WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY. _MEN AND WOMEN_.
This foot, once planted on the goal;
This glory-garland round my soul.
--_The Last Ride Together_.
Warmer climes
Give brighter plumage, stronger wing; the breeze
Of Alpine highths thou playest with, borne on
Beyond Sorrento and Amalfi, where
The Siren waits thee, singing song for song.
--LANDOR.
I.
The _Bells and Pomegranates_ made no very great way with the public,
which found the matter unequal and the title obscure. But both the title
and the greater part of the single poems are linked inseparably with the
most intimate personal relationship of his life. Hardly one of the
Romances, as we saw, but had been read in MS. by Elizabeth Barrett, and
pronounced upon with the frank yet critical delight of her nature. In
the abstruse symbolic title, too,--implying, as Browning expected his
readers to discover, "sound and sense" or "music and discoursing,"--her
wit had divined a more felicitous application to Browning's poetry--
"Some 'Pomegranate,' which, if cut deep down the middle,
Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity."
The two poets were still strangers when this was written; but each had
for years recognised in the other a new and wonderful poetic force,[25]
and the vivid words marked the profound community of spirit which was
finally to draw them together. A few years later, a basket of
pomegranates was handed to her, when travelling with her husband in
France, and she laughingly accepted the omen. The omen was fulfilled;
Elizabeth Browning's poetry expanded and matured in the companionship of
that rich-veined human heart; it was assuredly not by chance that
Browning, ten years after her death, recalled her symbol in the name of
his glorious woman-poet, Balaustion.
[Footnote 25: She had at once discerned the "new voice" in _Paracelsus_,
1835; and the occasion may have been not much later ("years ago" in
1845) on which he was all but admitted to the "shrine" of the "world's
wonder" _(R.B. to E.B.B._, Jan. 10, 1845).]
But she, on her part, also brought a new and potent influence to bear
upon his poetry, the only one which after early manhood he ever
experienced; and their union was by far the most signal event in
Browning's intellectual history, as it was in his life. Her experience
up to the time when they met had been in most points singularly unlike
his own. Though of somewhat higher social status, she had seen far less
of society and of the world; but she had gone through the agony of a
passionately loved brother's sudden death, and the glory of English wood
and meadow was for her chiefly, as to Milton in his age, an enchanted
memory of earlier days, romantically illuminating a darkened London
chamber. "Most of my events, and nearly all my intense pleasures," she
said to Horne, "have passed in my thoughts." Both were eager students,
and merited the hazardous reputation which both incurred, of being
"learned poets"; but Browning wore his learning, not indeed "lightly,
like a flower," but with the cool mastery of a scholarly man of the
world, whose interpretation of books is controlled at every point by his
knowledge of men; while Miss Barrett's Greek and Hebrew chiefly served
to allure an imagination naturally ecstatic and visionary along paths
crowded with congenial unearthly symbols, with sublime shapes of gods
and Titans, angels and seraphim. Then, notwithstanding the _rôle_ of
hopeless invalid which she was made to play, and did play with touching
conviction, she had, it is clear, a fund of buoyant and impulsive
vitality hardly inferior to Browning's own; only that the energy which
in him flowed out through natural channels had in her to create its own
opportunities, and surged forth with harsh or startling
violence,--sometimes "tearing open a parcel instead of untying it," and
sometimes compelling words to serve her will by masterful audacities of
collocation. Both poets stood apart from most of their contemporaries
by a certain exuberance--"a fine excess"--quite foreign to the instincts
of a generation which repudiated the Revolution and did its best to
repudiate Byron. But Browning's exuberance was genial, hearty, and on
occasion brutal; hers was exalted, impulsive, "head-long," [26] intense,
and often fantastic and quaint. His imagination flamed forth like an
intenser sunlight, heightening and quickening all that was alive and
alert in man and Nature; hers shot out superb or lurid volcanic gleams
across the simplicity of natural chiaro-oscuro, disturbing the air with
conflicting and incalculable effects of strange horror and strange
loveliness. It might have been averred of Browning that he said
everything he thought; of her the truer formula would be her own, that
she "took every means of saying" what she thought.[27] There was
something of Æschylus in her, as there was much of Aristophanes in him;
it was not for nothing that her girlish ardour had twice flung itself
upon the task of rendering the _Prometheus Bound_ in English; they met
on common ground in the human and pathetic Euripides. But her power was
lyric, not dramatic. She sang from the depths of a wonderfully rich and
passionate nature; while he was most truly himself when he was
personating some imaginary mind.
[Footnote 26: The word her Italian tutor meant to describe her by, but
could not pronounce it. He said she was _testa lunga (Letters of R. and
E.B., i. 7)_.]
[Footnote 27: _Letters, R. and E. B._, i. 8. Cf. her admirable letter to
Ruskin, ten years later, apropos of the charge of "affectation." "To say
a thing faintly, because saying it strongly sounds odd or obscure or
unattractive for some reason to careless readers, does appear to me bad
policy as well as bad art" (_Letters of E. B. B._, ii., 200).]
Early in January 1845 the two poets were brought by the genial Kenyon,
her cousin and his good friend, into actual communication, and the
memorable correspondence, the most famous of its kind in English
literature, at once began. Browning, as his way was in telling other
men's stories, burst at once _in medias res_ in this great story of his
own. "I love your verses, my dear Miss Barrett, with all my heart," he
assures her in the first sentence of his first letter. He feels them
already too much a part of himself to ever "try and find
fault,"--"nothing comes of it all,--so into me has it gone and part of
me has it become, this great living poetry of yours, not a flower of
which but took root and grew." It was "living," like his own; it was
also direct, as his own was not. His frank _cameraderie_ was touched
from the outset with a fervent, wondering admiration to which he was by
no means prone. "You _do_, what I always wanted, hoped to do, and only
seem likely now to do for the first time. You speak out, _you_,--I only
make men and women speak--give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and
fear the pure white light, even if it is in me, _but I am going to
try_." Thus the first contact with the "Lyric Love" of after days set
vibrating the chords of all that was lyric and personal in Browning's
nature. His brilliant virtuosity in the personation of other minds
threatened to check all simple utterance of his own. The "First Poem" of
Robert Browning had yet to be written, but now, as soon as he had broken
from his "dancing ring of men and women,"--the Dramatic Lyrics and
Romances and one or two outstanding dramas,--he meant to write it. Miss
Barrett herself hardly understood until much later the effect that her
personality, the very soul that spoke in her poetry, had upon her
correspondent. She revelled in the Dramatic Lyrics and Romances, and not
least in rollicking pieces, like _Sibrandus_ or _The Spanish Cloister_,
which appealed to the robust masculine humour with which this outwardly
fragile woman is too rarely credited. _Pippa Passes_ she could find in
her heart to covet the authorship of, more than any of his other
works--a preference in which he agreed. Few more brilliant appreciations
of English poetry are extant than some of those which sped during 1845
and 1846 from the invalid chamber in Harley Street to the "old room"
looking out on the garden at New Cross. But she did not conceal from him
that she wished him to seek "the other crown" also. "I do not think,
with all that music in you, only your own personality should be
dumb."[28] But she undoubtedly, with all her sense of the glory of the
dramatic art, discouraged his writing for the stage, a domain which she
regarded with an animus curiously compounded of Puritan loathing, poetic
scorn, and wellbred shrinking from the vulgarity of the green-room. And
it is clear that before the last plays, _Luria_ and _A Soul's Tragedy_,
were published his old stage ambition had entirely vanished. It was not
altogether hyperbole (in any case the hyperbole was wholly unconscious)
when he spoke of her as a new medium to which his sight was gradually
becoming adjusted, "_seeing all things, as it does, in you._"
[Footnote 28: _E.B.B to R.B._, 26th May 1846. Cf. _R.B._, 13th Feb.
1846.]
She, on her part, united, as clever women in love so often do, with a
woman's more utter self-abasement a larger measure of critical
penetration. The "poor tired wandering singer," who so humbly took the
hand of the liberal and princely giver, and who with perfect sincerity
applied to herself his unconscious phrase--
"Cloth of frieze, be not too bold
Though thou'rt match'd with cloth of gold,"
"That, beloved, was written for me!"[29]--shows at the same time the
keenest insight into the qualities of his work. She felt in him the
masculine temper and the masculine range, his singular union of rough
and even burly power with subtle intellect and penetrating music. With
the world of society and affairs she had other channels of
communication. But no one of her other friends--not _Orion_ Horne, not
even Kenyon--bridged as Browning did the gulf between the world of
society and affairs, which she vaguely knew, and the romantic world of
poetry in which she lived. If she quickened the need for lyrical
utterance in him, he drew her, in his turn, into a closer and richer
contact with common things. If she had her part in _Christmas-Eve and
Easter-Day_, he had his, no less, in _Aurora Leigh_.
[Footnote 29: _E.B.B. to R.B._, 9th Jan. 1846.]
Twenty-one months passed between Browning's first letter and their
marriage. The tentative exchange of letters passed into a formal
"contract" to correspond,--sudden if not as "unadvised" as the love-vows
of Juliet, a parallel which he shyly hinted, and she, with the security
of the whole-hearted, boldly recalled. All the winter and early spring
her health forbade a meeting, and it is clear that but for the quiet
pressure of his will they never would have met. But with May came
renewed vigour, and she reluctantly consented to a visit. "He has a way
of putting things which I have not, a way of putting aside,--so he
came." A few weeks later he spoke. She at first absolutely refused to
entertain the thought; he believed, and was silent. But in the meantime
the letters and the visits "rained down more and more," and the fire
glowed under the surface of the writing and the talk, subdued but
unsuppressed. Once more his power of "putting aside" compelled her to
listen, and when she listened she found herself assailed at a point
which her own exalted spirituality made her least able to defend, by a
love more utterly self-sacrificing than even she had ever imagined. This
man of the masterful will, who took no refusals, might perhaps in any
case have finally "put aside" all obstacles to her consent. But when he
disclosed--to her amazement, well as she thought she knew him--that he
had asked the right to love her without claiming any love in return,
that when he first spoke he had believed her disease to be incurable,
and yet preferred to be allowed to sit only a day at her side to the
fulfilment of "the brightest dream which should exclude her," her
resistance gave way,--and little by little, in her own beautiful words,
she was drawn into the persuasion that something was left, and that she
could still do something for the happiness of another. In another sense
than she intended in the great opening sonnet "from the Portuguese,"
Love, undreamt of, had come to her with the irresistible might of Death,
and called her back into life by rekindling in her the languishing,
almost extinguished, desire to live. Is it hyperbole, to be reminded of
that other world-famous rescue from death which Browning, twenty-five
years later, was to tell with such infinite verve? Browning did not need
to imagine, but only to remember, the magnificent and audacious vitality
of his Herakles; he had brought back his own "espoused saint," like
Alcestis, from the grave.
But the life thus gained was, in the immediate future, full of problems.
Browning, said Kenyon, was "great in everything"; and during the year
which followed their engagement he had occasion to exhibit the
capacities both of the financier he had once declined to be, and of the
diplomatist he was willing to become. Love had flung upon his life, as
upon hers, a sudden splendour for which he was in no way prepared. "My
whole scheme of life," he wrote to her,[30] "(with its wants, material
wants at least, closely cut down), was long ago calculated--and it
supposed _you_, the finding such an one as you, utterly impossible." But
his schemes for a profession and an income were summarily cut short.
