"Pippa Passes," "The Ring and the Book," "The Inn Album," these are
Browning's three great dramatic poems, as distinct from his poetic
plays. All are dramas in the exact sense, though the three I have named
are dramas for mental and not for positive presentation. Each reader
must embody for himself the images projected on his brain by the
electric quality of the poet's genius: within the ken of his imagination
he may perceive scenes not less moving, incidents not less thrilling,
complexities of motive and action not less intricately involved, than
upon the conventional stage.
The first is a drama of an idea, the second of the immediate and remote
consequences of a single act, the third of the tyranny of the passions.
I understand the general opinion among lovers and earnest students of
Browning's poetry to be that the highest peaks of his genius tower from
the vast tableland of "The Ring and the Book"; that thenceforth there
was declension. But Browning is not to be measured by common estimates.
It is easy to indicate, in the instances of many poets, just where the
music reaches its sweetest, its noblest, just where the extreme glow
wanes, just where the first shadows come leaping like greyhounds, or
steal almost imperceptibly from slow-closing horizons.
But with Browning, as with Shakspere, as with Victor Hugo, it is
difficult for our vision to penetrate the glow irradiating the supreme
heights of accomplishment. Like Balzac, like Shakspere again, he has
revealed to us a territory so vast, that while we bow down before the
sun westering athwart distant Andes, the gold of sunrise is already
flashing behind us, upon the shoulder of Atlas.
It is certain that "The Ring and the Book" is unique. Even Goethe's
masterpiece had its forerunners, as in Marlowe's "Faustus," and its
ambitious offspring, as in Bailey's "Festus." But is it a work of art?
Here is the only vital question which at present concerns us.
It is altogether useless to urge, as so many admirers of Browning do,
that "The Ring and the Book" is as full of beauties as the sea is of
waves. Undeniably it is, having been written in the poet's maturity.
But, to keep to the simile, has this epical poem the unity of ocean?
Does it consist of separate seas, or is it really one, as the wastes
which wash from Arctic to Antarctic, through zones temperate and
equatorial, are yet one and indivisible? If it have not this unity it is
still a stupendous accomplishment, but it is not a work of art. And
though art is but the handmaiden of genius, what student of Comparative
Literature will deny that nothing has survived the ruining breath of
Time--not any intellectual greatness nor any spiritual beauty, that is
not clad in perfection, be it absolute or relative--for relative
perfection there is, despite the apparent paradox.
The mere bulk of "The Ring and the Book" is, in point of art, nothing.
One day, after the publication of this poem, Carlyle hailed the author
with enthusiastic praise in which lurked damning irony: "What a
wonderful fellow you are, Browning: you have written a whole series of
'books' about what could be summed up in a newspaper paragraph!" Here,
Carlyle was at once right and wrong. The theme, looked at
dispassionately, is unworthy of the monument in which it is entombed for
eternity. But the poet looked upon the central incident as the inventive
mechanician regards the tiny pivot remote amid the intricate maze of his
machinery. Here, as elsewhere, Browning's real subject is too often
confounded with the accidents of the subject. His triumph is not that he
has created so huge a literary monument, but rather that,
notwithstanding its bulk, he has made it shapely and impressive. Stress
has frequently been laid on the greatness of the achievement in the
writing of twelve long poems in the exposition of one theme. Again, in
point of art, what significance has this? None. There is no reason why
it should not have been in nine or eleven parts; no reason why, having
been demonstrated in twelve, it should not have been expanded through
fifteen or twenty. Poetry ever looks askance at that gipsy-cousin of
hers, "Tour-de-force."
Of the twelve parts--occupying in all about twenty-one thousand
lines--the most notable as poetry are those which deal with the plea of
the implicated priest, Caponsacchi, with the meditation of the Pope, and
with the pathetic utterance of Pompilia. It is not a dramatic poem in
the sense that "Pippa Passes" is, for its ten Books (the first and
twelfth are respectively introductory and appendical) are monologues.
