grandeur out of grime, which has uplifted a story of mere vulgar evil to
the height of tragedy. Out of materials that might be melodramatic,
Browning has created a drama of humanity of which the impression is
single, intense and overpowering. Notwithstanding the clash of physical
catastrophe at the close, it is really a spiritual tragedy; and in it
Browning has achieved that highest of achievements: the right, vivid and
convincing presentment of human nature at its highest and lowest, at its
extremes of possible action and emotion. It is not perfect: the
colloquialism which truth and art alike demand sinks sometimes, though
not in the great scenes, to the confines of a bastard realism. But in
the main the poem is an excellent example of the higher imaginative
realism, of the close, yet poetic or creative, treatment of life.
The four characters who play out the brief and fateful action of this
drama in narrative (the poem is more nearly related in form to the pure
drama than any other of Browning's poems not cast in the dramatic form)
are creations, three of them at least, in a deeper sense than the
characters in _Red Cotton Night-Cap Country_, or than the character in
_Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_. The "good gay girl," serving her
unconscious purpose in the tragic action, is properly enough a mere
sketch; but the two men and the elder woman are profoundly studied
characters, struck into life and revealed to themselves, to one another
and to us, at the supreme moment of a complex crisis. The elder man is
one of Browning's most finished studies, and, morally, one of the worst
characters even he has ever investigated. He is at once bad, clever and
cynical, the combination, of all others, most noxious and most hopeless.
He prides himself above all things on his intellect; and it is evident
that he has had the power to shape his course and to sway others. But
now, at fifty, he knows himself to be a failure. The cause of it he
traces mainly to a certain crisis of his life, when he won, only to
abuse, the affections of a splendidly beautiful woman, whose equal
splendour of soul he saw only when too late. It is significant of him
that he never views his conduct as a crime, a wrong to the woman, but as
a mistake on his part; and his attitude is not that of remorse, but of
one who has missed a chance. When, after four years, he meets
unexpectedly the woman whom he has wronged and lost, the good and evil
in him blaze out in a sudden and single flame of earnest appeal. In the
fact that this passionate appeal should be only half-sincere, or, if
sincere, then only for the moment, that to her who hears it, it should
seem wholly insincere, lies the intensity of the situation.
The character of the woman is less complex but not less consistent and
convincing. Like the man, her development has been arrested and
distorted by the cause which has made him too a wreck. Her love was
single-hearted and over-mastering; its very force, in recoil, turned it
into hate. Yoked to a soulless husband, whom she has married half in
pity, half in despair, her whole nature has frozen; so that when we see
her she is, while physically the same, spiritually the ghost of her
former self. The subtlety of the picture is to show what she is now
while making equally plain what she was in the past. She is a figure not
so much pathetic as terrible.
Pathetic, despite its outer comedy, is the figure of the young man, the
great rough, foolish, rich youth, tutored in evil by his Mephistopheles,
but only, we fancy, skin-deep in it, slow of thought but quick of
feeling, with his one and only love, never forgotten, and now found
again in the very woman whom his "friend" has wronged. His last speech,
with its clumsy yet genuine chivalry, its touching, broken words, its
fine feeling and faltering expression, is one of the most pathetic
things I know. Such a character, in its very absence of subtlety, is a
triumph of Browning's, to whom intellectual simplicity must be the
hardest of all dramatic assumptions.
24. PACCHIAROTTO, and how he worked in Distemper: with other poems.
[Published in July, 1876 (_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol. XIV.
pp. 1-152).]
_Pacchiarotto and other Poems_ is the first collection of miscellaneous
pieces since the _Dramatis Personæ_ of 1864. It is somewhat of an
exception to the general rule of Browning's work. A large proportion of
it is critical rather than creative, a criticism of critics; perhaps it
would be at once more correct and concise to call it "Robert Browning's
Apology." _Pacchiarotto_, _At the "Mermaid"_, _House_, _Shop_ and
_Epilogue_, are all more or less personal utterances on art and the
artist, sometimes in a concrete and impersonal way, more often in a
somewhat combative and contemptuous spirit. The most important part of
the volume, however, is that which contains the two or three
monodramatic poems and the splendid ballad of the fleet, _Hervé Riel_.
