_THE TREATMENT OF NATURE_
In the previous chapter, some of the statements made on Browning as a
poet of Nature were not sufficiently illustrated; and there are other
elements in his natural description which demand attention. The best way
to repair these deficiencies will be to take chronologically the natural
descriptions in his poems and to comment upon them, leaving out those on
which we have already touched. New points of interest will thus arise;
and, moreover, taking his natural description as it occurs from volume
to volume, we may be able--within this phase of his poetic nature--to
place his poetic development in a clearer light.
I begin, therefore, with _Pauline_. The descriptions of nature in that
poem are more deliberate, more for their own sake, than elsewhere in
Browning's poetry. The first of them faintly recalls the manner of
Shelley in the _Alastor_, and I have no doubt was influenced by him. The
two others, and the more finished, have already escaped from Shelley,
and are almost pre-Raphaelite, as much so as Keats, in their detail. Yet
all the three are original, not imitative. They suggest Shelley and
Keats, and no more, and it is only the manner and not the matter of
these poets that they suggest. Browning became instantly original in
this as in other modes of poetry. It was characteristic of him from the
beginning to the end of his career, to possess within himself his own
methods, to draw out of himself new matter and new shapings.
From one point of view this was full of treasureable matter for us. It
is not often the gods give us so opulent an originality. From another
point of view it was unfortunate. If he had begun by imitating a little;
if he had studied the excellences of his predecessors more; if he had
curbed his individuality sufficiently to mark, learn and inwardly digest
the noble style of others in natural description, and in all other
matters of poetry as well, his work would have been much better than it
is; his original excellences would have found fitter and finer
expression; his faults would have been enfeebled instead of being
developed; his style would have been more concise on one side, less
abrupt on another, and we should not have been wrongly disturbed by
obscurities of diction and angularities of expression. He would have
reached more continuously the splendid level he often attained. This is
plentifully illustrated by his work on external nature, but less perhaps
than by his work on humanity.
The first natural description he published is in the beginning of
_Pauline_:
Thou wilt remember one warm morn when winter
Crept agèd from the earth, and spring's first breath
Blew soft from the moist hills; the blackthorn boughs,
So dark in the bare wood, when glistening
In the sunshine were white with coming buds,
Like the bright side of a sorrow, and the banks
Had violets opening from sleep like eyes.
That is fairly good; he describes what he has seen; but it might have
been better. We know what he means, but his words do not accurately or
imaginatively convey this meaning. The best lines are the first three,
but the peculiar note of Shelley sighs so fully in them that they do not
represent Browning. What is special in them is his peculiar delight not
only in the morning which here he celebrates, but in the spring. It was
in his nature, even in old age, to love with passion the beginnings of
things; dawn, morning, spring and youth, and their quick blood; their
changes, impulses, their unpremeditated rush into fresh experiment.
Unlike Tennyson, who was old when he was old, Browning was young when he
was old. Only once in _Asolando_, in one poem, can we trace that he felt
winter in his heart. And the lines in _Pauline_ which I now quote,
spoken by a young man who had dramatised himself into momentary age, are
no ill description of his temper at times when he was really old:
As life wanes, all its care and strife and toil
Seem strangely valueless, while the old trees
Which grew by our youth's home, the waving mass
Of climbing plants heavy with bloom and dew,
The morning swallows with their songs like words.
All these seem clear and only worth our thoughts:
So, aught connected with my early life,
My rude songs or my wild imaginings,
How I look on them--most distinct amid
The fever and the stir of after years!
The next description in _Pauline_ is that in which he describes--to
illustrate what Shelley was to him--the woodland spring which became a
mighty river. Shelley, as first conceived by Browning, seemed to him
like a sacred spring:
Scarce worth a moth's flitting, which long grasses cross,
And one small tree embowers droopingly--
Joying to see some wandering insect won
To live in its few rushes, or some locust
To pasture on its boughs, or some wild bird
Stoop for its freshness from the trackless air.
