great house, proud above all things of the honour of the family and its
yet stainless 'scutcheon, and proud, with a deep brotherly tenderness of
his sister Mildred: a strong and fine nature, one whom men instinctively
cite as "the perfect spirit of honour." Mertoun, the apparent hero of
the play, is a much less prominent and masterly figure than Tresham, not
so much from any lack of skill in his delineation, as from the essential
ineffectualness of his nature. Guendolen Tresham, the Beatrice of the
play (her lover Austin is certainly no Benedick) is one of the most
pleasantly humorous characters in Browning. Her gay, light-hearted talk
brightens the sombre action like a gleam of sunlight. And like her
prototype, she is a true woman. As Beatrice stands by the calumniated
Hero, so Guendolen stands by Mildred, and by her quick woman's heart and
wit, her instinct of things, sees and seizes the missing clue, though
too late, as it proves, to avert the impending disaster.
The play contains one of Browning's most delicate and musical lyrics,
the serenade beginning, "There's a woman like a dew-drop." This is the
first of the love-songs in long lines which Browning wrote so often at
the end of his life, and so seldom earlier.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 21: A contemporary account, written by Joseph Arnould to
Alfred Domett, says: "The first night was magnificent ... there could be
no mistake at all about the honest enthusiasm of the audience. The
gallery (and this, of course, was very gratifying, because not to be
expected at a play of _Browning_) took all the points quite as quickly
as the pit, and entered into the general feeling and interest of the
action far more than the boxes.... Altogether the first night was a
triumph."--_Robert Browning and Alfred Domett_, 1906, p. 65.]
[Footnote 22: Forster's _Life of Dickens_, vol. ii., p. 24.]
10. COLOMBE'S BIRTHDAY: A Play in Five Acts.
[Published in 1844 as No. VI. of _Bells and Pomegranates_
(_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol. IV., pp. 71-169). Played at the
Haymarket Theatre, April 25, 1853, Miss Helen Faucit taking
the part of _Colombe_; also, with Miss Alma Murray as
_Colombe_, at St. George's Hall, November 19, 1885, under the
direction of the Browning Society. The action takes place
from morning to night of one day].
_Colombe's Birthday_, a drama founded on an imaginary episode in the
history of a German duchy of the seventeenth century, is the first play
which is mainly concerned with inward rather than outward action; in
which the characters themselves, what they are in their own souls, what
they think of themselves, and what others think of them, constitute the
chief interest, the interest of the characters as they influence one
another or external events being secondary. Colombe of Ravestein,
Duchess of Juliers and Cleves, is surprised, on the first anniversary of
her accession (the day being also her birthday), by a rival claimant to
the duchy, Prince Berthold, who proves to be in fact the true heir.
Berthold, instead of pressing his claim, offers to marry her. But he
conceives the honour and the favour to be sufficient, and makes no
pretence at offering love as well. On the other hand, Valence, a poor
advocate of Cleves, who has stood by Colombe when all her other friends
failed, offers her his love, a love to which she can only respond by
"giving up the world"; in other words, by relinquishing her duchy, and
the alliance with a Prince who is on the way to be Emperor. We have
nothing to do with the question of who has the right and who has the
might: that matter is settled, and the succession agreed on, almost
from the beginning. Nor are we made to feel that any disgrace or
reputation of weakness will rest on Colombe if she gives up her duchy;
not even that the pang at doing so will be over-acute or entirely
unrelieved. All the interest centres in the purely personal and
psychological bearings of the act. It is perhaps a consequence of this
that the style is somewhat different from that of any previous play. Any
one who notices the stage directions will see that the persons of the
drama frequently speak "after a pause." The language which they use is,
naturally enough, more deliberate and reflective, the lines are slower
and more weighty, than would be appropriate amid the breathless action
of _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_ or _The Return of the Druses_. A certain
fiery quality, a thrilling, heart-stirred and heart-stirring tone, which
we find in these is wanting; but the calm sweep of the action is carried
onward by a verse whose large harmonies almost recall _Paracelsus_.
