author as "a glimpse from the burning of Jacques du Bourg-Molay [last
Grand-Master of the Templars], A.D. 1314, as distorted by the refraction
from Flemish brain to brain during the course of a couple of centuries."
Of all Browning's mediæval poems this is perhaps the greatest, as it is
certainly the most original, the most astonishing. Its special "note" is
indescribable, for there is nothing with which we can compare it. If I
say that it is perhaps the finest example in English poetry of the pure
grotesque, I shall fail to interpret it aright to those who think of the
grotesque as a synonym for the ugly and debased. If I call it fantastic,
I shall do it less than justice in suggesting a certain lightness and
flimsiness which are quite alien to its profound seriousness, a
seriousness which touches on sublimity. Browning's power of sculpturing
single situations is seldom shown in finer relief than in those poems in
which he has seized upon some "occult eccentricity of history" or of
legend, like this of _The Heretic's Tragedy_, or that in _Holy-Cross
Day_, fashioning it into some quaint, curt, tragi-comic form.
_Holy-Cross Day_ expresses the feelings of the Jews, who were forced on
this day (the 14th September) to attend an annual Christian sermon in
Rome. A deliciously naïve extract from an imaginary _Diary by the
Bishop's Secretary_, 1600, first sets forth the orthodox view of the
case; then the poem tells us "what the Jews really said." Nothing more
audaciously or more sardonically mirthful was ever written than the
first part of this poem, with its
"Fee, faw, fum! bubble and squeak!
Blessedest Thursday's the fat of the week;"
while the sudden transition to the sublime and steadfast Song of Death
of Rabbi ben Ezra is an effect worthy of Heine: more than worthy. Heine
would inevitably have put his tongue in his cheek again at the end.
With the three great mediæval poems should be named the slighter sketch
of _Protus_. The first and last lines, describing two imaginary busts,
are a fine instance of Browning's power of translating sense into sound.
Compare the smooth and sweet melody of the opening lines--
"Among these latter busts we count by scores
Half-emperors and quarter-emperors,
* * * * *
One loves a baby-face, with violets there--
Violets instead of laurels in the hair,--
As they were all the little locks could bear"--
with the rasping vigour and strength of sound which point the contrast
of the conclusion:--
"Here's John the Smith's rough-hammered head. Great eye,
Gross jaw and griped lips do what granite can
To give you the crown-grasper. What a man!"
One poem of absolutely unique order is the romance of "_Childe Roland to
the Dark Tower came_." If it were not for certain lines, certain
metaphors and images, here and there in his earlier works, we should
find in this poem an exception to the rule of Browning's work so
singular and startling as to be almost phenomenal. But in passages of
_Pauline_, of _Paracelsus_, of the lyric written in 1836, and
incorporated, more than twenty years later, with _James Lee's Wife_, we
have distinct evidence of a certain reserve, as it were, of romantic
sensibility, a certain tendency, which we may consider to have been
consciously checked rather than early exhausted, towards the weird and
fanciful. In _Childe Roland_ all this latent sensibility receives full
and final expression. The poem is very generally supposed to be an
allegory, and a number of ingenious interpretations have been suggested,
and the "Dark Tower" has been defined as Love, Life, Death and Truth.
But, as a matter of fact, Browning, in writing it, had no allegorical
intention whatever. It was meant to be, and is, a pure romance. It was
suggested by the line from Shakespeare which heads it, and was "built
up," in Mrs. Orr's words "of picturesque impressions, which have
separately or collectively produced themselves in the author's mind, ...
including a tower which Mr. Browning once saw in the Carrara Mountains,
a painting which caught his eye years later in Paris; and the figure of
a horse in the tapestry in his own drawing-room."[32] The poem depicts
the last adventure of a knight vowed to the quest of a certain "Dark
Tower." The description of his journey across a strange and dreadful
country is one of the ghastliest and most vivid in all poetry; ghastly
without hope, without alleviation, without a momentary touch of
contrast; vivid and ghastly as the lines following:--
"A sudden little river crossed my path
As unexpected as a serpent comes.
No sluggish tide congenial to the glooms;
This, as it frothed by, might have been a bath
For the fiend's glowing hoof--to see the wrath
Of its black eddy bespate with flakes and spumes.