"The Ring and the Book," in a word, consists, besides the two
extraneous parts, of ten monodramas, which are as ten huge facets to a
poetic Koh-i-Noor.
The square little Italian volume, in its yellow parchment and with its
heavy type, which has now found a haven in Oxford, was picked up by
Browning for a _lira_ (about eightpence), on a second-hand bookstall
in the Piazza San Lorenzo at Florence, one June day, 1865. Therein is set
forth, in full detail, all the particulars of the murder of his wife
Pompilia, for her supposed adultery, by a certain Count Guido
Franceschini; and of that noble's trial, sentence, and doom. It is much
the same subject matter as underlies the dramas of Webster, Ford, and
other Elizabethan poets, but subtlety of insight rather than intensity
of emotion and situation distinguishes the Victorian dramatist from his
predecessors. The story fascinated Browning, who, having in this book
and elsewhere mastered all the details, conceived the idea of writing
the history of the crime in a series of monodramatic revelations on the
part of the individuals more or less directly concerned. The more he
considered the plan the more it shaped itself to a great accomplishment,
and early in 1866 he began the most ambitious work of his life.
An enthusiastic admirer has spoken of the poem as "one of the most
extraordinary feats of which we have any record in literature." But
poetry is not mental gymnastics. All this insistence upon "extraordinary
feats" is to be deprecated: it presents the poet as Hercules, not as
Apollo: in a word, it is not criticism. The story is one of vulgar fraud
and crime, romantic to us only because the incidents occurred in Italy,
in the picturesque Rome and Arezzo of two centuries ago. The old
bourgeois couple, Pietro and Violante Comparini, manage to wed their
thirteen-year-old putative daughter to a middle-aged noble of Arezzo.
They expect the exquisite repute of an aristocratic connection, and
other tangible advantages. He, impoverished as he is, looks for a
splendid dowry. No one thinks of the child-wife, Pompilia. She becomes
the scapegoat, when the gross selfishness of the contracting parties
stands revealed. Count Guido has a genius for domestic tyranny. Pompilia
suffers. When she is about to become a mother she determines to leave
her husband, whom she now dreads as well as dislikes. Since the child is
to be the inheritor of her parents' wealth, she will not leave it to the
tender mercies of Count Guido. A young priest, a canon of Arezzo,
Giuseppe Caponsacchi, helps her to escape. In due course she gives birth
to a son. She has scarce time to learn the full sweetness of her
maternity ere she is done to death like a trampled flower. Guido, who
has held himself thrall to an imperative patience, till his hold upon
the child's dowry should be secure, hires four assassins, and in the
darkness of night betakes himself to Rome. He and his accomplices enter
the house of Pietro Comparini and his wife, and, not content with
slaying them, also murders Pompilia. But they are discovered, and Guido
is caught red-handed. Pompilia's evidence alone is damnatory, for she
was not slain outright, and lingers long enough to tell her story.
Franceschini is not foiled yet, however. His plea is that he simply
avenged the wrong done to him by his wife's adulterous connection with
the priest Caponsacchi. But even in the Rome of that evil day justice
was not extinct. Guido's motive is proved to be false; he himself is
condemned to death. An appeal to the Pope is futile. Finally, the
wretched man pays the too merciful penalty of his villainy.
There is nothing grand, nothing noble here: at most only a tragic pathos
in the fate of the innocent child-wife Pompilia. It is clear, therefore,
that the greatness of "The Ring and the Book" must depend even less upon
its subject, its motive, than upon its being "an extraordinary feat" in
the gymnastics of verse.
In a sense, Browning's longest work is akin to that of his wife. Both
"The Ring and the Book" and "Aurora Leigh" are metrical novels. The one
is discursive in episodes and spiritual experiences: the other in
intricacies of evidence. But there the parallel ends. If "The Ring and
the Book" were deflowered of its blooms of poetry and rendered into a
prose narrative, it might interest a barrister "getting up" a criminal
case, but it would be much inferior to, say, "The Moonstone"; its author
would be insignificant beside the ingenious M. Gaboriau. The
extraordinariness of the feat would then be but indifferently commented
upon.
