively English poet and a patriotic poet; at times
+too much of a patriot to judge tolerantly, or to write fairly, about
+other countries. He had, at least, a touch of national contempts, even
+of national hatreds. His position towards France was much that of the
+British sailor of Nelson's time. His position towards Ireland was that
+of the bishop, who has been a schoolmaster, to the naughty curate who
+has a will of his own. His position towards Scotland was that of one who
+was aware that it had a geographical existence, and that a regiment in
+the English army which had a genius for fighting was drawn from its
+Highlands. He condescends to write a poem at Edinburgh, but then
+Edinburgh was of English origin and name. Even with that help he cannot
+be patient of the place. The poem is a recollection of an Italian
+journey, and he forgets in memories of the South--though surely
+Edinburgh might have awakened some romantic associations--
+
+                the clouded Forth,
+    The gloom which saddens Heaven and Earth,
+      The bitter East, the misty summer
+    And gray metropolis of the North.
+
+Edinburgh is English in origin, but Tennyson did not feel England beyond
+the Border. There the Celt intruded, and he looked askance upon the
+Celt. The Celtic spirit smiled, and took its vengeance on him in its own
+way. It imposed on him, as his chief subject, a Celtic tale and a Celtic
+hero; and though he did his best to de-celticise the story, the
+vengeance lasts, for the more he did this the more he injured his work.
+However, being always a noble artist, he made a good fight for his
+insularity, and the expression of it harmonised with the pride of
+England in herself, alike with that which is just and noble in it, and
+with that which is neither the one nor the other.
+
+Then, too, his scenery (with some exceptions, and those invented) was of
+his own land, and chiefly of the places where he lived. It was quite
+excellent, but it was limited. But, within the limit of England, it was
+steeped in the love of England; and so sweet and full is this love, and
+so lovely are its results in song, that every Englishman has, for this
+reason if for no other, a deep and just affection for Tennyson.
+Nevertheless, in that point also his poetry was insular. A fault in the
+poet, not in the poetry. Perhaps, from this passionate concentration,
+the poetry was all the lovelier.
+
+Again, when Tennyson took a great gest of war as his subject, he took it
+exclusively from the history of his own land. No one would know from his
+writings that high deeds of sacrifice in battle had been done by other
+nations. He knew of them, but he did not care to write about them. Nor
+can we trace in his work any care for national struggles or national
+life beyond this island--except in a few sonnets and short pieces
+concerning Poland and Montenegro--an isolation of interests which cannot
+be imputed to any other great poet of the first part of the nineteenth
+century, excepting Keats, who had no British or foreign interests. Keats
+had no country save the country of Beauty.
+
+At all these points Browning differed from Tennyson. He never displayed
+a special patriotism. On the contrary, he is more Italian than English,
+and he is more quick to see and sympathise with the national
+characteristics of Spain or France or Germany, than he is with those of
+England. No insular feeling prevented him from being just to foreigners,
+or from having a keen pleasure in writing about them. _Strafford_ is the
+only play he wrote on an English subject, and it is rather a study of a
+character which might find its place in any aristocracy than of an
+English character. Even Pym and Hampden fail to be truly English, and it
+would have been difficult for any one but Browning to take their eminent
+English elements out of them. _Paracelsus_ and _Sordello_ belong to
+Germany and Italy, and there are scarcely three poems in the whole of
+the seven numbers of the _Bells and Pomegranates_ which even refer to
+England. Italy is there, and chiefly Italy. In _De Gustibus_ he
+contrasts himself with his friend who loves England:
+
+    Your ghost will walk, you lover of trees,
+      (If our loves remain)
+      In an English lane
+    By a cornfield-side a-flutter with poppies.
+
+           *       *       *
+
+    What I love best in all the world
+    Is a castle, precipice-encurled,
+    In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine.
+
+"Look for me, old fellow of mine, if I get out of the grave, in a
+seaside house in South Italy," and he describes the place and folk he
+loves, and ends:
+
+    Open my heart and you will see
+    Graved inside of it, "Italy."
+    Such lovers old are I and she:
+    So it always was, so shall ever be!
+
+It is a poem written out of his very heart.
+
+And then, the scenery? It is not of our country at all. It is of many
+lands, but, above all, it is vividly Italian. There is no more minute
+and subtly-felt description of the scenery of a piece of village country
+between the mountains and the sea, with all its life, than in the poem
+called _The Englishman in Italy_. The very title is an outline of
+Browning's position in this matter. We find this English poet in France,
+in Syria, in Greece, in Spain, but not in England. We find Rome,
+Florence, Venice, Mantua, Verona, and forgotten towns among the
+Apennines painted with happy love in verse, but not an English town nor
+an English village. The flowers, the hills, the ways of the streams, the
+talk of the woods, the doings of the sea and the clouds in tempest and
+in peace, the aspects of the sky at noon, at sunrise and sunset, are all
+foreign, not English. The one little poem which is of English landscape
+is written by him in Italy (in a momentary weariness with his daily
+adoration), and under a green impulse. Delightful as it is, he would not
+have remained faithful to it for a day. Every one knows it, but that we
+may realise how quick he was to remember and to touch a corner of early
+Spring in England, on a soft and windy day--for all the blossoms are
+scattered--I quote it here. It is well to read his sole contribution
+(except in _Pauline_ and a few scattered illustrations) to the scenery
+of his own country:
+
+        Oh, to be in England
+        Now that April's there,
+      And whoever wakes in England
+      Sees, some morning, unaware,
+    That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
+    Round the elm-tree hole are in tiny leaf,
+    While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
+          In England--now!
+
+    And after April, when May follows,
+    And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
+    Hark! where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
+    Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
+    Blossoms and dewdrops--at the bent spray's edge--
+    That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
+    Lest you should think he never could recapture
+    The first fine careless rapture!
+    And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
+    All will be gay, when noontide wakes anew
+    The buttercups, the little children's dower;
+    --Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!
+
+So it runs; but it is only a momentary memory; and he knew, when he had
+done it, and to his great comfort, that he was far away from England.
+But when Tennyson writes of Italy--as, for instance, in _Mariana in the
+South_--how apart he is! How great is his joy when he gets back to
+England!
+
+Then, again, when Browning was touched by the impulse to write about a
+great deed in war, he does not choose, like Tennyson, English subjects.
+The _Cavalier Tunes_ have no importance as patriot songs. They are mere
+experiments. The poem, _How They brought the Good News from Ghent to
+Aix_, has twice their vigour. His most intense war-incident is taken
+from the history of the French wars under Napoleon. The most ringing and
+swiftest poem of personal dash and daring--and at sea, as if he was
+tired of England's mistress-ship of the waves--a poem one may set side
+by side with the fight of _The Revenge_, is _Herve Riel_. It is a tale
+of a Breton sailor saving the French fleet from the English, with the
+sailor's mockery of England embedded in it; and Browning sent the
+hundred pounds he got for it to the French, after the siege of Paris.
+
+It was not that he did not honour his country, but that, as an artist,
+he loved more the foreign lands; and that in his deepest life he
+belonged less to England than to the world of man. The great deeds of
+England did not prevent him from feeling, with as much keenness as
+Tennyson felt those of England, the great deeds of France and Italy.
+National self-sacrifice in critical hours, splendid courage in love and
+war, belonged, he thought, to all peoples. Perhaps he felt, with
+Tennyson's insularity dominating his ears, that it was as well to put
+the other side. I think he might have done a little more for England.
+There is only one poem, out of all his huge production, which recognises
+the great deeds of our Empire in war; and this did not come of a
+life-long feeling, such as he had for Italy, but from a sudden impulse
+which arose in him, as sailing by, he saw Trafalgar and Gibraltar,
+glorified and incarnadined by a battle-sunset:
+
+    Nobly, nobly Cape Saint Vincent to the North-west died away;
+    Sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz Bay;
+    Bluish 'mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar lay;
+    In the dimmest North-east distance dawned Gibraltar grand and gray;
+    "Here and here did England help me: how can I help England?"--say.
+    Whoso turns as I, this evening, turn to God to praise and pray,
+    While Jove's planet rises yonder, silent over Africa.
+
+It is a little thing, and when it leaves the sunset it is poor. And
+there is twice the fervour of its sunset in the description of the
+sunrise at Asolo in _Pippa Passes_.
+
+Again, there is scarcely a trace in his work of any vital interest in
+the changes of thought and feeling in England during the sixty years of
+his life, such as appear everywhere in Tennyson. No one would know from
+his poetry (at least until the very end of his life, when he wrote
+_Francis Furini_) that the science of life and its origins had been
+revolutionised in the midst of his career, or, save in _A Death in the
+Desert_, that the whole aspect of theology had been altered, or that the
+democratic movement had taken so many new forms. He showed to these
+English struggles neither attraction nor repulsion. They scarcely
+existed for him--transient elements of the world, merely national, not
+universal. Nor did the literature or art of his own country engage him
+half so much as the literature and art of Italy. He loved both. Few were
+better acquainted with English poetry, or reverenced it more; but he
+loved it, not because it was English, but of that world of imagination
+which has no special country. He cared also for English art, but he gave
+all his personal love to the art of Italy. Nor does he write, as
+Tennyson loved to do, of the daily life of the English farmer, squire,
+miller and sailor, and of English sweet-hearting, nor of the English
+park and brook and village-green and their indwellers, but of the
+work-girl at Asolo, and the Spanish monk in his garden, and the Arab
+riding through the desert, and of the Duchess and her servant flying
+through the mountains of Moldavia, and of the poor painters at Fano and
+Florence, and of the threadbare poet at Valladolid, and of the
+peasant-girl who fed the Tuscan outlaw, and of the poor grammarian who
+died somewhere in Germany (as I think Browning meant it), and of the
+Jews at Rome, and of the girl at Pornic with the gold hair and the
+peasant's hand, and of a hundred others, none of whom are English. All
+his common life, all his love-making, sorrow and joy among the poor, are
+outside this country, with perhaps two exceptions; and neither of these
+has the English note which sounds so soft and clear in Tennyson. This is
+curious enough, and it is probably one of the reasons why English people
+for a long time would have so little to do with him. All the same, he
+was himself woven of England even more than of Italy. The English
+elements in his character and work are more than the Italian. His
+intellect was English, and had the English faults as well as the English
+excellences. His optimism was English; his steadfast fighting quality,
+his unyielding energy, his directness, his desire to get to the root of
+things, were English. His religion was the excellent English compromise
+or rather balance of dogma, practice and spirituality which laymen make
+for their own life. His bold sense of personal freedom was English. His
+constancy to his theories, whether of faith or art, was English; his
+roughness of form was positively early Teutonic.
+
+Then his wit, his _esprit_,[3] his capacity for induing he skin and the
+soul of other persons at remote times of history; his amazing
+inventiveness and the ease of it, at which point he beats Tennyson out
+of the field; his play, so high fantastical, with his subjects, and the
+way in which the pleasure he took in this play overmastered his literary
+self-control; his fantastic games with metre and with rhyme, his want of
+reverence for the rules of his art; his general lawlessness, belong to
+one side, but to one side only, of the Celtic nature. But the ardour
+of the man, the pathos of his passion and the passion of his pathos, his
+impulse towards the infinite and the constant rush he made into its
+indefinite realms; the special set of his imagination towards the
+fulfillment of perfection in Love; his vision of Nature as in colour,
+rather than in light and shade; his love of beauty and the kind of
+beauty that he loved; his extraordinary delight in all kinds of art as
+the passionate shaping of part of the unapproachable Beauty--these were
+all old Italian.
+
+Then I do not know whether Browning had any Jewish blood in his body by
+descent, but he certainly had Jewish elements in his intellect, spirit
+and character. His sense of an ever-victorious Righteousness at the
+centre of the universe, whom one might always trust and be untroubled,
+was Jewish, but he carried it forward with the New Testament and made
+the Righteousness identical with absolute Love. Yet, even in this, the
+Old Testament elements were more plainly seen than is usual among
+Christians. The appearance of Christ as all-conquering love in
+_Easter-Day_ and the scenery which surrounds him are such as Ezekiel
+might have conceived and written. Then his intellectual subtlety, the
+metaphysical minuteness of his arguments, his fondness for parenthesis,
+the way in which he pursued the absolute while he loaded it with a host
+of relatives, and conceived the universal through a multitude of
+particulars, the love he had for remote and unexpected analogies, the
+craft with which his intellect persuaded him that he could insert into
+his poems thoughts, illustrations, legends, and twisted knots of
+reasoning which a fine artistic sense would have omitted, were all as
+Jewish as the Talmud. There was also a Jewish quality in his natural
+description, in the way he invented diverse phrases to express different
+aspects of the same phenomenon, a thing for which the Jews were famous;
+and in the way in which he peopled what he described with animal life of
+all kinds, another remarkable habit of the Jewish poets. Moreover, his
+pleasure in intense colour, in splashes and blots of scarlet and crimson
+and deep blue and glowing green; in precious stones for the sake of
+their colour--sapphire, ruby, emerald, chrysolite, pearl, onyx,
+chalcedony (he does not care for the diamond); in the flame of gold, in
+the crimson of blood, is Jewish. So also is his love of music, of music
+especially as bringing us nearest to what is ineffable in God, of music
+with human aspiration in its heart and sounding in its phrases. It was
+this Jewish element in Browning, in all its many forms, which caused him
+to feel with and to write so much about the Jews in his poetry. The two
+poems in which he most fully enshrines his view of human life, as it may
+be in the thought of God and as it ought to be conceived by us, are both
+in the mouth of Jews, of _Rabbi Ben Ezra_ and _Jochanan Hakkadosh_. In
+_Filippo Baldinucci_ the Jew has the best of the battle; his courtesy,
+intelligence and physical power are contrasted with the coarseness,
+feeble brains and body of the Christians. In _Holy-Cross Day_, the Jew,
+forced to listen to a Christian sermon, begins with coarse and angry
+mockery, but passes into solemn thought and dignified phrase. No English
+poet, save perhaps Shakespeare, whose exquisite sympathy could not leave
+even Shylock unpitied, has spoken of the Jew with compassion, knowledge
+and admiration, till Browning wrote of him. The Jew lay deep in
+Browning. He was a complex creature; and who would understand or rather
+feel him rightly, must be able to feel something of the nature of all
+these races in himself. But Tennyson was not complex. He was English and
+only English.
+
+But to return from this digression. Browning does not stand alone among
+the poets in the apartness from his own land of which I have written.
+Byron is partly with him. Where Byron differs from him is, first, in
+this--that Byron had no poetic love for any special country as Browning
+had for Italy; and, secondly, that his country was, alas, himself, until
+at the end, sick of his self-patriotism, he gave himself to Greece.
+Keats, on the other hand, had no country except, as I have said, the
+country of Loveliness. Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley were not
+exclusively English. Shelley belonged partly to Italy, but chiefly to
+that future of mankind in which separate nationalities and divided
+patriotisms are absorbed. Wordsworth and Coleridge, in their early days,
+were patriots of humanity; they actually for a time abjured their
+country. Even in his later days Wordsworth's sympathies reach far beyond
+England. But none of these were so distinctively English as Tennyson,
+and none of them were so outside of England as Browning. Interesting as
+it is, the _completeness_ of this isolation from England was a
+misfortune, not a strength, in his poetry.
+
+There is another thing to say in this connection. The expansion of the
+interests of the English poets beyond England was due in Wordsworth,
+Coleridge, Shelley, and partly in Byron, to the great tidal-wave of
+feeling for man as man, which, rising long before the French Revolution,
+was lifted into twice its height and dashed on the shore of the world
+with overwhelming volume, by the earthquake in France of 1789. Special
+national sentiments were drowned in its waters. Patriotism was the duty
+of man, not to any one nation but to the whole of humanity, conceived of
+as the only nation.
+
+In 1832 there was little left of that influence in England among the
+educated classes, and Tennyson's insular patriotism represented their
+feeling for many years, and partly represents it now. But the ideas of
+the Revolution were at the same time taking a wiser and more practical
+form among the English democracy than they even had at their first
+outburst in France, and this emerged, on one side of it, in the idea of
+internationalism. It grew among the propertied classes from the greater
+facilities of travel, from the wide extension of commercial, and
+especially of literary, intercommunication. Literature, even more than
+commerce, diminishes the oppositions and increases the amalgamation of
+nations. On her lofty plane nations breathe an air in which their
+quarrels die. The same idea grew up of itself among the working classes,
+not only in England, but in Germany, Italy, France, America. They began,
+and have continued, to lose their old belief in distinct and warring
+nationalities. To denationalise the nations into one nation only--the
+nation of mankind--is too vast an idea to grow quickly, but in all
+classes, and perhaps most in the working class, there are an increasing
+number of thinking men who say to the varied nations, "We are all one;
+our interests, duties, rights, nature and aims are one." And, for my
+part, I believe that in the full development of that conception the
+progress of mankind is most deeply concerned, and will be best secured.
+
+Now, when all these classes in England, brought to much the same point
+by different paths, seek for a poetry which is international rather than
+national, and which recognises no special country as its own, they do
+not find it in Tennyson, but they do find Browning writing, and quite
+naturally, as if he belonged to other peoples as much as to his own,
+even more than to his own. And they also find that he had been doing
+this for many years before their own international interests had been
+awakened. That, then, differentiates him completely from Tennyson, and
+is another reason why he was not read in the past but is read in the
+present.
+
+9. Again, with regard to politics and social questions, Tennyson made us
+know what his general politics were, and he has always pleased or
+displeased men by his political position. The British Constitution
+appears throughout his work seated like Zeus on Olympus, with all the
+world awaiting its nod. Then, also, social problems raise their
+storm-awakening heads in his poetry: the Woman's Question; War;
+Competition; the State of the Poor; Education; a State without Religion;
+the Marriage Question; where Freedom lies; and others. These are brought
+by Tennyson, though tentatively, into the palace of poetry and given
+rooms in it.
+
+At both these points Browning differed from Tennyson. He was not the
+politician, not the sociologist, only the poet. No trace of the British
+Constitution is to be found in his poetry; no one could tell from it
+that he had any social views or politics at all. Sixty years in close
+contact with this country and its movements, and not a line about them!
+
+He records the politics of the place and people of whom or of which he
+is for the moment writing, but he takes no side. We know what they
+thought at Rome or among the Druses of these matters, but we do not know
+what Browning thought. The art-representation, the _Vorstellung_ of the
+thing, is all; the personal view of the poet is nothing. It is the same
+in social matters. What he says as a poet concerning the ideas which
+should rule the temper of the soul and human life in relation to our
+fellow men may be applied to our social questions, and usefully; but
+Browning is not on that plane. There are no poems directly applied to
+them. This means that he kept himself outside the realm of political and
+social discussions and in the realm of those high emotions and ideas out
+of which imagination in lonely creation draws her work to light. With
+steady purpose he refused to make his poetry the servant of the
+transient, of the changing elements of the world. He avoided the
+contemporary. For this high reserve we and the future of art will owe
+him gratitude.
+
+On the contrast between the theology we find in Tennyson and Browning,
+and on the contrast between their ethical positions, it will be wiser
+not to speak in this introduction. These two contrasts would lead me too
+far afield, and they have little or nothing to do with poetry. Moreover,
+Browning's theology and ethics, as they are called, have been discussed
+at wearying length for the last ten years, and especially by persons who
+use his poetry to illustrate from it their own systems of theology,
+philosophy and ethics.
+
+10. I will pass, therefore, to another contrast--the contrast between
+them as Artists.
+
+A great number of persons who write about the poets think, when they
+have said the sort of things I have been saying, that they have said
+either enough, or the most important things. The things are, indeed,
+useful to say; they enable us to realise the poet and his character, and
+the elements of which his poetry is made. They place him in a clear
+relation to his time; they distinguish him from other poets, and, taken
+all together, they throw light upon his work. But they are not half
+enough, nor are they the most important. They leave out the essence of
+the whole matter; they leave out the poetry. They illuminate the surface
+of his poetry, but they do not penetrate into his interpretation, by
+means of his special art, and under the influence of high emotion, of
+the beautiful and sublime Matter of thought and feeling which arises out
+of Nature and Human Nature, the two great subjects of song; which Matter
+the poets represent in a form so noble and so lovely in itself that,
+when it is received into a heart prepared for it, it kindles in the
+receiver a love of beauty and sublimity similar to that which the poet
+felt before he formed, and while he formed, his poem. Such a receiver,
+reading the poem, makes the poem, with an individual difference, in
+himself. And this is the main thing; the eternal, not the temporary
+thing.
+
+Almost all I have already discussed with regard to Tennyson and Browning
+belongs to the temporary; and the varying judgments which their public
+have formed of them, chiefly based on their appeal to the tendencies of
+the time, do not at all predict what the final judgment on these men as
+poets is likely to be. That will depend, not on feelings which belong to
+the temporary elements of the passing day, but on how far the eternal
+and unchanging elements of art appear in their work. The things which
+fitted the poetry of Tennyson to the years between 1840 and 1870 have
+already passed away; the things which, as I have explained, fitted the
+poetry of Browning to the tendencies of the years after 1870 will also
+disappear, and are already disappearing. Indeed, the excessive
+transiency of nearly all the interests of cultivated society during the
+last ten years is that in them which most deeply impresses any man who
+sits somewhat apart from them. And, at any rate, none of these merely
+contemporary elements, which often seem to men the most important, will
+count a hundred years hence in the estimate of the poetry either of
+Tennyson or Browning. They will be of historical interest, and no more.
+Matters in their poetry, now the subjects of warm discussion among their
+critics, will be laid aside as materials for judgment; and justly, for
+they are of quite impermanent value.
+
+Whenever, then, we try to judge them as poets, we must do our best to
+discharge these temporary things, and consider their poetry as it will
+seem a hundred years hence to men who will think seriously and feel
+sensitively, even passionately, towards great and noble Matter of
+imaginative thought and emotion concerning human life and the natural
+world, and towards lovely creation of such matter into Form. Their
+judgment will be made apart from the natural prejudices that arise from
+contemporary movements. They will not be wiser in their judgment of
+their own poets than we are about ours, but they will be wiser in their
+judgment of our poets, because, though they will have their own
+prejudices, they will not have ours. Moreover, the long, growing, and
+incessantly corrected judgment of those best fitted to feel what is most
+beautiful in shaping and most enduring in thought and feeling
+penetrated and made infinite by imagination, will, by that time, have
+separated the permanent from the impermanent in the work of Browning and
+Tennyson.
+
+That judgment will partly depend on the answers, slowly, as it were
+unconsciously, given by the world to two questions. First, how far does
+their poetry represent truly and passionately what is natural and most
+widely felt in loving human nature, whether terrible or joyful, simple
+or complex, tragic or humorous? Secondly, how far is the representation
+beautiful and noble in form, and true to the laws of their art. That
+poetry which is nearest to the most natural, the most universal elements
+of human life when they are suffused with love--in some at least of its
+various moods--and at the same time the most beautiful in form, is the
+best. It wins most affection from mankind, for it is about noble matters
+of thought which the greater number of men and women desire to
+contemplate, and about noble matters of passion which the greater number
+love and therefore enjoy. This poetry lasts from generation to
+generation, is independent of differences made by climate, by caste, by
+nationality, by religion, by politics, by knowledge, custom, tradition
+or morals. These universal, natural elements of human nature are, in all
+their infinite variety and striving, beloved by men, of undying interest
+in action, and of immortal pleasure in thought. The nearer a poet is to
+them, especially to what is lovable, and therefore beautiful in them,
+the greater and the more enduring is his work. It follows that this
+greater work will also be simple, that is, easy to feel with the heart
+though it may be difficult to grasp by the intelligence. Were it not
+simple in feeling, the general answer of mankind to the call of love, in
+all its forms, for sympathy would be unheard. And if it be simple in
+feeling, it does not much matter if the deep waters of its thought are
+difficult for the understanding to fathom.
+
+It would be ridiculous to dogmatise on a matter which can only be fully
+answered a century hence, but this much is plain. Of these two poets,
+taking into consideration the whole of their work, Tennyson is the
+closest to human nature in its noble, common and loving forms, as
+Browning is the closest to what is complex, subtle and uncommon in human
+nature. The representation both of the simple and of the complex is a
+good thing, and both poets have their place and honour. But the
+representation of the complex is plainly the more limited in range of
+influence, and appeals to a special class of minds rather than to
+mankind at large. There are some, indeed, who think that the appeal to
+the few, to thinkers alone or high-wrought specialists in various forms
+of culture, marks out the greater poet. It is the tendency of literary
+castes to think that specialised work is the greatest. "This man," they
+say, "is our poet, not the mob's. He stands apart, and his apartness
+marks his greatness." These are amusing persons, who practically say,
+"We alone understand him, therefore he is great."
+
+Yet a phrase like "apartness makes greatness," when justly applied to a
+poet, marks, not his superiority of rank, but his inferiority. It
+relegates him at once to a lower place. The greatest poets are loved by
+all, and understood by all who think and feel naturally. Homer was
+loved by Pericles and by the sausage-seller. Vergil was read with joy by
+Maecenas and Augustus, and by the vine-dressers of Mantua. Dante drew
+after him the greatest minds in Italy, and yet is sung to-day by the
+shepherds and peasants of the hill-villages of Tuscany. Shakespeare
+pleases the most selected spirits of the world and the galleries of the
+strolling theatres.
+
+And though Tennyson and Browning are far below these mightier poets, yet
+when we apply to them this rule, drawn from what we know to be true of
+the greatest, Tennyson answers its demand more closely than Browning.
+The highest work which poetry can do is to glorify what is most natural
+and simple in the whole of loving human nature, and to show the
+excelling beauty, not so much of the stranger and wilder doings of the
+natural world, but of its everyday doings and their common changes. In
+doing these two things with simplicity, passion and beauty is the finest
+work of the arts, the eternal youth, the illimitable material of poetry,
+and it will endure while humanity endures in this world, and in that
+which is to come. Among all our cultivated love of the uncommon, the
+remote, the subtle, the involved, the metaphysical and the terrible--the
+representation of which things has its due place, even its necessity--it
+is well to think of that quiet truth, and to keep it as a first
+principle in the judgment of the arts. Indeed, the recovery of the
+natural, simple and universal ways of acting and feeling in men and
+women who love as the finest subjects of the arts has always regenerated
+them whenever, in pursuit of the unnatural, the complicated, the
+analytic, and the sensational, they have fallen into decay.
+
+Browning did not like this view, being conscious that his poetry did not
+answer its demand. Not only in early but also in later poems, he
+pictured his critics stating it, and his picture is scornful enough.
+There is an entertaining sketch of Naddo, the Philistine critic, in the
+second book of _Sordello_; and the view I speak of is expressed by him
+among a huddle of criticisms--
+
+    "Would you have your songs endure?
+    Build on the human heart!--why, to be sure
+    Yours is one sort of heart.--But I mean theirs,
+    Ours, every one's, the healthy heart one cares
+    To build on! Central peace, mother of strength,
+    That's father of...."
+
+This is good fooling, and Naddo is an ass. Nevertheless, though Naddo
+makes nonsense of the truth, he was right in the main, and Browning as
+well as Sordello suffered when they forgot or ignored that truth. And,
+of course, Browning did not forget or ignore it in more than half his
+work. Even in _Sordello_ he tells us how he gave himself up to recording
+with pity and love the doings of the universal soul. He strove to paint
+the whole. It was a bold ambition. Few have fulfilled it so well. None,
+since Shakespeare, have had a wider range. His portraiture of life was
+so much more varied than that of Tennyson, so much more extensive and
+detailed, that on this side he excels Tennyson; but such portraiture is
+not necessarily poetic, and when it is fond of the complex, it is always
+in danger of tending to prose. And Browning, picturing human life,
+deviated too much into the delineation of its more obscure and complex
+forms. It was in his nature to do and love this kind of work; and indeed
+it has to be done, if human life is to be painted fully. Only, it is not
+to be done too much, if one desires to be always the poet. For the
+representation of the complex and obscure is chiefly done by the
+analysing understanding, and its work and pleasure in it lures the poet
+away from art. He loses the poetic turn of the thing of which he writes,
+and what he produces is not better than rhythmical prose. Again and
+again Browning fell into that misfortune; and it is a strange problem
+how a man, who was in one part of his nature a great poet, could, under
+the sway of another, cease to be a poet. At this point his inferiority
+to Tennyson as a poet is plain. Tennyson scarcely ever wrote a line
+which was not unmistakably poetry, while Browning could write pages
+which were unmistakably not poetry.
+
+I do not mean, in saying all this, that Browning did not appeal to that
+which is deepest and universal in nature and human nature, but only that
+he did not appeal to it as much as Tennyson. Browning is often simple,
+lovely and universal. And when he speaks out of that emotional
+imagination wherein is the hiding of a poet's power, and which is the
+legitimate sovereign of his intellectual work, he will win and keep the
+delight and love of the centuries to come. By work of this type he will
+be finally judged and finally endure; and, even now, every one who loves
+great poetry knows what these master-poems are. As to the others, the
+merely subtle, analytic poems in which intellect, not imagination, is
+supreme, especially those into which he drifted in his later life when
+the ardour of his poetic youth glowed less warmly--they will always
+appeal to a certain class of persons who would like to persuade
+themselves that they like poetry but to whom its book is sealed; and
+who, in finding out what Browning means, imagine to their great surprise
+that they find out that they care for poetry. What they really care for
+is their own cleverness in discovering riddles, and they are as far away
+from poetry as Sirius is from the Sun.
+
+There are, however, many true lovers of poetry who are enthusiastic
+about these poems. And parts of them deserve this enthusiasm, for they
+have been conceived and made in a wild borderland between analysis and
+imagination. They occupy a place apart, a backwater in the noble stream
+of English poetry, filled with strange plants; and the final judgment of
+Browning's rank as an artist will not depend on them but on the earlier
+poems, which, being more "simple, sensuous and passionate," are nearer
+to the common love and life of man. When, then, we apply this test, the
+difference of rank between him and Tennyson is not great, but it is
+plain. Yet comparison, on this point, is difficult. Both drew mankind.
+Tennyson is closer to that which is most universal in the human heart,
+Browning to the vast variety within it; and men in the future will find
+their poetic wants best satisfied by reading the work of both these
+poets. Let us say then that in this matter they are equal. Each has done
+a different part of that portraiture of human nature which is the chief
+work of a poet.
+
+But this is not the only test we may apply to these men as poets. The
+second question which tries the endurance and greatness of poetic work
+is this: "How far is any poet's representation of what is true and
+loving in itself lovely?" Their stuff may be equally good. Is their form
+equally good? Is it as beautiful as an artist, whose first duty is to be
+true to beauty as the shape of love and truth, ought to make it? The
+judgment of the future will also be formed on that ground, and
+inevitably.
+
+What we call form in poetry may be said to consist of, or to depend on,
+three things: (1) on a noble style; (2) on a harmonious composition,
+varied but at unity; (3) on a clear, sweet melody of lawful movement in
+verse. These are not everything in poetry, but they are the half of its
+whole. The other half is that the "matter"--that is, the deep substance
+of amalgamated Thought and Emotion--should be great, vital and fair. But
+both halves are necessary, and when the half which regards form is weak
+or unbeautiful, the judgment of the future drops the poems which are
+faulty in form out of memory, just as it drops out of its affections
+poems which are excellent in form, but of ignoble, unimpassioned, feeble
+or thoughtless matter. There was, for example, a whole set of poets
+towards the end of the Elizabethan period who were close and weighty
+thinkers, whose poetry is full of intellectual surprises and
+difficulties, who were capable of subtlety of expression and even of
+lovely turns and phantasies of feeling; whom students read to-day, but
+whom the poetical world does not read at all. And the reason is that
+their style, their melody, and their composition do not match in
+excellence their matter. Their stuff is good, their form is bad. The
+judgment of the future gives them no high rank. They do not answer well
+to the test of which I speak.
+
+I do not mean to apply that analogy altogether, only partly, to
+Browning. He rises far above these poets in style, composition and
+melody, but he skirts their faults. And if we are asked to compare him
+to Tennyson, he is inferior to Tennyson at all these points of Form.
+
+(1) His composition was rarely sufficiently careful. It was broken up,
+overcrowded; minor objects of thought or feeling are made too remarkable
+for the whole; there is far too little of poetical perspective; the
+variety of the poem does not always grow out of the subject itself, but
+out of the external play of Browning's mind upon things remotely
+connected with the subject; too many side-issues are introduced;
+everything he imagined is cast upon the canvas, too little is laid
+aside, so that the poems run to a length which weakens instead of
+strengthening the main impression. A number of the poems have, that is,
+the faults of a composer whose fancy runs away with him, who does not
+ride it as a master; and in whom therefore, for a time, imagination has
+gone to sleep. Moreover, only too often, they have those faults of
+composition which naturally belong to a poet when he writes as if
+intellect rather than passion were the ultimate umpire of the work of
+his art. Of course, there are many exceptions; and the study of those
+exceptions, as exceptions, would make an interesting essay. On the other
+hand, Tennyson's composition was for the most part excellent, and
+always careful.
+
+(2) Then as to style. Browning had a style of his own, wholly devoid of
+imitation, perfectly individual, and this is one of the marks of a good
+artist. It was the outcome of his poetic character, and represented it.
+At this point his style is more interesting than Tennyson's. Tennyson's
+style was often too much worked, too consciously subjected to the rules
+of his art, too worn down to smoothness of texture. Moreover, the
+natural surprises of an unchartered individuality do not sufficiently
+appear in it (Tennyson repressed the fantastic), though the whole weight
+of his character does magnificently appear. But if Tennyson was too
+conscious of his style--a great misfortune especially in passionate
+song--Browning did not take any deliberate pains with his style, and
+that is a greater misfortune. His freedom ran into undue licence; and he
+seems to be over-conscious, even proud, of his fantastical way of
+writing. His individuality runs riot in his style. He paid little
+attention to the well-established rules of his art, in a revulsion,
+perhaps, from any imitation of the great models. He had not enough
+reverence for his art, and little for the public. He flung his diction
+at our heads and said: "This is myself; take it or leave it."
+
+None of the greater artists of the world have ever done this. They have
+not cared for what the world said, but they have cared for their art.
+There are certain limits to individual capriciousness in style, long
+since laid down, as it were, by Beauty herself; which, transgressed,
+lessen, injure or lose beauty; and Browning continually transgressed
+those limits.
+
+Again, clearness is one of the first elements in style, and on poetry
+attaining clearness, depends, in great measure, its enduringness in the
+future. So far as clearness carries him, Tennyson's poetry is sure to
+last. So far as Browning's obscurity goes, his poetry will not last like
+Tennyson's. It is all very well for his students to say that he is not
+obscure; he is. Nor is it by any exceptional depth of thought or by any
+specially profound analysis of the soul that Browning is obscure. It is
+by his style. By that he makes what is easy difficult. The reader does
+not get at what he means as he gets at what Homer, Dante, and
+Shakespeare mean. Dante and Shakespeare are often difficult through the
+depth and difficulty of their matter; they are not difficult, except
+Shakespeare when he was learning his art, by obscurity or carelessness
+of style. But Browning is difficult not by his thoughts, but by his
+expression of them. A poet has no right to be so indifferent, so
+careless of clearness in his art, I might almost say, so lazy. Browning
+is negligent to a fault, almost to impertinence. The great poets put the
+right words in the right places, and Tennyson is with them in that.
+Browning continually puts his words into the wrong places. He leaves out
+words necessary for the easy understanding of the passage, and for no
+reason except his fancy. He leaves his sentences half-finished and his
+meaning half-expressed. He begins a sentence, and having begun it, three
+or four thoughts connected with it slide into his mind, and instead of
+putting them aside or using them in another place, he jerks them into
+the middle of his sentence in a series of parentheses, and then inserts
+the end of the original sentence, or does not insert it at all. This is
+irritating except to folk who like discovery of the twisted rather than
+poetry; and it is quite needless. It is worse than needless, for it
+lowers the charm and the dignity of the poetry.
+
+Yet, there is something to say on the other side. It is said, and with a
+certain justice, that "the style is the man. Strip his style away, and
+where is the man? Where is the real Browning if we get him to change a
+way of writing in which he naturally shaped his thought?" Well, no one
+would ask him to impose on himself a style which did not fit his nature.
+That would be fatal. When he has sometimes tried to do so, as in a few
+of the dramas, we scarcely recognise our poet, and we lose half of his
+intellectual and poetic charm. Just as Carlyle when he wrote away from
+his natural style, as in the life of Sterling and Schiller, is not the
+great writer he is elsewhere, so was it with Browning. Were we savage
+satirists, blinded by our savagery, we might then say both of Browning
+and Carlyle that half their power lay in their fantastic, rocky style.
+We should be quite wrong. Their style was the exact clothing of their
+thought. They wrote exactly as they thought; and when they put their
+thought into other clothing, when they doctored their style, they did
+not represent what they really thought. No sensible person then would
+have asked Browning to change his style, but would have asked him not to
+exaggerate it into its defects. It is plain he could have kept it within
+bounds. He has done so frequently. But as frequently he has allowed it
+to leap about as wildly as a young colt. He should have submitted it to
+the _manege_, and ridden it then where he pleased. A very little
+trouble on his part, a very little sacrifice of his unbridled
+fancifulness, would have spared us a great deal of unnecessary trouble,
+and made his poetry better and more enduring.
+
+Another excuse may be made for his faults of style. It may be said that
+in one sense the faults are excellences. When a poet has to represent
+excessively subtle phases of thought and feeling, with a crowd of
+side-thoughts and side-feelings intruding on them; when he has to
+describe the excessive oddities, the curious turns of human emotion in
+strange inward conditions or outward circumstances or when he has to
+deal with rugged or even savage characters under the sway of the
+passions; he cannot, we are told, do it otherwise than Browning did it,
+and, instead of being lazy, he used these quips and cranks of style
+deliberately.
+
+The excuse has something in it. But, all the same, an artist should have
+managed it otherwise. Shakespeare was far more subtle in thought than
+Browning, and he had to deal with every kind of strange circumstance and
+characters; but his composition and his style illuminate the characters,
+order the circumstances, and render clear, as, for example, in the
+Sonnets, the subtleties of his thought. A great artist, by his
+comprehensive grasp of the main issue of his work, even in a short lyric
+or a small picture, and by his luminous representation of it, suggests,
+without direct expression of them, all the strange psychology, and the
+play of character in the situations. And such an artist does this
+excellent thing by his noble composition, and by his lofty, clear, and
+melodious style. The excuse is, then, of some weight, but it does not
+relieve Browning of the charge. Had he been a greater artist, he would
+have been a greater master of the right way of saying things and a
+greater pleasurer of the future. Had he taken more pains with his style,
+but without losing its individual elements, he might have had as high a
+poetic place as Tennyson in the judgment of posterity.
+
+(3) In one thing more--in this matter of form--the beauty of poetry
+lies. It is in sweetness of melody and its charm; in exquisite fitness
+of its music to its thought and its emotion; in lawful change of harmony
+making enchanting variety to the ear; in the obedience of the melodies
+to the laws of the different kinds of poetry; and in the lovely conduct
+of the harmonies, through all their changes, to that finished close
+which throws back its own beauty on all that has preceded it. This part
+of the loveliness of form in poetry, along with composition and
+style--for without these and without noble matter of thought poetry is
+nothing but pleasant noise--secures also the continuous delight of men
+and the approving judgment of the future; and in this also Tennyson, who
+gave to it the steady work of a lifetime, stands above his brother-poet.
+Browning was far too careless of his melody. He frequently sacrificed
+it, and needlessly, to his thought. He may have imagined that he
+strengthened the thing he thought by breaking the melody. He did not, he
+injured it. He injured the melody also by casting into the middle of it,
+like stones into a clear water, rough parenthetic sounds to suit his
+parenthetic phrases. He breaks it sometimes into two with violent
+clanging words, with discords which he does not resolve, but forgets.
+And in the pleasure he took in quaint oddities of sound, in jarring
+tricks with his metre, in fantastic and difficult arrangements of rhyme,
+in scientific displays of double rhymes, he, only too often, immolates
+melody on the altar of his own cleverness.
+
+A great many of the poems in which the natural loveliness of melody is
+thus sacrificed or maimed will last, on account of the closely-woven
+work of the intellect in them, and on account of their vivid
+presentation of the travail of the soul; that is, they will last for
+qualities which might belong to prose; but they will not last as poetry.
+And other poems, in which the melody is only interrupted here and there,
+will lose a great deal of the continuity of pleasure they would have
+given to man had they been more careful to obey those laws of fine
+melody which Tennyson never disobeys.
+
+It is fortunate that neither of these injuries can be attributed to the
+whole of his work; and I am equally far from saying that his faults of
+style and composition belong to all his poetry.
+
+There are a number of poems the melody of which is beautiful, in which,
+if there are discords, they are resolved into a happy concord at their
+close. There are others the melody of which is so strange, brilliant,
+and capturing that their sound is never forgotten. There are others the
+subtle, minor harmonies of which belong to and represent remote pathetic
+phases of human passion, and they, too, are heard by us in lonely hours
+of pitiful feeling, and enchant the ear and heart. And these will endure
+for the noble pleasure of man.
+
+There are also poems the style of which is fitted most happily to the
+subject, like the Letter of Karshish to his Friend, in which Browning
+has been so seized by his subject, and yet has so mastered it, that he
+has forgotten to intercalate his own fancies; and in which, if the style
+is broken, it is broken in full harmony with the situation, and in
+obedience to the unity of impression he desired to make. There are
+others, like _Abt Vogler_, in which the style is extraordinarily noble,
+clear, and uplifted; and there are long passages in the more important
+poems, like _Paracelsus_, where the joy and glory of the thought and
+passion of Browning inform the verse with dignity, and make its march
+stately with solemn and beautiful music. Where the style and melody are
+thus fine the composition is also good. The parts, in their variety,
+belong to one another and to the unity of the whole. Style, melody and
+composition are always in the closest relation. And this nobleness of
+composition, style, and melody is chiefly found in those poems of his
+which have to do with the great matter of poetry--the representation of
+the universal and simple passions of human nature with their attendant
+and necessary thoughts. And there, in that part of his work, not in that
+other part for which he is unduly praised, and which belongs to the
+over-subtilised and over-intellectual time in which our self-conscious
+culture now is striving to resist its decay, and to prove that its
+disease is health, is the lasting power of Browning.
+
+And then, beyond all these matters of form, there is the poet himself,
+alone among his fellows in his unique and individual power, who has
+fastened himself into our hearts, added a new world to our perceptions,
+developed our lives and enlarged our interests. And there are the
+separate and distinguished excellences of his work--the virtues which
+have no defects, the virtues, too, of his defects, all the new wonders
+of his realm--the many originalities which have justly earned for him
+that high and lonely seat on Parnassus on which his noble Shadow sits
+to-day, unchallenged in our time save by that other Shadow with whom, in
+reverence and love, we have been perhaps too bold to contrast him.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] I state it roughly. The _Poems of Two Brothers_ appeared in 1826,
+Tennyson's first single volume in 1830, his second in 1833, his last in
+1892. Browning's first poem was issued in 1833, his last in 1890.
+_Paracelsus_, in which his genius clearly disclosed itself, was
+published in 1835, while Tennyson, seven years later, proved his
+mastership in the two volumes of 1842.
+
+[2] _A Death in the Desert_ touches on the doubts which, when it was
+written, had gathered from historical criticism round the subject matter
+of the Gospels, but the prophetic answer of St. John is not critical. It
+is Browning's personal reply to the critics, and is based on his own
+religious philosophy. The critical part of the argument is left
+untouched, and the answer is given from the poet's plane. It is the same
+when in the _Parleyings with Certain People_ Furini is made to embody
+Browning's belief in a personal God in contradistinction with the mere
+evolutionist. He does not argue the points. He places one doctrine over
+against the other and bids the reader choose. Moreover, he claims his
+view as his own alone. He seeks to impose it on no one.
+
+[3] Much has been said of the humour of Browning. But it is rather wit
+than humour which we perceive. The gentle pathos which belongs to
+humour, the pitiful turn of the humourist upon himself, his smile at his
+own follies and those of mankind, the half light, like that of evening,
+in which humour dwells, are wanting in Browning. It is true he has the
+charity of humour, though not its pathetic power. But, all the same, he
+is too keen, too brilliant, too fierce at times for a humourist. The
+light in which we see the foolish, fantastic, amusing or contemptible
+things of life is too bright for humour. He is a Wit--with charity--not
+a humourist. As for Tennyson, save in his Lincolnshire poems and _Will
+Waterproof's Soliloquy_, he was strangely devoid either of humour or of
+wit.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+_THE TREATMENT OF NATURE_
+
+
+It is a difficult task to explain or analyse the treatment of Nature by
+Browning. It is easy enough to point out his remarkable love of her
+colour, his vivid painting of brief landscapes, his minute observation,
+his flashing way of description, his feeling for the breadth and
+freshness of Nature, his love of flowers and animals, and the way he has
+of hitting and emphasising the central point or light of a landscape.
+This is easy work, but it is not so easy to capture and define the way
+in which his soul, when he was alone, felt with regard to the heavens,
+and the earth and all that therein is. Others, like Wordsworth, have
+stated this plainly: Browning has nowhere defined his way. What his
+intellect held the Natural World to be, in itself; what it meant for
+man; the relation in which it stood to God and God to it--these things
+are partly plain. They have their attraction for us. It is always
+interesting to know what an imaginative genius thinks about such
+matters. But it is only a biographical or a half-scientific interest.
+But what we want to discover is how Browning, as a poet, felt the world
+of Nature. We have to try and catch the unconscious attitude of his soul
+when the Universe was at work around him, and he was for the time its
+centre--and this is the real difficulty.
+
+Sometimes we imagine we have caught and fixed this elusive thing, but we
+finally give up the quest. The best we can do is to try to find the two
+or three general thoughts, the most frequently recurring emotions
+Browning had when Nature at sundry hours and in diverse manners
+displayed before him her beauty, splendour and fire, and seemed to ask
+his worship; or again, when she stood apart from him, with the mocking
+smile she often wears, and whispered in his ear, "Thou shall pursue me
+always, but never find my secret, never grasp my streaming hair." And
+both these experiences are to be found in Browning. Nature and he are
+sometimes at one, and sometimes at two; but seldom the first, and
+generally the second.
+
+The natural world Tennyson describes is for the greater part of it a
+reflection of man, or used to heighten man's feeling, or to illustrate
+his action, or sentimentalised by memorial associations of humanity, or,
+finally, invented as a background for a human subject, and with a
+distinct direction towards that subject. Browning, with a few
+exceptions, does the exact opposite. His natural world is not made by
+our thought, nor does it reflect our passions. His illustrations, drawn
+from it, of our actions, break down at certain points, as if the
+illustrating material were alien from our nature. Nature, it is true, he
+thinks, leads up to man, and therefore has elements in her which are dim
+prophecies and prognostics of us; but she is only connected with us as
+the road is with the goal it reaches in the end. She exists
+independently of us, but yet she exists to suggest to us what we may
+become, to awaken in us dim longings and desires, to surprise us into
+confession of our inadequacy, to startle us with perceptions of an
+infinitude we do not possess as yet but may possess; to make us feel our
+ignorance, weakness, want of finish; and by partly exhibiting the
+variety, knowledge, love, power and finish of God, to urge us forward in
+humble pursuit to the infinite in him. The day Browning climbs Mont
+Saleve, at the beginning of his poem _La Saisiaz_, after a description
+of his climb in which he notes a host of minute quaintnesses in rock and
+flower, and especially little flares of colour, all of them
+unsentimentalised, he suddenly stands on the mountain-top, and is
+smitten with the glory of the view. What does he see? Himself in Nature?
+or Nature herself, like a living being? Not at all. He sees what he
+thinks Nature is there to teach us--not herself, but what is beyond
+herself. "I was stationed," he cries, deliberately making this point,
+"face to face with--Nature?--rather with Infinitude." We are not in
+Nature: a part of God aspiring to the whole is there, but not the all of
+God. And Nature shows forth her glory, not to keep us with herself, but
+to send us on to her Source, of whom the universe is but a shred.
+
+The universe of what we call matter in all its forms, which is the
+definition of Nature as I speak of it here, is one form to Browning of
+the creative joy of God: we are another form of the same joy. Nor does
+Browning conceive, as Wordsworth conceived, of any pre-established
+harmony between us and the natural world, so that Humanity and Nature
+can easily converse and live together; so that we can express our
+thoughts and emotions in terms of Nature; or so that Nature can have, as
+it were, a human soul. This is not Browning's conception. If he had such
+a conception he would frequently use in his descriptions what Ruskin
+calls the "pathetic fallacy," the use of which is excessively common in
+Tennyson. I can scarcely recall more than a very few instances of this
+in all the poetry of Browning. Even where it seems to occur, where
+Nature is spoken of in human terms, it does not really occur. Take this
+passage from _James Lee's Wife_:
+
+    Oh, good gigantic smile o' the brown old earth,
+      This autumn morning! How he sets his bones
+    To bask i' the sun, and thrusts out knees and feet
+    For the ripple to run over in its mirth;
+      Listening the while, where on the heap of stones
+    The white breast of the sea-lark twitters sweet.
+
+The smile, the mirth, the listening, might be said to impute humanity to
+Nature: but the Earth and the Sea are plainly quite distinct from us.
+These are great giant creatures who are not ourselves: Titans who live
+with one another and not with us; and the terms of our humanity are used
+to make us aware of their separate existence from us, not of their being
+images only of our mind.
+
+Another passage will illustrate the same habit of Browning's mind with
+nature. He describes, for the purpose of his general thought, in _Fifine
+at the Fair_, the course of a stormy sunset. The clouds, the sun, the
+night, act like men, and are written of in terms of humanity. But this
+is only to explain matters to us; the mighty creatures themselves have
+nothing to do with us. They live their own vast, indifferent life; and
+we see, like spectators, what they are doing, and do not understand what
+we see. The sunset seems to him the last act of an ever-recurring drama,
+in which the clouds barricade the Sun against his rest, and he plays
+with their opposition like the huge giant he is; till Night, with her
+terrific mace, angry with them for preventing the Sun from repose,
+repose which will make her Queen of the world, beats them into ruin.
+This is the passage:
+
+    For as on edifice of cloud i' the grey and green
+    Of evening,--built about some glory of the west,
+    To barricade the sun's departure,--manifest,
+    He plays, pre-eminently gold, gilds vapour, crag and crest
+    Which bend in rapt suspense above the act and deed
+    They cluster round and keep their very own, nor heed
+    The world at watch; while we, breathlessly at the base
+    O' the castellated bulk, note momently the mace
+    Of night fall here, fall there, bring change with every blow,
+    Alike to sharpened shaft and broadened portico
+    I' the structure; heights and depths, beneath the leaden stress
+    Crumble and melt and mix together, coalesce,
+    Reform, but sadder still, subdued yet more and more
+    By every fresh defeat, till wearied eyes need pore
+    No longer on the dull impoverished decadence
+    Of all that pomp of pile in towering evidence
+    So lately.
+
+    _Fifine, cvi_.
+
+It is plain that Browning separates us altogether from the elemental
+life of these gigantic beings. And what is true of these passages is
+true, with one or two exceptions, of all the natural descriptions of
+Browning in which the pathetic fallacy seems to be used by him. I need
+not say how extraordinarily apart this method of his is from that of
+Tennyson. Then Tennyson, like Coleridge--only Tennyson is as vague and
+wavering in this belief as Coleridge is firm and clear in it--sometimes
+speaks as if Nature did not exist at all apart from our thought:
+
+    Her life the eddying of our living soul--
+
+a possible, even a probable explanation. But it is not Browning's view.
+There is a celebrated passage in _Paracelsus_ which is quite
+inconsistent with it. All Nature, from the beginning, is made to issue
+forth from the joy God has in making, in embodying his thought in form;
+and when one form has been made and rejoiced in, in making another still
+more lovely on the foundation of the last. So, joy after joy, the world
+was built, till, in the life of all he has made, God sees his ancient
+rapture of movement and power, and feels his delight renewed. I will not
+quote it here, but only mark that we and the "eddying of our living
+soul" have nothing to do with the making of this Nature. It is not even
+the thoughts of God in us. God and Nature are alone, and were alone
+together countless years before we were born. But man was the close of
+all. Nature was built up, through every stage, that man might know
+himself to be its close--its seal--but not it. It is a separate, unhuman
+form of God. Existing thus apart, it does a certain work on us,
+impressing us from without. The God in it speaks to the God in us. It
+may sometimes be said to be interested in us, but not like a man in a
+man. He even goes so far as to impute to Nature, but rarely, such an
+interest in us; but in reality he rather thinks that we, being Nature's
+end, have at such times touched for a moment some of those elements in
+her which have come down to us--elements apart from the soul. And
+Browning takes care, even when he represents Nature as suddenly at one
+with us, to keep up the separateness. The interest spoken of is not a
+human interest, nor resembles it. It is like the interest Ariel takes in
+Prospero and Miranda--an elemental interest, that of a creature whose
+nature knows its radical difference from human nature. If Nature sees us
+in sorrow or in joy, she knows, in these few passages of Browning's
+poetry, or seems to know, that we mourn or rejoice, and if she could
+feel with us she would; but she cannot quite do so. Like Ariel, she
+would be grieved with the grief of Gonzalo, were her affections human.
+She has then a wild, unhuman, unmoral, unspiritual interest in us, like
+a being who has an elemental life, but no soul. But sometimes she is
+made to go farther, and has the same kind of interest in us which Oberon
+has in the loves of Helena and Hermia. When we are loving, and on the
+verge of such untroubled joy as Nature has always in her being, then she
+seems able, in Browning's poetry, actually to work for us, and help us
+into the fulness of our joy. In his poem, _By the Fireside_, he tells
+how he and the woman he loved were brought to know their love. It is a
+passage full of his peculiar view of Nature. The place where the two
+lovers stay their footsteps on the hill knows all about them. "It is
+silent and aware." But it is apart from them also:
+
+      It has had its scenes, its joys and crimes,
+    But that is its own affair.
+
+And its silence also is its own. Those who linger there think that the
+place longs to speak; its bosom seems to heave with all it knows; but
+the desire is its own, not ours transferred to it. But when the two
+lovers were there, Nature, of her own accord, made up a spell for them
+and troubled them into speech:
+
+    A moment after, and hands unseen
+      Were hanging the night around us fast;
+    But we knew that a bar was broken between
+      Life and life: we were mixed at last
+    In spite of the mortal screen.
+
+    The forests had done it; there they stood;
+      We caught for a moment the powers at play:
+    They had mingled us so, for once and good,
+      Their work was done--we might go or stay,
+    They relapsed to their ancient mood.
+
+Not one of the poets of this century would have thought in that fashion
+concerning Nature. Only for a second, man happened to be in harmony with
+the Powers at play in Nature. They took the two lovers up for a moment,
+made them one, and dropped them. "They relapsed to their ancient mood."
+The line is a whole lesson in Browning's view of Nature. But this
+special interest in us is rare, for we are seldom in the blessed mood of
+unselfconscious joy and love. When we are, on the other hand,
+self-conscious, or in doubt, or out of harmony with love and joy, or
+anxious for the transient things of the world--Nature, unsympathetic
+wholly, mocks and plays with us like a faun. When Sordello climbs the
+ravine, thinking of himself as Apollo, the wood, "proud of its
+observer," a mocking phrase, "tried surprises on him, stratagems and
+games."
+
+Or, our life is too small for her greatness. When we are unworthy our
+high lineage, noisy or mean, then we
+
+                quail before a quiet sky
+    Or sea, too little for their quietude.
+
+That is a phrase which might fall in with Wordsworth's theory of Nature,
+but this which follows from _The Englishman in Italy_, is only
+Browning's. The man has climbed to the top of Calvano,
+
+        And God's own profound
+    Was above me, and round me the mountains,
+        And under, the sea,
+    And within me, my heart to bear witness
+        What was and shall be.
+
+He is worthy of the glorious sight; full of eternal thoughts. Wordsworth
+would then have made the soul of Nature sympathise with his soul. But
+Browning makes Nature manifest her apartness from the man. The mountains
+know nothing of his soul: they amuse themselves with him; they are even
+half angry with him for his intrusion--a foreigner who dares an entrance
+into their untrespassed world. Tennyson could not have thought that way.
+It is true the mountains are alive in the poet's thought, but not with
+the poet's life: nor does he touch them with his sentiment.
+
+    Oh, those mountains, their infinite movement
+          Still moving with you;
+    For, ever some new head and heart of them
+          Thrusts into view
+    To observe the intruder; you see it
+          If quickly you turn
+    And, before they escape you surprise them.
+        They grudge you should learn
+    How the soft plains they look on, lean over
+        And love (they pretend)--
+          Cower beneath them.
+
+Total apartness from us! Nature mocking, surprising us; watching us
+from a distance, even pleased to see us going to our destruction. We may
+remember how the hills look grimly on Childe Roland when he comes to the
+tower. The very sunset comes back to see him die:
+
+                before it left,
+    The dying sunset kindled through a cleft:
+    The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay,
+    Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay.--
+
+Then, as if they loved to see the death of their quarry, cried, without
+one touch of sympathy:
+
+    "Now stab and end the creature--to the heft!"
+
+And once, so divided from our life is her life, she pities her own case
+and refuses our pity. Man cannot help her. The starved, ignoble country
+in _Childe Roland_, one of the finest pieces of description in Browning,
+wicked, waste and leprous land, makes Nature herself sick with peevish
+wrath. "I cannot help my case," she cries. "Nothing but the Judgment's
+fire can cure the place."
+
+On the whole, then, for these instances might be supported by many more,
+Nature is alive in Browning, but she is not humanised at all, nor at all
+at one with us. Tennyson does not make her alive, but he does humanise
+her. The other poets of the century do make her alive, but they
+harmonise her in one way or another with us. Browning is distinct from
+them all in keeping her quite divided from man.
+
+But then he has observed that Nature is expressed in terms of man, and
+he naturally, for this conflicts with his general view, desires to
+explain this. He does explain it in a passage in _Paracelsus_. Man once
+descried, imprints for ever
+
+    His presence on all lifeless things; the winds
+    Are henceforth voices, wailing or a shout,
+    A querulous mutter or a quick gay laugh,
+    Never a senseless gust now man is born.
+    The herded pines commune and have deep thoughts
+    A secret they assemble to discuss
+    When the sun drops behind their trunks which glare
+    Like grates of hell: the peerless cup afloat
+    Of the lake-lily is an urn, some nymph
+    Swims bearing high above her head: no bird
+    Whistles unseen, but through the gaps above
+    That let light in upon the gloomy woods,
+    A shape peeps from the breezy forest-top,
+    Arch with small puckered mouth and mocking eye.
+    The morn has enterprise, deep quiet droops
+    With evening, triumph takes the sunset hour.
+    Voluptuous transport ripens with the corn
+    Beneath a warm moon like a happy face:
+    --And this to fill us with regard for Man.
+
+He does not say, as the other poets do, that the pines really commune,
+or that the morn has enterprise, or that nymphs and satyrs live in the
+woods, but that this _seems_ to be, because man, as the crown of the
+natural world, throws back his soul and his soul's life on all the
+grades of inferior life which preceded him. It is Browning's
+contradiction of any one who thinks that the pathetic fallacy exists in
+his poetry.
+
+Nature has then a life of her own, her own joys and sorrows, or rather,
+only joy. Browning, indeed, with his intensity of imagination and his
+ineradicable desire of life, was not the man to conceive Nature as dead,
+as having no conscious being of any kind. He did not impute a
+personality like ours to Nature, but he saw joy and rapture and play,
+even love, moving in everything; and sometimes headded to this delight
+she has in herself--and just because the creature was not human--a touch
+of elemental unmoral malice, a tricksome sportiveness like that of Puck
+in _Midsummer Night's Dream_. The life, then, of Nature had no relation
+of its own to our life; but we had some relation to it because we were
+conscious that we were its close and its completion.
+
+It follows from this idea of Browning's that he was capable of
+describing Nature as she is, without adding any deceiving mist of human
+sentiment to his descriptions; and of describing her as accurately and
+as vividly as Tennyson, even more vividly, because of his extraordinary
+eye for colour. And Nature, so described, is of great interest in
+Browning's poetry.
+
+But, then, in any description of Nature, we desire the entrance into
+such description of some human feeling so that it may be a more complete
+theme for poetry. Browning does this in a different way from Tennyson,
+who gives human feelings and thoughts to Nature, or steeps it in human
+memories. Browning catches Nature up into himself, and the human element
+is not in Nature but in him, in what _he_ thinks and feels, in all that
+Nature, quite apart from him, awakens in him. Sometimes he even goes so
+far as to toss Nature aside altogether, as unworthy to be thought of in
+comparison with humanity. That joy in Nature herself, for her own sake,
+which was so distinguishing a mark of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley,
+Byron and Keats, is rarely, if ever, found in Browning. This places him
+apart. What he loved was man; and save at those times of which I have
+spoken, when he conceives Nature as the life and play and wrath and
+fancy of huge elemental powers like gods and goddesses, he uses her as a
+background only for human life. She is of little importance unless man
+be present, and then she is no more than the scenery in a drama. Take
+the first two verses of _A Lovers' Quarrel_,
+
+    Oh, what a dawn of day!
+    How the March sun feels like May!
+      All is blue again
+      After last night's rain,
+    And the South dries the hawthorn-spray.
+
+That is well done--he has liked what he saw. But what is it all, he
+thinks; what do I care about it? And he ends the verse:
+
+      Only, my Love's away!
+    I'd as lief that the blue were grey.
+
+Then take the next verse:
+
+    Runnels, which rillets swell.
+    Must be dancing down the dell,
+      With a foaming head
+      On the beryl bed
+    Paven smooth as a hermit's cell.
+
+It is excellent description, but it is only scenery for the real passion
+in Browning's mind.
+
+      Each with a tale to tell--
+    Could my Love but attend as well.
+
+_By the Fireside_ illustrates the same point. No description can be
+better, more close, more observed, than of the whole walk over the hill;
+but it is mere scenery for the lovers. The real passion lies in their
+hearts.
+
+We have then direct description of Nature; direct description of man
+sometimes as influenced by Nature; sometimes Nature used as the scenery
+of human passion; but no intermingling of them both. Each is for ever
+distinct. The only thing that unites them in idea, and in the end, is
+that both have proceeded from the creative joy of God.
+
+Of course this way of thinking permits of the things of Nature being
+used to illustrate the doings, thinkings and character of man; and in
+none of his poems is such illustration better used than in _Sordello_.
+There is a famous passage, in itself a noble description of the opulent
+generativeness of a warm land like Italy, in which he compares the rich,
+poetic soul of Sordello to such a land, and the lovely line in it,
+
+    And still more labyrinthine buds the rose,
+
+holds in its symbolism the whole essence of a great artist's nature. I
+quote the passage. It describes Sordello, and it could not better
+describe Italy:
+
+    Sordello foremost in the regal class
+    Nature has broadly severed from the mass
+    Of men, and framed for pleasure, as she frames
+    Some happy lands, that have luxurious names,
+    For loose fertility; a footfall there
+    Suffices to upturn to the warm air
+    Half-germinating spices; mere decay
+    Produces richer life; and day by day
+    New pollen on the lily-petal grows,
+    And still more labyrinthine buds the rose.
+
+That compares to the character of a whole country the character of a
+whole type of humanity. I take another of such comparisons, and it is as
+minute as this is broad, and done with as great skill and charm.
+Sordello is full of poetic fancies, touched and glimmering with the dew
+of youth, and he has woven them around the old castle where he lives.
+Browning compares the young man's imaginative play to the airy and
+audacious labour of the spider. He, that is, Sordello,
+
+                O'er-festooning every interval,
+    As the adventurous spider, making light
+    Of distance, shoots her threads from depth to height,
+    From barbican to battlement: so flung
+    Fantasies forth and in their centre swung
+    Our architect,--the breezy morning fresh
+    Above, and merry,--all his waving mesh
+    Laughing with lucid dew-drops rainbow-edged.
+
+It could not be better done. The description might stand alone, but
+better than it is the image it gives of the joy, fancifulness and
+creativeness of a young poet, making his web of thoughts and
+imaginations, swinging in their centre like the spider; all of them
+subtle as the spider's threads, obeying every passing wind of impulse,
+and gemmed with the dew and sunlight of youth.
+
+Again, in _A Bean-stripe: also Apple-Eating_, Ferishtah is asked--Is
+life a good or bad thing, white or black? "Good," says Ferishtah, "if
+one keeps moving. I only move. When I stop, I may stop in a black place
+or a white. But everything around me is motionless as regards me, and is
+nothing more than stuff which tests my power of throwing light and
+colour on them as I move. It is I who make life good or bad, black or
+white. I am like the moon going through vapour"--and this is the
+illustration:
+
+                Mark the flying orb
+    Think'st thou the halo, painted still afresh
+    At each new cloud-fleece pierced and passaged through
+    This was and is and will be evermore
+    Coloured in permanence? The glory swims
+    Girdling the glory-giver, swallowed straight
+    By night's abysmal gloom, unglorified
+    Behind as erst before the advancer: gloom?
+    Faced by the onward-faring, see, succeeds
+    From the abandoned heaven a next surprise.
+    And where's the gloom now?--silver-smitten straight,
+    One glow and variegation! So, with me,
+    Who move and make,--myself,--the black, the white.
+    The good, the bad, of life's environment.
+
+Fine as these illustrations are, intimate and minute, they are only a
+few out of a multitude of those comparisons which in Browning image what
+is in man from that which is within Nature--hints, prognostics,
+prophecies, as he would call them, of humanity, but not human.
+
+There is, however, one human passion which Browning conceives as
+existing in Nature--the passion of joy. But it is a different joy from
+ours. It is not dashed by any sorrow, and it is very rarely that we are
+so freed from pain or from self-contemplation as to be able to enter
+even for a brief hour into the rapture of Nature. That rapture, in
+Browning's thought, was derived from the creative thought of God
+exercising itself with delight in the incessant making of Nature. And
+its manifestation was life, that joyful rush of life in all things into
+fuller and fuller being. No poet felt this ecstasy of mere living in
+Nature more deeply than Browning. His own rapture (the word is not too
+strong) in it appears again and again in his poetry, and when it does,
+Browning is not a man sympathising from without with Nature. He is then
+a part of Nature herself, a living piece of the great organism, having
+his own rejoicing life in the mightier life which includes him; and
+feeling, with the rest, the abounding pleasure of continuous life
+reaching upwards through growth to higher forms of being, swifter powers
+of living. I might give many examples, but one will suffice, and it is
+the more important because it belongs not to his ardent youth, but to
+his mature manhood. It is part of the song of Thamyris in _Aristophanes'
+Apology_. Thamyris, going to meet the Muses in rivalry, sings as he
+walks in the splendid morning the song of the rapture of the life of
+Earth, and is himself part of the rejoicing movement.
+
+    Thamuris, marching, laughed "Each flake of foam"
+    (As sparklingly the ripple raced him by)
+    "Mocks slower clouds adrift in the blue dome!"
+
+    For Autumn was the season; red the sky
+    Held morn's conclusive signet of the sun
+    To break the mists up, bid them blaze and die.
+
+    Morn had the mastery as, one by one
+    All pomps produced themselves along the tract
+    From earth's far ending to near heaven begun.
+
+    Was there a ravaged tree? it laughed compact
+    With gold, a leaf-ball crisp, high brandished now,
+    Tempting to onset frost which late attacked.
+
+    Was there a wizened shrub, a starveling bough,
+    A fleecy thistle filched from by the wind,
+    A weed, Pan's trampling hoof would disallow?
+
+    Each, with a glory and a rapture twined
+    About it, joined the rush of air and light
+    And force: the world was of one joyous mind.
+
+    Say not the birds flew! they forebore their right--
+    Swam, revelling onward in the roll of things.
+    Say not the beasts' mirth bounded! that was flight--
+
+    How could the creatures leap, no lift of wings?
+    Such earth's community of purpose, such
+    The ease of earth's fulfilled imaginings,--
+
+    So did the near and far appear to touch
+    I' the moment's transport,--that an interchange
+    Of function, far with near, seemed scarce too much;
+
+    And had the rooted plant aspired to range
+    With the snake's licence, while the insect yearned
+    To glow fixed as the flower, it were not strange--
+
+    No more than if the fluttery tree-top turned
+    To actual music, sang itself aloft;
+    Or if the wind, impassioned chantress, earned
+
+    The right to soar embodied in some soft
+    Fine form all fit for cloud companionship,
+    And, blissful, once touch beauty chased so oft.
+
+    Thamuris, marching, let no fancy slip
+    Born of the fiery transport; lyre and song
+    Were his, to smite with hand and launch from lip--
+
+The next thing to touch on is his drawing of landscape, not now of
+separate pieces of Nature, but of the whole view of a land seen under a
+certain aspect of the heavens. All the poets ought to be able to do this
+well, and I drew attention to the brief, condensed, yet fan-opening
+fashion in which Tennyson has done it. Sometimes the poets describe what
+they see before them, or have seen; drawing directly from Nature.
+Sometimes they invent a wide or varied landscape as a background for a
+human subject, and arrange and tone it for that purpose. Shelley did
+this with great stateliness and subtlety. Browning does not do it,
+except, perhaps, in _Christmas-Eve_, when he prepares the night for the
+appearance of Christ. Nevertheless, even in _Christmas-Eve_, the
+description of the lunar rainbow is of a thing he has seen, of a
+not-invented thing, and it is as clear, vivid and natural as it can be;
+only it is heightened and thrilled through by the expectancy and the
+thrill in Browning's soul which the reader feels and which the poet,
+through his emotion, makes the reader comprehend. But there is no
+suggestion that any of this feeling exists in Nature. The rainbow has no
+consciousness of the vision to come or of the passion in the poet (as it
+would have had in Wordsworth), and therefore is painted with an accuracy
+undimmed by any transference to Nature of the soul of the poet.
+
+I quote the piece; it is a noble specimen of his landscape work:
+
+    But lo, what think you? suddenly
+    The rain and the wind ceased, and the sky
+    Received at once the full fruition
+    Of the moon's consummate apparition.
+    The black cloud barricade was riven,
+    Ruined beneath her feet, and driven
+    Deep in the West; while, bare and breathless,
+      North and South and East lay ready
+    For a glorious thing that, dauntless, deathless,
+      Sprang across them and stood steady.
+
+    'Twas a moon-rainbow, vast and perfect,
+    From heaven to heaven extending, perfect
+    As the mother-moon's self, full in face.
+    It rose, distinctly at the base
+      With its severe proper colours chorded
+    Which still, in the rising, were compressed,
+    Until at last they coalesced,
+      And supreme the spectral creature lorded
+    In a triumph of whitest white,--
+    Above which intervened the night.
+    But above night too, like only the next,
+      The second of a wondrous sequence,
+      Reaching in rare and rarer frequence,
+    Till the heaven of heavens were circumflexed,
+    Another rainbow rose, a mightier,
+    Fainter, flushier and flightier,--
+    Rapture dying along its verge.
+    Oh, whose foot shall I see emerge,
+    Whose, from the straining topmost dark,
+    On to the key-stone of that arc?
+
+This is only a piece of sky, though I have called it landscape work. But
+then the sky is frequently treated alone by Browning; and is always
+present in power over his landscapes--it, and the winds in it. This is
+natural enough for one who lived so much in Italy, where the scenery of
+the sky is more superb than that of the earth--so various, noble and
+surprising that when Nature plays there, as a poet, her tragedy and
+comedy, one scarcely takes the trouble of considering the earth.
+
+However, we find an abundance of true landscapes in Browning. They are,
+with a few exceptions, Italian; and they have that grandeur and breadth,
+that intensity given by blazing colour, that peculiar tint either of
+labyrinthine or of tragic sentiment which belong to Italy. I select a
+few of them:
+
+    The morn when first it thunders in March
+      The eel in the pond gives a leap, they say;
+    As I leaned and looked over the aloed arch
+      Of the villa gate this warm March day,
+    No flash snapped, no dumb thunder rolled
+      In the valley beneath where, white and wide
+    Washed by the morning water-gold,
+      Florence lay out on the mountain side
+    River and bridge and street and square
+      Lay mine, as much at my beck and call,
+    Through the live translucent bath of air,
+      As the sights in a magic crystal ball.
+
+Here is the Roman Campagna and its very sentiment:
+
+    The champaign with its endless fleece
+      Of feathery grasses everywhere!
+    Silence and passion, joy and peace,
+      An everlasting wash of air--
+    Rome's ghost since her decease.
+
+And this might be in the same place:
+
+    Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles,
+      Miles and miles
+    On the solitary pastures where our sheep
+      Half-asleep
+    Tinkle homeward through the twilight--
+
+This is a crimson sunset over dark and distant woods in autumn:
+
+                That autumn eve was stilled:
+    A last remains of sunset dimly burned
+    O'er the far forests, like a torch-flame turned
+    By the wind back upon its bearer's hand
+    In one long flare of crimson; as a brand
+    The woods beneath lay black. A single eye
+    From all Verona cared for the soft sky.
