THE LAST DECADE.
Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiled.
Since the catastrophe of 1861 Browning had not entered Italy. In the
autumn of 1878 he once more bent his steps thither. Florence, indeed, he
refused to revisit; it was burnt in upon his brain by memories
intolerably dear. But in Venice the charm of Italy reasserted itself,
and he returned during his remaining autumns with increasing frequency
to the old-fashioned hostelry, Dell' Universo, on the Grand Canal, or
latterly, to the second home provided by the hospitality of his gifted
and congenial American friend, Mrs Arthur Bronson. Asolo, too, the town
of Pippa, he saw again, after forty years' absence, with poignant
feelings,--"such things have begun and ended with me in the interval!"
But the poignancy of memory did not restore the magic of perception
which had once been his. The mood described ten years later in the
Prologue to _Asolando_ was already dominant: the iris glow of youth no
longer glorified every common object of the natural world, but "a flower
was just a flower." The glory still came by moments; some of his most
thrilling outbursts of song belong to this time. But he built up no more
great poems. He was approaching seventy, and it might well seem that if
so prolific a versifier was not likely to become silent his poetry was
rapidly resolving itself into wastes of theological argument, of
grotesque posturing, or intellectualised anecdotage. The _Dramatic
Idyls_ of 1879 and 1880 showed that these more serious forebodings were
at least premature. There was little enough in them, no doubt, of the
qualities traditionally connected with "idyll." Browning habitually wore
his rue with a difference, and used familiar terms in senses of his own.
There is nothing here of "enchanted reverie" or leisurely pastoralism.
Browning's "idyls" are studies in life's moments of stress and strain,
not in its secluded pleasances and verdurous wooded ways. It is for the
most part some new variation of his familiar theme--the soul taken in
the grip of a tragic crisis, and displaying its unsuspected deeps and
voids. Not all are of this kind, however; and while his keenness for
intense and abnormal effects is as pronounced as ever, he seeks them in
an even more varied field. Italy, the main haunt of his song, yields--it
can hardly be said to have inspired--one only of the _Idyls_--_Pietro of
Abano_. Old memories of Russia are furbished up in _Iván Ivánovitch_,
odd gatherings from the byways of England and America in _Ned Bratts,
Halbert and Hob, Martin Relph_; and he takes from Virgil's hesitating
lips the hint of a joyous pagan adventure of the gods, and tells it with
his own brilliant plenitude and volubility. The mythic treatment of
nature had never appealed much to Browning, even as a gay decorative
device; he was presently to signalise his rejection of it in _Gerard de
Lairesse_, a superb example of what he rejected. In all mythology there
was something foreign to the tenacious humanity of his intellect; he was
most open to its appeal where it presented divinity stretching forth a
helping hand to man. The noble "idyl" of _Echetlos_ is thus a
counterpart, in its brief way, to the great tragic tale of Herakles and
Alkestis. Echetlos, the mysterious ploughman who shone amid the ranks at
Marathon,
"clearing Greek earth of weed
As he routed through the Sabian and rooted up the Mede,"
is one of the many figures which thrill us with Browning's passion for
Greece, and he is touched with a kind of magic which it did not lie in
his nature often to communicate. But the great successes of the
_Dramatic Idyls_ are to be found mainly among the tales of the purely
human kind that Browning had been used to tell. _Pheidippides_ belongs
to the heroic line of _How they brought the Good News_ and _Hervé Riel_.
The poetry of crisis, of the sudden, unforeseen, and irremediable
critical moment, upon which so much of Browning's psychology converges,
is carried to an unparalleled point of intensity in _Clive_ and _Martin
Relph_. And in most of these "idyls" there emerges a trait always
implicit in Browning but only distinctly apparent in this last
decade--the ironical contrasts between the hidden deeps of a man's soul
and the assumptions or speculations of his neighbours about it. The two
worlds--inner and outer--fall more sharply apart; stranger abysses of
self-consciousness appear on the one side, more shallow and complacent
illusions on the other. Relph's horror of remorse--painted with a few
strokes of incomparable intensity, like his 'Get you behind the man I am
now, you man that I used to be!'--is beyond the comprehension of the
friendly peasants; Clive's "fear" is as much misunderstood by his
auditor as his courage by the soldiers; the "foolishness" of Muleykeh
equally illudes his Arab comrades; the Russian villagers, the Pope, and
the lord have to fumble through a long process of argument to the
conclusion which for Iván had been the merest matter of fact from the
first. Admirable in its quiet irony is the contrast between the stormy
debate over his guilt or innocence and his serene security of mind as he
sits cutting out a toy for his children:--
"They told him he was free
As air to walk abroad; 'How otherwise?' asked he."