So petty yet so spiteful! All along,
Low scrubby alders kneeled down over it;
Drenched willows flung them headlong in a fit
Of mute despair, a suicidal throng:
The river which had done them all the wrong,
Whate'er that was rolled by, deterred no whit.
Which while I forded,--good saints, how I feared
To set my foot upon a dead man's cheek,
Each step, or feel the spear I thrust to seek
For hollows, tangled in his hair or beard!
--It may have been a water-rat I speared
But, ugh! it sounded like a baby's shriek."
The manner of the poem, wholly unlike that of any other poem, may be
described by varying Flaubert's phrase of "epic realism": it is romantic
realism. The weird, fantastic and profoundly imaginative picture brought
before us with such startling and almost oppressive vividness, is not
painted in a style of vague suggestiveness, but in a hard, distinct,
definite, realistic way, the realism which results from a faithful
record of distorted impressions. The poet's imagination is like a flash
of lightning which strikes through the darkness, flickering above the
earth, and lighting up, point by point, with a momentary and fearful
distinctness, the horrors of the landscape.
A large and important group of _Men and Women_ consists of love-poems,
or poems dealing, generally in some concrete and dramatic way, sometimes
in a purely lyrical manner, with the emotion of love. _Love among the
Ruins_, a masterpiece of an absolutely original kind, is the idyl of a
lover's meeting, in which the emotion is emphasised and developed by the
contrast of its surroundings. The lovers meet in a turret among the
ruins of an ancient city, and the moment chosen is immediately before
their meeting, when the lover gazes around him, struck into sudden
meditation by the vision of the mighty city fallen and of the living
might of Love.
"And I know, while thus the quiet-coloured eve
Smiles to leave
To their folding, all our many-tinkling fleece
In such peace,
And the slopes and rills and undistinguished grey
Melt away--
That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair
Waits me there
In the turret whence the charioteers caught soul
For the goal,
When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb
Till I come.
For he looked upon the city, every side,
Far and wide,
All the mountains topped with temples, all the glades'
Colonnades,
All the causeys, bridges, aqueducts,--and then,
All the men!
When I do come, she will speak not, she will stand,
Either hand
On my shoulder, give her eyes the first embrace
Of my face,
Ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight and speech
Each on each.
In one year they sent a million fighters forth
South and North,
And they built their gods a brazen pillar high
As the sky,
Yet reserved a thousand chariots in full force--
Gold, of course.
Oh heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns!
Earth's returns
For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin!
Shut them in,
With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!
Love is best."
The quaint chime or tinkle of a metre made out of the cadence of
sheep-bells renders with curious felicity the quietness and fervent
meditation of the subject. _A Lovers' Quarrel_ is in every respect a
contrast. It is a whimsical and delicious lyric, with a flowing and
leaping melody, a light and piquant music deepened into pathos by a
mournful undertone of retrospect and regret, not without a hope for the
future. All Browning is seen in this pathetic gaiety, this eagerness
and unrest and passionate make-believe of a lover's mood. _Evelyn Hope_
strikes a tenderer note; it is one of Browning's sweetest, simplest and
most pathetic pieces, and embodies, in a concrete form, one of his
deepest convictions. It is the lament of a man, no longer young, by the
death-bed of a young girl whom he has loved, unknown to her. She has
died scarcely knowing him, not even suspecting his love. But what
matter? God creates love to reward love, and there is another life to
come.
"So hush,--I will give you this leaf to keep
See, I shut it inside the sweet cold hand!
There, that is our secret: go to sleep!
You will wake, and remember, and understand."
_A Woman's Last Word_ is an exquisite little lyric which sings itself to
its own music of delicate gravity and gentle pathos; but it too holds,
in its few small lines, a complete situation, that most pathetic one in
which a woman resolves to merge her individuality in the wish and will
of her husband, to bind, for his sake, her intellect in the chains of
her heart.
"A WOMAN'S LAST WORD.
I.
Let's contend no more, Love,
Strive nor weep:
All be as before, Love,
--Only sleep!
II.
What so wild as words are?
I and thou
In debate, as birds are,
Hawk on bough!
III.
See the creature stalking
While we speak!
Hush and hide the talking,
Cheek on cheek!
IV.
What so false as truth is,
False to thee?
