realistic treatment and striking simplicity of verse and phrase,
connect it with the admirable little poem now know as _The Italian in
England_.[27] This is a tale of an Italian patriot, who, after an
unsuccessful rising, has taken refuge in England. It tells of his escape
and of how he was saved from the Austrian pursuers by the tact and
fidelity of a young peasant woman. Its chief charm lies in the
simplicity and sincere directness of its telling. _The Englishman in
Italy_, a poem of very different class, written in brisk and vigorous
anapæsts, is a vivid and humorous picture of Italian country life. It is
delightfully gay and charming and picturesque, and is the most entirely
descriptive poem ever written by Browning. In _The Glove_ we have a new
version, from an original and characteristic standpoint, of the familiar
old story known to all in its metrical version by Leigh Hunt, and more
curtly rhymed (without any very great impressiveness) by Schiller.
Browning has shown elsewhere that he can tell a simple anecdote simply,
but he has here seized upon the tale of the glove, not for the purpose
of telling over again what Leigh Hunt had so charmingly and sufficiently
told, but in order to present the old story in a new light, to show how
the lady might have been right and the knight wrong, in spite of King
Francis's verdict and the look of things. The tale, which is very
wittily told, and contains some fine serious lines on the lion, is
supposed to be related by Peter Ronsard, in the position of on-looker
and moraliser; and the character of the narrator, after the poet's
manner, is brought out by many cunning little touches. The poem is
written almost throughout in double rhymes, in the metre and much in the
manner of the _Pacchiarotto_ of thirty years later. It is worth noticing
that in the lines spoken by the lady to Ronsard, and in these alone, the
double rhymes are replaced by single ones, thus making a distinct
severance between the earnestness of this one passage and the cynical
wit of the rest.
The easy mastery of difficult rhyming which we notice in this piece is
still more marked in the strange and beautiful romance named _The Flight
of the Duchess_.[28] Not even in _Pacchiarotto_ has Browning so revelled
in the most outlandish and seemingly incredible combinations of sound,
double and treble rhymes of equal audacity and success. There is much
dramatic appropriateness in the unconventional diction, the story being
put into the mouth of a rough old huntsman. The device of linking
fantasy with familiarity is very curious, and the effect is original in
the extreme. The poem is a fusion of many elements, and has all the
varying colour of a romantic comedy. Contrast the intensely picturesque
opening landscape, the cleverly minute description of the gipsies and
their trades, the humorous naturalness of the Duke's mediæval
masquerading as related by his unsympathising forester, and, in a higher
key the beautiful figure of the young Duchess, and the serene, mystical
splendour of the old gipsy's chant.
Two poems yet remain to be named, and two of the most perfect in the
book. The little parable poem of _The Boy and the Angel_ is one of the
most simply beautiful, yet deeply earnest, of Browning's lyrical poems.
It is a parable in which "the allegorical intent seems to be shed by the
story, like a natural perfume from a flower;" and it preaches a sermon
on contentment and the doing of God's will such as no theologian could
better. _Saul_ (which I shall mention here, though only the first part,
sections one to nine, appeared in _Dramatic Romances_, sections ten to
nineteen being first published in _Men and Women_) has been by some
considered almost or quite Browning's finest poem. And indeed it seems
to unite almost the whole of his qualities as a poet in perfect fusion.
Music, song, the beauty of nature, the joy of life, the glory and
greatness of man, the might of Love, human and divine: all these are set
to an orchestral accompaniment of continuous harmony, now hushed as the
wind among the woods at evening, now strong and sonorous as the
storm-wind battling with the mountain-pine. _Saul_ is a vision of life,
of time and of eternity, told in song as sublime as the vision is
steadfast. The choral symphony of earth and all her voices with which
the poem concludes is at once the easiest passage to separate from its
context, and (if we may dare, in such a matter, to choose) one, at
least, of the very greatest of all.
"I know not too well how I found my way home in the night.
There were witnesses, cohorts about me, to left and to right,
Angels, powers, the unuttered, unseen, the alive, the aware:
I repressed, I got through them as hardly, as strugglingly there,
As a runner beset by the populace famished for news--
Life or death. The whole earth was awakened, hell loosed
with her crews;
And the stars of night beat with emotion, and tingled and shot
Out in fire the strong pain of pent knowledge: but I fainted not,
For the Hand still impelled me at once and supported, suppressed
All the tumult, and quenched it with quiet, and holy behest,
Till the rapture was shut in itself, and the earth sank to rest.
