poet's licence to heighten the effect and increase the piquancy of the
narrative. The poem is written in _ottava rima_, but, very singularly,
there is not one double rhyme from beginning to end. It is difficult to
see why Browning, a finer master of grotesque compound rhymes than
Byron, should have so carefully avoided them in a metre which, as in
Byron's hands, owes no little of its effect to a clever introduction of
such rhymes. The lines (again of set purpose, it is evident) overlap one
another without an end-pause where in Italian it is almost universal,
namely, after the sixth line. The result of the innovation is far from
successful: it destroys the flow of the verse and gives it an air of
abruptness. Of the liveliness, vivacity and pungency of the tale, no
idea can be given by quotation: two of the stanzas in which the moral is
enforced, the two finest, perhaps, in the poem, are, however, severable
from their context:--
"Who knows most, doubts most; entertaining hope,
Means recognizing fear; the keener sense
Of all comprised within our actual scope
Recoils from aught beyond earth's dim and dense.
Who, grown familiar with the sky, will grope
Henceforward among groundlings? That's offence
Just as indubitably: stars abound
O'erhead, but then--what flowers made glad the ground!
So, force is sorrow, and each sorrow, force:
What then? since Swiftness gives the charioteer
The palm, his hope be in the vivid horse
Whose neck God clothed with thunder, not the steer
Sluggish and safe! Yoke Hatred, Crime, Remorse,
Despair: but ever 'mid the whirling fear,
Let, through the tumult, break the poet's face
Radiant, assured his wild slaves win the race!"
The poem is followed by an exquisite Epilogue, one of the most
delicately graceful and witty and tender of Browning's lyrics. The
briefer Prologue is not less beautiful:--
"Such a starved bank of moss
Till, that May-morn,
Blue ran the flash across:
Violets were born!
Sky--what a scowl of cloud
Till, near and far,
Ray on ray split the shroud:
Splendid, a star!
World--how it walled about
Life with disgrace
Till God's own smile came out:
That was thy face!"
27. DRAMATIC IDYLS.
[Published in May 1879 (_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol. XV. pp.
1-80).]
In the _Dramatic Idyls_ Browning may almost be said to have broken new
ground. His idyls are short poems of passionate action, presenting in a
graphic and concentrated way a single episode or tragic crisis. Not only
by their concreteness and popular effectiveness, their extraordinary
vigour of conception and expression, are they distinguished from much of
Browning's later writing: they have in addition this significant novelty
of interest, that here for the first time Browning has found subjects
for his poetry among the poor, that here for the first time he has
painted, with all his close and imaginative realism, the human comedy of
the lower classes. That he has never done so before, though rather
surprising, comes, I suppose, from his preponderating interest in
intellectual problems, and from the difficulty of finding such among
what Léon Cladel has called _tragiques histoires plébéiennes_. But the
happy instinct has at last come to him, and we are permitted to watch
the humours of that delicious pair of sinners saved, "Publican Black Ned
Bratts and Tabby his big wife too," as a relief to the less pleasant and
profitable spectacle of His Majesty Napoleon III., or of even the two
poets of Croisic. All the poems in the volume (with the exception of a
notable and noble protest against vivisection, in the form of a touching
little true tale of a dog) are connected together by a single motive, on
which every poem plays a new variation. The motto of the book might
be:--
"There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of his life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries."
This idea of a turning-point or testing-time in the lives of men is more
or less expressed or implied in very much of Browning's poetry, but
nowhere is it expressed so completely, so concisely, or so
consecutively, as here. In _Martin Relph_ (which "embodies," says Mrs.
Orr, "a vague remembrance of something read by Mr. Browning when he was
himself a boy") we have an instance of the tide "omitted," and a
terrible picture of the remorse which follows. Martin Relph has the
chance presented to him of saving two lives, that of the girl he loves
and of his rival whom she loves. The chance is but of an instant's
duration. He hesitates, and the moment is for ever lost. In that one
moment his true soul, with its instinctive selfishness, has leapt to
light, and the knowledge of it torments him with an inextinguishable
agony. In _Ivàn Ivànovitch_ (founded on a popular Russian story of a
woman throwing her children to the wolves to save her own life) we have
a twofold illustration of the theme. The testing-moment comes to the
mother, Loùscha, and again to Ivàn Ivànovitch. While the woman fails
terribly in her duty, and meets a terrible reward, the man rises to a
strange and awful nobility of action, and "acts for God." _Halbert and
Hob_, a grim little tragedy (suggested by a passage in the Nicomachean
Ethics of Aristotle), presents us with the same idea in a singularly
concrete form. The crisis has a saving effect, but it is an incomplete,
an unwilling or irresistible, act of grace, and it bears but sorry
fruit. In _Ned Bratts_ (suggested by the story of "Old Tod," in Bunyan's
_Life and Death of Mr. Badman_[55]) we have a prompt and quite hurried
taking of the tide: the sudden conversion, repentance, and expiation of
the "worst couple, rogue and quean, unhanged." _Pheidippides_ (the
legend of the runner who brought the news of Marathon to Athens, and
died in the utterance) illustrates the idea in a more obvious but less
individual way.