Where the serpent's tooth is,
Shun the tree--
V.
Where the apple reddens
Never pry--
Lest we lose our Edens,
Eve and I.
VI.
Be a god and hold me
With a charm!
Be a man and fold me
With thine arm!
VII.
Teach me, only teach, Love!
As I ought
I will speak thy speech, Love,
Think thy thought--
VIII.
Meet, if thou require it,
Both demands,
Laying flesh and spirit
In thy hands.
IX.
That shall be to-morrow
Not to-night:
I must bury sorrow
Out of sight:
X.
--Must a little weep, Love,
(Foolish me!)
And so fall asleep, Love,
Loved by thee."
_Any Wife to any Husband_ is the grave and mournful lament of a dying
woman, addressed to the husband whose love has never wavered throughout
her life, but whose faithlessness to her memory she foresees. The
situation is novel in poetry, and it is realised with an intense
sympathy and depth of feeling. The tone of dignified sadness in the
woman's words, never passionate or pleading, only confirmed and
hopeless, is admirably rendered in the slow and solemn metre, whose firm
smoothness and regularity translate into sound the sentiment of the
speech. _A Serenade at the Villa_, which expresses a hopeless love from
the man's side, has a special picturesqueness, and something more than
picturesqueness: nature and life are seen in throbbing sympathy. The
little touches of description give one the very sense of the hot
thundrous summer night as it "sultrily suspires" in sympathy with the
disconsolate lover at his fruitless serenading. I can scarcely doubt
that this poem (some of which has been quoted on p. 25 above), was
suggested by one of the songs in Sidney's _Astrophel and Stella_, a poem
on the same subject in the same rare metre:--
"Who is it that this dark night
Underneath my window plaineth?
It is one who from thy sight
Being, ah! exiled, disdaineth
Every other vulgar light."
If Browning's love-poems have any model or anticipation in English
poetry, it is certainly in the love-songs of Sidney, in what Browning
himself has called,
"The silver speech,
Of Sidney's self, the starry paladin."
No lover in English poetry has been so much a man as Sidney and
Browning.
_Two in the Campagna_ presents a more intricate situation than most of
the love-poems. It is the lament of a man, addressed to the woman at his
side, whom he loves and by whom he is loved, over the imperfection and
innocent inconstancy of his love. The two can never quite grow to one,
and he, oppressed by the terrible burden of imperfect sympathies, is for
ever seeking, realising, losing, then again seeking the spiritual union
still for ever denied. The vague sense of the Roman Campagna is
distilled into exquisite words, and through all there sounds the sad and
weary undertone of baffled endeavour:--
"Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn."
_The Last Ride Together_ is one of those love-poems which I have spoken
of as specially noble and unique, and it is, I think, the noblest and
most truly unique of them all. Thought, emotion and melody are mingled
in perfect measure: it has the lyrical "cry," and the objectiveness of
the drama. The situation, sufficiently indicated in the title, is
selected with a choice and happy instinct: the very motion of riding is
given in the rhythm. Every line throbs with passion, or with a fervid
meditation which is almost passion, and in the last verse, and, still
more, in the single line--
"Who knows but the world may end to-night?"
the dramatic intensity strikes as with an electric shock.
_By the Fireside_ though in all its circumstances purely dramatic and
imaginary, rises again and again to the fervour of personal feeling, and
we can hardly be wrong in classing it, in soul though not in
circumstance, with _One Word More_ and the other sacred poems which
enshrine the memory of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But, apart from this
suggestion, the poem is a masterpiece of subtle simplicity and
picturesqueness. Nothing could be more admirable in themselves than the
natural descriptions throughout; but these are never mere isolated
descriptions, nor even a mere stationary background: they are fused with
the emotion which they both help to form and assist in revealing.
_One Word More_ (_To E. B. B._) is one of those sacred poems in which,
once and again, a great poet has embalmed in immortal words the holiest
and deepest emotion of his existence. Here, and here only in the songs
consecrated by the husband to the wife, the living love that too soon
became a memory is still "a hope, to sing by gladly." _One Word More_ is
Browning's answer to the _Sonnets from the Portuguese_. And, just as
Mrs. Browning never wrote anything more perfect than the _Sonnets_, so
Browning has never written anything more perfect than the answering
lyric.
