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diff --git a/old/14618.txt b/old/14618.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2192dd5 --- /dev/null +++ b/old/14618.txt @@ -0,0 +1,8895 @@ +The Project Gutenberg EBook of Robert Browning, by C. H. Herford + +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: Robert Browning + +Author: C. H. Herford + +Release Date: January 6, 2005 [EBook #14618] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROBERT BROWNING *** + + + + +Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Lynn Bornath and the PG Online +Distributed Proofreading Team + + + + + + +MODERN ENGLISH WRITERS. + +Crown 8vo, 2/6 each. + + + READY. + +MATTHEW ARNOLD . . . . . . . Professor SAINTSBURY. +R.L. STEVENSON . . . . . . . L. COPE CORNFORD. +JOHN RUSKIN . . . . . . . . Mrs MEYNELL. +ALFRED TENNYSON . . . . . . ANDREW LANG. +THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY . . . . EDWARD CLODD. +W.M. THACKERAY . . . . . . CHARLES WHIBLEY. +ROBERT BROWNING . . . . . . C.H. HERFORD. + + IN PREPARATION + +GEORGE ELIOT . . . . . . . A.T. QUILLER-COUCH. +J.A. FROUDE . . . . . . . JOHN OLIVER HOBBES. + +WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, EDINBURGH AND LONDON. + + + + +ROBERT BROWNING + +BY + +C.H. HERFORD + +PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE +UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER + +WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS +EDINBURGH AND LONDON +MCMV + + + + +TO THE +REV. F.E. MILLSON. + + +DEAR OLD FRIEND, + +A generation has passed since the day when, in your study at Brackenbed +Grange, your reading of "Ben Ezra," the tones of which still vibrate in +my memory, first introduced me to the poetry of Robert Browning. He was +then just entering upon his wider fame. You had for years been one not +merely of the few who recognised him, but of those, yet fewer, who +proclaimed him. The standpoint of the following pages is not, I think, +very remote from your own; conversations with you have, in any case, +done something to define it. You see, then, that your share of +responsibility for them is, on all counts, considerable, and you must +not refuse to allow me to associate them with a name which the old +Rabbi's great heartening cry: "Strive, and hold cheap the strain, Learn, +nor account the pang, Dare, never grudge the throe," summons +spontaneously to many other lips than mine. To some it is brought yet +closer by his calm retrospect through sorrow. + + + + +ei de theion ho nous pros ton anthropon, kai ho kata touton bios +theios pros ton anthropinon bion--ARIST., _Eth. N_. x. 8. + +"Ne creator ne creatura mai," +Comincio ei, "figliuol, fu senza amore." +--DANTE, _Purg_. xvii. 91. + + + + +PREFACE. + + +Browning is confessedly a difficult poet, and his difficulty is by no +means all of the kind which opposes unmistakable impediments to the +reader's path. Some of it is of the more insidious kind, which may +co-exist with a delightful persuasion that the way is absolutely clear, +and Browning's "obscurity" an invention of the invertebrate. The +problems presented by his writing are merely tough, and will always +yield to intelligent and patient scrutiny. But the problems presented by +his mind are elusive, and it would be hard to resist the cogency of his +interpreters, if it were not for their number. The rapid succession of +acute and notable studies of Browning put forth during the last three or +four years makes it even more apparent than it was before that the last +word on Browning has not yet been said, even in that very qualified +sense in which the last word about any poet, or any poetry, can ever be +said at all. The present volume, in any case, does not aspire to say it. +But it is not perhaps necessary to apologise for adding, under these +conditions, another to the list. From most of the recent studies I have +learned something; but this book has its roots in a somewhat earlier +time, and may perhaps be described as an attempt to work out, in the +detail of Browning's life and poetry, from a more definitely literary +standpoint and without Hegelian prepossessions, a view of his genius not +unlike that set forth with so much eloquence and penetration, in his +well-known volume, by Professor Henry Jones. The narrative of Browning's +life, in the earlier chapters, makes no pretence to biographical +completeness. An immense mass of detail and anecdote bearing upon him is +now available and within easy reach. I have attempted to sift out from +this picturesque loose drift the really salient and relevant material. +Much domestic incident, over which the brush would fain linger, will be +missed; on the other hand, the great central epoch of Browning's poetic +life, from 1846 to 1869, has been treated, deliberately, on what may +appear an inordinately generous scale. Some amount of overlapping and +repetition, it may be added, in the analytical chapters the plan of the +book rendered it impossible wholly to avoid. + +I am indebted to a friend, who wishes to be nameless, for reading the +proofs, with results extremely beneficial to the book. + +UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER, +_January 1905_. + + + + +CONTENTS. + + PAGE +PREFACE vii + + + PART I. + + BROWNING'S LIFE AND WORK. + +CHAP. + + I. EARLY LIFE. _PARACELSUS_ 1 + + II. ENLARGING HORIZONS. _SORDELLO_ 24 + + III. MATURING METHODS. DRAMAS AND DRAMATIC LYRICS 37 + Introduction. + I. Dramas. From _Strafford_ to _Pippa Passes_ 42 + II. From the _Blot in the 'Scutcheon_ to _Luria_ 51 + III. The early Dramatic Lyrics and Romances 65 + + IV. WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY. _MEN AND WOMEN_ 74 + I. January 1845 to September 1846 74 + II. Society and Friendships 84 + III. Politics 88 + IV. Poems of Nature 91 + V. Poems of Art 96 + VI. Poems of Religion 110 + VII. Poems of Love 132 + + V. LONDON. _DRAMATIS PERSONAE_ 148 + + VI. _THE RING AND THE BOOK_ 169 + + VII. AFTERMATH 187 + +VIII. THE LAST DECADE 220 + + + PART II. + + BROWNING'S MIND AND ART. + + IX. THE POET 237 + I. Divergent psychical tendencies of Browning--"romantic" + temperament, "realist" senses--blending of their + _donnees_ in his imaginative activity--shifting + complexion of "finite" and "infinite" 237 + II. His "realism." Plasticity, acuteness, and veracity + of intellect and senses 239 + III. But his realism qualified by energetic individual + preference along certain well-defined lines 245 + IV. _Joy in Light and Colour_ 246 + V. _Joy in Form_. Love of abruptness, of intricacy; + clefts and spikes 250 + VI. _Joy in Power_. Violence in imagery and description; + in sounds; in words. Grotesqueness. Intensity. + Catastrophic action. The pregnant moment 257 + VII. _Joy in Soul_. 1. Limited in Browning on the side + of simple human nature; of the family; of the + civic community; of myth and symbol 266 + VIII. _Joy in Soul_. 2. Supported by Joy in Light and + Colour; in Form; in Power. 3. Extended to + (a) sub-human Nature, (b) the inanimate + products of Art; Relation of Browning's poetry to + his interpretation of life 272 + + X. THE INTERPRETER OF LIFE 287 + I. Approximation of God, Man, Nature in the thought + of the early nineteenth century; how far reflected + in the thought of Browning 287 + + II. Antagonistic elements of Browning's intellect; resulting + fluctuations of his thought. Two conceptions of Reality. + Ambiguous treatment of "Matter"; of Time 290 + + III. Conflicting tendencies in his conception of God 295 + + IV. Conflicting tendencies in his treatment of Knowledge 297 + + V. Proximate solution of these antagonisms in the conception + of Love 300 + + VI. Final estimate of Browning's relation to the progressive + and conservative movements of his age 304 + + +INDEX 310 + + + + +PART I. + +BROWNING'S LIFE AND WORK + + + + +BROWNING. + + +CHAPTER I. + +EARLY LIFE. _PARACELSUS_. + + The Boy sprang up ... and ran, + Stung by the splendour of a sudden thought. + --_A Death in the Desert_. + + Dass ich erkenne, was die Welt + Im Innersten zusammenhaelt. + --_Faust_. + + +Judged by his cosmopolitan sympathies and his encyclopaedic knowledge, by +the scenery and the persons among whom his poetry habitually moves, +Browning was one of the least insular of English poets. But he was also, +of them all, one of the most obviously and unmistakably English. +Tennyson, the poetic mouthpiece of a rather specific and exclusive +Anglo-Saxondom, belonged by his Vergilian instincts of style to that +main current of European poetry which finds response and recognition +among cultivated persons of all nationalities; and he enjoyed a European +distinction not attained by any other English poet since Byron. +Browning, on the contrary, with his long and brilliant gallery of +European creations, Browning, who claimed Italy as his "university," +remains, as a poet, all but unknown even in Italy, and all but +non-existent for the rest of the civilised world beyond the Channel. His +cosmopolitan sympathies worked through the medium of a singularly +individual intellect; and the detaching and isolating effect which +pronounced individuality of thinking usually produces, even in a genial +temperament, was heightened in his case by a robust indifference to +conventions of all kinds, and not least to those which make genius +easily intelligible to the plain man. + +What is known of Browning's descent makes these contrasts in some degree +intelligible. An old strain of Wessex squires or yeomen, dimly +discernible in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, issued, about +the middle of the eighteenth, in the first distinct personality among +the poet's forebears, his grandfather, who also bore the name Robert. He +was a robust, hard-headed, energetic, pushing man of business and the +world, who made his way from a clerkship to an important and responsible +post in the Bank of England, and settled accounts with religion and with +literature in a right English way, by reading the Bible and 'Tom Jones' +through every year, and very little else. More problematical and +elusive is the figure of his first wife, Margaret Tittle, with whom, to +judge from the character of her eldest son, literary and artistic +sensibility first mingled in the hard practical Browning stock. In this +second Robert Browning, indeed, the somewhat brutal and grasping egotism +of the father gave place to a cultured humanity of almost feminine +tenderness and charm. All his life long he was passionately devoted to +literature, to art, to children. He collected rare books and prints with +avidity, but was no less generous in giving them away. Indifferent to +money, he hated to see a scrap of paper wasted. He had a neat touch in +epigrams, and a boyish delight in grotesque rhymes. But there was no +lack of grit in this accomplished, fresh-minded, and lovable man. He had +the tough fibre of his race; only it was the wrongs of others that +called out its tenacity, not his own. While holding an appointment on +his mother's West Indian estate, he braved the fierce resentment of the +whole colony by teaching a negro-boy to read; and finally incurred +disinheritance rather than draw a livelihood from slave-labour. This +Shelleyan act involved for him the resignation of his intellectual and +artistic ambitions; and with the docility characteristic of him, where +only his own interests were concerned, he forthwith entered the fairly +well-paid but unexciting service of the Bank. + +In 1811 he married, and on May 7 of the following year his eldest son, +Robert, was born. His wife was the daughter of a German shipowner, +William Wiedemann, who had settled and married at Dundee. Wiedemann is +said to have been an accomplished draughtsman and musician, and his +daughter, without herself sharing these gifts, probably passed them on +to her son. Whether she also communicated from her Scottish and German +ancestry the "metaphysical" proclivities currently ascribed to him, is a +hypothesis absolutely in the air.[1] What is clear is that she was +herself intellectually simple and of few ideas, but rich in the +temperament, at once nervous and spiritual, which when present in the +mother so often becomes genius in the son. "She was a divine woman," +such was her son's brief sufficing tribute. Physically he seems to have +closely resembled her,[2] and they were bound together by a peculiarly +passionate love from first to last. + +[Footnote 1: A similar but more groundless suggestion, that the author +of _Holy-cross Day_ and _Rabbi ben Ezra_ probably had Jewish +blood in his veins, can only be described as an impertinence--not to +Browning but to the Jewish race. As if to feel the spiritual genius of +Hebraism and to be moved by the pathos of Hebraic fate were an +eccentricity only to be accounted for by the bias of kin! It is +significant that his demonstrable share of German blood left him rather +conspicuously impervious to the literary--and more especially to the +"metaphysical"--products of the German mind.] + +[Footnote 2: Browning himself reports the exclamation of the family +doctor when trying to diagnose an attack of his: "Why, has anybody to +search far for a cause of whatever nervous disorder you may suffer +from, when there sits your mother--whom you so absolutely resemble!" +(_Letters to E.B.B._, ii. 456.)] + +The home in Camberwell into which the boy Robert was born reflected the +serene, harmonious, self-contented character of his parents. Friends +rarely disturbed the even tenor of its ways, and the storms of politics +seem to have intruded as faintly into this suburban seclusion as the +roar of London. Books, business, and religion provided a framework of +decorous routine within which these kindly and beautiful souls moved +with entire content. Well-to-do Camberwell perhaps contained few homes +so pure and refined; but it must have held many in which the life-blood +of political and social interests throbbed more vigorously, and where +thought and conversation were in closer touch with the intellectual life +of the capital and the larger movements of the time. Nothing in +Browning's boyhood tended to open his imagination to the sense of +citizenship and nationality which the imperial pageants and ceremonies +of Frankfurt so early kindled in the child Goethe. But within the limits +imposed by this quiet home young Robert soon began to display a vigour +and enterprise which tried all its resources. "He clamoured for +occupation from the moment he could speak," and "something to do" meant +above all some living thing to be caught for him to play with. The gift +of an animal was found a valuable aid to negotiations with the young +despot; when medicine was to be taken, he would name "a speckled frog" +as the price of his compliance, and presently his mother would be seen +hovering hither and thither among the strawberry-beds. A quaint +menagerie was gradually assembled: owls and monkeys, magpies and +hedgehogs, an eagle and snakes. Boy-collectors are often cruel; but +Robert showed from the first an anxious tenderness and an eager care for +life: we hear of a hurt cat brought home to be nursed, of ladybirds +picked up in the depths of winter and preserved with wondering delight +at their survival. Even in stories the death of animals moved him to +bitter tears. He was equally quick at books, and soon outdistanced his +companions at the elementary schools which he attended up to his +fourteenth year. Near at hand, too, was the Dulwich Gallery,--"a green +half-hour's walk across the fields,"--a beloved haunt of his childhood, +to which he never ceased to be grateful.[3] But his father's overflowing +library and portfolios played the chief part in his early development. +He read voraciously, and apparently without restraint or control. The +letters of Junius and of Horace Walpole were familiar to him "in +boyhood," we are assured with provoking indefiniteness by Mrs Orr; as +well as "all the works of Voltaire." Most to his mind, however, was the +rich sinewy English and athletic fancy of the seventeenth-century +Fantastic Quarles; a preference which foreshadowed his later delight in +the great master of the Fantastic school, and of all who care for +close-knit intellect in poetry, John Donne. + +[Footnote 3: _To E.B.B._, March 3, 1846.] + +Curiously enough, it was some fragments of the grandiose but shadowy +Ossian which first stirred the imitative impulse in this poet of +trenchant and clear-cut form. "The first composition I ever was guilty +of," he wrote to Elizabeth Barrett (Aug. 25, 1846), "was something in +imitation of Ossian, whom I had not read, but conceived through two or +three scraps in other books." And long afterwards Ossian was "the first +book I ever bought in my life" (ib.) These "imitations" were apparently +in verse, and in rhyme; and Browning's bent and faculty for both was +very early pronounced. "I never can recollect not writing rhymes; ... +but I knew they were nonsense even then." And a well-known anecdote of +his infancy describes his exhibition of a lively sense of metre in +verses which he recited with emphatic accompaniments upon the edge of +the dining-room table before he was tall enough to look over it. The +crowding thoughts of his maturity had not yet supervened to prevent the +abundant music that he "had in him" from "getting out." It is not +surprising that a boy of these proclivities was captivated by the stormy +swing and sweep of Byron; nor that he should have caught also something +of his "splendour of language," and even, a little later, a reflection, +respectable and suburban enough, of his rebellious Titanism. The less +so, that in Robert's eleventh or twelfth year Byron, the head of the +Satanic school, had become the heroic champion of Greek liberation, and +was probably spoken of with honour in the home of the large-hearted +banker who had in his day suffered so much for the sake of the +unemancipated slave. In later years Browning was accustomed to deliver +himself of breezy sarcasms at the expense of the "flat-fish" who +declaimed so eloquently about the "deep and dark blue ocean." But it is +easy to see that this genial chaff covered a real admiration,--the +tribute of one abounding nature to another, which even years and the +philosophic mind did not seriously abate. "I always retained my first +feeling for Byron in many respects," he wrote in a significant letter to +Miss Barrett in 1846. " ... I would at any time have gone to Finchley to +see a curl of his hair or one of his gloves, I am sure,--while Heaven +knows that I could not get up enthusiasm enough to cross the room if at +the other end of it all Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey were +condensed into the little china bottle yonder."[4] It was thus no mere +freak of juvenile taste that took shape in these early Byronic poems. He +entitled them, with the lofty modesty of boyish authorship, _Incondita_, +and his parents sought to publish them. No publisher could be found; but +they won the attention of a notable critic, W.J. Fox, who feared too +much splendour and too little thought in the young poet, but kept his +eye on him nevertheless. + +[Footnote 4: _To E.B.B._, Aug. 22, 1846.] + +Two years later the boy of fourteen caught the accents of another poetic +voice, destined to touch the sources of music and passion in him with +far more intimate power. His casual discovery, on a bookstall, of "Mr +Shelley's Atheistical poem" seems to have for the first time made known +to him even the name of the poet who had died in Italy four years +before. Something of Shelley's story seems to have been known to his +parents. It gives us a measure of the indulgent sympathy and religious +tolerance which prevailed in this Evangelical home, that the parents +should have unhesitatingly supplied the boy of fourteen, at some cost of +time and trouble, with all the accessible writings of the "atheistical" +poet, and with those of his presumably like-minded friend Keats as well. +He fell instantly under the spell of both. Whatever he may have known +before of ancient or modern literature, the full splendour of romantic +poetry here broke upon him for the first time. Immature as he was, he +already responded instinctively to the call of the spirits most +intimately akin to his own. Byron's stormy power thrilled and delighted +him; but it was too poor in spiritual elements, too negative, +self-centred, and destructive to stir the deeper sources of Browning's +poetry. In Keats and in Shelley he found poetic energies not less +glowing and intense, bent upon making palpable to eye and ear visions of +beauty which, with less of superficial realism, were fed by far more +exquisite and penetrating senses, and attached by more and subtler +filaments to the truth of things. Beyond question this was the decisive +literary experience of Browning's early years. Probably it had a chief +part in making the poet's career his fixed ideal, and ultimately, with +his father's willing consent, his definite choice. What we know of his +inner and outer life during the important years which turned the boy +into the man is slight and baffling enough. The fiery spirit of poetry +can rarely have worked out its way with so little disturbance to the +frame. Minute scrutiny has disclosed traits of unrest and revolt; he +professed "atheism" and practised vegetarianism, betrayed at times the +aggressive arrogance of an able youth, and gave his devoted and tender +parents moments of very superfluous concern. For with all his immensely +vivacious play of brain, there was something in his mental and moral +nature from first to last stubbornly inelastic and unimpressible, that +made him equally secure against expansion and collapse. The same simple +tenacity of nature which kept his buoyantly adventurous intellect +permanently within the tether of a few primary convictions, kept him, in +the region of practice and morality, within the bounds of a rather nice +and fastidious decorum. Malign influences effected no lodgment in a +nature so fundamentally sound; they might cloud and trouble imagination +for a while, but their scope hardly extended further, and as they were +literary in origin, so they were mainly literary in expression. In the +meantime he was laying, in an unsystematic but not ineffective way, the +foundations of his many-sided culture and accomplishment. We hear much +of private tutors, of instruction in French, in music, in riding, +fencing, boxing, dancing; of casual attendance also at the Greek classes +in University College. In all these matters he seems to have won more or +less definite accomplishment, and from most of them his versatile +literary talent took, at one time or another, an effective toll. The +athletic musician, who composed his own songs and gloried in a gallop, +was to make verse simulate, as hardly any artificer had made it before, +the labyrinthine meanderings of the fugue and the rhythmic swing of +hoofs. + +Of all these varied aims and aspirations, of all in short that was going +on under the surface of this brilliant and versatile Robert Browning of +twenty, we have a chaotic reflection in the famous fragment _Pauline_. +The quite peculiar animosity with which its author in later life +regarded this single "crab" of his youthful tree of knowledge only adds +to its interest. He probably resented the frank expression of passion, +nowhere else approached in his works. Yet passion only agitates the +surface of _Pauline_. Whether Pauline herself stand for an actual +woman--Miss Flower or another--or for the nascent spell of +womanhood--she plays, for one who is ostensibly the heroine of the poem, +a discouragingly minor part. No wonder she felt tempted to advise the +burning of so unflattering a record. Instead of the lyric language of +love, she has to receive the confessions of a subtle psychologist, who +must unlock the tumultuous story of his soul "before he can sing." And +these confessions are of a kind rare even amongst self-revelations of +genius. Pauline's lover is a dreamer, but a dreamer of an uncommon +species. He is preoccupied with the processes of his mind, but his mind +ranges wildly over the universe and chafes at the limitations it is +forced to recognise. Mill, a master, not to say a pedant, of +introspection, recognised with amazement the "intense self-consciousness" +of this poet, and self-consciousness is the keynote which persists +through all its changing harmonies. It is the self-consciousness of a +soul compelled by quick and eager senses and vivid intelligence to +recognise a host of outer realities not itself, which it constantly +strives to bring into relation with itself, as constantly baffled and +thrown back by the obstinate objectivity of that outer world. A pure +dreamer would have "contentedly lived in a nut-shell and imagined +himself king of infinite space"; a purely scientific intelligence would +have applied himself to the patient mastery of facts; in the hero of +_Pauline_ the despotic senses and intellect of science and the imperious +imagination of the poet appear to coexist and to contend, and he tosses +to and fro in a fever of fitful efforts, continually frustrated, to find +complete spiritual response and expressiveness in the intractable maze +of being. There had indeed been an earlier time when the visions of old +poets had wholly sufficed him; and the verses in which he recalls them +have almost the pellucid charm of Homer,-- + + "Never morn broke clear as those + On the dim clustered isles in the blue sea, + The deep groves, and white temples, and wet caves." + +But growing intellect demanded something more. Shelley, the +"Sun-treader," weaving soul and sense into a radiant vesture "from his +poet's station between both," did much to sustain him; Plato's more +explicit and systematic idealism gave him for a while a stronger +assurance. But disillusion broke in: "Suddenly, without heart-wreck I +awoke; I said, 'twas beautiful, yet but a dream, and so adieu to it!" +Then the passionate restlessness of his nature stings him forth afresh. +He steeps himself in the concrete vitality of things, lives in +imagination through "all life where it is most alive," immerses himself +in all that is most beautiful and intense in Nature, so fulfilling, it +might seem, his passionate craving to "be all, have, see, know, taste, +feel all,"--yet only to feel that satisfaction is not here: + + "My soul saddens when it looks beyond: + I cannot be immortal, taste all joy;" + +only the sickness of satiety. But when all joy was tasted, what then? If +there was any "crowning" state, it could only be, thought Browning, one +in which the soul looked up to the unattainable infinity of God. + +Such seem to be the outlines of the mental history which passes before +us, brilliant and incoherent as a dream, in _Pauline_. The material, +vast and many-sided as it is, is not fully mastered; but there is +nothing merely imitative; it is everywhere Browning, and no mere +disciple of Shelley or another, who is palpably at work. The influence +of Shelley seems, indeed, to have been already outgrown when _Pauline_ +was written; Browning gloried in him and in his increasing fame, but he +felt that his own aims and destiny were different. Rossetti, a few years +later, took _Pauline_ to be the work of an unconscious pre-Raphaelite; +and there is enough of subtle simplicity, of curious minuteness, in the +details to justify the error. In the meantime many outward circumstances +conspired to promote the "advance" which every line of it foretold. His +old mentor of the _Incondita_ days, W.J. Fox, in some sort a Browningite +before Browning, reviewed _Pauline_ in _The Monthly Repository_ (April +1833) with generous but discerning praise. This was the beginning of a +warm friendship between the two, which ended only with Fox's death. It +was founded upon hearty admiration on both sides, and no man living was +better qualified to scatter the morbid films that clung about the +expanding genius of young Browning than this robust and masculine critic +and preacher. A few months later came an event of which we know very +little, but which at least did much to detach him from the limited +horizons of Camberwell. At the invitation of M. Benckhausen, Russian +consul-general, Browning accompanied him, in the winter of 1833-34, on a +special mission to St Petersburg. The journey left few apparent traces +on his work. But he remembered the rush of the sledge through the forest +when, half a century later, he told the thrilling tale of _Ivan +Ivanovitch_. And even the modest intimacy with affairs of State +obtainable in the office of a consul-general seems to have led his +thoughts seriously to diplomacy as a career. One understands that to the +future dissector of a Hohenstiel-Schwangau and a Blougram the career +might present attractions. It marks the seriousness of his ambition +that he actually applied for a post in the Persian Embassy. This fancy +of _Ferishtah_, like a similar one of ten years later, was not +gratified, but the bent which was thus thwarted in practical life +disported itself freely in poetry, and the marks of the diplomatist _in +posse_ are pretty clearly legible in the subtle political webs which +make up so much of the plots of _Strafford, King Victor_, and +_Sordello_. + +But much sharper rebuffs than this would have failed to disturb the +immense buoyancy of Browning's temperament. He was twenty-three, and in +the first flush of conscious power. His exuberant animal spirits flowed +out in whimsical talk; he wrote letters of the gayest undergraduate +_insouciance_ to Fox, and articles full of extravagant jesting for _The +Trifler_, an amateur journal which received the lucubrations of his +little circle. He enjoyed life like a boy, and shared its diversions +like a man about town. These superficial vivacities were the slighter +play of a self-consciousness which in its deeper recesses was steadily +gathering power, richness, and assurance. His keen social instincts +saved him from most of the infirmities of budding genius; but the poems +he contributed to Fox's journal during the following two years (1834-36) +show a significant predilection for imagining the extravagances and +fanaticisms of lonely self-centred minds. Joannes Agricola, sublime on +the dizzy pinnacle of his theological arrogance, looking up through the +gorgeous roof of heaven and assured that nothing can stay his course to +his destined abode, God's breast; Porphyria's lover, the more uncanny +fanatic who murders with a smile; the young man who in his pride of +power sees in the failures and mistakes of other men examples +providentially intended for his guidance,--it was such subjects as these +that touched Browning's fancy in those ardent and sanguine years. He +probably entered with keener relish into these extravagances than his +maturer wisdom approved. It is significant, at any rate, that when +_Agricola_ and _Porphyria's Lover_ were republished in _The Bells and +Pomegranates_ of 1842, a new title, _Madhouse Cells_, gave warning that +their insanity was not to be attributed to the poet. The verses "Still +ailing wind," he qualified in a yet more explicit fashion twenty years +later, for they are the young man's poem which James Lee's wife reads +"under the cliff," and subjects to her austere and disillusioned +criticism. But they mark the drift of Browning of the mid-'Thirties, so +far as they go, clearly enough. Fortunately, however, we are not +dependent upon these slight clues. For during the winter months of +1834-35 he was occupied in portraying a far more imposing embodiment of +the young man's pride of power, a Joannes Agricola of equally superb +confidence and far more magnificent ideals. In April 1835 Browning was +able to announce to his good friend Fox the completion of _Paracelsus_. + +He owed the suggestion to another new acquaintance, whose intimacy, like +that of the Russian consul-general, marks the fascination exercised by +young Browning upon men of antecedents, race, and social standing widely +different from his own. Count Amedee de Ripert Monclar was a French +royalist and refugee; he was also an enthusiastic student of history. +Possibly he recognised an affinity between the vaguely outlined dreams +of Pauline's lover and those of the historic Paracelsus; and he may well +have thought that the task of grappling with definite historic material +would steady the young poet's hand. We could applaud the acuteness of +the suggestion with more confidence had not the Count had an unlucky +afterthought, which he regarded as fatal, to the effect that the story +of Paracelsus, however otherwise adapted to the creator of Pauline's +lover, was entirely destitute of a Pauline. There was no opening for +love. But Pauline, with all her warm erotic charms and her sparkling +French prose, was the most unsubstantial and perishable thing in the +poem which bore her name: she and the spirit which begot her had +vanished like a noisome smoke, and Browning threw himself with +undiminished ardour upon the task of interpreting a career in which the +sole sources of romance and of tragedy appeared to be the passion for +knowledge and the arrogance of discovery. + +For it is quite clear that, whatever criticisms Browning finally brought +to bear upon Paracelsus, his attitude towards him, at no time hostile, +was at the outset rather that of a literary champion, vindicating a man +of original genius from the calumnies of ignorance and dulness. This +view, then rather unusual, was a very natural one for him to take, +Paracelsus being among the many keen interests of the elder Browning.[5] +It is a strange mistake to suppose, with a recent very ingenious +commentator, that Browning, eager to destroy the fallacy of intellectual +pride, singled out Paracelsus as a crucial example of the futilities of +intellect. On the contrary, he filled his annotations with documentary +evidences which attest not only the commanding scientific genius of +Paracelsus, but the real significance of his achievements, even for the +modern world. In the intellectual hunger of Paracelsus, in that +"insatiable avidity of penetrating the secrets of nature" which his +follower Bitiskius (approvingly quoted by Browning) ascribed to him, he +saw a fascinating realisation of his own vague and chaotic +"restlessness." Here was a spirit made up in truth "of an intensest +life," driven hither and thither by the hunger for intellectual mastery +of the universe; and Browning, far from convicting him of intellectual +futility, has made him actually divine the secret he sought, and, in one +of the most splendid passages of modern poetry, declare with his dying +lips a faith which is no less Browning's than his own. + +[Footnote 5: His library, as I am informed by Prof. Hall Griffin, +contained a copy of the works of Paracelsus, doubtless that used by his +son.] + +While he thus lavished his utmost power on portraying the soaring genius +of Paracelsus, as he conceived it, he turned impatiently away from the +husk of popular legend by which it was half obscured. He shrank from no +attested fact, however damaging; but he brushed away the accretions of +folklore, however picturesque. The attendant spirit who enabled +Paracelsus to work his marvellous cures, and his no less renowned Sword, +were for Browning contemptible futilities. Yet a different way of +treating legend lay nearer to the spirit of contemporary poetry. Goethe +had not long before evolved his Mephistopheles from the "attendant +spirit" attached by that same sixteenth century to the Paracelsus of +Protestantism, Faust; Tennyson was already meditating a scene full of +the enchantment of the Arthurian sword Excalibur. Browning's peremptory +rejection of such springs of poetry marks one of his limitations as a +poet. Much of the finest poetry of _Faust_, as, in a lower degree, of +the _Idylls_, is won by a subtle transformation of the rude stuff of +popular imagination: for Browning, with rare exceptions, this rude stuff +was dead matter, impervious to his poetic insight, and irresponsive to +the magic of his touch. Winnowing the full ears, catching eagerly the +solid and stimulating grain, he hardly heeded the golden gleam of the +chaff as it flew by. + +He did not, however, refrain from accentuating his view of the story by +interweaving in it some gracious figures of his own. Festus, the honest, +devoted, but somewhat purblind friend, who offers Paracelsus the +criticism of sober common-sense, and is vindicated--at the bar of +common-sense--by his great comrade's tragic end; Michal, an exquisitely +tender outline of womanhood, even more devoted, and even less +distinguished; and the "Italian poet" Aprile, a creature of genius, +whose single overpowering thought avails to break down the stronghold of +Paracelsus's else unassailable conviction. Aprile, who lives for love as +Paracelsus for knowledge, is not to be identified with Shelley, but he +has unmistakable Shelleyan traits, and the dreamy pageant of his +imaginary creations might stand for a summary review of Shelley's work. +Had Shelley lived, he might have come nearer than any one else to +fulfilling the rounded and complete ideal of which Paracelsus and Aprile +were dissevered halves: the greater part of his actual achievement +belonged, Browning evidently thought, to the category of those dazzling +but imperfectly objective visions which he ascribes to his Aprile. But +Shelley--the poet of _Alastor_, the passionate "lover of Love," was yet +the fittest embodiment of that other finer spiritual energy which +Paracelsus in his Faustian passion for knowledge had ruthlessly put from +him. Sixteen years later, Browning was to define in memorable words what +he held to be the "noblest and predominating characteristic of +Shelley"--viz., "his simultaneous perception of Power and Love in the +Absolute and of Beauty and Good in the concrete, while he throws, from +his poet's station between both, swifter, subtler, and more numerous +films for the connection of each with each than have been thrown by any +modern artificer of whom I have knowledge." This divining and +glorifying power it is that Browning ascribes to Love; the lack of it is +in his conception the tragic flaw which brings to the ground the +superbly gifted genius of Paracelsus. This genuine and original tragic +motive is not worked out with uniform power; his degeneration, his +failures, are painted with the uncertain hand of one little acquainted +with either. But all the splendour of a young imagination, charged with +the passion for truth and for beauty, glows in the pictures of the great +moments in Paracelsus's career,--the scene in the quiet Wuerzburg garden, +where he conquers the doubts of Festus and Michal by the magnificent +assurance of his faith in his divine calling; and that in the hospital +cell at Salzburg, where his fading mind anticipates at the point of +death the clearness of immortal vision as he lays bare the conquered +secret of the world. + +That Paracelsian secret of the world was for Browning doubtless the +truth, though he never again expounded it so boldly. Paracelsus's reply +to the anxious inquiry of Festus whether he is sure of God's +forgiveness: "I have lived! We have to live alone to well set forth +God's praise"--might stand as a text before the works of Browning. In +all life he sees the promise and the potency of God,--in the teeming +vitalities of the lower world, in the creative energies of man, in the +rich conquests of his Art, in his myth-woven Nature. "God is glorified +in Man, and to man's glory vowed I soul and limb." The historic +Paracelsus failed most signally in his attempt to connect vast +conceptions of Nature akin to this with the detail of his empiric +discoveries. Browning, with his mind, as always, set upon things +psychical, attributes to him a parallel incapacity to connect his +far-reaching vision of humanity with the gross, malicious, or blockish +specimens of the genus Man whom he encountered in the detail of +practice. It was the problem which Browning himself was to face, and in +his own view triumphantly to solve; and Paracelsus, rising into the +clearness of his dying vision, becomes the mouthpiece of Browning's own +criticism of his failure, the impassioned advocate of the Love which +with him is less an elemental energy drawing things into harmonious +fusion than a subtle weapon of the intellect, making it wise + + "To trace love's faint beginnings in mankind, + To know even hate is but a mask of love's, + To see a good in evil and a hope + In ill-success." + +Paracelsus is a clear self-revelation, rich and inspired where it marks +out the circle of sublime ideas within which the poet was through life +to move, and by which he was, as a man and a thinker, if not altogether +as a poet, to live; reticent where it approaches the complexities of the +concrete which the poet was not yet sufficiently mature to handle, +restrained where increased power was to breed a too generous +self-indulgence, a too manifest aptitude for glorying and drinking +deep. It is flushed with the peculiar mellow beauty which comes if at +all to the early manhood of genius,--a beauty like that of Amiens or +Lincoln in Gothic art, where the crudeness of youth is overworn, and the +problems of full maturity, though foreshadowed and foreseen, have not +yet begun to perplex or to disintegrate. + + + + +CHAPTER II. + +ENLARGING HORIZONS. _SORDELLO_. + + Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach, in meiner Brust, + Die eine will sich von der andern trennen; + Die eine haelt in derber Liebeslust + Sich an die Welt mit klammernden Organen; + Die andre hebt gewaltsam sich vom Dust + Zu den Gefilden hoher Ahnen. + + --_Faust_. + + +_Paracelsus_, though only a series of quasi-dramatic scenes, suggested +considerable undeveloped capacity for drama. From a career in which the +most sensational event was a dismissal from a professorship, and the +absorbing passion the thirst for knowledge, he had elicited a tragedy of +the scientific intellect. But it was equally obvious that the writer's +talent was not purely dramatic; and that his most splendid and original +endowments required some other medium than drama for their full +unfolding. The author of _Paracelsus_ was primarily concerned with +character, and with action as the mirror of character; agreeing in both +points substantially with the author of _Hamlet_. But while Browning's +energetic temperament habitually impelled him to represent character in +action, his imaginative strength did not lie in the region of action at +all, but in the region of thought; the kinds of expression of which he +had boundless command were rather those which analyse character than +those which exhibit it. The two impulses derived from temperament and +from imagination thus drew him in somewhat diverse directions; and for +some years the joy in the stir and stress and many-sided life of drama +competed with the powerful bent of the portrayer of souls, until the two +contending currents finally coalesced in the dramatic monologues of _Men +and Women_. In 1835 the solution was not yet found, but the five years +which followed were to carry Browning, not without crises of perplexity +and hesitation, far on his way towards it. _Paracelsus_ was no sooner +completed than he entered upon his kindred but more esoteric portrayal +of the soul-history of Sordello,--a study in which, with the dramatic +form, almost all the dramatic excellences of its predecessors are put +aside. But the poet was outgrowing the method; the work hung fire; and +we find him, before he had gone far with the perplexed record of that +"ineffectual angel," already "eager to freshen a jaded mind by diverting +it to the healthy natures of a grand epoch."[6] + +[Footnote 6: Preface to the first edition of _Strafford_ (subsequently +omitted).] + +The open-eyed man of the world and of affairs in Browning was plainly +clamouring for more expression than he had yet found. An invitation from +the first actor of the day to write a tragedy for him was not likely, +under these circumstances, to be declined; and during the whole winter +of 1836-37 the story of Sordello remained untold, while its author +plunged, with a security and relish which no one who knew only his +poetry could have foretold, into the pragmatic politics and diplomatic +intrigues of _Strafford_. The performance of the play on May 1, 1837 +introduced further distractions. And _Sordello_ had made little further +progress, when, in the April of the following year, Browning embarked on +a sudden but memorable trip to the South of Europe. It gave him his +first glimpse of Italy and of the Mediterranean, and plenty of the rough +homely intercourse with men which he loved. He travelled, in a fashion +that suited his purse and his hardy nature, by a merchant vessel from +London to the Adriatic. The food was uneatable, the horrors of dirt and +discomfort portentous; but he bore them cheerfully for the sake of one +advantage,--"the solitariness of the _one_ passenger among all those +rough new creatures, _I_ like it much, and soon get deep into their +friendship."[7] Grim tragedies of the high-seas, too, came within his +ken.[8] Two or three moments of the voyage stand out for us with +peculiar distinctness: the gorgeous sunset off Cadiz bay, when he +watched the fading outlines of Gibraltar and Cape St Vincent,--ghostly +mementos of England,--not as Arnold's weary Titan, but as a Herakles +stretching a hand of help across the seas; the other sunset on the +Mediterranean, when Etna loomed against the flaming sky;[9] and, between +them, that glaring noontide on the African shore, when the "solitary +passenger," weary of shipboard and sea sickness, longed for his good +horse York in the stable at home, and scribbled his ballad of brave +horses, _How they brought the Good News_, in a blank leaf of Bartoli's +_Simboli_. The voyage ended at Trieste; and thence he passed to Venice, +brooded among her ruined palaces over Sordello, and "English Eyebright" +and all the destiny and task of the poet; and so turned homeward, +through the mountains, gathering vivid glimpses as he went of "all my +places and castles,"[10] and laying by a memory, soon to germinate, of +"delicious Asolo," "palpably fire-clothed" in the glory of his young +imagination. + +[Footnote 7: _R.B._ to _E.B.B._, i. 505.] + +[Footnote 8: Cf. the long letter to Miss Haworth, Orr, _Life_, p. 96.] + +[Footnote 9: Cf. _Sordello_, bk. iii., end.] + +[Footnote 10: Ib., p. 99.] + +Thus when, in 1840, _Sordello_ was at length complete, it bore the +traces of many influences and many moods. It reflected the expanding +ideals and the critical turning-points of four years of his life. In the +earlier books the brilliant yet self-centred poet of _Paracelsus_ is +still paramount, and even the "oddish boy" who had shyly evolved +_Pauline_ is not entirely effaced. But in the later books we recognise +without difficulty the man who has mixed with the larger world, has won +some fame in letters, has immersed himself in the stirring atmosphere of +a supreme national conflict, has seen Italy, and has, in the solitude +and detachment from his _milieu_ which foreign travel brings, girded up +his loins anew for a larger and more exacting poetic task. The tangled +political dissensions of the time are set before us with the baffling +allusiveness of the expert. The Italian landscape is painted, not with +richer imagination, for nothing in Browning exceeds some passages of the +earlier books, but with more depth of colouring, more precision of +contour and expression. And he has taken the "sad disheveled form," +Humanity, for his bride, the mate of an art which will disdain no evil +and turn away from nothing common, in the service of man. Doubtless the +result was not all gain. The intermittent composition and the shifting +points of view add an element of real ambiguity and indecision to faults +of expression which mainly spring from the swiftness and discursiveness +of a brilliant and athletic intellect. The alleged "obscurity" of the +poem is in great part a real obscurity; the profiles are at times not +merely intricate, but blurred. But he had written nothing yet, and he +was to write little after, which surpasses the finest pages of +_Sordello_ in close-packed, if somewhat elusive, splendour; the soil, as +he wrote of Italy, is full of loose fertility, and gives out +intoxicating odours at every footfall. Moreover, he can now paint the +clash and commotion of crowds, the turmoil of cities and armies, with +superb force--a capacity of which there is hardly a trace in +_Paracelsus_. Sordello himself stands out less clearly than Paracelsus +from the canvas; but the sympathetic reader finally admits that this +visionary being, who gleams ghostlike at the end of all the avenues and +vistas of the poem, whom we are always looking at but never rightly see, +is an even more fascinating figure. + +He is however less historical, in spite of the abstruse historic +background upon which he moves. Of the story of Paracelsus Browning +merely reinterpreted the recorded facts; whereas he brushes aside the +greater part of the Sordello story, as told confusedly and +inconsistently by Italian and Provencal tradition. The whole later +career of the Mantuan poet as an accomplished and not unsuccessful man +of the world, as the friend of Raymond of Toulouse and Charles of Anjou, +rewarded with ample estates by the latter for substantial services,--is +either rejected as myth, or purposely ignored. To all appearance, the +actual Sordello by no means lacked ability to "fit to the finite" such +"infinity" as he possessed. And if he had the chance, as is obscurely +hinted at the close, of becoming, like Dante, the "Apollo" of the +Italian people, he hardly missed it "through disbelief that anything was +to be done." But the outward shell of his career included some +circumstances which, had they befallen a Dante, might have deeply +moulded the history of Italy. His close relations with great Guelph and +Ghibelline families would have offered extraordinary opportunities to a +patriot of genius, which, for the purposes of patriotism, remained +unused. Yet Dante, a patriot of genius if ever there was one, had given +Sordello a position of extraordinary honour in the _Purgatory_, had +allowed him to illuminate the darkness of Virgil, and to guide both the +great poets towards the Gate. The contrast offered an undeniable +problem. But Dante had himself hinted the solution by placing Sordello +among those dilatory souls whose tardy repentance involved their sojourn +in the Ante-purgatory. To a mind preoccupied, like Browning's, with the +failures of aspiring souls, this hint naturally appealed. He imagined +his Sordello, too, as a moral loiterer, who, with extraordinary gifts, +failed by some inner enervating paralysis[11] to make his spiritual +quality explicit; and who impressed contemporaries sufficiently to start +a brilliant myth of what he did not do, but had to wait for recognition +until he met the eye and lips of Dante. It is difficult not to suspect +the influence of another great poet. _Sordello_ has no nearer parallel +in literature than Goethe's _Tasso_, a picture of the eternal antagonism +between the poet and the world, for which Bordello's failure to "fit to +the finite his infinity" might have served as an apt motto. Browning has +nowhere to our knowledge mentioned _Tasso_; but he has left on record +his admiration of the beautiful sister-drama _Iphigenie_.[12] + +[Footnote 11: + "Ah but to find +A certain mood enervate such a mind," &c. + --_Works_, i. 122.] + +[Footnote 12: _To E.B.B._, July 7, 1846. He is "vexed" at Landor's +disparagement of the play, and quotes with approval Landor's earlier +declaration that "nothing so Hellenic had been written these two +thousand years."] + +The elaboration of this conception is, however, entirely Browning's +own, and discloses at every point the individual quality of his mind. +Like _Faust_, like the Poet in the _Palace of Art_, Sordello bears the +stamp of an age in which the ideal of intellect, art, culture, and the +ideal of humanity, of social service, have both become potent +inspirations, often in apparent conflict, and continually demanding a +solution of their differences. Faust breaks away from the narrow +pedantries of the schools in order to heap upon his breast the weal and +woe of mankind, and to draw all their life and thought into the compass +of his mind. Tennyson's "glorious devil" (by a curious irony intended +for no other than Faust's creator) sets up his lordly pleasure-house +apart from the ways of men, until at last, confuted by experience, he +renounces his folly. _Sordello_ cannot claim the mature and classical +brilliance of the one, nor the limpid melodious beauty of the other; but +it approaches _Faust_ itself in its subtle soundings of the mysteries of +the intellectual life. It is a young poet's attempt to cope with the +problem of the poet's task and the poet's function, the relation of art +to life, and of life to art. Neither Goethe nor Tennyson thought more +loftily of the possibilities of poetic art. And neither insisted more +peremptorily--or rather assumed more unquestioningly--that it only +fulfils these possibilities when the poet labours in the service of man. +He is "earth's essential king," but his kingship rests upon his carrying +out the kingliest of mottoes--"Ich dien." Browning all his life had a +hearty contempt for the foppery of "Art for Art," and he never conveyed +it with more incisive brilliance than in the sketch of Bordello's +"opposite," the Troubadour Eglamor. + + "How he loved that art! + The calling marking him a man apart + From men--one not to care, take counsel for + Cold hearts, comfortless faces, ... since verse, the gift + Was his, and men, the whole of them, must shift + Without it." + +To Eglamor his art is a mysterious ritual, of which he is the sacrosanct +priest, and his happy rhyme the divine response vouchsafed to him in +answer. Such beauty as he produces is no effluence from a soul mating +itself, like Wordsworth's, "in love and holy passion with the universe," +but a cunning application of the approved recipes for effective writing +current in the literary guild;-- + + "He, no genius rare, + Transfiguring in fire or wave or air + At will, but a poor gnome that, cloistered up + In some rock-chamber, with his agate-cup, + His topaz-rod, his seed-pearl, in these few + And their arrangement finds enough to do + For his best art."[13] + +[Footnote 13: Works, i. 131.] + +From these mysticisms and technicalities of Troubadour and all other +poetic guilds Browning decisively detaches his poet. Sordello is not a +votary of poetry; he does not "cultivate the Muse"; he does not even +prostrate himself before the beauty and wonder of the visible universe. +Poetry is the atmosphere in which he lives; and in the beauty without he +recognises the "dream come true" of a soul which (like that of Pauline's +lover) "existence" thus "cannot satiate, cannot surprise." "Laugh thou +at envious fate," adorers cry to this inspired Platonist, + + "Who, from earth's simplest combination ... + Dost soar to heaven's complexest essence, rife + With grandeurs, unaffronted to the last, + Equal to being all."