Elizabeth Barrett peremptorily declined to countenance any such
sacrifice of the work he was called to for any other. The same deep
sense of what was due to him, and to his wife, sustained her through the
trial that remained,--from the apparent degradation of secrecy and
subterfuge which the domestic policy of Mr Barrett made inevitable, to
the mere physical and nervous strain of rising, that September morning
of 1846, from an invalid's couch to be married. That "peculiarity," as
she gently termed it, of her father's, malign and cruel as it was, twice
precipitated a happy crisis in their fortunes, which prudence might have
postponed. His refusal to allow her to seek health in Italy in Oct. 1845
had brought them definitely together; his second refusal in Aug. 1846
drove her to the one alternative of going there as Browning's wife. A
week after the marriage ceremony, during which they never met, Mrs
Browning left her home, with the faithful Wilson and the indispensable
Flush, _en route_ for Southampton. The following day they arrived in
Paris.
[Footnote 30: _R.B. to E.B.B._, Sept. 13, 1845.]
II.
There followed fifteen years during which the inexhaustible
correspondents of the last twenty months exchanged no further letter,
for they were never parted. That is the sufficient outward symbol of
their all but flawless union. After a leisurely journey through France,
and an experimental sojourn at the goal of Mrs Browning's two frustrated
journeys, Pisa, they settled towards the close of April 1847 in
furnished apartments in Florence, moving some four months later into the
more permanent home which their presence was to render famous, the
Palazzo (or "Casa") Guidi, just off the Piazza Pitti.
Their life--mirrored for us in Mrs Browning's vivid and delightful
letters--was, like many others, in which we recognise rare and precious
quality, singularly wanting in obviously expressive traits. It is
possible to describe everything that went on in the Browning household
in terms applicable to those of scores of other persons of wide
interests, cultivated tastes, and moderate but not painfully restricted
means. All that was passionate, ideal, heroic in them found expression
through conditions which it needs a fine eye to distinguish from those
of easy-going bourgeois mediocrity. Their large and catholic humanity
exempted them from much that makes for bold and sensational outline in
the story of a career. Their poetic home was built upon all the
philistine virtues. Mrs Jameson laughed at their "miraculous prudence
and economy"; and Mrs Browning herself laughed, a little, at her
husband's punctilious rigour in paying his debts,--his "horror of owing
five shillings for five days"; Browning, a born virtuoso in whatever he
undertook, abhorring a neglected bill as he did an easy rhyme, and all
other symbols of that slovenly Bohemia which came nearest, on the whole,
to his conception of absolute evil. They lived at first in much
seclusion, seeking no society, and unknown alike to the Italian and the
English quarters of the Florentine world. But Arcady was, at bottom,
just as foreign to their ways as Bohemia. "Soundless and stirless
hermits," Mrs Browning playfully called them; but in no house in
Florence did the news of political and literary Europe find keener
comment or response than in this quiet hermitage. Two long absences,
moreover (1851-52 and 1855-56), divided between London and Paris,
interrupted their Italian sojourn; and these times were crowded with
friendly intercourse, which they keenly enjoyed. "No place like Paris
for living in," Browning declared after returning from its blaze to the
quiet retreat of Casa Guidi. But both felt no less deeply the charm of
their "dream life" within these old tapestried walls.[31] Nor did
either, in spite of their delight in French poetry and their vivid
interest in French politics, really enter the French world. They were
received by George Sand, whose "indiscreet immortalities" had ravished
Elizabeth Barrett in her invalid chamber years before; but though she
"felt the burning soul through all that quietness," and through the
"crowds of ill-bred men who adore her _à genoux bas_, betwixt a puff of
smoke and an ejection of saliva,"--they both felt that she did not care
for them. Dumas, another admiration, they did not see; an introduction
to Hugo, Browning carried about for years but had no chance of
presenting; Béranger they saw in the street, and regretted the absence
of an intermediator. Balzac, to their grief, was just dead. A complete
set of his works was one of their Florentine ambitions. One memorable
intimacy was formed, however, during the Paris winter of 1851-52; for it
was now that he first met Joseph Milsand, his warm friend until
Milsand's death in 1886, and probably, for the last twenty years at
least, the most beloved of all his friends, as he was at all times one
of his shrewdest yet kindliest critics. Their summer visits to London
(1851, 1852, 1855, 1856) brought them much more of intimate personal
converse, tempered, however, inevitably, in a yet greater proportion, by
pain, discomfort, and fatigue. Of himself, yet more than of the
Laureate, might have been used the phrase in which he was to dedicate a
later poem to Tennyson--"noble and sincere in friendship." The visitors
who gathered about him in these London visits included friends who
belonged to every phase and aspect of his career--from his old master
and mentor, Fox, and Kenyon, the first begetter of his wedded happiness,
to Dante Rossetti, his first and, for years to come, solitary disciple,
and William Allingham, whom Rossetti introduced. Among his own
contemporaries they were especially intimate with Tennyson,--the
sterling and masculine "Alfred" of Carlyle, whom the world first learnt
to know from his biography; and with Carlyle himself, a more genial and
kindly Carlyle than most others had the gift of evoking, and whom his
biographers mostly efface.
[Footnote 31: _Letters of E.B.B._, ii. 199.]
After their return from the second journey to the north their Italian
life lost much of its dream-like seclusion. The publication of _Men and
Women_ (1855) and _Aurora Leigh_ (1856) drew new visitors to the salon
in Casa Guidi, and after 1853 they repeatedly wintered in Rome, mingling
freely in its more cosmopolitan society, and, on occasion, in the
gaieties of the Carnival. To the end, however, their Roman circle was
more American than English. "Is Mr Browning an American?" asked an
English lady of the American ambassador. "Is it possible that you ask me
that?" came the prompt and crushing retort; "why, there is not a village
in the United States so small that they could not tell you that Robert
Browning is an Englishman, and they wish he were an American."
Spiritualism, in the main an American institution, became during the
later years a centre of fervid interest to the one and an irritant to
the other. One turns gladly from that episode to their noble and helpful
friendship for a magnificent old dying lion, with whom, as every one
else discovered, it was ill to play--Walter Savage Landor. Here it was
the wife who looked on with critical though kindly sarcasm at what she
thought her husband's generous excess of confidence. Of all these
intimacies and relationships, however, the poetry of these years
discloses hardly a glimpse. His actual dealings with men and women
called out all his genial energies of heart and brain, but--with one
momentous exception--they did not touch his imagination.
III.
Almost as faint as these echoes of personal friendship are those of the
absorbing public interest of these years, the long agony, fitfully
relieved by spells of desperate and untimely hope, of the Italian
struggle for liberty. The Brownings arrived in Florence during the lull
which preceded the great outbreak of 1848. From the historic "windows of
Casa Guidi" they looked forth upon the gentle futilities of the Tuscan
revolution, the nine days' fight for Milan, the heroic adventure of
Savoy, and the apparently final collapse of all these high endeavours on
the field of Novara. Ten years of petty despotism on the one side, of "a
unanimity of despair" on the other, followed; and then the monotonous
tragedy seemed to break suddenly into romance, as the Emperor, "deep and
cold," marched his armies over the Alps for the Deliverance of Italy.
Of all this the Brownings were deeply moved spectators. Browning shared
his wife's sympathy with the Italians and her abhorrence of Austria,
and it is not likely that he uttered either sentiment with less vivacity
and emphasis, though much less of his talk is on record. "'How long, O
Lord, how long!' Robert kept saying." But he had not her passionate
admiration for France, still less her faith in the President-Emperor.
His less lyric temperament did not so readily harbour unqualified
emotion as hers. His judgment of character was cooler, and with all his
proverbial readiness as a poet to provide men of equivocal conduct with
hypothetical backgrounds of lofty or blameless motive, he was in
practice as exempt from amiable illusions as he was from narrow spite.
Himself the most exact and precise in his dealings with the world, he
could pardon the excesses and irregularities of a great nature; but
sordid self-seeking under the mask of high ideals revolted him. He
laughed at the boyish freaks of Lander's magnificent old age, which
irritated even his large-hearted wife; but he could not forgive Louis
Napoleon the _coup d'état_, and when the liberation of Lombardy was
followed by the annexation of Savoy and Nice, the Emperor's devoted
defender had to listen, without the power of effective retort, to his
biting summary of the situation: "It was a great action; but he has
taken eighteenpence for it, which is a pity."
A dozen years later Louis Napoleon's equivocal character and career were
to be subjected by Browning to a still more equivocal exposition. But
this sordid trait brought him within a category of "soul" upon which
Browning did not yet, in these glowing years, readily lavish his art. A
poem upon Napoleon, which had occupied him much during the winter of
1859 (cf. note, p. 167 below), was abandoned. "Blougram's" splendid and
genial duplicity already attracted him, but the analysis of the
meretricious figure of Napoleon became a congenial problem only to that
later Browning of the 'Sixties and 'Seventies who was to explore the
shady souls of a Guido, a Miranda, and a Sludge. On the other hand,
deeply as he felt the sorrows of Italy, it was no part of his poetic
mission to sing them. The voice of a great community wakened no lyric
note in him, nor did his anger on its behalf break into dithyrambs.
Nationality was not an effectual motive with him. He felt as keenly as
his wife, or as Shelley; but his feeling broke out in fitful allusion or
sardonic jest in the _De Gustibus_ or the _Old Pictures_--not in a _Casa
Guidi Windows_, or _Songs before Congress_, an _Ode to Naples_, or a
_Hellas_. An "Ode" containing, by his own account, fierce things about
England, he destroyed after Villafranca. It is only in subtle and
original variations that we faintly recognise the broad simple theme of
Italy's struggle for deliverance. The _Patriot_ and _Instans Tyrannus_
both have a kind of nexus with the place and time; but the one is a
caustic satire on popular fickleness and the other a sardonically
humorous travesty of persecution. Italy is mentioned in neither. Both
are far removed from the vivid and sympathetic reflection of the
national struggle which thrills us in _The Italian in England_ and the
third scene of _Pippa Passes_. This "tyrant" has nothing to do with the
Austrian whom Luigi was so eager to assassinate, or any other: whatever
in him belongs to history has been permeated through and through with
the poet's derisive irony; he is despotism stripped of the passionate
conviction which may lend it weight and political significance, reduced
to a kind of sport, like the chase of a butterfly, and contemplating its
own fantastic tricks with subdued amusement.
IV.
The great political drama enacted in Italy during the Brownings'
residence there, thus scarcely stirred the deeper currents of Browning's
imagination, any more than, for all the vivid and passionate eloquence
she poured forth in its name, it really touched the genius of his wife.
The spell of Italian scenery was less easily evaded than the
abstractions of politics by a poet of his keen sensibility to light and
colour. And the years of his Italian sojourn certainly left palpable
traces, not only, as is obvious, upon the landscape background which
glows behind his human figures, but on his way of conceiving and
rendering the whole relation between Nature and Man. They did not,
indeed, make him in any sense a Nature poet. In that very song of
delight in "Italy, my Italy," which tells how the things he best loves
in the world are
"a castle precipice-encurled
In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine,"
or some old palazzo, with a pointed cypress to guard it, by the opaque
blue breadth of summer sea, the joy in mountain and sea is subtly
reinforced at every point by the play of human interest; there are
frescoes on the crumbling walls, and a barefooted girl tumbles melons on
the pavement with news that the king has been shot at; art and politics
asserting their place beside Nature in the heart of Italy's "old lover."