A piece of careful detail, close to nature, but not close enough;
needing to be more detailed or less detailed, but the first instance in
his work of his deliberate use of Nature, not for love of herself only,
(Wordsworth, Coleridge or Byron would have described the spring in the
woods for its own sake), but for illustration of humanity. It is
Shelley--Shelley in his lonely withdrawn character, Shelley hidden in
the wood of his own thoughts, and, like a spring in that wood, bubbling
upwards into personal poetry--of whom Browning is now thinking. The
image is good, but a better poet would have dwelt more on the fountain
and left the insects and birds alone. It is Shelley also of whom he
thinks--Shelley breaking away from personal poetry to write of the fates
of men, of liberty and love and overthrow of wrong, of the future of
mankind--when he expands his tree-shaded fountain into the river and
follows it to the sea:
And then should find it but the fountain head,
Long lost, of some great river washing towns
And towers, and seeing old woods which will live
But by its banks untrod of human foot.
Which, when the great sun sinks, lie quivering
In light as some thing lieth half of life
Before God's foot, waiting a wondrous change;
Then girt with rocks which seek to turn or stay
Its course in vain, for it does ever spread
Like a sea's arm as it goes rolling on,
Being the pulse of some great country--so
Wast thou to me, and art thou to the world!
How good some of that is; how bad it is elsewhere! How much it needs
thought, concentration, and yet how vivid also and original! And the
faults of it, of grammar, of want of clearness, of irritating
parenthesis, of broken threads of thought, of inability to leave out the
needless, are faults of which Browning never quite cleared his work. I
do not think he ever cared to rid himself of them.
The next description is not an illustration of man by means of Nature.
It is almost the only set description of Nature, without reference to
man, which occurs in the whole of Browning's work. It is introduced by
his declaration (for in this I think he speaks from himself) of his
power of living in the life of all living things. He does not think of
himself as living in the whole Being of Nature, as Wordsworth or Shelley
might have done. There was a certain matter of factness in him which
prevented his belief in any theory of that kind. But he does transfer
himself into the rejoicing life of the animals and plants, a life which
he knows is akin to his own. And this distinction is true of all his
poetry of Nature. "I can mount with the bird," he says,
Leaping airily his pyramid of leaves
And twisted boughs of some tall mountain tree,
Or like a fish breathe deep the morning air
In the misty sun-warm water.
This introduces the description of a walk of twenty-four hours through
various scenes of natural beauty. It is long and elaborate--the scenery
he conceives round the home where he and Pauline are to live. And it is
so close, and so much of it is repeated in other forms in his later
poetry, that I think it is drawn direct from Nature; that it is here
done of set purpose to show his hand in natural description. It begins
with night, but soon leaves night for the morning and the noon. Here is
a piece of it:
Morning, the rocks and valleys and old woods.
How the sun brightens in the mist, and here,
Half in the air, like[5] creatures of the place,
Trusting the elements, living on high boughs
That sway in the wind--look at the silver spray
Flung from the foam-sheet of the cataract
Amid the broken rocks! Shall we stay here
With the wild hawks? No, ere the hot noon come
Dive we down--safe! See, this is our new retreat
Walled in with a sloped mound of matted shrubs,
Dark, tangled, old and green, still sloping down
To a small pool whose waters lie asleep,
Amid the trailing boughs turned water-plants:
And tall trees overarch to keep us in,
Breaking the sunbeams into emerald shafts,
And in the dreamy water one small group
Of two or three strange trees are got together
Wondering at all around--
This is nerveless work, tentative, talkative, no clear expression of the
whole; and as he tries to expand it further in lines we may study with
interest, for the very failures of genius are interesting, he becomes
even more feeble. Yet the feebleness is traversed by verses of power,
like lightning flashing through a mist upon the sea. The chief thing to
say about this direct, detailed work is that he got out of its manner as
fast as he could. He never tried it again, but passed on to suggest the
landscape by a few sharp, high-coloured words; choosing out one or two
of its elements and flashing them into prominence. The rest was left to
the imagination of the reader.
He is better when he comes forth from the shadowy woodland-pool into the
clear air and open landscape:
Up for the glowing day, leave the old woods!
See, they part like a ruined arch: the sky!
Blue sunny air, where a great cloud floats laden
With light, like a dead whale that white birds pick,
Floating away in the sun in some north sea.
