Browning by one who had heard it from its hero, the so-called Donald,
himself,"[59]) is a ballad, not at all in Browning's best style, but
certainly vigorous and striking, directed against the brutalising
influences of sport, as _Tray_ was directed against the infinitely worse
brutalities of ignorant and indiscriminate vivisection. Its noble human
sympathies and popular style appeal to a ready audience. _Solomon and
Balkis_, though by no means among the best of Browning's comic poems, is
a witty enough little tale from that inexhaustible repository, the
Talmud. It is a dialogue between Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, not
"solely" nor at all "of things sublime." _Pambo_ is a bit of pointed
fun, a mock-modest apology to critics. Finally, besides a musical little
love-song named _Wanting is--What?_ we have in _Never the Time and the
Place_ one of the great love-songs, not easily to be excelled, even in
the work of Browning, for strength of spiritual passion and intensity of
exultant and certain hope.
"NEVER THE TIME AND THE PLACE.
Never the time and the place
And the loved one all together!
This path--how soft to pace!
This May--what magic weather!
Where is the loved one's face?
In a dream that loved one's face meets mine,
But the house is narrow, the place is bleak
Where, outside, rain and wind combine
With a furtive ear, if I strive to speak,
With a hostile eye at my flushing cheek,
With a malice that marks each word, each sign!
O enemy sly and serpentine,
Uncoil thee from the waking man!
Do I hold the Past
Thus firm and fast
Yet doubt if the Future hold I can?
This path so soft to pace shall lead
Thro' the magic of May to herself indeed!
Or narrow if needs the house must be,
Outside are the storms and strangers: we--
Oh, close, safe, warm, sleep I and she,
--I and she!"
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 57: This note contains three burlesque sonnets whose chief
interest is, that they are, with the exception of the unclaimed sonnet
printed in the _Monthly Repository_ in 1834, the first sonnets ever
published by Browning.]
[Footnote 58: One can scarcely read this poem without recalling the
superb and not unsimilar episode in prose of another "great dramatic
poet," Landor's Imaginary Conversation between the Empress Catherine and
Princess Dashkof.]
[Footnote 59: Mrs. Orr, _Handbook_, p. 313.]
30. FERISHTAH'S FANCIES.
[Published in November, 1884 (_Poetical Works_, 1898, Vol.
XVI. pp. 1-92).]
_Ferishtah's Fancies_ consists of twelve sections, each an argument in
an allegory, Persian by presentment, modern or universal in
intention.[60] Lightly laid in between the sections, like flowers
between the leaves, are twelve lyrics, mostly love songs addressed to a
beloved memory, each lyric having a close affinity with the preceding
"Fancy." A humorous lyrical prologue, and a passionate lyrical epilogue,
complete the work. We learn from Mrs. Orr, that
"The idea of _Ferishtah's Fancies_ grew out of a fable by
Pilpay, which Mr. Browning read when a boy. He ... put this
into verse; and it then occurred to him to make the poem the
beginning of a series, in which the Dervish who is first
introduced as a learner should reappear in the character of a
teacher. Ferishtah's 'fancies' are the familiar illustrations
by which his teachings are enforced."[61]
The book is Browning's _West-Eastern Divan_, and it is written at nearly
the same age as Goethe's. But, though there is a good deal of local
colour in the setting, no attempt, as the motto warns us, is made to
reproduce Eastern thought. The "Persian garments" are used for a
disguise, not as a habit; perhaps for the very reason that the thoughts
they drape are of such intense personal sincerity. The drapery, however,
is perfectly transparent, and one may read "Robert Browning" for
"Dervish Ferishtah" _passim_.
The first two fancies (_The Eagle_ and _The Melon-Seller_) give the
lessons which Ferishtah learnt, and which determined him to become a
Dervish: all the rest are his own lessons to others. These deal
severally with faith (_Shah Abbas_), prayer (_The Family_), the
Incarnation (_The Sun_), the meaning of evil and of pain (_Mihrab
Shah_), punishment present and future (_A Camel-Driver_), asceticism
(_Two Camels_), gratefulness to God for small benefits (_Cherries_), the
direct personal relation existing between man and God (_Plot-Culture_),
the uncertain value of knowledge contrasted with the sure gain of love
(_A Pillar at Sebzevah_), and, finally, in _A Bean-Stripe: also Apple
Eating_, the problem of life: is it more good than evil, or more evil
than good? The work is a serious attempt to grapple with these great
questions, and is as important on its ethical as on its artistic side.
