AFTERMATH.
Which wins--Earth's poet or the Heavenly Muse?
--_Aristophanes' Apology_.
The publication of _The Ring and the Book_ marks in several ways a
turning-point in Browning's career. Conceived and planned before the
tragic close of his married life, and written during the first desolate
years of bereavement, it is, more than any other of his greater poems,
pervaded by his wife's spirit, a crowning monument to his Lyric Love.
But it is also the last upon which her spirit left any notable trace.
With his usual extraordinary recuperative power, Browning re-moulded the
mental universe which her love had seemed to complete, and her death
momentarily to shatter, into a new, lesser completeness. He lived in the
world, and frankly "liked earth's way," enjoying the new gifts of
friendship and of fame which the years brought in rich measure. The
little knot of critics whose praise even of _Men and Women_ and
_Dramatis Personæ_; had been little more than a cry in the wilderness,
found their voices lost in the chorus of admiration which welcomed the
story of Pompilia. Some stout recalcitrants, it is true, like Edward
FitzGerald, held their ground. And while the tone of even hostile
criticism became respectful, enough of it remained to provide objects,
seven years later, for the uproarious chaff of _Pacchiarotto_.
From 1869 to 1871 Browning published nothing, and he appears also to
have written nothing beyond a sonnet commemorating Helen, the mother of
Lord Dufferin (dated April 26, 1870), almost the only set of fourteen
lines in his works of which not one proclaims his authorship. But the
decade which followed was more prolific than any other ten years of his
life. Between 1871 and 1878 nine volumes in swift succession allured,
provoked, or bewildered the reading world. Everything was now planned on
a larger scale; the vast compass and boundless volubility of _The Ring
and the Book_ became normal. He gave free rein to his delight in
intricate involutions of plot and of argument; the dramatic monologue
grew into novels in verse like _Red-cotton Night-cap Country_ and _The
Inn Album_; and the "special pleaders," Hohenstiel and Juan, expounded
their cases with a complexity of apparatus unapproached even by Sludge.
A certain relaxation of poetic nerve is on the whole everywhere
apparent, notwithstanding the prodigal display of crude intellectual
power. His poetic alchemy is less potent, the ore of sordid fact remains
sordid still. Not that his high spirituality is insecure, his heroic
idealism dimmed; but they coalesce less intimately with the alert wit
and busy intelligence of the mere "clever man," and seek their nutriment
and material more readily in regions of legend and romance, where the
transmuting work of imagination has been already done. It is no accident
that his lifelong delight in the ideal figures of Greek tragedy, so
unlike his own creations, became in these years for the first time an
effective source of poetry. The poems of this decade form thus an odd
motley series--realism and romance interlaced but hardly blent,
Aeschylus and Euripides, the divine helper Herakles and the glorious
embodiment of the soul of Athens, Balaustion, emerging and re-emerging
after intervals occupied by the chicaneries of Miranda or the Elder Man.
No inept legend for the Browning of this decade is the noble song of
Thamuris which his Aristophanes half mockingly declaimed. "Earth's poet"
and "the heavenly Muse" are not allies, and they at times go different
ways.
_Hervé Riel_ (published March 1871) is less characteristic of Browning
in purely literary quality than in the hearty helpfulness which it
celebrates, and the fine international chivalry by which it was
inspired. The French disasters moved him deeply; he had many personal
ties with France, and was sharing with his dearest French friend, Joseph
Milsand, as near neighbour, a primitive villeggiatura in a Norman
fishing-village when the stupendous catastrophe of Sedan broke upon
them. Sympathy with the French sufferers induced Browning to do
violence to a cherished principle by offering the poem to George Smith
for publication in _The Cornhill_. Most of its French readers doubtless
heard of Hervé Riel, as well as of Robert Browning, for the first time.
His English readers found it hard to classify among the naval ballads of
their country, few of which had been devoted to celebrating the exploits
of foreign sailors, or the deliverance of hostile fleets. But they
recognised the poet of _The Ring and the Book_, Hervé has no touch of
Browning's "philosophy." He is none the less a true kinsman, in his
homely fashion, of Caponsacchi,--summoned in a supreme emergency for
which the appointed authorities have proved unequal.
A greater tale of heroic helpfulness was presently to engage him.