Perhaps for sheer perfection of art, for fundamental tragedy, for a
quality of compassionate and unflinching imaginative vision, nothing in
the book quite comes up to _Halbert and Hob_. There is hardly in
Browning a more elemental touch than that of: "A boy threw stones: he
picked them up and stored them in his breast." _Martin Relph_, besides
being a fine tale splendidly told, is among the most masterly of all
renderings of remorse, of the terrors and torments of conscience. Every
word is like a drop of agony wrung out of a tortured soul. _Ivàn
Ivànovitch_ is, as a narrative, still finer: as a piece of story-telling
Browning has perhaps never excelled it. Nothing could be more graphic
and exciting than the description of the approach of the wolves: the
effective change from iambs to anapæsts gives their very motion.
"Was that--wind?
Anyhow, Droug starts, stops, back go his ears, he snuffs,
Snorts,--never such a snort! then plunges, knows the sough's
Only the wind: yet, no--our breath goes up too straight!
Still the low sound,--less low, loud, louder, at a rate
There's no mistaking more! Shall I lean out--look--learn
The truth whatever it be? Pad, pad! At last, I turn--
'Tis the regular pad of the wolves in pursuit of the life in
the sledge!
An army they are: close-packed they press like the thrust of a wedge:
They increase as they hunt: for I see, through the pine-trunks
ranged each side,
Slip forth new fiend and fiend, make wider and still more wide
The four-footed steady advance. The foremost--none may pass:
They are elders and lead the line, eye and eye--green-glowing brass!
But a long way distant still. Droug, save us! He does his best:
Yet they gain on us, gain, till they reach,--one reaches....
How utter the rest?"
The setting of the story, the vast motionless Russian landscape, the
village life, the men and women, has a singular expressiveness; and the
revelation of the woman's character, the exposure of her culpable
weakness, seen in the very excuses by which she endeavours to justify
herself, is brought about with singularly masterly art. There are
moments of essential drama, not least significantly in the last lines,
above all in those two pregnant words: "_How otherwise_? asked he."
_Ned Bratts_ takes almost the same position among Browning's humorous
poems that _Ivàn Ivànovitch_ does among his narratives. It is a whole
comedy in itself. Surroundings and atmosphere are called up with perfect
art and the subtlest sympathy. What opening could be a better
preparation for the heated and grotesque utterances of Ned Bratts than
the wonderful description of the hot day? It serves to put us into
precisely the right mood for seeing and feeling the comic tragedy that
follows. Dickens himself never painted a more riotously realistic scene,
nor delineated a better ruffian than the murderous rascal precariously
converted by Bunyan and his book.
In the midst of these realistic tragedies and comedies, _Pheidippides_,
with its clear Greek outline and charm and heroical grace, stands finely
contrasted. The measure is of Browning's invention, and is finely
appropriate to the character of the poem.
"So, to this day, when friend meets friend, the word of salute
Is still 'Rejoice!'--his word which brought rejoicing indeed.
So is Pheidippides happy for ever,--the noble strong man
Who could race like a God, bear the face of a God, whom a God
loved so well
He saw the land saved he had helped to save, and was suffered to tell
Such tidings, yet never decline, but, gloriously as he began,
So to end gloriously--once to shout, thereafter be mute:
'Athens is saved!' Pheidippides dies in the shout for his meed."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 55: At a summer Assizes holden at _Hartfort_, while the Judge
was sitting upon the Bench, comes this old _Tod_ into the Court,
cloathed in a green Suit with his Leathern Girdle in his hand, his bosom
open, and all on a dung sweat, as if he had run for his Life; and, being
come in, he spake aloud as follows: _My Lord_, said he, _Here is the
veryest Rogue that breaths upon the face of the earth, ... My Lord,
there has not been a Robbery committed this many years, within so many
miles of this place but I have either been at it or privy to it._
"The Judge thought the fellow was mad, but after some conference with
some of the Justices, they agreed to Indict him; and so they did, of
several felonious Actions; to all of which he heartily confessed Guilty,
and so was hanged with his wife at the same time....
