Of Wordsworth Browning saw not a little in the ensuing few years,

for on the rare visits the elderly poet paid to London,

Talfourd never failed to ask the author of "Paracelsus",

for whom he had a sincere admiration, to meet the great man.

It was not in the nature of things that the two poets could become friends,

but though the younger was sometimes annoyed by the elder's pooh-poohing

his republican sympathies, and contemptuously waiving aside as a mere nobody

no less an individual than Shelley, he never failed of respect

and even reverence. With what tenderness and dignity he has commemorated

the great poet's falling away from his early ideals, may be seen

in "The Lost Leader", one of the most popular of Browning's short poems,

and likely to remain so. For several reasons, however,

it is best as well as right that Wordsworth should not be more

than merely nominally identified with the Lost Leader.

Browning was always imperative upon this point.

Towards Landor, on the other hand, he entertained a sentiment

of genuine affection, coupled with a profound sympathy and admiration:

a sentiment duly reciprocated. The care of the younger for the elder,

in the old age of the latter, is one of the most beautiful incidents

in a beautiful life.

But the evening was not to pass without another memorable incident,

one to which we owe "Strafford", and probably "A Blot in the 'Scutcheon".

Just as the young poet, flushed with the triumphant pleasure of the evening,

was about to leave, Macready arrested him by a friendly grip of the arm.

In unmistakable earnestness he asked Browning to write him a play.

With a simplicity equal to the occasion, the poet contented himself

with replying, "Shall it be historical and English? What do you say

to a drama on Strafford?"

Macready was pleased with the idea, and hopeful that his friend would be

more successful with the English statesman than with the eunuch Narses.

A few months elapsed before the poet, who had set aside the long work

upon which he was engaged ("Sordello"), called upon Macready

with the manuscript of "Strafford". The latter hoped much from it.

In March the MS. was ready. About the end of the month

Macready took it to Covent Garden Theatre, and read it to Mr. Osbaldiston,

"who caught at it with avidity, and agreed to produce it without delay."

It was an eventful first of May -- an eventful twelvemonth, indeed,

for it was the initial year of the Victorian era, notable, too,

as that wherein the Electric Telegraph was established, and, in letters,

wherein a new dramatic literature had its origin. For "Strafford",

already significant of a novel movement, and destined, it seems to me,

to be still more significant in that great dramatic period towards which

we are fast converging, was not less important to the Drama in England,

as a new departure in method and radically indicative of a fresh standpoint,

than "Hernani" was in France. But in literary history

the day itself is doubly memorable, for in the forenoon

Carlyle gave the first of his lectures in London. The play was a success,

despite the shamefully inadequate acting of some of those entrusted with

important parts. There was once, perhaps there were more occasions than one,

where success poised like the soul of a Mohammedan on the invisible thread

leading to Paradise, but on either side of which lies perdition.

There was none to cry `Timbul' save Macready, except Miss Helen Faucit,

who gained a brilliant triumph as Lady Carlisle. The part of Charles I.

was enacted so execrably that damnation for all was again and again

within measurable distance. "The Younger Vane" ranted so that a hiss,

like an embodied scorn, vibrated on vagrant wings throughout the house.

There was not even any extraneous aid to a fortunate impression.

The house was in ill repair: the seats dusty, the "scenery" commonplace

and sometimes noticeably inappropriate, the costumes and accessories

almost sordid. But in the face of all this, a triumph was secured.

For a brief while Macready believed that the star of regeneration had arisen.

Unfortunately 'twas, in the words of a contemporary dramatic poet,

"a rising sorrow splendidly forlorn." The financial condition

of Covent Garden Theatre was so ruinous that not even the most successful play

could have restored its doomed fortunes.

After the fifth night one of the leading actors, having received

a better offer elsewhere, suddenly withdrew.

This was the last straw. A collapse forthwith occurred.

In the scramble for shares in the few remaining funds

every one gained something, except the author, who was to have received

12 Pounds for each performance for the first twenty-five nights,

and 10 Pounds each for ten nights further. This disaster

was a deep disappointment to Browning, and a by no means transitory one,

for three or four years later he wrote (Advt. of "Bells and Pomegranates"):

"Two or three years ago I wrote a play, about which the chief matter

I much care to recollect at present is, that a pitful 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."

But, except in so far as its abrupt declension from the stage hurt its author

in the eyes of the critics, and possibly in those of theatrical managers,

"Strafford" was certainly no failure. It has the elements

of a great acting play. Everything, even the language

(and here was a stumbling-block with most of the critics and criticasters),

was subordinated to dramatic exigencies: though the subordination

was in conformity with a novel shaping method. "Strafford" was not, however,

allowed to remain unknown to those who had been unable to visit

Covent Garden Theatre.* Browning's name had quite sufficient literary repute

to justify a publisher in risking the issue of a drama by him,

one, at any rate, that had the advantage of association with Macready's name.

The Longmans issued it, and the author had the pleasure of knowing

that his third poetic work was not produced at the expense of a relative,

but at that of the publishers. It had but an indifferent reception, however.

--

* "It is time to deny a statement that has been repeated ad nauseam

in every notice that professes to give an account of Mr. Browning's career.

Whatever is said or not said, it is always that his plays have `failed'

on the stage. In point of fact, the three plays which he has brought out

have all succeeded, and have owed it to fortuitous circumstances

that their tenure on the boards has been comparatively short."

-- E. W. Gosse, in article in `The Century Magazine'.

--

Most people who saw the performance of "Strafford" given in 1886,

under the auspices of the Browning Society, were surprised

as well as impressed: for few, apparently, had realised from perusal

the power of the play as made manifest when acted. The secret of this

is that the drama, when privily read, seems hard if not heavy in its diction,

and to be so inornate, though by no means correspondingly simple,

as to render any comparison between it and the dramatic work of Shakespeare

out of the question. But when acted, the artistry of the play is revealed.

Its intense naturalness is due in great part to the stern concision

of the lines, where no word is wasted, where every sentence is fraught

with the utmost it can convey. The outlines which disturbed us

by their vagueness become more clear: in a word, we all see in enactment

what only a few of us can discern in perusal. The play has its faults,

but scarcely those of language, where the diction is noble and rhythmic,

because it is, so to speak, the genuine rind of the fruit it envelops.

But there are dramatic faults -- primarily, in the extreme economy

of the author in the presentment of his `dramatis personae',

who are embodied abstractions -- monomaniacs of ideas,

as some one has said of Hugo's personages -- rather than men as we are,

with manifold complexities in endless friction or fusion. One cardinal fault

is the lack of humour, which to my mind is the paramount objection

to its popular acceptance. Another, is the misproportionate length

of some of the speeches. Once again, there is, as in the greater portion

of Browning's longer poems and dramas, a baneful equality of emphasis.

The conception of Charles I. is not only obviously weak, but strangely

prejudiced adversely for so keen an analyst of the soul as Browning.

For what a fellow-dramatist calls this "Sunset Shadow of a King",

no man or woman could abase every hope and energy. Shakespeare would never

have committed the crucial mistake of making Charles the despicable deformity

he is in Browning's drama. Strafford himself disappears too soon:

in the fourth act there is the vacuum abhorred of dramatic propriety.

When he again comes on the scene, the charm is partly broken.

But withal the play is one of remarkable vigour and beauty.

It seems to me that too much has been written against it

on the score of its metrical rudeness. The lines are beat out by a hammer,

but in the process they are wrought clear of all needless alloy.

To urge, as has been lately urged, that it lacks all human touch

and is a mere intellectual fanfaronade, and that there is not once

a line of poignant insight, is altogether uncritical. Readers of this mind

must have forgotten or be indifferent to those lines, for example,

where the wretched Charles stammeringly excuses himself to his loyal minister

for his death-warrant, crying out that it was wrung from him,

and begging Strafford not to curse him: or, again, that wonderfully

significant line, so full of a too tardy knowledge and of concentrated scorn,

where Strafford first begs the king to "be good to his children,"

and then, with a contempt that is almost sublime, implores, "Stay, sir,

do not promise, do not swear!" The whole of the second scene in the fifth act

is pure genius. The reader, or spectator, knows by this time

that all hope is over: that Strafford, though all unaware,

is betrayed and undone. It is a subtle dramatic ruse,

that of Browning's representing him sitting in his apartment in the Tower

with his young children, William and Anne, blithely singing.

Can one read and ever forget the lines giving the gay Italian rhyme,

with the boy's picturesquely childish prose-accompaniment?