[14] + +[Footnote 14: Works, i. 122.] + +And, in truth, his power of imaginative apprehension has no bounds. From +the naive self-reflection of his boyish dreams he passes on to visions +which embrace a continually fuller measure of life, until he forestalls +the sublime Dantesque conception of a poetry vast and deep as humanity, +where every soul will stand forth revealed in its naked truth. But he +cannot, like Dante, put his vast conceptions into the shackles of +intelligible speech. His uncompromising "infinity" will not comply with +finite conditions, and he remains an inefficient and inarticulate +genius, a Hamlet of poetry. + +In the second half of the poem the Hamlet of poetry becomes likewise a +Hamlet of politics. He aspires to serve the people otherwise than by +holding up to them the mirror of an all-revealing poetry. Though by +birth associated with the aristocratic and imperial Ghibellines, his +natural affinity is clearly with the Church, which in some sort stood +for the people against the nobles, and for spirit against brute force. +We see him, now, a frail, inspired Shelleyan[15] democrat, pleading the +Guelph cause before the great Ghibelline soldier Salinguerra,--as he had +once pitted the young might of native song against the accomplished +Troubadour Eglamor. Salinguerra is the foil of the political, as Eglamor +of the literary, Sordello, and the dramatic interest of the whole poem +focusses in those two scenes. He had enough of the lonely inspiration of +genius to vanquish the craftsman, but too little of its large humanity +to cope with the astute man of the world. When Salinguerra, naturally +declining his naive entreaty that he should put his Ghibelline sword at +the service of the Guelph, offers Sordello, on his part, the command of +the imperial forces in Italy if he will remain true to the Ghibelline +cause, he makes this finite world more alluring than it had ever been +before to the "infinite" Sordello. After a long struggle, he renounces +the offer, and--dies, exhausted with the strain of choice. + +[Footnote 15: There are other Shelleyan traits in _Sordello_--e.g., the +young witch image (as in _Pauline_) at the opening of the second book.] + +What was Browning's judgment upon Sordello? Does he regard him as an +idealist of aims too lofty for success in this world, and whose +"failure" implied his triumph in another, where his "broken arc" would +become the "perfect round"? Assuredly not. That might indeed be his +destiny, but Browning makes it perfectly clear that he failed, not +because his ideal was incommensurate with the conditions in which he +lived, but because he lacked the supreme gift by which the greatest of +souls may find their function and create their sphere in the least +promising _milieu_,--a controlling and guiding passion of love. With +compassionate tenderness, as of a father to his wayward child, Browning +in the closing pages of the poem lays his finger on the ailing place. +"Ah, my Sordello, I this once befriend and speak for you." It was true +enough, in the past, that Soul, as belonging to Eternity, must needs +prove incomplete for Time. But is life to be therefore only a struggle +to escape from the shackles of the body? Is freedom only won by death? +No, rejoins the poet, and the reply comes from the heart of his poetry, +though at issue with much of his explicit doctrine; a harmony of soul +and body is possible here in which both fulfil their functions: + + "Like yonder breadth of watery heaven, a bay, + And that sky-space of water, ray for ray + And star for star, one richness where they mixed," + +the Soul seeing its way in Time without being either dazzled by, or +losing, its vision of Eternity, having the saving clue of Love. Dante, +for whom Love was the pervading spirit of the universe, and the +beginning and end of his inspiration, wrought his vision of eternal +truth and his experience of the passing lives of men into such a harmony +with unexampled power; and the comparison, implicit in every page of +_Sordello_, is driven home with almost scornful bitterness on the +last:-- + + "What he should have been, + Could be, and was not--the one step too mean + For him to take--we suffer at this day + Because of: Ecelin had pushed away + Its chance ere Dante could arrive and take + That step Sordello spurned, for the world's sake. + ... A sorry farce + Such life is, after all!" + +The publication of _Sordello_ in 1840 closes the first phase of +Browning's literary career. By the great majority of those who had +hailed the splendid promise of _Paracelsus_, the author of _Sordello_ +was frankly given up. Surprisingly few thought it worth while to wrestle +with the difficult book. It was the day of the gentle literary public +which had a few years before recoiled from _Sartor Resartus_, and which +found in the difficulty of a book the strongest presumption against it. +A later generation, leavened by Carlyle, came near to regarding +difficulty as a presumption in its favour, and this more strenuous and +athletic attitude towards literature was among the favouring conditions +which brought Browning at length into vogue. + + + + +CHAPTER III. + +MATURING METHODS. DRAMAS AND DRAMATIC LYRICS. + + Since Chaucer was alive and hale, + No man hath walk'd along our roads with step + So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue + So varied in discourse. + --LANDOR. + +The memorable moment when Browning, standing on the ruined palace-step +at Venice, had taken Humanity for his mate, opened an epoch in his +poetic life to which the later books of _Sordello_ form a splendid +prelude. For the Browning of 1840 it was no longer a sufficient task to +trace the epochs in the spiritual history of lonely idealists, to pursue +the problem of existence in minds themselves preoccupied with its +solution. "Soul" is still his fundamental preoccupation; but the +continued play of an eager intellect and vivacious senses upon life has +immensely multiplied the points of concrete experience which it vivifies +and transfigures to his eyes. It is as if a painter trained in the +school of Raphael or Lionardo had discovered that he could use the +minute and fearless brush of the Flemings in the service of their +ideals. He pursues soul in all its rich multiplicity, in the +tortuosities and dark abysses of character; he forces crowds of sordid, +grotesque, or commonplace facts to become its expressive speech; he +watches its thought and passion projected into the tide of affairs, +caught up in the clash and tangle of plot. In all these three ways the +Dramas and Dramatic Lyrics and Romances, which were to be his poetic +occupation during the Forties, detach themselves sharply from +_Paracelsus_ and the early books of _Sordello_. A poem like _The +Laboratory_ (1844), for instance, stands at almost the opposite pole of +art to these. All that Browning neglected or veiled in _Paracelsus_ he +here thrusts into stern relief. The passion and crime there faintly +discerned in the background of ideally beautiful figures are here his +absorbing theme. The curious technicalities of the chemist's workshop, +taken for granted in _Paracelsus_, are now painted with a realism +reminiscent of Romeo's Apothecary and _The Alchemist_. And the outward +drama of intrigue, completely effaced in _Paracelsus_ by the inward +drama of soul, sounds delusive scorn and laughter in the background, the +more sinister because it is not seen. These lyrics and romances are +"dramatic" not only in the sense that the speakers express, as Browning +insisted, other minds and sentiments than his own, but in the more +legitimate sense that they are plucked as it were out of the living +organism of a drama, all the vital issues of which can be read in their +self-revelation. + +A poet whose lyrics were of this type might be expected to find in drama +proper his free, full, and natural expression. This was not altogether +the case with Browning, who, despite an unquenchable appetency for +drama, did better work in his dramatic monologues than in his plays. The +drama alone allowed full scope for the development of plot-interest. But +it was less favourable to another yet more deeply rooted interest of +his. Not only did action and outward event--the stuff of drama--interest +Browning chiefly as "incidents in the development of soul," but they +became congenial to his art only as projected upon some other mind, and +tinged with its feeling and its thought. Half the value of a story for +him lay in the colours it derived from the narrator's personality; and +he told his own experience, as he uttered his own convictions, most +easily and effectively through alien lips. For a like reason he loved to +survey the slow continuities of actual events from the standpoint of a +given moment, under the conditions of perspective and illusion which it +imposed. Both these conditions were less well satisfied by drama, which +directly "imitates action," than by the dramatic speech or monologue, +which imitates action as focussed in a particular mind. And Browning's +dramatic genius found its most natural and effective outlet in the +wealth of implicit drama which he concentrated in these salient moments +tense with memory and hope. The insuppressible alertness and enterprise +of his own mind tells upon his portrayal of these intense moments. He +sees passion not as a blinding fume, but as a flame, which enlarges the +area, and quickens the acuteness, of vision; the background grows alive +with moving shapes. To the stricken girl in _Ye Banks and Braes_ memory +is torture, and she thrusts convulsively from her, like dagger-points, +the intolerable loveliness of the things that remind her of her love; +whereas the victim of _The Confessional_ pours forth from her frenzied +lips every detail of her tragic story. + +So in _The Laboratory_, once more, all the strands of the implicit drama +are seen like incandescent filaments in the glow of a single moment of +fierce impassioned consciousness:-- + + "He is with her, and they know that I know + Where they are, what they do: they believe my tears flow + While they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to the drear + Empty church, to pray God in, for them!--I am here." + +Both kinds--drama and dramatic lyric--continued to attract him, while +neither altogether satisfied; and they engaged him concurrently +throughout the decade. + +In this power of seizing the salient moment of a complex situation and +laying bare at a stroke all its issues, Browning's monologues have no +nearer parallel than the Imaginary Conversations of Landor, which +illuminate with so strange a splendour so many unrecorded scenes of the +great drama of history. To Landor, according to his wife's testimony, +Browning "always said that he owed more than to any contemporary"; to +Landor he dedicated the last volume of the _Bells and Pomegranates_. +Landor, on his part, hailed in Browning the "inquiring eye" and varied +discourse of a second Chaucer. It is hardly rash to connect with his +admiration for the elder artist Browning's predilection for these brief +revealing glimpses into the past. Browning cared less for the actual +_personnel_ of history, and often imagined his speakers as well as their +talk; but he imagined them with an equal instinct for seizing the +expressive traits of nationalities and of times, and a similar, if more +spontaneous and naive, anti-feudal temper. The French camp and the +Spanish cloister, _Gismond_ and _My Last Duchess_ (originally called +_France_ and _Italy_), are penetrated with the spirit of peoples, ages, +and institutions as seized by a historical student of brilliant +imagination and pronounced antipathies. + +But in one point Landor and Browning stood at opposite poles. Landor, +far beyond any contemporary English example, had the classic sense and +mastery of style; Browning's individuality of manner rested on a robust +indifference to all the traditional conventions of poetic speech. The +wave of realism which swept over English letters in the early 'Forties +broke down many barriers of language; the new things that had to be said +demanded new ways of saying them; homely, grotesque, or sordid life was +rendered in sordid, grotesque, and homely terms. _Pickwick_ in 1837 had +established the immense vogue of Dickens, the _Heroes_ in 1840 had +assured the imposing prestige of Carlyle; and the example of both made +for the freest and boldest use of language. Across the Channel the +stupendous fabric of the _Comedie Humaine_ was approaching completion, +and Browning was one of Balzac's keenest English readers. Alone among +the greater poets of the time Browning was in genius and temperament a +true kinsman to these great romantic realists; his poetry, as it emerged +in the rich dramatic harvest of the 'Forties, is the nearest counterpart +and analogue of their prose. + + +I. + + +Browning's first drama, as is well known, was the result of a direct +application from Macready. Introduced in November 1835 by his "literary +father" Fox, Browning immediately interested the actor. A reading of +_Paracelsus_ convinced him that Browning could write, if not a good +play, yet one with an effective tragic _role_ for himself. Strained +relations with his company presently made him eager to procure this +service. Browning, suddenly appealed to (in May 1836), promptly +suggested _Strafford_. He was full of the subject, having recently +assisted his friend Forster in compiling his life. The actor closed with +the suggestion, and a year later (May 1, 1837) the play was performed +at Covent Garden. The fine acting of Macready, and of Helen Faucit, who +was now associated with him, procured the piece a moderate success. It +went through five performances. + +Browning's _Strafford_, like his _Paracelsus_, was a serious attempt to +interpret a historic character; and historic experts like Gardiner have, +as regards the central figure, emphatically indorsed his judgment. The +other persons, and the action itself, he treated more freely, with +evident regard to their value as secondary elements in the portrayal of +Stafford; and it is easy to trace in the whole manner of his innovations +the well-marked ply of his mind. The harsh and rugged fanaticisms, the +splendid frivolities, of the seventeenth century, fade and lose +substance in an atmosphere charged with idealism and self-consciousness. +Generous self-devotion is not the universal note, but it is the +prevailing key, that in which the writer most naturally thinks and most +readily invents. Strafford's devotion to Charles and Pym's to his +country were historical; but Browning accentuates Pym's heroism by +making the man he sends to the scaffold his old friend; and devotion is +the single trait of the beautiful but imaginary character of Lucy +Carlisle. "Give me your notion of a thorough self-devotement, +self-forgetting," he wrote a few years later to Miss Flower: the idea +seems to have been already busy moulding his still embryonic invention +of character. Something of the visionary exaltation of the dying +Paracelsus thus hangs over the final scene in which Strafford goes to +meet the fate which the one friend imposes on him and the other cannot +turn aside. All the characters have something of the "deep +self-consciousness" of the author of _Pauline_. Not that they are, any +of them, drawn with very profound grasp of human nature or a many-sided +apprehension of life. They are either absolutely simple, like Lady +Carlisle, or built upon a rivalry or conflict of simple elements, like +Strafford and Charles; but there is so much restless vivacity in their +discourse, the broad surface of mood is so incessantly agitated by the +play and cross-play of thought and feeling, that they seem more complex +than they are. + +Though played for only five nights, _Strafford_ had won a success which +might well have dazzled a young and untried aspirant, and which was +sufficiently impressive to shrewd men of business like Messrs Longman to +induce them to undertake its publication free of cost. It appeared in +April, with an interesting preface, subsequently withdrawn, from which a +significant sentence has already been quoted. The composition of +_Strafford_ had not only "freshened a jaded mind" but permanently +quickened his zest for the drama of political crises. New projects for +historical dramas chased and jostled one another through his busy brain, +which seems to have always worked most prosperously in a highly charged +atmosphere. I am going "to begin ... thinking a Tragedy," he wrote +characteristically to Miss Haworth--"(an Historical one, so I shall want +heaps of criticisms on _Strafford_), and I want to have _another_ +tragedy in prospect; I write best so provided."[16] + +[Footnote 16: Orr, _Life_, p. 103.] + +The "Historical Tragedies" here foreshadowed, _King Victor and King +Charles_ and _The Return of the Druses_, were eventually published as +the Second and Fourth of the _Bells and Pomegranates_, in 1842-43. How +little Browning cared for history except as a quarry for psychical +problems, how little concern he had at bottom with the changing drama of +national life, is clear from the directions in which he now sought his +good. In _Strafford_ as in _Paracelsus_, and even in _Sordello_, the +subject had made some appeal to the interest in great epochs and famous +men. Henceforth his attitude, as a dramatist, to history is a curious +blend of the historical specialist who explores the recondite byways of +history, and the romantic poet who abandons actuality altogether. He +seeks his heroes in remote sequestered corners of the world,--Sardinia, +Juliers, Lebanon; but actual historic research gradually yields ground +to a free invention which, however, always simulates historic truth. +_King Victor and King Charles_ contains far less poetry than +_Paracelsus_, but it was the fruit of historic studies no less severe. +There was material for genuine tragedy in the story. The old king, who +after fifty years of despotic rule shifts the crown to the head of his +son with the intention of still pulling the wires behind the scenes, +but, finding that Charles means to rule as well as reign, clutches +angrily at his surrendered crown,--this King Victor has something in +him of Lear, something of the dying Henry IV. But history provided more +sober issues, and Browning's temperament habitually inclined him to +stave off the violence of tragic passion which disturbs the subtle +eddyings of thought and feeling. Charles is no Regan, hardly even an +Albany, no weakling either, but a man of sensitive conscience, who +shifts and gyrates responsively to the complex play of motive which +Browning brings to bear upon him. Reluctantly he orders Victor's arrest, +and when the old man, baffled and exasperated, is brought before him and +imperiously demands the crown, he puts it upon his father's head. +Neither character is drawn with the power of Strafford, but the play is +largely built upon the same contrasts between personal devotion and +political expediency, the untutored idealism of youth and the ruses or +rigidity of age. This was a type of dramatic action which Browning +imagined with peculiar power and insight, for it bodied forth a contrast +between contending elements of his own nature. Towards this type all his +drama tended to gravitate. In _The Return of the Druses_ Browning's +native bent can be more freely studied, for history has contributed only +the general situation. His turn for curious and far-fetched incident is +nowhere better illustrated than in this tangled intrigue carried on +between Frankish Hospitallers, Venetians, and Druses of Lebanon in a +lonely island of the Aegean where none of the three are at home. A +political revolution--the revolt of the Druses against their Frankish +lords--provides the outer momentum of the action; but the central +interest is concentrated upon a "Soul's tragedy," in which the conflict +of races goes on within the perplexed and paralysed bosom of a single +man. Djabal, the Druse patriot brought up in Brittany, analyses his own +character with the merciless self-consciousness of Browning himself: + + "I with my Arab instinct--thwarted ever + By my Frank policy, and with in turn + My Frank brain thwarted by my Arab heart-- + While these remained in equipoise, I lived-- + Nothing; had either been predominant, + As a Frank schemer or an Arab mystic + I had been something." + +The conflict between policy and devotion is now transferred to the arena +of a single breast, where its nature is somewhat too clearly understood +and formulated. The "Frank schemer" conceives the plan of turning the +Druse superstition to account by posing as an incarnation of their +Founder. But the "Arab mystic" is too near sharing the belief to act his +part with ease, and while he is still paltering the devoted Anael slays +the Prefect. The play is thenceforth occupied, ostensibly, with the +efforts of the Christian authorities to discover and punish the +murderers. Its real subject is the subtle changes wrought in Djabal and +Anael by their gradual transition from the relation of prophet and +devotee to that of lovers. Her passion, even before he comes to share +it, has begun to sap the security of his false pretensions: he longs, +not at first to disavow them, but to make them true: he will be the +prophetic helper of his people in very deed. To the outer world he +maintains his claim with undiminished boldness and complete success; but +the inner supports are gradually giving way, Arab mystic and Frank +schemer lose their hold, and + + "A third and better nature rises up, + My mere man's nature." + +Anael, a simpler character than any previous woman of the plays, thus +has a more significant function. Lady Carlisle fumbles blindly with the +dramatic issues without essentially affecting them; Polyxena furthers +them with loyal counsel, but is not their main executant. Anael, in her +fervid devotion, not only precipitates the catastrophe, but emancipates +her lover from the thraldom of his lower nature. In her Browning for the +first time in drama represented the purifying power of Love. The +transformations of soul by soul were already beginning to occupy +Browning's imagination. The poet of _Cristina_ and _Saul_ was already +foreshadowed. But nothing as yet foreshadowed the kind of spiritual +influence there portrayed--that which, instead of making its way through +the impact of character upon character, passion upon passion, is +communicated through an unconscious glance or a song. For one who +believed as fixedly as Browning in the power of these moments to change +the prevailing bias of character and conduct, such a conception was full +of implicit drama. A chance inspiration led him to attempt to show how +a lyric soul flinging its soul-seed unconsciously forth in song might +become the involuntary _deus ex machina_ in the tangle of passion and +plot through which she moved, resolving its problems and averting its +catastrophes. + +The result was a poem which Elizabeth Barrett "could find it in her +heart to envy" its author, which Browning himself (in 1845) liked better +than anything else he had yet done.[17] It has won a not less secure +place in the affections of all who care for Browning at all. It was +while walking alone in a wood near Dulwich, we are told by Mrs Orr, that +"the idea flashed upon him of some one walking thus through life; one +apparently too obscure to leave a trace of his or her passage, yet +exercising a lasting though unconscious influence at every step of it; +and the image shaped itself into the little silk-winder of Asolo."[18] +The most important effect of this design was to call out Browning's +considerable powers of rendering those gross, lurid, unspiritualised +elements of the human drama upon which Pippa was to flash her +transforming spell. His somewhat burly jocosity had expatiated freely in +letters; but he had done nothing which, like the cynical chaff of his +art students, suggests the not unskilful follower of Balzac and Dickens. +And he had given no hint of the elemental tragic power shown in the +great Ottima and Sebald scene, nor of the fierce and cruel sensuality, +the magnificence in sin, of Ottima herself. + +[Footnote 17: _Letters of R. and E.B.B._, i. 28.] + +[Footnote 18: Orr, _Handbook_, p. 55.] + +_Pippa Passes_, the most romantic in conception of all Browning's plays, +thus first disclosed his genius for realism. _Strafford_, _King Victor_, +_The Druses_ are couched in the tempered ideality of blank verse; here +we pass to and fro from the airiest lyric to the most massive and sinewy +prose. It counted for something, too, that Italy, and above all the +little hill-town in which the scene was laid, was a vivid personal +memory, not a vague region of fancy like his Sardinia or Lebanon. Asolo, +with its walls and turret, its bishop's palace and duomo, and girls +sitting on the steps, its upland farms among the cherry orchards, its +beetles sparkling along the dust, its "warm slow yellow moonlit nights" +of May, and "glaring pomps" of June,--Asolo, with its legend of "Kate +the queen" and her carolling page, lives as few other spots do for +Browning's readers. Pippa herself, in her exquisite detachment from the +sordid humanity amid which she moves, might have appeared too like a +visionary presence, not of earth though on it, had she not been brought +into touch, at so many points, with things that Browning had seen. +_Pippa Passes_ has, among Browning's dramas, the same kind of peculiar +interest which belongs to the _Tempest_ and to _Faust_ among +Shakespeare's and Goethe's. Faery and devilry were not Browning's +affair; but, within the limits of his resolute humanism, _Pippa Passes_ +is an ideal construction, shadowing forth, under the semblance of a +single definite bit of life, the controlling elements, as Browning +imagined them, in all life. For Browning, too, the world teemed with +Stephanos and Trinculos, Sebastians and Antonios; it was, none the less, +a magical Isle, where strange catastrophes and unsuspected revolutions +sprang suddenly into being at the unseen carol of Ariel as he passed. +Browning's Ariel is the organ of a spiritual power which, unlike +Prospero, seeks not merely to detect and avert crime, or merely to +dismiss the would-be criminal, forgiven, to "live and deal with others +better," but to renovate character; to release men from the bondage of +their egoisms by those influences, slight as a flower-bell or a sunset +touch, which renew us by setting all our aims and desires in a new +proportion. + + +II. + + +Browning's first four plays seemed to mark a growing neglect of the +requirements and traditions of the stage. He might even appear to have +renounced the stage altogether when in 1841 he arranged with Moxon to +publish his writings in a cheap pamphlet form. The first number of +_Bells and Pomegranates_ contained the least theatrical of his dramas, +_Pippa Passes_. "Two or three years ago" he declared in the preface (not +reprinted), "I wrote a play, about which the chief matter I much care to +recollect at present is that a Pit-full of good-natured people applauded +it. Ever since I have been desirous of doing something in the same way +that should better reward their attention. What follows I mean for the +first of a series of Dramatical Pieces, to come out at intervals; and I +amuse myself by fancying that the cheap mode in which they appear will +for once help me to a sort of Pit-audience again." + +But Browning's ambition for fame as a maker of plays was still keen, and +nothing but a renewed invitation to write for the stage was needed to +lure him back into tentative compliance with its ways. In the course of +1841 Macready intervened with a request for another play from the author +of _Strafford_.[19] Thereupon Browning produced with great rapidity _A +Blot in the 'Scutcheon_. After prolonged and somewhat sordid green-room +vicissitudes, it was performed on Feb. 11, 1843. Macready, its first +begetter, did his best to wreck it; the majority of the players refused +to understand their parts; but through the fine acting of Helen Faucit +(Mildred) and Phelps (Lord Tresham), it achieved a moderate but brief +success. + +[Footnote 19: The date is fixed by Browning's statement (Orr, p. 119).] + +The choice of subject indicates, as has been said, a desire to make +terms with stage tradition. But the ordinary theatre-goer, who went +expecting to witness what the title appeared to promise, found himself, +as the play proceeded, perplexed and out of his bearings. An English +nobleman, with the deep-engrained family pride of his order, had +suffered, or was to suffer, dishonour. But this seemingly commonplace +_motif_ was developed in a strange and unfamiliar ethical atmosphere--an +atmosphere of moral ideas which seemed to embrace both those who upheld +the feudal honour and those who "blotted" it; to hint at a purity deeper +than sin. In a more sinister sense than _Colombe's Birthday_, this play +might have been prefaced by the beautiful motto of its successor:-- + + "Ivy and violet, what do ye here + With blossom and shoot in the warm spring weather + Hiding the arms of Montecchi and Vere?" + +The love of Mildred and Mertoun, which blots the Tresham 'scutcheon, is +in origin as innocent as that which breaks into flower across the royal +ambitions of Colombe; and their childlike purity of passion becomes, in +spite of the wrong to which it has led them, the reconciling fact upon +which at the close all animosities and resentments die away. The +conception is genuinely tragic, for the doom which descends upon them +all is a Nemesis which they have all contributed to provoke, but which +none of them deserves; and which precisely the blended nobility and +naivete of Mildred and Mertoun prevents from passing by them altogether. +More mature or less sensitive lovers would have found an issue from the +situation as easily as an ordinary Hamlet from his task of vengeance. +But Mertoun and Mildred are at once too timid and too audacious, too +tremulous in their consciousness of guilt, too hardy and reckless in +their mutual devotion, to carry through so difficult a game. Mertoun +falters and stammers in his suit to Tresham; Mildred stands mute at her +brother's charge, incapable of evasion, only resolute not to betray. +Yet these same two children in the arts of politic self-defence are +found recklessly courting the peril of midnight meetings in Mildred's +chamber with the aid of all the approved resources and ruses of +romance--the disguise, the convenient tree, the signal set in the +window, the lover's serenade. And when the lover, who dared all risks to +his lady and to himself for a stolen interview with her night by night, +finally encounters Tresham, he is instantly paralysed, and will not even +lift a sword in his own defence. Upon this union of boundless daring for +one another's sake and sensibility to the shame of having wronged the +house and blotted the 'scutcheon Mertoun's fate hangs, and with his +Mildred's, and with hers Tresham's. + +Beside the tragedy and the stain of the love of Mertoun and Mildred, +Browning characteristically sets the calm, immaculate, cousinly +affection of Gwendolen and Austin. One has a glimpse here of his +habitual criticism of all satisfied attainment, of all easy completeness +on a low plane. It is Gwendolen herself who half disarms that criticism, +or makes it, as applied to her, more pathetic than trenchant by +instantly detecting and proclaiming the different quality of Mertoun's +love. "Mark him, Austin: that's true love! Ours must begin again." In +Tresham Browning seems to have designed to portray the finest type of +ancestral pride. He is "proud" of his "interminable line," because the +men were all "paladins" and the women all of flawless honour; and he +has the chivalrous tenderness of ideal knighthood, as well as its +honourable pride. When Mertoun has received his death-stroke and told +his story, the tenderness comes out; the sullied image of his +passionately loved sister not only recovers its appeal, but rises up +before him in mute intolerable reproach; and Mildred has scarcely +breathed her last in his arms when Tresham succumbs to the poison he has +taken in remorse for his hasty act. It is unlucky that this tragic +climax, finely conceived as it is, is marred by the unconscious +burlesque of his "Ah,--I had forgotten: I am dying." In such things one +feels Browning's want of the unerring sureness of a great dramatist at +the crucial moments of action. + +Although not brilliantly successful on the boards, _A Blot in the +'Scutcheon_ made a deep impression upon the more competent part of the +audience. For Browning himself the most definite result was that +Macready passed out of his life--for twenty years they never met--and +that his most effective link with the stage was thus finally severed. +But his more distant and casual relations with it were partly balanced +by the much enlarged understanding of dramatic effect which he had by +this time won; and _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_ was followed by a drama +which attains a beauty and charm not far below that of _Pippa Passes_ +under the conditions of a regular dramatic plot. The ostensible subject +of _Colombe's Birthday_ is a political crisis on the familiar lines;--an +imperilled throne in the centre of interest, a background of vague +oppression and revolt. But as compared with _King Victor_ or _The +Druses_ the dispute is harmless, the tumult of revolution easily +overheard. The diplomatic business is not etherealised into romance, +like the ladies' embassy in _Love's Labour's Lost_; but neither is it +allowed to become grave or menacing. Berthold's arrival to present his +claim to the government of this miniature state affects us somewhat like +the appearance of a new and formidable player in some drawing-room +diversion; and the "treason" of the courtiers like the "unfairness" of +children at play. Nevertheless, the victory of love over political +interest which the motto foreshadows is not accomplished without those +subtle fluctuations and surprises which habitually mark the conduct of +Browning's plots. The alternative issues gain in seriousness and +ideality as we proceed, and Browning has nowhere expressed the ideal of +sovereignty more finely than it is expressed in this play, by the man +for whose sake a sovereign is about to surrender her crown.[20] Colombe +herself is one of Browning's most gracious and winning figures. She +brings the ripe decision of womanhood to bear upon a series of difficult +situations without losing the bright glamour of her youth. Her inborn +truth and nature draw her on as by a quiet momentum, and gradually +liberate her from the sway of the hollow fictions among which her lot is +cast. Valence, the outward instrument of this liberation, is not the +least noble of that line of chivalrous lovers which reaches from Gismond +to Caponsacchi. With great delicacy the steps are marked in this inward +and spiritual "flight" of Colombe. Valence's "way of love" is to make +her realise the glory and privileges of the rulership which places her +beyond his reach, at the very moment when she is about to resign it in +despair. She discovers the needs of the woman and the possibilities of +power at the same time, and thus is brought, by Valence's means, to a +mood in which Prince Berthold's offer of his hand and crown together +weighs formidably, for a moment, against Valence's offer of his love +alone, until she discovers that Berthold is the very personation, in +love and in statecraft alike, of the fictions from which she had +escaped. Then, swiftly recovering herself, she sets foot finally on the +firm ground where she had first sought her "true resource." + +[Footnote 20: This fine speech of Valence to the greater glory of his +rival (Act iv.) is almost too subtle for the stage. Browning with good +reason directed its omission unless "a very good Valence" could be +found.] + +Berthold, like Blougram, Ogniben, and many another of Browning's mundane +personages, is a subtler piece of psychology than men of the type of +Valence, in whom his own idealism flows freely forth. He comes before us +with a weary nonchalance admirably contrasted with the fiery intensity +of Valence. He means to be emperor one day, and his whole life is a +process of which that is to be the product; but he finds the process +unaffectedly boring. Without relaxing a whit in the mechanical pursuit +of his end, he views life with much mental detachment, and shows a cool +and not unsympathetic observation of men who pursue other ideals, as +well as an abundance of critical irony towards those who apparently +share his own. An adept in courtly arts, and owing all his successes to +courtly favour, he meets the assiduities of other courtiers with open +contempt. His ends are those of Laertes or Fortinbras, and he is quite +capable of the methods of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; but he regards +ends and methods alike with the sated distaste of Hamlet. By birth and +principle a man of action, he has, even more than most of Browning's men +of action, the curious introspectiveness of the philosophic onlooker. He +"watches his mind," and if he does not escape illusions, recognises and +exposes them with ironical candour. Few of Browning's less right-minded +persons attain final insight at less cost to dramatic propriety than +Berthold when he pronounces his final verdict:-- + + "All is for the best. + Too costly a flower were this, I see it now, + To pluck and set upon my barren helm + To wither,--any garish plume will do." + +_Colombe's Birthday_ was published in 1844 as No. 6 of the _Bells_, but +had for the present no prospect of the stage. Nine years later, however, +the loyal Phelps, who had so doughtily come to the rescue of its +predecessor, put it successfully on the boards of his theatre at +Sadler's Wells. + +The most buoyant of optimists has moments of self-mockery, and the +hardiest believer in ideal truth moods in which poetry seems the phantom +and prose the fact. Such a mood had its share in colouring the dramatic +sketch which, it is now pretty evident, Browning wrote not long after +finishing _Colombe's Birthday_.[21] That play is a beautiful triumph of +poetry over prose, of soul and heart over calculation and business. _A +Soul's Tragedy_ exhibits the inverse process: the triumph of mundane +policy and genial _savoir faire_ in the person of Ogniben over the +sickly and equivocal "poetry" of Chiappino. Browning seems to have +thrown off this bitter parody of his own idealisms in a mood like that +in which Ibsen conceived the poor blundering idealist of the _Wild +Duck_. Chiappino is Browning's Werle; the reverse side of a type which +he had drawn with so much indulgence in the Luigi of _Pippa Passes_. +Plainly, it was a passing mood; as plainly, a mood which, from the high +and luminous vantage-ground of 1846, he could look back upon with +regret, almost with scorn. His intercourse with Elizabeth Barrett was +far advanced before she was at length reluctantly allowed to see it. +"For _The Soul's_ _Tragedy_," he wrote (Feb. 11)--"that will surprise +you, I think. There is no trace of you there,--you have not put out the +black face of _it_--it is all sneering and disillusion--and shall not be +printed but burned if you say the word." This word his correspondent, +needless to add, did not say; on the contrary, she found it even more +impressive than its successor _Luria_. This was, however, no tribute to +its stage qualities; for in hardly one of his plays is the stage more +openly ignored. The dramatic form, though still preserved, sets strongly +towards monologue; the entire second act foreshadows unmistakably the +great portrait studies of _Men and Women_; it might be called _Ogniben_ +with about as good right as they are called _Lippo Lippi_ or _Blougram_; +the personality of the supple ecclesiastic floods and takes possession +of the entire scene; we see the situation and the persons through the +brilliant ironic mirror of his mind. The Chiappino of the second act is +Ogniben's Chiappino, as Gigadibs is Blougram's Gigadibs. His "tragedy" +is one in which there is no room for terror or pity, only for contempt. +All real stress of circumstance is excluded. Both sides fight with +blunted weapons; the revolt is like one of those Florentine risings +which the Brownings later witnessed with amusement from the windows of +Casa Guidi, which were liable to postponement because of rain. The +prefect who is "assassinated" does not die, and the rebellious city is +genially bantered into submission. The "soul" of Chiappino is, in fact, +not the stuff of which tragedy is made. Even in his instant acceptance +of Luitolfo's bloodstained cloak when the pursuers are, as he thinks, at +the door, he seems to have been casually switched off the proper lines +of his character into a piece of heroism which properly belongs to the +man he would like to be thought, but has not the strength to be. On the +whole, Browning's scorn must be considered to have injured his art. +Tragedy, in the deepest sense, lay beyond his sphere; and this "tragedy" +of mere degeneration and helpless collapse left untouched all the +springs from which his poetry drew its life. + +[Footnote 21: Browning's letter to Elizabeth Barrett, Feb. 13, 1846, +which does not seem to have been adequately noticed. The piece is +ignored by Mrs Orr. He speaks of suspending the publication of the +"unlucky play" until a second edition of the _Bells_--an "apparition" +which Moxon, he says, seems to think possible; and then inserting it +before _Luria_: it will then be "in its place, for it was written two or +three years ago." In other words, _The Soul's Tragedy_ was written in +1843-44, between _Colombe's Birthday_ and _Luria_.] + +In the autumn of 1844 Browning made a second tour to Italy. It was +chiefly memorable for his meeting, at Leghorn, with Edward John +Trelawney, to whom he carried a letter of introduction;--one who had not +only himself "seen Shelley plain," but has contributed more than any one +else, save Hogg, to flash the unfading image of what he saw on the eyes +of posterity. The journey quickened and enriched his Italian memories; +and left many vivid traces in the poetry of the following year. Among +these was the drama of _Luria_, ultimately published as the concluding +number of the _Bells_. + +In this remarkable drama Browning turned once more to the type of +historical tragedy which he had originally essayed in _Strafford_. The +fall of a man of passionate fidelity through the treachery of the prince +or the people in whom he has put his trust, was for Browning one of the +most arresting of the great traditional motives of tragic drama. He +dwelt with emphasis upon this aspect of the fate of Charles's great +minister; in _Luria_, where he was working uncontrolled by historical +authority, it is the fundamental theme. At the same time the effect is +heightened by those race contrasts which had been so abundantly used in +_The Return of the Druses_. Luria is a Moor who has undertaken the +service of Florence, and whose religion it is to serve her. Like +Othello,[22] he has been intrusted, alien as he is, by a jealous and +exacting State, with the supreme command of her military forces, a +position in which the fervour of the Oriental and the frank simplicity +of the soldier inevitably lie open to the subtle strategy of Italians +and statesmen. "Luria," wrote Browning, while the whole scheme was "all +in my brain yet, ... devotes himself to something he thinks Florence, +and the old fortune follows, ... and I will soon loosen my Braccio and +Puccio (a pale discontented man) and Tiburzio (the Pisan, good true +fellow, this one), and Domizia the lady--loosen all these on dear +foolish (ravishing must his folly be) golden-hearted Luria, all these +with their worldly wisdom and Tuscan shrewd ways." Florence, in short, +plays collectively somewhat the part of Iago to this second Othello, but +of an Iago (need it be said) immeasurably less deeply rooted in +malignity than Shakespeare's. It was a source of weakness as well as of +strength in Browning as a dramatist that the evil things in men +dissolve so readily under his scrutiny as if they were mere shells of +flimsy disguise for the "soul of goodness" they contain. He has, in +fact, put so much strong sense on the side of the jealous Florentine +masters of his hero that his own sympathies were divided, with +paralysing effect, it would seem, upon his interest in drama.[23] Even +the formidable antagonism of Braccio, the Florentine Commissary, is +buttressed, if not based, upon a resolve to defend the rights of +civilisation against militarism, of intellect against brute force. +"Brute force shall not rule Florence." Even so, it is only after +conflict and fluctuation that he decides to allow Luria's trial to take +its course. Puccio, again, the former general of Florence, superseded by +Luria, and now serving under his command, turns out not quite the "pale +discontented man" whom Browning originally designed and whom such a +situation was no doubt calculated to produce. Instead of a Cassius, +enviously scowling at the greatness of his former comrade, Caesar, we +have one whose generous admiration for the alien set over him struggles +hard, and not unsuccessfully, with natural resentment. In keeping with +such company is the noble Pisan general, who vies with Luria in +generosity and twice intervenes decisively to save him from the +Florentine attack. Even Domizia, the "panther" lady who comes to the +camp burning for vengeance upon Florence for the death of her kinsmen, +and hoping to attain it by embroiling him with the city, finally emerges +as his lover. But in Domizia he confessedly failed. The correspondence +with Miss Barrett stole the vitality from all mere imaginary women; "the +panther would not be tamed." Her hatred and her love alike merely beat +the air. With all her volubility, she is almost as little in place in +the economy of the drama as in that of the camp; her "wild mass of rage" +has the air of being a valued property which she manages and exhibits, +not an impelling and consuming fire. The more potent passion of Luria +and his lieutenant Husain is more adequately rendered, though "the +simple Moorish instinct" in them is made to accomplish startling feats +in European subtlety. The East with its gift of "feeling" comes once +more, as in the _Druses_, into tragic contact with the North and its +gift of "thought"; but it is to the feeling East and not to thinking +North that we owe the clear analysis and exposition of the contrast. +Luria has indeed, like Djabal, assimilated just so much of European +culture as makes its infusion fatal to him: he suffers the doom of the +lesser race + + "Which when it apes the greater is forgone." + +But the noblest quality of the lesser race flashes forth at the close +when he takes his life, not in defiance, nor in despair, but as a last +act of passionate fidelity to Florence. This is conceived with a +refinement of moral imagination too subtle perhaps for appreciation on +the stage; but of the tragic power and pathos of the conception there +can be no question. Mrs Browning, whose eager interest accompanied this +drama through every stage of its progress, justly dwelt upon its +"grandeur." The busy exuberance of Browning's thinking was not +favourable to effects which multiplicity of detail tends to destroy; but +the fate of this son of the "lone and silent East," though utterly +un-Shakespearean in motive, recalls, more nearly than anything else in +Browning's dramas, the heroic tragedy of Shakespeare. + +[Footnote 22: Browning himself uses this parallel in almost his first +reference to _Luria_ while still unwritten: _Letters of R.B. and +E.B.B._, i. 26.] + +[Footnote 23: "For me, the misfortune is, I sympathise just as much with +these as with him,--so there can no good come of keeping this wild +company any longer."--Feb. 26, 1845.] + + +III. + + +"Mere escapes of my inner power, like the light of a revolving +lighthouse leaping out at intervals from a narrow chink;" so wrote +Browning in effect to Miss Barrett (Feb. 11, 1845) of the "scenes and +song-scraps," of which the first instalment had appeared three years +before as the _Dramatic Lyrics_. Yet it is just by the intermittent +flashes that the lighthouse is identified; and Browning's genius, as we +have seen, was in the end to be most truly denoted by these "mere +escapes." With a few notable exceptions, they offer little to the +student of Browning's ideology; they do not illustrate his theories of +life, they disclose no good in evil and no hope in ill-success. But they +are full of an exuberant joy in life itself, as seen by a keen observer +exempt from its harsher conditions, to whom all power and passion are a +feast. He watches the angers, the malignities of men and women, as one +might watch the quarrels of wild beasts, not cynically, but with the +detached, as it were professional, interest of a born "fighter." The +loftier hatred, which is a form of love,--the sublime hatred of a Dante, +the tragic hatred of a Timon, even the unforgetting, self-consuming +hatred of a Heathcliff,--did not now, or ever, engage his imagination. +The indignant invective against a political renegade, "Just for a +handful of silver he left us," in which Browning spoke his own mind, is +poor and uncharacteristic compared with pieces in which he stood aside +and let some accomplished devil, like the Duke in _My last Duchess_, +some clerical libertine, like the bishop of St Praxed's, some sneaking +reptile, like the Spanish friar, some tiger-hearted Regan, like the lady +of _The Laboratory_, or some poor crushed and writhing worm, like the +girl of _The Confessional_, utter their callous cynicism or their +deathbed torment, the snarl of petty spite, the low fierce cry of +triumphant malice, the long-drawn shriek of futile rage. There was +commonly an element of unreason, extravagance, even grotesqueness, in +the hatreds that caught his eye; he had a relish for the gratuitous +savagery of the lady in _Time's Revenges_, who would calmly decree that +her lover should be burnt in a slow fire "if that would compass her +desire." He seized the grotesque side of persecution; and it is not +fanciful to see in the delightful chronicle of the Nemesis inflicted +upon "Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis" a foretaste of the sardonic +confessions of _Instans Tyrannus_. And he seized the element of sheer +physical zest in even eager and impassioned action; the tramp of the +march, the swing of the gallop in the fiery Cavalier Tunes, the crash of +Gismond's "back--handed blow" upon Gauthier's mouth; the exultant lift +of the "great pace" of the riders who bring the Good News. + +Of love poetry, on the other hand, there was little in these first +Lyrics and Romances. Browning had had warm friendships with women, and +was singularly attractive to them; but at thirty-three love had at most +sent a dancing ripple across the bright surface of his life, and it +apparently counted for nothing in his dreams. His plans, as he told Miss +Barrett, had been made without any thought of "finding such a one as +you." That discovery introduced a new and unknown factor into his scheme +of things. The love-poetry of the Dramatic Lyrics and Romances is still +somewhat tentative and insecure. The beautiful fantasia _In a Gondola_ +was directly inspired by a picture of his friend Maclise. He paints the +romance of the lover's twilight tryst with all his incisive vigour; but +his own pulse beats rather with the lover who goes forth at daybreak, +and feels the kindling summons of the morning glory of sea and sunlight +into the "world of men." His attitude to women is touched with the +virginal reserve of the young Hippolytus, whose tragic fate he had told +in the lofty _Prologue_ of Artemis. He approaches them with a kind of +delicate and distant awe; tender, even chivalrous, but accentuating +rather the reserves and reticences of chivalry than its rewards. The +lady of _The Flower's Name_ is beautiful, but her beauty is only shyly +hinted; we see no feature of face or form; only the fold of her dress +brushing against the box border, the "twinkling" of her white fingers +among the dark leaves. The typical lover of these lyrics is of a +temperament in which feminine sensitiveness and masculine tenacity are +characteristically blended; a temperament which the faintest and most +fugitive signs of love--a word, a glance, the impalpable music of a +romantic name--not only kindle and subdue, but permanently fortify and +secure. _Cristina_, _Rudel_, and the _Lost Mistress_ stand in a line of +development which culminates in _The Last Ride Together_. Cristina's +lover has but "changed eyes" with her; but no queenly scorn of hers can +undo the spiritual transformation which her glance has wrought: + + "Her soul's mine; and thus, grown perfect, + I shall pass my life's remainder." + +The _Lost Mistress_ is an exquisitely tender and pathetic farewell, but +not the stifled cry of a man who has received a crushing blow. Not +easily, but yet without any ruinous convulsion, he makes that transition +from love to "mere friendship" which passionate men so hardly endure. + +The really tragic love-story was, for Browning, the story not of love +rejected but of love flagging, fading, or crushed out. + + "Never fear, but there's provision + Of the devil's to quench knowledge + Lest on earth we walk in rapture," + +Cristina's lover had bitterly reflected. Courts, as the focuses of +social artifice and ceremonial restraint, were for him the peculiar +breeding-places of such tragedies, and in several of the most incisive +of the Lyrics and Romances he appears as the champion of the love they +menace. The hapless _Last Duchess_ suffers for the largess of her kindly +smiles. The duchess of _The Flight_ and the lady of _The Glove_ +successfully revolt against pretentious substitutes for love offered in +love's name. _The Flight_ is a tale, as Mrs Browning said, "with a great +heart in it." Both the Gipsy-woman whose impassioned pleading we +overhear, and the old Huntsman who reports it, are drawn from a domain +of rough and simple humanity not very often trodden by Browning. The +genial retainer admirably mediates between the forces of the Court which +he serves and those of the wild primitive race to which his world-old +calling as a hunter makes him kin; his hearty, untutored speech and +character envelop the story like an atmosphere, and create a presumption +that heart and nature will ultimately have their way. Even the hinted +landscape-background serves as a mute chorus. In this "great wild +country" of wide forests and pine-clad mountains, the court is the +anomaly. + +Similarly, in _The Glove_, the lion, so magnificently sketched by +Browning, is made to bear out the inner expressiveness of the tale in a +way anticipated by no previous teller. The lion of Schiller's ballad is +already assuaged to his circumstances, and enters the arena like a +courtier entering a drawing-room. Browning's lion, still terrible and +full of the tameless passion for freedom, bursts in with flashing +forehead, like the spirit of the desert of which he dreams: it is the +irruption of this mighty embodiment of elemental Nature which wakens in +the lady the train of feeling and thought that impel her daring +vindication of its claims. + + * * * * * + +Art was far from being as strange to the Browning of 1842-45 as love. +But he seized with a peculiar predilection those types and phases of the +Art-world with which love has least to do. He studies the egoisms of +artists, the vanities of connoisseurs; the painter Lutwyche showing "how +he can hate"; the bishop of St Praxed's piteously bargaining on his +death-bed for the jasper and lapislazuli "which Gandolph shall not +choose but see and burst"; the duke of the _Last Duchess_ displaying his +wife's portrait as the wonder of his gallery, and unconcernedly +disposing of her person. In a single poem only Browning touches those +problems of the artist life which were to occupy him in the 'Fifties; +and the _Pictor Ignotus_ is as far behind the _Andrea del_ _Sarto_ and +_Fra Lippo Lippi_ in intellectual force as in dramatic brilliance and +plasticity. Browning's sanguine and energetic temperament always +inclined him to over-emphasis, and he has somewhat over-emphasised the +anaemia of this anaemic soul. Rarely again did he paint in such resolute +uniformity of ashen grey. The "Pictor" is the earliest, and the palest, +of Browning's pale ascetics, who make, in one way or another, the great +refusal, and lose their souls by trying to save them in a barrenness +which they call purity. + +The musician as such holds at this stage an even smaller place in +Browning's art than the painter. None of these Lyrics foreshadows _Abt +Vogler_ and _Hugues of Saxe-Gotha_ as the _Pictor_ foreshadows _Lippi_ +and _Del Sarto_. But if he did not as yet explore the ways of the +musical soul, he shows already a peculiar instinct for the poetic uses +and capabilities of music. He sings with peculiar _entrain_ of the +transforming magic of song. The thrush and cuckoo, among the throng of +singing-birds, attract him by their musicianly qualities--the "careless +rapture" repeated, the "minor third" _which only the cuckoo knows_. +These Lyrics and Romances of 1842-45 are as full of tributes to the +power of music as _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ themselves. Orpheus, +whose story Milton there touched so ravishingly, was too trite an +instance to arrest Browning; it needed perhaps the stimulus of his +friend Leighton's picture to call forth, long afterwards, the few choice +verses on Eurydice. More to his mind was the legend of that motley +Orpheus of the North, the Hamelin piper,--itself a picturesque motley +of laughter and tears. The Gipsy's lay of far-off romance awakens the +young duchess; Theocrite's "little human praise" wins God's ear, and +Pippa's songs transform the hearts of men. A poet in this vein would +fall naturally enough upon the Biblical story of the cure of the +stricken Saul by the songs of the boy David. But a special influence +drew Browning to this subject,--the wonderful _Song to David_ of +Christopher Smart,--"a person of importance in his day," who owes it +chiefly to Browning's enthusiastic advocacy of a poem he was never weary +of declaiming, that he is a poet of importance in ours. Smart's David is +before all things the glowing singer of the Joy of Earth,--the glory of +the visible creation uttering itself in rapturous Praise of the Lord. +And it is this David of whom we have a presentiment in the no less +glowing songs with which Browning's shepherd-boy seeks to reach the +darkened mind of Saul. + +Of the poem we now possess, only the first nine sections belong to the +present phase of Browning's work. These were confessedly incomplete, but +Browning was content to let them go forth as they were, and less bent +upon even their ultimate completion, it would seem, than Miss Barrett, +who bade him "remember" that the poem was "there only as a first part, +and that the next parts must certainly follow and complete what will be +a great lyrical work--now remember."