is possessed of much faith but has a distinct tendency to pessimism, and
another, who has a sceptical but also a hopeful turn of mind, respecting
Christianity, its credibility, and how its doctrines fit human nature
and affect the conduct of life. After keen discussion the argument
returns to the lament, common to both disputants: how very hard it is to
be, practically, a Christian. The speaker then relates, on account of
its bearing on the discussion, an experience (or vision, as he leaves us
free to imagine) which once came to him. Three years before, on an
Easter-Eve, he was crossing the common where stood the chapel referred
to by their friend (the poem thus, and thus only, links on to
_Christmas-Eve_.) As he walked along, musingly, he asked himself what
the Faith really was to him; what would be his fate, for instance, if he
fell dead that moment? And he said to himself, jestingly enough, why
should not the judgment-day dawn now, on Easter-morn?
"And as I said
This nonsense, throwing back my head
With light complacent laugh, I found
Suddenly all the midnight round
One fire. The dome of heaven had stood
As made up of a multitude
Of handbreadth cloudlets, one vast rack
Of ripples infinite and black,
From sky to sky. Sudden there went,
Like horror and astonishment,
A fierce vindictive scribble of red
Quick flame across, as if one said
(The angry scribe of Judgment) 'There--
Burn it!' And straight I was aware
That the whole ribwork round, minute
Cloud touching cloud beyond compute,
Was tinted, each with its own spot
Of burning at the core, till clot
Jammed against clot, and spilt its fire
Over all heaven, which 'gan suspire
As fanned to measure equable,--
Just so great conflagrations kill
Night overhead, and rise and sink,
Reflected. Now the fire would shrink
And wither off the blasted face
Of heaven, and I distinct might trace
The sharp black ridgy outlines left
Unburned like network--then, each cleft
The fire had been sucked back into,
Regorged, and out its surging flew
Furiously, and night writhed inflamed,
Till, tolerating to be tamed
No longer, certain rays world-wide
Shot downwardly. On every side,
Caught past escape, the earth was lit;
As if a dragon's nostril split
And all his famished ire o'erflowed;
Then as he winced at his lord's goad,
Back he inhaled: whereat I found
The clouds into vast pillars bound,
Based on the corners of the earth
Propping the skies at top: a dearth
Of fire i' the violet intervals,
Leaving exposed the utmost walls
Of time, about to tumble in
And end the world."
Judgment, according to the vision, is now over. He who has chosen earth
rather than heaven, is allowed his choice: earth is his for ever. How
the walls of the world shrink and narrow, how the glow fades off from
the beauty of nature, of art, of science; how the judged soul prays for
only a chance of love, only a hope of ultimate heaven; how the ban is
taken off him, and he wakes from the vision on the grey plain as
Easter-morn is breaking: this, with its profound and convincing moral
lessons, is told, without a didactic note, in poetry of sustained
splendour. In sheer height of imagination _Easter-Day_ could scarcely
exceed the greatest parts of _Christmas-Eve_, but it preserves a level
of more equable splendour, it is a work of art of more chastened
workmanship. In its ethical aspect it is also of special importance,
for, while the poet does not necessarily identify himself in all
respects with the seer of the vision, the poem enshrines some of
Browning's deepest convictions on life and religion.
15. MEN AND WOMEN.
[Published in 1855, in 2 vols.; now dispersed in Vols. IV.,
V. and VI. of _Poetical Works_, 1889.]
The series of _Men and Women_, fifty-one poems in number, represents
Browning's genius at its ripe maturity, its highest uniform level. In
this central work of his career, every element of his genius is equally
developed, and the whole brought into a perfection of harmony never
before or since attained. There is no lack, there is no excess. I do not
say that the poet has not touched higher heights since, or perhaps
before; but that he has never since nor before maintained himself so
long on so high a height, never exhibited the rounded perfection, the
imagination, thought, passion, melody, variety, all fused in one, never
produced a single work or group at once so great and so various, admits,
I think, of little doubt. Here are fifty poems, every one of which, in
its way, is a masterpiece; and the range is such as no other English
poet has perhaps ever covered in a single book of miscellaneous poems.