And in the actual life of the Brownings "Nature" had to be content, as a
rule, with the humbler share. Their chosen abode was not a castle in the
Apennines or an old crumbling house by the southern sea, but an
apartment commanding the crowded streets of Florence; and their
principal absences from it were spent in Rome, in London, or in the yet
more congenial "blaze of Paris." They delighted certainly to escape into
the forest uplands. "Robert and I go out and lose ourselves in the woods
and mountains, and sit by the waterfalls on the starry and moonlit
nights," she wrote from their high perch above Lucca in 1849; but their
adventures in this kind were on the whole like the noon-disport of the
amphibian swimmer in _Fifine_,--they always admitted of an easy retreat
to the _terra firma_ of civilisation,--
"Land the solid and safe
To welcome again (confess!)
When, high and dry, we chafe
The body, and don the dress."
The Nature Browning knew and loved was well within sight of humanity,
and it was commonly brought nearer by some intrusive vestiges of man's
work; the crescent moon drifting in the purple twilight, or "lamping"
between the cypresses, is seen over Fiesole or Samminiato; the "Alpine
gorge" above Lucca has its ruined chapel and its mill; the Roman
Campagna has its tombs--"Rome's ghost since her decease"; the Etrurian
hill--fastnesses have their crowning cities "crowded with culture." He
had always had an alert eye for the elements of human suggestion in
landscape. But his rendering of landscape before the Italian period was
habitually that of a brilliant, graphic, but not deeply interested
artist, wielding an incisive pencil and an opulent brush, fastening upon
every bit of individual detail, and sometimes, as in the admirable
_Englishman in Italy_, recalling Wordsworth's indignant reproof of the
great fellow-artist--Scott--who "made an inventory of Nature's charms."
This hard objective brilliance does not altogether disappear from the
work of his Italian period. But it tends to give way to a strangely
subtle interpenetration of the visible scene with the passion of the
seeing soul. Nature is not more alive, but her life thrills and
palpitates in subtler relation with the life of man. The author of _Men
and Women_ is a greater poet of Nature than the author of the _Lyrics
and Romances_, because he is, also, a greater poet of "Soul"; for his
larger command of soul-life embraces just those moods of spiritual
passion which beget the irradiated and transfigured Nature for which,
since Wordsworth, poetry has continually striven to find expression.
Browning's subtler feeling for Nature sprang from his profounder insight
into love. Love was his way of approach, as it was eminently not
Wordsworth's, to the transfigured Nature which Wordsworth first
disclosed. It is habitually lovers who have these visions,--all that was
mystical in Browning's mind attaching itself, in fact, in some way to
his ideas of love. To the Two in the Campagna its primeval silence grows
instinct with passion, and its peace with joy,--the joy of illimitable
space and freedom, alluring yet mocking the finite heart that yearns. To
the lovers of the Alpine gorge the old woods, heaped and dim, that hung
over their troth-plighting, mysteriously drew them together; the moment
that broke down the bar between soul and soul also breaking down, as it
were, the bar between man and nature:
"The forests had done it; there they stood;
We caught for a moment the powers at play:
They had mingled us so, for once and good,
Their work was done, we might go or stay,
They relapsed to their ancient mood."
Such "moments" were, in fact, for Browning as well as for his lovers,
rare and fitful exceptions to the general nonchalance of Nature towards
human affairs. The powers did good, as they did evil, "at play";
intervening with a kind of cynical or ironical detachment (like Jaques
plighting Touchstone and Audrey) in an alien affair of hearts. A certain
eerie playfulness is indeed a recurring trait in Browning's highly
individual feeling about Nature; the uncanny playfulness of a wild
creature of boundless might only half intelligible to man, which man
contemplates with mingled joy, wonder, and fear. Joy, when the brown old
Earth wears her good gigantic smile, on an autumn morning; wonder, when
he watches the "miracles wrought in play" in the teeming life of the
Campagna; fear, when, on a hot August midnight, Earth tosses stormily on
her couch. And all these notes of feelings are struck, with an intensity
and a boldness of invention which make it unique among his writings, in
the great romantic legend of _Childe Roland_. What the _Ancient Mariner_
is in the poetry of the mysterious terrors and splendours of the sea,
that _Childe Roland_ is in the poetry of bodeful horror, of haunted
desolation, of waste and plague, ragged distortion, and rotting ugliness
in landscape. The Childe, like the Mariner, advances through an
atmosphere and scenery of steadily gathering menace; the "starved
ignoble" Nature, "peevish and dejected" among her scrub of thistle and
dock, grows malignant; to the barren waste succeed the spiteful little
river with its drenched despairing willows, the blood-trampled mire and
wrecked torture-engine, the poisonous herbage and palsied oak, and
finally the mountains, ignoble as the plain--"mere ugly heights and
heaps," ranged round the deadly den of the Dark Tower. But Browning's
horror-world differs from Coleridge's in the pervading sense that the
powers which control its issues are "at play." The catastrophe is not
the less tragic for that; but the heroic knight is not a culprit who has
provoked the vengeance of his pursuers, but a quarry whose course they
follow with grim half-suppressed laughter as he speeds into the trap.
The hoary cripple cannot hide his malicious glee, the "stiff blind
horse" is as grotesque as he is woeful, the dreary day itself, as it
sinks, shoots one grim red leer at the doomed knight as he sets forth;
in the penury and inertness of the wasted plain he sees "grimace"; the
mountains fight like bulls or doze like dotards; and the Dark Tower
itself is "round and squat," built of brown stone, a mere anticlimax to
romance; while round it lie the sportsmen assembled to see the end--
"The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay
Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay."
V.
But the scenery of Italy, with all its appeals of picturesque outline
and glowing colour, interested Browning less than its painting,
sculpture, and music. "Nature I loved, and after Nature, Art," Landor
declared in one of his stately epitaphs on himself; Browning would, in
this sense of the terms at least, have inverted their order. Casa Guidi
windows commanded a view, not only of revolutionary throngs, but of the
façade of the Pitti--a fact of at least equal significance. From the
days of his boyish pilgrimages to the Dulwich Gallery across the
Camberwell meadows, he had been an eager student and critic of painting;
curious, too, if not yet expert in all the processes and technicalities
of the studio. He judged pictures with the eye of a skilful draughtsman;
and two rapid journeys had given him some knowledge of the Italian
galleries. Continuous residence among the chief glories of the brush and
chisel did not merely multiply artistic incitement and appeal; it
brought the whole world of art into more vital touch with his
imaginative activity. It would be hard to say that there is any definite
change in his view of art, but its problems grow more alluring to him,
and its images more readily waylay and capture his passing thought. The
artist as such becomes a more dominant figure in his hierarchy of
spiritual workers; while Browning himself betrays a new
self-consciousness of his own function as an artist in verse;
conceiving, for instance, his consummate address to his wife as an
artist's way of solving a perplexity which only an artist could feel,
that of finding unique expression for the unique love.
"He who works in fresco, steals a hair-brush,
Curbs the liberal hand, subservient proudly,
Cramps his spirit, crowds its all in little,
Makes a strange art of an art familiar,
Fills his lady's missal-marge with flowerets;
He who blows thro' bronze may breathe thro' silver,
Fitly serenade a slumbrous princess;
He who writes may write for once, as I do."
Browning is distinguished among the poets to whom art meant much by the
prominence with him of the specifically artist's point of view. He cared
for pictures, or for music, certainly, as clues to the interpretation of
human life, hints of "the absolute truth of things" which the sensible
world veils and the senses miss. But he cared for them also, and yet
more, as expressions of the artist's own "love of loving, rage of
knowing, seeing, feeling" that absolute truth. And he cared for them
also and not less, without regard to anything they expressed, as simple
outflows of vitality, however grotesque or capricious. His own eye and
ear continually provoked his hand to artistic experiments and
activities. During the last years in Italy his passion for modelling
even threatened to divert him from poetry; and his wife playfully
lamented that the "poor lost soul" produced only casts, which he broke
on completion, and no more Men and Women. And his own taste in art drew
him, notoriously, to work in which the striving hand was
palpable,--whether it was a triumphant _tour de force_ like Cellini's
Perseus, in the Loggia--their daily banquet in the early days at
Florence; or the half-articulate utterances of "the Tuscan's early art,"
like those "Pre-Giotto pictures" which surrounded them in the salon of
Casa Guidi, "quieting" them if they were over busy, as Mrs Browning
beautifully says,[32] more perhaps in her own spirit than in her
husband's.
[Footnote 32: _Letters of E.B.B._, ii. 199.]
Almost all Browning's finest poems of painting belong to these Italian
years, and were enshrined in _Men and Women._ They all illustrate more
or less his characteristic preoccupation with the artist's point of
view, and also, what is new, the point of view of particular and
historical artists,--a Guercino, an Andrea del Sarto, a Giotto, a Lippo
Lippi. Even where he seems to write under the peculiar spell of his
wife, as in the _Guardian Angel_, this trait asserts itself. They had
spent three glowing August days of 1848 at Fano, and thrice visited the
painting by Guercino there,--"to drink its beauty to our soul's
content." Mrs Browning wrote of the "divine" picture. Browning entered,
with a sympathy perhaps the more intimate that his own "angel" was with
him, and the memory of an old friend peculiarly near, into sympathy with
the guardian angel; but with one of his abrupt turns he passes into the
world of the studio, telling us how he has written for the sake of "dear
Guercino's fame," because he "did not work thus earnestly at all times,
and has endured some wrong." With all this, however, the _Guardian
Angel_ is one of the few pieces left by Browning which do not instantly
discover themselves as his. His typical children are well-springs of
spiritual influence, scattering the aerial dew of quickening song upon
a withered world, or taking God's ear with their "little human praise."
The spirituality of this child is of a different temper,--the submissive
"lamblike" temper which is fulfilled in quiescence and disturbed by
thought.
What is here a mere flash of good-natured championship becomes in the
great monologue of _Andrea del Sarto_ an illuminating compassion.
Compassion, be it noted, far less for the husband of an unfaithful wife
than for the great painter whose genius was tethered to a soulless mate.
The situation appealed profoundly to Browning, and Andrea's monologue is
one of his most consummate pieces of dramatic characterisation. It is a
study of spiritual paralysis, achieved without the least resort to the
rhetorical conventions which permit poetry to express men's silence with
speech and their apathy with song. Tennyson's Lotos-eaters chant their
world-weariness in choral strains of almost too magnificent afflatus to
be dramatically proper on the lips of spirits so resigned. Andrea's
spiritual lotus-eating has paralysed the nerve of passion in him, and
made him impotent to utter the lyrical cry which his fate seems to
crave. He is half "incapable of his own distress"; his strongest
emotions are a flitting hope or a momentary pang, quickly dissolved into
the ground-tone of mournful yet serene contemplation, which seems to
float ghostlike in the void between grief and joy. Reproach turns to
grateful acquiescence on his lips; the sting of blighted genius is
instantly annulled by the momentary enchantment of her smile, whose
worth he knows too well and remembers too soon:--
"And you smile indeed!
This hour has been an hour! Another smile?
If you would sit thus by me every night
I should work better, do you comprehend?
I mean that I should earn more, give you more."
The tragedy is for us, not for him: he regrets little, and would change
still less. The "silver-grey" lights of dreamy autumn eve were never
with more delicate insight rendered in terms of soul.
