remarkably simple. The action takes place within a few hours, on a
balcony at night. Norbert and Constance are two lovers. Norbert is in
the service of a certain Queen, to whom he has, by his diplomatic skill
and labour, rendered great services. His aim, all the while, though
unknown, as he thinks, to her, has been the hope of winning Constance,
the Queen's cousin and dependant. He is now about to claim her as his
recompense; but Constance, fearing for the result, persuades him,
reluctant though he is, to ask in a roundabout way, so as to flatter or
touch the Queen. He over-acts his part. The Queen, a heart-starved and
now ageing woman, believes that he loves her, and responds to him with
the passion of a long-thwarted nature. She announces the wonderful news,
with more than the ecstasy of a girl, to Constance. Constance resolves
to resign her lover, for his good and the Queen's, and, when he appears,
she endeavours to make him understand and enter into her plot. But he
cannot and will not see it. In the presence of the Queen he declares his
love for Constance, and for her alone. The Queen goes out, in white
silence. The lovers embrace in new knowledge and fervour of love.
Measured steps are heard within, and we know that the guard is
approaching.
Each of the three characters is admirably delineated. Norbert is a fine,
strong, solid, noble character, without subtlety or mixture of motives.
He loves Constance: he knows that his love is returned: he is resolved
to win her hand. From first to last he is himself, honest,
straightforward, single-minded, passionate; presenting the strongest
contrast to Constance's feminine over-subtlety. Constance is more, very
much more, of a problem: "a character," as Mr. Wedmore has admirably
said, "peculiarly wily for goodness, curiously rich in resource for
unalloyed and inexperienced virtue." Does her proposal to relinquish
Norbert in favour of the Queen show her to have been lacking in love for
him? It has been said, on the one hand, that her act was "noble and
magnanimous," on the other hand, that the act proved her nature to be
"radically insincere and inconstant." Probably the truth lies between
these two extremes. Her love, we cannot doubt, was true and intense up
to the measure of her capacity; but her nature was, instinctively, less
outspoken and truthful than Norbert's, more subtle, more reasoning. At
the critical moment she is seized by a whirl of emotions, and, with very
feminine but singularly unloverlike instinct, she resolves, as she would
phrase it, to sacrifice _herself_, not seeing that she is insulting her
lover by the very notion of his accepting such a sacrifice. Her
character has not the pure and steadfast nobility of Norbert's, but it
has the capacity of devotion, and it is genuinely human. The Queen,
unlike Constance, but like Norbert, is simple and single in nature. She
is a tragic and intense figure, at once pathetic and terrible. I am not
aware that the peculiarly pregnant motive: the hidden longing for love
in a starved and stunted nature, clogged with restrictions of state and
ceremony, harassed and hampered by circumstances and by the weight of
advancing years; the passionate longing suddenly met, as it seems, with
reward, and breaking out into a great flame of love and ardour, only to
be rudely and finally quenched: I am not aware that this motive has
ever elsewhere been worked out in dramatic poetry. As here developed, it
is among the great situations in literature.
The verse in which this little tragedy is written has, perhaps, more
flexibility than that of any of the formal dramas. It has a strong and
fine harmony, a weight and measure, and above all that pungent
naturalness which belongs to the period of _Andrea del Sarto_ and the
other great monologues.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 29: The picture which Lippo promises to paint (ll. 347-389) is
an exact description of his _Coronation of the Virgin_, in the Accademia
delle Belle Arti at Florence.]
[Footnote 30: Mrs Foster's translation (Bohn).]
[Footnote 31: Baldassarre Galuppi, surnamed Buranello (1706-1785), was a
Venetian composer of some distinction. "He was an immensely prolific
composer," says Vernon Lee, "and abounded in melody, tender, pathetic,
brilliant, which in its extreme simplicity and slightness occasionally
rose to the highest beauty."--_Studies of the Eighteenth Century in
Italy_, p. 101.]
[Footnote 32: _Handbook_, p. 266. The poem was written at Paris, January
3, 1852.]
[Footnote 33: Mrs Orr, _Handbook_, p. 201.]
[Footnote 34: The poem was suggested by the opening of the third ode of
the third Book of Horace: "Justum et tenacem propositi virum."]