[24] And the "next parts" when they +came, in _Men and Women_, bore the mark of his ten years' fellowship +with her devout and ecstatic soul, as well as of his own growth towards +the richer and fuller harmonies of verse. The 1845 fragment falls, of +course, far short of its sequel in imaginative audacity and splendour, +but it is steeped in a pellucid beauty which Browning's busy +intellectuality was too prone to dissipate. Kenyon read it nightly, as +he told Mrs Browning, "to put his dreams in order"; finely comparing it +to "Homer's Shield of Achilles, thrown into lyrical whirl and life." And +certainly, if Browning anywhere approaches that Greek plasticity for +which he cared so little, it is in these exquisitely sculptured yet +breathing scenes. Then, as the young singer kindles to his work, his +song, without becoming less transparent, grows more personal and +impassioned; he no longer repeats the familiar chants of his tribe, but +breaks into a new impetuous inspiration of his own; the lyrical whirl +and life gathers swiftness and energy, and the delicate bas-reliefs of +Saul's people, in their secular pieties of grief or joy, merge in the +ecstatic vision of Saul himself, as he had once been, and as he might +yet be, that + + "boyhood of wonder and hope, + Present promise and wealth of the future beyond the eye's scope," + +all the fulness and glory of the life of humanity gathered upon his +single head. It is the very voice of life, which thrills and strikes +across the spiritual darkness of Saul, as the coming of Hyperion +scattered the shadows of Saturnian night. + +[Footnote 24: _E.B.B. to R.B._, Dec. 10, 1845.] + + + + +CHAPTER IV. + + +WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY. _MEN AND WOMEN_. + + + This foot, once planted on the goal; + This glory-garland round my soul. + --_The Last Ride Together_. + + Warmer climes + Give brighter plumage, stronger wing; the breeze + Of Alpine highths thou playest with, borne on + Beyond Sorrento and Amalfi, where + The Siren waits thee, singing song for song. + --LANDOR. + + +I. + +The _Bells and Pomegranates_ made no very great way with the public, +which found the matter unequal and the title obscure. But both the title +and the greater part of the single poems are linked inseparably with the +most intimate personal relationship of his life. Hardly one of the +Romances, as we saw, but had been read in MS. by Elizabeth Barrett, and +pronounced upon with the frank yet critical delight of her nature. In +the abstruse symbolic title, too,--implying, as Browning expected his +readers to discover, "sound and sense" or "music and discoursing,"--her +wit had divined a more felicitous application to Browning's poetry-- + + "Some 'Pomegranate,' which, if cut deep down the middle, + Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity." + +The two poets were still strangers when this was written; but each had +for years recognised in the other a new and wonderful poetic force,[25] +and the vivid words marked the profound community of spirit which was +finally to draw them together. A few years later, a basket of +pomegranates was handed to her, when travelling with her husband in +France, and she laughingly accepted the omen. The omen was fulfilled; +Elizabeth Browning's poetry expanded and matured in the companionship of +that rich-veined human heart; it was assuredly not by chance that +Browning, ten years after her death, recalled her symbol in the name of +his glorious woman-poet, Balaustion. + +[Footnote 25: She had at once discerned the "new voice" in _Paracelsus_, +1835; and the occasion may have been not much later ("years ago" in +1845) on which he was all but admitted to the "shrine" of the "world's +wonder" _(R.B. to E.B.B._, Jan. 10, 1845).] + +But she, on her part, also brought a new and potent influence to bear +upon his poetry, the only one which after early manhood he ever +experienced; and their union was by far the most signal event in +Browning's intellectual history, as it was in his life. Her experience +up to the time when they met had been in most points singularly unlike +his own. Though of somewhat higher social status, she had seen far less +of society and of the world; but she had gone through the agony of a +passionately loved brother's sudden death, and the glory of English wood +and meadow was for her chiefly, as to Milton in his age, an enchanted +memory of earlier days, romantically illuminating a darkened London +chamber. "Most of my events, and nearly all my intense pleasures," she +said to Horne, "have passed in my thoughts." Both were eager students, +and merited the hazardous reputation which both incurred, of being +"learned poets"; but Browning wore his learning, not indeed "lightly, +like a flower," but with the cool mastery of a scholarly man of the +world, whose interpretation of books is controlled at every point by his +knowledge of men; while Miss Barrett's Greek and Hebrew chiefly served +to allure an imagination naturally ecstatic and visionary along paths +crowded with congenial unearthly symbols, with sublime shapes of gods +and Titans, angels and seraphim. Then, notwithstanding the _role_ of +hopeless invalid which she was made to play, and did play with touching +conviction, she had, it is clear, a fund of buoyant and impulsive +vitality hardly inferior to Browning's own; only that the energy which +in him flowed out through natural channels had in her to create its own +opportunities, and surged forth with harsh or startling +violence,--sometimes "tearing open a parcel instead of untying it," and +sometimes compelling words to serve her will by masterful audacities of +collocation. Both poets stood apart from most of their contemporaries +by a certain exuberance--"a fine excess"--quite foreign to the instincts +of a generation which repudiated the Revolution and did its best to +repudiate Byron. But Browning's exuberance was genial, hearty, and on +occasion brutal; hers was exalted, impulsive, "head-long," [26] intense, +and often fantastic and quaint. His imagination flamed forth like an +intenser sunlight, heightening and quickening all that was alive and +alert in man and Nature; hers shot out superb or lurid volcanic gleams +across the simplicity of natural chiaro-oscuro, disturbing the air with +conflicting and incalculable effects of strange horror and strange +loveliness. It might have been averred of Browning that he said +everything he thought; of her the truer formula would be her own, that +she "took every means of saying" what she thought.[27] There was +something of AEschylus in her, as there was much of Aristophanes in him; +it was not for nothing that her girlish ardour had twice flung itself +upon the task of rendering the _Prometheus Bound_ in English; they met +on common ground in the human and pathetic Euripides. But her power was +lyric, not dramatic. She sang from the depths of a wonderfully rich and +passionate nature; while he was most truly himself when he was +personating some imaginary mind. + +[Footnote 26: The word her Italian tutor meant to describe her by, but +could not pronounce it. He said she was _testa lunga (Letters of R. and +E.B., i. 7)_.] + +[Footnote 27: _Letters, R. and E. B._, i. 8. Cf. her admirable letter to +Ruskin, ten years later, apropos of the charge of "affectation." "To say +a thing faintly, because saying it strongly sounds odd or obscure or +unattractive for some reason to careless readers, does appear to me bad +policy as well as bad art" (_Letters of E. B. B._, ii., 200).] + +Early in January 1845 the two poets were brought by the genial Kenyon, +her cousin and his good friend, into actual communication, and the +memorable correspondence, the most famous of its kind in English +literature, at once began. Browning, as his way was in telling other +men's stories, burst at once _in medias res_ in this great story of his +own. "I love your verses, my dear Miss Barrett, with all my heart," he +assures her in the first sentence of his first letter. He feels them +already too much a part of himself to ever "try and find +fault,"--"nothing comes of it all,--so into me has it gone and part of +me has it become, this great living poetry of yours, not a flower of +which but took root and grew." It was "living," like his own; it was +also direct, as his own was not. His frank _cameraderie_ was touched +from the outset with a fervent, wondering admiration to which he was by +no means prone. "You _do_, what I always wanted, hoped to do, and only +seem likely now to do for the first time. You speak out, _you_,--I only +make men and women speak--give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and +fear the pure white light, even if it is in me, _but I am going to +try_." Thus the first contact with the "Lyric Love" of after days set +vibrating the chords of all that was lyric and personal in Browning's +nature. His brilliant virtuosity in the personation of other minds +threatened to check all simple utterance of his own. The "First Poem" of +Robert Browning had yet to be written, but now, as soon as he had broken +from his "dancing ring of men and women,"--the Dramatic Lyrics and +Romances and one or two outstanding dramas,--he meant to write it. Miss +Barrett herself hardly understood until much later the effect that her +personality, the very soul that spoke in her poetry, had upon her +correspondent. She revelled in the Dramatic Lyrics and Romances, and not +least in rollicking pieces, like _Sibrandus_ or _The Spanish Cloister_, +which appealed to the robust masculine humour with which this outwardly +fragile woman is too rarely credited. _Pippa Passes_ she could find in +her heart to covet the authorship of, more than any of his other +works--a preference in which he agreed. Few more brilliant appreciations +of English poetry are extant than some of those which sped during 1845 +and 1846 from the invalid chamber in Harley Street to the "old room" +looking out on the garden at New Cross. But she did not conceal from him +that she wished him to seek "the other crown" also. "I do not think, +with all that music in you, only your own personality should be +dumb."[28] But she undoubtedly, with all her sense of the glory of the +dramatic art, discouraged his writing for the stage, a domain which she +regarded with an animus curiously compounded of Puritan loathing, poetic +scorn, and wellbred shrinking from the vulgarity of the green-room. And +it is clear that before the last plays, _Luria_ and _A Soul's Tragedy_, +were published his old stage ambition had entirely vanished. It was not +altogether hyperbole (in any case the hyperbole was wholly unconscious) +when he spoke of her as a new medium to which his sight was gradually +becoming adjusted, "_seeing all things, as it does, in you._" + +[Footnote 28: _E.B.B to R.B._, 26th May 1846. Cf. _R.B._, 13th Feb. +1846.] + +She, on her part, united, as clever women in love so often do, with a +woman's more utter self-abasement a larger measure of critical +penetration. The "poor tired wandering singer," who so humbly took the +hand of the liberal and princely giver, and who with perfect sincerity +applied to herself his unconscious phrase-- + + "Cloth of frieze, be not too bold + Though thou'rt match'd with cloth of gold," + +"That, beloved, was written for me!"[29]--shows at the same time the +keenest insight into the qualities of his work. She felt in him the +masculine temper and the masculine range, his singular union of rough +and even burly power with subtle intellect and penetrating music. With +the world of society and affairs she had other channels of +communication. But no one of her other friends--not _Orion_ Horne, not +even Kenyon--bridged as Browning did the gulf between the world of +society and affairs, which she vaguely knew, and the romantic world of +poetry in which she lived. If she quickened the need for lyrical +utterance in him, he drew her, in his turn, into a closer and richer +contact with common things. If she had her part in _Christmas-Eve and +Easter-Day_, he had his, no less, in _Aurora Leigh_. + +[Footnote 29: _E.B.B. to R.B._, 9th Jan. 1846.] + +Twenty-one months passed between Browning's first letter and their +marriage. The tentative exchange of letters passed into a formal +"contract" to correspond,--sudden if not as "unadvised" as the love-vows +of Juliet, a parallel which he shyly hinted, and she, with the security +of the whole-hearted, boldly recalled. All the winter and early spring +her health forbade a meeting, and it is clear that but for the quiet +pressure of his will they never would have met. But with May came +renewed vigour, and she reluctantly consented to a visit. "He has a way +of putting things which I have not, a way of putting aside,--so he +came." A few weeks later he spoke. She at first absolutely refused to +entertain the thought; he believed, and was silent. But in the meantime +the letters and the visits "rained down more and more," and the fire +glowed under the surface of the writing and the talk, subdued but +unsuppressed. Once more his power of "putting aside" compelled her to +listen, and when she listened she found herself assailed at a point +which her own exalted spirituality made her least able to defend, by a +love more utterly self-sacrificing than even she had ever imagined. This +man of the masterful will, who took no refusals, might perhaps in any +case have finally "put aside" all obstacles to her consent. But when he +disclosed--to her amazement, well as she thought she knew him--that he +had asked the right to love her without claiming any love in return, +that when he first spoke he had believed her disease to be incurable, +and yet preferred to be allowed to sit only a day at her side to the +fulfilment of "the brightest dream which should exclude her," her +resistance gave way,--and little by little, in her own beautiful words, +she was drawn into the persuasion that something was left, and that she +could still do something for the happiness of another. In another sense +than she intended in the great opening sonnet "from the Portuguese," +Love, undreamt of, had come to her with the irresistible might of Death, +and called her back into life by rekindling in her the languishing, +almost extinguished, desire to live. Is it hyperbole, to be reminded of +that other world-famous rescue from death which Browning, twenty-five +years later, was to tell with such infinite verve? Browning did not need +to imagine, but only to remember, the magnificent and audacious vitality +of his Herakles; he had brought back his own "espoused saint," like +Alcestis, from the grave. + +But the life thus gained was, in the immediate future, full of problems. +Browning, said Kenyon, was "great in everything"; and during the year +which followed their engagement he had occasion to exhibit the +capacities both of the financier he had once declined to be, and of the +diplomatist he was willing to become. Love had flung upon his life, as +upon hers, a sudden splendour for which he was in no way prepared. "My +whole scheme of life," he wrote to her,[30] "(with its wants, material +wants at least, closely cut down), was long ago calculated--and it +supposed _you_, the finding such an one as you, utterly impossible." But +his schemes for a profession and an income were summarily cut short. +Elizabeth Barrett peremptorily declined to countenance any such +sacrifice of the work he was called to for any other. The same deep +sense of what was due to him, and to his wife, sustained her through the +trial that remained,--from the apparent degradation of secrecy and +subterfuge which the domestic policy of Mr Barrett made inevitable, to +the mere physical and nervous strain of rising, that September morning +of 1846, from an invalid's couch to be married. That "peculiarity," as +she gently termed it, of her father's, malign and cruel as it was, twice +precipitated a happy crisis in their fortunes, which prudence might have +postponed. His refusal to allow her to seek health in Italy in Oct. 1845 +had brought them definitely together; his second refusal in Aug. 1846 +drove her to the one alternative of going there as Browning's wife. A +week after the marriage ceremony, during which they never met, Mrs +Browning left her home, with the faithful Wilson and the indispensable +Flush, _en route_ for Southampton. The following day they arrived in +Paris. + +[Footnote 30: _R.B. to E.B.B._, Sept. 13, 1845.] + + +II. + + +There followed fifteen years during which the inexhaustible +correspondents of the last twenty months exchanged no further letter, +for they were never parted. That is the sufficient outward symbol of +their all but flawless union. After a leisurely journey through France, +and an experimental sojourn at the goal of Mrs Browning's two frustrated +journeys, Pisa, they settled towards the close of April 1847 in +furnished apartments in Florence, moving some four months later into the +more permanent home which their presence was to render famous, the +Palazzo (or "Casa") Guidi, just off the Piazza Pitti. + +Their life--mirrored for us in Mrs Browning's vivid and delightful +letters--was, like many others, in which we recognise rare and precious +quality, singularly wanting in obviously expressive traits. It is +possible to describe everything that went on in the Browning household +in terms applicable to those of scores of other persons of wide +interests, cultivated tastes, and moderate but not painfully restricted +means. All that was passionate, ideal, heroic in them found expression +through conditions which it needs a fine eye to distinguish from those +of easy-going bourgeois mediocrity. Their large and catholic humanity +exempted them from much that makes for bold and sensational outline in +the story of a career. Their poetic home was built upon all the +philistine virtues. Mrs Jameson laughed at their "miraculous prudence +and economy"; and Mrs Browning herself laughed, a little, at her +husband's punctilious rigour in paying his debts,--his "horror of owing +five shillings for five days"; Browning, a born virtuoso in whatever he +undertook, abhorring a neglected bill as he did an easy rhyme, and all +other symbols of that slovenly Bohemia which came nearest, on the whole, +to his conception of absolute evil. They lived at first in much +seclusion, seeking no society, and unknown alike to the Italian and the +English quarters of the Florentine world. But Arcady was, at bottom, +just as foreign to their ways as Bohemia. "Soundless and stirless +hermits," Mrs Browning playfully called them; but in no house in +Florence did the news of political and literary Europe find keener +comment or response than in this quiet hermitage. Two long absences, +moreover (1851-52 and 1855-56), divided between London and Paris, +interrupted their Italian sojourn; and these times were crowded with +friendly intercourse, which they keenly enjoyed. "No place like Paris +for living in," Browning declared after returning from its blaze to the +quiet retreat of Casa Guidi. But both felt no less deeply the charm of +their "dream life" within these old tapestried walls.[31] Nor did +either, in spite of their delight in French poetry and their vivid +interest in French politics, really enter the French world. They were +received by George Sand, whose "indiscreet immortalities" had ravished +Elizabeth Barrett in her invalid chamber years before; but though she +"felt the burning soul through all that quietness," and through the +"crowds of ill-bred men who adore her _a genoux bas_, betwixt a puff of +smoke and an ejection of saliva,"--they both felt that she did not care +for them. Dumas, another admiration, they did not see; an introduction +to Hugo, Browning carried about for years but had no chance of +presenting; Beranger they saw in the street, and regretted the absence +of an intermediator. Balzac, to their grief, was just dead. A complete +set of his works was one of their Florentine ambitions. One memorable +intimacy was formed, however, during the Paris winter of 1851-52; for it +was now that he first met Joseph Milsand, his warm friend until +Milsand's death in 1886, and probably, for the last twenty years at +least, the most beloved of all his friends, as he was at all times one +of his shrewdest yet kindliest critics. Their summer visits to London +(1851, 1852, 1855, 1856) brought them much more of intimate personal +converse, tempered, however, inevitably, in a yet greater proportion, by +pain, discomfort, and fatigue. Of himself, yet more than of the +Laureate, might have been used the phrase in which he was to dedicate a +later poem to Tennyson--"noble and sincere in friendship." The visitors +who gathered about him in these London visits included friends who +belonged to every phase and aspect of his career--from his old master +and mentor, Fox, and Kenyon, the first begetter of his wedded happiness, +to Dante Rossetti, his first and, for years to come, solitary disciple, +and William Allingham, whom Rossetti introduced. Among his own +contemporaries they were especially intimate with Tennyson,--the +sterling and masculine "Alfred" of Carlyle, whom the world first learnt +to know from his biography; and with Carlyle himself, a more genial and +kindly Carlyle than most others had the gift of evoking, and whom his +biographers mostly efface. + +[Footnote 31: _Letters of E.B.B._, ii. 199.] + +After their return from the second journey to the north their Italian +life lost much of its dream-like seclusion. The publication of _Men and +Women_ (1855) and _Aurora Leigh_ (1856) drew new visitors to the salon +in Casa Guidi, and after 1853 they repeatedly wintered in Rome, mingling +freely in its more cosmopolitan society, and, on occasion, in the +gaieties of the Carnival. To the end, however, their Roman circle was +more American than English. "Is Mr Browning an American?" asked an +English lady of the American ambassador. "Is it possible that you ask me +that?" came the prompt and crushing retort; "why, there is not a village +in the United States so small that they could not tell you that Robert +Browning is an Englishman, and they wish he were an American." +Spiritualism, in the main an American institution, became during the +later years a centre of fervid interest to the one and an irritant to +the other. One turns gladly from that episode to their noble and helpful +friendship for a magnificent old dying lion, with whom, as every one +else discovered, it was ill to play--Walter Savage Landor. Here it was +the wife who looked on with critical though kindly sarcasm at what she +thought her husband's generous excess of confidence. Of all these +intimacies and relationships, however, the poetry of these years +discloses hardly a glimpse. His actual dealings with men and women +called out all his genial energies of heart and brain, but--with one +momentous exception--they did not touch his imagination. + + +III. + + +Almost as faint as these echoes of personal friendship are those of the +absorbing public interest of these years, the long agony, fitfully +relieved by spells of desperate and untimely hope, of the Italian +struggle for liberty. The Brownings arrived in Florence during the lull +which preceded the great outbreak of 1848. From the historic "windows of +Casa Guidi" they looked forth upon the gentle futilities of the Tuscan +revolution, the nine days' fight for Milan, the heroic adventure of +Savoy, and the apparently final collapse of all these high endeavours on +the field of Novara. Ten years of petty despotism on the one side, of "a +unanimity of despair" on the other, followed; and then the monotonous +tragedy seemed to break suddenly into romance, as the Emperor, "deep and +cold," marched his armies over the Alps for the Deliverance of Italy. + +Of all this the Brownings were deeply moved spectators. Browning shared +his wife's sympathy with the Italians and her abhorrence of Austria, +and it is not likely that he uttered either sentiment with less vivacity +and emphasis, though much less of his talk is on record. "'How long, O +Lord, how long!' Robert kept saying." But he had not her passionate +admiration for France, still less her faith in the President-Emperor. +His less lyric temperament did not so readily harbour unqualified +emotion as hers. His judgment of character was cooler, and with all his +proverbial readiness as a poet to provide men of equivocal conduct with +hypothetical backgrounds of lofty or blameless motive, he was in +practice as exempt from amiable illusions as he was from narrow spite. +Himself the most exact and precise in his dealings with the world, he +could pardon the excesses and irregularities of a great nature; but +sordid self-seeking under the mask of high ideals revolted him. He +laughed at the boyish freaks of Lander's magnificent old age, which +irritated even his large-hearted wife; but he could not forgive Louis +Napoleon the _coup d'etat_, and when the liberation of Lombardy was +followed by the annexation of Savoy and Nice, the Emperor's devoted +defender had to listen, without the power of effective retort, to his +biting summary of the situation: "It was a great action; but he has +taken eighteenpence for it, which is a pity." + +A dozen years later Louis Napoleon's equivocal character and career were +to be subjected by Browning to a still more equivocal exposition. But +this sordid trait brought him within a category of "soul" upon which +Browning did not yet, in these glowing years, readily lavish his art. A +poem upon Napoleon, which had occupied him much during the winter of +1859 (cf. note, p. 167 below), was abandoned. "Blougram's" splendid and +genial duplicity already attracted him, but the analysis of the +meretricious figure of Napoleon became a congenial problem only to that +later Browning of the 'Sixties and 'Seventies who was to explore the +shady souls of a Guido, a Miranda, and a Sludge. On the other hand, +deeply as he felt the sorrows of Italy, it was no part of his poetic +mission to sing them. The voice of a great community wakened no lyric +note in him, nor did his anger on its behalf break into dithyrambs. +Nationality was not an effectual motive with him. He felt as keenly as +his wife, or as Shelley; but his feeling broke out in fitful allusion or +sardonic jest in the _De Gustibus_ or the _Old Pictures_--not in a _Casa +Guidi Windows_, or _Songs before Congress_, an _Ode to Naples_, or a +_Hellas_. An "Ode" containing, by his own account, fierce things about +England, he destroyed after Villafranca. It is only in subtle and +original variations that we faintly recognise the broad simple theme of +Italy's struggle for deliverance. The _Patriot_ and _Instans Tyrannus_ +both have a kind of nexus with the place and time; but the one is a +caustic satire on popular fickleness and the other a sardonically +humorous travesty of persecution. Italy is mentioned in neither. Both +are far removed from the vivid and sympathetic reflection of the +national struggle which thrills us in _The Italian in England_ and the +third scene of _Pippa Passes_. This "tyrant" has nothing to do with the +Austrian whom Luigi was so eager to assassinate, or any other: whatever +in him belongs to history has been permeated through and through with +the poet's derisive irony; he is despotism stripped of the passionate +conviction which may lend it weight and political significance, reduced +to a kind of sport, like the chase of a butterfly, and contemplating its +own fantastic tricks with subdued amusement. + + +IV. + + +The great political drama enacted in Italy during the Brownings' +residence there, thus scarcely stirred the deeper currents of Browning's +imagination, any more than, for all the vivid and passionate eloquence +she poured forth in its name, it really touched the genius of his wife. +The spell of Italian scenery was less easily evaded than the +abstractions of politics by a poet of his keen sensibility to light and +colour. And the years of his Italian sojourn certainly left palpable +traces, not only, as is obvious, upon the landscape background which +glows behind his human figures, but on his way of conceiving and +rendering the whole relation between Nature and Man. They did not, +indeed, make him in any sense a Nature poet. In that very song of +delight in "Italy, my Italy," which tells how the things he best loves +in the world are + + "a castle precipice-encurled + In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine," + +or some old palazzo, with a pointed cypress to guard it, by the opaque +blue breadth of summer sea, the joy in mountain and sea is subtly +reinforced at every point by the play of human interest; there are +frescoes on the crumbling walls, and a barefooted girl tumbles melons on +the pavement with news that the king has been shot at; art and politics +asserting their place beside Nature in the heart of Italy's "old lover." +And in the actual life of the Brownings "Nature" had to be content, as a +rule, with the humbler share. Their chosen abode was not a castle in the +Apennines or an old crumbling house by the southern sea, but an +apartment commanding the crowded streets of Florence; and their +principal absences from it were spent in Rome, in London, or in the yet +more congenial "blaze of Paris." They delighted certainly to escape into +the forest uplands. "Robert and I go out and lose ourselves in the woods +and mountains, and sit by the waterfalls on the starry and moonlit +nights," she wrote from their high perch above Lucca in 1849; but their +adventures in this kind were on the whole like the noon-disport of the +amphibian swimmer in _Fifine_,--they always admitted of an easy retreat +to the _terra firma_ of civilisation,-- + + "Land the solid and safe + To welcome again (confess!) + When, high and dry, we chafe + The body, and don the dress." + +The Nature Browning knew and loved was well within sight of humanity, +and it was commonly brought nearer by some intrusive vestiges of man's +work; the crescent moon drifting in the purple twilight, or "lamping" +between the cypresses, is seen over Fiesole or Samminiato; the "Alpine +gorge" above Lucca has its ruined chapel and its mill; the Roman +Campagna has its tombs--"Rome's ghost since her decease"; the Etrurian +hill--fastnesses have their crowning cities "crowded with culture." He +had always had an alert eye for the elements of human suggestion in +landscape. But his rendering of landscape before the Italian period was +habitually that of a brilliant, graphic, but not deeply interested +artist, wielding an incisive pencil and an opulent brush, fastening upon +every bit of individual detail, and sometimes, as in the admirable +_Englishman in Italy_, recalling Wordsworth's indignant reproof of the +great fellow-artist--Scott--who "made an inventory of Nature's charms." +This hard objective brilliance does not altogether disappear from the +work of his Italian period. But it tends to give way to a strangely +subtle interpenetration of the visible scene with the passion of the +seeing soul. Nature is not more alive, but her life thrills and +palpitates in subtler relation with the life of man. The author of _Men +and Women_ is a greater poet of Nature than the author of the _Lyrics +and Romances_, because he is, also, a greater poet of "Soul"; for his +larger command of soul-life embraces just those moods of spiritual +passion which beget the irradiated and transfigured Nature for which, +since Wordsworth, poetry has continually striven to find expression. +Browning's subtler feeling for Nature sprang from his profounder insight +into love. Love was his way of approach, as it was eminently not +Wordsworth's, to the transfigured Nature which Wordsworth first +disclosed. It is habitually lovers who have these visions,--all that was +mystical in Browning's mind attaching itself, in fact, in some way to +his ideas of love. To the Two in the Campagna its primeval silence grows +instinct with passion, and its peace with joy,--the joy of illimitable +space and freedom, alluring yet mocking the finite heart that yearns. To +the lovers of the Alpine gorge the old woods, heaped and dim, that hung +over their troth-plighting, mysteriously drew them together; the moment +that broke down the bar between soul and soul also breaking down, as it +were, the bar between man and nature: + + "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." + +Such "moments" were, in fact, for Browning as well as for his lovers, +rare and fitful exceptions to the general nonchalance of Nature towards +human affairs. The powers did good, as they did evil, "at play"; +intervening with a kind of cynical or ironical detachment (like Jaques +plighting Touchstone and Audrey) in an alien affair of hearts. A certain +eerie playfulness is indeed a recurring trait in Browning's highly +individual feeling about Nature; the uncanny playfulness of a wild +creature of boundless might only half intelligible to man, which man +contemplates with mingled joy, wonder, and fear. Joy, when the brown old +Earth wears her good gigantic smile, on an autumn morning; wonder, when +he watches the "miracles wrought in play" in the teeming life of the +Campagna; fear, when, on a hot August midnight, Earth tosses stormily on +her couch. And all these notes of feelings are struck, with an intensity +and a boldness of invention which make it unique among his writings, in +the great romantic legend of _Childe Roland_. What the _Ancient Mariner_ +is in the poetry of the mysterious terrors and splendours of the sea, +that _Childe Roland_ is in the poetry of bodeful horror, of haunted +desolation, of waste and plague, ragged distortion, and rotting ugliness +in landscape. The Childe, like the Mariner, advances through an +atmosphere and scenery of steadily gathering menace; the "starved +ignoble" Nature, "peevish and dejected" among her scrub of thistle and +dock, grows malignant; to the barren waste succeed the spiteful little +river with its drenched despairing willows, the blood-trampled mire and +wrecked torture-engine, the poisonous herbage and palsied oak, and +finally the mountains, ignoble as the plain--"mere ugly heights and +heaps," ranged round the deadly den of the Dark Tower. But Browning's +horror-world differs from Coleridge's in the pervading sense that the +powers which control its issues are "at play." The catastrophe is not +the less tragic for that; but the heroic knight is not a culprit who has +provoked the vengeance of his pursuers, but a quarry whose course they +follow with grim half-suppressed laughter as he speeds into the trap. +The hoary cripple cannot hide his malicious glee, the "stiff blind +horse" is as grotesque as he is woeful, the dreary day itself, as it +sinks, shoots one grim red leer at the doomed knight as he sets forth; +in the penury and inertness of the wasted plain he sees "grimace"; the +mountains fight like bulls or doze like dotards; and the Dark Tower +itself is "round and squat," built of brown stone, a mere anticlimax to +romance; while round it lie the sportsmen assembled to see the end-- + + "The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay + Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay." + + +V. + + +But the scenery of Italy, with all its appeals of picturesque outline +and glowing colour, interested Browning less than its painting, +sculpture, and music. "Nature I loved, and after Nature, Art," Landor +declared in one of his stately epitaphs on himself; Browning would, in +this sense of the terms at least, have inverted their order. Casa Guidi +windows commanded a view, not only of revolutionary throngs, but of the +facade of the Pitti--a fact of at least equal significance. From the +days of his boyish pilgrimages to the Dulwich Gallery across the +Camberwell meadows, he had been an eager student and critic of painting; +curious, too, if not yet expert in all the processes and technicalities +of the studio. He judged pictures with the eye of a skilful draughtsman; +and two rapid journeys had given him some knowledge of the Italian +galleries. Continuous residence among the chief glories of the brush and +chisel did not merely multiply artistic incitement and appeal; it +brought the whole world of art into more vital touch with his +imaginative activity. It would be hard to say that there is any definite +change in his view of art, but its problems grow more alluring to him, +and its images more readily waylay and capture his passing thought. The +artist as such becomes a more dominant figure in his hierarchy of +spiritual workers; while Browning himself betrays a new +self-consciousness of his own function as an artist in verse; +conceiving, for instance, his consummate address to his wife as an +artist's way of solving a perplexity which only an artist could feel, +that of finding unique expression for the unique love. + + "He who works in fresco, steals a hair-brush, + Curbs the liberal hand, subservient proudly, + Cramps his spirit, crowds its all in little, + Makes a strange art of an art familiar, + Fills his lady's missal-marge with flowerets; + He who blows thro' bronze may breathe thro' silver, + Fitly serenade a slumbrous princess; + He who writes may write for once, as I do." + +Browning is distinguished among the poets to whom art meant much by the +prominence with him of the specifically artist's point of view. He cared +for pictures, or for music, certainly, as clues to the interpretation of +human life, hints of "the absolute truth of things" which the sensible +world veils and the senses miss. But he cared for them also, and yet +more, as expressions of the artist's own "love of loving, rage of +knowing, seeing, feeling" that absolute truth. And he cared for them +also and not less, without regard to anything they expressed, as simple +outflows of vitality, however grotesque or capricious. His own eye and +ear continually provoked his hand to artistic experiments and +activities. During the last years in Italy his passion for modelling +even threatened to divert him from poetry; and his wife playfully +lamented that the "poor lost soul" produced only casts, which he broke +on completion, and no more Men and Women. And his own taste in art drew +him, notoriously, to work in which the striving hand was +palpable,--whether it was a triumphant _tour de force_ like Cellini's +Perseus, in the Loggia--their daily banquet in the early days at +Florence; or the half-articulate utterances of "the Tuscan's early art," +like those "Pre-Giotto pictures" which surrounded them in the salon of +Casa Guidi, "quieting" them if they were over busy, as Mrs Browning +beautifully says,[32] more perhaps in her own spirit than in her +husband's. + +[Footnote 32: _Letters of E.B.B._, ii. 199.] + +Almost all Browning's finest poems of painting belong to these Italian +years, and were enshrined in _Men and Women._ They all illustrate more +or less his characteristic preoccupation with the artist's point of +view, and also, what is new, the point of view of particular and +historical artists,--a Guercino, an Andrea del Sarto, a Giotto, a Lippo +Lippi. Even where he seems to write under the peculiar spell of his +wife, as in the _Guardian Angel_, this trait asserts itself. They had +spent three glowing August days of 1848 at Fano, and thrice visited the +painting by Guercino there,--"to drink its beauty to our soul's +content." Mrs Browning wrote of the "divine" picture. Browning entered, +with a sympathy perhaps the more intimate that his own "angel" was with +him, and the memory of an old friend peculiarly near, into sympathy with +the guardian angel; but with one of his abrupt turns he passes into the +world of the studio, telling us how he has written for the sake of "dear +Guercino's fame," because he "did not work thus earnestly at all times, +and has endured some wrong." With all this, however, the _Guardian +Angel_ is one of the few pieces left by Browning which do not instantly +discover themselves as his. His typical children are well-springs of +spiritual influence, scattering the aerial dew of quickening song upon +a withered world, or taking God's ear with their "little human praise." +The spirituality of this child is of a different temper,--the submissive +"lamblike" temper which is fulfilled in quiescence and disturbed by +thought. + +What is here a mere flash of good-natured championship becomes in the +great monologue of _Andrea del Sarto_ an illuminating compassion. +Compassion, be it noted, far less for the husband of an unfaithful wife +than for the great painter whose genius was tethered to a soulless mate. +The situation appealed profoundly to Browning, and Andrea's monologue is +one of his most consummate pieces of dramatic characterisation. It is a +study of spiritual paralysis, achieved without the least resort to the +rhetorical conventions which permit poetry to express men's silence with +speech and their apathy with song. Tennyson's Lotos-eaters chant their +world-weariness in choral strains of almost too magnificent afflatus to +be dramatically proper on the lips of spirits so resigned. Andrea's +spiritual lotus-eating has paralysed the nerve of passion in him, and +made him impotent to utter the lyrical cry which his fate seems to +crave. He is half "incapable of his own distress"; his strongest +emotions are a flitting hope or a momentary pang, quickly dissolved into +the ground-tone of mournful yet serene contemplation, which seems to +float ghostlike in the void between grief and joy. Reproach turns to +grateful acquiescence on his lips; the sting of blighted genius is +instantly annulled by the momentary enchantment of her smile, whose +worth he knows too well and remembers too soon:-- + + "And you smile indeed! + This hour has been an hour! Another smile? + If you would sit thus by me every night + I should work better, do you comprehend? + I mean that I should earn more, give you more." + +The tragedy is for us, not for him: he regrets little, and would change +still less. The "silver-grey" lights of dreamy autumn eve were never +with more delicate insight rendered in terms of soul. + +Suddenly these autumnal half-tones give way to the flash of torches in +the fragrant darkness of an Italian night. There is a scurry of feet +along a dark alley, a scuffle at the end, and the genial rotundity of +Brother Lippo Lippi's face, impudent, brilliant, insuppressible, leers +into the torchlight. _Fra Lippo Lippi_ is not less true and vivacious +than the _Andrea_, if less striking as an example of Browning's dramatic +power. Sarto is a great poetic creation; Browning's own robust +temperament provided hardly any aid in delineating the emaciated soul +whose gifts had thinned down to a morbid perfection of technique. But +this vigorous human creature, with the teeming brain, and the realist +eye, and the incorrigible ineptitude for the restraints of an insincere +clerical or other idealism, was a being to which Browning's heart went +out; and he even makes him the mouthpiece of literary ideas, which his +own portrait as here drawn aptly exemplifies. There is not much "soul" +in Lippo, but he has the hearty grasp of common things, of the world in +its business and its labour and its sport and its joys, which "edifies" +men more than artificial idealities designed expressly to "beat nature." +He "lends his mind out" and finds the answering mind in other men +instead of imposing one from without:-- + + "This world's no blot for us, +Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good: +To find its meaning is my meat and drink." + +"Ay, but," objects the Prior, "you do not instigate to prayer!" And it +is the prior and his system which for Lippi stand in the place of +Andrea's soulless wife. Lucrezia's illusive beauty lured his soul to its +doom; and Lippo, forced, as a child of eight, to renounce the world and +put on the cassock he habitually disgraced, triumphantly cast off the +incubus of a sham spirituality which only tended to obscure what was +most spiritual in himself. He was fortunate in the poet who has drawn +his portrait so superbly in his sitter's own style. + +These two monologues belong to the most finished achievements of +Browning. But we should miss much of the peculiar quality of his mind, +as well as a vivid glimpse into the hope-and-fear-laden atmosphere of +Tuscany in the early 'Fifties, if we had not that quaint heterogeneous +causerie called _Old Pictures in Florence_. There is passion in its +grotesqueness and method in its incoherence; for the old painters, +whose apologies he is ostensibly writing, with their imperfect +achievement and their insuppressible idealism, sounded a congenial note +to men whose eyes were bent incessantly upon the horizon waiting for the +invisible to come into play, and Florence looked for her completion as +Giotto's unfinished campanile for its spire. + +If Italy deepened Browning's hold upon the problems of painting, it +witnessed the beginnings of his equally characteristic achievement in +the kindred poetry of music. Not that his Italian life can have brought +any notable access of musical impressions to a man who had grown up +within easy reach of London concerts and operas. But England was a land +in which music was performed; Italy was a land in which it was made. +Verdi's "worst opera" could be heard in many places; but in Florence the +knowing spectator might see Verdi himself, at its close, + + "Look through all the roaring and the wreaths + Where sits Rossini patient in his stall." + +Italian music, with its facile melody and its relative poverty of ideas, +could not find so full a response in Browning's nature as Italian +painting. It had had its own gracious and tender youth; and Palestrina, +whom he contrasts with the mountainous fuguists of "Saxe-Gotha" and +elsewhere, probably had for him the same kind of charm as the early +painters of Florence. Out of that "infancy," however, there had arisen +no "titanically infantine" Michelangelo, but a race of accomplished +_petits maitres_, whose characteristic achievement was the opera of the +rococo age. A Goldsmith or a Sterne can make the light songs of their +contemporaries eloquent even to us of gracious amenities and cultivated +charm; but Browning, with the eternal April in his heart and brain, +heard in the stately measures it danced to, only the eloquence of a +dirge, penetrated with the sense of the mortality of such joy as theirs. +Byron had sung gaily of the gaieties of Venice; but the vivacious swing +of _Beppo_ was less to Browning's mind than the "cold music" of +Baldassare Galuppi, who made his world dance to the strains of its own +requiem, and fall upon dreamy suggestions of decay in the very climax of +the feast:-- + + "What? Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished, + sigh on sigh, + Told them something? Those suspensions, those solutions--'Must + we die?' + Those commiserating sevenths--"Life might last! We can but try!" + +The musician himself has no such illusions; but his music is only a more +bitter echo:-- + + "Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned: + The soul, doubtless, is immortal--where a soul can be discerned." + +And so the poet, in the self-consciousness of his immense vitality, +sweeps into the limbo of oblivion these dusty _debris_ of the past, with +no nearer approach to the romantic regret of a Malory for the glories of +old time or to Villon's awestruck contemplation of the mysterious +evanishment of storied beauty, than the half-contemptuous echo-- + + "'Dust and ashes!' So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold. + Dear dead women, with such hair too--what's become of all the gold + Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old." + +In the other music-poem of the Italian time it is not difficult to +detect a kindred mood beneath the half-disguise of rollicking rhymes and +whimsical comparisons. Once more Browning seems preoccupied with that in +music which lends expression to a soulless animation, a futile and +aimless vivacity. Only here it is the vivacity of the schools, not of +the ballroom. Yet some lines seem a very echo of that hollow joyless +mirth, for ever revolving on itself:-- + + "Est fuga, volvitur rota; + On we drift: where looms the dim port?" + +The intertwining and conflicting melodies of the fugue echo the impotent +strife of jangling tongues, "affirming, denying, holding, risposting, +subjoining,"--the shuttle play of comment and gloze shrouding the light +of nature and truth:-- + + "Over our heads truth and nature-- + Still our life's zigzags and dodges, + Ins and outs, weaving a new legislature-- + God's gold just shining its last where that lodges, + Palled beneath man's usurpature." + +But Browning was at heart too alive to the charm of this shuttle-play, +of these zigzags and dodges,--of zigzags and dodges of every kind,--not +to feel the irony of the attack upon this "stringing of Nature through +cobwebs"; when the organist breaks out, as the fugue's intricacy grows, +"But where's music, the dickens?" we hear Browning mocking the indignant +inquiries of similar purport so often raised by his readers. _Master +Hugues_ could only have been written by one who, with a childlike purity +of vision for truth and nature, for the shining of "God's gold" and the +glimpses of the "earnest eye of heaven," had also a keen perception and +instinctive delight in every filament of the web of human "legislature." + +This double aspect of Browning's poetic nature is vividly reflected in +the memorable essay on Shelley which he wrote at Paris in 1851, as an +introduction to a series of letters since shown to have been forged. The +essay--unfortunately not included in his Works--is a document of +first-rate importance for the mind of Browning in the midst of his +greatest time; it is also by far the finest appreciation of Shelley +which had yet appeared. He saw in Shelley one who, visionary and +subjective as he was, had solved the problem which confronts every +idealist who seeks to grasp the visible world in its concrete actuality. +To Browning himself that problem presented itself in a form which tasked +far more severely the resources of poetic imagination, in proportion as +actuality bodied itself forth to his alert senses in more despotic +grossness and strength. Shelley is commonly thought to have evaded this +task altogether,--building his dream-world of cloud and cavern +loveliness remote from anything we know. It is Browning, the most +"actual" of poets, who insisted, half a century ago, on the +"practicality" of Shelley,--insisted, as it is even now not superfluous +to insist, on the fearless and direct energy with which he strove to +root his intuitions in experience. "His noblest and predominating +characteristic," he urges, to quote these significant words once more, +"is his simultaneous perception of Power and Love in the absolute, and +of Beauty and Good in the concrete, while he throws, from his poet's +station between both, swifter, subtler, and more numerous films for the +connection of each with each than have been thrown by any modern +artificer of whom I have knowledge; proving how, as he says-- + + "'The spirit of the worm beneath the sod + In love and worship blends itself with God.'" + +Browning has nowhere else expounded so fully his ideas about the aims of +his own art. It lay in the peculiar "dramatic" quality of his mind to +express himself freely only in situations not his own. Hence, while he +does not altogether avoid the poet as a character, his poets are drawn +with a curious externality and detachment. It is in his musicians, his +painters, his grammarians, that the heart and passion of Browning the +poet really live. He is the poet of musicians and of painters, the poet +of lawyers and physicians and Rabbis, and of scores of callings which +never had a poet before; but he is not the poets' poet. In the +_Transcendentalism_, however, after tilting with gay irony at the fault +of over-much argument in poetry, which the world ascribed to his own, he +fixes in a splendid image the magic which it fitfully yet consummately +illustrates. The reading public which entertained any opinion about him +at all was inclined to take him for another Boehme, "with a tougher book +and subtler meanings of what roses say." A few knew that they had to +deal, not less, with a "stout Mage like him of Halberstadt," who + + "with a 'look you' vents a brace of rhymes, + And in there breaks the sudden rose herself, + Over us, under, round us every side." + +The portrait of the poet of Valladolid, on the other hand (_How it +Strikes a Contemporary_), is not so much a study of a poet as of popular +misconception and obtuseness. A grotesquely idle legend of the habits of +the "Corregidor" flourishes among the good folks of Valladolid; the +speaker himself, who desires to do him justice, is a plain, shrewd, but +unimaginative observer ("I never wrote a line of verse, did you?"), and +makes us acquainted with everything but the inner nature of the man. We +see the corregidor in the streets, in his chamber, at his frugal supper +and "decent cribbage" with his maid, but never at his verse. We see the +alert objective eye of this man with the "scrutinizing hat," who + + "stood and watched the cobbler at his trade, ... + If any beat a horse, you felt he saw, + If any cursed a woman, he took note,"-- + +and all this, for Browning, went to the making of the poet, but we get +no inkling of the process itself. Browning had, in his obscure as in his +famous days, peculiar opportunities of measuring the perversities of +popular repute. Later on, in the heyday of his renown, he chaffed its +critical dispensers in his most uproarious vein in _Pacchiarotto_. The +_Popularity_ stanzas present us with a theory of it conveyed in that +familiar manner of mingled poetry and grotesqueness which was one of the +obstacles to his own. + +There is, however, among these fifty men and women one true and sublime +poet,--the dying "Grammarian," who applies the alchemy of a lofty +imagination to the dry business of verbal erudition. + + "He said, 'What's time? Leave Now for dogs and apes! + Man has Forever.'" + +This is one of the half-dozen lyrics which enshrine in noble and +absolutely individual form the central core of Browning's passion and +thought. Even the verse, with its sequence of smooth-flowing iambics +broken by the leap of the dactyl, and the difficult double rhyme, +sustains the mood of victorious but not lightly won serenity of +soul--"too full for sound and foam." It is, among songs over the dead, +what _Rabbi ben Ezra_ and _Prospice_ are among the songs which face and +grapple with death; the fittest requiem to follow such deaths as those. +Like Ben Ezra, the Grammarian "trusts death," and stakes his life on the +trust:-- + + "He ventured neck or nothing--heaven's success + Found, or earth's failure: + 'Wilt thou trust death or not?' He answered, 'Yes: + Hence with life's pale lure!'" + +To ordinary eyes he spends his days grovelling among the dust and dregs +of erudition; but it is the grovelling of a builder at work upon a +fabric so colossally planned that life is fitly spent in laying the +foundations. He was made in the large mould of the gods,--born with "thy +face and throat, Lyric Apollo,"--and the disease which crippled and +silenced him in middle life could only alter the tasks on which he +wreaked his mind. And now that he is dead, he passes, as by right, to +the fellowship of the universe--of the sublime things of nature. + + "Here--here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form, + Lightnings 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." + + +VI. + + +_The Grammarian's Funeral_ achieves, in the terms and with the resources +of Browning's art, the problem of which he saw the consummate master in +Shelley,--that of throwing "films" for the connexion of Power and Love +in the abstract with Beauty and Good in the concrete, and finding a link +between the lowliest service or worship and the spirit of God. Such a +conception of a poet's crowning glory implied a peculiarly close +relation in Browning's view between poetry and religion, and in +particular with the religion which, above all others, glorified the +lowly. Here lay, in short, the supreme worth for him of the Christian +idea. "The revelation of God in Christ" was for him the consummate +example of that union of divine love with the world--"through all the +web of Being blindly wove"--which Shelley had contemplated in the +radiant glow of his poetry; accepted by the reason, as he wrote a few +years later, it solved "all problems in the earth and out of it." To +that solution Shelley seemed to Browning to be on the way, and his +incomplete grasp of it appealed to him more powerfully than did the +elaborate dogmatisms professedly based upon it. Shelley had mistaken +"Churchdom" for Christianity; but he was on the way, Browning was +convinced, to become a Christian himself. "I shall say what I +think,--had Shelley lived he would have finally ranged himself with the +Christians." + +This emphatic declaration is of great importance for Browning's +intellectual history. He may have overlooked the immense barriers which +must have always divided Shelley from the Christian world of his time; +he may have overlooked also that the Christian thought of our time has +in some important points "ranged itself with" Shelley; so that the +Christianity which he might finally have adopted would have been +sufficiently unlike that which he assailed. But it is clear that for +Browning himself the essence of Christianity lay at this time in +something not very remote from what he revered as the essence of +Shelleyism--a corollary, as it were, ultimately implicit in his thought. + +It was thus a deeper poetical rather than a religious or doctrinal +interest which drew Browning in these Italian years, again and again to +seek his revealing experiences of souls amid the eddies and convulsions, +the exultations and the agonies, brought into the world by the amazing +"revelation of God in Christ." It is true that we nowhere approach this +focus of interest, that we have no glimpse, through Browning's art, how +that "revelation" shaped itself in the first disciples, far less of +Christ himself. But that was at no time Browning's way of bringing to +expression what he deeply cared for. He would not trumpet forth truth in +his own person, or blazon it through the lips of the highest recognised +authority; he let it struggle up through the baffling density, or +glimmer through the conflicting persuasions of alien minds, and break +out in cries of angry wonder or involuntary recognition. And nowhere is +this method carried further than in the Christian poems of the Italian +time. The supreme musicians and painters he avoids, but Fra Lippo Lippi +and Master Hugues belong at least to the crafts whose secrets they +expound; while the Christian idea is set in a borrowed light caught from +the souls of men outside the Christian world--an Arab physician, a Greek +poet, a Jewish shepherd or rabbi, or from Christians yet farther from +the centre than these, like Blougram and the Abbe Deodaet. In method as +in conception these pieces are among the most Browningesque things that +Browning ever wrote. It is clear, however, that while his way of +handling these topics is absolutely his own, his peculiar concern with +them is new. The _Karshish_, the _Clean_, and the _Blougram_ have no +prototype or parallel among the poems of Browning's previous periods. In +the early Dramatic Lyrics and Romances, and in the plays, there is +exquisite rendering of religion, and also of irreligion; but the +religion is just the simple faith of Pippa or of Theocrite that "God's +in his world"; and the irreligion is the Humanist paganism of St +Praxed's, not so much hostile to Christianity as unconscious of it. No +single poem written before 1850 shows that acute interest in the +problems of Christian faith which constantly emerges in the work of this +and the following years. _Saul_, which might be regarded as signally +refuting this view, strikingly confirms it; the David of the first nine +sections, which alone were produced in 1845, being the naive, devout +child, brother of Pippa and of Theocrite; the evolution of this harping +shepherd-boy into the illuminated prophet of Christ was the splendid +achievement of the later years.[33] And to all this more acutely +Christian work the _Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day_ (1850) served as a +significant prologue. + +[Footnote 33: It is, indeed, clear, as has been seen, from Browning's +correspondence that a sequel of this kind was intended when the first +nine sections were published. The traditional legend of David would in +any case suggest so much. That the intention was not then executed is +just the significant fact.] + +There can be little doubt that the devout Christian faith of his wife +was principally concerned in this new direction of his poetry. Yet we +may easily overstate both the nature of her influence and its extent. +She, as little as he, was a dogmatic Christian; both refused to put on, +in her phrase, "any of the liveries of the sects."