Suddenly these autumnal half-tones give way to the flash of torches in
the fragrant darkness of an Italian night. There is a scurry of feet
along a dark alley, a scuffle at the end, and the genial rotundity of
Brother Lippo Lippi's face, impudent, brilliant, insuppressible, leers
into the torchlight. _Fra Lippo Lippi_ is not less true and vivacious
than the _Andrea_, if less striking as an example of Browning's dramatic
power. Sarto is a great poetic creation; Browning's own robust
temperament provided hardly any aid in delineating the emaciated soul
whose gifts had thinned down to a morbid perfection of technique. But
this vigorous human creature, with the teeming brain, and the realist
eye, and the incorrigible ineptitude for the restraints of an insincere
clerical or other idealism, was a being to which Browning's heart went
out; and he even makes him the mouthpiece of literary ideas, which his
own portrait as here drawn aptly exemplifies. There is not much "soul"
in Lippo, but he has the hearty grasp of common things, of the world in
its business and its labour and its sport and its joys, which "edifies"
men more than artificial idealities designed expressly to "beat nature."
He "lends his mind out" and finds the answering mind in other men
instead of imposing one from without:--
"This world's no blot for us,
Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good:
To find its meaning is my meat and drink."
"Ay, but," objects the Prior, "you do not instigate to prayer!" And it
is the prior and his system which for Lippi stand in the place of
Andrea's soulless wife. Lucrezia's illusive beauty lured his soul to its
doom; and Lippo, forced, as a child of eight, to renounce the world and
put on the cassock he habitually disgraced, triumphantly cast off the
incubus of a sham spirituality which only tended to obscure what was
most spiritual in himself. He was fortunate in the poet who has drawn
his portrait so superbly in his sitter's own style.
These two monologues belong to the most finished achievements of
Browning. But we should miss much of the peculiar quality of his mind,
as well as a vivid glimpse into the hope-and-fear-laden atmosphere of
Tuscany in the early 'Fifties, if we had not that quaint heterogeneous
causerie called _Old Pictures in Florence_. There is passion in its
grotesqueness and method in its incoherence; for the old painters,
whose apologies he is ostensibly writing, with their imperfect
achievement and their insuppressible idealism, sounded a congenial note
to men whose eyes were bent incessantly upon the horizon waiting for the
invisible to come into play, and Florence looked for her completion as
Giotto's unfinished campanile for its spire.
If Italy deepened Browning's hold upon the problems of painting, it
witnessed the beginnings of his equally characteristic achievement in
the kindred poetry of music. Not that his Italian life can have brought
any notable access of musical impressions to a man who had grown up
within easy reach of London concerts and operas. But England was a land
in which music was performed; Italy was a land in which it was made.
Verdi's "worst opera" could be heard in many places; but in Florence the
knowing spectator might see Verdi himself, at its close,
"Look through all the roaring and the wreaths
Where sits Rossini patient in his stall."
Italian music, with its facile melody and its relative poverty of ideas,
could not find so full a response in Browning's nature as Italian
painting. It had had its own gracious and tender youth; and Palestrina,
whom he contrasts with the mountainous fuguists of "Saxe-Gotha" and
elsewhere, probably had for him the same kind of charm as the early
painters of Florence. Out of that "infancy," however, there had arisen
no "titanically infantine" Michelangelo, but a race of accomplished
_petits maîtres_, whose characteristic achievement was the opera of the
rococo age. A Goldsmith or a Sterne can make the light songs of their
contemporaries eloquent even to us of gracious amenities and cultivated
charm; but Browning, with the eternal April in his heart and brain,
heard in the stately measures it danced to, only the eloquence of a
dirge, penetrated with the sense of the mortality of such joy as theirs.
Byron had sung gaily of the gaieties of Venice; but the vivacious swing
of _Beppo_ was less to Browning's mind than the "cold music" of
Baldassare Galuppi, who made his world dance to the strains of its own
requiem, and fall upon dreamy suggestions of decay in the very climax of
the feast:--
"What? Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished,
sigh on sigh,
Told them something? Those suspensions, those solutions--'Must
we die?'
Those commiserating sevenths--"Life might last! We can but try!"
The musician himself has no such illusions; but his music is only a more
bitter echo:--
"Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned:
The soul, doubtless, is immortal--where a soul can be discerned."
And so the poet, in the self-consciousness of his immense vitality,
sweeps into the limbo of oblivion these dusty _débris_ of the past, with
no nearer approach to the romantic regret of a Malory for the glories of
old time or to Villon's awestruck contemplation of the mysterious
evanishment of storied beauty, than the half-contemptuous echo--
"'Dust and ashes!' So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold.
Dear dead women, with such hair too--what's become of all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old."
In the other music-poem of the Italian time it is not difficult to
detect a kindred mood beneath the half-disguise of rollicking rhymes and
whimsical comparisons. Once more Browning seems preoccupied with that in
music which lends expression to a soulless animation, a futile and
aimless vivacity. Only here it is the vivacity of the schools, not of
the ballroom. Yet some lines seem a very echo of that hollow joyless
mirth, for ever revolving on itself:--
"Est fuga, volvitur rota;
On we drift: where looms the dim port?"
The intertwining and conflicting melodies of the fugue echo the impotent
strife of jangling tongues, "affirming, denying, holding, risposting,
subjoining,"--the shuttle play of comment and gloze shrouding the light
of nature and truth:--
"Over our heads truth and nature--
Still our life's zigzags and dodges,
Ins and outs, weaving a new legislature--
God's gold just shining its last where that lodges,
Palled beneath man's usurpature."
But Browning was at heart too alive to the charm of this shuttle-play,
of these zigzags and dodges,--of zigzags and dodges of every kind,--not
to feel the irony of the attack upon this "stringing of Nature through
cobwebs"; when the organist breaks out, as the fugue's intricacy grows,
"But where's music, the dickens?" we hear Browning mocking the indignant
inquiries of similar purport so often raised by his readers. _Master
Hugues_ could only have been written by one who, with a childlike purity
of vision for truth and nature, for the shining of "God's gold" and the
glimpses of the "earnest eye of heaven," had also a keen perception and
instinctive delight in every filament of the web of human "legislature."
This double aspect of Browning's poetic nature is vividly reflected in
the memorable essay on Shelley which he wrote at Paris in 1851, as an
introduction to a series of letters since shown to have been forged. The
essay--unfortunately not included in his Works--is a document of
first-rate importance for the mind of Browning in the midst of his
greatest time; it is also by far the finest appreciation of Shelley
which had yet appeared. He saw in Shelley one who, visionary and
subjective as he was, had solved the problem which confronts every
idealist who seeks to grasp the visible world in its concrete actuality.
To Browning himself that problem presented itself in a form which tasked
far more severely the resources of poetic imagination, in proportion as
actuality bodied itself forth to his alert senses in more despotic
grossness and strength. Shelley is commonly thought to have evaded this
task altogether,--building his dream-world of cloud and cavern
loveliness remote from anything we know. It is Browning, the most
"actual" of poets, who insisted, half a century ago, on the
"practicality" of Shelley,--insisted, as it is even now not superfluous
to insist, on the fearless and direct energy with which he strove to
root his intuitions in experience. "His noblest and predominating
characteristic," he urges, to quote these significant words once more,
"is his simultaneous perception of Power and Love in the absolute, and
of Beauty and Good in the concrete, while he throws, from his poet's
station between both, swifter, subtler, and more numerous films for the
connection of each with each than have been thrown by any modern
artificer of whom I have knowledge; proving how, as he says--
"'The spirit of the worm beneath the sod
In love and worship blends itself with God.'"
Browning has nowhere else expounded so fully his ideas about the aims of
his own art. It lay in the peculiar "dramatic" quality of his mind to
express himself freely only in situations not his own. Hence, while he
does not altogether avoid the poet as a character, his poets are drawn
with a curious externality and detachment. It is in his musicians, his
painters, his grammarians, that the heart and passion of Browning the
poet really live. He is the poet of musicians and of painters, the poet
of lawyers and physicians and Rabbis, and of scores of callings which
never had a poet before; but he is not the poets' poet. In the
_Transcendentalism_, however, after tilting with gay irony at the fault
of over-much argument in poetry, which the world ascribed to his own, he
fixes in a splendid image the magic which it fitfully yet consummately
illustrates. The reading public which entertained any opinion about him
at all was inclined to take him for another Boehme, "with a tougher book
and subtler meanings of what roses say." A few knew that they had to
deal, not less, with a "stout Mage like him of Halberstadt," who
"with a 'look you' vents a brace of rhymes,
And in there breaks the sudden rose herself,
Over us, under, round us every side."
The portrait of the poet of Valladolid, on the other hand (_How it
Strikes a Contemporary_), is not so much a study of a poet as of popular
misconception and obtuseness. A grotesquely idle legend of the habits of
the "Corregidor" flourishes among the good folks of Valladolid; the
speaker himself, who desires to do him justice, is a plain, shrewd, but
unimaginative observer ("I never wrote a line of verse, did you?"), and
makes us acquainted with everything but the inner nature of the man. We
see the corregidor in the streets, in his chamber, at his frugal supper
and "decent cribbage" with his maid, but never at his verse. We see the
alert objective eye of this man with the "scrutinizing hat," who
"stood and watched the cobbler at his trade, ...
If any beat a horse, you felt he saw,
If any cursed a woman, he took note,"--
and all this, for Browning, went to the making of the poet, but we get
no inkling of the process itself. Browning had, in his obscure as in his
famous days, peculiar opportunities of measuring the perversities of
popular repute. Later on, in the heyday of his renown, he chaffed its
critical dispensers in his most uproarious vein in _Pacchiarotto_. The
_Popularity_ stanzas present us with a theory of it conveyed in that
familiar manner of mingled poetry and grotesqueness which was one of the
obstacles to his own.
There is, however, among these fifty men and women one true and sublime
poet,--the dying "Grammarian," who applies the alchemy of a lofty
imagination to the dry business of verbal erudition.
"He said, 'What's time? Leave Now for dogs and apes!
Man has Forever.'"
This is one of the half-dozen lyrics which enshrine in noble and
absolutely individual form the central core of Browning's passion and
thought. Even the verse, with its sequence of smooth-flowing iambics
broken by the leap of the dactyl, and the difficult double rhyme,
sustains the mood of victorious but not lightly won serenity of
soul--"too full for sound and foam." It is, among songs over the dead,
what _Rabbi ben Ezra_ and _Prospice_ are among the songs which face and
grapple with death; the fittest requiem to follow such deaths as those.
Like Ben Ezra, the Grammarian "trusts death," and stakes his life on the
trust:--
"He ventured neck or nothing--heaven's success
Found, or earth's failure:
'Wilt thou trust death or not?' He answered, 'Yes:
Hence with life's pale lure!'"
To ordinary eyes he spends his days grovelling among the dust and dregs
of erudition; but it is the grovelling of a builder at work upon a
fabric so colossally planned that life is fitly spent in laying the
foundations. He was made in the large mould of the gods,--born with "thy
face and throat, Lyric Apollo,"--and the disease which crippled and
silenced him in middle life could only alter the tasks on which he
wreaked his mind. And now that he is dead, he passes, as by right, to
the fellowship of the universe--of the sublime things of nature.
"Here--here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form,
Lightnings are loosened,
Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm,
Peace let the dew send!
Lofty designs must close in like effects:
Loftily lying,
Leave him--still loftier than the world suspects,
Living and dying."
VI.