With the "wild men" Halbert and Hob it is the spell of a sudden memory
which makes an abrupt rift between the men they have seemed to be and
the men they prove. Browning in his earlier days had gloried in these
moments of disclosure; now they served to emphasise the normal illusion.
"Ah me!" sounds the note of the proem to the second series, scornful and
sad:--
"Ah me!
So ignorant of man's whole,
Of bodily organs plain to see--
So sage and certain, frank and free,
About what's under lock and key--
Man's soul!"
The volume called _Jocoseria_ (1883) contains some fine things, and
abounds with Browning's invariable literary accomplishment and metrical
virtuosity, but on the whole points to the gradual disintegration of his
genius. "Wanting is--what?" is the significant theme of the opening
lyric, and most of the poetry has something which recalls the "summer
redundant" of leaf and flower not "breathed above" by vitalising
passion. Compared with the _Men and Women_ or the _Dramatis Personæ_,
the _Jocoseria_ as a whole are indeed
"Framework which waits for a picture to frame, ...
Roses embowering with nought they embower."
Browning, the poet of the divining imagination, is less apparent here
than the astute ironical observer who delights in pricking the bubbles
of affectation, stripping off the masks of sham, and exhibiting human
nature in unadorned nakedness. _Donald_ is an exposure, savage and
ugly, of savagery and ugliness in Sport; _Solomon and Balkis_ a
reduction, dainty and gay, of these fabled paragons of wisdom to the
dimensions of ordinary vain and amorous humanity. Lilith and Eve unmask
themselves under stress of terror, as Balkis and Solomon at the
compulsion of the magic ring, and Adam urbanely replaces the mask.
Jochanan Hakka-dosh, the saintly prop of Israel, expounds from his
deathbed a gospel of struggle and endurance in which a troubled echo of
the great strain of Ben Ezra may no doubt be heard; but his career is,
as a whole, a half-sad, half-humorous commentary on the vainness of
striving to extend the iron frontiers of mortality. Lover, poet,
soldier, statist have each contributed a part of their lives to prolong
and enrich the saint's: but their fresh idealisms have withered when
grafted upon his sober and sapless brain; while his own garnered wisdom
fares no better when committed to the crude enthusiasm of his disciples.
But twice, in this volume, a richer and fuller music sounds. In the
great poem of _Ixion_, human illusions are still the preoccupying
thought; but they appear as fetters, not as specious masks, and instead
of the serio-comic exposure of humanity we see its tragic and heroic
deliverance. Ixion is Browning's Prometheus. The song that breaks from
his lips as he whirls upon the penal wheel of Zeus is a great liberating
cry of defiance to the phantom-god--man's creature and his ape--who may
plunge the body in torments but can never so baffle the soul but that
"From the tears and sweat and blood of his torment
Out of the wreck he rises past Zeus to the Potency o'er him,
Pallid birth of my pain--where light, where light is, aspiring,
Thither I rise, whilst thou--Zeus take thy godship and sink."
And in _Never the Time and the Place_, the pang of love's aching void
and the rapture of reunion blend in one strain of haunting magical
beauty, the song of an old man in whom one memory kindles eternal youth,
a song in which, as in hardly another, the wistfulness of autumn blends
with the plenitude of spring.
Browning spent the summer months of 1883 at Gressoney St Jean, a lonely
spot high up in the Val d'Aosta, living, as usual when abroad, on the
plainest of vegetable diet. "Delightful Gressoney!" he wrote,
"Who laughest, 'Take what is, trust what may be!'"
