_THE TREATMENT OF NATURE_
It is a difficult task to explain or analyse the treatment of Nature by
Browning. It is easy enough to point out his remarkable love of her
colour, his vivid painting of brief landscapes, his minute observation,
his flashing way of description, his feeling for the breadth and
freshness of Nature, his love of flowers and animals, and the way he has
of hitting and emphasising the central point or light of a landscape.
This is easy work, but it is not so easy to capture and define the way
in which his soul, when he was alone, felt with regard to the heavens,
and the earth and all that therein is. Others, like Wordsworth, have
stated this plainly: Browning has nowhere defined his way. What his
intellect held the Natural World to be, in itself; what it meant for
man; the relation in which it stood to God and God to it--these things
are partly plain. They have their attraction for us. It is always
interesting to know what an imaginative genius thinks about such
matters. But it is only a biographical or a half-scientific interest.
But what we want to discover is how Browning, as a poet, felt the world
of Nature. We have to try and catch the unconscious attitude of his soul
when the Universe was at work around him, and he was for the time its
centre--and this is the real difficulty.
Sometimes we imagine we have caught and fixed this elusive thing, but we
finally give up the quest. The best we can do is to try to find the two
or three general thoughts, the most frequently recurring emotions
Browning had when Nature at sundry hours and in diverse manners
displayed before him her beauty, splendour and fire, and seemed to ask
his worship; or again, when she stood apart from him, with the mocking
smile she often wears, and whispered in his ear, "Thou shall pursue me
always, but never find my secret, never grasp my streaming hair." And
both these experiences are to be found in Browning. Nature and he are
sometimes at one, and sometimes at two; but seldom the first, and
generally the second.
The natural world Tennyson describes is for the greater part of it a
reflection of man, or used to heighten man's feeling, or to illustrate
his action, or sentimentalised by memorial associations of humanity, or,
finally, invented as a background for a human subject, and with a
distinct direction towards that subject. Browning, with a few
exceptions, does the exact opposite. His natural world is not made by
our thought, nor does it reflect our passions. His illustrations, drawn
from it, of our actions, break down at certain points, as if the
illustrating material were alien from our nature. Nature, it is true, he
thinks, leads up to man, and therefore has elements in her which are dim
prophecies and prognostics of us; but she is only connected with us as
the road is with the goal it reaches in the end. She exists
independently of us, but yet she exists to suggest to us what we may
become, to awaken in us dim longings and desires, to surprise us into
confession of our inadequacy, to startle us with perceptions of an
infinitude we do not possess as yet but may possess; to make us feel our
ignorance, weakness, want of finish; and by partly exhibiting the
variety, knowledge, love, power and finish of God, to urge us forward in
humble pursuit to the infinite in him. The day Browning climbs Mont
Salève, at the beginning of his poem _La Saisiaz_, after a description
of his climb in which he notes a host of minute quaintnesses in rock and
flower, and especially little flares of colour, all of them
unsentimentalised, he suddenly stands on the mountain-top, and is
smitten with the glory of the view. What does he see? Himself in Nature?
or Nature herself, like a living being? Not at all. He sees what he
thinks Nature is there to teach us--not herself, but what is beyond
herself. "I was stationed," he cries, deliberately making this point,
"face to face with--Nature?--rather with Infinitude." We are not in
Nature: a part of God aspiring to the whole is there, but not the all of
God. And Nature shows forth her glory, not to keep us with herself, but
to send us on to her Source, of whom the universe is but a shred.
The universe of what we call matter in all its forms, which is the
definition of Nature as I speak of it here, is one form to Browning of
the creative joy of God: we are another form of the same joy. Nor does
Browning conceive, as Wordsworth conceived, of any pre-established
harmony between us and the natural world, so that Humanity and Nature
can easily converse and live together; so that we can express our
thoughts and emotions in terms of Nature; or so that Nature can have, as
it were, a human soul. This is not Browning's conception. If he had such
a conception he would frequently use in his descriptions what Ruskin
calls the "pathetic fallacy," the use of which is excessively common in
Tennyson. I can scarcely recall more than a very few instances of this
in all the poetry of Browning. Even where it seems to occur, where
Nature is spoken of in human terms, it does not really occur. Take this
passage from _James Lee's Wife_:
Oh, good gigantic smile o' the brown old earth,
This autumn morning! How he sets his bones
To bask i' the sun, and thrusts out knees and feet
For the ripple to run over in its mirth;
Listening the while, where on the heap of stones
The white breast of the sea-lark twitters sweet.
The smile, the mirth, the listening, might be said to impute humanity to
Nature: but the Earth and the Sea are plainly quite distinct from us.
These are great giant creatures who are not ourselves: Titans who live
with one another and not with us; and the terms of our humanity are used
to make us aware of their separate existence from us, not of their being
images only of our mind.
Another passage will illustrate the same habit of Browning's mind with
nature. He describes, for the purpose of his general thought, in _Fifine
at the Fair_, the course of a stormy sunset. The clouds, the sun, the
night, act like men, and are written of in terms of humanity. But this
is only to explain matters to us; the mighty creatures themselves have
nothing to do with us. They live their own vast, indifferent life; and
we see, like spectators, what they are doing, and do not understand what
we see. The sunset seems to him the last act of an ever-recurring drama,
in which the clouds barricade the Sun against his rest, and he plays
with their opposition like the huge giant he is; till Night, with her
terrific mace, angry with them for preventing the Sun from repose,
repose which will make her Queen of the world, beats them into ruin.
