MATURING METHODS. DRAMAS AND DRAMATIC LYRICS.
Since Chaucer was alive and hale,
No man hath walk'd along our roads with step
So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue
So varied in discourse.
--LANDOR.
The memorable moment when Browning, standing on the ruined palace-step
at Venice, had taken Humanity for his mate, opened an epoch in his
poetic life to which the later books of _Sordello_ form a splendid
prelude. For the Browning of 1840 it was no longer a sufficient task to
trace the epochs in the spiritual history of lonely idealists, to pursue
the problem of existence in minds themselves preoccupied with its
solution. "Soul" is still his fundamental preoccupation; but the
continued play of an eager intellect and vivacious senses upon life has
immensely multiplied the points of concrete experience which it vivifies
and transfigures to his eyes. It is as if a painter trained in the
school of Raphael or Lionardo had discovered that he could use the
minute and fearless brush of the Flemings in the service of their
ideals. He pursues soul in all its rich multiplicity, in the
tortuosities and dark abysses of character; he forces crowds of sordid,
grotesque, or commonplace facts to become its expressive speech; he
watches its thought and passion projected into the tide of affairs,
caught up in the clash and tangle of plot. In all these three ways the
Dramas and Dramatic Lyrics and Romances, which were to be his poetic
occupation during the Forties, detach themselves sharply from
_Paracelsus_ and the early books of _Sordello_. A poem like _The
Laboratory_ (1844), for instance, stands at almost the opposite pole of
art to these. All that Browning neglected or veiled in _Paracelsus_ he
here thrusts into stern relief. The passion and crime there faintly
discerned in the background of ideally beautiful figures are here his
absorbing theme. The curious technicalities of the chemist's workshop,
taken for granted in _Paracelsus_, are now painted with a realism
reminiscent of Romeo's Apothecary and _The Alchemist_. And the outward
drama of intrigue, completely effaced in _Paracelsus_ by the inward
drama of soul, sounds delusive scorn and laughter in the background, the
more sinister because it is not seen. These lyrics and romances are
"dramatic" not only in the sense that the speakers express, as Browning
insisted, other minds and sentiments than his own, but in the more
legitimate sense that they are plucked as it were out of the living
organism of a drama, all the vital issues of which can be read in their
self-revelation.
A poet whose lyrics were of this type might be expected to find in drama
proper his free, full, and natural expression. This was not altogether
the case with Browning, who, despite an unquenchable appetency for
drama, did better work in his dramatic monologues than in his plays. The
drama alone allowed full scope for the development of plot-interest. But
it was less favourable to another yet more deeply rooted interest of
his. Not only did action and outward event--the stuff of drama--interest
Browning chiefly as "incidents in the development of soul," but they
became congenial to his art only as projected upon some other mind, and
tinged with its feeling and its thought. Half the value of a story for
him lay in the colours it derived from the narrator's personality; and
he told his own experience, as he uttered his own convictions, most
easily and effectively through alien lips. For a like reason he loved to
survey the slow continuities of actual events from the standpoint of a
given moment, under the conditions of perspective and illusion which it
imposed. Both these conditions were less well satisfied by drama, which
directly "imitates action," than by the dramatic speech or monologue,
which imitates action as focussed in a particular mind. And Browning's
dramatic genius found its most natural and effective outlet in the
wealth of implicit drama which he concentrated in these salient moments
tense with memory and hope. The insuppressible alertness and enterprise
of his own mind tells upon his portrayal of these intense moments. He
sees passion not as a blinding fume, but as a flame, which enlarges the
area, and quickens the acuteness, of vision; the background grows alive
with moving shapes. To the stricken girl in _Ye Banks and Braes_ memory
is torture, and she thrusts convulsively from her, like dagger-points,
the intolerable loveliness of the things that remind her of her love;
whereas the victim of _The Confessional_ pours forth from her frenzied
lips every detail of her tragic story.
So in _The Laboratory_, once more, all the strands of the implicit drama
are seen like incandescent filaments in the glow of a single moment of
fierce impassioned consciousness:--
"He is with her, and they know that I know
Where they are, what they do: they believe my tears flow
While they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to the drear
Empty church, to pray God in, for them!--I am here."
Both kinds--drama and dramatic lyric--continued to attract him, while
neither altogether satisfied; and they engaged him concurrently
throughout the decade.
In this power of seizing the salient moment of a complex situation and
laying bare at a stroke all its issues, Browning's monologues have no
nearer parallel than the Imaginary Conversations of Landor, which
illuminate with so strange a splendour so many unrecorded scenes of the
great drama of history. To Landor, according to his wife's testimony,
Browning "always said that he owed more than to any contemporary"; to
Landor he dedicated the last volume of the _Bells and Pomegranates_.
Landor, on his part, hailed in Browning the "inquiring eye" and varied
discourse of a second Chaucer. It is hardly rash to connect with his
admiration for the elder artist Browning's predilection for these brief
revealing glimpses into the past. Browning cared less for the actual
_personnel_ of history, and often imagined his speakers as well as their
talk; but he imagined them with an equal instinct for seizing the
expressive traits of nationalities and of times, and a similar, if more
spontaneous and naïve, anti-feudal temper. The French camp and the
Spanish cloister, _Gismond_ and _My Last Duchess_ (originally called
_France_ and _Italy_), are penetrated with the spirit of peoples, ages,
and institutions as seized by a historical student of brilliant
imagination and pronounced antipathies.
But in one point Landor and Browning stood at opposite poles. Landor,
far beyond any contemporary English example, had the classic sense and
mastery of style; Browning's individuality of manner rested on a robust
indifference to all the traditional conventions of poetic speech. The
wave of realism which swept over English letters in the early 'Forties
broke down many barriers of language; the new things that had to be said
demanded new ways of saying them; homely, grotesque, or sordid life was
rendered in sordid, grotesque, and homely terms. _Pickwick_ in 1837 had
established the immense vogue of Dickens, the _Heroes_ in 1840 had
assured the imposing prestige of Carlyle; and the example of both made
for the freest and boldest use of language. Across the Channel the
stupendous fabric of the _Comédie Humaine_ was approaching completion,
and Browning was one of Balzac's keenest English readers. Alone among
the greater poets of the time Browning was in genius and temperament a
true kinsman to these great romantic realists; his poetry, as it emerged
in the rich dramatic harvest of the 'Forties, is the nearest counterpart
and analogue of their prose.