And a mood of serene acquiescence in keeping with the scene breathes
from the poem which occupied him during this pleasant summer. To
Browning's old age, as to Goethe's, the calm wisdom and graceful
symbolism of Persia offered a peculiar attraction. In the _Westöstlicher
Divan_, seventy years earlier, Goethe, with a subtler sympathy, laid his
finger upon the common germs of Eastern and Western thought and poetry.
Browning, far less in actual touch with the Oriental mind, turned to the
East in quest of picturesque habiliments for his very definitely
European convictions--"Persian garments," which had to be "changed" in
the mind of the interpreting reader.
The _Fancies_ have the virtues of good fables,--pithy wisdom, ingenious
moral instances, homely illustrations, easy colloquial dialogue; and the
ethical teaching has a striking superficial likeness to the common-sense
morality of prudence and content, which fables, like proverbs,
habitually expound. "Cultivate your garden, don't trouble your head
about insoluble riddles, accept your ignorance and your limitations,
assume your good to be good and your evil to be evil, be a man and
nothing more"--such is the recurring burden of Ferishtah's counsel. But
such preaching on Browning's lips always carried with it an implicit
assumption that the preacher had himself somehow got outside the human
limitations he insisted on; that he could measure the plausibility of
man's metaphysics and theology, and distinguish between the
anthropomorphism which is to be acquiesced in because we know no better,
and that which is to be spurned because we know too much. Ferishtah's
thought is a game of hide-and-seek, and its movements have all the
dexterity of winding and subterfuge proper to success in that game.
Against the vindictive God of the creeds he trusts his human assurance
that pain is God's instrument to educate us into pity and love; but
when it is asked how a just God can single out sundry fellow-mortals
"To undergo experience for our sake,
Just that the gift of pain, bestowed on them,
In us might temper to the due degree
Joy's else-excessive largess,"--
instead of admitting a like appeal to the same human assurance, he falls
back upon the unfathomable ways of Omnipotence. If the rifts in the
argument are in any sense supplied, it is by the brief snatches of song
which intervene between the _Fancies_, as the cicada-note filled the
pauses of the broken string. These exquisite lyrics are much more
adequate expressions of Browning's faith than the dialogues which
professedly embody it. They transfer the discussion from the jangle of
the schools and the cavils of the market-place to the passionate
persuasions of the heart and the intimate experiences of love, in which
all Browning's mysticism had its root. Thus Ferishtah's pragmatic,
almost philistine, doctrine of "Plot-culture," by which human life is
peremptorily walled in within its narrow round of tasks, "minuteness
severed from immensity," is followed by the lyric which tells how Love
transcends those limits, making an eternity of time and a universe of
solitude. Finally, the burden of these wayward intermittent strains of
love-music is caught up, with an added intensity drawn from the poet's
personal love and sorrow, in the noble Epilogue. As he listens to the
call of Love, the world becomes an enchanted place, resounding with the
triumph of good and the exultant battle-joy of heroes. But a "chill
wind" suddenly disencharms the enchantment, a doubt that buoyant faith
might be a mirage conjured up by Love itself:--
"What if all be error,
If the halo irised round my head were--Love, thine arms?"
He disdains to answer; for the last words glow with a fire which of
itself dispels the chill wind. A faith founded upon love had for
Browning a surer guarantee than any founded upon reason; it was secured
by that which most nearly emancipated men from the illusions of
mortality, and enabled them to see things as they are seen by God.