[Footnote 35: It will be more convenient to treat _In a Balcony_ in a
separate section than under the general heading of _Men and Women_, for
it is, to all intents and purposes, an independent work of another
order.]
16. DRAMATIS PERSONÆ.
[Published in 1864 (_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol. VII., pp.
43-255).]
_Dramatis Personæ_, like _Men and Women_ (which it followed after an
interval of nine years) is a collection of dramatic monologues, in each
of which it is attempted to delineate a single character or a single
mood by setting the "imaginary person" in some revealing situation. Of
the two possible methods, speech and soliloquy, Browning for the most
part prefers the former. In _Dramatis Personæ_, however, he recurs,
rather more frequently than usual, to the latter; and the situations
imaged are usually suggestive rather than explicit, more incomplete and
indirect than those in the _Men and Women_. As an ingenious critic said,
shortly after the volume was published, "Mr Browning lets us overhear a
part of the drama, generally a soliloquy, and we must infer the rest.
Had he to give the story of _Hamlet_, he would probably embody it in
three stanzas, the first beginning, 'O that this too too solid flesh
would melt!' the second 'To be or not to be, that is the question;' and
the third, 'Look here upon this picture, and on that!' From these
disjointed utterances the reader would have to construct the story."
Here our critic's clever ingenuity carries him a little too far; but
there is some truth in his definition or description of the special
manner which characterises such poems as _Too Late_, or _The Worst of
It_. But not merely the manner of presentment, the substance, and also
the style and versification, have undergone a change during the
long-silent years which lie between _Men and Women_ and _Dramatis
Personæ_. The first note of change, of the change which makes us speak
of earlier and later work, is here sounded. From 1833 up to 1855 forms a
single period of steady development, of gradual and unswerving ascent.
_Dramatis Personæ_ stands on the border line between this period and
another, the "later period," which more decisively begins with _The Ring
and the Book_. Still, the first note of divergence is certainly sounded
here. I might point to the profound intellectual depth of certain pieces
as its characteristic, or, equally, to the traces here and there of an
apparent carelessness of workmanship; or, yet again, to the new and very
marked partiality for scenes and situations of English and modern rather
than of mediæval and foreign life.
The larger part of the volume consists of dramatic monologues. Three
only are in blank verse; the greater number in varied lyric measures.
The first of these, and the longest, _James Lee_, as it was first
called, _James Lee's Wife_[36] as it is now more appropriately named, is
a _Lieder Kreis_, or cycle of songs, nine in number, which reveal, in
"tragic hints," not by means of a connected narrative, the history of an
unhappy marriage. There is nothing in it of heroic action or suffering;
it is one of those old stories always new which are always tragic to one
at least of the actors in them, and which may be tragic or trivial in
record, according as the artist is able to mould his material. Each of
the sections shows us a mood, signalized by some slight link of
circumstance which may the better enable us to grasp it. The development
of disillusion, the melancholy progress of change, is finely indicated
in the successive stages of this lyric sequence, from the first clear
strain of believing love (shaken already by a faint tremor of fear),
through gradual alienation and inevitable severance, to the final
resolved parting. This poem is worthy of notice as the only one in which
Browning has employed the sequence form; almost the only instance,
indeed, in which he has structurally varied his metre in the course of a
poem.
_James Lee's Wife_ is written in the form of soliloquy, or reflection.
In two other poems, closely allied to it in sentiment, _The Worst of it_
and _Too Late_, intense feeling expresses itself, though in solitude, as
if the object of emotion were present; each is, in great part, a mental
appeal to some one loved and lost. In _James Lee's Wife_ a woman was the
speaker, and the burden of her lament was mere estrangement. _The Worst
of it_ and _Too Late_ are both spoken by men. The former is the
utterance of a man whose wife has been false to him; the latter of a man
whose loved one is dead. But in each case the situation is further
complicated. The woman over whose loss of virtue her forsaken husband
mourns with passionate anguish and unavailing bitterness of regret, has
been to him, whom she now leaves for another, an image of purity: her
love and influence have lifted him from the mire, and "the Worst of it,"
the last pang which he cannot nerve himself to endure, is the knowledge
that she had saved him, and, partly at least through him, ruined
herself. The poem is one of the most passionate and direct of Browning's
dramatic lyrics: it is thrillingly intense and alive; and the swift
force and tremulous eagerness of its very original rhythm and metre
translate its sense into sound with perfect fitness. Similar in cadence,
though different in arrangement, is the measure of _Too Late_, with its
singularly constructed stanza of two quatrains, followed respectively by
two couplets, which together made another quatrain. It is worth noticing
how admirably and uniformly Browning contrives to connect, in sound, the
two halves of the broken quatrains, placing them so as to complete each
other, and relieve our ear of the sense of distance. The poem is spoken
by a lover who was neither rejected nor accepted: like the lover of
Evelyn Hope, he never told his love. His Edith married another, a
heartless and soulless lay-figure of a poet (or so at least his rival
regards him), and now she is dead. His vague but vivid hopes of some
future chance to love her and be loved; the dull rebellion of rashly
reasoning sorrow; the remembrance, the repentance, the regret; are all
poured out with pathetic naturalness.
