humour, like most of his qualities, is peculiar to himself, though no
doubt Carlyle had something of it. It is of wide capacity, and ranges
from the effervescence of pure fun and freak to that salt and briny
laughter whose taste is bitterer than tears. Its full extent will be
seen by comparing _The Pied Piper of Hamelin_ with _Confessions_, or in
the contrast of the two parts of _Holy-Cross Day_. We find the simplest
form of humour, the jolly laughter of an unaffected nature, the
effervescence of a sparkling and overflowing brain, in such poems as _Up
at a Villa--Down in the City_, or _Pacchiarotto_, or _Sibrandus
Schafnaburgensis_. _Fra Lippo Lippi_ leans to this category, though it
is infused with biting wit and stinging irony; for it is first and
foremost the bubbling-up of a restless and irrepressibly comic nature,
the born Bohemian compressed but not contained by the rough rope-girdle
of the monk. He is Browning's finest figure of comedy. _Ned Bratts_ is
another admirable creation of true humour, tinged with the grotesque. In
_A Lovers' Quarrel_ and _Dîs aliter Visum_, humour refines into passion.
In _Bishop Blougram_ it condenses into wit. The poem has a well-bred
irony; in _A Soul's Tragedy_ irony smiles and stings; in _Mr. Sludge,
the Medium_, it stabs with a thirsty point. In _Caliban upon Setebos_ we
have the pure grotesque, an essentially noble variety of art, admitting
of the utmost refinement of workmanship. The _Soliloquy of the Spanish
Cloister_ attains a new effect of grotesque: it is the comic tragedy of
vituperative malevolence. _Holy-Cross Day_ heightens the grotesque with
pity, indignation and solemnity: _The Heretic's Tragedy_ raises it to
sublimity. Browning's satire is equally keen and kindly. It never
condescends to raise laughter at infirmity, or at mere absurdities of
manners; it respects human nature, but it convicts falsity by the
revealing intensity of its illumination. Of cynicism, of the wit that
preys upon carrion, there is less than nothing.
Of all poets Browning is the healthiest and manliest; he is one of
the "substantial men" of whom Landor speaks. His genius is robust with
vigorous blood, and his tone has the cheeriness of intellectual health.
The most subtle of minds, his is the least sickly. The wind that blows
in his pages is no hot and languorous breeze, laden with scents and
sweets, but a fresh salt wind blowing in from the sea. His poetry is a
tonic; it braces and invigorates. "_Il fait vivre ses phrases_:"
his verse lives and throbs with life. He is incomparably plentiful of
vital heat; "so thoroughly and delightfully alive." This is an effect
of art, and a moral impression. It brings us into his own presence, and
stirs us with an answering warmth of life in the breathing pages. The
keynote of his philosophy is:--
"God's in his heaven,
All's right with the world!"
He has such a hopefulness of belief in human nature that he shrinks from
no _man_, however clothed and cloaked in evil, however miry with
stumblings and fallings. I am a man, he might say with the noblest
utterance of antiquity, and I deem nothing alien that is human. His
investigations of evil are profoundly consistent with an indomitable
optimism. Any one can say "All's right with the world," when he looks at
the smiling face of things, at comfortable prosperity and a decent
morality. But the test of optimism is its sight of evil. Browning has
fathomed it, and he can still hope, for he sees the reflection of the
sun in the depths of every foul puddle. This vivid hope and trust in man
is bound up with a strong and strenuous faith in God. Browning's
Christianity is wider than our creeds, and is all the more vitally
Christian in that it never sinks into pietism. He is never didactic, but
his faith is the root of his art, and transforms and transfigures it.
Yet as a dramatic poet he is so impartial, and can express all creeds
with so easy an interpretative accent, that it is possible to prove him
(as Shakespeare has been proved) a believer in every thing and a
disbeliever in anything.
Such, so far as I can realise my conception of him, is Robert Browning;
and such the tenour of his work as a whole. It is time to pass from
general considerations to particular ones; from characteristics of the
writer to characteristics of the poems. In the pages to follow I shall
endeavour to present a critical chronicle of Browning's works; not
neglecting to give due information about each, but not confining myself
to the mere giving of information. It is hoped that the quotations for
which I may find room will practically illustrate and convincingly
corroborate what I have to say about the poetry from which they are
taken.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: _Luria_, Act iii.]