Colombe, the true heroine of the play named after her is, if not "the
completest full-length portrait of a woman that Browning has drawn,"
certainly one of the sweetest and most stable. Her character develops
during the course of the play; as she herself says,
"This is indeed my birthday--soul and body,
Its hours have done on me the work of years--"
and it leaves her a nobler and stronger, yet not less charming woman
than it found her. Hitherto she has been a mere "play-queen," shut in
from action, shut in from facts and the world, and caring only to be gay
and amused. But now, at the first and yet final trial, she is proved
and found to be of noble metal. The gay girlishness of the young
Duchess, her joyous and generous light heart; her womanliness, her
earnestness, her clear, deep, noble nature, attract us from her first
words, and leave us, after the hour we have spent in her presence, with
a memory like that of some woman whom we have met, for an hour or a
moment, in the world or in books.
Berthold, the weary and unsatisfied conqueror, is a singularly
unconventional figure. He is a man of action, with some of the
sympathies of the scholar and the lover; resolute in the attainment of
ends which he sees to be, in themselves, vulgar; his ambition rather an
instinct than something to be pursued for itself, and his soul too
keenly aware of the joys and interests he foregoes, to be quite
satisfied or content with his lot and conduct. The grave courtesy of his
speech to Colombe, his somewhat condescending but not unfriendly tone
with Valence, his rough home-truths with the parasitical courtiers, and
his frank confidence with Melchior, are admirably discriminated.
Melchior himself, little as he speaks, is a fine sketch of the
contemplative, bookish man who finds no more congenial companion and
study than a successful man of action. His attitude of detachment, a
mere spectator in the background, is well in keeping with the calm and
thoughtful character of the play. Valence, the true hero of the piece,
the "pale fiery man" who can speak with so moving an eloquence, whether
he is pleading the wrongs of his townsmen or of Colombe, the rights of
Berthold or of himself, is no less masterly a portrait than the Prince,
though perhaps less wholly unconventional a character. His grave
earnestness, his honour as a man and passion as a lover, move our
instinctive sympathy, and he never forfeits it. Were it for nothing
else, he would deserve remembrance from the fact that he is one of the
speakers in that most delightful of love-duets, the incomparable scene
at the close of the fourth act. "I remember well to have seen," wrote
Moncure D. Conway in 1854, "a vast miscellaneous crowd in an American
theatre hanging with breathless attention upon every word of this
interview, down to the splendid climax when, in obedience to the
Duchess's direction to Valence how he should reveal his love to the lady
she so little suspects herself to be herself, he kneels--every heart
evidently feeling each word as an electric touch, and all giving vent at
last to their emotion in round after round of hearty applause."
All the minor characters are good and life-like, particularly Guibert,
the shrewd, hesitating, talkative, cynical, really good-hearted old
courtier, whom not even a court had deprived of a heart, though the
dangerous influence of the conscienceless Gaucelme, his fellow, has in
its time played sad pranks with it. He is one of the best of Browning's
minor characters.
The performance, in 1885, of _Colombe's Birthday_, under the direction
of the Browning Society, has brought to light unsuspected acting
qualities in what is certainly not the most "dramatic" of Browning's
plays. "_Colombe's Birthday_," it was said on the occasion, "is charming
on the boards, clearer, more direct in action, more full of delicate
surprises than one imagines it in print. With a very little cutting it
could be made an excellent acting play."[23]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 23: A. Mary F. Robinson, in _Boston Literary World_, December
12, 1885.]
11. DRAMATIC ROMANCES AND LYRICS.
[Published in 1845 as No. VII. of _Bells and Pomegranates_
(_Poetical Works_, 1889, dispersedly, in Vols. IV., V., and
VI.).]