These three poems are soliloquies; _Dîs aliter Visum; or, Le Byron de
nos Jours_, a poem closely akin in sentiment and style, recurs to the
more frequent and perhaps preferable manner of speech to an imagined
listener. It is written in that favourite stanza of five lines, on which
Browning has played so many variations: here, perhaps, in the internal
rhyme so oddly placed, the newest and most ingenious of all. The
sentiment and situation are the exact complement or contrast of those
expressed in _By the Fireside_. There, fate and nature have brought to a
crisis the latent love of two persons: the opportunity is seized, and
the crown of life obtained. Here, in circumstances singularly similar,
the vital moment is let slip, the tide is _not_ taken at the turn. And
ten years afterwards, when the famous poet and the girl whom he all but
let himself love, meet in a Paris drawing-room, and one of them tells
the old tale over for the instruction of both, she can point out, with
bitter earnestness and irony (and a perfect little touch of feminine
nature) his fatal mistake.
_Youth and Art_ is a slighter and more humorous sketch, with a somewhat
similar moral. It has wise humour, sharp characterisation, and
ballad-like simplicity. Still more perfect a poem, still more subtle,
still more Heinesque, if it were not better than Heine, is the little
piece called _Confessions_. The pathetic, humorous, rambling snatch of
final memory in the dying man, addressed, by a delightful irony, to the
attendant clergyman, has a sort of grim ecstasy, and the end is one of
the most triumphant things in this kind of poetry.
"CONFESSIONS.
I.
What is he buzzing in my ears?
'Now that I come to die.
Do I view the world as a vale of tears?'
Ah, reverend sir, not I!
II.
What I viewed there once, what I view again
Where the physic bottles stand
On the table's edge,--is a suburb lane,
With a wall to my bedside hand.
III.
That lane sloped, much as the bottles do,
From a house you could descry
O'er the garden wall; is the curtain blue
Or green to a healthy eye?
IV.
To mine, it serves for the old June weather
Blue above lane and wall;
And that farthest bottle labelled 'Ether'
Is the house o'er-topping all.
V.
At a terrace, somewhat near the stopper,
There watched for me, one June,
A girl: I know, sir, it's improper,
My poor mind's out of tune.
VI.
Only, there was a way ... you crept
Close by the side, to dodge
Eyes in the house, two eyes except:
They styled their house 'The Lodge.'
VII.
What right had a lounger up their lane?
But, by creeping very close,
With the good wall's help,--their eyes might strain
And stretch themselves to Oes,
VIII.
Yet never catch her and me together,
As she left the attic, there,
By the rim of the bottle labelled 'Ether,'
And stole from stair to stair,
IX.
And stood by the rose-wreathed gate. Alas,
We loved, sir,--used to meet:
How sad and bad and mad it was--
But then, how it was sweet!"
_A Likeness_ forms a third, and a good third, to these two fine and
subtle studies of modern English life. It is one of those poems which,
because they seem simple and superficial, and can be galloped off the
tongue in a racing jingle, we are apt to underrate or overlook. Yet it
would be difficult to find a more vivid bit of _genre_ painting than the
three-panelled picture in this single frame.
The three blank verse poems which complete the series of purely dramatic
pieces, _A Death in the Desert, Caliban upon Setebos_ and _Mr. Sludge,
"The Medium"_ are more elaborate than any yet named. They follow, to a
considerable extent, the form of the blank verse monologues which are
the glory of _Men and Women_. Alike in their qualities and defects they
represent a further step in development. The next step will lead to the
elaborate and extended monologues which comprise the greater part of
Browning's later works.