[34] "The truth, as +God sees it, must be something so different from these opinions about +truth.... I believe in what is divine and floats at highest, in all +these different theologies,--and because the really Divine draws +together souls, and tends so to a unity, could pray anywhere and with +all sorts of worshippers, from the Sistine chapel to Mr Fox's, those +kneeling and those standing."[35] Yet she demurs, a little farther on in +the same letter, to both these extremes. "The Unitarians seem to me to +throw over what is most beautiful in the Christian Doctrine; but the +Formulists, on the other side, stir up a dust, in which it appears +excusable not to see." To which he replies (Aug. 17): "Dearest, I know +your very meaning, in what you said of religion, and responded to it +with my whole soul--what you express now is for us both, ... those are +my own feelings, my convictions beside--instinct confirmed by reason." + +[Footnote 34: _E.B.B. to R.B._, 15th Aug. 1846.] + +[Footnote 35: Ib.] + +These words of Browning's seem to furnish the clue to the relation +between their minds in this matter. Their intercourse disturbed no +conviction on either side, for their convictions were identical. But her +intense personal devoutness undoubtedly quickened what was personal in +his belief, drew it into an atmosphere of keener and more emotional +consciousness, and in particular gave to that "revelation of God in +Christ" which they both regarded as what was "most beautiful in the +Christian doctrine," a more vital hold upon his intellectual and +imaginative life. In this sense, but only in this sense, his fervid +words to her (February 1846)--"I mean to ... let my mind get used to its +new medium of sight, seeing all things as it does through you; and then +let all I have done be the prelude and the real work begin"--were not +unfulfilled. No deep hiatus, such as this phrase suggests, divides the +later, as a whole, from the earlier work: the "dramatic" method, which +was among the elements of his art most foreign to her lyric nature, +established itself more and more firmly in his practice. But the letters +of 1845-46 show that her example was stimulating him to attempt a more +direct and personal utterance in poetry, and while he did not succeed, +or succeeded only "once and for one only," in evading his dramatic bias, +he certainly succeeded in making the dramatic form more eloquently +expressive of his personal faith. + +This was peculiarly the case in the remarkable _Christmas-Eve and +Easter-Day_ (1850), the first-fruits of his married life, and the most +instinct of all his poems with the mingled literary and religious +influences which it brought. The influence of the ardent singer, which +impelled him to fuller self-expression, here concurred with that of the +devout but undogmatic Christian, which drew the problem of Christianity +nearer to the focus of his imagination and his thought. There is much +throughout which suggests that Browning was deliberately putting off the +habits and usages of his art, and reaching out this way and that towards +untried sources and avenues of expression. He lays hold for the first +time of the machinery of supernatural vision. Nothing that he had yet +done approached in boldness these Christmas and Easter apparitions of +the Lord of Love. They break in, unheralded, a startling but splendid +anomaly, upon his human and actual world. And the really notable thing +is that never had he drawn human actuality with so remorseless and even +brutal fidelity as just here. He seeks no legendary scene and atmosphere +like that of Theocrite's Rome, in which the angels who come and go, and +God who enjoys his "little human praise," would be missed if they were +not there; but opens the visions of the Empyrean upon modern Camberwell. +The pages in which Browning might seem, for once, to vie with the author +of the Apocalypse are interleaved with others in which, for once, he +seems to vie with Balzac or Zola. Of course this is intensely +characteristic of Browning. The quickened spiritual pulse which these +poems betoken betrays itself just in his more daringly assured embrace +of the heights and the depths of the universe, as communicating and +akin, prompting also that not less daring embrace of the extremes of +expression,--sublime imagery and rollicking rhymes,--as equally genuine +utterances of spiritual fervour,-- + + "When frothy spume and frequent sputter + Prove that the soul's depths boil in earnest." + +These lines, and the great Shelleyan declaration that + + "A loving worm within its clod + Were diviner than a loveless God," + +are the key to both poems, but peculiarly to the _Christmas-Day_, in +which they occur. We need not in any wise identify Browning with the +Christmas-Day visionary; but it is clear that what is "dramatic" in him +exfoliates, as it were, from a root of character and thought which are +altogether Browning's own. Browning is apparent in the vivacious critic +and satirist of religious extravagances, standing a little aloof from +all the constituted religions; but he is apparent also in the +imaginative and sympathetic student of religion, who divines the +informing spark of love in all sincere worship; and however far he may +have been from putting forward the little conventicle with its ruins of +humanity, its soul at struggle with insanity, as his own final choice, +that choice symbolised in a picturesque half-humorous way his own +profound preference for the spiritual good which is hardly won. He makes +the speaker choose the "earthen vessel" in spite of its "taints of +earth," because it brimmed with spiritual water; but in Browning himself +there was something which relished the spiritual water the more because +the earthen vessel was flawed. + +Like _Christmas-Eve_, _Easter-Day_ is a dramatic study,--profound +convictions of the poet's own being projected as it were through forms +of religious consciousness perceptibly more angular and dogmatically +defined than his own. The main speaker is plainly not identical with the +narrator of _Christmas-Eve_, who is incidentally referred to as "our +friend." Their first beliefs may be much alike, but in the temper of +their belief they differ widely. The speaker in _Christmas-Eve_ is a +genial if caustic observer, submitting with robust tolerance to the +specks in the water which quenches his thirst; the speaker of +_Easter-Day_ is an anxious precisian, fearful of the contamination of +earth, and hoping that he may "yet escape" the doom of too facile +content. The problem of the one is, what to believe; the problem of the +other, how to believe; and each is helped towards a solution by a vision +of divine love. But the Easter-Day Vision conveys a sterner message than +that of _Christmas-Eve_. Love now illuminates, not by enlarging sympathy +and disclosing the hidden soul of good in error, but by suppressing +sympathies too diffusely and expansively bestowed. The Christmas Vision +makes humanity seem more divine; the Easter Vision makes the divine seem +less human. The hypersensitive moral nature of the Easter-Day speaker, +on the other hand, sees his own criminal darkness of heart and mind +before all else, and the divine visitation becomes a Last Judgment, with +the fierce vindictive red of the Northern Lights replacing the mild +glory of the lunar rainbows, and a stern and scornful cross-examination +the silent swift convoy of the winged robe. This difference of temper is +vividly expressed in the style. The rollicking rhymes, the "spume and +sputter" of the fervent soul, give place to a manner of sustained +seriousness and lyric beauty. + +Yet the Easter-Day speaker probes deeper and raises more fundamental +issues. When the form of Christian belief to be adopted has been +settled, a certain class of believing minds, not the least estimable, +will still remain restive. Browning of all men felt impatient of every +nominal belief held as unassimilated material, not welded into the +living substance of character; and he makes his Easter-Day visionary +confound with withering irony the "faith" which seeks assurance in +outward "evidence,"-- + + "'Tis found, + No doubt: as is your sort of mind, + So is your sort of search: you'll find + What you desire." + +Still less mercy has he for the dogmatic voluptuary who complacently +assumes the "all-stupendous tale" of Christianity to have been enacted + + "to give our joys a zest, + And prove our sorrows for the best." + +Upon these complacent materialisms and epicureanisms of the religious +character falls the scorching splendour of the Easter Vision, with its +ruthless condemnation of whatever is not glorified by Love, passing over +into the uplifting counter--affirmation, indispensable to Browning's +optimism, that-- + + "All thou dost enumerate + Of power and beauty in the world + The mightiness of Love was curled + Inextricably round about." + +With all their nobility of feeling, and frequent splendour of +description, these twin poems cannot claim a place in Browning's work at +all corresponding to the seriousness with which he put them forward, and +the imposing imaginative apparatus called in. The strong personal +conviction which seems to have been striving for direct utterance, +checked without perfectly mastering his dramatic instincts and +habitudes, resulting in a beautiful but indecisive poetry which lacks +both the frankness of a personal deliverance and the plasticity of a +work of art. The speakers can neither be identified with the poet nor +detached from him; they are neither his mouthpieces nor his creations. +The daring supernaturalism seems to indicate that the old spell of +Dante, so keenly felt in the _Sordello_ days, had been wrought to new +potency by the magic of the life in Dante's Florence, and the subtler +magic of the love which he was presently to compare not obscurely to +that of Dante for Beatrice.[36] The divine apparitions have the ironic +hauteurs and sarcasms of Beatrice in the _Paradise_. Yet the comparison +brings into glaring prominence the radical incoherence of Browning's +presentment. In Dante's world all the wonders that he describes seem to +be in place; but the Christmas and Easter Visions are felt as intrusive +anachronisms in modern London, where the divinest influences are not +those which become palpable in visions, but those which work through +heart and brain. + +[Footnote 36: _One Word More_.] + +Browning probably felt this, for the _Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day_ +stands in this respect alone in his work. But the idea of Christ as the +sign and symbol of the love which penetrates the universe lost none of +its hold upon his imagination; and it inspired some of the greatest +achievements of the _Men and Women_. It was under this impulse that he +now, at some time during the early Italian years, completed the splendid +torso of _Saul_. David's Vision of the Christ that is to be has as +little apparent relation to the quiet pastoralism of the earlier stanzas +as the Easter Vision to the common-sense reflections that preceded it. +But while this Vision abruptly bursts upon him, David's is the final +conquest of his own ardent intellect, under the impulse of a great human +task which lifts it beyond its experience, and calls out all its +powers. David is occupied with no speculative question, but with the +practical problem of saving a ruined soul; and neither logical ingenuity +nor divine suggestion, but the inherent spiritual significance of the +situation, urges his thought along the lonely path of prophecy. The love +for the old king, which prompts him to try all the hidden paths of his +soul in quest of healing, becomes a lighted torch by which he tracks out +the meaning of the world and the still unrevealed purposes of God; until +the energy of thought culminates in vision, and the Christ stands full +before his eyes. All that is supernatural in the _Saul_ is viewed +through the fervid atmosphere of David's soul. The magic of the +wonderful Nocturne at the close, where he feels his way home through the +appalled and serried gloom, is broken by no apparition; the whole earth +is alive and awake around him, and thrills to the quickening inrush of +the "new land"; but its light is the tingling emotion of the stars, and +its voice the cry of the little brooks; and the thronging cohorts of +angels and powers are unuttered and unseen. + +Only less beautiful than Browning's pictures of spiritual childhood are +his pictures of spiritual maturity and old age. The lyric simplicity, +the naive intensity which bear a David, a Pippa, a Pompilia without +effort into the region of the highest spiritual vision, appealed less +fully to his imagination than the more complex and embarrassed processes +through which riper minds forge their way towards the completed insight +of a Rabbi ben Ezra. In this sense, the great song of David has a +counterpart in the subtle dramatic study of the Arab physician Karshish. +He also is startled into discovery by a unique experience. But where +David is lifted on and on by a continuous tide of illuminating thought, +perfectly new and strange, but to which nothing in him opposes the +semblance of resistance, Karshish feels only a mysterious attraction, +which he hardly confesses, and which all the intellectual habits and +convictions of a life given up to study and thought seem to gainsay. No +touch of worldly motive belongs to either. The shepherd-boy is not more +single-souled than this devoted "picker up of learning's crumbs," who +makes nothing of perilous and toilsome journeys for the sake of his art, +who is threatened by hungry wild beasts, stripped and beaten by robbers, +arrested as a spy. At every step his quick scrutiny is rewarded by the +discovery of some new drug, mineral, or herb,--"things of price"--"blue +flowering borage, the Aleppo sort," or "Judaea's gum-tragacanth." But +Karshish has much of the temper of Browning himself: these +technicalities are the garb of a deep underlying mysticism. This man's +flesh so admirably made by God is yet but the earthly prison for "that +puff of vapour from his mouth, man's soul." The case of Lazarus, though +at once, as a matter of course, referred to the recognised medical +categories, yet strangely puzzles and arrests him, with a fascination +that will not be put by. This abstracted docile man of perfect physical +vigour, who heeds the approach of the Roman avenger as he would the +passing of a woman with gourds by the way, and is yet no fool, who seems +apathetic and yet loves the very brutes and the flowers of the +field,--compels his scrutiny, as a phenomenon of soul, and it is with +the eye of a psychological idealist rather than of a physician that he +interprets him:-- + + "He holds on firmly to some thread of life-- ... + Which runs across some vast distracting orb + Of glory on either side that meagre thread, + Which, conscious of, he must not enter yet-- + The spiritual life around the earthly life: + The law of that is known to him as this, + His heart and brain move there, his feet stay here. + So is the man perplext with impulses + Sudden to start off crosswise, not straight on, + Proclaiming what is right and wrong across, + And not along, this black thread through the blaze-- + 'It should be' baulked by 'here it cannot be.'" + +Lazarus stands where Paracelsus conceived that he himself stood: he +"knows God's secret while he holds the thread of life"; he lives in the +glare of absolute knowledge, an implicit criticism of the Paracelsian +endeavour to let in upon men the searing splendour of the unclouded day. +To Karshish, however, these very embarrassments--so unlike the knowing +cleverness of the spiritual charlatan--make it credible that Lazarus is +indeed no oriental Sludge, but one who has verily seen God. But then +came the terrible crux,--the pretension, intolerable to Semitic +monotheism, that God had been embodied in a man. The words scorch the +paper as he writes, and, like Ferishtah, he will not repeat them. Yet +he cannot escape the spell of the witness, and the strange thought +clings tenaciously to him, defying all the evasive shifts of a trained +mind, and suddenly overmastering him when his concern with it seems +finally at an end--when his letter is finished, pardon asked, and +farewell said--in that great outburst, startling and unforeseen yet not +incredible:-- + + "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!" + +That words like these, intensely Johannine in conception, should seem to +start naturally from a mind which just before has shrunk in horror from +the idea of an approximation between God and that which He fashioned, is +an extraordinary _tour de force_ of dramatic portraiture. Among the +minor traits which contribute to it is one of a kind to which Browning +rarely resorts. The "awe" which invests Lazarus is heightened by a +mystic setting of landscape. The visionary scene of his first meeting +with Karshish, though altogether Browningesque in detail, is +Wordsworthian in its mysterious effect upon personality:-- + + "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." + +A less formidable problem is handled in the companion study of _Cleon_. +The Greek mind fascinated Browning, though most of his renderings of it +have the savour of a salt not gathered in Attica, and his choice of +types shows a strong personal bias. From the heroic and majestic elder +art of Greece he turns with pronounced preference to Euripides the human +and the positive, with his facile and versatile intellect, his agile +criticism, and his "warm tears." It is somewhat along these lines that +he has conceived his Greek poet of the days of Karshish, confronted, +like the Arab doctor, with the "new thing." As Karshish is at heart a +spiritual idealist, for all his preoccupation with drugs and stones, so +Cleon, a past-master of poetry and painting, is among the most positive +and worldly-wise of men. He looks back over a life scored with literary +triumphs, as Karshish over his crumbs of learning gathered at the cost +of blows and obloquy. But while Karshish has the true scholar's +dispassionate and self-effacing thirst for knowledge, Cleon measures his +achievements with the insight of an epicurean artist. He gathers in +luxuriously the incense of universal applause,--his epos inscribed on +golden plates, his songs rising from every fishing-bark at +nightfall,--and wistfully contrasts the vast range of delights which as +an artist he imagines, with the limited pleasures which as a man he +enjoys. The magnificent symmetry, the rounded completeness of his life, +suffer a serious deduction here, and his Greek sense of harmony suffers +offence as well as his human hunger for joy. He is a thorough realist, +and finds no satisfaction in contemplating what he may not possess. Art +itself suffers disparagement, as heightening this vain capacity of +contemplation:-- + + "I know the joy of kingship: well, thou art king!" + +With great ingenuity this Greek realism is made the stepping-stone to a +conception of immortality as un-Greek as that of the Incarnation is +un-Semitic. Karshish shrank intuitively from a conception which +fascinated while it awed; to Cleon a future state in which joy and +capability will be brought again to equality seems a most plausible +supposition, which he only rejects with a sigh for lack of outer +evidence:-- + + "Zeus has not yet revealed it; and alas, + He must have done so, were it possible!" + +The little vignette in the opening lines finely symbolises the brilliant +Greek decadence, as does the closing picture in Karshish the mystic dawn +of the Earth. Here the portico, flooded with the glory of a sun about to +set, profusely heaped with treasures of art; there the naked uplands of +Palestine, and the moon rising over jagged hills in a wind-swept sky. + +In was in such grave _adagio_ notes as these that Browning chose to set +forth the "intimations of immortality" in the meditative wisdom and +humanity of heathendom. The after-fortunes of the Christian legend, on +the other hand, and the naive ferocities and fantasticalities of the +medieval world provoked him rather to _scherzo_,--audacious and +inimitable _scherzo_, riotously grotesque on the surface, but with a +grotesqueness so penetrated and informed by passion that it becomes +sublime. _Holy-Cross Day_ and _The Heretic's Tragedy_ both culminate, +like _Karshish_ and _Clean_, in a glimpse of Christ. But here, instead +of being approached through stately avenues of meditation, it is wrung +from the grim tragedy of persecution and martyrdom. The Jews, packed +like rats to hear the sermon, mutter under their breath the sublime song +of Ben Ezra, one of the most poignant indictments of Christianity in the +name of Christ ever conceived:-- + + "We withstood Christ then? Be mindful how + At least we withstand Barabbas now! + Was our outrage sore? But the worst we spared, + To have called these--Christians, had we dared! + Let defiance of them pay mistrust of Thee, + And Rome make amends for Calvary!" + +And John of Molay, as he burns in Paris Square, cries upon "the Name he +had cursed with all his life." The _Tragedy_ stands alone in literature; +Browning has written nothing more original. Its singularity springs +mainly from a characteristic and wonderfully successful attempt to +render several planes of emotion and animus through the same tale. The +"singer" looks on at the burning, the very embodiment of the robust, +savagely genial spectator, with a keen eye for all the sporting-points +in the exhibition,--noting that the fagots are piled to the right height +and are of the right quality-- + + "Good sappy bavins that kindle forthwith, ... + Larch-heart that chars to a chalk-white glow:" + +and when the torch is clapt-to and he has "leapt back safe," poking +jests and gibes at the victim. But through this distorting medium we see +the soul of John himself, like a gleam-lit landscape through the whirl +of a storm; a strange weird sinister thing, glimmering in a dubious +light between the blasphemer we half see in him with the singer's eyes +and the saint we half descry with our own. Of explicit pathos there is +not a touch. Yet how subtly the inner pathos and the outward scorn are +fused in the imagery of these last stanzas:-- + + "Ha, ha, John plucketh now at his rose + To rid himself of a sorrow at heart! + Lo,--petal on petal, fierce rays unclose; + Anther on anther, sharp spikes outstart; + And with blood for dew, the bosom boils; + And a gust of sulphur is all its smell; + And lo, he is horribly in the toils + Of a coal-black giant flower of hell! + + So, as John called now, through the fire amain, + On the Name, he had cursed with, all his life-- + To the Person, he bought and sold again-- + For the Face, with his daily buffets rife-- + Feature by feature It took its place: + And his voice, like a mad dog's choking bark, + At the steady whole of the Judge's face-- + Died. Forth John's soul flared into the dark." + +None of these dramatic studies of Christianity attracted so lively an +interest as _Bishop Blougram's Apology._ It was "actual" beyond anything +he had yet done; it portrayed under the thinnest of veils an +illustrious Catholic prelate familiar in London society; it could be +enjoyed with little or no feeling for poetry; and it was amazingly +clever. Even Tennyson, his loyal friend but unwilling reader, excepted +it, on the last ground, from his slighting judgment upon _Men and Women_ +at large. The figure of Blougram, no less than his discourse, was +virtually new in Browning, and could have come from him at no earlier +time. He is foreshadowed, no doubt, by a series of those accomplished +mundane ecclesiastics whom Browning at all times drew with so keen a +zest,--by Ogniben, the bishop in _Pippa Passes_, the bishop of St +Praxed's. But mundane as he is, he bears the mark of that sense of the +urgency of the Christian problem which since _Christmas-Eve and +Easter-Day_ had so largely and variously coloured Browning's work. It +occurred to none of those worldly bishops to justify their +worldliness,--it was far too deeply ingrained for that. But Blougram's +brilliant defence, enormously disproportioned as it is to the +insignificance of the attack, marks his tacit recognition of loftier +ideals than he professes. Like Cleon, he bears involuntary witness to +what he repudiates. + +But there is much more in Blougram than this. The imposing personality +of Wiseman contained much to attract and conciliate a poet like +Browning, whose visionary idealism went along with so unaffected a +relish for the world and the talents which succeed there. A great +spiritual ruler, performing with congenial ease the enormous and varied +functions of his office, and with intellectual resources, when they were +discharged, to win distinction in scholarship, at chess, in society, +appealed powerfully to Browning's congenital delight in all strong and +vivid life. He was a great athlete, who had completely mastered his +circumstances and shaped his life to his will. Opposed to a man of this +varied and brilliant achievement, an ineffectual dilettante appeared a +sorry creature enough; and Browning, far from taking his part and +putting in his craven mouth the burning retorts which the reader in vain +expects, makes him play helplessly with olive-stones while the great +bishop rolls him out his mind, and then, as one cured and confuted, +betake himself to the life of humbler practical activity and social +service. + +It is plain that the actual Blougram offered tempting points of contact +with that strenuous ideal of life which he was later to preach through +the lips of "Rabbi ben Ezra." Even what was most problematic in him, his +apparently sincere profession of an outworn creed, suggested the +difficult feat of a gymnast balancing on a narrow edge, or forcibly +holding his unbelief in check,-- + + "Kept quiet like the snake 'neath Michael's foot, + Who stands calm just because he feels it writhe." + +But Browning marks clearly the element both of self-deception and +deliberate masquerade in Blougram's defence. He made him "say right +things and call them by wrong names." The intellectual athlete in him +went out to the intellectual athlete in the other, and rejoiced in +every equation he seemed to establish. He played, and made Blougram +play, upon the elusive resemblance between the calm of effortless +mastery and that of hardly won control. + +The rich and varied poetry reviewed in the last three sections occupies +less than half of _Men and Women_, and leaves the second half of the +title unexplained. In that richer emotional atmosphere which breathes +from every line of his Italian work, the profound fulfilment of his +spiritual needs which he found in his home was the most vital and potent +element. His imaginative grasp of every kind of spiritual energy, of +every "incident of soul," was deepened by his new but incessant and +unqualified experience of love. His poetry focussed itself more +persistently than ever about those creative energies akin to love, of +which art in the fullest sense is the embodiment, and religion the +recognition. It would have been strange if the special form of +love-experience to which the quickening thrill was due had remained +untouched by it. In fact, however, the title of the volume is +significant as well as accurate; for Browning's poetry of the love +between men and women may be said, save for a few simple though +exquisite earlier notes, to begin with it. + + +VII. + + +The love-poetry of the _Men and Women_ volumes, as originally published, +was the most abundant and various, if not the most striking, part of its +contents. It was almost entirely transferred, in the collected edition +of his Poems issued in 1863, to other rubrics, to the _Dramatic +Lyrics_, of which it now forms the great bulk, and to the _Dramatic +Romances_. But of Browning's original "fifty men and women," nearly half +were lovers or occupied with love. Such fertility was natural enough in +the first years of a supremely happy marriage, crowning an early manhood +in which love of any kind had, for better or worse, played hardly any +part at all. Yet almost nothing in these beautiful and often brilliant +lyrics is in any strict sense personal. The biographer who searches them +for traits quivering with intimate experience searches all but in vain. +Browning's own single and supreme passion touched no fountain of song, +such as love sets flowing in most poets and in many who are not poets: +even the memorable months of 1845-46 provoked no Sonnets "_to_ the +Portuguese." His personal story impresses itself upon his poetry only +through the preoccupation which it induces with the love-stories of +other people, mostly quite unlike his own. The white light of his own +perfect union broke from that prismatic intellect of his in a poetry +brilliant with almost every other hue. No English poet of his century, +and few of any other, have made love seem so wonderful; but he +habitually takes this wonder bruised and jostled in the grip of +thwarting conditions. In his way of approaching love Browning strangely +blends the mystic's exaltation with the psychologist's cool penetrating +scrutiny of its accompanying phenomena, its favourable or impeding +conditions. The keen analytic accent of Paracelsus mingles with the +ecstatic unearthly note of Shelley. "Love is all" might have served as +the text for the whole volume of Browning's love-poetry; but the text is +wrought out with an amazingly acute vision for all the things which are +not love. "Love triumphing over the world" might have been the motto for +most of the love-poems in _Men and Women_; but some would have had to be +assigned to the opposite rubric, "The world triumphing over love." +Sometimes Love's triumph is, for Browning, the rapture of complete +union, for which all outer things exist only by subduing themselves to +its mood and taking its hue; sometimes it is the more ascetic and +spiritual triumph of an unrequited lover in the lonely glory of his +love. + +The triumph of Browning's united lovers has often a superb Elizabethan +note of defiance. Passion obliterates for them the past and throws a +mystically hued veil over Nature. The gentle Romantic sentiments hardly +touch the fresh springs of their emotion. They may meet and woo "among +the ruins," as Coleridge met and wooed his Genevieve "beside the ruined +tower"; but their song does not, like his, "suit well that ruin old and +hoary," but, on the contrary, tramples with gay scorn upon the lingering +memories of the ruined city,--a faded pageant yoked to its triumphal +car. + + "Oh heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns! + Earth's returns + For whole centuries of folly, noise, and sin! + Shut them in, + With their triumphs and their glories and the rest! + Love is best." + +Another lover, in _My Star_, pours lyric disdain upon his friends for +whose purblind common-sense vision the star which to him "dartled red +and blue," now a bird, now a flower, was just--a star. More finely +touched than either of these is _By the Fireside_. After _One Word +More_, to which it is obviously akin, it is Browning's most perfect +rendering of the luminous inner world, all-sufficing and self-contained, +of a rapturous love. The outer world is here neither thrust aside nor +fantastically varied; it is drawn into the inner world by taking its hue +and becoming the confidant and executant of its will. A landscape so +instinct with the hushed awe of expectation and with a mystic tenderness +is hardly to be found elsewhere save in _Christabel_,-- + + "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. + + * * * * * + + 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." + +_By the Fireside_ is otherwise memorable as portraying with whatever +disguise the Italian home-life of the poet and his wife. The famous +description of "the perfect wife" as she sat + + "Musing by firelight, that great brow + And the spirit-small hand propping it, + Yonder, my heart knows how"-- + +remain among the most living portraitures of that exquisite but fragile +form. Yet neither here nor elsewhere did Browning care to dwell upon the +finished completeness of the perfect union. His intellectual thirst for +the problematic, and his ethical thirst for the incomplete, combined to +hurry him away to the moments of suspense, big with undecided or +unfulfilled fate. The lover among the ruins is awaiting his mistress; +the rapturous expectancy of another waiting lover is sung in _In Three +Days_. And from the fireside the poet wanders in thought from that +highest height of love which he has won to the mystic hour before he won +it, when the elements out of which his fate was to be resolved still +hung apart, awaiting the magical touch, which might never be given:-- + + "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! + + * * * * * + + 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!" + +But the poet who lingered over these moments of suspended fate did not +usually choose the harmonious solution of them. The "little less" of +incomplete response might "suspend the breath" of the lover, but it was +an inexhaustible inspiration to the poet. It provokes, for instance, the +delicate symbolism of the twin lyrics _Love in a Life_ and _Life in a +Love_, variations on the same theme--vain pursuit of the averted +face--the one a _largo_, sad, persistent, dreamily hopeless; the other +impetuous, resolute, glad. The dreamier mood is elaborated in the +_Serenade at the Villa_ and _One Way of Love_. A few superbly +imaginative phrases bring the Italian summer night about us, sultry, +storm-shot, starless, still,-- + + "Life was dead, and so was light." + +The Serenader himself is no child of Italy but a meditative Teuton, who, +Hamlet-like, composes for his mistress the answer which he would not +have her give. The lover in _One Way of Love_ is something of a Teuton +too, and has thoughts which break the vehemence of the impact of his +fate. But there is a first moment when he gasps and knits himself closer +to endure--admirably expressed in the sudden change to a brief trochaic +verse; then the grim mood is dissolved in a momentary ecstasy of +remembrance or of idea--and the verse, too, unfolds and releases itself +in sympathy:-- + + "She will not hear my music? So! + Break the string; fold music's wing; + Suppose Pauline had bade me sing!" + +Or, instead of this systole and diastole alternation, the glory and the +pang are fused and interpenetrated in a continuous mood. Such a mood +furnishes the spiritual woof of one of Browning's most consummate and +one of his loveliest lyrics, _The Last Ride Together_ and _Evelyn Hope_. +"How are we to take it?" asks Mr Fotheringham of the latter. "As the +language of passion resenting death and this life's woeful +incompleteness? or as a prevision of the soul in a moment of intensest +life?" The question may be asked; yet the passion of regret which glows +and vibrates through it is too suffused with exalted faith in a final +recovery to find poignant expression. This lyric, with its taking +melody, has delighted thousands to whom Browning is otherwise "obscure," +partly because it appeals with naive audacity at once to Romantic and to +Christian sentiment--combining the faith in love's power to seal its +object for ever as its own with the Christian faith in personal +immortality--a personal immortality in which there is yet marrying and +giving in marriage, as Romance demands. _The Last Ride Together_ has +attracted a different audience. Its passion is of a rarer and more +difficult kind, less accessible to the love and less flattering to the +faith of common minds. This lover dreams of no future recovery of more +than he still retains; his love, once for all, avails nothing; and the +secure faith of Evelyn's lover, that "God creates the love to reward the +love," is not his. His mistress will never "awake and remember and +understand." But that dead form he is permitted to clasp; and in the +rapture of that phantom companionship passion and thought slowly +transfigure and glorify his fate, till from the lone limbo of outcast +lovers he seems to have penetrated to the innermost fiery core of life, +which art and poetry grope after in vain--to possess that supreme moment +of earth which, prolonged, is heaven. + + "What if heaven be that, fair and strong + At life's best, with our eyes upturned + Whither life's flower is first discerned, + We, fixed so, ever should so abide? + What if we still ride on, we two + With life for ever old yet new, + Changed not in kind but in degree, + The instant made eternity,-- + And heaven just prove that I and she + Ride, ride together, for ever ride?" + +The "glory of failure" is with Browning a familiar and inexhaustible +theme; but its spiritual abstraction here flushes with the human glory +of possession; the aethereal light and dew are mingled with breath and +blood; and in the wonderful long-drawn rhythm of the verse we hear the +steady stride of the horses as they bear their riders farther and +farther in to the visionary land of Romance. + +It is only the masculine lover whom Browning allows thus to get the +better of unreturned love. His women have no such _remedia amoris_; +their heart's blood will not transmute into the ichor of poetry. It is +women almost alone who ever utter the poignancy of rejected love; in +them it is tragic, unreflecting, unconsolable, and merciless; while +something of his own elastic buoyancy of intellect, his supple optimism, +his analytic, dissipating fancy, infused itself into his portrayal of +the grief-pangs of his own sex. This distinction is very apparent in the +group of lyrics which deal with the less complete divisions of love. An +almost oppressive intensity of womanhood pulses in _A Woman's Last Word, +In a Year_, and _Any Wife to Any Husband_: the first, with its depth of +self-abasement and its cloying lilting melody, trembles, exquisite as it +is, on the verge of the "sentimental." There is a rarer, subtler pathos +in _Two in the Campagna_. The outward scene finds its way to his senses, +and its images make a language for his mood, or else they break sharply +across it and sting it to a cry. He feels the Campagna about him, with +its tranced immensity lying bare to heaven:-- + + "Silence and passion, joy and peace, + An everlasting wash of air-- ... + Such life here, through such length of hours, + Such miracles performed in play, + Such primal naked forms of flowers, + Such letting nature have her way + While heaven looks from its towers;" + +and in the presence of that large sincerity of nature he would fain also +"be unashamed of soul" and probe love's wound to the core. But the +invisible barriers will not be put aside or transcended, and in the +midst of that "infinite passion" there remain "the finite hearts that +yearn." Or else he wakes after the quarrel in the blitheness of a bright +dawn:-- + + "All is blue again + After last night's rain, + And the South dries the hawthorn spray. + Only, my love's away! + I'd as lief that the blue were grey." + +The disasters of love rarely, with Browning, stir us very deeply. His +temperament was too elastic, his intellect too resourceful, to enter +save by artificial processes into the mood of blank and hopeless grief. +Tragedy did not lie in his blood, and fortune--kinder to the man than to +the poet--had as yet denied him, in love, the "baptism of sorrow" which +has wrung immortal verse from the lips of frailer men. It may even be +questioned whether all Browning's poetry of love's tragedy will live as +long as a few stanzas of Musset's _Nuits_,--bare, unadorned verses, +devoid of fancy or wit, but intense and penetrating as a cry:-- + + "Ce soir encor je t'ai vu m'apparaitre, + C'etait par une triste nuit. + L'aile des vents battait a ma fenetre; + J'etais seul, courbe sur mon lit. + J'y regardais une place cherie, + Tiede encor d'un baiser brulant; + Et je songeais comme la femme oublie, + Et je sentais un lambeau de ma vie, + Qui se dechirait lentement. + Je rassemblais des lettres de la veille, + Des cheveux, des debris d'amour. + Tout ce passe me criait a l'oreille + Ses eternels serments d'un jour. + Je contemplais ces reliques sacrees, + Qui me faisaient trembler la main: + Larmes du coeur par le coeur devorees, + Et que les yeux qui les avaient pleurees + Ne reconnaitront plus demain!"[37] + +[Footnote 37: Musset, _Nuit de decembre_.] + +The same quest of the problematic which attracted Browning to the poetry +of passion repelled or unrequited made him a curious student also of +fainter and feebler "wars of love"--embryonic or simulated forms of +passion which stood still farther from his personal experience. _A Light +Woman, A Pretty Woman_, and _Another Way of Love_ are refined studies in +this world of half tones. But the most important and individual poem of +this group is _The Statue and the Bust_, an excellent example of the +union in Browning of the Romantic temper with a peculiar mastery of +everything in human nature which traverses and repudiates Romance. The +duke and the lady are simpler and slighter Hamlets--Hamlets who have no +agonies of self-questioning and self-reproach; intervening in the long +pageant of the famous lovers of romantic tradition with the same +disturbing shock as he in the bead-roll of heroic avengers. The poet's +indignant denunciation of his lovers at the close, apparently for not +violating the vows of marriage, is puzzling to readers who do not +appreciate the extreme subtlety of Browning's use of figure. He was at +once too much and too little of a casuist,--too habituated to fine +distinctions and too unaware of the pitfalls they often present to +others,--to understand that in condemning his lovers for wanting the +energy to commit a crime he could be supposed to imply approval of the +crime they failed to commit. + +Lastly, in the outer periphery of his love poetry belong his rare and +fugitive "dreams" of love. _Women and Roses_ has an intoxicating +swiftness and buoyancy of music. But there is another and more sinister +kind of love-dream--the dream of an unloved woman. Such a dream, with +its tragic disillusion, Browning painted in his poignant and original +_In a Balcony_. It is in no sense a drama, but a dramatic incident in +three scenes, affecting the fates of three persons, upon whom the entire +interest is concentrated. The three vivid and impressive character-heads +stand out with intense and minute brilliance from a background +absolutely blank and void. Though the scene is laid in a court and the +heroine is a queen, there is no bustle of political intrigue, no +conflict between the rival attractions of love and power, as in +_Colombe's Birthday_. Love is the absorbing preoccupation of this +society, the ultimate ground of all undertakings. There is vague talk of +diplomatic victories, of dominions annexed, of public thanksgivings; but +the statesman who has achieved all this did it all to win the hand of a +girl, and the aged queen whom he has so successfully served has secretly +dreamed all the time, though already wedded, of being his. For a +brilliant young minister to fail to make love to his sovereign, in spite +of her grey hairs and the marriage law, is a kind of high treason. In +its social presuppositions this community belongs to a world as +visionary as the mystic dream-politics of M. Maeterlinck. But, those +presuppositions granted, everything in it has the uncompromising +clearness and persuasive reality that Browning invariably communicates +to his dreams. The three figures who in a few hours taste the height of +ecstasy and then the bitterness of disillusion or severance, are drawn +with remarkable psychologic force and truth. For all three love is the +absorbing passion, the most real thing in life, scornfully contrasted +with the reflected joys of the painter or the poet. Norbert's noble +integrity is of a kind which mingles in duplicity and intrigue with +disastrous results; he is too invincibly true to himself easily to act a +part; but he can control the secret hunger of his heart and give no +sign, until the consummate hour arrives when he may + + "resume + Life after death (it is no less than life, + After such long unlovely labouring days) + And liberate to beauty life's great need + O' the beautiful, which, while it prompted work, + Suppress'd itself erewhile." + +In the ecstasy of release from that suppression, every tree and flower +seems to be an embodiment of the harmonious freedom he had so long +foregone, as Wordsworth, chafing under his unchartered freedom, saw +everywhere the willing submission to Duty. Even + + "These statues round us stand abrupt, distinct, + The strong in strength, the weak in weakness fixed, + The Muse for ever wedded to her lyre, + Nymph to her fawn, and Silence to her rose: + See God's approval on his universe! + Let us do so--aspire to live as these + In harmony with truth, ourselves being true!" + +But it is the two women who attract Browning's most powerful handling. +One of them, the Queen, has hardly her like for pity and dread. A +"lavish soul" long starved, but kindling into the ecstasy of girlhood at +the seeming touch of love; then, as her dream is shattered by the +indignant honesty of Norbert, transmuted at once into the daemonic +Gudrun or Brynhild, glaring in speechless white-heat and implacable +frenzy upon the man who has scorned her proffered heart and the hapless +girl he has chosen.[38] Between these powerful, rigid, and simple +natures stands Constance, ardent as they, but with the lithe and +palpitating ardour of a flame. She is concentrated Romance. Her love is +an intense emotion; but some of its fascination lies in its secrecy,-- + + "Complots inscrutable, deep telegraphs, + Long-planned chance meetings, hazards of a look"; + +she shrinks from a confession which "at the best" will deprive their +love of its spice of danger and make them even as their "five hundred +openly happy friends." She loves adventure, ruse, and stratagem for +their own sake. But she is also romantically generous, and because she +"owes this withered woman everything," is eager to sacrifice her own +hopes of happiness. + +[Footnote 38: An anecdote to which Prof. Dowden has lately called +attention (_Browning_, p. 66) describes Browning in his last years as +demurring to the current interpretation of the _denoument_. Some one had +remarked that it was "a natural sequence that the guard should be heard +coming to take Norbert to his doom." "'Now I don't quite think that,' +answered Browning, _as if he were following out the play as a +spectator_. 'The queen has a large and passionate temperament.... She +would have died by a knife in her heart. The guard would have come to +carry away her dead body.'" The catastrophe here suggested is +undoubtedly far finer tragedy. But we cannot believe that this was what +Browning originally meant to happen. That Norbert and Constance expect +"doom" is obvious, and the queen's parting "glare" leaves the reader in +no doubt that they are right. They may, nevertheless, be wrong; but +what, then, is meant by the coming of the guard, and the throwing open +of the doors? The queen has in any case not died on the stage, for she +had left it; and if she died outside, how should they have come "to +carry away her dead body"?] + +Were it not for its unique position in Browning's poetry, one might well +be content with a passing tribute to the great love canticle which +closes _Men and Women_--the crown, as it is in a pregnant sense the +nucleus, of the whole. But here, for "once, and only once, and for one +only," not only the dramatic instinct, which habitually coloured all his +speech, but the reticence which so hardly permitted it to disclose his +most intimate personal emotion, were deliberately overcome--overcome, +however, only in order, as it were, to explain and justify their more +habitual sway. All the poetry in it is reached through the endeavour to +find speaking symbols for a love that cannot be told. The poet is a high +priest, entering with awed steps the sanctuary which even he cannot +tread without desecration save after divesting himself of all that is +habitual and of routine,--even the habits of his genius and the routine +of his art. Unable to divest himself of his poetry altogether, for he +has no other art, he lays aside his habitual dramatic guise to speak, +for once, not as Lippo, Roland, or Andrea, but "in his true person." And +he strips off the veil of his art and speaks in his own person only to +declare that speech is needless, and to fall upon that exquisite symbol +of an esoteric love uncommunicated and incommunicable to the +apprehension of the world,--the moon's other face with all its "silent +silver lights and darks," undreamed of by any mortal. "Heaven's gift +takes man's abatement," and poetry itself may only hint at the divinity +of perfect love. The _One Word More_ was written in September 1855, +shortly before the publication of the volume it closed, as the old moon +waned over the London roofs. Less than six years later the "moon of +poets" had passed for ever from his ken. + + + + +CHAPTER V. + +LONDON. _DRAMATIS PERSONAE._ + + + Ah, Love! but a day + And the world has changed! + The sun's away, + And the bird estranged. + --_James Lee's Wife_. + + That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows, + Or decomposes but to recompose, + Become my universe that feels and knows. + --_Epilogue_. + + +The catastrophe of June 29, 1861, closed with appalling suddenness the +fifteen years' married life of Browning. "I shall grow still, I hope," +he wrote to Miss Haworth, a month later, "but my root is taken, and +remains." The words vividly express the valour in the midst of +desolation which animated one little tried hitherto by sorrow. The +Italian home was shattered, and no thought of even attempting a +patched-up existence in its ruined walls seems to have occurred to him; +even the neighbourhood of the spot in which all that was mortal of her +had been laid had no power to detain him. But his departure was no mere +flight from scenes intolerably dear. He had their child to educate and +his own life to fulfil, and he set himself with grim resolution to the +work, as one who had indeed _had everything_, but who was as little +inclined to abandon himself to the past as to forget it. After visiting +his father in Paris--the "dear _nonno_" of his wife's charming +letters[39]--he settled in London, at first in lodgings, then at the +house in Warwick Crescent which was for a quarter of a century to be his +home. Something of that dreary first winter found its way, ten years +later, through whatever dramatic disguise, into the poignant epilogue of +_Fifine_. Browning had been that "Householder," had gone through the +dragging days and nights,-- + + "All the fuss and trouble of street-sounds, window-sights, + All the worry of flapping door and echoing roof; and then + All the fancies,"-- + +perhaps, among them, that of the "knock, call, cry," and the pang and +rapture of the visionary meeting. Certainly one of the effects of his +loss was to accentuate the mood of savage isolation which lurked beneath +Browning's genial sociality. The world from which his saint had been +snatched looked very common, sordid, and mean, and he resented its +intrusiveness on occasion with startling violence. When proposals were +made in 1863 in various quarters to publish her life, he turned like a +wild beast upon the "blackguards" who "thrust their paws into his +bowels" by prying into his intimacies. To the last he dismissed similar +proposals by critics of the highest status with a cavalier bluntness +highly surprising to persons who only knew him as the man of punctilious +observance and fastidious good form. For the rest, London contained much +that was bound by degrees to temper the gloom and assuage the hostility. +Florence and Rome could furnish nothing like the circle of men of genius +and varied accomplishment, using like himself the language of +Shakespeare and Milton, in which he presently began to move as an +intimate. Thackeray, Ruskin, Tennyson, Carlyle, Rossetti, Leighton, +Woolner, Prinsep, and many more, added a kind of richness to his life +which during the last fifteen years he had only enjoyed at intervals. +And the flock of old friends who accepted Browning began to be +reinforced by a crowd of unknown readers who proclaimed him. Tennyson +was his loyal comrade; but the prestige of Tennyson's popularity had +certainly blocked many of the avenues of Browning's fame, appealing as +the Laureate largely did to tastes in poetry which Browning rudely +traversed or ignored. On the Tennysonian reader _pur sang_ Browning's +work was pretty sure to make the impression so frankly described by +Frederick Tennyson to his brother, of "Chinese puzzles, trackless +labyrinths, unapproachable nebulosities." Even among these intimates of +his own generation were doubtless some who, with F. Tennyson again, +believed him to be "a man of infinite learning, jest, and bonhomie, and +a sterling heart that reverbs no hollowness," but who yet held "his +school of poetry" to be "the most grotesque conceivable." This was the +tone of the 'Fifties, when Tennyson's vogue was at its height. But with +the 'Sixties there began to emerge a critical disposition to look beyond +the trim pleasances of the Early Victorians to more daring romantic +adventure in search of the truth that lies in beauty, and more fearless +grip of the beauty that lies in truth. The genius of the pre-Raphaelites +began to find response. And so did the yet richer and more composite +genius of Browning. Moreover, the immense vogue won by the poetry of his +wife undoubtedly prepared the way for his more difficult but kindred +work. If _Pippa Passes_ counts for something in _Aurora Leigh, Aurora +Leigh_ in its turn trained the future readers of _The Ring and the +Book_. + +[Footnote 39: His father beautifully said of Mrs Browning's portrait +that it was a face which made the worship of saints seem possible.] + +The altered situation became apparent on the publication, in rapid +succession, in 1864, of Browning's _Dramatis Personae_ and Mr Swinburne's +_Atalanta in Calydon_. Both volumes found their most enthusiastic +readers at the universities. "All my new cultivators are young men," +Browning wrote to Miss Blagden; adding, with a touch of malicious +humour, "more than that, I observe that some of my old friends don't +like at all the irruption of outsiders who rescue me from their sober +and private approval, and take those words out of their mouths which +they 'always meant to say,' and never did." The volume included +practically all that Browning had actually written since 1855,--less +than a score of pieces,--the somewhat slender harves of nine years. But +during these later years in Italy, as we have seen, he had done little +at his art; and after his return much time had been occupied in +projecting the great scheme of that which figures in his familiar +letters as his "murder-poem," and was ultimately known as _The Ring and +the Book_. As a whole, the _Dramatis Personae_ stands yet more clearly +apart from _Men and Women_ than that does from all that had gone before. +Both books contain some of his most magnificent work; but the earlier is +full of summer light and glow, the later breathes the hectic and +poignant splendour of autumn. The sense of tragic loss broods over all +its music. In lyric strength and beauty there is no decay; but the +dramatic imagination has certainly lost somewhat of its flexible +strength and easy poise of wing: falling back now upon the personal +convictions of the poet, now upon the bald prose of daily life. _Rabbi +ben Ezra_ and _Abt Vogler, A Death in the Desert_, are as noble poetry +as _Andrea del Sarto_ or _The Grammarian's Funeral_; but it is a poetry +less charged with the "incidents" of any other soul than his own; and, +on the other hand, _Dis Aliter Visum_ and _Youth and Art_, and others, +effective as they are, yet move in an atmosphere less remote from prose +than any of the songs and lays of love which form one of the chief +glories of _Men and Women_. The world which is neither thrillingly +beautiful nor grotesquely ugly, but simply poor, unendowed, humdrum, +finds for the first time a place in his poetry. Its blankness answered +too well to the desolate regard which in the early 'Sixties he turned +upon life. The women are homely, even plain, like James Lee's wife, +with her "coarse hands and hair," and Edith in _Too Late_, with her +thin, odd features, or mediocre, like the speaker in _Dis Aliter Visum_; +and they have homely names, like "Lee" or "Lamb" or "Brown," not +gratuitously grotesque ones like Blougram, Blouphocks, or the outrageous +"Gigadibs." "Sludge" stands on a different footing; for it is +dramatically expressive, as these are not. The legend of the gold-haired +maiden of Pornic is told with a touch of harsher cynicism than was heard +in Galuppi's "chill" music of the vanished beauties of Venice. If we may +by no means say that the glory of humanity has faded for Browning, yet +its glory has become more fugitive and more extrinsic,--a "grace not +theirs" brought by love "settling unawares" upon minds "level and low, +burnt and bare" in themselves. And he dwells now on desolate and desert +scenes with a new persistence, just as it was wild primitive nooks of +the French coast which now became his chosen summer resorts in place of +the semi-civic rusticity which had been his choice in Italy. "This is a +wild little place in Brittany," he wrote to Miss Blagden in August 1863; +"close to the sea, a hamlet of a dozen houses, perfectly lonely--one may +walk on the edge of the low rocks by the sea for miles.... If I could I +would stay just as I am for many a day. I feel out of the very earth +sometimes as I sit here at the window." The wild coast scenery falls in +with the desolate mood of James Lee's wife; the savage luxuriance of the +Isle with the primitive fancies of Caliban; the arid desert holds in +its embrace, like an oasis, the well-spring of Love which flows from the +lips of the dying Apostle. In the poetry of _Men and Women_ we see the +ripe corn and the flowers in bloom; in _Dramatis Personae_, the processes +of Nature are less spontaneous and, as it were, less complete; the +desert and the abounding streams, the unreclaimed human nature and the +fertilising grace of love, emerge in a nearer approach to elemental +nakedness, and there are moods in which each appears to dominate. +Doubtless the mood which finally triumphed was that of the dying John +and of the Third Speaker; but it was a triumph no longer won by "the +happy prompt instinctive way of youth," and the way to it lay through +moods not unlike those of James Lee's wife, whose problem, like his own, +was how to live when the answering love was gone. His "fire," like hers, +was made "of shipwreck wood",[40] and her words "at the window" can only +be an echo of his-- + + "Ah, Love! but a day + And the world has changed! + The sun's away, + And the bird estranged; + The wind has dropped, + And the sky's deranged: + Summer has stopped." + +[Footnote 40: The second section of _James Lee's Wife, By the Fireside_, +cannot have been written without a conscious, and therefore a purposed +and significant, reference to the like-named poem in _Men and Women_, +which so exquisitely plays with the intimate scenery of his home-life.] + +As her problem is another life-setting of his, so she feels her way +towards its solution through processes which cannot have been strange to +him. She walks "along the Beach," or "on the Cliff," or "among the +rocks," and the voices of sea and wind ("Such a soft sea and such a +mournful wind!" he wrote to Miss Blagden) become speaking symbols in her +preoccupied mind. Not at all, however, in the fashion of the "pathetic +fallacy." She is too deeply disenchanted to imagine pity; and Browning +puts into her mouth (part vi.) a significant criticism of some early +stanzas of his own, in which he had in a buoyant optimistic fashion +interpreted the wailing of the wind.