I.
Browning's first drama, as is well known, was the result of a direct
application from Macready. Introduced in November 1835 by his "literary
father" Fox, Browning immediately interested the actor. A reading of
_Paracelsus_ convinced him that Browning could write, if not a good
play, yet one with an effective tragic _rôle_ for himself. Strained
relations with his company presently made him eager to procure this
service. Browning, suddenly appealed to (in May 1836), promptly
suggested _Strafford_. He was full of the subject, having recently
assisted his friend Forster in compiling his life. The actor closed with
the suggestion, and a year later (May 1, 1837) the play was performed
at Covent Garden. The fine acting of Macready, and of Helen Faucit, who
was now associated with him, procured the piece a moderate success. It
went through five performances.
Browning's _Strafford_, like his _Paracelsus_, was a serious attempt to
interpret a historic character; and historic experts like Gardiner have,
as regards the central figure, emphatically indorsed his judgment. The
other persons, and the action itself, he treated more freely, with
evident regard to their value as secondary elements in the portrayal of
Stafford; and it is easy to trace in the whole manner of his innovations
the well-marked ply of his mind. The harsh and rugged fanaticisms, the
splendid frivolities, of the seventeenth century, fade and lose
substance in an atmosphere charged with idealism and self-consciousness.
Generous self-devotion is not the universal note, but it is the
prevailing key, that in which the writer most naturally thinks and most
readily invents. Strafford's devotion to Charles and Pym's to his
country were historical; but Browning accentuates Pym's heroism by
making the man he sends to the scaffold his old friend; and devotion is
the single trait of the beautiful but imaginary character of Lucy
Carlisle. "Give me your notion of a thorough self-devotement,
self-forgetting," he wrote a few years later to Miss Flower: the idea
seems to have been already busy moulding his still embryonic invention
of character. Something of the visionary exaltation of the dying
Paracelsus thus hangs over the final scene in which Strafford goes to
meet the fate which the one friend imposes on him and the other cannot
turn aside. All the characters have something of the "deep
self-consciousness" of the author of _Pauline_. Not that they are, any
of them, drawn with very profound grasp of human nature or a many-sided
apprehension of life. They are either absolutely simple, like Lady
Carlisle, or built upon a rivalry or conflict of simple elements, like
Strafford and Charles; but there is so much restless vivacity in their
discourse, the broad surface of mood is so incessantly agitated by the
play and cross-play of thought and feeling, that they seem more complex
than they are.
Though played for only five nights, _Strafford_ had won a success which
might well have dazzled a young and untried aspirant, and which was
sufficiently impressive to shrewd men of business like Messrs Longman to
induce them to undertake its publication free of cost. It appeared in
April, with an interesting preface, subsequently withdrawn, from which a
significant sentence has already been quoted. The composition of
_Strafford_ had not only "freshened a jaded mind" but permanently
quickened his zest for the drama of political crises. New projects for
historical dramas chased and jostled one another through his busy brain,
which seems to have always worked most prosperously in a highly charged
atmosphere. I am going "to begin ... thinking a Tragedy," he wrote
characteristically to Miss Haworth--"(an Historical one, so I shall want
heaps of criticisms on _Strafford_), and I want to have _another_
tragedy in prospect; I write best so provided."[16]
[Footnote 16: Orr, _Life_, p. 103.]
The "Historical Tragedies" here foreshadowed, _King Victor and King
Charles_ and _The Return of the Druses_, were eventually published as
the Second and Fourth of the _Bells and Pomegranates_, in 1842-43. How
little Browning cared for history except as a quarry for psychical
problems, how little concern he had at bottom with the changing drama of
national life, is clear from the directions in which he now sought his
good. In _Strafford_ as in _Paracelsus_, and even in _Sordello_, the
subject had made some appeal to the interest in great epochs and famous
men. Henceforth his attitude, as a dramatist, to history is a curious
blend of the historical specialist who explores the recondite byways of
history, and the romantic poet who abandons actuality altogether. He
seeks his heroes in remote sequestered corners of the world,--Sardinia,
Juliers, Lebanon; but actual historic research gradually yields ground
to a free invention which, however, always simulates historic truth.
_King Victor and King Charles_ contains far less poetry than
_Paracelsus_, but it was the fruit of historic studies no less severe.
There was material for genuine tragedy in the story. The old king, who
after fifty years of despotic rule shifts the crown to the head of his
son with the intention of still pulling the wires behind the scenes,
but, finding that Charles means to rule as well as reign, clutches
angrily at his surrendered crown,--this King Victor has something in
him of Lear, something of the dying Henry IV. But history provided more
sober issues, and Browning's temperament habitually inclined him to
stave off the violence of tragic passion which disturbs the subtle
eddyings of thought and feeling. Charles is no Regan, hardly even an
Albany, no weakling either, but a man of sensitive conscience, who
shifts and gyrates responsively to the complex play of motive which
Browning brings to bear upon him. Reluctantly he orders Victor's arrest,
and when the old man, baffled and exasperated, is brought before him and
imperiously demands the crown, he puts it upon his father's head.