A _Death in the Desert_ is an argument in a dramatic frame-work. The
situation imaged is that of the mysterious death of St. John in extreme
old age. The background to the last utterance of the apostle is painted
with marvellous brilliance and tenderness: every circumstance is
conceived and represented in that pictorial style, in which a word is
equal to a touch of the brush of a great painter. But, delicately as the
circumstances and surroundings are indicated, it is as an argument that
the poem is mainly left to exist. The bearing of this argument on
contemporary theories may to some appear a merit, to others a blemish.
To make the dying John refute Strauss or Renan, handling their
propositions with admirable dialectical skill, is certainly, on the face
of it, somewhat hazardous. But I can see no real incongruity in imputing
to the seer of Patmos a prophetic insight into the future, no real
inconsequence in imagining the opponent of Cerinthus spending his last
breath in the defence of Christian truth against a foreseen scepticism.
In style, the poem a little recalls _Cleon_; with less of harmonious
grace and clear classic outline, it possesses a certain stilled
sweetness, a meditative tenderness, all its own, and certainly
appropriate to the utterance of the "beloved disciple."
_Caliban upon Setebos_; or, _Natural Theology In the Island_,[37] is
more of a creation, and a much greater poem, than _A Death in the
Desert_. It is sometimes forgotten that the grotesque has its own region
in art. The region of the grotesque has been well defined, in connection
with this poem, in a paper read by Mr. Cotter Morison before the
Browning Society. "Its proper province," he writes, "would seem to be
the exhibition of fanciful power by the artist; not beauty or truth in
the literal sense at all, but inventive affluence of unreal yet absurdly
comic forms, with just a flavour of the terrible added, to give a grim
dignity, and save from the triviality of caricature."[38] With the
exception of _The Heretic's Tragedy_, _Caliban upon Setebos_ is probably
the finest piece of grotesque art in the language. Browning's Caliban,
unlike Shakespeare's, has no active part to play: if he has ever seen
Stephano and Trinculo, he has forgotten it. He simply sprawls on the
ground "now that the heat of day is best," and expounds for himself, for
his own edification, his system of Natural Theology. I think Huxley has
said that the poem is a truly scientific representation of the
development of religious ideas in primitive man. It needed the subtlest
of poets to apprehend and interpret the undeveloped ideas and sensations
of a rudimentary and transitionally human creature like Caliban, to turn
his dumb stirrings of quaint fancies into words, and to do all this
without a discord. The finest poetical effect is in the close: it is
indeed one of the finest effects, climaxes, _surprises_, in literature.
Caliban has been venturing to talk rather disrespectfully of his God;
believing himself overlooked, he has allowed himself to speak out his
mind on religious questions. He chuckles to himself in safe
self-complacency. All at once--
"What, what? A curtain o'er the world at once!
Crickets stop hissing; not a bird--or, yes,
There scuds His raven that hath told Him all!
It was fool's play, this prattling! Ha! The wind
Shoulders the pillared dust, death's house o' the move,
And fast invading fires begin! White blaze--
A tree's head snaps--and there, there, there, there, there,
His thunder follows! Fool to jibe at Him!
Lo! 'Lieth flat and loveth Setebos!
'Maketh his teeth meet through his upper lip,
Will let those quails fly, will not eat this month
One little mess of whelks, so he may 'scape!"
_Mr. Sludge, "The Medium"_ is equally remote from both the other poems
in blank verse. It is a humorous and realistic tale of modern
spiritualism, suggested, it is said, by the life and adventures of the
American medium, Home. Like _Bishop Blougram_, it is at once an exposure
and an apologia. As a piece of analytic portraiture it would be
difficult to surpass; and it is certainly a fault on the right side if
the poet has endowed his precious blackguard with a dialectical head
hardly to be expected on such shoulders; if, in short, he has made him
nearly as clever as himself. When the critics complain that the
characters of a novelist are too witty, the characters of a poet too
profound, one cannot but feel thankful that it is once in a while
possible for such strictures to be made. The style of _Mr. Sludge_ is
the very acme of colloquialism. It is not "what is commonly understood
by poetry," certainly: but is it not poetry, all the same? If such a
character as Sludge should be introduced into poetry at all, it is
certain that no more characteristic expression could have been found for
him. But should he be dealt with? We limit our poetry nowadays, to the
length of our own tether; if we are unable to bring beauty out of every
living thing, merely because it is alive, and because nature is
beautiful in every movement, is it our own fault or nature's?