Yet another section of this most richly varied volume consists of poems,
narrative and lyrical, dealing in a brief and pregnant way with some
special episode or emotion: love, in some instances, but in a less
exclusive way than in the love-poems proper. _The Statue and the Bust_
(one of Browning's best narratives) is a romantic and mainly true tale,
written in _terza rima_, but in short lines. The story on which it is
founded is a Florentine tradition.
"In the piazza of the SS. Annunziata at Florence is an
equestrian statue of the Grand Duke Ferdinand the First,
representing him as riding away from the church, with his
head turned in the direction of the Riccardi [now Antinori]
Palace, which occupies one corner of the square. Tradition
asserts that he loved a lady whom her husband's jealousy kept
a prisoner there; and that he avenged his love by placing
himself in effigy where his glance could always dwell upon
her."[33]
In the poem the lovers agree to fly together, but the flight, postponed
for ever, never comes to pass. Browning characteristically blames them
for their sin of "the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin," for their
vacillating purpose, their failure in attaining "their life's set end,"
whatever that end might be. Despite the difficulty of the metre, the
verse is singularly fresh and musical. In this poem, the first in which
Browning has used the _terza rima_, he observes, with only occasional
licence, the proper pause at the end of each stanza of three lines. This
law, though rarely neglected by Dante, has seldom been observed by the
few English poets who have attempted the measure. Neither Byron in the
_Prophecy of Dante_, nor Shelley in _The Triumph of Life_, nor Mrs.
Browning in _Casa Guidi Windows_, has done so. In Browning's later poems
in this metre, the pause, as if of set purpose, is wholly disregarded.
_How it strikes a Contemporary_ is at once a dramatic monologue and a
piece of poetic criticism. Under the Spanish dress, and beneath the
humorous treatment, it is easy to see a very distinct, suggestive and
individual theory of poetry, and in the poet who "took such cognizance
of men and things, ...
"Of all thought, said and acted, then went home
And wrote it fully to our Lord the King--"
we have, making full allowance for the imaginary dramatic circumstances,
a very good likeness of a poet of Browning's order. Another poem,
"_Transcendentalism_," is a slighter piece of humorous criticism,
possibly self-criticism, addressed to one who "speaks" his thoughts
instead of "singing" them. Both have a penetrating quality of beauty in
familiarity.
_Before_ and _After_, which mean before and after the duel, realise
between them a single and striking situation. _Before_ is spoken by a
friend of the wronged man; _After_ by the wronged man himself. The
latter is not excelled by any poem of Browning's in its terrible
conciseness, the intensity of its utterance of stifled passion.
"AFTER.
"Take the cloak from his face, and at first
Let the corpse do its worst!
"How he lies in his rights of a man!
Death has done all death can.
And, absorbed in the new life he leads,
He recks not, he heeds
Nor his wrong nor my vengeance; both strike
On his senses alike,
And are lost in the solemn and strange
Surprise of the change.
Ha, what avails death to erase
His offence, my disgrace?
I would we were boys as of old
In the field, by the fold:
His outrage, God's patience, man's scorn,
Were so easily borne!
I stand here now, he lies in his place:
Cover the face!"
I know of no piece of verse in the language which has more of the
quality and hush of awe in it than this little fragment of eighteen
lines.
_Instans Tyrannus_[34] (the Threatening Tyrant) recalls by its motive,
however unlike it may be as a poem, the _Soliloquy of the Spanish
Cloister_. The situations are widely different, but the root of each is
identical. In both is developed the mood of passive or active hate,
arising from mere instinctive dislike. But while in the earlier poem the
theme is treated with boisterous sardonic humour, it is here embodied in
the grave figure of a stern, single-minded, relentless hater, a tyrant
in both senses of the term. Another poem, representing an act of will,
though here it is love, not hate, that impels, is _Mesmerism_. The
intense absorption, the breathless eagerness of the mesmerist, are
rendered in a really marvellous way by the breathless and yet measured
race of the verses: fifteen stanzas succeed one another without a single
full-stop, or a real pause in sense or sound. The beautiful and
significant little poem called _The Patriot: an old Story_, is a
narrative and parable at once, and only too credible and convincing as
each. _Respectability_ holds in its three stanzas all that is vital and
enviable in the real "Bohemia," and is the first of several poems of
escape, which culminate in _Fifine at the Fair_. Both here and in
another short suggestive poem, _A Light Woman_ (which might be called
the fourth act of a tragedy), the situation is outlined like a
silhouette. Equally graphic, in the more ordinary sense of the term, is
the picturesque and whimsical view of town and country life taken by a
frivolous Italian person of quality in the poem named _Up at a
Villa--Down in the City_, "a masterpiece of irony and of description,"
as an Italian critic has defined it.