Neither character is drawn with the power of Strafford, but the play is
largely built upon the same contrasts between personal devotion and
political expediency, the untutored idealism of youth and the ruses or
rigidity of age. This was a type of dramatic action which Browning
imagined with peculiar power and insight, for it bodied forth a contrast
between contending elements of his own nature. Towards this type all his
drama tended to gravitate. In _The Return of the Druses_ Browning's
native bent can be more freely studied, for history has contributed only
the general situation. His turn for curious and far-fetched incident is
nowhere better illustrated than in this tangled intrigue carried on
between Frankish Hospitallers, Venetians, and Druses of Lebanon in a
lonely island of the Aegean where none of the three are at home. A
political revolution--the revolt of the Druses against their Frankish
lords--provides the outer momentum of the action; but the central
interest is concentrated upon a "Soul's tragedy," in which the conflict
of races goes on within the perplexed and paralysed bosom of a single
man. Djabal, the Druse patriot brought up in Brittany, analyses his own
character with the merciless self-consciousness of Browning himself:
"I with my Arab instinct--thwarted ever
By my Frank policy, and with in turn
My Frank brain thwarted by my Arab heart--
While these remained in equipoise, I lived--
Nothing; had either been predominant,
As a Frank schemer or an Arab mystic
I had been something."
The conflict between policy and devotion is now transferred to the arena
of a single breast, where its nature is somewhat too clearly understood
and formulated. The "Frank schemer" conceives the plan of turning the
Druse superstition to account by posing as an incarnation of their
Founder. But the "Arab mystic" is too near sharing the belief to act his
part with ease, and while he is still paltering the devoted Anael slays
the Prefect. The play is thenceforth occupied, ostensibly, with the
efforts of the Christian authorities to discover and punish the
murderers. Its real subject is the subtle changes wrought in Djabal and
Anael by their gradual transition from the relation of prophet and
devotee to that of lovers. Her passion, even before he comes to share
it, has begun to sap the security of his false pretensions: he longs,
not at first to disavow them, but to make them true: he will be the
prophetic helper of his people in very deed. To the outer world he
maintains his claim with undiminished boldness and complete success; but
the inner supports are gradually giving way, Arab mystic and Frank
schemer lose their hold, and
"A third and better nature rises up,
My mere man's nature."
Anael, a simpler character than any previous woman of the plays, thus
has a more significant function. Lady Carlisle fumbles blindly with the
dramatic issues without essentially affecting them; Polyxena furthers
them with loyal counsel, but is not their main executant. Anael, in her
fervid devotion, not only precipitates the catastrophe, but emancipates
her lover from the thraldom of his lower nature. In her Browning for the
first time in drama represented the purifying power of Love. The
transformations of soul by soul were already beginning to occupy
Browning's imagination. The poet of _Cristina_ and _Saul_ was already
foreshadowed. But nothing as yet foreshadowed the kind of spiritual
influence there portrayed--that which, instead of making its way through
the impact of character upon character, passion upon passion, is
communicated through an unconscious glance or a song. For one who
believed as fixedly as Browning in the power of these moments to change
the prevailing bias of character and conduct, such a conception was full
of implicit drama. A chance inspiration led him to attempt to show how
a lyric soul flinging its soul-seed unconsciously forth in song might
become the involuntary _deus ex machina_ in the tangle of passion and
plot through which she moved, resolving its problems and averting its
catastrophes.
The result was a poem which Elizabeth Barrett "could find it in her
heart to envy" its author, which Browning himself (in 1845) liked better
than anything else he had yet done.[17] It has won a not less secure
place in the affections of all who care for Browning at all. It was
while walking alone in a wood near Dulwich, we are told by Mrs Orr, that
"the idea flashed upon him of some one walking thus through life; one
apparently too obscure to leave a trace of his or her passage, yet
exercising a lasting though unconscious influence at every step of it;
and the image shaped itself into the little silk-winder of Asolo."[18]
The most important effect of this design was to call out Browning's
considerable powers of rendering those gross, lurid, unspiritualised
elements of the human drama upon which Pippa was to flash her
transforming spell. His somewhat burly jocosity had expatiated freely in
letters; but he had done nothing which, like the cynical chaff of his
art students, suggests the not unskilful follower of Balzac and Dickens.
And he had given no hint of the elemental tragic power shown in the
great Ottima and Sebald scene, nor of the fierce and cruel sensuality,
the magnificence in sin, of Ottima herself.
[Footnote 17: _Letters of R. and E.B.B._, i. 28.]
[Footnote 18: Orr, _Handbook_, p. 55.]
_Pippa Passes_, the most romantic in conception of all Browning's plays,
thus first disclosed his genius for realism. _Strafford_, _King Victor_,
_The Druses_ are couched in the tempered ideality of blank verse; here
we pass to and fro from the airiest lyric to the most massive and sinewy
prose. It counted for something, too, that Italy, and above all the
little hill-town in which the scene was laid, was a vivid personal
memory, not a vague region of fancy like his Sardinia or Lebanon. Asolo,
with its walls and turret, its bishop's palace and duomo, and girls
sitting on the steps, its upland farms among the cherry orchards, its
beetles sparkling along the dust, its "warm slow yellow moonlit nights"
of May, and "glaring pomps" of June,--Asolo, with its legend of "Kate
the queen" and her carolling page, lives as few other spots do for
Browning's readers. Pippa herself, in her exquisite detachment from the
sordid humanity amid which she moves, might have appeared too like a
visionary presence, not of earth though on it, had she not been brought
into touch, at so many points, with things that Browning had seen.
_Pippa Passes_ has, among Browning's dramas, the same kind of peculiar
interest which belongs to the _Tempest_ and to _Faust_ among
Shakespeare's and Goethe's. Faery and devilry were not Browning's
affair; but, within the limits of his resolute humanism, _Pippa Passes_
is an ideal construction, shadowing forth, under the semblance of a
single definite bit of life, the controlling elements, as Browning
imagined them, in all life. For Browning, too, the world teemed with
Stephanos and Trinculos, Sebastians and Antonios; it was, none the less,
a magical Isle, where strange catastrophes and unsuspected revolutions
sprang suddenly into being at the unseen carol of Ariel as he passed.
Browning's Ariel is the organ of a spiritual power which, unlike
Prospero, seeks not merely to detect and avert crime, or merely to
dismiss the would-be criminal, forgiven, to "live and deal with others
better," but to renovate character; to release men from the bondage of
their egoisms by those influences, slight as a flower-bell or a sunset
touch, which renew us by setting all our aims and desires in a new
proportion.