[Footnote 2: _Aurora Leigh_, Book Fifth.]
[Footnote 3: Walter Pater, _The Renaissance_, p, 226.]
[Footnote 4: _Aurora Leigh_, Book Third.]
[Footnote 5: Preface to _Poems_, 1853.]
[Footnote 6: _George Chapman: A Critical Essay_, 1875.]
[Footnote 7: _Works_, 1847, Preface to Sermons, pp. viii.-ix., where
will also be found some exceedingly sensible remarks, which I commend to
those whom it concerns, on persons "who take it for granted that they
are acquainted with everything; and that no subject, if treated in the
manner it should be, can be treated in any manner but what is familiar
and easy to them."]
[Footnote 8: "Realism in Dramatic Art," _New Quarterly Magazine_, Oct.,
1879.]
[Footnote 9: Allowing at its highest valuation all that need be allowed
on this score, we find only that Mr. Browning has the defects of his
qualities; and from these who is exempted? By virtue of this style of
his he has succeeded in rendering into words the inmost thoughts and
finest shades of feeling of the "men and women fashioned by his fancy,"
and in such a task we can pardon even a fault, for such a result we can
overlook even a blemish; as Lessing, in _Laokoon_, remarking on an error
in Raphael's drapery, finely says, "Who will not rather praise him for
having had the wisdom and the courage to commit a slight fault, for the
sake of greater fulness of expression?"]
[Footnote 10: George Meredith, _Diana of the Crossways_.]
[Footnote 11: Italians, it is pleasant to remember, have warmly welcomed
the poet who has known and loved Italy best. "Her town and country, her
churches and her ruins, her sorrows and her hopes," said Prof. Nencioni,
as long ago as 1867, "are constantly sung by him. How he loves the land
that inspires him he has shown by his long residence among us, and by
the thrilling, almost lover-like tone with which he speaks of our dear
country. 'Open my heart and you will see, Graved inside of it Italy,' as
he exclaims in _De Gustibus_."]
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POEMS
(1833-1890)
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POEMS
(1833-1890.)
* * * * *
1. PAULINE: a Fragment of a Confession.
[Published anonymously in 1833; first reprinted (the text
unaltered) in _Poetical Works_, 6 vols., Smith, Elder and
Co., 1868 (Vol. I., pp. 1-41); revised text, _Poetical
Works_, 1889, Vol. I., pp. 1-45.]
_PAULINE_ was written at the age of twenty. Its prefatory motto from
Cornelius Agrippa (dated "_London, January, 1833_. _V.A.XX._") serves to
convey a hint that the "confession" is dramatic, and at the same time
lays claim to the indulgence due to the author's youth. These two points
are stated plainly in the "exculpatory word" prefixed to the reprint in
1868. After mentioning the circumstances under which the revival of the
poem was forced on him, Browning says:
"The thing was my earliest attempt at 'poetry always dramatic
in principle, and so many utterances of so many imaginary
persons, not mine,' which I have since written according to a
scheme less extravagant and scale less impracticable than
were ventured upon in this crude preliminary sketch--a sketch
that, on reviewal, appears not altogether wide of some hint
of the characteristic features of that particular _dramatis
persona_ it would fain have reproduced: good draughtsmanship,
however, and right handling were far beyond the artist at
that time."
In a note to the collected edition of 1889, Browning adds:
"Twenty years' endurance of an eyesore seems more than
sufficient; my faults remain duly recorded against me, and I
claim permission to somewhat diminish these, so far as style
is concerned, in the present and final edition."
A revised text follows, in which, while many "faults" are indeed
"diminished," it is difficult not to feel at times as if the foot-notes
had got into the text.
_Pauline_ is the confession of an unnamed poet to the woman whom he
loves, and whose name is given in the title. It is a sort of spiritual
autobiography; a record of sensations and ideas, rather than of deeds.