Each argument is conveyed by means of a parable, often brilliant, often
quaint, always striking and serviceable, and always expressed in
scrupulously clear and simple language. The teaching, put more plainly
and definitely, perhaps, with less intellectual disguise than usual, is
the old unconquered optimism which, in Browning, is so unmistakably a
matter of temperament.
The most purely delightful poetry in the volume will be found in the
delicate and musical love-songs which brighten its pages. They are
snatches of spontaneous and exquisite song, bird-notes seldom heard
except from the lips of youth. Perhaps the most perfect is the first.
"Round us the wild creatures, overhead the trees,
Underfoot the moss-tracks,--life and love with these!
I to wear a fawn-skin, thou to dress in flowers:
All the long lone Summer-day, that greenwood life of ours!
Rich-pavilioned, rather,--still the world without,--
Inside--gold-roofed silk-walled silence round about!
Queen it thou in purple,--I, at watch and ward
Couched beneath the columns, gaze, thy slave, love's guard!
So, for us no world? Let throngs press thee to me!
Up and down amid men, heart by heart fare we!
Welcome squalid vesture, harsh voice, hateful face!
God is soul, souls I and thou: with souls should souls have place."
"With souls should souls have place," is, with Browning, the condensed
expression of an experience, a philosophy, and an art. Like the lovers
of his lyric, he has renounced the selfish serenities of wild-wood and
dream-palace; he has gone up and down among men, listening to that human
music, and observing that human or divine comedy. He has sung what he
has heard, and he has painted what he has seen. If it should be asked
whether such work will live, there can be only one answer, and he has
already given it:
"It lives,
If precious be the soul of man to man."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 60: This is emphasized by the ingenious motto from _King
Lear_: "You, Sir, I entertain you for one of my hundred; only, I do not
like the fashion of your garments: you will say, they are Persian; but
let them be changed."]
[Footnote 61: _Handbook_, p. 321.]
31. PARLEYINGS WITH CERTAIN PEOPLE OF IMPORTANCE IN THEIR DAY.
[Published in January 1887. _Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol.
XVI., pp. 93-275.]
The method of the _Parleying_ is something of a new departure, and at
the same time something of a reversion. It is a reversion towards the
dramatic form of the monologue; but it is a new departure owing to the
precise form assumed, that of a "parleying" or colloquy of the author
with his characters. The persons with whom Browning parleys are
representative men selected from the England, Holland, and Italy of the
late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The parleying with
_Bernard de Mandeville_ (born at Dort, in Holland, 1670; died in London,
1733; author of _The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public
Benefits_) takes up the optimistic arguments already developed in
_Ferishtah's Fancies_ and elsewhere, and preaches, through the dubious
medium of the enigmatic fabulist, trust in the ordering of the world,
confidence in discerning a "soul of goodness in things evil." _Daniel
Bartoli_ ("a learned and ingenius writer," born at Florence, 1608; died
at Rome, 1685; the historian of the Order of Jesuits) serves to point a
moral against himself, in the contrast between the pale ineffectual
saints of his legendary record and the practically saint-like heroine of
a true tale recounted by Browning, the graphic and brilliant story of
the duke and the druggist's daughter. The parleying with _Christopher
Smart_ (the author of the _Song to David_, born at Shipborne, in Kent,
1722; died in the King's Bench, 1770) is a penetrating and
characteristic study in one of the great poetic problems of the
eighteenth century, the problem of a "void and null" verse-writer who,
at one moment only of his life, sang, as Browning reminds him,
"A song where flute-breath silvers trumpet-clang,
And stations you for once on either hand
With Milton and with Keats."
_George Bubb Dodington_ (Lord Melcombe, born 1691; died 1762) stands as
type of the dishonest politician, and in the course of a colloquy, which
is really a piece of sardonic irony long drawn out, a mock serious essay
in the way of a Superior Rogues' Guide or Instructions for Knaves,
receives at once castigation and instruction. The parleying with
_Francis Furini_ (born at Florence, 1600; died 1649) deals with its hero
as a man, as artist and as priest; it contains some of Browning's
noblest writing on art; and it touches on current and, indeed, continual
controversies in its splendidly vigorous onslaught on the decriers of
that supreme art which aims at painting men and women as God made them.