Air, air, fresh life-blood, thin and searching air,
The clear, dear breath of God that loveth us,
Where small birds reel and winds take their delight!
The last three lines are excellent, but nothing could be worse than the
sensational image of the dead whale. It does not fit the thing he
desires to illustrate, and it violates the sentiment of the scene he is
describing, but its strangeness pleased his imagination, and he put it
in without a question. Alas, in after times, he only too often, both in
the poetry of nature and of the human soul, hurried into his verse
illustrations which had no natural relation to the matter in hand, just
because it amused him to indulge his fancy. The finished artist could
not do this; he would hear, as it were, the false note, and reject it.
But Browning, a natural artist, never became a perfect one.
Nevertheless, as his poetry went on, he reached, by natural power,
splendid description, as indeed I have fully confessed; but, on the
other hand, one is never sure of him. He is never quite "inevitable."
The attempt at deliberate natural description in _Pauline_, of which I
have now spoken, is not renewed in _Paracelsus_. By the time he wrote
that poem the movement and problem of the spirit of man had all but
quenched his interest in natural scenery. Nature is only introduced as a
background, almost a scenic background for the players, who are the
passions, thoughts, and aspirations of the intellectual life of
Paracelsus. It is only at the beginning of Part II. that we touch a
landscape:
Over the waters in the vaporous West
The sun goes down as in a sphere of gold
Behind the arm of the city, which between;
With all the length of domes and minarets,
Athwart the splendour, black and crooked runs
Like a Turk verse along a scimitar.
That is all; nothing but an introduction. Paracelsus turns in a moment
from the sight, and absorbs himself in himself, just as Browning was
then doing in his own soul. Nearly two thousand lines are then written
before Nature is again touched upon, and then Festus and Paracelsus are
looking at the dawn; and it is worth saying how in this description
Browning's work on Nature has so greatly improved that one can scarcely
believe he is the same poet who wrote the wavering descriptions of
_Pauline_. This is close and clear:
Morn must be near.
FESTUS. Best ope the casement: see,
The night, late strewn with clouds and flying stars,
Is blank and motionless: how peaceful sleep
The tree-tops all together! Like an asp[6]
The wind slips whispering from bough to bough.
* * *
PARACELSUS. See, morn at length. The heavy darkness seems
Diluted, grey and clear without the stars;
The shrubs bestir and rouse themselves as if
Some snake, that weighed them down all night, let go
His hold; and from the East, fuller and fuller,
Day, like a mighty river, flowing in;
But clouded, wintry, desolate and cold.
That is good, clear, and sufficient; and there the description should
end. But Browning, driven by some small demon, adds to it three lines of
mere observant fancy.
Yet see how that broad prickly star-shaped plant,
Half-down in the crevice, spreads its woolly leaves,
All thick and glistening with diamond dew.
What is that for? To give local colour or reality? It does neither. It
is mere childish artistry. Tennyson could not have done it. He knew when
to stay his hand.[7]
The finest piece of natural description in _Paracelsus_ is of the
coming of Spring. It is full of the joy of life; it is inspired by a
passionate thought, lying behind it, concerning man. It is still more
inspired by his belief that God himself was eternal joy and filled the
universe with rapture. Nowhere did Browning reach a greater height in
his Nature poetry than in these lines, yet they are more a description,
as usual, of animal life than of the beauty of the earth and sea:
Then all is still; earth is a wintry clod:
But spring-wind, like a dancing psaltress, passes
Over its breast to waken it, rare verdure
Buds tenderly upon rough banks, between
The withered tree-roots and the cracks of frost,
Like a smile striving with a wrinkled face;
The grass grows bright, the boughs are swoln with blooms
Like chrysalids impatient for the air,
The shining dorrs are busy, beetles run
Along the furrows, ants make their ado;
Above, birds fly in merry flocks, the lark
Soars up and up, shivering for very joy;
Afar the ocean sleeps; white fishing-gulls
Flit where the strand is purple with its tribe
Of nested limpets; savage creatures seek
Their loves in wood and plain--and God renews
His ancient rapture.