_The Grammarian's Funeral_ achieves, in the terms and with the resources
of Browning's art, the problem of which he saw the consummate master in
Shelley,--that of throwing "films" for the connexion of Power and Love
in the abstract with Beauty and Good in the concrete, and finding a link
between the lowliest service or worship and the spirit of God. Such a
conception of a poet's crowning glory implied a peculiarly close
relation in Browning's view between poetry and religion, and in
particular with the religion which, above all others, glorified the
lowly. Here lay, in short, the supreme worth for him of the Christian
idea. "The revelation of God in Christ" was for him the consummate
example of that union of divine love with the world--"through all the
web of Being blindly wove"--which Shelley had contemplated in the
radiant glow of his poetry; accepted by the reason, as he wrote a few
years later, it solved "all problems in the earth and out of it." To
that solution Shelley seemed to Browning to be on the way, and his
incomplete grasp of it appealed to him more powerfully than did the
elaborate dogmatisms professedly based upon it. Shelley had mistaken
"Churchdom" for Christianity; but he was on the way, Browning was
convinced, to become a Christian himself. "I shall say what I
think,--had Shelley lived he would have finally ranged himself with the
Christians."
This emphatic declaration is of great importance for Browning's
intellectual history. He may have overlooked the immense barriers which
must have always divided Shelley from the Christian world of his time;
he may have overlooked also that the Christian thought of our time has
in some important points "ranged itself with" Shelley; so that the
Christianity which he might finally have adopted would have been
sufficiently unlike that which he assailed. But it is clear that for
Browning himself the essence of Christianity lay at this time in
something not very remote from what he revered as the essence of
Shelleyism--a corollary, as it were, ultimately implicit in his thought.
It was thus a deeper poetical rather than a religious or doctrinal
interest which drew Browning in these Italian years, again and again to
seek his revealing experiences of souls amid the eddies and convulsions,
the exultations and the agonies, brought into the world by the amazing
"revelation of God in Christ." It is true that we nowhere approach this
focus of interest, that we have no glimpse, through Browning's art, how
that "revelation" shaped itself in the first disciples, far less of
Christ himself. But that was at no time Browning's way of bringing to
expression what he deeply cared for. He would not trumpet forth truth in
his own person, or blazon it through the lips of the highest recognised
authority; he let it struggle up through the baffling density, or
glimmer through the conflicting persuasions of alien minds, and break
out in cries of angry wonder or involuntary recognition. And nowhere is
this method carried further than in the Christian poems of the Italian
time. The supreme musicians and painters he avoids, but Fra Lippo Lippi
and Master Hugues belong at least to the crafts whose secrets they
expound; while the Christian idea is set in a borrowed light caught from
the souls of men outside the Christian world--an Arab physician, a Greek
poet, a Jewish shepherd or rabbi, or from Christians yet farther from
the centre than these, like Blougram and the Abbe Deodaet. In method as
in conception these pieces are among the most Browningesque things that
Browning ever wrote. It is clear, however, that while his way of
handling these topics is absolutely his own, his peculiar concern with
them is new. The _Karshish_, the _Clean_, and the _Blougram_ have no
prototype or parallel among the poems of Browning's previous periods. In
the early Dramatic Lyrics and Romances, and in the plays, there is
exquisite rendering of religion, and also of irreligion; but the
religion is just the simple faith of Pippa or of Theocrite that "God's
in his world"; and the irreligion is the Humanist paganism of St
Praxed's, not so much hostile to Christianity as unconscious of it. No
single poem written before 1850 shows that acute interest in the
problems of Christian faith which constantly emerges in the work of this
and the following years. _Saul_, which might be regarded as signally
refuting this view, strikingly confirms it; the David of the first nine
sections, which alone were produced in 1845, being the naïve, devout
child, brother of Pippa and of Theocrite; the evolution of this harping
shepherd-boy into the illuminated prophet of Christ was the splendid
achievement of the later years.[33] And to all this more acutely
Christian work the _Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day_ (1850) served as a
significant prologue.
[Footnote 33: It is, indeed, clear, as has been seen, from Browning's
correspondence that a sequel of this kind was intended when the first
nine sections were published. The traditional legend of David would in
any case suggest so much. That the intention was not then executed is
just the significant fact.]
There can be little doubt that the devout Christian faith of his wife
was principally concerned in this new direction of his poetry. Yet we
may easily overstate both the nature of her influence and its extent.
She, as little as he, was a dogmatic Christian; both refused to put on,
in her phrase, "any of the liveries of the sects."[34] "The truth, as
God sees it, must be something so different from these opinions about
truth.... I believe in what is divine and floats at highest, in all
these different theologies,--and because the really Divine draws
together souls, and tends so to a unity, could pray anywhere and with
all sorts of worshippers, from the Sistine chapel to Mr Fox's, those
kneeling and those standing."[35] Yet she demurs, a little farther on in
the same letter, to both these extremes. "The Unitarians seem to me to
throw over what is most beautiful in the Christian Doctrine; but the
Formulists, on the other side, stir up a dust, in which it appears
excusable not to see." To which he replies (Aug. 17): "Dearest, I know
your very meaning, in what you said of religion, and responded to it
with my whole soul--what you express now is for us both, ... those are
my own feelings, my convictions beside--instinct confirmed by reason."
[Footnote 34: _E.B.B. to R.B._, 15th Aug. 1846.]
[Footnote 35: Ib.]
These words of Browning's seem to furnish the clue to the relation
between their minds in this matter. Their intercourse disturbed no
conviction on either side, for their convictions were identical. But her
intense personal devoutness undoubtedly quickened what was personal in
his belief, drew it into an atmosphere of keener and more emotional
consciousness, and in particular gave to that "revelation of God in
Christ" which they both regarded as what was "most beautiful in the
Christian doctrine," a more vital hold upon his intellectual and
imaginative life. In this sense, but only in this sense, his fervid
words to her (February 1846)--"I mean to ... let my mind get used to its
new medium of sight, seeing all things as it does through you; and then
let all I have done be the prelude and the real work begin"--were not
unfulfilled. No deep hiatus, such as this phrase suggests, divides the
later, as a whole, from the earlier work: the "dramatic" method, which
was among the elements of his art most foreign to her lyric nature,
established itself more and more firmly in his practice. But the letters
of 1845-46 show that her example was stimulating him to attempt a more
direct and personal utterance in poetry, and while he did not succeed,
or succeeded only "once and for one only," in evading his dramatic bias,
he certainly succeeded in making the dramatic form more eloquently
expressive of his personal faith.
This was peculiarly the case in the remarkable _Christmas-Eve and
Easter-Day_ (1850), the first-fruits of his married life, and the most
instinct of all his poems with the mingled literary and religious
influences which it brought. The influence of the ardent singer, which
impelled him to fuller self-expression, here concurred with that of the
devout but undogmatic Christian, which drew the problem of Christianity
nearer to the focus of his imagination and his thought. There is much
throughout which suggests that Browning was deliberately putting off the
habits and usages of his art, and reaching out this way and that towards
untried sources and avenues of expression. He lays hold for the first
time of the machinery of supernatural vision. Nothing that he had yet
done approached in boldness these Christmas and Easter apparitions of
the Lord of Love. They break in, unheralded, a startling but splendid
anomaly, upon his human and actual world. And the really notable thing
is that never had he drawn human actuality with so remorseless and even
brutal fidelity as just here. He seeks no legendary scene and atmosphere
like that of Theocrite's Rome, in which the angels who come and go, and
God who enjoys his "little human praise," would be missed if they were
not there; but opens the visions of the Empyrean upon modern Camberwell.
The pages in which Browning might seem, for once, to vie with the author
of the Apocalypse are interleaved with others in which, for once, he
seems to vie with Balzac or Zola. Of course this is intensely
characteristic of Browning. The quickened spiritual pulse which these
poems betoken betrays itself just in his more daringly assured embrace
of the heights and the depths of the universe, as communicating and
akin, prompting also that not less daring embrace of the extremes of
expression,--sublime imagery and rollicking rhymes,--as equally genuine
utterances of spiritual fervour,--
"When frothy spume and frequent sputter
Prove that the soul's depths boil in earnest."
These lines, and the great Shelleyan declaration that
"A loving worm within its clod
Were diviner than a loveless God,"
are the key to both poems, but peculiarly to the _Christmas-Day_, in
which they occur. We need not in any wise identify Browning with the
Christmas-Day visionary; but it is clear that what is "dramatic" in him
exfoliates, as it were, from a root of character and thought which are
altogether Browning's own. Browning is apparent in the vivacious critic
and satirist of religious extravagances, standing a little aloof from
all the constituted religions; but he is apparent also in the
imaginative and sympathetic student of religion, who divines the
informing spark of love in all sincere worship; and however far he may
have been from putting forward the little conventicle with its ruins of
humanity, its soul at struggle with insanity, as his own final choice,
that choice symbolised in a picturesque half-humorous way his own
profound preference for the spiritual good which is hardly won. He makes
the speaker choose the "earthen vessel" in spite of its "taints of
earth," because it brimmed with spiritual water; but in Browning himself
there was something which relished the spiritual water the more because
the earthen vessel was flawed.
Like _Christmas-Eve_, _Easter-Day_ is a dramatic study,--profound
convictions of the poet's own being projected as it were through forms
of religious consciousness perceptibly more angular and dogmatically
defined than his own. The main speaker is plainly not identical with the
narrator of _Christmas-Eve_, who is incidentally referred to as "our
friend." Their first beliefs may be much alike, but in the temper of
their belief they differ widely. The speaker in _Christmas-Eve_ is a
genial if caustic observer, submitting with robust tolerance to the
specks in the water which quenches his thirst; the speaker of
_Easter-Day_ is an anxious precisian, fearful of the contamination of
earth, and hoping that he may "yet escape" the doom of too facile
content. The problem of the one is, what to believe; the problem of the
other, how to believe; and each is helped towards a solution by a vision
of divine love. But the Easter-Day Vision conveys a sterner message than
that of _Christmas-Eve_. Love now illuminates, not by enlarging sympathy
and disclosing the hidden soul of good in error, but by suppressing
sympathies too diffusely and expansively bestowed. The Christmas Vision
makes humanity seem more divine; the Easter Vision makes the divine seem
less human. The hypersensitive moral nature of the Easter-Day speaker,
on the other hand, sees his own criminal darkness of heart and mind
before all else, and the divine visitation becomes a Last Judgment, with
the fierce vindictive red of the Northern Lights replacing the mild
glory of the lunar rainbows, and a stern and scornful cross-examination
the silent swift convoy of the winged robe. This difference of temper is
vividly expressed in the style. The rollicking rhymes, the "spume and
sputter" of the fervent soul, give place to a manner of sustained
seriousness and lyric beauty.
Yet the Easter-Day speaker probes deeper and raises more fundamental
issues. When the form of Christian belief to be adopted has been
settled, a certain class of believing minds, not the least estimable,
will still remain restive. Browning of all men felt impatient of every
nominal belief held as unassimilated material, not welded into the
living substance of character; and he makes his Easter-Day visionary
confound with withering irony the "faith" which seeks assurance in
outward "evidence,"--
"'Tis found,
No doubt: as is your sort of mind,
So is your sort of search: you'll find
What you desire."
Still less mercy has he for the dogmatic voluptuary who complacently
assumes the "all-stupendous tale" of Christianity to have been enacted
"to give our joys a zest,
And prove our sorrows for the best."
Upon these complacent materialisms and epicureanisms of the religious
character falls the scorching splendour of the Easter Vision, with its
ruthless condemnation of whatever is not glorified by Love, passing over
into the uplifting counter--affirmation, indispensable to Browning's
optimism, that--
"All thou dost enumerate
Of power and beauty in the world
The mightiness of Love was curled
Inextricably round about."
