_LATER POEMS_
A just appreciation of the work which Browning published after _The Ring
and the Book_ is a difficult task. The poems are of various kinds, on
widely separated subjects; and with the exception of those which treat
of Balaustion, they have no connection with one another. Many of them
must belong to the earlier periods of his life, and been introduced into
the volumes out of the crowd of unpublished poems every poet seems to
possess. These, when we come across them among their middle-aged
companions, make a strange impression, as if we found a white-thorn
flowering in an autumnal woodland; and in previous chapters of this book
I have often fetched them out of their places, and considered them where
they ought to be--in the happier air and light in which they were born.
I will not discuss them again, but in forming any judgment of the later
poems they must be discarded.
The struggle to which I have drawn attention between the imaginative and
intellectual elements in Browning, and which was equally balanced in
_The Ring and the Book_, continued after its publication, but with a
steady lessening of the imaginative and a steady increase of the
intellectual elements. One poem, however, written before the publication
of _The Ring and the Book_, does not belong to this struggle. This is
_Hervé Riel_, a ballad of fire and joy and triumph. It is curiously
French in sentiment and expression, and the eager sea-delight in it is
plainly French, not English in feeling. Nor is it only French; it is
Breton in audacity, in self-forgetfulness, in carelessness of reward,
and in loyalty to country, to love and to home. If Browning had been all
English, this transference of himself into the soul of another
nationality would have been wonderful, nay, impossible. As it is, it is
wonderful enough; and this self-transference--one of his finest poetic
powers--is nowhere better accomplished than in this poem, full of the
salt wind and the leap and joy of the sea-waves; but even more full, as
was natural to Browning, of the Breton soul of Hervé Riel.
In _Balaustion's Adventure_ (1871) which next appeared, the imaginative
elements, as we have seen, are still alive and happy; and though they
only emerge at intervals in its continuation, _Aristophanes' Apology_
(1875), yet they do emerge. Meanwhile, between _Balaustion's Adventure_
and the end of 1875, he produced four poems--_Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau,
Saviour of Society_; _Fifine at the Fair_; _Red Cotton Nightcap
Country_, or _Turf and Towers_; and _The Inn Album_. They are all long,
and were published in four separate volumes. In them the intellectual
elements have all but completely conquered the imaginative. They are,
however, favourite "exercise-places" for some of his admirers, who think
that they derive poetic pleasures from their study. The pleasure these
poems give, when they give it, is not altogether a poetic pleasure. It
is chiefly the pleasure of the understanding called to solve with
excitement a huddle of metaphysical problems. They have the name but not
the nature of poetry.
They are the work of my Lord Intelligence--attended by wit and
fancy--who sits at the desk of poetry, and with her pen in his hand. He
uses the furniture of poetry, but the goddess herself has left the room.
Yet something of her influence still fills the air of the chamber. In
the midst of the brilliant display that fancy, wit, and intellect are
making, a soft steady light of pure song burns briefly at intervals, and
then is quenched; like the light of stars seen for a moment of quiet
effulgence among the crackling and dazzling of fireworks.
The poems are, it is true, original. We cannot class them with any
previous poetry. They cannot be called didactic or satirical. The
didactic and satirical poems of England are, for the most part,
artificial, concise, clear. These poems are not artificial, clear or
concise. Nor do they represent the men and women of a cultured,
intellectual and conventional society, such as the poetry of Dryden and
Pope addressed. The natural man is in them--the crude, dull, badly-baked
man--what the later nineteenth century called the real man. We see his
ugly, sordid, contemptible, fettered soul, and long for Salinguerra, or
Lippo Lippi, or even Caliban. The representations are then human enough,
with this kind of humanity, but they might have been left to prose.
Poetry has no business to build its houses on the waste and leprous
lands of human nature; and less business to call its work art. Realism
of this kind is not art, it is science.
Yet the poems are not scientific, for they have no clarity of argument.
Their wanderings of thought are as intertangled as the sheep-walks on
league after league of high grasslands. When one has a fancy to follow
them, the pursuit is entertaining; but unless one has the fancy, there
are livelier employments. Their chief interest is the impression they
give us of a certain side of Browning's character. They are his darling
debauch of cleverness, of surface-psychology. The analysis follows no
conventional lines, does not take or oppose any well-known philosophical
side. It is not much more than his own serious or fantastic thinking
indulging itself with reckless abandon--amusing itself with itself. And
this gives them a humanity--a Browning humanity--outside of their
subjects.