As neither its subject, nor its extraordinariness as a feat, nor its
method, will withstand a searching examination, we must endeavour to
discern if transcendent poetic merit be discoverable in the treatment.
To arrive at a just estimate it is needful to free the mind not merely
from preconceptions, but from that niggardliness of insight which can
perceive only the minor flaws and shortcomings almost inevitable to any
vast literary achievement, and be blind to the superb merits. One must
prepare oneself to listen to a new musician, with mind and body alert
to the novel harmonies, and oblivious of what other musicians have done
or refrained from doing.
"The Ring and the Book," as I have said, was not begun in the year of
its imagining.[15] It is necessary to anticipate the biographical
narrative, and state that the finding of the parchment-booklet happened
in the fourth year of the poet's widowerhood, for his happy married
period of less than fifteen years came to a close in 1861.
[Footnote 15: The title is explained as follows:--"The story of the
Franceschini case, as Mr. Browning relates it, forms a circle of
evidence to its one central truth; and this circle was constructed in
the manner in which the worker in Etruscan gold prepares the ornamental
circlet which will be worn as a ring. The pure metal is too soft to bear
hammer or file; it must be mixed with alloy to gain the necessary power
of resistance. The ring once formed and embossed, the alloy is
disengaged, and a pure gold ornament remains. Mr. Browning's material
was also inadequate to his purpose, though from a different cause. It
was too _hard_. It was 'pure crude fact,' secreted from the fluid
being of the men and women whose experience it had formed. In its existing
state it would have broken up under the artistic attempt to weld and
round it. He supplied an alloy, the alloy of fancy, or--as he also calls
it--of one fact more: this fact being the echo of those past existences
awakened within his own. He breathed into the dead record the breath of
his own life; and when his ring of evidence had re-formed, first in
elastic then in solid strength, here delicately incised, there broadly
stamped with human thought and passion, he could cast fancy aside, and
bid his readers recognise in what he set before them unadulterated human
truth."--_Mrs. Orr_.]
On the afternoon of the day on which he made his purchase he read the
book from end to end. "A Spirit laughed and leapt through every limb."
The midsummer heats had caused thunder-clouds to congregate above
Vallombrosa and the whole valley of Arno: and the air in Florence was
painfully sultry. The poet stood by himself on his terrace at Casa
Guidi, and as he watched the fireflies wandering from the enclosed
gardens, and the sheet-lightnings quivering through the heated
atmosphere, his mind was busy in refashioning the old tale of loveless
marriage and crime.
"Beneath
I' the street, quick shown by openings of the sky
When flame fell silently from cloud to cloud,
Richer than that gold snow Jove rained on Rhodes,
The townsmen walked by twos and threes, and talked,
Drinking the blackness in default of air--
A busy human sense beneath my feet:
While in and out the terrace-plants, and round
One branch of tall datura, waxed and waned
The lamp-fly lured there, wanting the white flower."
Scene by scene was re-enacted, though of course only in certain
essential details. The final food for the imagination was found in a
pamphlet of which he came into possession of in London, where several
important matters were given which had no place in the volume he had
picked up in Florence.
Much, far the greater part, of the first "book" is--interesting! It is
mere verse. As verse, even, it is often so involved, so musicless
occasionally, so banal now and again, so inartistic in colour as well as
in form, that one would, having apprehended its explanatory interest,
pass on without regret, were it not for the noble close--the passionate,
out-welling lines to "the truest poet I have ever known," the beautiful
soul who had given her all to him, whom, but four years before he wrote
these words, he had laid to rest among the cypresses and ilexes of the
old Florentine garden of the dead.
"O lyric Love, half angel and half bird
And all a wonder and a wild desire,--
Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun,
Took sanctuary within the holier blue,
And sang a kindred soul out to his face,--
Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart--
When the first summons from the darkling earth
Reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue,
And bared them of the glory--to drop down,
To toil for man, to suffer or to die,--
This is the same voice: can thy soul know change?