With all their nobility of feeling, and frequent splendour of
description, these twin poems cannot claim a place in Browning's work at
all corresponding to the seriousness with which he put them forward, and
the imposing imaginative apparatus called in. The strong personal
conviction which seems to have been striving for direct utterance,
checked without perfectly mastering his dramatic instincts and
habitudes, resulting in a beautiful but indecisive poetry which lacks
both the frankness of a personal deliverance and the plasticity of a
work of art. The speakers can neither be identified with the poet nor
detached from him; they are neither his mouthpieces nor his creations.
The daring supernaturalism seems to indicate that the old spell of
Dante, so keenly felt in the _Sordello_ days, had been wrought to new
potency by the magic of the life in Dante's Florence, and the subtler
magic of the love which he was presently to compare not obscurely to
that of Dante for Beatrice.[36] The divine apparitions have the ironic
hauteurs and sarcasms of Beatrice in the _Paradise_. Yet the comparison
brings into glaring prominence the radical incoherence of Browning's
presentment. In Dante's world all the wonders that he describes seem to
be in place; but the Christmas and Easter Visions are felt as intrusive
anachronisms in modern London, where the divinest influences are not
those which become palpable in visions, but those which work through
heart and brain.
[Footnote 36: _One Word More_.]
Browning probably felt this, for the _Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day_
stands in this respect alone in his work. But the idea of Christ as the
sign and symbol of the love which penetrates the universe lost none of
its hold upon his imagination; and it inspired some of the greatest
achievements of the _Men and Women_. It was under this impulse that he
now, at some time during the early Italian years, completed the splendid
torso of _Saul_. David's Vision of the Christ that is to be has as
little apparent relation to the quiet pastoralism of the earlier stanzas
as the Easter Vision to the common-sense reflections that preceded it.
But while this Vision abruptly bursts upon him, David's is the final
conquest of his own ardent intellect, under the impulse of a great human
task which lifts it beyond its experience, and calls out all its
powers. David is occupied with no speculative question, but with the
practical problem of saving a ruined soul; and neither logical ingenuity
nor divine suggestion, but the inherent spiritual significance of the
situation, urges his thought along the lonely path of prophecy. The love
for the old king, which prompts him to try all the hidden paths of his
soul in quest of healing, becomes a lighted torch by which he tracks out
the meaning of the world and the still unrevealed purposes of God; until
the energy of thought culminates in vision, and the Christ stands full
before his eyes. All that is supernatural in the _Saul_ is viewed
through the fervid atmosphere of David's soul. The magic of the
wonderful Nocturne at the close, where he feels his way home through the
appalled and serried gloom, is broken by no apparition; the whole earth
is alive and awake around him, and thrills to the quickening inrush of
the "new land"; but its light is the tingling emotion of the stars, and
its voice the cry of the little brooks; and the thronging cohorts of
angels and powers are unuttered and unseen.
Only less beautiful than Browning's pictures of spiritual childhood are
his pictures of spiritual maturity and old age. The lyric simplicity,
the naïve intensity which bear a David, a Pippa, a Pompilia without
effort into the region of the highest spiritual vision, appealed less
fully to his imagination than the more complex and embarrassed processes
through which riper minds forge their way towards the completed insight
of a Rabbi ben Ezra. In this sense, the great song of David has a
counterpart in the subtle dramatic study of the Arab physician Karshish.
He also is startled into discovery by a unique experience. But where
David is lifted on and on by a continuous tide of illuminating thought,
perfectly new and strange, but to which nothing in him opposes the
semblance of resistance, Karshish feels only a mysterious attraction,
which he hardly confesses, and which all the intellectual habits and
convictions of a life given up to study and thought seem to gainsay. No
touch of worldly motive belongs to either. The shepherd-boy is not more
single-souled than this devoted "picker up of learning's crumbs," who
makes nothing of perilous and toilsome journeys for the sake of his art,
who is threatened by hungry wild beasts, stripped and beaten by robbers,
arrested as a spy. At every step his quick scrutiny is rewarded by the
discovery of some new drug, mineral, or herb,--"things of price"--"blue
flowering borage, the Aleppo sort," or "Judaea's gum-tragacanth." But
Karshish has much of the temper of Browning himself: these
technicalities are the garb of a deep underlying mysticism. This man's
flesh so admirably made by God is yet but the earthly prison for "that
puff of vapour from his mouth, man's soul." The case of Lazarus, though
at once, as a matter of course, referred to the recognised medical
categories, yet strangely puzzles and arrests him, with a fascination
that will not be put by. This abstracted docile man of perfect physical
vigour, who heeds the approach of the Roman avenger as he would the
passing of a woman with gourds by the way, and is yet no fool, who seems
apathetic and yet loves the very brutes and the flowers of the
field,--compels his scrutiny, as a phenomenon of soul, and it is with
the eye of a psychological idealist rather than of a physician that he
interprets him:--
"He holds on firmly to some thread of life-- ...
Which runs across some vast distracting orb
Of glory on either side that meagre thread,
Which, conscious of, he must not enter yet--
The spiritual life around the earthly life:
The law of that is known to him as this,
His heart and brain move there, his feet stay here.
So is the man perplext with impulses
Sudden to start off crosswise, not straight on,
Proclaiming what is right and wrong across,
And not along, this black thread through the blaze--
'It should be' baulked by 'here it cannot be.'"
Lazarus stands where Paracelsus conceived that he himself stood: he
"knows God's secret while he holds the thread of life"; he lives in the
glare of absolute knowledge, an implicit criticism of the Paracelsian
endeavour to let in upon men the searing splendour of the unclouded day.
To Karshish, however, these very embarrassments--so unlike the knowing
cleverness of the spiritual charlatan--make it credible that Lazarus is
indeed no oriental Sludge, but one who has verily seen God. But then
came the terrible crux,--the pretension, intolerable to Semitic
monotheism, that God had been embodied in a man. The words scorch the
paper as he writes, and, like Ferishtah, he will not repeat them. Yet
he cannot escape the spell of the witness, and the strange thought
clings tenaciously to him, defying all the evasive shifts of a trained
mind, and suddenly overmastering him when his concern with it seems
finally at an end--when his letter is finished, pardon asked, and
farewell said--in that great outburst, startling and unforeseen yet not
incredible:--
"The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think?
So, the All-Great were the All-Loving too,--
So, through the thunder comes a human voice
Saying, 'O heart I made, a heart beats here!'
Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself!"
That words like these, intensely Johannine in conception, should seem to
start naturally from a mind which just before has shrunk in horror from
the idea of an approximation between God and that which He fashioned, is
an extraordinary _tour de force_ of dramatic portraiture. Among the
minor traits which contribute to it is one of a kind to which Browning
rarely resorts. The "awe" which invests Lazarus is heightened by a
mystic setting of landscape. The visionary scene of his first meeting
with Karshish, though altogether Browningesque in detail, is
Wordsworthian in its mysterious effect upon personality:--
"I crossed a ridge of short, sharp, broken hills
Like an old lion's cheek teeth. Out there came
A moon made like a face with certain spots
Multiform, manifold and menacing:
Then a wind rose behind me."
A less formidable problem is handled in the companion study of _Cleon_.
The Greek mind fascinated Browning, though most of his renderings of it
have the savour of a salt not gathered in Attica, and his choice of
types shows a strong personal bias. From the heroic and majestic elder
art of Greece he turns with pronounced preference to Euripides the human
and the positive, with his facile and versatile intellect, his agile
criticism, and his "warm tears." It is somewhat along these lines that
he has conceived his Greek poet of the days of Karshish, confronted,
like the Arab doctor, with the "new thing." As Karshish is at heart a
spiritual idealist, for all his preoccupation with drugs and stones, so
Cleon, a past-master of poetry and painting, is among the most positive
and worldly-wise of men. He looks back over a life scored with literary
triumphs, as Karshish over his crumbs of learning gathered at the cost
of blows and obloquy. But while Karshish has the true scholar's
dispassionate and self-effacing thirst for knowledge, Cleon measures his
achievements with the insight of an epicurean artist. He gathers in
luxuriously the incense of universal applause,--his epos inscribed on
golden plates, his songs rising from every fishing-bark at
nightfall,--and wistfully contrasts the vast range of delights which as
an artist he imagines, with the limited pleasures which as a man he
enjoys. The magnificent symmetry, the rounded completeness of his life,
suffer a serious deduction here, and his Greek sense of harmony suffers
offence as well as his human hunger for joy. He is a thorough realist,
and finds no satisfaction in contemplating what he may not possess. Art
itself suffers disparagement, as heightening this vain capacity of
contemplation:--
"I know the joy of kingship: well, thou art king!"
With great ingenuity this Greek realism is made the stepping-stone to a
conception of immortality as un-Greek as that of the Incarnation is
un-Semitic. Karshish shrank intuitively from a conception which
fascinated while it awed; to Cleon a future state in which joy and
capability will be brought again to equality seems a most plausible
supposition, which he only rejects with a sigh for lack of outer
evidence:--
"Zeus has not yet revealed it; and alas,
He must have done so, were it possible!"
The little vignette in the opening lines finely symbolises the brilliant
Greek decadence, as does the closing picture in Karshish the mystic dawn
of the Earth. Here the portico, flooded with the glory of a sun about to
set, profusely heaped with treasures of art; there the naked uplands of
Palestine, and the moon rising over jagged hills in a wind-swept sky.
In was in such grave _adagio_ notes as these that Browning chose to set
forth the "intimations of immortality" in the meditative wisdom and
humanity of heathendom. The after-fortunes of the Christian legend, on
the other hand, and the naïve ferocities and fantasticalities of the
medieval world provoked him rather to _scherzo_,--audacious and
inimitable _scherzo_, riotously grotesque on the surface, but with a
grotesqueness so penetrated and informed by passion that it becomes
sublime. _Holy-Cross Day_ and _The Heretic's Tragedy_ both culminate,
like _Karshish_ and _Clean_, in a glimpse of Christ. But here, instead
of being approached through stately avenues of meditation, it is wrung
from the grim tragedy of persecution and martyrdom. The Jews, packed
like rats to hear the sermon, mutter under their breath the sublime song
of Ben Ezra, one of the most poignant indictments of Christianity in the
name of Christ ever conceived:--
"We withstood Christ then? Be mindful how
At least we withstand Barabbas now!
Was our outrage sore? But the worst we spared,
To have called these--Christians, had we dared!
Let defiance of them pay mistrust of Thee,
And Rome make amends for Calvary!"
And John of Molay, as he burns in Paris Square, cries upon "the Name he
had cursed with all his life." The _Tragedy_ stands alone in literature;
Browning has written nothing more original. Its singularity springs
mainly from a characteristic and wonderfully successful attempt to
render several planes of emotion and animus through the same tale. The
"singer" looks on at the burning, the very embodiment of the robust,
savagely genial spectator, with a keen eye for all the sporting-points
in the exhibition,--noting that the fagots are piled to the right height
and are of the right quality--
"Good sappy bavins that kindle forthwith, ...
Larch-heart that chars to a chalk-white glow:"
and when the torch is clapt-to and he has "leapt back safe," poking
jests and gibes at the victim. But through this distorting medium we see
the soul of John himself, like a gleam-lit landscape through the whirl
of a storm; a strange weird sinister thing, glimmering in a dubious
light between the blasphemer we half see in him with the singer's eyes
and the saint we half descry with our own. Of explicit pathos there is
not a touch. Yet how subtly the inner pathos and the outward scorn are
fused in the imagery of these last stanzas:--
"Ha, ha, John plucketh now at his rose
To rid himself of a sorrow at heart!
Lo,--petal on petal, fierce rays unclose;
Anther on anther, sharp spikes outstart;
And with blood for dew, the bosom boils;
And a gust of sulphur is all its smell;
And lo, he is horribly in the toils
Of a coal-black giant flower of hell!