This is the passage:
For as on edifice of cloud i' the grey and green
Of evening,--built about some glory of the west,
To barricade the sun's departure,--manifest,
He plays, pre-eminently gold, gilds vapour, crag and crest
Which bend in rapt suspense above the act and deed
They cluster round and keep their very own, nor heed
The world at watch; while we, breathlessly at the base
O' the castellated bulk, note momently the mace
Of night fall here, fall there, bring change with every blow,
Alike to sharpened shaft and broadened portico
I' the structure; heights and depths, beneath the leaden stress
Crumble and melt and mix together, coalesce,
Reform, but sadder still, subdued yet more and more
By every fresh defeat, till wearied eyes need pore
No longer on the dull impoverished decadence
Of all that pomp of pile in towering evidence
So lately.
_Fifine, cvi_.
It is plain that Browning separates us altogether from the elemental
life of these gigantic beings. And what is true of these passages is
true, with one or two exceptions, of all the natural descriptions of
Browning in which the pathetic fallacy seems to be used by him. I need
not say how extraordinarily apart this method of his is from that of
Tennyson. Then Tennyson, like Coleridge--only Tennyson is as vague and
wavering in this belief as Coleridge is firm and clear in it--sometimes
speaks as if Nature did not exist at all apart from our thought:
Her life the eddying of our living soul--
a possible, even a probable explanation. But it is not Browning's view.
There is a celebrated passage in _Paracelsus_ which is quite
inconsistent with it. All Nature, from the beginning, is made to issue
forth from the joy God has in making, in embodying his thought in form;
and when one form has been made and rejoiced in, in making another still
more lovely on the foundation of the last. So, joy after joy, the world
was built, till, in the life of all he has made, God sees his ancient
rapture of movement and power, and feels his delight renewed. I will not
quote it here, but only mark that we and the "eddying of our living
soul" have nothing to do with the making of this Nature. It is not even
the thoughts of God in us. God and Nature are alone, and were alone
together countless years before we were born. But man was the close of
all. Nature was built up, through every stage, that man might know
himself to be its close--its seal--but not it. It is a separate, unhuman
form of God. Existing thus apart, it does a certain work on us,
impressing us from without. The God in it speaks to the God in us. It
may sometimes be said to be interested in us, but not like a man in a
man. He even goes so far as to impute to Nature, but rarely, such an
interest in us; but in reality he rather thinks that we, being Nature's
end, have at such times touched for a moment some of those elements in
her which have come down to us--elements apart from the soul. And
Browning takes care, even when he represents Nature as suddenly at one
with us, to keep up the separateness. The interest spoken of is not a
human interest, nor resembles it. It is like the interest Ariel takes in
Prospero and Miranda--an elemental interest, that of a creature whose
nature knows its radical difference from human nature. If Nature sees us
in sorrow or in joy, she knows, in these few passages of Browning's
poetry, or seems to know, that we mourn or rejoice, and if she could
feel with us she would; but she cannot quite do so. Like Ariel, she
would be grieved with the grief of Gonzalo, were her affections human.
She has then a wild, unhuman, unmoral, unspiritual interest in us, like
a being who has an elemental life, but no soul. But sometimes she is
made to go farther, and has the same kind of interest in us which Oberon
has in the loves of Helena and Hermia. When we are loving, and on the
verge of such untroubled joy as Nature has always in her being, then she
seems able, in Browning's poetry, actually to work for us, and help us
into the fulness of our joy. In his poem, _By the Fireside_, he tells
how he and the woman he loved were brought to know their love. It is a
passage full of his peculiar view of Nature. The place where the two
lovers stay their footsteps on the hill knows all about them. "It is
silent and aware." But it is apart from them also:
It has had its scenes, its joys and crimes,
But that is its own affair.
And its silence also is its own. Those who linger there think that the
place longs to speak; its bosom seems to heave with all it knows; but
the desire is its own, not ours transferred to it. But when the two
lovers were there, Nature, of her own accord, made up a spell for them
and troubled them into speech:
A moment after, and hands unseen
Were hanging the night around us fast;
But we knew that a bar was broken between
Life and life: we were mixed at last
In spite of the mortal screen.
The forests had done it; there they stood;
We caught for a moment the powers at play:
They had mingled us so, for once and good,
Their work was done--we might go or stay,
They relapsed to their ancient mood.
Not one of the poets of this century would have thought in that fashion
concerning Nature. Only for a second, man happened to be in harmony with
the Powers at play in Nature. They took the two lovers up for a moment,
made them one, and dropped them. "They relapsed to their ancient mood."
The line is a whole lesson in Browning's view of Nature. But this
special interest in us is rare, for we are seldom in the blessed mood of
unselfconscious joy and love. When we are, on the other hand,
self-conscious, or in doubt, or out of harmony with love and joy, or
anxious for the transient things of the world--Nature, unsympathetic
wholly, mocks and plays with us like a faun. When Sordello climbs the
ravine, thinking of himself as Apollo, the wood, "proud of its
observer," a mocking phrase, "tried surprises on him, stratagems and
games."
Or, our life is too small for her greatness. When we are unworthy our
high lineage, noisy or mean, then we
quail before a quiet sky
Or sea, too little for their quietude.