"The scenery is in the chambers of thought; the agencies are powers and
passions; the events are transitions from one state of spiritual
existence to another." There is a vagueness of outline about the speaker
which is due partly, no doubt, to the immaturity of the writer, partly
also to the too exclusive portraiture of inactive mood. The difficulty
is acknowledged in a curious "editor's" note, written in French, and
signed "Pauline," in which Browning offered a sort of explanatory
criticism of his own work. So far as we can grasp his personality, the
speaker appears to us a highly-gifted and on the whole right-natured
man, but possessed of a morbid self-consciousness and a limitless yet
indecisive ambition. Endowed with a highly poetic nature, yet without,
as it seems, adequate concentrative power; filled, at times, with a
passionate yearning after God and good, yet morally unstable; he has
spent much of his strength in ineffectual efforts, and he is conscious
of lamentable failure and mistake in the course of his past life.
Specially does he recognise and mourn his "self-idolatry," which has
isolated him from others, and confined him within the close and vitiated
circle of his own selfhood. Led by some better impulse, he now turns to
Pauline, and to the memory of a great and dearly-loved poet, spoken of
as "Sun-treader," finding in these, the memory and the love, a quietude
and a redemption.
The poet of the poem is an imaginary character, but it is possible to
trace in this character some real traits of its creator. The passage
beginning "I am made up of an intensest life" is certainly a piece of
admirable self-portraiture; allusions here and there have a personal
significance. In this earliest poem we see the germ of almost all the
qualities (humour excepted) which mark Browning's mature work. Intensity
of religious belief, love of music, of painting, and of the Greek
classics; insight into nature, a primary interest in and intense insight
into the human soul, these are already manifest. No characteristic is
more interesting in the light of long subsequent achievement than the
familiarity with Greek literature, shown not merely by the references to
Plato and to Agamemnon, but by what is perhaps the finest passage in the
poem, the one ending:--
"Yet I say, never morn broke clear as those
On the dim clustered isles in the blue sea,
The deep groves and white temples and wet caves:
And nothing ever will surprise me now--
Who stood beside the naked Swift-footed,
Who bound my forehead with Proserpine's hair."
The enthusiasm which breathes through whole pages of address to the
"Sun-treader" gives no exaggerated picture of Browning's love and
reverence for Shelley, whose _Alastor_ might perhaps in some respects be
compared with _Pauline_. The rhythm of Browning's poem has a certain
echo in it of Shelley's earlier blank verse; and the lyrically emotional
descriptions and the vivid and touching metaphors derived from nature
frequently remind us of Shelley, and sometimes of Keats. On every page
we meet with magical touches like this:--
"Thou wilt remember one warm morn when winter
Crept aged from the earth, and spring's first breath
Blew soft from the moist hills; the black-thorn boughs,
So dark in the bare wood, when glistening
In the sunshine were white with coming buds,
Like the bright side of a sorrow, and the banks
Had violets opening from sleep like eyes;"
with lines full of exquisite fancy, such as those on the woodland
tarn:--
"The trees bend
O'er it as wild men watch a sleeping girl;"
and in one place we have a marvellously graphic description, extending
over three pages, perhaps the most elaborately painted landscape in
Browning's work. It seems like wronging the poem to speak of its
_promise_: it is, indeed, far from mature, but it has a superb precocity
marking a certain stage of ripeness. It is lacking, certainly, as
Browning himself declares, in "good draughtsmanship and right handling,"
but this defect of youth is richly compensated by the wealth of
inspiration, the keen intellectual and ethical insight, and the
numberless lines of haunting charm, which have nothing of youth in them
but its vigorous freshness.
2. PARACELSUS.
[Published in 1835; first acknowledged work (_Poetical
Works_, 1889, Vol. II., pp. 1-186.) The original MS. is in the
Forster Library at South Kensington.]
The poem is divided into five scenes, each a typical episode in the life
of Paracelsus. It is in the form of dialogue between Paracelsus and
others: Festus and his wife Michal in the first scene, Aprile, an
Italian poet, in the second, and Festus only in the remainder. The poem
is followed by an appendix, containing a few notes and a brief biography
of Paracelsus, translated from the _Biographie Universelle_.