_Gerard de Lairesse_ (born at Liége, in Flanders, 1640; died at
Amsterdam 1711; famed not only for his pictures, but for his _Treatise
on the Art of Painting_, composed after he had become blind) gives his
name to a discussion on the artistic interpretation of nature, its
change and advancement, and the deeper and truer vision which has
displaced the mythological fancies of earlier painters and poets. The
parleying with _Charles Avison_ (born at Newcastle, 1710; died there,
1770), the more than half forgotten organist-composer, embodies an
inquiry, critical or speculative, into the position and function of
music. All these poems are written in decasyllabic rhymed verse, with
varied arrangement of the rhymes. They are introduced by a dialogue
between Apollo and the Fates, and concluded by another between John Fust
and his friends, both written in lyrical measures, both uniting deep
seriousness of intention with capricious humour of form; the one wild
and stormy as the great "Dance of Furies" in Gluck's _Orfeo_; the other
quaint and grimly and sublimely grotesque as an old German print.
_Gerard de Lairesse_ contains a charming little "Spring Song" of three
stanzas; and _Charles Avison_ a sounding train-bands' chorus, written to
the air of one of Avison's marches.
The volume as a whole is full of weight, brilliance, and energy; and it
is not less notable for its fineness of versification, its splendour of
sound and colour, than for its depth and acuteness of thought and keen
grasp of intricate argument. Indeed, the quality which more than any
other distinguishes it from Browning's later work is the careful
writing of the verse, and the elaborate beauty of certain passages. Much
of Browning's later work would be ill represented by a selection of the
"purple patches." His strength has always lain, but of late has lain
much more exclusively, in the _ensemble_. Here, however, there is not
merely one passage of more than a hundred and fifty lines, the like of
which (I do not say in every sense the equal, but certainly the like of
which) we must go back to _Sordello_ or to _Paracelsus_ to find; but,
again and again, wherever we turn, we meet with more than usually fine
and impressive passages, single lines of more than usually exquisite
quality. The glory of the whole collection is certainly the "Walk," or
description, in rivalry with Gerard de Lairesse, of a whole day's
changes, from sunrise to sunset. To equal it in its own way, we must
look a long way back in our Browning, and nowhere out of Browning. Where
all is good, any preference must seem partial; but perhaps nothing in it
is finer than this picture of morning.
"But morning's laugh sets all the crags alight
Above the baffled tempest: tree and tree
Stir themselves from the stupor of the night
And every strangled branch resumes its right
To breathe, shakes loose dark's clinging dregs, waves free
In dripping glory. Prone the runnels plunge,
While earth, distent with moisture like a sponge,
Smokes up, and leaves each plant its gem to see,
Each grass-blade's glory-glitter. Had I known
The torrent now turned river?--masterful
Making its rush o'er tumbled ravage--stone
And stub which barred the froths and foams: no bull
Ever broke bounds in formidable sport
More overwhelmingly, till lo, the spasm
Sets him to dare that last mad leap: report
Who may--his fortunes in the deathly chasm
That swallows him in silence! Rather turn
Whither, upon the upland, pedestalled
Into the broad day-splendour, whom discern
These eyes but thee, supreme one, rightly called
Moon-maid in heaven above and, here below,
Earth's huntress-queen? I note the garb succinct
Saving from smirch that purity of snow
From breast to knee--snow's self with just the tint
Of the apple-blossom's heart-blush. Ah, the bow
Slack-strung her fingers grasp, where, ivory-linked
Horn curving blends with horn, a moonlike pair
Which mimic the brow's crescent sparkling so--
As if a star's live restless fragment winked
Proud yet repugnant, captive in such hair!
What hope along the hillside, what far bliss
Lets the crisp hair-plaits fall so low they kiss
Those lucid shoulders? Must a morn so blithe
Needs have its sorrow when the twang and hiss
Tell that from out thy sheaf one shaft makes writhe
Its victim, thou unerring Artemis?
Why did the chamois stand so fair a mark,
Arrested by the novel shape he dreamed
Was bred of liquid marble in the dark
Depths of the mountain's womb which ever teemed
With novel births of wonder? Not one spark
Of pity in that steel-grey glance which gleamed
At the poor hoof's protesting as it stamped
Idly the granite? Let me glide unseen
From thy proud presence: well may'st thou be queen
Of all those strange and sudden deaths which damped
So oft Love's torch and Hymen's taper lit
For happy marriage till the maidens paled
And perished on the temple-step, assailed
By--what except to envy must man's wit
Impute that sure implacable release
Of life from warmth and joy? But death means peace."
32. ASOLANDO: FANCIES AND FACTS.
[Dated 1890, but published December 12, 1889. _Poetical
Works_, 1889, Vol. XVII., pp. iv., 131.]