So, as John called now, through the fire amain,
On the Name, he had cursed with, all his life--
To the Person, he bought and sold again--
For the Face, with his daily buffets rife--
Feature by feature It took its place:
And his voice, like a mad dog's choking bark,
At the steady whole of the Judge's face--
Died. Forth John's soul flared into the dark."
None of these dramatic studies of Christianity attracted so lively an
interest as _Bishop Blougram's Apology._ It was "actual" beyond anything
he had yet done; it portrayed under the thinnest of veils an
illustrious Catholic prelate familiar in London society; it could be
enjoyed with little or no feeling for poetry; and it was amazingly
clever. Even Tennyson, his loyal friend but unwilling reader, excepted
it, on the last ground, from his slighting judgment upon _Men and Women_
at large. The figure of Blougram, no less than his discourse, was
virtually new in Browning, and could have come from him at no earlier
time. He is foreshadowed, no doubt, by a series of those accomplished
mundane ecclesiastics whom Browning at all times drew with so keen a
zest,--by Ogniben, the bishop in _Pippa Passes_, the bishop of St
Praxed's. But mundane as he is, he bears the mark of that sense of the
urgency of the Christian problem which since _Christmas-Eve and
Easter-Day_ had so largely and variously coloured Browning's work. It
occurred to none of those worldly bishops to justify their
worldliness,--it was far too deeply ingrained for that. But Blougram's
brilliant defence, enormously disproportioned as it is to the
insignificance of the attack, marks his tacit recognition of loftier
ideals than he professes. Like Cleon, he bears involuntary witness to
what he repudiates.
But there is much more in Blougram than this. The imposing personality
of Wiseman contained much to attract and conciliate a poet like
Browning, whose visionary idealism went along with so unaffected a
relish for the world and the talents which succeed there. A great
spiritual ruler, performing with congenial ease the enormous and varied
functions of his office, and with intellectual resources, when they were
discharged, to win distinction in scholarship, at chess, in society,
appealed powerfully to Browning's congenital delight in all strong and
vivid life. He was a great athlete, who had completely mastered his
circumstances and shaped his life to his will. Opposed to a man of this
varied and brilliant achievement, an ineffectual dilettante appeared a
sorry creature enough; and Browning, far from taking his part and
putting in his craven mouth the burning retorts which the reader in vain
expects, makes him play helplessly with olive-stones while the great
bishop rolls him out his mind, and then, as one cured and confuted,
betake himself to the life of humbler practical activity and social
service.
It is plain that the actual Blougram offered tempting points of contact
with that strenuous ideal of life which he was later to preach through
the lips of "Rabbi ben Ezra." Even what was most problematic in him, his
apparently sincere profession of an outworn creed, suggested the
difficult feat of a gymnast balancing on a narrow edge, or forcibly
holding his unbelief in check,--
"Kept quiet like the snake 'neath Michael's foot,
Who stands calm just because he feels it writhe."
But Browning marks clearly the element both of self-deception and
deliberate masquerade in Blougram's defence. He made him "say right
things and call them by wrong names." The intellectual athlete in him
went out to the intellectual athlete in the other, and rejoiced in
every equation he seemed to establish. He played, and made Blougram
play, upon the elusive resemblance between the calm of effortless
mastery and that of hardly won control.
The rich and varied poetry reviewed in the last three sections occupies
less than half of _Men and Women_, and leaves the second half of the
title unexplained. In that richer emotional atmosphere which breathes
from every line of his Italian work, the profound fulfilment of his
spiritual needs which he found in his home was the most vital and potent
element. His imaginative grasp of every kind of spiritual energy, of
every "incident of soul," was deepened by his new but incessant and
unqualified experience of love. His poetry focussed itself more
persistently than ever about those creative energies akin to love, of
which art in the fullest sense is the embodiment, and religion the
recognition. It would have been strange if the special form of
love-experience to which the quickening thrill was due had remained
untouched by it. In fact, however, the title of the volume is
significant as well as accurate; for Browning's poetry of the love
between men and women may be said, save for a few simple though
exquisite earlier notes, to begin with it.
VII.
The love-poetry of the _Men and Women_ volumes, as originally published,
was the most abundant and various, if not the most striking, part of its
contents. It was almost entirely transferred, in the collected edition
of his Poems issued in 1863, to other rubrics, to the _Dramatic
Lyrics_, of which it now forms the great bulk, and to the _Dramatic
Romances_. But of Browning's original "fifty men and women," nearly half
were lovers or occupied with love. Such fertility was natural enough in
the first years of a supremely happy marriage, crowning an early manhood
in which love of any kind had, for better or worse, played hardly any
part at all. Yet almost nothing in these beautiful and often brilliant
lyrics is in any strict sense personal. The biographer who searches them
for traits quivering with intimate experience searches all but in vain.
Browning's own single and supreme passion touched no fountain of song,
such as love sets flowing in most poets and in many who are not poets:
even the memorable months of 1845-46 provoked no Sonnets "_to_ the
Portuguese." His personal story impresses itself upon his poetry only
through the preoccupation which it induces with the love-stories of
other people, mostly quite unlike his own. The white light of his own
perfect union broke from that prismatic intellect of his in a poetry
brilliant with almost every other hue. No English poet of his century,
and few of any other, have made love seem so wonderful; but he
habitually takes this wonder bruised and jostled in the grip of
thwarting conditions. In his way of approaching love Browning strangely
blends the mystic's exaltation with the psychologist's cool penetrating
scrutiny of its accompanying phenomena, its favourable or impeding
conditions. The keen analytic accent of Paracelsus mingles with the
ecstatic unearthly note of Shelley. "Love is all" might have served as
the text for the whole volume of Browning's love-poetry; but the text is
wrought out with an amazingly acute vision for all the things which are
not love. "Love triumphing over the world" might have been the motto for
most of the love-poems in _Men and Women_; but some would have had to be
assigned to the opposite rubric, "The world triumphing over love."
Sometimes Love's triumph is, for Browning, the rapture of complete
union, for which all outer things exist only by subduing themselves to
its mood and taking its hue; sometimes it is the more ascetic and
spiritual triumph of an unrequited lover in the lonely glory of his
love.
The triumph of Browning's united lovers has often a superb Elizabethan
note of defiance. Passion obliterates for them the past and throws a
mystically hued veil over Nature. The gentle Romantic sentiments hardly
touch the fresh springs of their emotion. They may meet and woo "among
the ruins," as Coleridge met and wooed his Genevieve "beside the ruined
tower"; but their song does not, like his, "suit well that ruin old and
hoary," but, on the contrary, tramples with gay scorn upon the lingering
memories of the ruined city,--a faded pageant yoked to its triumphal
car.
"Oh heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns!
Earth's returns
For whole centuries of folly, noise, and sin!
Shut them in,
With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!
Love is best."
Another lover, in _My Star_, pours lyric disdain upon his friends for
whose purblind common-sense vision the star which to him "dartled red
and blue," now a bird, now a flower, was just--a star. More finely
touched than either of these is _By the Fireside_. After _One Word
More_, to which it is obviously akin, it is Browning's most perfect
rendering of the luminous inner world, all-sufficing and self-contained,
of a rapturous love. The outer world is here neither thrust aside nor
fantastically varied; it is drawn into the inner world by taking its hue
and becoming the confidant and executant of its will. A landscape so
instinct with the hushed awe of expectation and with a mystic tenderness
is hardly to be found elsewhere save in _Christabel_,--
"We two stood there with never a third,
But each by each, as each knew well:
The sights we saw and the sounds we heard,
The lights and the shades made up a spell,
Till the trouble grew and stirred.
* * * * *
A moment after, and hands unseen
Were hanging the night around us fast;
But we knew that a bar was broken between
Life and life: we were mixed at last
In spite of the mortal screen.
The forests had done it; there they stood;
We caught for a moment the powers at play:
They had mingled us so, for once and good,
Their work was done--we might go or stay,
They relapsed to their ancient mood."
_By the Fireside_ is otherwise memorable as portraying with whatever
disguise the Italian home-life of the poet and his wife. The famous
description of "the perfect wife" as she sat
"Musing by firelight, that great brow
And the spirit-small hand propping it,
Yonder, my heart knows how"--
remain among the most living portraitures of that exquisite but fragile
form. Yet neither here nor elsewhere did Browning care to dwell upon the
finished completeness of the perfect union. His intellectual thirst for
the problematic, and his ethical thirst for the incomplete, combined to
hurry him away to the moments of suspense, big with undecided or
unfulfilled fate. The lover among the ruins is awaiting his mistress;
the rapturous expectancy of another waiting lover is sung in _In Three
Days_. And from the fireside the poet wanders in thought from that
highest height of love which he has won to the mystic hour before he won
it, when the elements out of which his fate was to be resolved still
hung apart, awaiting the magical touch, which might never be given:--
"Oh moment, one and infinite!
The water slips o'er stock and stone;
The West is tender, hardly bright:
How grey at once is the evening grown--
One star, its chrysolite!
* * * * *
Oh, the little more, and how much it is!
And the little less, and what worlds away!
How a sound shall quicken content to bliss,
Or a breath suspend the blood's best play,
And life be a proof of this!"
But the poet who lingered over these moments of suspended fate did not
usually choose the harmonious solution of them. The "little less" of
incomplete response might "suspend the breath" of the lover, but it was
an inexhaustible inspiration to the poet. It provokes, for instance, the
delicate symbolism of the twin lyrics _Love in a Life_ and _Life in a
Love_, variations on the same theme--vain pursuit of the averted
face--the one a _largo_, sad, persistent, dreamily hopeless; the other
impetuous, resolute, glad. The dreamier mood is elaborated in the
_Serenade at the Villa_ and _One Way of Love_. A few superbly
imaginative phrases bring the Italian summer night about us, sultry,
storm-shot, starless, still,--
"Life was dead, and so was light."
The Serenader himself is no child of Italy but a meditative Teuton, who,
Hamlet-like, composes for his mistress the answer which he would not
have her give. The lover in _One Way of Love_ is something of a Teuton
too, and has thoughts which break the vehemence of the impact of his
fate. But there is a first moment when he gasps and knits himself closer
to endure--admirably expressed in the sudden change to a brief trochaic
verse; then the grim mood is dissolved in a momentary ecstasy of
remembrance or of idea--and the verse, too, unfolds and releases itself
in sympathy:--
"She will not hear my music? So!
Break the string; fold music's wing;
Suppose Pauline had bade me sing!"
Or, instead of this systole and diastole alternation, the glory and the
pang are fused and interpenetrated in a continuous mood. Such a mood
furnishes the spiritual woof of one of Browning's most consummate and
one of his loveliest lyrics, _The Last Ride Together_ and _Evelyn Hope_.
"How are we to take it?" asks Mr Fotheringham of the latter. "As the
language of passion resenting death and this life's woeful
incompleteness? or as a prevision of the soul in a moment of intensest
life?" The question may be asked; yet the passion of regret which glows
and vibrates through it is too suffused with exalted faith in a final
recovery to find poignant expression. This lyric, with its taking
melody, has delighted thousands to whom Browning is otherwise "obscure,"
partly because it appeals with naïve audacity at once to Romantic and to
Christian sentiment--combining the faith in love's power to seal its
object for ever as its own with the Christian faith in personal
immortality--a personal immortality in which there is yet marrying and
giving in marriage, as Romance demands. _The Last Ride Together_ has
attracted a different audience. Its passion is of a rarer and more
difficult kind, less accessible to the love and less flattering to the
faith of common minds. This lover dreams of no future recovery of more
than he still retains; his love, once for all, avails nothing; and the
secure faith of Evelyn's lover, that "God creates the love to reward the
love," is not his. His mistress will never "awake and remember and
understand." But that dead form he is permitted to clasp; and in the
rapture of that phantom companionship passion and thought slowly
transfigure and glorify his fate, till from the lone limbo of outcast
lovers he seems to have penetrated to the innermost fiery core of life,
which art and poetry grope after in vain--to possess that supreme moment
of earth which, prolonged, is heaven.