[41] If Nature has aught to teach, +it is the sterner doctrine, that nothing endures; that Love, like the +genial sunlight, has to glorify base things, to raise the low nature by +its throes, sometimes divining the hidden spark of God in what seemed +mere earth, sometimes only lending its transient splendour to a dead and +barren spirit,--the fiery grace of a butterfly momentarily obliterating +the dull turf or rock it lights on, but leaving them precisely what they +were. + +[Footnote 41: Cf. _supra_, p. 16.] + +_James Lee's Wife_ is a type of the other idyls of love which form so +large a part of the _Dramatis Personae_. The note of dissonance, of loss, +which they sound had been struck by Browning before, but never with the +same persistence and iteration. The _Dramatic Lyrics_ and _Men and +Women_ are not quite silent of the tragic failure of love; but it is +touched lightly in "swallow flights of song," like the _Lost Mistress_, +that "dip their wings in tears and skim away." And the lovers are +spiritual athletes, who can live on the memory of a look, and seem to be +only irradiated, not scorched, by the tragic flame. But these lovers of +the 'Sixties are of less aetherial temper; they are more obviously, +familiarly human; the loss of what they love comes home to them, and +there is agony in the purifying fire. Such are the wronged husband in +_The Worst of It_, and the finally frustrated lover in _Too Late_. In +the group of "Might-have-been" lyrics the sense of loss is less poignant +and tragic but equally uncompensated. "You fool!" cries the homely +little heroine of _Dis Aliter Visum_ to the elderly scholar who ten +years before had failed to propose to her,-- + + "You fool for all your lore!... + The devil laughed at you in his sleeve! + You knew not? That I well believe; + Or you had saved two souls;--nay, four." + +Nor is there much of the glory of failure in Kate Brown's bitter smile, +as she sums up the story of Youth and Art:-- + + "Each life unfulfilled, you see; + It hangs still, patchy and scrappy, + We have not sighed deep, laughed free, + Starved, feasted, despaired,--been happy." + +It is no accident that with the clearer recognition of sharp and +absolute loss Browning shows increasing preoccupation with the thought +of recovery after death. For himself death was now inseparably +intertwined with all that he had known of love, and the prospect of the +supreme reunion which death, as he believed, was to bring him, drew it +nearer to the core of his imagination and passion. Not that he looked +forward to it with the easy complacency of the hymn-writer. _Prospice_ +would not be the great uplifting song it is were the note of struggle, +of heroic heart to bear the brunt and pay in one moment all "life's +arrears of pain, darkness, and cold," less clearly sounded; and were the +final cry less intense with the longing of bereavement. How near this +thought of rapturous reunion lay to the springs of Browning's +imagination at this time, how instantly it leapt into poetry, may be +seen from the _Eurydice to Orpheus_ which he fitly placed immediately +after these-- + + "But give them me, the mouth, the eyes, the brow! + Let them once more absorb me!" + +But in two well-known poems of the _Dramatis Personae_ Browning has +splendidly unfolded what is implicit in the strong simple clarion--note +of _Prospice_. _Abt Vogler_ and _Rabbi ben Ezra_ are among the surest +strongholds of his popular fame. _Rabbi ben Ezra_ is a great song of +life, bearing more fully perhaps than any other poem the burden of what +he had to say to his generation, but lifted far above mere didacticism +by the sustained glow in which ethical passion, and its imaginative +splendour, indistinguishably blend. It is not for nothing that Browning +put this loftiest utterance of all that was most strenuous in his own +faith into the mouth of a member of the race which has beyond others +known how to suffer and how to transfigure its suffering. Ben Ezra's +thoughts are not all Hebraic, but they are conceived in the most exalted +temper of Hebrew prophecy; blending the calm of achieved wisdom with the +fervour of eagerly accepted discipline, imperious scorn for the +ignorance of fools, and heroic ardour, for the pangs and throes of the +fray. Ideals which, coolly analysed, seem antithetical, and which have +in reality inspired opposite ways of life, meet in the fusing flame of +the Rabbi's impassioned thought: the body is the soul's beguiling +sorceress, but also its helpful comrade; man is the passive clay which +the great Potter moulded and modelled upon the Wheel of Time, and yet is +bidden rage and strive, the adoring acquiescence of Eastern Fatalism +mingling with the Western gospel of individual energy. And all this +complex and manifold ethical appeal is conveyed in verse of magnificent +volume and resonance, effacing by the swift recurrent anvil crash of its +rhythm any suggestion that the acquiescence of the "clay" means +passivity. + +In _Abt Vogler_ the prophetic strain is even more daring and assured; +only it springs not from "old experience," but from the lonely ecstasy +of artistic creation. Browning has put into the mouth of his old +Catholic musician the most impassioned and undoubting assertion to be +found in his work of his faith that nothing good is finally lost. The +Abbe's theology may have supplied the substance of the doctrine, but it +could not supply the beautiful, if daring, expansion of it by which the +immortality of men's souls is extended to "all we have willed or hoped +or dreamed of good." This was the work of music; and the poem is in +truth less remarkable for this rapturous statement of faith than for the +penetrating power with which the mystical and transcendental suggestions +of music are explored and unfolded,--the mysterious avenues which it +seems to open to kinds of experience more universal than ours, exempt +from the limitations of our narrow faculties, even from the limitations +of time and space themselves. All that is doctrinal and speculative in +_Abt Vogler_ is rooted in musical experience,--the musical experience, +no doubt, of a richly imaginative mind, for which every organ-note turns +into the symbol of a high romance, till he sees heaven itself yearning +down to meet his passion as it seeks the sky. Of the doctrine and +speculation we may think as we will; of the psychological force and +truth of the whole presentment there can be as little question as of its +splendour and glow. It has the sinew, as well as the wing, of poetry. +And neither in poetry nor in prose has the elementary marvel of the +simplest musical form been more vividly seized than in the well-known +couplet-- + + "I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man + That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but + a star." + +_A Death in the Desert_, though a poem of great beauty, must be set, in +intrinsic value, below these two. To attack Strauss through the mouth of +the dying apostle was a smart pamphleteering device; but it gave his +otherwise noble verse a disagreeable twang of theological disputation, +and did no manner of harm to Strauss, who had to be met on other ground +and with other weapons,--the weapons of history and comparative +religion--in which Browning's skill was that only of a brilliant +amateur. But the impulse which created it had deeper springs than this. +What is most clearly personal and most deeply felt in it is the +exaltation of love, which seems to have determined the whole imaginative +fabric. Love, Browning's highest expression of spiritual vitality, was +the cardinal principle of his creed; God was vital to him only as a +loving God, and Christ only as the human embodiment and witness of God's +love. The traditional story of Christ was in this sense of profound +significance for him, while he turned away with indifference or disgust +from the whole doctrinal apparatus of the Atonement, which, however +closely bound up with the popular conception of God's love, had nothing +to do with his conception of it, and he could thus consistently decline +the name of Christian, as some witnesses aver that he did.[42] It was +thus in entire keeping with his way of approaching Christianity that he +imagined this moving episode,--the dying apostle whose genius had made +that way so singularly persuasive, the little remnant of doomed and +hunted fugitives who seem to belong to earth only by the spiritual bond +of their love to him, as his own physical life is now a firebrand all +but extinct,--"all ashes save the tip that holds a spark," but that still +glowing with undiminished soul. The material fabric which enshrines this +fine essence of the Christian spirit is of the frailest; and the +contrast is carried out in the scenic setting,--the dim cool cavern, +with its shadowy depth and faint glimmerings of day, the hushed voices, +the ragged herbage, and the glory in the face of the passing saint +within; without, the hard dazzling glare of the desert noon, and the +burning blue, and the implacable and triumphant might of Rome. + +[Footnote 42: Other testimony, it is true, equally strong, asserts that +he accepted the name; in any case he used it in a sense of his own.] + +The discourse of the "aged friend" is full of subtle and vivid thinking, +and contains some of Browning's most memorable utterances about Love, in +particular the noble lines-- + + "For life with all it yields of joy and woe ... + Is just our chance of the prize of learning love, + How love might be, hath been indeed, and is." + +Nowhere, either, do we see more clearly how this master-conception of +his won control of his reasoning powers, framing specious ladders to +conclusions towards which his whole nature yearned, but which his vision +of the world did not uniformly bear out. Man loved, and God would not be +above man if He did not also love. The horrible spectre of a God who has +power without love never ceased to lurk in the background of Browning's +thought, and he strove with all his resources of dialectic and poetry to +exorcise it. And no wonder. For a loving God was the very keystone of +Browning's scheme of life and of the world, and its withdrawal would +have meant for him the collapse of the whole structure. + +It is no accident that the _Death in the Desert_ is followed immediately +by a theological study in a very different key, _Caliban upon Setebos_. +For in this brilliantly original "dramatic monologue" Caliban--the +"savage man"--appears "mooting the point 'What is God?'" and +constructing his answer frankly from his own nature. It was quite in +Browning's way to take a humorous delight in imagining grotesque +parallels to ideas and processes in which he profoundly believed; a +proclivity aided by the curious subtle relation between his grotesquerie +and his seriousness, which makes _Pacchiarotto_, for instance, closely +similar in effect to parts of _Christmas-Eve_. Browning is one of three +or four sons of the nineteenth century who dared to fill in the +outlines, or to complete the half-told tale, of Shakespeare's +Caliban.[43] Kenan's hero is the quondam disciple of Stephano and +Trinculo, finished and matured in the corrupt mob-politics of Europe; a +caustic symbol of democracy, as Renan saw it, alternately trampling on +and patronising culture. Browning's Caliban is far truer to +Shakespeare's conception; he is the Caliban of Shakespeare, not +followed into a new phase but observed in a different attitude,--Caliban +of the days before the Storm, an unsophisticated creature of the island, +inaccessible to the wisdom of Europe, and not yet the dupe of its vice. +His wisdom, his science, his arts, are all his own. He anticipates the +heady joy of Stephano's bottle with a mash of gourds of his own +invention. And his religion too is his own,--no decoction from any of +the recognised vintages of religious thought, but a home-made brew +cunningly distilled from the teeming animal and plant life of the +Island. It is a mistake to call Caliban's theology a study of primitive +religion; for primitive religion is inseparable from the primitive +tribe, and Caliban the savage, who has never known society, was a +conception as unhistorical as it was exquisitely adapted to the +individualist ways of Browning's imagination. Tradition and +prescription, which fetter the savage with iron bonds, exist for Caliban +only in the form of the faith held by his dam, which he puts aside in +the calm decisive way of a modern thinker, as one who has nothing to +fear from the penalties of heresy, and has even outlived the exultation +of free thought:-- + + "His dam held that the Quiet made all things + Which Setebos vexed only: 'holds not so; + Who made them weak, made weakness He might vex." + +[Footnote 43: It is characteristic that M. Maeterlinck found no place +for Caliban in his striking fantasia on the _Tempest, Joyzelle_.] + +Caliban's theology has, moreover, very real points of contact with +Browning's own. His god is that sheer Power which Browning from the +first recognised; it is because Setebos feels heat and cold, and is +therefore a weak creature with ungratified wants, that Caliban decides +there must be behind him a divinity that "all it hath a mind to, doth." +Caliban is one of Browning's most consummate realists; he has the +remorselessly vivid perceptions of a Lippo Lippi and a Sludge. +Browning's wealth of recondite animal and plant lore is nowhere else so +amazingly displayed; the very character of beast or bird will be hit off +in a line,--as the pie with the long tongue + + "That pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm, + And says a plain word when she finds her prize," + +or the lumpish sea-beast which he blinded and called Caliban (an +admirable trait)-- + + "A bitter heart that bides its time and bites." + +And all this curious scrutiny is reflected in Caliban's god. The sudden +catastrophe at the close + + ("What, what? A curtain o'er the world at once!") + +is one of Browning's most superb surprises, breaking in upon the +leisured ease of theory with the suddenness of a horrible practical +emergency, and compelling Caliban, in the act of repudiating his +theology, to provide its most vivid illustration. + +Shakespeare, with bitter irony, brought his half-taught savage into +touch with the scum of modern civilisation, and made them conspire +together against its benignity and wisdom. The reader is apt to remember +this conjunction when he passes from _Caliban_ to _Mr Sludge._ Stephano +and Trinculo, almost alone among Shakespeare's rascals, are drawn +without geniality, and Sludge is the only one of Browning's "casuists" +whom he treats with open scorn. That some of the effects were palpably +fraudulent, and that, fraud apart, there remained a residuum of +phenomena not easy to explain, were all irritating facts. Yet no one can +mistake _Sludge_ for an outflow of personal irritation, still less for +an act of literary vengeance upon the impostor who had beguiled the +lofty and ardent intelligence of his wife. The resentful husband is +possibly there, but so elementary an emotion could not possibly have +taken exclusive possession of Browning's complex literary faculty, or +baulked the eager speculative curiosity which he brought to all new and +problematic modes of mind. His attitude towards spiritualism was in fact +the product of strangely mingled conditions. Himself the most convinced +believer in spirit among the poets of his time, he regarded the bogus +demonstrations of the "spiritualist" somewhat as the intellectual +sceptic regards the shoddy logic by which the vulgar unbeliever proves +there is no God. But even this anger had no secure tenure in a nature so +rich in solvents for disdain. It is hard to say where scorn ends and +sympathy begins, or where the indignation of the believer who sees his +religion travestied passes over into the curious interest of the +believer who recognises its dim distorted reflection in the unlikeliest +quarters. But Sludge is clearly permitted, like Blougram before and +Juan and Hohenstiel-Schwangau after him, to assume in good faith +positions, or at least to use, with perfect sincerity, language, which +had points of contact with Browning's own. He has an eye for "spiritual +facts" none the less genuine in its gross way that it has been acquired +in the course of professional training, and is valued as a professional +asset. But his supernaturalism at its best is devoid of spiritual +quality. His "spiritual facts" are collections of miraculous +coincidences raked together by the anteater's tongue of a cool egoist, +who waits for them + + "lazily alive, + Open-mouthed, ... + Letting all nature's loosely guarded motes + Settle and, slick, be swallowed." + +Like Caliban, who also finds the anteater an instructive symbol, he sees +"the supernatural" everywhere, and everywhere concerned with himself. +But Caliban's religion of terror, cunning, and cajolery is more +estimable than Sludge's business-like faith in the virtue of wares for +which he finds so profitable a market, and which he gets on such easy +terms. Caliban tremblingly does his best to hitch his waggon to +Setebos's star--when Setebos is looking; Sludge is convinced that the +stars are once for all hitched to his waggon; that heaven is occupied in +catering for his appetite and becoming an accomplice in his sins. +Sludge's spiritual world was genuine for him, but it had nothing but the +name in common with that of the poet of Ben Ezra, and of the _Epilogue_ +which immediately follows.[44] + +[Footnote 44: The foregoing account assumes that the poem was not +written, as is commonly supposed, in Florence in 1859-60, but after his +settlement in London. The only ground for the current view is Mrs +Browning's mention of his having been "working at a long poem" that +winter (_Letters_, May 18, 1860). I am enabled, by the kindness of Prof. +Hall Griffin, to state that an unpublished letter from Browning to +Buchanan in 1871 shows this "long poem" to have been one on Napoleon +III. (cf. above, p. 90). Some of it probably appears in _Hohenstiel +Schwangau_.] + +This _Epilogue_ is one of the few utterances in which Browning draws the +ambiguous dramatic veil from his personal faith. That he should choose +this moment of parting with the reader for such a confession confirms +one's impression that the focus of his interest in poetry now, more than +ever before, lay among those problems of life and death, of God and man, +to which nearly all the finest work of this collection is devoted. Far +more emphatically than in the analogous _Christmas-Eve_, Browning +resolves not only the negations of critical scholarship but the dogmatic +affirmations of the Churches into symptoms of immaturity in the +understanding of spiritual things; in the knowledge how heaven's high +with earth's low should intertwine. The third speaker voices the +manifold protest of the nineteenth century against all theologies built +upon an aloofness of the divine and human, whether the aloof God could +be reached by special processes and ceremonies, or whether he was a bare +abstraction, whose "pale bliss" never thrilled in response to human +hearts. The best comment upon his faith is the saying of Meredith, "The +fact that character can be and is developed by the clash of +circumstances is to me a warrant for infinite hope."[45] Only, for +Browning, that "infinite hope" translates itself into a sense of present +divine energies bending all the clashing circumstance to its benign end, +till the walls of the world take on the semblance of the shattered +Temple, and the crowded life within them the semblance of the seemingly +vanished Face, which + + "far from vanish, rather grows, + Or decomposes but to recompose, + Become my universe that feels and knows."[46] + +[Footnote 45: Quoted _Int. Journ. of Ethics_, April 1902.] + +[Footnote 46: The last line is pantheistic in expression, and has been +so understood by some, particularly by Mr J.M. Robertson. But pantheism +was at most a tendency, which the stubborn concreteness of his mind held +effectually in check; a point, one might say, upon which his thinking +converges, but which it never even proximately attains. God and the Soul +never mingle, however intimate their communion. Cf. chap. x. below.] + + + + +CHAPTER VI. + +_THE RING AND THE BOOK_. + + Tout passe.--L'art robuste + Seul a l'eternite. + Le buste + Survit a la cite. + Et la medaille austere + Que trouve un laboureur + Sous terre + Revele un empereur. + --GAUTIER: _L'Art_. + + +After four years of silence, the _Dramatis Personae_ was followed by _The +Ring and the Book_. This monumental poem, in some respects his +culminating achievement, has its roots in an earlier stratum of his life +than its predecessor. There is little here to recall the characteristic +moods of his first years of desolate widowhood--the valiant Stoicism, +the acceptance of the sombre present, the great forward gaze upon the +world beyond. We are in Italy once more, our senses tingle with its +glowing prodigality of day, we jostle the teeming throng of the Roman +streets, and are drawn into the vortex of a vast debate which seems to +occupy the entire community, and which turns, not upon immortality, or +spiritualism, or the nature of God, or the fate of man, but on the guilt +or innocence of the actors in one pitiful drama,--a priest, a noble, an +illiterate girl. + +With the analytic exuberance of one to whom the processes of Art were +yet more fascinating than its products, Browning has described how he +discovered this forgotten tale and forged its glowing metal into the +_Ring_. The chance finding of an "old square yellow book" which aroused +his curiosity among the frippery of a Florentine stall, was as +grotesquely casual an inception as poem ever had. But it was one of +those accidents which, suddenly befalling a creative mind, organise its +loose and scattered material with a magical potency unattainable by +prolonged cogitation. The story of Pompilia took shape in the gloom and +glare of a stormy Italian night of June 1860, as he watched from the +balcony of Casa Guidi. The patient elaboration of after-years wrought +into consummate expressiveness the _donnee_ of that hour. But the +conditions under which the elaboration was carried out were pathetically +unlike those of the primal vision. Before the end of June in the +following year Mrs Browning died, and Browning presently left Florence +for ever. For the moment all the springs of poetry were dried up, and it +is credible enough that, as Mrs Orr says, Browning abandoned all thought +of a poem, and even handed over his material to another. But within a +few months, it is clear, the story of Pompilia not merely recovered its +hold upon his imagination, but gathered a subtle hallowing association +with what was most spiritual in that vanished past of which it was the +last and most brilliant gift. The poem which enshrined Pompilia was thus +instinct with reminiscence; it was, with all its abounding vitality, yet +commemorative and memorial; and we understand how Browning, no friend of +the conventions of poetic art, entered on and closed his giant task with +an invocation to the "Lyric Love," as it were the Urania, or heavenly +Muse, of a modern epic. + +The definite planning of the poem in its present shape belongs to the +autumn of 1862. In September 1862 he wrote to Miss Blagden from Biarritz +of "my new poem which is about to be, and of which the whole is pretty +well in my head--the Roman murder-story, you know."[48] After the +completion of the _Dramatis Personae_ in 1863-64, the "Roman +murder-story" became his central occupation. To it three quiet early +morning hours were daily given, and it grew steadily under his hand. For +the rest he began to withdraw from his seclusion, to mix freely in +society, to "live and like earth's way." He talked openly among his +literary friends of the poem and its progress, rumour and speculation +busied themselves with it as never before with work of his, and the +literary world at large looked for its publication with eager and +curious interest. At length, in November 1868, the first instalment was +published. It was received by the most authoritative part of the press +with outspoken, even dithyrambic eulogies, in which the severely +judicial _Athenaeum_ took the lead. Confirmed sceptics or deriders, like +Edward FitzGerald, rubbed their eyes and tried once again, in vain, to +make the old barbarian's verses construe and scan. To critics trained in +classical traditions the original structure of the poem was extremely +disturbing; and most of FitzGerald's friends shared, according to him, +the opinion of Carlyle, who roundly pronounced it "without _Backbone_ or +basis of Common-sense," and "among the absurdest books ever written by a +gifted Man." Tennyson, however, admitted (to FitzGerald) that he "found +greatness" in it,[47] and Mr Swinburne was in the forefront of the +chorus of praise. The audience which now welcomed Browning was in fact +substantially that which had hailed the first fresh runnels of Mr +Swinburne's genius a few years before; the fame of both marked a wave of +reaction from the austere simplicity and attenuated sentiment of the +later _Idylls of the King_. Readers upon whom the shimmering +exquisiteness of Arthurian knighthood began to pall turned with relish +to Browning's Italian murder story, with its sensational crime, its +mysterious elopement, its problem interest, its engaging actuality. + +[Footnote 47: W.M. Rossetti reports Browning to have told him, in a +call, March 15, 1868, that he "began it in October 1864. Was staying at +Bayonne, and walked out to a mountain-gorge traditionally said to have +been cut or kicked out by Roland, and there laid out the full plan of +his twelve cantos, accurately carried out in the execution." The date is +presumably an error of Rossetti's for 1862 (_Rossetti Papers_, p. 302). +Cf. Letter of Sept. 29, 1862 (Orr, p. 259).] + +[Footnote 48: _More Letters_ of E.F.G.] + +And undoubtedly this was part of the attraction of the theme for +Browning himself. He had inherited his father's taste for stories of +mysterious crime.[49] And to the detective's interest in probing a +mystery, which seems to have been uppermost in the elder Browning, was +added the pleader's interest in making out an ingenious and plausible +case for each party. The casuist in him, the lover of argument as such, +and the devoted student of Euripides,[50] seized with delight upon a +forensic subject which made it natural to introduce the various "persons +of the drama," giving their individual testimonies and "apologies." He +avails himself remorselessly of all the pretexts for verbosity, for +iteration, for sophistical invention, afforded by the cumbrous machinery +of the law, and its proverbial delay. Every detail is examined from +every point of view. Little that is sordid or revolting is suppressed. +But then it is assuredly a mistake to represent, with one of the +liveliest of Browning's recent exponents, that the story was for him, +even at the outset, in the stage of "crude fact," merely a common and +sordid tale like a hundred others, picked up "at random" from a +rubbish-heap to be subjected to the alchemy of imagination by way of +showing the infinite worth of "the insignificant." Rather, he thought +that on that broiling June day, a providential "Hand" had "pushed" him +to the discovery, in that unlikely place, of a forgotten treasure, which +he forthwith pounced upon with ravishment as a "prize." He saw in it +from the first something rare, something exceptional, and made wondering +inquiries at Rome, where ecclesiasticism itself scarcely credited the +truth of a story which told "for once clean for the Church and dead +against the world, the flesh, and the devil."[51] The metal which went +to the making of the _Ring_, and on which he poured his imaginative +alloy, was crude and untempered, but it was gold. Its disintegrated +particles gleamed obscurely, as if with a challenge to the restorative +cunning of the craftsman. Above all, of course, and beyond all else, +that arresting gleam lingered about the bald record of the romance of +Pompilia and Caponsacchi. It was upon these two that Browning's divining +imagination fastened. Their relation was the crucial point of the whole +story, the point at which report stammered most lamely, and where the +interpreting spirit of poetry was most needed "to abolish the death of +things, deep calling unto deep." This process was itself, however, not +sudden or simple. This first inspiration was superb, visionary, +romantic,--in keeping with "the beauty and fearfulness of that June +night" upon the terrace at Florence, where it came to him. + + "All was sure, + Fire laid and cauldron set, the obscene ring traced, + The victim stripped and prostrate: what of God? + The cleaving of a cloud, a cry, a crash, + Quenched lay their cauldron, cowered i' the dust the crew, + As, in a glory of armour like Saint George, + Out again sprang the young good beauteous priest + Bearing away the lady in his arms + Saved for a splendid minute and no more."[52] + +[Footnote 49: Cf. II. Corkran, _Celebrities and I_ (R. Browning, +senior), 1903.] + +[Footnote 50: It is perhaps not without significance that in the summer +sojourn when _The Ring and the Book_ was planned, Euripides was, apart +from that, his absorbing companion. "I have got on," he writes to Miss +Blagden, "by having a great read at Euripides,--the one book I brought +with me."] + +[Footnote 51: _Ring and the Book_, i. 437.] + +[Footnote 52: _Ring and the Book_, i. 580-588.] + +Such a vision might have been rendered without change in the chiselled +gold and agate of the _Idylls of the King_. But Browning's hero could be +no Sir Galahad; he had to be something less; and also something more. +The idealism of his nature had to force its way through perplexities and +errors, beguiled by the distractions and baffled by the duties of his +chosen career. Born to be a lover, in Dante's great way, he had groped +through life without the vision of Beatrice, seeking to satisfy his +blind desire, as perhaps Dante after Beatrice's death did also, with the +lower love and scorning the loveless asceticism of the monk. The Church +encouraged its priest to be "a fribble and a coxcomb"; and a fribble and +a coxcomb, by his own confession, Caponsacchi became. But the vanities +he mingled with never quite blinded him. He walked in the garden of the +Hesperides bent on great adventure, plucked in ignorance hedge-fruit +and feasted to satiety, but yet he scorned the achievement, laughing at +such high fame for hips and haws.[53] Then suddenly flashed upon him the +apparition, in the theatre, of + + "A lady, young, tall, beautiful, strange and sad." + +[Footnote 53: _Caponsacchi_, 1002 f.] + +The gaze burnt to his soul, and the beautiful, sad, strange smile +haunted him night and day; but their first effect was to crush and +scatter all thoughts of love. The young priest found himself haunting +the solemn shades of the Duomo instead of serenading countesses; vowed +to write no more canzonets, and doubted much whether Marini were a +better poet than Dante after all. His patron jocularly charged him with +playing truant in Church all day long:-- + + "'Are you turning Molinist?' I answered quick: + 'Sir, what if I turned Christian? It might be.'" + +The forged love-letters he instantly sees through. They are the +scorpion--blotch feigned to issue miraculously from Madonna's mouth. And +then Pompilia makes her appeal. "Take me to Rome!" The Madonna has +turned her face upon him indeed, "to summon me and signify her choice," +and he at once receives and accepts + + "my own fact, my miracle + Self-authorised and self-explained," + +in the presence of which all hesitation vanished,--nay, thought itself +fell back before the tide of revealing emotion:-- + + "I paced the city: it was the first Spring. + By the invasion I lay passive to, + In rushed new things, the old were rapt away; + Alike abolished--the imprisonment + Of the outside air, the inside weight o' the world + That pulled me down." + +The bonds of his old existence snapped, the former heaven and earth died +for him, and that death was the beginning of life:-- + + "Death meant, to spurn the ground. + Soar to the sky,--die well and you do that. + The very immolation made the bliss; + Death was the heart of life, and all the harm + My folly had crouched to avoid, now proved a veil + Hiding all gain my wisdom strove to grasp: + As if the intense centre of the flame + Should turn a heaven to that devoted fly + Which hitherto, sophist alike and sage, + Saint Thomas with his sober grey goose-quill, + And sinner Plato by Cephisian reed, + Would fain, pretending just the insect's good, + Whisk off, drive back, consign to shade again. + Into another state, under new rule + I knew myself was passing swift and sure; + Whereof the initiatory pang approached, + Felicitous annoy, as bitter-sweet + As when the virgin-band, the victors chaste, + Feel at the end the earthly garments drop, + And rise with something of a rosy shame + Into immortal nakedness: so I + Lay, and let come the proper throe would thrill + Into the ecstasy and outthrob pain." + +But he presently discovered that his new task did not contravene, but +only completed, the old ideal. The Church had offered her priest no +alternative between the world and the cloister,--self-indulgence and +self-slaughter. For ignoble passion her sole remedy was to crush passion +altogether. She calls to the priest to renounce the fleshly woman and +cleave to Her, the Bride who took his plighted troth; but it is a +scrannel voice sighing from stone lungs:-- + + "Leave that live passion, come, be dead with me!" + +From the exalted Pisgah of his "new state" he recognised that the true +self-sacrifice, the perfect priesthood, lay by way of life, not death, +that life and death + + "Are means to an end, that passion uses both, + Indisputably mistress of the man + Whose form of worship is self-sacrifice." + +Yet it is not this recognition, but the "passion" which ultimately +determines his course. Love is, for Browning, in his maturity, deeper +and more secure than thought; Caponsacchi wavers in his thinking, falls +back upon the narrower conception of priesthood, persuades himself that +his duty is to serve God:-- + + "Duty to God is duty to her: I think + God, who created her, will save her too + Some new way, by one miracle the more, + Without me." + +But when once again he is confronted with the strange sad face, and +hears once more the pitiful appeal, all hesitations vanish, and he sees +no duty + + "Like daring try be good and true myself, + Leaving the shows of things to the Lord of Show." + +With the security of perfect innocence he flings at his judges as "the +final fact"-- + + "In contempt for all misapprehending ignorance + Of the human heart, much more the mind of Christ,-- + That I assuredly did bow, was blessed + By the revelation of Pompilia." + +Thus, through all the psychologic subtlety of the portrait the +groundwork of spiritual romance subsists. The militant saint of legend +reappears, in the mould and garb of the modern world, subject to all its +hampering conditions, and compelled to make his way over the corpses, +not of lions and dragons only, but of consecrated duties and treasured +instincts. And the matter-of-course chivalry of professed knighthood is +as inferior in art as in ethics to the chivalry to which this priest, +vowed to another service, is lifted by the vision of Pompilia. + +Pompilia is herself, like her soldier saint, vowed to another service. +But while he only after a struggle overcomes the apparent discrepancy +between his duty as a priest and as a knight, she rises with the ease +and swiftness of a perfectly pure and spiritual nature from the duty of +endurance to the duty of resistance-- + + "Promoted at one cry + O' the trump of God to the new service, not + To longer bear, but henceforth fight, be found + Sublime in new impatience with the foe!"[54] + +[Footnote 54: _The Pope_, 1057.] + +And she carries the same fearless simplicity into her love. Caponsacchi +falters and recoils in his adorations of her, with the compunction of +the voluptuary turned ascetic; he hardly dares to call his passion by a +name which the vulgar will mumble and misinterpret: she, utterly +unconscious of such peril, glories in the immeasurable devotion + + "Of my one friend, my only, all my own, + Who put his breast between the spears and me." + +Pompilia is steeped in the remembrance of the poet's "Lyric Love." +Remote enough this illiterate child must seem from the brilliant and +accomplished Elizabeth Browning. But Browning's conception of his wife's +nature had a significant affinity to his portrayal of Pompilia. She, he +declared, was "the poet," taught by genius more than by experience; he +himself "the clever person," effectively manipulating a comprehensive +knowledge of life. Pompilia does indeed put her narrow experience to +marvellous use; her blending of the infantine with the profound touches +the bounds of possible consistency; but her naive spiritual instinct is +ever on the alert, and fills her with a perpetual sense of the +strangeness of the things that happen, a "childlike, wondering yet +subtle perception of the anomalies of life." + +Spiritual simplicity has received no loftier tribute than from the most +opulent and complex poetic intellect of our day. He loves to bring such +natures into contrast with the cunning and cleverness of the world; to +show an Aprile, a David, a Pippa loosening the tangle of more +complicated lives with a song. Pompilia is a sister of the same +spiritual household as these. But she is a far more wonderful creation +than any of them; the same exquisite rarity of soul, but unfolded under +conditions more sternly real, and winning no such miraculous alacrity of +response. In lyrical wealth and swiftness Browning had perhaps advanced +little since the days of Pippa; but how much he had grown in +Shakespearian realism is fairly measured by the contrast between that +early, half-legendary lyric child, by whose unconscious alchemy the hard +hearts of Asolo are suddenly turned, and this later creation, whose +power over her world, though not less real, is so much more slowly and +hardly achieved. Her "song" is only the ravishing "unheard melody" which +breathes like incense from her inarticulate childhood. By simple force +of being what she is, she turns the priest into the saint, compels a +cynical society to believe in spiritual love, and wins even from the +husband who bought her and hated her and slew her the confession of his +last desperate cry-- + + "Pompilia, will you let them murder me?" + +In contrast with these two, who shape their course by the light of +their own souls, the authorised exponents of morality play a secondary +and for the most part a sorry part. The old Pope mournfully reflects +that his seven years' tillage of the garden of the Church has issued +only in the "timid leaf and the uncertain bud," while the perfect +flower, Pompilia, has sprung up by the wayside 'neath the foot of the +enemy, "a mere chance-sown seed." + + "Where are the Christians in their panoply? + The loins we girt about with truth, the breasts + Righteousness plated round, the shield of faith?... + Slunk into corners!" + +The Aretine Archbishop, who thrust the suppliant Pompilia back upon the +wolf, the Convent of Convertities, who took her in as a suffering saint, +and after her death claimed her succession because she was of dishonest +life, the unspeakable Abate and Canon, Guido's brothers,--it is these +figures who have played the most sinister part, and the old Pope +contemplates them with the "terror" of one who sees his fundamental +assumptions shaken at the root. For here the theory of the Church was +hard to maintain. Not only had the Church, whose mission it was to guide +corrupt human nature by its divine light, only darkened and destroyed, +but the saving love and faith had sprung forth at the bidding of natural +promptings of the spirit, which its rule and law were to supersede.[55] +The blaze of "uncommissioned meteors" had intervened where the +authorised luminaries failed, and if they dazzled, it was with excess of +light. Was Caponsacchi blind? + + "Ay, as a man should be inside the sun, + Delirious with the plenitude of light."[56] + +[Footnote 55: _The Pope_, 1550 f.] + +[Footnote 56: _The Pope_, 1563.] + +It is easy to imagine how so grave an indictment would have been forced +home by the author of the _Cenci_ had this other, less famous, "Roman +murder-case" fallen into his hands. The old Godwinian virus would have +found ready material in this disastrous breakdown of a great +institution, this magnificent uprising of emancipated souls. Yet, though +the Shelleyan affinities of Browning are here visible enough, his point +of view is clearly distinct. The revolutionary animus against +institutions as the sole obstacle to the native goodness of man has +wholly vanished; but of historic or mystic reverence for them he has not +a trace. He parts company with Rousseau without showing the smallest +affinity to Burke. As sources of moral and spiritual growth the State +and the Church do not count. Training and discipline have their relative +worth, but the spirit bloweth where it listeth, and the heights of moral +achievement are won by those alone in whom it breathes the heroism of +aspiration and resolve. His idealists grow for the most part in the +interstices of the social organism. He recognises them, it is true, +without difficulty even in the most central and responsible organs of +government. None of his unofficial heroes--Paracelsus or Sordello or +Rabbi ben Ezra--has a deeper moral insight than the aged Pope. But the +Pope's impressiveness for Browning and for his readers lies just in his +complete emancipation from the bias of his office. He faces the task of +judgment, not as an infallible priest, but as a man, whose wisdom, like +other men's, depends upon the measure of his God-given judgment, and +flags with years. His "grey ultimate decrepitude" is fallible, Pope +though he be; and he naively submits the verdict it has framed to the +judgment of his former self, the vigorous, but yet uncrowned, worker in +the world. This summing-up of the case is in effect the poet's own, and +is rich in the familiar prepossessions of Browning's individualist and +unecclesiastical mind. He vindicates Caponsacchi more in the spirit of +an antique Roman than of a Christian; he has open ears for the wisdom of +the pagan world, and toleration for the human Euripides; scorn for the +founder of Jesuitism, sympathy for the heretical Molinists; and he +blesses the imperfect knowledge which makes faith hard. The Pope, like +his creator, is "ever a fighter," and his last word is a peremptory +rejection of all appeals for mercy, whether in the name of policy, +Christian forgiveness, or "soft culture," and a resolve to + + "Smite with my whole strength once more, ere end my part, + Ending, so far as man may, this offence." + +And with this solemn and final summing-up--this quietly authoritative +keynote into which all the clashing discords seem at length to be +resolved--the poem, in most hands, would have closed. But Browning was +too ingrained a believer in the "oblique" methods of Art to acquiesce in +so simple and direct a conclusion; he loved to let truth struggle +through devious and unlikely channels to the heart instead of missing +its aim by being formally proclaimed or announced. Hence we are hurried +from the austere solitary meditation of the aged Pope to the condemned +cell of Guido, and have opened before us with amazing swiftness and +intensity all the recesses of that monstrous nature, its "lips unlocked" +by "lucidity of soul." It ends, not on a solemn keynote, but in that +passionate and horror-stricken cry where yet lurks the implicit +confession that he is guilty and his doom just-- + + "Pompilia, will you let them murder me?" + +It is easy--though hardly any longer quite safe--to cavil at the unique +structure of _The Ring and the Book_. But this unique structure, which +probably never deterred a reader who had once got under way, answers in +the most exact and expressive way to Browning's aims. The subject is not +the story of Pompilia only, but the fortunes of her story, and of all +stories of spiritual naivete such as hers, when projected upon the +variously refracting media of mundane judgment and sympathies. It is not +her guilt or innocence only which is on trial, but the mind of man in +its capacity to receive and apprehend the surprises of the spirit. The +issue, triumphant for her, is dubious and qualified for the mind of +man, where the truth only at last flames forth in its purity. Browning +even hints at the close that "one lesson" to be had from his work is the +falseness of human estimation, fame, and speech. But for the poet who +thus summed up the purport of his twenty thousand verses, this was not +the whole truth of the matter. Here, as always, that immense, even +riotous, vitality of his made the hazards and vicissitudes of the +process even more precious than the secure triumph of the issue, and the +spirit of poetry itself lured him along the devious ways of minds in +which personality set its own picturesque or lurid tinge upon truth. The +execution vindicated the design. Voluble, even "mercilessly voluble," +the poet of _The Ring and the Book_ undoubtedly is. But it is the +volubility of a consummate master of expression, in whose hands the +difficult medium of blank verse becomes an instrument of Shakespearian +flexibility and compass, easily answering to all the shifts and windings +of a prodigal invention, familiar without being vulgar, gritty with +homely detail without being flat; always, at its lowest levels, touched, +like a plain just before sunrise, with hints of ethereal light, +momentarily withheld; and rising from time to time without effort to a +magnificence of phrase and movement touched in its turn with that +suggestion of the homely and the familiar which in the inmost recesses +of Browning's genius lurked so near--so vitally near--to the roots of +the sublime. + + + + +CHAPTER VII. + +AFTERMATH. + + Which wins--Earth's poet or the Heavenly Muse? + --_Aristophanes' Apology_. + + +The publication of _The Ring and the Book_ marks in several ways a +turning-point in Browning's career. Conceived and planned before the +tragic close of his married life, and written during the first desolate +years of bereavement, it is, more than any other of his greater poems, +pervaded by his wife's spirit, a crowning monument to his Lyric Love. +But it is also the last upon which her spirit left any notable trace. +With his usual extraordinary recuperative power, Browning re-moulded the +mental universe which her love had seemed to complete, and her death +momentarily to shatter, into a new, lesser completeness. He lived in the +world, and frankly "liked earth's way," enjoying the new gifts of +friendship and of fame which the years brought in rich measure. The +little knot of critics whose praise even of _Men and Women_ and +_Dramatis Personae_; had been little more than a cry in the wilderness, +found their voices lost in the chorus of admiration which welcomed the +story of Pompilia. Some stout recalcitrants, it is true, like Edward +FitzGerald, held their ground. And while the tone of even hostile +criticism became respectful, enough of it remained to provide objects, +seven years later, for the uproarious chaff of _Pacchiarotto_. + +From 1869 to 1871 Browning published nothing, and he appears also to +have written nothing beyond a sonnet commemorating Helen, the mother of +Lord Dufferin (dated April 26, 1870), almost the only set of fourteen +lines in his works of which not one proclaims his authorship. But the +decade which followed was more prolific than any other ten years of his +life. Between 1871 and 1878 nine volumes in swift succession allured, +provoked, or bewildered the reading world. Everything was now planned on +a larger scale; the vast compass and boundless volubility of _The Ring +and the Book_ became normal. He gave free rein to his delight in +intricate involutions of plot and of argument; the dramatic monologue +grew into novels in verse like _Red-cotton Night-cap Country_ and _The +Inn Album_; and the "special pleaders," Hohenstiel and Juan, expounded +their cases with a complexity of apparatus unapproached even by Sludge. +A certain relaxation of poetic nerve is on the whole everywhere +apparent, notwithstanding the prodigal display of crude intellectual +power. His poetic alchemy is less potent, the ore of sordid fact remains +sordid still. Not that his high spirituality is insecure, his heroic +idealism dimmed; but they coalesce less intimately with the alert wit +and busy intelligence of the mere "clever man," and seek their nutriment +and material more readily in regions of legend and romance, where the +transmuting work of imagination has been already done. It is no accident +that his lifelong delight in the ideal figures of Greek tragedy, so +unlike his own creations, became in these years for the first time an +effective source of poetry. The poems of this decade form thus an odd +motley series--realism and romance interlaced but hardly blent, +Aeschylus and Euripides, the divine helper Herakles and the glorious +embodiment of the soul of Athens, Balaustion, emerging and re-emerging +after intervals occupied by the chicaneries of Miranda or the Elder Man. +No inept legend for the Browning of this decade is the noble song of +Thamuris which his Aristophanes half mockingly declaimed. "Earth's poet" +and "the heavenly Muse" are not allies, and they at times go different +ways. + +_Herve Riel_ (published March 1871) is less characteristic of Browning +in purely literary quality than in the hearty helpfulness which it +celebrates, and the fine international chivalry by which it was +inspired. The French disasters moved him deeply; he had many personal +ties with France, and was sharing with his dearest French friend, Joseph +Milsand, as near neighbour, a primitive villeggiatura in a Norman +fishing-village when the stupendous catastrophe of Sedan broke upon +them. Sympathy with the French sufferers induced Browning to do +violence to a cherished principle by offering the poem to George Smith +for publication in _The Cornhill_. Most of its French readers doubtless +heard of Herve Riel, as well as of Robert Browning, for the first time. +His English readers found it hard to classify among the naval ballads of +their country, few of which had been devoted to celebrating the exploits +of foreign sailors, or the deliverance of hostile fleets. But they +recognised the poet of _The Ring and the Book_, Herve has no touch of +Browning's "philosophy." He is none the less a true kinsman, in his +homely fashion, of Caponsacchi,--summoned in a supreme emergency for +which the appointed authorities have proved unequal. + +A greater tale of heroic helpfulness was presently to engage him. +_Balaustion's Adventure_ was, as the charming dedication tells us, the +most delightful of May-month amusements; but in the splendid proem which +enshrines the story of Herakles and Alkestis, we still feel the thrill +of the deadly conflict; the agony of France may be partly divined in the +agony of Athens. Thirty years before, he had shown, in the noble +fragmentary "prologue" to a _Hippolytus (Artemis Prologizes)_, a command +of the majestic, reticent manner of Greek tragedy sufficiently +remarkable in one whose natural instincts of expression were far more +Elizabethan than Greek. The incongruity of Greek dramatic methods with +his own seems to have speedily checked his progress; but Euripides, the +author of the Greek _Hippolytus_, retained a peculiar fascination for +him, and it was on another Euripidean drama that he now, in the fulness +of his powers, set his hand. The result certainly does not diminish our +sense of the incongruity. Keenly as he admired the humanity and pathos +of Euripides, he challenges comparison with Euripides most successfully +when he goes completely his own way. He was too robustly original to +"transcribe" well, and his bold emphatic speech, curbed to the task of +reproducing the choice and pregnant sobriety of Attic style, is apt to +eliminate everything but the sobriety. The "transcribed" Greek is often +yet flatter than "literal" versions of Greek verse are wont to be, and +when Browning speaks in his own person the style recovers itself with a +sudden and vehement bound, like a noble wild creature abruptly released +from restraint. Among the finest of these "recoveries" are the bursts of +description which Balaustion's enthusiasm interjects between the +passages of dialogue. Such is the magnificent picture of the coming of +Herakles. In the original he merely enters as the chorus end their song, +addressing them with the simple inquiry, "Friends, is Admetos haply +within?" to which the chorus reply, like civil retainers, "Yes, +Herakles, he is at home." Browning, or his Balaustion, cannot permit the +mighty undoer of the tragic harms to come on in this homely fashion. A +great interrupting voice rings suddenly through the dispirited +maunderings of Admetos' house-folk; and the hearty greeting, "My hosts +here!" thrills them with the sense that something good and opportune is +at hand:-- + + "Sudden into the midst of sorrow leapt, + Along with the gay cheer of that great voice + Hope, joy, salvation: Herakles was here! + Himself o' the threshold, sent his voice on first + To herald all that human and divine + I' the weary, happy face of him,--half god, + Half man, which made the god-part god the more." + +The heroic helpfulness of Herakles is no doubt the chief thing for +Browning in the story. The large gladness of spirit with which he +confronts the meticulous and perfunctory mourning of the stricken +household reflected his own habitual temper with peculiar vividness. But +it is clear that the Euripidean story contained an element which +Browning could not assimilate--Admetos' acceptance of Alkestis' +sacrifice. To the Greek the action seemed quite in order; the persons +who really incurred his reproof were Admetos' parents, who in spite of +their advanced years refused to anticipate their approaching death in +their son's favour. Browning cannot away with an Admetos who, from sheer +reluctance to die, allowed his wife to suffer death in his place; and he +characteristically suggests a version of the story in which its issues +are determined from first to last, and on both sides, by +self-sacrificing love. Admetos is now the large-minded king who grieves +to be called away before his work for his people is done. Alkestis +seeks, with Apollo's leave, to take his place, so that her lord may live +and carry out the purposes of his soul,-- + + "Nor let Zeus lose the monarch meant in thee." + +But Admetos will not allow this; for Alkestis is as spirit to his flesh, +and his life without her would be but a passive death. To which "pile of +truth on truth" she rejoins by adding the "one truth more," that his +refusal of her sacrifice would be in effect a surrender of the supreme +duty laid upon him of reigning a righteous king,--that this life-purpose +of his is above joy and sorrow, and the death which she will undergo for +his and its sake, her highest good as it is his. And in effect, her +death, instead of paralysing him, redoubles the vigour of his soul, so +that Alkestis, living on in a mind made better by her presence, has not +in the old tragic sense died at all, and finds her claim to enter Hades +rudely rejected by "the pensive queen o' the twilight," for whom death +meant just to die, and wanders back accordingly to live once more by +Admetos' side. Such the story became when the Greek dread of death was +replaced by Browning's spiritual conception of a death glorified by +love. The pathos and tragic forces of it were inevitably enfeebled; no +Herakles was needed to pluck this Alkestis from the death she sought, +and the rejection of her claim to die is perilously near to Lucianic +burlesque. But, simply as poetry, the joyous sun-like radiance of the +mighty spoiler of death is not unworthily replaced by the twilight +queen, whose eyes + + "lingered still + Straying among the flowers of Sicily," + +absorbed in the far memory of the life that Herakles asserted and +enforced,--until, at Alkestis' summons, she + + "broke through humanity + Into the orbed omniscience of a god." + +From his idealised Admetos Browning passed with hardly a pause to +attempt the more difficult feat of idealising a living sovereign. +Admetos was ennobled by presenting him as a political idealist; the +French Emperor, whose career had closed at Sedan, was in some degree +qualified for a parallel operation by the obscurity which still invested +the inmost nature of that well-meaning adventurer. Browning had watched +Louis Napoleon's career with mixed feelings; he had resented the _coup +d'etat_, and still more the annexation of Savoy and Nice after the war +of 1859. But he had never shared the bitter animus which prevailed at +home. He was equally far, no doubt, from sharing the exalted +hero-worship which inspired his wife's _Poems before Congress_. The +creator of _The Italian in England_, of Luigi, and Bluphocks, could not +but recognise the signal services of Napoleon to the cause of Italian +freedom, however sharply he condemned the hard terms on which Italy had +been compelled to purchase it. "It was a great action; but he has taken +eighteenpence for it--which is a pity";[57] it was on the lines of this +epigram, already quoted, that eleven years later he still interpreted +the fallen emperor, and that he now completed, as it would seem, the +abandoned poem of 1860. He saw in him a man of generous impulses doubled +with a _borne_ politician, a ruler of genuine Liberal and even +democratic proclivities, which the timid calculations of a second-rate +opportunist reduced to a contemptible travesty of Liberalism. The +shifting standpoints of such a man are reproduced with superfluous +fidelity in his supposed Defence, which seems designed to be as elusive +and impalpable as the character it reflects. How unlike the brilliant +and precise realism of Blougram, sixteen years before! The upcurling +cloud-rings from Hohenstiel's cigar seem to symbolise something +unsubstantial and evasive in the whole fabric. The assumptions we are +invited to form give way one after another. Leicester Square proves the +"Residenz," the "bud-mouthed arbitress" a shadowy memory, the discourse +to a friendly and flattered hearer a midnight meditation. And there is a +like fluctuation of mood. Now he is formally justifying his past, now +musing, half wistfully, half ironically, over all that he might have +been and was not. At the outset we see him complacently enough +intrenched within a strong position, that of the consistent opportunist, +who made the best of what he found, not a creator but a conservator, +"one who keeps the world safe." But he has ardent ideas and +aspirations. The freedom of Italy has kindled his imagination, and in +the grandest passage of the poem he broods over his frustrate but +deathless dream:-- + + "Ay, still my fragments wander, music-fraught, + Sighs of the soul, mine once, mine now, and mine + For ever! Crumbled arch, crushed aqueduct, + Alive with tremors in the shaggy growth + Of wild-wood, crevice-sown, that triumphs there, + Imparting exultation to the hills." + +[Footnote 57: _Letters of E.B.B._, ii. 385.] + +But if he had abandoned these generous dreams, he had won free trade and +given the multitude cheap bread, and in a highly ingenious piece of +sophistry he explains, by the aid of the gospel of Evolution, how men +are united by their common hunger, and thrust apart by their conflicting +ideas. But Hohenstiel knows very well that his intrenchments are not +unassailable; and he goes on to compose an imaginary biography of +himself as he might have been, with comments which reflect his actual +course. The finest part of this aethereal voyage is that in which his +higher unfulfilled self pours scorn upon the paltry duplicities of the +"Peace" policy by which his actual and lower self had kept on good terms +abroad, and beguiled the imperious thirst for "la gloire" at home. +Indignantly the author of _Herve Riel_ asks why "the more than all +magnetic race" should have to court its rivals by buying their goods +untaxed, or guard against them by war for war's sake, when Mother Earth +has no pride above her pride in that same + + "race all flame and air + And aspiration to the boundless Great, + The incommensurably Beautiful-- + Whose very falterings groundward come of flight + Urged by a pinion all too passionate + For heaven and what it holds of gloom and glow." + +_The Ring and the Book_ had made Browning famous. But fame was far from +tempting him to undue compliance with the tastes of his new-won public; +rather it prompted him to indulge his genius more freely, and to go his +own way with a more complete security and unconcern. +_Hohenstiel-Schwangau_--one of the rockiest and least attractive of all +Browning's poems--had mystified most of its readers and been little +relished by the rest. And now that plea for a discredited politician was +followed up by what, on the face of it, was, as Mrs Orr puts it, "a +defence of inconstancy in marriage." The apologist for Napoleon III. +came forward as the advocate of Don Juan. The prefixed bit of dialogue +from Moliere's play explains the situation. Juan, detected by his wife +in an intrigue, is completely nonplussed. "Fie!" cries Elvire, mockingly +(in Browning's happy paraphrase),-- + + "Fie! for a man of mode, accustomed at the court + To such a style of thing, how awkwardly my lord + Attempts defence!" + +In this emergency, Browning, as it would seem, steps in, and provides +the arch-voluptuary with a philosophy of illicit love, quite beyond the +speculative capacity of any Juan in literature, and glowing with poetry +of a splendour and fertility which neither Browning himself nor the +great English poet who had identified his name with that of Juan, and +whom Browning in this very poem overwhelms with genial banter, ever +surpassed. The poem inevitably challenged comparison with Byron's +masterpiece. In dazzling play of intellect, in swift interchange of wit +and passion, the English nineteenth century produced nothing more +comparable to the _Don Juan_ of Byron than _Fifine at the Fair_. + +It cannot be denied that the critics had some excuse who, like Mortimer, +frankly identified Browning with his hero, and described the poem as an +assertion of the "claim to relieve the fixity of conjugal affection by +varied adventure in the world of temporary loves."