That is a phrase which might fall in with Wordsworth's theory of Nature,
but this which follows from _The Englishman in Italy_, is only
Browning's. The man has climbed to the top of Calvano,
And God's own profound
Was above me, and round me the mountains,
And under, the sea,
And within me, my heart to bear witness
What was and shall be.
He is worthy of the glorious sight; full of eternal thoughts. Wordsworth
would then have made the soul of Nature sympathise with his soul. But
Browning makes Nature manifest her apartness from the man. The mountains
know nothing of his soul: they amuse themselves with him; they are even
half angry with him for his intrusion--a foreigner who dares an entrance
into their untrespassed world. Tennyson could not have thought that way.
It is true the mountains are alive in the poet's thought, but not with
the poet's life: nor does he touch them with his sentiment.
Oh, those mountains, their infinite movement
Still moving with you;
For, ever some new head and heart of them
Thrusts into view
To observe the intruder; you see it
If quickly you turn
And, before they escape you surprise them.
They grudge you should learn
How the soft plains they look on, lean over
And love (they pretend)--
Cower beneath them.
Total apartness from us! Nature mocking, surprising us; watching us
from a distance, even pleased to see us going to our destruction. We may
remember how the hills look grimly on Childe Roland when he comes to the
tower. The very sunset comes back to see him die:
before it left,
The dying sunset kindled through a cleft:
The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay,
Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay.--
Then, as if they loved to see the death of their quarry, cried, without
one touch of sympathy:
"Now stab and end the creature--to the heft!"
And once, so divided from our life is her life, she pities her own case
and refuses our pity. Man cannot help her. The starved, ignoble country
in _Childe Roland_, one of the finest pieces of description in Browning,
wicked, waste and leprous land, makes Nature herself sick with peevish
wrath. "I cannot help my case," she cries. "Nothing but the Judgment's
fire can cure the place."
On the whole, then, for these instances might be supported by many more,
Nature is alive in Browning, but she is not humanised at all, nor at all
at one with us. Tennyson does not make her alive, but he does humanise
her. The other poets of the century do make her alive, but they
harmonise her in one way or another with us. Browning is distinct from
them all in keeping her quite divided from man.
But then he has observed that Nature is expressed in terms of man, and
he naturally, for this conflicts with his general view, desires to
explain this. He does explain it in a passage in _Paracelsus_. Man once
descried, imprints for ever
His presence on all lifeless things; the winds
Are henceforth voices, wailing or a shout,
A querulous mutter or a quick gay laugh,
Never a senseless gust now man is born.
The herded pines commune and have deep thoughts
A secret they assemble to discuss
When the sun drops behind their trunks which glare
Like grates of hell: the peerless cup afloat
Of the lake-lily is an urn, some nymph
Swims bearing high above her head: no bird
Whistles unseen, but through the gaps above
That let light in upon the gloomy woods,
A shape peeps from the breezy forest-top,
Arch with small puckered mouth and mocking eye.
The morn has enterprise, deep quiet droops
With evening, triumph takes the sunset hour.
Voluptuous transport ripens with the corn
Beneath a warm moon like a happy face:
--And this to fill us with regard for Man.
He does not say, as the other poets do, that the pines really commune,
or that the morn has enterprise, or that nymphs and satyrs live in the
woods, but that this _seems_ to be, because man, as the crown of the
natural world, throws back his soul and his soul's life on all the
grades of inferior life which preceded him. It is Browning's
contradiction of any one who thinks that the pathetic fallacy exists in
his poetry.
Nature has then a life of her own, her own joys and sorrows, or rather,
only joy. Browning, indeed, with his intensity of imagination and his
ineradicable desire of life, was not the man to conceive Nature as dead,
as having no conscious being of any kind. He did not impute a
personality like ours to Nature, but he saw joy and rapture and play,
even love, moving in everything; and sometimes headded to this delight
she has in herself--and just because the creature was not human--a touch
of elemental unmoral malice, a tricksome sportiveness like that of Puck
in _Midsummer Night's Dream_. The life, then, of Nature had no relation
of its own to our life; but we had some relation to it because we were
conscious that we were its close and its completion.
It follows from this idea of Browning's that he was capable of
describing Nature as she is, without adding any deceiving mist of human
sentiment to his descriptions; and of describing her as accurately and
as vividly as Tennyson, even more vividly, because of his extraordinary
eye for colour. And Nature, so described, is of great interest in
Browning's poetry.
But, then, in any description of Nature, we desire the entrance into
such description of some human feeling so that it may be a more complete
theme for poetry. Browning does this in a different way from Tennyson,
who gives human feelings and thoughts to Nature, or steeps it in human
memories. Browning catches Nature up into himself, and the human element
is not in Nature but in him, in what _he_ thinks and feels, in all that
Nature, quite apart from him, awakens in him. Sometimes he even goes so
far as to toss Nature aside altogether, as unworthy to be thought of in
comparison with humanity. That joy in Nature herself, for her own sake,
which was so distinguishing a mark of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley,
Byron and Keats, is rarely, if ever, found in Browning. This places him
apart. What he loved was man; and save at those times of which I have
spoken, when he conceives Nature as the life and play and wrath and
fancy of huge elemental powers like gods and goddesses, he uses her as a
background only for human life. She is of little importance unless man
be present, and then she is no more than the scenery in a drama. Take
the first two verses of _A Lovers' Quarrel_,
Oh, what a dawn of day!