Hail then, and hearken from the realms of help!
Never may I commence my song, my due
To God who best taught song by gift of thee,
Except, with bent head and beseeching hand--
That still, despite the distance and the dark,
What was, again may be; some interchange
Of grace, some splendour once thy very thought,
Some benediction anciently thy smile:
--Never conclude, but raising hand and head
Thither where eyes, that cannot reach, yet yearn
For all hope, all sustainment, all reward,
Their utmost up and on,--so blessing back
In those thy realms of help, that heaven thy home,
Some whiteness which, I judge, thy face makes proud,
Some wanness where, I think, thy foot may fall!"
* * * * *
Thereafter, for close upon five thousand words, the poem descends again
to the level of a versified tale. It is saved from ruin by subtlety of
intellect, striking dramatic verisimilitude, an extraordinary vigour,
and occasional lines of real poetry. Retrospectively, apart from the
interest, often strained to the utmost, most readers, I fancy, will
recall with lingering pleasure only the opening of "The Other Half
Rome," the description of Pompilia, "with the patient brow and
lamentable smile," with flower-like body, in white hospital array--a
child with eyes of infinite pathos, "whether a flower or weed, ruined:
who did it shall account to Christ."
In these three introductory books we have the view of the matter taken
by those who side with Count Guido, of those who are all for Pompilia,
and of the "superior person," impartial because superciliously
indifferent, though sufficiently interested to "opine."
In the ensuing three books a much higher poetic level is reached. In the
first, Guido speaks; in the second, Caponsacchi; the third, that
lustrous opal set midway in the "Ring," is Pompilia's narrative. Here
the three protagonists live and move before our eyes. The sixth book may
be said to be the heart of the whole poem. The extreme intellectual
subtlety of Guido's plea stands quite unrivalled in poetic literature.
In comparing it, for its poetic beauty, with other sections, the reader
must bear in mind that in a poem of a dramatic nature the dramatic
proprieties must be dominant. It would be obviously inappropriate to
make Count Guido Franceschini speak with the dignity of the Pope, with
the exquisite pathos of Pompilia, with the ardour, like suppressed
molten lava, of Caponsacchi. The self-defence of the latter is a superb
piece of dramatic writing. Once or twice the flaming volcano of his
heart bursts upward uncontrollably, as when he cries--
"No, sirs, I cannot have the lady dead!
That erect form, flashing brow, fulgurant eye,
That voice immortal (oh, that voice of hers!)--
That vision of the pale electric sword
Angels go armed with--that was not the last
O' the lady. Come, I see through it, you find,
Know the manoeuvre! Also herself said
I had saved her: do you dare say she spoke false?
Let me see for myself if it be so!"
Than the poignant pathos and beauty of "Pompilia," there is nothing more
exquisite in our literature. It stands alone. Here at last we have the
poet who is the Lancelot to Shakspere's Arthur. It takes a supreme
effort of genius to be as simple as a child. How marvellously, after the
almost sublime hypocrisy of the end of Guido's defence, after the
beautiful dignity of Caponsacchi's closing words, culminating abruptly
in the heart-wrung cry, "O great, just, good God! miserable me!"--how
marvellously comes upon the reader the delicate, tearful tenderness of
the innocent child-wife--
"I am just seventeen years and five months old,
And, if I lived one day more, three full weeks;
'Tis writ so in the church's register,
Lorenzo in Lucina, all my names
At length, so many names for one poor child,
--Francesca Camilla Vittoria Angela
Pompilia Comparini--laughable!"
Only two writers of our age have depicted women with that imaginative
insight which is at once more comprehensive and more illuminative than
women's own invision of themselves--Robert Browning and George Meredith,
but not even the latter, most subtle and delicate of all analysts of the
tragi-comedy of human life, has surpassed "Pompilia." The meeting and
the swift uprising of love between Lucy and Richard, in "The Ordeal of
Richard Feveral," is, it is true, within the highest reach of prose
romance: but between even the loftiest height of prose romance and the
altitudes of poetry, there is an impassable gulf.