_Dramatic Romances_, Browning's second volume of miscellaneous poems, is
not markedly different in style or substance from the _Lyrics_ published
three years earlier. It is somewhat more mature, no doubt, as a whole,
somewhat richer and fuller, somewhat wider in reach and firmer in grasp;
but in tone and treatment it harmonises considerably more with its
predecessor than with its successor, after so long an interval, _Men and
Women_. The book opens with the ballad, _How they brought the Good News
from Ghent to Aix_, the most popular piece, except perhaps the _Pied
Piper_, that Browning has written. Few boys, I suppose, have not read
with breathless emotion this most stirring of ballads: few men can read
it without a thrill. The "good news" is intended for that of the
Pacification of Ghent, but the incident itself is not historical. The
poem was written at sea, off the African coast. Another poem of somewhat
similar kind, appealing more directly than usual to the simpler
feelings, is _The Lost Leader_. It was written in reference to
Wordsworth's abandonment of the Liberal cause, with perhaps a thought of
Southey, but it is applicable to any popular apostasy. This is one of
those songs that do the work of swords. It shows how easily Browning,
had he so chosen, could have stirred the national feeling with his
songs. The _Home-Thoughts from Abroad_ belongs, in its simple
directness, its personal and forthright fervour of song, to this section
of the volume. With the two pieces now known as _Home-Thoughts from
Abroad_ and _Home-Thoughts from the Sea_, a third, very inferior, piece
was originally published. It is now more appropriately included with
_Claret_ and _Tokay_ (two capital little snatches) under the head of
_Nationality in Drinks_. The two "Home-Thoughts," from sea and from
land, are equally remarkable for their poetry and for their patriotism.
I hope there is no need to commend to all Englishmen so passionate and
heartfelt a record of love for England. It is in _Home-Thoughts from
Abroad_, that we find the well-known and magical lines on the thrush:--
"That's the wise thrush: he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!"
The whole poem is beautiful, but _Home-Thoughts from the Sea_ is of that
order of song that moves the heart "more than with a trumpet."
"Nobly, nobly, Cape Saint Vincent to the North-West died away;
Sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz Bay;
Bluish 'mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar lay;
In the dimmest North-East distance dawned Gibraltar grand and gray;
'Here and here did England help me: how can I help England?'--say,
Whoso turns as I, this evening, turn to God to praise and pray,
While Jove's planet rises yonder, silent over Africa."
Next to _The Lost Leader_ comes, in the original edition, a sort of
companion poem, in
"THE LOST MISTRESS.
I.
All's over, then: does truth sound bitter
As one at first believes?
Hark! 'tis the sparrows' good-night twitter
About your cottage eaves!
II.
And the leaf-buds on the vine are woolly,
I noticed that, to-day;
One day more bursts them open fully
--You know the red turns gray.
III.
To-morrow we meet the same, then, dearest?
May I take your hand in mine?
Mere friends are we,--well, friends the merest
Keep much that I resign:
IV.
For each glance of the eye so bright and black
Though I keep with heart's endeavour,--
Your voice, when you wish the snowdrops back,
Though it stay in my heart for ever!--
V.
Yet I will but say what mere friends say,
Or only a thought stronger;
I will hold your hand but as long as all may.
Or so very little longer!"
This is one of those love-songs which we cannot but consider among the
noblest of such songs in all Love's language. The subject of "unrequited
love" has probably produced more effusions of sickly sentiment than any
other single subject. But Browning, who has employed the motive so
often (here, for instance, and yet more notably in _The Last Ride
Together_) deals with it in a way that is at once novel and fundamental.
There is no talk, among his lovers, of "blighted hearts," no whining and
puling, no contemptible professions of contempt for the woman who has
had the ill-taste to refuse some wondrous-conceited lover, but a noble
manly resignation, a profound and still grateful sorrow which has no
touch in it of reproach, no tone of disloyalty, and no pretence of
despair. In the first of the _Garden Fancies_ (_The Flower's Name_) a
delicate little love-story of a happier kind is hinted at. The second
_Garden Fancy_ (_Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis_) is of very different tone.
It is a whimsical tale of a no less whimsical revenge taken upon a piece
of pedantic lumber, the name of which is given in the title. The varying
ring and swing communicated to the dactyls of these two pieces by the
jolly humour of the one and the refined sentiment of the other, is a
point worth noticing. The easy flow, the careless charm of their
versification, is by no means the artless matter it may seem to a
careless reader. Nor is it the easiest of metrical tasks to poise
perfectly the loose lilt of such verses as these:--
"What a name! Was it love or praise?
Speech half-asleep or song half-awake?
I must learn Spanish, one of these days,
Only for that slow sweet name's sake."