How the March sun feels like May!
All is blue again
After last night's rain,
And the South dries the hawthorn-spray.
That is well done--he has liked what he saw. But what is it all, he
thinks; what do I care about it? And he ends the verse:
Only, my Love's away!
I'd as lief that the blue were grey.
Then take the next verse:
Runnels, which rillets swell.
Must be dancing down the dell,
With a foaming head
On the beryl bed
Paven smooth as a hermit's cell.
It is excellent description, but it is only scenery for the real passion
in Browning's mind.
Each with a tale to tell--
Could my Love but attend as well.
_By the Fireside_ illustrates the same point. No description can be
better, more close, more observed, than of the whole walk over the hill;
but it is mere scenery for the lovers. The real passion lies in their
hearts.
We have then direct description of Nature; direct description of man
sometimes as influenced by Nature; sometimes Nature used as the scenery
of human passion; but no intermingling of them both. Each is for ever
distinct. The only thing that unites them in idea, and in the end, is
that both have proceeded from the creative joy of God.
Of course this way of thinking permits of the things of Nature being
used to illustrate the doings, thinkings and character of man; and in
none of his poems is such illustration better used than in _Sordello_.
There is a famous passage, in itself a noble description of the opulent
generativeness of a warm land like Italy, in which he compares the rich,
poetic soul of Sordello to such a land, and the lovely line in it,
And still more labyrinthine buds the rose,
holds in its symbolism the whole essence of a great artist's nature. I
quote the passage. It describes Sordello, and it could not better
describe Italy:
Sordello foremost in the regal class
Nature has broadly severed from the mass
Of men, and framed for pleasure, as she frames
Some happy lands, that have luxurious names,
For loose fertility; a footfall there
Suffices to upturn to the warm air
Half-germinating spices; mere decay
Produces richer life; and day by day
New pollen on the lily-petal grows,
And still more labyrinthine buds the rose.
That compares to the character of a whole country the character of a
whole type of humanity. I take another of such comparisons, and it is as
minute as this is broad, and done with as great skill and charm.
Sordello is full of poetic fancies, touched and glimmering with the dew
of youth, and he has woven them around the old castle where he lives.
Browning compares the young man's imaginative play to the airy and
audacious labour of the spider. He, that is, Sordello,
O'er-festooning every interval,
As the adventurous spider, making light
Of distance, shoots her threads from depth to height,
From barbican to battlement: so flung
Fantasies forth and in their centre swung
Our architect,--the breezy morning fresh
Above, and merry,--all his waving mesh
Laughing with lucid dew-drops rainbow-edged.
It could not be better done. The description might stand alone, but
better than it is the image it gives of the joy, fancifulness and
creativeness of a young poet, making his web of thoughts and
imaginations, swinging in their centre like the spider; all of them
subtle as the spider's threads, obeying every passing wind of impulse,
and gemmed with the dew and sunlight of youth.
Again, in _A Bean-stripe: also Apple-Eating_, Ferishtah is asked--Is
life a good or bad thing, white or black? "Good," says Ferishtah, "if
one keeps moving. I only move. When I stop, I may stop in a black place
or a white. But everything around me is motionless as regards me, and is
nothing more than stuff which tests my power of throwing light and
colour on them as I move. It is I who make life good or bad, black or
white. I am like the moon going through vapour"--and this is the
illustration:
Mark the flying orb
Think'st thou the halo, painted still afresh
At each new cloud-fleece pierced and passaged through
This was and is and will be evermore
Coloured in permanence? The glory swims
Girdling the glory-giver, swallowed straight
By night's abysmal gloom, unglorified
Behind as erst before the advancer: gloom?
Faced by the onward-faring, see, succeeds
From the abandoned heaven a next surprise.
And where's the gloom now?--silver-smitten straight,
One glow and variegation! So, with me,
Who move and make,--myself,--the black, the white.
The good, the bad, of life's environment.
Fine as these illustrations are, intimate and minute, they are only a
few out of a multitude of those comparisons which in Browning image what
is in man from that which is within Nature--hints, prognostics,
prophecies, as he would call them, of humanity, but not human.
There is, however, one human passion which Browning conceives as
existing in Nature--the passion of joy. But it is a different joy from
ours. It is not dashed by any sorrow, and it is very rarely that we are
so freed from pain or from self-contemplation as to be able to enter
even for a brief hour into the rapture of Nature. That rapture, in
Browning's thought, was derived from the creative thought of God
exercising itself with delight in the incessant making of Nature. And
its manifestation was life, that joyful rush of life in all things into
fuller and fuller being. No poet felt this ecstasy of mere living in
Nature more deeply than Browning. His own rapture (the word is not too
strong) in it appears again and again in his poetry, and when it does,
Browning is not a man sympathising from without with Nature. He is then
a part of Nature herself, a living piece of the great organism, having
his own rejoicing life in the mightier life which includes him; and
feeling, with the rest, the abounding pleasure of continuous life
reaching upwards through growth to higher forms of being, swifter powers
of living. I might give many examples, but one will suffice, and it is
the more important because it belongs not to his ardent youth, but to
his mature manhood. It is part of the song of Thamyris in _Aristophanes'
Apology_. Thamyris, going to meet the Muses in rivalry, sings as he
walks in the splendid morning the song of the rapture of the life of
Earth, and is himself part of the rejoicing movement.