Shakespeare and his age trusted nature, and were justified; in our own
age only Browning has wholly trusted nature.
Scarcely second in importance to the dramatic group, comes the group of
lyrical poems, some of which are indeed, formally dramatic, that is,
the "utterance of so many imaginary persons," but still in general tone
and effect lyrical and even personal. _Abt Vogler_ for instance, and
_Rabbi ben Ezra_, might no doubt be considered instances of "vicarious
thinking" on behalf of the modern German composer and the mediæval
Jewish philosopher. But in neither case is there any distinct dramatic
intention. The one is a deep personal utterance on music, the other a
philosophy of life. But before I touch on these, which, with _Prospice_,
are the most important and impressive of the remaining poems, I should
name the two or three lesser pieces, the exquisite and pregnant little
elegy of love and mourning, _May and Death; A Face_, with its perfect
clearness and fineness of suggestive portraiture, as lovely as the
vignettes of Palma in _Sordello_, or as a real picture of the "Tuscan's
early art"; the two octaves (not in the first edition) on Woolner's
group of Constance and Arthur (_Deaf and Dumb_) and Sir Frederick
Leighton's picture of _Eurydice and Orpheus_; and the two semi-narrative
poems, _Gold Hair: a Story of Pornic_, and _Apparent Failure_, the
former a vivid rendering of the strange story told in Brittany of a
beautiful girl-miser, the latter a record and its stinging and consoling
moral ("Poor men, God made, and all for that!") of a visit that Browning
paid in 1850 to the Morgue.
_Abt Vogler_[39] ("after he has been extemporizing upon the musical
instrument of his invention") is an utterance on music which perhaps
goes further than any attempt which has ever been made in verse to set
forth the secret of the most sacred and illusive of the arts. Only the
wonderful lines in the _Merchant of Venice_ come anywhere near it. The
wonder and beauty of it grow on one, as the wonder and beauty of a sky,
of a sea, of a landscape, beautiful indeed and wonderful from the first,
become momentarily more evident, intense and absorbing. Life, religion
and music, the _Ganzen, Guten, Schönen_ of existence, are combined in
threefold unity, apprehended and interpreted in their essential spirit.
"Therefore to whom turn I but to thee, the ineffable Name?
Builder and maker, thou, of houses not made with hands!
What, have fear of change from thee who art ever the same!
Doubt that thy power can fill the heart that thy power expands?
There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before;
The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound;
What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more;
On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round.
All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good, shall exist;
Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist
When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that he heard it once; we shall hear it by-and-by.
And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence
For the fulness of the days? Have we withered or agonized?
Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue thence?
Why rushed the discord in, but that harmony should be prized?
Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear,
Each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and woe:
But God has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear;
The rest may reason and welcome: 'tis we musicians know."
In _Rabbi ben Ezra_ Browning has crystallized his religious philosophy
into a shape of abiding beauty. It has been called, not rashly, the
noblest of modern religious poems. Alike in substance and in form it
belongs to the highest order of meditative poetry; and it has, in
Browning's work, an almost unique quality of grave beauty, of severe
restraint, of earnest and measured enthusiasm. What the _Psalm of Life_
is to the people who do not think, _Rabbi ben Ezra_ might and should be
to those who do: a light through the darkness, a lantern of guidance and
a beacon of hope, to the wanderers lost and weary in the _selva
selvaggia_. It is one of those poems that mould character. I can give
only one or two of its most characteristic verses.
"Not on the vulgar mass
Called 'work' must sentence pass,
Things done, that took the eye and had the price;
O'er which, from level stand,
The low world laid its hand,
Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice:
But all, the world's coarse thumb
And finger failed to plumb,
So passed in making up the main account;
All instincts immature,
All purposes unsure,
That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount:
Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into a narrow act,
Fancies that broke through language and escaped;
All I could never be,
All, men ignored in me.
This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.
* * * * *