The first and longest poem, _Of Pacchiarotto, and how he worked in
Distemper_, divides itself into two parts, the first being the humorous
rendering of a true anecdote told in Vasari, of Giacomo Pacchiarotto, a
Sienese painter of the sixteenth century; and the second, a still more
mirthful onslaught of the poet upon his critics. The story--
"Begun with a chuckle,
And throughout timed by raps of the knuckle,"--
is funny enough in itself, and it points an excellent moral; but it is
chiefly interesting as a whimsical freak of verse, an extravaganza in
staccato. The rhyming is of its kind almost incomparable as a sustained
effort in double and triple grotesque rhymes. Not even in _Hudibras_,
not even in _Don Juan_, is there anything like them. I think all other
experiments of the kind, however successful as a whole, let you see now
and then that the author has had a hard piece of work to keep up his
appearance of ease. In _Pacchiarotto_ there is no evidence of the
strain. The masque of critics, under the cunning disguise of May-day
chimney-sweepers:--
"'We critics as sweeps out your chimbly!
Much soot to remove from your flue, sir!
Who spares coal in kitchen an't you, sir!
And neighbours complain it's no joke, sir!
You ought to consume your own smoke, sir!'"--
this after-part, overflowing with jolly humour and comic scorn, a besom
wielded by a laughing giant, is calculated to put the victims in better
humour with their executioner than with themselves. Browning has had to
endure more than most men at the hands of the critics, and he takes in
this volume, not in this poem only, a full and a characteristically
good-humoured revenge. The _Epilogue_ follows up the pendant to
_Pacchiarotto_. There is the same jolly humour, the same combative
self-assertiveness, the same retort _Tu quoque_, with a yet more earnest
and pungent enforcement.
"Wine, pulse in might from me!
It may never emerge in must from vat,
Never fill cask nor furnish can,
Never end sweet, which strong began--
God's gift to gladden the heart of man;
But spirit's at proof, I promise that!
No sparing of juice spoils what should be
Fit brewage--wine for me.
Man's thoughts and loves and hates!
Earth is my vineyard, these grow there:
From grape of the ground, I made or marred
My vintage; easy the task or hard,
Who set it--his praise be my reward!
Earth's yield! Who yearn for the Dark Blue Sea's
Let them 'lay, pray, bray'[51]--the addle-pates!
Mine be Man's thoughts, loves, hates!"
Despite its humorous expression, the view of poetic art contained in
these verses is both serious and significant. It is a frank (if defiant)
confession of faith.
_At the "Mermaid"_, a poem of characteristic energy and directness, is a
protest against the supposition or assumption that the personality and
personal views and opinions of a poet are necessarily reflected in his
dramatic work. It protests, at the same time, against the sham
melancholy and pseudo-despair which Byron made fashionable in poetry:--
"Have you found your life distasteful?
My life did and does smack sweet.
Was your youth of pleasure wasteful?
Mine I saved and hold complete.
Do your joys with age diminish?
When mine fail me, I'll complain.
Must in death your daylight finish?
My sun sets to rise again.
* * * * *
I find earth not gray but rosy,
Heaven not grim but fair of hue.
Do I stoop? I pluck a posy.
Do I stand and stare? All's blue."
_House_ confirms or continues the primary contention in _At the
"Mermaid"_: this time by the image of a House of Life, which some poets
may choose to set on view: "for a ticket apply to the Publisher."
Browning not merely denounces but denies the so-called self-revelations
of poets. He answers Wordsworth's
"With this same key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart,"
by the characteristic retort:--
"Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!"
In _Shop_ we have another keen piece of criticism: a protest against
poets who make their shop their home, and their song mere ware for sale.
After the personal and critical section we pass to half-a-dozen lyrics:
_Fears and Scruples_, a covert and startling poem, a doctrine embodied
in a character; then two beautiful little _Pisgah-Sights_, a dainty
experiment in metre, and in substance the expression of Browning's
favourite lesson, the worth of earth and the need of the mystery of
life; _Appearances_, a couple of stanzas whose telling simplicity
recalls the lovely earlier lilt, _Misconceptions; Natural Magic_ and
_Magical Nature_, two magical snatches, as perfect as the "first fine
careless rapture" of the earlier lyrics. I quote the latter:--
"MAGICAL NATURE.
1.
Flower--I never fancied, jewel--I profess you!
Bright I see and soft I feel the outside of a flower.
Save but glow inside and--jewel, I should guess you,
Dim to sight and rough to touch: the glory is the dower.
2.
You, forsooth, a flower? Nay, my love, a jewel--
Jewel at no mercy of a moment in your prime!
Time may fray the flower-face: kind be time or cruel,
Jewel, from each facet, flash your laugh at time!"