II.
Browning's first four plays seemed to mark a growing neglect of the
requirements and traditions of the stage. He might even appear to have
renounced the stage altogether when in 1841 he arranged with Moxon to
publish his writings in a cheap pamphlet form. The first number of
_Bells and Pomegranates_ contained the least theatrical of his dramas,
_Pippa Passes_. "Two or three years ago" he declared in the preface (not
reprinted), "I wrote a play, about which the chief matter I much care to
recollect at present is that a Pit-full of good-natured people applauded
it. Ever since I have been desirous of doing something in the same way
that should better reward their attention. What follows I mean for the
first of a series of Dramatical Pieces, to come out at intervals; and I
amuse myself by fancying that the cheap mode in which they appear will
for once help me to a sort of Pit-audience again."
But Browning's ambition for fame as a maker of plays was still keen, and
nothing but a renewed invitation to write for the stage was needed to
lure him back into tentative compliance with its ways. In the course of
1841 Macready intervened with a request for another play from the author
of _Strafford_.[19] Thereupon Browning produced with great rapidity _A
Blot in the 'Scutcheon_. After prolonged and somewhat sordid green-room
vicissitudes, it was performed on Feb. 11, 1843. Macready, its first
begetter, did his best to wreck it; the majority of the players refused
to understand their parts; but through the fine acting of Helen Faucit
(Mildred) and Phelps (Lord Tresham), it achieved a moderate but brief
success.
[Footnote 19: The date is fixed by Browning's statement (Orr, p. 119).]
The choice of subject indicates, as has been said, a desire to make
terms with stage tradition. But the ordinary theatre-goer, who went
expecting to witness what the title appeared to promise, found himself,
as the play proceeded, perplexed and out of his bearings. An English
nobleman, with the deep-engrained family pride of his order, had
suffered, or was to suffer, dishonour. But this seemingly commonplace
_motif_ was developed in a strange and unfamiliar ethical atmosphere--an
atmosphere of moral ideas which seemed to embrace both those who upheld
the feudal honour and those who "blotted" it; to hint at a purity deeper
than sin. In a more sinister sense than _Colombe's Birthday_, this play
might have been prefaced by the beautiful motto of its successor:--
"Ivy and violet, what do ye here
With blossom and shoot in the warm spring weather
Hiding the arms of Montecchi and Vere?"
The love of Mildred and Mertoun, which blots the Tresham 'scutcheon, is
in origin as innocent as that which breaks into flower across the royal
ambitions of Colombe; and their childlike purity of passion becomes, in
spite of the wrong to which it has led them, the reconciling fact upon
which at the close all animosities and resentments die away. The
conception is genuinely tragic, for the doom which descends upon them
all is a Nemesis which they have all contributed to provoke, but which
none of them deserves; and which precisely the blended nobility and
naïveté of Mildred and Mertoun prevents from passing by them altogether.
More mature or less sensitive lovers would have found an issue from the
situation as easily as an ordinary Hamlet from his task of vengeance.
But Mertoun and Mildred are at once too timid and too audacious, too
tremulous in their consciousness of guilt, too hardy and reckless in
their mutual devotion, to carry through so difficult a game. Mertoun
falters and stammers in his suit to Tresham; Mildred stands mute at her
brother's charge, incapable of evasion, only resolute not to betray.
Yet these same two children in the arts of politic self-defence are
found recklessly courting the peril of midnight meetings in Mildred's
chamber with the aid of all the approved resources and ruses of
romance--the disguise, the convenient tree, the signal set in the
window, the lover's serenade. And when the lover, who dared all risks to
his lady and to himself for a stolen interview with her night by night,
finally encounters Tresham, he is instantly paralysed, and will not even
lift a sword in his own defence. Upon this union of boundless daring for
one another's sake and sensibility to the shame of having wronged the
house and blotted the 'scutcheon Mertoun's fate hangs, and with his
Mildred's, and with hers Tresham's.
Beside the tragedy and the stain of the love of Mertoun and Mildred,
Browning characteristically sets the calm, immaculate, cousinly
affection of Gwendolen and Austin. One has a glimpse here of his
habitual criticism of all satisfied attainment, of all easy completeness
on a low plane. It is Gwendolen herself who half disarms that criticism,
or makes it, as applied to her, more pathetic than trenchant by
instantly detecting and proclaiming the different quality of Mertoun's
love. "Mark him, Austin: that's true love! Ours must begin again." In
Tresham Browning seems to have designed to portray the finest type of
ancestral pride. He is "proud" of his "interminable line," because the
men were all "paladins" and the women all of flawless honour; and he
has the chivalrous tenderness of ideal knighthood, as well as its
honourable pride. When Mertoun has received his death-stroke and told
his story, the tenderness comes out; the sullied image of his
passionately loved sister not only recovers its appeal, but rises up
before him in mute intolerable reproach; and Mildred has scarcely
breathed her last in his arms when Tresham succumbs to the poison he has
taken in remorse for his hasty act. It is unlucky that this tragic
climax, finely conceived as it is, is marred by the unconscious
burlesque of his "Ah,--I had forgotten: I am dying." In such things one
feels Browning's want of the unerring sureness of a great dramatist at
the crucial moments of action.
Although not brilliantly successful on the boards, _A Blot in the
'Scutcheon_ made a deep impression upon the more competent part of the
audience. For Browning himself the most definite result was that
Macready passed out of his life--for twenty years they never met--and
that his most effective link with the stage was thus finally severed.