+
+And if we desire a sunrise, there is the triumphant beginning of _Pippa
+Passes_--a glorious outburst of light, colour and splendour, impassioned
+and rushing, the very upsoaring of Apollo's head behind his furious
+steeds. It begins with one word, like a single stroke on the gong of
+Nature: it continues till the whole of the overarching vault, and the
+world below, in vast disclosure, is flooded with an ocean of gold.
+
+      Day!
+      Faster and more fast,
+      O'er night's brim, day boils at last;
+      Boils, pure gold, o'er the cloud-cup's brim
+      Where spurting and suppressed it lay.
+      For not a froth-flake touched the rim
+      Of yonder gap in the solid gray
+      Of the eastern cloud, an hour away;
+      But forth one wavelet, then another, curled.
+      Till the whole sunrise, not to be suppressed,
+      Rose, reddened, and its seething breast
+    Flickered in bounds, grew gold, then overflowed the world.
+
+This is chiefly of the sky, but the description in that gipsy-hearted
+poem, _The Flight of the Duchess_, brings before us, at great length,
+league after league of wide-spreading landscape. It is, first, of the
+great wild country, cornfield, vineyards, sheep-ranges, open chase, till
+we arrive at last at the mountains; and climbing up among their pines,
+dip down into a yet vaster and wilder country, a red, drear, burnt-up
+plain, over which we are carried for miles:
+
+    Till at the last, for a bounding belt,
+    Comes the salt sand hoar of the great sea-shore.
+
+Or we may read the _Grammarian's Funeral_, where we leave the city walls
+and climb the peak on whose topmost ledge he is to be buried. As we
+ascend the landscape widens; we see it expanding in the verse. Moreover,
+with a wonderful power, Browning makes us feel the air grow keener,
+fresher, brighter, more soundless and lonelier. That, too, is given by
+the verse; it is a triumph in Nature-poetry.
+
+Nor is he less effective in narrow landscape, in the description of
+small shut-in spaces of Nature. There is the garden at the beginning of
+_Paracelsus_; the ravine, step by step, in _Pauline_; the sea-beach, and
+its little cabinet landscapes, in _James Lee's Wife_; the exquisite
+pictures of the path over the Col di Colma in _By the Fireside_--for
+though the whole of the landscape is given, yet each verse almost might
+stand as a small picture by itself. It is one of Browning's favourite
+ways of description, to walk slowly through the landscape, describing
+step by step those parts of it which strike him, and leaving to us to
+combine the parts into the whole. But _his_ way of combination is to
+touch the last thing he describes with human love, and to throw back
+this atmosphere of feeling over all the pictures he has made. The verses
+I quote do this.
+
+    Oh moment, one and infinite!
+      The water slips o'er stock and stone;
+    The West is tender, hardly bright;
+      How grey at once is the evening grown--
+    One star, its chrysolite!
+
+    We two stood there with never a third,
+      But each by each, as each knew well:
+    The sights we saw and the sounds we heard,
+      The lights and the shades made up a spell
+    Till the trouble grew and stirred.
+
+    Oh, the little more, and how much it is!
+      And the little less, and what worlds away!
+    How a sound shall quicken content to bliss,
+      Or a breath suspend the blood's best play,
+    And life be a proof of this!
+
+There are many such miniatures of Nature in Browning's poetry.
+Sometimes, however, the pictures are larger and nobler, when the natural
+thing described is in itself charged with power, terror or dignity. I
+give one instance of this, where the fierce Italian thunderstorm is
+enhanced by being the messenger of God's vengeance on guilt. It is from
+_Pippa Passes_. The heaven's pillars are over-bowed with heat. The
+black-blue canopy descends close on Ottima and Sebald.
+
+    Buried in woods we lay, you recollect;
+    Swift ran the searching tempest overhead;
+    And ever and anon some bright white shaft
+    Burned thro' the pine-tree roof, here burned and there,
+    As if God's messenger thro' the close wood-screen
+    Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture,
+    Feeling for guilty thee and me; then broke
+    The thunder like a whole sea overhead--
+
+That is as splendid as the thing itself.
+
+Again, no one can help observing in all these quotations the
+extraordinary love of colour, a love Tennyson has in far fainter
+measure, but which Browning seems to possess more than any other English
+poet. Only Sir Walter Scott approaches him in this. Scott, knowing the
+Highlands, knew dark magnificence of colour. But Browning's love of
+colour arose from his having lived so long in Italy, where the light is
+so pure, clear, and brilliant that colour is more intense, and at dawn
+and sunset more deep, delicate, and various than it is in our land.
+Sometimes, as Ruskin says, "it is not colour, it is conflagration"; but
+wherever it is, in the bell of a flower, on the edge of a cloud, on the
+back of a lizard, on the veins of a lichen, it strikes in Browning's
+verse at our eyes, and he only, in English poetry, has joy enough in it
+to be its full interpreter.
+
+He sees the wild tulip blow out its great red bell; he sees the thin
+clear bubble of blood at its tip; he sees the spike of gold which burns
+deep in the bluebell's womb; the corals that, like lamps, disperse thick
+red flame through the dusk green universe of the ocean; the lakes which,
+when the morn breaks,
+
+    Blaze like a wyvern flying round the sun;
+
+the woodland brake whose withered fern Dawn feeds with gold; the moon
+carried oft at sunrise in purple fire; the larch-blooms crisp and pink;
+the sanguine heart of the pomegranate; the filberts russet-sheathed and
+velvet-capped; the poppies crimson to blackness; the red fans of the
+butterfly falling on the rock like a drop of fire from a brandished
+torch; the star-fish, rose-jacynth to the finger-tips; and a hundred
+other passionate seizures of colour. And, for the last of these colour
+remembrances, in quieter tints--almost in black and white--I quote this
+lovely verse from _James Lee's Wife_:
+
+    The swallow has set her six young on the rail,
+      And looks seaward:
+    The water's in stripes like a snake, olive pale
+      To the leeward,--
+    On the weather-side, black, spotted white with the wind.
+      "Good fortune departs, and disaster's behind"--
+    Hark, the wind with its wants and its infinite wail!
+
+So, not only do we possess all these landscapes but we possess them in
+colour. They are painted as well as drawn. It is his love of colour
+which made at least half of the impulse that drove him at times into
+Impressionism. Good drawing is little to the impressionist painters. It
+is the sudden glow, splash or flicker of colour that moves them, which
+makes on them the swift, the momentary impression they wish to record.
+
+And colour acted on Browning in the same way. I said he had been
+impressionist, when he liked, for forty years before Impressionism was
+born in modern art. He was so, because from the beginning he saw things
+in colour, more than in light and shade. It is well worth a reader's
+while to search him for colour-impressions. I take one, for example,
+with the black horse flung in at the end exactly in the way an artist
+would do it who loved a flash of black life midst of a dead expanse of
+gold and green:
+
+    Fancy the Pampas' sheen!
+    Miles and miles of gold and green
+      Where the sunflowers blow
+      In a solid glow,
+    And--to break now and then the screen--
+      Black neck and eyeballs keen,
+    Up a wild horse leaps between!
+
+Having, then, this extraordinary power of sight, needing no carefulness
+of observation or study, but capable of catching and holding without
+trouble all that his eye rested or glanced upon, it is no wonder that
+sometimes it amused him to put into verse the doings of a whole day: the
+work done in it by men of all classes and the natural objects that
+encompassed them; not cataloguing them dryly, but shooting through them,
+like rays of light, either his own fancies and thoughts, or the fancies
+and thoughts of some typical character whom he invented. This he has
+done specially in two poems: _The Englishman in Italy_, where the vast
+shell of the Sorrento plain, its sea and mountains, and all the doings
+of the peasantry, are detailed with the most intimate delight and
+truth. The second of these poems is _Up at a Villa--Down in the City_,
+where a farm of the Casentino with its surroundings is contrasted with
+the street-life of Florence; and both are described through the
+delightful character whom he invents to see them. These poems are
+astonishing pieces of intimate, joyful observation of scenery.
+
+Again, there is no poet whose love of animals is greater than
+Browning's, and none who has so frequently, so carefully, so vividly
+described them. It is amazing, as we go through his work, to realise the
+largeness of his range in this matter, from the river-horse to the
+lizard, from the eagle to the wren, from the loud singing bee to the
+filmy insect in the sunshine. I give a few examples. Mortal man could
+not see a lynx more clearly than Karshish--
+
+    A black lynx snarled and pricked a tufted ear;
+    Lust of my blood inflamed his yellow balls.
+
+And the very soul of the Eagle is in this question--
+
+    Ask the geier-eagle why she stoops at once
+    Into the vast and unexplored abyss,
+    What full-grown power informs her from the first,
+    Why she not marvels, strenuously beating
+    The silent boundless regions of the sky!
+
+He has watched the heavy-winged osprey in its haunts, fain to fly,
+
+                but forced the earth his couch to make
+    Far inland, till his friend the tempest wake,
+
+on whose fiercer wings he can flap his own into activity.
+
+In _Caliban upon Setebos_, as would naturally be the case, animal life
+is everywhere; and how close to truth, how keenly observed it is, how
+the right points for description are chosen to make us feel the beast
+and bird in a single line; how full of colour, how flashed into words
+which seem like colours, the descriptions are, any animal-lover may hear
+in the few lines I quote:
+
+    Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech;
+    Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam,
+    That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown
+    He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye.
+    By moonlight.
+
+That is enough to prove his power. And the animals are seen, not as a
+cultured person sees them, but as a savage, with his eyes untroubled by
+thoughts, sees them; for Browning, with his curious self-transmuting
+power, has put himself into the skin of Caliban. Then again, in that
+lovely lyric in _Paracelsus_,
+
+    Thus the Mayne glideth,
+
+the banks and waves are full of all the bird and beast life of a river.
+Elsewhere, he sees the falcon spread his wings like a banner, the stork
+clapping his bill in the marsh, the coot dipping his blue breast in the
+water, the swallow flying to Venice--"that stout sea-farer"--the lark
+shivering for joy, and a hundred other birds; and lastly, even the great
+bird of the Imagination, the Phoenix, flying home; and in a splendid
+verse records the sight:
+
+    As the King-bird with ages on his plumes
+    Travels to die in his ancestral glooms.
+
+Not less wonderful, and more unique in English poetry, is his painting
+of insects. He describes the hermit-bee, the soft, small, unfrighted
+thing, lighting on the dead vine-leaf, and twirling and filing all day.
+He strikes out the grasshopper at a touch--
+
+    Chirrups the contumacious grasshopper.
+
+He has a swift vision of the azure damsel-fly flittering in the wood:
+
+    Child of the simmering quiet, there to die.
+
+He sees all the insect population of an old green wall; fancies the
+fancies of the crickets and the flies, and the carousing of the cicala
+in the trees, and the bee swinging in the chalice of the campanula, and
+the wasps pricking the papers round the peaches, and the gnats and early
+moths craving their food from God when dawn awakes them, and the
+fireflies crawling like lamps through the moss, and the spider,
+sprinkled with mottles on an ash-grey back, and building his web on the
+edge of tombs. These are but a few things out of this treasure-house of
+animal observation and love. It is a love which animates and populates
+with life his landscapes.
+
+Many of the points I have attempted here to make are illustrated in
+_Saul_. In verse v. the sheep are pictured, with all a shepherd's
+delightful affection, coming back at evening to the folding; and, with
+David's poetic imagination, compared to the stars following one another
+into the meadows of night--
+
+    And now one after one seeks his lodging, as star follows star
+    Into eve and the blue far above us,--so blue and so far!--
+
+In verse vi. the quails, and the crickets, and the jerboa at the door
+of his sand house, are thrilled into quicker life by David's music. In
+verse ix. the full joy of living in beasts and men is painted in the
+midst of landscape after landscape, struck out in single lines,--till
+all nature seems crowded and simmering with the intense life whose
+rapture Browning loved so well. These fully reveal his poetic communion
+with animals. Then, there is a fine passage in verse x. where he
+describes the loosening of a thick bed of snow from the
+mountain-side[4]--an occurrence which also drew the interest on Shelley
+in the _Prometheus_--which illustrates what I have said of Browning's
+conception of the separate life, as of giant Titans, of the vaster
+things in Nature. The mountain is alive and lives his life with his own
+grim joy, and wears his snow like a breastplate, and discharges it when
+it pleases him. It is only David who thinks that the great creature
+lives to guard us from the tempests. And Hebron, high on its crested
+hill, lifts itself out of the morning mist in the same giant fashion,
+
+    For I wake in the grey dewy covert, while Hebron upheaves
+    The dawn struggling with night on his shoulder, and Kidron retrieves
+    Slow the damage of yesterday's sunshine.
+
+Then, at the end of the poem, Browning represents all Nature as full of
+emotion, as gathered into a fuller life, by David's prophecy of the
+coming of immortal Love in Christ to man. This sympathy of Nature with
+humanity is so rare a thought in Browning, and so apart from his view of
+her, that I think he felt its strangeness here; so that he has taken
+some pains to make us understand that it is not Nature herself who does
+this, but David, in his uplifted inspiration, who imputes it to her. If
+that is not the case, it is at least interesting to find the poet,
+impassioned by his imagination of the situation, driven beyond his usual
+view into another land of thought.
+
+There is one more thing to say in closing this chapter. Browning, unlike
+Tennyson, did not invent his landscapes. He drew directly from nature.
+The landscapes in _Pauline_ and _Sordello_, and in the lyrical poems are
+plainly recollections of what he has seen and noted in his memory, from
+the sweep of the mountainous or oceanic horizon to the lichen on the
+rock and the painted shell on the seashore. Even the imaginative
+landscape of _Childe Roland_ is a memory, not an invention. I do not say
+he would have been incapable of such invented landscape as we find in
+_Oenone_ and the _Lotos-Eaters_, but it was not his way to do this.
+However, he does it once; but he takes care to show that it is not real
+landscape he is drawing, but landscape in a picture. In _Gerard de
+Lairesse_, one of the poems in _Parleyings with Certain People_, he sets
+himself to rival the "Walk" in Lairesse's _Art of Painting_, and he
+invents as a background to mythological or historic scenes, five
+landscapes, of dawn, morning, and noon, evening and falling night. They
+may be compared with the walk in _Pauline_, and indeed one of them with
+its deep pool watched over by the trees recalls his description of a
+similar pool in _Pauline_--a lasting impression of his youth, for it is
+again used in _Sordello_. These landscapes are some of his most careful
+natural description. They begin with the great thunderstorm of dawn in
+which Prometheus is seen riveted to his rock and the eagle-hound of Zeus
+beside him. Then the morning is described and the awakening of the earth
+and Artemis going forth, the huntress-queen and the queen of death; then
+noon with Lyda and the Satyr--that sad story; then evening charged with
+the fate of empires; and then the night, and in it a vast ghost, the
+ghost of departing glory and beauty. The descriptions are too long to
+quote, but far too short to read. I would that Browning had done more of
+this excellent work; but that these were created when he was an old man
+proves that the fire of imagination burnt in him to the end. They are
+full of those keen picture-words in which he smites into expression the
+central point of a landscape. They realise the glory of light, the
+force, fierceness, even the quiet of Nature, but they have lost a great
+deal of the colour of which once he was so lavish. Nevertheless, the
+whole scheme of colour in these pictures, with their figures, recalls
+the pictures of Tintoret. They have his _furia_, his black, gold, and
+sombre purple, his white mist and barred clouds and the thunder-roar in
+his skies. Nor are Prometheus and Artemis, and Lyda on her heap of skins
+in the deep woods, unworthy of the daring hand of the great Venetian.
+They seem to stand forth from his canvas.
+
+The poem closes with a charming lyric, half-sad, half-joyful, in which
+he hails the spring, and which in itself is full of his heart when it
+was close to the hopefulness he drew from natural beauty. I quote it to
+close this chapter:
+
+    Dance, yellows and whites and reds,
+    Lead your gay orgy, leaves, stalks, heads
+    Astir with the wind in the tulip-beds.
+
+    There's sunshine; scarcely a wind at all
+    Disturbs starved grass and daisies small
+    On a certain mound by a churchyard wall.
+
+    Daisies and grass be my heart's bed-fellows,
+    On the mound wind spares and sunshine mellows:
+    Dance you, reds and whites and yellows.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[4] David could only have seen this on the upper slopes of Hermon. But
+at the time of the poem, when he is the shepherd-youth, he could
+scarcely have visited the north of Palestine. Indeed, he does not seem
+all his life long to have been near Hermon. Browning has transferred to
+David what he himself had seen in Switzerland.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+_THE TREATMENT OF NATURE_
+
+
+In the previous chapter, some of the statements made on Browning as a
+poet of Nature were not sufficiently illustrated; and there are other
+elements in his natural description which demand attention. The best way
+to repair these deficiencies will be to take chronologically the natural
+descriptions in his poems and to comment upon them, leaving out those on
+which we have already touched. New points of interest will thus arise;
+and, moreover, taking his natural description as it occurs from volume
+to volume, we may be able--within this phase of his poetic nature--to
+place his poetic development in a clearer light.
+
+I begin, therefore, with _Pauline_. The descriptions of nature in that
+poem are more deliberate, more for their own sake, than elsewhere in
+Browning's poetry. The first of them faintly recalls the manner of
+Shelley in the _Alastor_, and I have no doubt was influenced by him. The
+two others, and the more finished, have already escaped from Shelley,
+and are almost pre-Raphaelite, as much so as Keats, in their detail. Yet
+all the three are original, not imitative. They suggest Shelley and
+Keats, and no more, and it is only the manner and not the matter of
+these poets that they suggest. Browning became instantly original in
+this as in other modes of poetry. It was characteristic of him from the
+beginning to the end of his career, to possess within himself his own
+methods, to draw out of himself new matter and new shapings.
+
+From one point of view this was full of treasureable matter for us. It
+is not often the gods give us so opulent an originality. From another
+point of view it was unfortunate. If he had begun by imitating a little;
+if he had studied the excellences of his predecessors more; if he had
+curbed his individuality sufficiently to mark, learn and inwardly digest
+the noble style of others in natural description, and in all other
+matters of poetry as well, his work would have been much better than it
+is; his original excellences would have found fitter and finer
+expression; his faults would have been enfeebled instead of being
+developed; his style would have been more concise on one side, less
+abrupt on another, and we should not have been wrongly disturbed by
+obscurities of diction and angularities of expression. He would have
+reached more continuously the splendid level he often attained. This is
+plentifully illustrated by his work on external nature, but less perhaps
+than by his work on humanity.
+
+The first natural description he published is in the beginning of
+_Pauline_:
+
+    Thou wilt remember one warm morn when winter
+    Crept aged from the earth, and spring's first breath
+    Blew soft from the moist hills; the blackthorn boughs,
+    So dark in the bare wood, when glistening
+    In the sunshine were white with coming buds,
+    Like the bright side of a sorrow, and the banks
+    Had violets opening from sleep like eyes.
+
+That is fairly good; he describes what he has seen; but it might have
+been better. We know what he means, but his words do not accurately or
+imaginatively convey this meaning. The best lines are the first three,
+but the peculiar note of Shelley sighs so fully in them that they do not
+represent Browning. What is special in them is his peculiar delight not
+only in the morning which here he celebrates, but in the spring. It was
+in his nature, even in old age, to love with passion the beginnings of
+things; dawn, morning, spring and youth, and their quick blood; their
+changes, impulses, their unpremeditated rush into fresh experiment.
+Unlike Tennyson, who was old when he was old, Browning was young when he
+was old. Only once in _Asolando_, in one poem, can we trace that he felt
+winter in his heart. And the lines in _Pauline_ which I now quote,
+spoken by a young man who had dramatised himself into momentary age, are
+no ill description of his temper at times when he was really old:
+
+    As life wanes, all its care and strife and toil
+    Seem strangely valueless, while the old trees
+    Which grew by our youth's home, the waving mass
+    Of climbing plants heavy with bloom and dew,
+    The morning swallows with their songs like words.
+    All these seem clear and only worth our thoughts:
+    So, aught connected with my early life,
+    My rude songs or my wild imaginings,
+    How I look on them--most distinct amid
+    The fever and the stir of after years!
+
+The next description in _Pauline_ is that in which he describes--to
+illustrate what Shelley was to him--the woodland spring which became a
+mighty river. Shelley, as first conceived by Browning, seemed to him
+like a sacred spring:
+
+    Scarce worth a moth's flitting, which long grasses cross,
+    And one small tree embowers droopingly--
+    Joying to see some wandering insect won
+    To live in its few rushes, or some locust
+    To pasture on its boughs, or some wild bird
+    Stoop for its freshness from the trackless air.
+
+A piece of careful detail, close to nature, but not close enough;
+needing to be more detailed or less detailed, but the first instance in
+his work of his deliberate use of Nature, not for love of herself only,
+(Wordsworth, Coleridge or Byron would have described the spring in the
+woods for its own sake), but for illustration of humanity. It is
+Shelley--Shelley in his lonely withdrawn character, Shelley hidden in
+the wood of his own thoughts, and, like a spring in that wood, bubbling
+upwards into personal poetry--of whom Browning is now thinking. The
+image is good, but a better poet would have dwelt more on the fountain
+and left the insects and birds alone. It is Shelley also of whom he
+thinks--Shelley breaking away from personal poetry to write of the fates
+of men, of liberty and love and overthrow of wrong, of the future of
+mankind--when he expands his tree-shaded fountain into the river and
+follows it to the sea:
+
+    And then should find it but the fountain head,
+    Long lost, of some great river washing towns
+    And towers, and seeing old woods which will live
+    But by its banks untrod of human foot.
+    Which, when the great sun sinks, lie quivering
+    In light as some thing lieth half of life
+    Before God's foot, waiting a wondrous change;
+    Then girt with rocks which seek to turn or stay
+    Its course in vain, for it does ever spread
+    Like a sea's arm as it goes rolling on,
+    Being the pulse of some great country--so
+    Wast thou to me, and art thou to the world!
+
+How good some of that is; how bad it is elsewhere! How much it needs
+thought, concentration, and yet how vivid also and original! And the
+faults of it, of grammar, of want of clearness, of irritating
+parenthesis, of broken threads of thought, of inability to leave out the
+needless, are faults of which Browning never quite cleared his work. I
+do not think he ever cared to rid himself of them.
+
+The next description is not an illustration of man by means of Nature.
+It is almost the only set description of Nature, without reference to
+man, which occurs in the whole of Browning's work. It is introduced by
+his declaration (for in this I think he speaks from himself) of his
+power of living in the life of all living things. He does not think of
+himself as living in the whole Being of Nature, as Wordsworth or Shelley
+might have done. There was a certain matter of factness in him which
+prevented his belief in any theory of that kind. But he does transfer
+himself into the rejoicing life of the animals and plants, a life which
+he knows is akin to his own. And this distinction is true of all his
+poetry of Nature. "I can mount with the bird," he says,
+
+    Leaping airily his pyramid of leaves
+    And twisted boughs of some tall mountain tree,
+    Or like a fish breathe deep the morning air
+    In the misty sun-warm water.
+
+This introduces the description of a walk of twenty-four hours through
+various scenes of natural beauty. It is long and elaborate--the scenery
+he conceives round the home where he and Pauline are to live. And it is
+so close, and so much of it is repeated in other forms in his later
+poetry, that I think it is drawn direct from Nature; that it is here
+done of set purpose to show his hand in natural description. It begins
+with night, but soon leaves night for the morning and the noon. Here is
+a piece of it:
+
+    Morning, the rocks and valleys and old woods.
+    How the sun brightens in the mist, and here,
+    Half in the air, like[5] creatures of the place,
+    Trusting the elements, living on high boughs
+    That sway in the wind--look at the silver spray
+    Flung from the foam-sheet of the cataract
+    Amid the broken rocks! Shall we stay here
+    With the wild hawks? No, ere the hot noon come
+    Dive we down--safe! See, this is our new retreat
+    Walled in with a sloped mound of matted shrubs,
+    Dark, tangled, old and green, still sloping down
+    To a small pool whose waters lie asleep,
+    Amid the trailing boughs turned water-plants:
+    And tall trees overarch to keep us in,
+    Breaking the sunbeams into emerald shafts,
+    And in the dreamy water one small group
+    Of two or three strange trees are got together
+    Wondering at all around--
+
+This is nerveless work, tentative, talkative, no clear expression of the
+whole; and as he tries to expand it further in lines we may study with
+interest, for the very failures of genius are interesting, he becomes
+even more feeble. Yet the feebleness is traversed by verses of power,
+like lightning flashing through a mist upon the sea. The chief thing to
+say about this direct, detailed work is that he got out of its manner as
+fast as he could. He never tried it again, but passed on to suggest the
+landscape by a few sharp, high-coloured words; choosing out one or two
+of its elements and flashing them into prominence. The rest was left to
+the imagination of the reader.
+
+He is better when he comes forth from the shadowy woodland-pool into the
+clear air and open landscape:
+
+    Up for the glowing day, leave the old woods!
+    See, they part like a ruined arch: the sky!
+    Blue sunny air, where a great cloud floats laden
+    With light, like a dead whale that white birds pick,
+    Floating away in the sun in some north sea.
+    Air, air, fresh life-blood, thin and searching air,
+    The clear, dear breath of God that loveth us,
+    Where small birds reel and winds take their delight!
+
+The last three lines are excellent, but nothing could be worse than the
+sensational image of the dead whale. It does not fit the thing he
+desires to illustrate, and it violates the sentiment of the scene he is
+describing, but its strangeness pleased his imagination, and he put it
+in without a question. Alas, in after times, he only too often, both in
+the poetry of nature and of the human soul, hurried into his verse
+illustrations which had no natural relation to the matter in hand, just
+because it amused him to indulge his fancy. The finished artist could
+not do this; he would hear, as it were, the false note, and reject it.
+But Browning, a natural artist, never became a perfect one.
+Nevertheless, as his poetry went on, he reached, by natural power,
+splendid description, as indeed I have fully confessed; but, on the
+other hand, one is never sure of him. He is never quite "inevitable."
+
+The attempt at deliberate natural description in _Pauline_, of which I
+have now spoken, is not renewed in _Paracelsus_. By the time he wrote
+that poem the movement and problem of the spirit of man had all but
+quenched his interest in natural scenery. Nature is only introduced as a
+background, almost a scenic background for the players, who are the
+passions, thoughts, and aspirations of the intellectual life of
+Paracelsus. It is only at the beginning of Part II. that we touch a
+landscape:
+
+    Over the waters in the vaporous West
+    The sun goes down as in a sphere of gold
+    Behind the arm of the city, which between;
+    With all the length of domes and minarets,
+    Athwart the splendour, black and crooked runs
+    Like a Turk verse along a scimitar.
+
+That is all; nothing but an introduction. Paracelsus turns in a moment
+from the sight, and absorbs himself in himself, just as Browning was
+then doing in his own soul. Nearly two thousand lines are then written
+before Nature is again touched upon, and then Festus and Paracelsus are
+looking at the dawn; and it is worth saying how in this description
+Browning's work on Nature has so greatly improved that one can scarcely
+believe he is the same poet who wrote the wavering descriptions of
+_Pauline_. This is close and clear:
+
+    Morn must be near.
+
+    FESTUS. Best ope the casement: see,
+    The night, late strewn with clouds and flying stars,
+    Is blank and motionless: how peaceful sleep
+    The tree-tops all together! Like an asp[6]
+    The wind slips whispering from bough to bough.
+
+           *       *       *
+
+    PARACELSUS. See, morn at length. The heavy darkness seems
+    Diluted, grey and clear without the stars;
+    The shrubs bestir and rouse themselves as if
+    Some snake, that weighed them down all night, let go
+    His hold; and from the East, fuller and fuller,
+    Day, like a mighty river, flowing in;
+    But clouded, wintry, desolate and cold.
+
+That is good, clear, and sufficient; and there the description should
+end. But Browning, driven by some small demon, adds to it three lines of
+mere observant fancy.
+
+    Yet see how that broad prickly star-shaped plant,
+    Half-down in the crevice, spreads its woolly leaves,
+    All thick and glistening with diamond dew.
+
+What is that for? To give local colour or reality? It does neither. It
+is mere childish artistry. Tennyson could not have done it. He knew when
+to stay his hand.[7]
+
+The finest piece of natural description in _Paracelsus_ is of the
+coming of Spring. It is full of the joy of life; it is inspired by a
+passionate thought, lying behind it, concerning man. It is still more
+inspired by his belief that God himself was eternal joy and filled the
+universe with rapture. Nowhere did Browning reach a greater height in
+his Nature poetry than in these lines, yet they are more a description,
+as usual, of animal life than of the beauty of the earth and sea:
+
+    Then all is still; earth is a wintry clod:
+    But spring-wind, like a dancing psaltress, passes
+    Over its breast to waken it, rare verdure
+    Buds tenderly upon rough banks, between
+    The withered tree-roots and the cracks of frost,
+    Like a smile striving with a wrinkled face;
+    The grass grows bright, the boughs are swoln with blooms
+    Like chrysalids impatient for the air,
+    The shining dorrs are busy, beetles run
+    Along the furrows, ants make their ado;
+    Above, birds fly in merry flocks, the lark
+    Soars up and up, shivering for very joy;
+    Afar the ocean sleeps; white fishing-gulls
+    Flit where the strand is purple with its tribe
+    Of nested limpets; savage creatures seek
+    Their loves in wood and plain--and God renews
+    His ancient rapture.
+
+Once more, in _Paracelsus_, there is the lovely lyric about the flowing
+of the Mayne. I have driven through that gracious country of low hill
+and dale and wide water-meadows, where under flowered banks only a foot
+high the slow river winds in gentleness; and this poem is steeped in the
+sentiment of the scenery. But, as before, Browning quickly slides away
+from the beauty of inanimate nature into a record of the animals that
+haunt the stream. He could not get on long with mountains and rivers
+alone. He must people them with breathing, feeling things; anything for
+life!
+
+    Thus the Mayne glideth
+    Where my Love abideth.
+    Sleep's no softer; it proceeds
+    On through lawns, on through meads,
+    On and on, whate'er befall,
+    Meandering and musical,
+    Though the niggard pasturage
+    Bears not on its shaven ledge
+    Aught but weeds and waving grasses
+    To view the river as it passes,
+    Save here and there a scanty patch
+    Of primroses too faint to catch
+    A weary bee.
+                And scarce it pushes
+    Its gentle way through strangling rushes
+    Where the glossy kingfisher
+    Flutters when noon-heats are near,
+    Glad the shelving banks to shun
+    Red and steaming in the sun,
+    Where the shrew-mouse with pale throat
+    Burrows, and the speckled stoat;
+    Where the quick sandpipers flit
+    In and out the marl and grit
+    That seems to breed them, brown as they:
+    Naught disturbs its quiet way,
+    Save some lazy stork that springs,
+    Trailing it with legs and wings,
+    Whom the shy fox from the hill
+    Rouses, creep he ne'er so still.
+
+"My heart, they loose my heart, those simple words," cries Paracelsus,
+and he was right. They tell of that which to see and love is better,
+wiser, than to probe and know all the problems of knowledge. But that is
+a truth not understood, not believed. And few there be who find it. And
+if Browning had found the secret of how to live more outside of his
+understanding than he did, or having found it, had not forgotten it, he
+would not perhaps have spoken more wisely for the good of man, but he
+would have more continuously written better poetry.
+
+The next poem in which he may be said to touch Nature is _Sordello_.
+_Strafford_ does not count, save for the charming song of the boat in
+music and moonlight, which the children sing. In _Sordello_, the problem
+of life, as in _Paracelsus_, is still the chief matter, but outward
+life, as not in _Paracelsus_, takes an equal place with inward life. And
+naturally, Nature, its changes and beauty, being outward, are more fully
+treated than in _Paracelsus_. But it is never treated for itself alone.
+It is made to image or reflect the sentiment of the man who sees it, or
+to illustrate a phase of his passion or his thought. But there is a
+closer grip upon it than before, a clearer definition, a greater power
+of concentrated expression of it, and especially, a fuller use of
+colour. Browning paints Nature now like a Venetian; the very shadows of
+objects are in colour. This new power was a kind of revelation to him,
+and he frequently uses it with a personal joy in its exercise. Things in
+Nature blaze in his poetry now and afterwards in gold, purple, the
+crimson of blood, in sunlit green and topaz, in radiant blue, in dyes of
+earthquake and eclipse. Then, when he has done his landscape thus in
+colour, he adds more; he places in its foreground one drop, one eye of
+still more flaming colour, to vivify and inflame the whole.
+
+The main landscape of _Sordello_ is the plain and the low pine-clad
+hills around Mantua; the half-circle of the deep lagoon which enarms the
+battlemented town; and the river Mincio, seen by Sordello when he comes
+out of the forest on the hill, as it enters and leaves the lagoon, and
+winds, a silver ribbon, through the plain. It is the landscape Vergil
+must have loved. A long bridge of more than a hundred arches, with
+towers of defence, crosses the marsh from the towered gateway of the
+walls to the mainland, and in the midst of the lagoon the deep river
+flows fresh and clear with a steady swiftness. Scarcely anywhere in
+North Italy is the upper sky more pure at dawn and even, and there is no
+view now so mystic in its desolation. Over the lagoon, and puffing from
+it, the mists, daily encrimsoned by sunrise and sunset, continually rise
+and disperse.
+
+The character and the peculiarities of this landscape Browning has
+seized and enshrined in verse. But his descriptions are so arranged as
+to reflect certain moments of crisis in the soul of Sordello. He does
+not describe this striking landscape for its own sake, but for the sake
+of his human subject. The lines I quote below describe noon-day on the
+lagoon, seen from the golden woods and black pines; and the vision of
+the plain, city and river, suddenly opening out from the wood,
+symbolises the soul of Sordello opening out from solitude "into the
+veritable business of mankind."
+
+                Then wide
+    Opened the great morass, shot every side
+    With flashing water through and through; a-shine,
+    Thick-steaming, all-alive. Whose shape divine
+    Quivered i' the farthest rainbow-vapour, glanced
+    Athwart the flying herons? He advanced,
+    But warily; though Mincio leaped no more,
+    Each footfall burst up in the marish-floor
+    A diamond jet.
+
+And then he somewhat spoils this excellent thing by a piece of detail
+too minute for the largeness of the impression. But how clear and how
+full of true sentiment it is; and how the image of Palma rainbowed in
+the mist, and of Sordello seeing her, fills the landscape with youthful
+passion!
+
+Here is the same view in the morning, when Mincio has come down in flood
+and filled the marsh:
+
+                Mincio, in its place,
+    Laughed, a broad water, in next morning's face,
+    And, where the mists broke up immense and white
+    I' the steady wind, burned like a spilth of light
+    Out of the crashing of a million stars.
+
+It were well to compare that brilliant piece of light with the grey
+water-sunset at Ferrara in the beginning of Book VI.
+
+                While eve slow sank
+    Down the near terrace to the farther bank,
+    And only one spot left from out the night
+    Glimmered upon the river opposite--
+    breadth of watery heaven like a bay,
+    A sky-like space of water, ray for ray,
+    And star for star, one richness where they mixed
+    As this and that wing of an angel, fixed,
+    Tumultuary splendours folded in
+    To die.
+
+As usual, Spring enchants him. The second book begins with her coming,
+and predicates the coming change in Sordello's soul.
+
+    The woods were long austere with snow; at last
+    Pink leaflets budded on the beech, and fast
+    Larches, scattered through pine-tree solitudes,
+    Brightened, as in the slumbrous heart of the woods
+    Our buried year, a witch, grew young again
+    To placid incantations, and that stain
+    About were from her cauldron, green smoke blent
+    With those black pines.
+
+Nor does he omit in _Sordello_ to recall two other favourite aspects of
+nature, long since recorded in _Pauline_, the ravine and the woodland
+spring. Just as Turner repeated in many pictures of the same place what
+he had first observed in it, so Browning recalled in various poems the
+first impressions of his youth. He had a curious love for a ravine with
+overhanging trees and a thin thread of water, looping itself round
+rocks. It occurs in the _Fireside_, it is taken up in his later poems,
+and up such a ravine Sordello climbs among the pines of Goito:
+
+    He climbed with (June at deep) some close ravine
+    Mid clatter of its million pebbles sheen,
+    Over which, singing soft, the runnel slipped
+    Elate with rains.
+
+Then, in _Sordello_, we come again across the fountain in the grove he
+draws in _Pauline_, now greatly improved in clearness and
+word-brightness--a real vision. Fate has given him here a fount
+
+    Of pure loquacious pearl, the soft tree-tent
+    Guards, with its face of reate and sedge, nor fail
+    The silver globules and gold-sparkling grail
+    At bottom--
+
+where the impulse of the water sends up the sand in a cone--a solitary
+loveliness of Nature that Coleridge and Tennyson have both drawn with a
+finer pencil than Browning. The other examples of natural description in
+_Sordello_, as well as those in _Balaustion_ I shall reserve till I
+speak of those poems. As to the dramas, they are wholly employed with
+humanity. In them man's soul has so overmastered Browning that they are
+scarcely diversified half a dozen times by any illustrations derived
+from Nature.
+
+We now come, with _The Ring and the Book_, to a clear division in his
+poetry of Nature. From this time forth Nature decays in his verse. Man
+masters it and drives it out. In _The Ring and the Book_, huge as it is,
+Nature rarely intrudes; the human passion of the matter is so great that
+it swallows up all Browning's interest. There is a little forky flashing
+description of the entrance to the Val d'Ema in Guido's first statement.
+Caponsacchi is too intensely gathered round the tragedy to use a single
+illustration from Nature. The only person who does use illustrations
+from Nature is the only one who is by age, by his life, by the apartness
+of his high place, capable of sufficient quiet and contemplation to
+think of Nature at all. This is the Pope.
+
+He illustrates with great vigour the way in which Guido destroyed all
+the home life which clung about him and himself remained dark and vile,
+by the burning of a nest-like hut in the Campagna, with all its vines
+and ivy and flowers; till nothing remains but the blackened walls of the
+malicious tower round which the hut had been built.
+
+He illustrates the sudden event which, breaking in on Caponsacchi's
+life, drew out of him his latent power and his inward good, by this
+vigorous description:
+
+    As when a thundrous midnight, with black air
+    That burns, rain-drops that blister, breaks a spell,
+    Draws out the excessive virtue of some sheathed
+    Shut unsuspected flower that hoards and hides
+    Immensity of sweetness.
+
+And the last illustration, in which the Pope hopes that Guido's soul may
+yet be saved by the suddenness of his death, is one of the finest
+pieces of natural description in Browning, and reads like one of his own
+memories:
+
+    I stood at Naples once, a night so dark
+    I could have scarce conjectured there was earth
+    Anywhere, sky or sea or world at all:
+    But the night's black was burst through by a blaze--
+    Thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore,
+    Through her whole length of mountain visible:
+    There lay the city thick and plain with spires,
+    And, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea.
+    So may the truth be flashed out by one blow,
+    And Guido see, one instant, and be saved.
+
+After _The Ring and the Book_, poor Nature, as one of Browning's
+mistresses, was somewhat neglected for a time, and he gave himself up to
+ugly representations of what was odd or twisted in humanity, to its
+smaller problems, like that contained in _Fifine at the Fair_, to its
+fantastic impulses, its strange madnesses, its basenesses, even its
+commonplace crimes. These subjects were redeemed by his steady effort to
+show that underneath these evil developments of human nature lay
+immortal good; and that a wise tolerance, based on this underlying
+godlikeness in man, was the true attitude of the soul towards the false
+and the stupid in mankind. This had been his attitude from the
+beginning. It differentiates him from Tennyson, who did not maintain
+that view; and at that point he is a nobler poet than Tennyson.
+
+But he became too much absorbed in the intellectual treatment of these
+side-issues in human nature. And I think that he was left unprotected
+from this or not held back from it by his having almost given up Nature
+in her relation to man as a subject for his poetry. To love that great,
+solemn and beautiful Creature, who even when she seems most merciless
+retains her glory and loveliness, keeps us from thinking too much on the
+lower problems of humanity, on its ignobler movements; holds before us
+infinite grandeur, infinite beauty, infinite order, and suggests and
+confirms within us eternal aspiration. Those intimations of the ideal
+and endless perfectness which are dimmed within us by the meaner aspects
+of human life, or by the sordid difficulties of thought which a sensual
+and wealth-seeking society present to us, are restored to us by her
+quiet, order and beauty. When he wrote _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Red
+Cotton Nightcap Country_, and _The Inn Album_, Nature had ceased to
+awaken the poetic passion in him, and his poetry suffered from the loss.
+Its interest lies in the narrow realm of intellectual analysis, not in
+the large realm of tragic or joyous passion. He became the dissector of
+corrupt bodies, not the creator of living beings.
+
+Nevertheless, in _Fifine at the Fair_ there are several intercalated
+illustrations from Nature, all of which are interesting and some
+beautiful. The sunset over Sainte-Marie and the lie Noirmoutier, with
+the birds who sing to the dead, and the coming of the nightwind and the
+tide, is as largely wrought as the description of the mountain rill--the
+"infant of mist and dew," and its voyage to the sea is minute and
+delicate. There is also that magnificent description of a sunset which I
+have already quoted. It is drawn to illustrate some remote point in the
+argument, and is far too magnificent for the thing it illustrates. Yet
+how few in this long poem, how remote from Browning's heart, are these
+touches of Nature.
+
+Again, in _The Inn Album_ there is a description of an English elm-tree,
+as an image of a woman who makes marriage life seem perfect, which is
+interesting because it is the third, and only the third, reference to
+English scenery in the multitude of Browning's verses. The first is in
+_Pauline_, the second in that poem, "Oh, to be in England," and this is
+the third. The woman has never ceased to gaze
+
+    On the great elm-tree in the open, posed
+    Placidly full in front, smooth hole, broad branch,
+    And leafage, one green plenitude of May.
+                ... bosomful
+    Of lights and shades, murmurs and silences,
+    Sun-warmth, dew-coolness, squirrel, bee, bird,
+    High, higher, highest, till the blue proclaims
+    "Leave Earth, there's nothing better till next step
+    Heavenward!"
+
+This, save in one line, is not felt or expressed with any of that
+passion which makes what a poet says completely right.
+
+Browning could not stay altogether in this condition, in which,
+moreover, his humour was also in abeyance; and in his next book,
+_Pacchiarotto, &c._, he broke away from these morbid subjects, and, with
+that recovery, recovered also some of his old love of Nature. The
+prologue to that book is poetry; and Nature (though he only describes an
+old stone wall in Italy covered with straying plants) is interwoven with
+his sorrow and his love. Then, all through the book, even in its most
+fantastic humour, Nature is not altogether neglected for humanity; and
+the poetry, which Browning seemed to have lost the power to create, has
+partly returned to him. That is also the case in _La Saisiaz_, and I
+have already spoken of the peculiar elements of the nature-poetry in
+that work. In the _Dramatic Idyls_, of which he was himself fond; and in
+_Jocoseria_, there is very little natural description. The subjects did
+not allow of it, but yet Nature sometimes glides in, and when she does,
+thrills the verse into a higher humanity. In _Ferishtah's Fancies_, a
+book full of flying charm, Nature has her proper place, and in the
+lyrics which close the stories she is not forgotten; but still there is
+not the care for her which once ran like a full river of delight through
+his landscape of human nature. He loved, indeed, that landscape of
+mankind the most, the plains and hills and woods of human life; but when
+he watered it with the great river of Nature his best work was done.
+Now, as life grew to a close, that river had too much dried up in his
+poetry.
+
+It was not that he had not the power to describe Nature if he cared. But
+he did not care. I have spoken of the invented descriptions of morn and
+noon and sunset in Gerard de Lairesse in the book which preceded
+_Asolando_. They have his trenchant power, words that beat out the scene
+like strokes on an anvil, but, curiously enough, they are quite
+unsuffused with human feeling; as if, having once divorced Nature from
+humanity, he never could bring them together again. Nor is this a mere
+theory. The Prologue to _Asolando_ supports it.
+
+That sorrowful poem, written, it seems, in the year he died (1889),
+reveals his position towards Nature when he had lost the power of youth
+to pour fire on the world. It is full of his last thinking. "The poet's
+age is sad," he says. "In youth his eye lent to everything in the
+natural world the colours of his own soul, the rainbow glory of
+imagination:
+
+    And now a flower is just a flower:
+      Man, bird, beast are but beast, bird, man--
+    Simply themselves, uncinct by dower
+      Of dyes which, when life's day began,
+    Round each in glory ran."
+
+"Ah! what would you have?" he says. "What is the best: things draped in
+colour, as by a lens, or the naked things themselves? truth ablaze, or
+falsehood's fancy haze? I choose the first."
+
+It is an old man's effort to make the best of age. For my part, I do not
+see that the things are the better for losing the colour the soul gives
+them. The things themselves are indifferent. But as seen by the soul,
+they are seen in God, and the colour and light which imagination gives
+them are themselves divine. Nor is their colour or light only in our
+imagination, but in themselves also, part of the glory and beauty of
+God. A flower is never only a flower, or a beast a beast. And so
+Browning would have said in the days when he was still a lover of Nature
+as well as of man, when he was still a faithful soldier in the army of
+imagination, a poet more than a philosopher at play. It is a sad
+business. He has not lost his eagerness to advance, to climb beyond the
+flaming walls, to find God in his heaven. He has not lost the great
+hopes with which he began, nor the ideals he nursed of old. He has not
+lost his fighting power, nor his cheerful cry that life is before him in
+the fulness of the world to come. The _Reverie_ and the _Epilogue_ to
+_Asolando_ are noble statements of his courage, faith, and joy. There is
+nothing sad there, nothing to make us beat the breast. But there is
+sadness in this abandonment of the imaginative glory with which once he
+clothed the world of Nature; and he ought to have retained it. He would
+have done so had he not forgotten Nature in anatomising man.
+
+However, he goes on with his undying effort to make the best of things,
+and though he has lost his rapture in Nature, he has not lost his main
+theory of man's life and of the use of the universe. The end of this
+_Prologue_ puts it as clearly as it was put in _Paracelsus_. Nothing is
+changed in that.
+
+"At Asolo," he continues, "my Asolo, when I was young, all natural
+objects were palpably clothed with fire. They mastered me, not I them.
+Terror was in their beauty. I was like Moses before the Bush that
+burned. I adored the splendour I saw. Then I was in danger of being
+content with it; of mistaking the finite for the infinite beauty. To be
+satisfied--that was the peril. Now I see the natural world as it is,
+without the rainbow hues the soul bestowed upon it. Is that well? In one
+sense yes.
+
+    And now? The lambent flame is--where?
+      Lost from the naked world: earth, sky,
+    Hill, vale, tree, flower--Italia's rare
+      O'er-running beauty crowds the eye--
+    But flame?--The Bush is bare.
+
+All is distinct, naked, clear, Nature and nothing else. Have I lost
+anything in getting down to fact instead of to fancy? Have I shut my
+eyes in pain--pain for disillusion? No--now I know that my home is not
+in Nature; there is no awe and splendour in her which can keep me with
+her. Oh, far beyond is the true splendour, the infinite source of awe
+and love which transcends her:
+
+    No, for the purged ear apprehends
+      Earth's import, not the eye late dazed:
+    The Voice said "Call my works thy friends!
+      At Nature dost thou shrink amazed?
+    God is it who transcends."
+
+All Browning is in that way of seeing the matter; but he forgets that he
+could see it in the same fashion while he still retained the imaginative
+outlook on the world of Nature. And the fact is that he did do so in
+_Paracelsus_, in _Easter-Day_, in a host of other poems. There was then
+no need for him to reduce to naked fact the glory with which young
+imagination clothed the world, in order to realise that God transcended
+Nature. He had conceived that truth and believed it long ago. And this
+explanation, placed here, only tells us that he had lost his ancient
+love of Nature, and it is sorrowful to understand it of him.
+
+Finally, the main contentions of this chapter, which are drawn from a
+chronological view of Browning's treatment of Nature, are perhaps worth
+a summary. The first is that, though the love of Nature was always less
+in him than his love of human nature, yet for the first half of his work
+it was so interwoven with his human poetry that Nature suggested to him
+humanity and humanity Nature. And these two, as subjects for thought and
+feeling, were each uplifted and impassioned, illustrated and developed,
+by this intercommunion. That was a true and high position. Humanity was
+first, Nature second in Browning's poetry, but both were linked together
+in a noble marriage; and at that time he wrote his best poetry.
+
+The second thing this chronological treatment of his Nature-poetry
+shows, is that his interest in human nature pushed out his love of
+Nature, gradually at first, but afterwards more swiftly, till Nature
+became almost non-existent in his poetry. With that his work sank down
+into intellectual or ethical exercises, in which poetry decayed.
+
+It shows, thirdly, how the love of Nature, returning, but returning with
+diminished power, entered again into his love of human nature, and
+renewed the passion of his poetry, its singing, and its health. But
+reconciliations of this kind do not bring back all the ancient affection
+and happiness. Nature and humanity never lived together in his poetry in
+as vital a harmony as before, nor was the work done on them as good as
+it was of old. A broken marriage is not repaired by an apparent
+condonation. Nature and humanity, though both now dwelt in him, kept
+separate rooms. Their home-life was destroyed. Browning had been drawn
+away by a Fifine of humanity. He never succeeded in living happily again
+with Elvire; and while our intellectual interest in his work remained,
+our poetic interest in it lessened. We read it for mental and ethical
+entertainment, not for ideal joy.
+
+No; if poetry is to _be_ perfectly written; if the art is to be brought
+to its noblest height; if it is to continue to lift the hearts of men
+into the realm where perfection lives; if it is to glow, an unwearied
+fire, in the world; the love of Nature must be justly mingled in it
+with the love of humanity. The love of humanity must be first, the love
+of Nature second, but they must not be divorced. When they are, when the
+love of Nature forms the only subject, or when the love of Man forms the
+only subject, poetry decays and dies.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[5] Creatures accordant with the place?
+
+[6] Browning, even more than Shelley, was fond of using the snake in his
+poetry. Italy is in that habit.
+
+[7] There is a fine picture of the passing of a hurricane in
+_Paracelsus_ (p. 67, vol i.) which illustrates this inability to stop
+when he has done all he needs. Paracelsus speaks:
+
+                The hurricane is spent,
+    And the good boat speeds through the brightening weather;
+    But is it earth or sea that heaves below?
+    The gulf rolls like a meadow-swell, o'erstrewn
+    With ravaged boughs and remnants of the shore;
+    And now, some islet, loosened from the land,
+    Swims past with all its trees, sailing to ocean:
+    _And now the air is full of uptorn canes._
+    _Light strippings from the fan-trees, tamarisks_
+    _Unrooted, with their birds still clinging to them,_
+    _All high in the wind_. Even so my varied life
+    Drifts by me.
+
+I think that the lines I have italicised should have been left out. They
+weaken what he has well done.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+_BROWNING'S THEORY OF HUMAN LIFE_
+
+_PAULINE AND PARACELSUS_
+
+
+To isolate Browning's view of Nature, and to leave it behind us, seemed
+advisable before speaking of his work as a poet of mankind. We can now
+enter freely on that which is most distinctive, most excellent in his
+work--his human poetry; and the first thing that meets us and in his
+very first poems, is his special view of human nature, and of human
+life, and of the relation of both to God. It marks his originality that
+this view was entirely his own. Ancient thoughts of course are to be
+found in it, but his combination of them is original amongst the English
+poets. It marks his genius that he wrought out this conception while he
+was yet so young. It is partly shaped in _Pauline_; it is fully set
+forth in _Paracelsus_. And it marks his consistency of mind that he
+never changed it. I do not think he ever added to it or developed it. It
+satisfied him when he was a youth, and when he was an old man. We have
+already seen it clearly expressed in the _Prologue_ to _Asolando_.
+
+That theory needs to be outlined, for till it is understood Browning's
+poetry cannot be understood or loved as fully as we should desire to
+love it. It exists in _Pauline_, but all its elements are in solution;
+uncombined, but waiting the electric flash which will mix them, in due
+proportions, into a composite substance, having a lucid form, and
+capable of being used. That flash was sent through the confused elements
+of _Pauline_, and the result was _Paracelsus_.
+
+I will state the theory first, and then, lightly passing through
+_Pauline_ and _Paracelsus_, re-tell it. It is fitting to apologise for
+the repetition which this method of treatment will naturally cause; but,
+considering that the theory underlies every drama and poem that he wrote
+during sixty years, such repetition does not seem unnecessary. There are
+many who do not easily grasp it, or do not grasp it at all, and they may
+be grateful. As to those who do understand it, they will be happy in
+their anger with any explanation of what they know so well.
+
+He asks what is the secret of the world: "of man and man's true purpose,
+path and fate." He proposes to understand "God-and his works and all
+God's intercourse with the human soul."
+
+We are here, he thinks, to grow enough to be able to take our part in
+another life or lives. But we are surrounded by limitations which baffle
+and retard our growth. That is miserable, but not so much as we think;
+for the failures these limitations cause prevent us--and this is a main
+point in Browning's view--from being content with our condition on the
+earth. There is that within us which is always endeavouring to transcend
+those limitations, and which believes in their final dispersal. This
+aspiration rises to something higher than any possible actual on earth.
+It is never worn out; it is the divine in us; and when it seems to
+decay, God renews it by spiritual influences from without and within,
+coming to us from nature as seen by us, from humanity as felt by us, and
+from himself who dwells in us.
+
+But then, unless we find out and submit to those limitations, and work
+within them, life is useless, so far as any life is useless. But while
+we work within them, we see beyond them an illimitable land, and thirst
+for it. This battle between the dire necessity of working in chains and
+longing for freedom, between the infinite destiny of the soul and the
+baffling of its effort to realise its infinitude on earth, makes the
+storm and misery of life. We may try to escape that tempest and sorrow
+by determining to think, feel, and act only within our limitations, to
+be content with them as Goethe said; but if we do, we are worse off than
+before. We have thrown away our divine destiny. If we take this world
+and are satisfied with it, cease to aspire, beyond our limits, to full
+perfection in God; if our soul should ever say, "I want no more; what I
+have here--the pleasure, fame, knowledge, beauty or love of this
+world--is all I need or care for," then we are indeed lost. That is the
+last damnation. The worst failure, the deepest misery, is better than
+contentment with the success of earth; and seen in this light, the
+failures and misery of earth are actually good things, the cause of a
+chastened joy. They open to us the larger light. They suggest, and in
+Browning's belief they proved, that this life is but the threshold of an
+infinite life, that our true life is beyond, that there is an infinite
+of happiness, of knowledge, of love, of beauty which we shall attain.
+Our failures are prophecies of eternal successes. To choose the finite
+life is to miss the infinite Life! O fool, to claim the little cup of
+water earth's knowledge offers to thy thirst, or the beauty or love of
+earth, when the immeasurable waters of the Knowledge, Beauty and Love of
+the Eternal Paradise are thine beyond the earth.
+
+Two things are then clear: (1) The attainment of our desires for
+perfection, the satisfaction of our passion for the infinite, is
+forbidden to us on earth by the limitations of life. We are made
+imperfect; we are kept imperfect here; and we must do all our work
+within the limits this natural imperfection makes. (2) We must,
+nevertheless, not cease to strive towards the perfection unattainable on
+earth, but which shall be attained hereafter. Our destiny, the God
+within us, demands that. And we lose it, if we are content with our
+earthly life, even with its highest things, with knowledge, beauty, or
+with love.
+
+Hence, the foundation of Browning's theory is a kind of Original Sin in
+us, a natural defectiveness deliberately imposed on us by God, which
+prevents us attaining any absolute success on earth. And this
+defectiveness of nature is met by the truth, which, while we aspire, we
+know--that God will fulfil all noble desire in a life to come.
+
+We must aspire then, but at the same time all aspiring is to be
+conterminous with steady work within our limits. Aspiration to the
+perfect is not to make us idle, indifferent to the present, but to drive
+us on. Its passion teaches us, as it urges into action all our powers,
+what we can and what we cannot do. That is, it teaches us, through the
+action it engenders, what our limits are; and when we know them, the
+main duties of life rise clear. The first of these is, to work patiently
+within our limits; and the second is the apparent contradiction of the
+first, never to be satisfied with our limits, or with the results we
+attain within them. Then, having worked within them, but always looked
+beyond them, we, as life closes, learn the secret. The failures of earth
+prove the victory beyond: "For--
+
+                what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence
+      For the fulness of the days? Have we withered or agonised?
+    Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue thence?
+      Why rushed the discords in but that harmony should be prized?
+    Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear.
+      Each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and the woe:
+    But God has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear;
+      The rest may reason, and welcome: 'tis we musicians know."
+
+    _Abt Vogler_.
+
+Finally, the root and flower of this patient but uncontented work is
+Love for man because of his being in God, because of his high and
+immortal destiny. All that we do, whether failure or not, builds up the
+perfect humanity to come, and flows into the perfection of God in whom
+is the perfection of man. This love, grounded on this faith, brings joy
+into life; and, in this joy of love, we enter into the eternal temple of
+the Life to come. Love opens Heaven while Earth closes us round. At last
+limitations cease to trouble us. They are lost in the vision, they
+bring no more sorrow, doubt or baffling. Therefore, in this confused
+chaotic time on earth--
+
+    Earn the means first. God surely will contrive
+      Use for our earning.
+    Others mistrust, and say: "But time escapes;
+      Live now or never!"
+    He said, "What's time? Leave Now for dogs and apes!
+      Man has Forever."
+
+    _A Grammarian's Funeral_.
+
+This is a sketch of his explanation of life. The expression of it began
+in _Pauline_. Had that poem been as imitative, as poor as the first
+efforts of poets usually are, we might leave it aside. But though, as he
+said, "good draughtsmanship and right handling were far beyond the
+artist at that time," though "with repugnance and purely of necessity"
+he republished it, he did republish it; and he was right. It was crude
+and confused, but the stuff in it was original and poetic; wonderful
+stuff for a young man.
+
+The first design of it was huge. _Pauline_ is but a fragment of a poem
+which was to represent, not one but various types of human life. It
+became only the presentation of the type of the poet, the first sketch
+of the youth of Sordello. The other types conceived were worked up into
+other poems.
+
+The hero in _Pauline_ hides in his love for Pauline from a past he
+longed to forget. He had aspired to the absolute beauty and goodness,
+and the end was vanity and vexation. The shame of this failure beset him
+from the past, and the failure was caused because he had not been true
+to the aspirations which took him beyond himself. When he returned to
+self, the glory departed. And a fine simile of his soul as a young witch
+whose blue eyes,
+
+    As she stood naked by the river springs,
+    Drew down a God,
+
+who, as he sat in the sunshine on her knees singing of heaven, saw the
+mockery in her eyes and vanished, tells of how the early ravishment
+departed, slain by self-scorn that followed on self-worship. But one
+love and reverence remained--that for Shelley, the Sun-treader, and kept
+him from being "wholly lost." To strengthen this one self-forgetful
+element, the love of Pauline enters in, and the new impulse brings back
+something of the ancient joy. "Let me take it," he cries, "and sing on
+again
+
+                fast as fancies come;
+    Rudely, the verse being as the mood it paints,"--
+
+a line which tells us how Browning wished his metrical movement to be
+judged. This is the exordium, and it is already full of his theory of
+life--the soul forced from within to aspire to the perfect whole, the
+necessary failure, the despair, the new impulse to love arising out of
+the despair; failure making fresh growth, fresh uncontentment. God has
+sent a new impulse from without; let me begin again.
+
+Then, in the new light, he strips his mind bare. What am I? What have I
+done? Where am I going?
+
+The first element in his soul, he thinks, is a living personality,
+linked to a principle of restlessness,
+
+    Which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all.
+
+And this would plunge him into the depths of self were it not for that
+Imagination in him whose power never fails to bear him beyond himself;
+and is finally in him a need, a trust, a yearning after God; whom, even
+when he is most lost, he feels is always acting on him, and at every
+point of life transcending him.
+
+And Imagination began to create, and made him at one with all men and
+women of whom he had read (the same motive is repeated in _Sordello_),
+but especially at one with those out of the Greek world he loved--"a God
+wandering after Beauty"--a high-crested chief
+
+    Sailing with troops of friends to Tenedos.
+
+Never was anything more clear than these lives he lived beyond himself;
+and the lines in which he records the vision have all the sharpness and
+beauty of his after-work--
+
+    I had not seen a work of lofty art.
+    Nor woman's beauty nor sweet Nature's face,
+    Yet, I say, never morn broke clear as those
+    On the dim-clustered isles in the blue sea,
+    The deep groves and white temples and wet caves:
+    And nothing ever will surprise me now--
+    Who stood beside the naked Swift-footed,
+    Who bound my forehead with Proserpine's hair.
+
+Yet, having this infinite world of beauty, he aimed low; lost in
+immediate wants, striving only for the mortal and the possible, while
+all the time there lived in him, breathing with keen desire, powers
+which, developed, would make him at one with the infinite Life of God.
+
+But having thus been untrue to his early aspiration, he fell into the
+sensual life, like Paracelsus, and then, remorseful, sought peace in
+self-restraint; but no rest, no contentment was gained that way. It is
+one of Browning's root-ideas that peace is not won by repression of the
+noble passions, but by letting them loose in full freedom to pursue
+after their highest aims. Not in restraint, but in the conscious
+impetuosity of the soul towards the divine realities, is the wisdom of
+life. Many poems are consecrated to this idea.
+
+So, cleansing his soul by ennobling desire, he sought to realise his
+dreams in the arts, in the creation and expression of pure Beauty. And
+he followed Poetry and Music and Painting, and chiefly explored passion
+and mind in the great poets. Fed at these deep springs, his soul rose
+into keen life; his powers burst forth, and gazing on all systems and
+schemes of philosophy and government, he heard ineffable things
+unguessed by man. All Plato entered into him; he vowed himself to
+liberty and the new world where "men were to be as gods and earth us
+heaven." Thus, yet here on earth, not only beyond the earth, he would
+attain the Perfect. Man also shall attain it; and so thinking, he
+turned, like Sordello, to look at and learn mankind, pondering "how best
+life's end might be attained--an end comprising every joy."
+
+And even as he believed, the glory vanished; everything he had hoped for
+broke to pieces:
+
+    First went my hopes of perfecting mankind,
+    Next--faith in them, and then in freedom's self
+    And virtue's self, then my own motives, ends
+    And aims and loves, and human love went last.
+
+And then, with the loss of all these things of the soul which bear a
+man's desires into the invisible and unreachable, he gained the world,
+and success in it. All the powers of the mere Intellect, that
+grey-haired deceiver whose name is Archimago, were his;--wit, mockery,
+analytic force, keen reasoning on the visible, the Understanding's
+absolute belief in itself; its close grasp on what it called facts, and
+its clear application of knowledge for clear ends. God, too, had
+vanished in this intellectual satisfaction; and in the temple of his
+soul, where He had been worshipped, troops of shadows now knelt to the
+man whose intellect, having grasped all knowledge, was content; and
+hailed him as king.
+
+The position he describes is like that Wordsworth states in the
+_Prelude_ to have been his, when, after the vanishing of his aspirations
+for man which followed the imperialistic fiasco of the French
+Revolution, he found himself without love or hope, but with full power
+to make an intellectual analysis of nature and of human nature, and was
+destroyed thereby. It is the same position which Paracelsus attains and
+which is followed by the same ruin. It is also, so far as its results
+are concerned, the position of the Soul described by Tennyson in _The
+Palace of Art_.
+
+Love, emotion, God are shut out. Intellect and knowledge of the world's
+work take their place. And the result is the slow corrosion of the soul
+by pride. "I have nursed up energies," says Browning, "they will prey on
+me." He feels this and breaks away from its death. "My heart must
+worship," he cries. The "shadows" know this feeling is against them, and
+they shout in answer:
+
+    "Thyself, thou art our king!"
+
+But the end of that is misery. Therefore he begins to aspire again, but
+still, not for the infinite of perfection beyond, but for a finite
+perfection on, the earth.
+
+"I will make every joy here my own," he cries, "and then I will die." "I
+will have one rapture to fill all the soul." "All knowledge shall be
+mine." It is the aspiration of Paracelsus. "I will live in the whole of
+Beauty, and here it shall be mine." It is the aspiration of Aprile.
+"Then, having this perfect human soul, master of all powers, I shall
+break forth, at some great crisis in history, and lead the world." It is
+the very aspiration of Sordello.
+
+But when he tries for this, he finds failure at every point. Everywhere
+he is limited; his soul demands what his body refuses to fulfil; he is
+always baffled, falling short, chained down and maddened by
+restrictions; unable to use what he conceives, to grasp as a tool what
+he can reach in Thought; hating himself; imagining what might be, and
+driven back from it in despair.
+
+Even in his love for Pauline, in which he has skirted the infinite and
+known that his soul cannot accept finality--he finds that in him which
+is still unsatisfied.
+
+What does this puzzle mean? "It means," he answers, "that this earth's
+life is not my only sphere,
+
+    Can I so narrow sense but that in life
+    Soul still exceeds it?"
+
+Yet, he will try again. He has lived in all human life, and his craving
+is still athirst. He has not yet tried Nature herself. She seems to
+have undying beauty, and his feeling for her is now, of course, doubled
+by his love for Pauline. "Come with me," he cries to her, "come out of
+the world into natural beauty"; and there follows a noble description of
+a lovely country into which he passes from a mountain glen--morning,
+noon, afternoon and evening all described--and the emotion of the whole
+rises till it reaches the topmost height of eagerness and joy, when,
+suddenly, the whole fire is extinguished--
+
+      I am concentrated--I feel;
+    But my soul saddens when it looks beyond:
+    I cannot be immortal, taste all joy.
+
+    O God, where do they tend--these struggling aims?
+    What would I have? What is this "sleep" which seems
+    To bound all? Can there be a "waking" point
+    Of crowning life?
+
+           *       *       *
+
+    And what is that I hunger for but God?
+
+So, having worked towards perfection, having realised that he cannot
+have it here, he sees at last that the failures of earth are a prophecy
+of a perfection to come. He claims the infinite beyond. "I believe," he
+cries, "in God and truth and love. Know my last state is happy, free
+from doubt or touch of fear."
+
+That is Browning all over. These are the motives of a crowd of poems,
+varied through a crowd of examples; never better shaped than in the
+trenchant and magnificent end of _Easter-Day_, where the questions and
+answers are like the flashing and clashing of sharp scimitars. Out of
+the same quarry from which _Pauline_ was hewn the rest were hewn. They
+are polished, richly sculptured, hammered into fair form, but the stone
+is the same. Few have been so consistent as Browning, few so true to
+their early inspiration. He is among those happy warriors
+
+                Who, when brought
+    Among the tasks of real life, have wrought
+    Upon the plan that pleased their boyish thought.
+
+This, then, is _Pauline_; I pass on to _Paracelsus_. _Paracelsus_, in
+order to give the poem a little local colour, opens at Wuerzburg in a
+garden, and in the year 1512. But it is not a poem which has to do with
+any place or any time. It belongs only to the country of the human soul.
+The young student Paracelsus is sitting with his friends Festus and
+Michal, on the eve of his departure to conquer the whole world by
+knowledge. They make a last effort to retain him, but even as he listens
+to their arguments his eyes are far away--
+
+    As if where'er he gazed there stood a star,
+
+so strong, so deep is desire to attain his aim.
+
+For Paracelsus aims to know the whole of knowledge. Quiet and its
+charms, this homelike garden of still work, make their appeal in vain.
+"God has called me," he cries; "these burning desires to know all are
+his voice in me; and if I stay and plod on here, I reject his call who
+has marked me from mankind. I must reach pure knowledge. That is my only
+aim, my only reward."
+
+Then Festus replies: "In this solitariness of aim, all other interests
+of humanity are left out. Will knowledge, alone, give you enough for
+life? You, a man!" And again: "You discern your purpose clearly; have
+you any security of attaining it? Is it not more than mortal power is
+capable of winning?" Or again: "Have you any knowledge of the path to
+knowledge?" Or, once more, "Is anything in your mind so clear as this,
+your own desire to be singly famous?"
+
+"All this is nothing," Paracelsus answers; "the restless force within me
+will overcome all difficulties. God does not give that fierce energy
+without giving also that which it desires. And, I am chosen out of all
+the world to win this glory."
+
+"Why not then," says Festus, "make use of knowledge already gained? Work
+here; what knowledge will you gain in deserts?"
+
+"I have tried all the knowledge of the past," Paracelsus replies, "and
+found it a contemptible failure. Others were content with the scraps
+they won. Not I! I want the whole; the source and sum of divine and
+human knowledge, and though I craze as even one truth expands its
+infinitude before me, I go forth alone, rejecting all that others have
+done, to prove my own soul. I shall arrive at last. And as to mankind,
+in winning perfect knowledge I shall serve them; but then, all
+intercourse ends between them and me. I will not be served by those I
+serve."
+
+"Oh," answers Festus, "is that cause safe which produces carelessness of
+human love? You have thrown aside all the helps of human knowledge; now
+you reject all sympathy. No man can thrive who dares to claim to serve
+the race, while he is bound by no single tie to the race. You would be a
+being knowing not what Love is--a monstrous spectacle!"
+
+"That may be true," Paracelsus replies, "but for the time I will have
+nothing to do with feeling. My affections shall remain at rest, and
+then, _when_ I have attained my single aim, when knowledge is all mine,
+my affections will awaken purified and chastened by my knowledge. Let
+me, unhampered by sympathy, win my victory. And I go forth certain of
+victory."
+
+    Are there not, Festus, are there not, dear Michal,
+    Two points in the adventure of the diver:
+    One--when, a beggar, he prepares to plunge;
+    One--when, a prince, he rises with his pearl?
+    Festus, I plunge!
+
+    FESTUS.          We wait you when you rise.
+
+So ends the first part, and the second opens ten years afterwards in a
+Greek Conjurer's house in Constantinople, with Paracelsus writing down
+the result of his work. And the result is this:
+
+"I have made a few discoveries, but I could not stay to use them. Nought
+remains but a ceaseless, hungry pressing forward, a vision now and then
+of truth; and I--I am old before my hour: the adage is true--
+
+    Time fleets, youth fades, life is an empty dream;
+
+and now I would give a world to rest, even in failure!
+
+"This is all my gain. Was it for this," he cries, "I subdued my life,
+lost my youth, rooted out love; for the sake of this wolfish thirst of
+knowledge?" No dog, said Faust, in Goethe's poem, driven to the same
+point by the weariness of knowledge, no dog would longer live this life.
+My tyrant aim has brought me into a desert; worse still, the purity of
+my aim is lost. Can I truly say that I have worked for man alone? Sadder
+still, if I had found that which I sought, should I have had power to
+use it? O God, Thou who art pure mind, spare my mind. Thus far, I have
+been a man. Let me conclude, a man! Give me back one hour of my young
+energy, that I may use and finish what I know.
+
+"And God is good: I started sure of that; and he may still renew my
+heart.
+
+                True, I am worn;
+    But who clothes summer, who is life itself?
+    God, that created all things, can renew!"
+
+At this moment the voice of Aprile is heard singing the song of the
+poets, who, having great gifts, refused to use them, or abused them, or
+were too weak; and who therefore live apart from God, mourning for ever;
+who gaze on life, but live no more. He breaks in on Paracelsus, and, in
+a long passage of overlapping thoughts, Aprile--who would love
+infinitely and be loved, aspiring to realise every form of love, as
+Paracelsus has aspired to realise the whole of knowledge--makes
+Paracelsus feel that love is what he wants. And then, when Paracelsus
+realises this, Aprile in turn realises that he wants knowledge. Each
+recognises that he is the complement of the other, that knowledge is
+worthless without love, and love incapable of realising its aspirations
+without knowledge--as if love did not contain the sum of knowledge
+necessary for fine being. Both have failed; and it seems, at first, that
+they failed because they did not combine their aims. But the chief
+reason of their failure--and this is, indeed, Browning's main point--is
+that each of them tried to do more than our limits on earth permit.
+Paracelsus would have the whole sum of knowledge, Aprile nothing less
+than the whole of love, and, in this world. It is impossible; yet, were
+it possible, could they have attained the sum of knowledge and of love
+on earth and been satisfied therewith, they would have shut out the
+infinite of knowledge and love beyond them in the divine land, and been,
+in their satisfaction, more hopelessly lost than they are in their
+present wretchedness. Failure that leaves an unreached ideal before the
+soul is in reality a greater boon than success which thinks perfect
+satisfaction has been reached. Their aim at perfection is right: what is
+wrong is their view that failure is ruin, and not a prophecy of a
+greater glory to come. Could they have thought perfection were attained
+on earth--were they satisfied with anything this world can give, no
+longer stung with hunger for the infinite--all Paradise, with the
+illimitable glories, were closed to them!
+
+Few passages are more beautiful in English poetry than that in which
+Aprile narrates his youthful aspiration: how, loving all things
+infinitely, he wished to throw them into absolute beauty of form by
+means of all the arts, for the love of men, and receive from men love
+for having revealed beauty, and merge at last in God, the Eternal Love.