The subjects too, though not delightful, are founded on facts of human
life. _Bishop Blougram_ was conceived from Cardinal Wiseman's career,
_Mr. Sludge_ from Mr. Home's. _Prince Hohenstiel Schwangau_ explains and
defends the expediency by which Napoleon III. directed his political
action. _The Inn Album_, _Red Cotton Nightcap Country_, are taken from
actual stories that occurred while Browning was alive, and _Fifine at
the Fair_ analyses a common crisis in the maturer lives of men and
women. The poems thus keep close to special cases, yet--and in this the
poet appears--they have an extension which carries them beyond the
particular subjects into the needs and doings of a wider humanity. Their
little rivers run into the great sea. They have then their human
interest for a reader who does not wish for beauty, passion,
imagination, or the desires of the spirit in his poetry; but who hankers
at his solitary desk after realistic psychology, fanciful ethics,
curiosities of personal philosophy, cold intellectual play with
argument, and honest human ugliness.
Moreover, the method Browning attempts to use in them for the discovery
of truth is not the method of poetry, nor of any of the arts. It is
almost a commonplace to say that the world of mankind and each
individual in it only arrives at the truth on any matter, large or
small, by going through and exhausting the false forms of that
truth--and a very curious arrangement it seems to be. It is this method
Browning pursues in these poems. He represents one after another various
false or half-true views of the matter in hand, and hopes in that
fashion to clear the way to the truth. But he fails to convince partly
because it is impossible to give all or enough of the false or half-true
views of any one truth, but chiefly because his method is one fitted for
philosophy or science, but not for poetry. Poetry claims to see and feel
the truth at once. When the poet does not assert that claim, and act on
it, he is becoming faithless to his art.
Browning's method in these poems is the method of a scientific
philosopher, not of an artist. He gets his man into a debateable
situation; the man debates it from various points of view; persons are
introduced who take other aspects of the question, or personified
abstractions such as _Sagacity, Reason, Fancy_ give their opinions. Not
satisfied with this, Browning discusses it again from his own point of
view. He is then like the chess-player who himself plays both red and
white; who tries to keep both distinct in his mind, but cannot help now
and again taking one side more than the other; and who is frequently a
third person aware of himself as playing red, and also of himself as
playing white; and again of himself as outside both the players and
criticising their several games. This is no exaggerated account of what
is done in these poems. Three people, even when the poems are
monologues, are arguing in them, and Browning plays all their hands,
even in _The Inn Album_, which is not a monologue. In _Red Cotton
Nightcap Country_, when he has told the story of the man and woman in
all its sordid and insane detail, with comments of his own, he brings
the victim of mean pleasure and mean superstition to the top of the
tower whence he throws himself down, and, inserting his intelligence
into the soul of the man, explains his own view of the situation. In
_Prince Hohenstiel Schwangau_, we have sometimes what Browning really
thinks, as in the beginning of the poem, about the matter in hand, and
then what he thinks the Prince would think, and then, to complicate the
affair still more, the Prince divides himself, and makes a personage
called _Sagacity_ argue with him on the whole situation. As to _Fifine
at the Fair_--a poem it would not be fair to class altogether with
these--its involutions resemble a number of live eels in a tub of water.
Don Juan changes his personality and his views like a player on the
stage who takes several parts; Elvire is a gliding phantom with gliding
opinions; Fifine is real, but she remains outside of this shifting
scenery of the mind; and Browning, who continually intrudes, is
sometimes Don Juan and sometimes himself and sometimes both together,
and sometimes another thinker who strives to bring, as in the visions
in the poem, some definition into this changing cloudland of the brain.
And after all, not one of the questions posed in any of the poems is
settled in the end. I do not say that the leaving of the questions
unsettled is not like life. It is very like life, but not like the work
of poetry, whose high office it is to decide questions which cannot be
solved by the understanding.
Bishop Blongram thinks he has proved his points. Gigadibs is half
convinced he has. But the Bishop, on looking back, thinks he has not
been quite sincere, that his reasonings were only good for the occasion.
He has evaded the centre of the thing. What he has said was no more than
intellectual fencing. It certainly is intellectual fencing of the finest
kind. Both the Bishop and his companion are drawn to the life; yet, and
this is the cleverest thing in the poem, we know that the Bishop is in
reality a different man from the picture he makes of himself. And the
truth which in his talk underlies its appearance acts on Gigadibs and
sends him into a higher life. The discussion--as it may be called though
the Bishop only speaks--concerning faith and doubt is full of admirable
wisdom, and urges me to modify my statement that Browning took little or
no interest in the controversies of his time. Yet, all through the
fencing, nothing is decided. The button is always on the Bishop's foil.