And as it is with simplicity so it is with tenderness. Only the sternly
strong can be supremely tender. And infinitely tender is the poetry of
"Pompilia"--
"Oh, how good God is that my babe was born,
--Better than born, baptised and hid away
Before this happened, safe from being hurt!
That had been sin God could not well forgive:
_He was too young to smile and save himself_----"
or the lines which tell how as a little girl she gave her roses not to
the spick and span Madonna of the Church, but to the poor, dilapidated
Virgin, "at our street-corner in a lonely niche," with the babe that had
sat upon her knees broken off: or that passage, with its exquisite
naïveté, where Pompilia relates why she called her boy Gaetano, because
she wished "no old name for sorrow's sake," so chose the latest addition
to the saints, elected only twenty-five years before--
"So, carefuller, perhaps,
To guard a namesake than those old saints grow,
Tired out by this time,--see my own five saints!"
or these--
"Thus, all my life,
I touch a fairy thing that fades and fades.
--Even to my babe! I thought, when he was born,
Something began for once that would not end,
Nor change into a laugh at me, but stay
For evermore, eternally quite mine----"
once more--
"One cannot judge
Of what has been the ill or well of life
The day that one is dying....
Now it is over, and no danger more ...
To me at least was never evening yet
But seemed far beautifuller than its day,
For past is past----"
Lovely, again, are the lines in which she speaks of the first "thrill of
dawn's suffusion through her dark," the "light of the unborn face sent
long before:" or those unique lines of the starved soul's Spring (ll.
1512-27): or those, of the birth of her little one--
"A whole long fortnight; in a life like mine
A fortnight filled with bliss is long and much.
All women are not mothers of a boy....
I never realised God's birth before--
How he grew likest God in being born.
This time I felt like Mary, had my babe
Lying a little on my breast like hers."
When she has weariedly, yet with surpassing triumph, sighed out her last
words--
"God stooping shows sufficient of His light
For us i' the dark to rise by. And I rise----"
who does not realise that to life's end he shall not forget that
plaintive voice, so poignantly sweet, that ineffable dying smile, those
wistful eyes with so much less of earth than heaven?
But the two succeeding "books" are more tiresome and more unnecessary
than the most inferior of the three opening sections--the first of the
two, indeed, is intolerably wearisome, a desolate boulder-strewn gorge
after the sweet air and sunlit summits of "Caponsacchi" and "Pompilia."
In the next "book" Innocent XII. is revealed. All this section has a
lofty serenity, unsurpassed in its kind. It must be read from first to
last for its full effect, but I may excerpt one passage, the high-water
mark of modern blank-verse:--
"For the main criminal I have no hope
Except in such a suddenness of fate.
I stood at Naples once, a night so dark
I could have scarce conjectured there was earth
Anywhere, sky or sea or world at all:
But the night's black was burst through by a blaze--
Thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore,
Through her whole length of mountain visible:
There lay the city thick and plain with spires,
And, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea.
So may the truth be flashed out by one blow,
And Guido see, one instant, and be saved."
Finally comes that throbbing, terrible last "book" where the murderer
finds himself brought to bay and knows that all is lost. Who can forget
its unparalleled close, when the wolf-like Guido suddenly, in his
supreme agony, transcends his lost manhood in one despairing cry--
"Abate,--Cardinal,--Christ,--Maria,--God, ...
Pompilia, will you let them murder me?"
Lastly, the Epilogue rounds off the tale. But is this Epilogue
necessary? Surely the close should have come with the words just quoted?
