_POEMS OF THE PASSION OF LOVE_
When we leave _Paracelsus_, _Sordello_ and the _Dramas_ behind, and find
ourselves among the host of occasional poems contained in the _Dramatic
Lyrics_ and _Romances_, in _Men and Women_, in _Dramatis Personæ_, and
in the later volumes, it is like leaving an unencumbered sea for one
studded with a thousand islands. Every island is worth a visit and
different from the rest. Their variety, their distinct scenery, their
diverse inhabitants, the strange surprises in them, are as continual an
enchantment for the poetic voyager as the summer isles of the Pacific.
But while each of them is different from the rest, yet, like the islands
in the Pacific, they fall into groups; and to isolate these groups is
perhaps the best way to treat so varied a collection of poems. To treat
them chronologically would be a task too long and wearisome for a book.
To treat them zoologically, if I may borrow that term, is possible, and
may be profitable. This chapter is dedicated to the poems which relate
to Love.
Commonly speaking, the term _Love Poems_ does not mean poems concerning
the absolute Love, or the love of Ideas, such as Truth or Beauty, or
Love of mankind or one's own country, or the loves that belong to home,
or the love of friends, or even married love unless it be specially
bound up, as it is in Browning's poem of _By the Fireside_, with
ante-nuptial love--but poems expressing the isolating passion of one sex
for the other; chiefly in youth, or in conditions which resemble those
of youth, whether moral or immoral. These celebrate the joys and
sorrows, rapture and despair, changes and chances, moods, fancies, and
imaginations, quips and cranks and wanton wiles, all the tragedy and
comedy, of that passion, which is half of the sense and half of the
spirit, sometimes wholly of the senses and sometimes wholly of the
spirit. It began, in one form of it, among the lower animals and still
rules their lives; it has developed through many thousand years of
humanity into myriads of shapes in and outside of the soul; into stories
whose varieties and multitudes are more numerous than the stars of
heaven or the sand of the seashore; and yet whose multitudinous changes
and histories have their source in two things only--in the desire to
generate, which is physical; in the desire to forget self in another,
which is spiritual. The union of both these desires into one passion of
thought, act and feeling is the fine quintessence of this kind of love;
but the latter desire alone is the primal motive of all the other forms
of love, from friendship and maternal love to love of country, of
mankind, of ideas, and of God.
With regard to love-poems of the sort we now discuss, the times in
history when they are most written are those in which a nation or
mankind renews its youth. Their production in the days of Elizabeth was
enormous, their passion various and profound, their fancy elaborate,
their ornament extravagant with the extravagance of youth; and, in the
hands of the greater men, their imagination was as fine as their melody.
As that age grew older they were not replaced but were dominated by more
serious subjects; and though love in its fantasies was happily recorded
in song during the Caroline period, passion in English love-poetry
slowly decayed till the ideas of the Revolution, before the French
outbreak, began to renew the youth of the world. The same career is run
by the individual poet. The subject of his youth is the passion of love,
as it was in Browning's _Pauline_. The subjects of his manhood are
serious with other thought and feeling, sad with another sadness, happy
with another happiness. They traverse a wider range of human feeling and
thought, and when they speak of love, it is of love in its wiser,
steadier, graver and less selfish forms. It was so with Browning, who
far sooner than his comrades, escaped from the tangled wilderness of
youthful passion. It is curious to think that so young a creature as he
was in 1833 should have left the celebration of the love of woman behind
him, and only written of the love which his _Paracelsus_ images in
Aprile. It seems a little insensitive in so young a man. But I do not
think Browning was ever quite young save at happy intervals; and this
falls in with the fact that his imagination was more intellectual than
passionate; that while he felt love, he also analysed, even dissected
it, as he wrote about it; that it scarcely ever carried him away so far
as to make him forget everything but itself. Perhaps once or twice, as
in _The Last Ride Together_, he may have drawn near to this absorption,
but even then the man is thinking more of his own thoughts than of the
woman by his side, who must have been somewhat wearied by so silent a
companion. Even in _By the Fireside_, when he is praising the wife whom
he loved with all his soul, and recalling the moment of early passion
while yet they looked on one another and felt their souls embrace before
they spoke--it is curious to find him deviating from the intensity of
the recollection into a discussion of what might have been if she had
not been what she was--a sort of _excursus_ on the chances of life which
lasts for eight verses--before he returns to that immortal moment. Even
after years of married life, a poet, to whom passion has been in youth
supreme, would scarcely have done that. On the whole, his poetry, like
that of Wordsworth, but not so completely, is destitute of the love-poem
in the ordinary sense of the word; and the few exceptions to which we
might point want so much that exclusiveness of a lover which shuts out
all other thought but that of the woman, that it is difficult to class
them in that species of literature. However, this is not altogether
true, and the main exception to it is a curious-piece of literary and
personal history. Those who read _Asolando_, the last book of poems he
published, were surprised to find with what intensity some of the first
poems in it described the passion of sexual love. They are fully charged
with isolated emotion; other thoughts than those of love do not intrude
upon them. Moreover, they have a sincere lyric note. It is impossible,
unless by a miracle of imagination, that these could have been written
when he was about eighty years of age. I believe, though I do not know,
that he wrote them when he was quite a young man; that he found them on
looking over his portfolios, and had a dim and scented pleasure in
reading and publishing them in his old age. He mentions in the preface
that the book contains both old and new poems. The new are easily
isolated, and the first poem, the introduction to the collection, is of
the date of the book. The rest belong to different periods of his life.