But the finest lyric in the volume is _St. Martin's Summer_, a poem
fantastically tragic, hauntingly melodious, mysterious and chilling as
the ghostly visitants at late love's pleasure-bower of whom it sings. I
do not think Browning has written many lyrical poems of more brilliant
and original quality. _Bifurcation_, as its name denotes, is a study of
divided paths in life, the paths of Love and Duty chosen severally by
two lovers whose epitaphs Browning gives. The moral problem, which is
sinner, which is saint, is stated and left open. The poem is an etching,
sharp, concise and suggestive. _Numpholeptos_ (nymph-entranced) has all
the mystery, the vague charm, the lovely sadness, of a picture of Burne
Jones. Its delicately fantastic colouring, its dreamy passion, and the
sad and quiet sweetness of its verse, have some affinity with _St.
Martin's Summer_, but are unlike anything else in Browning. It is the
utterance of a hopeless-hoping and pathetically resigned love: the love
of a merely human man for an angelically pure and unhumanly cold woman,
who requires in him an unattainable union of immaculate purity and
complete experience of life.
"Still you stand, still you listen, still you smile!
Still melts your moonbeam through me, white awhile,
Softening, sweetening, till sweet and soft
Increase so round this heart of mine, that oft
I could believe your moonbeam smile has past
The pallid limit and, transformed at last,
Lies, sunlight and salvation--warms the soul
It sweetens, softens!
* * * * *
What means the sad slow silver smile above
My clay but pity, pardon?--at the best,
But acquiescence that I take my rest,
Contented to be clay, while in your heaven
The sun reserves love for the Spirit-Seven
Companioning God's throne they lamp before,
--Leaves earth a mute waste only wandered o'er
By that pale soft sweet disempassioned moon
Which smiles me slow forgiveness! Such the boon
I beg? Nay, dear ...
Love, the love whole and sole without alloy!"
The action of this soul's tragedy takes place under "the light that
never was on sea or land": it is the tragedy of a soul, but of a
disembodied soul.
_A Forgiveness_ is a drama of this world. It is the legitimate successor
of the monologues of _Men and Women_; it may, indeed, be most precisely
compared with an earlier monologue, _My Last Duchess_; and it is, like
these, the concentrated essence of a complete tragedy. Like all the best
of Browning's poems, it is thrown into a striking situation, and
developed from this central point. It is the story of a love merged in
contempt, quenched in hate, and rekindled in a fatal forgiveness, told
in confession to a monk by the man whom the monk has wronged. The
personage who speaks is one of the most sharply-outlined characters in
Browning: a clear, cold, strong-willed man, implacable in love or hate.
He tells his story in a quiet, measured, utterly unemotional manner,
with reflective interruptions and explanations, the acute analysis of a
merciless intellect; leading gradually up to a crisis only to be matched
by the very finest crises in Browning:--
"Immersed
In thought so deeply, Father? Sad, perhaps?
For whose sake, hers or mine or his who wraps
--Still plain I seem to see!--about his head
The idle cloak,--about his heart (instead
Of cuirass) some fond hope he may elude
My vengeance in the cloister's solitude?
Hardly, I think! As little helped his brow
The cloak then, Father--as your grate helps now!"
The poem is by far the greatest thing in the volume; it is, indeed, one
of the very finest examples of Browning's psychological subtlety and
concentrated dramatic power.[52]
The ballad of _Hervé Riel_ which has no rival but Tennyson's _Revenge_
among modern sea-ballads, was written at Croisic, 30th September 1867,
and was published in the _Cornhill Magazine_ for March, 1871 in, order
that the £100 which had been offered for it might be sent to the Paris
Relief Fund. It may be named, with the "Ride from Ghent to Aix," as a
proof of how simply and graphically Browning can write if he likes; how
promptly he can stir the blood and thrill the heart. The facts of the
story, telling how, after the battle of the Hogue, a simple Croisic
sailor saved all that was left of the French fleet by guiding the
vessels into the harbour, are given in the Croisic guide-books; and
Browning has followed them in everything but the very effective end:--
"'Since 'tis ask and have, I may--
Since the others go ashore--
Come! A good whole holiday!
Leave to go and see my wife, whom I call the Belle Aurore!'
That he asked and that he got,--nothing more."
"Ce brave homme," says the account, "ne demanda pour récompense d'un
service aussi signalé, qu'un _conge absolu_ pour rejoindre sa femme,
qu'il nomma la Belle Aurore."