In _Men and Women_ Browning's special instrument, the monologue, is
brought to perfection. Such monologues as _Andrea del Sarto_ or the
_Epistle of Karshish_ never have been, and probably never will be
surpassed, on their own ground, after their own order. To conceive a
drama, to present every side and phase and feature of it from one point
of view, to condense all its potentialities of action, all its
significance and import, into some few hundred lines, this has been done
by but one poet, and nowhere with such absolute perfection as here. Even
when dealing with a single emotion, Browning usually crystallizes it
into a choice situation; and almost every poem in the series, down to
the smallest lyric, is essentially a dramatic monologue. But perhaps the
most striking instances of the form and method, and, with the little
drama of _In a Balcony_, the principal poems in the collection, are the
five blank verse pieces, _Andrea del Sarto_, _Fra Lippo Lippi_, _Cleon_,
_Karshish_, and _Bishop Blougram_. Each is a masterpiece of poetry. Each
is in itself a drama, and contains the essence of a life, condensed into
a single episode, or indicated in a combination of discourse,
conversation, argument, soliloquy, reminiscence. Each, besides being the
presentation of a character, moves in a certain atmosphere of its own,
philosophical, ethical, or artistic. _Andrea del Sarto_ and _Fra Lippo
Lippi_ deal with art. _Cleon_ and _Karshish_, in a sense companion
poems, are concerned, each secondarily, with the arts and physical
sciences, primarily with the attitude of the Western and Eastern worlds
when confronted with the problem of the Gospel of Christ. _Bishop
Blougram_ is modern, ecclesiastical and argumentative. But however
different in form and spirit, however diverse in _milieu_, each is alike
the record of a typical soul at a typical moment.
_Andrea del Sarto_ is a "translation into song" of the picture known as
"Andrea del Sarto and his Wife," in the Pitti Palace at Florence. The
story of Andrea del Sarto is told by Vasari, in one of the best known of
his _Lives_: how the painter, who at one time seemed as if he might have
competed with Raphael, was ruined, as artist and as man, by his
beautiful, soulless wife, the fatal Lucrezia del Fede; and how, led and
lured by her, he outraged his conscience, lowered his ideal, and, losing
all heart and hope, sank into the cold correctness, the unerring
fluency, the uniform, melancholy repetition of a single type, his
wife's, which distinguish his later works. Browning has taken his facts
from Vasari, and he has taken them quite literally. But what a change,
what a transformation and transfiguration! Instead of a piece of prose
biography and criticism, we have (in Mr. Swinburne's appropriate words)
"the whole man raised up and reclothed with flesh." No more absolutely
creative work has been done in our days; few more beautiful and pathetic
poems written. The mood of sad, wistful, hopeless mournfulness of
resignation which the poem expresses, is a somewhat rare one with
Browning's vivid and vivacious genius. It is an autumn twilight piece.
"A common greyness silvers everything,--
All in a twilight, you and I alike
--You, at the point of your first pride in me
(That's gone, you know),--but I, at every point;
My youth, my hope, my art, being all toned down
To yonder sober pleasant Fiesole.
There's the bell clinking from the chapel top;
That length of convent-wall across the way
Holds the trees safer, huddled more inside;
The last monk leaves the garden; days decrease,
And autumn grows, autumn in everything.
Eh, the whole seems to fall into a shape
As if I saw alike my work and self
And all that I was born to be and do,
A twilight-piece."
The very movement of the lines, their tone and touch, contribute to the
effect. A single clear impression is made to result from an infinity of
minute, scarcely appreciable touches: how fine these touches are, how
clear the impression, can only be hinted at in words, can be realised
only by a loving and scrupulous study.
Whether the picture which suggested the poem is an authentic work of
Andrea, or whether, as experts have now agreed, it is a work by an
unknown artist representing an imaginary man and woman is, of course, of
no possible consequence in connection with the poem. Nor is it of any
more importance that the Andrea of Vasari is in all probability not the
real Andrea. Historic fact has nothing to do with poetry: it is mere
material, the quarry of ideas; and the real truth of Browning's portrait
of Andrea would no more be impugned by the establishment of Vasari's
inaccuracy, than the real truth of Shakespeare's portrait of Macbeth by
the proof of the untrustworthiness of Holinshed.