The four poems to which I refer are _Now_, _Summum Bonum_, _A Pearl--A
Girl_, and _Speculative_. They are beautiful with a beauty of their own;
full of that natural abandonment of the whole world for one moment with
the woman loved, which youth and the hours of youth in manhood feel. I
should have been sorry if Browning had not shaped into song this
abandonment. He loved the natural, and was convinced of its rightness;
and he had, as I might prove, a tenderness for it even when it passed
into wrong. He was the last man in the world to think that the passion
of noble sexual love was to be despised. And it is pleasant to find, at
the end of his long poetic career, that, in a serious and wise old age,
he selected, to form part of his last book, poems of youthful and
impassioned love, in which the senses and the spirit met, each in their
pre-eminence.
The two first of these, _Now_ and _Summum Bonum_, must belong to his
youth, though from certain turns of expression and thought in them, it
seems that Browning worked on them at the time he published them. I
quote the second for its lyric charm, even though the melody is
ruthlessly broken,
All the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one bee:
All the wonder and wealth of the mine in the heart of one gem:
In the core of one pearl all the shade and the shine of the sea:
Breath and bloom, shade and shine,--wonder, wealth, and
--how far above them--
Truth, that's brighter than gem,
Trust, that's purer than pearl,--
Brightest truth, purest trust in the universe--all were for me
In the kiss of one girl.
The next two poems are knit to this and to _Now_ by the strong emotion
of earthly love, of the senses as well as of the spirit, for one woman;
but they differ in the period at which they were written. The first, _A
Pearl--A Girl_, recalls that part of the poem _By the Fireside_, when
one look, one word, opened the infinite world of love to Browning. If
written when he was young, it has been revised in after life.
A simple ring with a single stone
To the vulgar eye no stone of price:
Whisper the right word, that alone--
Forth starts a sprite, like fire from ice,
And lo, you are lord (says an Eastern scroll)
Of heaven and earth, lord whole and sole
Through the power in a pearl.
A woman ('tis I this time that say)
With little the world counts worthy praise
Utter the true word--out and away
Escapes her soul: I am wrapt in blaze,
Creation's lord, of heaven and earth
Lord whole and sole--by a minute's birth--
Through the love in a girl!
The second--_Speculative_--also describes a moment of love-longing, but
has the characteristics of his later poetry. It may be of the same date
as the book, or not much earlier. It may be of his later manhood, of
the time when he lost his wife. At any rate, it is intense enough. It
looks back on the love he has lost, on passion with the woman he loved.
And he would surrender all--Heaven, Nature, Man, Art--in this momentary
fire of desire; for indeed such passion is momentary. Momentariness is
the essence of the poem. "Even in heaven I will cry for the wild hours
now gone by--Give me back the Earth and Thyself." _Speculative_, he
calls it, in an after irony.
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!"
Nor was this reversion to the passion of youthful love altogether a new
departure. The lyrics in _Ferishtah's Fancies_ are written to represent,
from the side of emotion, the intellectual and ethical ideas worked out
in the poems. The greater number of them are beautiful, and they would
gain rather than lose if they were published separately from the poems.