The two perfect little pieces on "Fame" and "Love," _Earth's
Immortalities_, are remarkable, even in Browning's work, for their
concentrated felicity, and, the second especially, for swift
suggestiveness of haunting music. Not less exquisite in its fresh
melody and subtle simplicity is the following _Song_:--
I.
"Nay but you, who do not love her,
Is she not pure gold, my mistress?
Holds earth aught--speak truth--above her?
Aught like this tress, see, and this tress,
And this last fairest tress of all,
So fair, see, ere I let it fall?
II.
Because, you spend your lives in praising;
To praise, you search the wide world over:
Then why not witness, calmly gazing,
If earth holds aught--speak truth--above her?
Above this tress, and this, I touch
But cannot praise, I love so much!"
In two tiny pictures, _Night and Morning_, one of four lines, the other
of twelve, we have, besides the picture, two moments which sum up a
lifetime, and "on how fine a needle's point that little world of passion
is balanced!"
I.
"MEETING AT NIGHT.
1.
The gray sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed i' the slushy sand.
2.
Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, thro' its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!
II.
PARTING AT MORNING.
Round the cape of a sudden came the sea,
And the sun looked over the mountain's rim:
And straight was a path of gold for him,
And the need of a world of men for me."
But the largest, if not the greatest work in the volume must be sought
for, not in the romances, properly speaking, nor in the lyrics, but in
the dramatic monologues. _Pictor Ignotus_ (Florence, 15--) is the first
of those poems about painting, into which Browning has put so much of
his finest art. It is a sort of first faint hint or foreshadowing of
_Andrea del Sarto_, perfectly individual and distinct though it is.
_Pictor Ignotus_ expresses the subdued sadness of a too timid or too
sensitive nature, an "unknown painter" who has dreamed of painting great
pictures and winning great fame, but who shrinks equally from the
attempt and the reward: an attempt which he is too self-distrustful to
make, a reward which he is too painfully discriminating to enjoy.
"So, die my pictures! surely, gently die!
O youth, men praise so,--holds their praise its worth?
Blown harshly, keeps the trump its golden cry?
Tastes sweet the water with such specks of earth?"
The monotonous "linked sweetness long drawn out" of the verses, the
admirably arranged pause, recurrence and relapse of the lines, render
the sense and substance of the subject with singular appropriateness.
_The Tomb at St. Praxed's_ (now known as _The Bishop orders his Tomb at
St. Praxed's Church_), has been finally praised by Ruskin, and the whole
passage may be here quoted:--
"Robert Browning is unerring in every sentence he writes of
the Middle Ages; always vital, right, and profound; so that
in the matter of art, with which we have been specially
concerned, there is hardly a principle connected with the
mediæval temper that he has not struck upon in those
seemingly careless and too rugged lines of his.
"'As here I lie
In this state-chamber, dying by degrees,
Hours and long hours in the dead night, I ask
"Do I live, am I dead?" Peace, peace seems all.
Saint Praxed's ever was the church for peace;
And so, about this tomb of mine. I fought
With tooth and nail to save my niche, ye know:
--Old Gandolf cozened me, despite my care;
Shrewd was that snatch from out the corner South
He graced his carrion with, God curse the same!
Yet still my niche is not so cramped but thence
One sees the pulpit o' the epistle-side,
And somewhat of the choir, those silent seats.
And up into the aery dome where live
The angels, and a sunbeam's sure to lurk:
And I shall fill my slab of basalt there,
And 'neath my tabernacle take my rest,
With those nine columns round me, two and two,
The odd one at my feet where Anselm stands:
Peach-blossom marble all, the rare, the ripe
As fresh-poured red wine of a mighty pulse.
--Old Gandolf with his paltry onion-stone,
Put me where I may look at him! True peach,
Rosy and flawless: how I earned the prize!
Draw close: that conflagration of my church
--What then? So much was saved if aught were missed!
My sons, ye would not be my death? Go dig
The white-grape vineyard where the oil-press stood,
Drop water gently till the surface sink,
And if ye find ... Ah God, I know not, I!...
Bedded in store of rotten fig-leaves soft,
And corded up in a tight olive-frail,
Some lump, ah God, of _lapis lazuli_,
Big as a Jew's head cut off at the nape,
Blue as a vein o'er the Madonna's breast....