It will not be after a first perusal that the reader will be able to
arrive at a definite conviction. No individual or collective estimate of
to-day can be accepted as final. Those who come after us, perhaps not
the next generation, nor the next again, will see "The Ring and the
Book" free of all the manifold and complex considerations which confuse
our judgment. Meanwhile, each can only speak for himself. To me it seems
that "The Ring and the Book" is, regarded as an artistic whole, the most
magnificent failure in our literature. It enshrines poetry which no
other than our greatest could have written; it has depths to which many
of far inferior power have not descended. Surely the poem must be judged
by the balance of its success and failure? It is in no presumptuous
spirit, but out of my profound admiration of this long-loved and
often-read, this superb poem, that I, for one, wish it comprised but the
Prologue, the Plea of Guido, "Caponsacchi," "Pompilia," "The Pope," and
Guido's last Defence. I cannot help thinking that this is the form in
which it will be read in the years to come. Thus circumscribed, it seems
to me to be rounded and complete, a great work of art void of the dross,
the mere _débris_ which the true artist discards. But as it is, in all
its lordly poetic strength and flagging impulse, is it not, after all,
the true climacteric of Browning's genius?
"The Inn Album," a dramatic poem of extraordinary power, has so much
more markedly the defects of his qualities that I take it to be, at the
utmost, the poise of the first gradual refluence. This analogy of the
tidal ebb and flow may be observed with singular aptness in Browning's
life-work--the tide that first moved shoreward in the loveliness of
"Pauline," and, with "long withdrawing roar," ebbed in slow, just
perceptible lapse to the poet's penultimate volume. As for "Asolando," I
would rather regard it as the gathering of a new wave--nay, again
rather, as the deep sound of ocean which the outward surge has reached.
But for myself I do not accept "The Inn Album" as the first hesitant
swing of the tide. I seem to hear the resilient undertone all through
the long slow poise of "The Ring and the Book." Where then is the full
splendour and rush of the tide, where its culminating reach and power?
I should say in "Men and Women"; and by "Men and Women" I mean not
merely the poems comprised in the collection so entitled, but all in the
"Dramatic Romances," "Lyrics," and the "Dramatis Personæ," all the short
pieces of a certain intensity of note and quality of power, to be found
in the later volumes, from "Pacchiarotto" to "Asolando."
And this because, in the words of the poet himself when speaking of
Shelley, I prefer to look for the highest attainment, not simply the
high--and, seeing it, to hold by it. Yet I am not oblivious of the mass
of Browning's lofty achievement, "to be known enduringly among men,"--an
achievement, even on its secondary level, so high, that around its
imperfect proportions, "the most elaborated productions of ordinary art
must arrange themselves as inferior illustrations."
How am I to convey concisely that which it would take a volume to do
adequately--an idea of the richest efflorescence of Browning's genius in
these unfading blooms which we will agree to include in "Men and
Women"? How better--certainly it would be impossible to be more
succinct--than by the enumeration of the contents of an imagined volume,
to be called, say "Transcripts from Life"?
It would be to some extent, but not rigidly, arranged chronologically.
It would begin with that masterpiece of poetic concision, where a whole
tragedy is burned in upon the brain in fifty-six lines, "My Last
Duchess." Then would follow "In a Gondola," that haunting lyrical drama
_in petto_, where the lover is stabbed to death as his heart is
beating against that of his mistress; "Cristina," with its keen
introspection; those delightfully stirring pieces, the "Cavalier-Tunes,"
"Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr," and "The Pied Piper of Hamelin";
"The Flower's Name"; "The Flight of the Duchess"; "The Tomb at St.