_Balaustion's Adventure_ was, as the charming dedication tells us, the
most delightful of May-month amusements; but in the splendid proem which
enshrines the story of Herakles and Alkestis, we still feel the thrill
of the deadly conflict; the agony of France may be partly divined in the
agony of Athens. Thirty years before, he had shown, in the noble
fragmentary "prologue" to a _Hippolytus (Artemis Prologizes)_, a command
of the majestic, reticent manner of Greek tragedy sufficiently
remarkable in one whose natural instincts of expression were far more
Elizabethan than Greek. The incongruity of Greek dramatic methods with
his own seems to have speedily checked his progress; but Euripides, the
author of the Greek _Hippolytus_, retained a peculiar fascination for
him, and it was on another Euripidean drama that he now, in the fulness
of his powers, set his hand. The result certainly does not diminish our
sense of the incongruity. Keenly as he admired the humanity and pathos
of Euripides, he challenges comparison with Euripides most successfully
when he goes completely his own way. He was too robustly original to
"transcribe" well, and his bold emphatic speech, curbed to the task of
reproducing the choice and pregnant sobriety of Attic style, is apt to
eliminate everything but the sobriety. The "transcribed" Greek is often
yet flatter than "literal" versions of Greek verse are wont to be, and
when Browning speaks in his own person the style recovers itself with a
sudden and vehement bound, like a noble wild creature abruptly released
from restraint. Among the finest of these "recoveries" are the bursts of
description which Balaustion's enthusiasm interjects between the
passages of dialogue. Such is the magnificent picture of the coming of
Herakles. In the original he merely enters as the chorus end their song,
addressing them with the simple inquiry, "Friends, is Admetos haply
within?" to which the chorus reply, like civil retainers, "Yes,
Herakles, he is at home." Browning, or his Balaustion, cannot permit the
mighty undoer of the tragic harms to come on in this homely fashion. A
great interrupting voice rings suddenly through the dispirited
maunderings of Admetos' house-folk; and the hearty greeting, "My hosts
here!" thrills them with the sense that something good and opportune is
at hand:--
"Sudden into the midst of sorrow leapt,
Along with the gay cheer of that great voice
Hope, joy, salvation: Herakles was here!
Himself o' the threshold, sent his voice on first
To herald all that human and divine
I' the weary, happy face of him,--half god,
Half man, which made the god-part god the more."
The heroic helpfulness of Herakles is no doubt the chief thing for
Browning in the story. The large gladness of spirit with which he
confronts the meticulous and perfunctory mourning of the stricken
household reflected his own habitual temper with peculiar vividness. But
it is clear that the Euripidean story contained an element which
Browning could not assimilate--Admetos' acceptance of Alkestis'
sacrifice. To the Greek the action seemed quite in order; the persons
who really incurred his reproof were Admetos' parents, who in spite of
their advanced years refused to anticipate their approaching death in
their son's favour. Browning cannot away with an Admetos who, from sheer
reluctance to die, allowed his wife to suffer death in his place; and he
characteristically suggests a version of the story in which its issues
are determined from first to last, and on both sides, by
self-sacrificing love. Admetos is now the large-minded king who grieves
to be called away before his work for his people is done. Alkestis
seeks, with Apollo's leave, to take his place, so that her lord may live
and carry out the purposes of his soul,--
"Nor let Zeus lose the monarch meant in thee."
But Admetos will not allow this; for Alkestis is as spirit to his flesh,
and his life without her would be but a passive death. To which "pile of
truth on truth" she rejoins by adding the "one truth more," that his
refusal of her sacrifice would be in effect a surrender of the supreme
duty laid upon him of reigning a righteous king,--that this life-purpose
of his is above joy and sorrow, and the death which she will undergo for
his and its sake, her highest good as it is his. And in effect, her
death, instead of paralysing him, redoubles the vigour of his soul, so
that Alkestis, living on in a mind made better by her presence, has not
in the old tragic sense died at all, and finds her claim to enter Hades
rudely rejected by "the pensive queen o' the twilight," for whom death
meant just to die, and wanders back accordingly to live once more by
Admetos' side. Such the story became when the Greek dread of death was
replaced by Browning's spiritual conception of a death glorified by
love. The pathos and tragic forces of it were inevitably enfeebled; no
Herakles was needed to pluck this Alkestis from the death she sought,
and the rejection of her claim to die is perilously near to Lucianic
burlesque. But, simply as poetry, the joyous sun-like radiance of the
mighty spoiler of death is not unworthily replaced by the twilight
queen, whose eyes
"lingered still
Straying among the flowers of Sicily,"
absorbed in the far memory of the life that Herakles asserted and
enforced,--until, at Alkestis' summons, she
"broke through humanity
Into the orbed omniscience of a god."
From his idealised Admetos Browning passed with hardly a pause to
attempt the more difficult feat of idealising a living sovereign.
Admetos was ennobled by presenting him as a political idealist; the
French Emperor, whose career had closed at Sedan, was in some degree
qualified for a parallel operation by the obscurity which still invested
the inmost nature of that well-meaning adventurer. Browning had watched
Louis Napoleon's career with mixed feelings; he had resented the _coup
d'état_, and still more the annexation of Savoy and Nice after the war
of 1859. But he had never shared the bitter animus which prevailed at
home. He was equally far, no doubt, from sharing the exalted
hero-worship which inspired his wife's _Poems before Congress_. The
creator of _The Italian in England_, of Luigi, and Bluphocks, could not
but recognise the signal services of Napoleon to the cause of Italian
freedom, however sharply he condemned the hard terms on which Italy had
been compelled to purchase it. "It was a great action; but he has taken
eighteenpence for it--which is a pity";[57] it was on the lines of this
epigram, already quoted, that eleven years later he still interpreted
the fallen emperor, and that he now completed, as it would seem, the
abandoned poem of 1860. He saw in him a man of generous impulses doubled
with a _borné_ politician, a ruler of genuine Liberal and even
democratic proclivities, which the timid calculations of a second-rate
opportunist reduced to a contemptible travesty of Liberalism. The
shifting standpoints of such a man are reproduced with superfluous
fidelity in his supposed Defence, which seems designed to be as elusive
and impalpable as the character it reflects. How unlike the brilliant
and precise realism of Blougram, sixteen years before! The upcurling
cloud-rings from Hohenstiel's cigar seem to symbolise something
unsubstantial and evasive in the whole fabric. The assumptions we are
invited to form give way one after another. Leicester Square proves the
"Residenz," the "bud-mouthed arbitress" a shadowy memory, the discourse
to a friendly and flattered hearer a midnight meditation. And there is a
like fluctuation of mood. Now he is formally justifying his past, now
musing, half wistfully, half ironically, over all that he might have
been and was not. At the outset we see him complacently enough
intrenched within a strong position, that of the consistent opportunist,
who made the best of what he found, not a creator but a conservator,
"one who keeps the world safe." But he has ardent ideas and
aspirations. The freedom of Italy has kindled his imagination, and in
the grandest passage of the poem he broods over his frustrate but
deathless dream:--
"Ay, still my fragments wander, music-fraught,
Sighs of the soul, mine once, mine now, and mine
For ever! Crumbled arch, crushed aqueduct,
Alive with tremors in the shaggy growth
Of wild-wood, crevice-sown, that triumphs there,
Imparting exultation to the hills."