He never sends the rapier home. And no doubt that is the reason that his
companion, with "his sudden healthy vehemence" did drive his weapon home
into life--and started for Australia.
Mr. Sludge, the medium, excuses his imposture, and then thinks "it may
not altogether be imposture. For all he knows there may really be
spirits at the bottom of it. He never meant to cheat; yet he did cheat.
Yet, even if he lied, lies help truth to live; and he must live himself;
and God may have made fools for him to live on;" and many other are the
twists of his defence. The poem is as lifelike in its insight into the
mind of a supple cheat as it is a brilliant bit of literature; but
Browning leaves the matter unconcluded, as he would not have done, I
hold, had he been writing poetry. Prince Hohenstiel's defence of
expediency in politics is made by Browning to seem now right, now wrong,
because he assumes at one time what is true as the ground of his
argument, and then at another what is plainly false, and in neither case
do the assumptions support the arguments. What really is concluded is
not the question, but the slipperiness of the man who argues. And at the
end of the poem Browning comes in again to say that words cannot be
trusted to hit truth. Language is inadequate to express it. Browning was
fond of saying this. It does not seem worth saying. In one sense it is a
truism; in another it resembles nonsense. Words are the only way by
which we can express truth, or our nearest approach to what we think it
is. At any rate, silence, in spite of Maeterlinck, does not express it.
Moreover, with regard to the matter in hand, Browning knew well enough
how a poet would decide the question of expediency he has here brought
into debate. He has decided it elsewhere; but here he chooses not to
take that view, that he may have the fun of exercising his clever brain.
There is no reason why he should not entertain himself and us in this
way; but folk need not call this intellectual jumping to and fro a poem,
or try to induce us to believe that it is the work of art.
When he had finished these products of a time when he was intoxicated
with his intellect, and of course somewhat proud of it, the poet in him
began to revive. This resurrection had begun in _Fifine at the Fair_. I
have said it would not be just to class this poem with the other three.
It has many an oasis of poetry where it is a happiness to rest. But the
way between their palms and wells is somewhat dreary walking, except to
those who adore minute psychology. The poem is pitilessly long. If
throughout its length it were easy to follow we might excuse the length,
but it is rendered difficult by the incessant interchange of misty
personalities represented by one personality. Elvire, Fifine only exist
in the mind of Don Juan; their thoughts are only expressed in his words;
their outlines not only continually fade into his, but his thought
steals into his presentation of their thought, till it becomes
impossible to individualise them. The form in which Browning wrote the
poem, by which he made Don Juan speak for them, makes this want of
clearness and sharpness inevitable. The work is done with a terrible
cleverness, but it is wearisome at the last.
The length also might be excused if the subject were a great one or had
important issues for mankind. But, though it has its interest and is
human enough, it does not deserve so many thousand lines nor so much
elaborate analysis. A few lyrics or a drama of two acts might say all
that is worth saying on the matter. What Browning has taken for subject
is an every-day occurrence. We are grateful to him for writing on so
universal a matter, even though it is unimportant; and he has tried to
make it uncommon and important by weaving round it an intricate
lace-work of psychology; yet, when we get down to its main lines, it is
the ordinary event, especially commonplace in any idle society which
clings to outward respectability and is dreadfully wearied of it. Our
neighbours across the Channel call it _La Crise_ when, after years of a
quiet, not unhappy, excellent married existence, day succeeding day in
unbroken continuity of easy affection and limited experience, the man or
the woman, in full middle life, suddenly wearies of the apparent
monotony, the uneventful love, the slow encroaching tide of the
commonplace, and looks on these as fetters on their freedom, as walls
which shut them in from the vivid interests of the outside world, from
the gipsy roving of the passions. The time arrives, when this becomes,
they think, too great for endurance, and their impatience shows itself
in a daily irritability quite new in the household, apparently
causeless, full of sudden, inexplicable turns of thought and act which
turn the peaceful into a tempestuous home. It is not that the husband or
the wife are inconstant by nature--to call _Fifine at the Fair_ a
defence of inconstancy is to lose the truth of the matter--but it is the
desire of momentary change, of a life set free from conventional
barriers, of an outburst into the unknown, of the desire for new
experiences, for something which will bring into play those parts of
their nature of which they are vaguely conscious but which are as yet
unused--new elements in their senses, intellect, imagination, even in
their spirit, but not always in their conscience. That, for the time
being, as in this poem, is often shut up in the cellar, where its voice
cannot be heard.