Strafford is seated, weary and distraught: --

"`O bell' andare

Per barca in mare,

Verso la sera

Di Primavera!'

William. The boat's in the broad moonlight all this while --

`Verso la sera

Di Primavera!'

And the boat shoots from underneath the moon

Into the shadowy distance; only still

You hear the dipping oar --

`Verso la sera,'

And faint, and fainter, and then all's quite gone,

Music and light and all, like a lost star.

Anne. But you should sleep, father: you were to sleep.

Strafford. I do sleep, Anne; or if not -- you must know

There's such a thing as . . .

William. You're too tired to sleep.

Strafford. It will come by-and-by and all day long,

In that old quiet house I told you of:

We sleep safe there.

Anne. Why not in Ireland?

Strafford. No!

Too many dreams! --"

To me this children's-song and the fleeting and now plaintive echo of it,

as "Voices from Within" -- "Verso la sera, Di Primavera" --

in the terrible scene where Strafford learns his doom,

is only to be paralleled by the song of Mariana in "Measure for Measure",

wherein, likewise, is abduced in one thrilling poignant strain

the quintessential part of the tense life of the whole play.

So much has been written concerning the dramas of Robert Browning --

though indeed there is still room for a volume of careful criticism,

dealing solely with this theme -- that I have the less regret

in having so inadequately to pass in review works of such poetic magnitude

as those enumerated above.

But it would be impossible, in so small a book as this,

to examine them in detail without incurring a just charge of misproportion.

The greatness and the shortcomings of the dramas and dramatic poems

must be noted as succinctly as practicable; and I have dwelt more liberally

upon "Pauline", "Paracelsus", and "Strafford", partly because

(certainly without more than one exception, "Sordello")

these are the three least read of Browning's poems, partly because

they indicate the sweep and reach of his first orient eagle-flight

through new morning-skies, and mainly because in them

we already find Browning at his best and at his weakest,

because in them we hear not only the rush of his sunlit pinions,

but also the low earthward surge of dullard wings.

Browning is foreshadowed in his earliest writings, as perhaps

no other poet has been to like extent. In the "Venus and Adonis",

and the "Rape of Lucrece", we have but the dimmest foreview of the author

of "Hamlet", "Othello", and "Macbeth"; had Shakespeare died prematurely

none could have predicted, from the exquisite blossoms of his adolescence,

the immortal fruit of his maturity. But, in Browning's three earliest works,

we clearly discern him, as the sculptor of Melos previsioned his Venus

in the rough-hewn block.

Thenceforth, to change the imagery, he developed rapidly upon the same lines,

or doubled upon himself in intricate revolutions; but already

his line of life, his poetic parallel, was definitely established.

In the consideration of Browning's dramas it is needful to be sure

of one's vantage for judgment. The first step towards this assurance

is the ablation of the chronic Shakespearian comparison. Primarily,

the shaping spirit of the time wrought Shakespeare and Browning

to radically divergent methods of expression, but each to a method

in profound harmony with the dominant sentiment of the age in which he lived.

Above all others, the Elizabethan era was rich in romantic adventure,

of the mind as well as of the body, and above all others,

save that of the Renaissance in Italy, animated by a passionate curiosity.

So, too, supremely, the Victorian era has been prolific of novel and vast

Titanic struggles of the human spirit to reach those Gates of Truth

whose lowest steps are the scarce discernible stars and furthest suns we scan,

by piling Ossas of searching speculation upon Pelions of hardly-won

positive knowledge. The highest exemplar of the former is Shakespeare,

Browning the profoundest interpreter of the latter.

To achieve supremacy the one had to create a throbbing actuality,

a world of keenest living, of acts and intervolved situations and episodes:

the other to fashion a mentality so passionately alive

that its manifold phases should have all the reality

of concrete individualities. The one reveals individual life to us

by the play of circumstance, the interaction of events,

the correlative eduction of personal characteristics:

the other by his apprehension of that quintessential movement or mood or phase

wherein the soul is transitorily visible on its lonely pinnacle of light.

The elder poet reveals life to us by the sheer vividness of his own vision:

the younger, by a newer, a less picturesque but more scientific abduction,

compels the complex rayings of each soul-star to a singular simplicity,

as by the spectrum analysis. The one, again, fulfils his aim

by a broad synthesis based upon the vivid observance and selection

of vital details: the other by an extraordinary acute psychic analysis.

In a word, Shakespeare works as with the clay of human action:

Browning as with the clay of human thought.

As for the difference in value of the two methods it is useless to dogmatise.

The psychic portraiture produced by either is valuable

only so far as it is convincingly true.

The profoundest insight cannot reach deeper than its own possibilities

of depth. The physiognomy of the soul is never visible in its entirety,

barely ever even its profile. The utmost we can expect to reproduce,

perhaps even to perceive in the most quintessential moment,

is a partially faithful, partially deceptive silhouette.

As no human being has ever seen his or her own soul,

in all its rounded completeness of good and evil, of strength and weakness,

of what is temporal and perishable and what is germinal and essential,

how can we expect even the subtlest analyst to adequately depict

other souls than his own. It is Browning's high distinction

that he has this soul-depictive faculty -- restricted as even in his instance

it perforce is -- to an extent unsurpassed by any other poet,

ancient or modern. As a sympathetic critic has remarked,

"His stage is not the visible phenomenal England (or elsewhere) of history;

it is a point in the spiritual universe, where naked souls meet and wrestle,

as they play the great game of life, for counters, the true value of which

can only be realised in the bullion of a higher life than this."

No doubt there is "a certain crudeness in the manner in which

these naked souls are presented," not only in "Strafford" but elsewhere

in the plays. Browning markedly has the defects of his qualities.

As part of his method, it should be noted that his real trust

is upon monologue rather than upon dialogue. To one who works

from within outward -- in contradistinction to the Shakespearian method

of striving to win from outward forms "the passion and the life

whose fountains are within" -- the propriety of this dramatic means

can scarce be gainsaid. The swift complicated mental machinery

can thus be exhibited infinitely more coherently and comprehensibly

than by the most electric succinct dialogue. Again and again

Browning has nigh foundered in the morass of monologue, but, broadly speaking,

he transcends in this dramatic method.

At the same time, none must take it for granted that

the author of "A Blot in the 'Scutcheon", "Luria", "In a Balcony",

is not dramatic in even the most conventional sense. Above all, indeed

-- as Mr. Walter Pater has said -- his is the poetry of situations.

In each of the `dramatis personae', one of the leading characteristics

is loyalty to a dominant ideal. In Strafford's case

it is that of unswerving devotion to the King: in Mildred's and in Thorold's,

in "A Blot in the 'Scutcheon", it is that of subservience respectively

to conventional morality and family pride (Lord Tresham, it may be added,

is the most hopelessly monomaniacal of all Browning's "monomaniacs"):

in Valence's, in "Colombe's Birthday", to chivalric love:

in Charles, in "King Victor and King Charles", to kingly and filial duty:

in Anael's and Djabal's, in "The Return of the Druses",

respectively to religion and unscrupulous ambition modified by patriotism:

in Chiappino's, in "A Soul's Tragedy", to purely sordid ambition:

in Luria's, to noble steadfastness: and in Constance's, in "In a Balcony",

to self-denial. Of these plays, "The Return of the Druses" seems to me

the most picturesque, "Luria" the most noble and dignified,

and "In a Balcony" the most potentially a great dramatic success.

The last is in a sense a fragment, but, though the integer

of a great unaccomplished drama, is as complete in itself

as the Funeral March in Beethoven's `Eroica' Symphony.

"A Blot in the 'Scutcheon" has the radical fault characteristic of

writers of sensational fiction, a too promiscuous "clearing the ground"

by syncope and suicide. Another is the juvenility of Mildred: --

a serious infraction of dramatic law, where the mere tampering with history,

as in the circumstances of King Victor's death in the earlier play,

is at least excusable by high precedent. More disastrous, poetically,

is the ruinous banality of Mildred's anticlimax when,

after her brother reveals himself as her lover's murderer,

she, like the typical young `Miss Anglaise' of certain French novelists,

betrays her incapacity for true passion by exclaiming, in effect,

"What, you've murdered my lover! Well, tell me all. Pardon?

Oh, well, I pardon you: at least I THINK I do. Thorold, my dear brother,

how very wretched you must be!"