Some are plainly of the same date as the poems. Others, I think, were
written in Browning's early time, and the preceding poems are made to
fit them. But whatever be their origin, they nearly all treat of love,
and one of them with a crude claim on the love of the senses alone, as
if that--as if the love of the body, even alone--were not apart from
the consideration of a poet who wished to treat of the whole of human
nature. Browning, when he wished to make a thought or a fact quite
plain, frequently stated it without any of its modifications, trusting
to his readers not to mistake him; knowing indeed, that if they cared to
find the other side--in this case the love which issues from the senses
and the spirit together, or from the spirit alone--they would find it
stated just as soundly and clearly. He meant us to combine both
statements, and he has done so himself with regard to love.
When, however, we have considered these exceptions, it still remains
curious how little the passionate Love-poem, with its strong personal
touch, exists in Browning's poetry. One reason may be that Love-poems of
this kind are naturally lyrical, and demand a sweet melody in the verse,
and Browning's genius was not especially lyrical, nor could he
inevitably command a melodious movement in his verse. But the main
reason is that he was taken up with other and graver matters, and
chiefly with the right theory of life; with the true relation of God and
man; and with the picturing--for absolute Love's sake, and in order to
win men to love one another by the awakening of pity--of as much of
humanity as he could grasp in thought and feeling. Isolated and personal
love was only a small part of this large design.
One personal love, however, he possessed fully and intensely. It was his
love for his wife, and three poems embody it. The first is _By the
Fireside_. It does not take rank as a true love lyric; it is too long,
too many-motived for a lyric. It is a meditative poem of recollective
tenderness wandering through the past; and no poem written on married
love in England is more beautiful. The poet, sitting silent in the room
where his wife sits with him, sees all his life with her unrolled, muses
on what has been, and is, since she came to bless his life, or what will
be, since she continues to bless it; and all the fancies and musings
which, in a usual love lyric, would not harmonise with the intensity of
love-passion in youth, exactly fit in with the peace and satisfied joy
of a married life at home with God and nature and itself. The poem is
full of personal charm. Quiet thought, profound feeling and sweet memory
like a sunlit mist, soften the aspect of the room, the image of his
wife, and all the thoughts, emotions and scenery described. It is a
finished piece of art.
The second of these poems is the Epilogue to the volumes of _Men and
Women_, entitled _One Word More_. It also is a finished piece of art,
carefully conceived, upbuilded stone by stone, touch by touch, each
separate thought with its own emotion, each adding something to the
whole, each pushing Browning's emotion and picture into our souls, till
the whole impression is received. It is full, and full to the brim, with
the long experience of peaceful joy in married love. And the subtlety of
the close of it, and of Browning's play with his own fancy about the
moon, do not detract from the tenderness of it; for it speaks not of
transient passion but of the love of a whole life lived from end to end
in music.
The last of these is entitled _Prospice_. When he wrote it he had lost
his wife. It tells what she had made of him; it reveals alike his
steadfast sadness that she had gone from him and the steadfast
resolution, due to her sweet and enduring power, with which, after her
death, he promised, bearing with him his sorrow and his memory of joy,
to stand and withstand in the battle of life, ever a fighter to the
close--and well he kept his word. It ends with the expression of his
triumphant certainty of meeting her, and breaks forth at last into so
great a cry of pure passion that ear and heart alike rejoice. Browning
at his best, Browning in the central fire of his character, is in it.
Fear death?--to feel the fog in my throat,
The mist in my face,
When the snows begin, and the blasts denote
I am nearing the place,
The power of the night, the press of the storm,
The post of the foe;
Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,
Yet the strong man must go:
For the journey is done and the summit attained
And the barriers fall,
Though a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained,
The reward of it all.
I was ever a fighter, so--one fight more,
The best and the last!
I would hate that Death bandaged my eyes, and forbore,
And bade me creep past.
No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers
The heroes of old,
Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears
Of pain, darkness and cold.
For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,
The black minute's at end,
And the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave,
Shall dwindle, shall blend,
Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain,
Then a light, then thy breast,
O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest!
Leaving now these personal poems on Love, we come to those we may call
impersonal. They are poems about love, not in its simplicities, but in
its subtle moments--moments that Browning loved to analyse, and which he
informed not so much with the passion of love, as with his profound love
of human nature. He describes in them, with the seriousness of one who
has left youth behind, the moods of love, its changes, vagaries,
certainties, failures and conquests. It is a man writing, not of the
love of happy youth, but of love tossed on the stormy seas of manhood
and womanhood, and modified from its singular personal intensity by the
deeper thought, feeling and surprising chances of our mortal life. Love
does not stand alone, as in the true love lyric, but with many other
grave matters. As such it is a more interesting subject for Browning.