Thamuris, marching, laughed "Each flake of foam"
(As sparklingly the ripple raced him by)
"Mocks slower clouds adrift in the blue dome!"
For Autumn was the season; red the sky
Held morn's conclusive signet of the sun
To break the mists up, bid them blaze and die.
Morn had the mastery as, one by one
All pomps produced themselves along the tract
From earth's far ending to near heaven begun.
Was there a ravaged tree? it laughed compact
With gold, a leaf-ball crisp, high brandished now,
Tempting to onset frost which late attacked.
Was there a wizened shrub, a starveling bough,
A fleecy thistle filched from by the wind,
A weed, Pan's trampling hoof would disallow?
Each, with a glory and a rapture twined
About it, joined the rush of air and light
And force: the world was of one joyous mind.
Say not the birds flew! they forebore their right--
Swam, revelling onward in the roll of things.
Say not the beasts' mirth bounded! that was flight--
How could the creatures leap, no lift of wings?
Such earth's community of purpose, such
The ease of earth's fulfilled imaginings,--
So did the near and far appear to touch
I' the moment's transport,--that an interchange
Of function, far with near, seemed scarce too much;
And had the rooted plant aspired to range
With the snake's licence, while the insect yearned
To glow fixed as the flower, it were not strange--
No more than if the fluttery tree-top turned
To actual music, sang itself aloft;
Or if the wind, impassioned chantress, earned
The right to soar embodied in some soft
Fine form all fit for cloud companionship,
And, blissful, once touch beauty chased so oft.
Thamuris, marching, let no fancy slip
Born of the fiery transport; lyre and song
Were his, to smite with hand and launch from lip--
The next thing to touch on is his drawing of landscape, not now of
separate pieces of Nature, but of the whole view of a land seen under a
certain aspect of the heavens. All the poets ought to be able to do this
well, and I drew attention to the brief, condensed, yet fan-opening
fashion in which Tennyson has done it. Sometimes the poets describe what
they see before them, or have seen; drawing directly from Nature.
Sometimes they invent a wide or varied landscape as a background for a
human subject, and arrange and tone it for that purpose. Shelley did
this with great stateliness and subtlety. Browning does not do it,
except, perhaps, in _Christmas-Eve_, when he prepares the night for the
appearance of Christ. Nevertheless, even in _Christmas-Eve_, the
description of the lunar rainbow is of a thing he has seen, of a
not-invented thing, and it is as clear, vivid and natural as it can be;
only it is heightened and thrilled through by the expectancy and the
thrill in Browning's soul which the reader feels and which the poet,
through his emotion, makes the reader comprehend. But there is no
suggestion that any of this feeling exists in Nature. The rainbow has no
consciousness of the vision to come or of the passion in the poet (as it
would have had in Wordsworth), and therefore is painted with an accuracy
undimmed by any transference to Nature of the soul of the poet.
I quote the piece; it is a noble specimen of his landscape work:
But lo, what think you? suddenly
The rain and the wind ceased, and the sky
Received at once the full fruition
Of the moon's consummate apparition.
The black cloud barricade was riven,
Ruined beneath her feet, and driven
Deep in the West; while, bare and breathless,
North and South and East lay ready
For a glorious thing that, dauntless, deathless,
Sprang across them and stood steady.
'Twas a moon-rainbow, vast and perfect,
From heaven to heaven extending, perfect
As the mother-moon's self, full in face.
It rose, distinctly at the base
With its severe proper colours chorded
Which still, in the rising, were compressed,
Until at last they coalesced,
And supreme the spectral creature lorded
In a triumph of whitest white,--
Above which intervened the night.
But above night too, like only the next,
The second of a wondrous sequence,
Reaching in rare and rarer frequence,
Till the heaven of heavens were circumflexed,
Another rainbow rose, a mightier,
Fainter, flushier and flightier,--
Rapture dying along its verge.
Oh, whose foot shall I see emerge,
Whose, from the straining topmost dark,
On to the key-stone of that arc?
This is only a piece of sky, though I have called it landscape work. But
then the sky is frequently treated alone by Browning; and is always
present in power over his landscapes--it, and the winds in it. This is
natural enough for one who lived so much in Italy, where the scenery of
the sky is more superb than that of the earth--so various, noble and
surprising that when Nature plays there, as a poet, her tragedy and
comedy, one scarcely takes the trouble of considering the earth.
However, we find an abundance of true landscapes in Browning. They are,
with a few exceptions, Italian; and they have that grandeur and breadth,
that intensity given by blazing colour, that peculiar tint either of
labyrinthine or of tragic sentiment which belong to Italy. I select a
few of them:
The morn when first it thunders in March
The eel in the pond gives a leap, they say;
As I leaned and looked over the aloed arch
Of the villa gate this warm March day,
No flash snapped, no dumb thunder rolled
In the valley beneath where, white and wide
Washed by the morning water-gold,
Florence lay out on the mountain side
River and bridge and street and square
Lay mine, as much at my beck and call,
Through the live translucent bath of air,
As the sights in a magic crystal ball.
Here is the Roman Campagna and its very sentiment:
The champaign with its endless fleece
Of feathery grasses everywhere!
Silence and passion, joy and peace,
An everlasting wash of air--
Rome's ghost since her decease.