The _Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day_ (1887)
is a more laboured and, save for one or two splendid episodes, a less
remarkable achievement than _Ferishtah_. All the burly diffuseness which
had there been held in check by a quasi-oriental ideal of lightly-knit
facility and bland oracular pithiness, here has its way without stint,
and no more songs break like the rush of birds' wings upon the dusty air
of colloquy. Thrusting in between the lyrics of _Ferishtah_ and
_Asolando_, these _Parleyings_ recall those other "people of importance"
whose intrusive visit broke in upon "the tenderness of Dante." Neither
their importance in their own day nor their relative obscurity, for the
most part, in ours, had much to do with Browning's choice. They do not
illustrate merely his normal interest in the obscure freaks and
out-of-the-way anomalies of history. The doings of these "people" had
once been "important" to Browning himself, and the old man's memory
summoned up these forgotten old-world friends of his boyhood to be
championed or rallied by their quondam disciple. The death of the
dearest friend of his later life, J. Milsand, in 1886, probably set
these chords vibrating; the book is dedicated to his memory. Perhaps the
_Imaginary Conversations_ of an older friend and master of Browning's,
one even more important in Browning's day and in ours than in his own,
and the master of his youth, once more suggested the scheme. But these
_Parleyings_ are conversations only in name. They are not even
monologues of the old brilliantly dramatic kind. All the dramatic zest
of converse is gone, the personages are the merest shadows, nothing is
seen but the old poet haranguing his puppets or putting voluble
expositions of his own cherished dogmas into their wooden lips. We have
glimpses of the boy, when not yet able to compass an octave, beating
time to the simple but stirring old march of Avison "whilom of Newcastle
organist"; and before he has done, the memory masters him, and the
pedestrian blank verse breaks into a hymn "rough, rude, robustious,
homely heart athrob" to Pym the "man of men." Or he calls up Bernard
Mandeville to confute the formidable pessimism of his old friend
Carlyle--"whose groan I hear, with guffaw at the end disposing of
mock--melancholy." Gerard de Lairesse, whose rococo landscapes had
interested him as a boy, he introduces only to typify an outworn way of
art--the mythic treatment of nature; but he illustrates this "inferior"
way with a splendour of poetry that makes his ironic exposure
dangerously like an unwitting vindication. These visions of Prometheus
on the storm-swept crag, of Artemis hunting in the dawn, show that
Browning was master, if he had cared to use it, of that magnificent
symbolic speech elicited from Greek myth in the _Hyperion_ or the
_Prometheus Unbound_. But it was a foreign idiom to him, and his
occasional use of it a _tour de force_.
Two years only now remained for Browning, and it began to be apparent to
his friends that his sturdy health was no longer secure. His way of life
underwent no change, he was as active in society as ever, and
acquaintances, old and new, still claimed his time, and added to the
burden, always cheerfully endured, of his correspondence. In October
1887 the marriage of his son attached him by a new tie to Italy, and the
Palazzo Rezzonico on the Grand Canal, where "Pen" and his young American
wife presently settled, was to be his last, as it was his most
magnificent, abode. To Venice he turned his steps each autumn of these
last two years; lingering by the way among the mountains or in the
beautiful border region at their feet. It was thus that, in the early
autumn of 1889, he came yet once again to Asolo. His old friend and
hostess, Mrs Arthur Bronson, had discovered a pleasant, airy abode on
the old town-wall, overhanging a ravine, and Asolo, seen from this
"castle precipice-encurled," recovered all its old magic. It was here
that he put together the disconnected pieces, many written during the
last two years in London, others at Asolo itself, which were finally
published on the day of his death. The Tower of Queen Cornaro still
overlooked the little town, as it had done half a century before; and he
attached these last poems to the same tradition by giving them the
pleasant title said to have been invented by her secretary.
_Asolando_--_Facts and Fancies_, both titles contain a hint of the
ageing Browning,--the relaxed physical energy which allows this
strenuous waker to dream (_Reverie; Bad Dreams_); the flagging poetic
power, whose fitful flashes could no longer transfigure the world for
him, but only cast a fantastic flicker at moments across its prosaic
features. The opening lines sadly confess the wane of the old vision:--
"And now a flower is just a flower:
Man, bird, beast are but beast, bird, man--
Simply themselves, uncinct by dower
Of dyes which, when life's day began,
Round each in glory ran."