[Footnote 57: _Letters of E.B.B._, ii. 385.]
But if he had abandoned these generous dreams, he had won free trade and
given the multitude cheap bread, and in a highly ingenious piece of
sophistry he explains, by the aid of the gospel of Evolution, how men
are united by their common hunger, and thrust apart by their conflicting
ideas. But Hohenstiel knows very well that his intrenchments are not
unassailable; and he goes on to compose an imaginary biography of
himself as he might have been, with comments which reflect his actual
course. The finest part of this æthereal voyage is that in which his
higher unfulfilled self pours scorn upon the paltry duplicities of the
"Peace" policy by which his actual and lower self had kept on good terms
abroad, and beguiled the imperious thirst for "la gloire" at home.
Indignantly the author of _Hervé Riel_ asks why "the more than all
magnetic race" should have to court its rivals by buying their goods
untaxed, or guard against them by war for war's sake, when Mother Earth
has no pride above her pride in that same
"race all flame and air
And aspiration to the boundless Great,
The incommensurably Beautiful--
Whose very falterings groundward come of flight
Urged by a pinion all too passionate
For heaven and what it holds of gloom and glow."
_The Ring and the Book_ had made Browning famous. But fame was far from
tempting him to undue compliance with the tastes of his new-won public;
rather it prompted him to indulge his genius more freely, and to go his
own way with a more complete security and unconcern.
_Hohenstiel-Schwangau_--one of the rockiest and least attractive of all
Browning's poems--had mystified most of its readers and been little
relished by the rest. And now that plea for a discredited politician was
followed up by what, on the face of it, was, as Mrs Orr puts it, "a
defence of inconstancy in marriage." The apologist for Napoleon III.
came forward as the advocate of Don Juan. The prefixed bit of dialogue
from Molière's play explains the situation. Juan, detected by his wife
in an intrigue, is completely nonplussed. "Fie!" cries Elvire, mockingly
(in Browning's happy paraphrase),--
"Fie! for a man of mode, accustomed at the court
To such a style of thing, how awkwardly my lord
Attempts defence!"
In this emergency, Browning, as it would seem, steps in, and provides
the arch-voluptuary with a philosophy of illicit love, quite beyond the
speculative capacity of any Juan in literature, and glowing with poetry
of a splendour and fertility which neither Browning himself nor the
great English poet who had identified his name with that of Juan, and
whom Browning in this very poem overwhelms with genial banter, ever
surpassed. The poem inevitably challenged comparison with Byron's
masterpiece. In dazzling play of intellect, in swift interchange of wit
and passion, the English nineteenth century produced nothing more
comparable to the _Don Juan_ of Byron than _Fifine at the Fair_.
It cannot be denied that the critics had some excuse who, like Mortimer,
frankly identified Browning with his hero, and described the poem as an
assertion of the "claim to relieve the fixity of conjugal affection by
varied adventure in the world of temporary loves."[58] For Browning has
not merely given no direct hint of his own divergence from Juan,
corresponding to his significant comment upon Blougram--"he said true
things but called them by false names"; he has made his own subtlest and
profoundest convictions on life and art spring spontaneously from the
brain of this brilliant conqueror of women. Like Goethe's Faust, he
unmistakably shares the mind, the wisdom, the faith, of his creator; it
is plausible to suppose that the poet indorses his application of them.
This is unquestionably a complete mistake; but Browning, as usual,
presumed too much upon his readers' insight, and took no pains to
obviate a confusion which he clearly supposed to be impossible.
[Footnote 58: Mrs Orr, _Life_, p. 297. Her own criticism is, however,
curiously indecisive and embarrassed.]
It was on the strand at Pornic that he encountered the fateful gipsy
whom he calls Fifine. Arnold, years before, had read unutterable depths
of soul in another gipsy child by another shore. For Browning now, as in
the days of the _Flight of the Duchess_, the gipsy symbolised the life
of joyous detachment from the constraints of society and civilisation.
The elementary mood, out of which the wondrous woof of reasonings and
images is evolved, is simply the instinctive beat of the spirit of
romance in us all, in sympathy with these light-hearted losels of the
wild, who "cast allegiance off, play truant, nor repine," and though
disgraced but seem to relish life the more.