And this might be in the same place:
Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles,
Miles and miles
On the solitary pastures where our sheep
Half-asleep
Tinkle homeward through the twilight--
This is a crimson sunset over dark and distant woods in autumn:
That autumn eve was stilled:
A last remains of sunset dimly burned
O'er the far forests, like a torch-flame turned
By the wind back upon its bearer's hand
In one long flare of crimson; as a brand
The woods beneath lay black. A single eye
From all Verona cared for the soft sky.
And if we desire a sunrise, there is the triumphant beginning of _Pippa
Passes_--a glorious outburst of light, colour and splendour, impassioned
and rushing, the very upsoaring of Apollo's head behind his furious
steeds. It begins with one word, like a single stroke on the gong of
Nature: it continues till the whole of the overarching vault, and the
world below, in vast disclosure, is flooded with an ocean of gold.
Day!
Faster and more fast,
O'er night's brim, day boils at last;
Boils, pure gold, o'er the cloud-cup's brim
Where spurting and suppressed it lay.
For not a froth-flake touched the rim
Of yonder gap in the solid gray
Of the eastern cloud, an hour away;
But forth one wavelet, then another, curled.
Till the whole sunrise, not to be suppressed,
Rose, reddened, and its seething breast
Flickered in bounds, grew gold, then overflowed the world.
This is chiefly of the sky, but the description in that gipsy-hearted
poem, _The Flight of the Duchess_, brings before us, at great length,
league after league of wide-spreading landscape. It is, first, of the
great wild country, cornfield, vineyards, sheep-ranges, open chase, till
we arrive at last at the mountains; and climbing up among their pines,
dip down into a yet vaster and wilder country, a red, drear, burnt-up
plain, over which we are carried for miles:
Till at the last, for a bounding belt,
Comes the salt sand hoar of the great sea-shore.
Or we may read the _Grammarian's Funeral_, where we leave the city walls
and climb the peak on whose topmost ledge he is to be buried. As we
ascend the landscape widens; we see it expanding in the verse. Moreover,
with a wonderful power, Browning makes us feel the air grow keener,
fresher, brighter, more soundless and lonelier. That, too, is given by
the verse; it is a triumph in Nature-poetry.
Nor is he less effective in narrow landscape, in the description of
small shut-in spaces of Nature. There is the garden at the beginning of
_Paracelsus_; the ravine, step by step, in _Pauline_; the sea-beach, and
its little cabinet landscapes, in _James Lee's Wife_; the exquisite
pictures of the path over the Col di Colma in _By the Fireside_--for
though the whole of the landscape is given, yet each verse almost might
stand as a small picture by itself. It is one of Browning's favourite
ways of description, to walk slowly through the landscape, describing
step by step those parts of it which strike him, and leaving to us to
combine the parts into the whole. But _his_ way of combination is to
touch the last thing he describes with human love, and to throw back
this atmosphere of feeling over all the pictures he has made. The verses
I quote do this.
Oh moment, one and infinite!
The water slips o'er stock and stone;
The West is tender, hardly bright;
How grey at once is the evening grown--
One star, its chrysolite!
We two stood there with never a third,
But each by each, as each knew well:
The sights we saw and the sounds we heard,
The lights and the shades made up a spell
Till the trouble grew and stirred.
Oh, the little more, and how much it is!
And the little less, and what worlds away!
How a sound shall quicken content to bliss,
Or a breath suspend the blood's best play,
And life be a proof of this!
There are many such miniatures of Nature in Browning's poetry.
Sometimes, however, the pictures are larger and nobler, when the natural
thing described is in itself charged with power, terror or dignity. I
give one instance of this, where the fierce Italian thunderstorm is
enhanced by being the messenger of God's vengeance on guilt. It is from
_Pippa Passes_. The heaven's pillars are over-bowed with heat. The
black-blue canopy descends close on Ottima and Sebald.
Buried in woods we lay, you recollect;
Swift ran the searching tempest overhead;
And ever and anon some bright white shaft
Burned thro' the pine-tree roof, here burned and there,
As if God's messenger thro' the close wood-screen
Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture,
Feeling for guilty thee and me; then broke
The thunder like a whole sea overhead--
That is as splendid as the thing itself.
Again, no one can help observing in all these quotations the
extraordinary love of colour, a love Tennyson has in far fainter
measure, but which Browning seems to possess more than any other English
poet. Only Sir Walter Scott approaches him in this. Scott, knowing the
Highlands, knew dark magnificence of colour. But Browning's love of
colour arose from his having lived so long in Italy, where the light is
so pure, clear, and brilliant that colour is more intense, and at dawn
and sunset more deep, delicate, and various than it is in our land.
Sometimes, as Ruskin says, "it is not colour, it is conflagration"; but
wherever it is, in the bell of a flower, on the edge of a cloud, on the
back of a lizard, on the veins of a lichen, it strikes in Browning's
verse at our eyes, and he only, in English poetry, has joy enough in it
to be its full interpreter.