The famous Epilogue is the last cheer of an old warrior in whom the
stout fibre of heroism still held out when the finer nerve of vision
decayed; but _A Reverie_ shows how heavy a strain it had to endure in
sustaining his faith that the world is governed by Love. Of outward
evidence for that conviction Browning saw less and less. But age had
not dimmed his inner witness, and those subtle filaments of mysterious
affinity which, for Browning, bound the love of God for man to the love
of man for woman, remained unimpaired. The old man of seventy-seven was
still, in his last autumn, singing songs redolent, not of autumn, but of
the perfume and the ecstasy of spring and youth,--love-lyrics so
illusively youthful that one, not the least competent, of his critics
has refused to accept them as work of his old age. Yet _Now_ and _Summum
Bonum_, and _A Pearl, a Girl_, with all their apparent freshness and
spontaneity, are less like rapt utterances of passion than eloquent
analyses of it by one who has known it and who still vibrates with the
memory. What preoccupies and absorbs him is not the woman, but the
wonder of the transfiguration wrought for him by her word or kiss,--the
moment made eternal, the "blaze" in which he became "lord of heaven and
earth." But some of the greatest love-poetry of the world--from Dante
onwards--has reflected an intellect similarly absorbed in articulating a
marvellous experience. For the rest, _Asolando_ is a miscellany of old
and new,--bright loose drift from the chance moods of genius, or bits of
anecdotic lumber carefully recovered and refurbished, as in prescience
of the nearing end.
Yet no such prescience appears to have been his. His buoyant confidence
in his own vitality held its own. He was full of schemes of work. At the
end of October the idyllic days at Asolo ended, and Browning repaired
for the last time to the Palazzo Rezzonico. A month later he caught a
bronchial catarrh; failure of the heart set in, and on the evening of
December 12 he peacefully died. On the last day of the year his body was
laid to rest in "Poets' Corner."
PART II.
BROWNING'S MIND AND ART
CHAPTER IX.
THE POET.
Then, who helps more, pray, to repair our loss--
Another Boehme with a tougher book
And subtler meanings of what roses say,--
Or some stout Mage, like him of Halberstadt,
John, who made things Boehme wrote thoughts about?
He with a "look you!" vents a brace of rhymes,
And in there breaks the sudden rose herself,
* * * * *
Buries us with a glory, young once more,
Pouring heaven into this shut house of life.
--_Transcendentalism_.
I.
"I have, you are to know," Browning once wrote to Miss Haworth, "such a
love for flowers and leaves ... that I every now and then in an
impatience at being unable to possess them thoroughly, to see them
quite, satiate myself with their scent,--bite them to bits." "All
poetry," he wrote some twenty years later to Ruskin, "is the problem of
putting the infinite into the finite." Utterances like these, not
conveyed through the lips of some "dramatic" creation, but written
seriously in his own person to intimate friends, give us a clue more
valuable it may be than some other utterances which are oftener quoted
and better known, to the germinal impulses of Browning's poetic work.
"Finite" and "infinite" were words continually on his lips, and it is
clear that both sides of the antithesis represented instincts rooted in
his mental nature, drawing nourishment from distinct but equally
fundamental springs of feeling and thought. Each had its stronghold in a
particular psychical region. The province and feeding-ground of his
passion for "infinity" was that eager and restless self-consciousness
which he so vividly described in _Pauline_, seeking to "be all, have,
see, know, taste, feel all," to become all natures, like Sordello, yet
retain the law of his own being. "I pluck the rose and love it more than
tongue can speak," says the lover in _Two in the Campagna_. Browning had
his full portion of the romantic idealism which, under the twofold
stimulus of literary and political revolution, had animated the poetry
of the previous generation. But while he clearly shared the uplifted
aspiring spirit of Shelley, it assumed in him a totally different
character. Shelley abhors limits, everything grows evanescent and
ethereal before his solvent imagination, the infinity he aspires after
unveils itself at his bidding, impalpable, undefined, "intense,"
"inane." Whereas Browning's restlessly aspiring temperament worked under
the control of an eye and ear that fastened with peculiar emphasis and
eagerness upon all the limits, the dissonances, the angularities that
Shelley's harmonising fancy dissolved away. The ultimate psychological
result was that the brilliant clarity and precision of his imagined
forms gathered richness and intensity of suggestion from the vaguer
impulses of temperament, and that an association was set up between them
which makes it literally true to say that, for Browning, the "finite" is
not the rival or the antithesis, but the very language of the
"infinite,"--that the vastest and most transcendent realities have for
him their _points d'appui_ in some bit of intense life, some darting
bird or insect, some glowing flower or leaf. Existence ebbs away from
the large, featureless, monotonous things, to concentrate itself in a
spiked cypress or a jagged mountain cleft. A placid soul without
"incidents" arrests him less surely than the fireflies on a mossy bank.