[58] For Browning has +not merely given no direct hint of his own divergence from Juan, +corresponding to his significant comment upon Blougram--"he said true +things but called them by false names"; he has made his own subtlest and +profoundest convictions on life and art spring spontaneously from the +brain of this brilliant conqueror of women. Like Goethe's Faust, he +unmistakably shares the mind, the wisdom, the faith, of his creator; it +is plausible to suppose that the poet indorses his application of them. +This is unquestionably a complete mistake; but Browning, as usual, +presumed too much upon his readers' insight, and took no pains to +obviate a confusion which he clearly supposed to be impossible. + +[Footnote 58: Mrs Orr, _Life_, p. 297. Her own criticism is, however, +curiously indecisive and embarrassed.] + +It was on the strand at Pornic that he encountered the fateful gipsy +whom he calls Fifine. Arnold, years before, had read unutterable depths +of soul in another gipsy child by another shore. For Browning now, as in +the days of the _Flight of the Duchess_, the gipsy symbolised the life +of joyous detachment from the constraints of society and civilisation. +The elementary mood, out of which the wondrous woof of reasonings and +images is evolved, is simply the instinctive beat of the spirit of +romance in us all, in sympathy with these light-hearted losels of the +wild, who "cast allegiance off, play truant, nor repine," and though +disgraced but seem to relish life the more. + +The beautiful _Prologue_--one of the most original lyrics in the +language--strikes the keynote:-- + + "Sometimes, when the weather + Is blue, and warm waves tempt + To free oneself of tether, + And try a life exempt + + From worldly noise and dust, + In the sphere which overbrims + With passion and thought,--why, just + Unable to fly, one swims.... + + Emancipate through passion + And thought,--with sea for sky, + We substitute, in a fashion, + For heaven--poetry." + +It is this "emancipation" from our confinement in the bonds of prose, +commonplace, and routine, by a passion and thought-winged imagination, +which is the true subject of the poem. But he chooses to convey his +meaning, as usual, through the rich refracting medium of dramatic +characters and situations quite unlike his own. So his "apology for +poetry" becomes an item in Don Juan's case for the "poetry" of dalliance +with light-o'-loves. Fifine herself acquires new importance; the +emancipated gipsy turns into the pert seductive coquette, while over +against her rises the pathetic shadow of the "wife in trouble," her +white fingers pressing Juan's arm, "ravishingly pure" in her "pale +constraint." Between these three persons the moving drama is played out, +ending, like all Don Juan stories, with the triumph of the baser +influence. Elvire, with her eloquent silences and wistful pathos, is an +exquisite creation,--a wedded sister of Shakespeare's Hero; Fifine, too, +with her strutting bravado and "pose half frank, half fierce," shrills +her discordant note vivaciously enough. The principal speaker himself is +the most complex of Browning's casuists, a marvellously rich and +many-hued piece of portraiture. This Juan is deeply versed in all the +activities of the imagination which he so eloquently defends. Painting +and poetry, science and philosophy, are at his command; above all, he is +an artist and a poet in the lore of Love. + +It is easy to see that the kind of adventure on which Juan claims the +right of projecting his imagination has close affinities with the +habitual procedure of Browning's own. Juan defends his dealings with +the gay fizgig Fifine as a step to the fuller appreciation of Elvire; he +demands freedom to escape only as a means of possessing more surely and +intimately what he has. And Browning's "emancipation" is not that of the +purely Romantic poet, who pursues a visionary abstraction remote from +all his visible environment. The emancipated soul, for him, was rather +that which incessantly "practised with" its environment, fighting its +way through countless intervening films of illusion to the full +knowledge of itself and of all that it originally held _in posse_. This +might not be an adequate account of his own artistic processes, in which +genial instinct played a larger, and resolute will a smaller, part than +his invincible athleticism of temperament would suggest. But his +marvellous wealth of spontaneous vision was fed and enriched by +incessant "practice with" his environment; his idealism was vitalised by +the ceaseless play of eye and brain upon the least promising mortal +integuments of spirit; he possessed "Elvire" the more securely for +having sent forth his adventurous imagination to practise upon +innumerable Fifines. + +The poem itself--as a defence of his poetic methods--was an "adventure" +in which imagination played an unusually splendid part. A succession of +brilliant and original images, visions, similes, parables, exhibits the +twofold nature of the "stuff" with which the artist plays,--its +inferiority, its poverty, its "falseness" in itself, its needfulness, +its potency, its worth for him. It is the water which supports the +swimmer, but in which he cannot live; the dross of straw and chaff which +yields the brilliant purity of flame (c. 55); the technical cluster of +sounds from which issues "music--that burst of pillared cloud by day and +pillared fire by night" (c. 41). The whole poem is haunted by the sense +of dissonance which these images suggest between the real and the +apparent meaning of things. Browning's world, else so massive and so +indubitable, becomes unsubstantial and phantasmal, an illusive pageant +in which Truth is present only under a mask, being "forced to manifest +itself through falsehood." Juan, who declares that, unlike poets, "we +prose-folk" always dream, has, in effect, a visionary quality of +imagination which suits his thesis and his theme. The "dream figures" of +the famous ladies pass before us like a gorgeous tapestry,--some rich +Venetian rendering of a medieval _ballade du temps jadis_; then Venice +itself opens before us, all moving life and colour, under the +enchantment of Schumann's _Carnival_, only to resolve itself into a +vaster pageant of the world, with its mighty fanes of art and science, +which, seemingly "fixed as fate, not fairy-work," yet + + "tremblingly grew blank + From bright, then broke afresh in triumph,--ah, but sank + As soon, for liquid change through artery and vein + O' the very marble wound its way." + +The August of 1872 found Browning and his sister once more in France. +This time, however, not at Croisic but Saint Aubin--the primitive +hamlet on the Norman coast to which he had again been drawn by his +attachment to Joseph Milsand. At a neighbouring village was another old +friend, Miss Thackeray, who has left a charming account of the place. +They walked along a narrow cliff-path: "The sea-coast far below our +feet, the dried, arid vegetation of the sandy way, the rank yellow +snapdragon lining the paths.... We entered the Brownings' house. The +sitting-room door opened to the garden and the sea beyond--a fresh-swept +bare floor, a table, three straw chairs, one book upon the table." A +misunderstanding, now through the good offices of Milsand happily +removed, had clouded the friendship of Browning and Miss Thackeray; and +his joyous revulsion of heart has left characteristic traces in the poem +which he dedicated to his "fair friend." The very title is jest--an +outflow of high spirits in an exuberantly hearty hand-shake--"British +man with British maid"; the country of the "Red-cotton Night-cap" being +in fact, of course, the country which her playful realism had already +nicknamed "White-cotton Night-cap Country," from the white lawn +head-dress of the Norman women. Nothing so typical and everyday could +set Browning's imagination astir, and among the wilderness of white, +innocent and flavourless, he caught at a story which promised to be +"wrong and red and picturesque," and vary "by a splotch the righteous +flat of insipidity." + +The story of Miranda the Paris jeweller and his mistress, Clara de +Millefleurs, satisfied this condition sufficiently. Time had not +mellowed the raw crudity of this "splotch," which Browning found +recorded in no old, square, yellow vellum book, but in the French +newspapers of that very August; the final judgment of the court at Caen +("Vire") being actually pronounced while he wrote. The poet followed on +the heels of the journalist, and borrowed, it must be owned, not a +little of his methods. If any poem of Browning's may be compared to +versified special correspondence, it is this. He tells the story, in his +own person, in blank verse of admirable ease and fluency, from which +every pretence of poetry is usually remote. What was it in this rather +sordid tale that arrested him? Clearly the strangely mingled character +of Miranda. Castile and Paris contend in his blood; and his love +adventures, begun on the boulevards and in their spirit, end in an +ecstasy of fantastic devotion. His sins are commonplace and prosaic +enough, but his repentances detach him altogether from the herd of +ordinary penitents as well as of ordinary sinners--confused and violent +gesticulations of a visionary ascetic struggling to liberate himself +from the bonds of his own impurity. "The heart was wise according to its +lights"; but the head was incapable of shaping this vague heart-wisdom +into coherent practice. A parallel piece of analysis presents Clara as a +finished artist in life--a Meissonier of limited but flawless perfection +in her unerring selection of means to ends. In other words, this not +very attractive pair struck Browning as another example of his familiar +contrast between those who "try the low thing and leave it done," and +those who aim higher and fail. Yet it must be owned that these +Browningesque ideas are not thoroughly wrought into the substance of the +poem; they are rather a sort of marginal embroidery woven on to a story +which, as a whole, has neither been shaped by Browning's hand nor +vitalised with his breath. Neither Clara nor Miranda can be compared in +dramatic force with his great creations; even Clara's harangue to the +Cousinry, with all its passion and flashing scorn, is true rather to her +generic character as the injured champion of her dead lord than to her +individual variety of it--the woman of subtle, inflexible, yet +calculating devotion. Miranda's soliloquy before he throws himself from +the Tower is a powerful piece of construction, but, when the book is +closed, what we seem to see in it is not the fantastical goldsmith +surveying the motives of his life, but Browning filling in the bizarre +outlines of his construction with appropriate psychological detail. +Another symptom of decline in Browning's most characteristic kind of +power is probably to be found in the play of symbolism which invests +with an air of allegorical abstraction the "Tower" and the "Turf," and +makes the whole poem, with all its prosaic realism, intelligibly +regarded as a sort of fantasia on self-indulgence and self-control. + +The summer retreat of 1874 was found once more on the familiar north +coast of France,--this time at the quiet hamlet of Mers, near Treport. +In this lonely place, with scarcely a book at hand, he wrote the greater +part of the most prodigally and exuberantly learned of all his +poems--_Aristophanes' Apology_ (published April 1875). It was not +Browning's way to repeat his characters, but the story of Balaustion, +the brilliant girl devotee of Euripides, had proved an admirable setting +for his interpretations of Greek drama; and the charm of that earlier +"most delightful of May-month amusements" was perhaps not the less +easily revived in these weeks of constant companionship with a devoted +woman-friend of his own. Balaustion is herself full ten years older than +at the time of her first adventure; her fresh girlish enthusiasm has +ripened into the ardent conviction of intellectual maturity; she can not +only cite Euripides, but vindicate his art against his mightiest +assailant. Situation, scenery, language, are here all more complex. The +first Adventure was almost Greek in its radiant and moving simplicity; +the last is Titanically Browningesque, a riot of the least Hellenic +elements of Browning's mind with the uptorn fragments of the Hellenic +world. Moreover, the issue is far from being equally clear. The glory of +Euripides is still the ostensible theme; but Aristophanes had so many +points of contact with Browning himself, and appeals in his defence to +so many root-ideas of Browning's own, that the reader hesitates between +the poet to whom Browning's imagination allied him, and the poet whom +his taste preferred. His Aristophanes is, like himself, the poetry of +"Life," a broad and generous realist, who like Lippo Lippi draws all +existence into his art; an enemy of all asceticisms and abstractions, +who drives his meaning home through vivid concrete example and drastic +phrase, rather than by enunciating the impressive moral commonplaces of +tragic poetry.[59] Aristophanes, too, had been abused for his +"unintelligible" poetry,--"mere psychologic puzzling,"[60]--by a +"chattering" public which preferred the lilt of nursery rhymes. The +magnificent portrait of Aristophanes is conceived in the very spirit of +the riotous exuberance of intellect and senses-- + + "Mind a-wantoning + At ease of undisputed mastery + Over the body's brood"-- + +which was so congenial to the realist in Browning; "the clear +baldness--all his head one brow"--and the surging flame of red from +cheek to temple; the huge eyeballs rolling back native fire, imperiously +triumphant, the "pursed mouth's pout aggressive," and "the beak supreme +above," "beard whitening under like a vinous foam." + +[Footnote 59: _Arist. Ap._, p. 698.] + +[Footnote 60: Ib., p. 688.] + +Balaustion is herself the first to recognise the divinity shrouded in +this half satyr-like form: in some of the finest verses of the poem she +compares him to the sea-god, whom as a child she had once seen peer + + "large-looming from his wave, + + * * * * * + + A sea-worn face, sad as mortality, + Divine with yearning after fellowship," + +while below the surface all was "tail splash, frisk of fin." And when +Balaustion has recited her poet's masterpiece of tragic pathos, +Aristophanes lays aside the satirist a moment and attests his affinity +to the divine poets by the noble song of Thamyris. The "transcript from +Euripides" itself is quite secondary in interest to this vivid and +powerful dramatic framework. Far from being a vital element in the +action, like the recital of the _Alkestis_, the reading of the _Hercules +Furens_ is an almost gratuitous diversion in the midst of the talk; and +the tameness of a literal (often awkwardly literal) translation is +rarely broken by those inrushes of alien genius which are the glory of +Browning's _Alkestis_. Yet the very self-restraint sprang probably from +Browning's deep sensibility to the pathos of the story. "Large tears," +as Mrs Orr has told us, fell from his eyes, and emotion choked his +voice, when he first read it aloud to her. + +The _Inn Album_ is, like _Red-cotton Night-cap Country_, a versified +novel, melodramatic in circumstances, frankly familiar in scenery and +atmosphere. Once more, as in the _Blot in the 'Scutcheon_, and in _James +Lee's Wife_, Browning turned for his "incidents in the development of +souls" to the passion and sin-frayed lives of his own countrymen. But no +halo of seventeenth-century romance here tempers the sordid modernity of +the facts; the "James Lee" of this tragedy appears in person and is +drawn with remorseless insistence on every mean detail which announces +the "rag-and-feather hero-sham." Everything except his wit and eloquence +is sham and shabby in this Club-and-Country-house villain, who violates +more signally than any figure in poetic literature the canon that the +contriver of the tragic harms must not be totally despicable. A thief, +as Schiller said, can qualify for a tragic hero only by adding to his +theft the more heroic crime of murder; but Browning's Elder Man +compromises even the professional perfidies of a Don Juan with shady +dealings at cards and the like which Don Juan himself would have +scouted. In _Fifine_ the Don Juan of tradition was lifted up into and +haloed about with poetical splendours not his own; here he is depressed +into an equally alien sorriness of prose. But the decisive and +commanding figure, for Browning and for his readers, is of course his +victim and Nemesis, the Elder Lady. She is as unlike Pompilia as he is +unlike Guido; but we see not less clearly how the upleaping of the soul +of womanhood in the child, under the stress of foul and cruel wrongs, +has once more asserted its power over him. And if Pompilia often recalls +his wife, the situation of the Elder Lady may fairly remind us of that +of Marion Erle in _Aurora Leigh_. But many complexities in the working +out mark Browning's design. The betrayed girl, scornfully refusing her +betrayer's tardy offer of marriage, has sought a refuge, as the wife of +a clergyman, in the drudgery of a benighted parish. The chance meeting +of the two, four years after, in the inn parlour, their bitter +confessions, through the veil of mutual hatred, that life has been +ruined for both,--he, with his scandalous successes growing at last +notorious, she, the soul which once "sprang at love," now sealed +deliberately against beauty, and spent in preaching monstrous doctrines +which neither they nor their savage parishioners believe nor +observe,--all this is imagined very powerfully and on lines which would +hardly have occurred to any one else. + +The _Pacchiarotto_ volume forms a kind of epilogue to the work of the +previous half-dozen years. Since _The Ring and the Book_ he had become a +famous personage; his successive poems had been everywhere reviewed at +length; a large public was genuinely interested in him, while a yet +larger complained of his "obscurity," but did not venture to ignore him, +and gossiped eagerly about his private life. He himself, mingling +freely, an ever-welcome guest, in the choicest London society, had the +air of having accepted the world as cordially as it on the whole +accepted him. Yet barriers remained. Poems like the _Red-cotton +Night-cap Country_, the _Inn Album_, and _Fifine_ had alienated many +whom _The Ring and the Book_ had won captive, and embarrassed the +defence of some of Browning's staunchest devotees. Nobody knew better +than the popular diner-out, Robert Browning, how few of the men and +women who listened to his brilliant talk had any grip upon his inner +mind; and he did little to assist their insight. The most affable and +accessible of men up to a certain point, he still held himself, in the +deeper matters of his art, serenely and securely aloof. But it was a +good-humoured, not a cynical, aloofness, which found quite natural +expression in a volley of genial chaff at the critics who thought +themselves competent to teach him his business. This is the main, at +least the most dominant, note of _Pacchiarotto_. It is like an aftermath +of _Aristophanes' Apology_. But the English poet scarcely deigns to +defend his art. No beautiful and brilliant woman is there to put him on +his mettle and call out his chivalry. The mass of his critics are +roundly made game of, in a boisterously genial sally, as "sweeps" +officiously concerned at his excess of "smoke." _Pacchiarotto_ is a +whimsical tale of a poor painter who came to grief in a Quixotic effort +to "reform" his fellows. Rhyme was never more brilliantly abused than in +this _tour de force_, in which the clang of the machinery comes near to +killing the music. More seriously, in the finely turned stanzas _At the +Mermaid_, and _House_, he avails himself of the habitual reticence of +Shakespeare to defend by implication his own reserve, not without a +passing sarcasm at the cost of the poet who took Europe by storm with +the pageant of his broken heart. _House_ is for the most part rank +prose, but it sums up incisively in the well-known retort: + + "'_With this same key + Shakespeare unlocked his heart_,' once more! + Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!" + +This "house" image is singularly frequent in this volume. The poet seems +haunted by the idea of the barrier walls, which keep off the public +gaze, but admit the privileged spirit. In _Fears and Scruples_ it +symbolises the reticence of God. In _Appearances_ the "poor room" in +which troth was plighted and the "rich room" in which "the other word +was spoken" become half human in sympathy. A woman's "natural magic" +makes the bare walls she dwells in a "fairy tale" of verdure and song. +The prologue seems deliberately to strike this note, with its exquisite +idealisation of the old red brick wall and its creepers lush and +lithe,--a formidable barrier indeed, but one which spirit and love can +pass. For here the "wall" is the unsympathetic throng who close the poet +in; there + + "I--prison-bird, with a ruddy strife + At breast, and a life whence storm-notes start-- + Hold on, hope hard in the subtle thing + That's spirit: though cloistered fast, soar free; + Account as wood, brick, stone, this ring + Of the rueful neighbours, and--forth to thee!" + +These stanzas finely hint at a second theme which wanders in and out +among the strident notes of Browning's anti-critical "apologetics." Of +all the springs of poetry none lay deeper in Browning than love; to the +last he could sing of love with the full inspiration of his best time; +and the finest things in this volume are concerned with it. But as +compared with the love-lays of the _Dramatic Lyrics_ or _Men and Women_ +there is something wistful, far off, even elegiac, in this love-poetry. +A barrier, undefinable but impassable, seems to part us from the full +tide of youthful passion. The richest in this tender sunset beauty is +the _St Martin's Summer_, where the late love is suddenly smitten with +the discovery that its apparent warmth is a ghost of old passion buried +but unallayed. Again and again Browning here dwells upon the magic of +love,--as if love still retained for the ageing poet an isolated and +exceptional irradiating power in a world fast fading into commonplace +and prose. The brief, exquisite snatches of song, _Natural Magic, +Magical Nature_, are joyous tributes to the power of the charm, paid by +one who remains master of his heart. _Numpholeptos_ is the long-drawn +enchanted reverie of one in the very toils of the spell--a thing woven +of dreams and emotions, dark-glowing, iridescent to the eye, languorous +to the ear, impalpable to the analytic intellect. In _Bifurcation_ he +puts again, with more of subtlety and of detachment, the problem of the +conventional conflict of love with duty, so peremptorily decided in +love's favour in _The Statue and the Bust_. _A Forgiveness_ is a +powerful reworking of the theme of _My Last Duchess_, with an added +irony of situation: Browning, who excels in the drama of silent +figures, has drawn none more effective than this guilty priest, who +grinds his teeth behind the confessional grating as he listens perforce +to the story of his own crime from the lips of the wronged husband, +still cherishing the hope that he is unrecognised, or at the worst may +elude vengeance in his cloister's solitude; until the avenger's last +words throw off the mask:-- + + "Hardly, I think! As little helped his brow + The cloak then, Father--as your grate helps now!" + +From these high matters of passion and tragedy we pass by easy steps +into the jocular-colloquial region in which the volume opened. Painting +in these later days of Browning's has ceased to yield high, or even +serious poetry, and Baldinucci's tale of shabby trickery cannot be +compared, even for grotesque humour, with the powerful grotesquerie of +_Holy-Cross Day_, while it wholly lacks the great lift of Hebraic +sublimity at the close. The _Epilogue_ returns to the combative +apologetics of the title poem; but, unlike that, does attempt some reply +to the cavils of the discontented. They cannot have the strong and the +sweet--body and bouquet--at once, he tells them in effect, and he +chooses to be strong, to give the good grape and leave the cowslips +growing in the meadow. The argument was but another sally of the poet's +good-humoured chaff, and would not have stood the scrutiny of his +subtler mind. Doubtless he, like Ben Jonson, inclined to see signs of +the "strong" in the astringent and the gritty; but no one knew better, +when he chose, to wed his "strength" with "sweetness." The falling-off +of the present volume compared with _Men and Women_ or _Dramatis +Personae_ lay less in the lack of either quality than in his failure to +bring them together. Of the "stiff brew" there is plenty; but the +choicest aroma comes from that "wine of memories"--the fragrant +reminiscences--which the poet affected to despise. The epilogue ends, +incorrigibly, with a promise to "posset and cosset" the cavilling reader +henceforward with "nettle-broth," good for the sluggish blood and the +disordered stomach. + +The following year brought a production which the cavilling reader might +excusably regard as a fulfilment of this jocose threat. For the +translation of the _Agamemnon_ (1877) was not in any sense a serious +contribution to the English knowledge and love of Greek drama. The +Balaustion "transcripts" had betrayed an imperfect sensibility to the +finer qualities of Greek dramatic style. But Browning seems to have gone +to work upon the greatest of antique tragedies with the definite +intention of showing, by a version of literal fidelity, how little the +Greek drama at its best owed to Greek speech. And he has little +difficulty in making the oracular brevity of Aeschylus look bald, and +his sublime incoherences frigid.[61] The result is, nevertheless, very +interesting and instructive to the student of Browning's mind. Nowhere +else do we feel so acutely how foreign to his versatile and athletic +intellect was the primitive and elemental imagination which interprets +the heart and the conscience of nations. His acute individualism in +effect betrayed him, and made his too faithful translation resemble a +parody of this mighty fragment of the mind of Themistoclean Athens by +one of the brilliant irresponsible Sophists of the next generation. + +[Footnote 61: It is hard to explain how Browning came also to choose his +restless hendecasyllables as a medium for the stately iambic of +AEschylus. It is more like Fletcher outdoing himself in double endings.] + +The spring and summer of 1877 were not productive. The summer holiday +was spent in a new haunt among the Savoy Alps, and Browning missed the +familiar stimulus of the sea-air. But the early autumn brought an event +which abruptly shattered his quiescence, and called forth, presently, +the most intimately personal poem of his later years. Miss Ann +Egerton-Smith, his gifted and congenial companion at London concerts, +and now, for the fourth year in succession, in the summer +_villeggiatura_, died suddenly of heart disease at dawn on Sept. 14, as +she was preparing for a mountain expedition with her friends. It was not +one of those losses which stifle thought or sweep it along on the +vehement tide of lyric utterance; it was rather of the kind which set it +free, creating an atmosphere of luminous serenity about it, and allaying +all meaner allurements and distractions. Elegy is often the outcome of +such moods; and the elegiac note is perceptible in the grave music of +_La Saisiaz_. Yet the poem as a whole does not even distantly recall, +save in the quiet intensity of its ground tone, the noble poems in which +Milton or Shelley, Arnold or Tennyson, commemorated their dead friends. +He himself commemorated no other dead friend in a way like this; to his +wife's memory he had given only the sacred silence, the impassioned +hymn, the wealth of poetry inspired by her spirit but not addressed to +her. This poem, also, was written "once, and only once, and for one +only." _La Saisiaz_ recalls to us, perversely perhaps, poems of his in +which no personal sorrow beats. The glory of the dawn and the +mountain-peak--Saleve with its outlook over the snowy splendour of Mont +Blanc--instils itself here into the mourner's mood, as, long before, a +like scene had animated the young disciples of the Grammarian; while the +"cold music" of Galuppi's Toccata seems to be echoed inauspiciously in +these lingering trochaics. Something of both moods survives, but the +dominant tone is a somewhat grey and tempered hope, remote indeed from +the oppressive sense of evanescence, the crumbling mortality, of the +second poem, remote no less from the hushed exaltation, the subdued but +rapturous confidence of the first. + +The poet is growing old; the unity of poetic vision is breaking up into +conflicting aspects only to be adjusted in the give and take of debate; +he puts off his singing robes to preside as moderator, while Fancy and +Reason exchange thrust and parry on the problem of immortality; +delivering at last, as the "sad summing up of all," a balanced and +tentative affirmation. And he delivers the decision with an oppressive +sense that it is but his own. He is "Athanasius contra mundum"; and he +dwells, with a "pallid smile" which Athanasius did not inspire, upon the +marvellous power of fame. Nay, Athanasius himself has his doubts. Even +his sober hope is not a secure possession; but in the gloom of London's +November he remembers that he had hoped in the sunset glory of Saleve, +and "saves up" the memory of that pregnant hour for succour in less +prosperous times. + +The _Two Poets of Croisic_, published with _La Saisiaz_, cannot be +detached from it. The opening words take up the theme of "Fame," there +half mockingly played with, and the whole poem is a sarcastic criticism +of the worship of Fame. The stories of Rene Gentilhomme and Paul +Desfarges Maillard are told with an immense burly vivacity, in the +stanza, and a Browningesque version of the manner, of _Beppo_. Both +stories turned upon those decisive moments which habitually caught +Browning's eye. Only, in their case, the decisive moment was not one of +the revealing crises which laid bare their utmost depths, but a crisis +which temporarily invested them with a capricious effulgence. Yet these +instantaneous transformations have a peculiar charm for Browning; they +touch and fall in with his fundamental ideas of life; and the delicious +prologue and epilogue hint these graver analogies in a dainty music +which pleasantly relieves the riotous uncouthness of the tale itself. +If Rene's life is suddenly lighted up, so is the moss bank with the +"blue flash" of violets in spring; and the diplomatic sister through +whose service Paul wins his laurels has a more spiritual comrade in the +cicada, who, with her little heart on fire, sang forth the note of the +broken string and won her singer his prize. Browning's pedestrian verse +passes into poetry as he disengages from the transient illusions, the +flickerings and bickerings, of Fame, the eternal truth of Love. But it +is only in the closing stanzas of the main poem that his thought clearly +emerges; when, having exposed the vanity of fame as a test of poetic +merit, he asks how, then, poets shall be tried; and lays down the +characteristic criterion, a happy life. But it is the happiness of Rabbi +ben Ezra, a joy three parts pain, the happiness won not by ignoring evil +but by mastering it!-- + + "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!" + + + + + +CHAPTER VIII. + +THE LAST DECADE. + + Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiled. + + +Since the catastrophe of 1861 Browning had not entered Italy. In the +autumn of 1878 he once more bent his steps thither. Florence, indeed, he +refused to revisit; it was burnt in upon his brain by memories +intolerably dear. But in Venice the charm of Italy reasserted itself, +and he returned during his remaining autumns with increasing frequency +to the old-fashioned hostelry, Dell' Universo, on the Grand Canal, or +latterly, to the second home provided by the hospitality of his gifted +and congenial American friend, Mrs Arthur Bronson. Asolo, too, the town +of Pippa, he saw again, after forty years' absence, with poignant +feelings,--"such things have begun and ended with me in the interval!" +But the poignancy of memory did not restore the magic of perception +which had once been his. The mood described ten years later in the +Prologue to _Asolando_ was already dominant: the iris glow of youth no +longer glorified every common object of the natural world, but "a flower +was just a flower." The glory still came by moments; some of his most +thrilling outbursts of song belong to this time. But he built up no more +great poems. He was approaching seventy, and it might well seem that if +so prolific a versifier was not likely to become silent his poetry was +rapidly resolving itself into wastes of theological argument, of +grotesque posturing, or intellectualised anecdotage. The _Dramatic +Idyls_ of 1879 and 1880 showed that these more serious forebodings were +at least premature. There was little enough in them, no doubt, of the +qualities traditionally connected with "idyll." Browning habitually wore +his rue with a difference, and used familiar terms in senses of his own. +There is nothing here of "enchanted reverie" or leisurely pastoralism. +Browning's "idyls" are studies in life's moments of stress and strain, +not in its secluded pleasances and verdurous wooded ways. It is for the +most part some new variation of his familiar theme--the soul taken in +the grip of a tragic crisis, and displaying its unsuspected deeps and +voids. Not all are of this kind, however; and while his keenness for +intense and abnormal effects is as pronounced as ever, he seeks them in +an even more varied field. Italy, the main haunt of his song, yields--it +can hardly be said to have inspired--one only of the _Idyls_--_Pietro of +Abano_. Old memories of Russia are furbished up in _Ivan Ivanovitch_, +odd gatherings from the byways of England and America in _Ned Bratts, +Halbert and Hob, Martin Relph_; and he takes from Virgil's hesitating +lips the hint of a joyous pagan adventure of the gods, and tells it with +his own brilliant plenitude and volubility. The mythic treatment of +nature had never appealed much to Browning, even as a gay decorative +device; he was presently to signalise his rejection of it in _Gerard de +Lairesse_, a superb example of what he rejected. In all mythology there +was something foreign to the tenacious humanity of his intellect; he was +most open to its appeal where it presented divinity stretching forth a +helping hand to man. The noble "idyl" of _Echetlos_ is thus a +counterpart, in its brief way, to the great tragic tale of Herakles and +Alkestis. Echetlos, the mysterious ploughman who shone amid the ranks at +Marathon, + + "clearing Greek earth of weed + As he routed through the Sabian and rooted up the Mede," + +is one of the many figures which thrill us with Browning's passion for +Greece, and he is touched with a kind of magic which it did not lie in +his nature often to communicate. But the great successes of the +_Dramatic Idyls_ are to be found mainly among the tales of the purely +human kind that Browning had been used to tell. _Pheidippides_ belongs +to the heroic line of _How they brought the Good News_ and _Herve Riel_. +The poetry of crisis, of the sudden, unforeseen, and irremediable +critical moment, upon which so much of Browning's psychology converges, +is carried to an unparalleled point of intensity in _Clive_ and _Martin +Relph_. And in most of these "idyls" there emerges a trait always +implicit in Browning but only distinctly apparent in this last +decade--the ironical contrasts between the hidden deeps of a man's soul +and the assumptions or speculations of his neighbours about it. The two +worlds--inner and outer--fall more sharply apart; stranger abysses of +self-consciousness appear on the one side, more shallow and complacent +illusions on the other. Relph's horror of remorse--painted with a few +strokes of incomparable intensity, like his 'Get you behind the man I am +now, you man that I used to be!'--is beyond the comprehension of the +friendly peasants; Clive's "fear" is as much misunderstood by his +auditor as his courage by the soldiers; the "foolishness" of Muleykeh +equally illudes his Arab comrades; the Russian villagers, the Pope, and +the lord have to fumble through a long process of argument to the +conclusion which for Ivan had been the merest matter of fact from the +first. Admirable in its quiet irony is the contrast between the stormy +debate over his guilt or innocence and his serene security of mind as he +sits cutting out a toy for his children:-- + + "They told him he was free + As air to walk abroad; 'How otherwise?' asked he." + +With the "wild men" Halbert and Hob it is the spell of a sudden memory +which makes an abrupt rift between the men they have seemed to be and +the men they prove. Browning in his earlier days had gloried in these +moments of disclosure; now they served to emphasise the normal illusion. +"Ah me!" sounds the note of the proem to the second series, scornful and +sad:-- + + "Ah me! + So ignorant of man's whole, + Of bodily organs plain to see-- + So sage and certain, frank and free, + About what's under lock and key-- + Man's soul!" + +The volume called _Jocoseria_ (1883) contains some fine things, and +abounds with Browning's invariable literary accomplishment and metrical +virtuosity, but on the whole points to the gradual disintegration of his +genius. "Wanting is--what?" is the significant theme of the opening +lyric, and most of the poetry has something which recalls the "summer +redundant" of leaf and flower not "breathed above" by vitalising +passion. Compared with the _Men and Women_ or the _Dramatis Personae_, +the _Jocoseria_ as a whole are indeed + + "Framework which waits for a picture to frame, ... + Roses embowering with nought they embower." + +Browning, the poet of the divining imagination, is less apparent here +than the astute ironical observer who delights in pricking the bubbles +of affectation, stripping off the masks of sham, and exhibiting human +nature in unadorned nakedness. _Donald_ is an exposure, savage and +ugly, of savagery and ugliness in Sport; _Solomon and Balkis_ a +reduction, dainty and gay, of these fabled paragons of wisdom to the +dimensions of ordinary vain and amorous humanity. Lilith and Eve unmask +themselves under stress of terror, as Balkis and Solomon at the +compulsion of the magic ring, and Adam urbanely replaces the mask. +Jochanan Hakka-dosh, the saintly prop of Israel, expounds from his +deathbed a gospel of struggle and endurance in which a troubled echo of +the great strain of Ben Ezra may no doubt be heard; but his career is, +as a whole, a half-sad, half-humorous commentary on the vainness of +striving to extend the iron frontiers of mortality. Lover, poet, +soldier, statist have each contributed a part of their lives to prolong +and enrich the saint's: but their fresh idealisms have withered when +grafted upon his sober and sapless brain; while his own garnered wisdom +fares no better when committed to the crude enthusiasm of his disciples. +But twice, in this volume, a richer and fuller music sounds. In the +great poem of _Ixion_, human illusions are still the preoccupying +thought; but they appear as fetters, not as specious masks, and instead +of the serio-comic exposure of humanity we see its tragic and heroic +deliverance. Ixion is Browning's Prometheus. The song that breaks from +his lips as he whirls upon the penal wheel of Zeus is a great liberating +cry of defiance to the phantom-god--man's creature and his ape--who may +plunge the body in torments but can never so baffle the soul but that + + "From the tears and sweat and blood of his torment + Out of the wreck he rises past Zeus to the Potency o'er him, + Pallid birth of my pain--where light, where light is, aspiring, + Thither I rise, whilst thou--Zeus take thy godship and sink." + +And in _Never the Time and the Place_, the pang of love's aching void +and the rapture of reunion blend in one strain of haunting magical +beauty, the song of an old man in whom one memory kindles eternal youth, +a song in which, as in hardly another, the wistfulness of autumn blends +with the plenitude of spring. + +Browning spent the summer months of 1883 at Gressoney St Jean, a lonely +spot high up in the Val d'Aosta, living, as usual when abroad, on the +plainest of vegetable diet. "Delightful Gressoney!" he wrote, + + "Who laughest, 'Take what is, trust what may be!'" + +And a mood of serene acquiescence in keeping with the scene breathes +from the poem which occupied him during this pleasant summer. To +Browning's old age, as to Goethe's, the calm wisdom and graceful +symbolism of Persia offered a peculiar attraction. In the _Westoestlicher +Divan_, seventy years earlier, Goethe, with a subtler sympathy, laid his +finger upon the common germs of Eastern and Western thought and poetry. +Browning, far less in actual touch with the Oriental mind, turned to the +East in quest of picturesque habiliments for his very definitely +European convictions--"Persian garments," which had to be "changed" in +the mind of the interpreting reader. + +The _Fancies_ have the virtues of good fables,--pithy wisdom, ingenious +moral instances, homely illustrations, easy colloquial dialogue; and the +ethical teaching has a striking superficial likeness to the common-sense +morality of prudence and content, which fables, like proverbs, +habitually expound. "Cultivate your garden, don't trouble your head +about insoluble riddles, accept your ignorance and your limitations, +assume your good to be good and your evil to be evil, be a man and +nothing more"--such is the recurring burden of Ferishtah's counsel. But +such preaching on Browning's lips always carried with it an implicit +assumption that the preacher had himself somehow got outside the human +limitations he insisted on; that he could measure the plausibility of +man's metaphysics and theology, and distinguish between the +anthropomorphism which is to be acquiesced in because we know no better, +and that which is to be spurned because we know too much. Ferishtah's +thought is a game of hide-and-seek, and its movements have all the +dexterity of winding and subterfuge proper to success in that game. +Against the vindictive God of the creeds he trusts his human assurance +that pain is God's instrument to educate us into pity and love; but +when it is asked how a just God can single out sundry fellow-mortals + + "To undergo experience for our sake, + Just that the gift of pain, bestowed on them, + In us might temper to the due degree + Joy's else-excessive largess,"-- + +instead of admitting a like appeal to the same human assurance, he falls +back upon the unfathomable ways of Omnipotence. If the rifts in the +argument are in any sense supplied, it is by the brief snatches of song +which intervene between the _Fancies_, as the cicada-note filled the +pauses of the broken string. These exquisite lyrics are much more +adequate expressions of Browning's faith than the dialogues which +professedly embody it. They transfer the discussion from the jangle of +the schools and the cavils of the market-place to the passionate +persuasions of the heart and the intimate experiences of love, in which +all Browning's mysticism had its root. Thus Ferishtah's pragmatic, +almost philistine, doctrine of "Plot-culture," by which human life is +peremptorily walled in within its narrow round of tasks, "minuteness +severed from immensity," is followed by the lyric which tells how Love +transcends those limits, making an eternity of time and a universe of +solitude. Finally, the burden of these wayward intermittent strains of +love-music is caught up, with an added intensity drawn from the poet's +personal love and sorrow, in the noble Epilogue. As he listens to the +call of Love, the world becomes an enchanted place, resounding with the +triumph of good and the exultant battle-joy of heroes. But a "chill +wind" suddenly disencharms the enchantment, a doubt that buoyant faith +might be a mirage conjured up by Love itself:-- + + "What if all be error, + If the halo irised round my head were--Love, thine arms?" + +He disdains to answer; for the last words glow with a fire which of +itself dispels the chill wind. A faith founded upon love had for +Browning a surer guarantee than any founded upon reason; it was secured +by that which most nearly emancipated men from the illusions of +mortality, and enabled them to see things as they are seen by God. + +The _Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day_ (1887) +is a more laboured and, save for one or two splendid episodes, a less +remarkable achievement than _Ferishtah_. All the burly diffuseness which +had there been held in check by a quasi-oriental ideal of lightly-knit +facility and bland oracular pithiness, here has its way without stint, +and no more songs break like the rush of birds' wings upon the dusty air +of colloquy. Thrusting in between the lyrics of _Ferishtah_ and +_Asolando_, these _Parleyings_ recall those other "people of importance" +whose intrusive visit broke in upon "the tenderness of Dante." Neither +their importance in their own day nor their relative obscurity, for the +most part, in ours, had much to do with Browning's choice. They do not +illustrate merely his normal interest in the obscure freaks and +out-of-the-way anomalies of history. The doings of these "people" had +once been "important" to Browning himself, and the old man's memory +summoned up these forgotten old-world friends of his boyhood to be +championed or rallied by their quondam disciple. The death of the +dearest friend of his later life, J. Milsand, in 1886, probably set +these chords vibrating; the book is dedicated to his memory. Perhaps the +_Imaginary Conversations_ of an older friend and master of Browning's, +one even more important in Browning's day and in ours than in his own, +and the master of his youth, once more suggested the scheme. But these +_Parleyings_ are conversations only in name. They are not even +monologues of the old brilliantly dramatic kind. All the dramatic zest +of converse is gone, the personages are the merest shadows, nothing is +seen but the old poet haranguing his puppets or putting voluble +expositions of his own cherished dogmas into their wooden lips. We have +glimpses of the boy, when not yet able to compass an octave, beating +time to the simple but stirring old march of Avison "whilom of Newcastle +organist"; and before he has done, the memory masters him, and the +pedestrian blank verse breaks into a hymn "rough, rude, robustious, +homely heart athrob" to Pym the "man of men." Or he calls up Bernard +Mandeville to confute the formidable pessimism of his old friend +Carlyle--"whose groan I hear, with guffaw at the end disposing of +mock--melancholy." Gerard de Lairesse, whose rococo landscapes had +interested him as a boy, he introduces only to typify an outworn way of +art--the mythic treatment of nature; but he illustrates this "inferior" +way with a splendour of poetry that makes his ironic exposure +dangerously like an unwitting vindication. These visions of Prometheus +on the storm-swept crag, of Artemis hunting in the dawn, show that +Browning was master, if he had cared to use it, of that magnificent +symbolic speech elicited from Greek myth in the _Hyperion_ or the +_Prometheus Unbound_. But it was a foreign idiom to him, and his +occasional use of it a _tour de force_. + +Two years only now remained for Browning, and it began to be apparent to +his friends that his sturdy health was no longer secure. His way of life +underwent no change, he was as active in society as ever, and +acquaintances, old and new, still claimed his time, and added to the +burden, always cheerfully endured, of his correspondence. In October +1887 the marriage of his son attached him by a new tie to Italy, and the +Palazzo Rezzonico on the Grand Canal, where "Pen" and his young American +wife presently settled, was to be his last, as it was his most +magnificent, abode. To Venice he turned his steps each autumn of these +last two years; lingering by the way among the mountains or in the +beautiful border region at their feet. It was thus that, in the early +autumn of 1889, he came yet once again to Asolo. His old friend and +hostess, Mrs Arthur Bronson, had discovered a pleasant, airy abode on +the old town-wall, overhanging a ravine, and Asolo, seen from this +"castle precipice-encurled," recovered all its old magic. It was here +that he put together the disconnected pieces, many written during the +last two years in London, others at Asolo itself, which were finally +published on the day of his death. The Tower of Queen Cornaro still +overlooked the little town, as it had done half a century before; and he +attached these last poems to the same tradition by giving them the +pleasant title said to have been invented by her secretary. +_Asolando_--_Facts and Fancies_, both titles contain a hint of the +ageing Browning,--the relaxed physical energy which allows this +strenuous waker to dream (_Reverie; Bad Dreams_); the flagging poetic +power, whose fitful flashes could no longer transfigure the world for +him, but only cast a fantastic flicker at moments across its prosaic +features. The opening lines sadly confess the wane of the old vision:-- + + "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." + +The famous Epilogue is the last cheer of an old warrior in whom the +stout fibre of heroism still held out when the finer nerve of vision +decayed; but _A Reverie_ shows how heavy a strain it had to endure in +sustaining his faith that the world is governed by Love. Of outward +evidence for that conviction Browning saw less and less. But age had +not dimmed his inner witness, and those subtle filaments of mysterious +affinity which, for Browning, bound the love of God for man to the love +of man for woman, remained unimpaired. The old man of seventy-seven was +still, in his last autumn, singing songs redolent, not of autumn, but of +the perfume and the ecstasy of spring and youth,--love-lyrics so +illusively youthful that one, not the least competent, of his critics +has refused to accept them as work of his old age. Yet _Now_ and _Summum +Bonum_, and _A Pearl, a Girl_, with all their apparent freshness and +spontaneity, are less like rapt utterances of passion than eloquent +analyses of it by one who has known it and who still vibrates with the +memory. What preoccupies and absorbs him is not the woman, but the +wonder of the transfiguration wrought for him by her word or kiss,--the +moment made eternal, the "blaze" in which he became "lord of heaven and +earth." But some of the greatest love-poetry of the world--from Dante +onwards--has reflected an intellect similarly absorbed in articulating a +marvellous experience. For the rest, _Asolando_ is a miscellany of old +and new,--bright loose drift from the chance moods of genius, or bits of +anecdotic lumber carefully recovered and refurbished, as in prescience +of the nearing end. + +Yet no such prescience appears to have been his. His buoyant confidence +in his own vitality held its own. He was full of schemes of work. At the +end of October the idyllic days at Asolo ended, and Browning repaired +for the last time to the Palazzo Rezzonico. A month later he caught a +bronchial catarrh; failure of the heart set in, and on the evening of +December 12 he peacefully died. On the last day of the year his body was +laid to rest in "Poets' Corner." + + + + +PART II. + +BROWNING'S MIND AND ART + + + + +CHAPTER IX. + +THE POET. + + Then, who helps more, pray, to repair our loss-- + Another Boehme with a tougher book + And subtler meanings of what roses say,-- + Or