He sees the wild tulip blow out its great red bell; he sees the thin
clear bubble of blood at its tip; he sees the spike of gold which burns
deep in the bluebell's womb; the corals that, like lamps, disperse thick
red flame through the dusk green universe of the ocean; the lakes which,
when the morn breaks,
Blaze like a wyvern flying round the sun;
the woodland brake whose withered fern Dawn feeds with gold; the moon
carried oft at sunrise in purple fire; the larch-blooms crisp and pink;
the sanguine heart of the pomegranate; the filberts russet-sheathed and
velvet-capped; the poppies crimson to blackness; the red fans of the
butterfly falling on the rock like a drop of fire from a brandished
torch; the star-fish, rose-jacynth to the finger-tips; and a hundred
other passionate seizures of colour. And, for the last of these colour
remembrances, in quieter tints--almost in black and white--I quote this
lovely verse from _James Lee's Wife_:
The swallow has set her six young on the rail,
And looks seaward:
The water's in stripes like a snake, olive pale
To the leeward,--
On the weather-side, black, spotted white with the wind.
"Good fortune departs, and disaster's behind"--
Hark, the wind with its wants and its infinite wail!
So, not only do we possess all these landscapes but we possess them in
colour. They are painted as well as drawn. It is his love of colour
which made at least half of the impulse that drove him at times into
Impressionism. Good drawing is little to the impressionist painters. It
is the sudden glow, splash or flicker of colour that moves them, which
makes on them the swift, the momentary impression they wish to record.
And colour acted on Browning in the same way. I said he had been
impressionist, when he liked, for forty years before Impressionism was
born in modern art. He was so, because from the beginning he saw things
in colour, more than in light and shade. It is well worth a reader's
while to search him for colour-impressions. I take one, for example,
with the black horse flung in at the end exactly in the way an artist
would do it who loved a flash of black life midst of a dead expanse of
gold and green:
Fancy the Pampas' sheen!
Miles and miles of gold and green
Where the sunflowers blow
In a solid glow,
And--to break now and then the screen--
Black neck and eyeballs keen,
Up a wild horse leaps between!
Having, then, this extraordinary power of sight, needing no carefulness
of observation or study, but capable of catching and holding without
trouble all that his eye rested or glanced upon, it is no wonder that
sometimes it amused him to put into verse the doings of a whole day: the
work done in it by men of all classes and the natural objects that
encompassed them; not cataloguing them dryly, but shooting through them,
like rays of light, either his own fancies and thoughts, or the fancies
and thoughts of some typical character whom he invented. This he has
done specially in two poems: _The Englishman in Italy_, where the vast
shell of the Sorrento plain, its sea and mountains, and all the doings
of the peasantry, are detailed with the most intimate delight and
truth. The second of these poems is _Up at a Villa--Down in the City_,
where a farm of the Casentino with its surroundings is contrasted with
the street-life of Florence; and both are described through the
delightful character whom he invents to see them. These poems are
astonishing pieces of intimate, joyful observation of scenery.
Again, there is no poet whose love of animals is greater than
Browning's, and none who has so frequently, so carefully, so vividly
described them. It is amazing, as we go through his work, to realise the
largeness of his range in this matter, from the river-horse to the
lizard, from the eagle to the wren, from the loud singing bee to the
filmy insect in the sunshine. I give a few examples. Mortal man could
not see a lynx more clearly than Karshish--
A black lynx snarled and pricked a tufted ear;
Lust of my blood inflamed his yellow balls.
And the very soul of the Eagle is in this question--
Ask the geier-eagle why she stoops at once
Into the vast and unexplored abyss,
What full-grown power informs her from the first,
Why she not marvels, strenuously beating
The silent boundless regions of the sky!
He has watched the heavy-winged osprey in its haunts, fain to fly,
but forced the earth his couch to make
Far inland, till his friend the tempest wake,
on whose fiercer wings he can flap his own into activity.
In _Caliban upon Setebos_, as would naturally be the case, animal life
is everywhere; and how close to truth, how keenly observed it is, how
the right points for description are chosen to make us feel the beast
and bird in a single line; how full of colour, how flashed into words
which seem like colours, the descriptions are, any animal-lover may hear
in the few lines I quote:
Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech;
Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam,
That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown
He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye.
By moonlight.
That is enough to prove his power. And the animals are seen, not as a
cultured person sees them, but as a savage, with his eyes untroubled by
thoughts, sees them; for Browning, with his curious self-transmuting
power, has put himself into the skin of Caliban. Then again, in that
lovely lyric in _Paracelsus_,
Thus the Mayne glideth,
the banks and waves are full of all the bird and beast life of a river.
Elsewhere, he sees the falcon spread his wings like a banner, the stork
clapping his bill in the marsh, the coot dipping his blue breast in the
water, the swallow flying to Venice--"that stout sea-farer"--the lark
shivering for joy, and a hundred other birds; and lastly, even the great
bird of the Imagination, the Phoenix, flying home; and in a splendid
verse records the sight:
As the King-bird with ages on his plumes
Travels to die in his ancestral glooms.
Not less wonderful, and more unique in English poetry, is his painting
of insects. He describes the hermit-bee, the soft, small, unfrighted
thing, lighting on the dead vine-leaf, and twirling and filing all day.
He strikes out the grasshopper at a touch--
Chirrups the contumacious grasshopper.
He has a swift vision of the azure damsel-fly flittering in the wood:
Child of the simmering quiet, there to die.
He sees all the insect population of an old green wall; fancies the
fancies of the crickets and the flies, and the carousing of the cicala
in the trees, and the bee swinging in the chalice of the campanula, and
the wasps pricking the papers round the peaches, and the gnats and early
moths craving their food from God when dawn awakes them, and the
fireflies crawling like lamps through the moss, and the spider,
sprinkled with mottles on an ash-grey back, and building his web on the
edge of tombs. These are but a few things out of this treasure-house of
animal observation and love. It is a love which animates and populates
with life his landscapes.