The beautiful _Prologue_--one of the most original lyrics in the
language--strikes the keynote:--
"Sometimes, when the weather
Is blue, and warm waves tempt
To free oneself of tether,
And try a life exempt
From worldly noise and dust,
In the sphere which overbrims
With passion and thought,--why, just
Unable to fly, one swims....
Emancipate through passion
And thought,--with sea for sky,
We substitute, in a fashion,
For heaven--poetry."
It is this "emancipation" from our confinement in the bonds of prose,
commonplace, and routine, by a passion and thought-winged imagination,
which is the true subject of the poem. But he chooses to convey his
meaning, as usual, through the rich refracting medium of dramatic
characters and situations quite unlike his own. So his "apology for
poetry" becomes an item in Don Juan's case for the "poetry" of dalliance
with light-o'-loves. Fifine herself acquires new importance; the
emancipated gipsy turns into the pert seductive coquette, while over
against her rises the pathetic shadow of the "wife in trouble," her
white fingers pressing Juan's arm, "ravishingly pure" in her "pale
constraint." Between these three persons the moving drama is played out,
ending, like all Don Juan stories, with the triumph of the baser
influence. Elvire, with her eloquent silences and wistful pathos, is an
exquisite creation,--a wedded sister of Shakespeare's Hero; Fifine, too,
with her strutting bravado and "pose half frank, half fierce," shrills
her discordant note vivaciously enough. The principal speaker himself is
the most complex of Browning's casuists, a marvellously rich and
many-hued piece of portraiture. This Juan is deeply versed in all the
activities of the imagination which he so eloquently defends. Painting
and poetry, science and philosophy, are at his command; above all, he is
an artist and a poet in the lore of Love.
It is easy to see that the kind of adventure on which Juan claims the
right of projecting his imagination has close affinities with the
habitual procedure of Browning's own. Juan defends his dealings with
the gay fizgig Fifine as a step to the fuller appreciation of Elvire; he
demands freedom to escape only as a means of possessing more surely and
intimately what he has. And Browning's "emancipation" is not that of the
purely Romantic poet, who pursues a visionary abstraction remote from
all his visible environment. The emancipated soul, for him, was rather
that which incessantly "practised with" its environment, fighting its
way through countless intervening films of illusion to the full
knowledge of itself and of all that it originally held _in posse_. This
might not be an adequate account of his own artistic processes, in which
genial instinct played a larger, and resolute will a smaller, part than
his invincible athleticism of temperament would suggest. But his
marvellous wealth of spontaneous vision was fed and enriched by
incessant "practice with" his environment; his idealism was vitalised by
the ceaseless play of eye and brain upon the least promising mortal
integuments of spirit; he possessed "Elvire" the more securely for
having sent forth his adventurous imagination to practise upon
innumerable Fifines.
The poem itself--as a defence of his poetic methods--was an "adventure"
in which imagination played an unusually splendid part. A succession of
brilliant and original images, visions, similes, parables, exhibits the
twofold nature of the "stuff" with which the artist plays,--its
inferiority, its poverty, its "falseness" in itself, its needfulness,
its potency, its worth for him. It is the water which supports the
swimmer, but in which he cannot live; the dross of straw and chaff which
yields the brilliant purity of flame (c. 55); the technical cluster of
sounds from which issues "music--that burst of pillared cloud by day and
pillared fire by night" (c. 41). The whole poem is haunted by the sense
of dissonance which these images suggest between the real and the
apparent meaning of things. Browning's world, else so massive and so
indubitable, becomes unsubstantial and phantasmal, an illusive pageant
in which Truth is present only under a mask, being "forced to manifest
itself through falsehood." Juan, who declares that, unlike poets, "we
prose-folk" always dream, has, in effect, a visionary quality of
imagination which suits his thesis and his theme. The "dream figures" of
the famous ladies pass before us like a gorgeous tapestry,--some rich
Venetian rendering of a medieval _ballade du temps jadis_; then Venice
itself opens before us, all moving life and colour, under the
enchantment of Schumann's _Carnival_, only to resolve itself into a
vaster pageant of the world, with its mighty fanes of art and science,
which, seemingly "fixed as fate, not fairy-work," yet
"tremblingly grew blank
From bright, then broke afresh in triumph,--ah, but sank
As soon, for liquid change through artery and vein
O' the very marble wound its way."
The August of 1872 found Browning and his sister once more in France.
This time, however, not at Croisic but Saint Aubin--the primitive
hamlet on the Norman coast to which he had again been drawn by his
attachment to Joseph Milsand. At a neighbouring village was another old
friend, Miss Thackeray, who has left a charming account of the place.
They walked along a narrow cliff-path: "The sea-coast far below our
feet, the dried, arid vegetation of the sandy way, the rank yellow
snapdragon lining the paths.... We entered the Brownings' house. The
sitting-room door opened to the garden and the sea beyond--a fresh-swept
bare floor, a table, three straw chairs, one book upon the table." A
misunderstanding, now through the good offices of Milsand happily
removed, had clouded the friendship of Browning and Miss Thackeray; and
his joyous revulsion of heart has left characteristic traces in the poem
which he dedicated to his "fair friend." The very title is jest--an
outflow of high spirits in an exuberantly hearty hand-shake--"British
man with British maid"; the country of the "Red-cotton Night-cap" being
in fact, of course, the country which her playful realism had already
nicknamed "White-cotton Night-cap Country," from the white lawn
head-dress of the Norman women. Nothing so typical and everyday could
set Browning's imagination astir, and among the wilderness of white,
innocent and flavourless, he caught at a story which promised to be
"wrong and red and picturesque," and vary "by a splotch the righteous
flat of insipidity."