_Paracelsus_ might be praised, and has justly been praised, for its
serious and penetrating quality as an historical study of the great
mystic and great man of science, who had realised, before most people,
that "matter is the visible body of the invisible God," and who had been
the Luther of medicine. But the historical element is less important
than the philosophical; both are far less important than the purely
poetical. The leading motive is not unlike that of _Pauline_ and of
_Sordello_: it is handled, however, far more ably than in the former,
and much more clearly than in the latter. Paracelsus is a portrait of
the seeker after knowledge, one whose ambition transcends all earthly
limits, and exhausts itself in the thirst of the impossible. His career
is traced from its noble outset at Würzburg to its miserable close in
the hospital at Salzburg, through all its course of struggle, conquest
and deterioration. His last effort, the superb dying speech, gives the
moral of his mistake, and, in the light of the new intuition flashed on
his soul by death, the true conception of the powers and limits of man.
The character and mental vicissitudes of Paracelsus are brought out, as
has been stated, in dialogue with others. The three minor characters,
though probably called into being as mere foils to the protagonist, have
a distinct individuality of their own. Michal is Browning's first sketch
of a woman. She is faint in outline and very quiet in presence, but
though she scarcely speaks twenty lines, her face remains with us like a
beautiful face seen once and never to be forgotten. There is something
already, in her tentative delineation, of that "piercing and
overpowering tenderness which glorifies the poet of Pompilia." Festus,
Michal's husband, the friend and adviser of Paracelsus, is a man of
simple nature and thoughtful mind, cautious yet not cold, clear-sighted
rather than far-seeing, yet not without enthusiasm; perhaps a little
narrow and commonplace, as the prudent are apt to be. He, like Michal,
has no influence on the external action of the poem. Aprile, the Italian
poet whom Paracelsus encounters in the second scene, is an integral part
of the poem; for it is through him that a crisis is reached in the
development of the seeker after knowledge. Unlike Festus and Michal, he
is a type rather than a realisable human being, the type of the Artist
pure and simple, the lover of beauty and of beauty alone, a soul
immoderately possessed with the desire to love, as Paracelsus with the
desire to know. He flickers, an expiring flame, across the pathway of
the stronger spirit, one luminous moment and no more.
_Paracelsus_, though written in dialogue, is not intended to be a drama.
This was clearly stated in the preface to the first edition, an
important document, never afterwards reprinted. "Instead of having
recourse," wrote Browning, "to an external machinery of incidents to
create and evolve the crisis I desire to produce, I have ventured to
display somewhat minutely the mood itself in its rise and progress, and
have suffered the agency by which it is influenced to be generally
discernible in its effects alone, and subordinate throughout, if not
altogether excluded."[12] The proportions of the work are epical rather
than dramatic; but indeed it is difficult to class, so exuberant is the
vitality which fills and overflows all limits. What is not a drama,
though in dialogue, nor yet an epic, except in length, can scarcely be
considered, any more than its successors, and perhaps imitators,
_Festus_, _Balder_, or _A Life Drama_, properly artistic in form. But it
is distinguished from this prolific progeny not only by a finer and
firmer imagination, a truer poetic richness, but by a moderation, a
concreteness, a grip, which are certainly all its own. In few of
Browning's poems are there so many individual lines and single passages
which we are so apt to pause on, to read again and again, for the mere
enjoyment of their splendid sound and colour. And this for a reason. The
large and lofty character of Paracelsus, the avoidance of much external
detail, and the high tension at which thought and emotion are kept
throughout, permit the poet to use his full resources of style and
diction without producing an effect of unreality and extravagance. We
meet on almost every page with lines like these:--
"Ask the gier-eagle why she stoops at once
Into the vast and unexplored abyss,
What full-grown power informs her from the first,
Why she not marvels, strenuously beating
The silent boundless regions of the sky."
Or again, lines like these, which have become the watch-word of a
Gordon:--
"I go to prove my soul!
I see my way as birds their trackless way.
I shall arrive! what time, what circuit first,
I ask not: but unless God send his hail
Or blinding fireballs, sleet or stifling snow,
In some time, his good time, I shall arrive:
He guides me and the bird. In his good time!"
At times the brooding splendour bursts forth in a kind of vast ecstasy,
and we have such magnificence as this:--
"The centre fire heaves underneath the earth,
And the earth changes like a human face;
The molten ore bursts up among the rocks,
Winds into the stone's heart, outbranches bright
In hidden mines, spots barren river-beds,
Crumbles into fine sand where sunbeams bask--
God joys therein. The wroth sea's waves are edged
With foam, white as the bitten lip of hate,
When, in the solitary waste, strange groups
Of young volcanos come up, cyclops-like,
Staring together with their eyes on flame--
God tastes a pleasure in their uncouth pride.