Many of the points I have attempted here to make are illustrated in
_Saul_. In verse v. the sheep are pictured, with all a shepherd's
delightful affection, coming back at evening to the folding; and, with
David's poetic imagination, compared to the stars following one another
into the meadows of night--
And now one after one seeks his lodging, as star follows star
Into eve and the blue far above us,--so blue and so far!--
In verse vi. the quails, and the crickets, and the jerboa at the door
of his sand house, are thrilled into quicker life by David's music. In
verse ix. the full joy of living in beasts and men is painted in the
midst of landscape after landscape, struck out in single lines,--till
all nature seems crowded and simmering with the intense life whose
rapture Browning loved so well. These fully reveal his poetic communion
with animals. Then, there is a fine passage in verse x. where he
describes the loosening of a thick bed of snow from the
mountain-side[4]--an occurrence which also drew the interest on Shelley
in the _Prometheus_--which illustrates what I have said of Browning's
conception of the separate life, as of giant Titans, of the vaster
things in Nature. The mountain is alive and lives his life with his own
grim joy, and wears his snow like a breastplate, and discharges it when
it pleases him. It is only David who thinks that the great creature
lives to guard us from the tempests. And Hebron, high on its crested
hill, lifts itself out of the morning mist in the same giant fashion,
For I wake in the grey dewy covert, while Hebron upheaves
The dawn struggling with night on his shoulder, and Kidron retrieves
Slow the damage of yesterday's sunshine.
Then, at the end of the poem, Browning represents all Nature as full of
emotion, as gathered into a fuller life, by David's prophecy of the
coming of immortal Love in Christ to man. This sympathy of Nature with
humanity is so rare a thought in Browning, and so apart from his view of
her, that I think he felt its strangeness here; so that he has taken
some pains to make us understand that it is not Nature herself who does
this, but David, in his uplifted inspiration, who imputes it to her. If
that is not the case, it is at least interesting to find the poet,
impassioned by his imagination of the situation, driven beyond his usual
view into another land of thought.
There is one more thing to say in closing this chapter. Browning, unlike
Tennyson, did not invent his landscapes. He drew directly from nature.
The landscapes in _Pauline_ and _Sordello_, and in the lyrical poems are
plainly recollections of what he has seen and noted in his memory, from
the sweep of the mountainous or oceanic horizon to the lichen on the
rock and the painted shell on the seashore. Even the imaginative
landscape of _Childe Roland_ is a memory, not an invention. I do not say
he would have been incapable of such invented landscape as we find in
_Oenone_ and the _Lotos-Eaters_, but it was not his way to do this.
However, he does it once; but he takes care to show that it is not real
landscape he is drawing, but landscape in a picture. In _Gerard de
Lairesse_, one of the poems in _Parleyings with Certain People_, he sets
himself to rival the "Walk" in Lairesse's _Art of Painting_, and he
invents as a background to mythological or historic scenes, five
landscapes, of dawn, morning, and noon, evening and falling night. They
may be compared with the walk in _Pauline_, and indeed one of them with
its deep pool watched over by the trees recalls his description of a
similar pool in _Pauline_--a lasting impression of his youth, for it is
again used in _Sordello_. These landscapes are some of his most careful
natural description. They begin with the great thunderstorm of dawn in
which Prometheus is seen riveted to his rock and the eagle-hound of Zeus
beside him. Then the morning is described and the awakening of the earth
and Artemis going forth, the huntress-queen and the queen of death; then
noon with Lyda and the Satyr--that sad story; then evening charged with
the fate of empires; and then the night, and in it a vast ghost, the
ghost of departing glory and beauty. The descriptions are too long to
quote, but far too short to read. I would that Browning had done more of
this excellent work; but that these were created when he was an old man
proves that the fire of imagination burnt in him to the end. They are
full of those keen picture-words in which he smites into expression the
central point of a landscape. They realise the glory of light, the
force, fierceness, even the quiet of Nature, but they have lost a great
deal of the colour of which once he was so lavish. Nevertheless, the
whole scheme of colour in these pictures, with their figures, recalls
the pictures of Tintoret. They have his _furia_, his black, gold, and
sombre purple, his white mist and barred clouds and the thunder-roar in
his skies. Nor are Prometheus and Artemis, and Lyda on her heap of skins
in the deep woods, unworthy of the daring hand of the great Venetian.
They seem to stand forth from his canvas.
The poem closes with a charming lyric, half-sad, half-joyful, in which
he hails the spring, and which in itself is full of his heart when it
was close to the hopefulness he drew from natural beauty. I quote it to
close this chapter:
Dance, yellows and whites and reds,
Lead your gay orgy, leaves, stalks, heads
Astir with the wind in the tulip-beds.
There's sunshine; scarcely a wind at all
Disturbs starved grass and daisies small
On a certain mound by a churchyard wall.
Daisies and grass be my heart's bed-fellows,
On the mound wind spares and sunshine mellows:
Dance you, reds and whites and yellows.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] David could only have seen this on the upper slopes of Hermon. But
at the time of the poem, when he is the shepherd-youth, he could
scarcely have visited the north of Palestine. Indeed, he does not seem
all his life long to have been near Hermon. Browning has transferred to
David what he himself had seen in Switzerland.
* * * * *