Once more, in _Paracelsus_, there is the lovely lyric about the flowing
of the Mayne. I have driven through that gracious country of low hill
and dale and wide water-meadows, where under flowered banks only a foot
high the slow river winds in gentleness; and this poem is steeped in the
sentiment of the scenery. But, as before, Browning quickly slides away
from the beauty of inanimate nature into a record of the animals that
haunt the stream. He could not get on long with mountains and rivers
alone. He must people them with breathing, feeling things; anything for
life!
Thus the Mayne glideth
Where my Love abideth.
Sleep's no softer; it proceeds
On through lawns, on through meads,
On and on, whate'er befall,
Meandering and musical,
Though the niggard pasturage
Bears not on its shaven ledge
Aught but weeds and waving grasses
To view the river as it passes,
Save here and there a scanty patch
Of primroses too faint to catch
A weary bee.
And scarce it pushes
Its gentle way through strangling rushes
Where the glossy kingfisher
Flutters when noon-heats are near,
Glad the shelving banks to shun
Red and steaming in the sun,
Where the shrew-mouse with pale throat
Burrows, and the speckled stoat;
Where the quick sandpipers flit
In and out the marl and grit
That seems to breed them, brown as they:
Naught disturbs its quiet way,
Save some lazy stork that springs,
Trailing it with legs and wings,
Whom the shy fox from the hill
Rouses, creep he ne'er so still.
"My heart, they loose my heart, those simple words," cries Paracelsus,
and he was right. They tell of that which to see and love is better,
wiser, than to probe and know all the problems of knowledge. But that is
a truth not understood, not believed. And few there be who find it. And
if Browning had found the secret of how to live more outside of his
understanding than he did, or having found it, had not forgotten it, he
would not perhaps have spoken more wisely for the good of man, but he
would have more continuously written better poetry.
The next poem in which he may be said to touch Nature is _Sordello_.
_Strafford_ does not count, save for the charming song of the boat in
music and moonlight, which the children sing. In _Sordello_, the problem
of life, as in _Paracelsus_, is still the chief matter, but outward
life, as not in _Paracelsus_, takes an equal place with inward life. And
naturally, Nature, its changes and beauty, being outward, are more fully
treated than in _Paracelsus_. But it is never treated for itself alone.
It is made to image or reflect the sentiment of the man who sees it, or
to illustrate a phase of his passion or his thought. But there is a
closer grip upon it than before, a clearer definition, a greater power
of concentrated expression of it, and especially, a fuller use of
colour. Browning paints Nature now like a Venetian; the very shadows of
objects are in colour. This new power was a kind of revelation to him,
and he frequently uses it with a personal joy in its exercise. Things in
Nature blaze in his poetry now and afterwards in gold, purple, the
crimson of blood, in sunlit green and topaz, in radiant blue, in dyes of
earthquake and eclipse. Then, when he has done his landscape thus in
colour, he adds more; he places in its foreground one drop, one eye of
still more flaming colour, to vivify and inflame the whole.
The main landscape of _Sordello_ is the plain and the low pine-clad
hills around Mantua; the half-circle of the deep lagoon which enarms the
battlemented town; and the river Mincio, seen by Sordello when he comes
out of the forest on the hill, as it enters and leaves the lagoon, and
winds, a silver ribbon, through the plain. It is the landscape Vergil
must have loved. A long bridge of more than a hundred arches, with
towers of defence, crosses the marsh from the towered gateway of the
walls to the mainland, and in the midst of the lagoon the deep river
flows fresh and clear with a steady swiftness. Scarcely anywhere in
North Italy is the upper sky more pure at dawn and even, and there is no
view now so mystic in its desolation. Over the lagoon, and puffing from
it, the mists, daily encrimsoned by sunrise and sunset, continually rise
and disperse.
The character and the peculiarities of this landscape Browning has
seized and enshrined in verse. But his descriptions are so arranged as
to reflect certain moments of crisis in the soul of Sordello. He does
not describe this striking landscape for its own sake, but for the sake
of his human subject. The lines I quote below describe noon-day on the
lagoon, seen from the golden woods and black pines; and the vision of
the plain, city and river, suddenly opening out from the wood,
symbolises the soul of Sordello opening out from solitude "into the
veritable business of mankind."