But his more distant and casual relations with it were partly balanced
by the much enlarged understanding of dramatic effect which he had by
this time won; and _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_ was followed by a drama
which attains a beauty and charm not far below that of _Pippa Passes_
under the conditions of a regular dramatic plot. The ostensible subject
of _Colombe's Birthday_ is a political crisis on the familiar lines;--an
imperilled throne in the centre of interest, a background of vague
oppression and revolt. But as compared with _King Victor_ or _The
Druses_ the dispute is harmless, the tumult of revolution easily
overheard. The diplomatic business is not etherealised into romance,
like the ladies' embassy in _Love's Labour's Lost_; but neither is it
allowed to become grave or menacing. Berthold's arrival to present his
claim to the government of this miniature state affects us somewhat like
the appearance of a new and formidable player in some drawing-room
diversion; and the "treason" of the courtiers like the "unfairness" of
children at play. Nevertheless, the victory of love over political
interest which the motto foreshadows is not accomplished without those
subtle fluctuations and surprises which habitually mark the conduct of
Browning's plots. The alternative issues gain in seriousness and
ideality as we proceed, and Browning has nowhere expressed the ideal of
sovereignty more finely than it is expressed in this play, by the man
for whose sake a sovereign is about to surrender her crown.[20] Colombe
herself is one of Browning's most gracious and winning figures. She
brings the ripe decision of womanhood to bear upon a series of difficult
situations without losing the bright glamour of her youth. Her inborn
truth and nature draw her on as by a quiet momentum, and gradually
liberate her from the sway of the hollow fictions among which her lot is
cast. Valence, the outward instrument of this liberation, is not the
least noble of that line of chivalrous lovers which reaches from Gismond
to Caponsacchi. With great delicacy the steps are marked in this inward
and spiritual "flight" of Colombe. Valence's "way of love" is to make
her realise the glory and privileges of the rulership which places her
beyond his reach, at the very moment when she is about to resign it in
despair. She discovers the needs of the woman and the possibilities of
power at the same time, and thus is brought, by Valence's means, to a
mood in which Prince Berthold's offer of his hand and crown together
weighs formidably, for a moment, against Valence's offer of his love
alone, until she discovers that Berthold is the very personation, in
love and in statecraft alike, of the fictions from which she had
escaped. Then, swiftly recovering herself, she sets foot finally on the
firm ground where she had first sought her "true resource."
[Footnote 20: This fine speech of Valence to the greater glory of his
rival (Act iv.) is almost too subtle for the stage. Browning with good
reason directed its omission unless "a very good Valence" could be
found.]
Berthold, like Blougram, Ogniben, and many another of Browning's mundane
personages, is a subtler piece of psychology than men of the type of
Valence, in whom his own idealism flows freely forth. He comes before us
with a weary nonchalance admirably contrasted with the fiery intensity
of Valence. He means to be emperor one day, and his whole life is a
process of which that is to be the product; but he finds the process
unaffectedly boring. Without relaxing a whit in the mechanical pursuit
of his end, he views life with much mental detachment, and shows a cool
and not unsympathetic observation of men who pursue other ideals, as
well as an abundance of critical irony towards those who apparently
share his own. An adept in courtly arts, and owing all his successes to
courtly favour, he meets the assiduities of other courtiers with open
contempt. His ends are those of Laertes or Fortinbras, and he is quite
capable of the methods of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; but he regards
ends and methods alike with the sated distaste of Hamlet. By birth and
principle a man of action, he has, even more than most of Browning's men
of action, the curious introspectiveness of the philosophic onlooker. He
"watches his mind," and if he does not escape illusions, recognises and
exposes them with ironical candour. Few of Browning's less right-minded
persons attain final insight at less cost to dramatic propriety than
Berthold when he pronounces his final verdict:--
"All is for the best.
Too costly a flower were this, I see it now,
To pluck and set upon my barren helm
To wither,--any garish plume will do."
_Colombe's Birthday_ was published in 1844 as No. 6 of the _Bells_, but
had for the present no prospect of the stage. Nine years later, however,
the loyal Phelps, who had so doughtily come to the rescue of its
predecessor, put it successfully on the boards of his theatre at
Sadler's Wells.
The most buoyant of optimists has moments of self-mockery, and the
hardiest believer in ideal truth moods in which poetry seems the phantom
and prose the fact. Such a mood had its share in colouring the dramatic
sketch which, it is now pretty evident, Browning wrote not long after
finishing _Colombe's Birthday_.[21] That play is a beautiful triumph of
poetry over prose, of soul and heart over calculation and business. _A
Soul's Tragedy_ exhibits the inverse process: the triumph of mundane
policy and genial _savoir faire_ in the person of Ogniben over the
sickly and equivocal "poetry" of Chiappino. Browning seems to have
thrown off this bitter parody of his own idealisms in a mood like that
in which Ibsen conceived the poor blundering idealist of the _Wild
Duck_. Chiappino is Browning's Werle; the reverse side of a type which
he had drawn with so much indulgence in the Luigi of _Pippa Passes_.
Plainly, it was a passing mood; as plainly, a mood which, from the high
and luminous vantage-ground of 1846, he could look back upon with
regret, almost with scorn. His intercourse with Elizabeth Barrett was
far advanced before she was at length reluctantly allowed to see it.
"For _The Soul's_ _Tragedy_," he wrote (Feb. 11)--"that will surprise
you, I think. There is no trace of you there,--you have not put out the
black face of _it_--it is all sneering and disillusion--and shall not be
printed but burned if you say the word." This word his correspondent,
needless to add, did not say; on the contrary, she found it even more
impressive than its successor _Luria_. This was, however, no tribute to
its stage qualities; for in hardly one of his plays is the stage more
openly ignored. The dramatic form, though still preserved, sets strongly
towards monologue; the entire second act foreshadows unmistakably the
great portrait studies of _Men and Women_; it might be called _Ogniben_
with about as good right as they are called _Lippo Lippi_ or _Blougram_;
the personality of the supple ecclesiastic floods and takes possession
of the entire scene; we see the situation and the persons through the
brilliant ironic mirror of his mind. The Chiappino of the second act is
Ogniben's Chiappino, as Gigadibs is Blougram's Gigadibs. His "tragedy"
is one in which there is no room for terror or pity, only for contempt.