A greater contrast, in every respect, than that between _Andrea del
Sarto_ and _Fra Lippo Lippi_ can scarcely be conceived. The story of
Filippo Lippi[29] is taken, like that of Andrea, from Vasari's _Lives_:
it is taken as literally, it is made as authentically living, and, in
its own more difficult way, it is no less genuine a poem. The jolly,
jovial tone of the poem, its hearty humour and high spirits, and the
breathless rush and hurry of the verse, render the scapegrace painter to
the life. Not less in keeping is the situation in which the unsaintly
friar is introduced: caught by the civic guard, past midnight, in an
equivocal neighbourhood, quite able and ready, however, to fraternise
with his captors, and pour forth, rough and ready, his ideas and
adventures. A passage from the poem placed side by side with an extract
from Vasari will show how faithfully the record of Fra Lippo's life is
followed, and it will also show, in some small measure, the essential
newness, the vividness and revelation of the poet's version.
"By the death of his father," writes Vasari,[30] "he was left
a friendless orphan at the age of two years, his mother also
having died shortly after his birth. The child was for some
time under the care of a certain Mona Lapaccia, his aunt, the
sister of his father, who brought him up with great
difficulty until he had attained his eighth year, when, being
no longer able to support the burden of his maintenance, she
placed him in the above-named convent of the Carmelites."
Here is Browning's version:--
"I was a baby when my mother died
And father died and left me in the street.
I starved there, God knows how, a year or two
On fig-skins, melon-parings, rinds and shucks,
Refuse and rubbish. One fine frosty day,
My stomach being empty as your hat,
The wind doubled me up and down I went.
Old Aunt Lapaccia trussed me with one hand,
(Its fellow was a stinger as I knew)
And so along the wall, over the bridge,
By the straight cut to the convent. Six words there,
While I stood munching my first bread that month:
'So, boy, you're minded,' quoth the good fat father,
Wiping his own mouth, 'twas refection-time,--
'To quit this very miserable world?'"
But not only has Browning given a wonderfully realistic portrait of the
man; a man to whom life in its fulness was the only joy, a true type of
the Renaissance spirit, metamorphosed by ironic fate into a monk; he
has luminously indicated the true end and aim of art and the false
asceticism of so-called "religious" art, in the characteristic comments
and confessions of an innovator in the traditions of religious painting.
_Cleon_ is prefaced by the text "As certain also of your own poets have
said" (_Acts_, xvii. 28), and is supposed to be a letter from one of the
poets to whom St. Paul refers, addressed to Protus, an imaginary
"Tyrant," whose wondering admiration of Cleon's many-sided culture has
drawn him to one who is at once poet, painter, sculptor, musician and
philosopher. Compared with such poems as _Andrea del Sarto_, there is
little realisable detail in the course of the calm argument or
statement, but I scarcely see how the temper of the time, among its
choicest spirits (the time of classic decadence, of barren culture, of
fruitless philosophy) could well have been more finely shadowed forth.
The quality of the versification, unique here as in every one of the
five great poems, is perfectly adapted to the subject. The slow sweep of
the verse, its stately melody, its large, clear, classic harmony, enable
us to receive the right impression as admirably as the other qualities,
already pointed out, enable us to feel the resigned sadness of Andrea
and the jovial gusto of Lippo. In _Cleon_ we have a historical picture,
imaginary indeed, but typical. It reveals or records the religious
feeling of the pagan world at the time of the coming of Christ; its
sadness, dissatisfaction and expectancy, and the failure of its wisdom
to fathom the truths of the new Gospel.
In _An Epistle containing the strange Medical Experience of Karshish,
the Arab Physician_, we have perhaps a yet more subtle delineation of a
character similar by contrast. Cleon is a type of the Western and
sceptical, Karshish of the Eastern and believing, attitude of mind; the
one repellent, the other absorbent, of new things offered for belief.