Then wide
Opened the great morass, shot every side
With flashing water through and through; a-shine,
Thick-steaming, all-alive. Whose shape divine
Quivered i' the farthest rainbow-vapour, glanced
Athwart the flying herons? He advanced,
But warily; though Mincio leaped no more,
Each footfall burst up in the marish-floor
A diamond jet.
And then he somewhat spoils this excellent thing by a piece of detail
too minute for the largeness of the impression. But how clear and how
full of true sentiment it is; and how the image of Palma rainbowed in
the mist, and of Sordello seeing her, fills the landscape with youthful
passion!
Here is the same view in the morning, when Mincio has come down in flood
and filled the marsh:
Mincio, in its place,
Laughed, a broad water, in next morning's face,
And, where the mists broke up immense and white
I' the steady wind, burned like a spilth of light
Out of the crashing of a million stars.
It were well to compare that brilliant piece of light with the grey
water-sunset at Ferrara in the beginning of Book VI.
While eve slow sank
Down the near terrace to the farther bank,
And only one spot left from out the night
Glimmered upon the river opposite--
breadth of watery heaven like a bay,
A sky-like space of water, ray for ray,
And star for star, one richness where they mixed
As this and that wing of an angel, fixed,
Tumultuary splendours folded in
To die.
As usual, Spring enchants him. The second book begins with her coming,
and predicates the coming change in Sordello's soul.
The woods were long austere with snow; at last
Pink leaflets budded on the beech, and fast
Larches, scattered through pine-tree solitudes,
Brightened, as in the slumbrous heart of the woods
Our buried year, a witch, grew young again
To placid incantations, and that stain
About were from her cauldron, green smoke blent
With those black pines.
Nor does he omit in _Sordello_ to recall two other favourite aspects of
nature, long since recorded in _Pauline_, the ravine and the woodland
spring. Just as Turner repeated in many pictures of the same place what
he had first observed in it, so Browning recalled in various poems the
first impressions of his youth. He had a curious love for a ravine with
overhanging trees and a thin thread of water, looping itself round
rocks. It occurs in the _Fireside_, it is taken up in his later poems,
and up such a ravine Sordello climbs among the pines of Goito:
He climbed with (June at deep) some close ravine
Mid clatter of its million pebbles sheen,
Over which, singing soft, the runnel slipped
Elate with rains.
Then, in _Sordello_, we come again across the fountain in the grove he
draws in _Pauline_, now greatly improved in clearness and
word-brightness--a real vision. Fate has given him here a fount
Of pure loquacious pearl, the soft tree-tent
Guards, with its face of reate and sedge, nor fail
The silver globules and gold-sparkling grail
At bottom--
where the impulse of the water sends up the sand in a cone--a solitary
loveliness of Nature that Coleridge and Tennyson have both drawn with a
finer pencil than Browning. The other examples of natural description in
_Sordello_, as well as those in _Balaustion_ I shall reserve till I
speak of those poems. As to the dramas, they are wholly employed with
humanity. In them man's soul has so overmastered Browning that they are
scarcely diversified half a dozen times by any illustrations derived
from Nature.
We now come, with _The Ring and the Book_, to a clear division in his
poetry of Nature. From this time forth Nature decays in his verse. Man
masters it and drives it out. In _The Ring and the Book_, huge as it is,
Nature rarely intrudes; the human passion of the matter is so great that
it swallows up all Browning's interest. There is a little forky flashing
description of the entrance to the Val d'Ema in Guido's first statement.
Caponsacchi is too intensely gathered round the tragedy to use a single
illustration from Nature. The only person who does use illustrations
from Nature is the only one who is by age, by his life, by the apartness
of his high place, capable of sufficient quiet and contemplation to
think of Nature at all. This is the Pope.
He illustrates with great vigour the way in which Guido destroyed all
the home life which clung about him and himself remained dark and vile,
by the burning of a nest-like hut in the Campagna, with all its vines
and ivy and flowers; till nothing remains but the blackened walls of the
malicious tower round which the hut had been built.