This is, as I said, a crisis of common occurrence. It may be rightly
directed, its evil controlled, and a noble object chosen for the
satisfaction of the impulse. Here, that is not the case; and Browning
describes its beginning with great freshness and force as Juan walks
down to the fair with Elvire. Nor has he omitted to treat other forms of
it in his poetry. He knew how usual it was, but he has here made it
unusual by putting it into the heart of a man who, before he yielded to
it, was pleased to make it the subject of a wandering metaphysical
analysis; who sees not only how it appears to himself in three or four
moods, but how it looks to the weary, half-jealous wife to whom he is so
rude while he strives to be courteous, and to the bold, free,
conscienceless child of nature whose favour he buys, and with whom,
after all his barren metaphysics, he departs, only to attain, when his
brief spell of foolish freedom is over, loneliness and cynic satiety. It
may amuse us to circle with him through his arguments, though every one
knows he will yield at last and that yielding is more honest than his
talk; but what we ask is--Was the matter worth the trouble of more than
two thousand lines of long-winded verse? Was it worth an artist's
devotion? or, to ask a question I would not ask if the poem were good
art, is it of any real importance to mankind? Is it, finally, anything
more than an intellectual exercise of Browning on which solitary
psychologists may, in their turn, employ their neat intelligence? This
poem, with the exceptions of some episodes of noble poetry, is, as well
as the three others, a very harlequinade of the intellect.
I may say, though this is hypercritical, that the name of Don Juan is a
mistake. Every one knows Don Juan, and to imagine him arguing in the
fashion of this poem is absurd. He would instantly, without a word, have
left Elvire, and abandoned Fifine in a few days. The connection then of
the long discussions in the poem with his name throws an air of
unreality over the whole of it. The Don Juan of the poem had much better
have stayed with Elvire, who endured him with weary patience. I have no
doubt that he bored Fifine to extinction.
The poems that follow these four volumes are mixed work, half
imaginative, half intellectual. Sometimes both kinds are found,
separated, in the same poem; sometimes in one volume half the poems will
be imaginative and the other half not. Could the imaginative and
intellectual elements have now been fused as they were in his earlier
work, it were well; but they were not. They worked apart. His witful
poems are all wit, his analytical poems are all analysis, and his
imaginative poems, owing to this want of fusion, have not the same
intellectual strength they had in other days. _Numpholeptos_, for
instance, an imaginative poem, full too of refined and fanciful emotion,
is curiously wanting in intellectual foundation.
The _Numpholeptos_ is in the volume entitled _Pacchiarotto, and how he
worked in Distemper_. Part of the poems in it are humorous, such as
_Pacchiarotto_ and _Filippo Baldinucci_, excellent pieces of agreeable
wit, containing excellent advice concerning life. One reads them, is
amused by them, and rarely desires to read them again. In the same
volume there are some severe pieces, sharply ridiculing his critics. In
the old days, when he wrote fine imaginative poetry, out of his heart
and brain working together, he did not mind what the critics said, and
only flashed a scoff or two at them in his creation of Naddo in
_Sordello_. But now when he wrote a great deal of his poetry out of his
brain alone, he became sensitive to criticism. For that sort of poetry
does not rest on the sure foundation which is given by the consciousness
the imagination has of its absolute rightness. He expresses his needless
soreness with plenty of wit in _Pacchiarotto_ and in the _Epilogue_,
criticises his critics, and displays his good opinion of his work--no
doubt of these later poems, like _The Inn Album_ and the rest--with a
little too much of self-congratulation. "The poets pour us wine," he
says, "and mine is strong--the strong wine of the loves and hates and
thoughts of man. But it is not sweet as well, and my critics object.
Were it so, it would be more popular than it is. Sweetness and strength
do not go together, and I have strength."
But that is not the real question. The question is--Is the strength
poetical? Has it imagination? It is rough, powerful, full of humanity,
and that is well. But is it half prose, or wholly prose? Or is it
poetry, or fit to be called so? He thinks that _Prince Hohenstiel_, or
_Red Cotton Nightcap Country_, are poetry. They are, it is true, strong;
and they are not sweet. But have they the strength of poetry in them,
and not the strength of something else altogether? That is the question
he ought to have answered, and it does not occur to him.