_Cenciaja_, the only blank verse piece in the volume, is of the nature
of a note or appendix to Shelley's "superb achievement" _The Cenci_. It
serves to explain the allusion to the case of Paolo Santa Croce
(_Cenci_, Act V. sc. iv.). Browning obtained the facts from a MS. volume
of memorials of Italian crime, in the possession of Sir John Simeon, who
published it in the series of the Philobiblon Society.[53]
_Filippo Baldinucci on the Privilege of Burial_, a grotesque and
humorously-told "reminiscence of A.D. 1670," is, up to stanza 35, the
versification of an anecdote recorded by Baldinucci, the artist and art
critic (1624-1696), in his History of Painters. The incident with which
it concludes is imaginary.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 51: The jocose vindictiveness with which Browning returns
again and again to the assault of the bad grammar and worse rhetoric of
Byron's once so much belauded address to the ocean is very amusing. The
above is only one out of four or five instances.]
[Footnote 52: It is worth comparing _A Forgiveness_ with a poem of very
similar motive by Leconte de Lisle: _Le Jugement de Komor_ (_Poèmes
Barbares_). Each is a fine example of its author, in just those
qualities for which both poets are eminent: originality and subtlety of
subject, pregnant picturesqueness of phrase and situation, and grimly
tragic power. The contrast no less than the likeness which exists
between them will be evident on a comparison of the two poems.]
[Footnote 53: In reference to the title _Cenciaja_, and the Italian
proverb which follows it, _Ogni cencio vuol entrare in bucato_, Browning
stated, in a letter to Mr. H.B. Forman (printed in his _Shelley_, 1880,
ii. 419), that "'aia' is generally an accumulative yet depreciative
termination: 'Cenciaja'--a bundle of rags--a trifle. The proverb means,
'Every poor creature will be pressing into the company of his betters,'
and I used it to deprecate the notion that I intended anything of the
kind."]
25. THE AGAMEMNON OF ÆSCHYLUS.
[Published in October, 1877 (_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol.
XIII. pp. 259-357).]
Browning prefaces his transcript of the _Agamemnon_ with a brief
introduction, in which he thus sets forth his theory of translation:--
"If, because of the immense fame of the following Tragedy, I
wished to acquaint myself with it, and could only do so by
the help of a translator, I should require him to be literal
at every cost save that of absolute violence to our language.
The use of certain allowable constructions which, happening
to be out of daily favour, are all the more appropriate to
archaic workmanship, is no violence: but I would be tolerant
for once,--in the case of so immensely famous an
original,--of even a clumsy attempt to furnish me with the
very turn of each phrase in as Greek a fashion as English
will bear: while, with respect to amplifications and
embellishments, anything rather than, with the good farmer,
experience that most signal of mortifications, 'to gape for
Æschylus and get Theognis.' I should especially
decline,--what may appear to brighten up a passage,--the
employment of a new word for some old one--[Greek: phonos],
or [Greek: megas], or [Greek: telos], with its congeners,
recurring four times in three lines.... Further,--if I
obtained a mere strict bald version of thing by thing, or at
least word pregnant with thing, I should hardly look for an
impossible transmission of the reputed magniloquence and
sonority of the Greek; and this with the less regret,
inasmuch as there is abundant musicality elsewhere, but
nowhere else than in his poem the ideas of the poet. And
lastly, when presented with these ideas I should expect the
result to prove very hard reading indeed if it were meant to
resemble Æschylus."
Every condition here laid down has been carried out with unflinching
courage. Browning has rendered word by word and line by line; with,
indeed, some slight inevitable expansion in the rhymed choruses, very
slight, infinitely slighter than every other translator has found
needful. Throughout, there are numberless instances of minute and happy
accuracy of phrase, re-creations of the very thoughts of Æschylus. An
incomparable dexterity is shown in fitting phrase upon phrase, forcing
line to bear the exact weight of line, rendering detail by detail. But
for this very reason, as a consequence of this very virtue, there is no
denying that Browning's version is certainly "very hard reading," so
hard reading that it is sometimes necessary to turn to the Greek in
order to fully understand the English. Browning has anticipated, but not
altogether answered, this objection. For, besides those passages which
in their fidelity to every "minute particular," simply reproduce the
obscurity of the original, there is much that seems either obscure or
harsh, and is so simply because it gives "the turn of each phrase," not
merely "in as Greek a fashion as English will bear," but beyond it:
phrases which are native to Greek, foreign to English. The choruses,
which are attempted in metre as close as English can come to Greek
metre, suggest the force, but not the dignity of the original; and seem
often to be content to drop much of the poem by the way in getting at
"the ideas of the poet." It is a Titan's version of an Olympian, and it
is thus no doubt the scholar rather than the general reader who will
find most to please him in "this attempt to give our language the
similitude of Greek by close and sustained grappling, word to word, with
so sublime and difficult a masterpiece."[54]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 54: J.A. Symonds, _Academy_, Nov. 10, 1877.]