some stout Mage, like him of Halberstadt, + John, who made things Boehme wrote thoughts about? + He with a "look you!" vents a brace of rhymes, + And in there breaks the sudden rose herself, + + * * * * * + + Buries us with a glory, young once more, + Pouring heaven into this shut house of life. + + --_Transcendentalism_. + + +I. + + +"I have, you are to know," Browning once wrote to Miss Haworth, "such a +love for flowers and leaves ... that I every now and then in an +impatience at being unable to possess them thoroughly, to see them +quite, satiate myself with their scent,--bite them to bits." "All +poetry," he wrote some twenty years later to Ruskin, "is the problem of +putting the infinite into the finite." Utterances like these, not +conveyed through the lips of some "dramatic" creation, but written +seriously in his own person to intimate friends, give us a clue more +valuable it may be than some other utterances which are oftener quoted +and better known, to the germinal impulses of Browning's poetic work. +"Finite" and "infinite" were words continually on his lips, and it is +clear that both sides of the antithesis represented instincts rooted in +his mental nature, drawing nourishment from distinct but equally +fundamental springs of feeling and thought. Each had its stronghold in a +particular psychical region. The province and feeding-ground of his +passion for "infinity" was that eager and restless self-consciousness +which he so vividly described in _Pauline_, seeking to "be all, have, +see, know, taste, feel all," to become all natures, like Sordello, yet +retain the law of his own being. "I pluck the rose and love it more than +tongue can speak," says the lover in _Two in the Campagna_. Browning had +his full portion of the romantic idealism which, under the twofold +stimulus of literary and political revolution, had animated the poetry +of the previous generation. But while he clearly shared the uplifted +aspiring spirit of Shelley, it assumed in him a totally different +character. Shelley abhors limits, everything grows evanescent and +ethereal before his solvent imagination, the infinity he aspires after +unveils itself at his bidding, impalpable, undefined, "intense," +"inane." Whereas Browning's restlessly aspiring temperament worked under +the control of an eye and ear that fastened with peculiar emphasis and +eagerness upon all the limits, the dissonances, the angularities that +Shelley's harmonising fancy dissolved away. The ultimate psychological +result was that the brilliant clarity and precision of his imagined +forms gathered richness and intensity of suggestion from the vaguer +impulses of temperament, and that an association was set up between them +which makes it literally true to say that, for Browning, the "finite" is +not the rival or the antithesis, but the very language of the +"infinite,"--that the vastest and most transcendent realities have for +him their _points d'appui_ in some bit of intense life, some darting +bird or insect, some glowing flower or leaf. Existence ebbs away from +the large, featureless, monotonous things, to concentrate itself in a +spiked cypress or a jagged mountain cleft. A placid soul without +"incidents" arrests him less surely than the fireflies on a mossy bank. +Hence, while "the finite" always appears, when explicitly contrasted +with "the infinite," as the inferior,--as something _soi-disant_ +imperfect and incomplete,--its actual status and function in Browning's +imaginative world rather resembles that of Plato's peras in +relation to the apeiron,--the saving "limit" which gives +definite existence to the limitless vague. + + +II. + + +Hence Browning, while a romantic in temper, was, in comparison with his +predecessors, a thorough realist in method. All the Romantic poets of +the previous generation had refused and decried some large portion of +reality. Wordsworth had averted his ken from half of human fate; Keats +and Shelley turned from the forlornness of human society as it was to +the transfigured humanity of myth. All three were out of sympathy with +civilisation; and their revolt went much deeper than a distaste for the +types of men it bred. They attacked a triumphant age of reason in its +central fastness, the brilliant analytic intelligence to which its +triumphs were apparently due. Keats declaimed at cold philosophy which +undid the rainbow's spells; Shelley repelled the claim of mere +understanding to settle the merits of poetry; Wordsworth, the +profoundest, though by no means the most cogent or connected, thinker of +the three, denounced the "meddling intellect" which murders to dissect, +and strove to strip language itself of every element of logic and fancy, +as distortions of the truth, only to be uttered in the barest words, +which comes to the heart that watches and receives. On all these issues +Browning stands in sharp, if not quite absolute, contrast. "Barbarian," +as he has been called, and as in a quite intelligible sense he was, he +found his poetry pre-eminently among the pursuits, the passions, the +interests and problems, of civilised men. His potent gift of imagination +never tempted him, during his creative years, to assail the sufficiency +of intellect, or to disparage the intellectual and "artificial" elements +of speech; on the contrary, he appears from the outset employing in the +service of poetry a discursive logic of unsurpassed swiftness and +dexterity, and a vast heterogeneous army of words gathered, like a +sudden levy, with a sole eye to their effective force, from every +corner of civilised life, and wearing the motley of the most prosaic +occupations. It was only in the closing years that he began to distrust +the power of thought to get a grip upon reality. His delight in poetic +argument is often doubtless that of the ironical casuist, looking on at +the self-deceptions of a soul; but his interest in ideas was a rooted +passion that gave a thoroughly new, and to many readers most unwelcome, +"intellectuality" to the whole manner as well as substance of his poetic +work. + +While Browning thus, in Nietzsche's phrase, said "Yes" to many sides of +existence which his Romantic predecessors repudiated or ignored, he had +some very definite limitations of his own. He gathered into his verse +crowded regions of experience which they neglected; but some very +glorious avenues of poetry pursued by them he refused to explore. +Himself the most ardent believer in the supernatural among all the great +poets of his time, the supernatural, as such, has hardly any explicit +place in his poetry. To the eternal beauty of myth and +folk-lore,--dream-palaces "never built at all and therefore built for +ever,"--all that province of the poetical realm which in the memorable +partition of 1797 Coleridge had taken for his own, splendidly emulated +by Shelley and by Keats, Browning the Platonist maintained on the whole +the attitude of the utilitarian man of facts. "Fairy-poetry," he agreed +with Elizabeth Barrett in 1845-46, was "impossible in the days of +steam." With a faith in a transcendent divine world as assured as +Dante's or Milton's, he did not aspire to "pass the flaming bounds of +Space or Time," or "to possess the sun and stars." No reader of _Gerard +de Lairesse_ at one end of his career, or of the vision of _Paracelsus_ +at the other, or _Childe Roland_ in the middle, can mistake the +capacity; but habit is more trustworthy than an occasional _tour de +force_; and Browning's imagination worked freely only when it bodied +forth a life in accord with the waking experience of his own day. "A +poet never dreams," said his philosophical Don Juan, "we prose folk +always do"; and the epigram brilliantly announced the character of +Browning's poetic world,--the world of prose illuminated through and +through in every cranny and crevice by the keenest and most adventurous +of exploring intellects. + +In physical organisation Browning's endowment was decidedly of the kind +which prompts men to "accept the universe" with joyful alacrity. Like +his contemporary Victor Hugo, he was, after all reserves have been made, +from first to last one of the healthiest and heartiest of men. If he +lacked the burly stature and bovine appetite with which young Hugo a +little scandalised the delicate sensibilities of French Romanticism, he +certainly "came eating and drinking," and amply equipped with nerve and +muscle, activity, accomplishment, social instinct, and _savoir faire_. +The isolating loneliness of genius was checkmated by a profusion of the +talents which put men _en rapport_ with their kind. The reader of his +biography is apt to miss in it the signs of that heroic or idealist +detachment which he was never weary of extolling in his verse. He is the +poet _par excellence_ of the glory of failure and dissatisfaction: but +his life was, in the main, that of one who succeeded and who was +satisfied with his success. In the vast bulk of his writings we look in +vain for the "broken arc," the "half-told tale," and it is +characteristic that he never revised. Even after the great sorrow of his +life, the mood of _Prospice_, though it may have underlain all his other +moods, did not suppress or transform them; he "lived in the world and +loved earth's way," and however assured that this earth is not his only +sphere, did not wish + + "the wings unfurled + That sleep in the worm, they say." + +Whatever affinities Browning may have with the mystic or the symbolist +for whom the whole sense-world is but the sign of spiritual realities, +it is plain that this way of envisaging existence found little support +in the character of his senses. He had not the brooding eye, beneath +which, as it gazes, loveliness becomes far lovelier, but an organ +aggressively alert, minutely inquisitive, circumstantially exact, which +perceived the bearings of things, and explored their intricacies, noted +how the mortar was tempered in the walls and if any struck a woman or +beat a horse, but was as little prone to transfigure these or other +things with the glamour of mysterious suggestion as the eye of Peter +Bell himself. He lacked the stranger and subtler sensibilities of eye +and ear, to which Nature poetry of the nineteenth century owes so much. +His senses were efficient servants to an active brain, not magicians +flinging dazzling spells into the air before him or mysterious music +across his path. By a curious and not unimportant peculiarity he could +see a remote horizon clearly with one eye, and read the finest print in +twilight with the other; but he could not, like Wordsworth, hear the +"sound of alien melancholy" given out from the mountains before a storm. +The implicit realism of his eye and ear was fortified by acute tactual +and muscular sensibilities. He makes us vividly aware of surface and +texture, of space, solidity, shape. Matter with him is not the +translucent, tenuous, half-spiritual substance of Shelley, but +aggressively massive and opaque, tense with solidity. And he had in an +eminent degree the quick and eager apprehension of space--relations +which usually goes with these developed sensibilities of eye and muscle. +There is a hint of it in an early anecdote. "Why, sir, you are quite a +geographer!" he reported his mother to have said to him when, on his +very first walk with her, he had given her an elaborate imaginary +account of "his houses and estates."[62] But it was only late in life +that this acute plasticity and concreteness of his sensibility found its +natural outlet. When in their last winter at Rome (1860-61) he took to +clay-modelling, it was with an exultant rapture which for the time +thrust poetry into the shade. "The more tired he has been, and the more +his back ached, poor fellow," writes his wife, "the more he has exulted +and been happy--no, nothing ever made him so happy before."[63] This was +the immense joy of one who has at length found the key after half a +lifetime of trying at the lock. + +[Footnote 62: Mrs Orr, _Life_, p. 24.] + +[Footnote 63: Mrs Browning's _Letters_, March 1861.] + + +III. + + +And yet realism as commonly understood is a misleading term for +Browning's art. If his keen objective senses penned his imagination, +save for a few daring escapades, within the limits of a somewhat normal +actuality, it exercised, within those limits, a superb individuality of +choice. The acute observer was doubled with a poet whose vehement and +fiery energy and intense self-consciousness influenced what he observed, +and yet far more what he imagined and what he expressed. It is possible +to distinguish four main lines along which this determining bias told. +He gloried in the strong sensory-stimulus of glowing colour, of dazzling +light; in the more complex _motory_-stimulus of intricate, abrupt, and +plastic form,--feasts for the agile eye; in all the signs of power, +exciting a kindred joy by sympathy; and in all the signs of conscious +life or "soul," exciting a joy which only reaches its height when it is +enforced by those more elemental and primitive springs of joy, when he +is engaged with souls that glow like a flower or a gem, with souls +picturesquely complex and diversified, or vehement, aspiring, heroic. In +each of those four domains, light and colour, form, power, soul, +Browning had a profound, and in the fullest sense creative, joy, which +in endless varieties and combinations dominated his imagination, +controlled and pointed its flight, and determined the contents, the +manner, and the atmosphere of his poetic work. To trace these operations +in detail will be the occupation of the five following sections. + + +IV. + +1. JOY IN LIGHT AND COLOUR. + + +Browning's repute as a thinker and "teacher" long overshadowed his glory +as a singer, and it still to some extent impedes the recognition of his +bold and splendid colouring. It is true that he is never a colourist +pure and simple; his joy in light and colour is never merely epicurean. +Poets so great as Keats often seem to sit as luxurious guests at their +own feasts of sense; Browning has rather the air of a magnificent +dispenser, who "provides and not partakes." His colouring is not subtle; +it recalls neither the aethereal opal of Shelley nor the dewy flushing +glow and "verdurous glooms" of Keats, nor the choice and cultured +splendour of Tennyson; it is bold, simple, and intense. He neglects the +indecisive and subdued tones; the mingled hues chiefly found in Nature, +or the tender "silvery-grey" of Andrea's placid perfection. He dazzles +us with scarlet and crimson; with rubies, and blood, and "the poppy's +red effrontery," with topaz, and amethyst, and the glory of gold, makes +the sense ache with the lustre of blue, and heightens the effect of all +by the boldest contrast. Who can doubt that he fell the more readily +upon one of his quaintest titles because of the priestly ordinance that +the "Pomegranates" were to be "of blue and of purple and of scarlet," +and the "Bells" "of gold"? He loves the daybreak hour of the world's +awakening vitality as poets of another temper love the twilight; the +splendour of sunrise pouring into the chamber of Pippa, and steeping +Florence in that "live translucent bath of air"[64]; he loves the blaze +of the Italian mid-day-- + + "Great noontides, thunderstorms, all glaring pomps + That triumph at the heels of June the god." + +Even a violet-bed he sees as a "flash" of "blue."[65] He loves the play +of light on golden hair, and rarely imagines womanhood without it, even +in the sombre South and the dusky East; Poiphyria and Lady Carlisle, +Evelyn Hope and the maid of Pornic, share the gift with Anael the Druse, +with Sordello's Palma, whose + + "tresses curled + Into a sumptuous swell of gold, and wound + About her like a glory! even the ground + Was bright as with spilt sunbeams;" + +and the girl in _Love among the Ruins_, and the "dear dead women" of +Venice. His love of fire and of the imagery of flame has one of its +sources in his love of light. Verona emerges from the gloom of the past +as "a darkness kindling at the core." He sees the "pink perfection of +the cyclamen," the "rose bloom o'er the summit's front of stone." And, +like most painters of the glow of light, he throws a peculiar intensity +into his glooms. When he paints a dark night, as in _Pan and Luna_, the +blackness is a solid jelly-like thing that can be cut. And even night +itself falls short of the pitchy gloom that precedes the Eastern vision, +breaking in despair "against the soul of blackness there," as the gloom +of Saul's tent discovers within it "a something more black than the +blackness," the sustaining tent-pole, and then Saul himself "gigantic +and blackest of all." + +[Footnote 64: "I never grow tired of sunrises," he wrote in a letter, +recently published, to Aubrey de Vere, in 1851 (_A. de Vere: A Memoir_, +by Wilfrid Ward).] + +[Footnote 65: _Two Poets of Croisic_.] + +But mostly the foil is a vivid, even strident, contrast. He sees the +"old June weather" blue above, and the + + "great opaque + Blue breadth of sea without a break" + +under the walls of the seaside palazzo in Southern Italy, "where the +baked cicala dies of drouth"; and the blue lilies about the harp of +golden-haired David; and Solomon gold-robed in the blue abyss of his +cedar house, "like the centre spike of gold which burns deep in the +blue-bell's womb";[66] and the "gaze of Apollo" through the gloom of +Verona woods;[67] he sees the American pampas--"miles and miles of gold +and green," "where the sunflowers blow in a solid glow," with a +horse--"coal-black"--careering across it; and his swarthy Ethiop uses +the yellow poison-wattles of a lizard to divine with.[68] If he imagines +the "hairy-gold orbs" of the sorb-fruit, they must be ensconced in +"black glossy myrtle-berries," foils in texture as in hue;[69] and he +neglects the mellow harmonies of autumnal decay in order to paint the +leaf which is like a splash of blood intense, abrupt, across the flame +of a golden shield.[70] He makes the most of every hint of contrast he +finds, and delights in images which accentuate the rigour of antithesis; +Cleon's mingled black and white slaves remind him of a tesselated +pavement, and Blougram's fluctuating faith and doubt of a chess-board. +And when, long after the tragic break-up of his Italian home, he +reverted in thought to Miss Blagden's Florentine garden, the one +impression that sifted itself out in his tell-tale memory was of spots +of colour and light upon dark backgrounds,--"the herbs in red flower, +and the butterflies on the top of the wall under the olive-trees."[71] + +[Footnote 66: _Popularity_.] + +[Footnote 67: _Sordello_.] + +[Footnote 68: Ibid.] + +[Footnote 69: _Englishman in Italy_.] + +[Footnote 70: _By the Fireside_.] + +[Footnote 71: Mrs Orr, _Life_, p. 258.] + +Browning's colouring is thus strikingly expressive of the build of his +mind, as sketched above. It is the colouring of a realist in so far as +it is always caught from life, and never fantastic or mythical. But it +is chosen with an instinctive and peremptory bias of eye and +imagination--the index of a mind impatient of indistinct confusions and +placid harmony, avid of intensity, decision, and conflict. + + +V. + +2. JOY IN FORM. + + +If the popular legend of Browning ignores his passion for colour, it +altogether scouts the suggestion that he had a peculiar delight in form. +By general consent he lacked the most ordinary and decent attention to +it. No doubt he is partly responsible for this impression himself. His +ideals of literary form were not altogether those commonly recognised in +literature. If we understand by form the quality of clear-cut outline +and sharply defined articulation, there is a sense in which it was one +of the most ingrained instincts of his nature, indulged at times with +even morbid excess. Alike in life and in art he hated sloth,--the +slovenliness of the "ungirt loin" and of the indecisive touch. In +conduct, this animus expressed itself in a kind of punctilious +propriety. The forms of social convention Browning observed not merely +with the scrupulous respect of the man of fashion, but with the +enthusiasm of the virtuoso. Near akin in genius to the high priests of +the Romantic temple, Browning rarely, even in the defiant heyday of +adolescence, set more than a tentative foot across the outer precincts +of the Romantic Bohemia. His "individualism" was not of the type which +overflows in easy affectations; he was too original to be eccentric, too +profoundly a man of letters to look "like a damned literary man." In his +poetry this animus took a less equivocal shape. Not a little, both of +its vividness and of its obscurity, flows from the undisciplined +exuberance of his joy in form. An acute criticism of Mrs Browning's--in +some points the very best critic he ever had--puts one aspect of this +admirably. _The Athenaeum_ had called him "misty." "Misty," she retorts, +"is an infamous word for your kind of obscurity. You never are misty, +not even in _Sordello_--never vague. Your graver cuts deep sharp lines, +always,--and there is an extra distinctness in your images and thoughts, +from the midst of which, crossing each other infinitely, the general +significance seems to escape."[72] That is the overplus of form +producing obscurity. But through immense tracts of Browning the effect +of the extra-distinctness of his images and thoughts, of the deep sharp +lines cut by his graver, is not thus frustrated, but tells to the full +in amazingly vivid and unforgettable expression. Yet he is no more a +realist of the ordinary type here than in his colouring. His deep sharp +lines are caught from life, but under the control of a no less definite +bias of eye and brain. Sheer nervous and muscular energy had its part +here also. As he loved the intense colours which most vigorously +stimulate the optic nerve, so he delighted in the angular, indented, +intertwining, labyrinthine varieties of line and surface which call for +the most delicate, and at the same time the most agile, adjustments of +the muscles of the eye. He caught at the edges of things--the white line +of foam against the shore, the lip of the shell, and he could compare +whiteness as no other poet ever did to "the bitten lip of hate." He once +saw with delight "a solitary bee nipping a leaf round till it exactly +fitted the front of a hole."[73] Browning's joy in form was as little +epicurean as his joy in colour; it was a banquet of the senses in which +the sense of motion and energy had the largest part. Smooth, flowing, +rounded, undulating outlines, which the eye glides along without check, +are insipid and profitless to him, and he "welcomes the rebuff" of every +jagged excrescence or ragged fray, of every sudden and abrupt breach of +continuity. His eye seizes the crisp indentations of ferns as they "fit +their teeth to the polished block" of a grey boulder-stone;[74] seizes +the "sharp-curled" olive-leaves as they "print the blue sky" above the +morning glories of Florence;[75] seizes the sharp zigzag of lightning +against the Italian midnight, the fiery west through a dungeon grating +or a lurid rift in the clouds,[76]--"one gloom, a rift of fire, another +gloom,"--the brilliant line of Venice suspended "between blue and blue." +"Cup-mosses and ferns and spotty yellow leaves--all that I love +heartily," he wrote to E.B.B.[77] Roses and moss strike most men's +senses by a soft luxuriance in which all sharp articulation of parts is +merged; but what Browning seizes on in the rose is its "labyrinthine" +intricacy, while the moss becomes a little forest of "fairy-cups and elf +needles." And who else would have thought of saying that "the fields +look _rough_ with hoary dew"?[78] In the _Easter-Day_ vision he sees the +sky as a network of black serrated ridges. He loves the intricate play +of light and shade, and the irregular, contorted, honeycombed surface +which produces it; craggy, scarred, indented mountains, "like an old +lion's cheek-teeth";[79] old towns with huddled roofs and towers picked +out "black and crooked," like "fretwork," or "Turkish verse along a +scimitar"; old walls, creviced and crannied, intertwined with creepers, +and tenanted by crossing swarms of ever-busy flies,--such things are the +familiar commonplace of Browning's sculpturesque fancy. His metrical +movements are full of the same joy in "fretwork" effects--verse-rhythm +and sense-rhythm constantly crossing where the reader expects them to +coincide.[80] + +[Footnote 72: _E.B. to R.B._, Jan. 19, 1846.] + +[Footnote 73: _To E.B.B._, Jan. 5, 1846.] + +[Footnote 74: _By the Fireside_.] + +[Footnote 75: _Old Pictures in Florence_.] + +[Footnote 76: _Sordello_, i. 181.] + +[Footnote 77: Jan. 5, 1846, apropos of a poem by Horne. The "love" may +refer to Horne's description of these things, but it matters little for +the present purpose.] + +[Footnote 78: _Home Thoughts_.] + +[Footnote 79: _Karshish_, i. 515. Cf. _Englishman in Italy_, i. 397.] + +[Footnote 80: Cf., _e.g._, his treatment of the six-line stanza.] + +Nor was his imaginative sculpture confined to low-relief. Every rift in +the surface catches his eye, and the deeper and more intricate the +recess, the more curiously his insinuating fancy explores it. Sordello's +palace is "a maze of corridors,"--"dusk winding stairs, dim galleries." +He probes the depths of the flower-bell; he pries after the warmth and +scent that lie within the "loaded curls" of his lady, and irradiates the +lizard, or the gnome,[81] in its rock-chamber, the bee in its amber +drop,[82] or in its bud,[83] the worm in its clod. When Keats describes +the closed eyes of the sleeping Madeline he is content with the +loveliness he sees:-- + + "And still she slept an _azure-lidded_ sleep." + +Browning's mining fancy insists on showing us the eye of the dead +Porphyria "ensconced" within its eyelid, "like a bee in a bud." A cleft +is as seductive to his imagination as a cave to Shelley's. In a cleft of +the wind gashed Apennines he imagines the home he would best love in all +the world;[84] in a cleft the pine-tree, symbol of hardy song,[85] +strikes precarious root, the ruined eagle finds refuge,[86] and +Sibrandus Schaffnaburgensis a watery Inferno. A like instinct allures +him to other images of deep hollow things the recesses of which +something else explores and occupies,--the image of the sheath; the +image of the cup. But he is equally allured by the opposite, or salient, +kind of angularity. Beside the Calabrian seaside house stands a "sharp +tree--a cypress--rough iron-spiked, ripe fruit o'er-crusted,"--in all +points a thoroughly Browningesque tree. + +[Footnote 81: _Sordello_.] + +[Footnote 82: This turn of fancy was one of his points of affinity with +Donne; cf. _R.B. to E.B.B._, i. 46: "Music should enwrap the thought, as +Donne says an amber drop enwraps a bee."] + +[Footnote 83: _Porphyria_.] + +[Footnote 84: _De Gustibus_.] + +[Footnote 85: _Pan and Luna_.] + +[Footnote 86: E.g., _Balaustion's Adventure_; Proem.] + +And so, corresponding to the cleft-like array of sheaths and cups, a not +less prolific family of _spikes_ and _wedges_ and _swords_ runs riot in +Browning's work. The rushing of a fresh river-stream into the warm ocean +tides crystallises into the "crystal spike between two warm walls of +wave;"[87] "air thickens," and the wind, grown solid, "edges its wedge +in and in as far as the point would go."[88] The fleecy clouds embracing +the flying form of Luna clasp her as close "as dented spine fitting its +flesh."[89] The fiery agony of John the heretic is a plucking of sharp +spikes from his rose.[90] Lightning is a bright sword, plunged through +the pine-tree roof. And Mont Blanc himself is half effaced by his +"earth-brood" of aiguilles,--"needles red and white and green, Horns of +silver, fangs of crystal, set on edge in his demesne."[91] + +[Footnote 87: _Caliban on Setebos_.] + +[Footnote 88: _A Lover's Quarrel_.] + +[Footnote 89: _Pan and Luna_.] + +[Footnote 90: _The Heretic's Tragedy_.] + +[Footnote 91: _La Saisiaz_.] + +Browning's joy in abrupt and intricate form had then a definite root in +his own nervous and muscular energy. It was no mere preference which +might be indulged or not, but an instinctive bias, which deeply affected +his way not only of imagining but of conceiving the relations of things. +In this brilliant visual speech of sharply cut angles and saliences, of +rugged incrustations, and labyrinthine multiplicity, Browning's romantic +hunger for the infinite had to find its expression; and it is clear that +the bias implicit in speech imposed itself in some points upon the +matter it conveyed. Abrupt demarcations cut off soul from body, and man +from God; the infinite habitually presented itself to him as something, +not transcending and comprehending the finite, but _beginning where the +finite stopped_,--Eternity at the end of Time. But the same imaginative +passion for form which imposed some concrete limitations upon the +Absolute deprived it also of the vagueness of abstraction. Browning's +divinity is very finite, but also amazingly real and near; not +"interfused" with the world, which is full of stubborn distinctness, but +permeating it through and through, "curled inextricably round about" all +its beauty and its power,[92] "intertwined" with earth's lowliest +existence, and thrilling with answering rapture to every throb of life. +The doctrine of God's "immanence" was almost a commonplace with +Browning's generation. Browning turned the doctrine into imaginative +speech equalled in impressiveness by that of Carlyle and by that of +Emerson, but distinguished from both by an eager articulating concrete +sensibility which lifts into touch with supreme Good all the +labyrinthine multiplicity of existence which Carlyle impatiently +suppressed, while it joyously accentuates the sharp dissonances which +Emerson's ideality ignored. + +[Footnote 92: _Easter-Day_, xxx.] + + +VI. + +3. JOY IN POWER. + + +Browning was thus announced, we have seen, even by his splendour of +colouring and his rich and clear-cut plasticity, as something more than +a feaster upon colour and form. In his riot of the senses there was more +of the athlete than of the voluptuary. His joy was that of one to whom +nervous and muscular tension was itself a stimulating delight. In such a +temperament the feeling of energy was an elementary instinct, a +passionate obsession, which projected itself through eye and ear and +imagination into the outer world, filling it with the throbbing +pulsations or the clashing conflict of vehement powers. We know that it +was thus with Browning. "From the first Power was, I knew," he wrote in +the last autumn of his life.[93] It was a primitive instinct, and it +remained firmly rooted to the last. As Wordsworth saw Joy everywhere, +and Shelley Love, so Browning saw Power. If he later "saw Love as +plainly," it was the creative and transforming, not the emotional, +aspect of Love which caught his eye. His sense of Power played a yet +more various part in the shaping of his poetic world than did his sense +of form. But intellectual growth inevitably modified the primitive +instinct which it could not uproot; and his sense of Power traverses the +whole gamut of dynamic tones, from the lusty "barbaric" joy in the +sheer violence of ripping and clashing, to the high-wrought sensibility +which throbs in sympathy with the passionate heart-beats of the stars. + +[Footnote 93: _Asolando: Reverie._] + +No one can miss the element of savage energy in Browning. His associates +tell us of his sudden fits of indignation, "which were like +thunder-storms"; of his "brutal scorn" for effeminacy, of the "vibration +of his loud voice, and his hard fist upon the table," which made short +work of cobwebs.[94] The impact of hard resisting things, the jostlings +of stubborn matter bent on going its own way, attracted him as the +subtle compliances of air appealed to Shelley; and he runs riot in the +vocabulary (so abundantly developed in English) which conveys with +monosyllabic vigour to the ear these jostlings and impacts. + +[Footnote 94: Mr E. Gosse, in _Dict. of N.B._] + + "Who were the stragglers, what war did they wage; + Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank + Soil to a plash?" + +he asks in _Childe Roland_,--altogether an instructive example of the +ways of Browning's imagination when working, as it so rarely did, on a +deliberately fantastic theme. Hear again with what savage joy his Moon +"rips the womb" of the cloud that crosses it; Shelley's Moon, in keeping +with the ways of his more tender-hefted universe, merely _broke its +woof_. So the gentle wife of James Lee sees in a vineyard "the vines +writhe in rows each impaled on its stake." + +His "clefts" and "wedges" owe their attraction not only to their +intricate angularity but to the violent cleavings and thrustings apart +which they result from or produce. And his clefts are as incomplete +without some wild bit of fierce or frightened life in their grip as are +Shelley's caves without some form of unearthly maidenhood in their +embrace.[95] His mountains--so rarely the benign pastoral presences of +Wordsworth--are not only craggy and rough, but invisible axes have hewn +and mutilated them,--they are fissured and cloven and "scalped" and +"wind-gashed." When they thrust their mighty feet into the plain and +"entwine base with base to knit strength more intensely,"[96] the image +owes its grandeur to the double suggestion of sinewy power and +intertwined limbs. Still grander, but in the same style, is the sketch +of Hildebrand in _Sordello_:-- + + "See him stand + Buttressed upon his mattock, Hildebrand + Of the huge brain-mask welded ply o'er ply + As in a forge; ... teeth clenched, + The neck tight-corded too, the chin deep-trenched, + As if a cloud enveloped him while fought + Under its shade, grim prizers, thought with thought + At deadlock."[97] + +[Footnote 95: Cf. _Prometheus Unbound_, passim.] + +[Footnote 96: _Saul_.] + +[Footnote 97: _Sordello_, i. 171.] + +When the hoary cripple in _Childe Roland_ laughs, his mouth-edge is +"pursed and scored" with his glee; and his scorn must not merely be +uttered, but _written_ with his crutch "in the dusty thoroughfare." +This idea is resumed yet more dramatically in the image of the palsied +oak, cleft like "a distorted mouth that splits its rim gaping at death." +Later on, thrusting his spear into the gloom, he fancies it "tangled in +a dead man's hair or beard." Similarly, Browning is habitually lured +into expressive detail by the idea of smooth surfaces frayed or +shredded,--as of flesh torn with teeth or spikes: Akiba,-- + + "the comb + Of iron carded, flesh from bone, away,"[98] + +or Hippolytus, ruined on the "detested beach" that was "bright with +blood and morsels of his flesh."[99] + +[Footnote 98: _Joch. Halk._] + +[Footnote 99: _Artemis Prol._] + +This savageness found vent still more freely in his rendering of sounds. +By one of those apparent paradoxes which abound in Browning, the poet +who has best interpreted the glories of music in verse, the poet of +musicians _par excellence_, is also the poet of grindings and jostlings, +of jars and clashes, of grating hinges and flapping doors; civilisation +mated with barbarism, "like Jove in a thatched house." + +Music appealed to him by its imaginative suggestiveness, or by its +intricate technique; as the mine from which Abt Vogler reared his +palace, the loom on which Master Hugues wove the intertwining harmonies +of his fugue. But the most dulcet harmony aroused him less surely to +vivacious expression than some "gruff hinge's invariable scold,"[100] or +the quick sharp rattle of rings down the net-poles,[101] or the +hoof-beat of a galloping horse, or the grotesque tumble of the old +organist, in fancy, down the "rotten-runged, rat-riddled stairs" of his +lightless loft. There was much in him of his own Hamelin rats' alacrity +of response to sounds "as of scraping tripe" and squeezing apples, and +the rest. Milton contrasted the harmonious swing of the gates of +Paradise with the harsh grinding of the gates of hell. Browning would +have found in the latter a satisfaction subtly allied to his zest for +other forms of robust malignity. + +[Footnote 100: _Christmas Eve_, i. 480.] + +[Footnote 101: _Englishman in Italy_, i. 396.] + +And with his joy in savage images went an even more pronounced joy in +savage words. He loved the grinding, clashing, and rending sibilants and +explosives as Tennyson the tender-hefted liquids. Both poets found their +good among Saxon monosyllables, but to Tennyson they appealed by limpid +simplicity, to Browning by gnarled and rugged force. Dante, in a famous +chapter of the _De Vulgari Eloquio_[102] laid down a fourfold +distinction among words on the analogy of the varying texture of the +hair; enjoining the poet to avoid both the extremes of smoothness and +roughness,--to prefer the "combed" and the "shaggy" to the "tousled" and +the "sleek." All four kinds had their function in the versatile +technique of Browning and Tennyson; but it is safe to say that while +Tennyson's vocabulary is focussed among the "combed" in the direction of +the "sleek," Browning's centres in the "shaggy," verging towards the +"tousled."[103] The utmost sweetness is his when he will; it is the +counterpart of his pure intensity of colouring, and of the lyric +loveliness of his Pippas and Pompilias; but + + "All the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one bee," + +though genuine Browning, is not distinctively and unmistakably his, like + + "Irks care the crop-full bird? Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?" + +[Footnote 102: _De Vulg. Eloq._, ii. 8.] + +[Footnote 103: Making allowance, of course, for the more "shaggy" and +"tousled" character of the English vocabulary as a whole, compared with +Italian.] + +Browning's genial violence continually produced strokes which only +needed a little access of oddity or extravagance to become grotesque. He +probably inherited a bias in this direction; we know that his father +delighted in drawing grotesque heads, and even "declared that he could +not draw a pretty face."[104] But his grotesqueness is never the mere +comic oddness which sometimes assumes the name. It is a kind of +monstrosity produced not by whimsical mutilations, but by a riot of +exuberant power. And he has also a grave and tragic use of the +grotesque, in which he stands alone. He is, in fact, by far the greatest +English master of grotesque. _Childe Roland_, where the natural bent of +his invention has full fling, abounds with grotesque traits which, +instead of disturbing the romantic atmosphere, infuse into it an +element of strange, weird, and uncanny mirth, more unearthly than any +solemnity; the day shooting its grim red leer across the plain, the old +worn-out horse with its red, gaunt, and colloped neck a-strain; or, in +_Paracelsus_, the "Cyclops-like" volcanoes "staring together with their +eyes on flame," in whose "uncouth pride" God tastes a pleasure. Shelley +had recoiled from the horrible idea of a host of these One-eyed +monsters;[105] Browning deliberately invokes it. But he can use +grotesque effects to heighten tragedy as well as romance. One source of +the peculiar poignancy of the _Heretic's Tragedy_ is the eerie blend in +it of mocking familiarity and horror. + +[Footnote 104: H. Corkran, _Celebrities and I_.] + +[Footnote 105: Cf. Locock, _Examination of the Shelley MSS. in the +Bodleian_, p. 19. At the words "And monophalmic (_sic_) Polyphemes who +haunt the pine-hills, flocked," the writing becomes illegible and the +stanza is left incomplete. Mr Forman explains the breaking-off in the +same way.] + +Yet it was not always in this brutal and violent guise that Browning +imagined power. He was "ever a fighter," and had a sense as keen as +Byron's, and far more joyous, for storm and turbulence; but he had also, +as Byron had not, the finer sense which feels the universe tense with +implicit energies, and the profoundest silences of Nature oppressive +with the burden of life straining to the birth. The stars in _Saul_ +"beat with emotion" and "shot out in fire the strong pain of pent +knowledge," and a "gathered intensity" is "brought to the grey of the +hills"; upon the lovers of _In a Balcony_ evening comes "intense with +yon first trembling star." Wordsworth's "quiet" is lonely, pensive, and +serene; his stars are not beating with emotion, but "listening quietly." +Browning's is hectic, bodeful, high-strung. The vast featureless +Campagna is instinct with "passion," and its "peace with joy."[106] + + "Quietude--that's a universe in germ-- + The dormant passion needing but a look + To burst into immense life."[107] + +[Footnote 106: _Two in the Campagna._] + +[Footnote 107: _Asolando: Inapprehensiveness_.] + +Half the romantic spell of _Childe Roland_ lies in the wonderful +suggestion of impending catastrophe. The gloom is alive with mysterious +and impalpable menace; the encompassing presences which everything +suggests and nothing betrays, grow more and more oppressively real, +until the decisive moment when Roland's blast suddenly lets them loose. + +For the power that Browning rejoiced to imagine was pre-eminently +sudden; an unforeseen cataclysm, abruptly changing the conditions it +found, and sharply marking off the future from the past. The same bias +of imagination which crowded his inner vision of space with abrupt +angular forms tended to resolve the slow, continuous, organic energies +of the world before his inner vision into explosion and catastrophe. His +geology neglects the aeons of gradual stratification; it is not the slow +stupendous upheaval of continents, but the volcanic uprush of the molten +ore among the rocks, which renew the ancient rapture of the Paracelsian +God. He is the poet of the sudden surprises of plant-life: the bud +"bursting unaware" into flower, the brushwood about the elm-tree +breaking, some April morning, into tiny leaf, the rose-flesh mushroom +born in a night. The "metamorphoses of plants,"[108] which fascinated +Goethe by their inner continuity, arrest Browning by their outward +abruptness: that the flower is implicit in the leaf was a fact of much +less worth for him than that the bud suddenly passes into something so +unlike it as the flower. The gradual coming on of spring among the +mountains concentrates itself for him in one instant of epic +sublimity,--that in which the mountain unlooses its year's load of +sound, and + + "Fold on fold all at once it crowds thunderously down to his + feet."[109] + +[Footnote 108: _Metamorphose der Pflanzen_.] + +[Footnote 109: _Saul_.] + +Even in the gradual ebb of day he discovers a pregnant instant in which +day dies:-- + + "For note, when evening shuts, + A certain moment cuts + The deed off, calls the glory from the grey." + +Hence his love of images which convey these sudden transformations,--the +worm, putting forth in autumn its "two wondrous winglets,"[110] the +"transcendental platan," breaking into foliage and flower at the summit +of its smooth tall bole; the splendour of flame leaping from the dull +fuel of gums and straw. In such images we see how the simple joy in +abrupt changes of sensation which belonged to his riotous energy of +nerve lent support to his peremptory way of imagining all change and +especially all vital and significant becoming. For Browning's trenchant +imagination things were not gradually evolved; a sudden touch loosed the +springs of latent power, or an overmastering energy from without rushed +in like a flood. With all his connoisseur's delight in technique, +language and sound were only spells which unlocked a power beyond their +capacity to express. Music was the "burst of pillared cloud by day and +pillared fire by night," starting up miraculously from the barren +wilderness of mechanical expedients,[111] and poetry "the sudden +rose"[112] "breaking in" at the bidding of a "brace of rhymes." That in +such transmutations Browning saw one of the most marvellous of human +powers we may gather from the famous lines of _Abt Vogler_ already +quoted:-- + + "And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man, + That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star." + +[Footnote 110: _Sordello_ (Works, i. 123).] + +[Footnote 111: _Fifine_, xlii.] + +[Footnote 112: _Transcendentalism_.] + + +VII. + +4. JOY IN SOUL. + + +No saying of Browning's is more familiar than that in which he declared +"incidents in the development of souls"[113] to be to him the supreme +interest of poetry. The preceding sections of this chapter have +sufficiently shown how far this formula was from exhausting the vital +springs of Browning's work. "Little else" might be "worth study"; but a +great many other things had captured those rich sensibilities, without +which the "student's analytic zeal" might have devoured the poet. On the +other hand, his supreme interest in "incidents in the development of +souls" was something very different from the democratic enthusiasm for +humanity, or the Wordsworthian joy in the "common tears and mirth" of +"every village." The quiet routine existence of uneventful lives hardly +touched him more than the placid quiescence of animal and vegetable +existence; the commonplace of humanity excited in him no mystic rapture; +the human "primrose by the river's brim," merely as one among a throng, +was for him pretty much what it was to Peter Bell. There was no doubt a +strain of pantheistic thought in Browning which logically involved a +treatment of the commonplace as profoundly reverent as Wordsworth's own. +But his passionate faith in the divine love pervading the universe did +not prevent his turning away resolutely from regions of humanity, as of +nature, for which his poetic alchemy provided no solvent. His poetic +throne was not built on "humble truth"; and he, as little as his own +Sordello, deserved the eulogy of the plausible Naddo upon his verses as +based "on man's broad nature," and having a "staple of common-sense."[114] +The homely toiler as such, all members of homely undistinguished classes +and conditions of men, presented, _as_ embodiments of those classes +and conditions, no coign of vantage to his art. In this point, +human-hearted and democratic as he was, he fell short not only of the +supreme portrayers of the eternal commonplaces of peasant life,--of a +Burns, a Wordsworth, a Millet, a Barnes,--but even of the fastidious +author of _The Northern Farmer_. Once, in a moment of exaltation, at +Venice, Browning had seen Humanity in the guise of a poor soiled and +faded bit of Venetian girlhood, and symbolically taken her as the future +mistress of his art. The programme thus laid down was not, like +Wordsworth's similarly announced resolve to sing of "sorrow barricadoed +evermore within the walls of cities," simply unfulfilled; but it was far +from disclosing the real fountain of his inspiration. + +[Footnote 113: Preface to _Sordello_, ed. 1863.] + +[Footnote 114: _Sordello_, ii. 135.] + +And as Browning deals little with the commonplace in human nature, so he +passes by with slight concern the natural relationships into which men +are born, as compared with those which they enter by passion or choice. +The bond of kinship, the love between parents and children, brothers and +sisters, so prolific of poetry elsewhere, is singularly rare and +unimportant in Browning, to whom every other variety of the love between +men and women was a kindling theme. The names of husband, of wife, of +lover, vibrate for him with a poetry more thrilling than any that those +names excite elsewhere in the poetry of his generation; but the mystic +glory which in Blake and Wordsworth and Coleridge gathered about +unconscious childhood is all but fled. Children--real children, naive +and inarticulate, like little Fortu--rarely appear in his verse, and +those that do appear seem to have been first gently disengaged, like +Pippa, David, Theocrite, from all the clinging filaments of Home. In its +child pathos _The Pied Piper_--addressed to a child--stands all but +alone among his works. His choicest and loveliest figures are lonely and +unattached. Pippa, David, Pompilia, Bordello, Paracelsus, Balaustion, +Mildred, Caponsacchi, have no ties of home and blood, or only such as +work malignly upon their fate. Mildred has no mother, and she falls; +Sordello moves like a Shelleyan shadow about his father's house; +Balaustion breaks away from the ties of kindred to become a spiritual +daughter of Athens; Paracelsus goes forth, glorious in the possession of +"the secret of the world," which is his alone; Caponsacchi, himself +sisterless and motherless, releases Pompilia from the doom inflicted on +her by her parents' calculating greed; the song of Pippa releases Luigi +from the nobler but yet hurtful bondage of his mother's love. + +More considerable, but yet relatively slight, is the part played in +Browning's poetry by those larger and more complex communities, like the +City or the State, whose bond of membership, though less involuntary +than that of family, is still for the most part the expression of +material necessity or interest, not of spiritual discernment, passion, +or choice. Patriotism, in this sense, is touched with interest but +hardly with conviction, or with striking power, by Browning. Casa Guidi +windows betrayed too much. Two great communities alone moved his +imagination profoundly; just those two, namely, in which the bond of +common political membership was most nearly merged in the bond of a +common spiritual ideal. And Browning puts the loftiest passion for +Athens in the mouth of an alien, and the loftiest Hebraism in the mouth +of a Jew of the dispersion. Responsive to the personal cry of the +solitary hero, Browning rarely caught or cared to reproduce the vaguer +multitudinous murmur of the great mass. In his defining, isolating +imagination the voice of the solitary soul rings out with thrilling +clearness, but the "still sad music of humanity" escapes. The inchoate +and the obsolescent, the indistinctness of immaturity, the incipient +disintegration of decay, the deepening shadow of oblivion, the +half-instinctive and organic bond of custom, whatever stirs the blood +but excites only blurred images in the brain, and steals into character +without passing through the gates of passion or of thought, finds +imperfect or capricious reflection in his verse. + +Browning's interest in "soul" was not, then, a diffused enjoyment of +human nature as such. But, on the other hand, human nature stood for too +much with him, his sense of what all personality at the lowest implies +was too keen, to allow him to relish, or make much use of, those +unpsychological amalgams of humanity and thought,--the personified +abstractions. Whether in the base form branded by Wordsworth, or in the +lofty and noble form of Keats's "Autumn" and Shelley's "West Wind," this +powerful instrument of poetic expression was touched only in fugitive +and casual strokes to music by Browning's hand. Personality, to interest +him, had to possess a possible status in the world of experience. It had +to be of the earth, and like its inhabitants. The stamp of fashioning +intelligence, or even of blind myth-making instinct, alienates and warns +him off. He climbs to no Olympus or Valhalla, he wanders through no +Empyrean. His rare divinities tread the visible and solid ground. His +Artemis "prologizes" to, his Herakles plays a part in, a human drama; +and both are as frankly human themselves as the gods of Homer. Shelley +and Keats had rekindled about the faded forms of the Greek gods the +elemental Nature-worship from which they had started; Apollo, Hyperion, +are again glorious symbols of the "all-seeing" and all-vitalising Sun. +Browning, far from seeking to recover their primitive value, treats +their legends, with the easy rationalism of Euripides or Ferishtah, as a +mine of ethical and psychological illustration. He can play charmingly, +in later years, with the myth of Pan and Luna, of Arion and the +dolphin,[115] or of Apollo and the Fates, but idyl gets the better of +nature feeling; "maid-moon" Luna is far more maid than moon. The spirit +of autumn does not focus itself for him, as for Keats, in some symbolic +shape, slumbering among the harvest swathes or at watch over the +fragrant cider-press; it breaks up into the vivid concrete traits of +_The Englishman in Italy_. The spirit of humanity is not shadowed forth +in a Prometheus, but realised in a Caponsacchi. + +[Footnote 115: _Fifine at the Fair_, lxxviii.] + + +VIII. + + +What, then, in the vast multifarious field of soul-life were the points +of special attraction for Browning? To put it in a word, the same +fundamental instincts of the senses and the imagination which we have +watched shaping the visible world of his poetry, equally determined the +complexion of its persons. The joy in pure and intense colour, in +abruptness of line and intricacy of structure, in energetic movement and +sudden disclosure and transformation,--all these characteristics have +their analogies in Browning's feeling for the complexion, morphology, +and dynamics of what he calls the soul. Just as this lover of crowded +labyrinthine forms surprises us at first by his masses of pure and +simple colour, untroubled by blur or modulation, so in the long +procession of Browning's men of the world, adepts in the tangled lore of +experience, there mingle from time to time figures radiant with a pure, +intense, immaculate spiritual light,--Pippa, Pompilia, the David of the +earlier _Saul_. Something of the strange charm of these naively +beautiful beings springs from their isolation. That detachment from the +bonds of home and kindred which was noticed above in its negative +aspect, appears now as a source of positive expressiveness. They start +into unexplained existence like the sudden beauty of flames from straw. +Browning is no poet of the home, but he is peculiarly the poet of a kind +of spirituality which subsists independently of earthly ties without +disdaining them, lonely but unconscious of loneliness. Pippa would +hardly be so recognisably steeped as she is in the very atmosphere of +Browning's mind, but for this loneliness of hers,--the loneliness +neither of the exile nor of the anchorite, but native, spontaneous, and +serene. Wordsworth sometimes recalls it, but he is apt to invest his +lonely beings with a mystic glamour which detaches them from humanity as +well as from their fellow-men. The little "H.C., six years old," is "a +dewdrop which the morn brings forth," that + + "at the touch of wrong, without a strife, + Slips in a moment out of life." + +Pippa, with all her ideality and her upward gaze, has her roots in +earth; she is not the dewdrop but the flower. + +But loneliness belongs in a less degree to almost all characters which +seriously engaged Browning's imagination. His own intense isolating +self-consciousness infused itself into them. Each is a little island +kingdom, judged and justified by its own laws, and not entirely +intelligible to the foreigner. Hence his persistent use of the dramatic +monologue. Every man had his point of view, and his right to state his +case. "Where you speak straight out," Browning wrote in effect, as we +saw, in one of his earliest letters to his future wife, "I break the +white light in the seven colours of men and women"[116]; and each colour +had its special truth and worth. His study of character is notoriously +occupied with failures of transit between mind and mind. His lovers miss +the clue; if they find it, as in _By the Fireside_, the collapse of the +barrier walls is told with triumph, and the spell of the forests invoked +to explain it. + +[Footnote 116: _R.B. to E.B.B._, i. 6.] + +And within the viewless intrenchments thus drawn about character +Browning's imagination was prone to reproduce the abrupt and intricate +play of line and surface which fascinated his outward eye. "The +care-bit, erased, broken-up beauties ever took my taste," says, in +_Sordello_, the creator of the pure flame-like soul-beauty of Pompilia +and Pippa; very much as the crumbling and blistering of the frescoed +walls are no less needful to the charm he feels in his Southern villa +than the "blue breadth of sea without break" expanding before it. The +abruptness, the sharp transitions, the startling and picturesque +contrasts which mark so much of the talk of his persons, reflect not +merely his agility of mind but his aesthetic relish for the Gothic +richness and fretted intricacy that result. The bishop of St Praxed's +monologue, for instance, is a sort of live mosaic,--anxious entreaty to +his sons, diapered with gloating triumph over old Gandulph. The larger +tracts of soul-life are apt in his hands to break up into shifting +phases, or to nodulate into sudden crises; here a Blougram, with his +"chess-board" of faith diversified by doubt, there a Paracelsus, +advancing by complex alternations of "aspiring" and "attainment." +Everywhere in Browning the slow continuities of existence are obscured +by vivid moments,--the counterpart of his bursts of sunlight through +rifts and chinks. A moment of speech with Shelley stands out, a +brilliant handbreadth of time between the blank before and after; a +moment of miserable failure blots out the whole after-life of Martin +Relph; a moment of heroism stamps once for all the quality of Clive; the +whole complex story of Pompilia focuses in the "splendid minute and no +more" in which she is "saved"; the lover's whole life is summed up in +"some moment's product" when "the soul declares itself,"[117] or utters +the upgarnered poetry of its passion; or else, conversely, he looks back +on a moment equally indelible, when the single chance of love was +missed. "It once might have been, once only," is the refrain of the +lover's regret in Browning, as "once and only once and for one only" is +the keynote of his triumph. In the contours of event and circumstance, +as in those of material objects, he loves jagged angularity, not +harmonious curve. "Our interest's in the dangerous edge of things,"-- + + "The honest thief, the tender murderer, + The superstitious atheist;" + +where an alien strain violently crosses the natural course of kind; and +these are only extreme examples of the abnormal nature which always +allured and detained Browning's imagination, though it was not always +the source of its highest achievement. Ivanovitch, executing justice +under the forms of murder, Caponsacchi, executing mercy under the forms +of an elopement, the savagery of Halbert and Hob unnerved by an abrupt +reminiscence,--it is in these suggestive and pregnant situations, at the +meeting-points of apparently irreconcilable classes and kinds, that +Browning habitually found or placed those of his characters who +represent any class or kind at all. + +[Footnote 117: _By the Fireside_.] + +The exploring, in-and-out scrutinising instincts of Browning's +imagination equally left their vivid impress upon his treatment of +character. If the sharp nodosities of character caught his eye, its +mysterious recesses and labyrinthine alleys allured his curiosity; this +lover of "clefts," this pryer among tangled locks and into the depths of +flower-bells, peered into all the nooks and chambers of the soul with +inexhaustible enterprise. It is hard to deny that even _The Ring and the +Book_ itself suffers something from the unflagging zest with which the +poet pursues all the windings of popular speculation, all the fretwork +of Angelo de Hyacinthis's forensic and domestic futilities. The poem is +a great poetic Mansion, with many chambers, and he will lead us sooner +or later to its inner shrine; but on the way there are "closets to +search and alcoves to importune,"-- + + "The day wears, + And door succeeds door, + We try the fresh fortune, + Range the wide house from the wing to the centre." + +For the most part, after the not wholly successful experiment of direct +analysis in _Sordello_, he chose to make his men and women the +instruments of their own illumination; and this was a second source of +his delight in the dramatic monologue. He approached all problematic +character with a bias towards disbelieving appearances, which was fed, +if not generated, by that restlessly exploring instinct of an +imagination that spontaneously resolved surface and solidity into +integument and core. Not that Browning always displays the core; on the +contrary, after elaborately removing an imposing mask from what appears +to be a face, he will hint that the unmasked face is itself a mask. "For +Blougram, he believed, say, half he spoke." Browning is less concerned +to "save" the subjects of his so-called "Special Pleadings" than to +imagine them divested of the gross disguises of public rumour about +them; not naked as God made them, but clothed in the easy undress of +their own subtly plausible illusions about themselves. But the optimist +in him is always alert, infusing into the zest of exploration a cheery +faith that behind the last investiture lurks always some soul of +goodness, and welcoming with a sudden lift of verse the escape of some +diviner gleam through the rifts, such as Blougram's-- + + "Just when we're safest comes a sunset touch." + +Yet it is hardly a paradox to say that his faith throve upon the +obstacles it overcame. He imagined yet more vividly than he saw, and the +stone wall which forbade vision but whetted imagination, acquired an +ideal merit in his eyes because it was not an open door. In later life +he came with growing persistence to regard the phenomenal world as a +barrier of illusion between man and truth. But instead of chilling his +faith, the obstacle only generated that poet's philosophy of the "value +of a lie" which perturbs the less experienced reader of _Fifine_. +"Truth" was "forced to manifest itself through falsehood," won thence by +the excepted eye, at the rare season, for the happy moment, till +"through the shows of sense, which ever proving false still promise to +be true," the soul of man worked its way to its final union with the +soul of God.