I am unaware if this anticlimax has been pointed out by any one,

but surely it is one of the most appalling lapses of genius

which could be indicated. Even the beautiful song in

the third scene of the first act, "There's a woman like a dew-drop,

she's so purer than the purest," is, in the circumstances,

nearly over the verge which divides the sublime from the ridiculous.

No wonder that, on the night the play was first acted,

Mertoun's song, as he clambered to his mistress's window,

caused a sceptical laugh to ripple lightly among the tolerant auditory.

It is with diffidence I take so radically distinct a standpoint from that

of Dickens, who declared he knew no love like that of Mildred and Mertoun,

no passion like it, no moulding of a splendid thing after its conception,

like it; who, further, at a later date, affirmed that he would rather have

written this play than any work of modern times: nor with less reluctance,

that I find myself at variance with Mr. Skelton, who speaks of the drama

as "one of the most perfectly conceived and perfectly executed tragedies

in the language." In the instance of Luria, that second Othello,

suicide has all the impressiveness of a plenary act of absolution:

the death of Anael seems as inevitable as the flash of lightning

after the concussion of thunder-clouds. But Thorold's suicide

is mere weakness, scarce a perverted courage; and Mildred's broken heart

was an ill not beyond the healing of a morally robust physician.

"Colombe's Birthday" has a certain remoteness of interest,

really due to the reader's more or less acute perception

of the radical divergence, for all Valence's greatness of mind and spirit,

between the fair young Duchess and her chosen lover:

a circumstance which must surely stand in the way of its popularity.

Though "A Soul's Tragedy" has the saving quality of humour,

it is of too grim a kind to be provocative of laughter.

In each of these plays* the lover of Browning will recall passage

after passage of superbly dramatic effect. But supreme in his remembrance

will be the wonderful scene in "The Return of the Druses", where the Prefect,

drawing a breath of relief, is almost simultaneously assassinated;

and that where Anael, with every nerve at tension in her fierce

religious resolve, with a poignant, life-surrendering cry,

hails Djabal as `Hakeem' -- as Divine -- and therewith falls dead at his feet.

Nor will he forget that where, in "A Blot in the 'Scutcheon",

Mildred, with a dry sob in her throat, stammeringly utters --

"I -- I -- was so young!

Besides I loved him, Thorold -- and I had

No mother; God forgot me: so I fell ----"

or that where, "at end of the disastrous day," Luria takes the phial of poison

from his breast, muttering --

"Strange! This is all I brought from my own land

To help me."

--

* "Strafford", 1837; "King Victor and King Charles", 1842;

"The Return of the Druses", and "A Blot in the 'Scutcheon", 1843;

"Colombe's Birthday", 1844; "Luria", and "A Soul's Tragedy", 1845.

--

Before passing on from these eight plays to Browning's most imperishable

because most nearly immaculate dramatic poem, "Pippa Passes",

and to "Sordello", that colossal derelict upon the ocean of poetry,

I should like -- out of an embarrassing quantity of alluring details --

to remind the reader of two secondary matters of interest, pertinent to

the present theme. One is that the song in "A Blot in the 'Scutcheon",

"There's a woman like a dew-drop", written several years before

the author's meeting with Elizabeth Barrett, is so closely

in the style of "Lady Geraldine's Courtship", and other ballads

by the sweet singer who afterwards became a partner in the loveliest marriage

of which we have record in literary history, that, even were there nothing

to substantiate the fact, it were fair to infer that Mertoun's song to Mildred

was the electric touch which compelled to its metric shape

one of Mrs. Browning's best-known poems.

The further interest lies in the lordly acknowledgment

of the dedication to him of "Luria", which Landor sent to Browning --

lines pregnant with the stateliest music of his old age: --

"Shakespeare is not our poet but the world's,

Therefore on him no speech! and brief for thee,

Browning! Since Chaucer was alive and hale

No man has walked along our roads with step

So active, so enquiring eye, or tongue

So varied in discourse. But warmer climes

Give brighter plumage, stronger wing: the breeze

Of Alpine heights thou playest with, borne on

Beyond Sorrento and Amalfi, where

The Siren waits thee, singing song for song."

Chapter 5.

In my allusion to "Pippa Passes", towards the close of the preceding chapter,

as the most imperishable because the most nearly immaculate of Browning's

dramatic poems, I would not have it understood that its pre-eminence

is considered from the standpoint of technical achievement, of art, merely.

It seems to me, like all simple and beautiful things, profound enough

for the searching plummet of the most curious explorer of the depths of life.

It can be read, re-read, learned by heart, and the more it is known

the wider and more alluring are the avenues of imaginative thought

which it discloses. It has, more than any other long composition

by its author, that quality of symmetry, that `symmetria prisca'

recorded of Leonardo da Vinci in the Latin epitaph of Platino Piatto;

and, as might be expected, its mental basis, what Rossetti called

fundamental brain-work, is as luminous, depth within depth,

as the morning air. By its side, the more obviously "profound" poems,

Bishop Blougram and the rest, are mere skilled dialectics.

The art that is most profound and most touching must ever be the simplest.

Whenever Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, are at white heat

they require no exposition, but meditation only -- the meditation akin to

the sentiment of little children who listen, intent upon every syllable,

and passionately eager of soul, to hearthside tragedies.

The play of genius is like the movement of the sea. It has its solemn rhythm:

its joy, irradiate of the sun; its melancholy, in the patient moonlight:

its surge and turbulence under passing tempests: below all,

the deep oceanic music. There are, of course, many to whom

the sea is but a waste of water, at best useful as a highway

and as the nursery of the winds and rains. For them there is no hint

"of the incommunicable dream" in the curve of the rising wave,

no murmur of the oceanic undertone in the short leaping sounds,

invisible things that laugh and clap their hands for joy and are no more.

To them it is but a desert: obscure, imponderable, a weariness.

The "profundity" of Browning, so dear a claim in the eyes

of the poet's fanatical admirers, exists, in their sense,

only in his inferior work. There is more profound insight

in Blake's Song of Innocence, "Piping down the valleys wild,"

or in Wordsworth's line, "Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,"

or in Keats' single verse, "There is a budding morrow in midnight,"

or in this quatrain on Poetry, by a young living poet --

"She comes like the husht beauty of the night,

But sees too deep for laughter;

Her touch is a vibration and a light

From worlds before and after ----"

there is more "profundity" in any of these than in libraries

of "Sludge the Medium" literature. Mere hard thinking

does not involve profundity, any more than neurotic excitation

involves spiritual ecstasy. `De profundis', indeed, must the poet come:

there must the deep rhythm of life have electrified his "volatile essence"

to a living rhythmic joy. In this deep sense, and this only,

the poet is born, not made. He may learn to fashion anew

that which he hath seen: the depth of his insight depends upon

the depth of his spiritual heritage. If wonder dwell not in his eyes and soul

there can be no "far ken" for him. Here it seems apt to point out

that Browning was the first writer of our day to indicate this transmutive,

this inspired and inspiring wonder-spirit, which is the deepest motor

in the evolution of our modern poetry. Characteristically,

he puts his utterance into the mouth of a dreamy German student,

the shadowy Schramm who is but metaphysics embodied,

metaphysics finding apt expression in tobacco-smoke: "Keep but ever looking,

whether with the body's eye or the mind's, and you will soon find something

to look on! Has a man done wondering at women? -- there follow men,

dead and alive, to wonder at. Has he done wondering at men? --

there's God to wonder at: and the faculty of wonder may be,

at the same time, old and tired enough with respect to its first object,

and yet young and fresh sufficiently, so far as concerns its novel one."

This wonder is akin to that `insanity' of the poet which is

but impassioned sanity. Plato sums the matter when he says,

"He who, having no touch of the Muse's madness in his soul,

comes to the door and thinks he will get into the temple by the help of Art --

he, I say, and his poetry, are not admitted."

In that same wood beyond Dulwich to which allusion has already been made,

the germinal motive of "Pippa Passes" flashed upon the poet.

No wonder this resort was for long one of his sacred places,

and that he lamented its disappearance as fervently

as Ruskin bewailed the encroachment of the ocean of bricks and mortar

upon the wooded privacies of Denmark Hill.