+This was his huge aim, his full desire.
+
+Few passages are more pathetic than that in which he tells his failure
+and its cause. "Time is short; the means of life are limited; we have
+no means answering to our desires. Now I am wrecked; for the
+multitudinous images of beauty which filled my mind forbade my seizing
+upon one which I could have shaped. I often wished to give one to the
+world, but the others came round and baffled me; and, moreover, I could
+not leave the multitude of beauty for the sake of one beauty. Unless I
+could embody all I would embody none.
+
+"And, afterwards, when a cry came from man, 'Give one ray even of your
+hoarded light to us,' and I tried for man's sake to select one, why,
+then, mists came--old memories of a thousand sweetnesses, a storm of
+images--till it was impossible to choose; and so I failed, and life is
+ended.
+
+"But could I live I would do otherwise. I would give a trifle out of
+beauty, as an example by which men could guess the rest and love it all;
+one strain from an angel's song; one flower from the distant land, that
+men might know that such things were. Then, too, I would put common life
+into loveliness, so that the lowest hind would find me beside him to put
+his weakest hope and fear into noble language. And as I thus lived with
+men, and for them, I should win from them thoughts fitted for their
+progress, the very commonest of which would come forth in beauty, for
+they would have been born in a soul filled full of love. This should now
+be my aim: no longer that desire to embrace the whole of beauty which
+isolates a man from his fellows; but to realise enough of loveliness to
+give pleasure to men who desire to love. Therefore, I should live, still
+aspiring to the whole, still uncontent, but waiting for another life to
+gain the whole; but at the same time content, for man's sake, to work
+within the limitations of life; not grieving either for failure, because
+love given and received makes failure pleasure. In truth, the failure to
+grasp all on earth makes, if we love, the certainty of a success beyond
+the earth."
+
+And Paracelsus listening and applying what Aprile says to his old desire
+to grasp, apart from men, the whole of knowledge as Aprile had desired
+to grasp the whole of love, learns the truth at last, and confesses it:
+
+    Love me henceforth, Aprile, while I learn
+    To love; and, merciful God, forgive us both!
+    We wake at length from weary dreams; but both
+    Have slept in fairy-land: though dark and drear
+    Appears the world before us, we no less
+    Wake with our wrists and ankles jewelled still.
+    I too have sought to KNOW as thou to LOVE--
+    Excluding love as thou refusedst knowledge.
+
+We are halves of a dissevered world, and we must never part till the
+Knower love, and thou, the Lover, know, and both are saved.
+
+"No, no; that is not all," Aprile answers, and dies. "Our perfection is
+not in ourselves but in God. Not our strength, but our weakness is our
+glory. Not in union with me, with earthly love alone, will you find the
+perfect life. I am not that you seek. It is God the King of Love, his
+world beyond, and the infinite creations Love makes in it."
+
+But Paracelsus does not grasp that last conclusion. He only understands
+that he has left out love in his aim, and therefore failed. He does not
+give up the notion of attainment upon earth. He cannot lose the first
+imprint of his idea of himself--his lonely grasp of the whole of
+Knowledge.
+
+The next two parts of the poem do not strengthen much the main
+thoughts. Paracelsus tries to work out the lesson learnt from Aprile--to
+add love to knowledge, to aspire to that fulness in God. But he does not
+love enough. He despises those who follow him for the sake of his
+miracles, yet he desires their worship. Moreover, the pride of knowledge
+still clings to him; he cannot help thinking it higher than love; and
+the two together drive him into the thought that this world must give
+him satisfaction. So, he puts aside the ideal aim. But here also he is
+baffled. Those who follow him as the great teacher ask of him signs. He
+gives these; and he finds at Basel that he has sunk into the desire of
+vulgar fame, and prostituted his knowledge; and, sick of this, beaten
+back from his noble ambitions, he determines to have something at least
+out of earth, and chooses at Colmar the life of sensual pleasure. "I
+still aspire," he cries. "I will give the night to study, but I will
+keep the day for the enjoyment of the senses. Thus, intellect and sense
+woven together, I shall at least have attained something. If I do not
+gain knowledge I shall have gained sensual pleasure. Man I despise and
+hate, and God has deceived me. I take the world." But, even while he
+says this, his ancient aspiration lives so much in him that he scorns
+himself for his fall as much as he scorns the crowd.
+
+Then comes the last scene, when, at Salzburg, he returns to find his
+friend Festus, and to die. In the hour of his death he reviews his whole
+life, his aims, their failure and the reason of it, and yet dies
+triumphant for he has found the truth.
+
+I pass over the pathetic delirium in which Paracelsus thinks that
+Aprile is present, and cries for his hand and sympathy while Festus is
+watching by the couch. At last he wakes, and knows his friend, and that
+he is dying. "I am happy," he cries; "my foot is on the threshold of
+boundless life; I see the whole whirl and hurricane of life behind me;
+all my life passes by, and I know its purpose, to what end it has
+brought me, and whither I am going. I will tell you all the meaning of
+life. Festus, my friend, tell it to the world.
+
+"There was a time when I was happy; the secret of life was in that
+happiness." "When, when was that?" answers Festus, "all I hope that
+answer will decide."
+
+    PAR. When, but the time I vowed myself to man?
+
+    FEST. Great God, thy judgments are inscrutable!
+
+Then he explains. "There are men, so majestical is our nature, who,
+hungry for joy and truth, win more and more of both, and know that life
+is infinite progress in God. This they win by long and slow battle. But
+there are those, of whom I was one"--and here Browning draws the man of
+genius--"who are born at the very point to which these others, the men
+of talent, have painfully attained. By intuition genius knows, and I
+knew at once, what God is, what we are, what life is. Alas! I could not
+use the knowledge aright. There is an answer to the passionate longings
+of the heart for fulness, and I knew it. And the answer is this: Live in
+all things outside of yourself by love and you will have joy. That is
+the life of God; it ought to be our life. In him it is accomplished and
+perfect; but in all created things it is a lesson learned slowly
+against difficulty.
+
+"Thus I knew the truth, but I was led away from it. I broke down from
+thinking of myself, my fame, and of this world. I had not love enough,
+and I lost the truth for a time. But whatever my failures were, I never
+lost sight of it altogether. I never was content with myself or with the
+earth. Out of my misery I cried for the joy God has in living outside of
+himself in love of all things."
+
+Then, thrilled with this thought, he breaks forth into a most noble
+description--new in English poetry, new in feeling and in thought,
+enough of itself to lift Browning on to his lofty peak--first of the joy
+of God in the Universe he makes incessantly by pouring out of himself
+his life, and, secondly, of the joy of all things in God. "Where dwells
+enjoyment there is He." But every realised enjoyment looks forward, even
+in God, to a new and higher sphere of distant glory, and when that is
+reached, to another sphere beyond--
+
+                thus climbs
+    Pleasure its heights for ever and for ever.
+
+Creation is God's joyous self-giving. The building of the frame of earth
+was God's first joy in Earth. That made him conceive a greater joy--the
+joy of clothing the earth, of making life therein--of the love which in
+animals, and last in man, multiplies life for ever.
+
+So there is progress of all things to man, and all created things before
+his coming have--in beauty, in power, in knowledge, in dim shapes of
+love and trust in the animals--had prophecies of him which man has
+realised, hints and previsions, dimly picturing the higher race, till
+man appeared at last, and one stage of being was complete. But the law
+of progress does not cease now man has come. None of his faculties are
+perfect. They also by their imperfection suggest a further life, in
+which as all that was unfinished in the animals suggested man, so also
+that which is unfinished in us suggests ourselves in higher place and
+form. Man's self is not yet Man.
+
+We learn this not only from our own boundless desires for higher life,
+and from our sense of imperfection. We learn it also when we look back
+on the whole of nature that was before we were. We illustrate and
+illuminate all that has been. Nature is humanised, spiritualised by us.
+We have imprinted ourselves on all things; and this, as we realise it,
+as we give thought and passion to lifeless nature, makes us understand
+how great we are, and how much greater we are bound to be. We are the
+end of nature but not the end of ourselves. We learn the same truth when
+among us the few men of genius appear; stars in the darkness. We do not
+say--These stand alone; we never can become as they. On the contrary, we
+cry: All are to be what these are, and more. They longed for more, and
+we and they shall have it. All shall be perfected; and then, and not
+till then, begins the new age and the new life, new progress and new
+joy. This is the ultimate truth.
+
+"And as in inferior creatures there were prognostics of man--and here
+Browning repeats himself--so in man there are prognostics of the future
+and loftier humanity.
+
+    August anticipations, symbols, types
+    Of a dim splendour ever on before
+    In that eternal cycle life pursues.
+    For men begin to pass their nature's bound--
+
+ceaselessly outgrowing themselves in history, and in the individual
+life--and some, passionately aspiring, run ahead of even the general
+tendency, and conceive the very highest, and live to reveal it, and in
+revealing it lift and save those who do not conceive it.
+
+"I, Paracelsus," he cries--and now Browning repeats the whole argument
+of the poem--"was one of these. To do this I vowed myself, soul and
+limb.
+
+"But I mistook my means, I took the wrong path, led away by pride. I
+gazed on power alone, and on power won by knowledge alone. This I
+thought was the only note and aim of man, and it was to be won, at once
+and in the present, without any care for all that man had already done.
+I rejected all the past. I despised it as a record of weakness and
+disgrace. Man should be all-sufficient now; a single day should bring
+him to maturity. He has power to reach the whole of knowledge at one
+leap.
+
+"In that, I mistook the conditions of life. I did not see our barriers;
+nor that progress is slow; nor that every step of the past is necessary
+to know and to remember; nor that, in the shade of the past, the present
+stands forth bright; nor that the future is not to be all at once, but
+to dawn on us, in zone after zone of quiet progress. I strove to laugh
+down all the limits of our life, and then the smallest things broke me
+down--me, who tried to realise the impossible on earth. At last I knew
+that the power I sought was only God's, and then I prayed to die. All my
+life was failure.
+
+"At this crisis I met Aprile, and learned my deep mistake. I had left
+love out; and love and knowledge, and power through knowledge, must go
+together. And Aprile had also failed, for he had sought love and
+rejected knowledge. Life can only move when both are hand in hand:
+
+                love preceding
+    Power, and with much power, always much more love:
+    Love still too straitened in its present means,
+    And earnest for new power to set love free.
+    I learned this, and supposed the whole was learned.
+
+"But to learn it, and to fulfil it, are two different things. I taught
+the simple truth, but men would not have it. They sought the complex,
+the sensational, the knowledge which amazed them. And for this knowledge
+they praised me. I loathed and despised their praise; and when I would
+not give them more of the signs and wonders I first gave them, they
+avenged themselves by casting shame on my real knowledge. Then I was
+tempted, and became the charlatan; and yet despised myself for seeking
+man's praise for that which was most contemptible in me. Then I sought
+for wild pleasure in the senses, and I hated myself still more. And
+hating myself I came to hate men; and then all that Aprile taught to me
+was lost.
+
+"But now I know that I did not love enough to trace beneath the hate of
+men their love. I did not love enough to see in their follies the grain
+of divine wisdom.
+
+    To see a good in evil, and a hope
+    In ill-success; to sympathise, be proud
+    Of their half-reasons, faint aspirings, dim
+    Struggles for truth, their poorest fallacies,
+    Their prejudice and fears and cares and doubts;
+    All with a touch of nobleness, despite
+    Their error, upward tending all though weak.
+
+"I did not see this, I did not love enough to see this, and I failed.
+
+"Therefore let men regard me, who rashly longed to know all for power's
+sake; and regard Aprile, the poet, who rashly longed for the whole of
+love for beauty's sake--and regarding both, shape forth a third and
+better-tempered spirit, in whom beauty and knowledge, love and power,
+shall mingle into one, and lead Man up to God, in whom all these four
+are One. In God alone is the goal.
+
+"Meanwhile I die in peace, secure of attainment. What I have failed in
+here I shall attain there. I have never, in my basest hours, ceased to
+aspire; God will fulfil my aspiration:
+
+                If I stoop
+    Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud.
+    It is but for a time; I press God's lamp
+    Close to my breast; its splendour, soon or late,
+    Will pierce the gloom: I shall emerge one day.
+    You understand me? I have said enough?
+
+    Aprile! Hand in hand with you, Aprile!"
+
+And so he dies.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+_THE POET OF ART_
+
+
+The theory of human life which Browning conceived, and which I attempted
+in the last chapter to explain out of _Pauline_ and _Paracelsus_,
+underlies the poems which have to do with the arts. Browning as the poet
+of Art is as fascinating a subject as Browning the poet of Nature; even
+more so, for he directed of set purpose a great deal of his poetry to
+the various arts, especially to music and painting. Nor has he neglected
+to write about his own art. The lover in Pauline is a poet. Paracelsus
+and Aprile have both touched that art. Sordello is a poet, and so are
+many others in the poems. Moreover, he treats continually of himself as
+a poet, and of the many criticisms on his work.
+
+All through this work on the arts, the theory of which we have written
+appears continuously. It emerges fully in the close of _Easter-Day_. It
+is carefully wrought into poems like _Abt Vogler_ and _A Grammarian's
+Funeral_, in which the pursuit of grammar is conceived of as the pursuit
+of an art. It is introduced by the way in the midst of subjects
+belonging to the art of painting, as in _Old Pictures in Florence_ and
+_Andrea del Sarto_. Finally, in those poems which represent in vivid
+colour and selected personalities special times and forms of art, the
+theory still appears, but momentarily, as a dryad might show her face in
+a wood to a poet passing by. I shall be obliged then to touch again and
+again on this theory of his in discussing Browning as the poet of the
+arts. This is a repetition which cannot be helped, but for which I
+request the pardon of my readers.
+
+The subject of the arts, from the time when Caliban "fell to make
+something" to the re-birth of naturalism in Florence, from the earliest
+music and poetry to the latest, interested Browning profoundly; and he
+speaks of them, not as a critic from the outside, but out of the soul of
+them, as an artist. He is, for example, the only poet of the nineteenth
+century till we come to Rossetti, who has celebrated painting and
+sculpture by the art of poetry; and Rossetti did not link these arts to
+human life and character with as much force and penetration as Browning.
+Morris, when he wrote poetry, did not care to write about the other
+arts, their schools or history. He liked to describe in verse the
+beautiful things of the past, but not to argue on their how and why. Nor
+did he ever turn in on himself as artist, and ask how he wrote poetry or
+how he built up a pattern. What he did as artist was to _make_, and when
+he had made one thing to make another. He ran along like Pheidippides to
+his goal, without halting for one instant to consider the methods of his
+running. And all his life long this was his way.
+
+Rossetti described a picture in a sonnet with admirable skill, so
+admirable that we say to ourselves--"Give me the picture or the sonnet,
+not both. They blot out one another." But to describe a picture is not
+to write about art. The one place where he does go down to its means and
+soul is in his little prose masterpiece, _Hand and Soul_, in which we
+see the path, the goal, the passion, but not the power of art. But he
+never, in thought, got, like Browning, to the bottom-joy of it. He does
+not seem to see, as clearly as Browning saw, that the source of all art
+was love; and that the expression of love in beautiful form was or ought
+to be accomplished with that exulting joy which is the natural child of
+self-forgetfulness. This story of Rossetti's was in prose. In poetry,
+Rossetti, save in description from the outside, left art alone; and
+Browning's special work on art, and particularly his poetic studies of
+it, are isolated in English poetry, and separate him from other poets.
+
+I cannot wish that he had thought less and written less about other arts
+than poetry. But I do wish he had given more time and trouble to his own
+art, that we might have had clearer and lovelier poetry. Perhaps, if he
+had developed himself with more care as an artist in his own art, he
+would not have troubled himself or his art by so much devotion to
+abstract thinking and intellectual analysis. A strange preference also
+for naked facts sometimes beset him, as if men wanted these from a poet.
+It was as if some scientific demon entered into him for a time and
+turned poetry out, till Browning got weary of his guest and threw him
+out of the window. These reversions to some far off Browning in the
+past, who was deceived into thinking the intellect the king of life,
+enfeebled and sometimes destroyed the artist in him; and though he
+escaped for the best part of his poetry from this position, it was not
+seldom in his later years as a brand plucked from the burning. Moreover,
+he recognised this tendency in himself; and protested against it,
+sometimes humorously, sometimes seriously. At least so I read what he
+means in a number of poems, when he turns, after an over-wrought piece
+of analysis, upon himself, and bursts out of his cobwebs into a solution
+of the question by passion and imagination. Nevertheless the charm of
+this merely intellectual play pulled at him continually, and as he could
+always embroider it with fancy it seemed to him close to imagination;
+and this belief grew upon him as he got farther away from the warmth and
+natural truth of youth. It is the melancholy tendency of some artists,
+as they feel the weakness of decay, to become scientific; and a fatal
+temptation it is. There is one poem of his in which he puts the whole
+matter clearly and happily, with a curious and suggestive title,
+"_Transcendentalism_: A Poem in Twelve Books."
+
+He speaks to a young poet who will give to men "naked thought, good,
+true, treasurable stuff, solid matter, without imaginative imagery,
+without emotion."
+
+    Thought's what they mean by verse, and seek in verse.
+    Boys seek for images and melody,
+    Men must have reason--so, you aim at men.
+
+It is "quite otherwise," Browning tells him, and he illustrates the
+matter by a story.
+
+Jacob Boehme did not care for plants. All he cared for was his mysticism.
+But one day, as if the magic of poetry had slipped into his soul, he
+heard all the plants talking, and talking to him; and behold, he loved
+them and knew what they meant. Imagination had done more for him than
+all his metaphysics. So we give up our days to collating theory with
+theory, criticising, philosophising, till, one morning, we wake "and
+find life's summer past."
+
+What remedy? What hope? Why, a brace of rhymes! And then, in life, that
+miracle takes place which John of Halberstadt did by his magic. We feel
+like a child; the world is new; every bit of life is run over and
+enchanted by the wild rose.
+
+    And in there breaks the sudden rose herself,
+    Over us, under, round us every side,
+    Nay, in and out the tables and the chairs
+    And musty volumes, Boehme's book and all--Buries
+    us with a glory, young once more,
+    Pouring heaven into this shut house of life.
+
+    So come, the harp back to your heart again!
+
+I return, after this introduction, to Browning's doctrine of life as it
+is connected with the arts. It appears with great clearness in
+_Easter-Day_. He tells of an experience he had when, one night, musing
+on life, and wondering how it would be with him were he to die and be
+judged in a moment, he walked on the wild common outside the little
+Dissenting Chapel he had previously visited on Christmas-Eve and thought
+of the Judgment. And Common-sense said: "You have done your best; do not
+be dismayed; you will only be surprised, and when the shock is over you
+will smile at your fear." And as he thought thus the whole sky became a
+sea of fire. A fierce and vindictive scribble of red quick flame ran
+across it, and the universe was burned away. "And I knew," thought
+Browning, "now that Judgment had come, that I had chosen this world, its
+beauty, its knowledge, its good--that, though I often looked above, yet
+to renounce utterly the beauty of this earth and man was too hard for
+me." And a voice came: "Eternity is here, and thou art judged." And then
+Christ stood before him and said: "Thou hast preferred the finite when
+the infinite was in thy power. Earthly joys were palpable and tainted.
+The heavenly joys flitted before thee, faint, and rare, and taintless.
+Thou hast chosen those of this world. They are thine."
+
+"O rapture! is this the Judgment? Earth's exquisite treasures of wonder
+and delight for me!"
+
+"So soon made happy," said the voice. "The loveliness of earth is but
+like one rose flung from the Eden whence thy choice has excluded thee.
+The wonders of earth are but the tapestry of the ante-chamber in the
+royal house thou hast abandoned.
+
+    All partial beauty was a pledge
+    Of beauty in its plenitude:
+    But since the pledge sufficed thy mood,
+    Retain it! plenitude be theirs
+    Who looked above!
+
+"O sharp despair! but since the joys of earth fail me, I take art. Art
+gives worth to nature; it stamps it with man. I'll take the Greek
+sculpture, the perfect painting of Italy--that world is mine!"
+
+"Then obtain it," said the voice: "the one abstract form, the one face
+with its one look--all they could manage. Shall I, the illimitable
+beauty, be judged by these single forms? What of that perfection in
+their souls these artists were conscious of, inconceivably exceeding all
+they did? What of their failure which told them an illimitable beauty
+was before them? What of Michael Angelo now, who did not choose the
+world's success or earth's perfection, and who now is on the breast of
+the Divine? All the beauty of art is but furniture for life's first
+stage. Take it then. But there are those, my saints, who were not
+content, like thee, with earth's scrap of beauty, but desired the whole.
+They are now filled with it. Take thy one jewel of beauty on the beach;
+lose all I had for thee in the boundless ocean."
+
+"Then I take mind; earth's knowledge carries me beyond the finite.
+Through circling sciences, philosophies and histories I will spin with
+rapture; and if these fail to inspire, I will fly to verse, and in its
+dew and fire break the chain which binds me to the earth;--Nay, answer
+me not, I know what Thou wilt say: What is highest in knowledge, even
+those fine intuitions which lead the finite into the infinite, and which
+are best put in noble verse, are but gleams of a light beyond them,
+sparks from the sum of the whole. I give that world up also, and I take
+Love. All I ask is leave to love."
+
+"Ah," said the voice, "is this thy final choice? Love is the best; 'tis
+somewhat late. Yet all the power and beauty, nature and art and
+knowledge of this earth were only worth because of love. Through them
+infinite love called to thee; and even now thou clingest to earth's love
+as all. It is precious, but it exists to bear thee beyond the love of
+earth into the boundless love of God in me." At last, beaten to his
+last fortress, all broken down, he cries:
+
+    Thou Love of God! Or let me die,
+    Or grant what shall seem heaven almost.
+    Let me not know that all is lost,
+    Though lost it be--leave me not tied
+    To this despair--this corpse-like bride!
+    Let that old life seem mine--no more--
+    With limitation as before,
+    With darkness, hunger, toil, distress:
+    Be all the earth a wilderness!
+    Only let me go on, go on,
+    Still hoping ever and anon
+    To reach one eve the Better Land!
+
+This is put more strongly, as in the line: "Be all the earth a
+wilderness!" than Browning himself would have put it. But he is in the
+passion of the man who speaks, and heightens the main truth into an
+extreme. But the theory is there, and it is especially applied to the
+love of beauty and therefore to the arts. The illustrations are taken
+from music and painting, from sculpture and poetry. Only in dwelling too
+exclusively, as perhaps the situation demands, on the renunciation of
+this world's successes, he has left out that part of his theory which
+demands that we should, accepting our limits, work within them for the
+love of man, but learn from their pressure and pain to transcend them
+always in the desire of infinite perfection. In _Rabbi Ben Ezra_, a
+masterpiece of argumentative and imaginative passion--such a poem as
+only Browning could have written, who, more than other poets, equalised,
+when most inspired, reasoning, emotions and intuitions into one material
+for poetry--he applies this view of his to the whole of man's life here
+and in the world to come, when the Rabbi in the quiet of old age
+considers what his life has been, and how God has wrought him through it
+for eternity. But I leave that poem, which has nothing to do with art,
+for _Abt Vogler_, which is dedicated to music.
+
+"When Solomon pronounced the Name of God, all the spirits, good and bad,
+assembled to do his will and build his palace. And when I, Abt Vogler,
+touched the keys, I called the Spirits of Sound to me, and they have
+built my palace of music; and to inhabit it all the Great Dead came
+back, till in the vision I made a perfect music. Nay, for a moment, I
+touched in it the infinite perfection; but now it is gone; I cannot
+bring it back. Had I painted it, had I written it, I might have
+explained it. But in music, out of the sounds something emerges which is
+above the sounds, and that ineffable thing I touched and lost. I took
+the well-known sounds of earth, and out of them came a fourth sound,
+nay, not a sound--but a star. This was a flash of God's will which
+opened the Eternal to me for a moment; and I shall find it again in the
+eternal life. Therefore, from the achievement of earth and the failure
+of it, I turn to God, and in him I see that every image, thought,
+impulse, and dream of knowledge or of beauty--which, coming whence we
+know not, flit before us in human life, breathe for a moment, and then
+depart; which, like my music, build a sudden palace in imagination;
+which abide for an instant and dissolve, but which memory and hope
+retain as a ground of aspiration--are not lost to us though they seem to
+die in their immediate passage. Their music has its home in the Will of
+God and we shall find them completed there.
+
+    All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist;
+      Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power
+    Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist
+      When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.
+    The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
+      The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
+    Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
+      Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by-and-by.
+
+           *       *       *
+
+    Well, it is earth with me; silence resumes her reign:
+      I will be patient and proud, and soberly acquiesce.
+    Give me the keys. I feel for the common chord again,
+      Sliding by semitones, till I sink to the minor,--yes,
+    And I blunt it into a ninth, and I stand on alien ground,
+      Surveying awhile the heights I rolled from into the deep;
+    Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting-place is found,
+      The C Major of this life: so, now I will try to sleep."
+
+With that he returns to human life, content to labour in its limits--the
+common chord is his. But he has been where he shall be, and he is not
+likely to be satisfied with the C major of life. This, in Browning's
+thought, is the true comfort and strength of the life of the artist, to
+whom these fallings from us, vanishings, these transient visits of the
+infinite Divine, like swallows that pass in full flight, are more common
+than to other men. They tell him of the unspeakable beauty; they let
+loose his spirit to fly into the third heaven.
+
+So much for the theory in this poem. As to the artist and his art in it,
+that is quite a different matter; and as there are few of Browning's
+poems which reach a higher level than this both in form, thought, and
+spiritual passion, it may be worth while, for once, to examine a poem of
+his at large.
+
+Browning's imagination conceived in a moment the musician's experience
+from end to end; and the form of the experience arose along with the
+conception. He saw Abt Vogler in the silent church, playing to himself
+before the golden towers of the organ, and slipping with sudden surprise
+into a strain which is less his than God's. He saw the vision which
+accompanied the music, and the man's heart set face to face with the
+palace of music he had built. He saw him live in it and then pass to
+heaven with it and lose it. And he saw the close of the experience, with
+all its scenery in the church and in Abt Vogler's heart, at the same
+time, in one vision. In this unconscious shaping of his thought into a
+human incident, with its soul and scenery, is the imagination creating,
+like a god, a thing unknown, unseen before.
+
+Having thus shaped the form, the imagination passed on to make the
+ornament. It creates that far-off image of Solomon and his spirits
+building their palace for the Queen of Sheba which exalts the whole
+conception and enlarges the reader's imagination through all the legends
+of the great King--and then it makes, for fresh adornment, the splendid
+piling up of the sounds into walls of gold, pinnacles, splendours and
+meteor moons; and lastly, with upward sweeping of its wings, bids the
+sky to fall in love with the glory of the palace, and the mighty forms
+of the noble Dead to walk in it. This is the imagination at play with
+its conception, adorning, glorifying, heightening the full impression,
+but keeping every imaged ornament misty, impalpable, as in a dream--for
+so the conception demanded.
+
+And then, to fill the conception with the spirit of humanity, the
+personal passion of the poet rises and falls through the description, as
+the music rises and falls. We feel his breast beating against ours;
+till the time comes when, like a sudden change in a great song, his
+emotion changes into ecstasy in the outburst of the 9th verse:
+
+    Therefore to whom turn I but to thee, the ineffable Name?
+
+It almost brings tears into the eyes. This is art-creation--this is what
+imagination, intense emotion, and individuality have made of the
+material of thought--poetry, not prose.
+
+Even at the close, the conception, the imagination, and the personal
+passion keep their art. The rush upwards of the imaginative feeling dies
+slowly away; it is as evanescent as the Vision of the Palace, but it
+dies into another picture of humanity which even more deeply engages the
+human heart. Browning sees the organ-loft now silent and dark, and the
+silent figure in it, alone and bowed over the keys. The church is still,
+but aware of what has been. The golden pipes of the organ are lost in
+the twilight and the music is over--all the double vision of the third
+heaven into which he has been caught has vanished away. The form of the
+thing rightly fits the idea. Then, when the form is shaped, the poet
+fills it with the deep emotion of the musician's soul, and then with his
+own emotion; and close as the air to the earth are the sorrow and
+exultation of Abt Vogler and Browning to the human heart--sorrow for the
+vanishing and the failure, exultant joy because what has been is but an
+image of the infinite beauty they will have in God. In the joy they do
+not sorrow for the failure. It is nothing but an omen of success. Their
+soul, greater than the vision, takes up common life with patience and
+silent hope. We hear them sigh and strike the chord of C.
+
+This is lyric imagination at work in lyric poetry. There are two kinds
+of lyrics among many others. One is where the strong emotion of the
+poet, fusing all his materials into one creation, comes to a height and
+then breaks off suddenly. It is like a thunderstorm, which, doubling and
+redoubling its flash and roar, ends in the zenith with the brightest
+flash and loudest clang of thunder. There is another kind. It is when
+the storm of emotion reaches, like the first, its climax, but does not
+end with it. The lyric passion dies slowly away from the zenith to the
+horizon, and ends in quietude and beauty, attended by soft colour and
+gentle sounds; like the thunderstorm which faints with the sunset and
+gathers its clouds to be adorned with beauty. This lyric of Browning's
+is a noble example of the second type.
+
+I take another poem, the _Grammarian's Funeral_, to illustrate his art.
+The main matter of thought in it is the same as that of _Abt Vogler_,
+with the variation that the central figure is not a musician but a
+grammarian; that what he pursued was critical knowledge, not beauty, and
+that he is not a modern, like Abt Vogler, but one of the Renaissance
+folk, and seized, as men were seized then, with that insatiable
+curiosity which characterised the outbreak of the New Learning. The
+matter of thought in it is of less interest to us than the poetic
+creation wrought out of it, or than the art with which it is done. We
+see the form into which the imaginative conception is thrown--the group
+of sorrowing students carrying their master's corpse to the high
+platform of the mountain, singing what he was, in admiration and honour
+and delight that he had mastered life and won eternity; a conception
+full of humanity, as full of the life of the dead master's soul as of
+the students' enthusiasm. This thrills us into creation, with the poet,
+as we read. Then the imagination which has made the conception into form
+adorns it. It creates the plain, the encircling mountains, one cloudy
+peak higher than the rest; as we mount we look on the plain below; we
+reach the city on the hill, pass it, and climb the hill-top; there are
+all the high-flying birds, the meteors, the lightnings, the thickest
+dew. And we lay our dead on the peak, above the plain. This is the
+scenery, the imaginative ornament, and all through it we are made to
+hear the chant of the students; and so lifting is the melody of the
+verse we seem to taste the air, fresher and fresher as we climb. Then,
+finally, into the midst of this flows for us the eager intensity of the
+scholar. Dead as he is, we feel him to be alive; never resting, pushing
+on incessantly, beating failure beneath his feet, making it the step for
+further search for the infinite, resolute to live in the dull limits of
+the present work, but never content save in waiting for that eternity
+which will fulfil the failure of earth; which, missing earth's success,
+throws itself on God, dying to gain the highest. This is the passion of
+the poem, and Browning is in it like a fire. It was his own, his very
+life. He pours it into the students who rejoice in the death of their
+master, and he gives it to us as we read the poem. And then, because
+conception, imagination, and intensity of thought and emotion all here
+work together, as in _Abt Vogler_, the melody of the poem is lovely,
+save in one verse which ought to be out of the poem. As to the
+conclusion, it is priceless. Such a conclusion can only emerge when all
+that precedes it finely contains it, and I have often thought that it
+pictures Browning himself. I wish he had been buried on a mountain top,
+all Italy below him.
+
+    Well, here's the platform, here's the proper place:
+      Hail to your purlieus,
+    All ye high-flyers of the feathered race,
+      Swallows and curlews!
+    Here's the top-peak; the multitude below
+      Live, for they can, there:
+    This man decided not to Live but Know--
+      Bury this man there?
+
+    Here--here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form,
+      Lightenings are loosened.
+    Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm,
+      Peace let the dew send!
+    Lofty designs must close in like effects:
+      Loftily lying,
+    Leave him--still loftier than the world suspects,
+      Living and dying.
+
+This is the artist at work, and I doubt whether all the laborious prose
+written, in history and criticism, on the revival of learning, will ever
+express better than this short poem the inexhaustible thirst of the
+Renaissance in its pursuit of knowledge, or the enthusiasm of the pupils
+of a New Scholar for his desperate strife to know in a short life the
+very centre of the Universe.
+
+Another poem on the arts which is mixed up with Browning's theory of
+life is _Andrea del Sarto_. Into it the theory slips, like an uninvited
+guest into a dinner-party of whom it is felt that he has some relation
+to some one of the guests, but for whom no cover is laid. The faulty
+and broken life of Andrea, in its contrast with his flawless drawing,
+has been a favourite subject with poets. Alfred de Musset and others
+have dramatised it, and it seems strange that none of our soul-wrecking
+and vivisecting novelists have taken it up for their amusement. Browning
+has not left out a single point of the subject. The only criticism I
+should make of this admirable poem is that, when we come to the end, we
+dislike the woman and despise the man more than we pity either of them;
+and in tragic art-work of a fine quality, pity for human nature with a
+far-off tenderness in it should remain as the most lasting impression.
+All the greater artists, even while they went to the bottom of sorrow
+and wickedness, have done this wise and beautiful thing, and Browning
+rarely omits it.
+
+The first art-matter in the poem is Browning's sketch of the sudden
+genesis of a picture. Andrea is sitting with his wife on the window-seat
+looking out to Fiesole. As he talks she smiles a weary, lovely, autumn
+smile, and, born in that instant and of her smile, he sees his picture,
+knows its atmosphere, realises its tone of colour, feels its prevailing
+sentiment. How he will execute it is another question, and depends on
+other things; but no better sketch could be given of the sudden
+spiritual fashion in which great pictures are generated. Here are the
+lines, and they also strike the keynote of Andrea's soul--that to which
+his life has brought him.
+
+    You smile? why, there's my picture ready made,
+    There's what we painters call our harmony!
+    A common greyness silvers everything,--
+    All in a twilight, you and I alike--,
+    You at the point of your first pride in me
+    (That's gone, you know),--but I, at every point;
+    My youth, my hope, my art, being all toned down
+    To yonder sober pleasant Fiesole.
+    There's the bell clinking from the chapel-top;
+    That length of convent-wall across the way
+    Holds the trees safer, huddled more inside;
+    The last monk leaves the garden; days decrease,
+    And autumn grows, autumn in everything.
+    Eh? the whole seems to fall into a shape
+    As if I saw alike my work and self
+    And all that I was born to be and do,
+    A twilight piece. Love, we are in God's hand.
+
+In God's hand? Yes, but why being free are we so fettered? And here
+slips in the unbidden guest of the theory. Andrea has chosen earthly
+love; Lucrezia is all in all; and he has reached absolute perfection in
+drawing--
+
+    I do what many dream of, all their lives.
+
+He can reach out beyond himself no more. He has got the earth, lost the
+heaven. He makes no error, and has, therefore, no impassioned desire
+which, flaming through the faulty picture, makes it greater art
+than his faultless work. "The soul is gone from me, that vext,
+suddenly-impassioned, upward-rushing thing, with its play, insight,
+broken sorrows, sudden joys, pursuing, uncontented life. These men reach
+a heaven shut out from me, though they cannot draw like me. No praise or
+blame affects me. I know my handiwork is perfect. But there burns a
+truer light of God in them. Lucrezia, I am judged."
+
+    Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
+    Or what's a heaven for? All is silver-grey
+    Placid and perfect with my art:--the worse
+
+"Here," he says, "is a piece of Rafael. The arm is out of drawing, and
+I could make it right. But the passion, the soul of the thing is not in
+me. Had you, my love, but urged me upward, to glory and God, I might
+have been uncontent; I might have done it for you. No," and again he
+sweeps round on himself, out of his excuses, "perhaps not, 'incentives
+come from the soul's self'; and mine is gone. I've chosen the love of
+you, Lucrezia, earth's love, and I cannot pass beyond my faultless
+drawing into the strife to paint those divine imaginations the soul
+conceives."
+
+That is the meaning of Browning. The faultless, almost mechanical art,
+the art which might be born of an adulterous connection between science
+and art, is of little value to men. Not in the flawless painter is true
+art found, but in those who painted inadequately, yet whose pictures
+breathe
+
+    Infinite passion and the pain
+    Of finite hearts that yearn.
+
+In this incessant strife to create new worlds, and in their creation,
+which, always ending in partial failure, forces fresh effort, lies,
+Browning might have said, the excuse for God having deliberately made us
+defective. Had we been made good, had we no strife with evil; had we the
+power to embody at once the beauty we are capable of seeing; could we
+have laid our hand on truth, and grasped her without the desperate
+struggle we have to win one fruit from her tree; had we had no strong
+crying and tears, no agony against wrong, against our own passions and
+their work, against false views of things--we might have been angels;
+but we should not have had humanity and all its wild history, and all
+its work; we should not have had that which, for all I know, may be
+unique in the universe; no, nor any of the great results of the battle
+and its misery. Had it not been for the defectiveness, the sin and pain,
+we should have had nothing of the interest of the long evolution of
+science, law and government, of the charm of discovery, of pursuit, of
+the slow upbuilding of moral right, of the vast variety of philosophy.
+Above all, we should have had none of the great art men love so well, no
+_Odyssey_, _Divine Comedy_ no _Hamlet_, no _Oedipus_, no Handel, no
+Beethoven, no painting or sculpture where the love and sorrow of the
+soul breathe in canvas, fresco, marble and bronze, no, nor any of the
+great and loving lives who suffered and overcame, from Christ to the
+poor woman who dies for love in a London lane. All these are made
+through the struggle and the sorrow. We should not have had, I repeat,
+humanity; and provided no soul perishes for ever but lives to find union
+with undying love, the game, with all its terrible sorrow, pays for the
+candle. We may find out, some day, that the existence and work of
+humanity, crucified as it has been, are of untold interest and use to
+the universe--which things the angels desire to look into. If Browning
+had listened to that view, he would, I think, have accepted it.
+
+_Old Pictures in Florence_ touches another side of his theory.
+In itself, it is one of Browning's half-humorous poems; a
+pleasantly-composed piece, glancing here and glancing there, as a man's
+mind does when leaning over a hill-villa's parapet on a sunny morning
+in Florence. I have elsewhere quoted its beginning. It is a fine example
+of his nature-poetry: it creates the scenery and atmosphere of the poem;
+and the four lines with which the fourth verse closes sketch what
+Browning thought to be one of his poetic gifts--
+
+    And mark through the winter afternoons.
+      By a gift God grants me now and then,
+    In the mild decline of those suns like moons.
+      Who walked in Florence, besides her men.
+
+This, then, is a poem of many moods, beginning with Giotto's Tower; then
+wondering why Giotto did not tell the poet who loved him so much that
+one of his pictures was lying hidden in a shop where some one else
+picked it up; then, thinking of all Giotto's followers, whose ghosts he
+imagines are wandering through Florence, sorrowing for the decay of
+their pictures.
+
+"But at least they have escaped, and have their holiday in heaven, and
+do not care one straw for our praise or blame. They did their work, they
+and the great masters. We call them old Masters, but they were new in
+their time; their old Masters were the Greeks. They broke away from the
+Greeks and revolutionised art into a new life. In our turn we must break
+away from them."
+
+And now glides in the theory. "When Greek art reached its perfection,
+the limbs which infer the soul, and enough of the soul to inform the
+limbs, were faultlessly represented. Men said the best had been done,
+and aspiration and growth in art ceased. Content with what had been
+done, men imitated, but did not create. But man cannot remain without
+change in a past perfection; for then he remains in a kind of death.
+Even with failure, with faulty work, he desires to make new things, and
+in making, to be alive and feel his life. Therefore Giotto and the rest
+began to create a fresh aspect of humanity, which, however imperfect in
+form, would suggest an infinite perfection. The Greek perfection ties us
+down to earth, to a few forms, and the sooner, if it forbid us to go on,
+we reject its ideal as the only one, the better for art and for mankind.
+
+    'Tis a life-long toil till our lump be leaven--
+      The better! What's come to perfection perishes.
+    Things learned on earth, we shall practise in heaven:
+      Works done least rapidly, Art most cherishes.
+
+"The great Campanile is still unfinished;" so he shapes his thoughts
+into his scenery. Shall man be satisfied in art with the crystallised
+joy of Apollo, or the petrified grief of Niobe, when there are a million
+more expressions of joy and grief to render? In that way felt Giotto and
+his crew. "We will paint the whole of man," they cried, "paint his new
+hopes and joys and pains, and never pause, because we shall never quite
+succeed. We will paint the soul in all its infinite variety--bring the
+invisible full into play. Of course we shall miss perfection--who can
+get side by side with infinitude?--but we shall grow out of the dead
+perfection of the past, and live and move, and have our being.
+
+    Let the visible go to the dogs--what matters?"
+
+Thus art began again. Its spring-tide came, dim and dewy; and the world
+rejoiced.
+
+And that is what has happened again and again in the history of art.
+Browning has painted a universal truth. It was that which took place
+when Wordsworth, throwing away the traditions of a century and all the
+finished perfection, as men thought, of the Augustan age, determined to
+write of man as man, whatever the issue; to live with the infinite
+variety of human nature, and in its natural simplicities. What we shall
+see, he thought, may be faulty, common, unideal, imperfect. What we
+shall write will not have the conventional perfection of Pope and Gray,
+which all the cultivated world admires, and in which it rests
+content--growth and movement dead--but it will be true, natural, alive,
+running onwards to a far-off goal. And we who write--our loins are
+accinct, our lights burning, as men waiting for the revelation of the
+Bridegroom. Wordsworth brought back the soul to Poetry. She made her
+failures, but she was alive. Spring was blossoming around her with dews
+and living airs, and the infinite opened before her.
+
+So, too, it was when Turner recreated landscape art. There was the
+perfect Claudesque landscape, with all its parts arranged, its colours
+chosen, the composition balanced, the tree here, the river there, the
+figures in the foreground, the accurate distribution and gradation of
+the masses of light and shade. "There," the critics said, "we have had
+perfection. Let us rest in that." And all growth in landscape-art
+ceased. Then came Turner, who, when he had followed the old for a time
+and got its good, broke away from it, as if in laughter. "What," he
+felt, "the infinite of nature is before me; inconceivable change and
+variety in earth, and sky, and sea--and shall I be tied down to one form
+of painting landscape, one arrangement of artistic properties? Let the
+old perfection go." And we had our revolution in landscape art: nothing,
+perhaps, so faultless as Claude's composition, but life, love of nature,
+and an illimitable range; incessant change, movement, and aspiration
+which have never since allowed the landscape artist to think that he has
+attained.
+
+On another side of the art of painting, Rossetti, Millais, Hunt arose;
+and they said, "We will paint men as they actually were in the past, in
+the moments of their passion, and with their emotions on their faces,
+and with the scenery around them as it was; and whatever background of
+nature there was behind them, it shall be painted direct from the very
+work of nature herself, and in her very colours. In doing this our range
+will become infinite. No doubt we shall fail. We cannot grasp the whole
+of nature and humanity, but we shall be _in_ their life: aspiring,
+alive, and winning more and more of truth." And the world of art howled
+at them, as the world of criticism howled at Wordsworth. But a new life
+and joy began to move in painting. Its winter was over, its spring had
+begun, its summer was imagined. Their drawing was faulty; their colour
+was called crude; they seemed to know little or nothing of composition;
+but the Spirit of Life was in them, and their faults were worth more
+than the best successes of the school that followed Rafael; for their
+faults proved that passion, aspiration and originality were again alive:
+
+    Give these, I exhort you, their guerdon and glory
+      For daring so much, before they well did it.
+
+If ever the artist should say to himself, "What I desire has been
+attained: I can but imitate or follow it"; or if the people who care for
+any art should think, "The best has been reached; let us be content to
+rest in that perfection"; the death of art has come.
+
+The next poem belonging to this subject is the second part of _Pippa
+Passes_. What concerns us here is that Jules, the French artist, loves
+Phene; and on his return from his marriage pours out his soul to her
+concerning his art.
+
+In his work, in his pursuit of beauty through his aspiration to the old
+Greek ideal, he has found his full content--his heaven upon earth. But
+now, living love of a woman has stolen in. How can he now, he asks,
+pursue that old ideal when he has the real? how carve Tydeus, with her
+about the room? He is disturbed, thrilled, uncontent A new ideal rises.
+How can he now
+
+    Bid each conception stand while, trait by trait,
+    My hand transfers its lineaments to stone?
+    Will my mere fancies live near you, their truth--
+    The live truth, passing and repassing me,
+    Sitting beside me?
+
+Before he had seen her, all the varied stuff of Nature, every material
+in her workshop, tended to one form of beauty, to the human archetype.
+But now she, Phene, represents the archetype; and though Browning does
+not express this, we feel that if Jules continue in that opinion, his
+art will die. Then, carried away by his enthusiasm for his art, he
+passes, through a statement that nature suggests in all her doings man
+and his life and his beauty--a statement Browning himself makes in
+_Paracelsus_--to a description of the capabilities of various stuffs in
+nature under the sculptor's hand, and especially of marble as having in
+it the capabilities of all the other stuffs and also something more a
+living spirit in itself which aids the sculptor and even does some of
+his work.
+
+This is a subtle thought peculiarly characteristic of Browning's
+thinking about painting, music, poetry, or sculpture. I believe he felt,
+and if he did not, it is still true, that the vehicle of any art brought
+something out of itself into the work of the artist. Abt Vogler feels
+this as he plays on the instrument he made. Any musician who plays on
+two instruments knows that the distinct instrument does distinct work,
+and loves each instrument for its own spirit; because each makes his
+art, expressed in it, different from his art expressed in another. Even
+the same art-creation is different in two instruments: the vehicle does
+its own part of the work. Any painter will say the same, according as he
+works in fresco or on canvas, in water-colour or in oil. Even a material
+like charcoal makes him work the same conception in a different way. I
+will quote the passage; it goes to the root of the matter; and whenever
+I read it, I seem to hear a well-known sculptor as he talked one night
+to me of the spiritual way in which marble, so soft and yet so firm,
+answered like living material to his tool, sending flame into it, and
+then seemed, as with a voice, to welcome the emotion which, flowing from
+him through the chisel, passed into the stone.
+
+    But of the stuffs one can be master of,
+    How I divined their capabilities!
+    From the soft-rinded smoothening facile chalk
+    That yields your outline to the air's embrace,
+    Half-softened by a halo's pearly gloom:
+    Down to the crisp imperious steel, so sure
+    To cut its one confided thought clean out
+    Of all the world. But marble!--'neath my tools
+    More pliable than jelly--as it were
+    Some clear primordial creature dug from depths
+    In the earth's heart, where itself breeds itself.
+    And whence all baser substance may be worked;
+    Refine it off to air, you may--condense it
+    Down to the diamond;--is not metal there,
+    When o'er the sudden speck my chisel trips?
+    --Not flesh, as flake off flake I scale, approach,
+    Lay bare those bluish veins of blood asleep?
+    Lurks flame in no strange windings where, surprised
+    By the swift implement sent home at once,
+    Flushes and glowings radiate and hover
+    About its track?
+
+But Jules finds that Phene, whom he has been deceived into believing an
+intelligence equal to his own, does not understand one word he has said,
+is nothing but an uneducated girl; and his dream of perfection in the
+marriage of Art and Love vanishes away, and with the deception the aims
+and hopes of his art as it has been. And Browning makes this happen of
+set purpose, in order that, having lost satisfaction in his art-ideal,
+and then his satisfaction in that ideal realised in a woman--having
+failed in Art and Love--he may pass on into a higher aim, with a higher
+conception, both of art and love, and make a new world, in the woman and
+in the art. He is about to accept the failure, to take only to revenge
+on his deceivers, when Pippa sings as she is passing, and the song
+touches him into finer issues of thought. He sees that Phene's soul is,
+like a butterfly, half-loosed from its chrysalis, and ready for flight.
+The sight and song awake a truer love, for as yet he has loved Phene
+only through his art. Now he is impassioned with pity for a human soul,
+and his first new sculpture will be the creation of her soul.
+
+    Shall to produce form out of unshaped stuff
+    Be Art--and further, to evoke a soul
+    From form be nothing? This new soul is mine!
+
+At last, he is borne into self-forgetfulness by love, and finds a man's
+salvation. And in that loss of self he drinks of the deep fountain of
+art. Aprile found that out. Sordello dies as he discovers it, and Jules,
+the moment he has touched its waters with his lip, sees a new realm of
+art arise, and loves it with such joy that he knows he will have power
+to dwell in its heart, and create from its joy.
+
+    One may do whate'er one likes
+    In Art; the only thing is, to make sure
+    That one does like it--which takes pains to know.
+
+He breaks all his models up. They are paltry, dead things belonging to a
+dead past. "I begin," he cries, "art afresh, in a fresh world,
+
+    Some unsuspected isle in far-off seas."
+
+The ideal that fails means the birth of a new ideal. The very centre of
+Browning as an artist is there:
+
+    Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
+      Sleep to wake!
+
+Sordello is another example of his theory, of a different type from
+Aprile, or that poet in _Pauline_ who gave Browning the sketch from
+which Sordello was conceived. But Browning, who, as I have said,
+repeated his theory, never repeated his examples: and Sordello is not
+only clearly varied from Aprile and the person in _Pauline_, but the
+variations themselves are inventively varied. The complex temperament of
+Sordello incessantly alters its form, not only as he grows from youth to
+manhood, but as circumstances meet him. They give him a shock, as a
+slight blow does to a kaleidoscope, and the whole pattern of his mind
+changes. But as with the bits of coloured glass in the kaleidoscope, the
+elements of Bordello's mind remain the same. It is only towards the end
+of his career, on the forcible introduction into his life of new
+elements from the outward world, that his character radically changes,
+and his soul is born. He wins that which he has been without from the
+beginning. He wins, as we should say, a heart. He not only begins to
+love Palma otherwise than in his dreams, but with that love the love of
+man arises--for, in characters like Sordello, personal love, once really
+stirred, is sure to expand beyond itself--and then, following on the
+love of man, conscience is quickened into life, and for the first time
+recognises itself and its duties. In this new light of love and
+conscience, directed towards humanity, he looks back on his life as an
+artist, or rather, Browning means us to do so; and we understand that he
+has done nothing worthy in his art; and that even his gift of
+imagination has been without the fire of true passion. His aspirations,
+his phantasies, his songs, done only for his own sake, have been cold,
+and left the world cold.
+
+He has aspired to a life in the realm of pure imagination, to winning by
+imagination alone all knowledge and all love, and the power over men
+which flows from these. He is, in this aspiration, Paracelsus and Aprile
+in one. But he has neither the sincerity of Paracelsus nor the passion
+of Aprile. He lives in himself alone, beyond the world of experience,
+and only not conscious of those barriers which limit our life on which
+Browning dwells so much, because he does not bring his aspirations or
+his imaginative work to the test by shaping them outside of himself. He
+fails, that is, to create anything which will please or endure; fails in
+the first aim, the first duty of an artist. He comes again and again to
+the verge of creating something which may give delight to men, but only
+once succeeds, when by chance, in a moment of excited impulse, caused
+partly by his own vanity, and partly by the waves of humanity at Palma's
+_Court of Love_ beating on his soul, he breaks for a passing hour into
+the song which conquers Eglamor. When, at the end, he does try to shape
+himself without for the sake of men he is too late for this life. He
+dies of the long struggle, of the revelation of his failure and the
+reasons of it, of the supreme light which falls on his wasted life; and
+yet not wasted, since even in death he has found his soul and all it
+means. His imagination, formerly only intellectual, has become emotional
+as well; he loves mankind, and sacrifices fame, power, and knowledge to
+its welfare. He no longer thinks to avoid, by living only in himself,
+the baffling limitations which inevitably trouble human life; but now
+desires, working within these limits, to fix his eyes on the ineffable
+Love; failing but making every failure a ladder on which to climb to
+higher things. This--the true way of life--he finds out as he dies. To
+have that spirit, and to work in it, is the very life of art. To pass
+for ever out of and beyond one's self is to the artist the lesson of
+Bordello's story.
+
+It is hardly learnt. The self in Sordello, the self of imagination
+unwarned by love of men, is driven out of the artist with strange
+miseries, battles and despairs, and these Browning describes with such
+inventiveness that at the last one is inclined to say, with all the
+pitiful irony of Christ, "This kind goeth not forth but with prayer and
+fasting."
+
+The position in the poem is at root the same as that in Tennyson's
+_Palace of Art_. These two poets found, about the same time, the same
+idea, and, independently, shaped it into poems. Tennyson put it into the
+form of a vision, the defect of which was that it was too far removed
+from common experience. Browning put it into the story of a man's life.
+Tennyson expressed it with extraordinary clearness, simplicity, and with
+a wealth of lovely ornament, so rich that it somewhat overwhelmed the
+main lines of his conception. Browning expressed it with extraordinary
+complexity, subtlety, and obscurity of diction. But when we take the
+trouble of getting to the bottom of _Sordello_, we find ourselves where
+we do not find ourselves in _The Palace of Art_--we find ourselves in
+close touch and friendship with a man, living with him, sympathising
+with him, pitying him, blessing him, angry and delighted with him,
+amazingly interested in his labyrinthine way of thinking and feeling; we
+follow with keen interest his education, we see a soul in progress; we
+wonder what he will do next, what strange turn we shall come to in his
+mind, what new effort he will make to realise himself; and, loving him
+right through from his childhood to his death, we are quite satisfied
+when he dies. At the back of this, and complicating it still more--but,
+when we arrive at seeing it clearly, increasing the interest of the
+poem--is a great to-and-fro of humanity at a time when humanity was
+alive and keen and full of attempting; when men were savagely original,
+when life was lived to its last drop, and when a new world was dawning.
+Of all this outside humanity there is not a trace in Tennyson, and
+Browning could not have got on without it. Of course, it made his poetry
+difficult. We cannot get excellences without their attendant defects. We
+have a great deal to forgive in _Sordello_. But for the sake of the
+vivid humanity we forgive it all.
+
+Sordello begins as a boy, living alone in a castle near Mantua, built in
+a gorge of the low hills, and the description of the scenery of the
+castle, without and within, is one example of the fine ornament of which
+_Sordello_ is so full. There, this rich and fertile nature lives, fit to
+receive delight at every sense, fit to shape what is received into
+imaginative pictures within, but not without; content with the
+contemplation of his own imaginings. At first it is Nature from whom
+Sordello receives impressions, and he amuses himself with the fancies he
+draws from her. But he never shapes his emotion into actual song. Then
+tired of Nature, he dreams himself into the skin and soul of all the
+great men of whom he has read. He becomes them in himself, as Pauline's
+lover has done before him; but one by one they fade into unreality--for
+he knows nothing of men--and the last projection of himself into Apollo,
+the Lord of Poetry, is the most unreal of them all: at which fantasy all
+the woods and streams and sunshine round Goito are infinitely amused.
+Thus, when he wants sympathy, he does not go down to Mantua and make
+song for the crowd of men; he invents in dreams a host of sympathisers,
+all of whom are but himself in other forms. Even when he aims at
+perfection, and, making himself Apollo, longs for a Daphne to double his
+life, his soul is still such stuff as dreams are made of, till he wakes
+one morning to ask himself: "When will this dream be truth?"
+
+This is the artist's temperament in youth when he is not possessed of
+the greater qualities of genius--his imaginative visions, his
+aspirations, his pride in apartness from men, his self-contentment, his
+sloth, the presence in him of barren imagination, the absence from it of
+the spiritual, nothing in him which as yet desires, through the sorrow
+and strife of life, God's infinitude, or man's love; a natural life
+indeed, forgiveable, gay, sportive, dowered with happy self-love, good
+to pass through and enjoy, but better to leave behind. But Sordello will
+not become the actual artist till he lose his self-involvement and find
+his soul, not only in love of his Daphne but in love of man. And the
+first thing he will have to do is that which Sordello does not care to
+do--to embody before men in order to give them pleasure or impulse, to
+console or exalt them, some of the imaginations he has enjoyed within
+himself. Nor can Sordello's imagination reach true passion, for it
+ignores that which chiefly makes the artist; union with the passions of
+mankind. Only when near to death does he outgrow the boy of Goito, and
+then we find that he has ceased to be the artist. Thus, the poem is the
+history of the failure of a man with an artistic temperament to be an
+artist. Or rather, that is part of the story of the poem, and, as
+Browning was an artist himself, a part which is of the greatest
+interest.
+
+Sordello, at the close of the first book, is wearied of dreams. Even in
+his solitude, the limits of life begin to oppress him. Time fleets, fate
+is tardy, life will be over before he lives. Then an accident helps
+him--
+
+    Which breaking on Sordello's mixed content
+    Opened, like any flash that cures the blind,
+    The veritable business of mankind.
+
+This accident is the theme of the second book. It belongs to the subject
+of this chapter, for it contrasts two types of the artist, Eglamor and
+Sordello, and it introduces Naddo, the critic, with a good knowledge of
+poetry, with a great deal of common sense, with an inevitable sliding
+into the opinion that what society has stamped must be good--a mixed
+personage, and a sketch done with Browning's humorous and pitying skill.
+
+The contrast between Eglamor and Sordello runs through the whole poem.
+Sordello recalls Eglamor at the last, and Naddo appears again and again
+to give the worldly as well as the common-sense solution of the problems
+which Sordello makes for himself. Eglamor is the poet who has no genius,
+whom one touch of genius burns into nothing, but who, having a charming
+talent, employs it well; and who is so far the artist that what he feels
+he is able to shape gracefully, and to please mankind therewith; who,
+moreover loves, enjoys, and is wholly possessed with what he shapes in
+song. This is good; but then he is quite satisfied with what he does; he
+has no aspiration, and all the infinitude of beauty is lost to him. And
+when Sordello takes up his incomplete song, finishes it, inspires,
+expands what Eglamor thought perfect, he sees at last that he has only a
+graceful talent, that he has lived in a vain show, like a gnome in a
+cell of the rock of gold. Genius, momentarily realising itself in
+Sordello, reveals itself to Eglamor with all its infinities; Heaven and
+Earth and the universe open on Eglamor, and the revelation of what he
+is, and of the perfection beyond, kills him. That is a fine, true, and
+piteous sketch.
+
+But Sordello, who is the man of possible genius, is not much better off.
+There has been one outbreak into reality at Palma's _Court of Love_.
+Every one, afterwards, urges him to sing. The critics gather round him.
+He makes poems, he becomes the accepted poet of Northern Italy. But he
+cannot give continuous delight to the world. His poems are not like his
+song before Palma. They have no true passion, being woven like a
+spider's web out of his own inside. His case then is more pitiable, his
+failure more complete, than Eglamor's. Eglamor could shape something; he
+had his own enjoyment, and he gave pleasure to men. Sordello, lured
+incessantly towards abstract ideals, lost in their contemplation, is
+smitten, like Aprile, into helplessness by the multitudinousness of the
+images he sees, refuses to descend into real life and submit to its
+limitations, is driven into the slothfulness of that dreaming
+imagination which is powerless to embody its images in the actual song.
+Sometimes he tries to express himself, longing for reality. When he
+tries he fails, and instead of making failure a step to higher effort,
+he falls back impatiently on himself, and is lost in himself. Moreover,
+he tries always within himself, and with himself for judge. He does not
+try the only thing which would help him--the submission of his work to
+the sympathy and judgment of men. Out of touch with any love save love
+of his own imaginings, he cannot receive those human impressions which
+kindle the artist into work, nor answer the cry which comes from
+mankind, with such eagerness, to genius--"Express for us in clear form
+that which we vaguely feel. Make us see and admire and love." Then he
+ceases even to love song, because, though he can imagine everything, he
+can do nothing; and deaf to the voices of men, he despises man. Finally
+he asks himself, like so many young poets who have followed his way,
+What is the judgment of the world worth? Nothing at all, he answers.
+With that ultimate folly, the favourite resort of minor poets, Sordello
+goes altogether wrong. He pleases nobody, not even himself; spends his
+time in arguing inside himself why he has not succeeded; and comes to no
+conclusion, except that total failure is the necessity of the world. At
+last one day, wandering from Mantua, he finds himself in his old
+environment, in the mountain cup where Goito and the castle lie. And the
+old dream, awakened by the old associations, that he was Apollo, Lord of
+Song, rushed back upon him and enwrapped him wholly. He feels, in the
+blessed silence, that he is no longer what he has been of late,
+
+                a pettish minstrel meant
+    To wear away his soul in discontent,
+    Brooding on fortune's malice,
+
+but himself once more, freed from the world of Mantua; alone again, but
+in his loneliness really more lost than he was at Mantua, as we soon
+find out in the third book.
+
+I return, in concluding this chapter, to the point which bears most
+clearly on Browning as the poet of art. The only time when Sordello
+realises what it is to be an artist is when, swept out of himself by the
+kindled emotion of the crowd at the _Court of Love_ and inspired also by
+the true emotion of Eglamor's song, which has been made because he loved
+it--his imagination is impassioned enough to shape for man the thing
+within him, outside of himself, and to sing for the joy of
+singing--having forgotten himself in mankind, in their joy and in his
+own.
+
+But it was little good to him. When he stole home to Goito in a dream,
+he sat down to think over the transport he had felt, why he felt it, how
+he was better than Eglamor; and at last, having missed the whole use of
+the experience (which was to draw him into the service of man within the
+limits of life but to always transcend the limits in aspiration), he
+falls away from humanity into his own self again; and perfectly happy
+for the moment, but lost as an artist and a man, lies lazy, filleted and
+robed on the turf, with a lute beside him, looking over the landscape
+below the castle and fancying himself Apollo. This is to have the
+capacity to be an artist, but it is not to be an artist. And we leave
+Sordello lying on the grass enjoying himself, but not destined on that
+account to give any joy to man.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+_SORDELLO_
+
+
+The period in which the poem of _Sordello_ opens is at the end of the
+first quarter of the thirteenth century, at the time when the Guelf
+cities allied themselves against the Ghibellines in Northern Italy. They
+formed the Lombard League, and took their private quarrels up into one
+great quarrel--that between the partisans of the Empire and those of the
+Pope. Sordello is then a young man of thirty years. He was born in 1194,
+when the fierce fight in the streets of Vicenza took place which
+Salinguerra describes, as he looks back on his life, in the fourth canto
+of this poem. The child is saved in that battle, and brought from
+Vicenza by Adelaide, the second wife of Ezzelino da Romano II.,[8] to
+Goito. He is really the son of Salinguerra and Retrude, a connection of
+Frederick II., but Adelaide conceals this, and brings him up as her
+page, alleging that he is the son of Elcorte, an archer. Palma (or
+Cunizza), Ezzelino's daughter by Agnes Este, his first wife, is also at
+Goito in attendance on Adelaide. Sordello and she meet as girl and boy,
+and she becomes one of the dreams with which his lonely youth at Goito
+is adorned.
+
+At Adelaide's death Palma discovers the real birth of Sordello. She has
+heard him sing some time before at a Love-court, where he won the prize;
+where she, admiring, began to love him; and this love of hers has been
+increased by his poetic fame which has now filled North Italy. She
+summons him to her side at Verona, makes him understand that she loves
+him, and urges him, as Salinguerra's son, to take the side of the
+Ghibellines to whose cause Salinguerra, the strongest military
+adventurer in North Italy, has now devoted himself. When the poem
+begins, Salinguerra has received from the Emperor the badge which gives
+him the leadership of the Ghibelline party in North Italy.
+
+Then Palma, bringing Sordello to see Salinguerra, reveals to the great
+partisan that Sordello is his son, and that she loves him. Salinguerra,
+seeing in the union of Palma, daughter of the Lord of Romano, with his
+son, a vital source of strength to the Emperor's party, throws the
+Emperor's badge on his son's neck, and offers him the leadership of the
+Ghibellines. Palma urges him to accept it; but Sordello has been already
+convinced that the Guelf side is the right one to take for the sake of
+mankind. Rome, he thinks, is the great uniting power; only by Rome can
+the cause of peace and the happiness of the people be in the end
+secured. That cause--the cause of a happy people--is the one thing for
+which, after many dreams centred in self, Sordello has come to care. He
+is sorely tempted by the love of Palma and by the power offered him to
+give up that cause or to palter with it; yet in the end his soul resists
+the temptation. But the part of his life, in which he has neglected his
+body, has left him without physical strength; and now the struggle of
+his soul to do right in this spiritual crisis gives the last blow to his
+weakened frame. His heart breaks, and he dies at the moment when he
+dimly sees the true goal of life. This is a masterpiece of the irony of
+the Fate-Goddess; and a faint suspicion of this irony, underlying life,
+even though Browning turns it round into final good, runs in and out of
+the whole poem in a winding thread of thought.
+
+This is the historical background of the poem, and in front of it are
+represented Sordello, his life, his development as an individual soul,
+and his death. I have, from one point of view, slightly analysed the
+first two books of the poem, but to analyse the whole would be apart
+from the purpose of this book. My object in this and the following
+chapter is to mark out, with here and there a piece of explanation,
+certain characteristics of the poem in relation, first, to the time in
+which it is placed; secondly, to the development of Sordello in contact
+with that time; and thirdly, to our own time; then to trace the
+connection of the poem with the poetic evolution of Browning; and
+finally, to dwell throughout the whole discussion on its poetic
+qualities.
+
+1. The time in which the poem's thought and action are placed is the
+beginning of the thirteenth century in North Italy, a period in which
+the religious basis of life, laid so enthusiastically in the eleventh
+century, and gradually weakening through the twelfth, had all but faded
+away for the mediaeval noble and burgher, and even for the clergy.
+Religion, it is true, was confessed and its dogmas believed in; the
+Cistercian revival had restored some of its lost influence, but it did
+not any longer restrain the passions, modify the wickedness, control the
+ambitions or subdue the world, in the heart of men, as it had done in
+the eleventh century. There was in Italy, at least, an unbridled licence
+of life, a fierce individuality, which the existence of a number of
+small republics encouraged; and, in consequence, a wild confusion of
+thought and act in every sphere of human life. Moreover, all through the
+twelfth century there had been a reaction among the artistic and
+literary men against the theory of life laid down by the monks, and
+against the merely saintly aims and practice of the religious, of which
+that famous passage in _Aucassin and Nicolete_ is an embodiment. Then,
+too, the love poetry (a poetry which tended to throw monkish purity
+aside) started in the midst of the twelfth century; then the troubadours
+began to sing; and then the love-songs of Germany arose. And Italian
+poetry, a poetry which tended to repel the religion of the spirit for
+the religion of enjoyment, had begun in Sicily and Siena in 1172-78, and
+was nurtured in the Sicilian Court of Frederick II., while Sordello was
+a youth. All over Europe, poetry drifted into a secular poetry of love
+and war and romance. The religious basis of life had lost its strength.
+As to North Italy, where our concern lies, humanity there was weltering
+like a sea, tossing up and down, with no direction in its waves. It was
+not till Francis of Assisi came that a new foundation for religious
+life, a new direction for it, began to be established. As to Law,
+Government, Literature, and Art, all their elements were in equal
+confusion. Every noble, every warrior who reached ascendency, or was
+born to it, made his own laws and governed as he liked. Every little
+city had its own fashions and its own aims; and was continually
+fighting, driven by jealousy, envy, hatred, or emulation, with its
+neighbours. War was the incessant business of life, and was carried on
+not only against neighbouring cities, but by each city in its own
+streets, from its own towers, where noble fought against noble, citizen
+with citizen, and servant with servant. Literature was only trying to
+begin, to find its form, to find its own Italian tongue, to understand
+what it desired. It took more than a century after Sordello's youth to
+shape itself into the poetry of Dante and Petrarch, into their prose and
+the prose of Boccaccio. The _Vita Nuova_ was set forth in 1290, 93, the
+_Decameron_ in 1350, 53, and Petrarch was crowned at Rome in 1341. And
+the arts of sculpture and painting were in the same condition. They were
+struggling towards a new utterance, but as yet they could not speak.
+
+It is during this period of impassioned confusion and struggle towards
+form, during this carnival of individuality, that Sordello, as conceived
+by Browning, a modern in the midst of mediaevalism, an exceptional
+character wholly unfitted for the time, is placed by Browning. And the
+clash between himself and his age is too much for him. He dies of it;
+dies of the striving to find an anchorage for life, and of his inability
+to find it in this chartless sea. But the world of men, incessantly
+recruited by new generations, does not die like the individual, and
+what Sordello could not do, it did. It emerged from this confusion in
+the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with S. Francis, Dante,
+Petrarch and Boccaccio, the Pisani, Giotto, and the Commonwealth of
+Florence. Religion, Poetry, Prose, Sculpture, Painting, Government and
+Law found new foundations. The Renaissance began to dawn, and during its
+dawn kept, among the elect of mankind, all or nearly all the noble
+impulses and faith of mediaevalism.
+
+This dawn of the Renaissance is nearly a hundred years away at the time
+of this poem, yet two of its characteristics vitally moved through this
+transition period; and, indeed, while they continued even to the end of
+the Renaissance, were powers which brought it about. The first of these
+was a boundless curiosity about life, and the second was an intense
+individuality. No one can read the history of the Italian Republics in
+the thirteenth century without incessantly coming into contact with both
+these elements working fiercely, confusedly, without apparently either
+impulse or aim, but producing a wonderful activity of life, out of
+which, by command as it were of the gods, a new-created world might rise
+into order. It was as if chaos were stirred, like a cauldron with a
+stick, that suns and planets, moving by living law, might emerge in
+beauty. Sordello lived in the first whirling of these undigested
+elements, and could only dream of what might be; but it was life in
+which he moved, disorderly life, it is true, but not the dread disorder
+of decay. Browning paints it with delight.
+
+This unbridled curiosity working in men of unbridled individuality
+produced a tumbling confusion in life. Men, full of eagerness, each
+determined to fulfil his own will, tried every kind of life, attempted
+every kind of pursuit, strove to experience all the passions, indulged
+their passing impulses to the full, and when they were wearied of any
+experiment in living passed on to the next, not with weariness but with
+fresh excitement. Cities, small republics, did the same
+collectively--Ferrara, Padua, Verona, Mantua, Milan, Parma, Florence,
+Pisa, Siena, Perugia. Both cities and citizens lived in a nervous storm,
+and at every impulse passed into furious activity. In five minutes a
+whole town was up in the market-place, the bells rang, the town banner
+was displayed, and in an hour the citizens were marching out of the
+gates to attack the neighbouring city. A single gibe in the streets, or
+at the church door, interchanged between one noble and another of
+opposite factions, and the gutters of the streets ran red with the blood
+of a hundred men. This then was the time of _Sordello_, and splendidly
+has Browning represented it.
+
+2. Sordello is the image of this curiosity and individuality, but only
+inwardly. In the midst of this turbulent society Browning creates him
+with the temperament of a poet, living in a solitary youth, apart from
+arms and the wild movement of the world. His soul is full of the
+curiosity of the time. The inquisition of his whole life is, "What is
+the life most worth living? How shall I attain it, in what way make it
+mine?" and then, "What sort of lives are lived by other men?" and,
+finally, "What is the happiest life for the whole?" The curiosity does
+not drive him, like the rest of the world, into action in the world. It
+expands only in thought and dreaming. But however he may dream, however
+wrapt in self he may be, his curiosity about these matters never lessens
+for a moment. Even in death it is his ruling passion.
+
+Along with this he shares fully in the impassioned individuality of the
+time. Browning brings that forward continually. All the dreams of his
+youth centre in himself; Nature becomes the reflection of himself; all
+histories of great men he represents as in himself; finally, he becomes
+to himself Apollo, the incarnation of poetry. But he does not seek to
+realise his individuality, any more than his curiosity, in action. When
+he is drawn out of himself at Mantua and sings for a time to please men,
+he finds that the public do not understand him, and flies back to his
+solitude, back to his own soul. And Mantua, and love, and adventure all
+die within him. "I have all humanity," he says, "within myself--why then
+should I seek humanity?" This is the way the age's passion for
+individuality shows itself in him. Other men put it into love, war, or
+adventure. He does not; he puts it into the lonely building-up of his
+own soul. Even when he is brought into the midst of the action of the
+time we see that he is apart from it. As he wanders through the turmoil
+of the streets of Ferrara in Book iv., he is dreaming still of his own
+life, of his own soul. His curiosity, wars and adventures are within.