Karshish, "the picker up of learning's crumbs," writes from Syria to his
master at home, "Abib, all sagacious in our art," concerning a man whose
singular case has fascinated him, one Lazarus of Bethany. There are few
more lifelike and subtly natural narratives in Browning's poetry; few
more absolutely interpenetrated by the finest imaginative sympathy. The
scientific caution and technicality of the Arab physician, his careful
attempt at a statement of the case from a purely medical point of view,
his self-reproachful uneasiness at the strange interest which the man's
story has caused in him, the strange credulity which he cannot keep from
encroaching on his mind: all this is rendered with a matchless delicacy
and accuracy of touch and interpretation. Nor can anything be finer than
the representation of Lazarus after his resurrection, a representation
which has significance beyond its literal sense, and points a moral
often enforced by the poet: that doubt and mystery, in life and in
religion alike, are necessary, and indeed alone make either life or
religion possible. The special point in the tale of Lazarus which has
impressed Karshish with so intense an interest is that
"This man so cured regards the curer, then,
As--God forgive me! who but God himself,
Creator and sustainer of the world,
That came and dwelt in flesh on it awhile!
--'Sayeth that such an one was born and lived,
Taught, healed the sick, broke bread at his own house,
Then died, with Lazarus by, for aught I know,
And yet was ... what I said nor choose repeat,
And must have so avouched himself, in fact,
In hearing of this very Lazarus
Who saith--but why all this of what he saith?
Why write of trivial matters, things of price
Calling at every moment for remark?
I noticed on the margin of a pool
Blue-flowering borage, the Aleppo sort,
Aboundeth, very nitrous. It is strange!"
How perfectly the attitude of the Arab sage is here given, drawn,
against himself, to a conviction which he feels ashamed to entertain. As
in _Cleon_ the very pith of the letter is contained in the postscript,
so, after the apologies and farewell greetings of Karshish, the thought
which all the time has been burning within him bursts into flame.
"The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think?
So, the All-Great were the All-Loving too--
So, through the thunder comes a human voice
Saying, 'O heart I made, a heart beats here!
Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself!
Thou hast no power nor may'st conceive of mine,
But love I gave thee, with myself to love,
And thou must love me who have died for thee!'
The madman saith He said so: it is strange."
So far, the monologues are single-minded, and represent the sincere and
frank expression of the thoughts and opinions of their speakers. _Bishop
Blougram's Apology_ introduces a new element, the casuistical. The
Bishop's Apology is, literally, an _apologia_, a speech in defence of
himself, in which the aim is to confound an adversary, not to state the
truth. This form, intellectual rather than emotional, argumentative more
than dramatic, has had, from this time forward, a considerable
attraction for Browning, and it is responsible for some of his hardest
work, such as _Fifine at the Fair_ and _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_.
_Bishop Blougram's Apology_ represents the after-dinner talk of a great
Roman Catholic dignitary. It is addressed to Mr. Gigadibs, a young and
shallow literary man, who poses as free-thinker and as critic of the
Bishop's position. Mr. Gigadibs' implied opinion is, that a man of
Blougram's intellect and broad views cannot, with honesty, hold and
teach Roman Catholic dogma; that his position is anomalous and unideal.
Blougram retorts with his voluminous and astonishingly clever "apology."
In this apology we trace three distinct elements. First, there is a
substratum of truth, truth, that is, in the abstract; then there is an
application of these true principles to his own case and conduct, an
application which is thoroughly unjustifiable--
"He said true things, but called them by wrong names--"
but which serves for an ingenious, and apparently, as regards Gigadibs,
a triumphant, defence; finally, there is the real personal element, the
man as he is. We are quite at liberty to suppose, even if we were not
bound to suppose, that after all Blougram's defence is merely or partly
ironical, and that he is not the contemptible creature he would be if we
took him quite seriously. It is no secret that Blougram himself is, in
the main, modelled after and meant for Cardinal Wiseman, who, it is
said, was the writer of a good-humoured review of the poem in the
Catholic journal, _The Rambler_ (January, 1856). The supple, nervous
strength and swiftness of the blank verse is, in its way, as fine as the
qualities we have observed in the other monologues: there is a splendid
"go" in it, a vast capacity for business; the verse is literally alive
with meaning, packed with thought, instinct with wit and irony; and not
this only, but starred with passages of exquisite charm, such as that on
"how some actor played Death on the stage," or that more famous one:--
"Just when we're safest, there's a sunset-touch,
A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death,
A chorus-ending from Euripides,--
And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears
As old and new at once as nature's self,
To rap and knock and enter in our soul,
Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring
Round the ancient idol, on his base again,--
The grand Perhaps!"