_Asolando_ (a name taken from the invented verb _Asolare_, "to disport
in the open air") was published on the day of Browning's death. He died
in Venice, and his body was brought to England, and buried in
Westminster Abbey on the last day of the year. The Abbey was invisible
in the fog, and, inside, dim yellow fog filled all the roof, above the
gas and the candles. The coffin, carried high, came into the church to
the sound of processional music, and as one waited near the grave one
saw the coffin and the wreaths on it, over the heads of the people, and
heard, in Dr. Bridge's setting, the words: "He giveth his beloved
sleep."
Reading _Asolando_ once more, and remembering that coffin one had looked
down upon in the Abbey, only then quite feeling that all was indeed
over, it is perhaps natural that the book should come to seem almost
consciously testamentary, as if certain things in it had been really
meant for a final leave-taking. The Epilogue is a clear, brave
looking-forward to death, as to an event now close at hand, and imagined
as actually accomplished. It breaks through for once, as if at last the
occasion demanded it, a reticence never thus broken through before,
claiming, with a supreme self-confidence, calmly, as an acknowledged
right, the "Well done" of the faithful servant at the end of the long
day's labour. In _Reverie_, in _Rephan_, and in other poems, the
teachings of a lifetime are enforced with a final emphasis, there is
the same joyous readiness to "aspire yet never attain;" the same delight
in the beauty and strangeness of life, in the "wild joy of living," in
woman, in art, in scholarship; and in _Rosny_ we have the vision of a
hero dead on the field of victory, with the comment, "That is best."
To those who value Browning, not as the poet of metaphysics, but as the
poet of life, his last book will be singularly welcome. Something like
metaphysics we find, indeed, but humanised, made poetry, in the blank
verse of _Development_, the lyrical verse of the _Prologue_, and the
third of the _Bad Dreams_, with their subtle comments and surmises on
the relations of art with nature, of nature with truth. But it is life
itself, a final flame, perhaps mortally bright, that burns and shines in
the youngest of Browning's books. The book will be not less welcome to
those who feel that the finest poetic work is usually to be found in
short pieces, and that even _The Ring and the Book_ would scarcely be an
equivalent for the fifty _Men and Women_ of those two incomparable
volumes of 1855. Nor is _Asolando_ without a further attractiveness to
those who demand in poetry a certain fleeting and evanescent grace.
"Car nous voulons la Nuance encor,
Pas la Couleur, rien que la Nuance,"
as Paul Verlaine says, somewhat exclusively, in his poetical confession
of faith. It is, indeed, _la Nuance_, the last fine shade, that Browning
has captured and fixed for us in those lovely love-poems, _Summum
Bonum_, _Poetics_, _a Pearl, a Girl_, and the others, so young-hearted,
so joyous and buoyant; and in the woody piping of _Flute Music, with an
Accompaniment_. Simple and eager in _Dubiety_, daintily, prettily
pathetic in _Humility_, more intense in _Speculative_, in the fourteen
lines called _Now_, the passion of the situation leaps like a cry from
the heart, and one may say that the poem is, rather than renders, the
very fever of the supreme moment, "the moment eternal."
"Now.
Out of your whole life give but a moment:
All of your life that has gone before,
All to come after it,--so you ignore,
So you make perfect the present,--condense,
In a rapture of rage, for perfection's endowment,
Thought and feeling and soul and sense--
Merged in a moment which gives me at last
You around me for once, you beneath me, above me--
Me--sure that despite of time future, time past,--
This tick of our life-time's one moment you love me!
How long such suspension may linger? Ah, Sweet--
The moment eternal--just that and no more--
When ecstasy's utmost we clutch at the core,
While cheeks burn, arms open, eyes shut and lips meet!"
Here the whole situation is merged in the single cry, the joy,
"unbodied" and "embodied," of any, of every lover; in several of the
poems a more developed story is told or indicated. One of the finest
pieces in the volume is the brief dramatic monologue called
_Inapprehensiveness_, which condenses a whole tragedy into its
thirty-two lines, in the succinct, suggestive manner of such poems as
_My Last Duchess_. Only Heine, Browning, and George Meredith in _Modern
Love_, each in his entirely individual way, have succeeded in dealing,
in a tone of what I may call sympathetic irony, with the unheroic
complications of modern life; so full of poetic matter really, but of
matter so difficult to handle. The poem is a mere incident, such as
happens every day: we are permitted to overhear a scrap of trivial
conversation; but this very triviality does but deepen the effect of
what we surmise, a dark obstruction, underneath the "babbling runnel" of
light talk. A study not entirely dissimilar, though, as its name warns
us, more difficult to grasp, is the fourth of the _Bad Dreams_: how
fine, how impressive, in its dream-distorted picture of a man's remorse
for the love he has despised or neglected till death, coming in, makes
love and repentance alike too late! With these may be named that other
electric little poem, _Which?_ a study in love's casuistries, reminding
one slightly of the finest of all Browning's studies in that kind,
_Adam, Lilith, and Eve_.