Hence, while "the finite" always appears, when explicitly contrasted
with "the infinite," as the inferior,--as something _soi-disant_
imperfect and incomplete,--its actual status and function in Browning's
imaginative world rather resembles that of Plato's peras in
relation to the apeiron,--the saving "limit" which gives
definite existence to the limitless vague.
II.
Hence Browning, while a romantic in temper, was, in comparison with his
predecessors, a thorough realist in method. All the Romantic poets of
the previous generation had refused and decried some large portion of
reality. Wordsworth had averted his ken from half of human fate; Keats
and Shelley turned from the forlornness of human society as it was to
the transfigured humanity of myth. All three were out of sympathy with
civilisation; and their revolt went much deeper than a distaste for the
types of men it bred. They attacked a triumphant age of reason in its
central fastness, the brilliant analytic intelligence to which its
triumphs were apparently due. Keats declaimed at cold philosophy which
undid the rainbow's spells; Shelley repelled the claim of mere
understanding to settle the merits of poetry; Wordsworth, the
profoundest, though by no means the most cogent or connected, thinker of
the three, denounced the "meddling intellect" which murders to dissect,
and strove to strip language itself of every element of logic and fancy,
as distortions of the truth, only to be uttered in the barest words,
which comes to the heart that watches and receives. On all these issues
Browning stands in sharp, if not quite absolute, contrast. "Barbarian,"
as he has been called, and as in a quite intelligible sense he was, he
found his poetry pre-eminently among the pursuits, the passions, the
interests and problems, of civilised men. His potent gift of imagination
never tempted him, during his creative years, to assail the sufficiency
of intellect, or to disparage the intellectual and "artificial" elements
of speech; on the contrary, he appears from the outset employing in the
service of poetry a discursive logic of unsurpassed swiftness and
dexterity, and a vast heterogeneous army of words gathered, like a
sudden levy, with a sole eye to their effective force, from every
corner of civilised life, and wearing the motley of the most prosaic
occupations. It was only in the closing years that he began to distrust
the power of thought to get a grip upon reality. His delight in poetic
argument is often doubtless that of the ironical casuist, looking on at
the self-deceptions of a soul; but his interest in ideas was a rooted
passion that gave a thoroughly new, and to many readers most unwelcome,
"intellectuality" to the whole manner as well as substance of his poetic
work.
While Browning thus, in Nietzsche's phrase, said "Yes" to many sides of
existence which his Romantic predecessors repudiated or ignored, he had
some very definite limitations of his own. He gathered into his verse
crowded regions of experience which they neglected; but some very
glorious avenues of poetry pursued by them he refused to explore.
Himself the most ardent believer in the supernatural among all the great
poets of his time, the supernatural, as such, has hardly any explicit
place in his poetry. To the eternal beauty of myth and
folk-lore,--dream-palaces "never built at all and therefore built for
ever,"--all that province of the poetical realm which in the memorable
partition of 1797 Coleridge had taken for his own, splendidly emulated
by Shelley and by Keats, Browning the Platonist maintained on the whole
the attitude of the utilitarian man of facts. "Fairy-poetry," he agreed
with Elizabeth Barrett in 1845-46, was "impossible in the days of
steam." With a faith in a transcendent divine world as assured as
Dante's or Milton's, he did not aspire to "pass the flaming bounds of
Space or Time," or "to possess the sun and stars." No reader of _Gerard
de Lairesse_ at one end of his career, or of the vision of _Paracelsus_
at the other, or _Childe Roland_ in the middle, can mistake the
capacity; but habit is more trustworthy than an occasional _tour de
force_; and Browning's imagination worked freely only when it bodied
forth a life in accord with the waking experience of his own day. "A
poet never dreams," said his philosophical Don Juan, "we prose folk
always do"; and the epigram brilliantly announced the character of
Browning's poetic world,--the world of prose illuminated through and
through in every cranny and crevice by the keenest and most adventurous
of exploring intellects.