He illustrates the sudden event which, breaking in on Caponsacchi's
life, drew out of him his latent power and his inward good, by this
vigorous description:
As when a thundrous midnight, with black air
That burns, rain-drops that blister, breaks a spell,
Draws out the excessive virtue of some sheathed
Shut unsuspected flower that hoards and hides
Immensity of sweetness.
And the last illustration, in which the Pope hopes that Guido's soul may
yet be saved by the suddenness of his death, is one of the finest
pieces of natural description in Browning, and reads like one of his own
memories:
I stood at Naples once, a night so dark
I could have scarce conjectured there was earth
Anywhere, sky or sea or world at all:
But the night's black was burst through by a blaze--
Thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore,
Through her whole length of mountain visible:
There lay the city thick and plain with spires,
And, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea.
So may the truth be flashed out by one blow,
And Guido see, one instant, and be saved.
After _The Ring and the Book_, poor Nature, as one of Browning's
mistresses, was somewhat neglected for a time, and he gave himself up to
ugly representations of what was odd or twisted in humanity, to its
smaller problems, like that contained in _Fifine at the Fair_, to its
fantastic impulses, its strange madnesses, its basenesses, even its
commonplace crimes. These subjects were redeemed by his steady effort to
show that underneath these evil developments of human nature lay
immortal good; and that a wise tolerance, based on this underlying
godlikeness in man, was the true attitude of the soul towards the false
and the stupid in mankind. This had been his attitude from the
beginning. It differentiates him from Tennyson, who did not maintain
that view; and at that point he is a nobler poet than Tennyson.
But he became too much absorbed in the intellectual treatment of these
side-issues in human nature. And I think that he was left unprotected
from this or not held back from it by his having almost given up Nature
in her relation to man as a subject for his poetry. To love that great,
solemn and beautiful Creature, who even when she seems most merciless
retains her glory and loveliness, keeps us from thinking too much on the
lower problems of humanity, on its ignobler movements; holds before us
infinite grandeur, infinite beauty, infinite order, and suggests and
confirms within us eternal aspiration. Those intimations of the ideal
and endless perfectness which are dimmed within us by the meaner aspects
of human life, or by the sordid difficulties of thought which a sensual
and wealth-seeking society present to us, are restored to us by her
quiet, order and beauty. When he wrote _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Red
Cotton Nightcap Country_, and _The Inn Album_, Nature had ceased to
awaken the poetic passion in him, and his poetry suffered from the loss.
Its interest lies in the narrow realm of intellectual analysis, not in
the large realm of tragic or joyous passion. He became the dissector of
corrupt bodies, not the creator of living beings.
Nevertheless, in _Fifine at the Fair_ there are several intercalated
illustrations from Nature, all of which are interesting and some
beautiful. The sunset over Sainte-Marie and the lie Noirmoutier, with
the birds who sing to the dead, and the coming of the nightwind and the
tide, is as largely wrought as the description of the mountain rill--the
"infant of mist and dew," and its voyage to the sea is minute and
delicate. There is also that magnificent description of a sunset which I
have already quoted. It is drawn to illustrate some remote point in the
argument, and is far too magnificent for the thing it illustrates. Yet
how few in this long poem, how remote from Browning's heart, are these
touches of Nature.
Again, in _The Inn Album_ there is a description of an English elm-tree,
as an image of a woman who makes marriage life seem perfect, which is
interesting because it is the third, and only the third, reference to
English scenery in the multitude of Browning's verses. The first is in
_Pauline_, the second in that poem, "Oh, to be in England," and this is
the third. The woman has never ceased to gaze
On the great elm-tree in the open, posed
Placidly full in front, smooth hole, broad branch,
And leafage, one green plenitude of May.
... bosomful
Of lights and shades, murmurs and silences,
Sun-warmth, dew-coolness, squirrel, bee, bird,
High, higher, highest, till the blue proclaims
"Leave Earth, there's nothing better till next step
Heavenward!"
This, save in one line, is not felt or expressed with any of that
passion which makes what a poet says completely right.