Anon at the dawn, all that trouble had withered from earth--
Not so much, but I saw it die out in the day's tender birth;
In the gathered intensity brought to the gray of the hills;
In the shuddering forests' held breath; in the sudden wind-thrills;
In the startled wild beasts that bore off, each with eye sidling
still
Though averted with wonder and dread; in the birds stiff and chill
That rose heavily, as I approached them, made stupid with awe:
E'en the serpent that slid away silent,--he felt the new law.
The same stared in the white humid faces upturned by the flowers;
The same worked in the heart of the cedar and moved the vine bowers:
And the little brooks witnessing murmured, persistent and low,
With their obstinate, all but hushed voices--' E'en so, it is so!'"
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 24: _Modern Painters_, Vol. IV., pp. 377-79.]
[Footnote 25: It is interesting to remember that Rossetti's first
water-colour was an illustration of this poem, and has for subject and
title the line, "Which is the poison to poison her, prithee?"]
[Footnote 26: James Thomson, the writer of _The City of Dreadful
Night_.]
[Footnote 27: "Mr Browning is proud to remember," we are told by Mrs
Orr, "that Mazzini informed him he had read this poem to certain of his
fellow exiles in England to show how an Englishman could sympathise with
them."--_Handbook_ 2nd ed., p. 306.]
[Footnote 28: Some curious particulars are recorded in reference to the
composition of this poem. "_The Flight of the Duchess_ took its rise
from a line--'Following the Queen of the Gipsies, O!' the burden of a
song which the poet, when a boy, heard a woman singing on a Guy Fawkes'
day. The poem was written in two parts, of which the first was published
in _Hood's Magazine_, April, 1845, and contained only nine sections. As
Mr Browning was writing it, he was interrupted by the arrival of a
friend on some important business, which drove all thoughts of the
Duchess and the scheme of her story out of the poet's head. But some
months after the publication of the first part, when he was staying at
Bettisfield Park, in Shropshire, a guest, speaking of early winter,
said, 'The deer had already to break the ice in the pond.' On this a
fancy struck the poet, and, on returning home, he worked it up into the
conclusion of _The Flight of the Duchess_ as it now stands."--_Academy_,
May 5, 1883.]
12. A SOUL'S TRAGEDY.
[Published in 1846 (with _Luria_) as No. VIII. of _Bells and
Pomegranates_ (_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol. IV., pp.
257-302). Acted by the Stage Society at the Court Theatre,
March 13, 1904.]
The development of Browning's genius, as shown in his plays, has been
touched on in dealing with _Colombe's Birthday_. That play, as I
intimated, shows the first token of transition from the comparatively
conventional dramatic style of the early plays to the completely
unconventional style of the later ones, which in turn lead almost
imperceptibly to the final pausing-place of the monologue. From _A Blot
in the 'Scutcheon_ to _Colombe's Birthday_ is a step; from _Colombe's
Birthday_ to _A Soul's Tragedy_ and _Luria_ another step; and in these
last we are not more than another step from _Men and Women_ and its
successors. In _A Soul's Tragedy_ the action is all internalized.
Outward action there is, and of a sufficiently picturesque nature; but
here, considerably more than even in _Colombe's Birthday_, the interest
is withdrawn from the action, as action, and concentrated on a single
character, whose "soul's tragedy," not his mere worldly fortunes,
strange and significant as these are, we are called on to contemplate.
Chiappino fills and possesses the scene. The other characters are
carefully subordinated, and the impression we receive is not unlike that
received from one of Browning's most vivid and complete monologues, with
its carefully placed apparatus of sidelights.