"As for the truth of this Story, the Relator told me that he was at the
same time himself in the Court, and stood within less than two yards of
old _Tod_, when he heard him aloud to utter the words."--Bunyan's _Life
and Death of Mr. Badman_, 1680.]
28. DRAMATIC IDYLS. Second Series.
[Published in July, 1880. _Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol. XV.
pp. 81-163.]
The second series of _Dramatic Idyls_ is bound together, like the first,
though somewhat less closely, by a leading idea, which, whether
consciously or not, is hinted at in a pointed little prologue: the idea
of the paradox of human action, and the apparent antagonism between
motive and result. The volume differs considerably from its precursor,
and it contains nothing quite equal to the best of the earlier poems.
There is more variety, perhaps, but the human interest is less intense,
the stories less moving and absorbing. With less humour, there is a much
more pronounced element of the grotesque. And most prominent of all is
that characteristic of Browning which a great critic has called agility
of intellect.
The first poem, _Echetlos_, is full of heroical ardour and firm, manly
vigour of movement. Like _Pheidippides_, it is a legend of Marathon. It
sings of the mysterious helper who appeared to the Greeks, in rustic
garb and armed with a plough.
"But one man kept no rank and his sole arm plied no spear,
As a flashing came and went, and a form i' the van, the rear,
Brightened the battle up, for he blazed now there, now here.
* * * * *
Did the steady phalanx falter? To the rescue, at the need,
The clown was ploughing Persia, clearing Greek earth of weed,
As he routed through the Sakian and rooted up the Mede."
After the battle, the man was nowhere to be seen, and inquiry was made
of the oracle.
"How spake the Oracle? 'Care for no name at all!
Say but just this: We praise one helpful whom we call
The Holder of the Ploughshare. The great deed ne'er grows small.'"
With _Echetlos_ may be mentioned the Virgilian legend of _Pan and Luna_,
a piece of graceful fancy, with its exquisite burden, that
"Verse of five words, each a boon:
Arcadia, night, a cloud, Pan, and the moon."
_Clive_, the most popular in style, and certainly one of the finest
poems in the volume, is a dramatic monologue very much akin, in subject,
treatment and form, to the narratives in the first series. The story
deals with an episode in the life of Clive, when, as a young man, he
first proved his courage in the face of a bully whom he had caught
cheating at cards. The poem is full of fire and brilliance, and is a
subtle analysis and presentation of the character of Clive. Its
structure is quite in Browning's best manner: a central situation,
illumined by "what double and treble reflection and refraction!" Like
Balzac (whose _Honorine_, for instance, is constructed on precisely
similar lines) Browning often increases the effect of his picture by
setting it in a framework, more or less elaborate, by placing the
central narrative in the midst of another slighter and secondary one,
related to it in some subtle way. The story of _Clive_ obtains emphasis,
and is rendered more impressive, by the lightly but strongly sketched-in
figure of the old veteran who tells the tale. Scarcely anything in the
poem seems to me so fine as this pathetic portrait of the lonely old
man, sitting, like Colonel Newcome, solitary in his house among his
memories, with his boy away: "I and Clive were friends."
The Arabian tale of _Muléykeh_ is the most perfect and pathetic piece in
the volume. It is told in singularly fine verse, and in remarkably
clear, simple, yet elevated style. The end is among the great heroic
things in poetry. Hóseyn, though he has neither herds nor flocks, is the
richest and happiest of men, for he possesses the peerless mare,
Muléykeh the Pearl, whose speed has never been outstripped. Duhl, the
son of Sheybán, who envies Hóseyn and has endeavoured by every means,
but without success, to obtain the mare, determines at last to steal
her. He enters Hóseyn's tent noiselessly by night, saddles Muléykeh, and
gallops away. In an instant Hóseyn is on the back of Buhéyseh, the
Pearl's sister, only less fleet than herself, and in pursuit.
"And Hóseyn--his blood turns flame, he has learned long since
to ride,
And Buhéyseh does her part,--they gain--they are gaining fast
On the fugitive pair, and Duhl has Ed-Dárraj to cross and quit,
And to reach the ridge El-Sabán,--no safety till that be spied!