26. LA SAISIAZ: THE TWO POETS OF CROISIC.
[Published in May, 1878. _La Saisiaz_ (written November,
1877), pp. 1-82; _The Two Poets of Croisic_, pp. 83-201.
(_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol. XIV. pp. 153-204, 205-279).]
In _La Saisiaz_ Browning reasons of God and the soul, of life here and
of life to come. The poem is addressed to a friend of old date, who died
suddenly while she was staying with Browning and his sister, in the
summer of 1877, at a villa called La Saisiaz (The Sun) in the mountains
near Geneva. The first twenty pages tell the touching story; the rest of
the poem records the argument which it called forth. "Was ending ending
once and always, when you died?" Browning asks himself, and he attempts
to answer the question, not on traditional grounds, or on the authority
of a creed, but by honest reasoning. He assumes two postulates, and two
only, that God exists and that the soul exists; and he proceeds to show,
very forcibly, the unsatisfactory nature of life if consciousness ends
with death, and its completely satisfactory nature if the soul's
existence continues.
"Without the want,
Life, now human, would be brutish: just that hope, however scant,
Makes the actual life worth leading; take the hope therein away,
All we have to do is surely not endure another day.
This life has its hopes for this life, hopes that promise joy:
life done--
Out of all the hopes, how many had complete fulfilment? none.
'But the soul is not the body': and the breath is not the flute;
Both together make the music: either marred and all is mute."
This hypothesis is purely personal, and as such he holds it. But, to his
own mind at least, he finds that
"Sorrow did and joy did nowise,--life well weighed--preponderate.
By necessity ordained thus? I shall bear as best I can;
By a cause all-good, all-wise, all-potent? No, as I am man!"
Yet, if only the assumption of a future life may be made, he will
thankfully acquiesce in an earthly failure, which will then be only
relative, and the earnest of a heavenly gain. Having arrived at this
point, Browning proceeds to argue out the question yet further, under
the form of a dialogue between "Fancy" (or the soul's instinct) and
"Reason." He here shows that not merely is life explicable only as a
probation, but that probation is only possible under our present
conditions, in our present uncertainty. If it were made certain that
there is a future life in which we shall be punished or rewarded,
according as we do evil or good, we should have no choice of action,
hence no virtue in doing what were so manifestly to our own advantage.
Again, if we were made certain of this future life of higher faculties
and greater happiness, should we hesitate to rush to it at the first
touch of sorrow, before our time? He ends, therefore, with a "hope--no
more than hope, but hope--no less than hope," which amounts practically
to the assurance that, as he puts it in the last line--
"He at least believed in Soul, was very sure of God!"
_The Two Poets of Croisic_ is a comedy in narrative, dealing mainly with
the true tale of Paul Desforges-Maillard, whose story furnished Piron
with the matter of his _Métromanie_. The first of the "two poets" is one
René Gentilhomme, born 1610, once page to the Prince of Condé,
afterwards court-poet to Louis XIII. His story, by an easy transition,
leads into the richer record of Desforges, which Browning gives with not
a few variations, evidently intentional, from the facts of the case.
Paul-Briand Maillard, self-surnamed Desforges, was born at Croisic,
April 24, 1699: he died at the age of seventy-three. His memory has
survived that of better poets on account of the famous hoax which he
played on the Paris of his day, including no less a person than
Voltaire. The first part of the story is told pretty literally in
Browning's pages:--how Desforges, unsuccessful as a poet in his own
person, assumed the title of a woman, and as Mlle. Malcrais de la Vigne
(his verses being copied by an obliging cousin, Mme. Mondoret) obtained
an immediate and astonishing reputation. The sequel is somewhat altered.
Voltaire's revenge when the cheat was discovered, so far from being
prompt and immediate, was treacherously dissimulated, and its
accomplishment deferred for more than one long-subsequent occasion.
Desforges lived to have the last word, in assisting at the first
representation of Piron's _Métromanie_, in which Voltaire's humiliation
and the Croisic poet's clever trick are perpetuated for as long as that
sprightly and popular comedy shall be remembered.