The story of Miranda the Paris jeweller and his mistress, Clara de
Millefleurs, satisfied this condition sufficiently. Time had not
mellowed the raw crudity of this "splotch," which Browning found
recorded in no old, square, yellow vellum book, but in the French
newspapers of that very August; the final judgment of the court at Caen
("Vire") being actually pronounced while he wrote. The poet followed on
the heels of the journalist, and borrowed, it must be owned, not a
little of his methods. If any poem of Browning's may be compared to
versified special correspondence, it is this. He tells the story, in his
own person, in blank verse of admirable ease and fluency, from which
every pretence of poetry is usually remote. What was it in this rather
sordid tale that arrested him? Clearly the strangely mingled character
of Miranda. Castile and Paris contend in his blood; and his love
adventures, begun on the boulevards and in their spirit, end in an
ecstasy of fantastic devotion. His sins are commonplace and prosaic
enough, but his repentances detach him altogether from the herd of
ordinary penitents as well as of ordinary sinners--confused and violent
gesticulations of a visionary ascetic struggling to liberate himself
from the bonds of his own impurity. "The heart was wise according to its
lights"; but the head was incapable of shaping this vague heart-wisdom
into coherent practice. A parallel piece of analysis presents Clara as a
finished artist in life--a Meissonier of limited but flawless perfection
in her unerring selection of means to ends. In other words, this not
very attractive pair struck Browning as another example of his familiar
contrast between those who "try the low thing and leave it done," and
those who aim higher and fail. Yet it must be owned that these
Browningesque ideas are not thoroughly wrought into the substance of the
poem; they are rather a sort of marginal embroidery woven on to a story
which, as a whole, has neither been shaped by Browning's hand nor
vitalised with his breath. Neither Clara nor Miranda can be compared in
dramatic force with his great creations; even Clara's harangue to the
Cousinry, with all its passion and flashing scorn, is true rather to her
generic character as the injured champion of her dead lord than to her
individual variety of it--the woman of subtle, inflexible, yet
calculating devotion. Miranda's soliloquy before he throws himself from
the Tower is a powerful piece of construction, but, when the book is
closed, what we seem to see in it is not the fantastical goldsmith
surveying the motives of his life, but Browning filling in the bizarre
outlines of his construction with appropriate psychological detail.
Another symptom of decline in Browning's most characteristic kind of
power is probably to be found in the play of symbolism which invests
with an air of allegorical abstraction the "Tower" and the "Turf," and
makes the whole poem, with all its prosaic realism, intelligibly
regarded as a sort of fantasia on self-indulgence and self-control.
The summer retreat of 1874 was found once more on the familiar north
coast of France,--this time at the quiet hamlet of Mers, near Treport.
In this lonely place, with scarcely a book at hand, he wrote the greater
part of the most prodigally and exuberantly learned of all his
poems--_Aristophanes' Apology_ (published April 1875). It was not
Browning's way to repeat his characters, but the story of Balaustion,
the brilliant girl devotee of Euripides, had proved an admirable setting
for his interpretations of Greek drama; and the charm of that earlier
"most delightful of May-month amusements" was perhaps not the less
easily revived in these weeks of constant companionship with a devoted
woman-friend of his own. Balaustion is herself full ten years older than
at the time of her first adventure; her fresh girlish enthusiasm has
ripened into the ardent conviction of intellectual maturity; she can not
only cite Euripides, but vindicate his art against his mightiest
assailant. Situation, scenery, language, are here all more complex. The
first Adventure was almost Greek in its radiant and moving simplicity;
the last is Titanically Browningesque, a riot of the least Hellenic
elements of Browning's mind with the uptorn fragments of the Hellenic
world. Moreover, the issue is far from being equally clear. The glory of
Euripides is still the ostensible theme; but Aristophanes had so many
points of contact with Browning himself, and appeals in his defence to
so many root-ideas of Browning's own, that the reader hesitates between
the poet to whom Browning's imagination allied him, and the poet whom
his taste preferred. His Aristophanes is, like himself, the poetry of
"Life," a broad and generous realist, who like Lippo Lippi draws all
existence into his art; an enemy of all asceticisms and abstractions,
who drives his meaning home through vivid concrete example and drastic
phrase, rather than by enunciating the impressive moral commonplaces of
tragic poetry.[59] Aristophanes, too, had been abused for his
"unintelligible" poetry,--"mere psychologic puzzling,"[60]--by a
"chattering" public which preferred the lilt of nursery rhymes. The
magnificent portrait of Aristophanes is conceived in the very spirit of
the riotous exuberance of intellect and senses--
"Mind a-wantoning
At ease of undisputed mastery
Over the body's brood"--
which was so congenial to the realist in Browning; "the clear
baldness--all his head one brow"--and the surging flame of red from
cheek to temple; the huge eyeballs rolling back native fire, imperiously
triumphant, the "pursed mouth's pout aggressive," and "the beak supreme
above," "beard whitening under like a vinous foam."
[Footnote 59: _Arist. Ap._, p. 698.]
[Footnote 60: Ib., p. 688.]