+The various lives he is anxious to live are lived in lonely
+imaginations. The individuality he realises is in thought. At this point
+then he is apart from his century--an exceptional temperament set in
+strong contrast to the world around him--the dreamer face to face with
+a mass of men all acting with intensity. And the common result takes
+place; the exceptional breaks down against the steady and terrible pull
+of the ordinary. It is Hamlet over again, and when Sordello does act it
+is just as Hamlet does, by a sudden impulse which lifts him from
+dreaming into momentary action, out of which, almost before he has
+realised he is acting, he slips back again into dreams. And his action
+seems to him the dream, and his dream the activity. That saying of
+Hamlet's would be easy on the lips of Sordello, if we take "bad dreams"
+to mean for him what they meant for Hamlet the moment he is forced to
+action in the real world--"I could be bounded in a nut-shell and think
+myself king of infinite space, had I not bad dreams." When he is
+surprised into action at the Court of Love at Mantua, and wins the prize
+of song, he seems to slip back into a sleepy cloud. But Palma, bending
+her beautiful face over him and giving him her scarf, wins him to stay
+at Mantua; and for a short time he becomes the famous poet. But he is
+disappointed. That which he felt himself to be (the supernal greatness
+of his individuality) is not recognised, and at last he feels that to
+act and fight his way through a world which appreciates his isolated
+greatness so little as to dare to criticise him, is impossible. We have
+seen in the last chapter how he slips back to Goito, to his
+contemplation of himself in nature, to his self-communion, to the dreams
+which do not contradict his opinion of himself. The momentary creator
+perishes in the dreamer. He gives up life, adventure, love, war, and he
+finally surrenders his art. No more poetry for him.
+
+It is thus that a character feeble for action, but mystic in
+imagination, acts in the petulance of youth when it is pushed into a
+clashing, claiming world. In this mood a year passes by in vague
+content. Yet a little grain of conscience makes him sour. He is vexed
+that his youth is gone with all its promised glow, pleasure and action;
+and the vexation is suddenly deepened by seeing a great change in the
+aspect of nature. "What," he thinks, when he sees the whole valley
+filled with Mincio in flood, "can Nature in this way renew her youth,
+and not I? Alas! I cannot so renew myself; youth is over." But if youth
+be dead, manhood remains; and the curiosity and individuality of the age
+stir in him again. "I must find," he thinks, "the fitting kind of life.
+I must make men feel what I am. But how; what do I want for this? I want
+some outward power to draw me forth and upward, as the moon draws the
+waters; to lead me to a life in which I may know mankind, in order that
+I may take out of men all I need to make _myself_ into perfect form--a
+full poet, able to impose my genius on mankind, and to lead them where I
+will. What force can draw me out of these dreaming solitudes in which I
+fail to realise my art? Why, there is none so great as love. Palma who
+smiled on me, she shall be my moon." At that moment, when he is again
+thrilled with curiosity concerning life, again desirous to realise his
+individuality in the world of men, a message comes from Palma. "Come,
+there is much for you to do--come to me at Verona." She lays a political
+career before him. "Take the Kaiser's cause, you and I together; build a
+new Italy under the Emperor." And Sordello is fired by the thought, not
+as yet for the sake of doing good to man, but to satisfy his curiosity
+in a new life, and to edify his individual soul into a perfection
+unattained as yet. "I will go," he thinks, "and be the spirit in this
+body of mankind, wield, animate, and shape the people of Italy, make
+them the form in which I shall express myself. It is not enough to act,
+in imagination, all that man is, as I have done. I will now make men act
+by the force of my spirit: North Italy shall be my body, and thus I
+shall realise myself"--as if one could, with that self-contemplating
+motive, ever realise personality.
+
+This, then, is the position of Sordello in the period of history I have
+pictured, and it carries him to the end of the third book of the poem.
+It has embodied the history of his youth--of his first contact with the
+world; of his retreat from it into thought over what he has gone
+through; and of his reawakening into a fresh questioning--how he shall
+realise life, how manifest himself in action. "What shall I do as a
+poet, and a man?"
+
+3. The next thing to be said of _Sordello_ is its vivid realisation of
+certain aspects of mediaeval life. Behind this image of the curious
+dreamer lost in abstractions, and vividly contrasted with it, is the
+fierce activity of mediaeval cities and men in incessant war; each city,
+each man eager to make his own individuality supreme; and this is
+painted by Browning at the very moment when the two great parties were
+formed, and added to personal war the intensifying power of two ideals.
+This was a field for imagination in which Browning was sure to revel,
+like a wild creature of the woods on a summer day. He had the genius of
+places, of portraiture, and of sudden flashes of action and passion;
+and the time of which he wrote supplied him with full matter for these
+several capacities of genius.
+
+When we read in _Sordello_ of the fierce outbursts of war in the cities
+of North Italy, we know that Browning saw them with his eyes and shared
+their fury and delight. Verona is painted in the first book just as the
+news arrives that her prince is captive in Ferrara. It is evening, a
+still and flaming sunset, and soft sky. In dreadful contrast to this
+burning silence of Nature is the wrath and hate which are seething in
+the market-place. Group talked with restless group, and not a face
+
+    But wrath made livid, for among them were
+    Death's staunch purveyors, such as have in care
+    To feast him. Fear had long since taken root
+    In every breast, and now these crushed its fruit,
+    The ripe hate, like a wine; to note the way
+    It worked while each grew drunk! Men grave and grey
+    Stood, with shut eyelids, rocking to and fro,
+    Letting the silent luxury trickle slow
+    About the hollows where a heart should be;
+    But the young gulped with a delirious glee
+    Some foretaste of their first debauch in blood
+    At the fierce news.
+
+Step by step the varying passions, varying with the men of the varied
+cities of the League assembled at Verona, are smitten out on the anvil
+of Browning's imagination. Better still is the continuation of the same
+scene in the third book, when the night has come, and the raging of the
+people, reaching its height, declares war. Palma and Sordello, who are
+in the palace looking on the square, lean out to see and hear. On the
+black balcony beneath them, in the still air, amid a gush of
+torch-fire, the grey-haired counsellors harangue the people;
+
+                then
+    Sea-like that people surging to and fro
+    Shouted, "Hale forth the carroch--trumpets, ho,
+    A flourish! Run it in the ancient grooves!
+    Back from the bell! Hammer--that whom behoves
+    May hear the League is up!"
+
+Then who will may read the dazzling account of the streets of Ferrara
+thick with corpses; of Padua, of Bassano streaming blood; of the wells
+chokeful of carrion, of him who catches in his spur, as he is kicking
+his feet when he sits on the well and singing, his own mother's face by
+the grey hair; of the sack of Vicenza in the fourth book; of the
+procession of the envoys of the League through the streets of Ferrara,
+with ensigns, war-cars and clanging bells; of the wandering of Sordello
+at night through the squares blazing with fires, and the soldiers camped
+around them singing and shouting; of his solitary silent thinking
+contrasted with their noise and action--and he who reads will know, as
+if he lived in them, the fierce Italian towns of the thirteenth century.
+
+Nor is his power less when he describes the solitary silent places of
+mediaeval castles, palaces, and their rooms; of the long, statue-haunted,
+cypress-avenued gardens, a waste of flowers and wild undergrowth. We
+wander, room by room, through Adelaide's castle at Goito, we see every
+beam in the ceiling, every figure on the tapestry; we walk with Browning
+through the dark passages into the dim-lighted chambers of the town
+palace at Verona, and hang over its balconies; we know the gardens at
+Goito, and the lonely woods; and we keep pace with Sordello through
+those desolate paths and ilex-groves, past the fountains lost in the
+wilderness of foliage, climbing from terrace to terrace where the broken
+statues, swarming with wasps, gleam among the leering aloes and the
+undergrowth, in the garden that Salinguerra made for his Sicilian wife
+at Ferrara. The words seem as it were to flare the ancient places out
+before the eyes.
+
+Mixed up with all this painting of towns, castles and gardens there is
+some natural description. Browning endeavours, it is plain, to keep that
+within the mediaeval sentiment. But that he should succeed in that was
+impossible. The mediaeval folk had little of our specialised sentiment
+for landscape, and Browning could not get rid of it.
+
+The modern philosophies of Nature do not, however, appear in _Sordello_
+as they did in _Pauline_ or _Paracelsus_. Only once in the whole of
+_Sordello_ is Nature conceived as in analogy with man, and Browning says
+this in a parenthesis. "Life is in the tempest," he cries, "thought
+
+    "Clothes the keen hill-top; mid-day woods are fraught
+    With fervours":
+
+but, in spite of the mediaeval environment, the modern way of seeing
+Nature enters into all his descriptions. They are none the worse for it,
+and do not jar too much with the mediaeval _mise-en-scene_. We expect our
+modern sentiment, and Sordello himself, being in many ways a modern,
+seems to license these descriptions. Most of them also occur when he is
+on the canvas, and are a background to his thought. Moreover, they are
+not set descriptions; they are flashed out, as it were, in a few lines,
+as if they came by chance, and are not pursued into detail. Indeed, they
+are not done so much for the love of Nature herself, as for passing
+illustrations of Sordello's ways of thought and feeling upon matters
+which are not Nature. As such, even in a mediaeval poem, they are
+excusable. And vivid they are in colour, in light, in reality. Some I
+have already isolated. Here are a few more, just to show his hand. This
+is the castle and its scenery, described in Book i.:
+
+    In Mantua territory half is slough,
+    Half pine-tree forest: maples, scarlet oaks
+    Breed o'er the river-beds; even Mincio chokes
+    With sand the summer through: but 'tis morass
+    In winter up to Mantua's walls. There was,
+    Some thirty years before this evening's coil,
+    One spot reclaimed from the surrounding spoil,
+    Goito; just a castle built amid
+    A few low mountains; firs and larches hid
+    Their main defiles, and rings of vineyard bound
+    The rest. Some captured creature in a pound,
+    Whose artless wonder quite precludes distress,
+    Secure beside in its own loveliness,
+    So peered, with airy head, below, above
+    The castle at its toils, the lapwings love
+    To glean among at grape time.
+
+And this is the same place from the second book:
+
+                And thus he wandered, dumb
+    Till evening, when he paused, thoroughly spent
+    On a blind hill-top: down the gorge he went,
+    Yielding himself up as to an embrace.
+    The moon came out; like features of a face,
+    A querulous fraternity of pines,
+    Sad blackthorn clumps, leafless and grovelling vines
+    Also came out, made gradually up
+    The picture; 'twas Goito's mountain-cup
+    And castle.
+
+And here, from Book iii., is Spring when Palma, dreaming of the man she
+can love, cries that the waking earth is in a thrill to welcome him--
+
+                "Waits he not the waking year?
+    His almond-blossoms must be honey-ripe
+    By this; to welcome him fresh runnels stripe
+    The thawed ravines; because of him the wind
+    Walks like a herald."
+
+This is May from Book ii.; and afterwards, in the third book, the months
+from Spring to Summer--
+
+                My own month came;
+    'Twas a sunrise of blossoming and May.
+    Beneath a flowering laurel thicket lay
+    Sordello; each new sprinkle of white stars
+    That smell fainter of wine than Massic jars
+    Dug up at Baiae, when the south wind shed
+    The ripest, made him happier.
+
+    Not any strollings now at even-close
+    Down the field path, Sordello! by thorn-rows
+    Alive with lamp-flies, swimming spots of fire
+    And dew, outlining the black cypress-spire
+    She waits you at, Elys, who heard you first
+    Woo her, the snow month through, but, ere she durst
+    Answer 'twas April. Linden-flower-time long
+    Her eyes were on the ground; 'tis July, strong
+    Now; and, because white dust-clouds overwhelm
+    The woodside, here, or by the village elm
+    That holds the moon, she meets you, somewhat pale.
+
+And here are two pieces of the morning, one of the wide valley of
+Naples; another with which the poem ends, pure modern, for it does not
+belong to Sordello's time, but to our own century. This is from the
+fourth book.
+
+                Broke
+    Morning o'er earth; he yearned for all it woke--
+    From the volcano's vapour-flag, winds hoist
+    Black o'er the spread of sea,--down to the moist
+    Dale's silken barley-spikes sullied with rain,
+    Swayed earthwards, heavily to rise again.
+
+And this from the last book--
+
+    Lo, on a heathy brown and nameless hill
+    By sparkling Asolo, in mist and chill,
+    Morning just up, higher and higher runs
+    A child barefoot and rosy. See! the sun's
+    On the square castle's inner-court's low wall
+    Like the chine of some extinct animal
+    Half-turned to earth and flowers; and through the haze,
+    (Save where some slender patches of grey maize
+    Are to be over-leaped) that boy has crossed
+    The whole hill-side of dew and powder-frost
+    Matting the balm and mountain camomile.
+    Up and up goes he, singing all the while
+    Some unintelligible words to beat
+    The lark, God's poet, swooning at his feet.
+
+As alive, and even clearer in outline than these natural descriptions,
+are the portraits in _Sordello_ of the people of the time. No one can
+mistake them for modern folk. I do not speak of the portrait of
+Sordello--that is chiefly of the soul, not of the body--but of the
+personages who fill the background, the heads of noble houses, the
+warriors, priests, soldiers, singers, the women, and chiefly Adelaide
+and Palma. These stand before us as Tintoret or Veronese might have
+painted them had they lived on into the great portrait-century. Their
+dress, their attitudes, their sudden gestures, their eyes, hair, the
+trick of their mouths, their armour, how they walked and talked and read
+and wrote, are all done in quick touches and jets of colour. Each is
+distinct from the others, each a type. A multitude of cabinet sketches
+of men are made in the market-places, in castle rooms, on the roads, in
+the gardens, on the bastions of the towns. Take as one example the
+Pope's Legate:
+
+    With eyes, like fresh-blown thrush-eggs on a thread,
+    Faint-blue and loosely floating in his head,
+    Large tongue, moist open mouth; and this long while
+    That owner of the idiotic smile
+    Serves them!
+
+Nor does Browning confine himself to personages of Sordello's time.
+There are admirable portraits, but somewhat troubled by unnecessary
+matter, of Dante, of Charlemagne, of Hildebrand. One elaborate portrait
+is continued throughout the poem. It is that of Salinguerra, the man of
+action as contrasted with Sordello the dreamer. Much pains are spent on
+this by Browning. We see him first in the streets of Ferrara.
+
+                Men understood
+    Living was pleasant to him as he wore
+    His careless surcoat, glanced some missive o'er,
+    Propped on his truncheon in the public way.
+
+Then at the games at Mantua, when he is told Sordello will not come to
+sing a welcome to him. What cares he for poet's whims?
+
+    The easy-natured soldier smiled assent,
+    Settled his portly person, smoothed his chin,
+    And nodded that the bull-bait might begin.
+
+Then mad with fighting frenzy in the sacking of Vicenza, then in his
+palace nursing his scheme to make the Emperor predominant, then pacing
+like a lion, hot with hope of mastering all Italy, when he finds out
+that Sordello is his son: "hands clenched, head erect, pursuing his
+discourse--crimson ear, eyeballs suffused, temples full fraught."
+
+Then in the fourth book there is a long portrait of him which I quote as
+a full specimen of the power with which Browning could paint a partisan
+of the thirteenth century. Though sixty years old, Salinguerra looked
+like a youth--
+
+                So agile, quick
+    And graceful turned the head on the broad chest
+    Encased in pliant steel, his constant vest,
+    Whence split the sun off in a spray of fire
+    Across the room; and, loosened of its tire
+    Of steel, that head let breathe the comely brown
+    Large massive locks discoloured as if a crown
+    Encircled them, so frayed the basnet where
+    A sharp white line divided clean the hair;
+    Glossy above, glossy below, it swept
+    Curling and fine about a brow thus kept
+    Calm, laid coat upon coat, marble and sound:
+    This was the mystic mark the Tuscan found,
+    Mused of, turned over books about. Square-faced,
+    No lion more; two vivid eyes, enchased
+    In hollows filled with many a shade and streak
+    Settling from the bold nose and bearded cheek.
+    Nor might the half-smile reach them that deformed
+    A lip supremely perfect else--unwarmed,
+    Unwidened, less or more; indifferent
+    Whether on trees or men his thoughts were bent,
+    Thoughts rarely, after all, in trim and train
+    As now a period was fulfilled again:
+    Of such, a series made his life, compressed
+    In each, one story serving for the rest.
+
+This is one example of a gallery of vivid portraiture in all Browning's
+work, such as Carlyle only in the nineteenth century has approached in
+England. It is not a national, but an international gallery of
+portraits. The greater number of the portraits are Italian, and they
+range over all classes of society from the Pope to the peasant. Even
+Bishop Blougram has the Italian subtlety, and, like the Monsignore in
+_Pippa Passes_, something of the politic morality of Machiavelli. But
+Israel, Greece, France, Spain, Germany, and the days before the world
+was brought together, furnish him with men drawn as alive. He has
+painted their souls, but others have done this kind of painting as well,
+if not so minutely. But no others have painted so livingly the outside
+of men--their features one by one, their carriage, their gestures, their
+clothing, their walk, their body. All the colours of their dress and
+eyes and lips are given. We see them live and move and have their being.
+It is the same with his women, but I keep these for further treatment.
+
+4. The next thing I have to say about _Sordello_ concerns what I call
+its illustrative episodes. Browning, wishing to illuminate his subject,
+sometimes darts off from it into an elaborate simile as Homer does. But
+in Homer the simile is carefully set, and explained to be a comparison.
+It is not mixed up with the text. It is short, rarely reaching more than
+ten lines. In Browning, it is glided into without any preparation, and
+at first seems part of the story. Nor are we always given any intimation
+of its end. And Browning is led away by his imaginative pleasure in its
+invention to work it up with adventitious ornament of colour and
+scenery; having, in his excitement of invention, lost all power of
+rejecting any additional touch which occurs to him, so that the
+illustration, swelling out into a preposterous length, might well be
+severed from the book and made into a separate poem. Moreover, these
+long illustrations are often but faintly connected with the subject they
+are used to illumine; and they delay the movement of the poem while they
+confuse the reader. The worst of these, worst as an illustration, but
+in itself an excellent fragment to isolate as a picture-poem, is the
+illustration of the flying slave who seeks his tribe beyond the
+Mountains of the Moon. It is only to throw light on a moment of
+Salinguerra's discursive thought, and is far too big for that. It is
+more like an episode than an illustration. I quote it not only to show
+what I mean, but also for its power. It is in Bk. iv.
+
+    "As, shall I say, some Ethiop, past pursuit
+    Of all enslavers, dips a shackled foot
+    Burnt to the blood, into the drowsy black
+    Enormous watercourse which guides him back
+    To his own tribe again, where he is king;
+    And laughs because he guesses, numbering
+    The yellower poison-wattles on the pouch
+    Of the first lizard wrested from its couch
+    Under the slime (whose skin, the while, he strips
+    To cure his nostril with, and festered lips,
+    And eyeballs bloodshot through the desert-blast)
+    That he has reached its boundary, at last
+    May breathe;--thinks o'er enchantments of the South
+    Sovereign to plague his enemies, their mouth,
+    Eyes, nails, and hair; but, these enchantments tried
+    In fancy, puts them soberly aside
+    For truth, projects a cool return with friends,
+    The likelihood of winning mere amends
+    Ere long; thinks that, takes comfort silently,
+    Then, from the river's brink, his wrongs and he,
+    Hugging revenge close to their hearts, are soon
+    Off-striding for the Mountains of the Moon."
+
+The best of these is where he illustrates the restless desire of a poet
+for the renewal of energy, for finding new worlds to sing. The poet
+often seems to stop his work, to be satisfied. "Here I will rest," he
+says, "and do no more." But he only waits for a fresh impulse.
+
+    'Tis but a sailor's promise, weather-bound:
+    "Strike sail, slip cable, here the bark be moored
+    For once, the awning stretched, the poles assured!
+    Noontide above; except the wave's crisp dash,
+    Or buzz of colibri, or tortoise' splash,
+    The margin's silent: out with every spoil
+    Made in our tracking, coil by mighty coil,
+    This serpent of a river to his head
+    I' the midst! Admire each treasure, as we spread
+    The bank, to help us tell our history
+    Aright; give ear, endeavour to descry
+    The groves of giant rushes, how they grew
+    Like demons' endlong tresses we sailed through,
+    What mountains yawned, forests to give us vent
+    Opened, each doleful side, yet on we went
+    Till ... may that beetle (shake your cap) attest
+    The springing of a land-wind from the West!"
+    --Wherefore? Ah yes, you frolic it to-day!
+    To-morrow, and the pageant moved away
+    Down to the poorest tent-pole, we and you
+    Part company: no other may pursue
+    Eastward your voyage, be informed what fate
+    Intends, if triumph or decline await
+    The tempter of the everlasting steppe!
+
+This, from Book iii., is the best because it is closer than the rest to
+the matter in hand; but how much better it might have been! How
+curiously overloaded it is, how difficult what is easy has been made!
+
+The fault of these illustrations is the fault of the whole poem.
+_Sordello_ is obscure, Browning's idolaters say, by concentration of
+thought. It is rather obscure by want of that wise rejection of
+unnecessary thoughts which is the true concentration. It is obscure by a
+reckless misuse of the ordinary rules of language. It is obscure by a
+host of parentheses introduced to express thoughts which are only
+suggested, half-shaped, and which are frequently interwoven with
+parentheses introduced into the original parentheses. It is obscure by
+the worst punctuation I ever came across, but this was improved in the
+later editions. It is obscure by multitudinous fancies put in whether
+they have to do with the subject or not, and by multitudinous deviations
+within those fancies. It is obscure by Browning's effort to make words
+express more than they are capable of expressing.
+
+It is no carping criticism to say this of Browning's work in _Sordello_,
+because it is the very criticism his after-practice as an artist makes.
+He gave up these efforts to force, like Procrustes, language to stretch
+itself or to cut itself down into forms it could not naturally take; and
+there is no more difficulty in most of his earlier poems than there is
+in _Paracelsus_. Only a little of the Sordellian agonies remains in
+them, only that which was natural to Browning's genius. The interwoven
+parentheses remain, the rushes of invention into double and triple
+illustrations, the multiplication of thought on thought; but for these
+we may even be grateful. Opulence and plenitude of this kind are not
+common; we are not often granted a man who flings imaginations, fancies
+and thoughts from him as thick and bright as sparks from a grinder's
+wheel. It is not every poet who is unwilling to leave off, who finds
+himself too full to stop. "These bountiful wits," as Lamb said, "always
+give full measure, pressed down, and running over."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[8] Browning spells this name _Ecelin_, probably for easier use in
+verse.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+_BROWNING AND SORDELLO_
+
+
+There are certain analogies between Browning as a poet and the Sordello
+of the poem; between his relation to the world of his time and that of
+Sordello to his time; and finally, between Browning's language in this
+poem and the change in the Italian language which he imputes to the work
+of Sordello. This chapter will discuss these analogies, and close with
+an appreciation of Browning's position between the classic and romantic
+schools of poetry.
+
+The analogies of which I write may be denied, but I do not think they
+can be disproved. Browning is, no doubt, separate from Sordello in his
+own mind, but underneath the young poet he is creating, he is
+continually asking himself the same question which Sordello asks--What
+shall I do as an artist? To what conclusion shall I come with regard to
+my life as a poet? It is no small proof of this underlying personal
+element in the first three books of the poem that at the end of the
+third book Browning flings himself suddenly out of the mediaeval world
+and the men he has created, and waking into 1835-40 at Venice, asks
+himself--What am I writing, and why? What is my aim in being a poet? Is
+it worth my while to go on with Sordello's story, and why is it worth
+the telling? In fact, he allows us to think that he has been describing
+in Sordello's story a transitory phase of his own career. And then,
+having done this, he tells how he got out of confusion into clearer
+light.
+
+The analogy between Browning's and Sordello's time is not a weak one.
+The spirit of the world, between 1830 and 1840 in England, resembled in
+many ways the spirit abroad at the beginning of the thirteenth century.
+The country had awakened out of a long sleep, and was extraordinarily
+curious not only with regard to life and the best way to live it, but
+also with regard to government, law, the condition of the people, the
+best kind of religion and how best to live it, the true aims of poetry
+and how it was to be written, what subjects it should work on, what was
+to be the mother-motive of it, that is, what was the mother-motive of
+all the arts. And this curiosity deepened from year to year for fifty
+years. But even stronger than the curiosity was the eager individualism
+of this time, which extended into every sphere of human thought and
+action, and only began about 1866 to be balanced by an equally strong
+tendency towards collectivism.
+
+These two elements in the time-spirit did not produce, in a settled
+state like England, the outward war and confusion they produced in the
+thirteenth century, though they developed after 1840, in '48, into a
+European storm--but they did produce a confused welter of mingled
+thoughts concerning the sources and ends of human life, the action it
+should take, and why it should take it. The poetry of Arnold and Clough
+represents with great clearness the further development in the soul of
+man of this confusion. I think that Browning has represented in the
+first three books of _Sordello_ his passage through this tossing sea of
+thought.
+
+He had put into _Paracelsus_ all that he had worked out with clearness
+during his youth; his theory of life is stated with lucidity in that
+poem. But when it was finished, and he had entered, like Sordello from
+Goito into Mantua, into the crowd and clash of the world; when, having
+published _Pauline_ and _Paracelsus_, he had, like Sordello, met
+criticism and misunderstanding, his Paracelsian theory did not seem to
+explain humanity as clearly as he imagined. It was only a theory; Would
+it stand the test of life among mankind, be a saving and healing
+prophecy? Life lay before him, now that the silent philosophising of
+poetic youth was over, in all its inexplicable, hurried, tormented,
+involved, and multitudinously varied movement. He had built up a
+transcendental building[9] in _Paracelsus_. Was it all to fall in ruin?
+No answer came when he looked forth on humanity over whose landscape the
+irony of the gods, a bitter mist, seemed to brood. At what then shall he
+aim as a poet? What shall be his subject-matter? How is life to be
+lived?
+
+Then he thought that he would, as a poet, describe his own time and his
+own soul under the character of Sordello, and place Sordello in a time
+more stormy than his own. And he would make Sordello of an exceptional
+temper like himself, and to clash with _his_ time as he was then
+clashing with his own. With these thoughts he wrote the first books of
+_Sordello_, and Naddo, the critic of Sordello's verses, represents the
+critics of Paracelsus and the early poems. I have experienced, he says
+of himself in _Sordello_, something of the spite of fate.
+
+Then, having done this, he leaves Sordello at the end of the third book,
+and turns, beset with a thousand questions, to himself and his art in a
+personal digression. Reclining on a ruined palace-step at Venice, he
+thinks of Eglamor who made a flawless song, the type of those who reach
+their own perfection here; and then of Sordello who made a song which
+stirred the world far more than Eglamor's, which yet was not flawless,
+not perfect; but because of its imperfection looked forward uncontented
+to a higher song. Shall he, Browning the poet, choose Eglamor or
+Sordello; even though Sordello perish without any achievement? And he
+chooses to sail for ever towards the infinite, chooses the imperfection
+which looks forward. A sailor who loves voyaging may say, when
+weather-bound, "Here rest, unlade the ship, sleep on this grassy bank."
+'Tis but a moment on his path; let the wind change, and he is away
+again, whether triumph or shipwreck await him, for ever
+
+    The tempter of the everlasting steppe.
+
+That much is then settled for life and for poetry. And in that choice of
+endless aspiration Browning confirms all that he thought, with regard to
+half of his theory of life, in _Paracelsus_. This is his first thought
+for life, and it is embodied in the whole of Sordello's career.
+Sordello is never content with earth, either when he is young, or when
+he passes into the world, or when he dies not having attained or been
+already perfect--a thought which is as much at the root of romanticism
+as of Christianity. Then comes the further question: To whom shall I
+dedicate the service of my art? Who shall be my motive, the Queen whom I
+shall love and write of; and he thinks of Sordello who asks that
+question and who, for the time, answers "Palma," that is, the passion of
+love.
+
+"But now, shall I, Browning, take as my Queen"--and he symbolises his
+thought in the girls he sees in the boats from his palace steps--"that
+girl from Bassano, or from Asolo, or her from Padua; that is, shall I
+write of youth's love, of its tragic or its comedy, of its darkness, joy
+and beauty only? No, he answers, not of that stuff shall I make my work,
+but of that sad dishevelled ghost of a girl, half in rags, with eyes
+inveterately full of tears; of wild, worn, care-bitten, ravishing,
+piteous, and pitiful Humanity, who begs of me and offers me her faded
+love in the street corners. She shall be my Queen, the subject of my
+song, the motive of my poetry. She may be guilty, warped awry from her
+birth, and now a tired harlotry; but she shall rest on my shoulder and I
+shall comfort her. She is false, mistaken, degraded, ignorant, but she
+moves blindly from evil to good, and from lies to truth, and from
+ignorance to knowledge, and from all to love; and all her errors prove
+that she has another world in which, the errors being worked through,
+she will develop into perfectness. Slowly she moves, step by step; but
+not a millionth part is here done of what she will do at last. That is
+the matter of my poetry, which, in its infinite change and hopes, I
+shall express in my work. I shall see it, say what I have seen, and it
+may be
+
+    Impart the gift of seeing to the rest.
+
+Therefore I have made Sordello, thus far, with all his weakness and
+wrong--
+
+                moulded, made anew
+    A Man, and give him to be turned and tried,
+    Be angry with or pleased at."
+
+And then Browning severs himself from Sordello. After this retirement of
+thought into himself, described as taking place in Venice during an
+hour, but I dare say ranging over half a year in reality, he tells the
+rest of Sordello's story from the outside, as a spectator and describer.
+
+Browning has now resolved to dedicate his art, which is his life, to
+love of Humanity, of that pale dishevelled girl, unlovely and lovely,
+evil and good; and to tell the story of individual men and women, and of
+as many as possible; to paint the good which is always mixed with their
+evil; to show that their failures and sins point to a success and
+goodness beyond, because they emerged from aspiration and aspiration
+from the divinity at the root of human nature. But to do this, a poet
+must not live like Sordello, in abstractions, nor shrink from the shock
+of men and circumstance, nor refuse to take men and life as they
+are--but throw himself into the vital present, with its difficulties,
+baffling elements and limitations; take its failures for his own; go
+through them while he looks beyond them, and, because he looks beyond
+them, never lose hope, or retreat from life, or cease to fight his way
+onward. And, to support him in this, there is but one thing--infinite
+love, pity, and sympathy for mankind, increased, not lessened by
+knowledge of the sins and weakness, the failure and despairs of men.
+This is Browning's second thought for life. But this is the very thing
+Sordello, as conceived by Browning, did not and could not do. He lived
+in abstractions and in himself; he tried to discard his human nature, or
+to make it bear more than it could bear. He threw overboard the natural
+physical life of the body because it limited, he thought, the outgoings
+of the imaginative soul, and only found that in weakening the body he
+enfeebled the soul. At every point he resented the limits of human life
+and fought against them. Neither would he live in the world allotted to
+him, nor among the men of his time, nor in its turmoil; but only in
+imagination of his own inner world, among men whom he created for
+himself, of which world he was to be sole king. He had no love for men;
+they wearied, jarred, and disturbed his ideal world. All he wanted was
+their applause or their silence, not their criticism, not their
+affection. And of course human love and sympathy for men and insight
+into them, departed from him, and with them his art departed. He never
+became a true poet.
+
+It is this failure, passing through several phases of life in which
+action is demanded of Sordello, that Browning desired to record in the
+last three books of the poem. And he thinks it worth doing because it is
+human, and the record of what is human is always of worth to man. He
+paints Sordello's passage through phase after phase of thought and act
+in the outside world, in all of which he seems for the moment to succeed
+or to touch the verge of success, but in which his neglect of the needs
+of the body and the uncontentment of his soul produce failure. At last,
+at the very moment of death he knows why he failed, and sees, as through
+a glass darkly, the failure making the success of the world to come. The
+revelation bursts his heart.
+
+And now what is the end, what is the result for man of this long
+striving of Sordello? Nothing! Nothing has been done. Yet no, there is
+one result. The imperfect song he made when he was young at Goito, in
+the flush of happiness, when he forgot himself in love of nature and of
+the young folk who wandered rejoicing through the loveliness of
+nature--that song is still alive, not in the great world among the noble
+women and warriors of the time, but on the lips of the peasant girls of
+Asolo who sing it on dewy mornings when they climb the castle hill. This
+is the outcome of Sordello's life, and it sounds like irony on
+Browning's lips. It is not so; the irony is elsewhere in the poem, and
+is of another kind. Here, the conclusion is,--that the poem, or any work
+of art, made in joy, in sympathy with human life, moved by the love of
+loveliness in man or in nature, lives and lasts in beauty, heals and
+makes happy the world. And it has its divine origin in the artist's loss
+of himself in humanity, and his finding of himself, through union with
+humanity, in union with God the eternal poet. In this is hidden the life
+of an artist's greatness. And here the little song, which gives joy to
+a child, and fits in with and enhances its joy, is greater in the eyes
+of the immortal judges than all the glory of the world which Sordello
+sought so long for himself alone. It is a truth Browning never failed to
+record, the greatness and power of the things of love; for, indeed, love
+being infinite and omnipotent, gives to its smallest expression the
+glory of all its qualities.
+
+The second of these analogies between Browning and Sordello relates to
+Browning's treatment of the English language in the poem of _Sordello_
+and what he pictures Sordello as doing for the Italian language in the
+poem. The passage to which I refer is about half-way in the second book.
+As there is no real ground for representing Sordello as working any
+serious change in the Italian tongue of literature except a slight
+phrase in a treatise of Dante's, the representation is manifestly an
+invention of Browning's added to the character of Sordello as conceived
+by himself. As such it probably comes out of, and belongs to, his own
+experience. The Sordello who acts thus with language represents the
+action of Browning himself at the time he was writing the poem. If so,
+the passage is full of interest.
+
+All we know about Sordello as a poet is that he wrote some Italian
+poems. Those by which he was famous were in Provencal. In Dante's
+treatise on the use of his native tongue, he suggests that Sordello was
+one of the pioneers of literary Italian. So, at least, Browning seems to
+infer from the passage, for he makes it the motive of his little
+"excursus" on Sordello's presumed effort to strike out a new form and
+method in poetic language. Nothing was more needed than such an effort
+if any fine literature were to arise in Italy. In this unformed but
+slowly forming thirteenth century the language was in as great a
+confusion--and, I may say, as individual (for each poet wrote in his own
+dialect) as the life of the century.
+
+What does Browning make Sordello do? He has brought him to Mantua as the
+accepted master of song; and Sordello burns to be fully recognised as
+the absolute poet. He has felt for some time that while he cannot act
+well he can imagine action well. And he sings his imaginations. But
+there is at the root of his singing a love of the applause of the people
+more than a love of song for itself. And he fails to please. So Sordello
+changes his subject and sings no longer of himself in the action of the
+heroes he imagines, but of abstract ideas, philosophic dreams and
+problems. The very critics cried that he had left human nature behind
+him. Vexed at his failure, and still longing to catch the praise of men,
+that he may confirm his belief that he is the loftiest of poets, he
+makes another effort to amaze the world. "I'll write no more of
+imaginary things," he cries; "I will catch the crowd by reorganising the
+language of poetry, by new arrangements of metre and words, by elaborate
+phraseology, especially by careful concentration of thought into the
+briefest possible frame of words. I will take the stuff of thought--that
+is, the common language--beat it on the anvil into new shapes, break
+down the easy flow of the popular poetry, and scarcely allow a tithe of
+the original words I have written to see the light,
+
+                welding words into the crude
+    Mass from the new speech round him, till a rude
+    Armour was hammered out, in time to be
+    Approved beyond the Roman panoply
+    Melted to make it."
+
+That is, he dissolved the Roman dialect to beat out of it an Italian
+tongue. And in this new armour of language he clothed his thoughts. But
+the language broke away from his thoughts: neither expressed them nor
+made them clear. The people failed to understand his thought, and at the
+new ways of using language the critics sneered. "Do get back," they
+said, "to the simple human heart, and tell its tales in the simple
+language of the people."
+
+I do not think that the analogy can be missed. Browning is really
+describing--with, perhaps, a half-scornful reference to his own desire
+for public appreciation--what he tried to do in _Sordello_ for the
+language in which his poetry was to be written. I have said that when he
+came to write _Sordello_ his mind had fallen back from the clear theory
+of life laid down in _Paracelsus_ into a tumbled sea of troubled
+thoughts; and _Sordello_ is a welter of thoughts tossing up and down,
+now appearing, then disappearing, and then appearing again in
+conjunction with new matter, like objects in a sea above which a cyclone
+is blowing. Or we may say that his mind, before and during the writing
+of _Sordello_, was like the thirteenth century, pressing blindly in
+vital disturbance towards an unknown goal. That partly accounts for the
+confused recklessness of the language of the poem. But a great many of
+the tricks Browning now played with his poetic language were
+deliberately done. He had tried--like Sordello at the Court of Love--a
+love-poem in _Pauline_. It had not succeeded. He had tried in
+_Paracelsus_ to expose an abstract theory of life, as Sordello had tried
+writing on abstract imaginings. That also had failed. Now he
+determined--as he represents Sordello doing--to alter his whole way of
+writing. "I will concentrate now," he thought, "since they say I am too
+loose and too diffuse; cut away nine-tenths of all I write, and leave
+out every word I can possibly omit. I will not express completely what I
+think; I shall only suggest it by an illustration. And if anything occur
+to me likely to illuminate it, I shall not add it afterwards but insert
+it in a parenthesis. I will make a new tongue for my poetry." And the
+result was the style and the strange manner in which _Sordello_ was
+written. This partly excuses its obscurity, if deliberation can be an
+excuse for a bad manner in literature. Malice prepense does not excuse a
+murder, though it makes it more interesting. Finally, the manner in
+which _Sordello_ was written did not please him. He left it behind him,
+and _Pippa Passes_, which followed _Sordello_, is as clear and simple as
+its predecessor is obscure in style.
+
+Thirdly, the language of _Sordello_, and, in a lesser degree, that of
+all Browning's poetry, proves--if his whole way of thought and passion
+did not also prove it--that Browning was not a classic, that he
+deliberately put aside the classic traditions in poetry. In this he
+presents a strong contrast to Tennyson. Tennyson was possessed by those
+traditions. His masters were Homer, Vergil, Milton and the rest of those
+who wrote with measure, purity, and temperance; and from whose poetry
+proceeded a spirit of order, of tranquillity, of clearness, of
+simplicity; who were reticent in ornament, in illustration, and stern in
+rejection of unnecessary material. None of these classic excellences
+belong to Browning, nor did he ever try to gain them, and that was,
+perhaps, a pity. But, after all, it would have been of no use had he
+tried for them. We cannot impose from without on ourselves that which we
+have not within; and Browning was, in spirit, a pure romantic, not a
+classic. Tennyson never allowed what romanticism he possessed to have
+its full swing. It always wore the classic dress, submitted itself to
+the classic traditions, used the classic forms. In the _Idylls of the
+King_ he took a romantic story; but nothing could be more unromantic
+than many of the inventions and the characters; than the temper, the
+morality, and the conduct of the poem. The Arthurian poets, Malory
+himself, would have jumped out their skin with amazement, even with
+indignation, had they read it. And a great deal of this oddity, this
+unfitness of the matter to the manner, arose from the romantic story
+being expressed in poetry written in accordance with classic traditions.
+Of course, there were other sources for these inharmonies in the poem,
+but that was one, and not the least of them.
+
+Browning had none of these classic traditions. He had his own matter,
+quite new stuff it was; and he made his own manner. He did not go back
+to the old stories, but, being filled with the romantic spirit, embodied
+it in new forms, and drenched with it his subjects, whether he took
+them from ancient, mediaeval, Renaissance, or modern life. He felt, and
+truly, that it is of the essence of romanticism to be always arising
+into new shapes, assimilating itself, century by century, to the needs,
+the thought and the passions of growing mankind; progressive, a lover of
+change; in steady opposition to that dull conservatism the tendency to
+which besets the classic literature.
+
+Browning had the natural faults of the romantic poet; and these are most
+remarkable when such a poet is young. The faults are the opposites of
+the classic poet's excellences: want of measure, want of proportion,
+want of clearness and simplicity, want of temperance, want of that
+selective power which knows what to leave out or when to stop. And these
+frequently become positive and end in actual disorder of composition,
+huddling of the matters treated of into ill-digested masses, violence in
+effects and phrase, bewildering obscurity, sought-out even desperate
+strangeness of subject and expression, uncompromising individuality,
+crude ornament, and fierce colour. Many examples of these faults are to
+be found in _Sordello_ and throughout the work of Browning. They are the
+extremes into which the Romantic is frequently hurried.
+
+But, then, Browning has the natural gifts and excellences of the
+romantic poet, and these elements make him dearer than the mere Classic
+to a multitude of imaginative persons. One of them is endless and
+impassioned curiosity, for ever unsatisfied, always finding new worlds
+of thought and feeling into which to make dangerous and thrilling
+voyages of discovery--voyages that are filled from end to end with
+incessantly changing adventure, or delight in that adventure. This
+enchants the world. And it is not only in his subjects that the romantic
+poet shows his curiosity. He is just as curious of new methods of
+tragedy, of lyric work, of every mode of poetry; of new ways of
+expressing old thoughts; new ways of treating old metres; of the
+invention of new metres and new ways of phrasing; of strange and
+startling word-combinations, to clothe fittingly the strange and
+startling things discovered in human nature, in one's own soul, or in
+the souls of others. In ancient days such a temper produced the many
+tales of invention which filled the romantic cycles.
+
+Again and again, from century to century, this romantic spirit has done
+its re-creating work in the development of poetry in France, Germany,
+Italy, Spain, and England. And in 1840, and for many years afterwards,
+it produced in Browning, and for our pleasure, his dramatic lyrics as he
+called them; his psychological studies, which I may well call
+excursions, adventures, battles, pursuits, retreats, discoveries of the
+soul; for in the soul of man lay, for Browning, the forest of
+Broceliande, the wild country of Morgan le Fay, the cliffs and moors of
+Lyonnesse. It was there, over that unfooted country, that Childe Roland
+rode to the Dark Tower. Nor can anything be more in the temper of old
+spiritual romance--though with a strangely modern _mise-en-scene_--than
+the great adventure on the dark common with Christ in _Christmas-Eve and
+Easter-Day_.
+
+Another root of the romantic spirit was the sense of, and naturally the
+belief in, a world not to be felt of the senses or analysed by the
+understanding; which was within the apparent world as its substance or
+soul, or beyond it as the power by which it existed; and this mystic
+belief took, among poets, philosophers, theologians, warriors and the
+common people, a thousand forms, ranging from full-schemed philosophies
+to the wildest superstitions. It tended, in its extremes, to make this
+world a shadow, a dream; and our life only a real life when it
+habitually dwelt in the mystic region mortal eye could not see, whose
+voices mortal ear could not receive. Out of this root, which shot its
+first fibres into the soul of humanity in the days of the earliest
+savage and separated him by an unfathomable gulf from the brute, arose
+all the myths and legends and mystic stories which fill romance. Out of
+it developed the unquenchable thirst of those of the romantic temper for
+communion with the spiritual beings of this mystic world; a thirst
+which, however repressed for a time, always arises again; and is even
+now arising among the poets of to-day.
+
+In Browning's view of the natural world some traces of this element of
+the romantic spirit may be distinguished, but in his poetry of Man it
+scarcely appears. Nor, indeed, is he ever the true mystic. He had too
+much of the sense which handles daily life; he saw the facts of life too
+clearly, to fall into the vaguer regions of mysticism. But one part of
+its region, and of the romantic spirit, so incessantly recurs in
+Browning that it may be said to underlie the whole of his work. It is
+that into which the thoughts and passions of the romantic poets in all
+ages ran up, as into a goal--the conception of a perfect world, beyond
+this visible, in which the noble hopes, loves and work of
+humanity--baffled, limited, and ruined here--should be fulfilled and
+satisfied. The Greeks did not frame this conception as a people, though
+Plato outreached towards it; the Romans had it not, though Vergil seems
+to have touched it in hours of inspiration. The Teutonic folk did not
+possess it till Christianity invaded them. Of course, it was alive like
+a beating heart in Christianity, that most romantic of all religions.
+But the Celtic peoples did conceive it before Christianity and with a
+surprising fulness, and wherever they went through Europe they pushed it
+into the thought, passions and action of human life. And out of this
+conception, which among the Irish took form as the Land of Eternal
+Youth, love and joy, where human trouble ceased, grew that element in
+romance which is perhaps the strongest in it--the hunger for eternity,
+for infinite perfection of being, and, naturally, for unremitting
+pursuit of it; and among Christian folk for a life here which should fit
+them for perfect life to come. Christian romance threw itself with
+fervour into that ideal, and the pursuit, for example, of the Holy Grail
+is only one of the forms of this hunger for eternity and perfection.
+
+Browning possessed this element of romance with remarkable fulness, and
+expressed it with undiminished ardour for sixty years of poetic work.
+From _Pauline_ to _Asolando_ it reigns supreme. It is the
+fountain-source of _Sordello_--by the pervasiveness of which the poem
+consists. Immortal life in God's perfection! Into that cry the
+Romantic's hunger for eternity had developed in the soul of Browning.
+His heroes, in drama and lyric, in _Paracelsus_ and _Sordello_, pass
+into the infinite, there to be completed.
+
+And if I may here introduce a kind of note, it is at this moment that we
+ought to take up the _Purgatorio_, and see Sordello as Dante saw him in
+that flowery valley of the Ante-Purgatory when he talked with Dante and
+Vergil. He is there a very different person from the wavering creature
+Browning drew. He is on the way to that perfect fulfilment in God which
+Browning desired for him and all mankind.
+
+Nevertheless, in order to complete this statement, Browning, in his full
+idea of life, was not altogether a romantic. He saw there was a great
+danger that the romantic mysticism might lead its pursuers to neglect
+the duties of life, or lessen their interest in the drama of mankind.
+Therefore he added to his cry for eternity and perfection, his other
+cry: "Recognise your limitations, and work within them, while you must
+never be content with them. Give yourself in love and patience to the
+present labour of mankind; but never imagine for a moment that it ends
+on earth." He thus combined with the thirst of the romantic for eternity
+the full ethical theory of life, as well as the classic poet's
+determination to represent the complete aspect of human life on earth.
+At this point, but with many fantastic deviations due to his prevailing
+romanticism, he was partly of the classic temper. The poem of _Sordello_
+is not without an image of this temper, set vigorously in contrast with
+Sordello himself. This is Salinguerra, who takes the world as it is, and
+is only anxious to do what lies before him day by day. His long
+soliloquy, in which for the moment he indulges in dreams, ends in the
+simple resolution to fight on, hour by hour, as circumstances call on
+him.
+
+Browning's position, then, is a combination of the romantic and
+classical, of the Christian and ethical, of the imaginative and
+scientific views of human life; of the temper which says, "Here only is
+our life, here only our concern," and that which says, "Not here, but
+hereafter is our life." "Here, and hereafter," answered Browning. "Live
+within earth's limits with all your force; never give in, fight on; but
+always transcend your fullest action in aspiration, faith and love."
+
+It amuses me sometimes the way he is taken by his readers. The romantic
+and the Christian folk often claim him as the despiser of this world, as
+one who bids us live wholly for the future, or in the mystic ranges of
+thought and passion. The scientific, humanitarian, and ethical folk
+accept that side of him which agrees with their views of human
+life--views which exclude God, immortality, and a world beyond--that
+is, they take as the whole of Browning the lesser part of his theory of
+life. This is not creditable to their understanding, though it is
+natural enough. We may accept it as an innocent example of the power of
+a strong bias in human nature. But it is well to remember that the
+romantic, Christian, mystic elements of human life are more important in
+Browning's eyes than the ethical or scientific; that the latter are
+nothing to him without the former; that the best efforts of the latter
+for humanity are in his belief not only hopeless, but the stuff that
+dreams are made of, without the former. In the combination of both is
+Browning's message to mankind.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[9] He makes a simile of this in _Sordello_. See Book iii. before his
+waking up in Venice, the lines beginning
+
+                "Rather say
+    My transcendental platan!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+_THE DRAMAS_
+
+
+Of the great poets who, not being born dramatists, have attempted to
+write dramas in poetry, Browning was the most persevering. I suppose
+that, being conscious of his remarkable power in the representation of
+momentary action and of states of the soul, he thought that he could
+harmonise into a whole the continuous action of a number of persons, and
+of their passions in sword-play with one another; and then conduct to a
+catastrophe their interaction. But a man may be capable of writing
+dramatic lyrics and dramatic romances without being capable of writing a
+drama. Indeed, so different are the two capabilities that I think the
+true dramatist could not write such a lyric or romance as Browning calls
+dramatic; his genius would carry one or the other beyond the just limits
+of this kind of poetry into his own kind. And the writer of excellent
+lyrics and romances of this kind will be almost sure to fail in real
+drama. I wish, in order to avoid confusion of thought, that the term
+"dramatic" were only used of poetry which belongs to drama itself. I
+have heard Chaucer called dramatic. It is a complete misnomer. His
+genius would have for ever been unable to produce a good drama. Had he
+lived in Elizabeth's time, he would, no doubt, have tried to write one,
+but he must have failed. The genius for story-telling is just the genius
+which is incapable of being a fine dramatist. And the opposite is also
+true. Shakespeare, great as his genius was, would not have been able to
+write a single one of the Canterbury Tales. He would have been driven
+into dramatising them.
+
+Neither Tennyson nor Browning had dramatic genius--that is, the power to
+conceive, build, co-ordinate and finish a drama. But they thought they
+had, and we may pardon them for trying their hand. I can understand the
+hunger and thirst which beset great poets, who had, like these two men,
+succeeded in so many different kinds of poetry, to succeed also in the
+serious drama, written in poetry. It is a legitimate ambition; but poets
+should be acquainted with their limitations, and not waste their
+energies or our patience on work which they cannot do well. That men
+like Tennyson and Browning, who were profoundly capable of understanding
+what a great drama means, and is; who had read what the
+master-tragedians of Greece have done; who knew their Shakespeare, to
+say nothing of the other Elizabethan dramatists; who had seen Moliere on
+the stage; who must have felt how the thing ought to be done, composed,
+and versed; that they, having written a play like _Harold_ or
+_Strafford_, should really wish to stage it, or having heard and seen it
+on the stage should go on writing more dramas, would seem
+incomprehensible, were it not that power to do one thing very well is so
+curiously liable to self-deceit.
+
+The writing of the first drama is not to be blamed. It would be
+unnatural not to try one's hand. It is the writing of the others which
+is amazing in men like Tennyson and Browning. They ought to have felt,
+being wiser than other men in poetry, that they had no true dramatic
+capacity. Other poets who also tried the drama did know themselves
+better. Byron wrote several dramas, but he made little effort to have
+them represented on the stage. He felt they were not fit for that; and,
+moreover, such scenic poems as _Manfred_ and _Cain_ were not intended
+for the stage, and do not claim to be dramas in that sense. To write
+things of this kind, making no claim to public representation, with the
+purpose of painting a situation of the soul, is a legitimate part of a
+poet's work, and among them, in Browning's work, might be classed _In a
+Balcony_, which I suppose his most devoted worshipper would scarcely
+call a drama.
+
+Walter Scott, than whom none could conduct a conversation better in a
+novel, or make more living the clash of various minds in a critical
+event, whether in a cottage or a palace; whom one would select as most
+likely to write a drama well--had self-knowledge enough to understand,
+after his early attempts, that true dramatic work was beyond his power.
+Wordsworth also made one effort, and then said good-bye to drama.
+Coleridge tried, and staged _Remorse_. It failed and deserved to fail.
+To read it is to know that the writer had no sense of an audience in his
+mind as he wrote it--a fatal want in a dramatist. Even its purple
+patches of fine poetry and its noble melody of verse did not redeem it.
+Shelley did better than these brethren of his, and that is curious. One
+would say, after reading his previous poems, that he was the least
+likely of men to write a true drama. Yet the _Cenci_ approaches that
+goal, and the fragment of _Charles the First_ makes so great a grip on
+the noble passions and on the intellectual eye, and its few scenes are
+so well woven, that it is one of the unfulfilled longings of literature
+that it should have been finished. Yet Shelley himself gave it up. He
+knew, like the others, that the drama was beyond his power.
+
+Tennyson and Browning did not so easily recognise their limits. They
+went on writing dramas, not for the study, which would have been natural
+and legitimate, but for the stage. This is a curious psychological
+problem, and there is only one man who could have given us, if he had
+chosen, a poetic study of it, and that is Browning himself. I wish,
+having in his mature age read _Strafford_ over, and then read his other
+dramas--all of them full of the same dramatic weaknesses as
+_Strafford_--he had analysed himself as "the poet who would be a
+dramatist and could not." Indeed, it is a pity he did not do this. He
+was capable of smiling benignly at himself, and sketching himself as if
+he were another man; a thing of which Tennyson, who took himself with
+awful seriousness, and walked with himself as a Druid might have walked
+in the sacred grove of Mona, was quite incapable.
+
+However, the three important dramas of Tennyson are better, as dramas,
+than Browning's. That is natural enough. For Browning's dramas were
+written when he was young, when his knowledge of the dramatic art was
+small, and when his intellectual powers were not fully developed.
+Tennyson wrote his when his knowledge of the Drama was great, and when
+his intellect had undergone years of careful training. He studied the
+composition and architecture of the best plays; he worked at the stage
+situations; he created a blank verse for his plays quite different from
+that he used in his poems, and a disagreeable thing it is; he introduced
+songs, like Shakespeare, at happy moments; he imitated the old work, and
+at the same time strove hard to make his own original. He laboured at
+the history, and _Becket_ and _Harold_ are painfully historical. History
+should not master a play, but the play the history. The poet who is
+betrayed into historical accuracy so as to injure the development of his
+conception in accordance with imaginative truth, is lost; and _Harold_
+and _Becket_ both suffer from Tennyson falling into the hands of those
+critical historians whom Tennyson consulted.
+
+Nevertheless, by dint of laborious intellectual work, but not by the
+imagination, not by dramatic genius, Tennyson arrived at a relative
+success. He did better in these long dramas than Coleridge, Wordsworth,
+Scott or Byron. _Queen Mary_, _Harold_, and _Becket_ get along in one's
+mind with some swiftness when one reads them in an armchair by the fire.
+Some of the characters are interesting and wrought with painful skill.
+We cannot forget the pathetic image of Queen Mary, which dwells in the
+mind when the play has disappeared; nor the stately representation in
+_Becket_ of the mighty and overshadowing power of Rome, claiming as its
+own possession the soul of the world. But the minor characters; the
+action; the play of the characters, great and small, and of the action
+and circumstance together towards the catastrophe--these things were out
+of Tennyson's reach, and still more out of Browning's. They could both
+build up characters, and Browning better than Tennyson; they could both
+set two people to talk together, and by their talk to reveal their
+character to us; but to paint action, and the action of many men and
+women moving to a plotted end; to paint human life within the limits of
+a chosen subject, changing and tossing and unconscious of its fate, in a
+town, on a battlefield, in the forum, in a wild wood, in the king's
+palace or a shepherd farm; and to image this upon the stage, so that
+nothing done or said should be unmotived, unrelated to the end, or
+unnatural; of that they were quite incapable, and Browning more
+incapable than Tennyson.
+
+There is another thing to say. The three long dramas of Tennyson are
+better as dramas than the long ones of Browning. But the smaller
+dramatic pieces of Browning are much better than the smaller ones of
+Tennyson. _The Promise of May_ is bad in dialogue, bad in composition,
+bad in delineation of character, worst of all in its subject, in its
+plot, and in its motives. _The Cup_, and _The Falcon_, a beautiful story
+beautifully written by Boccaccio, is strangely dulled, even vulgarised,
+by Tennyson. The _Robin Hood_ play has gracious things in it, but as a
+drama it is worthless, and it is impossible to forgive Tennyson for his
+fairies. All these small plays are dreadful examples of what a great
+poet may do when he works in a vehicle--if I may borrow a term from
+painting--for which he has no natural capacity, but for which he thinks
+he has. He is then like those sailors, and meets justly the same fate,
+who think that because they can steer a boat admirably, they can also
+drive a coach and four. The love scene in _Becket_ between Rosamund and
+Henry illustrates my meaning. It was a subject in itself that Tennyson
+ought to have done well, and would probably have done well in another
+form of poetry; but, done in a form for which he had no genius, he did
+it badly. It is the worst thing in the play. Once, however, he did a
+short drama fairly well. _The Cup_ has some dramatic movement, its
+construction is clear, its verse imaginative, its scenery well
+conceived; and its motives are simple and easily understood. But then,
+as in _Becket_, Irving stood at his right hand, and advised him
+concerning dramatic changes and situations. Its passion is, however,
+cold; it leaves us unimpressed.
+
+On the contrary, Browning's smaller dramatic pieces--I cannot call them
+dramas--are much better than those of Tennyson. _Pippa Passes_, _A Soul's
+Tragedy_, _In a Balcony_, stand on a much higher level, aim higher, and
+reach their aim more fully than Tennyson's shorter efforts. They have
+not the qualities which fit them for representation, but they have those
+which fit them for thoughtful and quiet reading. No one thinks much of
+the separate personalities; our chief interest is in following
+Browning's imagination as it invents new phases of his subject, and
+plays like a sword in sunlight, in and out of these phases. As poems of
+the soul in severe straits, made under a quasi-dramatic form, they reach
+a high excellence, but all that we like best in them, when we follow
+them as situations of the soul, we should most dislike when represented
+on the stage.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Strafford_ is, naturally, the most immature of the dramas, written
+while he was still writing _Paracelsus_, and when he was very young. It
+is strange to compare the greater part of its prosaic verse with the
+rich poetic verse of _Paracelsus_; and this further illustrates how much
+a poet suffers when he writes in a form which is not in his genius.
+There are only a very few passages in _Strafford_ which resemble poetry
+until we come to the fifth Act, where Browning passes from the jerky,
+allusive but rhythmical prose of the previous acts into that talk
+between Strafford and his children which has poetic charm, clearness and
+grace. The change does not last long, and when Hollis, Charles and Lady
+Carlisle, followed by Pym, come in, the whole Act is in confusion.
+Nothing is clear, except absence of the clearness required for a drama.
+But the previous Acts are even more obscure; not indeed for their
+readers, but for hearers in a theatre who--since they are hurried on at
+once to new matter--are forced to take in on the instant what the
+dramatist means. It would be impossible to tell at first hearing what
+the chopped-up sentences, the interrupted phrases, the interjected
+"nots" and "buts" and "yets" are intended to convey. The conversation is
+mangled. This vice does not prevail in the other dramas to the same
+extent as in _Strafford_. Browning had learnt his lesson, I suppose,
+when he saw _Strafford_ represented. But it sorely prevails in
+_Colombe's Birthday_.
+
+Strafford is brought before us as a politician, as the leader of the
+king's side in an austere crisis of England's history. The first scene
+puts the great quarrel forward as the ground on which the drama is to be
+wrought. An attempt is made to represent the various elements of the
+popular storm in the characters of Pym, Hampden, the younger Vane and
+others, and especially in the relations between Pym and Strafford, who
+are set over, one against the other, with some literary power. But the
+lines on which the action is wrought are not simple. No audience could
+follow the elaborate network of intrigue which, in Browning's effort to
+represent too much of the history, he has made so confused. Strong
+characterisation perishes in this effort to write a history rather than
+a drama. What we chiefly see of the crisis is a series of political
+intrigues at the Court carried out by base persons, of whom the queen is
+the basest, to ruin Strafford; the futility of Strafford's sentimental
+love of the king, whom he despises while he loves him; Strafford's
+blustering weakness and blindness when he forces his way into the
+Parliament House, and the contemptible meanness of Charles. The low
+intrigues of the Court leave the strongest impression on the mind, not
+the mighty struggle, not the fate of the Monarchy and its dark
+supporter.
+
+Browning tries--as if he had forgotten that which should have been first
+in his mind--to lift the main struggle into importance in the last Act,
+but he fails. That which ought to be tragic is merely sentimental.
+Indeed, sentimentality is the curse of the play. Strafford's love of the
+king is almost maudlin. The scenes between Strafford and Pym in which
+their ancient friendship is introduced are over-sentimentalised, not
+only for their characters, but for the great destinies at stake. Even at
+the last, when Pym and Strafford forgive each other and speak of meeting
+hereafter, good sense is violated, and the natural dignity of the scene,
+and the characters of the men. Strafford is weaker here, if that were
+possible, than he is in the rest of the drama. Nothing can be more
+unlike the man.
+
+Pym is intended to be especially strong. He is made a blusterer. He was
+a gentleman, but in this last scene he is hateful. As to Charles, he was
+always a selfish liar, but he was not a coward, and a coward he becomes
+in this play. He, too, is sentimentalised by his uxoriousness. Lady
+Carlisle is invented. I wish she had not been. Stratford's misfortunes
+were deep enough without having her in love with him. I do not believe,
+moreover, that any woman in the whole world from the very beginning was
+ever so obscure in her speech to the man she loves as Lady Carlisle was
+to Strafford. And the motive of her obscurity--that if she discloses the
+King's perfidy she robs Strafford of that which is dearest to him--his
+belief in the King's affection for him--is no doubt very fine, but the
+woman was either not in love who argued in that way, or a fool; for
+Strafford knew, and lets her understand that he knew, the treachery of
+the King. But Browning meant her to be in love, and to be clever.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next play Browning wrote, undeterred by the fate of _Strafford_, was
+_King Victor and King Charles_. The subject is historical, but it is
+modified by Browning, quite legitimately, to suit his own purposes. In
+itself the plot is uninteresting. King Victor, having brought the
+kingdom to the verge of ruin, abdicates and hands the crown to his son,
+believing him to be a weak-minded person whose mistakes will bring
+him--Victor--back to the throne, when he can throw upon the young king
+the responsibility of the mess he has himself made of the kingdom.
+Charles turns out to be a strong character, sets right the foreign
+affairs of the kingdom, and repairs his father's misgovernment. Then
+Victor, envious and longing for power, conspires to resume the throne,
+and taken prisoner, begs back the crown. Charles, touched as a son, and
+against his better judgment, restores his father, who immediately and
+conveniently dies. It is a play of court intrigue and of politics, and
+these are not made interesting by any action, such as we call dramatic,
+in the play. From end to end there is no inter-movement of public
+passion. There are only four characters. D'Ormea, the minister, is a
+mere stick in a prime-minister's robes and serves Victor and Charles
+with equal ease, in order to keep his place. He is not even subtle in
+his _role_. When we think what Browning would have made of him in a
+single poem, and contrast it with what he has made of him here, we are
+again impressed with Browning's strange loss of power when he is writing
+drama. Victor and Charles are better drawn than any characters in
+_Strafford_; and Polyxena is a great advance on Lady Carlisle. But this
+piece is not a drama; it is a study of soul-situations, and none of them
+are of any vital importance. There is far too great an improbability in
+the conception of Charles. A weak man in private becomes a strong man in
+public life. To represent him, having known and felt his strength, as
+relapsing into his previous weakness when it endangers all his work, is
+quite too foolish. He did not do it in history. Browning, with
+astonishing want of insight, makes him do it here, and adds to it a
+foolish anger with his wife because she advises him against it. And the
+reason he does it and is angry with his wife, is a merely sentimental
+one--a private, unreasoning, childish love of his father, such a love as
+Strafford is supposed to have for Charles I.--the kind of love which
+intruded into public affairs ruins them, and which, being feeble and for
+an unworthy object, injures him who gives it and him who receives it.
+Even as a study of characters, much more as a drama, this piece is a
+failure, and the absence of poetry in it is amazing.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Return of the Druses approaches more nearly to a true drama than its
+predecessors; it is far better written; it has several fine motives
+which are intelligently, but not dramatically, worked out; and it is
+with great joy that one emerges at last into a little poetry. Browning,
+having more or less invented his subject, is not seduced, by the desire
+to be historical, to follow apparent instead of imaginative truth; nor
+are we wearied by his unhappy efforts to analyse, in disconnected
+conversations, political intrigue. Things are in this play as the logic
+of imaginative passion wills, as Browning's conception drove him. But,
+unfortunately for its success as a true drama, Browning doubles and
+redoubles the motives which impel his characters. Djabal, Anael, Loys,
+have all of them, two different and sometimes opposite aims working in
+them. They are driven now by one, now by the other, and the changes of
+speech and action made by the different motives surging up, alternately
+or together, within their will, are so swift and baffling that an
+audience would be utterly bewildered. It is amusing to follow the
+prestidigitation of Browning's intellect creating this confused battle
+in souls as long as one reads the play at home, though even then we
+wonder why he cannot, at least in a drama, make a simple situation. If
+he loved difficult work, this would be much more difficult to do well
+than the confused situation he has not done well. Moreover, the
+simplified situation would be effective on the stage; and it would give
+a great opportunity for fine poetry. As it is, imaginative work is
+replaced by intellectual exercises, poetry is lost in his analysis of
+complex states of feeling. However, this involved in-and-out of thought
+is entertaining to follow in one's study if not on the stage. It is done
+with a loose power no one else in England possessed, and our only regret
+is that he did not bridle and master his power. Finally, with regard to
+this play, I should like to isolate from it certain imaginative
+representations of characters which embody types of the men of the time,
+such as the Prefect and the Nuncio. The last interview between Loys and
+the Prefect, taken out of the drama, would be a little masterpiece of
+characterisation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_The Blot in the Scutcheon_ is the finest of all these dramas. It might
+well be represented on the stage as a literary drama before those who
+had already read it, and who would listen to it for its passion and
+poetry; but its ill-construction and the unnaturalness of its situations
+will always prevent, and justly, its public success as a drama. It is
+full of pathetic and noble poetry; its main characters are clearly
+outlined and of a refreshing simplicity. It has few obtrusive
+metaphysical or intellectual subtleties--things which Browning could not
+keep out of his dramas, but which only a genius like Shakespeare can
+handle on the stage. It has real intensity of feeling, and the various
+passions interlock and clash together with some true dramatic
+interaction. Their presentation awakens our pity, and wonder for the
+blind fates of men. The close leaves us in sorrow, yet in love with
+human nature. The pathos of the catastrophe is the most pathetic thing
+in Browning. I do not even except the lovely record of Pompilia. The
+torture of the human heart, different but equal, of Tresham and Mildred
+in the last scene, is exceedingly bitter in its cry--too cruel almost to
+hear and know, were it not relieved by the beauty of their tenderness
+and forgiveness in the hour of death. They die of their pain, but die
+loving, and are glad to die. They have all of them--Mildred, Tresham,
+and Mertoun--sinned as it were by error. Death unites them in
+righteousness, loveliness and love. A fierce, swift storm sweeps out of
+a clear heaven upon them, destroys them, and saves them. It is all over
+in three days. They are fortunate; their love deserved that the ruin
+should be brief, and the reparation be transferred, in a moment, to the
+grave justice of eternity.
+
+The first two acts bear no comparison with the third. The first scene,
+with all the servants, only shows how Browning failed in bringing a
+number of characters together, and in making them talk with ease and
+connectedly. Then, in two acts, the plot unfolds itself. It is a marvel
+of bad construction, grossly improbable, and offends that popular common
+sense of what is justly due to the characters concerned and to human
+nature itself, to which a dramatist is bound to appeal.
+
+Mildred and Mertoun have loved and sinned. Mertoun visits her every
+night. Gerard, an old gamekeeper, has watched him climbing to her
+window, and he resolves to tell this fatal tale to Tresham, Mildred's
+brother, whose strongest feeling is pride in the unblemished honour of
+his house. Meantime Mertoun has asked Tresham for Mildred's hand in
+marriage, and these lovers, receiving his consent, hope that their sin
+will be purged. Then Gerard tells his story. Tresham summons Mildred.
+She confesses the lover, and Tresham demands his name. To reveal the
+name would have saved the situation, as we guess from Tresham's
+character. His love would have had time to conquer his pride. But
+Mildred will not tell the name, and when Tresham says: "Then what am I
+to say to Mertoun?" she answers, "I will marry him." This, and no
+wonder, seems the last and crowning dishonour to Tresham, and he curses,
+as if she were a harlot, the sister whom he passionately loves.
+
+This is a horrible situation which Browning had no right to make. The
+natural thing would be for Mildred to disclose that her lover and Lord
+Mertoun, whom she was to marry, were one and the same. There is no
+adequate reason, considering the desperate gravity of the situation, for
+her silence; it ought to be accounted for and it is not, nor could it
+be. Her refusal to tell her lover's name, her confession of her
+dishonour and at the same time her acceptance of Mertoun as a husband at
+her brother's hands, are circumstances which shock probability and
+common human nature.
+
+Then it is not only this which irritates a reader; it is also the
+stupidity of Tresham. That also is most unnatural. He believes that the
+girl whom he has loved and honoured all his life, whose purity was as a
+star to him, will accept Mertoun while she was sinning with another! He
+should have felt that this was incredible, and immediately understood,
+as Guendolen does, that her lover and Mertoun were the same. Dulness and
+blindness so improbable are unfitting in a drama, nor does the passion
+of his overwhelming pride excuse him. The central situation is a
+protracted irritation. Browning was never a good hand at construction,
+even in his poems. His construction is at its very worst in this drama.
+
+But now, when we have, with wrath, accepted this revolting
+situation--which, of course, Browning made in order to have his tragic
+close, but which a good dramatist would have arranged so differently--we
+pass into the third act, the tragic close; and that is simple enough in
+its lines, quite naturally wrought out, beautifully felt, and of
+exquisite tenderness. Rashness of wrath and pride begin it; Mertoun is
+slain by Tresham as he climbs to Mildred's window, though why he should
+risk her honour any more when she is affianced to him is another of
+Browning's maddening improbabilities. And then wrath and pride pass
+away, and sorrow and love and the joy of death are woven together in
+beauty. If we must go through the previous acts to get to this, we
+forgive, for its sake, their wrongness. It has turns of love made
+exquisitely fair by inevitable death, unfathomable depths of feeling. We
+touch in these last scenes the sacred love beyond the world in which
+forgiveness is forgotten.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Colombe's Birthday_ is of all these plays the nearest to a true drama.
+It has been represented in America as well as in England, and its
+skilful characterisation of Valence, Colombe, and Berthold has won
+deserved praise; but it could not hold the stage. The subject is too
+thin. Colombe finds out on her birthday that she is not the rightful
+heir to the Duchy; but as there is some doubt, she resolves to fight the
+question. In her perplexities she is helped and supported by Valence, an
+advocate from one of the cities of the Duchy, who loves her, but whom
+she believes to serve her from loyalty alone. Berthold, the true heir,
+to avoid a quarrel, offers to marry Colombe, not because he loves her,
+but as a good piece of policy. She then finds out that she loves
+Valence, and refusing the splendid alliance, leaves the court a private
+person, with love and her lover. This slight thing is spun out into five
+acts by Browning's metaphysics of love and friendship. There is but
+little action, or pressure of the characters into one another. The
+intriguing courtiers are dull, and their talk is not knit together. The
+only thing alive in them is their universal meanness. That meanness, it
+is true, enhances the magnanimity of Valence and Berthold, but its dead
+level in so many commonplace persons lowers the dramatic interest of the
+piece. The play is rather an interesting conversational poem about the
+up-growing of love between two persons of different but equally noble
+character; who think love is of more worth than power or wealth, and who
+are finally brought together by a bold, rough warrior who despises love
+in comparison with policy. Its real action takes place in the hearts of
+Valence and Colombe, not in the world of human life; and what takes
+place in their hearts is at times so quaintly metaphysical, so curiously
+apart from the simplicities of human love, so complicated, even beyond
+the complexity of the situation--for Browning loved to pile complexity
+on complexity--that it makes the play unfit for public representation
+but all the more interesting for private reading. But, even in the quiet
+of our room, we ask why Browning put his subject into a form which did
+not fit it; why he overloaded the story of two souls with a host of
+characters who have no vital relation to it, and, having none, are
+extremely wearisome? It might have been far more successfully done in
+the form of _In a Balcony_, which Browning himself does not class as a
+drama.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Luria_, the last of the dramas in date of composition, may be said to
+have no outward action, except in one scene where Tiburzio breaks in
+suddenly to defend Luria, who, like a wounded stag, stands at bay among
+the dogs and hunters who suspect his fidelity to Florence. It is a drama
+of inward action, of changes in the souls of men. The full purification
+of Luria is its one aim, and the motive of Luria himself is a single
+motive. The play occupies one day only, and passes in one place.
+
+Luria is a noble Moor who commands the armies of Florence against Pisa,
+and conquers Pisa. He is in love with the city of Florence as a man is
+with a woman. Its beauty, history, great men, and noble buildings
+attract his Eastern nature, by their Northern qualities, as much as they
+repel his friend and countryman Husain. He lives for her with unbroken
+faithfulness, and he dies for her with piteous tenderness when he finds
+out that Florence distrusts him. When he is suspected of treachery, his
+heart breaks, and to explain his broken heart, he dies. There is no
+other way left to show to Florence that he has always been true to her.
+And at the moment of his death, all who spied on him, distrusted and
+condemned him, are convinced of his fidelity. Even before he dies, his
+devotion to his ideal aim, his absolute unselfishness, have won over and
+ennobled all the self-interested characters which surround him--Puccio,
+the general who is jealous of him; Domizia, the woman who desires to use
+him as an instrument of her hate to Florence; even Braccio, the
+Macchiavellian Florentine who thinks his success must be dangerous to
+the state. Luria conquers them all. It is the triumph of
+self-forgetfulness. And the real aim of the play is not dramatic. It is
+too isolated an aim to be dramatic. It is to build up and image the
+noble character of Luria, and it reaches that end with dignity.