Browning could not stay altogether in this condition, in which,
moreover, his humour was also in abeyance; and in his next book,
_Pacchiarotto, &c._, he broke away from these morbid subjects, and, with
that recovery, recovered also some of his old love of Nature. The
prologue to that book is poetry; and Nature (though he only describes an
old stone wall in Italy covered with straying plants) is interwoven with
his sorrow and his love. Then, all through the book, even in its most
fantastic humour, Nature is not altogether neglected for humanity; and
the poetry, which Browning seemed to have lost the power to create, has
partly returned to him. That is also the case in _La Saisiaz_, and I
have already spoken of the peculiar elements of the nature-poetry in
that work. In the _Dramatic Idyls_, of which he was himself fond; and in
_Jocoseria_, there is very little natural description. The subjects did
not allow of it, but yet Nature sometimes glides in, and when she does,
thrills the verse into a higher humanity. In _Ferishtah's Fancies_, a
book full of flying charm, Nature has her proper place, and in the
lyrics which close the stories she is not forgotten; but still there is
not the care for her which once ran like a full river of delight through
his landscape of human nature. He loved, indeed, that landscape of
mankind the most, the plains and hills and woods of human life; but when
he watered it with the great river of Nature his best work was done.
Now, as life grew to a close, that river had too much dried up in his
poetry.
It was not that he had not the power to describe Nature if he cared. But
he did not care. I have spoken of the invented descriptions of morn and
noon and sunset in Gerard de Lairesse in the book which preceded
_Asolando_. They have his trenchant power, words that beat out the scene
like strokes on an anvil, but, curiously enough, they are quite
unsuffused with human feeling; as if, having once divorced Nature from
humanity, he never could bring them together again. Nor is this a mere
theory. The Prologue to _Asolando_ supports it.
That sorrowful poem, written, it seems, in the year he died (1889),
reveals his position towards Nature when he had lost the power of youth
to pour fire on the world. It is full of his last thinking. "The poet's
age is sad," he says. "In youth his eye lent to everything in the
natural world the colours of his own soul, the rainbow glory of
imagination:
And now a flower is just a flower:
Man, bird, beast are but beast, bird, man--
Simply themselves, uncinct by dower
Of dyes which, when life's day began,
Round each in glory ran."
"Ah! what would you have?" he says. "What is the best: things draped in
colour, as by a lens, or the naked things themselves? truth ablaze, or
falsehood's fancy haze? I choose the first."
It is an old man's effort to make the best of age. For my part, I do not
see that the things are the better for losing the colour the soul gives
them. The things themselves are indifferent. But as seen by the soul,
they are seen in God, and the colour and light which imagination gives
them are themselves divine. Nor is their colour or light only in our
imagination, but in themselves also, part of the glory and beauty of
God. A flower is never only a flower, or a beast a beast. And so
Browning would have said in the days when he was still a lover of Nature
as well as of man, when he was still a faithful soldier in the army of
imagination, a poet more than a philosopher at play. It is a sad
business. He has not lost his eagerness to advance, to climb beyond the
flaming walls, to find God in his heaven. He has not lost the great
hopes with which he began, nor the ideals he nursed of old. He has not
lost his fighting power, nor his cheerful cry that life is before him in
the fulness of the world to come. The _Rêverie_ and the _Epilogue_ to
_Asolando_ are noble statements of his courage, faith, and joy. There is
nothing sad there, nothing to make us beat the breast. But there is
sadness in this abandonment of the imaginative glory with which once he
clothed the world of Nature; and he ought to have retained it. He would
have done so had he not forgotten Nature in anatomising man.
However, he goes on with his undying effort to make the best of things,
and though he has lost his rapture in Nature, he has not lost his main
theory of man's life and of the use of the universe. The end of this
_Prologue_ puts it as clearly as it was put in _Paracelsus_. Nothing is
changed in that.
"At Asolo," he continues, "my Asolo, when I was young, all natural
objects were palpably clothed with fire. They mastered me, not I them.
Terror was in their beauty. I was like Moses before the Bush that
burned. I adored the splendour I saw. Then I was in danger of being
content with it; of mistaking the finite for the infinite beauty. To be
satisfied--that was the peril. Now I see the natural world as it is,
without the rainbow hues the soul bestowed upon it. Is that well? In one
sense yes.
And now? The lambent flame is--where?