Praxed's," the poem which educed Ruskin's enthusiastic praise for its
marvellous apprehension of the spirit of the Middle Ages; "Pictor Ignotus,"
and "The Lost Leader." But as there is not space for individual detail, and
as many of the more important are spoken of elsewhere in this volume, I
must take the reader's acquaintance with the poems for granted. So,
following those first mentioned, there would come "Home Thoughts from
Abroad"; "Home Thoughts from the Sea"; "The Confessional"; "The
Heretic's Tragedy"; "Earth's Immortalities"; "Meeting at Night: Parting
at Morning"; "Saul"; "Karshish"; "A Death in the Desert"; "Rabbi Ben
Ezra"; "A Grammarian's Funeral"; "Love Among the Ruins"; _Song_, "Nay
but you"; "A Lover's Quarrel"; "Evelyn Hope"; "A Woman's Last Word";
"Fra Lippo Lippi"; "By the Fireside"; "Any Wife to Any Husband"; "A
Serenade at the Villa"; "My Star"; "A Pretty Woman"; "A Light Woman";
"Love in a Life"; "Life in a Love"; "The Last Ride Together"; "A Toccata
of Galuppi's"; "Master Hugues of Saxe Gotha"; "Abt Vogler";
"Memorabilia"; "Andrea Del Sarto"; "Before"; "After"; "In Three Days";
"In a Year"; "Old Pictures in Florence"; "De Gustibus"; "Women and
Roses"; "The Guardian Angel"; "Cleon"; "Two in the Campagna"; "One Way
of Love"; "Another Way of Love"; "Misconceptions"; "May and Death";
"James Lee's Wife"; "Dîs Aliter Visum"; "Too Late"; "Confessions";
"Prospice"; "Youth and Art"; "A Face"; "A Likeness"; "Apparent Failure."
Epilogue to Part I.--"O Lyric Voice," etc., from end of First Part of
"The Ring and the Book." Part II.--"Hervé Riel"; "Amphibian"; "Epilogue
to Fifine"; "Pisgah Sights"; "Natural Magic"; "Magical Nature";
"Bifurcation"; "Numpholeptos"; "Appearances"; "St. Martin's Summer"; "A
Forgiveness"; Epilogue to Pacchiarotto volume; Prologue to "La Saisiaz";
Prologue to "Two Poets of Croisic"; "Epilogue"; "Pheidippides";
"Halbert and Hob"; "Ivàn Ivànovitch"; "Echetlos"; "Muléykeh"; "Pan and
Luna"; "Touch him ne'er so lightly"; Prologue to "Jocoseria"; "Cristina
and Monaldeschi"; "Mary Wollstonecraft and Fuseli"; "Ixion"; "Never the
Time and the Place"; _Song_, "Round us the wild creatures ";
_Song_, "Wish no word unspoken "; _Song_, "You groped your way";
_Song_:, "Man I am"; _Song_, "Once I saw"; "Verse-making";
"Not with my Soul Love"; "Ask not one least word of praise"; "Why from
the world"; "The Round of Day" (Pts. 9, 10, 11, 12 of Gérard de Lairesse);
Prologue to "Asolando"; "Rosny"; "Now"; "Poetics"; "Summum Bonum";
"A Pearl"; "Speculative"; "Inapprehensiveness"; "The Lady and the Painter;"
"Beatrice Signorini"; "Imperante Augusto"; "Rephan"; "Reverie";
Epilogue to "Asolando" (in all, 122).
But having drawn up this imaginary anthology, possibly with faults of
commission and probably with worse errors of omission, I should like to
take the reader into my confidence concerning a certain volume,
originally compiled for my own pleasure, though not without thought of
one or two dear kinsmen of a scattered Brotherhood--a volume half the
size of the projected Transcripts, and rare as that star in the tip of
the moon's horn of which Coleridge speaks.
_Flower o' the Vine_, so it is called, has for double-motto these two
lines from the Epilogue to the Pacchiarotto volume--
"Man's thoughts and loves and hates!
Earth is my vineyard, these grew there--"
and these words, already quoted, from the Shelley Essay, "I prefer to
look for the highest attainment, not simply the high."
1. From "Pauline"[16]--i. "Sun-treader, life and light be thine for
ever!" 2. The Dawn of Beauty; 3. Andromeda; 4. Morning. II. "Heap
Cassia, Sandal-buds," etc. (song from "Paracelsus"). III. "Over the Sea
our Galleys went" (song from "Paracelsus"). IV. The Joy of the World
("Paracelsus").[17] V. From "Sordello"--1. Sunset;[18] 2. The Fugitive
Ethiop;[19] 3. Dante.[20] VI. Ottima and Sebald (Pt. i., "Pippa
Passes"). VII. Jules and Phene (Pt. ii., "Pippa Passes"). VIII. My Last
Duchess. IX. In a Gondola. X. Home Thoughts from Abroad (i. and ii.).