+
+The other characters are but foils to enhance the solitary greatness of
+Luria. Braccio is a mere voice, a theory who talks, and, at the end,
+when he becomes more human, he seems to lose his intelligence. The
+Secretaries have no individuality. Domizia causes nothing, and might
+with advantage be out of the play. However, when, moved by the nobleness
+of Luria, she gives up her revenge on Florence, she speaks well, and her
+outburst is poetical. Puccio is a real personage, but a poor fellow.
+Tiburzio is a pale reflection of Luria. Husain alone has some
+personality, but even his Easternness, which isolates him, is merged in
+his love of Luria. All of them only exist to be the scaffolding by means
+of which Luria's character is built into magnificence, and they
+disappear from our sight, like scaffolding, when the building is
+finished.
+
+There are fine things in the poem: the image of Florence; its men, its
+streets, its life as seen by the stranger-eyes of Luria; the contrast
+between the Eastern and the Latin nature; the picture of hot war; the
+sudden friendship of Luria and Tiburzio, the recognition in a moment of
+two high hearts by one another; the picture of Tiburzio fighting at the
+ford, of Luria tearing the letter among the shamed conspirators; the
+drawing of the rough honest soldier-nature in Puccio, and, chief of all,
+the vivid historic painting of the time and the type of Italian
+character at the time of the republics.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The first part of _A Soul's Tragedy_ is written in poetry and the second
+in prose. The first part is dull but the second is very lively and
+amusing; so gay and clever that we begin to wish that a good deal of
+Browning's dramas had been written in prose. And the prose itself,
+unlike his more serious prose in his letters and essays, is good, clear,
+and of an excellent style. The time of the play is in the sixteenth
+century; but there is nothing in it which is special to that time: no
+scenery, no vivid pictures of street life, no distinct atmosphere of the
+period. It might just as well be of the eighteenth or nineteenth
+century. The character of Chiappino may be found in any provincial town.
+This compound of envy, self-conceit, superficial cleverness and real
+silliness is one of our universal plagues, and not uncommon among the
+demagogues of any country. And he contrasts him with Ogniben, the Pope's
+legate, another type, well known in governments, skilled in affairs,
+half mocking, half tolerant of the "foolish people," the alluring
+destroyer of all self-seeking leaders of the people. He also is as
+common as Chiappino, as modern as he is ancient. Both are representative
+types, and admirably drawn. They are done at too great length, but
+Browning could not manage them as well in Drama as he would have done in
+a short piece such as he placed in _Men and Women_. Why this little
+thing is called _A Soul's Tragedy_ I cannot quite understand. That title
+supposes that Chiappino loses his soul at the end of the play. But it is
+plain from his mean and envious talk at the beginning with Eulalia that
+his soul is already lost. He is not worse at the end, but perhaps on the
+way to betterment. The tragedy is then in the discovery by the people
+that he who was thought to be a great soul is a fraud. But that
+conclusion was not Browning's intention. Finally, if this be a tragedy
+it is clothed with comedy. Browning's humour was never more wise,
+kindly, worldly and biting than in the second act, and Ogniben may well
+be set beside Bishop Blougram. It would be a privilege to dine with
+either of them.
+
+Every one is in love with _Pippa Passes_, which appeared immediately
+after _Sordello_. It may have been a refreshment to Browning after the
+complexities and metaphysics of _Sordello_, to live for a time with the
+soft simplicity of Pippa, with the clear motives of the separate
+occurrences at Asolo, with the outside picturesque world, and in a lyric
+atmosphere. It certainly is a refreshment to us. It is a pity so little
+was done by Browning in this pleasant, graceful, happy way. The
+substance of thought in it and its intellectual force are just as strong
+as in _Sordello_ or _Paracelsus_, and are concerned, especially in the
+first two pieces, with serious and weighty matters of human life. Beyond
+the pleasure the poem gives, its indirect teaching is full of truth and
+beauty; and the things treated of belong to many phases of human life,
+and touch their problems with poetic light and love. Pippa herself, in
+her affectionate, natural goodness, illuminates the greater difficulties
+of life in a single day more than Sordello or Paracelsus could in the
+whole course of their lives.
+
+It may be that there are persons who think lightly of _Pippa Passes_ in
+comparison with _Fifine at the Fair_, persons who judge poetry by the
+difficulties they find in its perusal. But _Pippa Passes_ fulfils the
+demands of the art of poetry, and produces in the world the high results
+of lovely and noble poetry. The other only does these things in part;
+and when _Fifine at the Fair_ and even _Sordello_ are in the future
+only the study of pedants, _Pippa Passes_ will be an enduring strength
+and pleasure to all who love tenderly and think widely. And those
+portions of it which belong to Pippa herself, the most natural, easy and
+simplest portions, will be the sources of the greatest pleasure and the
+deepest thought. Like Sordello's song, they will endure for the healing,
+comforting, exalting and impelling of the world.
+
+I have written of her and of other parts of the poem elsewhere. It only
+remains to say that nowhere is the lyric element in Browning's genius
+more delightfully represented than in this little piece of mingled song
+and action. There is no better love-lyric in his work than
+
+    You'll love me yet!--and I can tarry
+      Your love's protracted growing;
+
+and the two snatches of song which Pippa sings when she is passing under
+Ottima's window and the Monsignore's--"The year's at the spring" and
+"Overhead the tree-tops meet"--possess, independent of the meaning of
+the words and their poetic charm, a freshness, dewiness, morning
+ravishment to which it is difficult to find an equal. They are filled
+with youth and its delight, alike of the body and the soul. What
+Browning's spirit felt and lived when he was young and his heart beating
+with the life of the universe, is in them, and it is their greatest
+charm.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+_POEMS OF THE PASSION OF LOVE_
+
+
+When we leave _Paracelsus_, _Sordello_ and the _Dramas_ behind, and find
+ourselves among the host of occasional poems contained in the _Dramatic
+Lyrics_ and _Romances_, in _Men and Women_, in _Dramatis Personae_, and
+in the later volumes, it is like leaving an unencumbered sea for one
+studded with a thousand islands. Every island is worth a visit and
+different from the rest. Their variety, their distinct scenery, their
+diverse inhabitants, the strange surprises in them, are as continual an
+enchantment for the poetic voyager as the summer isles of the Pacific.
+But while each of them is different from the rest, yet, like the islands
+in the Pacific, they fall into groups; and to isolate these groups is
+perhaps the best way to treat so varied a collection of poems. To treat
+them chronologically would be a task too long and wearisome for a book.
+To treat them zoologically, if I may borrow that term, is possible, and
+may be profitable. This chapter is dedicated to the poems which relate
+to Love.
+
+Commonly speaking, the term _Love Poems_ does not mean poems concerning
+the absolute Love, or the love of Ideas, such as Truth or Beauty, or
+Love of mankind or one's own country, or the loves that belong to home,
+or the love of friends, or even married love unless it be specially
+bound up, as it is in Browning's poem of _By the Fireside_, with
+ante-nuptial love--but poems expressing the isolating passion of one sex
+for the other; chiefly in youth, or in conditions which resemble those
+of youth, whether moral or immoral. These celebrate the joys and
+sorrows, rapture and despair, changes and chances, moods, fancies, and
+imaginations, quips and cranks and wanton wiles, all the tragedy and
+comedy, of that passion, which is half of the sense and half of the
+spirit, sometimes wholly of the senses and sometimes wholly of the
+spirit. It began, in one form of it, among the lower animals and still
+rules their lives; it has developed through many thousand years of
+humanity into myriads of shapes in and outside of the soul; into stories
+whose varieties and multitudes are more numerous than the stars of
+heaven or the sand of the seashore; and yet whose multitudinous changes
+and histories have their source in two things only--in the desire to
+generate, which is physical; in the desire to forget self in another,
+which is spiritual. The union of both these desires into one passion of
+thought, act and feeling is the fine quintessence of this kind of love;
+but the latter desire alone is the primal motive of all the other forms
+of love, from friendship and maternal love to love of country, of
+mankind, of ideas, and of God.
+
+With regard to love-poems of the sort we now discuss, the times in
+history when they are most written are those in which a nation or
+mankind renews its youth. Their production in the days of Elizabeth was
+enormous, their passion various and profound, their fancy elaborate,
+their ornament extravagant with the extravagance of youth; and, in the
+hands of the greater men, their imagination was as fine as their melody.
+As that age grew older they were not replaced but were dominated by more
+serious subjects; and though love in its fantasies was happily recorded
+in song during the Caroline period, passion in English love-poetry
+slowly decayed till the ideas of the Revolution, before the French
+outbreak, began to renew the youth of the world. The same career is run
+by the individual poet. The subject of his youth is the passion of love,
+as it was in Browning's _Pauline_. The subjects of his manhood are
+serious with other thought and feeling, sad with another sadness, happy
+with another happiness. They traverse a wider range of human feeling and
+thought, and when they speak of love, it is of love in its wiser,
+steadier, graver and less selfish forms. It was so with Browning, who
+far sooner than his comrades, escaped from the tangled wilderness of
+youthful passion. It is curious to think that so young a creature as he
+was in 1833 should have left the celebration of the love of woman behind
+him, and only written of the love which his _Paracelsus_ images in
+Aprile. It seems a little insensitive in so young a man. But I do not
+think Browning was ever quite young save at happy intervals; and this
+falls in with the fact that his imagination was more intellectual than
+passionate; that while he felt love, he also analysed, even dissected
+it, as he wrote about it; that it scarcely ever carried him away so far
+as to make him forget everything but itself. Perhaps once or twice, as
+in _The Last Ride Together_, he may have drawn near to this absorption,
+but even then the man is thinking more of his own thoughts than of the
+woman by his side, who must have been somewhat wearied by so silent a
+companion. Even in _By the Fireside_, when he is praising the wife whom
+he loved with all his soul, and recalling the moment of early passion
+while yet they looked on one another and felt their souls embrace before
+they spoke--it is curious to find him deviating from the intensity of
+the recollection into a discussion of what might have been if she had
+not been what she was--a sort of _excursus_ on the chances of life which
+lasts for eight verses--before he returns to that immortal moment. Even
+after years of married life, a poet, to whom passion has been in youth
+supreme, would scarcely have done that. On the whole, his poetry, like
+that of Wordsworth, but not so completely, is destitute of the love-poem
+in the ordinary sense of the word; and the few exceptions to which we
+might point want so much that exclusiveness of a lover which shuts out
+all other thought but that of the woman, that it is difficult to class
+them in that species of literature. However, this is not altogether
+true, and the main exception to it is a curious-piece of literary and
+personal history. Those who read _Asolando_, the last book of poems he
+published, were surprised to find with what intensity some of the first
+poems in it described the passion of sexual love. They are fully charged
+with isolated emotion; other thoughts than those of love do not intrude
+upon them. Moreover, they have a sincere lyric note. It is impossible,
+unless by a miracle of imagination, that these could have been written
+when he was about eighty years of age. I believe, though I do not know,
+that he wrote them when he was quite a young man; that he found them on
+looking over his portfolios, and had a dim and scented pleasure in
+reading and publishing them in his old age. He mentions in the preface
+that the book contains both old and new poems. The new are easily
+isolated, and the first poem, the introduction to the collection, is of
+the date of the book. The rest belong to different periods of his life.
+The four poems to which I refer are _Now_, _Summum Bonum_, _A Pearl--A
+Girl_, and _Speculative_. They are beautiful with a beauty of their own;
+full of that natural abandonment of the whole world for one moment with
+the woman loved, which youth and the hours of youth in manhood feel. I
+should have been sorry if Browning had not shaped into song this
+abandonment. He loved the natural, and was convinced of its rightness;
+and he had, as I might prove, a tenderness for it even when it passed
+into wrong. He was the last man in the world to think that the passion
+of noble sexual love was to be despised. And it is pleasant to find, at
+the end of his long poetic career, that, in a serious and wise old age,
+he selected, to form part of his last book, poems of youthful and
+impassioned love, in which the senses and the spirit met, each in their
+pre-eminence.
+
+The two first of these, _Now_ and _Summum Bonum_, must belong to his
+youth, though from certain turns of expression and thought in them, it
+seems that Browning worked on them at the time he published them. I
+quote the second for its lyric charm, even though the melody is
+ruthlessly broken,
+
+    All the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one bee:
+      All the wonder and wealth of the mine in the heart of one gem:
+    In the core of one pearl all the shade and the shine of the sea:
+      Breath and bloom, shade and shine,--wonder, wealth, and
+        --how far above them--
+          Truth, that's brighter than gem,
+          Trust, that's purer than pearl,--
+    Brightest truth, purest trust in the universe--all were for me
+          In the kiss of one girl.
+
+The next two poems are knit to this and to _Now_ by the strong emotion
+of earthly love, of the senses as well as of the spirit, for one woman;
+but they differ in the period at which they were written. The first, _A
+Pearl--A Girl_, recalls that part of the poem _By the Fireside_, when
+one look, one word, opened the infinite world of love to Browning. If
+written when he was young, it has been revised in after life.
+
+    A simple ring with a single stone
+      To the vulgar eye no stone of price:
+    Whisper the right word, that alone--
+      Forth starts a sprite, like fire from ice,
+    And lo, you are lord (says an Eastern scroll)
+    Of heaven and earth, lord whole and sole
+      Through the power in a pearl.
+
+    A woman ('tis I this time that say)
+      With little the world counts worthy praise
+    Utter the true word--out and away
+      Escapes her soul: I am wrapt in blaze,
+    Creation's lord, of heaven and earth
+    Lord whole and sole--by a minute's birth--
+      Through the love in a girl!
+
+The second--_Speculative_--also describes a moment of love-longing, but
+has the characteristics of his later poetry. It may be of the same date
+as the book, or not much earlier. It may be of his later manhood, of
+the time when he lost his wife. At any rate, it is intense enough. It
+looks back on the love he has lost, on passion with the woman he loved.
+And he would surrender all--Heaven, Nature, Man, Art--in this momentary
+fire of desire; for indeed such passion is momentary. Momentariness is
+the essence of the poem. "Even in heaven I will cry for the wild hours
+now gone by--Give me back the Earth and Thyself." _Speculative_, he
+calls it, in an after irony.
+
+    Others may need new life in Heaven--
+      Man, Nature, Art--made new, assume!
+    Man with new mind old sense to leaven,
+      Nature--new light to clear old gloom,
+    Art that breaks bounds, gets soaring-room.
+
+    I shall pray: "Fugitive as precious--
+      Minutes which passed,--return, remain!
+    Let earth's old life once more enmesh us,
+      You with old pleasure, me--old pain,
+      So we but meet nor part again!"
+
+Nor was this reversion to the passion of youthful love altogether a new
+departure. The lyrics in _Ferishtah's Fancies_ are written to represent,
+from the side of emotion, the intellectual and ethical ideas worked out
+in the poems. The greater number of them are beautiful, and they would
+gain rather than lose if they were published separately from the poems.
+Some are plainly of the same date as the poems. Others, I think, were
+written in Browning's early time, and the preceding poems are made to
+fit them. But whatever be their origin, they nearly all treat of love,
+and one of them with a crude claim on the love of the senses alone, as
+if that--as if the love of the body, even alone--were not apart from
+the consideration of a poet who wished to treat of the whole of human
+nature. Browning, when he wished to make a thought or a fact quite
+plain, frequently stated it without any of its modifications, trusting
+to his readers not to mistake him; knowing indeed, that if they cared to
+find the other side--in this case the love which issues from the senses
+and the spirit together, or from the spirit alone--they would find it
+stated just as soundly and clearly. He meant us to combine both
+statements, and he has done so himself with regard to love.
+
+When, however, we have considered these exceptions, it still remains
+curious how little the passionate Love-poem, with its strong personal
+touch, exists in Browning's poetry. One reason may be that Love-poems of
+this kind are naturally lyrical, and demand a sweet melody in the verse,
+and Browning's genius was not especially lyrical, nor could he
+inevitably command a melodious movement in his verse. But the main
+reason is that he was taken up with other and graver matters, and
+chiefly with the right theory of life; with the true relation of God and
+man; and with the picturing--for absolute Love's sake, and in order to
+win men to love one another by the awakening of pity--of as much of
+humanity as he could grasp in thought and feeling. Isolated and personal
+love was only a small part of this large design.
+
+One personal love, however, he possessed fully and intensely. It was his
+love for his wife, and three poems embody it. The first is _By the
+Fireside_. It does not take rank as a true love lyric; it is too long,
+too many-motived for a lyric. It is a meditative poem of recollective
+tenderness wandering through the past; and no poem written on married
+love in England is more beautiful. The poet, sitting silent in the room
+where his wife sits with him, sees all his life with her unrolled, muses
+on what has been, and is, since she came to bless his life, or what will
+be, since she continues to bless it; and all the fancies and musings
+which, in a usual love lyric, would not harmonise with the intensity of
+love-passion in youth, exactly fit in with the peace and satisfied joy
+of a married life at home with God and nature and itself. The poem is
+full of personal charm. Quiet thought, profound feeling and sweet memory
+like a sunlit mist, soften the aspect of the room, the image of his
+wife, and all the thoughts, emotions and scenery described. It is a
+finished piece of art.
+
+The second of these poems is the Epilogue to the volumes of _Men and
+Women_, entitled _One Word More_. It also is a finished piece of art,
+carefully conceived, upbuilded stone by stone, touch by touch, each
+separate thought with its own emotion, each adding something to the
+whole, each pushing Browning's emotion and picture into our souls, till
+the whole impression is received. It is full, and full to the brim, with
+the long experience of peaceful joy in married love. And the subtlety of
+the close of it, and of Browning's play with his own fancy about the
+moon, do not detract from the tenderness of it; for it speaks not of
+transient passion but of the love of a whole life lived from end to end
+in music.
+
+The last of these is entitled _Prospice_. When he wrote it he had lost
+his wife. It tells what she had made of him; it reveals alike his
+steadfast sadness that she had gone from him and the steadfast
+resolution, due to her sweet and enduring power, with which, after her
+death, he promised, bearing with him his sorrow and his memory of joy,
+to stand and withstand in the battle of life, ever a fighter to the
+close--and well he kept his word. It ends with the expression of his
+triumphant certainty of meeting her, and breaks forth at last into so
+great a cry of pure passion that ear and heart alike rejoice. Browning
+at his best, Browning in the central fire of his character, is in it.
+
+    Fear death?--to feel the fog in my throat,
+      The mist in my face,
+    When the snows begin, and the blasts denote
+      I am nearing the place,
+    The power of the night, the press of the storm,
+      The post of the foe;
+    Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,
+      Yet the strong man must go:
+    For the journey is done and the summit attained
+      And the barriers fall,
+    Though a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained,
+      The reward of it all.
+    I was ever a fighter, so--one fight more,
+      The best and the last!
+    I would hate that Death bandaged my eyes, and forbore,
+      And bade me creep past.
+    No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers
+      The heroes of old,
+    Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears
+      Of pain, darkness and cold.
+    For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,
+      The black minute's at end,
+    And the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave,
+      Shall dwindle, shall blend,
+    Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain,
+      Then a light, then thy breast,
+    O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
+      And with God be the rest!
+
+Leaving now these personal poems on Love, we come to those we may call
+impersonal. They are poems about love, not in its simplicities, but in
+its subtle moments--moments that Browning loved to analyse, and which he
+informed not so much with the passion of love, as with his profound love
+of human nature. He describes in them, with the seriousness of one who
+has left youth behind, the moods of love, its changes, vagaries,
+certainties, failures and conquests. It is a man writing, not of the
+love of happy youth, but of love tossed on the stormy seas of manhood
+and womanhood, and modified from its singular personal intensity by the
+deeper thought, feeling and surprising chances of our mortal life. Love
+does not stand alone, as in the true love lyric, but with many other
+grave matters. As such it is a more interesting subject for Browning.
+For Love then becomes full of strange turns, unexpected thoughts,
+impulses unknown before creating varied circumstances, and created by
+them; and these his intellectual spirituality delighted to cope with,
+and to follow, labyrinth after labyrinth. I shall give examples of these
+separate studies, which have always an idea beyond the love out of which
+the poem arises. In some of them the love is finally absorbed in the
+idea. In all of them their aim is beyond the love of which they speak.
+
+_Love among the Ruins_ tells of a lover going to meet his sweetheart.
+There are many poems with this expectant motive in the world of song,
+and no motive has been written of with greater emotion. If we are to
+believe these poems, or have ever waited ourselves, the hour contains
+nothing but her presence, what she is doing, how she is coming, why she
+delays, what it will be when she comes--a thousand things, each like
+white fire round her image. But Browning's lover, through nine verses,
+cares only for the wide meadows over which he makes his way and the
+sheep wandering over them, and their flowers and the ruins in the midst
+of them; musing on the changes and contrasts of the world--the lonely
+land and the populous glory which was of old in the vast city. It is
+only then, and only in two lines, that he thinks of the girl who is
+waiting for him in the ruined tower. Even then his imagination cannot
+stay with her, but glances from her instantly--thinking that the ancient
+king stood where she is waiting, and looked, full of pride, from the
+high tower on his splendid city. When he has elaborated this second
+excursion of thought he comes at last to the girl. Then is the hour of
+passion, but even in its fervour he draws a conclusion, belonging to a
+higher world than youthful love, as remote from it as his description of
+the scenery and the ruins. "Splendour of arms, triumph of wealth,
+centuries of glory and pride, they are nothing to love. Love is best."
+It is a general, not a particular conclusion. In a true Love-poem it
+would be particular.
+
+Another poem of waiting love is _In Three Days_. And this has the spirit
+of a true love lyric in it. It reads like a personal thing; it breathes
+exaltation; it is quick, hurried, and thrilled. The delicate fears of
+chance and change in the three days, or in the years to come, belong of
+right and nature to the waiting, and are subtly varied and condensed. It
+is, however, the thoughtful love of a man who can be metaphysical in
+love, not the excluding mastery of passion.
+
+_Two in the Campagna_ is another poem in which love passes away into a
+deeper thought than love--a strange and fascinating poem of twofold
+desire. The man loves a woman and desires to be at peace with her in
+love, but there is a more imperative passion in his soul--to rest in the
+infinite, in accomplished perfection. And his livelong and vain pursuit
+of this has wearied him so much that he has no strength left to realise
+earthly love. Is it possible that she who now walks with him in the
+Campagna can give him in her love the peace of the infinite which he
+desires, and if not, why--where is the fault? For a moment he seems to
+catch the reason, and asks his love to see it with him and to grasp it.
+In a moment, like the gossamer thread he traces only to see it vanish,
+it is gone--and nothing is left, save
+
+    Infinite passion, and the pain
+    Of finite hearts that yearn.
+
+Least of all is the woman left. She has quite disappeared. This is not a
+Love-poem at all, it is the cry of Browning's hunger for eternity in the
+midst of mortality, in which all the hunger for earthly love is burnt to
+dust.
+
+The rest are chiefly studies of different kinds of love, or of crises in
+love; moments in its course, in its origin or its failure. There are
+many examples in the shorter dramatic pieces, as _In a Balcony_; and
+even in the longer dramas certain sharp climaxes of love are recorded,
+not as if they belonged to the drama, but as if they were distinct
+studies introduced by chance or caprice. In the short poems called
+"dramatic" these studies are numerous, and I group a few of them
+together according to their motives, leaving out some which I shall
+hereafter treat of when I come to discuss the women in Browning. _Evelyn
+Hope_ has nothing to do with the passion of love. The physical element
+of love is entirely excluded by the subject. It is a beautiful
+expression of a love purely spiritual, to be realised in its fulness
+only after death, spirit with spirit, but yet to be kept as the master
+of daily life, to whose law all thought and action are referred. The
+thought is noble, the expression of it simple, fine, and clear. It is,
+moreover, close to truth--there are hundreds of men who live quietly in
+love of that kind, and die in its embrace.
+
+In _Cristina_ the love is just as spiritual, but the motive of the poem
+is not one, as in _Evelyn Hope_, but two. The woman is not dead, and she
+has missed her chance. But the lover has not. He has seen her and in a
+moment loved her. She also looked on him and felt her soul matched by
+his as they "rushed together." But the world carried her away and she
+lost the fulness of life. He, on the contrary, kept the moment for ever,
+and with it, her and all she might have been with him.
+
+    Her soul's mine: and thus grown perfect,
+    I shall pass my life's remainder.
+
+This is not the usual Love-poem. It is a love as spiritual, as mystic,
+even more mystic, since the woman lives, than the lover felt for Evelyn
+Hope.
+
+The second motive in _Cristina_ of the lover who meets the true partner
+of his soul or hers, and either seizes the happy hour and possesses joy
+for ever, or misses it and loses all, is a favourite with Browning. He
+repeats it frequently under diverse circumstances, for it opened out so
+many various endings, and afforded so much opportunity for his beloved
+analysis. Moreover, optimist as he was in his final thought of man, he
+was deeply conscious of the ironies of life, of the ease with which
+things go wrong, of the impossibility of setting them right from
+without. And in the matter of love he marks in at least four poems how
+the moment was held and life was therefore conquest. Then in _Youth and
+Art_, in _Dis Aliter Visum_, in _Bifurcation_, in _The Lost Mistress_,
+and in _Too Late_, he records the opposite fate, and in characters so
+distinct that the repetition of the motive is not monotonous. These are
+studies of the Might-have-beens of love.
+
+Another motive, used with varied circumstance in three or four poems,
+but fully expanded in _James Lee's Wife_, is the discovery, after years
+of love, that love on one side is lost irretrievably. Another motive is,
+that rather than lose love men or women will often sacrifice their
+conscience, their reason, or their liberty. This sacrifice, of all that
+makes our nobler being for the sake of personal love alone, brings with
+it, because the whole being is degraded, the degradation, decay, and
+death of personal love itself.
+
+Another set of poems describes with fanciful charm, sometimes with happy
+gaiety, love at play with itself. True love makes in the soul an
+unfathomable ocean in whose depths are the imaginations of love,
+serious, infinite, and divine. But on its surface the light of jewelled
+fancies plays--a thousand thousand sunny memories and hopes, flying
+thoughts and dancing feelings. A poet would be certain to have often
+seen this happy crowd, and to desire to trick them out in song. So
+Browning does in his poem, _In a Gondola_. The two lovers, with the dark
+shadow of fate brooding over them, sing and muse and speak alternately,
+imaging in swift and rival pictures made by fancy their deep-set love;
+playing with its changes, creating new worlds in which to place it, but
+always returning to its isolated individuality; recalling how it began,
+the room where it reached its aim, the pictures, the furniture, the
+balcony, her dress, all the scenery, in a hundred happy and glancing
+pictures; while interlaced through their gaiety--and the gaiety made
+keener by the nearness of dark fate--is coming death, death well
+purchased by an hour of love. Finally, the lover is stabbed and slain,
+and the pity of it throws back over the sunshine of love's fancies a
+cloud of tears. This is the stuff of life that Browning loved to
+paint--interwoven darkness and brightness, sorrow and joy trembling each
+on the edge of the other, life playing at ball, as joyous as Nausicaa
+and her maids, on a thin crust over a gulf of death.
+
+Just such another poem--of the sportiveness of love, only this time in
+memory, not in present pleasure, is to be found in _A Lovers' Quarrel_,
+and the quarrel is the dark element in it. Browning always feels that
+mighty passion has its root in tragedy, and that it seeks relief in
+comedy. The lover sits by the fireside alone, and recalls, forgetting
+pain for a moment, the joyful play they two had together, when love
+expressed its depth of pleasure in dramatic fancies. Every separate
+picture is done in Browning's impressionist way. And when the glad
+memories are over, and the sorrow returns, passion leaps out--
+
+      It is twelve o'clock:
+      I shall hear her knock
+    In the worst of a storm's uproar,
+      I shall pull her through the door,
+    I shall have her for evermore!
+
+This is partly a study of the memory of love; and Browning has
+represented, without any sorrow linked to it, memorial love in a variety
+of characters under different circumstances, so that, though the subject
+is the same, the treatment varies. A charming instance of this is _The
+Flowers Name_; easy to read, happy in its fancy, in its scenery, in the
+subtle play of deep affection, in the character of its lover, in the
+character of the girl who is remembered--a good example of Browning's
+power to image in a few verses two human souls so clearly that they live
+in our world for ever. _Meeting at Night--Parting at Morning_ is another
+reminiscence, mixed up with the natural scenery of the meeting and
+parting, a vivid recollection of a fleeting night of passion, and then
+the abandonment of its isolation for a wider, fuller life with humanity.
+I quote it for the fine impassioned way in which human feeling and
+natural scenery are fused together.
+
+    MEETING AT NIGHT.
+
+    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.
+    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!
+
+
+    PARTING AT MORNING.
+
+    Round the cape of a sudden came the sea,
+      And the sun looked over the mountain's rim:
+      And straight was a path of gold for him,
+    And the need of a world of men for me.
+
+The poem entitled _Confessions_ is another of these memories, in which a
+dying man, careless of death, careless of the dull conventions of the
+clergyman, cares for nothing but the memory of his early passion for a
+girl one happy June, and dies in comfort of the sweetness of the memory,
+though he thinks--
+
+    How sad and bad and mad it was.
+
+Few but Browning would have seen, and fewer still have recorded, this
+vital piece of truth. It represents a whole type of character--those who
+in a life of weary work keep their day of love, even when it has been
+wrong, as their one poetic, ideal possession, and cherish it for ever.
+The wrong of it disappears in the ideal beauty which now has gathered
+round it, and as it was faithful, unmixed with other love, it escapes
+degradation. We see, when the man images the past and its scenery out of
+the bottles of physic on the table, how the material world had been
+idealised to him all his life long by this passionate memory--
+
+    Do I view the world as a vale of tears?
+      Ah, reverend sir, not I.
+
+It might be well to compare with this another treatment of the memory
+of love in _St. Martin's Summer_. A much less interesting and natural
+motive rules it than _Confessions_; and the characters, though more "in
+society" than the dying man, are grosser in nature; gross by their
+inability to love, or by loving freshly to make a new world in which the
+old sorrow dies or is transformed. There is no humour in the thing,
+though there is bitter irony. But there is humour in an earlier poem--_A
+Serenade at the Villa_, where, in the last verse, the bitterness of
+wrath and love together (a very different bitterness from that of _St.
+Martin's Summer_), breaks out, and is attributed to the garden gate. The
+night-watch and the singing is over; she must have heard him, but she
+gave no sign. He wonders what she thought, and then, because he was only
+half in love, flings away--
+
+    Oh how dark your villa was,
+      Windows fast and obdurate!
+    How the garden grudged me grass
+      Where I stood--the iron gate
+    Ground its teeth to let me pass!
+
+It is impossible to notice all these studies of love, but they form,
+together, a book of transient phases of the passion in almost every
+class of society. And they show how Browning, passing through the world,
+from the Quartier Latin to London drawing-rooms, was continually on the
+watch to catch, store up, and reproduce a crowd of motives for poetry
+which his memory held and his imagination shaped.
+
+There is only one more poem, which I cannot pass by in this group of
+studies. It is one of sacred and personal memory, so much so that it is
+probable the loss of his life lies beneath it. It rises into that
+highest poetry which fuses together into one form a hundred thoughts and
+a hundred emotions, and which is only obscure from the mingling of their
+multitude. I quote it, I cannot comment on it.
+
+        Never the time and the place
+          And the loved one all together!
+        This path--how soft to pace!
+          This May--what magic weather!
+        Where is the loved one's face?
+    In a dream that loved one's face meets mine
+      But the house is narrow, the place is bleak
+    Where, outside, rain and wind combine
+      With a furtive ear, if I strive to speak,
+      With a hostile eye at my flushing cheek,
+    With a malice that marks each word, each sign!
+        O enemy sly and serpentine,
+        Uncoil thee from the waking man!
+          Do I hold the Past
+          Thus firm and fast
+        Yet doubt if the Future hold I can?
+      This path so soft to pace shall lead
+      Through the magic of May to herself indeed!
+      Or narrow if needs the house must be,
+      Outside are the storms and strangers: we--
+      Oh, close, safe, warm sleep I and she,
+     --I and she!
+
+That, indeed, is passionate enough.
+
+Then there is another group--tales which embody phases of love. _Count
+Gismond_ is one of these. It is too long, and wants Browning's usual
+force. The outline of the story was, perhaps, too simple to interest his
+intellect, and he needed in writing poetry not only the emotional
+subject, but that there should be something in or behind the emotion
+through the mazes of which his intelligence might glide like a
+serpent.[10]
+
+_The Glove_ is another of these tales--a good example of the brilliant
+fashion in which Browning could, by a strange kaleidoscopic turn of his
+subject, give it a new aspect and a new ending. The world has had the
+tale before it for a very long time. Every one had said the woman was
+wrong and the man right; but here, poetic juggler as he is, Browning
+makes the woman right and the man wrong, reversing the judgment of
+centuries. The best of it is, that he seems to hold the truth of the
+thing. It is amusing to think that only now, in the other world, if she
+and Browning meet, will she find herself comprehended.
+
+Finally, as to the mightier kinds of love, those supreme forms of the
+passion, which have neither beginning nor end; to which time and space
+are but names; which make and fill the universe; the least grain of
+which predicates the whole; the spirit of which is God Himself; the
+breath of whose life is immortal joy, or sorrow which means joy; whose
+vision is Beauty, and whose activity is Creation--these, united in God,
+or divided among men into their three great entities--love of ideas for
+their truth and beauty; love of the natural universe, which is God's
+garment; love of humanity, which is God's child--these pervade the whole
+of Browning's poetry as the heat of the sun pervades the earth and every
+little grain upon it. They make its warmth and life, strength and
+beauty. They are too vast to be circumscribed in a lyric, represented in
+a drama, bound up even in a long story of spiritual endeavour like
+_Paracelsus_. But they move, in dignity, splendour and passion, through
+all that he deeply conceived and nobly wrought; and their triumph and
+immortality in his poetry are never for one moment clouded with doubt or
+subject to death. This is the supreme thing in his work. To him Love is
+the Conqueror, and Love is God.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[10] There is one simple story at least which he tells quite admirably,
+_The Pied Piper of Hamelin_. But then, that story, if it is not troubled
+by intellectual matter, is also not troubled by any deep emotion. It is
+told by a poet who becomes a child for children.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+_THE PASSIONS OTHER THAN LOVE_
+
+
+The poems on which I have dwelt in the last chapter, though they are
+mainly concerned with love between the sexes, illustrate the other noble
+passions, all of which, such as joy, are forms of, or rather children
+of, self-forgetful love. They do not illustrate the evil or ignoble
+passions--envy, jealousy, hatred, base fear, despair, revenge, avarice
+and remorse--which, driven by the emotion that so fiercely and swiftly
+accumulates around them, master the body and soul, the intellect and the
+will, like some furious tyrant, and in their extremes hurry their victim
+into madness. Browning took some of these terrible powers and made them
+subjects in his poetry. Short, sharp-outlined sketches of them occur in
+his dramas and longer poems. There is no closer image in literature of
+long-suppressed fear breaking out into its agony of despair than in the
+lines which seal Guido's pleading in the _The Ring and the Book_.
+
+                Life is all!
+    I was just stark mad,--let the madman live
+    Pressed by as many chains as you please pile!
+    Don't open! Hold me from them! I am yours,
+    I am the Grand Duke's--no, I am the Pope's!
+    Abate,--Cardinal,--Christ,--Maria,--God, ...
+    Pompilia, will you let them murder me?
+
+But there is no elaborate, long-continued study of these sordid and
+evil things in Browning. He was not one of our modern realists who love
+to paddle and splash in the sewers of humanity. Not only was he too
+healthy in mind to dwell on them, but he justly held them as not fit
+subjects for art unless they were bound up with some form of pity, as
+jealousy and envy are in Shakespeare's treatment of the story of
+Othello; or imaged along with so much of historic scenery that we lose
+in our interest in the decoration some of the hatefulness of the
+passion. The combination, for example, of envy and hatred resolved on
+vengeance in _The Laboratory_ is too intense for any pity to intrude,
+but Browning realises not only the evil passions in the woman but the
+historical period also and its temper; and he fills the poem with
+scenery which, though it leaves the woman first in our eyes, yet lessens
+the malignant element. The same, but of course with the difference
+Browning's variety creates, may be said of the story of the envious
+king, where envy crawls into hatred, hatred almost motiveless--the
+_Instans Tyrannus_. A faint vein of humour runs through it. The king
+describes what has been; his hatred has passed. He sees how small and
+fanciful it was, and the illustrations he uses to express it tell us
+that; though they carry with them also the contemptuous intensity of his
+past hatred. The swell of the hatred remains, though the hatred is past.
+So we are not left face to face with absolute evil, with the corruption
+hate engenders in the soul. God has intervened, and the worst of it has
+passed away.
+
+Then there is the study of hatred in the _Soliloquy of the Spanish
+Cloister_. The hatred is black and deadly, the instinctive hatred of a
+brutal nature for a delicate one, which, were it unrelieved, would be
+too vile for the art of poetry. But it is relieved, not only by the
+scenery, the sketch of the monks in the refectory, the garden of
+flowers, the naughty girls seated on the convent bank washing their
+black hair, but also by the admirable humour which ripples like laughter
+through the hopes of his hatred, and by the brilliant sketching of the
+two men. We see them, know them, down to their little tricks at dinner,
+and we end by realising hatred, it is true, but in too agreeable a
+fashion for just distress.
+
+In other poems of the evil passions the relieving element is pity. There
+are the two poems entitled _Before_ and _After_, that is, before and
+after the duel. _Before_ is the statement of one of the seconds, with
+curious side-thoughts introduced by Browning's mental play with the
+subject, that the duel is absolutely necessary. The challenger has been
+deeply wronged; and he cannot and will not let forgiveness intermit his
+vengeance. The man in us agrees with that; the Christian in us says,
+"Forgive, let God do the judgment." But the passion for revenge has here
+its way and the guilty falls. And now let Browning speak--Forgiveness is
+right and the vengeance-fury wrong. The dead man has escaped, the living
+has not escaped the wrath of conscience; pity is all.
+
+    Take the cloak from his face, and at first
+      Let the corpse do its worst!
+
+    How he lies in his rights of a man!
+      Death has done all death can.
+    And, absorbed in the new life he leads,
+      He recks not, he heeds
+
+    Nor his wrong nor my vengeance; both strike
+      On his senses alike,
+    And are lost in the solemn and strange
+      Surprise of the change.
+
+    Ha, what avails death to erase
+      His offence, my disgrace?
+    I would we were boys as of old
+      In the field, by the fold:
+    His outrage, God's patience, man's scorn
+      Were so easily borne!
+
+    I stand here now, he lies in his place;
+      Cover the face.
+
+Again, there are few studies in literature of contempt, hatred and
+revenge more sustained and subtle than Browning's poem entitled _A
+Forgiveness_; and the title marks how, though the justice of revenge was
+accomplished on the woman, yet that pity, even love for her, accompanied
+and followed the revenge. Our natural revolt against the cold-blooded
+work of hatred is modified, when we see the man's heart and the woman's
+soul, into pity for their fate. The man tells his story to a monk in the
+confessional, who has been the lover of his wife. He is a statesman
+absorbed in his work, yet he feels that his wife makes his home a
+heaven, and he carries her presence with him all the day. His wife takes
+the first lover she meets, and, discovered, tells her husband that she
+hates him. "Kill me now," she cries. But he despises her too much to
+hate her; she is not worth killing. Three years they live together in
+that fashion, till one evening she tells him the truth. "I was jealous
+of your work. I took my revenge by taking a lover, but I loved you, you
+only, all the time, and lost you--
+
+                I thought you gave
+    Your heart and soul away from me to slave
+    At statecraft. Since my right in you seemed lost,
+    I stung myself to teach you, to your cost,
+    What you rejected could be prized beyond
+    Life, heaven, by the first fool I threw a fond
+    Look on, a fatal word to.
+
+"Ah, is that true, you loved and still love? Then contempt perishes, and
+hate takes its place. Write your confession, and die by my hand.
+Vengeance is foreign to contempt, you have risen to the level at which
+hate can act. I pardon you, for as I slay hate departs--and now, sir,"
+and he turns to the monk--
+
+                She sleeps, as erst
+    Beloved, in this your church: ay, yours!
+
+and drives the poisoned dagger through the grate of the confessional
+into the heart of her lover.
+
+This is Browning's closest study of hate, contempt, and revenge. But
+bitter and close as it is, what is left with us is pity for humanity,
+pity for the woman, pity for the lover, pity for the husband.
+
+Again, in the case of Sebald and Ottima in _Pippa Passes_, pity also
+rules. Love passing into lust has led to hate, and these two have slaked
+their hate and murdered Luca, Ottima's husband. They lean out of the
+window of the shrub-house as the morning breaks. For the moment their
+false love is supreme. Their crime only creeps like a snake, half
+asleep, about the bottom of their hearts; they recall their early
+passion and try to brazen it forth in the face of their murder, which
+now rises, dreadful and more dreadful, into threatening life in their
+soul. They reanimate their hate of Luca to lower their remorse, but at
+every instant his blood stains their speech. At last, while Ottima loves
+on, Sebald's dark horror turns to hatred of her he loved, till she lures
+him back into desire of her again. The momentary lust cannot last, but
+Browning shoots it into prominence that the outburst of horror and
+repentance may be the greater.
+
+    I kiss you now, dear Ottima, now and now!
+    This way? Will you forgive me--be once more
+    My great queen?
+
+At that moment Pippa passes by, singing:
+
+    The year's at the spring
+    And day's at the morn;
+    Morning's at seven;
+    The hill-side's dew-pearled;
+    The lark's on the wing;
+    The snail's on the thorn;
+    God's in his heaven--
+    All's right with the world!
+
+Something in it smites Sebald's heart like a hammer of God. He repents,
+but in the cowardice of repentance curses her. That baseness I do not
+think Browning should have introduced, no, nor certain carnal phrases
+which, previously right, now jar with the spiritual passion of
+repentance. But his fury with her passes away into the passion of
+despair--
+
+    My brain is drowned now--quite drowned: all I feel
+    Is ... is, at swift recurring intervals,
+    A hurry-down within me, as of waters
+    Loosened to smother up some ghastly pit:
+    There they go--whirls from a black fiery sea!
+
+lines which must have been suggested to Browning by verses, briefer and
+more intense, in Webster's
+
+_Duchess of Malfi_. Even Ottima, lifted by her love, which purifies
+itself in wishing to die for her lover, repents.
+
+    Not me,--to him, O God, be merciful!
+
+Thus into this cauldron of sin Browning steals the pity of God. We know
+they will be saved, so as by fire.
+
+Then there is the poem on the story of _Cristina and Monaldeschi_; a
+subject too odious, I think, to be treated lyrically. It is a tale of
+love turned to hatred, and for good cause, and of the pitiless vengeance
+which followed. Browning has not succeeded in it; and it may be so
+because he could get no pity into it. The Queen had none. Monaldeschi
+deserved none--a coward, a fool, and a traitor! Nevertheless, more might
+have been made of it by Browning. The poem is obscure and wandering, and
+the effort he makes to grip the subject reveals nothing but the weakness
+of the grip. It ought not to have been published.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now I turn to passions more delightful, that this chapter may close
+in light and not in darkness--passions of the imagination, of the
+romantic regions of the soul. There is, first, the longing for the
+mystic world, the world beneath appearance, with or without reference to
+eternity. Secondly, bound up with that, there is the longing for the
+unknown, for following the gleam which seems to lead us onward, but we
+know not where. Then, there is the desire, the deeper for its constant
+suppression, for escape from the prison of a worldly society, from its
+conventions and maxims of morality, its barriers of custom and rule,
+into liberty and unchartered life. Lastly, there is that longing to
+discover and enjoy the lands of adventure and romance which underlies
+and wells upwards through so much of modern life, and which has never
+ceased to send its waters up to refresh the world. These are romantic
+passions. On the whole, Browning does not often touch them in their
+earthly activities. His highest romance was beyond this world. It
+claimed eternity, and death was the entrance into its enchanted realm.
+When he did bring romantic feeling into human life, it was for the most
+part in the hunger and thirst, which, as in _Abt Vogler_, urged men
+beyond the visible into the invisible. But now and again he touched the
+Romantic of Earth. _Childe Roland_, _The Flight of the Duchess_, and
+some others, are alive with the romantic spirit.
+
+But before I write of these, there are a few lyrical poems, written in
+the freshness of his youth, which are steeped in the light of the
+story-telling world; and might be made by one who, in the morning of
+imagination, sat on the dewy hills of the childish world. They are full
+of unusual melody, and are simple and wise enough to be sung by girls
+knitting in the sunshine while their lovers bend above them. One of
+these, a beautiful thing, with that touch of dark fate at its close
+which is so common in folk-stories, is hidden away in _Paracelsus_.
+"Over the sea," it begins:
+
+      Over the sea our galleys went,
+    With cleaving prows in order brave
+    To a speeding wind and a bounding wave,
+      A gallant armament:
+    Each bark built out of a forest-tree
+      Left leafy and rough as first it grew,
+    And nailed all over the gaping sides,
+    Within and without, with black bull-hides,
+    Seethed in fat, and suppled with flame,
+    To bear the playful billows' game.
+
+It is made in a happy melody, and the curious mingling in the tale, as
+it continues, of the rudest ships, as described above, with purple
+hangings, cedar tents, and noble statues,
+
+    A hundred shapes of lucid stone,
+
+and with gentle islanders from Graecian seas, is characteristic of
+certain folk-tales, especially those of Gascony. That it is spoken by
+Paracelsus as a parable of the state of mind he has reached, in which he
+clings to his first fault with haughty and foolish resolution, scarcely
+lessens the romantic element in it. That is so strong that we forget
+that it is meant as a parable.
+
+There is another song which touches the edge of romance, in which
+Paracelsus describes how he will bury in sweetness the ideal aims he had
+in youth, building a pyre for them of all perfumed things; and the last
+lines of the verse I quote leave us in a castle of old romance--
+
+    And strew faint sweetness from some old
+      Egyptian's fine worm-eaten shroud
+    Which breaks to dust when once unrolled;
+      Or shredded perfume, like a cloud
+    From closet long to quiet vowed,
+    With mothed and dropping arras hung,
+    Mouldering her lute and books among,
+    As when a queen, long dead, was young.
+
+The other is a song, more than a song, in _Pippa Passes_, a true piece
+of early folk-romance, with a faint touch of Greek story, wedded to
+Eastern and mediaeval elements, in its roving imaginations. It is
+admirably pictorial, and the air which broods over it is the sunny and
+still air which, in men's fancy, was breathed by the happy children of
+the Golden Age. I quote a great part of it:
+
+    A King lived long ago,
+    In the morning of the world,
+    When earth was nigher heaven than now:
+    And the King's locks curled,
+    Disparting o'er a forehead full
+    As the milk-white space 'twixt horn and horn
+    Of some sacrificial bull--
+    Only calm as a babe new-born:
+    For he was got to a sleepy mood,
+    So safe from all decrepitude,
+    Age with its bane, so sure gone by,
+    (The gods so loved him while he dreamed)
+    That, having lived thus long, there seemed
+    No need the King should ever die.
+
+    LUIGI. No need that sort of King should ever die!
+
+    Among the rocks his city was:
+    Before his palace, in the sun,
+    He sat to see his people pass,
+    And judge them every one
+    From its threshold of smooth stone
+    They haled him many a valley-thief
+    Caught in the sheep-pens, robber chief
+    Swarthy and shameless, beggar, cheat,
+    Spy-prowler, or rough pirate found
+    On the sea-sand left aground;
+
+           *       *       *
+
+    These, all and every one,
+    The King judged, sitting in the sun.
+
+    LUIGI. That King should still judge sitting in the sun!
+
+    His councillors, on left and right,
+    Looked anxious up,--but no surprise
+    Disturbed the King's old smiling eyes
+    Where the very blue had turned to white.
+    'Tis said, a Python scared one day
+    The breathless city, till he came,
+    With forty tongue and eyes on flame,
+    Where the old King sat to judge alway;
+    But when he saw the sweepy hair
+    Girt with a crown of berries rare
+    Which the god will hardly give to wear
+    To the maiden who singeth, dancing bare
+    In the altar-smoke by the pine-torch lights,
+    At his wondrous forest rites,--
+    Seeing this, he did not dare
+    Approach the threshold in the sun,
+    Assault the old king smiling there.
+    Such grace had kings when the world begun!
+
+Then there are two other romantic pieces, not ringing with this early
+note, but having in them a wafting scent of the Provencal spirit. One is
+the song sung by Pippa when she passes the room where Jules and Phene
+are talking--the song of Kate, the Queen. The other is the cry Rudel,
+the great troubadour, sent out of his heart to the Lady of Tripoli whom
+he never saw, but loved. The subject is romantic, but that, I think, is
+all the romance in it. It is not Rudel who speaks but Browning. It is
+not the twelfth but the nineteenth century which has made all that
+analysis and over-worked illustration.
+
+There remain, on this matter, _Childe Roland_ and the _Flight of the
+Duchess_. I believe that _Childe Roland_ emerged, all of a sudden and to
+Browning's surprise, out of the pure imagination, like the Sea-born
+Queen; that Browning did not conceive it beforehand; that he had no
+intention in it, no reason for writing it, and no didactic or moral aim
+in it. It was not even born of his will. Nor does he seem to be
+acquainted with the old story on the subject which took a ballad form
+in Northern England. The impulse to write it was suddenly awakened in
+him by that line out of an old song the Fool quotes in _King Lear_.
+There is another tag of a song in _Lear_ which stirs a host of images in
+the imagination; and out of which some poet might create a romantic
+lyric:
+
+    Still through the hawthorn blows the cold wind.
+
+But it does not produce so concrete a set of images as _Childe Roland to
+the Dark Tower came_. Browning has made that his own, and what he has
+done is almost romantic. Almost romantic, I say, because the
+peculiarities of Browning's personal genius appear too strongly in
+_Childe Roland_ for pure romantic story, in which the idiosyncrasy of
+the poet, the personal element of his fancy, are never dominant. The
+scenery, the images, the conduct of the tales of romance, are, on
+account of their long passage through the popular mind, impersonal.
+
+Moreover, Browning's poem is too much in the vague. The romantic tales
+are clear in outline; this is not. But the elements in the original
+story entered, as it were of their own accord, into Browning. There are
+several curious, unconscious reversions to folk-lore which have crept
+into his work like living things which, seeing Browning engaged on a
+story of theirs, entered into it as into a house of their own, and
+without his knowledge. The wretched cripple who points the way; the
+blind and wicked horse; the accursed stream; the giant mountain range,
+all the peaks alive, as if in a nature myth; the crowd of Roland's
+predecessors turned to stone by their failure; the sudden revealing of
+the tower where no tower had been, might all be matched out of
+folk-stories. I think I have heard that Browning wrote the poem at a
+breath one morning; and it reads as if, from verse to verse, he did not
+know what was coming to his pen. This is very unlike his usual way; but
+it is very much the way in which tales of this kind are unconsciously
+up-built.
+
+Men have tried to find in the poem an allegory of human life; but
+Browning had no allegorising intention. However, as every story which
+was ever written has at its root the main elements of human nature, it
+is always possible to make an allegory out of any one of them. If we
+like to amuse ourselves in that fashion, we may do so; but we are too
+bold and bad if we impute allegory to Browning. _Childe Roland_ is
+nothing more than a gallop over the moorlands of imagination; and the
+skies of the soul, when it was made, were dark and threatening storm.
+But one thing is plain in it: it is an outcome of that passion for the
+mystical world, for adventure, for the unknown, which lies at the root
+of the romantic tree.
+
+The _Flight of the Duchess_ is full of the passion of escape from the
+conventional; and no where is Browning more original or more the poet.
+Its manner is exactly right, exactly fitted to the character and
+condition of the narrator, who is the Duke's huntsman. Its metrical
+movement is excellent, and the changes of that movement are in harmony
+with the things and feelings described. It is astonishingly swift,
+alive, and leaping; and it delays, as a stream, with great charm, when
+the emotion of the subject is quiet, recollective, or deep. The
+descriptions of Nature in the poem are some of the most vivid and true
+in Browning's work. The sketches of animal life--so natural on the lips
+of the teller of the story--are done from the keen observation of a
+huntsman, and with his love for the animals he has fed, followed and
+slain. And, through it all, there breathes the romantic passion--to be
+out of the world of custom and commonplace, set free to wander for ever
+to an unknown goal; to drink the air of adventure and change; not to
+know to-day what will take place to-morrow, only to know that it will be
+different; to ride on the top of the wave of life as it runs before the
+wind; to live with those who live, and are of the same mind; to be loved
+and to find love the best good in the world; to be the centre of hopes
+and joys among those who may blame and give pain, but who are never
+indifferent; to have many troubles, but always to pursue their far-off
+good; to wring the life out of them, and, at the last, to have a new
+life, joy and freedom in another and a fairer world. But let Browning
+tell the end:
+
+    So, at the last shall come old age.
+    Decrepit as befits that stage;
+    How else would'st thou retire apart
+    With the hoarded memories of thy heart,
+    And gather all to the very least
+    Of the fragments of life's earlier feast,
+    Let fall through eagerness to find
+    The crowning dainties yet behind?
+    Ponder on the entire past
+    Laid together thus at last,
+    When the twilight helps to fuse
+    The first fresh with the faded hues.
+    And the outline of the whole
+    Grandly fronts for once thy soul.
+    And then as, 'mid the dark, a gleam
+    Of yet another morning breaks,
+    And, like the hand which ends a dream,
+    Death, with the might of his sunbeam,
+    Touches the flesh, and the soul awakes,
+    Then----
+
+Then the romance of life sweeps into the world beyond. But even in that
+world the duchess will never settle down to a fixed life. She will be,
+like some of us, a child of the wandering tribes of eternity.
+
+This romantic passion which never dies even in our modern society, is
+embodied in the gipsy crone who, in rags and scarcely clinging to life,
+suddenly lifts into youth and queenliness, just as in a society, where
+romance seems old or dead, it springs into fresh and lovely life. This
+is the heart of the poem, and it is made to beat the more quickly by the
+wretched attempt of the duke and his mother to bring back the
+observances of the Middle Ages without their soul. Nor even then does
+Browning leave his motive. The huntsman has heard the gipsy's song; he
+has seen the light on his mistress' face as she rode away--the light
+which is not from sun or star--and the love of the romantic world is
+born in him. He will not leave his master; there his duty lies. "I must
+see this fellow his sad life through." But then he will go over the
+mountains, after his lady, leaving the graves of his wife and children,
+into the unknown, to find her, or news of her, in the land of the
+wanderers. And if he never find her, if, after pleasant journeying,
+earth cannot give her to his eyes, he will still pursue his quest in a
+world where romance and formality are not married together.
+
+    So I shall find out some snug corner,
+    Under a hedge, like Orson the wood-knight,
+    Turn myself round and bid the world Good Night;
+    And sleep a sound sleep till the trumpet's blowing
+    Wakes me (unless priests cheat us laymen)
+    To a world where will be no further throwing
+    Pearls before swine that can't value them. Amen.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+_IMAGINATIVE REPRESENTATIONS_
+
+
+All poems might be called "imaginative representations." But the class
+of poems in Browning's work to which I give that name stands apart. It
+includes such poems as _Cleon, Caliban on Setebos, Fra Lippo Lippi_, the
+_Epistle of Karshish_, and they isolate themselves, not only in
+Browning's poetry, but in English poetry. They have some resemblance in
+aim and method to the monologues of Tennyson, such as the _Northern
+Farmer_ or _Rizpah_, but their aim is much wider than Tennyson's, and
+their method far more elaborate and complex.
+
+What do they represent? To answer this is to define within what limits I
+give them the name of "imaginative representations." They are not only
+separate studies of individual men as they breathed and spoke; face,
+form, tricks of body recorded; intelligence, character, temper of mind,
+spiritual aspiration made clear--Tennyson did that; they are also
+studies of these individual men--Cleon, Karshish and the rest--as
+general types, representative images, of the age in which they lived; or
+of the school of art to which they belonged; or of the crisis in
+theology, religion, art, or the social movement which took place while
+the men they paint were alive, and which these men led, on formed, or
+followed. That is their main element, and it defines them.
+
+They are not dramatic. Their action and ideas are confined to one
+person, and their circumstance and scenery to one time and place. But
+Browning, unlike Tennyson, filled the background of the stage on which
+he placed his single figure with a multitude of objects, or animals, or
+natural scenery, or figures standing round or in motion; and these give
+additional vitality and interest to the representation. Again, they are
+short, as short as a soliloquy or a letter or a conversation in a
+street. Shortness belongs to this form of poetic work--a form to which
+Browning gave a singular intensity. It follows that they must not be
+argumentative beyond what is fitting. Nor ought they to glide into the
+support of a thesis, or into didactic addresses, as _Bishop Blougram_
+and _Mr. Sludge_ do. These might be called treatises, and are apart from
+the kind of poem of which I speak. They begin, indeed, within its
+limits, but they soon transgress those limits; and are more properly
+classed with poems which, also representative, have not the brevity, the
+scenery, the lucidity, the objective representation, the concentration
+of the age into one man's mind, which mark out these poems from the
+rest, and isolate them into a class of their own.
+
+The voice we hear in them is rarely the voice of Browning; nor is the
+mind of their personages his mind, save so far as he is their creator.
+There are a few exceptions to this, but, on the whole, Browning has, in
+writing these poems, stripped himself of his own personality. He had, by
+creative power, made these men; cast them off from himself, and put them
+into their own age. They talk their minds out in character with their
+age. Browning seems to watch them, and to wonder how they got out of his
+hands and became men. That is the impression they make, and it
+predicates a singular power of imagination. Like the Prometheus of
+Goethe, the poet sits apart, moulding men and then endowing them with
+life. But he cannot tell, any more than Prometheus, what they will say
+and do after he has made them. He does tell, of course, but that is not
+our impression. Our impression is that they live and talk of their own
+accord, so vitally at home they are in the country, the scenery, and the
+thinking of the place and time in which he has imagined them.
+
+Great knowledge seems required for this, and Browning had indeed an
+extensive knowledge not so much of the historical facts, as of the
+tendencies of thought which worked in the times wherein he placed his
+men. But the chief knowledge he had, through his curious reading, was of
+a multitude of small intimate details of the customs, clothing,
+architecture, dress, popular talk and scenery of the towns and country
+of Italy from the thirteenth century up to modern times. To every one of
+these details--such as are found in _Sordello_, in _Fra Lippo Lippi_, in
+the _Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's Church_--his vivid and
+grasping imagination gave an uncommon reality.
+
+But even without great knowledge such poems may be written, if the poet
+have imagination, and the power to execute in metrical words what has
+been imagined. _Theology in the Island_ and the prologue to a _Death in
+the Desert_ are examples of this. Browning knew nothing of that island
+in the undiscovered seas where Prosper dwelt, but he made all the
+scenery of it and all its animal life, and he re-created Caliban. He had
+never seen the cave in the desert where he placed John to die, nor the
+sweep of rocky hills and sand around it, nor the Bactrian waiting with
+the camels. Other poets, of course, have seen unknown lands and alien
+folks, but he has seen them more vividly, more briefly, more forcibly.
+His imagination was objective enough.
+
+But it was as subjective as it was objective. He saw the soul of Fra
+Lippo Lippi and the soul of his time as vividly as he saw the streets of
+Florence at night, the watch, the laughing girls, and the palace of the
+Medici round the corner. It was a remarkable combination, and it is by
+this combination of the subjective and objective imagination that he
+draws into some dim approach to Shakespeare; and nowhere closer than in
+these poems.
+
+Again, not only the main character of each of these poems, but all the
+figures introduced (sometimes only in a single line) to fill up the
+background, are sketched with as true and vigorous a pencil as the main
+figure; are never out of place or harmony with the whole, and are justly
+subordinated. The young men who stand round the Bishop's bed when he
+orders his tomb, the watchmen in _Fra Lippo Lippi_, the group of St.
+John's disciples, are as alive, and as much in tune with the whole, as
+the servants and tenants of Justice Shallow. Again, it is not only the
+lesser figures, but the scenery of these poems which is worth our study.
+That also is closely fitted to the main subject. The imagination paints
+it for that, and nothing else. It would not fit any other subject. For
+imagination, working at white heat, cannot do what is out of harmony; no
+more than a great musician can introduce a false chord. All goes
+together in these poems--scenery, characters, time, place and action.
+
+Then, also, the extent of their range is remarkable. Their subjects
+begin with savage man making his god out of himself. They pass through
+Greek mythology to early Christian times; from Artemis and Pan to St.
+John dying in the desert. Then, still in the same period, while Paul was
+yet alive, he paints another aspect of the time in Cleon the rich
+artist, the friend of kings, who had reached the top of life, included
+all the arts in himself, yet dimly craved for more than earth could
+give. From these times the poems pass on to the early and late
+Renaissance, and from that to the struggle for freedom in Italy, and
+from that to modern life in Europe. This great range illustrates the
+penetration and the versatility of his genius. He could place us with
+ease and truth at Corinth, Athens or Rome, in Paris, Vienna or London;
+and wherever we go with him we are at home.
+
+One word more must be said about the way a great number of these poems
+arose. They leaped up in his imagination full-clad and finished at a
+single touch from the outside. _Caliban upon Setebos_ took its rise from
+a text in the Bible which darted into his mind as he read the _Tempest_.
+_Cleon_ arose as he read that verse in St. Paul's speech at Athens, "As
+certain also of your own poets have said." I fancy that _An Epistle of
+Karshish_ was born one day when he read those two stanzas in _In
+Memoriam_ about Lazarus, and imagined how the subject would come to him.
+_Fra Lippo Lippi_ slipped into his mind one day at the Belle Arti at
+Florence as he stood before the picture described in the poem, and
+walked afterwards at night through the streets of Florence. These fine
+things are born in a moment, and come into our world from poet, painter,
+and musician, full-grown; built, like Aladdin's palace, with all their
+jewels, in a single night. They are inexplicable by any scientific
+explanation, as inexplicable as genius itself. When have the
+hereditarians explained Shakespeare, Mozart, Turner? When has the
+science of the world explained the birth of a lyric of Burns, a song of
+Beethoven's, or a drawing of Raffaelle? Let these gentlemen veil their
+eyes, and confess their inability to explain the facts. For it is fact
+they touch. "Full fathom five thy father lies"--that song of Shakespeare
+exists. The overture to Don Giovanni is a reality. We can see the
+Bacchus and Ariadne at the National Gallery and the Theseus at the
+Museum. These are facts; but they are a million million miles beyond the
+grasp of any science. Nay, the very smallest things of their kind, the
+slightest water-colour sketch of Turner, a half-finished clay sketch of
+Donatello, the little song done in the corner of a provincial paper by a
+working clerk in a true poetic hour, are not to be fathomed by the most
+far-descending plummet of the scientific understanding. These things are
+in that superphysical world into which, however closely he saw and
+dealt with his characters in the world of the senses, the conscience, or
+the understanding, Browning led them all at last.
+
+The first of these poems is _Natural Theology on the Island; or, Caliban
+upon Setebos_. Caliban, with the instincts and intelligence of an early
+savage, has, in an hour of holiday, set himself to conceive what
+Setebos, his mother's god, is like in character. He talks out the
+question with himself, and because he is in a vague fear lest Setebos,
+hearing him soliloquise about him, should feel insulted and swing a
+thunder-bolt at him, he not only hides himself in the earth, but speaks
+in the third person, as if it was not he that spoke; hoping in that
+fashion to trick his God.
+
+Browning, conceiving in himself the mind and temper of an honest,
+earthly, imaginative savage--who is developed far enough to build
+nature-myths in their coarse early forms--architectures the character of
+Setebos out of the habits, caprices, fancies, likes and dislikes, and
+thoughts of Caliban; and an excellent piece of penetrative imagination
+it is. Browning has done nothing better, though he has done as well.
+
+But Browning's Caliban is not a single personage. No one savage, at no
+one time, would have all these thoughts of his God. He is the
+representative of what has been thought, during centuries, by many
+thousands of men; the concentration into one mind of the ground-thoughts
+of early theology. At one point, as if Browning wished to sketch the
+beginning of a new theological period, Caliban represents a more
+advanced thought than savage man conceives. This is Caliban's
+imagination of a higher being than Setebos who is the capricious creator
+and power of the earth--of the "Quiet," who is master of Setebos and
+whose temper is quite different; who also made the stars, things which
+Caliban, with a touch of Browning's subtle thought, separates from the
+sun and moon and earth. It is plain from this, and from the whole
+argument which is admirably conducted, that Caliban is an intellectual
+personage, too long neglected; and Prospero, could he have understood
+his nature, would have enjoyed his conversation. Renan agreed with
+Browning in this estimate of his intelligence, and made him the
+foundation of a philosophical play.
+
+There is some slight reason for this in Shakespeare's invention. He
+lifts Caliban in intellect, even in feeling, far above Trinculo,
+Stephano, the Boatswain and the rest of the common men. The objection,
+however, has been made that Browning makes him too intelligent. The
+answer is that Browning is not drawing Caliban only, but embodying in an
+imagined personage the thoughts about God likely to be invented by early
+man during thousands of years--and this accounts for the insequences in
+Caliban's thinking. They are not the thoughts of one but of several men.
+Yet a certain poetic unity is given to them by the unity of place. The
+continual introduction of the landscape to be seen from his refuge knits
+the discursive thinking of the savage into a kind of unity. We watch him
+lying in the thick water-slime of the hollow, his head on the rim of it
+propped by his hands, under the cave's mouth, hidden by the gadding
+gourds and vines; looking out to sea and watching the wild animals that
+pass him by--and out of this place he does not stir.
+
+In Shakespeare's _Tempest_ Caliban is the gross, brutal element of the
+earth and is opposed to Ariel, the light, swift, fine element of the
+air. Caliban curses Prospero with the evils of the earth, with the
+wicked dew of the fen and the red plague of the sea-marsh. Browning's
+Caliban does not curse at all. When he is not angered, or in a caprice,
+he is a good-natured creature, full of animal enjoyment. He loves to lie
+in the cool slush, like a lias-lizard, shivering with earthy pleasure
+when his spine is tickled by the small eft-things that course along it,
+
+    Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh.
+
+The poem is full of these good, close, vivid realisations of the brown
+prolific earth.
+
+Browning had his own sympathy with Caliban Nor does Shakespeare make him
+altogether brutish. He has been so educated by his close contact with
+nature that his imagination has been kindled. His very cursing is
+imaginative:
+
+    As wicked dew as e'er my mother brushed
+    With raven's feather from unwholesome fen
+    Drop on you both; a south-west blow on you
+    And blister you all o'er.
+
+Stephano and Trinculo, vulgar products of civilisation, could never have
+said that. Moreover, Shakespeare's Caliban, like Browning's, has the
+poetry of the earth-man in him. When Ariel plays, Trinculo and Stephano
+think it must be the devil, and Trinculo is afraid: but Caliban loves
+and enjoys the music for itself:
+
+    Be not afear'd; the isle is full of noises,
+    Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
+    Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
+    Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices
+    That, if I then had waked after long sleep.
+    Will make me sleep again.
+
+Stephano answers, like a modern millionaire:
+
+    This will prove a brave kingdom for me, where I shall have
+    my music for nothing.
+
+Browning's Caliban is also something of a poet, and loves the Nature of
+whom he is a child. We are not surprised when he
+
+                looks out o'er yon sea which sunbeams cross
+    And recross till they weave a spider web
+    (Meshes of fire some great fish breaks at times)
+
+though the phrase is full of a poet's imagination, for so the living
+earth would see and feel the sea. It belongs also to Caliban's nearness
+to the earth that he should have the keenest of eyes for animals, and
+that poetic pleasure in watching their life which, having seen them
+vividly, could describe them vividly. I quote one example from the poem;
+there are many others:
+
+    'Thinketh, He made thereat the sun, this isle,
+    Trees and the fowls here, beast and creeping thing.
+    Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech;
+    Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam,
+    That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown
+    He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye
+    By moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue
+    That pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm,
+    And says a plain word when she finds her prize,
+    But will not eat the ants; the ants themselves
+    That build a wall of seeds and settled stalks
+    About their hole--
+
+There are two more remarks to make about this poem. First, that
+Browning makes Caliban create a dramatic world in which Miranda, Ariel,
+and he himself play their parts, and in which he assumes the part of
+Prosper. That is, Caliban invents a new world out of the persons he
+knows, but different from them, and a second self outside himself. No
+lower animal has ever conceived of such a creation. Secondly, Browning
+makes Caliban, in order to exercise his wit and his sense of what is
+beautiful, fall to making something--a bird, an insect, or a building
+which he ornaments, which satisfies him for a time, and which he then
+destroys to make a better. This is art in its beginning; and the highest
+animal we know of is incapable of it. We know that the men of the caves
+were capable of it. When they made a drawing, a piece of carving, they
+were unsatisfied until they had made a better. When they made a story
+out of what they knew and saw, they went on to make more. Creation,
+invention, art--this, independent entirely of the religious desire,
+makes the infinite gulf which divides man from the highest animals.
+
+I do not mean, in this book, to speak of the theology of Caliban, though
+the part of the poem which concerns the origin of sacrifice is well
+worth our attention. But the poem may be recommended to those
+theological persons who say there is no God; and to that large class of
+professional theologians, whose idea of a capricious, jealous,
+suddenly-angered God, without any conscience except his sense of power
+to do as he pleases, is quite in harmony with Caliban's idea of Setebos.
+
+The next of these "imaginative representations" is the poem called
+_Cleon_. Cleon is a rich and famous artist of the Grecian isles, alive
+while St. Paul was still making his missionary journeys, just at the
+time when the Graeco-Roman culture had attained a height of refinement,
+but had lost originating power; when it thought it had mastered all the
+means for a perfect life, but was, in reality, trembling in a deep
+dissatisfaction on the edge of its first descent into exhaustion. Then,
+as everything good had been done in the art of the past, cultivated men
+began to ask "Was there anything worth doing?" "Was life itself worth
+living?"; questions never asked by those who are living. Or "What is
+life in its perfection, and when shall we have it?"; a question also not
+asked by those who live in the morning of a new aera, when the world--as
+in Elizabeth's days, as in 1789, as perhaps it may be in a few years--is
+born afresh; but which is asked continually in the years when a great
+movement of life has passed its culminating point and has begun to
+decline. Again and again the world has heard these questions; in Cleon's
+time, and when the Renaissance had spent its force, and at the end of
+the reign of Louis XIV., and before Elizabeth's reign had closed, and
+about 1820 in England, and of late years also in our society. This is
+the temper and the time that Browning embodies in Cleon, who is the
+incarnation of a culture which is already feeling that life is going out
+of it.
+
+Protus, the king, has written to him, and the poem is Cleon's answer to
+the king. Browning takes care, as usual, to have his background of
+scenery quite clear and fair. It is a courtyard to Cleon's house in one
+of the sprinkled isles--
+
+    Lily on lily, that o'erlace the sea,
+    And laugh their pride when the light wave lisps "Greece."
+
+I quote it; it marks the man and the age of luxurious culture.
+
+    They give thy letter to me, even now;
+    I read and seem as if I heard thee speak.
+    The master of thy galley still unlades
+    Gift after gift; they block my court at last
+    And pile themselves along its portico
+    Royal with sunset, like a thought of thee;
+    And one white she-slave from the group dispersed
+    Of black and white slaves (like the chequer work
+    Pavement, at once my nation's work and gift,
+    Now covered with this settle-down of doves),
+    One lyric woman, in her crocus vest
+    Woven of sea-wools, with her two white hands
+    Commends to me the strainer and the cup
+    Thy lip hath bettered ere it blesses mine.
+
+But he is more than luxurious. He desires the highest life, and he
+praises the king because he has acknowledged by his gifts the joy that
+Art gives to life; and most of all he praises him, because he too
+aspires, building a mighty tower, not that men may look at it, but that
+he may gaze from its height on the sun, and think what higher he may
+attain. The tower is the symbol of the cry of the king's soul.
+
+Then he answers the king's letter. "It is true, O king, I am poet,
+sculptor, painter, architect, philosopher, musician; all arts are mine.
+Have I done as well as the great men of old? No, but I have combined
+their excellences into one man, into myself.
+
+    "I have not chanted verse like Homer, no--
+    Nor swept string like Terpander--no--nor carved
+    And painted men like Phidias and his friend:
+    I am not great as they are, point by point.
+    But I have entered into sympathy
+    With these four, running these into one soul,
+    Who, separate, ignored each other's art.
+    Say, is it nothing that I know them all?
+
+"This, since the best in each art has already been done, was the only
+progress possible, and I have made it. It is not unworthy, king!
+
+"Well, now thou askest, if having done this, 'I have not attained the
+very crown of life; if I cannot now comfortably and fearlessly meet
+death?' 'I, Cleon, leave,' thou sayest, 'my life behind me in my poems,
+my pictures; I am immortal in my work. What more can life desire?'"