The character of Chiappino is that of a Djabal degenerated; he is the
second of Browning's delineations of the half-deceived and
half-deceiving nature, the moral hybrid. Chiappino comes before us as a
much-professing yet apparently little-performing person, moody and
complaining, envious of his friend Luitolfo's better fortune, a soured
man and a discontented patriot. But he is quite sure of his own complete
probity. He declaims bitterly against his fellow-townsmen, his friend,
and the woman whom he loves; all of whom, he asseverates, treat him
unjustly, and as he never could, by any possibility, treat them. While
he is thus protesting to Eulalia, his friend's betrothed, to whom for
the first time he avows his own love, a trial is at hand, and nearer
than he or we expect. Luitolfo rushes in. He has gone to the Provost's
palace to intercede on behalf of his banished friend, and in a moment of
wrath has struck and, as he thinks, killed the Provost: the guards are
after him, and he is lost. Is this the moment of test? Apparently; and
apparently Chiappino proves his nobility. For, with truly heroic
unselfishness, he exchanges dress with his friend, induces him, in a
sort of stupefaction of terror, to escape, and remains in his place, "to
die for him." But the harder test has yet to come. Instead of the
Provost's guards, it is the enthusiastic populace that bursts in upon
him, hailing him as saviour and liberator. The people have risen in
revolt, the guards have fled, and the people call on the striker of the
blow to be their leader. Chiappino says nothing. "Chiappino?" says
Eulalia, questioning him with her eyes. "Yes, I understand," he rejoins,
"You think I should have promptlier disowned
This deed with its strange unforeseen success,
In favour of Luitolfo. But the peril,
So far from ended, hardly seems begun.
To-morrow, rather, when a calm succeeds,
We easily shall make him full amends:
And meantime--if we save them as they pray,
And justify the deed by its effects?
_Eu._ You would, for worlds, you had denied at once.
_Ch._ I know my own intention, be assured!
All's well. Precede us, fellow-citizens!"
Thus ends act first, "being what was called the poetry of Chiappino's
life;" and act second, "its prose," opens after a supposed interval of a
month.
The second act exhibits, in very humorous prose, the gradual and
inevitable deterioration which the silence and the deception have
brought about. Drawn on and on, upon his own lines of thought and
conduct, by Ogniben, the Pope's legate, who has come to put down the
revolt by diplomatic measures, Chiappino denies his political
principles, finding a democratic rule not at all so necessary when the
provostship may perhaps fall to himself; denies his love, for his views
of love are, he finds, widened; and finally, denies his friend, to the
extent of arguing that the very blow which, as struck by Luitolfo, has
been the factor of his fortune, was practically, because logically, his
own. Ogniben now agrees to invest him with the Provost's office, making
at the same time the stipulation that the actual assailant of the
Provost shall suffer the proper penalty. Hereupon Luitolfo comes forward
and avows the deed. Ogniben orders him to his house; Chiappino "goes
aside for a time;" "and now," concludes the legate, addressing the
people, "give thanks to God, the keys of the Provost's palace to me, and
yourselves to profitable meditation at home."
Besides Chiappino, there are three other characters, who serve to set
off the main figure. Eulalia is an observer, Luitolfo a foil, Ogniben a
touchstone. Eulalia and Luitolfo, though sufficiently worked out for
their several purposes, are only sketches, the latter perhaps more
distinctly outlined than the former, and serving admirably as a contrast
to Chiappino. But Ogniben, who does so much of the talking in the second
act, is a really memorable figure. His portrait is painted with more
prominent effect, for his part in the play is to draw Chiappino out, and
to confound him with his own weapons: "I help men," as he says, "to
carry out their own principles; if they please to say two and two make
five, I assent, so they will but go on and say, four and four make ten."
His shrewd Socratic prose is delightfully wise and witty. This prose,
the only dramatic prose written by Browning, with the exception of that
in _Pippa Passes_, is, in its way, almost as good as the poetry: keen,
vivacious, full-thoughted, picturesque, and singularly original. For
instance, Chiappino is expressing his longing for a woman who could
understand, as he says, the whole of him, to whom he could reveal alike
his strength and weakness.
"Ah, my friend," rejoins Ogniben, "wish for nothing so
foolish! Worship your love, give her the best of you to see;
be to her like the western lands (they bring us such strange
news of) to the Spanish Court; send her only your lumps of
gold, fans of feathers, your spirit-like birds, and fruits
and gems. So shall you, what is unseen of you, be supposed
altogether a paradise by her,--as these western lands by
Spain: though I warrant there is filth, red baboons, ugly
reptiles and squalor enough, which they bring Spain as few
samples of as possible."
There is in all this prose, lengthy as it is, the true dramatic note, a
recognisable tone of talk. But _A Soul's Tragedy_ is for the study, not
the stage.
13. LURIA: A Tragedy in Five Acts.
[Published in 1846 (with _A Soul's Tragedy_) as No. VIII of
_Bells and Pomegranates_ (_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol. VI.
pp. 205-289). The action takes place from morning to night of
one day].