Save for a couple of brief visits abroad, Browning spent the years,

between his first appearance as a dramatic writer and his marriage,

in London and the neighbourhood. Occasionally he took long walks

into the country. One particular pleasure was to lie beside a hedge,

or deep in meadow-grasses, or under a tree, as circumstances

and the mood concurred, and there to give himself up so absolutely

to the life of the moment that even the shy birds would alight close by,

and sometimes venturesomely poise themselves on suspicious wings

for a brief space upon his recumbent body. I have heard him say that

his faculty of observation at that time would not have appeared despicable

to a Seminole or an Iroquois: he saw and watched everything,

the bird on the wing, the snail dragging its shell up the pendulous woodbine,

the bee adding to his golden treasure as he swung in the bells

of the campanula, the green fly darting hither and thither

like an animated seedling, the spider weaving her gossamer from twig to twig,

the woodpecker heedfully scrutinising the lichen on the gnarled oak-bole,

the passage of the wind through leaves or across grass,

the motions and shadows of the clouds, and so forth.

These were his golden holidays. Much of the rest of his time,

when not passed in his room in his father's house, where he wrote

his dramas and early poems, and studied for hours daily,

was spent in the Library of the British Museum, in an endless curiosity

into the more or less unbeaten tracks of literature. These London experiences

were varied by whole days spent at the National Gallery,

and in communion with kindred spirits. At one time he had rooms,

or rather a room, in the immediate neighbourhood of the Strand,

whither he could go when he wished to be in town continuously for a time,

or when he had any social or theatrical engagement.

Browning's life at this period was distraught by more than one

episode of the heart. It would be strange were it otherwise.

He had in no ordinary degree a rich and sensuous nature,

and his responsiveness was so quick that the barriers of prudence

were apt to be as shadowy to him as to the author of "The Witch of Atlas".

But he was the earnest student for the most part, and, above all, the poet.

His other pleasure, in his happy vagrant days, was to join company

with any tramps, gipsies, or other wayfarers, and in good fellowship

gain much knowledge of life that was useful at a later time.

Rustic entertainments, particularly peripatetic "Theatres Royal",

had a singular fascination for him, as for that matter had rustic oratory,

whether of the alehouse or the pulpit. At one period

he took the keenest interest in sectaries of all kinds:

and often he incurred a gentle reproof from his mother

because of his nomad propensities in search of "PASTORS new".

There was even a time when he seriously deliberated whether

he should not combine literature and religious ministry,

as Faraday combined evangelical fervour with scientific enthusiasm.

"'Twas a girl with eyes like two dreams of night" that saved him from himself,

and defrauded the Church Independent of a stalwart orator.

It was, as already stated, while he strolled through Dulwich Wood one day

that the thought occurred to him which was to find development and expression

in "Pippa Passes". "The image flashed upon him," writes his intimate friend,

Mrs. Sutherland Orr, "of some one walking thus alone 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,

Felippa or Pippa."

It has always seemed to me a radical mistake to include "Pippa Passes"

among Browning's dramas. Not only is it absolutely unactable,

but essentially undramatic in the conventional sense. True dramatic writing

concerns itself fundamentally with the apt conjunction of events,

and the more nearly it approximates to the verity of life the more likely

is it to be of immediate appeal. There is a `vraie verite'

which only the poet, evolving from dramatic concepts rather than attempting

to concentrate these in a quick, moving verisimilitude, can attempt.

The passing hither and thither of Pippa, like a beneficent Fate,

a wandering chorus from a higher amid the discordant medley of a lower world,

changing the circumstances and even the natures of certain more or less

heedless listeners by the wild free lilt of her happy song of innocence,

is of this `vraie verite'. It is so obviously true, spiritually,

that it is unreal in the commonplace of ordinary life.

Its very effectiveness is too apt for the dramatist, who can ill afford

to tamper further with the indifferent banalities of actual existence.

The poet, unhampered by the exigencies of dramatic realism, can safely,

and artistically, achieve an equally exact, even a higher verisimilitude,

by means which are, or should be, beyond adoption by the dramatist proper.

But over and above any `nice discrimination', "Pippa Passes" is simply a poem,

a lyrical masque with interspersed dramatic episodes, and subsidiary

interludes in prose. The suggestion recently made that it should be acted

is a wholly errant one. The finest part of it is unrepresentable.

The rest would consist merely of a series of tableaux,

with conversational accompaniment.

The opening scene, "the large mean airy chamber," where Pippa,

the little silk-winder from the mills at Asolo, springs from bed,

on her New Year's Day `festa', and soliloquises as she dresses, is as true

as it is lovely when viewed through the rainbow glow of the poetic atmosphere:

but how could it succeed on the stage? It is not merely that the monologue

is too long: it is too inapt, in its poetic richness, for its purpose.

It is the poet, not Pippa, who evokes this sweet sunrise-music,

this strain of the "long blue solemn hours serenely flowing."

The dramatic poet may occupy himself with that deeper insight,

and the wider expression of it, which is properly altogether beyond

the scope of the playwright. In a word, he may irradiate his theme

with the light that never was on sea or land, nor will he thereby

sacrifice aught of essential truth: but his comrade must see to it

that he is content with the wide liberal air of the common day.

The poetic alchemist may turn a sword into pure gold:

the playwright will concern himself with the due usage of the weapon

as we know it, and attribute to it no transcendent value,

no miraculous properties. What is permissible to Blake,

painting Adam and Eve among embowering roses and lilies,

while the sun, moon, and stars simultaneously shine,

is impermissible to the portrait-painter or the landscapist,

who has to idealise actuality to the point only of artistic realism,

and not to transmute it at the outset from happily-perceived concrete facts

to a glorified abstract concept.

In this opening monologue the much-admired song, "All service ranks the same

with God," is no song at all, properly, but simply a beautiful short poem.

From the dramatist's point of view, could anything be more shaped for disaster

than the second of the two stanzas? --

"Say not `a small event'! Why `small'?

Costs it more pain than this, ye call

A `great event', should come to pass,

Than that? Untwine me from the mass

Of deeds which make up life, one deed

Power shall fall short in or exceed!"

The whole of this lovely prologue is the production of a dramatic poet,

not of a poet writing a drama. On the other hand, I cannot agree

with what I read somewhere recently -- that Sebald's song, at the opening of

the most superb dramatic writing in the whole range of Victorian literature,

is, in the circumstances, wholly inappropriate. It seems to me

entirely consistent with the character of Ottima's reckless lover.

He is akin to the gallant in one of Dumas' romances,

who lingered atop of the wall of the prison whence he was escaping

in order to whistle the concluding bar of a blithe chanson of freedom.

What is, dramatically, disastrous in the instance of Mertoun

singing "There's a woman like a dew-drop", when he ought to be

seeking Mildred's presence in profound stealth and silence, is, dramatically,

electrically startling in the mouth of Sebald, among the geraniums

of the shuttered shrub-house, where he has passed the night with Ottima,

while her murdered husband lies stark in the adjoining room.

It must, however, be borne in mind that this thrilling dramatic effect

is fully experienced only in retrospection, or when there is knowledge

of what is to follow.

A conclusive objection to the drama as an actable play is that

three of the four main episodes are fragmentary. We know nothing

of the fate of Luigi: we can but surmise the future of Jules and Phene:

we know not how or when Monsignor will see Pippa righted.

Ottima and Sebald reach a higher level in voluntary death

than they ever could have done in life.

It is quite unnecessary, here, to dwell upon this exquisite flower of genius

in detail. Every one who knows Browning at all knows "Pippa Passes".

Its lyrics have been unsurpassed, for birdlike spontaneity

and a rare high music, by any other Victorian poet: its poetic insight

is such as no other poet than the author of "The Ring and the Book"

and "The Inn Album" can equal. Its technique, moreover, is superb.

From the outset of the tremendous episode of Ottima and Sebald,

there is a note of tragic power which is almost overwhelming.

Who has not know what Jakob Boehme calls "the shudder of a divine excitement"

when Luca's murderer replies to his paramour,

"morning?

It seems to me a night with a sun added."

How deep a note, again, is touched when Sebald exclaims,

in allusion to his murder of Luca, that he was so "wrought upon",

though here, it may be, there is an unconscious reminiscence

of the tenser and more culminative cry of Othello, "but being wrought,

perplext in the extreme." Still more profound a touch is that where Ottima,

daring her lover to the "one thing that must be done; you know what thing:

Come in and help to carry," says, with affected lightsomeness,

"This dusty pane might serve for looking-glass," and simultaneously exclaims,

as she throws them rejectingly from her nervous fingers, "Three, four --

four grey hairs!" then with an almost sublime coquetry of horror

turns abruptly to Sebald, saying with a voice striving vainly to be blithe --

"Is it so you said

A plait of hair should wave across my neck?

No -- this way."

Who has not been moved by the tragic grandeur of the verse, as well as

by the dramatic intensity of the episode of the lovers' "crowning night"?