+
+It is the question so many are asking now, and it is the answer now
+given. What better immortality than in one's work left behind to move in
+men? What more than this can life desire? But Cleon does not agree with
+that. "If thou, O king, with the light now in thee, hadst looked at
+creation before man appeared, thou wouldst have said, 'All is perfect so
+far.' But questioned if anything more perfect in joy might be, thou
+wouldst have said, 'Yes; a being may be made, unlike these who do not
+know the joy they have, who shall be conscious of himself, and know that
+he is happy. Then his life will be satisfied with daily joy.'" O king,
+thou wouldst have answered foolishly. The higher the soul climbs in joy
+the more it sees of joy, and when it sees the most, it perishes. Vast
+capabilities of joy open round it; it craves for all it presages; desire
+for more deepening with every attainment. And then the body intervenes.
+Age, sickness, decay, forbid attainment. Life is inadequate to joy. What
+have the gods done? It cannot be their malice, no, nor carelessness;
+but--to let us see oceans of joy, and only give us power to hold a
+cupful--is that to live? It is misery, and the more of joy my artist
+nature makes me capable of feeling, the deeper my misery.
+
+"But then, O king, thou sayest 'that I leave behind me works that will
+live; works, too, which paint the joy of life.' Yes, but to show what
+the joy of life is, is not to have it. If I carve the young Phoebus, am
+I therefore young? I can write odes of the delight of love, but grown
+too grey to be beloved, can I have its delight? That fair slave of
+yours, and the rower with the muscles all a ripple on his back who
+lowers the sail in the bay, can write no love odes nor can they paint
+the joy of love; but they can have it--not I."
+
+The knowledge, he thinks, of what joy is, of all that life can give,
+which increases in the artist as his feebleness increases, makes his
+fate the deadlier. What is it to him that his works live? He does not
+live. The hand of death grapples the throat of life at the moment when
+he sees most clearly its infinite possibilities. Decay paralyses his
+hand when he knows best how to use his tools. It is accomplished
+wretchedness.
+
+I quote his outburst. It is in the soul of thousands who have no hope of
+a life to come.
+
+    "But," sayest thou--(and I marvel, I repeat,
+    To find thee trip on such a mere word) "what
+    Thou writest, paintest, stays; that does not die:
+    Sappho survives, because we sing her songs,
+    And AEschylus, because we read his plays!"
+    Why, if they live still, let them come and take
+    Thy slave in my despite, drink from thy cup,
+    Speak in my place! "Thou diest while I survive?"--
+    Say rather that my fate is deadlier still,
+    In this, that every day my sense of joy
+    Grows more acute, my soul (intensified
+    By power and insight) more enlarged, more keen;
+    While every day my hairs fall more and more,
+    My hand shakes, and the heavy years increase--
+    The horror quickening still from year to year,
+    The consummation coming past escape
+    When I shall know most, and yet least enjoy--
+    When all my works wherein I prove my worth,
+    Being present still to mock me in men's mouths,
+    Alive still, in the praise of such as thou,
+    I, I the feeling, thinking, acting man,
+    The man who loved his life so overmuch,
+    Sleep in my urn. It is so horrible
+    I dare at times imagine to my need
+    Some future state revealed to us by Zeus,
+    Unlimited in capability
+    For joy, as this is in desire of joy,
+    --To seek which the joy-hunger forces us:
+    That, stung by straitness of our life, made strait
+    On purpose to make prized the life at large--
+    Freed by the throbbing impulse we call death,
+    We burst there as the worm into the fly.
+    Who, while a worm still, wants his wings. But no!
+    Zeus has not yet revealed it; and alas,
+    He must have done so, were it possible!
+
+This is one only of Browning's statements of what he held to be the
+fierce necessity for another life. Without it, nothing is left for
+humanity, having arrived at full culture, knowledge, at educated love of
+beauty, at finished morality and unselfishness--nothing in the end but
+Cleon's cry--sorrowful, somewhat stern, yet gentle--to Protus,
+
+    Live long and happy, and in that thought die,
+    Glad for what was. Farewell.
+
+But for those who are not Cleon and Protus, not kings in comfort or
+poets in luxury, who have had no gladness, what end--what is to be said
+of them? I will not stay to speak of _A Death in the Desert_, which is
+another of these poems, because the most part of it is concerned with
+questions of modern theology. St. John awakes into clear consciousness
+just before his death in the cave where he lies tended by a few
+disciples. He foresees some of the doubts of this century and meets them
+as he can. The bulk of this poem, very interesting in its way, is
+Browning's exposition of his own belief, not an imaginative
+representation of what St. John actually would have said. It does not
+therefore come into my subject. What does come into it is the
+extraordinary naturalness and vitality of the description given by
+John's disciple of the place where they were, and the fate of his
+companions. This is invented in Browning's most excellent way. It could
+not be better done.
+
+The next poem is the _Epistle of Karshish, the Arab Physician_, to his
+master, concerning his strange medical experience. The time is just
+before the last siege of Jerusalem, and Karshish, journeying through
+Jericho, and up the pass, stays for a few days at Bethany and meets
+Lazarus. His case amazes him, and though he thinks his interest in it
+unworthy of a man of science in comparison with the new herbs and new
+diseases he has discovered, yet he is carried away by it and gives a
+full account of it to his master.
+
+I do not think that Browning ever wrote a poem the writing of which he
+more enjoyed. The creation of Karshish suited his humour and his quaint
+play with recondite knowledge. He describes the physician till we see
+him alive and thinking, in body and soul. The creation of Lazarus is
+even a higher example of the imaginative power of Browning; and that it
+is shaped for us through the mind of Karshish, and in tune with it,
+makes the imaginative effort the more remarkable. Then the problem--how
+to express the condition of a man's body and soul, who, having for three
+days according to the story as Browning conceives it lived consciously
+in the eternal and perfect world, has come back to dwell in this
+world--was so difficult and so involved in metaphysical strangenesses,
+that it delighted him.
+
+Of course, he carefully prepares his scenery to give a true semblance to
+the whole. Karshish comes up the flinty pass from Jericho; he is
+attacked by thieves twice and beaten, and the wild beasts endanger his
+path;
+
+    A black lynx snarled and pricked a tufted ear,
+    Lust of my blood inflamed his yellow balls;
+    I cried and threw my staff and he was gone,
+
+and then, at the end of the pass, he met Lazarus. See how vividly the
+scenery is realised--
+
+    I crossed a ridge of short, sharp, broken hills
+    Like an old lion's cheek-teeth. Out there came
+    A moon made like a face with certain spots,
+    Multiform, manifold and menacing:
+    Then a wind rose behind me. So we met
+    In this old sleepy town at unaware
+    The man and I.
+
+And the weird evening, Karshish thinks, had something to do with the
+strange impression the man has made on him. Then we are placed in the
+dreamy village of Bethany. We hear of its elders, its diseases, its
+flowers, its herbs and gums, of the insects which may help medicine--
+
+                There is a spider here
+    Weaves no web, watches on the ledge of tombs,
+    Sprinkled with mottles on an ash-grey back;
+
+and then, how the countryside is all on fire with news of Vespasian
+marching into Judaea. So we have the place, the village, the hills, the
+animals, and the time, all clear, and half of the character of Karshish.
+The inner character of the man emerges as clearly when he comes to deal
+with Lazarus. This is not a case of the body, he thinks, but of the
+soul. "The Syrian," he tells his master, "has had catalepsy, and a
+learned leech of his nation, slain soon afterwards, healed him and
+brought him back to life after three days. He says he was dead, and made
+alive again, but that is his madness; though the man seems sane enough.
+At any rate, his disease has disappeared, he is as well as you and I.
+But the mind and soul of the man, that is the strange matter, and in
+that he is entirely unlike other men. Whatever he has gone through has
+rebathed him as in clear water of another life, and penetrated his whole
+being. He views the world like a child, he scarcely listens to what goes
+on about him, yet he is no fool. If one could fancy a man endowed with
+perfect knowledge beyond the fleshly faculty, and while he has this
+heaven in him forced to live on earth, such a man is he. His heart and
+brain move there, his feet stay here. He has lost all sense of our
+values of things. Vespasian besieging Jerusalem and a mule passing with
+gourds awaken the same interest. But speak of some little fact, little
+as we think, and he stands astonished with its prodigious import. If his
+child sicken to death it does not seem to matter to him, but a gesture,
+a glance from the child, starts him into an agony of fear and anger, as
+if the child were undoing the universe. He lives like one between two
+regions, one of distracting glory, of which he is conscious but must not
+enter yet; and the other into which he has been exiled back again--and
+between this region where his soul moves and the earth where his body
+is, there is so little harmony of thought or feeling that he cannot
+undertake any human activity, nor unite the demands of the two worlds.
+He knows that what ought to be cannot be in the world he has returned
+to, so that his life is perplexed; but in this incessant perplexity he
+falls back on prone submission to the heavenly will. The time will come
+when death will restore his being to equilibrium; but now he is out of
+harmony, for the soul knows more than the body and the body clouds the
+soul."
+
+"I probed this seeming indifference. 'Beast, to be so still and careless
+when Rome is at the gates of thy town.' He merely looked with his large
+eyes at me. Yet the man is not apathetic, but loves old and young, the
+very brutes and birds and flowers of the field. His only impatience is
+with wrongdoing, but he curbs that impatience."
+
+At last Karshish tells, with many apologies for his foolishness, the
+strangest thing of all. Lazarus thinks that his curer was God himself
+who came and dwelt in flesh among those he had made, and went in and out
+among them healing and teaching, and then died. "It is strange, but why
+write of trivial matters when things of price call every moment for
+remark? Forget it, my master, pardon me and farewell."
+
+Then comes the postscript, that impression which, in spite of all his
+knowledge, is left in Karshish's mind--
+
+    The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think?
+    So, the All-Great were the All-Loving too--
+    So, through the thunder comes a human voice
+    Saying: "O heart I made, a heart beats here!
+    Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself!
+    Thou hast no power, nor may'st conceive of mine,
+    But love I gave thee, with myself to love,
+    And thou must love me who have died for thee!"--
+    The madman saith He said so; it is strange.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+_IMAGINATIVE REPRESENTATIONS RENAISSANCE_
+
+
+The Imaginative Representations to be discussed in this chapter are
+those which belong to the time of the Renaissance. We take a great leap
+when we pass from Karshish and Cleon to Fra Lippo Lippi, from early
+Christian times to the early manhood of the Renaissance. But these leaps
+are easy to a poet, and Browning is even more at his ease and in his
+strength in the fifteenth century than in the first.
+
+We have seen with what force in _Sordello_ he realised the life and
+tumult of the thirteenth century. The fourteenth century does not seem
+to have attracted him much, though he frequently refers to its work in
+Florence; but when the Renaissance in the fifteenth century took its
+turn with decision towards a more open freedom of life and thought,
+abandoning one after another the conventions of the past; when the moral
+limits, which the Church still faintly insisted on, were more and more
+withdrawn and finally blotted out; when, as the century passed into the
+next, the Church led the revolt against decency, order, and morality;
+when scepticism took the place of faith, even of duty, and criticism the
+place of authority, then Browning became interested, not of course in
+the want of faith and in immorality, but in the swift variety and
+intensity of the movement of intellectual and social life, and in the
+interlacing changes of the movement. This was an enchanting world for
+him, and as he was naturally most interested in the arts, he represented
+the way in which the main elements of the Renaissance appeared to him in
+poems which were concerned with music, poetry, painting and the rest of
+the arts, but chiefly with painting. Of course, when the Renaissance
+began to die down into senile pride and decay, Browning, who never
+ceased to choose and claim companionship with vigorous life, who
+abhorred decay either in Nature or nations, in societies or in cliques
+of culture, who would have preferred a blood-red pirate to the daintiest
+of decadents--did not care for it, and in only one poem, touched with
+contemptuous pity and humour, represented its disease and its
+disintegrating elements, with so much power, however, with such grasping
+mastery, that it is like a painting by Velasquez. Ruskin said justly
+that the _Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's Church_ concentrated
+into a few lines all the evil elements of the Renaissance. But this want
+of care for the decaying Renaissance was contrasted by the extreme
+pleasure with which he treated its early manhood in _Fra Lippo Lippi_.
+
+The Renaissance had a life and seasons, like those of a human being. It
+went through its childhood and youth like a boy of genius under the care
+of parents from whose opinions and mode of life he is sure to sever
+himself in the end; but who, having made a deep impression on his
+nature, retain power over, and give direction to, his first efforts at
+creation. The first art of the Renaissance, awakened by the discovery of
+the classic remnants, retained a great deal of the faith and
+superstition, the philosophy, theology, and childlike _naivete_ of the
+middle ages. Its painting and sculpture, but chiefly the first of these,
+gave themselves chiefly to the representation of the soul upon the face,
+and of the untutored and unconscious movements of the body under the
+influence of religious passion; that is, such movements as expressed
+devotion, fervent love of Christ, horror of sin, were chosen, and
+harmonised with the expression of the face. Painting dedicated its work
+to the representation of the heavenly life, either on earth in the story
+of the gospels and in the lives of the saints, or in its glory in the
+circles of heaven. Then, too, it represented the thought, philosophy,
+and knowledge of its own time and of the past in symbolic series of
+quiet figures, in symbolic pictures of the struggle of good with evil,
+of the Church with the world, of the virtues with their opposites.
+Naturally, then, the expression on the face of secular passions, the
+movement of figures in war and trade and social life and the whole vast
+field of human life in the ordinary world, were neglected as unworthy of
+representation; and the free, full life of the body, its beauty, power
+and charm, the objects which pleased its senses, the frank
+representation of its movement under the influence of the natural as
+contrasted with the spiritual passions, were looked upon with religious
+dismay. Such, but less in sculpture than in painting, was the art of
+the Renaissance in its childhood and youth, and Browning has scarcely
+touched that time. He had no sympathy with a neglect of the body, a
+contempt of the senses or of the beauty they perceived. He claimed the
+physical as well as the intellectual and spiritual life of man as by
+origin and of right divine. When, then, in harmony with a great change
+in social and literary life, the art of the Renaissance began to turn,
+in its early manhood, from the representation of the soul to the
+representation of the body in natural movement and beauty; from the
+representation of saints, angels and virtues to the representation of
+actual men and women in the streets and rooms of Florence; from
+symbolism to reality--Browning thought, "This suits me; this is what I
+love; I will put this mighty change into a poem." And he wrote _Fra
+Lippo Lippi_.
+
+As long as this vivid representation of actual human life lasted, the
+art of the Renaissance was active, original, and interesting; and as it
+moved on, developing into higher and finer forms, and producing
+continually new varieties in its development, it reached its strong and
+eager manhood. In its art then, as well as in other matters, the
+Renaissance completed its new and clear theory of life; it remade the
+grounds of life, of its action and passion; and it reconstituted its
+aims. Browning loved this summer time of the Renaissance, which began
+with the midst of the fifteenth century. But he loved its beginnings
+even more than its fulness. That was characteristic. I have said that
+even when he was eighty years old, his keenest sympathies were with
+spring rather than summer, with those times of vital change when fresh
+excitements disturbed the world, when its eyes were smiling with hope,
+and its feet eager with the joy of pursuit. He rejoiced to analyse and
+embody a period which was shaking off the past, living intensely in the
+present, and prophesying the future. It charms us, as we read him, to
+see his intellect and his soul like two hunting dogs, and with all their
+eagerness, questing, roving, quartering, with the greatest joy and in
+incessant movement, over a time like this, where so many diverse,
+clashing, and productive elements mingled themselves into an enchanting
+confusion and glory of life. Out of that pleasure of hunting in a
+morning-tide of humanity, was born _Fra Lippo Lippi_; and there is
+scarcely an element of the time, except the political elements, which it
+does not represent; not dwelt on, but touched for the moment and left;
+unconsciously produced as two men of the time would produce them in
+conversation. The poem seems as easy as a chat in Pall Mall last night
+between some intelligent men, which, read two hundred years hence, would
+inform the reader of the trend of thought and feeling in this present
+day. But in reality to do this kind of thing well is to do a very
+difficult thing. It needs a full knowledge, a full imagination and a
+masterly execution. Yet when we read the poem, it seems as natural as
+the breaking out of blossoms. This is that divine thing, the ease of
+genius.
+
+The scenery of the poem is as usual clear. We are in fifteenth-century
+Florence at night. There is no set description, but the slight touches
+are enough to make us see the silent lonely streets, the churches, the
+high walls of the monastic gardens, the fortress-palaces. The sound of
+the fountains is in our ears; the little crowds of revelling men and
+girls appear and disappear like ghosts; the surly watch with their
+weapons and torches bustle round the corner. Nor does Browning neglect
+to paint by slight enlivening touches, introduced into Lippo Lippi's
+account of himself as a starving boy, the aspect by day and the
+character of the Florence of the fifteenth century. This painting of
+his, slight as it is, is more alive than all the elaborate descriptions
+in _Romola_.
+
+As to the poem itself, Browning plunges at once into his matter; no long
+approaches, no elaborate porches belong to his work. The man and his
+character are before us in a moment--
+
+    I am poor brother Lippo, by your leave!
+    You need not clap your torches to my face.
+    Zooks, what's to blame? You think you see a monk!
+    What, 'tis past midnight, and you go the rounds,
+    And here you catch me at an alley's end
+    Where sportive ladies leave their doors ajar?
+
+For three weeks he has painted saints, and saints, and saints again, for
+Cosimo in the Medici Palace; but now the time of blossoms has come.
+Florence is now awake at nights; the secret of the spring moves in his
+blood; the man leaps up, the monk retires.
+
+    Ouf! I leaned out of window for fresh air.
+    There came a hurry of feet and little feet,
+    A sweep of lute-strings, laughs and whifts of song,--
+      _Flower o' the broom._
+      _Take away love, and our earth is a tomb!_
+      _Flower of the quince,_
+      _I let Lisa go, and what good in life since?_
+      _Flower of the thyme_--and so on. Round they went.
+    Scarce had they turned the corner when a titter,
+    Like the skipping of rabbits by moonlight,--three slim shapes,
+    And a face that looked up ... zooks, sir, flesh and blood,
+    That's all I'm made of! Into shreds it went,
+    Curtain and counterpane and coverlet,
+    All the bed furniture--a dozen knots,
+    There was a ladder! Down I let myself,
+    Hands and feet, scrambling somehow, and so dropped,
+    And after them. I came up with the fun
+    Hard by St. Laurence, hail fellow, well met,--
+      _Flower o' the rose,_
+      _If I've been merry, what matter who knows?_
+
+It is a picture, not only of the man, but of the time and its temper,
+when religion and morality, as well as that simplicity of life which
+Dante describes, had lost their ancient power over society in Florence;
+when the claim to give to human nature all it desired had stolen into
+the Church itself. Even in the monasteries, the long seclusion from
+natural human life had produced a reaction, which soon, indulging itself
+as Fra Lippo Lippi did, ran into an extremity of licence. Nevertheless,
+something of the old religious life lasted at the time of this poem. It
+stretched one hand back to the piety of the past, and retained, though
+faith and devotion had left them, its observances and conventions; so
+that, at first, when Lippo was painting, the new only peeped out of the
+old, like the saucy face of a nymph from the ilexes of a sacred grove.
+This is the historical moment Browning illustrates. Lippo Lippi was
+forced to paint the worn religious subjects: Jerome knocking his breast,
+the choirs of angels and martyrs, the scenes of the Gospel; but out of
+all he did the eager modern life began to glance! Natural, quaint,
+original faces and attitudes appeared; the angels smiled like Florentine
+women; the saints wore the air of Bohemians. There is a picture by
+Lippo Lippi in the National Gallery of some nine of them sitting on a
+bench under a hedge of roses, and it is no paradox to say that they
+might fairly represent the Florentines who tell the tales of the
+_Decameron_.
+
+The transition as it appeared in art is drawn in this poem. Lippo Lippi
+became a monk by chance; it was not his vocation. A starving boy, he
+roamed the streets of Florence; and the widespread intelligence of the
+city is marked by Browning's account of the way in which the _boy_
+observed all the life of the streets for eight years. Then the coming
+change of the aims of art is indicated by the way in which, when he was
+allowed to paint, he covered the walls of the Carmine, not with saints,
+virgins, and angels, but with the daily life of the streets--the boy
+patting the dog, the murderer taking refuge at the altar, the white
+wrath of the avenger coming up the aisle, the girl going to market, the
+crowd round the stalls in the market, the monks, white, grey, and
+black--things as they were, as like as two peas to the reality; flesh
+and blood now painted, not skin and bone; not the expression on the face
+alone, but the whole body in speaking movement; nothing conventional,
+nothing imitative of old models, but actual life as it lay before the
+painter's eyes. Into this fresh aera of art Lippo Lippi led the way with
+the joy of youth. But he was too soon. The Prior, all the
+representatives of the conservative elements in the convent, were sorely
+troubled. "Why, this will never do: faces, arms, legs, and bodies like
+the true; life as it is; nature as she is; quite impossible." And
+Browning, in Lippo's defence of himself, paints the conflict of the
+past with the coming art in a passage too long to quote, too admirable
+to shorten.
+
+The new art conquered the old. The whole life of Florence was soon
+painted as it was: the face of the town, the streets, the churches, the
+towers, the winding river, the mountains round about it; the country,
+the fields and hills and hamlets, the peasants at work, ploughing,
+sowing, and gathering fruit, the cattle feeding, the birds among the
+trees and in the sky; nobles and rich burghers hunting, hawking; the
+magistrates, the citizens, the street-boys, the fine ladies, the
+tradesmen's wives, the heads of the guilds; the women visiting their
+friends; the interior of the houses. We may see this art of human life
+in the apse of Santa Maria Novella, painted by the hand of Ghirlandajo:
+in the Riccardi Palace, painted by Benozzo Gozzoli; in more than half
+the pictures of the painters who succeeded Fra Lippo Lippi. Only, so
+much of the old clings that all this actual Florentine life is painted
+into the ancient religious subjects--the life of the Baptist and the
+Virgin, the embassage of the Wise Men, the life of Christ, the legends
+of the saints, the lives of the virgins and martyrs, Jerusalem and its
+life painted as if it were Florence and its life--all the spiritual
+religion gone out of it, it is true, but yet, another kind of religion
+budding in it--the religion, not of the monastery, but of daily common
+life.
+
+                the world
+    --The beauty and the wonder and the power,
+    The shapes of things, their colours, lights, and shades.
+    Changes, surprises--and God made it all!
+
+Who paints these things as if they were alive, and loves them while he
+paints, paints the garment of God; and men not only understand their own
+life better because they see, through the painting, what they did not
+see before; but also the movement of God's spirit in the beauty of the
+world and in the life of men. Art interprets to man all that is, and God
+in it.
+
+                Oh, oh,
+    It makes me mad to think what men shall do
+    And we in our graves! This world's no blot for us,
+    No blank; it means intensely, and means good:
+    To find its meaning is my meat and drink.
+
+He could not do it; the time was not ripe enough. But he began it. And
+the spirit of its coming breaks out in all he did.
+
+We take a leap of more than half a century when we pass from _Fra Lippo
+Lippi_ to _Andrea del Sarto_. That advance in art to which Lippo Lippi
+looked forward with a kind of rage at his own powerlessness had been
+made. In its making, the art of the Renaissance had painted men and
+women, both body and soul, in every kind of life, both of war and peace;
+and better than they had ever been painted before. Having fulfilled
+that, the painters asked, "What more? What new thing shall we do? What
+new aim shall we pursue?" And there arose among them a desire to paint
+all that was paintable, and especially the human body, with scientific
+perfection. "In our desire to paint the whole of life, we have produced
+so much that we were forced to paint carelessly or inaccurately. In our
+desire to be original, we have neglected technique. In our desire to
+paint the passions on the face and in the movements of men, we have
+lost the calm and harmony of the ancient classic work, which made its
+ethical impression of the perfect balance of the divine nature by the
+ideal arrangement, in accord with a finished science, of the various
+members of the body to form a finished whole. Let the face no longer
+then try to represent the individual soul. One type of face for each
+class of art-representation is enough. Let our effort be to represent
+beauty by the perfect drawing of the body in repose and in action, and
+by chosen attitudes and types. Let our composition follow certain
+guiding lines and rules, in accordance with whose harmonies all pictures
+shall be made. We will follow the Greek; compose as he did, and by his
+principles; and for that purpose make a scientific study of the body of
+man; observing in all painting, sculpture, and architecture the general
+forms and proportions that ancient art, after many experiments, selected
+as the best. And, to match that, we must have perfect drawing in all we
+do."
+
+This great change, which, as art's adulterous connection with science
+deepened, led to such unhappy results, Browning represents, when its aim
+had been reached, in his poem, _Andrea del Sarto_; and he tells
+us--through Andrea's talk with his wife Lucretia--what he thought of it;
+and what Andrea himself, whose broken life may have opened his eyes to
+the truth of things, may himself have thought of it. On that element in
+the poem I have already dwelt, and shall only touch on the scenery and
+tragedy, of the piece:
+
+We sit with Andrea, looking out to Fiesole.
+
+                sober, pleasant Fiesole.
+    There's the bell clinking from the chapel top;
+    That length of convent-wall across the way
+    Holds the trees safer, huddled more inside;
+    The last monk leaves the garden; days decrease,
+    And autumn grows, autumn in everything.
+
+As the poem goes on, the night falls, falls with the deepening of the
+painter's depression; the owls cry from the hill, Florence wears the
+grey hue of the heart of Andrea; and Browning weaves the autumn and the
+night into the tragedy of the painter's life.
+
+That tragedy was pitiful. Andrea del Sarto was a faultless painter and a
+weak character; and it fell to his lot to love with passion a faithless
+woman. His natural weakness was doubled by the weakness engendered by
+unconquerable passion; and he ruined his life, his art, and his honour,
+to please his wife. He wearied her, as women are wearied, by passion
+unaccompanied by power; and she endured him only while he could give her
+money and pleasures. She despised him for that endurance, and all the
+more that he knew she was guilty, but said nothing lest she should leave
+him. Browning fills his main subject--his theory of the true aim of
+art--with this tragedy; and his treatment of it is a fine example of his
+passionate humanity; and the passion of it is knitted up with close
+reasoning and illuminated by his intellectual play.
+
+It is worth a reader's while to read, along with this poem, Alfred de
+Musset's short play, _Andre del Sarto_. The tragedy of the situation is
+deepened by the French poet, and the end is told. Unlike Browning, only
+a few lines sketch the time, its temper, and its art. It is the depth of
+the tragedy which De Musset paints, and that alone; and in order to
+deepen it, Andrea is made a much nobler character than he is in
+Browning's poem. The betrayal is also made more complete, more
+overwhelming. Lucretia is false to Andrea with his favourite pupil, with
+Cordiani, to whom he had given all he had, whom he loved almost as much
+as he loved his wife. Terrible, inevitable Fate broods over this brief
+and masterly little play.
+
+The next of these imaginative representations of the Renaissance is,
+_The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's Church_. We are placed in
+the full decadence of the Renaissance. Its total loss of religion, even
+in the Church; its immorality--the bishop's death-bed is surrounded by
+his natural sons and the wealth he leaves has been purchased by every
+kind of iniquity--its pride of life; its luxury; its semi-Paganism; its
+imitative classicism; its inconsistency; its love of jewels, and fine
+stones, and rich marbles; its jealousy and envy; its pleasure in the
+adornment of death; its delight in the outsides of things, in mere
+workmanship; its loss of originality; its love of scholarship for
+scholarship's sake alone; its contempt of the common people; its
+exhaustion--are one and all revealed or suggested in this astonishing
+poem.
+
+These are the three greater poems dedicated to this period; but there
+are some minor poems which represent different phases of its life. One
+of these is the _Pictor Ignotus_. There must have been many men, during
+the vital time of the Renaissance, who, born, as it were, into the
+art-ability of the period, reached without trouble a certain level in
+painting, but who had no genius, who could not create; or who, if they
+had some touch of genius, had no boldness to strike it into fresh forms
+of beauty; shy, retiring men, to whom the criticism of the world was a
+pain they knew they could not bear. These men are common at a period
+when life is racing rapidly through the veins of a vivid city like
+Florence. The general intensity of the life lifts them to a height they
+would never reach in a dull and sleepy age. The life they have is not
+their own, but the life of the whole town. And this keen perception of
+life outside of them persuades them that they can do all that men of
+real power can do. In reality, they can do nothing and make nothing
+worth a people's honour. Browning, who himself was compact of boldness,
+who loved experiment in what was new, and who shaped what he conceived
+without caring for criticism, felt for these men, of whom he must have
+met many; and, asking himself "How they would think; what they would do;
+and how life would seem to them," wrote this poem. In what way will poor
+human nature excuse itself for failure? How will the weakness in the man
+try to prove that it was power? How, having lost the joy of life, will
+he attempt to show that his loss is gain, his failure a success; and,
+being rejected of the world, approve himself within?
+
+This was a subject to please Browning; meat such as his soul loved: a
+nice, involved, Daedalian, labyrinthine sort of thing, a mixture of real
+sentiment and self-deceit; and he surrounded it with his pity for its
+human weakness.
+
+"I could have painted any picture that I pleased," cries this painter;
+"represented on the face any passion, any virtue." If he could he would
+have done it, or tried it. Genius cannot hold itself in.
+
+"I have dreamed of sending forth some picture which should enchant the
+world (and he alludes to Cimabue's picture)--
+
+    "Bound for some great state,
+    Or glad aspiring little burgh, it went--
+    Flowers cast upon the car which bore the freight,
+    Through old streets named afresh from the event.
+
+"That would have been, had I willed it. But mixed with the praisers
+there would have been cold, critical faces; judges who would press on me
+and mock. And I--I could not bear it." Alas! had he had genius, no fear
+would have stayed his hand, no judgment of the world delayed his work.
+What stays a river breaking from its fountain-head?
+
+So he sank back, saying the world was not worthy of his labours. "What?
+Expose my noble work (things he had conceived but not done) to the prate
+and pettiness of the common buyers who hang it on their walls! No, I
+will rather paint the same monotonous round of Virgin, Child, and Saints
+in the quiet church, in the sanctuary's gloom. No merchant then will
+traffic in my heart. My pictures will moulder and die. Let them die. I
+have not vulgarised myself or them." Brilliant and nobly wrought as the
+first three poems are of which I have written, this quiet little piece
+needed and received a finer workmanship, and was more difficult than
+they.
+
+Then there is _How it strikes a Contemporary_--the story of the gossip
+of a Spanish town about a poor poet, who, because he wanders everywhere
+about the streets observing all things, is mistaken for a spy of the
+king. The long pages he writes are said to be letters to the king; the
+misfortunes of this or that man are caused by his information. The
+world thinks him a wonder of cleverness; he is but an inferior poet. It
+imagines that he lives in Assyrian luxury; he lives and dies in a naked
+garret. This imaginative representation might be of any time in a
+provincial town of an ignorant country like Spain. It is a slight study
+of what superstitious imagination and gossip will work up round any man
+whose nature and manners, like those of a poet, isolate him from the
+common herd. Force is added to this study by its scenery. The Moorish
+windows, the shops, the gorgeous magistrates pacing down the promenade,
+are touched in with a flying pencil; and then, moving through the crowd,
+the lean, black-coated figure, with his cane and dog and his peaked hat,
+clear flint eyes and beaked nose, is seen, as if alive, in the vivid
+sunshine of Valladolid. But what Browning wished most to describe in
+this poem was one of the first marks of a poet, even of a poor one like
+this gentleman--the power of seeing and observing everything. Nothing
+was too small, nothing uninteresting in this man's eyes. His very hat
+was scrutinising.
+
+    He stood and watched the cobbler at his trade,
+    The man who slices lemons into drink,
+    The coffee-roaster's brazier, and the boys
+    That volunteer to help him turn its winch.
+    He glanced o'er books on stalls with half an eye,
+    And fly-leaf ballads on the vendor's string,
+    And broad-edged bold-print posters by the wall.
+    He took such cognisance of man and things,
+    If any beat a horse you felt he saw;
+    If any cursed a woman, he took note;
+    Yet stared at nobody, you stared at him,
+    And found, less to your pleasure than surprise,
+    He seemed to know you and expect as much.
+
+That is the artist's way. It was Browning's way. He is describing
+himself. In that fashion he roamed through Venice or Florence, stopping
+every moment, attracted by the smallest thing, finding a poem in
+everything, lost in himself yet seeing all that surrounded him, isolated
+in thinking, different from and yet like the rest of the world.
+
+Another poem--_My Last Duchess_--must be mentioned. It is plainly placed
+in the midst of the period of the Renaissance by the word _Ferrara_,
+which is added to its title. But it is rather a picture of two
+temperaments which may exist in any cultivated society, and at any
+modern time. There are numbers of such men as the Duke and such women as
+the Duchess in our midst. Both are, however, drawn with mastery.
+Browning has rarely done his work with more insight, with greater
+keenness of portraiture, with happier brevity and selection. As in _The
+Flight of the Duchess_, untoward fate has bound together two
+temperaments sure to clash with each other--and no gipsy comes to
+deliver the woman in this case. The man's nature kills her. It happens
+every day. The Renaissance society may have built up more men of this
+type than ours, but they are not peculiar to it.
+
+Germany, not Italy, is, I think, the country in which Browning intended
+to place two other poems which belong to the time of the
+Renaissance--_Johannes Agricola in Meditation_ and _A Grammarian's
+Funeral_. Their note is as different from that of the Italian poems as
+the national temper of Germany is from that of Italy. They have no sense
+of beauty for beauty's sake alone. Their atmosphere is not soft or gay
+but somewhat stern. The logical arrangement of them is less one of
+feeling than of thought. There is a stronger manhood in them, a grimmer
+view of life. The sense of duty to God and Man, but little represented
+in the Italian poems of the Renaissance, does exist in these two German
+poems. Moreover, there is in them a full representation of aspiration to
+the world beyond. But the Italian Renaissance lived for the earth alone,
+and its loveliness; too close to earth to care for heaven.
+
+It pleased Browning to throw himself fully into the soul of Johannes
+Agricola; and he does it with so much personal fervour that it seems as
+if, in one of his incarnations, he had been the man, and, for the moment
+of his writing, was dominated by him. The mystic-passion fills the
+poetry with keen and dazzling light, and it is worth while, from this
+point of view, to compare the poem with Tennyson's _Sir Galahad_, and on
+another side, with _St. Simeon Stylites_.
+
+Johannes Agricola was one of the products of the reforming spirit of the
+sixteenth century in Germany, one of its wild extremes. He believes that
+God had chosen him among a few to be his for ever and for his own glory
+from the foundation of the world. He did not say that all sin was
+permitted to the saints, that what the flesh did was no matter, like
+those wild fanatics, one of whom Scott draws in _Woodstock_; but he did
+say, that if he sinned it made no matter to his election by God. Nay,
+the immanence of God in him turned the poison to health, the filth to
+jewels. Goodness and badness make no matter; God's choice is all. The
+martyr for truth, the righteous man whose life has saved the world, but
+who is not elected, is damned for ever in burning hell. "I am eternally
+chosen; for that I praise God. I do not understand it. If I did, could I
+praise Him? But I know my settled place in the divine decrees." I quote
+the beginning. It is pregnant with superb spiritual audacity, and
+kindled with imaginative pride.
+
+    There's heaven above, and night by night
+      I look right through its gorgeous roof;
+    No suns and moons though e'er so bright
+      Avail to stop me; splendour-proof
+      Keep the broods of stars aloof:
+    For I intend to get to God,
+      For 'tis to God I speed so fast,
+    For in God's breast, my own abode,
+      Those shoals of dazzling glory, passed,
+      I lay my spirit down at last.
+    I lie where I have always lain,
+      God smiles as he has always smiled;
+    Ere suns and moons could wax and wane,
+      Ere stars were thunder-girt, or piled
+      The heavens, God thought on me his child;
+    Ordained a life for me, arrayed
+      Its circumstances every one
+    To the minutest; ay, God said
+      This head this hand should rest upon
+      Thus, ere he fashioned star or sun.
+    And having thus created me,
+      Thus rooted me, he bade me grow,
+    Guiltless for ever, like a tree
+      That buds and blooms, nor seeks to know
+      The law by which it prospers so:
+    But sure that thought and word and deed
+      All go to swell his love for me,
+    Me, made because that love had need
+      Of something irreversibly
+      Pledged solely its content to be.
+
+As to _A Grammarian's Funeral_, that poem also belongs to the German
+rather than to the Italian spirit. The Renaissance in Italy lost its
+religion; at the same time, in Germany, it added a reformation of
+religion to the New Learning. The Renaissance in Italy desired the
+fulness of knowledge in this world, and did not look for its infinities
+in the world beyond. In Germany the same desire made men call for the
+infinities of knowledge beyond the earth. A few Italians, like
+Savonarola, like M. Angelo, did the same, and failed to redeem their
+world; but eternal aspiration dwelt in the soul of every German who had
+gained a religion. In Italy, as the Renaissance rose to its luxury and
+trended to its decay, the pull towards personal righteousness made by
+belief in an omnipotent goodness who demands the subjection of our will
+to his, ceased to be felt by artists, scholars and cultivated society. A
+man's will was his only law. On the other hand, the life of the New
+Learning in Germany and England was weighted with a sense of duty to an
+eternal Righteousness. The love of knowledge or beauty was modified into
+seriousness of life, carried beyond this life in thought, kept clean,
+and, though filled with incessant labour on the earth, aspired to reach
+its fruition only in the life to come.
+
+This is the spirit and the atmosphere of the _Grammarian's Funeral_, and
+Browning's little note at the beginning says that its time "was shortly
+after the revival of learning in Europe." I have really no proof that
+Browning laid the scene of his poem in Germany, save perhaps the use of
+such words as "thorp" and "croft," but there is a clean, pure morning
+light playing through the verse, a fresh, health-breathing northern air,
+which does not fit in with Italy; a joyous, buoyant youthfulness in the
+song and march of the students who carry their master with gay strength
+up the mountain to the very top, all of them filled with his aspiring
+spirit, all of them looking forward with gladness and vigour to
+life--which has no relation whatever to the temper of Florentine or
+Roman life during the age of the Medici. The bold brightness, moral
+earnestness, pursuit of the ideal, spiritual intensity, reverence for
+good work and for the man who did it, which breathe in the poem, differ
+by a whole world from the atmosphere of life in _Andrea del Sarto_. This
+is a crowd of men who are moving upwards, who, seizing the Renaissance
+elements, knitted them through and through with reformation of life,
+faith in God, and hope for man. They had a future and knew it. The
+semi-paganism of the Renaissance had not, and did not know it had not.
+
+We may close this series of Renaissance representations by _A Toccata of
+Galuppi's_. It cannot take rank with the others as a representative
+poem. It is of a different class; a changeful dream of images and
+thoughts which came to Browning as he was playing a piece of
+eighteenth-century Venetian music. But in the dream there is a sketch of
+that miserable life of fruitless pleasure, the other side of which was
+dishonourable poverty, into which Venetian society had fallen in the
+eighteenth century. To this the pride, the irreligion, the immorality,
+the desire of knowledge and beauty for their own sake alone, had brought
+the noblest, wisest, and most useful city in Italy. That part of the
+poem is representative. It is the end of such a society as is drawn in
+_The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's Church_. That tomb is placed
+in Rome, but it is in Venice that this class of tombs reached their
+greatest splendour of pride, opulence, folly, debasement and irreligion.
+
+Finally, there are a few poems which paint the thoughts, the sorrows,
+the pleasures, and the political passions of modern Italy. There is the
+_Italian in England_, full of love for the Italian peasant and of pity
+for the patriot forced to live and die far from his motherland. Mazzini
+used to read it to his fellow-exiles to show them how fully an English
+poet could enter into the temper of their soul. So far it may be said to
+represent a type. But it scarcely comes under the range of this chapter.
+But _Up in a Villa, down in the City_, is so vivid a representation of
+all that pleased a whole type of the city-bred and poor nobles of Italy
+at the time when Browning wrote the _Dramatic Lyrics_ that I cannot omit
+it. It is an admirable piece of work, crowded with keen descriptions of
+nature in the Casentino, and of life in the streets of Florence. And
+every piece of description is so filled with the character of the
+"Italian person of quality" who describes them--a petulant, humorous,
+easily angered, happy, observant, ignorant, poor gentleman--that
+Browning entirely disappears. The poem retains for us in its verse, and
+indeed in its light rhythm, the childlikeness, the _naivete_, the simple
+pleasures, the ignorance, and the honest boredom with the solitudes of
+nature--of a whole class of Italians, not only of the time when it was
+written, but of the present day. It is a delightful, inventive piece of
+gay and pictorial humour.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+_WOMANHOOD IN BROWNING_
+
+
+The first woman we meet in Browning's poetry is Pauline; a twofold
+person, exceedingly unlike the woman usually made by a young poet. She
+is not only the Pauline idealised and also materialised by the selfish
+passion of her lover, but also the real woman whom Browning has
+conceived underneath the lover's image of her. This doubling of his
+personages, as seen under two diverse aspects or by two different
+onlookers, in the same poem, is not unfrequent in his poetry, and it
+pleased his intellect to make these efforts. When the thing was well
+done, its cleverness was amazing, even imaginative; when it was ill
+done, it was confusing. Tennyson never did this; he had not analytic
+power enough. What he sees of his personages is all one, quite clearly
+drawn and easy to understand. But we miss in them, and especially in his
+women, the intellectual play, versatility and variety of Browning.
+Tennyson's women sometimes border on dulness, are without that movement,
+change and surprises, which in women disturb mankind for evil or for
+good. If Tennyson had had a little more of Browning's imaginative
+analysis, and Browning a little less of it, both would have been better
+artists.
+
+The Pauline of the lover is the commonplace woman whom a young man so
+often invents out of a woman for his use and pleasure. She is to be his
+salvation, to sympathise with his ideals, joys and pains, to give him
+everything, with herself, and to live for him and him alone. Nothing can
+be more _naif_ and simple than this common selfishness which forgets
+that a woman has her own life, her own claim on the man, and her own
+individuality to develop; and this element in the poem, which never
+occurs again in Browning's poetry, may be the record of an early
+experience. If so, he had escaped from this youthful error before he had
+finished the poem, and despised it, perhaps too much. It is excusable
+and natural in the young. His contempt for this kind of love is embodied
+in the second Pauline. She is not the woman her lover imagines her to
+be, but far older and more experienced than her lover; who has known
+long ago what love was; who always liked to be loved, who therefore
+suffers her lover to expatiate as wildly as he pleases; but whose life
+is quite apart from him, enduring him with pleasurable patience,
+criticising him, wondering how he can be so excited. There is a dim
+perception in the lover's phrases of these elements in his mistress'
+character; and that they are in her character is quite plain from the
+patronising piece of criticism in French which Browning has put into her
+mouth. The first touch of his humour appears in the contrast of the
+gentle and lofty boredom of the letter with the torrents of love in the
+poem. And if we may imagine that the lover is partly an image of what
+Browning once felt in a youthful love, we may also think that the
+making of the second and critical Pauline was his record, when his love
+had passed, of what he thought about it all.
+
+This mode of treatment, so much more analytic than imaginative, belongs
+to Browning as an artist. He seems, while he wrote, as if half of him
+sat apart from the personages he was making, contemplating them in his
+observant fashion, discussing them coolly in his mind while the other
+half of him wrote about them with emotion; placing them in different
+situations and imagining what they would then do; inventing trials for
+them and recombining, through these trials, the elements of their
+characters; arguing about and around them, till he sometimes loses the
+unity of their personality. This is a weakness in his work when he has
+to create characters in a drama who may be said, like Shakespeare's, to
+have, once he has created them, a life of their own independent of the
+poet. His spinning of his own thoughts about their characters makes us
+often realise, in his dramas, the individuality of Browning more than
+the individuality of the characters. We follow him at this work with
+keen intellectual pleasure, but we do not always follow him with a
+passionate humanity.
+
+On the contrary, this habit, which was one cause of his weakness as an
+artist in the drama, increased his strength as an artist when he made
+single pictures of men and women at isolated crises in their lives; or
+when he pictured them as they seemed at the moment to one, two, or three
+differently tempered persons--pictorial sketches and studies which we
+may hang up in the chambers of the mind for meditation or discussion.
+Their intellectual power and the emotional interest they awaken, the
+vivid imaginative lightning which illuminates them in flashes, arise out
+of that part of his nature which made him a weak dramatist.
+
+Had he chosen, for example, to paint Lady Carlisle as he conceived her,
+in an isolated portrait, and in the same circumstances as in his drama
+of _Strafford_, we should have had a clear and intimate picture of her
+moving, alive at every point, amidst the decay and shipwreck of the
+Court. But in the play she is a shade who comes and goes, unoutlined,
+confused and confusing, scarcely a woman at all. The only clear hints of
+what Browning meant her to be are given in the _asides_ of Strafford.
+
+Browning may have been content with _Strafford_ as a whole, but, with
+his passion for vitality, he could not have been content with either
+Lady Carlisle or the Queen as representatives of women. Indeed, up to
+this point, when he had written _Pauline_, _Paracelsus_ and _Strafford_,
+he must have felt that he had left out of his poetry one half of the
+human race; and his ambition was to represent both men and women.
+Pauline's chief appearance is in French prose. Michel, in _Paracelsus_,
+is a mere silhouette of the sentimental German Frau, a soft sympathiser
+with her husband and with the young eagle Paracelsus, who longs to leave
+the home she would not leave for the world--an excellent and fruitful
+mother. She is set in a pleasant garden landscape. Twice Browning tries
+to get more out of her and to lift her into reality. But the men carry
+him away from her, and she remains undrawn. These mere images, with the
+exception of the woman in _Porphyria's Lover_, who, with a boldness
+which might have astonished even Byron but is characteristic of Browning
+in his audacious youth, leaves the ball to visit her lover in the
+cottage in the garden--are all that he had made of womanhood in 1837,
+four years after he had begun to publish poetry.
+
+It was high time he should do something better, and he had now begun to
+know more of the variousness of women and of their resolute grip on life
+and affairs. So, in _Sordello_, he created Palma. She runs through the
+poem, and her appearances mark turning points in Sordello's development;
+but thrice she appears in full colour and set in striking
+circumstances--first, in the secret room of the palace at Verona with
+Sordello when she expounds her policy, and afterwards leans with him
+amid a gush of torch-fire over the balcony, whence the grey-haired
+councillors spoke to the people surging in the square and shouting for
+the battle. The second time is in the streets of Ferrara, full of
+camping men and fires; and the third is when she waits with Taurello in
+the vaulted room below the chamber where Sordello has been left to
+decide what side he shall take, for the Emperor or the Pope. He dies
+while they wait, but there is no finer passage in the poem than this of
+Palma and Taurello talking in the dim corridor of the new world they
+would make for North Italy with Sordello. It is not dramatic
+characterisation, but magnificent individualisation of the woman and the
+man.
+
+We see Palma first as a girl at Goito, where she fills Sordello with
+dreams, and Browning gives her the beauty of the Venetians Titian
+painted.
+
+                How the tresses curled
+    Into a sumptuous swell of gold and wound
+    About her like a glory! even the ground
+    Was bright as with spilt sunbeams:
+
+Full consciousness of her beauty is with her, frank triumph in it; but
+she is still a child. At the Court of Love she is a woman, not only
+conscious of her loveliness, but able to use it to bind and loose,
+having sensuous witchery and intellectual power, that terrible
+combination. She lays her magic on Sordello.
+
+But she is not only the woman of personal magic and beauty. Being of
+high rank and mixed with great events, she naturally becomes the
+political woman, a common type in the thirteenth century. And Browning
+gives her the mental power to mould and direct affairs. She uses her
+personal charm to lure Sordello into politics.
+
+                Her wise
+    And lulling words are yet about the room,
+    Her presence wholly poured upon the gloom
+    Down even to her vesture's creeping stir.
+    And so reclines he, saturate with her.
+
+           *       *       *
+
+    But when she felt she held her friend indeed
+    Safe, she threw back her curls, began implant
+    Her lessons;
+
+Her long discourse on the state of parties, and how Sordello may, in
+mastering them, complete his being, fascinates him and us by the charm
+of her intelligence.
+
+But the political woman has often left love behind. Politics, like
+devotion, are a woman's reaction from the weariness of loving and being
+loved. But Palma is young, and in the midst of her politics she retains
+passion, sentiment, tenderness and charm. She dreams of some soul beyond
+her own, who, coming, should call on all the force in her character;
+enable her, in loving him, to give consummation to her work for Italy;
+and be himself the hand and sword of her mind. Therefore she held
+herself in leash till the right man came, till she loved. "Waits he
+not," her heart cries, and mixes him with coming Spring:
+
+                Waits he not the waking year?
+    His almond blossoms must be honey-ripe
+    By this; to welcome him, fresh runnels stripe
+    The thawed ravines; because of him, the wind
+    Walks like a herald. I shall surely find
+    Him now.
+
+She finds him in Sordello, and summons him, when the time is ripe, to
+Verona. Love and ambition march together in her now. In and out of all
+her schemes Sordello moves. The glory of her vision of North Italian
+rule is like a halo round his brow. Not one political purpose is lost,
+but all are transfigured in her by love. Softness and strength,
+intellect and feeling meet in her. This is a woman nobly carved, and the
+step from Michel, Pauline and Lady Carlisle to her is an immense one.
+
+By exercise of his powers Browning's genius had swiftly developed. There
+comes a time, sooner or later, to a great poet when, after many
+experiments, the doors of his intellect and soul fly open, and his
+genius is flooded with the action and thought of what seems a universe.
+And with this revelation of Man and Nature, a tidal wave of creative
+power, new and impelling, carries the poet far beyond the station where
+last he rested. It came to Browning now. The creation of Palma would be
+enough to prove it, but there is not a character or scene in _Sordello_
+which does not also prove it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In this new outrush of his genius he created a very different woman from
+Palma. He created Pippa, the Asolan girl, at the other end of society
+from Palma, at the other end of feminine character. Owing to the host of
+new thoughts which in this early summer of genius came pouring into his
+soul--all of which he tried to express, rejecting none, choosing none
+out of the rest, expressing only half of a great number of them; so
+delighted with them all that he could leave none out--he became obscure
+in _Sordello_. Owing also to the great complexity of the historical
+_mise-en-scene_ in which he placed his characters in that poem, he also
+became obscure. Had he been an experienced artist he would have left out
+at least a third of the thoughts and scenes he inserted. As it was, he
+threw all his thoughts and all the matters he had learnt about the
+politics, cities, architecture, customs, war, gardens, religion and
+poetry of North Italy in the thirteenth century, pell-mell into this
+poem, and left them, as it were, to find their own places. This was very
+characteristic of a young man when the pot of his genius was boiling
+over. Nothing bolder, more incalculable, was ever done by a poet in the
+period of his storm and stress. The boundless and to express it, was
+never sought with more audacity. It was impossible, in this effort, for
+him to be clear, and we need not be vexed with him. The daring, the
+rush, the unconsciousness and the youth of it all, are his excuse, but
+not his praise. And when the public comes to understand that the
+dimness and complexity of _Sordello_ arise from plenteousness not
+scarcity of thought, and that they were not a pose of the poet's but the
+natural leaping of a full fountain just let loose from its mountain
+chamber, it will have a personal liking, not perhaps for the poem but
+for Browning. "I will not read the book," it will say, "but I am glad he
+had it in him."
+
+Still it was an artistic failure, and when Browning understood that the
+public could not comprehend him--and we must remember that he desired to
+be comprehended, for he loved mankind--he thought he would use his
+powers in a simpler fashion, and please the honest folk. So, in the joy
+of having got rid in _Sordello_ of so many of his thoughts by expression
+and of mastering the rest; and determined, since he had been found
+difficult, to be the very opposite--loving contrast like a poet--he
+wrote _Pippa Passes_. I need not describe its plan. Our business is with
+the women in it.
+
+Ottima, alive with carnal passion, in the fire of which the murder of
+her husband seems a mere incident, is an audacious sketch, done in
+splashes of ungradated colour. Had Browning been more in the woman's
+body and soul he would not have done her in jerks as he has done. Her
+trick of talking of the landscape, as if she were on a holiday like
+Pippa, is not as subtly conceived or executed as it should be, and is
+too far away from her dominant carnality to be natural. And her
+sensualism is too coarse for her position. A certain success is
+attained, but the imagination is frequently jarred. The very outburst of
+unsensual love at the end, when her love passes from the flesh into the
+spirit, when self-sacrifice dawns upon her and she begins to suffer the
+first agonies of redemption, is plainly more due to the poet's pity than
+to the woman's spirit. Again, Sebald is the first to feel remorse after
+the murder. Ottima only begins to feel it when she thinks her lover is
+ceasing to love her. I am not sure that to reverse the whole situation
+would not be nearer to the truth of things; but that is matter of
+discussion. Then the subject-matter is sordid. Nothing relieves the
+coarseness of Sebald, Ottima and Luca and their relations to one another
+but the few descriptions of nature and the happy flash of innocence when
+Pippa passes by. Nor are there any large fates behind the tale or large
+effects to follow which might lift the crime into dignity. This mean,
+commonplace, ugly kind of subject had a strange attraction for Browning,
+as we see in _The Inn Album_, in _Red Cotton Nightcap Country_, and
+elsewhere. I may add that it is curious to find him, in 1841, writing
+exactly like a modern realist, nearly fifty years before realism of this
+kind had begun. And this illustrates what I have said of the way in
+which he anticipated by so many years the kind of work to which the
+literary world should come. The whole scene between Sebald and Ottima
+might have been written by a powerful, relentless modern novelist.
+
+We have more of this realism, but done with great skill, humanity, even
+tenderness, in the meeting and talk of the young harlotry on the steps
+of the Duomo near the fountain. When we think of this piece of bold,
+clear, impressionist reality cast into the midst of the proprieties of
+literature in 1841, it is impossible not to wonder and smile. The girls
+are excellently drawn and varied from each other. Browning's pity
+gathers round them, and something of underlying purity, of natural grace
+of soul, of tenderness in memory of their youth emerges in them; and the
+charm of their land is round their ways. There was also in his mind, I
+think, a sense of picturesqueness in their class when they were young,
+which, mingling with his pity for them, attracted his imagination, or
+touched into momentary life that roving element in a poet which resents
+the barriers made by social and domestic purity. _Fifine at the Fair_ is
+partly a study of that temper which comes and goes, goes and comes in
+the life not only of poets but of ordinary men and women.
+
+Then, to illustrate this further, there is in _Sordello_ a brilliant
+sketch of girls of this kind at Venice, full of sunlight, colour and
+sparkling water, in which he has seen these butterflies of women as a
+painter would see them, or as a poet who, not thinking then of moral
+questions or feeling pity for their fate, is satisfied for the flying
+moment with the picture they make, with the natural freedom of their
+life.
+
+But he does not leave that picture without a representation of the other
+side of this class of womanhood. It was a daring thing, when he wished
+to say that he would devote his whole work to the love and
+representation of humanity to symbolise it by a sorrowful street-girl in
+Venice who wistfully asks an alms; worn and broken with sorrow and
+wrong; whose eyes appeal for pity, for comprehension of her good and for
+his love; and whose fascination and beauty are more to him than those
+of her unsuffering companions. The other side of that class of women is
+here given with clear truth and just compassion, and the representation
+is lifted into imaginative strength, range and dignity of thought and
+feeling by her being made the image of the whole of humanity. "This
+woman," he thought, "is humanity, whom I love, who asks the poet in me
+to reveal her as she is, a divine seed of God to find some day its
+flowering--the broken harlot of the universe, who will be, far off, the
+Magdalen redeemed by her ineradicable love. That, and with every power I
+have, I will, as poet, love and represent."
+
+This is the imagination working at its best, with its most penetrative
+and passionate power, and Browning is far greater as a poet in this
+Thing of his, where thought and love are knit into union to give birth
+to moral, intellectual and spiritual beauty, than he is in those lighter
+and cleverer poems in which he sketches with a facile but too discursive
+a pencil, the transient moments, grave or light, of the lives of women.
+Yet this and they show his range, his variety, the embracing of his
+sympathy.
+
+Over against these girls in the market-place, against Ottima in her
+guilt, and Phene who is as yet a nonentity (her speech to the sculptor
+is too plainly Browning's analysis of the moment, not her own
+thinking--no girl of fourteen brought up by Natalia would talk in that
+fashion) is set Pippa, the light, life and love of the day, the town,
+the people and the poem. She passes like an angel by and touches with
+her wing events and persons and changes them to good. She has some
+natural genius, and is as unconscious of her genius as she is of the
+good she does. In her unconsciousness is the fountain of her charm. She
+lives like a flower of the field that knows not it has blest and
+comforted with its beauty the travellers who have passed it by. She has
+only one day in the whole year for her own, and for that day she creates
+a fresh personality for herself. She clothes her soul, intellect,
+imagination, and spiritual aspiration in holiday garments for the day,
+becoming for the time a new poetic self, and able to choose any other
+personality in Asolo from hour to hour--the queen and spirit of the
+town; not wishing to be, actually, the folk she passes by, but only,
+since she is so isolated, to be something in their lives, to touch them
+for help and company.
+
+The world of nature speaks to her and loves her. She sees all that is
+beautiful, feeds on it, and grasps the matter of thought that underlies
+the beauty. And so much is she at home with nature that she is able to
+describe with ease in words almost as noble as the thing itself the
+advent of the sun. When she leaps out of her bed to meet the leap of the
+sun, the hymn of description she sings might be sung by the Hours
+themselves as they dance round the car of the god. She can even play
+with the great Mother as with an equal, or like her child. The charming
+gaiety with which she speaks to the sunlights that dance in her room,
+and to the flowers which are her sisters, prove, however isolated her
+life may be, that she is never alone. Along with this brightness she has
+seriousness, the sister of her gaiety; the deep seriousness of
+imagination, the seriousness also of the evening when meditation broods
+over the day and its doings before sleep. These, with her sweet
+humanity, natural piety, instinctive purity, compose her of soft
+sunshine and soft shadow. Nor does her sadness at the close, which is
+overcome by her trust in God, make her less but more dear to us. She is
+a beautiful creation. There are hosts of happy women like her. They are
+the salt of the earth. But few poets have made so much of them and so
+happily, or sung about these birds of God so well as Browning has in
+_Pippa Passes_.
+
+That was in 1841. Pleased with his success in this half-lyrical,
+half-dramatic piece, he was lured towards the drama again, and also to
+try his hand at those short lyrics--records of transient emotion on
+fanciful subjects--or records of short but intense moments of thought or
+feeling. It is a pity that he did not give to dramatic lyrics (in which
+species of poetry he is quite our first master) the time he gave to
+dramas, in which he is not much better than an amateur. Nevertheless, we
+cannot omit the women in the dramas. I have already written of Lady
+Carlisle. Polyxena, in _King Victor and King Charles_, is partly the
+political woman and partly the sensible and loving wife of a strangely
+tempered man. She is fairly done, but is not interesting. Good womanly
+intelligence in affairs, good womanly support of her man; clear womanly
+insight into men and into intrigue--a woman of whom there are hundreds
+of thousands in every rank of life. In her, as in so much of Browning's
+work, the intellect of the woman is of a higher quality than the
+intellect of the man.
+
+Next, among his women, is Anael in the _Return of the Druses_, She is
+placed in too unnatural a situation to allow her nature to have fair
+play. In the preternatural world her superstition creates, she adores
+Djabal, murders the Prefect, and dies by her own hand. She is, in that
+world, a study of a young girl's enthusiasm for her faith and her
+country, and for the man she thinks divine; and were the subject, so far
+as it relates to her character, well or clearly wrought, she might be
+made remarkable. As it is wrought, it is so intertwisted with complex
+threads of thought and passion that any clear outline of her character
+is lost. Both Djabal and she are like clouds illuminated by flashes of
+sheet lightning which show an infinity of folds and shapes of vapour in
+each cloud, but show them only for an instant; and then, when the
+flashes come again, show new folds, new involutions. The characters are
+not allowed by Browning to develop themselves.
+
+Anael, when she is in the preternatural world, loves Djabal as an
+incarnation of the divine, but in the natural world of her girlhood her
+heart goes out to the Knight of Malta who loves her. The in-and-out of
+these two emotional states--one in the world of religious enthusiasm,
+and one in her own womanhood, as they cross and re-cross one another--is
+elaborated with merciless analysis; and Anael's womanhood appears, not
+as a whole, but in bits and scraps. How will this young girl, divided by
+two contemporaneous emotions, one in the supernatural and one in the
+natural world, act in a crisis of her life? Well, the first, conquering
+the second, brings about her death the moment she tries to transfer the
+second into the world of the first--her dim, half-conscious love for
+Lois into her conscious adoration of Djabal.
+
+Mildred and Guendolen are the two women in _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_.
+Guendolen is the incarnation of high-hearted feminine commonsense, of
+clear insight into the truth of things, born of the power of love in
+her. Amid all the weaknesses of the personages and the plot; in the
+wildered situation made by a confused clashing of pride and innocence
+and remorse, in which Browning, as it were on purpose to make a display
+of his intellectual ability, involves those poor folk--Guendolen is the
+rock on which we can rest in peace; the woman of the world, yet not
+worldly; full of experience, yet having gained by every experience more
+of love; just and strong yet pitiful, and with a healthy but
+compassionate contempt for the intelligence of the men who belong to
+her.
+
+Contrasted with her, and the quality of her love contrasted also, is
+Mildred, the innocent child girl who loves for love's sake, and
+continues to be lost in her love. But Browning's presentation of her
+innocence, her love, is spoiled by the over-remorse, shame and fear
+under whose power he makes her so helpless. They are in the
+circumstances so unnaturally great that they lower her innocence and
+love, and the natural courage of innocence and love. These rise again to
+their first level, but it is only the passion of her lover's death which
+restores them. And when they recur, she is outside of girlhood. One
+touch of the courage she shows in the last scene would have saved in the
+previous scene herself, her lover, and her brother. The lie she lets her
+brother infer when she allows him to think that the lover she has
+confessed to is not the Earl, yet that she will marry the Earl, degrades
+her altogether and justly in her brother's eyes, and is so terribly out
+of tune with her character that I repeat I cannot understand how
+Browning could invent that situation. It spoils the whole presentation
+of the girl. It is not only out of her character, it is out of nature.
+Indeed, in spite of the poetry, in spite of the pathetic beauty of the
+last scene, Mildred and Tresham are always over-heightened,
+over-strained beyond the concert-pitch of nature. But the drawing of the
+woman's character suffers more from this than the man's, even though
+Tresham, in the last scene, is half turned into a woman. Sex seems to
+disappear in that scene.
+
+A different person is Colombe, the Duchess in _Colombe's Birthday_. That
+play, as I have said, gets on, but it gets on because Colombe moves
+every one in the play by her own motion. From beginning to end of the
+action she is the fire and the soul of it. Innocent, frank and brave,
+simple and constant among a group of false and worldly courtiers, among
+whom she moves like the white Truth, untouched as yet by love or by the
+fates of her position, she is suddenly thrown into a whirlpool of
+affairs and of love; and her simplicity, clearness of intelligence,
+unconscious rightness of momentary feeling, which comes of her not
+thinking about her feelings--that rare and precious element in
+character--above all, her belief in love as the one worthy thing in the
+world, bring her out of the whirlpool, unshipwrecked, unstained by a
+single wave of ill-feeling or mean thinking, into a quiet harbour of
+affection and of power. For she will influence Berthold all his life
+long.
+
+She is herself lovely. Valence loves her at sight. Her love for Valence
+is born before she knows it, and the touch of jealousy, which half
+reveals it to her, is happily wrought by Browning. When she finds out
+that Valence did for love of her what she thought was done for loyalty
+alone to her, she is a little revolted; her single-heartedness is
+disappointed. She puts aside her growing love, which she does not know
+as yet is love, and says she will find out if Berthold wishes to marry
+her because he loves her, or for policy. Berthold is as honest as she
+is, and tells her love has nothing to do with the matter. The thought of
+an untrue life with Berthold then sends her heart with a rush back to
+Valence, and she chooses love and obscurity with Valence. It is the
+portrait of incarnate truth, in vivid contrast to Constance, who is a
+liar in grain.
+
+Constance is the heroine of the fragment of a drama called _In a
+Balcony_. Norbert, a young diplomat, has served the Queen, who is fifty
+years old, for a year, all for the love of Constance, a cousin and
+dependent of the Queen. He tells Constance he will now, as his reward,
+ask the Queen for her hand. Constance says, "No; that will ruin us both;
+temporise; tell the Queen, who is hungry for love, that you love her;
+and that, as she cannot marry a subject, you will be content with me,
+whom the Queen loves." Norbert objects, and no wonder, to this lying
+business, but he does it; and the Queen runs to Constance, crying, "I am
+loved, thank God! I will throw everything aside and marry him. I
+thought he loved you, but he loves me." Then Constance, wavering from
+truth again, says that the Queen is right. Norbert does love her. And
+this is supposed by some to be a noble self-sacrifice, done in pity for
+the Queen. It is much more like jealousy.
+
+Then, finding that all Norbert's future depends on the Queen, she is
+supposed to sacrifice herself again, this time for Norbert's sake. She
+will give him up to the Queen, for the sake of his career; and she tells
+the Queen, before Norbert, that he has confessed to her his love for the
+Queen--another lie! Norbert is indignant--he may well be--and throws
+down all this edifice of falsehood. The Queen knows then the truth, and
+leaves them in a fury. Constance and Norbert fly into each other's arms,
+and the tramp of the soldiers who come to arrest them is heard as the
+curtain falls.
+
+I do not believe that Browning meant to make self-sacrifice the root of
+Constance's doings. If he did, he has made a terrible mess of the whole
+thing. He was much too clear-headed a moralist to link self-sacrifice to
+systematic lying. Self-sacrifice is not self-sacrifice at all when it
+sacrifices truth. It may wear the clothes of Love, but, in injuring
+righteousness, it injures the essence of love. It has a surface beauty,
+for it imitates love, but if mankind is allured by this beauty, mankind
+is injured. It is the false Florimel of self-sacrifice. Browning, who
+had studied self-sacrifice, did not exhibit it in Constance. There is
+something else at the root of her actions, and I believe he meant it to
+be jealousy. The very first lie she urges her lover to tell (that is, to
+let the Queen imagine he loves her) is just the thing a jealous woman
+would invent to try her lover and the Queen, if she suspected the Queen
+of loving him, and him of being seduced from her by the worldly
+advantage of marrying the Queen. And all the other lies are best
+explained on the supposition of jealous experiments. At the last she is
+satisfied; the crowning test had been tried. Through a sea of lying she
+had made herself sure of Norbert's love, and she falls into his arms.
+Had Browning meant Constance to be an image of self-sacrifice, he would
+scarcely have written that line when Norbert, having told the truth of
+the matter to the Queen, looks at both women, and cries out, "You two
+glare, each at each, like panthers now." A woman, filled with the joy
+and sadness of pure self-sacrifice, would not have felt at this moment
+like a panther towards the woman for whom she had sacrificed herself.
+
+Even as a study of jealousy, Constance is too subtle. Jealousy has none
+of these labyrinthine methods; it goes straight with fiery passion to
+its end. It may be said, then, that Constance is not a study of
+jealousy. But it may be a study by Browning of what he thought in his
+intellect jealousy would be. At any rate, Constance, as a study of
+self-sacrifice, is a miserable failure. Moreover, it does not make much
+matter whether she is a study of this or that, because she is eminently
+wrong-natured. Her lying is unendurable, only to be explained or excused
+by the madness of jealousy, and she, though jealous, is not maddened
+enough by jealousy to excuse her lies. The situations she causes are
+almost too ugly. Whenever the truth is told, either by the Queen or
+Norbert, the situations break up in disgrace for her. It is difficult
+to imagine how Norbert could go on loving her. His love would have
+departed if they had come to live together. He is radically true, and
+she is radically false. A fatal split would have been inevitable.
+Nothing could be better for them both--after their momentary outburst of
+love at the end--than death.
+
+From the point of view of art, Constance is interesting. It is more than
+we can say of Domizia in _Luria_. She is nothing more than a passing
+study whom Browning uses to voice his theories. Eulalia in _A Soul's
+Tragedy_ is also a transient thing, only she is more colourless, more a
+phantom than Domizia.
+
+By this time, by the year 1846, Browning had found out that he could not
+write dramas well, or even such dramatic proverbs as _In a Balcony_. And
+he gave himself up to another species of his art. The women he now draws
+(some of which belong to the years during which he wrote dramas) are
+done separately, in dramatic lyrics as he called them, and in narrative
+and philosophical poems. Some are touched only at moments of their
+lives, and we are to infer from the momentary action and feeling the
+whole of the woman. Others are carefully and lovingly drawn from point
+to point in a variety of action, passion and circumstance. In these we
+find Browning at his best in the drawing of women. I know no women among
+the second-rate poets so sweetly, nobly, tenderly and wisely drawn as
+Pompilia and Balaustion.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+_WOMANHOOD IN BROWNING_
+
+(_THE DRAMATIC LYRICS AND POMPILIA_)
+
+
+No modern poet has written of women with such variety as Browning.
+Coleridge, except in a few love-poems, scarcely touched them. Wordsworth
+did not get beyond the womanhood of the home affections, except in a few
+lovely and spiritual sketches of girlhood which are unique in our
+literature, in which maidenhood and the soul of nature so interchange
+their beauty that the girl seems born of the lonely loveliness of nature
+and lives with her mother like a child.
+
+What motherhood in its deep grief and joy, what sisterhood and wifehood
+may be, have never been sung with more penetration and exquisiteness
+than Wordsworth sang them. But of the immense range, beyond, of
+womanhood he could not sing. Byron's women are mostly in love with Byron
+under various names, and he rarely strays beyond the woman who is loved
+or in love. The woman who is most vital, true and tender is Haidee in
+_Don Juan_. Shelley's women melt into philosophic mist, or are used to
+build up a political or social theory, as if they were "properties" of
+literature. Cythna, Rosalind, Asia, Emilia are ideas, not realities.
+Beatrice is alive, but she was drawn for him in the records of her
+trial. Even the woman of his later lyrics soon ceases to be flesh and
+blood. Keats let women alone, save in Isabella, and all that is of
+womanhood in her is derived from Boccaccio. Madeline is nothing but a
+picture. It is curious that his remarkable want of interest in the time
+in which he lived should be combined with as great a want of interest in
+women, as if the vivid life of any period in the history of a people
+were bound up with the vivid life of women in that period. When women
+awake no full emotion in a poet, the life of the time, as in the case of
+Keats, awakes little emotion in him. He will fly to the past for his
+subjects. Moreover, it is perhaps worth saying that when the poets cease
+to write well about women, the phase of poetry they represent, however
+beautiful it be, is beginning to decay. When poetry is born into a new
+life, women are as living in it as men. Womanhood became at once one of
+its dominant subjects in Tennyson and Browning. Among the new political,
+social, religious, philosophic and artistic ideas which were then borne
+like torches through England, the idea of the free development of women
+was also born; and it carried with it a strong emotion. They claimed the
+acknowledgment of their separate individuality, of their distinct use
+and power in the progress of the world. This was embodied with
+extraordinary fulness in _Aurora Leigh_, and its emotion drove itself
+into the work of Tennyson and Browning. How Tennyson treated the subject
+in the _Princess_ is well known. His representation of women in his
+other poems does not pass beyond a few simple, well-known types both of
+good and bad women. But the particular types into which the variety of
+womanhood continually throws itself, the quick individualities, the
+fantastic simplicities and subtleties, the resolute extremes, the
+unconsidered impulses, the obstinate good and evil, the bold cruelties
+and the bold self-sacrifices, the fears and audacities, the hidden work
+of the thoughts and passions of women in the far-off worlds within them
+where their soul claims and possesses its own desires--these were beyond
+the power of Tennyson to describe, even, I think, to conceive. But they
+were in the power of Browning, and he made them, at least in lyric
+poetry, a chief part of his work.
+
+In women he touched great variety and great individuality; two things
+each of which includes the other, and both of which were dear to his
+imagination. With his longing for variety of representation, he was not
+content to pile womanhood up into a few classes, or to dwell on her
+universal qualities. He took each woman separately, marking out the
+points which differentiated her from, not those which she shared with,
+the rest of her sex. He felt that if he dwelt only on the deep-seated
+roots of the tree of womanhood, he would miss the endless play, fancy,
+movement, interaction and variety of its branches, foliage and flowers.
+Therefore, in his lyrical work, he leaves out for the most part the
+simpler elements of womanhood and draws the complex, the particular, the
+impulsive and the momentary. Each of his women is distinct from the
+rest. That is a great comfort in a world which, through laziness, wishes
+to busy itself with classes rather than with personalities. I do not
+believe that Browning ever met man or woman without saying to
+himself--Here is a new world; it may be classed, but it also stands
+alone. What distinguishes it from the rest--that I will know and that
+describe.