"What if heaven be that, fair and strong
At life's best, with our eyes upturned
Whither life's flower is first discerned,
We, fixed so, ever should so abide?
What if we still ride on, we two
With life for ever old yet new,
Changed not in kind but in degree,
The instant made eternity,--
And heaven just prove that I and she
Ride, ride together, for ever ride?"
The "glory of failure" is with Browning a familiar and inexhaustible
theme; but its spiritual abstraction here flushes with the human glory
of possession; the æthereal light and dew are mingled with breath and
blood; and in the wonderful long-drawn rhythm of the verse we hear the
steady stride of the horses as they bear their riders farther and
farther in to the visionary land of Romance.
It is only the masculine lover whom Browning allows thus to get the
better of unreturned love. His women have no such _remedia amoris_;
their heart's blood will not transmute into the ichor of poetry. It is
women almost alone who ever utter the poignancy of rejected love; in
them it is tragic, unreflecting, unconsolable, and merciless; while
something of his own elastic buoyancy of intellect, his supple optimism,
his analytic, dissipating fancy, infused itself into his portrayal of
the grief-pangs of his own sex. This distinction is very apparent in the
group of lyrics which deal with the less complete divisions of love. An
almost oppressive intensity of womanhood pulses in _A Woman's Last Word,
In a Year_, and _Any Wife to Any Husband_: the first, with its depth of
self-abasement and its cloying lilting melody, trembles, exquisite as it
is, on the verge of the "sentimental." There is a rarer, subtler pathos
in _Two in the Campagna_. The outward scene finds its way to his senses,
and its images make a language for his mood, or else they break sharply
across it and sting it to a cry. He feels the Campagna about him, with
its tranced immensity lying bare to heaven:--
"Silence and passion, joy and peace,
An everlasting wash of air-- ...
Such life here, through such length of hours,
Such miracles performed in play,
Such primal naked forms of flowers,
Such letting nature have her way
While heaven looks from its towers;"
and in the presence of that large sincerity of nature he would fain also
"be unashamed of soul" and probe love's wound to the core. But the
invisible barriers will not be put aside or transcended, and in the
midst of that "infinite passion" there remain "the finite hearts that
yearn." Or else he wakes after the quarrel in the blitheness of a bright
dawn:--
"All is blue again
After last night's rain,
And the South dries the hawthorn spray.
Only, my love's away!
I'd as lief that the blue were grey."
The disasters of love rarely, with Browning, stir us very deeply. His
temperament was too elastic, his intellect too resourceful, to enter
save by artificial processes into the mood of blank and hopeless grief.
Tragedy did not lie in his blood, and fortune--kinder to the man than to
the poet--had as yet denied him, in love, the "baptism of sorrow" which
has wrung immortal verse from the lips of frailer men. It may even be
questioned whether all Browning's poetry of love's tragedy will live as
long as a few stanzas of Musset's _Nuits_,--bare, unadorned verses,
devoid of fancy or wit, but intense and penetrating as a cry:--
"Ce soir encor je t'ai vu m'apparaître,
C'était par une triste nuit.
L'aile des vents battait à ma fenêtre;
J'étais seul, courbé sur mon lit.
J'y regardais une place chérie,
Tiède encor d'un baiser brûlant;
Et je songeais comme la femme oublie,
Et je sentais un lambeau de ma vie,
Qui se déchirait lentement.
Je rassemblais des lettres de la veille,
Des cheveux, des débris d'amour.
Tout ce passé me criait à l'oreille
Ses éternels serments d'un jour.
Je contemplais ces réliques sacrées,
Qui me faisaient trembler la main:
Larmes du coeur par le coeur devorées,
Et que les yeux qui les avaient pleurées
Ne reconnaîtront plus demain!"[37]
[Footnote 37: Musset, _Nuit de décembre_.]
The same quest of the problematic which attracted Browning to the poetry
of passion repelled or unrequited made him a curious student also of
fainter and feebler "wars of love"--embryonic or simulated forms of
passion which stood still farther from his personal experience. _A Light
Woman, A Pretty Woman_, and _Another Way of Love_ are refined studies in
this world of half tones. But the most important and individual poem of
this group is _The Statue and the Bust_, an excellent example of the
union in Browning of the Romantic temper with a peculiar mastery of
everything in human nature which traverses and repudiates Romance. The
duke and the lady are simpler and slighter Hamlets--Hamlets who have no
agonies of self-questioning and self-reproach; intervening in the long
pageant of the famous lovers of romantic tradition with the same
disturbing shock as he in the bead-roll of heroic avengers. The poet's
indignant denunciation of his lovers at the close, apparently for not
violating the vows of marriage, is puzzling to readers who do not
appreciate the extreme subtlety of Browning's use of figure. He was at
once too much and too little of a casuist,--too habituated to fine
distinctions and too unaware of the pitfalls they often present to
others,--to understand that in condemning his lovers for wanting the
energy to commit a crime he could be supposed to imply approval of the
crime they failed to commit.
Lastly, in the outer periphery of his love poetry belong his rare and
fugitive "dreams" of love. _Women and Roses_ has an intoxicating
swiftness and buoyancy of music. But there is another and more sinister
kind of love-dream--the dream of an unloved woman. Such a dream, with
its tragic disillusion, Browning painted in his poignant and original
_In a Balcony_. It is in no sense a drama, but a dramatic incident in
three scenes, affecting the fates of three persons, upon whom the entire
interest is concentrated. The three vivid and impressive character-heads
stand out with intense and minute brilliance from a background
absolutely blank and void. Though the scene is laid in a court and the
heroine is a queen, there is no bustle of political intrigue, no
conflict between the rival attractions of love and power, as in
_Colombe's Birthday_. Love is the absorbing preoccupation of this
society, the ultimate ground of all undertakings. There is vague talk of
diplomatic victories, of dominions annexed, of public thanksgivings; but
the statesman who has achieved all this did it all to win the hand of a
girl, and the aged queen whom he has so successfully served has secretly
dreamed all the time, though already wedded, of being his. For a
brilliant young minister to fail to make love to his sovereign, in spite
of her grey hairs and the marriage law, is a kind of high treason. In
its social presuppositions this community belongs to a world as
visionary as the mystic dream-politics of M. Maeterlinck. But, those
presuppositions granted, everything in it has the uncompromising
clearness and persuasive reality that Browning invariably communicates
to his dreams. The three figures who in a few hours taste the height of
ecstasy and then the bitterness of disillusion or severance, are drawn
with remarkable psychologic force and truth. For all three love is the
absorbing passion, the most real thing in life, scornfully contrasted
with the reflected joys of the painter or the poet. Norbert's noble
integrity is of a kind which mingles in duplicity and intrigue with
disastrous results; he is too invincibly true to himself easily to act a
part; but he can control the secret hunger of his heart and give no
sign, until the consummate hour arrives when he may
"resume
Life after death (it is no less than life,
After such long unlovely labouring days)
And liberate to beauty life's great need
O' the beautiful, which, while it prompted work,
Suppress'd itself erewhile."
In the ecstasy of release from that suppression, every tree and flower
seems to be an embodiment of the harmonious freedom he had so long
foregone, as Wordsworth, chafing under his unchartered freedom, saw
everywhere the willing submission to Duty. Even
"These statues round us stand abrupt, distinct,
The strong in strength, the weak in weakness fixed,
The Muse for ever wedded to her lyre,
Nymph to her fawn, and Silence to her rose:
See God's approval on his universe!
Let us do so--aspire to live as these
In harmony with truth, ourselves being true!"
But it is the two women who attract Browning's most powerful handling.
One of them, the Queen, has hardly her like for pity and dread. A
"lavish soul" long starved, but kindling into the ecstasy of girlhood at
the seeming touch of love; then, as her dream is shattered by the
indignant honesty of Norbert, transmuted at once into the daemonic
Gudrun or Brynhild, glaring in speechless white-heat and implacable
frenzy upon the man who has scorned her proffered heart and the hapless
girl he has chosen.[38] Between these powerful, rigid, and simple
natures stands Constance, ardent as they, but with the lithe and
palpitating ardour of a flame. She is concentrated Romance. Her love is
an intense emotion; but some of its fascination lies in its secrecy,--
"Complots inscrutable, deep telegraphs,
Long-planned chance meetings, hazards of a look";
she shrinks from a confession which "at the best" will deprive their
love of its spice of danger and make them even as their "five hundred
openly happy friends." She loves adventure, ruse, and stratagem for
their own sake. But she is also romantically generous, and because she
"owes this withered woman everything," is eager to sacrifice her own
hopes of happiness.
[Footnote 38: An anecdote to which Prof. Dowden has lately called
attention (_Browning_, p. 66) describes Browning in his last years as
demurring to the current interpretation of the _dénoûment_. Some one had
remarked that it was "a natural sequence that the guard should be heard
coming to take Norbert to his doom." "'Now I don't quite think that,'
answered Browning, _as if he were following out the play as a
spectator_. 'The queen has a large and passionate temperament.... She
would have died by a knife in her heart. The guard would have come to
carry away her dead body.'" The catastrophe here suggested is
undoubtedly far finer tragedy. But we cannot believe that this was what
Browning originally meant to happen. That Norbert and Constance expect
"doom" is obvious, and the queen's parting "glare" leaves the reader in
no doubt that they are right. They may, nevertheless, be wrong; but
what, then, is meant by the coming of the guard, and the throwing open
of the doors? The queen has in any case not died on the stage, for she
had left it; and if she died outside, how should they have come "to
carry away her dead body"?]
Were it not for its unique position in Browning's poetry, one might well
be content with a passing tribute to the great love canticle which
closes _Men and Women_--the crown, as it is in a pregnant sense the
nucleus, of the whole. But here, for "once, and only once, and for one
only," not only the dramatic instinct, which habitually coloured all his
speech, but the reticence which so hardly permitted it to disclose his
most intimate personal emotion, were deliberately overcome--overcome,
however, only in order, as it were, to explain and justify their more
habitual sway. All the poetry in it is reached through the endeavour to
find speaking symbols for a love that cannot be told. The poet is a high
priest, entering with awed steps the sanctuary which even he cannot
tread without desecration save after divesting himself of all that is
habitual and of routine,--even the habits of his genius and the routine
of his art. Unable to divest himself of his poetry altogether, for he
has no other art, he lays aside his habitual dramatic guise to speak,
for once, not as Lippo, Roland, or Andrea, but "in his true person." And
he strips off the veil of his art and speaks in his own person only to
declare that speech is needless, and to fall upon that exquisite symbol
of an esoteric love uncommunicated and incommunicable to the
apprehension of the world,--the moon's other face with all its "silent
silver lights and darks," undreamed of by any mortal. "Heaven's gift
takes man's abatement," and poetry itself may only hint at the divinity
of perfect love. The _One Word More_ was written in September 1855,
shortly before the publication of the volume it closed, as the old moon
waned over the London roofs. Less than six years later the "moon of
poets" had passed for ever from his ken.