At least six of the poems contained in _Men and Women_ deal with
painting and music. But while four of these seem to fall into one group,
the remaining two, _Andrea del Sarto_ and _Fra Lippo Lippi_, properly
belong, though themselves the greatest of the art-poems as art-poems, to
the group of monodramas already noticed. But _Old Pictures in Florence_,
_The Guardian Angel_, _Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha_ and _A Toccata of
Galuppi's_, are chiefly and distinctively notable in their relation to
art, or to some special picture or piece of music.
_The Guardian Angel_ is a "translation into song" of Guercino's picture
of that name (_L'Angelo Custode_). It is addressed to "Waring," and was
written by Browning at Ancona, after visiting with Mrs. Browning the
church of San Agostino at Fano, which contains the picture. This
touching and sympathetic little poem is Browning's only detailed
description of a picture; but it is of more interest as an expression of
personal feeling. Something in its sentiment has made it one of the most
popular of his poems. _Old Pictures in Florence_ is a humorous and
earnest moralising on the meaning and mission of art and the rights and
wrongs of artists, suggested by some of the old pictures in Florence. It
contains perhaps the most complete and particular statement of
Browning's artistic principles that we have anywhere in his work, as
well as a very noble and energetic outburst of indignant enthusiasm on
behalf of the "early masters," the lesser older men whom the world slurs
over or forgets. The principles which Browning imputes to the early
painters may be applied to poetry as well as to art. Very characteristic
and significant is the insistence on the deeper value of life, of soul,
than of mere expression or technique, or even of mere unbreathing
beauty. _Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha_ is the humorous soliloquy of an
imaginary organist over a fugue in F minor by an imaginary composer,
named in the title. It is a mingling of music and moralising. The famous
description of a fugue, and the personification of its five voices, is a
brilliantly ingenious _tour de force_; and the rough humour is quite in
keeping with the _dramatis persona_. In complete contrast to _Master
Hugues_ is _A Toccata of Galuppi's_,[31] one of the daintiest, most
musical, most witching and haunting of Browning's poems, certainly one
of his masterpieces as a lyric poet. It is a vision of Venice evoked
from the shadowy Toccata, a vision of that delicious, brilliant,
evanescent, worldly life, when
"Balls and masks began at midnight, burning ever to midday,"
and the lover and his lady would break off their talk to listen while
Galuppi
"Sat and played Toccatas, stately at the clavichord."
But "the eternal note of sadness" soon creeps in.
"Yes, you, like a ghostly cricket, creaking where a house was burned:
'Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned.
* * * * *
Dust and ashes!' So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold.
Dear dead women, with such hair, too--what's become of all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old."
In this poem Browning has called up before us the whole aspect of
Venetian life in the eighteenth century. In three other poems, among the
most remarkable that he has ever written, _A Grammarian's Funeral_, _The
Heretic's Tragedy_ and _Holy-Cross Day_, he has realised and represented
the life and temper of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. _A
Grammarian's Funeral_, "shortly after the Revival of Learning in
Europe," gives the nobler spirit of the earlier pioneers of the
Renaissance, men like Cyriac of Ancona and Filelfo, devoted pedants who
broke ground in the restoration to the modern world of the civilisation
and learning of ancient Greece and Rome. It gives this, the nobler and
earlier spirit, as finely as _The Tomb at St. Praxed's_ gives the later
and grosser. In Browning's hands the figure of the old grammarian
becomes heroic. "He settled _Hoti's_ business," true; but he did
something more than that. It is the spirit in which the work is done,
rather than the special work itself, here only relatively important,
which is glorified. Is it too much to say that this is the noblest of
all requiems ever chanted over the grave of the scholar?
"Here's the top peak; the multitude below
Live, for they can, there:
This man decided not to Live but Know--
Bury this man there.
Here--here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form,
Lightnings are loosened,
Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm,
Peace let the dew send!
Lofty designs must close in like effects:
Loftily lying,
Leave him--still loftier than the world suspects,
Living or dying."
The union of humour with intense seriousness, of the grotesque with the
stately, is one that only Browning could have compassed, and the effect
is singularly appropriate. As the disciples of the old humanist bear
their dead master up to his grave on the mountain-top, chanting their
dirge and eulogy, the lines of the poem seem actually to move to the
steady climbing rhythm of their feet.