For Love then becomes full of strange turns, unexpected thoughts,
impulses unknown before creating varied circumstances, and created by
them; and these his intellectual spirituality delighted to cope with,
and to follow, labyrinth after labyrinth. I shall give examples of these
separate studies, which have always an idea beyond the love out of which
the poem arises. In some of them the love is finally absorbed in the
idea. In all of them their aim is beyond the love of which they speak.
_Love among the Ruins_ tells of a lover going to meet his sweetheart.
There are many poems with this expectant motive in the world of song,
and no motive has been written of with greater emotion. If we are to
believe these poems, or have ever waited ourselves, the hour contains
nothing but her presence, what she is doing, how she is coming, why she
delays, what it will be when she comes--a thousand things, each like
white fire round her image. But Browning's lover, through nine verses,
cares only for the wide meadows over which he makes his way and the
sheep wandering over them, and their flowers and the ruins in the midst
of them; musing on the changes and contrasts of the world--the lonely
land and the populous glory which was of old in the vast city. It is
only then, and only in two lines, that he thinks of the girl who is
waiting for him in the ruined tower. Even then his imagination cannot
stay with her, but glances from her instantly--thinking that the ancient
king stood where she is waiting, and looked, full of pride, from the
high tower on his splendid city. When he has elaborated this second
excursion of thought he comes at last to the girl. Then is the hour of
passion, but even in its fervour he draws a conclusion, belonging to a
higher world than youthful love, as remote from it as his description of
the scenery and the ruins. "Splendour of arms, triumph of wealth,
centuries of glory and pride, they are nothing to love. Love is best."
It is a general, not a particular conclusion. In a true Love-poem it
would be particular.
Another poem of waiting love is _In Three Days_. And this has the spirit
of a true love lyric in it. It reads like a personal thing; it breathes
exaltation; it is quick, hurried, and thrilled. The delicate fears of
chance and change in the three days, or in the years to come, belong of
right and nature to the waiting, and are subtly varied and condensed. It
is, however, the thoughtful love of a man who can be metaphysical in
love, not the excluding mastery of passion.
_Two in the Campagna_ is another poem in which love passes away into a
deeper thought than love--a strange and fascinating poem of twofold
desire. The man loves a woman and desires to be at peace with her in
love, but there is a more imperative passion in his soul--to rest in the
infinite, in accomplished perfection. And his livelong and vain pursuit
of this has wearied him so much that he has no strength left to realise
earthly love. Is it possible that she who now walks with him in the
Campagna can give him in her love the peace of the infinite which he
desires, and if not, why--where is the fault? For a moment he seems to
catch the reason, and asks his love to see it with him and to grasp it.
In a moment, like the gossamer thread he traces only to see it vanish,
it is gone--and nothing is left, save
Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.
Least of all is the woman left. She has quite disappeared. This is not a
Love-poem at all, it is the cry of Browning's hunger for eternity in the
midst of mortality, in which all the hunger for earthly love is burnt to
dust.
The rest are chiefly studies of different kinds of love, or of crises in
love; moments in its course, in its origin or its failure. There are
many examples in the shorter dramatic pieces, as _In a Balcony_; and
even in the longer dramas certain sharp climaxes of love are recorded,
not as if they belonged to the drama, but as if they were distinct
studies introduced by chance or caprice. In the short poems called
"dramatic" these studies are numerous, and I group a few of them
together according to their motives, leaving out some which I shall
hereafter treat of when I come to discuss the women in Browning. _Evelyn
Hope_ has nothing to do with the passion of love. The physical element
of love is entirely excluded by the subject. It is a beautiful
expression of a love purely spiritual, to be realised in its fulness
only after death, spirit with spirit, but yet to be kept as the master
of daily life, to whose law all thought and action are referred. The
thought is noble, the expression of it simple, fine, and clear. It is,
moreover, close to truth--there are hundreds of men who live quietly in
love of that kind, and die in its embrace.
In _Cristina_ the love is just as spiritual, but the motive of the poem
is not one, as in _Evelyn Hope_, but two. The woman is not dead, and she
has missed her chance. But the lover has not. He has seen her and in a
moment loved her. She also looked on him and felt her soul matched by
his as they "rushed together." But the world carried her away and she
lost the fulness of life. He, on the contrary, kept the moment for ever,
and with it, her and all she might have been with him.
Her soul's mine: and thus grown perfect,
I shall pass my life's remainder.
This is not the usual Love-poem. It is a love as spiritual, as mystic,
even more mystic, since the woman lives, than the lover felt for Evelyn
Hope.