XI. Meeting at Night: Parting at Morning. XII. A Grammarian's Funeral.
XIII. Saul. XIV. Rabbi Ben Ezra. XV. Love among the Ruins. XVI. Evelyn
Hope. XVII. My Star. XVIII. A Toccata of Galuppi's. XIX. Abt Vogler. XX.
Memorabilia. XXI. Andrea del Sarto. XXI. Two in the Campagna. XXII.
James Lee's Wife. XXIII. Prospice. XXIV. From "The Ring and the
Book"--1. O Lyric Love (The Invocation: 26 lines); 2. Caponsacchi (ll.
2069 to 2103); 3. Pompilia (ll. 181 to 205); 4. Pompilia (ll. 1771 to
1845); 5. The Pope (ll. 2017 to 2228); 6. Count Guido (Book XI., ll.
2407 to 2427). XXV. Prologue to "La Saisiaz." XXVI. Prologue to "Two
Poets of Croisic." XXVII. Epilogue to "Two Poets of Croisic." XXVIII.
Never the Time and Place. XXIX. "Round us the Wild Creatures," etc.
(song from "Ferishtah's Fancies"). XXX. "The Walk" (Pts. ix., x., xi.,
xii., of "Gérard de Lairesse.") XXXI. "One word more" (To E.B.B.).[21]
[Footnote 16: The first, from the line quoted, extends through 55
lines--"To see thee for a moment as thou art." No. 2 consists of the
xviii ll. beginning, "They came to me in my first dawn of life." No. 3,
the xi ll. of the Andromeda picture. No. 4, the lix ll. beginning,
"Night, and one single ridge of narrow path" (to "delight").]
[Footnote 17: No. IV. comprises the xxix ll. beginning, "The centre fire
heaves underneath the earth," down to "ancient rapture."]
[Footnote 18: No. V. The vi. ll. beginning, "That autumn ere has stilled."]
[Footnote 19: The xxii ll. beginning, "As, shall I say, some Ethiop."]
[Footnote 20: The xxix ll. beginning, "For he,--for he."]
[Footnote 21: To these XXXI selections there must now be added "Now,"
"Summum Bonum," "Reverie" and the "Epilogue," from "Asolando."]
It is here--I will not say in _Flower o' the Vine_, nor even venture
to restrictively affirm it of that larger and fuller compilation we have
agreed, for the moment, to call "Transcripts from Life"--it is here, in
the worthiest poems of Browning's most poetic period, that, it seems to
me, his highest greatness is to be sought. In these "Men and Women" he
is, in modern times, an unparalleled dramatic poet. The influence he
exercises through these, and the incalculably cumulative influence which
will leaven many generations to come, is not to be looked for in
individuals only, but in the whole thought of the age, which he has
moulded to new form, animated anew, and to which he has imparted a fresh
stimulus. For this a deep debt is due to Robert Browning. But over and
above this shaping force, this manipulative power upon character and
thought, he has enriched our language, our literature, with a new wealth
of poetic diction, has added to it new symbols, has enabled us to inhale
a more liberal if an unfamiliar air, has, above all, raised us to a
fresh standpoint, a standpoint involving our construction of a new
definition.
Here, at least, we are on assured ground: here, at any rate, we realise
the scope and quality of his genius. But, let me hasten to add, he, at
his highest, not being of those who would make Imagination the handmaid
of the Understanding, has given us also a Dorado of pure poetry, of
priceless worth. Tried by the severest tests, not merely of substance,
but of form, not merely of the melody of high thinking, but of rare and
potent verbal music, the larger number of his "Men and Women" poems are
as treasurable acquisitions, in kind, to our literature, as the shorter
poems of Milton, of Shelley, of Keats, and of Tennyson. But once again,
and finally, let me repeat that his primary importance--not greatness,
but importance--is in having forced us to take up a novel standpoint,
involving our construction of a new definition.