All real stress of circumstance is excluded. Both sides fight with
blunted weapons; the revolt is like one of those Florentine risings
which the Brownings later witnessed with amusement from the windows of
Casa Guidi, which were liable to postponement because of rain. The
prefect who is "assassinated" does not die, and the rebellious city is
genially bantered into submission. The "soul" of Chiappino is, in fact,
not the stuff of which tragedy is made. Even in his instant acceptance
of Luitolfo's bloodstained cloak when the pursuers are, as he thinks, at
the door, he seems to have been casually switched off the proper lines
of his character into a piece of heroism which properly belongs to the
man he would like to be thought, but has not the strength to be. On the
whole, Browning's scorn must be considered to have injured his art.
Tragedy, in the deepest sense, lay beyond his sphere; and this "tragedy"
of mere degeneration and helpless collapse left untouched all the
springs from which his poetry drew its life.
[Footnote 21: Browning's letter to Elizabeth Barrett, Feb. 13, 1846,
which does not seem to have been adequately noticed. The piece is
ignored by Mrs Orr. He speaks of suspending the publication of the
"unlucky play" until a second edition of the _Bells_--an "apparition"
which Moxon, he says, seems to think possible; and then inserting it
before _Luria_: it will then be "in its place, for it was written two or
three years ago." In other words, _The Soul's Tragedy_ was written in
1843-44, between _Colombe's Birthday_ and _Luria_.]
In the autumn of 1844 Browning made a second tour to Italy. It was
chiefly memorable for his meeting, at Leghorn, with Edward John
Trelawney, to whom he carried a letter of introduction;--one who had not
only himself "seen Shelley plain," but has contributed more than any one
else, save Hogg, to flash the unfading image of what he saw on the eyes
of posterity. The journey quickened and enriched his Italian memories;
and left many vivid traces in the poetry of the following year. Among
these was the drama of _Luria_, ultimately published as the concluding
number of the _Bells_.
In this remarkable drama Browning turned once more to the type of
historical tragedy which he had originally essayed in _Strafford_. The
fall of a man of passionate fidelity through the treachery of the prince
or the people in whom he has put his trust, was for Browning one of the
most arresting of the great traditional motives of tragic drama. He
dwelt with emphasis upon this aspect of the fate of Charles's great
minister; in _Luria_, where he was working uncontrolled by historical
authority, it is the fundamental theme. At the same time the effect is
heightened by those race contrasts which had been so abundantly used in
_The Return of the Druses_. Luria is a Moor who has undertaken the
service of Florence, and whose religion it is to serve her. Like
Othello,[22] he has been intrusted, alien as he is, by a jealous and
exacting State, with the supreme command of her military forces, a
position in which the fervour of the Oriental and the frank simplicity
of the soldier inevitably lie open to the subtle strategy of Italians
and statesmen. "Luria," wrote Browning, while the whole scheme was "all
in my brain yet, ... devotes himself to something he thinks Florence,
and the old fortune follows, ... and I will soon loosen my Braccio and
Puccio (a pale discontented man) and Tiburzio (the Pisan, good true
fellow, this one), and Domizia the lady--loosen all these on dear
foolish (ravishing must his folly be) golden-hearted Luria, all these
with their worldly wisdom and Tuscan shrewd ways." Florence, in short,
plays collectively somewhat the part of Iago to this second Othello, but
of an Iago (need it be said) immeasurably less deeply rooted in
malignity than Shakespeare's. It was a source of weakness as well as of
strength in Browning as a dramatist that the evil things in men
dissolve so readily under his scrutiny as if they were mere shells of
flimsy disguise for the "soul of goodness" they contain. He has, in
fact, put so much strong sense on the side of the jealous Florentine
masters of his hero that his own sympathies were divided, with
paralysing effect, it would seem, upon his interest in drama.[23] Even
the formidable antagonism of Braccio, the Florentine Commissary, is
buttressed, if not based, upon a resolve to defend the rights of
civilisation against militarism, of intellect against brute force.
"Brute force shall not rule Florence." Even so, it is only after
conflict and fluctuation that he decides to allow Luria's trial to take
its course. Puccio, again, the former general of Florence, superseded by
Luria, and now serving under his command, turns out not quite the "pale
discontented man" whom Browning originally designed and whom such a
situation was no doubt calculated to produce. Instead of a Cassius,
enviously scowling at the greatness of his former comrade, Cæsar, we
have one whose generous admiration for the alien set over him struggles
hard, and not unsuccessfully, with natural resentment. In keeping with
such company is the noble Pisan general, who vies with Luria in
generosity and twice intervenes decisively to save him from the
Florentine attack. Even Domizia, the "panther" lady who comes to the
camp burning for vengeance upon Florence for the death of her kinsmen,
and hoping to attain it by embroiling him with the city, finally emerges
as his lover. But in Domizia he confessedly failed. The correspondence
with Miss Barrett stole the vitality from all mere imaginary women; "the
panther would not be tamed." Her hatred and her love alike merely beat
the air. With all her volubility, she is almost as little in place in
the economy of the drama as in that of the camp; her "wild mass of rage"
has the air of being a valued property which she manages and exhibits,
not an impelling and consuming fire. The more potent passion of Luria
and his lieutenant Husain is more adequately rendered, though "the
simple Moorish instinct" in them is made to accomplish startling feats
in European subtlety. The East with its gift of "feeling" comes once
more, as in the _Druses_, into tragic contact with the North and its
gift of "thought"; but it is to the feeling East and not to thinking
North that we owe the clear analysis and exposition of the contrast.
Luria has indeed, like Djabal, assimilated just so much of European
culture as makes its infusion fatal to him: he suffers the doom of the
lesser race
"Which when it apes the greater is forgone."
But the noblest quality of the lesser race flashes forth at the close
when he takes his life, not in defiance, nor in despair, but as a last
act of passionate fidelity to Florence. This is conceived with a
refinement of moral imagination too subtle perhaps for appreciation on
the stage; but of the tragic power and pathos of the conception there
can be no question. Mrs Browning, whose eager interest accompanied this
drama through every stage of its progress, justly dwelt upon its
"grandeur." The busy exuberance of Browning's thinking was not
favourable to effects which multiplicity of detail tends to destroy; but
the fate of this son of the "lone and silent East," though utterly
un-Shakespearean in motive, recalls, more nearly than anything else in
Browning's dramas, the heroic tragedy of Shakespeare.