The second motive in _Cristina_ of the lover who meets the true partner
of his soul or hers, and either seizes the happy hour and possesses joy
for ever, or misses it and loses all, is a favourite with Browning. He
repeats it frequently under diverse circumstances, for it opened out so
many various endings, and afforded so much opportunity for his beloved
analysis. Moreover, optimist as he was in his final thought of man, he
was deeply conscious of the ironies of life, of the ease with which
things go wrong, of the impossibility of setting them right from
without. And in the matter of love he marks in at least four poems how
the moment was held and life was therefore conquest. Then in _Youth and
Art_, in _Dis Aliter Visum_, in _Bifurcation_, in _The Lost Mistress_,
and in _Too Late_, he records the opposite fate, and in characters so
distinct that the repetition of the motive is not monotonous. These are
studies of the Might-have-beens of love.
Another motive, used with varied circumstance in three or four poems,
but fully expanded in _James Lee's Wife_, is the discovery, after years
of love, that love on one side is lost irretrievably. Another motive is,
that rather than lose love men or women will often sacrifice their
conscience, their reason, or their liberty. This sacrifice, of all that
makes our nobler being for the sake of personal love alone, brings with
it, because the whole being is degraded, the degradation, decay, and
death of personal love itself.
Another set of poems describes with fanciful charm, sometimes with happy
gaiety, love at play with itself. True love makes in the soul an
unfathomable ocean in whose depths are the imaginations of love,
serious, infinite, and divine. But on its surface the light of jewelled
fancies plays--a thousand thousand sunny memories and hopes, flying
thoughts and dancing feelings. A poet would be certain to have often
seen this happy crowd, and to desire to trick them out in song. So
Browning does in his poem, _In a Gondola_. The two lovers, with the dark
shadow of fate brooding over them, sing and muse and speak alternately,
imaging in swift and rival pictures made by fancy their deep-set love;
playing with its changes, creating new worlds in which to place it, but
always returning to its isolated individuality; recalling how it began,
the room where it reached its aim, the pictures, the furniture, the
balcony, her dress, all the scenery, in a hundred happy and glancing
pictures; while interlaced through their gaiety--and the gaiety made
keener by the nearness of dark fate--is coming death, death well
purchased by an hour of love. Finally, the lover is stabbed and slain,
and the pity of it throws back over the sunshine of love's fancies a
cloud of tears. This is the stuff of life that Browning loved to
paint--interwoven darkness and brightness, sorrow and joy trembling each
on the edge of the other, life playing at ball, as joyous as Nausicaa
and her maids, on a thin crust over a gulf of death.
Just such another poem--of the sportiveness of love, only this time in
memory, not in present pleasure, is to be found in _A Lovers' Quarrel_,
and the quarrel is the dark element in it. Browning always feels that
mighty passion has its root in tragedy, and that it seeks relief in
comedy. The lover sits by the fireside alone, and recalls, forgetting
pain for a moment, the joyful play they two had together, when love
expressed its depth of pleasure in dramatic fancies. Every separate
picture is done in Browning's impressionist way. And when the glad
memories are over, and the sorrow returns, passion leaps out--
It is twelve o'clock:
I shall hear her knock
In the worst of a storm's uproar,
I shall pull her through the door,
I shall have her for evermore!
This is partly a study of the memory of love; and Browning has
represented, without any sorrow linked to it, memorial love in a variety
of characters under different circumstances, so that, though the subject
is the same, the treatment varies. A charming instance of this is _The
Flowers Name_; easy to read, happy in its fancy, in its scenery, in the
subtle play of deep affection, in the character of its lover, in the
character of the girl who is remembered--a good example of Browning's
power to image in a few verses two human souls so clearly that they live
in our world for ever. _Meeting at Night--Parting at Morning_ is another
reminiscence, mixed up with the natural scenery of the meeting and
parting, a vivid recollection of a fleeting night of passion, and then
the abandonment of its isolation for a wider, fuller life with humanity.
I quote it for the fine impassioned way in which human feeling and
natural scenery are fused together.
MEETING AT NIGHT.
The grey sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow.
And quench its speed i' the slushy sand.
Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears.
Than the two hearts beating each to each!
PARTING AT MORNING.
Round the cape of a sudden came the sea,
And the sun looked over the mountain's rim:
And straight was a path of gold for him,
And the need of a world of men for me.