It is in these small poems, dealing varyingly with various phases of
love, that the finest, the rarest, work in the volume is to be found.
Such a poem as _Imperante Augusto natus est_ (strong, impressive,
effective as it is) cannot but challenge comparison with what is
incomparable, the dramatic monologues of _Men and Women_, and in
particular with the _Epistle of Karshish_. In _Beatrice Signorini_ we
have one of the old studies in lovers' casuistries; and it is told with
gusto, but is after all scarcely more than its last line claims for it:
"The pretty incident I put in rhyme." In the _Ponte dell' Angela,
Venice_, we find one of the old grotesques, but more loosely "hitched
into rhyme" (it is his own word) than the better among those poems which
it most resembles. But there is something not precisely similar to
anything that had gone before in the dainty simplicity, the frank,
beautiful fervour, of such lyrics as _Summum Bonum_, in which exquisite
expression is given to the merely normal moods of ordinary affection. In
most of Browning's love poems the emotion is complex, the situation more
or less exceptional. It is to this that they owe their singular,
penetrating quality of charm. But there is a charm of another kind, and
a more generally appreciated one,
"that commonplace
Perfection of honest grace,"
which lies in the expression of feelings common to everyone, feelings
which everyone can without difficulty make or imagine his own. In the
lyrics to which I am referring, Browning has spoken straight out, in
just this simple, direct way, and with a delicate grace and smoothness
of rhythm not always to be met with in his later work. Here is a poem
called _Speculative_:
"Others may need new life in Heaven--
Man, Nature, Art--made new, assume!
Man with new mind old sense to leaven,
Nature--new light to clear old gloom,
Art that breaks bounds, gets soaring-room.
I shall pray: 'Fugitive as precious--
Minutes which passed--return, remain!
Let earth's old life once more enmesh us,
You with old pleasure, me--old pain,
So we but meet nor part again.'"
How hauntingly does that give voice to the instinctive, the universal
feeling! the lover's intensity of desire for the loved and lost one, for
herself, the "little human woman full of sin," for herself, unchanged,
unglorified, as she was on earth, not as she may be in a vague heaven.
To the lover in _Summum Bonum_ all the delight of life has been
granted; it lies in "the kiss of one girl," and that has been his. In
the delicious little poem called _Humility_, the lover is content in
being "proudly less," a thankful pensioner on the crumbs of love's
feast, laid for another. In _White Witchcraft_ love has outlived injury;
in the first of the _Bad Dreams_ it has survived even heart-break.
"Last night I saw you in my sleep:
And how your charm of face was changed!
I asked 'Some love, some faith you keep?'
You answered, 'Faith gone, love estranged.'
Whereat I woke--a twofold bliss:
Waking was one, but next there came
This other: 'Though I felt, for this,
My heart break, I loved on the same.'"
Not subtlety, but simplicity, a simplicity pungent as only Browning
could make it, is the characteristic of most of the best work in this
last volume of a poet preeminently subtle. This characteristic of
simplicity is seen equally in the love-poems and in the poems of satire,
in the ballads and in the narrative pieces, and notably in the story of
_The Pope and the Net_, an anecdote in verse, told with the frank relish
of the thing, and without the least attempt to tease a moral out of it.
There are other light ballads, as different in merit as _Muckle-mouth
Meg_ on the one hand and _The Cardinal and the Dog_ and _The Bean-Feast_
on the other, with snatches of moralising story, as cutting as _Arcades
Ambo_, which is a last word written for love of beasts, and as stinging
as _The Lady and the Painter_, which is a last word written for love of
birds and of the beauty of nakedness. One among these poems, _The
Cardinal and the Dog_, indistinguishable in style from the others, was
written fifty years earlier. It is as if the poet, taking leave of that
"British public" which had "loved him not," and to whose caprices he had
never condescended, was, after all, anxious to "part friends." The
result may be said, in a measure, to have been attained.