Yet, he was, in this very book, half-way out of this muddle. There are
poems in it, just as strong as _The Inn Album_, but with the ineffable
spirit of imaginative emotion and thought clasped together in them, so
that the strong is stronger, and the humanity deeper than in the pieces
he thought, being deceived by the Understanding, were more strong than
the poems of old. In _Bifurcation_, in _St. Martin's Summer_, the
diviner spirit breathes. There is that other poem called _Forgiveness_
of which I have already spoken--one of his masterpieces. _Cenciaja_,
which may be classed with _Forgiveness_ as a study of the passion of
hatred, is not so good as its comrade, but its hatred is shown in a mean
character and for a meaner motive. And the _Prologue_, in its rhythm and
pleasure, its subtlety of thought, its depth of feeling, and its close
union of both, recalls his earlier genius.
The first of the _Pisgah Sights_ is a jewel. It is like a poem by
Goethe, only Goethe would have seen the "sight" not when he was dying,
but when he was alive to his finger-tips. The second is not like
Goethe's work, nor Browning's; but it is a true picture of what many
feel and are. So is _Fears and Scruples_. As to _Natural Magic_, surely
it is the most charming of compliments, most enchantingly expressed.
The next volume of original poems was _La Saisiaz_ and the _Two Poets of
Croisic_. The _Croisic Poets_ are agreeable studies, written with verve
and lucidity, of two fantastic events which lifted these commonplace
poets suddenly into fame. They do well to amuse an idle hour. The end of
both is interesting. That of the first, which begins with stanza lix.,
discusses the question: "Who cares, how such a mediocrity as René lived
after the fame of his prophecy died out?"[11] And Browning answers--
Well, I care--intimately care to have
Experience how a human creature felt
In after life, who bore the burthen grave
Of certainly believing God had dealt
For once directly with him: did not rave
--A maniac, did not find his reason melt
--An idiot, but went on, in peace or strife,
The world's way, lived an ordinary life.
The solution Browning offers is interesting, because it recalls a part
of the experiences of Lazarus in the _Epistle to Karshish_. René, like
Lazarus, but only for a moment, has lived in the eternal.
Are such revelations possible, is his second question. Yes, he answers;
and the form of the answer belongs to the theory of life laid down in
_Paracelsus_. Such sudden openings of the greater world are at
intervals, as to Abt Vogler, given by God to men.
The end of the second asks what is the true test of the greater poet,
when people take on them to weigh the worth of poets--who was better,
best, this, that or the other bard? When I read this I trembled, knowing
that I had compared him with Tennyson. But when I heard the answer I
trembled no more. "The best poet of any two is the one who leads the
happier life. The strong and joyful poet is the greater." But this is a
test of the greatness of a man, not necessarily of a poet. And,
moreover, in this case, Tennyson and Browning both lived equally happy
lives. Both were strong to the end, and imaginative joy was their
companion. But the verse in which Browning winds up his answer is one of
the finest in his poetry.
So, force is sorrow, and each sorrow, force;
What then? since Swiftness gives the charioteer
The palm, his hope be in the vivid horse
Whose neck God clothed with thunder, not the steer
Sluggish and safe! Yoke Hatred, Crime, Remorse,
Despair; but ever mid the whirling fear,
Let, through the tumult, break the poet's face
Radiant, assured his wild slaves win the race!
_La Saisiaz_ is a more important poem: it describes the sudden death of
his friend, Ann Egerton Smith, and passes from that, and all he felt
concerning it, into an argument on the future life of the soul, with the
assumption that God is, and the soul. The argument is interesting, but
does not concern us here. What does concern us is that Browning has
largely recovered his poetical way of treating a subject. He is no
longer outside of it, but in it. He does not use it as a means of
exercising his brains only. It is steeped in true and vital feeling, and
the deep friendship he had for his friend fills even the theological
argument with a passionate intensity. Nevertheless, the argument is
perilously near the work of the understanding alone--as if a question
like that of immortality could receive any solution from the hands of
the understanding. Only each man, in the recesses of his own spirit with
God, can solve that question for himself, and not for another. That is
Browning's position when he writes as a poet, and no one has written
more positively on the subject. But when he submits the question to
reasoning, he wavers, as he does here, and leaves the question more
undecided than anywhere else in his work. This is a pity, but it is the
natural penalty of his partial abandonment of the poetic for the prosaic
realm, of the imagination for the understanding, of the Reason for
reasoning.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] René Gentilhomme, page to Prince Condé, heir of France since Louis
XIII. and his brother Gaston were childless, is surprised, while writing
a love poem, by a lightning flash which shatters a marble ducal crown.
He thinks this a revelation from God, and he prophecies that a Dauphin
will be born to the childless Queen. The Dauphin was born, and René
pushed suddenly into fame.
* * * * *