The action and interest in _Luria_ are somewhat less internalised than
in _A Soul's Tragedy_, but the drama is in form a still nearer approach
to monologue. Many of the speeches are so long as to be almost
monologues in themselves; and the whole play is manifestly written
(unlike the other plays, except its immediate predecessor, or rather its
contemporary) with no thought of the stage. The poet is retreating
farther and farther from the glare of the footlights; he is writing
after his own fancy, and not as his audience or his manager would wish
him to write. None of Browning's plays is so full of large heroic
speech, of deep philosophy, of choice illustration; seldom has he
written nobler poetry. There is not the intense and throbbing humanity
of _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_; the characters are not so simply and so
surely living men and women; but in the grave and lofty speech and
idealised characters of _Luria_ we have something new, and something
great as well.
The central figure is Luria himself; but the other characters are not so
carefully and completely subordinated to him as are those in _A Soul's
Tragedy_ to Chiappino. Luria is one of the noblest and most heroic
figures in Browning's works. A Moor, with the instincts of the East and
the culture of the West, he presents a racial problem which is very
subtly handled; while his natural nobility and confidence are no less
subtly set off against the Italian craft of his surroundings. The
spectacle he presents is impressive and pathetic. An alien, with no bond
to Florence save that of his inalienable love, he has led her forces
against the Pisans, and saved her. Looking for no reward but the
grateful love of the people he has saved, he meets instead with the
basest ingratitude. While he is fighting and conquering for her,
Florence, at home, is trying him for his life on a charge of treachery:
a charge which has no foundation but in the base natures of his
accusers, who know that he might, and therefore suspect that he will,
turn to evil purpose his military successes and the power which they
have gained him over the army. Generals of their own blood have betrayed
them: how much more will this barbarian? Luria learns of the treachery
of his allies in time to take revenge, he is urged to take revenge, and
the means are placed in his hands, but his nobler nature conquers, and
the punishment he deals on Florence is the punishment of his own
voluntary death. The strength of love which restrains him from punishing
the ungrateful city forbids him to live when his only love has proved
false, his only link to life has gone. But before he dies he has the
satisfaction of seeing the late repentance and regret of every enemy,
whether secret schemer or open foe.
"Luria goes not poorly forth.
If we could wait! The only fault's with time;
All men become good creatures: but so slow!"
In the pathos of his life and death Luria may remind us of another
unrequited lover, Strafford, whose devotion to his king gains the same
reward as Luria's devotion to his adopted country.
In Luria's faithful friend and comrade Husain we have a contrasted
picture of the Moor untouched by alien culture. The instincts of the one
are dulled or disturbed by his Western wisdom and experience; Husain
still keeps the old instincts and the unmixed nature, and still speaks
the fervid and highly-coloured Eastern speech. But while Husain is to
some extent a contrast with Luria, Luria and Husain together form an
infinitely stronger contrast with the group of Italians. Braccio, the
Florentine Commissary, is an admirable study of Italian subtlety and
craft. Only a writer with Browning's special knowledge and sympathies
could have conceived and executed so acute and true a picture of the
Italian temper of the time, a temper manifested with singular
appropriateness by the city of Machiavelli. Braccio is the chief schemer
against Luria, and he schemes, not from any real ill-will, but from the
diplomatic distrust of a too cautious and too suspicious patriot.
Domizia, the vengeful Florentine lady, plotting against Florence with
the tireless patience of an unforgetting wrong, is also a representative
sketch, though not so clearly and firmly outlined as a character.
Puccio, Luria's chief officer, once his commander, the simple fighting
soldier, discontented but honest, unswervingly loyal to Florence, but
little by little aware of and aggrieved at the wrong done to Luria, is a
really touching conception. Tiburzio, the Pisan leader, is yet finer in
his perfect chivalry of service to his foe. Nothing could be more nobly
planned than the first meeting, and indeed the whole relations, of these
magnanimous and worthy opponents, Luria and Tiburzio. There is a
certain intellectual fascination for Browning in the analysis of mean
natures and dubious motives, but of no contemporary can it be more
justly said that he rises always and easily to the height and at the
touch of an heroic action or of a noble nature.
14. CHRISTMAS-EVE AND EASTER-DAY: A Poem.
[Published in 1850 (_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol. V., pp.
207-307). Written in Florence.]
_Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day_ is the chief work in which Browning deals
directly and primarily with the subject of Christianity and the
religious beliefs of the age. Both the poems which appear under this
title are studies of religious life and thought, the first more in the
narrative and critical way, the second rather in relation to individual
experience. Browning's position towards Christianity is perhaps unique.
He has been described as "the latest extant Defender of the Faith," but
the manner of his belief and the modes of his defence are as little
conventional as any other of his qualities. Beyond all question the most
deeply religious poet of our day, perhaps the greatest religious poet we
have ever had, Browning has never written anything in the ordinary style
of religious verse, the style of Herbert, of Keble, of the hymn-writers.
The spirit which runs through all his work is more often felt as an
influence than manifested in any concrete and separate form.
_Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day_, _La Saisiaz_ and _Ferishtah's Fancies_
are the only prominent exceptions to this rule.
_Christmas-Eve_ is a study or vision of the religious life of the time.
It professes to be the narrative of a strange experience lived through
on a Christmas-Eve ("whether in the body I cannot tell, or whether out
of the body,") in a little dissenting chapel on the outskirts of a
country town, in St. Peter's at Rome, and at an agnostic lecture-hall in
Göttingen. The vivid humorous sketch of the little chapel and its flock
is like a bit of Dickens at his best. Equally good, in another kind, is
the picture of the Professor and his audience at Göttingen, with its
searching and scathing irony of merciless logic, and the tender and
subtle discrimination of its judgment, sympathetic with the good faith
of the honest thinker. Different again in style, and higher still in
poetry, is the glowing description of the Basilica and its sensuous
fervour of ceremonial; and higher and greater yet the picture of the
double lunar rainbow merging into that of the vision: a piece of
imaginative work never perhaps exceeded in spiritual exaltation and
concordant splendour of song in the whole work of the poet, though
equalled, if not exceeded, by the more terrible vision of judgment which
will be cited later from _Easter-Day_.
"For lo, what think you? suddenly
The rain and the wind ceased, and the sky
Received at once the full fruition
Of the moon's consummate apparition.
The black cloud-barricade was riven,
Ruined beneath her feet, and driven
Deep in the West; while, bare and breathless,
North and South and East lay ready
For a glorious thing that, dauntless, deathless,
Sprang across them and stood steady.
'Twas a moon-rainbow, vast and perfect,
From heaven to heaven extending, perfect
As the mother-moon's self, full in face.
It rose, distinctly at the base
With its seven proper colours chorded,
Which still, in the rising, were compressed,
Until at last they coalesced,
And supreme the spectral creature lorded
In a triumph of purest white,--
Above which intervened the night.
But above night too, like only the next,
The second of a wondrous sequence,
Reaching in rare and rarer frequence,
Till the heaven of heavens were circumflexed,
Another rainbow rose, a mightier,
Fainter, flushier, and flightier,--
Rapture dying along its verge.
Oh, whose foot shall I see emerge,
Whose, from the straining topmost dark,
On to the keystone of that arc?"
At moments of such energy and ecstasy as this, all that there is in the
poet of mere worldly wisdom and intellectual ingenuity drops off, or
rather is consumed to a white glow in the intense flame of triumphant
and over-mastering inspiration.
The piercing light cast in the poem on the representative creeds of the
age is well worthy of serious consideration, from an ethical as well as
from a poetical point of view. No nobler lesson of religious tolerance,
united with religious earnestness, has been preached in our day. Nothing
could be more novel and audacious than the union here attempted and
achieved of colloquial realism and grotesque humour with imaginative
vision and solemn earnestness. The style and metre vary with the mood.
Where the narrative is serious the lines are regular and careful, they
shrink to their smallest structural limit, and the rhymes are chiefly
single and simple. Where it becomes humorous, the rhythm lengthens out
its elastic syllables to the full extent, and swings and sways, jolts
and rushes; the rhymes fall double and triple and break out into audible
laughter.
_Easter-Day_, like its predecessor, is written in lines of four beats
each, but the general effect is totally dissimilar. Here the verse is
reduced to its barest constituents; every line is, syllabically as well
as accentually, of equal length; and the lines run in pairs, without one
double rhyme throughout. The tone and contents of the two poems (though
also, in a sense, derived from the same elements) are in singular
contrast. _Easter-Day_, despite a momentary touch or glimmer, here and
there, of grave humour, is thoroughly serious in manner and continuously
solemn in subject. The burden of the poem is stated in its first two
lines:--
"How very hard it is to be
A Christian!"