[Footnote 22: Browning himself uses this parallel in almost his first
reference to _Luria_ while still unwritten: _Letters of R.B. and
E.B.B._, i. 26.]
[Footnote 23: "For me, the misfortune is, I sympathise just as much with
these as with him,--so there can no good come of keeping this wild
company any longer."--Feb. 26, 1845.]
III.
"Mere escapes of my inner power, like the light of a revolving
lighthouse leaping out at intervals from a narrow chink;" so wrote
Browning in effect to Miss Barrett (Feb. 11, 1845) of the "scenes and
song-scraps," of which the first instalment had appeared three years
before as the _Dramatic Lyrics_. Yet it is just by the intermittent
flashes that the lighthouse is identified; and Browning's genius, as we
have seen, was in the end to be most truly denoted by these "mere
escapes." With a few notable exceptions, they offer little to the
student of Browning's ideology; they do not illustrate his theories of
life, they disclose no good in evil and no hope in ill-success. But they
are full of an exuberant joy in life itself, as seen by a keen observer
exempt from its harsher conditions, to whom all power and passion are a
feast. He watches the angers, the malignities of men and women, as one
might watch the quarrels of wild beasts, not cynically, but with the
detached, as it were professional, interest of a born "fighter." The
loftier hatred, which is a form of love,--the sublime hatred of a Dante,
the tragic hatred of a Timon, even the unforgetting, self-consuming
hatred of a Heathcliff,--did not now, or ever, engage his imagination.
The indignant invective against a political renegade, "Just for a
handful of silver he left us," in which Browning spoke his own mind, is
poor and uncharacteristic compared with pieces in which he stood aside
and let some accomplished devil, like the Duke in _My last Duchess_,
some clerical libertine, like the bishop of St Praxed's, some sneaking
reptile, like the Spanish friar, some tiger-hearted Regan, like the lady
of _The Laboratory_, or some poor crushed and writhing worm, like the
girl of _The Confessional_, utter their callous cynicism or their
deathbed torment, the snarl of petty spite, the low fierce cry of
triumphant malice, the long-drawn shriek of futile rage. There was
commonly an element of unreason, extravagance, even grotesqueness, in
the hatreds that caught his eye; he had a relish for the gratuitous
savagery of the lady in _Time's Revenges_, who would calmly decree that
her lover should be burnt in a slow fire "if that would compass her
desire." He seized the grotesque side of persecution; and it is not
fanciful to see in the delightful chronicle of the Nemesis inflicted
upon "Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis" a foretaste of the sardonic
confessions of _Instans Tyrannus_. And he seized the element of sheer
physical zest in even eager and impassioned action; the tramp of the
march, the swing of the gallop in the fiery Cavalier Tunes, the crash of
Gismond's "back--handed blow" upon Gauthier's mouth; the exultant lift
of the "great pace" of the riders who bring the Good News.
Of love poetry, on the other hand, there was little in these first
Lyrics and Romances. Browning had had warm friendships with women, and
was singularly attractive to them; but at thirty-three love had at most
sent a dancing ripple across the bright surface of his life, and it
apparently counted for nothing in his dreams. His plans, as he told Miss
Barrett, had been made without any thought of "finding such a one as
you." That discovery introduced a new and unknown factor into his scheme
of things. The love-poetry of the Dramatic Lyrics and Romances is still
somewhat tentative and insecure. The beautiful fantasia _In a Gondola_
was directly inspired by a picture of his friend Maclise. He paints the
romance of the lover's twilight tryst with all his incisive vigour; but
his own pulse beats rather with the lover who goes forth at daybreak,
and feels the kindling summons of the morning glory of sea and sunlight
into the "world of men." His attitude to women is touched with the
virginal reserve of the young Hippolytus, whose tragic fate he had told
in the lofty _Prologue_ of Artemis. He approaches them with a kind of
delicate and distant awe; tender, even chivalrous, but accentuating
rather the reserves and reticences of chivalry than its rewards. The
lady of _The Flower's Name_ is beautiful, but her beauty is only shyly
hinted; we see no feature of face or form; only the fold of her dress
brushing against the box border, the "twinkling" of her white fingers
among the dark leaves. The typical lover of these lyrics is of a
temperament in which feminine sensitiveness and masculine tenacity are
characteristically blended; a temperament which the faintest and most
fugitive signs of love--a word, a glance, the impalpable music of a
romantic name--not only kindle and subdue, but permanently fortify and
secure. _Cristina_, _Rudel_, and the _Lost Mistress_ stand in a line of
development which culminates in _The Last Ride Together_. Cristina's
lover has but "changed eyes" with her; but no queenly scorn of hers can
undo the spiritual transformation which her glance has wrought:
"Her soul's mine; and thus, grown perfect,
I shall pass my life's remainder."
The _Lost Mistress_ is an exquisitely tender and pathetic farewell, but
not the stifled cry of a man who has received a crushing blow. Not
easily, but yet without any ruinous convulsion, he makes that transition
from love to "mere friendship" which passionate men so hardly endure.
The really tragic love-story was, for Browning, the story not of love
rejected but of love flagging, fading, or crushed out.
"Never fear, but there's provision
Of the devil's to quench knowledge
Lest on earth we walk in rapture,"
Cristina's lover had bitterly reflected. Courts, as the focuses of
social artifice and ceremonial restraint, were for him the peculiar
breeding-places of such tragedies, and in several of the most incisive
of the Lyrics and Romances he appears as the champion of the love they
menace. The hapless _Last Duchess_ suffers for the largess of her kindly
smiles. The duchess of _The Flight_ and the lady of _The Glove_
successfully revolt against pretentious substitutes for love offered in
love's name. _The Flight_ is a tale, as Mrs Browning said, "with a great
heart in it." Both the Gipsy-woman whose impassioned pleading we
overhear, and the old Huntsman who reports it, are drawn from a domain
of rough and simple humanity not very often trodden by Browning. The
genial retainer admirably mediates between the forces of the Court which
he serves and those of the wild primitive race to which his world-old
calling as a hunter makes him kin; his hearty, untutored speech and
character envelop the story like an atmosphere, and create a presumption
that heart and nature will ultimately have their way. Even the hinted
landscape-background serves as a mute chorus. In this "great wild
country" of wide forests and pine-clad mountains, the court is the
anomaly.