"Ottima. The day of it too, Sebald!

When heaven's pillars seemed o'erbowed with heat,

Its black-blue canopy suffered descend

Close on us both, to weigh down each to each,

And smother up all life except our life.

So lay we till the storm came.

Sebald. How it came!

Ottima. Buried in woods we lay, you recollect;

Swift ran the searching tempest overhead;

And ever and anon some bright white shaft

Burned thro' the pine-tree roof, here burned and there,

As if God's messenger thro' the close wood screen

Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture,

Feeling for guilty thee and me: then broke

The thunder like a whole sea overhead ----"

Surely there is nothing in all our literature more poignantly dramatic

than this first part of "Pippa Passes". The strains which Pippa sings

here and throughout are as pathetically fresh and free as a thrush's song

in the heart of a beleaguered city, and as with the same unconsidered magic.

There is something of the mavis-note, liquid falling tones,

caught up in a moment in joyous caprice, in

"Give her but a least excuse to love me!

When -- where ----"

No one of these songs, all acutely apt to the time and the occasion,

has a more overwhelming effect than that which interrupts Ottima and Sebald

at the perilous summit of their sin, beyond which lies utter darkness,

behind which is the narrow twilit backward way.

"Ottima. Bind it thrice about my brow;

Crown me your queen, your spirit's arbitress,

Magnificent in sin. Say that!

Sebald. I crown you

My great white queen, my spirit's arbitress,

Magnificent . . .

[From without is heard the voice of PIPPA singing --]

The year's at the spring,

And day's at the morn;

Morning's at seven;

The hill-side's dew-pearled;

The lark's on the wing;

The snail's on the thorn:

God's in his heaven --

All's right with the world!

[PIPPA passes.]

Sebald. God's in his heaven! Do you hear that?

Who spoke?"

This sweet voice of Pippa reaches the guilty lovers,

reaches Luigi in his tower, hesitating between love and patriotic duty,

reaches Jules and Phene when all the happiness of their unborn years

trembles in the balance, reaches the Prince of the Church

just when his conscience is sore beset by a seductive temptation,

reaches one and all at a crucial moment in the life of each.

The ethical lesson of the whole poem is summed up in

"All service ranks the same with God --

With God, whose puppets, best and worst,

Are we: there is no last nor first,"

and in

"God's in his heaven --

All's right with the world!"

"With God there is no lust of Godhood," says Rossetti in "Hand and Soul":

`Und so ist der blaue Himmel grosser als jedes Gewoelk darin,

und dauerhafter dazu,' meditates Jean Paul: "There can be nothing good,

as we know it, nor anything evil, as we know it, in the eye

of the Omnipresent and the Omniscient," utters the Oriental mystic.

It is interesting to know that many of the nature touches were indirectly

due to the poet's solitary rambles, by dawn, sundown, and "dewy eve",

in the wooded districts south of Dulwich, at Hatcham, and upon

Wimbledon Common, whither he was often wont to wander and to ramble for hours,

and where he composed one day the well-known lines upon Shelley,

with many another unrecorded impulse of song. Here, too, it was,

that Carlyle, riding for exercise, was stopped by `a beautiful youth',

who introduced himself as one of the philosopher's profoundest admirers.

It was from the Dulwich wood that, one afternoon in March,

he saw a storm glorified by a double rainbow of extraordinary beauty;

a memorable vision, recorded in an utterance of Luigi to his mother:

here too that, in autumnal dusks, he saw many a crescent moon

with "notched and burning rim." He never forgot the bygone

"sunsets and great stars" he saw in those days of his fervid youth.

Browning remarked once that the romance of his life was in his own soul;

and on another occasion I heard him smilingly add, to some one's

vague assertion that in Italy only was there any romance left,

"Ah, well, I should like to include poor old Camberwell!"

Perhaps he was thinking of his lines in "Pippa Passes", of the days

when that masterpiece came ebullient from the fount of his genius --

"May's warm slow yellow moonlit summer nights --

Gone are they, but I have them in my soul!"

There is all the distinction between "Pippa Passes" and "Sordello"

that there is between the Venus of Milos and a gigantic Theban Sphinx.

The latter is, it is true, proportionate in its vastness;

but the symmetry of mere bulk is not the `symmetria prisca'

of ideal sculpture. I have already alluded to "Sordello"

as a derelict upon the ocean of poetry. This, indeed, it still seems to me,

notwithstanding the well-meaning suasion of certain admirers of the poem

who have hoped "I should do it justice," thereby meaning

that I should eulogise it as a masterpiece. It is a gigantic effort,

of a kind; so is the sustained throe of a wrestling Titan.

That the poem contains much which is beautiful is undeniable,

also that it is surcharged with winsome and profound thoughts

and a multitude of will-o'-the-wisp-like fancies which all shape

towards high thinking.

But it is monotonous as one of the enormous American inland seas

to a lover of the ocean, to whom the salt brine is as the breath of delight.

The fatal facility of the heroic couplet to lapse into diffuseness,

has, coupled with a warped anxiety for irreducible concision,

been Browning's ruin here.

There is one charge even yet too frequently made against "Sordello",

that of "obscurity". Its interest may be found remote,

its treatment verbose, its intricacies puzzling to those

unaccustomed to excursions from the familiar highways of old usage,

but its motive thought is not obscure. It is a moonlit plain

compared with the "silva oscura" of the "Divina Commedia".

Surely this question of Browning's obscurity was expelled

to the Limbo of Dead Stupidities when Mr. Swinburne,

in periods as resplendent as the whirling wheels of Phoebus Apollo's chariot,

wrote his famous incidental passage in his "Essay on Chapman".

Too probably, in the dim disintegrating future which will reduce

all our o'ertoppling extremes, "Sordello" will be as little read

as "The Faerie Queene", and, similarly, only for the gleam

of the quenchless lamps amid its long deserted alleys and stately avenues.

Sadly enough, for to poets it will always be an unforgotten land --

a continent with amaranth-haunted Vales of Tempe, where,

as Spenser says in one of the Aeclogues of "The Shepherd's Calendar",

they will there oftentimes "sitten as drouned in dreme."

It has, for those who are not repelled, a charm all its own.

I know of no other poem in the language which is at once

so wearisome and so seductive. How can one explain paradoxes?

There is a charm, or there is none: that is what it amounts to,

for each individual. `Tutti ga i so gusti, e mi go i mii' --

"everybody follows his taste, and I follow mine," as the Venetian saying,

quoted by Browning at the head of his Rawdon Brown sonnet, has it.

All that need be known concerning the framework of "Sordello",

and of the real Sordello himself, will be found in the various

Browning hand-books, in Mr. Nettleship's and other dissertations,

and, particularly, in Mrs. Dall's most circumspect and able historical essay.

It is sufficient here to say that while the Sordello and Palma of the poet

are traceable in the Cunizza and the strange comet-like Sordello

of the Italian and Provencal Chronicles (who has his secure immortality,

by Dante set forth in leonine guise -- `a guisa di leon quando si posa' --

in the "Purgatorio"), both these are the most shadowy of prototypes.

The Sordello of Browning is a typical poetic soul: the narrative

of the incidents in the development of this soul is adapted to

the historical setting furnished by the aforesaid Chronicles.

Sordello is a far more profound study than Aprile in "Paracelsus", in whom,

however, he is obviously foreshadowed. The radical flaw in his nature

is that indicated by Goethe of Heine, that "he had no heart."

The poem is the narrative of his transcendent aspirations,

and more or less futile accomplishment.

It would be vain to attempt here any adequate excerption

of lines of singular beauty. Readers familiar with the poem

will recall passage after passage -- among which there is probably none

more widely known than the grandiose sunset lines: --

"That autumn eve was stilled:

A last remains of sunset dimly burned

O'er the far forests, -- like a torch-flame turned

By the wind back upon its bearer's hand

In one long flare of crimson; as a brand,

The woods beneath lay black." . . .

What haunting lines there are, every here and there -- such as those of Palma,

with her golden hair like spilt sunbeams, or those on Elys, with her

"Few fine locks

Coloured like honey oozed from topmost rocks

Sun-blanched the livelong summer," . . .

or these,

"Day by day

New pollen on the lily-petal grows,

And still more labyrinthine buds the rose ----"

or, once more,

"A touch divine --

And the sealed eyeball owns the mystic rod;

Visibly through his garden walketh God ----"

But, though sorely tempted, I must not quote further, save only

the concluding lines of the unparalleled and impassioned address to Dante: --

"Dante, pacer of the shore

Where glutted hell disgorgeth filthiest gloom,

Unbitten by its whirring sulphur-spume,

Or whence the grieved and obscure waters slope

Into a darkness quieted by hope;

Plucker of amaranths grown beneath God's eye

In gracious twilights where his chosen lie ----"

. . . . .