+
+When women are not enslaved to conventions--and the new movement towards
+their freedom of development which began shortly after 1840 had
+enfranchised and has continued ever since to enfranchise a great number
+from this slavery--they are more individual and various than men are
+allowed to be. They carry their personal desires, aspirations and
+impulses into act, speech, and into extremes with much greater licence
+than is possible to men. One touches with them much more easily the
+original stuff of humanity. It was this original, individual and various
+Thing in women on which Browning seized with delight. He did not write
+half as much as other poets had done of woman as being loved by man or
+as loving him. I have said that the mere love-poem is no main element in
+his work. He wrote of the original stuff of womanhood, of its good and
+bad alike, sometimes of it as all good, as in Pompilia; but for the most
+part as mingled of good and ill, and of the good as destined to conquer
+the ill.
+
+He did not exalt her above man. He thought her as vital, interesting and
+important for progress as man, but not more interesting, vital, or
+important. He neither lowered her nor idealised her beyond natural
+humanity. She stands in his poetry side by side with man on an equality
+of value to the present and future of mankind. And he has wrought this
+out not by elaborate statement of it in a theory, as Tennyson did in
+the _Princess_ with a conscious patronage of womanhood, but by
+unconscious representation of it in the multitude of women whom he
+invented.
+
+But though the wholes were equal, the particulars of which the wholes
+were composed differed in their values; and women in his view were more
+keenly alive than men, at least more various in their manifestation of
+life. It was their intensity of life which most attracted him. He loved
+nothing so much as life--in plant or animal or man. His longer poems are
+records of the larger movement of human life, the steadfast record in
+quiet verse as in _Paracelsus_, or the clashing together in abrupt verse
+as in _Sordello_, of the turmoil and meditation, the trouble and joy of
+the living soul of humanity. When he, this archangel of reality, got
+into touch with pure fact of the human soul, beating with life, he was
+enchanted. And this was his vast happiness in his longest poem, the
+_Ring and the Book_--
+
+    Do you see this square old yellow book I toss
+    I' the air, and catch again, and twirl about
+    By the crumpled vellum covers--pure crude fact
+    Secreted from man's life when hearts beat hard
+    And brains, high blooded, ticked two centuries hence?
+    Give it me back. The thing's restorative
+    I' the touch and sight.
+
+But in his lyrics, it was not the steady development of life on which he
+loved to write, but the unexpected, original movement of life under the
+push of quick thought and sudden passion into some new form of action
+which broke through the commonplace of existence. Men and women, and
+chiefly women, when they spoke and acted on a keen edge of life with a
+precipice below them or on the summit of the moment, with straight and
+clear intensity, and out of the original stuff of their nature--were his
+darling lyric subjects. And he did this work in lyrics, because the
+lyric is the poem of the moment.
+
+There was one of these critical moments which attracted him
+greatly--that in which all after-life is contained and decided; when a
+step to the right or left settles, in an instant, the spiritual basis of
+the soul. I have already mentioned some of these poems--those concerned
+with love, such as _By the Fireside_ or _Cristina_--and the woman is
+more prominent in them than the man. One of the best of them, so far as
+the drawing of a woman is concerned, is _Dis aliter visum_. We see the
+innocent girl, and ten years after what the world has made of her. But
+the heart of the girl lies beneath the woman of the world. And she
+recalls to the man the hour when they lingered near the church on the
+cliff; when he loved her, when he might have claimed her, and did not.
+He feared they might repent of it; sacrificing to the present their
+chance of the eternities of love. "Fool! who ruined four lives--mine and
+your opera-dancer's, your own and my husband's!" Whether her outburst
+now be quite true to her whole self or not Browning does not let us
+know; but it is true to that moment of her, and it is full of the poetry
+of the moment she recalls. Moreover, these thirty short verses paint as
+no other man could have done the secret soul of a woman in society. I
+quote her outburst. It is full of Browning's keen poetry; and the first
+verse of it may well be compared with a similar moment in _By the
+Fireside_, where nature is made to play the same part, but succeeds as
+here she fails:
+
+    Now I may speak: you fool, for all
+      Your lore! Who made things plain in vain?
+      What was the sea for? What, the grey
+      Sad church, that solitary day,
+    Crosses and graves and swallows' call?
+
+    Was there nought better than to enjoy?
+      No feat which, done, would make time break,
+      And let us pent-up creatures through
+      Into eternity, our due?
+    No forcing earth teach heaven's employ?
+
+    No wise beginning, here and now,
+      What cannot grow complete (earth's feat)
+      And heaven must finish, there and then?
+      No tasting earth's true food for men,
+    Its sweet in sad, its sad in sweet?
+
+    No grasping at love, gaining a share
+      O' the sole spark from God's life at strife
+      With death, so, sure of range above
+      The limits here? For us and love.
+    Failure; but, when God fails, despair.
+
+    This you call wisdom? Thus you add
+      Good unto good again, in vain?
+      You loved, with body worn and weak;
+      I loved, with faculties to seek:
+    Were both loves worthless since ill-clad?
+
+    Let the mere star-fish in his vault
+      Crawl in a wash of weed, indeed,
+      Rose-jacynth to the finger tips:
+      He, whole in body and soul, outstrips
+    Man, found with either in default.
+
+    But what's whole, can increase no more,
+      Is dwarfed and dies, since here's its sphere.
+      The devil laughed at you in his sleeve!
+      You knew not? That I well believe;
+    Or you had saved two souls: nay, four.
+
+    For Stephanie sprained last night her wrist,
+      Ankle or something. "Pooh," cry you?
+      At any rate she danced, all say,
+      Vilely; her vogue has had its day.
+    Here comes my husband from his whist.
+
+Here the woman speaks for herself. It is characteristic of Browning's
+boldness that there are a whole set of poems in which he imagines the
+unexpressed thoughts which a woman revolves in self-communion under the
+questionings and troubles of the passions, and chiefly of the passion of
+love. The most elaborate of these is _James Lee's Wife_, which tells
+what she thinks of when after long years she has been unable to retain
+her husband's love. Finally, she leaves him. The analysis of her
+thinking is interesting, but the woman is not. She is not the quick,
+natural woman Browning was able to paint so well when he chose. His own
+analytic excitement, which increases in mere intellectuality as the poem
+moves on, enters into her, and she thinks more through Browning the man
+than through her womanhood. Women are complex enough, more complex than
+men, but they are not complex in the fashion of this poem. Under the
+circumstances Browning has made, her thought would have been quite clear
+at its root, and indeed in its branches. She is represented as in love
+with her husband. Were she really in love, she would not have been so
+involved, or able to argue out her life so anxiously. Love or love's
+sorrow knows itself at once and altogether, and its cause and aim are
+simple. But Browning has unconsciously made the woman clear enough for
+us to guess the real cause of her departure. That departure is believed
+by some to be a self-sacrifice. There are folk who see self-sacrifice in
+everything Browning wrote about women. Browning may have originally
+intended her action to be one of self-sacrifice, but the thing, as he
+went on, was taken out of his hands, and turns out to be quite a
+different matter. The woman really leaves her husband because her love
+for him was tired out. She talks of leaving her husband free, and
+perhaps, in women's way, persuades herself that she is sacrificing
+herself; but she desires in reality to set herself free from an
+unavailing struggle to keep his love. There comes a time when the
+striving for love wearies out love itself. And James Lee's wife had
+reached that moment. Her departure, thus explained, is the most womanly
+thing in the poem, and I should not wonder if Browning meant it so. He
+knew what self-sacrifice really was, and this departure of the woman was
+not a true self-sacrifice.
+
+Another of these poems in which a woman speaks out her heart is _Any
+Wife to any Husband_. She is dying, and she would fain claim his undying
+fidelity to his love of her; but though she believes in his love, she
+thinks, when her presence is not with him, that his nature will be drawn
+towards other women. Then what he brings her, when he meets her again,
+will not be perfect. Womanly to the core, and her nature is a beautiful
+nature, she says nothing which is not kind and true, and the picture she
+draws of faithfulness, without one stain of wavering, is natural and
+lovely. But, for all that, it is jealousy that speaks, the desire to
+claim all for one's self. "Thou art mine, and mine only"--that fine
+selfishness which injures love so deeply in the end, because it forbids
+its expansion, that is, forbids the essential nature of love to act.
+That may be pardoned, unless in its extremes, during life, if the pardon
+does not increase it; but this is in the hour of death, and it is
+unworthy of the higher world. To carry jealousy beyond the grave is a
+phase of that selfish passion over which this hour, touched by the
+larger thought of the infinite world, should have uplifted the woman.
+Still, what she says is in nature, and Browning's imagination has closed
+passionately round his subject. But he has left us with pity for the
+woman rather than with admiration of her.
+
+Perhaps the subtlest part of the poem is the impression left on us that
+the woman knows all her pleading will be in vain, that she has fathomed
+the weakness of her husband's character. He will not like to remember
+that knowledge of hers; and her letting him feel it is a kind of
+vengeance which will not help him to be faithful. It is also her worst
+bitterness, but if her womanhood were perfect, she would not have had
+that bitterness.
+
+In these two poems, and in others, there is to be detected the
+deep-seated and quiet half-contempt--contempt which does not damage
+love, contempt which is half pity--which a woman who loves a man has for
+his weakness under passion or weariness. Both the wives in these poems
+feel that their husbands are inferior to themselves in strength of
+character and of intellect. To feel this is common enough in women, but
+is rarely confessed by them. A man scarcely ever finds it out from his
+own observation; he is too vain for that. But Browning knew it. A poet
+sees many things, and perhaps his wife told him this secret. It was like
+his audacity to express it.
+
+This increased knowledge of womanhood was probably due to the fact that
+Browning possessed in his wife a woman of genius who had studied her own
+sex in herself and in other women. It is owing to her, I think, that in
+so many poems the women are represented as of a finer, even a stronger
+intellect than the men. Many poets have given them a finer intuition;
+that is a common representation. But greater intellectual power allotted
+to women is only to be found in Browning. The instances of it are few,
+but they are remarkable.
+
+It was owing also to his wife, whose relation to him was frank on all
+points, that Browning saw so much more clearly than other poets into the
+deep, curious or remote phases of the passions, thoughts and vagaries of
+womanhood. I sometimes wonder what women themselves think of the things
+Browning, speaking through their mouth, makes them say; but that is a
+revelation of which I have no hope, and for which, indeed, I have no
+desire.
+
+Moreover, he moved a great deal in the society where women, not having
+any real work to do, or if they have it, not doing it, permit a greater
+freedom to their thoughts and impulses than those of their sex who sit
+at the loom of duty. Tennyson withdrew from this society, and his women
+are those of a retired poet--a few real types tenderly and sincerely
+drawn, and a few more worked out by thinking about what he imagined they
+would be, not by knowing them. Browning, roving through his class and
+other classes of society, and observing while he seemed unobservant,
+drew into his inner self the lives of a number of women, saw them living
+and feeling in a great diversity of circumstances; and, always on the
+watch, seized the moment into which he thought the woman entered with
+the greatest intensity, and smote that into a poem. Such poems,
+naturally lyrics, came into his head at the opera, at a ball, at a
+supper after the theatre, while he talked at dinner, when he walked in
+the park; and they record, not the whole of a woman's character, but the
+vision of one part of her nature which flashed before him and vanished
+in an instant. Among these poems are _A Light Woman_, _A Pretty Woman_,
+_Solomon and Balkis_, _Gold Hair_, and, as a fine instance of this
+sheet-lightning poem about women--_Adam, Lilith and Eve. Too Late_ and
+_The Worst of It_ do not belong to these slighter poems; they are on a
+much higher level. But they are poems of society and its secret lives.
+The men are foremost in them, but in each of them a different woman is
+sketched, through the love of the men, with a masterly decision.
+
+Among all these women he did not hesitate to paint the types farthest
+removed from goodness and love. The lowest woman in the poems is she who
+is described in _Time's Revenges_--
+
+    So is my spirit, as flesh with sin,
+    Filled full, eaten out and in
+    With the face of her, the eyes of her,
+    The lips, the little chin, the stir
+    Of shadow round her mouth; and she
+    --I'll tell you--calmly would decree
+    That I should roast at a slow fire,
+    If that would compass her desire
+    And make her one whom they invite
+    To the famous ball to-morrow night
+
+Contrasted with this woman, from whose brutal nature civilisation has
+stripped away the honour and passion of the savage, the woman of _In a
+Laboratory_ shines like a fallen angel. She at least is natural, and
+though the passions she feels are the worst, yet she is capable of
+feeling strongly. Neither have any conscience, but we can conceive that
+one of these women might attain it, but the other not. Both are examples
+of a thing I have said is exceedingly rare in Browning's poetry--men
+or women left without some pity of his own touched into their
+circumstances or character.
+
+_In a Laboratory_ is a full-coloured sketch of what womanhood could
+become in a court like that of Francis I.; in which every shred of
+decency, gentlehood and honour had disappeared. Browning's description,
+vivid as it is, is less than the reality. Had he deepened the colours of
+iniquity and indecency instead of introducing so much detailed
+description of the laboratory, detail which weakens a little our
+impression of the woman, he had done better, but all the same there is
+no poet in England, living or dead, who could have done it so well. One
+of the best things in the poem is the impression made on us that it is
+not jealousy, but the hatred of envy which is the motive of the woman.
+Jealousy supposes love or the image of love, but among those who
+surrounded Francis, love did not exist at all, only lust, luxury and
+greed of power; and in the absence of love and in the scorn of it, hate
+and envy reign unchallenged. This is what Browning has realised in this
+poem, and, in this differentiation, he has given us not only historical
+but moral truth.
+
+Apart from these lighter and momentary poems about women there are
+those written out of his own ideal of womanhood, built up not only from
+all he knew and loved in his wife, but also out of the dreams of his
+heart. They are the imaginings of the high honour and affection which a
+man feels for noble, natural and honest womanhood. They are touched here
+and there by complex thinking, but for the most part are of a beloved
+simplicity and tenderness, and they will always be beautiful. There is
+the sketch of the woman in _The Italian in England_, a never to be
+forgotten thing. It is no wonder the exile remembered her till he died.
+There is the image we form of the woman in _The Flowers Name_. He does
+not describe her; she is far away, but her imagined character and
+presence fill the garden with an incense sweeter than all the flowers,
+and her beauty irradiates all beauty, so delicately and so plenteously
+does the lover's passion make her visible. There is _Evelyn Hope_, and
+surely no high and pure love ever created a more beautiful soul in a
+woman than hers who waits her lover in the spiritual world. There are
+those on whom we have already dwelt--Pippa, Colombe, Mildred, Guendolen.
+There is the woman in the _Flight of the Duchess_; not a sketch, but a
+completed picture. We see her, just emerged from her convent, thrilling
+with eagerness to see the world, believing in its beauty, interested in
+everything, in the movement of the leaves on the trees, of the birds in
+the heaven, ready to speak to every one high or low, desirous to get at
+the soul of all things in Nature and Humanity, herself almost a creature
+of the element, akin to air and fire.
+
+She is beaten into silence, but not crushed; overwhelmed by dry old
+people, by imitation of dead things, but the life in her is not slain.
+When the wandering gipsy claims her for a natural life, her whole nature
+blossoms into beauty and joy. She will have troubles great and deep, but
+every hour will make her conscious of more and more of life. And when
+she dies, it will be the beginning of an intenser life.
+
+Finally, there is his wife. She is painted in these lyric poems with a
+simplicity of tenderness, with a reticence of worship as sacred as it is
+fair and delicate, with so intense a mingling of the ideal and the real
+that we never separate them, and with so much passion in remembrance of
+the past and in longing for the future, that no comment can enhance the
+picture Browning draws of her charm, her intellect and her spirit.
+
+These pictures of womanhood were set forth before 1868, when a collected
+edition of his poems was published in six volumes. They were chiefly
+short, even impressionist studies, save those in the dramas, and Palma
+in _Sordello_. Those in the dramas were troubled by his want of power to
+shape them in that vehicle. It would have then been a pity if, in his
+matured strength, he had not drawn into clear existence, with full and
+careful, not impressionist work, and with unity of conception, some
+women who should, standing alone, become permanent personages in poetry;
+whom men and women in the future, needing friends, should love, honour
+and obey, and in whom, when help and sympathy and wisdom were wanted,
+these healing powers should be found. Browning did this for us in
+_Pompilia_ and _Balaustion_, an Italian and a Greek girl--not an English
+girl. It is strange how to the very end he lived as a poet outside of
+his own land.
+
+In 1868, Pompilia appeared before the world, and she has captured ever
+since the imagination, the conscience and the sentiment of all who love
+womanhood and poetry. Her character has ennobled and healed mankind.
+Born of a harlot, she is a star of purity; brought up by characters who
+love her, but who do not rise above the ordinary meanness and small
+commercial honesty of their class, she is always noble, generous,
+careless of wealth, and of a high sense of honour. It is as if Browning
+disdained for the time all the philosophy of heredity and environment;
+and indeed it was characteristic of him to believe in the sudden
+creation of beauty, purity and nobility out of their contraries and in
+spite of them. The miracle of the unrelated birth of genius--that out of
+the dunghill might spring the lily, and out of the stratum of crime the
+saint--was an article of faith with him. Nature's or God's surprises
+were dear to him; and nothing purer, tenderer, sweeter, more natural,
+womanly and saintly was ever made than Pompilia, the daughter of a
+vagrant impurity, the child of crime, the girl who grew to womanhood in
+mean and vulgar circumstances.
+
+The only hatred she earns is the hatred of Count Guido her husband, the
+devil who has tortured and murdered her--the hatred of evil for good.
+When Count Guido, condemned to death, bursts into the unrestrained
+expression of his own nature, he cannot say one word about Pompilia
+which is not set on fire by a hell of hatred. Nothing in Browning's
+writing is more vivid, more intense, than these sudden outbursts of
+tiger fierceness against his wife. They lift and enhance the image of
+Pompilia.
+
+When she comes into contact with other characters such as the Archbishop
+and the Governor, men overlaid with long-deposited crusts of convention,
+she wins a vague pity from them, but her simplicity, naturalness and
+saintliness are nearly as repugnant to social convention as her goodness
+is to villany; and Browning has, all through the poem, individualised in
+Pompilia the natural simplicity of goodness in opposition to the
+artificial moralities of conservative society. But when Pompilia touches
+characters who have any good, however hidden, in them, she draws forth
+that good. Her so-called parents pass before they die out of meanness
+into nobility of temper. Conti, her husband's cousin, a fat, waggish man
+of the world, changes into seriousness, pity and affection under her
+silent influence. The careless folk she meets on her flight to Rome
+recognise, even in most suspicious circumstances, her innocence and
+nobleness; and change at a touch their ordinary nature for a higher. And
+when she meets a fine character like Caponsacchi, who has been led into
+a worldly, immoral and indifferent life, he is swept in a moment out of
+it by the sight alone of this star of innocence and spiritual beauty,
+and becomes her true mate, daily self-excelled. The monk who receives
+her dying confession, the Pope, far set by his age above the noise of
+popular Rome, almost at one with the world beyond death and feeling what
+the divine judgment would be, both recognise with a fervour which
+carries them beyond the prejudices of age and of their society the
+loveliness of Heaven in the spirit of this girl of seventeen years, and
+claim her as higher than themselves.
+
+It is fitting that to so enskied and saintly a child, when she rests
+before her death, the cruel life she had led for four years should seem
+a dream; and the working out of that thought, and of the two checks of
+reality it received in the coming of her child and the coming of
+Caponsacchi, is one of the fairest and most delicate pieces of
+work that Browning ever accomplished. She was so innocent and so
+simple-hearted--and the development of that part of her character in the
+stories told of her childhood is exquisitely touched into life--so
+loving, so born to be happy in being loved, that when she was forced
+into a maze of villany, bound up with hatred, cruelty, baseness and
+guilt, she seemed to live in a mist of unreality. When the pain became
+too deep to be dreamlike she was mercifully led back into the dream by
+the approach of death. As she lay dying there, all she had suffered
+passed again into unreality. Nothing remained but love and purity, the
+thrill when first she felt her child, the prayer to God which brought
+Caponsacchi to her rescue so that her child might be born, and lastly
+the vision of perfect union hereafter with her kindred soul, who, not
+her lover on earth, would be her lover in eternity. Even her boy, who
+had brought her, while she lived, her keenest sense of reality (and
+Browning's whole treatment of her motherhood, from the moment she knew
+she was in child, till the hour when the boy lay in her arms, is as true
+and tender as if his wife had filled his soul while he wrote), even her
+boy fades away into the dream. It is true she was dying, and there is no
+dream so deep as dying. Yet it was bold of Browning, and profoundly
+imagined by him, to make the child disappear, and to leave the woman at
+last alone with the thought and the spiritual passion of her union with
+Caponsacchi--
+
+    O lover of my life, O soldier saint,
+    No work begun shall ever pause for death.
+
+It is the love of Percival's sister for Galahad.
+
+It is not that she is naturally a dreamer, that she would not have felt
+and enjoyed the realities of earth. Her perceptions are keen, her nature
+expansive. Browning, otherwise, would not have cared for her. It was
+only when she was involved in evil, like an angel in hell (a wolfs arm
+round her throat and a snake curled over her feet), that she seemed to
+be dreaming, not living. It was incredible to her that such things
+should be reality. Yet even the dream called the hidden powers of her
+soul into action. In realising these as against evil she is not the
+dreamer. Her fortitude is unbroken; her moral courage never fails,
+though she is familiar with fear; her action, when the babe has leaped
+in her womb, is prompt, decisive and immediate; her physical courage,
+when her husband overtakes her and befouls her honour, is like a man's.
+She seizes his sword and would have slain the villain. Then, her natural
+goodness, the genius of her goodness, gives her a spiritual penetration
+which is more than an equivalent in her for an educated intelligence.
+Her intuition is so keen that she sees through the false worldliness of
+Caponsacchi to the real man beneath, and her few words call it into
+goodness and honour for ever. Her clear sense of truth sees all the
+threads of the net of villany in which she has been caught, and the only
+means to break through it, to reveal and bring it into condemnation.
+Fortitude, courage, intuition and intelligence are all made to arise out
+of her natural saintliness and love. She is always the immortal child.
+
+For a time she has passed on earth through the realms of pain; and now,
+stabbed to her death, she looks back on the passage, and on all who have
+been kind and unkind to her--on the whole of the falsehood and villany.
+And the royal love in her nature is the master of the moment. She makes
+excuses for Violante's lie. "She meant well, and she did, as I feel now,
+little harm." "I am right now, quite happy; dying has purified me of the
+evil which touched me, and I colour ugly things with my own peace and
+joy. Every one that leaves life sees all things softened and bettered."
+As to her husband, she finds that she has little to forgive him at the
+last. Step by step she goes over all he did, and even finds excuses for
+him, and, at the end, this is how she speaks, a noble utterance of
+serene love, lofty intelligence, of spiritual power and of the
+forgiveness of eternity.
+
+    For that most woeful man my husband once,
+    Who, needing respite, still draws vital breath,
+    I--pardon him? So far as lies in me,
+    I give him for his good the life he takes,
+    Praying the world will therefore acquiesce.
+    Let him make God amends,--none, none to me
+    Who thank him rather that, whereas strange fate
+    Mockingly styled him husband and me wife,
+    Himself this way at least pronounced divorce,
+    Blotted the marriage bond: this blood of mine
+    Flies forth exultingly at any door,
+    Washes the parchment white, and thanks the blow
+    We shall not meet in this world nor the next,
+    But where will God be absent? In His face
+    Is light, but in His shadow healing too:
+    Let Guido touch the shadow and be healed!
+    And as my presence was importunate,--
+    My earthly good, temptation and a snare,--
+    Nothing about me but drew somehow down
+    His hate upon me,--somewhat so excused
+    Therefore, since hate was thus the truth of him,--
+    May my evanishment for evermore
+    Help further to relieve the heart that cast
+    Such object of its natural loathing forth!
+    So he was made; he nowise made himself:
+    I could not love him, but his mother did.
+    His soul has never lain beside my soul:
+    But for the unresisting body,--thanks!
+    He burned that garment spotted by the flesh.
+    Whatever he touched is rightly ruined: plague
+    It caught, and disinfection it had craved
+    Still but for Guido; I am saved through him
+    So as by fire; to him--thanks and farewell!
+
+Thus, pure at heart and sound of head, a natural, true woman in her
+childhood, in her girlhood, and when she is tried in the fire--by nature
+gay, yet steady in suffering; brave in a hell of fears and shame;
+clear-sighted in entanglements of villany; resolute in self-rescue;
+seeing and claiming the right help and directing it rightly; rejoicing
+in her motherhood and knowing it as her crown of glory, though the child
+is from her infamous husband; happy in her motherhood for one fortnight;
+slain like a martyr; loving the true man with immortal love; forgiving
+all who had injured her, even her murderer; dying in full faith and love
+of God, though her life had been a crucifixion; Pompilia passes away,
+and England's men and women will be always grateful to Browning for her
+creation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+_BALAUSTION_
+
+
+Among the women whom Browning made, Balaustion is the crown. So vivid is
+her presentation that she seems with us in our daily life. And she also
+fills the historical imagination.
+
+One would easily fall in love with her, like those sensitive princes in
+the _Arabian Nights_, who, hearing only of the charms of a princess, set
+forth to find her over the world. Of all Browning's women, she is the
+most luminous, the most at unity with herself. She has the Greek
+gladness and life, the Greek intelligence and passion, and the Greek
+harmony. All that was common, prattling, coarse, sensual and spluttering
+in the Greek, (and we know from Aristophanes how strong these lower
+elements were in the Athenian people), never shows a trace of its
+influence in Balaustion. Made of the finest clay, exquisite and delicate
+in grain, she is yet strong, when the days of trouble come, to meet them
+nobly and to change their sorrows into spiritual powers.
+
+And the _mise-en-scene_ in which she is placed exalts her into a
+heroine, and adds to her the light, colour and humanity of Greek
+romance. Born at Rhodes, but of an Athenian mother, she is fourteen
+when the news arrives that the Athenian fleet under Nikias, sent to
+subdue Syracuse, has been destroyed, and the captive Athenians driven to
+labour in the quarries. All Rhodes, then in alliance with Athens, now
+cries, "Desert Athens, side with Sparta against Athens." Balaustion
+alone resists the traitorous cry. "What, throw off Athens, be disloyal
+to the source of art and intelligence--
+
+                to the life and light
+    Of the whole world worth calling world at all!"
+
+And she spoke so well that her kinsfolk and others joined her and took
+ship for Athens. Now, a wind drove them off their course, and behind
+them came a pirate ship, and in front of them loomed the land. "Is it
+Crete?" they thought; "Crete, perhaps, and safety." But the oars flagged
+in the hands of the weary men, and the pirate gained. Then Balaustion,
+springing to the altar by the mast, white, rosy, and uplifted, sang on
+high that song of AEschylus which saved at Salamis--
+
+    'O sons of Greeks, go, set your country free,
+    Free your wives, free your children, free the fanes
+    O' the Gods, your fathers founded,--sepulchres
+    They sleep in! Or save all, or all be lost.'
+
+The crew, impassioned by the girl, answered the song, and drove the boat
+on, "churning the black water white," till the land shone clear, and the
+wide town and the harbour, and lo, 'twas not Crete, but Syracuse,
+luckless fate! Out came a galley from the port. "Who are you; Sparta's
+friend or foe?" "Of Rhodes are we, Rhodes that has forsaken Athens!"
+
+"How, then, that song we heard? All Athens was in that AEschylus. Your
+boat is full of Athenians--back to the pirate; we want no Athenians
+here.... Yet, stay, that song was AEschylus; every one knows it--how
+about Euripides? Might you know any of his verses?" For nothing helped
+the poor Athenians so much if any of them had his mouth stored with
+
+    Old glory, great plays that had long ago
+    Made themselves wings to fly about the world,--
+
+But most of all those were cherished who could recite Euripides to
+Syracuse, so mighty was poetry in the ancient days to make enemies into
+friends, to build, beyond the wars and jealousies of the world, a land
+where all nations are one.
+
+At this the captain cried: "Praise the God, we have here the very girl
+who will fill you with Euripides," and the passage brings Balaustion
+into full light.
+
+    Therefore, at mention of Euripides,
+    The Captain crowed out, "Euoi, praise the God!
+    Ooep, boys, bring our owl-shield to the fore!
+    Out with our Sacred Anchor! Here she stands,
+    Balaustion! Strangers, greet the lyric girl!
+    Euripides? Babai! what a word there 'scaped
+    Your teeth's enclosure, quoth my grandsire's song
+    Why, fast as snow in Thrace, the voyage through,
+    Has she been falling thick in flakes of him!
+    Frequent as figs at Kaunos, Kaunians said.
+    Balaustion, stand forth and confirm my speech!
+    Now it was some whole passion of a play;
+    Now, peradventure, but a honey-drop
+    That slipt its comb i' the chorus. If there rose
+    A star, before I could determine steer
+    Southward or northward--if a cloud surprised
+    Heaven, ere I fairly hollaed 'Furl the sail!'--
+    She had at fingers' end both cloud and star
+    Some thought that perched there, tame and tuneable,
+    Fitted with wings, and still, as off it flew,
+    'So sang Euripides,' she said, 'so sang
+    The meteoric poet of air and sea,
+    Planets and the pale populace of heaven,
+    The mind of man, and all that's made to soar!'
+    And so, although she has some other name,
+    We only call her Wild-pomegranate-flower,
+    Balaustion; since, where'er the red bloom burns
+    I' the dull dark verdure of the bounteous tree,
+    Dethroning, in the Rosy Isle, the rose,
+    You shall find food, drink, odour, all at once;
+    Cool leaves to bind about an aching brow.
+    And, never much away, the nightingale.
+    Sing them a strophe, with the turn-again,
+    Down to the verse that ends all, proverb like.
+    And save us, thou Balaustion, bless the name"
+
+And she answered: "I will recite the last play he wrote from first to
+last--_Alkestis_--his strangest, saddest, sweetest song."
+
+    Then because Greeks are Greeks, and hearts are hearts.
+    And poetry is power,--they all outbroke
+    In a great joyous laughter with much love:
+    "Thank Herakles for the good holiday!
+    Make for the harbour! Row, and let voice ring,
+      'In we row, bringing more Euripides!'"
+    All the crowd, as they lined the harbour now,
+      "More of Euripides!"--took up the cry.
+    We landed; the whole city, soon astir,
+    Came rushing out of gates in common joy
+    To the suburb temple; there they stationed me
+    O' the topmost step; and plain I told the play,
+    Just as I saw it; what the actors said,
+    And what I saw, or thought I saw the while,
+    At our Kameiros theatre, clean scooped
+    Out of a hill side, with the sky above
+    And sea before our seats in marble row:
+    Told it, and, two days more, repeated it
+    Until they sent us on our way again
+    With good words and great wishes.
+
+So, we see Balaustion's slight figure under the blue sky, and the white
+temple of Herakles from the steps of which she spoke; and among the
+crowd, looking up to her with rapture, the wise and young Sicilian who
+took ship with her when she was sent back to Athens, wooed her, and
+found answer before they reached Piraeus. And there in Athens she and her
+lover saw Euripides, and told the Master how his play had redeemed her
+from captivity. Then they were married; and one day, with four of her
+girl friends, under the grape-vines by the streamlet side, close to the
+temple, Baccheion, in the cool afternoon, she tells the tale;
+interweaving with the play (herself another chorus) what she thinks, how
+she feels concerning its personages and their doings, and in the comment
+discloses her character. The woman is built up in this way for us. The
+very excuse she makes for her inserted words reveals one side of her
+delightful nature--her love of poetry, her love of beauty, her seeing
+eye, her delicate distinction, her mingled humility and self-knowledge.
+
+    Look at Baccheion's beauty opposite,
+    The temple with the pillars at the porch!
+    See you not something beside masonry?
+    What if my words wind in and out the stone
+    As yonder ivy, the God's parasite?
+    Though they leap all the way the pillar leads,
+    Festoon about the marble, foot to frieze,
+    And serpentiningly enrich the roof,
+    Toy with some few bees and a bird or two,--
+    What then? The column holds the cornice up.
+
+As the ivy is to the pillar that supports the cornice, so are her words
+to the _Alkestis_ on which she comments.
+
+That is her charming way. She also is, like Pompilia, young. But no
+contrast can be greater than that between Pompilia at seventeen years of
+age and Balaustion at fifteen. In Greece, as in Italy, women mature
+quickly. Balaustion is born with that genius which has the experience of
+age in youth and the fire of youth in age. Pompilia has the genius of
+pure goodness, but she is uneducated, her intelligence is untrained, and
+her character is only developed when she has suffered. Balaustion, on
+the contrary, has all the Greek capacity, a thorough education, and that
+education also which came in the air of that time to those of the
+Athenian temper. She is born into beauty and the knowledge of it, into
+high thinking and keen feeling; and she knows well why she thought and
+how she felt. So finely wrought is she by passion and intelligence
+alike, with natural genius to make her powers tenfold, that she sweeps
+her kinsfolk into agreement with her, subdues the sailors to her will,
+enchants the captain, sings the whole crew into energy, would have, I
+believe, awed and enthralled the pirate, conquers the Syracusans,
+delights the whole city, draws a talent out of the rich man which she
+leaves behind her for the prisoners, is a dear friend of sombre
+Euripides, lures Aristophanes, the mocker, into seriousness, mates
+herself with him in a whole night's conversation, and wrings praise and
+honour from the nimblest, the most cynical, and the most world-wise
+intellect in Athens.
+
+Thus, over against Pompilia, she is the image of fine culture, held back
+from the foolishness and vanity of culture by the steadying power of
+genius. Then her judgment is always balanced. Each thing to her has many
+sides. She decides moral and intellectual questions and action with
+justice, but with mercy to the wrong opinion and the wrong thing,
+because her intellect is clear, tolerant and forgiving through
+intellectual breadth and power. Pompilia is the image of natural
+goodness and of its power. A spotless soul, though she is passed through
+hell, enables her, without a trained intellect, with ignorance of all
+knowledge, and with as little vanity as Balaustion, to give as clear and
+firm a judgment of right and wrong. She is as tolerant, as full of
+excuses for the wrong thing, as forgiving, as Balaustion, but it is by
+the power of goodness and love in her, not by that of intellect.
+Browning never proved his strength more than when he made these two, in
+vivid contrast, yet in their depths in harmony; both equal, though so
+far apart, in noble womanhood. Both are beyond convention; both have a
+touch of impulsive passion, of natural wildness, of flower-beauty. Both
+are, in hours of crisis, borne beyond themselves, and mistress of the
+hour. Both mould men, for their good, like wax in their fingers. But
+Pompilia is the white rose, touched with faint and innocent colour; and
+Balaustion is the wild pomegranate flower, burning in a crimson of love
+among the dark green leaves of steady and sure thought, her powers
+latent till needed, but when called on and brought to light, flaming
+with decision and revelation.
+
+In this book we see her in her youth, her powers as yet untouched by
+heavy sorrow. In the next, in _Aristophanes' Apology_, we first find her
+in matured strength, almost mastering Aristophanes; and afterwards in
+the depth of grief, as she flies with her husband over the seas to
+Rhodes, leaving behind her Athens, the city of her heart, ruined and
+enslaved. The deepest passion in her, the patriotism of the soul, is all
+but broken-hearted. Yet, she is the life and support of all who are with
+her; even a certain gladness breaks forth in her, and she secures for
+all posterity the intellectual record of Athenian life and the images,
+wrought to vitality, of some of the greater men of Athens. So we possess
+her completely. Her life, her soul, its growth and strength, are laid
+before us. To follow her through these two poems is to follow their
+poetry. Whenever we touch her we touch imagination. _Aristophanes'
+Apology_ is illuminated by Balaustion's eyes. A glimpse here and there
+of her enables us to thread our way without too great weariness through
+a thorny undergrowth of modern and ancient thought mingled together on
+the subject of the Apology.
+
+In _Balaustion's Adventure_ she tells her tale, and recites, as she did
+at Syracuse, the _Alkestis_ to her four friends. But she does more; she
+comments on it, as she did not at Syracuse. The comments are, of course,
+Browning's, but he means them to reveal Balaustion. They are touched
+throughout with a woman's thought and feeling, inflamed by the poetic
+genius with which Browning has endowed her. Balaustion is his deliberate
+picture of genius the great miracle.
+
+The story of the _Alkestis_ begins before the play. Apollo, in his
+exile, having served King Admetos as shepherd, conceives a friendship
+for the king, helps him to his marriage, and knowing that he is doomed
+to die in early life, descends to hell and begs the Fates to give him
+longer life. That is a motive, holding in it strange thoughts of life
+and death and fate, which pleased Browning, and he treats it separately,
+and with sardonic humour, in the Prologue to one of his later volumes.
+The Fates refuse to lengthen Admetos' life, unless some one love him
+well enough to die for him. They must have their due at the allotted
+time.
+
+The play opens when that time arrives. We see, in a kind of Prologue,
+Apollo leaving the house of Admetos and Death coming to claim his
+victim. Admetos has asked his father, mother, relations and servants to
+die instead of him. None will do it; but his wife, Alkestis, does.
+Admetos accepts her sacrifice. Her dying, her death, the sorrow of
+Admetos is described with all the poignant humanity of Euripides. In the
+meantime Herakles has come on the scene, and Admetos, though steeped in
+grief, conceals--his wife's death and welcomes his friend to his house.
+As Alkestis is the heroine of self-sacrifice, Admetos is the hero of
+hospitality. Herakles feasts, but the indignant bearing of an old
+servant attracts his notice, and he finds out the truth. He is shocked,
+but resolves to attack Death himself, who is bearing away Alkestis. He
+meets and conquers Death and brings back Alkestis alive to her husband.
+So the strong man conquers the Fates, whom even Apollo could not subdue.
+
+This is a fine subject. Every one can see in how many different ways it
+may be treated, with what different conceptions, how variously the
+characters may be built up, and what different ethical and emotional
+situations may be imaginatively treated in it. Racine himself thought it
+the finest of the Greek subjects, and began a play upon it. But he died
+before he finished it, and ordered his manuscript to be destroyed. We
+may well imagine how the quiet, stately genius of Racine would have
+conceived and ordered it; with the sincere passion, held under restraint
+by as sincere a dignity, which characterised his exalted style.
+
+Balaustion treats it with an equal moral force, and also with that
+modern moral touch which Racine would have given it; which, while it
+removed the subject at certain points from the Greek morality, would yet
+have exalted it into a more spiritual world than even the best of the
+Greeks conceived. The commentary of Balaustion is her own treatment of
+the subject. It professes to explain Euripides: it is in reality a fresh
+conception of the characters and their motives, especially of the
+character of Herakles. Her view of the character of Alkestis, especially
+in her death, is not, I think, the view which Euripides took. Her
+condemnation of Admetos is unmodified by those other sides of the
+question which Euripides suggests. The position Balaustion takes up with
+regard to self-sacrifice is far more subtle, with its half-Christian
+touches, than the Greek simplicity would have conceived. Finally, she
+feels so strongly that the subject has not been adequately conceived
+that, at the end, she recreates it for herself. Even at the beginning
+she rebuilds the Euripidean matter. When Apollo and Death meet,
+Balaustion conceives the meeting for herself. She images the divine
+Apollo as somewhat daunted, and images the dread meeting of these two
+with modern, not Greek imagination. It is like the meeting, she thinks,
+of a ruined eagle, caught as he swooped in a gorge, half heedless, yet
+terrific, with a lion, the haunter of the gorge, the lord of the ground,
+who pauses, ere he try the worst with the frightful, unfamiliar
+creature, known in the shadows and silences of the sky but not known
+here. It is the first example we have of Balaustion's imaginative power
+working for itself. There is another, farther on, where she stays her
+recitation to describe Death's rush in on Alkestis when the dialogue
+between him and Apollo is over--
+
+    And, in the fire-flash of the appalling sword,
+    The uprush and the outburst, the onslaught
+    Of Death's portentous passage through the door,
+    Apollon stood a pitying moment-space:
+    I caught one last gold gaze upon the night,
+    Nearing the world now: and the God was gone,
+    And mortals left to deal with misery.
+
+So she speaks, as if she saw more than Euripides, as if to her the
+invisible were visible--as it was. To see the eternal unseen is the
+dower of imagination in its loftiest mood.
+
+She is as much at home with the hero of earth, the highest manhood, as
+she is with the gods. When Herakles comes on the scene she cannot say
+enough about him; and she conceives him apart from the Herakles of
+Euripides. She paints in him, and Browning paints through her, the idea
+of the full, the perfect man; and it is not the ideal of the cultivated,
+of the sensitive folk. It is more also a woman's than a man's ideal.
+For, now, suddenly, into the midst of the sorrow of the house, every one
+wailing, life full of penury and inactivity, there leaps the "gay cheer
+of a great voice," the full presence of the hero, his "weary happy
+face, half god, half man, which made the god-part god the more." His
+very voice, which smiled at sorrow, and his look, which, saying sorrow
+was to be conquered, proclaimed to all the world "My life is in my hand
+to give away, to make men glad," seemed to dry up all misery at its
+source, for his love of man makes him always joyful. When Admetos opened
+the house to him, and did not tell him of his wife's death, Balaustion
+comments "The hero, all truth, took him at his word, and then strode off
+to feast." He takes, she thought, the present rest, the physical food
+and drink as frankly as he took the mighty labours of his fate. And she
+rejoices as much in his jovial warmth, his joy in eating and drinking
+and singing, and festivity, as in his heroic soul. They go together,
+these things, in a hero.
+
+    Making the most o' the minute, that the soul
+    And body, strained to height a minute since,
+    Might lie relaxed in joy, this breathing space,
+    For man's sake more than ever;
+
+He slew the pest of the marish, yesterday; to-day he takes his fill of
+food, wine, song and flowers; to-morrow he will slay another plague of
+mankind.
+
+So she sings, praising aloud the heroic temper, as mighty in the natural
+joys of natural life, in the strength and honour of the body, as in the
+saving of the world from pain and evil. But this pleasure of the senses,
+though in the great nature, is in it under rule, and the moment Herakles
+hears of Alkestis dead, he casts aside, in "a splendour of resolve," the
+feast, wine, song, and garlands, and girds himself to fight with Death
+for her rescue And Balaustion, looking after him as he goes, cries out
+the judgment of her soul on all heroism. It is Browning's judgment also,
+one of the deepest things in his heart; a constant motive in his poetry,
+a master-thought in his life.
+
+    Gladness be with thee, Helper of our world!
+    I think this is the authentic sign and seal
+    Of Godship, that it ever waxes glad,
+    And more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts
+    Into a rage to suffer for mankind,
+    And recommence at sorrow: drops like seed
+    After the blossom, ultimate of all.
+    Say, does the seed scorn earth and seek the sun?
+    Surely it has no other end and aim
+    Than to drop, once more die into the ground,
+    Taste cold and darkness and oblivion there:
+    And thence rise, tree-like grow through pain to joy,
+    More joy and most joy,--do man good again.
+
+That is the truth Browning makes this woman have the insight to reveal.
+Gladness of soul, becoming at one with sorrow and death and rising out
+of them the conqueror, but always rejoicing, in itself, in the joy of
+the universe and of God, is the root-heroic quality.
+
+Then there is the crux of the play--Alkestis is to die for Admetos, and
+does it. What of the conduct of Admetos? What does Balaustion, the
+woman, think of that? She thinks Admetos is a poor creature for having
+allowed it. When Alkestis is brought dying on the stage, and Admetos
+follows, mourning over her, Balaustion despises him, and she traces in
+the speech of Alkestis, which only relates to her children's fate and
+takes no notice of her husband's protestations, that she has judged her
+husband, that love is gone in sad contempt, that all Admetos has given
+her is now paid for, that her death is a business transaction which has
+set her free to think no more about him, only of her children. For, what
+seems most pertinent for him to say, if he loved, "Take, O Fates, your
+promise back, and take my life, not hers," he does not say. That is not
+really the thought of Euripides.
+
+Then, and this is subtly but not quite justly wrought into Euripides by
+Balaustion, she traces through the play the slow awakening of the soul
+of Admetos to the low-hearted thing he had done. He comes out of the
+house, having disposed all things duteously and fittingly round the
+dead, and Balaustion sees in his grave quietude that the truth is
+dawning on him; when suddenly Pheres, his father, who had refused to die
+for him, comes to lay his offering on the bier. This, Balaustion thinks,
+plucks Admetos back out of unselfish thought into that lower atmosphere
+in which he only sees his own advantage in the death of Alkestis; and in
+which he now bitterly reproaches his father because he did not die to
+save Alkestis. And the reproach is the more bitter because--and this
+Balaustion, with her subtle morality, suggests--an undernote of
+conscience causes him to see his own baser self, now prominent in his
+acceptance of Alkestis' sacrifice, finished and hardened in the temper
+of his father--young Admetos in old Pheres. He sees with dread and pain
+what he may become when old. This hatred of himself in his father is,
+Balaustion thinks, the source of his extreme violence with his father.
+She, with the Greek sense of what was due to nature, seeks to excuse
+this unfitting scene. Euripides has gone too far for her. She thinks
+that, if Sophocles had to do with the matter, he would have made the
+Chorus explain the man.
+
+But the unnatural strife would not have been explained by Sophocles as
+Balaustion explains it. That fine ethical twist of hers--"that Admetos
+hates himself in his father," is too modern for a Greek. It has the
+casuistical subtlety which the over-developed conscience of the
+Christian Church encouraged. It is intellectual, too, rather than real,
+metaphysical more than moral, Browning rather than Sophocles. Nor do I
+believe that a Rhodian girl, even with all Athens at the back of her
+brain, would have conceived it at all. Then Balaustion makes another
+comment on the situation, in which there is more of Browning than of
+herself. "Admetos," she says, "has been kept back by the noisy quarrel
+from seeing into the truth of his own conduct, as he was on the point of
+doing, for 'with the low strife comes the little mind.'" But when his
+father is gone, and Alkestis is borne away, then, in the silence of the
+house and the awful stillness in his own heart, he sees the truth. His
+shame, the whole woe and horror of his failure in love, break, like a
+toppling wave, upon him, and the drowned truth, so long hidden from him
+by self, rose to the surface, and appalled him by its dead face. His
+soul in seeing true, is saved, yet so las by fire. At this moment
+Herakles comes in, leading Alkestis, redeemed from death; and finding,
+so Balaustion thinks, her husband restored to his right mind.
+
+But, then, we ask, how Alkestis, having found him fail, will live with
+him again, how she, having topped nobility, will endure the memory of
+the ignoble in him? That would be the interesting subject, and the
+explanation Euripides suggests does not satisfy Balaustion. The dramatic
+situation is unfinished. Balaustion, with her fine instinct, feels that,
+to save the subject, it ought to be otherwise treated, and she invents a
+new Admetos, a new Alkestis. She has heard that Sophocles meant to make
+a new piece of the same matter, and her balanced judgment, on which
+Browning insists so often, makes her say, "That is well. One thing has
+many sides; but still, no good supplants a good, no beauty undoes
+another; still I will love the _Alkestis_ which I know. Yet I have so
+drunk this poem, so satisfied with it my heart and soul, that I feel as
+if I, too, might make a new poem on the same matter."
+
+                Ah, that brave
+    Bounty of poets, the one royal race
+    That ever was, or will be, in this world!
+    They give no gift that bounds itself and ends
+    I' the giving and the taking: theirs so breeds
+    I' the heart and soul o' the taker, so transmutes
+    The man who only was a man before,
+    That he grows godlike in his turn, can give--
+    He also: share the poet's privilege,
+    Bring forth new good, new beauty, from the old.
+
+And she gives her conception of the subject, and it further unfolds her
+character.
+
+When Apollo served Admetos, the noble nature of the God so entered into
+him that all the beast was subdued in the man, and he became the ideal
+king, living for the ennoblement of his people. Yet, while doing this
+great work, he is to die, still young, and he breaks out, in a bitter
+calm, against the fate which takes him from the work of his life.
+
+"Not so," answers Alkestis, "I knew what was coming, and though Apollo
+urged me not to disturb the course of things, and not to think that any
+death prevents the march of good or ends a life, yet he yielded; and I
+die for you--all happiness."
+
+"It shall never be," replies Admetos; "our two lives are one. But I am
+the body, thou art the soul; and the body shall go, and not the soul. I
+claim death."
+
+"No," answered Alkestis; "the active power to rule and weld the people
+into good is in the man. Thou art the acknowledged power. And as to the
+power which, thou sayest, I give thee, as to the soul of me--take it, I
+pour it into thee. Look at me." And as he looks, she dies, and the king
+is left--still twofold as before, with the soul of Alkestis in
+him--himself and her. So is Fate cheated, and Alkestis in Admetos is not
+dead. A passage follows of delicate and simple poetry, written by
+Browning in a manner in which I would he had oftener written. To read it
+is to regret that, being able to do this, he chose rather to write, from
+time to time, as if he were hewing his way through tangled underwood. No
+lovelier image of Proserpina has been made in poetry, not even in
+Tennyson's _Demeter_, than this--
+
+    And even while it lay, i' the look of him,
+    Dead, the dimmed body, bright Alkestis' soul
+    Had penetrated through the populace
+    Of ghosts, was got to Kore,--throned and crowned
+    The pensive queen o' the twilight, where she dwells
+    Forever in a muse, but half away
+    From flowery earth she lost and hankers for,--
+    And there demanded to become a ghost
+    Before the time.
+                Whereat the softened eyes
+    Of the lost maidenhood that lingered still
+    Straying among the flowers in Sicily,
+    Sudden was startled back to Hades' throne
+    By that demand: broke through humanity
+    Into the orbed omniscience of a God,
+    Searched at a glance Alkestis to the soul
+    And said ...
+    "Hence, thou deceiver! This is not to die,
+    If, by the very death which mocks me now,
+    The life, that's left behind and past my power,
+    Is formidably doubled ..."
+    And so, before the embrace relaxed a whit,
+    The lost eyes opened, still beneath the look;
+    And lo, Alkestis was alive again,
+    And of Admetos' rapture who shall speak?
+
+The old conception has more reality. This is in the vague world of
+modern psychical imagination. Nevertheless it has its own beauty, and it
+enlarges Browning's picture of the character of Balaustion.
+
+Her character is still further enlarged in _Aristophanes' Apology_. That
+poem, if we desire intellectual exercise, illuminated by flashings of
+imagination, is well worth reading, but to comprehend it fully, one must
+know a great deal of Athenian life and of the history of the Comic
+Drama. It is the defence by Aristophanes of his idea of the business,
+the method, and the use of Comedy. How far what he says is Browning
+speaking for Aristophanes, and how far it is Browning speaking for
+himself, is hard to tell. And it would please him to leave that
+purposely obscure. What is alive and intense in the poem is, first, the
+realisation of Athenian life in several scenes, pictured with all
+Browning's astonishing force of presentation, as, for instance, the
+feast after the play, and the grim entrance of Sophocles, black from
+head to foot, among the glittering and drunken revellers, to announce
+the death of Euripides.
+
+Secondly, there is the presentation of Aristophanes. Browning has
+created him for us--
+
+    And no ignoble presence! On the bulge
+    Of the clear baldness,--all his head one brow,--
+    True, the veins swelled, blue network, and there surged
+    A red from cheek to temple,--then retired
+    As if the dark-leaved chaplet damped a flame,--
+    Was never nursed by temperance or health.
+    But huge the eyeballs rolled back native fire,
+    Imperiously triumphant: nostrils wide
+    Waited their incense; while the pursed mouth's pout
+    Aggressive, while the beak supreme above,
+    While the head, face, nay, pillared throat thrown back,
+    Beard whitening under like a vinous foam,
+    There made a glory, of such insolence--
+    I thought,--such domineering deity
+    Hephaistos might have carved to cut the brine
+    For his gay brother's prow, imbrue that path
+    Which, purpling, recognised the conqueror.
+    Impudent and majestic: drunk, perhaps,
+    But that's religion; sense too plainly snuffed:
+    Still, sensuality was grown a rite.
+
+We see the man, the natural man, to the life. But as the poem goes on,
+we company with his intellect and soul, with the struggle of sensualism
+against his knowledge of a more ideal life; above all, with one, who
+indulging the appetites and senses of the natural man, is yet, at a
+moment, their master. The coarse chambers of his nature are laid bare,
+his sensuous pleasure in the lower forms of human life, his joy in
+satirising them, his contempt for the good or the ideal life if it throw
+the sensual man away. Then, we are made to know the power he has to rise
+above this--without losing it--into the higher imaginative region where,
+for the time, he feels the genius of Sophocles, Euripides, the moral
+power of Balaustion, and the beauty of the natural world. Indeed, in
+that last we find him in his extant plays. Few of the Greeks could write
+with greater exquisiteness of natural beauty than this wild poet who
+loved the dunghill. And Browning does not say this, but records in this
+_Apology_ how when Aristophanes is touched for an instant by
+Balaustion's reading of the _Herakles_, and seizing the psalterion sings
+the song of Thamuris marching to his trial with the Muses through a
+golden autumn morning--it is the glory and loveliness of nature that he
+sings. This portraiture of the poet is scattered through the whole poem.
+It is too minute, too full of detail to dwell on here. It has a thousand
+touches of life and intimacy. And it is perhaps the finest thing
+Browning has done in portraiture of character. But then there was a
+certain sympathy in Browning for Aristophanes. The natural man was never
+altogether put aside by Browning.
+
+Lastly, there is the fresh presentation of Balaustion, of the matured
+and experienced woman whom we have known as a happy girl. Euthycles and
+she are married, and one night, as she is sitting alone, he comes in,
+bringing the grave news that Euripides is dead, but had proved at the
+court of Archelaos of Macedonia his usefulness as counsellor to King and
+State, and his power still to sing--
+
+    Clashed thence _Alkaion_, maddened _Pentheus'_ up;
+    Then music sighed itself away, one moan
+    Iphigeneia made by Aulis' strand;
+    With her and music died Euripides.
+
+And Athens, hearing, ceased to mock and cried "Bury Euripides in
+Peiraios, bring his body back." "Ah," said Balaustion, "Death alters the
+point of view. But our tribute is in our hearts; and more, his soul
+will now for ever teach and bless the world.
+
+    Is not that day come? What if you and I
+    Re-sing the song, inaugurate the fame?
+
+For, like Herakles, in his own _Alkestis_, he now strides away (and this
+is the true end of the _Alkestis_) to surmount all heights of destiny."
+While she spoke thus, the Chorus of the Comedy, girls, boys, and men, in
+drunken revel and led by Aristophanes, thundered at the door and claimed
+admittance. Balaustion is drawn confronting them--tall and superb, like
+Victory's self; her warm golden eyes flashing under her black hair,
+"earth flesh with sun fire," statuesque, searching the crowd with her
+glance. And one and all dissolve before her silent splendour of reproof,
+all save Aristophanes. She bids him welcome. "Glory to the Poet," she
+cries. "Light, light, I hail it everywhere; no matter for the murk, that
+never should have been such orb's associate." Aristophanes changes as he
+sees her; a new man confronts her.
+
+    "So!" he smiled, "piercing to my thought at once,
+    You see myself? Balaustion's fixed regard
+    Can strip the proper Aristophanes
+    Of what our sophists, in their jargon, style
+    His accidents?"
+
+He confesses her power to meet him in discourse, unfolds his views and
+plans to her, and having contrasted himself with Euripides, bids her use
+her thrice-refined refinement, her rosy strength, to match his argument.
+She claims no equality with him, the consummate creator; but only, as a
+woman, the love of all things lovable with which to meet him who has
+degraded Comedy. She appeals to the high poet in the man, and finally
+bids him honour the deep humanity in Euripides. To prove it, and to win
+his accord, she reads the _Herakles_, the last of Euripides.
+
+It is this long night of talk which Balaustion dictates to Euthycles as
+she is sailing, day after day, from Athens back to Rhodes. The aspect of
+sea and sky, as they sail, is kept before us, for Balaustion uses its
+changes as illustrations, and the clear descriptions tell, even more
+fully than before, how quick this woman was to observe natural beauty
+and to correlate it with humanity. Here is one example. In order to
+describe a change in the temper of Aristophanes from wild license to
+momentary gravity, Balaustion seizes on a cloud-incident of the
+voyage--Euthycles, she cries,
+
+    ... "o'er the boat side, quick, what change,
+    Watch--in the water! But a second since,
+    It laughed a ripply spread of sun and sea,
+    Ray fused with wave, to never disunite.
+    Now, sudden, all the surface hard and black,
+    Lies a quenched light, dead motion: what the cause?
+    Look up, and lo, the menace of a cloud
+    Has solemnised the sparkling, spoiled the sport!
+    Just so, some overshadow, some new care
+    Stopped all the mirth and mocking on his face."
+
+Her feeling for nature is as strong us her feeling for man, and both are
+woven together.
+
+All her powers have now ripened, and the last touch has been given to
+them by her ideal sorrow for Athens, the country of her soul, where high
+intelligence and imagination had created worlds. She leaves it now,
+ruined and degraded, and the passionate outbreak of her patriotic sorrow
+with which the poem opens lifts the character and imagination of
+Balaustion into spiritual splendour. Athens, "hearted in her heart," has
+perished ignobly. Not so, she thinks, ought this beauty of the world to
+have died, its sea-walls razed to the ground to the fluting and singing
+of harlots; but in some vast overwhelming of natural energies--in the
+embrace of fire to join the gods; or in a sundering of the earth, when
+the Acropolis should have sunken entire and risen in Hades to console
+the ghosts with beauty; or in the multitudinous over-swarming of ocean.
+This she could have borne, but, thinking of what has been, of the misery
+and disgrace, "Oh," she cries, "bear me away--wind, wave and bark!" But
+Browning does not leave Balaustion with only this deep emotion in her
+heart. He gives her the spiritual passion of genius. She is swept beyond
+her sorrow into that invisible world where the soul lives with the gods,
+with the pure Ideas of justice, truth and love; where immortal life
+awaits the disembodied soul and we shall see Euripides. In these high
+thoughts she will outlive her sorrow.
+
+    Why should despair be? Since, distinct above
+    Man's wickedness and folly, flies the wind
+    And floats the cloud, free transport for our soul
+    Out of its fleshly durance dim and low,--
+    Since disembodied soul anticipates
+    (Thought-borne as now, in rapturous unrestraint)
+    Above all crowding, crystal silentness,
+    Above all noise, a silver solitude:--
+    Surely, where thought so bears soul, soul in time
+    May permanently bide, "assert the wise,"
+    There live in peace, there work in hope once more--
+    O nothing doubt, Philemon! Greed and strife,
+    Hatred and cark and care, what place have they
+    In yon blue liberality of heaven?
+    How the sea helps! How rose-smit earth will rise
+    Breast-high thence, some bright morning, and be Rhodes!
+    Heaven, earth and sea, my warrant--in their name,
+    Believe--o'er falsehood, truth is surely sphered,
+    O'er ugliness beams beauty, o'er this world
+    Extends that realm where, "as the wise assert,"
+    Philemon, thou shalt see Euripides
+    Clearer than mortal sense perceived the man!
+
+We understand that she has drunk deep of Socrates, that her spiritual
+sense reached onward to the Platonic Socrates. In this supersensuous
+world of thought she is quieted out of the weakness which made her
+miserable over the fall of Athens; and in the quiet, Browning, who will
+lift his favourite into perfectness, adds to her spiritual imagination
+the dignity of that moral judgment which the intellect of genius gathers
+from the facts of history. In spite of her sorrow, she grasps the truth
+that there was justice in the doom of Athens. Let justice have its way.
+Let the folk die who pulled her glory down. This is her prophetic
+strain, the strength of the Hebrew in the Greek.
+
+And then the prophet in the woman passes, and the poet in her takes the
+lyre. She sees the splendid sunset. Why should its extravagance of glory
+run to waste? Let me build out of it a new Athens, quarry out the golden
+clouds and raise the Acropolis, and the rock-hewn Place of Assembly,
+whence new orators may thunder over Greece; and the theatre where
+AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, godlike still, may contend for the
+prize. Yet--and there is a further change of thought--yet that may not
+be. To build that poetic vision is to slip away from reality, and the
+true use of it. The tragedy is there--irrevocable. Let it sink deep in
+us till we see Rhodes shining over the sea. So great, so terrible, so
+piteous it is, that, dwelt on in the soul and seen in memory, it will do
+for us what the great tragedians made their tragic themes do for their
+hearers. It will purify the heart by pity and terror from the baseness
+and littleness of life. Our small hatreds, jealousies and prides, our
+petty passions will be rebuked, seem nothing in its mighty sorrow.
+
+    What else in life seems piteous any more
+    After such pity, or proves terrible
+    Beside such terror;
+
+This is the woman--the finest creature Browning drew, young and fair and
+stately, with her dark hair and amber eyes, lovely--the wild pomegranate
+flower of a girl--as keen, subtle and true of intellect as she is
+lovely, able to comment on and check Euripides, to conceive a new play
+out of his subject, to be his dearest friend, to meet on equality
+Aristophanes; so full of lyric sympathy, so full of eager impulse that
+she thrills the despairing into action, enslaves a city with her
+eloquence, charms her girl-friends by the Ilissus, and so sends her
+spirit into her husband that, when the Spartans advise the razing of
+Athens to the ground he saves the city by those famous lines of
+Euripides, of which Milton sang; so at one with natural beauty, with all
+beauty, that she makes it live in the souls of men; so clear in judgment
+that she sees the right even when it seems lost in the wrong, that she
+sees the justice of the gods in the ruin of the city she most loved; so
+poetic of temper that everything speaks to her of life, that she
+acknowledges the poetry which rises out of the foulness she hates in
+Aristophanes, that she loves all humanity, bad or good, and Euripides
+chiefly because of his humanity; so spiritual, that she can soar out of
+her most overwhelming sorrow into the stormless world where the gods
+breathe pure thought and for ever love; and, abiding in its peace, use
+the griefs of earth for the ennoblement of the life of men, because in
+all her spiritual apartness, however far it bear her from earth, she
+never loses her close sympathy with the fortunes of mankind. Nay, from
+her lofty station she is the teacher of truth and love and justice, in
+splendid prophecy. It is with an impassioned exaltation, worthy of Sibyl
+and Pythoness in one, of divine wisdom both Roman and Greek, that she
+cries to the companions of her voyage words which embody her soul and
+the soul of all the wise and loving of the earth, when they act for men;
+bearing their action, thought and feeling beyond man to God in man--
+
+    Speak to the infinite intelligence,
+    Sing to the everlasting sympathy!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+_THE RING AND THE BOOK_
+
+
+When Browning published _The Ring and the Book_, he was nearly fifty
+years old. All his powers (except those which create the lyric) are used
+therein with mastery; and the ease with which he writes is not more
+remarkable than the exultant pleasure which accompanies the ease. He
+has, as an artist, a hundred tools in hand, and he uses them with
+certainty of execution. The wing of his invention does not falter
+through these twelve books, nor droop below the level at which he began
+them; and the epilogue is written with as much vigour as the prologue.
+The various books demand various powers. In each book the powers are
+proportionate to the subject; but the mental force behind each exercise
+of power is equal throughout. He writes as well when he has to make the
+guilty soul of Guido speak, as when the innocence of Pompilia tells her
+story. The gain-serving lawyers, each distinctly isolated, tell their
+worldly thoughts as clearly as Caponsacchi reveals his redeemed and
+spiritualised soul. The parasite of an aristocratic and thoughtless
+society in _Tertium Quid_ is not more vividly drawn than the Pope, who
+has left in his old age the conventions of society behind him, and
+speaks in his silent chamber face to face with God. And all the minor
+characters--of whom there are a great number, ranging from children to
+old folk, from the peasant to the Cardinal, through every class of
+society in Italy--are drawn, even when they are slashed out in only
+three lines, with such force, certainty, colour and life that we know
+them better than our friends. The variousness of the product would seem
+to exclude an equality of excellence in drawing and invention. But it
+does not. It reveals and confirms it. The poem is a miracle of
+intellectual power.
+
+This great length, elaborate detail, and the repetition so many times of
+the same story, would naturally suggest to an intending reader that the
+poem might be wearisome. Browning, suspecting this, and in mercy to a
+public who does not care for a work of _longue haleine_, published it at
+first in four volumes, with a month's interval between each volume. He
+thought that the story told afresh by characters widely different would
+strike new, if each book were read at intervals of ten days. There were
+three books in each volume. And if readers desire to realise fully the
+intellectual _tour de force_ contained in telling the same story twelve
+times over, and making each telling interesting, they cannot do better
+than read the book as Browning wished it to be read. "Give the poem four
+months, and let ten days elapse between the reading of each book," is
+what he meant us to understand. Moreover, to meet this possible
+weariness, Browning, consciously, or probably unconsciously, since
+genius does the right thing without asking why, continually used a trick
+of his own which, at intervals, stings the reader into wakefulness and
+pleasure, and sends him on to the next page refreshed and happy. After
+fifty, or it may be a hundred lines of somewhat dry analysis, a vivid
+illustration, which concentrates all the matter of the previous lines,
+flashes on the reader as a snake might flash across a traveller's dusty
+way: or some sudden description of an Italian scene in the country or in
+the streets of Rome enlivens the well-known tale with fresh humanity. Or
+a new character leaps up out of the crowd, and calls us to note his
+ways, his dress, his voice, his very soul in some revealing speech, and
+then passes away from the stage, while we turn, refreshed (and indeed at
+times we need refreshment), to the main speaker, the leading character.
+
+But to dwell on the multitude of portraits with which Browning's keen
+observation, memory and love of human nature have embellished _The Ring
+and the Book_ belongs to another part of this chapter. At present the
+question rises: "What place does _The Ring and the Book_ hold in
+Browning's development?" It holds a central place. There was always a
+struggle in Browning between two pleasures; pleasure in the exercise of
+his intellect--his wit, in the fullest sense of the word; pleasure in
+the exercise of his poetic imagination. Sometimes one of these had the
+upper hand in his poems, sometimes the other, and sometimes both happily
+worked together. When the exercise of his wit had the upper hand, it
+tended to drive out both imagination and passion. Intellectual play may
+be without any emotion except its delight in itself. Then its mere
+cleverness attracts its user, and gives him an easily purchased
+pleasure. When a poet falls a complete victim to this pleasure,
+imagination hides her face from him, passion runs away, and what he
+produces resembles, but is not, poetry. And Browning, who had got
+perilously near to the absence of poetry in _Bishop Blougram's Apology_,
+succeeded in _Mr. Sludge, the Medium_, in losing poetry altogether. In
+_The Ring and the Book_ there are whole books, and long passages in its
+other books in which poetry almost ceases to exist and is replaced by
+brilliant cleverness, keen analysis, vivid description, and a
+combination of wit and fancy which is rarely rivalled; but no emotion,
+no imagination such as poets use inflames the coldness of these
+qualities into the glow of poetry. The indefinable difference which
+makes imaginative work into poetry is not there. There is abundance of
+invention; but that, though a part of imagination, belongs as much to
+the art of prose as to the art of poetry.
+
+Browning could write thus, out of his intellect alone. None of the
+greater poets could. Their genius could not work without fusing into
+their intellectual work intensity of feeling; and that combination
+secured poetic treatment of their subject. It would have been totally
+impossible for Milton, Shakespeare, Dante, Vergil, or even the great
+mass of second-rate poets, to have written some of Browning's so-called
+poetry--no matter how they tried. There was that in Browning's nature
+which enabled him to exercise his intellectual powers alone, without
+passion, and so far he almost ceases to deserve the name of poet. And
+his pleasure in doing this grew upon him, and having done it with
+dazzling power in part of _The Ring and the Book_, he was carried away
+by it and produced a number of so-called poems; terrible examples of
+what a poet can come to when he has allowed his pleasure in clever
+analysis to tyrannise over him--_Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_, _The Inn
+Album_, _Red Cotton Nightcap Country_, and a number of shorter poems in
+the volumes which followed. In these, what Milton meant by passion,
+simplicity and sensuousness were banished, and imagination existed only
+as it exists in a prose writer.
+
+This condition was slowly arrived at. It had not been fully reached when
+he wrote _The Ring and the Book_. His poetic powers resisted their
+enemies for many years, and had the better in the struggle. If it takes
+a long time to cast a devil out, it takes a longer time to depose an
+angel. And the devil may be utterly banished, but the angel never. And
+though the devil of mere wit and the little devils of analytic
+exercise--devils when they usurp the throne in a poet's soul and enslave
+imaginative emotion--did get the better of Browning, it was only for a
+time. Towards the end of his life he recovered, but never as completely
+as he had once possessed them, the noble attributes of a poet. The evils
+of the struggle clung to him; the poisonous pleasure he had pursued
+still affected him; he was again and again attacked by the old malaria.
+He was as a brand plucked from the burning.
+
+_The Ring and the Book_ is the central point of this struggle. It is
+full of emotion and thought concentrated on the subject, and commingled
+by imagination to produce beauty. And whenever this is the case, as in
+the books which treat of Caponsacchi and Pompilia, we are rejoiced by
+poetry. In their lofty matter of thought and feeling, in their
+simplicity and nobleness of spiritual beauty, poetry is dominant. In
+them also his intellectual powers, and his imaginative and passionate
+powers, are fused into one fire. Nor is the presentation of Guido
+Franceschini under two faces less powerful, or that of the Pope, in his
+meditative silence. But in these books the poetry is less, and is
+mingled, as would naturally indeed be the case, with a searching
+analysis, which intrudes too much into their imaginative work.
+Over-dissection makes them cold. In fact, in fully a quarter of this
+long poem, the analysing understanding, that bustling and self-conscious
+person, who plays only on the surface of things and separates their
+elements from one another instead of penetrating to their centre; who is
+incapable of seeing the whole into which the various elements have
+combined--is too masterful for the poetry. It is not, then, imaginative,
+but intellectual pleasure which, as we read, we gain.
+
+Then again there is throughout a great part of the poem a dangerous
+indulgence of his wit; the amusement of remote analogies; the use of
+far-fetched illustrations; quips and cranks and wanton wiles of the
+reasoning fancy in deviating self-indulgence; and an allusiveness which
+sets commentators into note-making effervescence. All these, and more,
+which belong to wit, are often quite ungoverned, allowed to disport
+themselves as they please. Such matters delight the unpoetic readers of
+Browning, and indeed they are excellent entertainment. But let us call
+them by their true name; let us not call them poetry, nor mistake their
+art for the art of poetry. Writing them in blank verse does not make
+them poetry. In _Half-Rome_, in _The Other Half-Rome_, and in _Tertium
+Quid_, these elements of analysis and wit are exhibited in three-fourths
+of the verse; but the other fourth--in description of scenes, in vivid
+portraiture, in transient outbursts out of which passion, in glimpses,
+breaks--rises into the realm of poetry. In the books which sketch the
+lawyers and their pleadings, there is wit in its finest brilliancy,
+analysis in its keenest veracity, but they are scarcely a poet's work.
+The whole book is then a mixed book, extremely mixed. All that was
+poetical in Browning's previous work is represented in it, and all the
+unpoetical elements which had gradually been winning power in him, and
+which showed themselves previously in _Bishop Blougram_ and _Mr.
+Sludge_, are also there in full blast. It was, as I have said, the
+central battlefield of two powers in him. And when _The Ring and the
+Book_ was finished, the inferior power had for a time the victory.
+
+To sum up then, there are books in the poem where matter of passion and
+matter of thought are imaginatively wrought together. There are others
+where psychological thought and metaphysical reasoning are dominant, but
+where passionate feeling has also a high place. There are others where
+analysis and wit far excel the elements of imaginative emotion; and
+there are others where every kind of imagination is absent, save that
+which is consistent throughout and which never fails--the power of
+creating men and women into distinct individualities. That is left, but
+it is a power which is not special to a poet. A prose writer may possess
+it with the same fulness as a poet. Carlyle had it as remarkably as
+Browning, or nearly as remarkably. He also had wit--a heavier wit than
+Browning's, less lambent, less piercing, but as forcible.
+
+One thing more may be said. The poem is far too long, and the subject
+does not bear its length. The long poems of the world (I do not speak of
+those by inferior poets) have a great subject, are concerned with
+manifold fates of men, and are naturally full of various events and
+varied scenery. They interest us with new things from book to book. In
+_The Ring and the Book_ the subject is not great, the fates concerned
+are not important, and the same event runs through twelve books and is
+described twelve times. However we may admire the intellectual force
+which actually makes the work interesting, and the passion which often
+thrills us in it--this is more than the subject bears, and than we can
+always endure. Each book is spun out far beyond what is necessary; a
+great deal is inserted which would be wisely left out. No one could be
+more concise than Browning when he pleased. His power of flashing a
+situation or a thought into a few words is well known. But he did not
+always use this power. And in _The Ring and the Book_, as in some of the
+poems that followed it, he seems now and then to despise that power.