Similarly, in _The Glove_, the lion, so magnificently sketched by
Browning, is made to bear out the inner expressiveness of the tale in a
way anticipated by no previous teller. The lion of Schiller's ballad is
already assuaged to his circumstances, and enters the arena like a
courtier entering a drawing-room. Browning's lion, still terrible and
full of the tameless passion for freedom, bursts in with flashing
forehead, like the spirit of the desert of which he dreams: it is the
irruption of this mighty embodiment of elemental Nature which wakens in
the lady the train of feeling and thought that impel her daring
vindication of its claims.
* * * * *
Art was far from being as strange to the Browning of 1842-45 as love.
But he seized with a peculiar predilection those types and phases of the
Art-world with which love has least to do. He studies the egoisms of
artists, the vanities of connoisseurs; the painter Lutwyche showing "how
he can hate"; the bishop of St Praxed's piteously bargaining on his
death-bed for the jasper and lapislazuli "which Gandolph shall not
choose but see and burst"; the duke of the _Last Duchess_ displaying his
wife's portrait as the wonder of his gallery, and unconcernedly
disposing of her person. In a single poem only Browning touches those
problems of the artist life which were to occupy him in the 'Fifties;
and the _Pictor Ignotus_ is as far behind the _Andrea del_ _Sarto_ and
_Fra Lippo Lippi_ in intellectual force as in dramatic brilliance and
plasticity. Browning's sanguine and energetic temperament always
inclined him to over-emphasis, and he has somewhat over-emphasised the
anæmia of this anæmic soul. Rarely again did he paint in such resolute
uniformity of ashen grey. The "Pictor" is the earliest, and the palest,
of Browning's pale ascetics, who make, in one way or another, the great
refusal, and lose their souls by trying to save them in a barrenness
which they call purity.
The musician as such holds at this stage an even smaller place in
Browning's art than the painter. None of these Lyrics foreshadows _Abt
Vogler_ and _Hugues of Saxe-Gotha_ as the _Pictor_ foreshadows _Lippi_
and _Del Sarto_. But if he did not as yet explore the ways of the
musical soul, he shows already a peculiar instinct for the poetic uses
and capabilities of music. He sings with peculiar _entrain_ of the
transforming magic of song. The thrush and cuckoo, among the throng of
singing-birds, attract him by their musicianly qualities--the "careless
rapture" repeated, the "minor third" _which only the cuckoo knows_.
These Lyrics and Romances of 1842-45 are as full of tributes to the
power of music as _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ themselves. Orpheus,
whose story Milton there touched so ravishingly, was too trite an
instance to arrest Browning; it needed perhaps the stimulus of his
friend Leighton's picture to call forth, long afterwards, the few choice
verses on Eurydice. More to his mind was the legend of that motley
Orpheus of the North, the Hamelin piper,--itself a picturesque motley
of laughter and tears. The Gipsy's lay of far-off romance awakens the
young duchess; Theocrite's "little human praise" wins God's ear, and
Pippa's songs transform the hearts of men. A poet in this vein would
fall naturally enough upon the Biblical story of the cure of the
stricken Saul by the songs of the boy David. But a special influence
drew Browning to this subject,--the wonderful _Song to David_ of
Christopher Smart,--"a person of importance in his day," who owes it
chiefly to Browning's enthusiastic advocacy of a poem he was never weary
of declaiming, that he is a poet of importance in ours. Smart's David is
before all things the glowing singer of the Joy of Earth,--the glory of
the visible creation uttering itself in rapturous Praise of the Lord.
And it is this David of whom we have a presentiment in the no less
glowing songs with which Browning's shepherd-boy seeks to reach the
darkened mind of Saul.
Of the poem we now possess, only the first nine sections belong to the
present phase of Browning's work. These were confessedly incomplete, but
Browning was content to let them go forth as they were, and less bent
upon even their ultimate completion, it would seem, than Miss Barrett,
who bade him "remember" that the poem was "there only as a first part,
and that the next parts must certainly follow and complete what will be
a great lyrical work--now remember."[24] And the "next parts" when they
came, in _Men and Women_, bore the mark of his ten years' fellowship
with her devout and ecstatic soul, as well as of his own growth towards
the richer and fuller harmonies of verse. The 1845 fragment falls, of
course, far short of its sequel in imaginative audacity and splendour,
but it is steeped in a pellucid beauty which Browning's busy
intellectuality was too prone to dissipate. Kenyon read it nightly, as
he told Mrs Browning, "to put his dreams in order"; finely comparing it
to "Homer's Shield of Achilles, thrown into lyrical whirl and life." And
certainly, if Browning anywhere approaches that Greek plasticity for
which he cared so little, it is in these exquisitely sculptured yet
breathing scenes. Then, as the young singer kindles to his work, his
song, without becoming less transparent, grows more personal and
impassioned; he no longer repeats the familiar chants of his tribe, but
breaks into a new impetuous inspiration of his own; the lyrical whirl
and life gathers swiftness and energy, and the delicate bas-reliefs of
Saul's people, in their secular pieties of grief or joy, merge in the
ecstatic vision of Saul himself, as he had once been, and as he might
yet be, that
"boyhood of wonder and hope,
Present promise and wealth of the future beyond the eye's scope,"
all the fulness and glory of the life of humanity gathered upon his
single head. It is the very voice of life, which thrills and strikes
across the spiritual darkness of Saul, as the coming of Hyperion
scattered the shadows of Saturnian night.
[Footnote 24: _E.B.B. to R.B._, Dec. 10, 1845.]