And Buhéyseh is, bound by bound, but a horse-length off at last,
For the Pearl has missed the tap of the heel, the touch of the bit.
She shortens her stride, she chafes at her rider the strange
and queer:
Buhéyseh is mad with hope--beat sister she shall and must,
Though Duhl, of the hand and heel so clumsy, she has to thank.
She is near now, nose by tail--they are neck by croup--joy! fear!
What folly makes Hóseyn shout 'Dog Duhl, Damned son of the Dust,
Touch the right ear and press with your foot my Pearl's left flank!'
And Duhl was wise at the word, and Muléykeh as prompt perceived
Who was urging redoubled pace, and to hear him was to obey,
And a leap indeed gave she, and evanished for evermore.
And Hóseyn looked one long last look as who, all bereaved,
Looks, fain to follow the dead so far as the living may:
Then he turned Buhéyseh's neck slow homeward, weeping sore.
And, lo, in the sunrise, still sat Hóseyn upon the ground
Weeping: and neighbours came, the tribesmen of Bénu-Asád
In the vale of green Er-Rass, and they questioned him of his grief;
And he told them from first to last how, serpent-like, Duhl had wound
His way to the nest, and how Duhl rode like an ape, so bad!
And how Buhéyseh did wonders, yet Pearl remained with the thief.
And they jeered him, one and all: 'Poor Hóseyn is crazed past hope!
How else had he wrought himself his ruin, in fortune's spite!
To have simply held the tongue were a task for a boy or girl,
And here were Muléykeh again, the eyed like an antelope,
The child of his heart by day, the wife of his breast by night!'
'And the beaten in speed!' wept Hóseyn: 'You never have loved
my Pearl!'"
There remain _Pietro of Abano_[56] and _Doctor_ ----. The latter, a
Talmudic legend, is probably the poorest of Browning's poems: it is
rather farce than humour. The former is a fine piece of genuine
grotesque art, full of pungent humour, acuteness, worldly wisdom, and
clever phrasing and rhyming. It is written in an elaborate comic metre
of Browning's invention, indicated at the end by eight bars of music.
The poem is one of the most characteristic examples of that "Teutonic
grotesque, which lies in the expression of deep ideas through fantastic
forms," a grotesque of noble and cultivated art, of which Browning is as
great a master in poetry as Carlyle in prose.
The volume ends with a charming lyrical epilogue, not without its
personal bearing, though it has sometimes, very unfairly, been
represented as a piece of mere self-gratulation.
"Thus I wrote in London, musing on my betters,"
Browning tells us in some album-verses which have found their way into
print, and he naturally complains that what he wrote of Dante should be
foisted upon himself. Indeed, he has quite as much the characteristics
of the "spontaneous" as of the "brooding" poet of his parable.
"'Touch him ne'er so lightly, into song he broke:
Soil so quick-receptive,--not one feather-seed,
Not one flower-dust fell, but straight its fall awoke
Vitalising virtue: song would song succeed
Sudden as spontaneous--prove a poet soul!'
Indeed?
Rock's the song-soil rather, surface hard and bare:
Sun and dew their mildness, storm and frost their rage
Vainly both expend,--few flowers awaken there:
Quiet in its cleft broods--what the after age
Knows and names a pine, a nation's heritage."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 56: Pietro of Abano was an Italian physician, alchemist and
philosopher, born at Abano, near Padua, in 1246, died about 1320. He had
the reputation of a wizard, and was imprisoned by the Inquisition. He
was condemned to be burnt; he died in prison, and his dead body was
ordered to be burnt; but as that had been taken away by his friends, the
Inquisition burnt his portrait. His reputed antipathy to milk and
cheese, with its natural analogy, suggested the motive of the poem. The
book referred to in it is his principal work, _Conciliator
differentiarum quæ inter philosophos et medicos versantur_. Mantua,
1472.]
29. JOCOSERIA.
[Published in March, 1883 (_Poetical Works_, 1889, pp.
165-266).]
The name _Jocoseria_ (mentioned by Browning in its original connection,
Melander's "Jocoseria," in the notes to _Paracelsus_) expresses very
cleverly the particular nature of the volume, in its close union and
fusion of grave and gay. The book is not, as a whole, so intense or so
brilliant as the first and second series of _Dramatic Idyls_, but one
or two of the shorter poems are, in their way, hardly excelled by
anything in either volume.