The poem entitled _Confessions_ is another of these memories, in which a
dying man, careless of death, careless of the dull conventions of the
clergyman, cares for nothing but the memory of his early passion for a
girl one happy June, and dies in comfort of the sweetness of the memory,
though he thinks--
How sad and bad and mad it was.
Few but Browning would have seen, and fewer still have recorded, this
vital piece of truth. It represents a whole type of character--those who
in a life of weary work keep their day of love, even when it has been
wrong, as their one poetic, ideal possession, and cherish it for ever.
The wrong of it disappears in the ideal beauty which now has gathered
round it, and as it was faithful, unmixed with other love, it escapes
degradation. We see, when the man images the past and its scenery out of
the bottles of physic on the table, how the material world had been
idealised to him all his life long by this passionate memory--
Do I view the world as a vale of tears?
Ah, reverend sir, not I.
It might be well to compare with this another treatment of the memory
of love in _St. Martin's Summer_. A much less interesting and natural
motive rules it than _Confessions_; and the characters, though more "in
society" than the dying man, are grosser in nature; gross by their
inability to love, or by loving freshly to make a new world in which the
old sorrow dies or is transformed. There is no humour in the thing,
though there is bitter irony. But there is humour in an earlier poem--_A
Serenade at the Villa_, where, in the last verse, the bitterness of
wrath and love together (a very different bitterness from that of _St.
Martin's Summer_), breaks out, and is attributed to the garden gate. The
night-watch and the singing is over; she must have heard him, but she
gave no sign. He wonders what she thought, and then, because he was only
half in love, flings away--
Oh how dark your villa was,
Windows fast and obdurate!
How the garden grudged me grass
Where I stood--the iron gate
Ground its teeth to let me pass!
It is impossible to notice all these studies of love, but they form,
together, a book of transient phases of the passion in almost every
class of society. And they show how Browning, passing through the world,
from the Quartier Latin to London drawing-rooms, was continually on the
watch to catch, store up, and reproduce a crowd of motives for poetry
which his memory held and his imagination shaped.
There is only one more poem, which I cannot pass by in this group of
studies. It is one of sacred and personal memory, so much so that it is
probable the loss of his life lies beneath it. It rises into that
highest poetry which fuses together into one form a hundred thoughts and
a hundred emotions, and which is only obscure from the mingling of their
multitude. I quote it, I cannot comment on it.
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
Through 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!
That, indeed, is passionate enough.
Then there is another group--tales which embody phases of love. _Count
Gismond_ is one of these. It is too long, and wants Browning's usual
force. The outline of the story was, perhaps, too simple to interest his
intellect, and he needed in writing poetry not only the emotional
subject, but that there should be something in or behind the emotion
through the mazes of which his intelligence might glide like a
serpent.[10]
_The Glove_ is another of these tales--a good example of the brilliant
fashion in which Browning could, by a strange kaleidoscopic turn of his
subject, give it a new aspect and a new ending. The world has had the
tale before it for a very long time. Every one had said the woman was
wrong and the man right; but here, poetic juggler as he is, Browning
makes the woman right and the man wrong, reversing the judgment of
centuries. The best of it is, that he seems to hold the truth of the
thing. It is amusing to think that only now, in the other world, if she
and Browning meet, will she find herself comprehended.
Finally, as to the mightier kinds of love, those supreme forms of the
passion, which have neither beginning nor end; to which time and space
are but names; which make and fill the universe; the least grain of
which predicates the whole; the spirit of which is God Himself; the
breath of whose life is immortal joy, or sorrow which means joy; whose
vision is Beauty, and whose activity is Creation--these, united in God,
or divided among men into their three great entities--love of ideas for
their truth and beauty; love of the natural universe, which is God's
garment; love of humanity, which is God's child--these pervade the whole
of Browning's poetry as the heat of the sun pervades the earth and every
little grain upon it. They make its warmth and life, strength and
beauty. They are too vast to be circumscribed in a lyric, represented in
a drama, bound up even in a long story of spiritual endeavour like
_Paracelsus_. But they move, in dignity, splendour and passion, through
all that he deeply conceived and nobly wrought; and their triumph and
immortality in his poetry are never for one moment clouded with doubt or
subject to death. This is the supreme thing in his work. To him Love is
the Conqueror, and Love is God.
FOOTNOTES:
[10] There is one simple story at least which he tells quite admirably,
_The Pied Piper of Hamelin_. But then, that story, if it is not troubled
by intellectual matter, is also not troubled by any deep emotion. It is
told by a poet who becomes a child for children.
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