Sons, all have I bequeathed you, villas, all,
That brave Frascati-villa with its bath,
So, let the blue lump poise between my knees,
Like God the Father's globe on both his hands
Ye worship in the Jesu Church so gay,
For Gandolf shall not choose but see and burst!
Swift as a weaver's shuttle fleet our years:
Man goeth to the grave, and where is he?
Did I say basalt for my slab, sons? Black--
'Twas ever antique-black I meant! How else
Shall ye contrast my frieze to come beneath?
The bas-relief in bronze ye promised me,
Those Pans and Nymphs ye wot of, and perchance
Some tripod, thyrsus, with a vase or so,
The Saviour at his sermon on the mount,
Saint Praxed in a glory, and one Pan
Ready to twitch the Nymph's last garment off,
And Moses with the tables ... but I know
Ye mark me not! What do they whisper thee,
Child of my bowels, Anselm? Ah, ye hope
To revel down my villas while I gasp
Bricked o'er with beggar's mouldy travertine,
Which Gandolf from his tomb-top chuckles at!
Nay, boys, ye love me--all of jasper, then!
'Tis jasper ye stand pledged to, lest I grieve
My bath must needs be left behind, alas!
One block, pure green as a pistachio-nut,
There's plenty jasper somewhere in the world--
And have I not Saint Praxed's ear to pray
Horses for ye, and brown Greek manuscripts,
And mistresses with great smooth marbly limbs?
--That's if ye carve my epitaph aright,
Choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully's every word,
No gaudy ware like Gandolf's second line--
Tully, my masters? Ulpian serves his need.'
"I know no other piece of modern English prose or poetry in
which there is so much told, as in these lines, of the
Renaissance spirit,--its worldliness, inconsistency, pride,
hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and
of good Latin. It is nearly all that I have said of the
central Renaissance in thirty pages of the _Stones of
Venice_, put into as many lines, Browning's also being the
antecedent work."[24]
This poem is the third of the iambic monologues, and, but for _Artemis
Prologizes_, the first in blank verse. I am not aware if it was written
much later than _Pictor Ignotus_, but it belongs to a later manner.
Scarcely at his very best, scarcely in the very greatest monologues of
the central series of _Men and Women_, or in these only, has Browning
written a finer or a more characteristic poem. As a study in human
nature it has all the concentrated truth, all the biting and imaginative
realism, of a scene from Balzac's _Comédie Humaine_: it is as much a
fact and a creation. It is, moreover, as Ruskin has told us, typical not
only of a single individual but of a whole epoch; while, as a piece of
metrical writing, it has all the originality of an innovation. If
Browning can scarcely be said to have created this species of blank
verse, half familiar, vivid with natural life, full of vigour and
beauty, rising and falling, with the unerring motion of the sea, he has
certainly adapted, perfected, and made it a new thing in his hands.
Akin to _The Tomb at St. Praxed's_ on its dramatic, though dissimilar on
its lyric, side, is the picturesque and terrible little poem of _The
Laboratory_[25] in which a Brinvilliers of the _Ancien Régime_ is
represented buying poison for her rival; one of the very finest examples
of Browning's unique power of compressing and concentrating intense
emotion into a few pregnant words, each of which has its own visible
gesture and audible intonation.
It is in such poems that Browning is at his best, nor is he perhaps
anywhere so inimitable. The second poem under the general heading of
"France and Spain," _The Confessional_, in which a girl, half-maddened
by remorse and impotent rage, tells how a false priest induced her to
betray the political secrets of her lover, is, though vivid and
effective, not nearly so powerful and penetrating as its companion
piece. _Time's Revenges_ may perhaps be classified with these utterances
of individual passion, though in form it is more closely connected with
the poems I shall touch on next. It is a bitter and affecting little
poem, not unlike some of the poems written many years afterwards by a
remarkable and unfortunate poet,[26] who knew, in his own experience,
something of what Browning happily rendered by the instinct of the
dramatist only. It is a powerful and literal rendering of a certain
sordid and tragic aspect of life, and is infused with that peculiar grim
humour, the laugh that chokes in a sob, which comes to men when mere
lamentation is a thing foregone.