Balaustion is herself the first to recognise the divinity shrouded in
this half satyr-like form: in some of the finest verses of the poem she
compares him to the sea-god, whom as a child she had once seen peer
"large-looming from his wave,
* * * * *
A sea-worn face, sad as mortality,
Divine with yearning after fellowship,"
while below the surface all was "tail splash, frisk of fin." And when
Balaustion has recited her poet's masterpiece of tragic pathos,
Aristophanes lays aside the satirist a moment and attests his affinity
to the divine poets by the noble song of Thamyris. The "transcript from
Euripides" itself is quite secondary in interest to this vivid and
powerful dramatic framework. Far from being a vital element in the
action, like the recital of the _Alkestis_, the reading of the _Hercules
Furens_ is an almost gratuitous diversion in the midst of the talk; and
the tameness of a literal (often awkwardly literal) translation is
rarely broken by those inrushes of alien genius which are the glory of
Browning's _Alkestis_. Yet the very self-restraint sprang probably from
Browning's deep sensibility to the pathos of the story. "Large tears,"
as Mrs Orr has told us, fell from his eyes, and emotion choked his
voice, when he first read it aloud to her.
The _Inn Album_ is, like _Red-cotton Night-cap Country_, a versified
novel, melodramatic in circumstances, frankly familiar in scenery and
atmosphere. Once more, as in the _Blot in the 'Scutcheon_, and in _James
Lee's Wife_, Browning turned for his "incidents in the development of
souls" to the passion and sin-frayed lives of his own countrymen. But no
halo of seventeenth-century romance here tempers the sordid modernity of
the facts; the "James Lee" of this tragedy appears in person and is
drawn with remorseless insistence on every mean detail which announces
the "rag-and-feather hero-sham." Everything except his wit and eloquence
is sham and shabby in this Club-and-Country-house villain, who violates
more signally than any figure in poetic literature the canon that the
contriver of the tragic harms must not be totally despicable. A thief,
as Schiller said, can qualify for a tragic hero only by adding to his
theft the more heroic crime of murder; but Browning's Elder Man
compromises even the professional perfidies of a Don Juan with shady
dealings at cards and the like which Don Juan himself would have
scouted. In _Fifine_ the Don Juan of tradition was lifted up into and
haloed about with poetical splendours not his own; here he is depressed
into an equally alien sorriness of prose. But the decisive and
commanding figure, for Browning and for his readers, is of course his
victim and Nemesis, the Elder Lady. She is as unlike Pompilia as he is
unlike Guido; but we see not less clearly how the upleaping of the soul
of womanhood in the child, under the stress of foul and cruel wrongs,
has once more asserted its power over him. And if Pompilia often recalls
his wife, the situation of the Elder Lady may fairly remind us of that
of Marion Erle in _Aurora Leigh_. But many complexities in the working
out mark Browning's design. The betrayed girl, scornfully refusing her
betrayer's tardy offer of marriage, has sought a refuge, as the wife of
a clergyman, in the drudgery of a benighted parish. The chance meeting
of the two, four years after, in the inn parlour, their bitter
confessions, through the veil of mutual hatred, that life has been
ruined for both,--he, with his scandalous successes growing at last
notorious, she, the soul which once "sprang at love," now sealed
deliberately against beauty, and spent in preaching monstrous doctrines
which neither they nor their savage parishioners believe nor
observe,--all this is imagined very powerfully and on lines which would
hardly have occurred to any one else.
The _Pacchiarotto_ volume forms a kind of epilogue to the work of the
previous half-dozen years. Since _The Ring and the Book_ he had become a
famous personage; his successive poems had been everywhere reviewed at
length; a large public was genuinely interested in him, while a yet
larger complained of his "obscurity," but did not venture to ignore him,
and gossiped eagerly about his private life. He himself, mingling
freely, an ever-welcome guest, in the choicest London society, had the
air of having accepted the world as cordially as it on the whole
accepted him. Yet barriers remained. Poems like the _Red-cotton
Night-cap Country_, the _Inn Album_, and _Fifine_ had alienated many
whom _The Ring and the Book_ had won captive, and embarrassed the
defence of some of Browning's staunchest devotees. Nobody knew better
than the popular diner-out, Robert Browning, how few of the men and
women who listened to his brilliant talk had any grip upon his inner
mind; and he did little to assist their insight. The most affable and
accessible of men up to a certain point, he still held himself, in the
deeper matters of his art, serenely and securely aloof. But it was a
good-humoured, not a cynical, aloofness, which found quite natural
expression in a volley of genial chaff at the critics who thought
themselves competent to teach him his business. This is the main, at
least the most dominant, note of _Pacchiarotto_. It is like an aftermath
of _Aristophanes' Apology_. But the English poet scarcely deigns to
defend his art. No beautiful and brilliant woman is there to put him on
his mettle and call out his chivalry. The mass of his critics are
roundly made game of, in a boisterously genial sally, as "sweeps"
officiously concerned at his excess of "smoke." _Pacchiarotto_ is a
whimsical tale of a poor painter who came to grief in a Quixotic effort
to "reform" his fellows. Rhyme was never more brilliantly abused than in
this _tour de force_, in which the clang of the machinery comes near to
killing the music. More seriously, in the finely turned stanzas _At the
Mermaid_, and _House_, he avails himself of the habitual reticence of
Shakespeare to defend by implication his own reserve, not without a
passing sarcasm at the cost of the poet who took Europe by storm with
the pageant of his broken heart. _House_ is for the most part rank
prose, but it sums up incisively in the well-known retort:
"'_With this same key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart_,' once more!
Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!"
This "house" image is singularly frequent in this volume. The poet seems
haunted by the idea of the barrier walls, which keep off the public
gaze, but admit the privileged spirit. In _Fears and Scruples_ it
symbolises the reticence of God. In _Appearances_ the "poor room" in
which troth was plighted and the "rich room" in which "the other word
was spoken" become half human in sympathy. A woman's "natural magic"
makes the bare walls she dwells in a "fairy tale" of verdure and song.
The prologue seems deliberately to strike this note, with its exquisite
idealisation of the old red brick wall and its creepers lush and
lithe,--a formidable barrier indeed, but one which spirit and love can
pass. For here the "wall" is the unsympathetic throng who close the poet
in; there
"I--prison-bird, with a ruddy strife
At breast, and a life whence storm-notes start--
Hold on, hope hard in the subtle thing
That's spirit: though cloistered fast, soar free;
Account as wood, brick, stone, this ring
Of the rueful neighbours, and--forth to thee!"
These stanzas finely hint at a second theme which wanders in and out
among the strident notes of Browning's anti-critical "apologetics." Of
all the springs of poetry none lay deeper in Browning than love; to the
last he could sing of love with the full inspiration of his best time;
and the finest things in this volume are concerned with it. But as
compared with the love-lays of the _Dramatic Lyrics_ or _Men and Women_
there is something wistful, far off, even elegiac, in this love-poetry.
A barrier, undefinable but impassable, seems to part us from the full
tide of youthful passion. The richest in this tender sunset beauty is
the _St Martin's Summer_, where the late love is suddenly smitten with
the discovery that its apparent warmth is a ghost of old passion buried
but unallayed. Again and again Browning here dwells upon the magic of
love,--as if love still retained for the ageing poet an isolated and
exceptional irradiating power in a world fast fading into commonplace
and prose. The brief, exquisite snatches of song, _Natural Magic,
Magical Nature_, are joyous tributes to the power of the charm, paid by
one who remains master of his heart. _Numpholeptos_ is the long-drawn
enchanted reverie of one in the very toils of the spell--a thing woven
of dreams and emotions, dark-glowing, iridescent to the eye, languorous
to the ear, impalpable to the analytic intellect. In _Bifurcation_ he
puts again, with more of subtlety and of detachment, the problem of the
conventional conflict of love with duty, so peremptorily decided in
love's favour in _The Statue and the Bust_. _A Forgiveness_ is a
powerful reworking of the theme of _My Last Duchess_, with an added
irony of situation: Browning, who excels in the drama of silent
figures, has drawn none more effective than this guilty priest, who
grinds his teeth behind the confessional grating as he listens perforce
to the story of his own crime from the lips of the wronged husband,
still cherishing the hope that he is unrecognised, or at the worst may
elude vengeance in his cloister's solitude; until the avenger's last
words throw off the mask:--
"Hardly, I think! As little helped his brow
The cloak then, Father--as your grate helps now!"
From these high matters of passion and tragedy we pass by easy steps
into the jocular-colloquial region in which the volume opened. Painting
in these later days of Browning's has ceased to yield high, or even
serious poetry, and Baldinucci's tale of shabby trickery cannot be
compared, even for grotesque humour, with the powerful grotesquerie of
_Holy-Cross Day_, while it wholly lacks the great lift of Hebraic
sublimity at the close. The _Epilogue_ returns to the combative
apologetics of the title poem; but, unlike that, does attempt some reply
to the cavils of the discontented. They cannot have the strong and the
sweet--body and bouquet--at once, he tells them in effect, and he
chooses to be strong, to give the good grape and leave the cowslips
growing in the meadow. The argument was but another sally of the poet's
good-humoured chaff, and would not have stood the scrutiny of his
subtler mind. Doubtless he, like Ben Jonson, inclined to see signs of
the "strong" in the astringent and the gritty; but no one knew better,
when he chose, to wed his "strength" with "sweetness." The falling-off
of the present volume compared with _Men and Women_ or _Dramatis
Personæ_ lay less in the lack of either quality than in his failure to
bring them together. Of the "stiff brew" there is plenty; but the
choicest aroma comes from that "wine of memories"--the fragrant
reminiscences--which the poet affected to despise. The epilogue ends,
incorrigibly, with a promise to "posset and cosset" the cavilling reader
henceforward with "nettle-broth," good for the sluggish blood and the
disordered stomach.
The following year brought a production which the cavilling reader might
excusably regard as a fulfilment of this jocose threat. For the
translation of the _Agamemnon_ (1877) was not in any sense a serious
contribution to the English knowledge and love of Greek drama. The
Balaustion "transcripts" had betrayed an imperfect sensibility to the
finer qualities of Greek dramatic style. But Browning seems to have gone
to work upon the greatest of antique tragedies with the definite
intention of showing, by a version of literal fidelity, how little the
Greek drama at its best owed to Greek speech. And he has little
difficulty in making the oracular brevity of Aeschylus look bald, and
his sublime incoherences frigid.[61] The result is, nevertheless, very
interesting and instructive to the student of Browning's mind. Nowhere
else do we feel so acutely how foreign to his versatile and athletic
intellect was the primitive and elemental imagination which interprets
the heart and the conscience of nations. His acute individualism in
effect betrayed him, and made his too faithful translation resemble a
parody of this mighty fragment of the mind of Themistoclean Athens by
one of the brilliant irresponsible Sophists of the next generation.