The longest poem, though by no means the best is the imaginary
Rabbinical legend of _Jochanan Hakkadosh_ (John the Saint), which
Browning, with a touch of learned quizzicalness, states in his note[57]
"to have no better authority than that of the treatise, existing
dispersedly, in fragments of Rabbinical writing, [the name, 'Collection
of many Lies,' follows in Hebrew,] from which I might have helped myself
more liberally." It is written in _terza rima_, like _Doctor_ ---- in
the second series of _Dramatic Idyls_, and is supposed to be told by
"the Jew aforesaid" in order to "make amends and justify our Mishna."
That it may to some extent do, but it seems to me that its effectiveness
as an example of the serio-grotesque style would have been heightened by
some metre less sober and placid than the _terza rima_; by rhythm and
rhyme as audacious and characteristic as the rhythm and the rhymes of
_Pietro of Abano_, for instance.
_Ixion_, a far finer poem than _Jochanan Hakkadosh_, is, no doubt, an
equally sincere utterance of personal belief. The poem is a monologue,
in unrhymed hexameters and pentameters. It presents the old myth in a
new light. Ixion is represented as the Prometheus of man's righteous
revolt against the tyranny of an unjust God. The poem is conceived in a
spirit of intense earnestness, and worked out with great vigour and
splendour of diction. For passion and eloquence nothing in it surpasses
the finely culminating last lines, of which I can but tear a few, only
too barbarously, from their context:--
"What is the influence, high o'er Hell, that turns to a rapture
Pain--and despair's murk mists blends in a rainbow of hope?
What is beyond the obstruction, stage by stage tho' it baffle?
Back must I fall, confess 'Ever the weakness I fled'?
No, for beyond, far, far is a Purity all-unobstructed!
Zeus was Zeus--not Man: wrecked by his weakness I whirl.
Out of the wreck I rise--past Zeus to the Potency o'er him!
I--to have hailed him my friend! I--to have clasped her--my love!
Pallid birth of my pain,--where light, where light is, aspiring
Thither I rise, whilst thou--Zeus, keep the godship and sink!"
While _Ixion_ is the noblest and most heroically passionate of these
poems, _Adam, Lilith, and Eve_, is the most pregnant and suggestive.
Browning has rarely excelled it in certain qualities, hardly found in
any other poet, of pungency, novelty, and penetrating bitter-sweetness.
"ADAM, LILITH, AND EVE.
One day it thundered and lightened.
Two women, fairly frightened,
Sank to their knees, transformed, transfixed,
At the feet of the man who sat betwixt;
And 'Mercy!' cried each, 'If I tell the truth
Of a passage in my youth!'
Said This: 'Do you mind the morning
I met your love with scorning?
As the worst of the venom left my lips,
I thought, "If, despite this lie, he strips
The mask from my soul with a kiss--I crawl,
His slave,--soul, body and all!"'
Said That: 'We stood to be married;
The priest, or someone, tarried;
"If Paradise-door prove locked?" smiled you.
I thought, as I nodded, smiling too,
"Did one, that's away, arrive--nor late
Nor soon should unlock Hell's gate!"'
It ceased to lighten and thunder.
Up started both in wonder,
Looked round, and saw that the sky was clear,
Then laughed, 'Confess you believed us, Dear!'
'I saw through the joke!' the man replied
They seated themselves beside."
Much of the same power is shown in _Cristina and Monaldeschi_,[58] a
dramatic monologue with all the old vigour of Browning's early work of
that kind; not only keen and subtle, but charged with a sharp electrical
quality, which from time to time darts out with a sudden and unexpected
shock. The style and tone are infused with a peculiar fierce irony. The
metre is rapid and stinging, like the words of the vindictive queen as
she hurries her treacherous victim into the hands of the assassins.
There is dramatic invention in the very cadence:
"Ah, but how each loved each, Marquis!
Here's the gallery they trod
Both together, he her god,
She his idol,--lend your rod,
Chamberlain!--ay, there they are--'_Quis
Separabit_?'--plain those two
Touching words come into view,
Apposite for me and you!"
_Mary Wollstonecraft and Fuseli_, a dramatic lyric of three verses, the
pathetic utterance of an unloved loving woman's heart, is not dissimilar
in style to _Cristina and Monaldeschi_. It would be unjust to Fuseli to
name him Bottom, but only fair to Mary Wollstonecraft to call her
Titania.