+
+And now for the poem itself. Browning tells the story eight times by
+different persons, each from a different point of view, and twice more
+by the same person before and after his condemnation and, of course,
+from two points of view. Then he practically tells it twice more in the
+prologue and the epilogue--twelve times in all--and in spite of what I
+have said about the too great length of the poem, this is an
+intellectual victory that no one else but Browning could have won
+against its difficulties. Whether it was worth the creation by himself
+of the difficulty is another question. He chose to do it, and we had
+better submit to him and get the good of his work. At least we may avoid
+some of the weariness he himself feared by reading it in the way I have
+mentioned, as Browning meant it to be read. Poems--being the highest
+product of the highest genius of which man is capable--ought to be
+approached with some reverence. And a part of that reverence is to read
+them in accordance with the intention and desire of the writer.
+
+We ought not to forget the date of the tale when we read the book. It is
+just two hundred years ago. The murder of Pompilia took place in 1698;
+and the book completes his studies of the Renaissance in its decay. If
+_Sordello_ is worth our careful reading as a study of the thirteenth
+century in North Italy, this book is as valuable as a record of the
+society of its date. It is, in truth, a mine of gold; pure crude ore is
+secreted from man's life, then moulded into figures of living men and
+women by the insight and passion of the poet. In it is set down Rome as
+she was--her customs, opinions, classes of society; her dress, houses,
+streets, lanes, byeways and squares; her architecture, fountains,
+statues, courts of law, convents, gardens; her fashion and its
+drawing-rooms, the various professions and their habits, high life and
+middle class, tradesmen and beggars, priest, friar, lay-ecclesiastic,
+cardinal and Pope. Nowhere is this pictorial and individualising part of
+Browning's genius more delighted with its work. Every description is
+written by a lover of humanity, and with joy.
+
+Nor is he less vivid in the _mise-en-scene_ in which he places this
+multitude of personages. In _Half-Rome_ we mingle with the crowd between
+Palazzo Fiano and Ruspoli, and pass into the church of Lorenzo in Lucina
+where the murdered bodies are exposed. The mingled humours of the crowd,
+the various persons and their characters are combined with and enhanced
+by the scenery. Then there is the Market Place by the Capucin convent of
+the Piazza Barberini, with the fountains leaping; then the _Reunion_ at
+a palace, and the fine fashionable folk among the mirrors and the
+chandeliers, each with their view of the question; then the Courthouse,
+with all its paraphernalia, where Guido and Caponsacchi plead; then, the
+sketches, as new matters turn up, of the obscure streets of Rome, of the
+country round Arezzo, of Arezzo itself, of the post road from Arezzo to
+Rome and the country inn near Rome, of the garden house in the suburbs,
+of the households of the two advocates and their different ways of
+living; of the Pope in his closet and of Guido in the prison cell; and
+last, the full description of the streets and the Piazza del Popolo on
+the day of the execution--all with a hundred vivifying, illuminating,
+minute details attached to them by this keen-eyed, observant, questing
+poet who remembered everything he saw, and was able to use each detail
+where it was most wanted. Memories are good, but good usage of them is
+the fine power. The _mise-en-scene_ is then excellent, and Browning was
+always careful to make it right, fitting and enlivening. Nowhere is this
+better done than in the Introduction where he finds the book on a stall
+in the Square of San Lorenzo, and describes modern Florence in his walk
+from the Square past the Strozzi, the Pillar and the Bridge to Casa
+Guidi on the other side of the Arno opposite the little church of San
+Felice. During the walk he read the book through, yet saw everything he
+passed by. The description will show how keen were his eyes, how
+masterly his execution.
+
+    That memorable day,
+    (June was the month, Lorenzo named the Square)
+    I leaned a little and overlooked my prize
+    By the low railing round the fountain-source
+    Close to the statue, where a step descends:
+    While clinked the cans of copper, as stooped and rose
+    Thick-ankled girls who brimmed them, and made place
+    For marketmen glad to pitch basket down,
+    Dip a broad melon-leaf that holds the wet,
+    And whisk their faded fresh. And on I read
+    Presently, though my path grew perilous
+    Between the outspread straw-work, piles of plait
+    Soon to be flapping, each o'er two black eyes
+    And swathe of Tuscan hair, on festas fine:
+    Through fire-irons, tribes of tongs, shovels in sheaves,
+    Skeleton bedsteads, wardrobe-drawers agape,
+    Rows of tall slim brass lamps with dangling gear,--
+    And worse, cast clothes a-sweetening in the sun:
+    None of them took my eye from off my prize.
+    Still read I on, from written title page
+    To written index, on, through street and street,
+    At the Strozzi, at the Pillar, at the Bridge;
+    Till, by the time I stood at home again
+    In Casa Guidi by Felice Church,
+    Under the doorway where the black begins
+    With the first stone-slab of the staircase cold,
+    I had mastered the contents, knew the whole truth
+    Gathered together, bound up in this book,
+    Print three-fifths, written supplement the rest.
+
+This power, combined with his power of portraiture, makes this long poem
+alive. No other man of his century could paint like him the to and fro
+of a city, the hurly-burly of humanity, the crowd, the movement, the
+changing passions, the loud or quiet clash of thoughts, the gestures,
+the dress, the interweaving of expression on the face, the whole play of
+humanity in war or peace. As we read, we move with men and women; we are
+pressed everywhere by mankind. We listen to the sound of humanity,
+sinking sometimes to the murmur we hear at night from some high window
+in London; swelling sometimes, as in _Sordello_, into a roar of
+violence, wrath, revenge, and war. And it was all contained in that
+little body, brain and heart; and given to us, who can feel it, but not
+give it. This is the power which above all endears him to us as a poet.
+We feel in each poem not only the waves of the special event of which he
+writes, but also the large vibration of the ocean of humanity.
+
+He was not unaware of this power of his. We are told in _Sordello_ that
+he dedicated himself to the picturing of humanity; and he came to think
+that a Power beyond ours had accepted this dedication, and directed his
+work. He declares in the introduction that he felt a Hand ("always above
+my shoulder--mark the predestination"), that pushed him to the stall
+where he found the fated book in whose womb lay his child--_The Ring and
+the Book_. And he believed that he had certain God-given qualities which
+fitted him for this work. These he sets forth in this introduction, and
+the self-criticism is of the greatest interest.
+
+The first passage is, when he describes how, having finished the book
+and got into him all the gold of its fact, he added from himself that to
+the gold which made it workable--added to it his live soul, informed,
+transpierced it through and through with imagination; and then, standing
+on his balcony over the street, saw the whole story from the beginning
+shape itself out on the night, alive and clear, not in dead memory but
+in living movement; saw right away out on the Roman road to Arezzo, and
+all that there befell; then passed to Rome again with the actors in the
+tragedy, a presence with them who heard them speak and think and act.
+The "life in him abolished the death of things--deep calling unto deep."
+For "a spirit laughed and leaped through his every limb, and lit his
+eye, and lifted him by the hair, and let him have his will" with
+Pompilia, Guido, Caponsacchi, the lawyers, the Pope, and the whole of
+Rome. And they rose from the dead; the old woe stepped on the stage
+again at the magician's command; and the rough gold of fact was rounded
+to a ring by art. But the ring should have a posy, and he makes that in
+a passionate cry to his dead wife--a lovely spell where high thinking
+and full feeling meet and mingle like two deep rivers. Whoso reads it
+feels how her spirit, living still for him, brooded over and blest his
+masterpiece:
+
+    O lyric Love, half angel and half bird
+    And all a wonder and a wild desire,--
+    Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun,
+    Took sanctuary within the holier blue,
+    And sang a kindred soul out to his face,--
+    Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart--
+    When the first summons from the darkling earth
+    Reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue,
+    And bared them of the glory--to drop down,
+    To toil for man, to suffer or to die,--
+    This is the same voice: can thy soul know change
+    Hail then, and hearken from the realms of help!
+    Never may I commence my song, my due
+    To God who best taught song by gift of thee,
+    Except with bent head and beseeching hand--
+    That still, despite the distance and the dark,
+    What was, again may be; some interchange
+    Of grace, some splendour once thy very thought,
+    Some benediction anciently thy smile:
+    --Never conclude, but raising hand and head
+    Thither where eyes, that cannot reach, yet yearn
+    For all hope, all sustainment, all reward,
+    Their utmost up and on,--so blessing back
+    In those thy realms of help, that heaven thy home,
+    Some whiteness which, I judge, thy face makes proud,
+    Some wanness where, I think, thy foot may fall!
+
+The poem begins with the view that one half of Rome took of the events.
+At the very commencement we touch one of the secondary interests of the
+book, the incidental characters. Guido, Caponsacchi, Pompilia, the Pope,
+and, in a lesser degree, Violante and Pietro, are the chief characters,
+and the main interest contracts around them. But, through all they say
+and do, as a motley crowd through a street, a great number of minor
+characters move to and fro; and Browning, whose eye sees every face, and
+through the face into the soul, draws them one by one, some more fully
+than others in perhaps a hundred lines, some only in ten. Most of them
+are types of a class, a profession or a business, yet there is always a
+touch or two which isolates each of them so that they do not only
+represent a class but a personal character. He hated, like Morris, the
+withering of the individual, nor did he believe, nor any man who knows
+and feels mankind, that by that the world grew more and more. The poem
+is full of such individualities. It were well, as one example, to read
+the whole account of the people who come to see the murdered bodies laid
+out in the Church of Lorenzo. The old, curious, doddering gossip of the
+Roman street is not less alive than the Cardinal, and the clever pushing
+Curato; and around them are heard the buzz of talk, the movement of the
+crowd. The church, the square are humming with humanity.
+
+He does the same clever work at the deathbed of Pompilia. She lies in
+the House of the dying, and certain folk are allowed to see her. Each
+one is made alive by this creative pencil; and all are different, one
+from the other--the Augustinian monk, old mother Baldi chattering like a
+jay who thought that to touch Pompilia's bedclothes would cure her
+palsy, Cavalier Carlo who fees the porter to paint her face just because
+she was murdered and famous, the folk who argue on theology over her
+wounded body. Elsewhere we possess the life-history of Pietro and
+Violante, Pompilia's reputed parents; several drawings of the retired
+tradesmen class, with their gossips and friends, in the street of a poor
+quarter in Rome; then, the Governor and Archbishop of Arezzo, the friar
+who is kindly but fears the world and all the busy-bodies of this
+provincial town. Arezzo, its characters and indwellers, stand in clear
+light. The most vivid of these sketches is Dominus Hyacinthus, the
+lawyer who defends Guido. I do not know anything better done, and more
+amusingly, than this man and his household--a paternal creature, full of
+his boys and their studies, making us, in his garrulous pleasure, at
+home with them and his fat wife. Browning was so fond of this sketch
+that he drew him and his boys over again in the epilogue.
+
+These represent the episodical characters in this drama of life; and
+Browning has scattered them, as it were, behind the chief characters,
+whom sometimes they illustrate and sometimes they contrast. Of these the
+whitest, simplest, loveliest is Pompilia, of whom I have already
+written. The other chief characters are Count Guido and Giuseppe
+Caponsacchi; and to the full development of these two characters
+Browning gives all his powers. They are contrasted types of the spirit
+of good and the spirit of evil conquering in man. Up to a certain point
+in life their conduct is much alike. Both belong to the Church--one as a
+priest, one as a layman affiliated to the Church. The lust of money and
+self, when the character of Pompilia forces act, turns Guido into a
+beast of greed and hate. The same character, when it forces act, lifts
+Caponsacchi into almost a saint. This was a piece of contrasted
+psychology in which the genius of Browning revelled, and he followed all
+the windings of it in both these hearts with the zest of an explorer.
+They were labyrinthine, but the more labyrinthine the better he was
+pleased. Guido's first speech is made before the court in his defence.
+We see disclosed the outer skin of the man's soul, all that he would
+have the world know of him--cynical, mocking, not cruel, not
+affectionate, a man of the world whom life had disappointed, and who
+wishing to establish himself in a retired life by marriage had been
+deceived and betrayed, he pleads, by his wife and her parents--an
+injured soul who, stung at last into fury at having a son foisted on
+him, vindicates his honour. And in this vindication his hypocrisy slips
+at intervals from him, because his hatred of his wife is too much for
+his hypocrisy.
+
+This is the only touch of the wolf in the man--his cruel teeth shown
+momentarily through the smooth surface of his defence. A weaker poet
+would have left him there, not having capacity for more. But Browning,
+so rich in thought he was, had only begun to draw him. Guido is not only
+painted by three others--by Caponsacchi, by Pompilia, by the Pope--but
+he finally exposes his real self with his own hand. He is condemned to
+death. Two of his friends visit him the night before his execution, in
+his cell. Then, exalted into eloquence by the fierce passions of fear of
+death and hatred of Pompilia, he lays bare as the night his very soul,
+mean, cruel, cowardly, hungry for revenge, crying for life, black with
+hate--a revelation such as in literature can best be paralleled by the
+soliloquies of Iago. Baseness is supreme in his speech, hate was never
+better given; the words are like the gnashing of teeth; prayers for life
+at any cost were never meaner, and the outburst of terror and despair at
+the end is their ultimate expression.
+
+Over against him is set Caponsacchi, of noble birth, of refined manner,
+one of those polished and cultivated priests of whom Rome makes such
+excellent use, and of whom Browning had drawn already a different type
+in Bishop Blougram. He hesitated, being young and gay, to enter the
+Church. But the archbishop of that easy time, two hundred years ago,
+told him the Church was strong enough to bear a few light priests, and
+that he would be set free from many ecclesiastical duties if, by
+assiduity in society and with women, he strengthened the social weight
+of the Church. In that way, making his madrigals and confessing fine
+ladies, he lived for four years. This is an admirable sketch of a type
+of Church society of that date, indeed, of any date in any Church; it
+is by no means confined to Rome.
+
+On this worldly, careless, indifferent, pleasure-seeking soul Pompilia,
+in her trouble and the pity of it, rises like a pure star seen through
+mist that opens at intervals to show her excelling brightness; and in a
+moment, at the first glimpse of her in the theatre, the false man drops
+away; his soul breaks up, stands clear, and claims its divine birth. He
+is born again, and then transfigured. The life of convention, of
+indifference, dies before Pompilia's eyes; and on the instant he is true
+to himself, to her, and to God. The fleeting passions which had absorbed
+him, and were of the senses, are burned up, and the spiritual love for
+her purity, and for purity itself--that eternal, infinite desire--is now
+master of his life. Not as Miranda and Ferdinand changed eyes in
+youthful love, but as Dante and Beatrice look on one another in
+Paradise, did Pompilia and Caponsacchi change eyes, and know at once
+that both were true, and see without speech the central worth of their
+souls. They trusted one another and they loved for ever. So, when she
+cried to him in her distress, he did her bidding and bore her away to
+Rome. He tells the story of their flight, and tells it with
+extraordinary beauty and vehemence in her defence. So noble is the tale
+that he convinces the judges who at first had disbelieved him; and the
+Pope confesses that his imprudence was a higher good than priestly
+prudence would have been. When he makes his defence he has heard that
+Pompilia has been murdered. Then we understand that in his conversion to
+goodness he has not lost but gained passion. Scorn of the judges, who
+could not see that neither he was guilty nor Pompilia; fiery
+indignation with the murderer; infinite grief for the lamb slain by the
+wolf, and irrevocable love for the soul of Pompilia, whom he will dwell
+with eternally when they meet in Heaven, a love which Pompilia, dying,
+declares she has for him, and in which, growing and abiding, she will
+wait for him--burn on his lips. He is fully and nobly a man; yet, at the
+end--and he is no less a man for it--the wild sorrow at his heart breaks
+him down into a cry:
+
+    O great, just, good God! Miserable me!
+
+Pompilia ends her words more quietly, in the faith that comes with
+death. Caponsacchi has to live on, to bear the burden of the world. But
+Pompilia has borne all she had to bear. All pain and horror are behind
+her, as she lies in the stillness, dying. And in the fading of this
+life, she knows she loves Caponsacchi in the spiritual world and will
+love him for ever. Each speaks according to the circumstance, but she
+most nobly:
+
+    He is ordained to call and I to come!
+    Do not the dead wear flowers when dressed for God?
+    Say,--I am all in flowers from head to foot!
+    Say,--not one flower of all he said and did,
+    Might seem to flit unnoticed, fade unknown,
+    But dropped a seed, has grown a balsam-tree
+    Whereof the blossoming perfumes the place
+    At this supreme of moments! He is a priest;
+    He cannot marry therefore, which is right:
+    I think he would not marry if he could.
+    Marriage on earth seems such a counterfeit,
+    Mere imitation of the inimitable:
+    In heaven we have the real and true and sure.
+    'Tis there they neither marry nor are given
+    In marriage but are as the angels: right,
+    Oh how right that is, how like Jesus Christ
+    To say that! Marriage-making for the earth,
+    With gold so much,--birth, power, repute so much,
+    Or beauty, youth so much, in lack of these!
+    Be as the angels rather, who, apart,
+    Know themselves into one, are found at length
+    Married, but marry never, no, nor give
+    In marriage; they are man and wife at once
+    When the true time is; here we have to wait
+    Not so long neither! Could we by a wish
+    Have what we will and get the future now,
+    Would we wish aught done undone in the past?
+    So, let him wait God's instant men call years;
+    Meantime hold hard by truth and his great soul,
+    Do out the duty! Through such souls alone
+    God stooping shows sufficient of His light
+    For us i' the dark to rise by. And I rise.
+
+Last of these main characters, the Pope appears. Guido, condemned to
+death by the law, appeals from the law to the head of the Church,
+because, being half an ecclesiastic, his death can only finally be
+decreed by the ecclesiastical arm. An old, old man, with eyes clear of
+the quarrels, conventions, class prejudices of the world, the Pope has
+gone over all the case during the day, and now night has fallen. Far
+from the noise of Rome, removed from the passions of the chief
+characters, he is sitting in the stillness of his closet, set on his
+decision. We see the whole case now, through his mind, in absolute
+quiet. He has been on his terrace to look at the stars, and their solemn
+peace is with him. He feels that he is now alone with God and his old
+age. And being alone, he is not concise, but garrulous and discursive.
+Browning makes him so on purpose. But discursive as his mind is, his
+judgment is clear, his sentence determined. Only, before he speaks, he
+will weigh all the characters, and face any doubts that may shoot into
+his conscience. He passes Guido and the rest before his spiritual
+tribunal, judging not from the legal point of view, but from that which
+his Master would take at the Judgment Day. How have they lived; what
+have they made of life? When circumstances invaded them with temptation,
+how did they meet temptation? Did they declare by what they did that
+they were on God's side or the devil's? And on these lines he delivers
+his sentence on Pompilia, Caponsacchi, Guido, Pietro, Violante, and the
+rest. He feels he speaks as the Vicegerent of God.
+
+This solemn, silent, lonely, unworldly judgment of the whole case, done
+in God's presence, is, after the noisy, crowded, worldly judgment of it
+by Rome, after the rude humours of the law, and the terrible clashing of
+human passions, most impressive; and it rises into the majesty of old
+age in the summing up of the characters of Pompilia, Caponsacchi, and
+Guido. I wish Browning had left it there. But he makes a sudden doubt
+invade the Pope with a chill. Has he judged rightly in thinking that
+divine truth is with him? Is there any divine truth on which he may
+infallibly repose?
+
+And then for many pages we are borne away into a theological discussion,
+which I take leave to say is wearisome; and which, after all, lands the
+Pope exactly at the point from which he set out--a conclusion at which,
+as we could have told him beforehand, he would be certain to arrive. We
+might have been spared this. It is an instance of Browning's pleasure in
+intellectual discourse which had, as I have said, such sad results on
+his imaginative work. However, at the end, the Pope resumes his interest
+in human life. He determines; and quickly--"Let the murderer die
+to-morrow."
+
+Then comes the dreadful passion of Guido in the condemned cell, of
+which I have spoken. And then, one would think the poem would have
+closed. But no, the epilogue succeeds, in which, after all the tragedy,
+humour reigns supreme. It brings us into touch with all that happened in
+this case after the execution of Guido; the letters written by the
+spectators, the lawyer's view of the deed, the gossip of Rome upon the
+interesting occasion. No piece of humour in Browning's poetry, and no
+portrait-sketching, is better than the letter written by a Venetian
+gentleman in Rome giving an account of the execution. It is high comedy
+when we are told that the Austrian Ambassador, who had pleaded for
+Guido's life, was so vexed by the sharp "no" of the Pope (even when he
+had told the Pope that he had probably dined at the same table with
+Guido), that he very nearly refused to come to the execution, and would
+scarcely vouchsafe it more than a glance when he did come--as if this
+conduct of his were a slight which the Pope would feel acutely. Nor does
+Browning's invention stop with this inimitable letter. He adds two other
+letters which he found among the papers; and these give to the
+characters of the two lawyers, new turns, new images of their steady
+professional ambition not to find truth, but to gain the world.
+
+One would think, after this, that invention would be weary. Not at all!
+The Augustinian monk who attended Pompilia has not had attention enough;
+and this is the place, Browning thinks, to show what he thought of the
+case, and how he used it in his profession. So, we are given a great
+part of the sermon he preached on the occasion, and the various
+judgments of Rome upon it.
+
+It is wonderful, after invention has been actively at work for eleven
+long books, pouring forth its waters from an unfailing fountain, to find
+it, at the end, as gay, as fresh, as keen, as youthful as ever. This, I
+repeat, is the excellence of Browning's genius--fulness of creative
+power, with imagination in it like a fire. It does not follow that all
+it produces is poetry; and what it has produced in _The Ring and the
+Book_ is sometimes, save for the metre, nothing better than prose. But
+this is redeemed by the noble poetry of a great part of it. The book is,
+as I have said, a mixed book--the central arena of that struggle in
+Browning between prose and poetry with a discussion of which this
+chapter began, and with the mention of which I finish it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+_LATER POEMS_
+
+
+A just appreciation of the work which Browning published after _The Ring
+and the Book_ is a difficult task. The poems are of various kinds, on
+widely separated subjects; and with the exception of those which treat
+of Balaustion, they have no connection with one another. Many of them
+must belong to the earlier periods of his life, and been introduced into
+the volumes out of the crowd of unpublished poems every poet seems to
+possess. These, when we come across them among their middle-aged
+companions, make a strange impression, as if we found a white-thorn
+flowering in an autumnal woodland; and in previous chapters of this book
+I have often fetched them out of their places, and considered them where
+they ought to be--in the happier air and light in which they were born.
+I will not discuss them again, but in forming any judgment of the later
+poems they must be discarded.
+
+The struggle to which I have drawn attention between the imaginative and
+intellectual elements in Browning, and which was equally balanced in
+_The Ring and the Book_, continued after its publication, but with a
+steady lessening of the imaginative and a steady increase of the
+intellectual elements. One poem, however, written before the publication
+of _The Ring and the Book_, does not belong to this struggle. This is
+_Herve Riel_, a ballad of fire and joy and triumph. It is curiously
+French in sentiment and expression, and the eager sea-delight in it is
+plainly French, not English in feeling. Nor is it only French; it is
+Breton in audacity, in self-forgetfulness, in carelessness of reward,
+and in loyalty to country, to love and to home. If Browning had been all
+English, this transference of himself into the soul of another
+nationality would have been wonderful, nay, impossible. As it is, it is
+wonderful enough; and this self-transference--one of his finest poetic
+powers--is nowhere better accomplished than in this poem, full of the
+salt wind and the leap and joy of the sea-waves; but even more full, as
+was natural to Browning, of the Breton soul of Herve Riel.
+
+In _Balaustion's Adventure_ (1871) which next appeared, the imaginative
+elements, as we have seen, are still alive and happy; and though they
+only emerge at intervals in its continuation, _Aristophanes' Apology_
+(1875), yet they do emerge. Meanwhile, between _Balaustion's Adventure_
+and the end of 1875, he produced four poems--_Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau,
+Saviour of Society_; _Fifine at the Fair_; _Red Cotton Nightcap
+Country_, or _Turf and Towers_; and _The Inn Album_. They are all long,
+and were published in four separate volumes. In them the intellectual
+elements have all but completely conquered the imaginative. They are,
+however, favourite "exercise-places" for some of his admirers, who think
+that they derive poetic pleasures from their study. The pleasure these
+poems give, when they give it, is not altogether a poetic pleasure. It
+is chiefly the pleasure of the understanding called to solve with
+excitement a huddle of metaphysical problems. They have the name but not
+the nature of poetry.
+
+They are the work of my Lord Intelligence--attended by wit and
+fancy--who sits at the desk of poetry, and with her pen in his hand. He
+uses the furniture of poetry, but the goddess herself has left the room.
+Yet something of her influence still fills the air of the chamber. In
+the midst of the brilliant display that fancy, wit, and intellect are
+making, a soft steady light of pure song burns briefly at intervals, and
+then is quenched; like the light of stars seen for a moment of quiet
+effulgence among the crackling and dazzling of fireworks.
+
+The poems are, it is true, original. We cannot class them with any
+previous poetry. They cannot be called didactic or satirical. The
+didactic and satirical poems of England are, for the most part,
+artificial, concise, clear. These poems are not artificial, clear or
+concise. Nor do they represent the men and women of a cultured,
+intellectual and conventional society, such as the poetry of Dryden and
+Pope addressed. The natural man is in them--the crude, dull, badly-baked
+man--what the later nineteenth century called the real man. We see his
+ugly, sordid, contemptible, fettered soul, and long for Salinguerra, or
+Lippo Lippi, or even Caliban. The representations are then human enough,
+with this kind of humanity, but they might have been left to prose.
+Poetry has no business to build its houses on the waste and leprous
+lands of human nature; and less business to call its work art. Realism
+of this kind is not art, it is science.
+
+Yet the poems are not scientific, for they have no clarity of argument.
+Their wanderings of thought are as intertangled as the sheep-walks on
+league after league of high grasslands. When one has a fancy to follow
+them, the pursuit is entertaining; but unless one has the fancy, there
+are livelier employments. Their chief interest is the impression they
+give us of a certain side of Browning's character. They are his darling
+debauch of cleverness, of surface-psychology. The analysis follows no
+conventional lines, does not take or oppose any well-known philosophical
+side. It is not much more than his own serious or fantastic thinking
+indulging itself with reckless abandon--amusing itself with itself. And
+this gives them a humanity--a Browning humanity--outside of their
+subjects.
+
+The subjects too, though not delightful, are founded on facts of human
+life. _Bishop Blougram_ was conceived from Cardinal Wiseman's career,
+_Mr. Sludge_ from Mr. Home's. _Prince Hohenstiel Schwangau_ explains and
+defends the expediency by which Napoleon III. directed his political
+action. _The Inn Album_, _Red Cotton Nightcap Country_, are taken from
+actual stories that occurred while Browning was alive, and _Fifine at
+the Fair_ analyses a common crisis in the maturer lives of men and
+women. The poems thus keep close to special cases, yet--and in this the
+poet appears--they have an extension which carries them beyond the
+particular subjects into the needs and doings of a wider humanity. Their
+little rivers run into the great sea. They have then their human
+interest for a reader who does not wish for beauty, passion,
+imagination, or the desires of the spirit in his poetry; but who hankers
+at his solitary desk after realistic psychology, fanciful ethics,
+curiosities of personal philosophy, cold intellectual play with
+argument, and honest human ugliness.
+
+Moreover, the method Browning attempts to use in them for the discovery
+of truth is not the method of poetry, nor of any of the arts. It is
+almost a commonplace to say that the world of mankind and each
+individual in it only arrives at the truth on any matter, large or
+small, by going through and exhausting the false forms of that
+truth--and a very curious arrangement it seems to be. It is this method
+Browning pursues in these poems. He represents one after another various
+false or half-true views of the matter in hand, and hopes in that
+fashion to clear the way to the truth. But he fails to convince partly
+because it is impossible to give all or enough of the false or half-true
+views of any one truth, but chiefly because his method is one fitted for
+philosophy or science, but not for poetry. Poetry claims to see and feel
+the truth at once. When the poet does not assert that claim, and act on
+it, he is becoming faithless to his art.
+
+Browning's method in these poems is the method of a scientific
+philosopher, not of an artist. He gets his man into a debateable
+situation; the man debates it from various points of view; persons are
+introduced who take other aspects of the question, or personified
+abstractions such as _Sagacity, Reason, Fancy_ give their opinions. Not
+satisfied with this, Browning discusses it again from his own point of
+view. He is then like the chess-player who himself plays both red and
+white; who tries to keep both distinct in his mind, but cannot help now
+and again taking one side more than the other; and who is frequently a
+third person aware of himself as playing red, and also of himself as
+playing white; and again of himself as outside both the players and
+criticising their several games. This is no exaggerated account of what
+is done in these poems. Three people, even when the poems are
+monologues, are arguing in them, and Browning plays all their hands,
+even in _The Inn Album_, which is not a monologue. In _Red Cotton
+Nightcap Country_, when he has told the story of the man and woman in
+all its sordid and insane detail, with comments of his own, he brings
+the victim of mean pleasure and mean superstition to the top of the
+tower whence he throws himself down, and, inserting his intelligence
+into the soul of the man, explains his own view of the situation. In
+_Prince Hohenstiel Schwangau_, we have sometimes what Browning really
+thinks, as in the beginning of the poem, about the matter in hand, and
+then what he thinks the Prince would think, and then, to complicate the
+affair still more, the Prince divides himself, and makes a personage
+called _Sagacity_ argue with him on the whole situation. As to _Fifine
+at the Fair_--a poem it would not be fair to class altogether with
+these--its involutions resemble a number of live eels in a tub of water.
+Don Juan changes his personality and his views like a player on the
+stage who takes several parts; Elvire is a gliding phantom with gliding
+opinions; Fifine is real, but she remains outside of this shifting
+scenery of the mind; and Browning, who continually intrudes, is
+sometimes Don Juan and sometimes himself and sometimes both together,
+and sometimes another thinker who strives to bring, as in the visions
+in the poem, some definition into this changing cloudland of the brain.
+And after all, not one of the questions posed in any of the poems is
+settled in the end. I do not say that the leaving of the questions
+unsettled is not like life. It is very like life, but not like the work
+of poetry, whose high office it is to decide questions which cannot be
+solved by the understanding.
+
+Bishop Blongram thinks he has proved his points. Gigadibs is half
+convinced he has. But the Bishop, on looking back, thinks he has not
+been quite sincere, that his reasonings were only good for the occasion.
+He has evaded the centre of the thing. What he has said was no more than
+intellectual fencing. It certainly is intellectual fencing of the finest
+kind. Both the Bishop and his companion are drawn to the life; yet, and
+this is the cleverest thing in the poem, we know that the Bishop is in
+reality a different man from the picture he makes of himself. And the
+truth which in his talk underlies its appearance acts on Gigadibs and
+sends him into a higher life. The discussion--as it may be called though
+the Bishop only speaks--concerning faith and doubt is full of admirable
+wisdom, and urges me to modify my statement that Browning took little or
+no interest in the controversies of his time. Yet, all through the
+fencing, nothing is decided. The button is always on the Bishop's foil.
+He never sends the rapier home. And no doubt that is the reason that his
+companion, with "his sudden healthy vehemence" did drive his weapon home
+into life--and started for Australia.
+
+Mr. Sludge, the medium, excuses his imposture, and then thinks "it may
+not altogether be imposture. For all he knows there may really be
+spirits at the bottom of it. He never meant to cheat; yet he did cheat.
+Yet, even if he lied, lies help truth to live; and he must live himself;
+and God may have made fools for him to live on;" and many other are the
+twists of his defence. The poem is as lifelike in its insight into the
+mind of a supple cheat as it is a brilliant bit of literature; but
+Browning leaves the matter unconcluded, as he would not have done, I
+hold, had he been writing poetry. Prince Hohenstiel's defence of
+expediency in politics is made by Browning to seem now right, now wrong,
+because he assumes at one time what is true as the ground of his
+argument, and then at another what is plainly false, and in neither case
+do the assumptions support the arguments. What really is concluded is
+not the question, but the slipperiness of the man who argues. And at the
+end of the poem Browning comes in again to say that words cannot be
+trusted to hit truth. Language is inadequate to express it. Browning was
+fond of saying this. It does not seem worth saying. In one sense it is a
+truism; in another it resembles nonsense. Words are the only way by
+which we can express truth, or our nearest approach to what we think it
+is. At any rate, silence, in spite of Maeterlinck, does not express it.
+Moreover, with regard to the matter in hand, Browning knew well enough
+how a poet would decide the question of expediency he has here brought
+into debate. He has decided it elsewhere; but here he chooses not to
+take that view, that he may have the fun of exercising his clever brain.
+There is no reason why he should not entertain himself and us in this
+way; but folk need not call this intellectual jumping to and fro a poem,
+or try to induce us to believe that it is the work of art.
+
+When he had finished these products of a time when he was intoxicated
+with his intellect, and of course somewhat proud of it, the poet in him
+began to revive. This resurrection had begun in _Fifine at the Fair_. I
+have said it would not be just to class this poem with the other three.
+It has many an oasis of poetry where it is a happiness to rest. But the
+way between their palms and wells is somewhat dreary walking, except to
+those who adore minute psychology. The poem is pitilessly long. If
+throughout its length it were easy to follow we might excuse the length,
+but it is rendered difficult by the incessant interchange of misty
+personalities represented by one personality. Elvire, Fifine only exist
+in the mind of Don Juan; their thoughts are only expressed in his words;
+their outlines not only continually fade into his, but his thought
+steals into his presentation of their thought, till it becomes
+impossible to individualise them. The form in which Browning wrote the
+poem, by which he made Don Juan speak for them, makes this want of
+clearness and sharpness inevitable. The work is done with a terrible
+cleverness, but it is wearisome at the last.
+
+The length also might be excused if the subject were a great one or had
+important issues for mankind. But, though it has its interest and is
+human enough, it does not deserve so many thousand lines nor so much
+elaborate analysis. A few lyrics or a drama of two acts might say all
+that is worth saying on the matter. What Browning has taken for subject
+is an every-day occurrence. We are grateful to him for writing on so
+universal a matter, even though it is unimportant; and he has tried to
+make it uncommon and important by weaving round it an intricate
+lace-work of psychology; yet, when we get down to its main lines, it is
+the ordinary event, especially commonplace in any idle society which
+clings to outward respectability and is dreadfully wearied of it. Our
+neighbours across the Channel call it _La Crise_ when, after years of a
+quiet, not unhappy, excellent married existence, day succeeding day in
+unbroken continuity of easy affection and limited experience, the man or
+the woman, in full middle life, suddenly wearies of the apparent
+monotony, the uneventful love, the slow encroaching tide of the
+commonplace, and looks on these as fetters on their freedom, as walls
+which shut them in from the vivid interests of the outside world, from
+the gipsy roving of the passions. The time arrives, when this becomes,
+they think, too great for endurance, and their impatience shows itself
+in a daily irritability quite new in the household, apparently
+causeless, full of sudden, inexplicable turns of thought and act which
+turn the peaceful into a tempestuous home. It is not that the husband or
+the wife are inconstant by nature--to call _Fifine at the Fair_ a
+defence of inconstancy is to lose the truth of the matter--but it is the
+desire of momentary change, of a life set free from conventional
+barriers, of an outburst into the unknown, of the desire for new
+experiences, for something which will bring into play those parts of
+their nature of which they are vaguely conscious but which are as yet
+unused--new elements in their senses, intellect, imagination, even in
+their spirit, but not always in their conscience. That, for the time
+being, as in this poem, is often shut up in the cellar, where its voice
+cannot be heard.
+
+This is, as I said, a crisis of common occurrence. It may be rightly
+directed, its evil controlled, and a noble object chosen for the
+satisfaction of the impulse. Here, that is not the case; and Browning
+describes its beginning with great freshness and force as Juan walks
+down to the fair with Elvire. Nor has he omitted to treat other forms of
+it in his poetry. He knew how usual it was, but he has here made it
+unusual by putting it into the heart of a man who, before he yielded to
+it, was pleased to make it the subject of a wandering metaphysical
+analysis; who sees not only how it appears to himself in three or four
+moods, but how it looks to the weary, half-jealous wife to whom he is so
+rude while he strives to be courteous, and to the bold, free,
+conscienceless child of nature whose favour he buys, and with whom,
+after all his barren metaphysics, he departs, only to attain, when his
+brief spell of foolish freedom is over, loneliness and cynic satiety. It
+may amuse us to circle with him through his arguments, though every one
+knows he will yield at last and that yielding is more honest than his
+talk; but what we ask is--Was the matter worth the trouble of more than
+two thousand lines of long-winded verse? Was it worth an artist's
+devotion? or, to ask a question I would not ask if the poem were good
+art, is it of any real importance to mankind? Is it, finally, anything
+more than an intellectual exercise of Browning on which solitary
+psychologists may, in their turn, employ their neat intelligence? This
+poem, with the exceptions of some episodes of noble poetry, is, as well
+as the three others, a very harlequinade of the intellect.
+
+I may say, though this is hypercritical, that the name of Don Juan is a
+mistake. Every one knows Don Juan, and to imagine him arguing in the
+fashion of this poem is absurd. He would instantly, without a word, have
+left Elvire, and abandoned Fifine in a few days. The connection then of
+the long discussions in the poem with his name throws an air of
+unreality over the whole of it. The Don Juan of the poem had much better
+have stayed with Elvire, who endured him with weary patience. I have no
+doubt that he bored Fifine to extinction.
+
+The poems that follow these four volumes are mixed work, half
+imaginative, half intellectual. Sometimes both kinds are found,
+separated, in the same poem; sometimes in one volume half the poems will
+be imaginative and the other half not. Could the imaginative and
+intellectual elements have now been fused as they were in his earlier
+work, it were well; but they were not. They worked apart. His witful
+poems are all wit, his analytical poems are all analysis, and his
+imaginative poems, owing to this want of fusion, have not the same
+intellectual strength they had in other days. _Numpholeptos_, for
+instance, an imaginative poem, full too of refined and fanciful emotion,
+is curiously wanting in intellectual foundation.
+
+The _Numpholeptos_ is in the volume entitled _Pacchiarotto, and how he
+worked in Distemper_. Part of the poems in it are humorous, such as
+_Pacchiarotto_ and _Filippo Baldinucci_, excellent pieces of agreeable
+wit, containing excellent advice concerning life. One reads them, is
+amused by them, and rarely desires to read them again. In the same
+volume there are some severe pieces, sharply ridiculing his critics. In
+the old days, when he wrote fine imaginative poetry, out of his heart
+and brain working together, he did not mind what the critics said, and
+only flashed a scoff or two at them in his creation of Naddo in
+_Sordello_. But now when he wrote a great deal of his poetry out of his
+brain alone, he became sensitive to criticism. For that sort of poetry
+does not rest on the sure foundation which is given by the consciousness
+the imagination has of its absolute rightness. He expresses his needless
+soreness with plenty of wit in _Pacchiarotto_ and in the _Epilogue_,
+criticises his critics, and displays his good opinion of his work--no
+doubt of these later poems, like _The Inn Album_ and the rest--with a
+little too much of self-congratulation. "The poets pour us wine," he
+says, "and mine is strong--the strong wine of the loves and hates and
+thoughts of man. But it is not sweet as well, and my critics object.
+Were it so, it would be more popular than it is. Sweetness and strength
+do not go together, and I have strength."
+
+But that is not the real question. The question is--Is the strength
+poetical? Has it imagination? It is rough, powerful, full of humanity,
+and that is well. But is it half prose, or wholly prose? Or is it
+poetry, or fit to be called so? He thinks that _Prince Hohenstiel_, or
+_Red Cotton Nightcap Country_, are poetry. They are, it is true, strong;
+and they are not sweet. But have they the strength of poetry in them,
+and not the strength of something else altogether? That is the question
+he ought to have answered, and it does not occur to him.
+
+Yet, he was, in this very book, half-way out of this muddle. There are
+poems in it, just as strong as _The Inn Album_, but with the ineffable
+spirit of imaginative emotion and thought clasped together in them, so
+that the strong is stronger, and the humanity deeper than in the pieces
+he thought, being deceived by the Understanding, were more strong than
+the poems of old. In _Bifurcation_, in _St. Martin's Summer_, the
+diviner spirit breathes. There is that other poem called _Forgiveness_
+of which I have already spoken--one of his masterpieces. _Cenciaja_,
+which may be classed with _Forgiveness_ as a study of the passion of
+hatred, is not so good as its comrade, but its hatred is shown in a mean
+character and for a meaner motive. And the _Prologue_, in its rhythm and
+pleasure, its subtlety of thought, its depth of feeling, and its close
+union of both, recalls his earlier genius.
+
+The first of the _Pisgah Sights_ is a jewel. It is like a poem by
+Goethe, only Goethe would have seen the "sight" not when he was dying,
+but when he was alive to his finger-tips. The second is not like
+Goethe's work, nor Browning's; but it is a true picture of what many
+feel and are. So is _Fears and Scruples_. As to _Natural Magic_, surely
+it is the most charming of compliments, most enchantingly expressed.
+
+The next volume of original poems was _La Saisiaz_ and the _Two Poets of
+Croisic_. The _Croisic Poets_ are agreeable studies, written with verve
+and lucidity, of two fantastic events which lifted these commonplace
+poets suddenly into fame. They do well to amuse an idle hour. The end of
+both is interesting. That of the first, which begins with stanza lix.,
+discusses the question: "Who cares, how such a mediocrity as Rene lived
+after the fame of his prophecy died out?"[11] And Browning answers--
+
+    Well, I care--intimately care to have
+      Experience how a human creature felt
+    In after life, who bore the burthen grave
+      Of certainly believing God had dealt
+    For once directly with him: did not rave
+      --A maniac, did not find his reason melt
+    --An idiot, but went on, in peace or strife,
+    The world's way, lived an ordinary life.
+
+The solution Browning offers is interesting, because it recalls a part
+of the experiences of Lazarus in the _Epistle to Karshish_. Rene, like
+Lazarus, but only for a moment, has lived in the eternal.
+
+Are such revelations possible, is his second question. Yes, he answers;
+and the form of the answer belongs to the theory of life laid down in
+_Paracelsus_. Such sudden openings of the greater world are at
+intervals, as to Abt Vogler, given by God to men.
+
+The end of the second asks what is the true test of the greater poet,
+when people take on them to weigh the worth of poets--who was better,
+best, this, that or the other bard? When I read this I trembled, knowing
+that I had compared him with Tennyson. But when I heard the answer I
+trembled no more. "The best poet of any two is the one who leads the
+happier life. The strong and joyful poet is the greater." But this is a
+test of the greatness of a man, not necessarily of a poet. And,
+moreover, in this case, Tennyson and Browning both lived equally happy
+lives. Both were strong to the end, and imaginative joy was their
+companion. But the verse in which Browning winds up his answer is one of
+the finest in his poetry.
+
+    So, force is sorrow, and each sorrow, force;
+      What then? since Swiftness gives the charioteer
+    The palm, his hope be in the vivid horse
+      Whose neck God clothed with thunder, not the steer
+    Sluggish and safe! Yoke Hatred, Crime, Remorse,
+      Despair; but ever mid the whirling fear,
+      Let, through the tumult, break the poet's face
+      Radiant, assured his wild slaves win the race!
+
+_La Saisiaz_ is a more important poem: it describes the sudden death of
+his friend, Ann Egerton Smith, and passes from that, and all he felt
+concerning it, into an argument on the future life of the soul, with the
+assumption that God is, and the soul. The argument is interesting, but
+does not concern us here. What does concern us is that Browning has
+largely recovered his poetical way of treating a subject. He is no
+longer outside of it, but in it. He does not use it as a means of
+exercising his brains only. It is steeped in true and vital feeling, and
+the deep friendship he had for his friend fills even the theological
+argument with a passionate intensity. Nevertheless, the argument is
+perilously near the work of the understanding alone--as if a question
+like that of immortality could receive any solution from the hands of
+the understanding. Only each man, in the recesses of his own spirit with
+God, can solve that question for himself, and not for another. That is
+Browning's position when he writes as a poet, and no one has written
+more positively on the subject. But when he submits the question to
+reasoning, he wavers, as he does here, and leaves the question more
+undecided than anywhere else in his work. This is a pity, but it is the
+natural penalty of his partial abandonment of the poetic for the prosaic
+realm, of the imagination for the understanding, of the Reason for
+reasoning.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[11] Rene Gentilhomme, page to Prince Conde, heir of France since Louis
+XIII. and his brother Gaston were childless, is surprised, while writing
+a love poem, by a lightning flash which shatters a marble ducal crown.
+He thinks this a revelation from God, and he prophecies that a Dauphin
+will be born to the childless Queen. The Dauphin was born, and Rene
+pushed suddenly into fame.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+_THE LAST POEMS_
+
+
+Two Volumes of Dramatic Idyls, one in 1879, the other in 1880, followed
+_La Saisiaz_ and _The Two Poets of Croisic_. These are also mixed books,
+composed, partly of studies of character written in rhythmical prose,
+and partly of poems wrought out of the pure imagination. Three of
+them--if they were written at this time--show how the Greek legends
+still dwelt with Browning; and they brought with them the ocean-scent,
+heroic life, and mythical charm of Athenian thought. It would be
+difficult, if one could write of them at all, not to write of them
+poetically; and _Pheidippides, Echetlos, Pan and Luna_ are alive with
+force, imaginative joy, and the victorious sense the poet has of having
+conquered his material. _Pheidippides_ is as full of fire, of careless
+heroism as _Herve Riel_, and told in as ringing verse. The versing of
+_Echetlos_, its rugged, rousing sound, its movement, are in most
+excellent harmony with the image of the rude, giant "Holder of the
+ploughshare," who at Marathon drove his furrows through the Persians and
+rooted up the Mede. Browning has gathered into one picture and one sound
+the whole spirit of the story. _Pan and Luna_ is a bold re-rendering of
+the myth that Vergil enshrines, and the greater part of it is of such
+poetic freshness that I think it must be a waif from the earlier years
+of his poetry. Nor is there better imaginative work in his descriptive
+poetry than the image of the naked moon, in virginal distress, flying
+for refuge through the gazing heaven to the succourable cloud--fleece on
+fleece of piled-up snow, drowsily patient--where Pan lay in ambush for
+her beauty.
+
+Among these more gracious idyls, one of singular rough power tells the
+ghastly tale of the mother who gave up her little children to the wolves
+to save herself. Browning liked this poem, and the end he added to the
+story--how the carpenter, Ivan, when the poor frightened woman
+confessed, lifted his axe and cut off her head; how he knew that he did
+right, and was held to have done right by the village and its pope. The
+sin by which a mother sacrificed the lives of her children to save her
+own was out of nature: the punishment should be outside of ordinary law.
+It is a piteous tale, and few things in Browning equal the horror of the
+mother's vain attempt to hide her crime while she confesses it. Nor does
+he often show greater imaginative skill in metrical movement than when
+he describes in galloping and pattering verse the grey pack emerging
+from the forest, their wild race for the sledge, and their demon leader.
+
+The other idyls in these two volumes are full of interest for those who
+care for psychological studies expressed in verse. What the vehicle of
+verse does for them is to secure conciseness and suggestiveness in the
+rendering of remote, daring, and unexpected turns of thought and
+feeling, and especially of conscience. Yet the poems themselves cannot
+be called concise. Their subjects are not large enough, nor indeed
+agreeable enough, to excuse their length. Goethe would have put them
+into a short lyrical form. It is impossible not to regret, as we read
+them, the Browning of the _Dramatic Lyrics_. Moreover, some of them are
+needlessly ugly. _Halbert and Hob_--and in _Jocoseria_--_Donald_, are
+hateful subjects, and their treatment does not redeem them; unlike the
+treatment of _Ivan Ivanovitch_ which does lift the pain of the story
+into the high realms of pity and justice. Death, swift death, was not
+only the right judgment, but also the most pitiful. Had the mother
+lived, an hour's memory would have been intolerable torture.
+Nevertheless, if Browning, in his desire to represent the whole of
+humanity, chose to treat these lower forms of human nature, I suppose we
+must accept them as an integral part of his work; and, at least, there
+can be no doubt of their ability, and of the brilliancy of their
+psychological surprises. _Ned Bratts_ is a monument of cleverness, as
+well as of fine characterisation of a momentary outburst of conscience
+in a man who had none before; and who would have lost it in an hour, had
+he not been hanged on the spot. The quick, agile, unpremeditated turns
+of wit in this poem, as in some of the others, are admirably easy, and
+happily expressed. Indeed, in these later poems of character and event,
+ingenuity or nimbleness of intellect is the chief element, and it is
+accompanied by a facile power which is sometimes rude, often careless,
+always inventive, fully fantastical, and rarely imaginative in the
+highest sense of the word. Moreover, as was not the case of old, they
+have, beyond the story, a direct teaching aim, which, while it lowers
+them as art, is very agreeable to the ethical psychologist.
+
+_Jocoseria_ has poems of a higher quality, some of which, like the
+lovely _Never the Time and Place_, I have been already quoted. _Ixion_
+is too obscurely put to attain its end with the general public. But it
+may be recommended, though vainly, to those theologians who, hungry for
+the Divine Right of torture, build their God, like Caliban, out of their
+own minds; who, foolish enough to believe that the everlasting endurance
+of evil is a necessary guarantee of the everlasting endurance of good,
+are still bold and bad enough to proclaim the abominable lie of eternal
+punishment. They need that spirit the little child whom Christ placed in
+the midst of his disciples; and in gaining which, after living the life
+of the lover, the warrior, the poet, the statesman, _Jochanan Hakkadosh_
+found absolute peace and joy. Few poems contain more of Browning's
+matured theory of life than this of the Jewish Rabbi; and its
+seriousness is happily mingled with imaginative illustrations and with
+racy wit. The sketch of Tsaddik, who puts us in mind of Wagner in the
+_Faust_, is done with a sarcastic joy in exposing the Philistine, and
+with a delight in its own cleverness which is fascinating.
+
+_Ferishtah's Fancies_ and _Parleyings with Certain People_ followed
+_Jocoseria_ in 1884 and 1887. The first of these books is much the
+better of the two. A certain touch of romance is given by the Dervish,
+by the Fables with which he illustrates his teaching, and by the Eastern
+surroundings. Some of the stories are well told, and their scenery is
+truthfully wrought and in good colour. The subjects are partly
+theological, with always a reference to human life; and partly of the
+affections and their working. It is natural to a poet, and delightful in
+Browning, to find him in his old age dwelling from poem to poem on the
+pre-eminence of love, on love as the ultimate judge of all questions. He
+asserts this again and again; with the greatest force in _A Pillar at
+Sebzevar_, and, more lightly, in _Cherries_. Yet, and this is a pity, he
+is not satisfied with the decision of love, but spends pages in
+argumentative discussions which lead him away from that poetical
+treatment of the subjects which love alone, as the master, would have
+enabled him to give. However, the treatment that love gives we find in
+the lyrics at the end of each _Fancy_; and some of these lyrics are of
+such delicate and subtle beauty that I am tempted to think that they
+were written at an earlier period, and their _Fancies_ composed to fit
+them. If they were written now, it is plain that age had not disenabled
+him from walking with pleasure and power among those sweet, enamelled
+meadows of poetry in whose soil he now thought great poetry did not
+grow. And when we read the lyrics, our regret is all the more deep that
+he chose the thorn-clad and desert lands, where barren argument goes
+round and round its subjects without ever finding the true path to their
+centre.
+
+He lost himself more completely in this error in _Parleyings with
+Certain People_, in which book, with the exception of the visionary
+landscapes in _Gerard de Lairesse_, and some few passages in _Francis
+Furini_ and _Charles Avison_, imagination, such as belongs to a poet,
+has deserted Browning. He feels himself as if this might be said of
+him; and he asks in _Gerard de Lairesse_ if he has lost the poetic
+touch, the poetic spirit, because he writes of the soul, of facts, of
+things invisible--not of fancy's feignings, not of the things perceived
+by the senses? "I can do this," he answers, "if I like, as well as you,"
+and he paints the landscape of a whole day filled with mythological
+figures. The passage is poetry; we see that he has not lost his poetic
+genius. But, he calls it "fooling," and then contrasts the spirit of
+Greek lore with the spirit of immortal hope and cheer which he
+possesses, with his faith that there is for man a certainty of Spring.
+But that is not the answer to his question. It only says that the spirit
+which animates him now is higher than the Greek spirit. It does not
+answer the question--Whether _Daniel Bartoli_ or _Charles Avison_ or any
+of these _Parleyings_ even approach as poetry _Paracelsus_, the
+_Dramatic Lyrics_, or _Men and Women_. They do not. Nor has their
+intellectual work the same force, unexpectedness and certainty it had of
+old. Nevertheless, these _Parleyings_, at the close of the poet's life,
+and with biographical touches which give them vitality, enshrine
+Browning's convictions with regard to some of the greater and lesser
+problems of human life. And when his personality is vividly present in
+them, the argument, being thrilled with passionate feeling, rises, but
+heavily like a wounded eagle, into an imaginative world.
+
+The sub-consciousness in Browning's mind to which I have alluded--that
+these later productions of his were not as poetical as his earlier work
+and needed defence--is the real subject of a remarkable little poem at
+the end of the second volume of the _Dramatic Idyls_. He is thinking of
+himself as poet, perhaps of that double nature in him which on one side
+was quick to see and love beauty; and on the other, to see facts and
+love their strength. Sometimes the sensitive predominated. He was only
+the lover of beauty whom everything that touched him urged into song.
+
+    "Touch him ne'er so lightly, into song he broke:
+      Soil so quick-receptive,--not one feather-seed,
+    Not one flower-dust fell but straight its fall awoke
+      Vitalising virtue: song would song succeed
+      Sudden as spontaneous--prove a poet-soul!"
+
+This, which Browning puts on the lips of another, is not meant, we are
+told, to describe himself. But it does describe one side of him very
+well, and the origin and conduct of a number of his earlier poems. But
+now, having changed his manner, even the principles of his poetry, he
+describes himself as different from that--as a sterner, more iron poet,
+and the work he now does as more likely to endure, and be a power in the
+world of men. He was curiously mistaken.
+
+Indeed, he cries, is that the soil in which a poet grows?
+
+    "Rock's the song-soil rather, surface hard and bare:
+    Sun and dew their mildness, storm and frost their rage
+      Vainly both expend,--few flowers awaken there:
+    Quiet in its cleft broods--what the after-age
+    Knows and names a pine, a nation's heritage."
+
+In this sharp division, as in his _Epilogue_ to _Pacchiarotto_, he
+misses the truth. It is almost needless to say that a poet can be
+sensitive to beauty, and also to the stern facts of the moral and
+spiritual struggle of mankind through evil to good. All the great poets
+have been sensitive to both and mingled them in their work. They were
+ideal and real in both the flower and the pine. They are never forced
+to choose one or other of these aims or lives in their poetry. They
+mingled facts and fancies, the intellectual and the imaginative. They
+lived in the whole world of the outward and the inward, of the senses
+and the soul. Truth and beauty were one to them. This division of which
+Browning speaks Was the unfortunate result of that struggle between his
+intellect and his imagination on which I have dwelt. In old days it was
+not so with him. His early poetry had sweetness with strength, stern
+thinking with tender emotion, love of beauty with love of truth,
+idealism with realism, nature with humanity, fancy with fact. And this
+is the equipment of the great poet. When he divides these qualities each
+from the other, and is only aesthetic or only severe in his realism; only
+the worshipper of Nature or only the worshipper of human nature; only
+the poet of beauty or only the poet of austere fact; only the idealist
+or only the realist; only of the senses or only of the soul--he may be a
+poet, but not a great poet. And as the singular pursuit of the realistic
+is almost always bound up with pride, because realism does not carry us
+beyond ourselves into the infinite where we are humbled, the realistic
+poetry loses imagination; its love of love tends to become self-love, or
+love of mere cleverness. And then its poetic elements slowly die.
+
+There was that, as I have said, in Browning which resisted this sad
+conclusion, but the resistance was not enough to prevent a great loss of
+poetic power. But whatever he lost, there was one poetic temper of mind
+which never failed him, the heroic temper of the faithful warrior for
+God and man; there was one ideal view of humanity which dominated all
+his work; there was one principle which directed all his verse to
+celebrate the struggle of humanity towards the perfection for which God,
+he believed, had destined it. These things underlie all the poems in
+_Ferishtah's Fancies_ and the _Parleyings with Certain People_, and give
+to them the uplifted, noble trumpet note with which at times they are
+animated. The same temper and principle, the same view of humanity
+emerge in that fine lyric which is the Epilogue to _Ferishtah's
+Fancies_, and in the Epilogue to _Asolando_.
+
+The first sees a vision of the present and the future in which all the
+battle of our life passes into a glorious end; nor does the momentary
+doubt that occurs at the close of the poem--that his belief in a divine
+conclusion of our strife may only have been caused by his own happiness
+in love--really trouble his conviction. That love itself is part of the
+power which makes the noble conclusion sure. The certainty of this
+conclusion made his courage in the fight unwavering, despair impossible,
+joy in battle, duty; and to be "ever a fighter" in the foremost rank the
+highest privilege of man.
+
+    Then the cloud-rift broadens, spanning earth that's under,
+      Wide our world displays its worth, man's strife and strife's success:
+    All the good and beauty, wonder crowning wonder,
+      Till my heart and soul applaud perfection, nothing less.
+
+And for that reason, because of the perfectness to come, Browning lived
+every hour of his life for good and against wrong. He said with justice
+of himself, and with justice he brought the ideal aim and the real
+effort together:
+
+    I looked beyond the world for truth and beauty:
+     Sought, found, and did my duty.
+
+Nor, almost in the very grasp of death, did this faith fail him. He
+kept, in the midst of a fretful, slothful, wailing world, where prophets
+like Carlyle and Ruskin were as impatient and bewildered, as lamenting
+and despondent, as the decadents they despised, the temper of his
+Herakles in _Balaustion_. He left us that temper as his last legacy, and
+he could not have left us a better thing. We may hear it in his last
+poem, and bind it about our hearts in sorrow and joy, in battle and
+peace, in the hour of death and the days of judgment.
+
+    At the midnight in the silence of the sleep-time
+        When you set your fancies free,
+    Will they pass to where--by death, fools think, imprisoned--
+    Low he lies who once so loved you, whom you loved so
+                        --Pity me?
+
+    Oh to love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken
+        What had I on earth to do
+    With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly?
+    Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel
+                        --Being--who?
+
+    One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward,
+        Never doubted clouds would break,
+    Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
+    Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
+                        Sleep to wake.
+
+    No, at noonday in the bustle of man's work-time
+        Greet the unseen with a cheer!
+    Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be,
+    "Strive and thrive!" cry "Speed,--fight on, fare ever
+                        There as here!"
+
+With these high words he ended a long life, and his memory still falls
+upon us, like the dew which fell on Paradise. It was a life lived fully,
+kindly, lovingly, at its just height from the beginning to the end. No
+fear, no vanity, no lack of interest, no complaint of the world, no
+anger at criticism, no villain fancies disturbed his soul. No laziness,
+no feebleness in effort, injured his work, no desire for money, no
+faltering of aspiration, no pandering of his gift and genius to please
+the world, no surrender of art for the sake of fame or filthy lucre, no
+falseness to his ideal, no base pessimism, no slavery to science yet no
+boastful ignorance of its good, no morbid naturalism, no devotion to the
+false forms of beauty, no despair of man, no retreat from men into a
+world of sickly or vain beauty, no abandonment of the great ideas or
+disbelief in their mastery, no enfeeblement of reason such as at this
+time walks hand in hand with the worship of the mere discursive
+intellect, no lack of joy and healthy vigour and keen inquiry and
+passionate interest in humanity. Scarcely any special bias can be found
+running through his work; on the contrary, an incessant change of
+subject and manner, combined with a strong but not overweening
+individuality, raced, like blood through the body, through every vein of
+his labour. Creative and therefore joyful, receptive and therefore
+thoughtful, at one with humanity and therefore loving; aspiring to God
+and believing in God, and therefore steeped to the lips in radiant Hope;
+at one with the past, passionate with the present, and possessing by
+faith an endless and glorious future--this was a life lived on the top
+of the wave, and moving with its motion from youth to manhood, from
+manhood to old age.
+
+There is no need to mourn for his departure. Nothing feeble has been
+done, nothing which lowers the note of his life, nothing we can regret
+as less than his native strength. His last poem was like the last look
+of the Phoenix to the sun before the sunlight lights the odorous pyre
+from which the new-created Bird will spring. And as if the Muse of
+Poetry wished to adorn the image of his death, he passed away amid a
+world of beauty, and in the midst of a world endeared to him by love.
+Italy was his second country. In Florence lies the wife of his heart. In
+every city he had friends, friends not only among men and women, but
+friends in every ancient wall, in every fold of Apennine and Alp, in
+every breaking of the blue sea, in every forest of pines, in every
+Church and Palace and Town Hall, in every painting that great art had
+wrought, in every storied market place, in every great life which had
+adorned, honoured and made romantic Italy; the great mother of Beauty,
+at whose breasts have hung and whose milk have sucked all the arts and
+all the literatures of modern Europe. Venice saw and mourned his death.
+The sea and sky and mountain glory of the city he loved so well
+encompassed him with her beauty; and their soft graciousness, their
+temperate power of joy and life made his departure peaceful. Strong and
+tender in life, his death added a new fairness to his life. Mankind is
+fortunate to have so noble a memory, so full and excellent a work to
+rest upon and love.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+OF PASSAGES RELATING TO THE POEMS
+
+
+A
+
+Andre del Sarto (A. de Musset)
+
+Animal Studies
+
+Arnold, Matthew
+
+Art, Poems dealing with
+  Romantic Revival in
+  During the Renaissance
+
+Art, Browning's Poetic,
+  Compared with that of Tennyson
+  Compared with that of Morris and Rossetti
+  In Abt Vogler
+  In the Grammarian's Funeral
+  In the Ring and the Book
+
+Art, Browning's Theory of,
+  In Andrea del Sarto
+  In Pippa Passes
+  In Sordello
+
+Aurora Leigh (E.B. Browning)
+
+
+B
+
+Balaustion's Adventures and Aristophanes' Apology,
+  Character of the Heroine
+  Contrast between Balaustion and Pompilia
+  Balaustion's Prologue
+  The Story of Alkestis
+  Representation of Aristophanes
+
+Becket (Tennyson)
+
+Boccaccio
+
+Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
+  Poems relating to
+
+Browning--
+  His relation to his Age
+  His artistic Development
+  His Art Poems
+  His Minor Characters
+  His Sense of Colour
+  His Composition
+  His Cosmopolitan Sympathies
+  As a Dramatist
+  As Poet of Humanity
+  His Imagination
+  The Influence of Shelley
+  Intellectual Analysis
+  His Love Poems
+  His Lyrical Poems
+  His Methods
+  His Treatment of Nature
+  His Obscurity
+  His Originality
+  His Treatment of the Renaissance
+  Romantic and Classic Elements in
+  His Spontaneity
+  His Style
+  Compared with Tennyson
+  His Theory of Life
+  His Wideness of Range
+  His Wit and Humour
+
+Byron
+
+
+C
+
+Cain (Byron)
+
+Carlyle
+
+Cenci, The (Shelley)
+
+Charles the First (Shelley)
+
+Chaucer
+
+Clough
+
+Coleridge
+
+Colour-sense in Browning
+
+Cup, The (Tennyson)
+
+
+D
+
+Dante
+
+Decameron (Boccaccio)
+
+Dramas, The
+  Absence of Nature Pictures in
+  Defects in Browning's Dramatic Treatment
+  Dramas separately considered
+
+Dramatic Poems
+
+Duchess of Malfi (Webster)
+
+
+E
+
+English Scenery in Browning
+
+
+F
+
+Falcon, The (Tennyson)
+
+Form in Poetry
+
+French Revolution, its Influence in England
+
+
+H
+
+Hand and Soul (Rossetti)
+
+Harold (Tennyson)
+
+History, Imaginative Study of
+
+Homer
+
+Humanity, Browning's Treatment of
+
+Humour, Browning's
+
+Hunt, Holman
+
+
+I
+
+Imagination in Browning
+
+Imaginative Representations
+  Definition of Term
+  Their Inception
+  Theological Studies
+  Renaissance Studies
+  Poems on Modern Italy
+
+In Memoriam (Tennyson)
+
+
+K
+
+Keats
+
+King Lear
+
+
+L
+
+Landscapes, Browning's
+
+Later Poems
+  More intellectual than imaginative
+  Subjects generally founded on Fact
+  Show Sensitiveness to Criticism
+
+Last Poems
+  Psychological Studies in
+
+Lotos-Eaters, The (Tennyson)
+
+Love Poetry,
+  What it is and when produced
+  Rare in Browning
+
+Love Poems, The
+  Poems of Passion
+  Poems to Elizabeth Barrett Browning
+  Impersonal Poems
+  Poems embodying Phases of Love
+
+Lyrical Element in Browning
+
+
+M
+
+Malory
+
+Manfred (Byron)
+
+Mariana in the South (Tennyson)
+
+Maud (Tennyson)
+
+Mazzini
+
+Midsummer Night's Dream, A
+
+Millais
+
+Milton
+
+Morris
+
+Musset, Alfred de
+
+
+N
+
+Nature, Browning's Treatment of
+  Separate from and subordinate to Man
+  Joy in Nature
+  God and Nature
+  The Pathetic Fallacy
+  Illustrations drawn from Nature
+  Browning's view compared with that of other Poets
+  His Treatment illustrated in Saul
+  Faults in his Treatment
+  Nature Pictures
+  Later Indifference to Nature
+
+New Age, The (Arnold)
+
+Northern Farmer, The (Tennyson)
+
+
+O
+
+Oenone (Tennyson)
+
+Originality, Browning's
+
+
+P
+
+Palace of Art, The (Tennyson)
+
+Paracelsus
+  Nature-description in
+  Theory of Life in
+  Sketch of Argument
+
+Passions, Poems of the Fiercer
+  Poems of the Romantic
+
+Pathetic Fallacy, The
+
+Pauline
+  Theory of Life in
+  Nature-description in
+  Mental Development of Hero
+Character of Pauline
+
+Petrarch
+
+Pippa Passes
+  Nature-description in
+  Theory of Art in
+  Lyrics in
+  Studies of Women in
+
+Plato
+
+Poems, Passages relating to,
+  Abt Vogler
+  Adam, Lilith and Eve
+  After
+  Andrea del Sarto
+  Any Wife to any Husband
+  Aristophanes' Apology
+  Asolando
+  Balaustion's Adventure
+  Bean Stripe, A
+  Before
+  Bells and Pomegranates
+  Bifurcation
+  Bishop Blougram
+  Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's Church, The
+  Blot in the 'Scutcheon, A
+  By the Fireside
+  Caliban upon Setebos
+  Cavalier Tunes
+  Cenciaja
+  Charles Avison
+  Cherries
+  Childe Ronald
+  Christmas Eve
+  Cleon
+  Colombe's Birthday
+  Confessions
+  Count Gismond
+  Cristina
+  Cristina and Monaldeschi
+  Daniel Bartoli
+  Death in the Desert, A
+  De Gustibus
+  Dis Aliter Visum
+  Donald
+  Dramas, The
+    Strafford
+    King Victor and King Charles
+    The Return of the Druses
+    A Blot in the 'Scutcheon
+    Colombe's Birthday
+    Luria
+    A Soul's Tragedy
+    Pippa Passes
+  Dramatic Idylls
+  Dramatic Lyrics
+  Dramatic Romances
+  Dramatis Personae
+  Easter Day
+  Echetlos
+  Englishman in Italy, The
+  Epilogue to Asolando, in
+  Epilogue to Ferishtah's Fancies
+  Epilogue to Pacchiarotto
+  Epistle of Karshish, An
+  Evelyn Hope
+  Fears and Scruples
+  Ferishtah's Fancies
+  Fifine at the Fair
+  Filippo Baldinucci
+  Flight of the Duchess, The
+  Flower's Name, The
+  Forgiveness, A
+  Fra Lippo Lippi
+  Francis Furini
+  Gerard de Lairesse
+  Glove, The
+  Gold Hair
+  Grammarian's Funeral, A
+  Halbert and Hob
+  Herve Riel
+  Holy Cross Day
+  Home Thoughts from Abroad
+  Home Thoughts from the Sea
+  How it strikes a Contemporary
+  How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix
+  In a Balcony
+  In a Gondola
+  Inn Album, The
+  Instans Tyrannus
+  In Three Days
+  Italian in England, The
+  Ivan Ivanovitch
+  Ixion
+  James Lee's Wife
+  Jochanan Hakkadosh
+  Jocoseria
+  Johannes Agricola in Meditation
+  King Victor and King Charles
+  Laboratory, The
+  Last Ride Together, The
+  Light Woman, A
+  Lost Mistress, The
+  Love Among the Ruins
+  Lovers' Quarrel, A
+  Luria
+  Meeting at Night--Parting at Morning
+  Men and Women
+  Mr. Sludge, the Medium
+  My Last Duchess
+  Natural Magic
+  Natural Theology on the Island
+  Ned Bratts
+  Never the Time and the Place
+  Now
+  Numpholeptos
+  Old Pictures in Florence
+  One Word More
+  Pacchiarotto
+  Pacchiarotto Prologue to
+  Pacchiarotto Epilogue to
+  Pan and Luna
+  Paracelsus
+  Parleyings with Certain People
+  Pauline
+  Pearl--A Girl, A
+  Pheidippides
+  Pictor Ignotus
+  Pied Piper of Hamelin, The
+  Pillar at Sebzevar, A
+  Pippa Passes
+  Pisgah Sights
+  Porphyria's Lover
+  Pretty Woman, A
+  Rabbi Ben Ezra
+  Red Cotton Nightcap Country
+  Return of the Druses, The
+  Reverie
+  Rudel and the Lady of Tripoli
+  St. Martin's Summer
+  Saisiaz, La
+  Saul
+  Serenade at the Villa, A
+  Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, A
+  Solomon and Balkis
+  Sordello
+  Soul's Tragedy, A
+  Speculative
+  Strafford
+  Summum Bonum
+  Time's Revenges
+  Toccata of Galuppi's, A
+  Too Late
+  Transcendentalism
+  Two in the Campagna
+  Two Poets of Croisic
+  Up in a Villa--Down in the City
+  Waring
+  Worst of it, The
+  Youth and Art
+
+Poet, Characteristics of a
+
+Poetry
+  Grounds of Judgment on
+  Characteristics of Best
+  Form in
+  Matter in
+  Thought and Emotion in
+
+Portraiture, Browning's Power of Minute
+
+Prelude, The (Wordsworth)
+
+Princess, The (Tennyson)
+
+Promise of May, The (Tennyson)
+
+Purgatorio, The (Dante)
+
+
+Q
+
+Queen Mary (Tennyson)
+
+
+R
+
+Racine
+
+Realism in Browning
+
+Religious Phases, Poems dealing with
+
+Renaissance, The
+
+Renaissance, Poems dealing with the
+
+Renan
+
+Revenge, The (Tennyson)
+
+Ring and the Book, The
+  Nature-description in
+  Its Position among Browning's Works
+  Its Plan
+  Humour and Wit in
+  Partly intellectual, partly imaginative
+  Study of Renaissance in
+  Scenery and human Background
+  Browning's imaginative Method in
+  Minor Characters in
+  Principal Characters
+    Guido
+    Caponsacchi
+    Pompilia
+    The Pope
+  The Conclusion
+
+Rizpah (Tennyson)
+
+Robin Hood (Tennyson)
+
+Romantic Spirit in Browning
+
+Rossetti
+
+Ruskin
+
+
+S
+
+St. Simeon Stylites (Tennyson)
+
+Scott
+
+Shakespeare
+
+Shelley
+
+Sir Galahad (Tennyson)
+
+Sordello
+  Landscape in
+  The Temperament of the Hero
+  His artistic Development
+  The Argument
+  Historical Background to the Story
+  Nature Pictures
+  Portraiture
+  Illustrative Episodes
+  Analogy between Sordello and Browning
+  Theory of Art in
+  Theory of Life in
+  Character of the Heroine
+
+Style in Browning
+
+Swinburne
+
+
+T
+
+Tempest, The (Shakespeare)
+
+Tennyson
+
+Turner
+
+Theory of Life, Browning's
+  Its main Features
+  In Pauline
+  In Paracelsus
+  In Easter Day
+  In Abt Vogler
+  In Andrea del Sarto
+  In Old Pictures in Florence
+  In Sordello
+
+
+V
+
+Vergil
+Vita Nuova, La (Dante)
+
+
+W
+
+Will Waterproof's Monologue (Tennyson)
+
+Womanhood, Studies of
+  In the Early Poems
+    Pauline
+    Lady Carlisle
+    Palma
+  In the Dramas, &c.
+    Ottima
+    Pippa
+    Anael
+    Mildred and Guendolen
+    Colombe
+    Constance
+  In the Dramatic Lyrics
+  Characteristics of Browning's Women
+  Poems to Mrs. Browning
+  Pompilia
+  Balaustion
+
+Womanhood in the Modern Poets
+
+Wordsworth
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Poetry Of Robert Browning
+by Stopford A. Brooke
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE POETRY OF ROBERT BROWNING ***
+
+***** This file should be named 14316.txt or 14316.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/1/4/3/1/14316/
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram and the Online Distributed Proofreading
+Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.