It is a fair land, for those who have lingered in its byways:

but, alas, a troubled tide of strange metres, of desperate rhythms,

of wild conjunctions, of panic-stricken collocations,

oftentimes overwhelms it. "Sordello" grew under the poet's fashioning till,

like the magic vapour of the Arabian wizard, it passed beyond his control,

"voluminously vast."

It is not the truest admirers of what is good in it who will refuse

to smile at the miseries of conscientious but baffled readers.

Who can fail to sympathise with Douglas Jerrold when,

slowly convalescent from a serious illness, he found among

some new books sent him by a friend a copy of "Sordello".

Thomas Powell, writing in 1849, has chronicled the episode.

A few lines, he says, put Jerrold in a state of alarm.

Sentence after sentence brought no consecutive thought to his brain.

At last the idea occurred to him that in his illness his mental faculties

had been wrecked. The perspiration rolled from his forehead,

and smiting his head he sank back on the sofa, crying, "O God,

I AM an idiot!" A little later, adds Powell, when Jerrold's

wife and sister entered, he thrust "Sordello" into their hands,

demanding what they thought of it. He watched them intently while they read.

When at last Mrs. Jerrold remarked, "I don't understand what this man means;

it is gibberish," her delighted husband gave a sigh of relief and exclaimed,

"Thank God, I am NOT an idiot!"

Many friends of Browning will remember his recounting this incident

almost in these very words, and his enjoyment therein:

though he would never admit justification for such puzzlement.

But more illustrious personages than Douglas Jerrold were puzzled by the poem.

Lord Tennyson manfully tackled it, but he is reported to have admitted

in bitterness of spirit: "There were only two lines in it that I understood,

and they were both lies; they were the opening and closing lines,

`Who will may hear Sordello's story told,' and `Who would has heard

Sordello's story told!'" Carlyle was equally candid: "My wife," he writes,

"has read through `Sordello' without being able to make out

whether `Sordello' was a man, or a city, or a book."

In an article on this poem, in a French magazine, M. Odysse Barot

quotes a passage where the poet says "God gave man two faculties" --

and adds, "I wish while He was about it (`pendant qu'il etait en train')

God had supplied another -- viz., the power of understanding Mr. Browning."

And who does not remember the sad experience of generous and delightful

Gilead P. Beck, in "The Golden Butterfly": how, after "Fifine at the Fair",

frightful symptoms set in, till in despair he took up

"Red Cotton Nightcap Country", and fell for hours into a dull comatose misery.

"His eyes were bloodshot, his hair was pushed in disorder about his head,

his cheeks were flushed, his hands were trembling, the nerves in his face

were twitching. Then he arose, and solemnly cursed Robert Browning.

And then he took all his volumes, and, disposing them carefully

in the fireplace, set light to them. `I wish,' he said,

`that I could put the poet there too.'" One other anecdote of the kind

was often, with evident humorous appreciation, recounted by the poet.

On his introduction to the Chinese Ambassador, as a "brother-poet",

he asked that dignitary what kind of poetic expression

he particularly affected. The great man deliberated,

and then replied that his poetry might be defined as "enigmatic".

Browning at once admitted his fraternal kinship.

That he was himself aware of the shortcomings of "Sordello" as a work of art

is not disputable. In 1863, Mrs. Orr says, he considered the advisability

of "rewriting it in a more transparent manner, but concluded that the labour

would be disproportionate to the result, and contented himself

with summarising the contents of each `book' in a continuous heading,

which represents the main thread of the story."

The essential manliness of Browning is evident in the famous dedication

to the French critic Milsand, who was among his early admirers.

"My own faults of expression were many; but with care for a man or book such

would be surmounted, and without it what avails the faultlessness of either?

I blame nobody, least of all myself, who did my best then and since."

Whatever be the fate of "Sordello", one thing pertinent to it shall survive:

the memorable sentence in the dedicatory preface -- "My stress lay on

the incidents in the development of a soul: little else is worth study."

The poem has disastrous faults, but is a magnificent failure.

"Vast as night," to borrow a simile from Victor Hugo, but, like night,

innumerously starred.

Chapter 6.

"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 Shakespeare, as with Victor Hugo,

it is difficult for our vision to penetrate the glow

irradiating the supreme heights of accomplishment. Like Balzac,

like Shakespeare 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.* 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.

--

* 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 Shakespeare'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 naivete, 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 debris 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 Personae",

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";

"Dis 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. -- "Herve 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"; "Ivan Ivanovitch"; "Echetlos"; "Muleykeh";

"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 Gerard 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."

I. From "Pauline"*1* -- 1. "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").*2* V. From "Sordello" --

1. Sunset;*3* 2. The Fugitive Ethiop;*4* 3. Dante.*5*

VI. Ottima and Sebald (Pt. 1, "Pippa Passes"). VII. Jules and Phene

(Pt. 2, "Pippa Passes"). VIII. My Last Duchess. IX. In a Gondola.

X. Home Thoughts from Abroad (1 and 2). 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.

XXII. Two in the Campagna. XXIII. James Lee's Wife. XXIV. Prospice.

XXV. 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 11, ll. 2407 to 2427). XXVI. Prologue to "La Saisiaz".

XXVII. Prologue to "Two Poets of Croisic". XXVIII. Epilogue to

"Two Poets of Croisic". XXIX. Never the Time and Place.

XXX. "Round us the Wild Creatures," etc. (song from "Ferishtah's Fancies").

XXXI. "The Walk" (Pts. 9, 10, 11, 12, of "Gerard de Lairesse").

XXXII. "One word more" (To E. B. B.).*6*

--

*1* The first, from the line quoted, extends through 55 lines --

"To see thee for a moment as thou art." No. 2 consists of the 18 lines

beginning, "They came to me in my first dawn of life." No. 3,

the 11 lines of the Andromeda picture. No. 4, the 59 lines beginning,

"Night, and one single ridge of narrow path" (to "delight").

*2* No. IV. comprises the 29 lines beginning, "The centre fire

heaves underneath the earth," down to "ancient rapture."

*3* No. V. The 6 lines beginning, "That autumn ere has stilled."

*4* The 22 lines beginning, "As, shall I say, some Ethiop."

*5* The 29 lines beginning, "For he, -- for he."

*6* To these 32 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.

Chapter 7.

There are, in literary history, few `scenes de la vie privee'

more affecting than that of the greatest of English poetesses,

in the maturity of her first poetic period, lying, like a fading flower,

for hours, for days continuously, in a darkened room in a London house.

So ill was Miss Elizabeth Barrett, early in the second half of the forties,

that few friends, herself even, could venture to hope

for a single one of those Springs which she previsioned so longingly.

To us, looking back at this period, in the light of what we know of a story

of singular beauty, there is an added pathos in the circumstance that,

as the singer of so many exquisite songs lay on her invalid's sofa,

dreaming of things which, as she thought, might never be,

all that was loveliest in her life was fast approaching --

though, like all joy, not without an equally unlooked-for sorrow.

"I lived with visions for my company, instead of men and women . . .

nor thought to know a sweeter music than they played to me."

This is not the occasion, and if it were, there would still be imperative need

for extreme concision, whereon to dwell upon the early life

of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The particulars of it are familiar

to all who love English literature: for there is, in truth,

not much to tell -- not much, at least, that can well be told.

It must suffice, here, that Miss Barrett was born on the 4th of March 1809,*

and so was the senior, by three years, of Robert Browning.

--

* Should be 1806. See note in Table of Contents. -- A. L., 1996.

--

By 1820, in remote Herefordshire, the not yet eleven-year-old poetess

had already "cried aloud on obsolete Muses from childish lips"

in various "nascent odes, epics, and didactics." At this time, she tells us,

the Greeks were her demi-gods, and she dreamt much of Agamemnon.

In the same year, in suburban Camberwell, a little boy was often wont

to listen eagerly to his father's narrative of the same hero, and to all

the moving tale of Troy. It is significant that these two children,

so far apart, both with the light of the future upon their brows,

grew up in familiarity with something of the antique beauty.

It was a lifelong joy to both, that "serene air of Greece".