Lost from the naked world: earth, sky,
Hill, vale, tree, flower--Italia's rare
O'er-running beauty crowds the eye--
But flame?--The Bush is bare.
All is distinct, naked, clear, Nature and nothing else. Have I lost
anything in getting down to fact instead of to fancy? Have I shut my
eyes in pain--pain for disillusion? No--now I know that my home is not
in Nature; there is no awe and splendour in her which can keep me with
her. Oh, far beyond is the true splendour, the infinite source of awe
and love which transcends her:
No, for the purged ear apprehends
Earth's import, not the eye late dazed:
The Voice said "Call my works thy friends!
At Nature dost thou shrink amazed?
God is it who transcends."
All Browning is in that way of seeing the matter; but he forgets that he
could see it in the same fashion while he still retained the imaginative
outlook on the world of Nature. And the fact is that he did do so in
_Paracelsus_, in _Easter-Day_, in a host of other poems. There was then
no need for him to reduce to naked fact the glory with which young
imagination clothed the world, in order to realise that God transcended
Nature. He had conceived that truth and believed it long ago. And this
explanation, placed here, only tells us that he had lost his ancient
love of Nature, and it is sorrowful to understand it of him.
Finally, the main contentions of this chapter, which are drawn from a
chronological view of Browning's treatment of Nature, are perhaps worth
a summary. The first is that, though the love of Nature was always less
in him than his love of human nature, yet for the first half of his work
it was so interwoven with his human poetry that Nature suggested to him
humanity and humanity Nature. And these two, as subjects for thought and
feeling, were each uplifted and impassioned, illustrated and developed,
by this intercommunion. That was a true and high position. Humanity was
first, Nature second in Browning's poetry, but both were linked together
in a noble marriage; and at that time he wrote his best poetry.
The second thing this chronological treatment of his Nature-poetry
shows, is that his interest in human nature pushed out his love of
Nature, gradually at first, but afterwards more swiftly, till Nature
became almost non-existent in his poetry. With that his work sank down
into intellectual or ethical exercises, in which poetry decayed.
It shows, thirdly, how the love of Nature, returning, but returning with
diminished power, entered again into his love of human nature, and
renewed the passion of his poetry, its singing, and its health. But
reconciliations of this kind do not bring back all the ancient affection
and happiness. Nature and humanity never lived together in his poetry in
as vital a harmony as before, nor was the work done on them as good as
it was of old. A broken marriage is not repaired by an apparent
condonation. Nature and humanity, though both now dwelt in him, kept
separate rooms. Their home-life was destroyed. Browning had been drawn
away by a Fifine of humanity. He never succeeded in living happily again
with Elvire; and while our intellectual interest in his work remained,
our poetic interest in it lessened. We read it for mental and ethical
entertainment, not for ideal joy.
No; if poetry is to _be_ perfectly written; if the art is to be brought
to its noblest height; if it is to continue to lift the hearts of men
into the realm where perfection lives; if it is to glow, an unwearied
fire, in the world; the love of Nature must be justly mingled in it
with the love of humanity. The love of humanity must be first, the love
of Nature second, but they must not be divorced. When they are, when the
love of Nature forms the only subject, or when the love of Man forms the
only subject, poetry decays and dies.
FOOTNOTES:
[5] Creatures accordant with the place?
[6] Browning, even more than Shelley, was fond of using the snake in his
poetry. Italy is in that habit.
[7] There is a fine picture of the passing of a hurricane in
_Paracelsus_ (p. 67, vol i.) which illustrates this inability to stop
when he has done all he needs. Paracelsus speaks:
The hurricane is spent,
And the good boat speeds through the brightening weather;
But is it earth or sea that heaves below?
The gulf rolls like a meadow-swell, o'erstrewn
With ravaged boughs and remnants of the shore;
And now, some islet, loosened from the land,
Swims past with all its trees, sailing to ocean:
_And now the air is full of uptorn canes._
_Light strippings from the fan-trees, tamarisks_
_Unrooted, with their birds still clinging to them,_
_All high in the wind_. Even so my varied life
Drifts by me.
I think that the lines I have italicised should have been left out. They
weaken what he has well done.
* * * * *