[118] + +[Footnote 118: _Fifine at the fair_, cxxiv.] + + * * * * * + +And here at length if not before we have a clear glimpse of the athlete +who lurks behind the explorer. Browning's joy in imagining impediment +and illusion was only another aspect of his joy in the spiritual energy +which answers to the spur of difficulty and "works" through the shows of +sense; and this other joy found expression in a poetry of soul yet more +deeply tinged with the native hue of his mind. "From the first, Power +was, I knew;" and souls were the very central haunt and focus of its +play. Not that strong natures, as such, have much part in Browning's +poetic-world; the strength that allured his imagination was not the +strength that is rooted in nerve or brain, slowly enlarging with the +build of the organism, but the strength that has suddenly to be begotten +or infused, that leaps by the magic of spiritual influence from heart to +heart. If Browning multiplies and deepens the demarcations among +material things, he gives his souls a rare faculty of transcending them. +Bright spiritual beings like Pippa shed their souls innocently and +unwittingly about like a spilth of "X-rays," and the irradiation +penetrates instantly the dense opposing integuments of passion, +cupidity, and worldliness. At all times in his life these accesses of +spiritual power occupied his imagination. Cristina's momentary glance +and the Lady of Tripoli's dreamed-of face lift their devotees to +completeness:-- + + "She has lost me, I have gained her, + Her soul's mine, and now grown perfect + I shall pass my life's remainder." + +Forty years later, Browning told with far greater realistic power and a +grim humour suited to the theme, the "transmutation" of Ned Bratts. +Karshish has his sudden revealing flash as he ponders the letter of +Abib:-- + + "The very God! Think, Abib, dost thou think,-- + So the All-great were the All-loving too"-- + +and the boy David his prophetic vision. A yet more splendid vision +breaks from the seemingly ruined brain of the dying Paracelsus, and he +has a gentler comrade in the dying courtier, who starts up from his +darkened chamber crying that-- + + "Spite of thick air and closed doors + God told him it was June,--when harebells grow, + And all that kings could ever give or take + Would not be precious as those blooms to me." + +But it is not only in these magical transitions and transformations that +Browning's joy in soul was decisively coloured by his joy in power. A +whole class of his characters--the most familiarly "Browningesque" +division of them all--was shaped under the sway of this master-passion; +the noble army of "strivers" who succeed and of "strivers" who fail, +baffled artists and rejected lovers who mount to higher things on +stepping-stones of their frustrated selves, like the heroes of _Old +Painters in Florence_, and _The Last Ride Together_, and _The Lost +Mistress_; and on the other hand, the artists and lovers who fail for +want of this saving energy, like the Duke and Lady of the _Statue and +the Bust_, like Andrea del Sarto and the Unknown Painter. But his very +preoccupation with Art and with Love itself sprang mainly from his +peculiar joy in the ardent putting-forth of soul. No kind of vivid +consciousness was indifferent to him, but the luxurious receptivity of +the spectator or of a passively beloved mistress touched him little, +compared with the faintest pulsation of the artist's "love of loving, +rage of knowing, feeling, seeing the absolute truth of things," of the +lover's passion for union with another soul. When he describes effects +of music or painting, he passes instinctively over to the standpoint of +the composer or the performer; shows us Hugues and Andrea themselves at +the organ, or the easel; and instead of feeling the world turned into +"an unsubstantial faery place" by the magic of the cuckoo or the thrush, +strikes out playful theories of the professional methods of these +songsters,--the cuckoo's monopoly of the "minor third," the thrush's +wise way of repeating himself "lest you should think he never could +recapture his first fine careless rapture." Suffering enters Browning's +poetry almost never as the artless wail of the helpless stricken thing; +the intolerable pathos of _Ye Banks and Braes_, or of + + "We twa hae paidl't in the burn + Frae morning sun till dine," + +belonged to a side of primitive emotion to which "artificial" poets like +Tennyson were far more sensitive than he. Suffering began to interest +him when the wail passed into the fierceness of vindictive passion, as +in _The Confessional_, or into the outward calm of a self-subjugated +spirit, as in _Any Wife to any Husband_, or _A Woman's Last Word_; or +into reflective and speculative, if bitter, retrospect, as in _The Worst +of It_ or _James Lee's Wife_. And happiness, equally,--even the lover's +happiness,--needed, to satisfy Browning, to have some leaven of +challenging disquiet; the lover must have something to fear, or +something to forgive, some hostility, or guilt, or absence, or death, to +brave. Or the rapturous union of lovers must be remembered with a pang, +when they have quarrelled; or its joy be sobered by recalling the +perilous hairbreadth chances incurred in achieving it (_By the +Fireside_)-- + + "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!" + +Further, his joy in soul drew into the sphere of his poetry large tracts +of existence which lay wholly or partly outside the domain of soul +itself. The world of the lower animals hardly touched the deeper chords +of his thought or emotion; but he watched their activities with a very +genuine and constant delight, and he took more account of their pangs +than he did of the soul-serving throes of man.[119] His imaginative +selection among the countless types of these "low kinds" follows the +lead of all those forms of primitive joy which we have traced in his +types of men and women: here it is the quick-glancing intricate flights +of birds or insects, the flitting of quick sandpipers in and out of the +marl, or of flies about an old wall; now the fierce contrasts of hue, +angularity, and grotesque deformity all at once in Caliban's beasts:-- + + "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;" + +or it is the massive power of the desert lion, in _The Glove_ or the +bright aethereal purity of the butterfly fluttering over the swimmer's +head, with its + + "membraned wings + So wonderful, so wide, + So sun-suffused;"[120] + +or the cheery self-dependence of the solitary insect. "I always love +those wild creatures God sets up for themselves," he wrote to Miss +Barrett, "so independently, so successfully, with their strange happy +minute inch of a candle, as it were, to light them." [121] + +[Footnote 119: _Donald_.] + +[Footnote 120: Some of these examples are from Mr Brooke's excellent +chapter on Browning's Treatment of Nature.] + +[Footnote 121: _To E.B.B._, 5th Jan. 1846.] + +Finally, Browning's joy in soul flowed over also upon the host of +lifeless things upon which "soul" itself has in any way been spent. To +bear the mark of Man's art and toil, to have been hewn or moulded or +built, compounded or taken to pieces, by human handiwork, was to +acquire a certain romantic allurement for Browning's imagination hardly +found in any other poet in the same degree. The "artificial products" of +civilised and cultured life were for him not merely instruments of +poetic expression but springs of poetic joy. No poetry can dispense with +images from "artificial" things; Wordsworth himself does not always +reject them; with most poets they are commoner, merely because they are +better known; but for Browning the impress of "our meddling intellect" +added exactly the charm and stimulus which complete exemption from it +added for Wordsworth. His habitual imagery is fetched, not from flowers +or clouds or moving winds and waters, but from wine-cups, swords and +sheaths, lamps, tesselated pavements, chess-boards, pictures, houses, +ships, shops. Most of these appealed also to other instincts,--to his +joy in brilliant colour, abrupt line, intricate surface, or violent +emotion. But their "artificiality" was an added attraction. The wedge, +for instance, appeals to him not only by its angularity and its rending +thrust, but as a weapon contrived by man's wit and driven home by his +muscle. The cup appeals to him not only by its shape, and by the rush of +the foaming wine, but as fashioned by the potter's wheel, and flashing +at the festal board. His delight in complex technicalities, in the +tangled issues of the law-courts, and the intertwining harmonies of +Bach, sprang from his joy in the play of mind as well as from his joy in +mere intricacy as such. His mountains are gashed and cleft and carved +not only because their intricacy of craggy surface or the Titanic +turmoil of mountain-shattering delights him, but also because he loves +to suggest the deliberate axe or chisel of the warrior or the artist +Man. He turns the quiet vicissitudes of nature into dexterous +achievements of art. If he does not paint or dye the meads, he turns the +sunset clouds into a feudal castle, shattered slowly with a visible +mace; the morning sun pours into Pippa's chamber as from a wine-bowl; +and Fifine's ear is + + "cut + Thin as a dusk-leaved rose carved from a cocoanut."[122] + +[Footnote 122: _Fifine at the Fair_, ii. 325.] + +Sordello's slowly won lyric speech is called + + "a rude + Armour ... hammered out, in time to be + Approved beyond the Roman panoply + Melted to make it."[123] + +[Footnote 123: _Sordello_, i. 135.] + +And thirty years later he used the kindred but more recondite simile of +a ring with its fortifying alloy, to symbolise the welded _Wahrheit_ and +_Dichtung_ of his greatest poem. + +Between _Dichtung_ and _Wahrheit_ there was, indeed, in Browning's mind, +a closer affinity than that simile suggests. His imagination was a +factor in his apprehension of truth; his "poetry" cannot be detached +from his interpretation of life, nor his interpretation of life from his +poetry. Not that all parts of his apparent teaching belong equally to +his poetic mind. On the contrary, much of it was derived from traditions +of which he never shook himself clear; much from the exercise of a +speculative reason which, though incomparably agile, was neither well +disciplined in its methods nor particularly original in its grasp of +principles. But with the vitalising heart of his faith neither tradition +nor reasoning had so much to do as that logic of the imagination by +which great poets often implicitly enunciate what the after-thinker +slowly works out. The characteristic ways of Browning's poetry, the +fundamental joys on which it fed, of which the present chapter attempts +an account, by no means define the range or the limits of his +interpreting intellect, but they mark the course of its deepest +currents, the permanent channels which its tides overflow, but to which +in the last resort they return. In the following chapter we shall have +to study these fluctuating movements of his explicit and formulated +thought, and to distinguish, if we may, the ground-tone of the deep +waters from the more resonant roll of the shifting tides. + + + + +CHAPTER X. + +THE INTERPRETER OF LIFE. + + His voice sounds loudest and also clearest for the things that as a + race we like best; ... the fascination of faith, the acceptance of + life, the respect for its mysteries, the endurance of its charges, + the vitality of the will, the validity of character, the beauty of + action, the seriousness, above all, of great human passion. + + --HENRY JAMES. + + + +I. + + +The trend of speculative thought in Europe during the century which +preceded the emergence of Browning may be described as a progressive +integration along several distinct lines of the great regions of +existence which common beliefs, resting on a still vigorous medievalism, +thrust apart. Nature was brought into nearer relation with Man, and Man +with God, and God with Nature and with Man. In one aspect, not the least +striking, it was a "return to Nature"; economists from Adam Smith to +Malthus worked out the laws of man's dependence upon the material world; +poets and idealists from Rousseau to Wordsworth discovered in a life +"according to nature" the ideal for man; sociologists from Hume to +Bentham, and from Burke to Coleridge, applied to human society +conceptions derived from physics or from biology, and emphasised all +that connects it with the mechanical aggregate of atoms, or with the +organism. + +In another aspect it was a return to God. If the scientific movement +tended to subjugate man to a Nature in which, as Laplace said, there was +no occasion for God, Wordsworth saw both in Nature and in man a spirit +"deeply interfused"; and the great contemporary school of German +philosophy set all ethical thinking in a new perspective by its original +handling of the old thesis that duty is a realisation of the will of +God. + +But, in yet another aspect, it was a return to Man. If Man was brought +nearer to Nature and to God, it was to a Nature and to a God which had +themselves acquired, for him, closer affinities with humanity. He +divined, with Wordsworth, his own joy, with Shelley his own love, in the +breathing flower; he saw with Hegel in the Absolute Spirit a power +vitally present in all man's secular activities and pursuits. And these +interpreting voices of poets and philosophers were but the signs of less +articulate sensibilities far more widely diffused, which were in effect +bringing about a manifold expansion and enrichment of normal, mental, +and emotional life. Scott made the romantic past, Byron and Goethe, in +their different ways, the Hellenic past, a living element of the +present; and Fichte, calling upon his countrymen to emancipate +themselves, in the name not of the "rights of men" but of the genius of +the German people, uttered the first poignant recognition of national +life as a glorious vesture arraying the naked body of the individual +member, not an aggregate of other units competing with or controlling +him. + +In this complicated movement Browning played a very notable and +memorable part. But it was one of which the first generation of his +readers was entirely, and he himself to a great extent, unconscious, and +which his own language often disguises or conceals. Of all the poets of +the century he had the clearest and most confident vision of the working +of God in the world, the most buoyant faith in the divine origin and +destiny of man. Half his poetry is an effort to express, in endless +variety of iteration, the nearness of God, to unravel the tangled +circumstance of human life, and disclose everywhere infinity enmeshed +amid the intricacies of the finite. + +On the side of Nature his interest was less keen and his vision less +subtle. His "visitations of the living God" came to him by other avenues +than those opened by Wordsworth's ecstatic gaze, "in love and holy +passion," upon outward beauty. Only limited classes of natural phenomena +appealed to him powerfully at all, the swift and sudden upheavals and +catastrophes, the ardours and accesses, the silence that thrills with +foreboding and suspense. For continuities, both of the mechanical and +the organic kind, he lacked sense. We have seen how his eye fastened +everywhere upon the aspects of life least suggestive of either iron +uniformity or harmonious evolution. The abrupt demarcations which he +everywhere imposes or discovers were the symptom of a primitive +ingrained atomism of thought which all the synthetic strivings of a +God-intoxicated intellect could not entirely overcome. + + +II. + + +His metaphysical thinking thus became an effort to reconcile an +all-embracing synthesis with a sense of individuality as stubborn and +acute as ever man had. Body and Soul, Nature and Spirit, Man and God, +Good and Evil, he presented now as co-operative or alien, now as hostile +antagonists or antitheses. That their opposition is not ultimate, that +evil is at bottom a form of good, and all finite existence a passing +mode of absolute being, was a conviction towards which his thought on +one side constantly strove, which it occasionally touched, but in which +it could not securely rest. Possessed by the thirst for absoluteness, he +vindicated the "infinity" of God and the soul by banishing all the +"finiteness" of sense into a limbo of illusion. The infinite soul, +imprisoned for life in a body which at every moment clogs its motion and +dims its gaze, fights its way through the shows of sense,[124] "which +ever proving false still promise to be true," until death opens the +prison-gate and restores the captive to its infinity. Sorrow and evil +were stains imposed by Time upon the white radiance of an eternal being; +and Browning sometimes rose, though with a less sure step, to the +dizzier height of holding Time itself to be unreal, and the soul's +earthly life not an episode in an endless sequence, but a dream of +progressive change imposed upon a changeless and timeless essence. + +[Footnote 124: _Fifine at the Fair._] + +But there were, as has been said, elements in Browning's mental make +which kept this abstract and formal theory, fortified though it was by +theological prepossessions, in check. His most intense consciousness, +his most definite grip upon reality, was too closely bound up with the +collisions and jostlings, the limits and angularities, of the world of +the senses, for the belief in their illusoriness easily to hold its +ground. This "infinite soul" palpably had its fullest and richest +existence in the very heart of finite things. Wordsworth had turned for +"intimations of immortality" to the remembered intuitions of childhood; +Browning found them in every pang of baffled aspiration and frustrate +will. Hence there arose in the very midst of this realm of illusion a +new centre of reality; the phantoms took on solid and irrefragable +existence, and refused to take to flight when the cock-crow announced +that "Time was done, Eternity begun." + +Body and Time had in general too strong a grip upon him to be resolved +into illusion. His actual pictures of departed souls suggest a state +very unlike that reversion of the infinite spirit which had been thrust +upon Matter and distended in Time, to the timeless Infinitude it had +forgone. It does not escape from Time, but only passes on from the +limited section of Time known as life, into another section, without +limit, known as Eternity. And if it escapes from Body, at least Browning +represents his departed soul more boldly than any other modern poet in a +garb of flesh. Evelyn Hope, when she wakens in another world, will find +her unknown lover's leaf in her hand, and "remember, and understand." + +And just as Matter and Time invade Browning's spiritual eternity, so his +ideal of conduct for man while still struggling with finite conditions +casts its shadow on to the state of immortal release. Two conceptions, +in fact, of the life after death, corresponding to divergent aspects of +his thought, contend in Browning's mind. Now it is a state of +emancipation from earthly limits,--when the "broken arcs" become +"perfect rounds" and "evil" is transformed into "so much good more," and +"reward and repose" succeed the "struggles"[125] by which they have been +won. But at times he startles the devout reader by foreshadowing not a +sudden transformation but a continuation of the slow educative process +of earth in a succession of preliminary heavens before the consummate +state is reached. "Progress," in short, was too deeply ingrained in +Browning's conception of what was ultimately good, and therefore +ultimately real, not to find entrance into his heaven, were it only by +some casual backdoor of involuntary intuition. Even in that more +gracious state "achievement lacked a gracious somewhat"[126] to his +indomitable fighting instinct. + +[Footnote 125: _Saul_, xvii.] + +[Footnote 126: _One Word More_.] + + "Soul resteth not, and mine must still advance," + +he had said in _Pauline_, and the soul that ceased to advance ceased for +Browning, in his most habitual mood, to exist. The "infinity" of the +soul was not so much a gift as a destiny, a power of hungering for ever +after an ideal completeness which it was indefinitely to pursue and to +approach, but not to reach. Far from having to await a remote +emancipation to become completely itself, the soul's supremest life was +in its hours of heroic stress, when it kept some dragon of unbelief +quiet underfoot, like Michael, + + "Who stands calm, just because he feels it writhe." + +It was at this point that the athletic energy of Browning's nature told +most palpably upon the complexion of his thought. It did not affect its +substance, but it altered the bearing of the parts, giving added weight +to all its mundane and positive elements. It gave value to every +challenging obstruction akin to that which allured him to every angular +and broken surface, to all the "evil" which balks our easy perception of +"good."[127] Above all, by idealising effort, it created a new ethical +end which every strenuous spirit could not merely strive after but +fulfil, every day of its mortal life; and thus virtually transferred the +focus of interest and importance from "the next world's reward and +repose" to the vital "struggles in this." + +[Footnote 127: _Bishop Blougram_.] + +Browning's characteristic conception of the nature and destiny of man +was thus not a compact and consistent system, but a group of intuitions +nourished from widely different regions of soul and sense, and +undergoing, like the face of a great actor, striking changes of +expression without material change of feature under the changing +incidence of stress and glow. The ultimate gist of his teaching was +presented through the medium of conceptions proper to another school of +thought, which, like a cryptogram, convey one meaning but express +another, He had to work with categories like finite and infinite, which +the atomic habits of his mind thrust into exclusive opposition; whereas +the profoundest thing that he had to say was that the "infinite" has to +be achieved in and through the finite, that just the most definitely +outlined action, the most individual purpose, the most sharply +expressive thought, the most intense and personal passion, are the +points or saliency in life which most surely catch the radiance of +eternity they break. The white light was "blank" until shattered by +refraction; and Browning is less Browning when he glories in its +unbroken purity than when he rejoices in the prism, whose obstruction +alone + + "shows aright + The secret of a sunbeam, breaks its light + Into the jewelled bow from blankest white."[128] + +[Footnote 128: _Deaf and Dumb_.] + +We have now to watch Browning's efforts to interpret this profound and +intimate persuasion of his in terms of the various conceptions at his +disposal.[129] + +[Footnote 129: On the matter of this section cf. Mr A.C. Pigou's acute +and lucid discussions, _Browning as a Religious Teacher_, ch. viii. and +ix.] + + +III. + + +Beside the soul, there was something else that "stood sure" for +Browning--namely, God. Here, too, a theological dogma, steeped in his +ardent mind, acquired a new potency for the imagination, and a more +vital nexus with man and nature than any other poet of the century had +given it. And here, too, the mystic and the positive strains of +Browning's genius wrought together, impressing themselves equally in +that wonderful Browningesque universe in which every germ seems to be +itself a universe "needing but a look to burst into immense life," and +infinity is ever at hand, behind a closed door. The whole of his +theology was an attempt to express consistently two convictions, rarely +found of the same intensity in the same brain, of the divineness of the +universe and the individuality of man. + +The mechanical Creator of Paley and the deists could never have +satisfied him. From the first he "saw God everywhere." There was in him +the stuff of which the "God-intoxicated" men are made, and he had +moments, like that expressed in one of his most deliberate and emphatic +personal utterances, in which all existence seemed to be the visible +Face of God-- + + "Become my universe that feels and knows."[130] + +[Footnote 130: _Epilogue_.] + +He clearly strained towards the sublime pantheistic imaginings of the +great poets of the previous generation,--Wordsworth's "Something far +more deeply interfused," Shelley's "One spirit's plastic stress," and +Goethe's _Erdgeist_, who weaves the eternal vesture of God at the loom +of Time. The dying vision of Paracelsus is as sublime as these, and +marks Browning's nearest point of approach to the ways of thought they +embody. In all the vitalities of the world, from the uncouth play of the +volcano to the heaven-and-earth transfiguring mind of man, God was +present, sharing their joy. But even here the psychological barrier is +apparent, against which all the surge of pantheistic impulse in Browning +broke in vain. This God of manifold joys was sharply detached from his +universe; he was a sensitive and sympathetic spectator, not a pervading +spirit. In every direction human personality opposed rigid frontiers +which even the infinite God could not pass, and no poet less needed the +stern warning which he addressed to German speculation against the +"gigantic stumble"[131] of making them one. The mystic's dream of +seeing all things in God, the Hegelian thesis of a divine mind realising +itself in and through the human, found no lodgment in a consciousness of +mosaic-like clearness dominated by the image of an incisively individual +and indivisible self. In later life the sharp lines which he drew from +the first about individual personality became a ring-fence within which +each man "cultivated his plot,"[132] managing independently as he might +the business of his soul. The divine love might wind inextricably about +him,[133] the dance of plastic circumstance at the divine bidding +impress its rhythms upon his life,[134] he retained his human identity +inviolate, a "point of central rock" amid the welter of the waves.[135] +His love might be a "spark from God's fire," but it was his own, to use +as he would; he "stood on his own stock of love and power."[136] + +[Footnote 131: _Christmas-Eve._] + +[Footnote 132: _Ferishtah_.] + +[Footnote 133: _Easter-Day_.] + +[Footnote 134: _Rabbi ben Ezra_.] + +[Footnote 135: _Epilogue_.] + +[Footnote 136: _Christmas-Eve_.] + + +IV. + + +In this sharp demarcation of man's being from God's, Browning never +faltered. On the contrary, the individualising animus which there found +expression impelled him to raise more formidable barriers about man, and +to turn the ring-fence which secured him from intrusion into a high wall +which cut off his view. In other words, the main current of Browning's +thought sets strongly towards a sceptical criticism of human knowledge. +At the outset he stands on the high _a priori_ ground of Plato. Truth in +its fulness abides in the soul, an "imprisoned splendour," which +intellect quickened by love can elicit, which moments of peculiar +insight, deep joy, and sorrow, and the coming on of death, can release. +But the gross flesh hems it in, wall upon wall, "a baffling and +perverting carnal mesh,"[137] the source of all error. The process of +discovery he commonly conceived as an advance through a succession of +Protean disguises of truth, each "one grade above its last +presentment,"[138] until, at the rare moment, by the excepted eye, the +naked truth was grasped. But Browning became steadily more reluctant to +admit that these fortunate moments ever occurred, that the Proteus was +ever caught. Things would be known to the soul as they were known to God +only when it was emancipated by death. Infinity receded into an ever +more inaccessible remoteness from the finite. For the speaker in +_Christmas-Eve_ man's mind was the image of God's, reflecting trace for +trace his absolute knowledge; for Francis Furini the bare fact of his +own existence is all he knows, a narrow rock-spit of knowledge enisled +in a trackless ocean of ignorance. Thus for Browning, in differing moods +and contexts, the mind of man becomes now a transparent pane, opening +directly upon the truth as God sees it, now a coloured lens, presenting +truth in blurred refraction, now an opaque mirror idly bodying forth his +futile and illusive dreams. + +[Footnote 137: _Paracelsus_.] + +[Footnote 138: _Fifine_, cxxiv.] + +These conflicting views were rooted in different elements of Browning's +many-sided nature. His vivid intuition of his own self-consciousness +formed a standing type of seemingly absolute immediate knowledge, to +which he stubbornly clung. When the optimism of the "Head" was +discredited, passion-fraught instinct, under the name of the Heart, came +to the rescue, and valiantly restored its authority. On the other hand, +a variety of subtle attractions drew him on to give "illusion" a wider +and wider scope. Sheer joy in battle had no small share. The immortal +and infinite soul, projected among the shows of sense, could not be +expected to do its part worthily if it saw through them: it had to +believe its enemies real enemies, and its warfare a rational warfare; it +had to accept time and place, and good and evil, as the things they +seem. To have a perfectly clear vision of truth as it is in God was to +be dazzled with excess of light, to grope and fumble about the world as +it is for man, like the risen Lazarus-- + + "witless of the size, the sum, + The value in proportion of all things, + Or whether it be little or be much." + +The mystic who withdrew from the struggle with phantoms to gaze upon +eternal realities was himself the victim of the worst illusions; while +the hero who plunged into that struggle was training his soul, and +thereby getting a grip upon ultimate truth. Thus Browning's passionate +and reiterated insistence upon the illusiveness of knowledge was rooted +in his inalienable faith in the worth and reality of moral conflict. The +infinite soul realised itself most completely when it divested itself of +the trappings of its infinity, and it worked out God's law most +implicitly when it ignored God's point of view. + + +V. + + +Such a result could not be finally satisfying, and Browning's thought +fastened with increasing predilection and exclusiveness upon one intense +kind of vitality in which the hard antagonism of good and evil seems to +be transcended, and that complete immersion of the soul in a nature not +its own appears not as self-abnegation but as self-fulfilment. He did +not himself use this phraseology about Love; it is that of a school to +which he, at no time, it would seem, made any conscious approach. But it +is clear that he found in the mysterious union and transfusion of +diverse being which takes place in Love, as Hegel found in the union of +opposites, the clue to the nature of reality, the very core of the heart +of life. He did not talk of the union of opposites, but of "infinitude +wreaking itself upon the finite." God himself would have been less +divine, and so, as God, less real, had he remained aloof in lonely +infinity instead of uniting himself with all creation in that love +which "moves the world and the other stars"; the "loving worm," to +quote his pregnant saying once more, were diviner than a loveless God. +We saw how his theology is double-faced between the pantheistic yearning +to find God everywhere and the individualist's resolute maintenance of +the autonomy of man. God's Love, poured through the world, inextricably +blended with all its power and beauty, thrilled with answering rapture +by all its joy, and striving to clasp every human soul, provided the +nearest approach to a solution of that conflict which Browning's +mechanical metaphysics permitted. One comprehends, then, the profound +significance for him of the actual solution apparently presented by +Christian theology. In one supreme, crucial example the union of God +with man in consummate love had actually, according to Christian belief, +taken place, and Browning probably uttered his own faith when he made St +John declare that + + "The acknowledgment of God in Christ + Acknowledged by thy reason solves for thee + All questions in the earth and out of it."[139] + +[Footnote 139: _Death in the Desert_. These lines, however "dramatic," +mark with precision the extent, and the limits, of Browning's Christian +faith. The evidence of his writings altogether confirms Mrs Orr's +express statement that Christ was for him, from first to last, "a +manifestation of divine love," by human form accessible to human love; +but not the Redeemer of the orthodox creed.] + +For to acknowledge this was to recognise that love was divine, and that +mankind at large, in virtue of their gift of love, shared in God's +nature, finite as they were; that whatever clouds of intellectual +illusion they walked in, they were lifted to a hold upon reality as +unassailable as God's own by the least glimmer of love. Whatever else is +obscure or elusive in Browning, he never falters in proclaiming the +absolute and flawless worth of love. The lover cannot, like the +scientific investigator, miss his mark, he cannot be baffled or misled; +the object of his love may be unworthy, or unresponsive, but in the mere +act of loving he has his reward. + + "Knowledge means + Ever renewed assurance by defeat + That victory is somehow still to reach; + But love is victory, the prize itself."[140] + +[Footnote 140: _Pillar of Sebzevir_.] + +This aspect of Browning's doctrine of love, though it inspired some of +his most exalted lyrics, throws into naked relief the dearth of social +consciousness in Browning's psychology. Yet it is easy to see that the +absolute self-sufficiency into which he lifted the bare fact of love was +one of the mainsprings of his indomitable optimism. In Love was +concentrated all that emancipates man from the stubborn continuities of +Nature. It started up in corrupt or sordid hearts, and swept all their +blind velleities into its purifying flame of passion-- + + "Love is incompatible + With falsehood,--purifies, assimilates + All other passions to itself."[141] + +[Footnote 141: _Colombe's Birthday_.] + +And the glimmer of soul that lurked in the veriest act of humanity the +breath of love could quicken into pervading fire.[142] Love was only the +most intense and potent of those sudden accesses of vitality which are +wont, in Browning, suddenly to break like a flame from the straw and +dross of a brutish or sophisticated consciousness, confounding foresight +and calculation, but giving endless stimulus to hope. Even in the +contact with sin and sorrow Browning saw simply the touch of Earth from +which Love, like Antaeus, sprang into fuller being; they were the "dread +machinery" devised to evolve man's moral qualities, "to make him love in +turn and be beloved."[143] + +[Footnote 142: _Fifine_.] + +[Footnote 143: _The Pope_.] + +But with all its insurgent emancipating vehemence Love was for Browning, +also, the very ground of stable and harmonious existence, "the energy of +integration," as Myers has finely said, "which makes a cosmos of the sum +of things," the element of permanence, of law. True, its harmony was of +the kind which admits discord and eschews routine; its law that which is +of eternity and not of yesterday; its stability that which is only +assured and fortified by the chivalry that plucks a Pompilia, or an +Alcestis, from their legal doom. The true anarchist, as he sometimes +dared to hint, was the cold unreason of duty which, as in _Bifurcation_, +keeps lovers meant for each other apart. It is by love that the soul +solves the problem--so tragically insoluble to poor Sordello--of +"fitting to the finite its infinity," and satisfying the needs of Time +and Eternity at once;[144] for Love, belonging equally to both spheres, +can bring the purposes of body and soul into complete accord: + + "Like yonder breadth of watery heaven, a bay + And that sky-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." + +[Footnote 144: _Sordello, sub fin_.] + +In a life thus thrilled into harmony heaven was already realised on +earth; and Eternity itself could but continue what Time had begun. +Death, for such a soul, was not an awaking, for it had not slept; nor an +emancipation, for it was already free; nor a satisfying of desire, for +the essence of Love was to want; it was only a point at which the "last +ride together" might pass into an eternal "riding on"-- + + "With life for ever old, yet new, + Changed not in kind but in degree, + The instant made Eternity,-- + And Heaven just prove that I and she + Ride, ride together, for ever ride!" + + +VI. + + +No intellectual formula, no phrase, no word, can express the whole +purport of those intense and intimate fusions of sensation, passion, and +thought which we call poetic intuition, and which all strictly poetic +"philosophy" or "criticism of life" is an attempt to interpret and +articulate. Browning was master of more potent weapons of the strictly +intellectual kind than many poets of his rank, and his work is charged +with convictions which bear upon philosophic problems and involve +philosophic ideas. But they were neither systematic deductions from a +speculative first principle nor fragments of tradition eclectically +pieced together; by their very ambiguity and Protean many-sidedness they +betrayed that, however tinged they might be on the surface with +speculative or traditional phrases, the nourishing roots sprang from the +heart of joyous vitality in a primitive and original temperament. In +Browning, if in any man, Joy sang that "strong music of the soul" which +re-creates all the vitalities of the world, and endows us with "a new +Earth and a new Heaven." And if joy was the root of Browning's +intuition, and life "in widest commonalty spread" the element in which +it moved, Love, the most intimate, intense, and marvellous of all vital +energies, was the ideal centre towards which it converged. In Love, as +Browning understood it, all those elementary joys of his found +satisfaction. There he saw the flawless purity which rejoiced him in +Pompilia's soul, which "would not take pollution, ermine-like armed from +dishonour by its own soft snow." There he saw sudden incalculableness of +power abruptly shattering the continuities of routine, throwing life +instantly into a new perspective, and making barren trunks break into +sudden luxuriance like the palm; or, again, intimately interpenetrating +soul with soul,--"one near one is too far"; or entangling the whole +creation in the inextricable embrace of God. + +But if all his instincts and imaginative proclivities found their ideal +in Love, they also insensibly impressed their own character upon his +conception of it. The "Love" which has so deep a significance for +Browning is a Love steeped in the original complexion of his mind, and +bearing the impress of the singular position which he occupies in the +welter of nineteenth-century intellectual history. His was one of the +rare natures in which revolutionary liberalism and spiritual reaction, +encountering in nearly equal strength, seem to have divided their +principles and united their forces. Psychologically, the one had its +strongest root in the temper which reasons, and values ideas; the other +in that which feels, and values emotions. Sociologically, the one stood +for individualism, the other for solidarity. In their ultimate +presuppositions, the one inclined to the standpoint of the senses and +experience; the other to a mostly vague and implicit idealism. In their +political ideals, the one strove for progress, and for freedom as its +condition; the other for order, and for active legal intervention as its +safeguard. + +In two of these four points of contrast, Browning's temperament ranged +him more or less decisively on the Liberal side. Individualist to the +core, he was conspicuously deficient in the kind of social mind which +makes a poet the voice of an organised community, a nation, or a class. +Progress, again, was with him even more an instinct than a principle; +and he became the _vates sacer_ of unsatisfied aspiration. On the other +hand, that he was not without elements of the temper which makes for +order was shown by his punctilious, almost eager, observance of social +conventions, and, in the last years of his life, by the horror excited +in him by what he took to be the anarchy of Women's Suffrage and Home +Rule. In the other two fields of opposition he belonged decisively to +the spiritual and emotional reaction. Spirit was for him the ultimate +fact of existence, the soul and God were the indissoluble realities. But +his idealism was not potent and pure enough either to control the +realist suggestions of his strong senses and energetic temperament, or +to interpret them in its own terms. And in the conflict between reason +and feeling, or, as he put it, between "head" and "heart," as sources of +insight, and factors in human advancement, feeling found its most +brilliant champion in Browning, and its most impressive statement in his +doctrine of Love. An utilitarian reduction of welldoing to a +distribution of properly calculated doses of satisfaction he dismissed +with a scorn as derisive as Carlyle's; "general utility" was a favourite +of "that old stager the devil."[145] Yet no critic of intellect ever +used intellect more vigorously, and no preacher of the rights of the +heart ever dealt less in flaccid sentiment. Browning was Paracelsus as +well as Aprile, and sharply as he chose to dissever "Knowledge" and +"Love," Love was for him never a foe of intellect, but a more gifted +comrade who does the same work more effectively, who dives deeper, soars +higher, welds more potently into more enduring unities, and flings upon +dry hearts with a more infallible magic the seed of more marvellous new +births. Browning as the poet of Love is thus the last, and assuredly not +the least, in the line which handed on the torch of Plato. The author of +the _Phoedrus_ saw in the ecstasy of Love one of the avenues to the +knowledge of the things that indeed are. To Dante the supreme realities +were mirrored in the eyes of Beatrice. For Shelley Love was interwoven +through all the mazes of Being; it was the source of the strength by +which man masters his gods. To all these masters of idealism Browning's +vision of Love owed something of its intensity and of its range. With +the ethical Love of Jesus and St Paul his affinities were more apparent, +but less profound. For him, too, love was the sum of all morality and +the root of all goodness. But it resembled more the joyous +self-expansion of the Greek than the humility and self-abnegation of +Christian love. Not the saintly ascetic nor the doer of good works, but +the artist and the "lover," dominated his imagination when he wrote of +Love; imbuing even God's love for the world with the joy of creation and +the rapture of embrace. Aprile's infinite love for things impelled him +to body them visibly forth. Deeper in Browning than his Christianity, +and prior to it, lay his sense of immeasurable worth in all life, the +poet's passion for being. + +[Footnote 145: _Red-cotton Night-cap Country_.] + +Browning's poetry is thus one of the most potent of the influences which +in the nineteenth century helped to break down the shallow and +mischievous distinction between the "sacred" and the "secular," and to +set in its place the profounder division between man enslaved by apathy, +routine, and mechanical morality, and man lifted by the law of love into +a service which is perfect freedom, into an approximation to God which +is only the fullest realisation of humanity. + + + + +INDEX. + + +Note--The names of the Persons are given in small capitals; titles of +literary works in _italics_; other names in ordinary type; *black figures* +indicate the more detailed references. Only the more important of the +incidental quotations are included. Poems are referred to only under +their authors' names. + + +AESCHYLUS, 215. +ALLINGHAM, W., 87. +American fame of Browning, 87. +ARISTOPHANES, 77, 207 f. +ARNOLD, M., 26. +Asolo, 27, 50, 220, 232. +_Athenaeum, The_, 172, 251. + +BALZAC, 42, 49, 86, 117. +BARRETT, ELIZABETH. See Browning, E.B. +BARTOLI, his _Simboli_, 27. +BENCKHAUSEN, Russian Consul-General, 14. +BERANGER, 86. +BLAGDEN, ISA. See BROWNING, R., letters. +BRONSON, Mrs ARTHUR, 220, 231. +BRONTE, EMILY, her character "Heathcliff," 66. +BROWNING, ROBERT (grandfather), 2. +BROWNING, ROBERT (father), 3, 6, 18, 149 n., 173. +BROWNING, ROBERT, + cosmopolitan in sympathies, English by his art, 1, 2; + his birth, 3; + likeness to his mother, 4 n.; + character of his home, 5; + boyhood, 5, 6; + early sense of rhythm, 7; + reads Shelley, Keats, and Byron, 8 f.; + journey to St Petersburg, 14; + first voyage to Italy, 26 f.; + second voyage to Italy, 61; + correspondence with E.B. Barrett, 78; + marriage, 81; + settlement in Italy, 84; + friendships and society at Florence, 84 f.; + Italian politics, 88; + Italian scenery, 91; + Italian painting, 98 f.; + and music, 103 f.; + religion, 110 f.; + his interpretation of _In a Balcony_, 145 n.; + death of Mrs Browning, 147; + return to London, 148; + society, 150; + summer sojourns in France, 153 f., 202 f.; + in the Alps, 216; + death of Miss Egerton-Smith, 216; + Italy once more, 220; + Asolo and Venice, 231 f.; + death, 234. + Works-- + _Abt Vogler_, 71, *158* f. + _Agamemnon_ (translation of), 215 f. + _Andrea del Sarto_, 70 f., *100* f. + _Another Way of Love_, 142. + _Any Wife to Any Husband_, 140. + _Appearances_, 212. + _Aristophanes' Apology_, *206* f. + _Artemis Prologizes_, 68, 190. + _Asolando_, 220, *232* f. + _At the Mermaid_, 211. + _Bad Dreams_, 232. + _Balaustion's Adventure_, 75, *190* f. + _Baldinucci_, 214. + _Bells and Pomegranates_, 16, 41 f., 74. + _Bifurcation_, 213. + _Bishop of St Praxed's, The_, 70, 113, 275. + _Blot in the 'Scutcheon, A_, *52* f. + _Blougram's Apology_, 14, 57, 60, 90, 113, *129* f., 277 f. + _Boy and the Angel, The_, 113, 116. + _By the Fireside_, 94, *135* f., 275. + _Caliban upon Setebos_, *162* f. + _Cavalier Tunes_, 67. + _Childe Roland_, *95* f., 262 f. + _Christmas-Eve and Easter Day_, 81, *114* f., 162. + _Cleon_, 113, *126* f. + _Clive_, 223. + _Colombe's Birthday_, 53, *55* f. + _Confessional, The_, 40, 66. + _Cristina_, 48, *68* f. + _Deaf and Dumb_, 295. + _Death in the Desert, A_, 152, *160* f. + _De Gustibus_, 90, 92, 254. + _Dis Aliter Visum_, 152, 156. + _Dramas_, 37 f. + _Dramatic Idylls_, *221* f. + _Dramatic Lyrics_, 38 f., *65* f., 79. + _Dramatic Romances_, 38, 79. + _Dramatis Personae_, *151-168*, 213. + _Echetlos_, 222. + _Englishman in Italy, The_, 93. + _Epilogue to Dramatis Personae_, 154, *167* f., 296. + _Epistle of Karshish, An_, 113, *123* f. + _Eurydice to Orpheus_, 157. + _Evelyn Hope_, 138, 293. + _Fears and Scruples_, 212. + _Ferishtah's Fancies_, *227* f. + _Fifine at the Fair_, 92 f., 149, *197* f., 209, 242. + _Flight of the Duchess, The_, *69* f., 199. + _Flower's Name, The_, 68. + _Forgiveness, A_, 213. + _Fra Lippo Lippi_, 71, *101* f., 112. + _Francis Furini_, 298. + _Gerard de Lairesse_, 222. + _Gismond_, 41, 57, 67. + _Glove, The_, 69, *70*. + _Grammarian's Funeral, The_, *109* f. + _Guardian Angel, The_, 99. + _Halbert and Hob_, *222*. + _Helen's Tower_, sonnet, 188. + _Heretic's Tragedy, A_, *128* f., 263. + _Herve Riel_, *189* f., 222. + _Holy Cross Day_, 4 n., *128*. + _Home Thoughts from Abroad_ (quoted), 265. + _Home Thoughts from the Sea_, 26. + _House_, 211. + _How it Strikes a Contemporary_, 108 f. + _How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix_, 27, 67, 222. + _Hugues of Saxe Gotha, Master_, 71, *105* f., 113. + _In a Balcony_, *143* f. + _In a Gondola_, 67. + _In a Year_, 140. + _Incondita_, 8. + _Inn Album, The_, 188, *208* f. + _Instans Tyrannus_, 66, 90. + _In Three Days_, 137, 141. + _Italian in England, The_, 91. + _Ivan Ivanovitch_, 14, 221, *223*. + _Ixion_, *225* f. + _James Lee's Wife_, 153 f. + _Jochanan Halkadosh_, 225. + _Jocoseria_, *224* f. + _Johannes Agricola_, 15 f. + _King Victor and King Charles_, 15, *45*, 50. + _Laboratory, The_, 38, 66. + _La Saisiaz_, *216* f. + _Last Ride Together, The_, 68, *138* f., 304. + _Life in a Love_, 137. + _Light Woman, A_, 142. + _Lost Leader, The_, 66. + _Lost Mistress, The_, 68, 156. + _Love in a Life_, 137. + _Luria_, 60, *61* f. + _Madhouse Cells_, 16. + _Martin Relph_, 222 f., 275. + _Men and Women_, 25, 60, 72, 74, *87-147*, 152, 213. + _Muleykeh_, 223. + _My Last Duchess_, 66, 70, 213. + _My Star_, 140. + _Natural Magic_, 213. + _Ned Bratts_, 222. + _Never the Time and the Place_, 226. + _Now_, 233. + _Numpholeptos_, 213. + _Old Pictures in Florence_, 90, 102 f. + _One Way of Love_, 137. + _One Word More_, 97 f., *146* f. + _Pacchiarotto_, 109, 162, 188, *210* f. + _Pan and Luna_, 248. + _Paracelsus_, 16 f., 25, 29, 38, 42. + _Parleyings with Certain People of Importance_, 229 f. + _Patriot, The_, 90. + _Pauline_, 11 f. + _Pearl, a Girl, A_, 233. + _Pheidippides_, 222. + _Pictor Ignolus_, 70 f. + _Pied Piper, The_, 71 f., 269. + _Pippa Passes_, *49* f., 59, 79, 91, 151, 181. + _Popularity_, 109. + _Porphyria's Lover_, 16. + _Pretty Woman, A_, 142. + _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_, 14, *194* f. + _Prospice_, 109, 157. + _Rabbi ben Ezra_, 4 n., 109, *157* f. + _Red-cotton Night-cap Country_, 90 + (Miranda), 188, *203* f. + _Return of the Druses, The_, 45, *46* f., 64. + _Reverie_, 233. + _Ring and the Book, The_, 151 f., *169-186*, 276 f. + _Rudel_, 68. + _Saint Martin's Summer_, 213. + _Saul_, 48, *72* f., 113, *121* f. + _Serenade at the Villa_, 137. + _Shelley, Essay on_, 20, *106* f., 109 f. + _Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis_, 67, 79. + _Sludge, Mr, the Medium_, 90, *165* f. + _Solomon and Balkis_, 225. + _Sordello_, 15, *25* f., 238. + _Soul's Tragedy, A_, 59 f. + _Spanish Cloister, The_, 79. + _Statue and the Bust, The_, 142, 213. + _Strafford_, 15, 25, *42* f. + _Summum Bonum_, 233. + _Time's Revenges_, 66. + _Toccata of Galuppi's, A_, 104 f.,153. + _Too Late_, 153. + _Transcendentalism_, 108. + _Two in the Campagna_, 93, 134, *140*, 238. + _Two Poets of Croisic, The_, *218* f. + _Woman's Last Word, A_, 140. + _Women and Roses_, 143. + _Worst of It, The_, 156. + _Youth and Art_, 152, 156. + Letters, + to E.B.B., 4 n., 6, 8, 49, 59 n., 62, 63, 65, 67, 72, 75, 78-83 + passim, 85, 114 f., 241, 252 f., 283; + to Miss Blagden, 153, 171, 173 n., 249; + to Miss Flower, 43; + to Miss Haworth, 26 n., 44, 237; + to Ruskin, 237; + to Aubrey de Vere, 247 n. +BROWNING, ELIZABETH BARRETT MOULTON-BARRETT (wife). + First allusion to Browning, 75; + reads _Paracelsus_, 75 n.; + her character, early life, and poetry, 76 f.; + correspondence with Browning, 78 f.; + marriage, 81; + settlement in Italy, 84; + friendships, society at Florence, 84 f.; + death, 147; + her relation to Pompilia, 180. + _Aurora Leigh_, 81, 87, 151, 209. + _Songs before Congress_, 90. + _Sonnets from the Portuguese_, 87. + _Casa Guidi Windows_, 90. + Letters to R.B., 49, 65, 77 n., 78-83 _passim_, 114, 251. + Letter to Ruskin, 77 n. + Letters to others, 85, 89, 92, 99, 245. +BROWNING, SARAH ANNA (mother), 4. +BURNS, R., 40, 281. +BYRON, LORD, 7, 8, 104, 198, 218, 263. + +CARLYLE, THOMAS, 36, 42, 87, 150, 172, 230, 256, 307. +_Carnival_, Schumann's, 202. +Casa Guidi, 84 f., 97. +CELLINI, BENVENUTO, 98. +CHAUCER, G., 41. +COLERIDGE, S. T., 8, 95 f., 134. +CORNARO, CATHARINE, 50, 331. +_Cornhill Magazine, The_, 190. + +DANTE, 29 f., 33, 35, 66, 120 f, 261 f., 308. +DICKENS, CHARLES, 42, 49. +DOMETT, ALFRED (referred to), 99. +DONNE, JOHN, 6, 254 n. +Dulwich, 6, 49, 97. + +EGERTON-SMITH, ANN, 216. +EMERSON, R.W., 256. +EURIPIDES, 173 n., 191, 208. + +Fano, the Brownings at, 99. +FAUCIT, HELEN (Lady Martin), 43. +FICHTE, J.E., 288 f. +FITZGERALD, EDWARD, 172, 188. +Florence, 84 f. _passim._ +FLOWER, ELIZA, 11, 43. +FORSTER, JOHN, 42. +FOX, W.J., 8, 14, 42, 86. + +Germany. German strain in Browning, 4 n. +GIOTTO, 99, 103. +GOETHE, J.W. VON, 5, 288; + _Faust_, 19, 31, 50, 198, 296; + _Iphigenie_, 30 n.; + _Metamorphose der Pflanzen_, 265; + _Tasso_, 30; + _Westoestlicher Divan_, 226. +Greek, early studies in, 8. +Gressoney, 226. + +HAWORTH, EUPHRASIA FANNY, 27. +HORNE, author of _Orion_, 80. +HUGO, VICTOR, 86, 242. + +IBSEN, H., _The Wild Duck_, 59. + +JAMESON, ANNA, 84. +Jews. Browning's attitude towards the Jewish race, 4 n. +JONSON, BEN, 38, 214. +_Junius, Letters of_, 6. + +KEATS, J., 9, 73, 240 f., 254. +KENYON, JOHN, 73, 78, 80, 82, 86. + +LANDOR, W.S., 30 n., 40 f., 87 f., 96, 229. +LEIGHTON, Sir FREDERIC, 71, 150. +Lucca, the Brownings at, 92. + +MACLISE, 67. +MACREADY, 42 f., 32. +MAETERLINCK, M., 144, 162 n. +MALORY, 104. +MEREDITH, Mr G., 168. +Metres, Browning's, 186, 253, 261. +MICHELANGELO, 103. +MILL, JOHN STUART, 11 f. +MILSAND, JOSEPH, 86, 188, 203, 230. +MILTON, J., 71, 261. +_Monthly Repository_, 14. +MOXON, EDWARD, publisher, 59 n. +MUSSET, ALFRED DE, 141 f. + +NAPOLEON III., Emperor, 88 f., 194. + +OSSIAN, 7. + +PALESTRINA, 103. +Paris, 85 f., 92, 106, 204. +PAUL, SAINT, 308. +PHELPS, actor, 58. +Pisa, 84. +PLATO, 12, 239, 307. +PRINSEP, V., 150. + +QUARLES, FRANCIS, 6. + +Rezzonico Palace, 231. +RIPERT-MONCLAR, COMTE AMEDEE DE, 17. +Rome, the Brownings in, 87. +ROSSETTI, D.G., 13 f., 86 f., 150. +ROSSETTI, Mr W.M., 171 n. +RUSKIN, JOHN, 77 n., 150, 237. + +SAND, GEORGE, 85. +SCHILLER, F., 70, 209. +SCOTT, Sir W., 93. +SHAKESPEARE, W., 65, 200, 211; + _Romeo and Juliet_, 38; + _The Tempest_, 50 f., 162 f.; + _Loves Labour's Lost_, 56; + _Hamlet_, 58; + _Julius Caesar_, 63; + _Othello_, 62; + _As You Like It_, 95. +SHELLEY, P.B., 8, 9, 12 f., 20, 34, 90, 110 f., 183, 238, 240, 254, 257, + 263, 271, 296. +SMART, CHRISTOPHER, his _Song to David_, 72. +SOUTHEY, R., 8. +Spiritualism, 87. +SWINBURNE, Mr A.C., 151. + +TENNYSON, ALFRED LORD, 1, 19, 31, 86 f., 130, 150, 172, 175, 261 f. +TENNYSON, FREDERICK, 150. +THACKERAY, ANNIE (Mrs Ritchie), 203. +THACKERAY, W.M., 150. +TITTLE, MARGARET, the poet's grandmother, 3. +TRELAWNEY, E.J., 61. +_Trifler, The_, 15. + +Venice, 27, 37. +VERDI, 103. +VILLON, 105. +Virgil, Dante's, 30. +Vocabulary, Browning's, 261. +VOLTAIRE, 6. + +WALPOLE, HORACE, 6. +WIEDEMANN, WILLIAM, the poet's maternal grandfather, 4. +WISEMAN, CARDINAL, 130. +WOOLNER, 150. +WORDSWORTH, 8, 32, 93 f., 244, 264, 268, 273, 284. + +York (a horse), 27. + + +THE END. + +PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS. + + + + +PERIODS OF EUROPEAN LITERATURE. + +A COMPLETE AND CONTINUOUS HISTORY OF THE SUBJECT. + +Edited by PROFESSOR SAINTSBURY. + +In 12 crown 8vo vols., each 5s. net. + + I. 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