Many an hour of gloom was charmed away by it for the poetess

who translated the "Prometheus Bound" of Aeschylus, and wrote "The Dead Pan":

many a happy day and memorable night were spent in that "beloved environment"

by the poet who wrote "Balaustion's Adventure" and translated the "Agamemnon".

The chief sorrow of her life, however, occurred in her thirty-first year.

She never quite recovered from the shock of her well-loved brother Edward's

tragic death, a mysterious disaster, for the foundering of the little yacht

`La Belle Sauvage' is almost as inexplicable as that of the `Ariel'

in the Spezzian waters beyond Lerici. Not only through the ensuing winter,

but often in the dreams of after years, "the sound of the waves

rang in my ears like the moans of one dying."

The removal of the Barrett household to Gloucester Place,

in Western London, was a great event. Here, invalid though she was,

she could see friends occasionally and get new books constantly.

Her name was well known and became widely familiar when

her "Cry of the Children" rang like a clarion throughout the country.

The poem was founded upon an official report by Richard Hengist Horne,

the friend whom some years previously she had won in correspondence,

and with whom she had become so intimate, though without

personal acquaintance, that she had agreed to write a drama

in collaboration with him, to be called "Psyche Apocalypte",

and to be modelled on "Greek instead of modern tragedy."

Horne -- a poet of genius, and a dramatist of remarkable power --

was one of the truest friends she ever had, and, so far as her literary life

is concerned, came next in influence only to her poet-husband.

Among the friends she saw much of in the early forties was a distant "cousin",

John Kenyon -- a jovial, genial, gracious, and altogether delightful man,

who acted the part of Providence to many troubled souls, and, in particular,

was "a fairy godfather" to Elizabeth Barrett and to "the other poet",

as he used to call Browning. It was to Mr. Kenyon -- "Kenyon,

with the face of a Benedictine monk, but the most jovial of good fellows,"

as a friend has recorded of him; "Kenyon the Magnificent",

as he was called by Browning -- that Miss Barrett owed her first introduction

to the poetry of her future husband.

Browning's poetry had for her an immediate appeal. With sure insight

she discerned the special quality of the poetic wealth

of the "Bells and Pomegranates", among which she then and always

cared most for the penultimate volume, the "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics".

Two years before she met the author she had written,

in "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" --

"Or from Browning some `Pomegranate' which, if cut deep down the middle,

Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity."

A little earlier she had even, unwittingly on either side,

been a collaborateur with "the author of `Paracelsus'."

She gave Horne much aid in the preparation of his "New Spirit of the Age",

and he has himself told us "that the mottoes, which are singularly

happy and appropriate, were for the most part supplied

by Miss Barrett and Robert Browning, then unknown to each other."

One thing and another drew them nearer and nearer. Now it was a poem,

now a novel expression, now a rare sympathy.

An intermittent correspondence ensued, and both poets became anxious

to know each other. "We artists -- how well praise agrees with us,"

as Balzac says.

A few months later, in 1846, they came to know one another personally.

The story of their first meeting, which has received a wide acceptance,

is apocryphal. The meeting was brought about by Kenyon.

This common friend had been a schoolfellow of Browning's father,

and so it was natural that he took a more than ordinary interest

in the brilliant young poet, perhaps all the more so

that the reluctant tide of popularity which had promised to set in

with such unparalleled sweep and weight had since experienced a steady ebb.

And so the fates brought these two together. The younger was already

far the stronger, but he had an unbounded admiration for Miss Barrett.

To her, he was even then the chief living poet. She perceived

his ultimate greatness; as early as 1845 had "a full faith in him

as poet and prophet."

As Browning admitted to a friend, the love between them

was almost instantaneous, a thing of the eyes, mind, and heart --

each striving for supremacy, till all were gratified equally in a common joy.

They had one bond of sterling union: passion for the art

to which both had devoted their lives.

To those who love love for love's sake, who `se passionnent pour la passion,'

as Prosper Merimee says, there could scarce be a more sacred spot in London

than that fiftieth house in unattractive Wimpole Street,

where these two poets first met each other; and where, in the darkened room,

"Love quivered, an invisible flame." Elizabeth Barrett was indeed,

in her own words, "as sweet as Spring, as Ocean deep."

She, too, was always, as she wrote of Harriet Martineau,

in a hopeless anguish of body and serene triumph of spirit.

As George Sand says of one of her fictitious personages,

she was an "artist to the backbone; that is, one who feels life

with frightful intensity." To this too keen intensity of feeling

must be attributed something of that longing for repose,

that deep craving for rest from what is too exciting from within,

which made her affirm the exquisite appeal to her of such Biblical passages as

"The Lord of peace Himself give you peace," and "He giveth His Beloved Sleep,"

which, as she says in one of her numerous letters to Miss Mitford,

"strike upon the disquieted earth with such a FOREIGNNESS of heavenly music."

Nor was he whom she loved as a man, as well as revered as a poet,

unworthy of her. His was the robustest poetic intellect of the century;

his the serenest outlook; his, almost the sole unfaltering footsteps

along the perilous ways of speculative thought. A fair life,

irradiate with fairer ideals, conserved his native integrity

from that incongruity between practice and precept so commonly exemplified.

Comely in all respects, with his black-brown wavy hair, finely-cut features,

ready and winsome smile, alert luminous eyes, quick, spontaneous,

expressive gestures -- an inclination of the head, a lift of the eyebrows,

a modulation of the lips, an assertive or deprecatory wave of the hand,

conveying so much -- and a voice at that time of a singular

penetrating sweetness, he was, even without that light of the future

upon his forehead which she was so swift to discern, a man to captivate

any woman of kindred nature and sympathies. Over and above these advantages,

he possessed a rare quality of physical magnetism. By virtue of this

he could either attract irresistibly or strongly repel.

I have several times heard people state that a handshake from Browning

was like an electric shock. Truly enough, it did seem as though

his sterling nature rang in his genially dominant voice, and, again,

as though his voice transmitted instantaneous waves of an electric current

through every nerve of what, for want of a better phrase,

I must perforce call his intensely alive hand. I remember once how a lady,

afflicted with nerves, in the dubious enjoyment of her first experience of

a "literary afternoon", rose hurriedly and, in reply to her hostess' inquiry

as to her motive, explained that she could not sit any longer

beside the elderly gentleman who was talking to Mrs. So-and-so,

as his near presence made her quiver all over, "like a mild attack

of pins-and-needles," as she phrased it. She was chagrined to learn

that she had been discomposed not by `a too exuberant financier',

as she had surmised, but by, as "Waring" called Browning,

the "subtlest assertor of the Soul in song."

With the same quick insight as she had perceived Robert Browning's

poetic greatness, Elizabeth Barrett discerned his personal worth.

He was essentially manly in all respects: so manly,

that many frail souls of either sex philandered about his over-robustness.

From the twilight gloom of an aesthetic clique came a small voice

belittling the great man as "quite too `loud', painfully excessive."

Browning was manly enough to laugh at all ghoulish cries

of any kind whatsoever. Once in a way the lion would look round

and by a raised breath make the jackals wriggle; as when the poet

wrote to a correspondent, who had drawn his attention

to certain abusive personalities in some review or newspaper:

"Dear Sir -- I am sure you mean very kindly, but I have had

too long an experience of the inability of the human goose

to do other than cackle when benevolent and hiss when malicious,

and no amount of goose criticism shall make me lift a heel

against what waddles behind it."

Herself one whose happiest experiences were in dreamland,

Miss Barrett was keenly susceptible to the strong humanity of Browning's song,

nor less keenly attracted by his strenuous and fearless outlook,

his poetic practicality, and even by his bluntness of insight

in certain matters. It was no slight thing to her that she could,

in Mr. Lowell's words, say of herself and of him --

"We, who believe life's bases rest

Beyond the probe of chemic test."

She rejoiced, despite her own love for remote imaginings,

to know that he was of those who (to quote again from the same fine poet)

". . . wasted not their breath in schemes

Of what man might be in some bubble-sphere,

As if he must be other than he seems

Because he was not what he should be here,

Postponing Time's slow proof to petulant dreams;"

that, in a word, while `he could believe the promise of to-morrow,' he was

at the same time supremely conscious of `the wondrous meaning of to-day.'

Both, from their youth onward, had travelled `on trails divine

of unimagined laws.' It was sufficient for her that he kept his eyes

fixed on the goal beyond the way he followed: it did not matter

that he was blind to the dim adumbrations of novel byways,

of strange Calvarys by the wayside, so often visible to her.