Then all is still; earth is a wintry clod:
But spring-wind, like a dancing psaltress, passes
Over its breast to waken it, rare verdure
Buds tenderly upon rough banks, between
The withered tree-roots and the cracks of frost,
Like a smile striving with a wrinkled face;
The grass grows bright, the boughs are swoln with blooms
Like chrysalids impatient for the air,
The shining dorrs are busy, beetles run
Along the furrows, ants make their ado;
Above, birds fly in merry flocks, the lark
Soars up and up, shivering for very joy;
Afar the ocean sleeps; white fishing-gulls
Flit where the strand is purple with its tribe
Of nested limpets; savage creatures seek
Their loves in wood and plain--and God renews
His ancient rapture."
The blank verse of _Paracelsus_ is varied by four lyrics, themselves
various in style, and full of rare music: the spirit song of the
unfaithful poets--
"The sad rhyme of the men who sadly clung
To their first fault, and withered in their pride,"
the gentle song of the Mayne river, and that strange song of old spices
which haunts the brain like a perfume:--
"Heap cassia, sandal-buds and stripes
Of labdanum, and aloe-balls,
Smeared with dull nard an Indian wipes
From out her hair: such balsam falls
Down sea-side mountain pedestals,
From tree-tops where tired winds are fain,
Spent with the vast and howling main,
To treasure half their island gain.
And strew faint sweetness from some old
Egyptian's fine worm-eaten shroud
Which breaks to dust when once unrolled;
Or shredded perfume, like a cloud
From closet long to quiet vowed,
With mothed and dropping arras hung,
Mouldering her lute and books among,
As when a queen, long dead was young."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 12: See the whole Preface, Appendix II.]
3. STRAFFORD: an Historical Tragedy.
[Written toward the close of 1836; acted at the Theatre
Royal, Covent Garden (_Strafford_, Mr. Macready; _Countess of
Carlisle_, Miss Helen Faucit), May 1, 1837; by the Browning
Society at the Strand Theatre, Dec. 21, 1886, and at Oxford
by the O.U.D.S. in 1890; published in 1837 (_Poetical Works_,
1889, Vol. II., pp. 187-307).]
_Strafford_ was written, at Macready's earnest request, in an interval
of the composition of _Sordello_. Like all Browning's plays which were
acted, it owed its partial failure to causes quite apart from its own
merits or defects as a play.[13] Browning may not have had the making of
a good playwright; but at least no one ever gave him the chance of
showing whether he was or not. The play is not without incident,
especially in the third act. But its chief merit lies in the language
and style of the dialogue. There is no aim at historical dignity or
poetical elaboration; the aim is nature, quick with personal passion.
Every word throbs with emotion; through these exclamatory, yet how
delicate and subtle lines, we seem actually to see and hear the
speakers, and with surprising vividness. The words supply their own
accents, looks and gestures.
In his preface to the first edition (reprinted in Appendix II.) Browning
states that he believes the historical portraits to be faithful. This is
to a considerable extent confirmed by Professor Gardiner, who has given
a careful consideration of the play in its historical aspects, in his
Introduction to Miss Hickey's annotated edition (G. Bell & Sons, 1884).
As a representation of history, he tells us, it is inaccurate; "the very
roots of the situation are untrue to fact." But (as he allows) this
departure from fact, in the conduct of the action, is intentional, and,
of course, allowable: Browning was writing a drama, not a history. Of
the portraits, the really vital part of the play as an interpretation of
history, he writes:--
"For myself, I can only say that, every time I read the play,
I feel more convinced that Mr. Browning has seized the real
Strafford, the man of critical brain, of rapid decision, and
tender heart, who strove for the good of his nation, without
sympathy for the generation in which he lived. Charles, too,
with his faults perhaps exaggerated, is, nevertheless, a real
Charles.... There is a wonderful parallelism between the Lady
Carlisle of the play and the less noble Lady Carlisle which
history conjectures rather than describes.... On the other
hand, Pym is the most unsatisfactory, from an historical
point of view, of the leading personages."