[Footnote 61: It is hard to explain how Browning came also to choose his
restless hendecasyllables as a medium for the stately iambic of
Æschylus. It is more like Fletcher outdoing himself in double endings.]
The spring and summer of 1877 were not productive. The summer holiday
was spent in a new haunt among the Savoy Alps, and Browning missed the
familiar stimulus of the sea-air. But the early autumn brought an event
which abruptly shattered his quiescence, and called forth, presently,
the most intimately personal poem of his later years. Miss Ann
Egerton-Smith, his gifted and congenial companion at London concerts,
and now, for the fourth year in succession, in the summer
_villeggiatura_, died suddenly of heart disease at dawn on Sept. 14, as
she was preparing for a mountain expedition with her friends. It was not
one of those losses which stifle thought or sweep it along on the
vehement tide of lyric utterance; it was rather of the kind which set it
free, creating an atmosphere of luminous serenity about it, and allaying
all meaner allurements and distractions. Elegy is often the outcome of
such moods; and the elegiac note is perceptible in the grave music of
_La Saisiaz_. Yet the poem as a whole does not even distantly recall,
save in the quiet intensity of its ground tone, the noble poems in which
Milton or Shelley, Arnold or Tennyson, commemorated their dead friends.
He himself commemorated no other dead friend in a way like this; to his
wife's memory he had given only the sacred silence, the impassioned
hymn, the wealth of poetry inspired by her spirit but not addressed to
her. This poem, also, was written "once, and only once, and for one
only." _La Saisiaz_ recalls to us, perversely perhaps, poems of his in
which no personal sorrow beats. The glory of the dawn and the
mountain-peak--Salève with its outlook over the snowy splendour of Mont
Blanc--instils itself here into the mourner's mood, as, long before, a
like scene had animated the young disciples of the Grammarian; while the
"cold music" of Galuppi's Toccata seems to be echoed inauspiciously in
these lingering trochaics. Something of both moods survives, but the
dominant tone is a somewhat grey and tempered hope, remote indeed from
the oppressive sense of evanescence, the crumbling mortality, of the
second poem, remote no less from the hushed exaltation, the subdued but
rapturous confidence of the first.
The poet is growing old; the unity of poetic vision is breaking up into
conflicting aspects only to be adjusted in the give and take of debate;
he puts off his singing robes to preside as moderator, while Fancy and
Reason exchange thrust and parry on the problem of immortality;
delivering at last, as the "sad summing up of all," a balanced and
tentative affirmation. And he delivers the decision with an oppressive
sense that it is but his own. He is "Athanasius contra mundum"; and he
dwells, with a "pallid smile" which Athanasius did not inspire, upon the
marvellous power of fame. Nay, Athanasius himself has his doubts. Even
his sober hope is not a secure possession; but in the gloom of London's
November he remembers that he had hoped in the sunset glory of Salève,
and "saves up" the memory of that pregnant hour for succour in less
prosperous times.
The _Two Poets of Croisic_, published with _La Saisiaz_, cannot be
detached from it. The opening words take up the theme of "Fame," there
half mockingly played with, and the whole poem is a sarcastic criticism
of the worship of Fame. The stories of René Gentilhomme and Paul
Desfarges Maillard are told with an immense burly vivacity, in the
stanza, and a Browningesque version of the manner, of _Beppo_. Both
stories turned upon those decisive moments which habitually caught
Browning's eye. Only, in their case, the decisive moment was not one of
the revealing crises which laid bare their utmost depths, but a crisis
which temporarily invested them with a capricious effulgence. Yet these
instantaneous transformations have a peculiar charm for Browning; they
touch and fall in with his fundamental ideas of life; and the delicious
prologue and epilogue hint these graver analogies in a dainty music
which pleasantly relieves the riotous uncouthness of the tale itself.
If René's life is suddenly lighted up, so is the moss bank with the
"blue flash" of violets in spring; and the diplomatic sister through
whose service Paul wins his laurels has a more spiritual comrade in the
cicada, who, with her little heart on fire, sang forth the note of the
broken string and won her singer his prize. Browning's pedestrian verse
passes into poetry as he disengages from the transient illusions, the
flickerings and bickerings, of Fame, the eternal truth of Love. But it
is only in the closing stanzas of the main poem that his thought clearly
emerges; when, having exposed the vanity of fame as a test of poetic
merit, he asks how, then, poets shall be tried; and lays down the
characteristic criterion, a happy life. But it is the happiness of Rabbi
ben Ezra, a joy three parts pain, the happiness won not by ignoring evil
but by mastering it!--
"So, force is sorrow, and each sorrow, force:
What then? since Swiftness gives the charioteer
The palm, his hope be in the vivid horse
Whose neck God clothed with thunder, not the steer
Sluggish and safe! Yoke Hatred, Crime, Remorse,
Despair: but ever mid the whirling fear
Let, through the tumult, break the poet's face
Radiant, assured his wild slaves win the race!"