Of the wealth of lyrics and short poems no adequate count can here be
made. Yet, I cannot pass without a word, if only in a word may I
indicate, the admirable craftsmanship and playful dexterity of the lines
on _A Pretty Woman_; the pathetic feeling and the exquisite and novel
music of _Love in a Life and Life in a Love_; the tense emotion, the
suppressed and hopeful passion, of _In Three Days_, and the sad and
haunting song of _In a Year_, with its winding and liquid melody, its
mournful and wondering lament over love forgotten; the rich and
marvellously modulated music, the glowing colour, the vivid and
passionate fancy, of _Women and Roses_; the fresh felicity of "_De
Gustibus_," with its enthusiasm for Italy scarcely less fervid than the
English enthusiasm of the _Home-Thoughts_; the quaint humour and
pregnant simplicity of the admirable little parable of _The Twins_; the
sympathetic charm and light touch of _Misconceptions_, and the pretty
figurative fancy of _My Star_; the strong, sad, suggestive little poem
named _One Way of Love_, with its delicately-wrought companion _Another
Way of Love_, the former a love-lyric to be classed with _The Lost
Mistress_ and _The Last Ride Together_; and, finally, the epilogue to
the first volume and a late poem in the second: _Memorabilia_, a tribute
to Shelley, full of grateful remembrance and admiring love, significant
among the few personal utterances of the poet, and the not less lovely
poem and only less fervent tribute to Keats, the sumptuous, gorgeous,
and sardonic lines on _Popularity_. A careful study or even, one would
think, a careless perusal, of but a few of the poems named above, should
be enough to show, once and for all, the infinite richness and variety
of Browning's melody, and his complete mastery over the most simple and
the most intricate lyric measures. As an example of the finest artistic
simplicity, rich with restrained pathos and quiet with keen tension of
feeling, we may choose the following.
"ONE WAY OF LOVE
I.
All June I bound the rose in sheaves.
Now, rose by rose, I strip the leaves
And strew them where Pauline may pass.
She will not turn aside? Alas!
Let them lie. Suppose they die?
The chance was they might take her eye.
II.
How many a month I strove to suit
These stubborn fingers to the lute!
To-day I venture all I know.
She will not hear my music? So!
Break the string; fold music's wing:
Suppose Pauline had bade me sing?
III.
My whole life long I learned to love.
This hour my utmost art I prove
And speak my passion--heaven or hell?
She will not give me heaven? 'Tis well!
Love who may--I still can say,
Those who win heaven, blest are they!"
IN A BALCONY.[35]
[Written at Bagni di Lucca, 1853; published in _Men and
Women_, above; reprinted in _Poetical Works_, 1863, under a
separate heading; _id_., 1889 (Vol. VII. pp. 1-41). Performed
at the Browning Society's Third Annual Entertainment,
Prince's Hall, Piccadilly, Nov. 28, 1884, and by the English
Drama Society at the Victoria Hall, June 8, 1905.]
The dramatic scene of _In a Balcony_ is the last of the works written in
dialogue. We have seen, in tracing the course of the plays from
_Strafford_ to _A Soul's Tragedy_, how the playwright gave place to the
poet; how the stage construction, the brisk and interchanged dialogue of
the earlier dramas, gradually and inevitably developed into the more
subtle, the more lengthy dialogue, which itself approached more and more
nearly to monologue, of the later ones. _In a Balcony_, written eight
years later than _A Soul's Tragedy_, has more affinity with it, in form
at least, than with any other of the plays. But while the situation
there was purely intellectual and moral, it is here passionate and
highly-wrought, to a degree never before reached, except in the crowning
scene of _Pippa Passes_. We must go to the greatest among the
Elizabethans to exceed that; we must turn to _Le Roi s'amuse_ to equal
this.