Their first meeting was speedily followed by a second -- by a third --

and then? When we know not, but ere long, each found that happiness

was in the bestowal of the other.

The secret was for some time kept absolutely private. From the first

Mr. Barrett had been jealous of his beloved daughter's new friend.

He did not care much for the man, he with all the prejudices

and baneful conservatism of the slave-owning planter, the other

with ardent democratic sentiments and a detestation of all forms of iniquity.

Nor did he understand the poet. He could read his daughter's flowing verse

with pleasure, but there was to his ear a mere jumble of sound and sense

in much of the work of the author of "The Tomb at St. Praxed's"

and "Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis". Of a selfishly genial but also

of a violent and often sullen nature, he resented more and more any friendship

which threatened to loosen the chain of affection and association

binding his daughter to himself.

Both the lovers believed that an immediate marriage would,

from every point of view, be best. It was not advisable that it should be

long delayed, if to happen at all, for the health of Miss Barrett was so poor

that another winter in London might, probably would, mean irretrievable harm.

Some time before this she had become acquainted with Mrs. Jameson,

the eminent art-writer. The regard, which quickly developed

to an affectionate esteem, was mutual. One September morning

Mrs. Jameson called, and after having dwelt on the gloom and peril

of another winter in London, dwelt on the magic of Italy,

and concluded by inviting Miss Barrett to accompany her

in her own imminent departure for abroad. The poet was touched and grateful,

but, pointing to her invalid sofa, and gently emphasising

her enfeebled health and other difficult circumstances,

excused herself from acceptance of Mrs. Jameson's generous offer.

In the "Memoirs of Mrs. Jameson" that lady's niece, Mrs. Macpherson,

relates how on the eve of her and her aunt's departure,

a little note of farewell arrived from Miss Barrett, "deploring the writer's

inability to come in person and bid her friend good-bye,

as she was `forced to be satisfied with the sofa and silence.'"

It is easy to understand, therefore, with what amazement Mrs. Jameson,

shortly after her arrival in Paris, received a letter from Robert Browning

to the effect that he AND HIS WIFE had just come from London,

on their way to Italy. "My aunt's surprise was something almost comical,"

writes Mrs. Macpherson, "so startling and entirely unexpected was the news."

And duly married indeed the two poets had been!

From the moment the matter was mooted to Mr. Barrett, he evinced

his repugnance to the idea. To him even the most foolish assertion of his own

was a sacred pledge. He called it "pride in his word": others recognised it

as the very arrogance of obstinacy. He refused to countenance the marriage

in any way, refused to have Browning's name mentioned in his presence,

and even when his daughter told him that she had definitely made up her mind,

he flatly declined to acknowledge as even possible what was indeed

very imminent.

Nor did he ever step down from his ridiculous pinnacle of wounded self-love.

Favourite daughter though she had been, Mr. Barrett never forgave her,

held no communication with her even when she became a mother,

and did not mention her in his will. It is needless to say anything more

upon this subject. What Mr. and Mrs. Browning were invariably reticent upon

can well be passed over with mere mention of the facts.

At the last moment there had been great hurry and confusion.

But nevertheless, on the forenoon of the 12th of September 1846,

Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett had unceremoniously

stepped into St. Mary-le-bone Church and there been married.

So secret had the matter been kept that even such old friends

as Richard Hengist Horne and Mr. Kenyon were in ignorance of the event

for some time after it had actually occurred.

Mrs. Jameson made all haste to the hotel where the Brownings were,

and ultimately persuaded them to leave the hotel for the quieter `pension'

in the Rue Ville d'Eveque, where she and Mrs. Macpherson were staying.

Thereafter it was agreed that, as soon as a fortnight had gone by,

they should journey to Italy together.

Truly enough, as Mrs. Macpherson says, the journey must have been "enchanting,

made in such companionship." Before departing from Paris,

Mrs. Jameson, in writing to a friend, alluded to her unexpected companions,

and added, "Both excellent: but God help them! for I know not how

the two poet heads and poet hearts will get on through this prosaic world."

This kindly friend was not the only person who experienced similar doubts.

One acquaintance, no other than the Poet-Laureate, Wordsworth, added:

"So, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett have gone off together!

Well, I hope they may understand each other -- nobody else could!"

As a matter of fact they did, and to such good intent

that they seem never to have had one hour of dissatisfaction,

never one jar in the music of their lives.

What a happy wayfaring through France that must have been!

The travelling had to be slow, and with frequent interruptions,

on account of Mrs. Browning's health: yet she steadily improved,

and was almost from the start able to take more exercise,

and to be longer in the open air than had for long been her wont.

They passed southward, and after some novel experiences in `diligences',

reached Avignon, where they rested for a couple of days.

Thence a little expedition, a poetical pilgrimage, was made to Vaucluse,

sacred to the memory of Petrarch and Laura. There, as Mrs. Macpherson

has told us, at the very source of the "chiare, fresche e dolce acque,"

Browning took his wife up in his arms, and, carrying her across

through the shallow curling waters, seated her on a rock

that rose throne-like in the middle of the stream. Thus, indeed,

did love and poetry take a new possession of the spot immortalised

by Petrarch's loving fancy.

Three weeks passed happily before Pisa, the Brownings' destination,

was reached. But even then the friends were unwilling to part,

and Mrs. Jameson and her niece remained in the deserted old city

for a score of days longer. So wonderful was the change

wrought in Mrs. Browning by happiness, and by all the enfranchisement

her marriage meant for her, that, as her friend wrote to Miss Mitford,

"she is not merely improved but transformed." In the new sunshine

which had come into her life, she blossomed like a flower-bud

long delayed by gloom and chill. Her heart, in truth, was like a lark

when wafted skyward by the first spring-wind.

At last to her there had come something of that peace she had longed for,

and though, in the joy of her new life, her genius "like an Arab bird

slept floating in the wind," it was with that restful hush

which precedes the creative storm. There is something deeply pathetic

in her conscious joy. So little actual experience of life had been hers that

in many respects she was as a child: and she had all the child's yearning

for those unsullied hours that never come when once they are missed.

But it was not till love unfastened the inner chambers of her heart and brain

that she realised to the full, what she had often doubted,

how supreme a thing mere life is. It was in some such mood

that she wrote the lovely forty-second of the "Sonnets from the Portuguese",

closing thus --

"Let us stay

Rather on earth, Beloved, -- where the unfit

Contrarious moods of men recoil away

And isolate pure spirits, and permit

A place to stand and love in for a day,

With darkness and the death-hour rounding it."

As for Browning's love towards his wife, nothing more tender and chivalrous

has ever been told of ideal lovers in an ideal romance.

It is so beautiful a story that one often prefers it

to the sweetest or loftiest poem that came from the lips of either.

That love knew no soilure in the passage of the years.

Like the flame of oriental legend, it was perennially incandescent

though fed not otherwise than by sunlight and moonshine.

If it alone survive, it may resolve the poetic fame of either

into one imperishable, luminous ray of white light: as the uttered song

fused in the deathless passion of Sappho gleams star-like down the centuries

from the high steep of Leucadoe.

It was here, in Pisa, I have been told on indubitable authority,

that Browning first saw in manuscript those "Sonnets from the Portuguese"

which no poet of Portugal had ever written, which no man could have written,

which no other woman than his wife could have composed.

From the time when it had first dawned upon her that love was to be hers,

and that the laurel of poetry was not to be her sole coronal,

she had found expression for her exquisite trouble in these short poems,

which she thinly disguised from `inner publicity' when she issued them

as "from the Portuguese".

It is pleasant to think of the shy delight with which the delicate,

flower-like, almost ethereal poet-wife, in those memorable Pisan evenings --

with the wind blowing soundingly from the hills of Carrara,

or quiescent in a deep autumnal calm broken only by the slow wash of Arno

along the sea-mossed long-deserted quays -- showed her love-poems

to her husband. With what love and pride he must have read

those outpourings of the most sensitive and beautiful nature he had ever met,

vials of lovely thought and lovelier emotion, all stored against

the coming of a golden day.

"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

I love thee to the level of every day's

Most quiet need, by sun and candle light.

I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;

I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints, -- I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life! -- and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after Death!"

Even such heart-music as this cannot have thrilled him more

than these two exquisite lines, with their truth almost too poignant

to permit of serene joy --

"I yield the grave for thy sake, and exchange

My near sweet view of heaven for earth with thee!"