In physical organisation Browning's endowment was decidedly of the kind
which prompts men to "accept the universe" with joyful alacrity. Like
his contemporary Victor Hugo, he was, after all reserves have been made,
from first to last one of the healthiest and heartiest of men. If he
lacked the burly stature and bovine appetite with which young Hugo a
little scandalised the delicate sensibilities of French Romanticism, he
certainly "came eating and drinking," and amply equipped with nerve and
muscle, activity, accomplishment, social instinct, and _savoir faire_.
The isolating loneliness of genius was checkmated by a profusion of the
talents which put men _en rapport_ with their kind. The reader of his
biography is apt to miss in it the signs of that heroic or idealist
detachment which he was never weary of extolling in his verse. He is the
poet _par excellence_ of the glory of failure and dissatisfaction: but
his life was, in the main, that of one who succeeded and who was
satisfied with his success. In the vast bulk of his writings we look in
vain for the "broken arc," the "half-told tale," and it is
characteristic that he never revised. Even after the great sorrow of his
life, the mood of _Prospice_, though it may have underlain all his other
moods, did not suppress or transform them; he "lived in the world and
loved earth's way," and however assured that this earth is not his only
sphere, did not wish
"the wings unfurled
That sleep in the worm, they say."
Whatever affinities Browning may have with the mystic or the symbolist
for whom the whole sense-world is but the sign of spiritual realities,
it is plain that this way of envisaging existence found little support
in the character of his senses. He had not the brooding eye, beneath
which, as it gazes, loveliness becomes far lovelier, but an organ
aggressively alert, minutely inquisitive, circumstantially exact, which
perceived the bearings of things, and explored their intricacies, noted
how the mortar was tempered in the walls and if any struck a woman or
beat a horse, but was as little prone to transfigure these or other
things with the glamour of mysterious suggestion as the eye of Peter
Bell himself. He lacked the stranger and subtler sensibilities of eye
and ear, to which Nature poetry of the nineteenth century owes so much.
His senses were efficient servants to an active brain, not magicians
flinging dazzling spells into the air before him or mysterious music
across his path. By a curious and not unimportant peculiarity he could
see a remote horizon clearly with one eye, and read the finest print in
twilight with the other; but he could not, like Wordsworth, hear the
"sound of alien melancholy" given out from the mountains before a storm.
The implicit realism of his eye and ear was fortified by acute tactual
and muscular sensibilities. He makes us vividly aware of surface and
texture, of space, solidity, shape. Matter with him is not the
translucent, tenuous, half-spiritual substance of Shelley, but
aggressively massive and opaque, tense with solidity. And he had in an
eminent degree the quick and eager apprehension of space--relations
which usually goes with these developed sensibilities of eye and muscle.
There is a hint of it in an early anecdote. "Why, sir, you are quite a
geographer!" he reported his mother to have said to him when, on his
very first walk with her, he had given her an elaborate imaginary
account of "his houses and estates."[62] But it was only late in life
that this acute plasticity and concreteness of his sensibility found its
natural outlet. When in their last winter at Rome (1860-61) he took to
clay-modelling, it was with an exultant rapture which for the time
thrust poetry into the shade. "The more tired he has been, and the more
his back ached, poor fellow," writes his wife, "the more he has exulted
and been happy--no, nothing ever made him so happy before."[63] This was
the immense joy of one who has at length found the key after half a
lifetime of trying at the lock.
[Footnote 62: Mrs Orr, _Life_, p. 24.]
[Footnote 63: Mrs Browning's _Letters_, March 1861.]
III.
And yet realism as commonly understood is a misleading term for
Browning's art. If his keen objective senses penned his imagination,
save for a few daring escapades, within the limits of a somewhat normal
actuality, it exercised, within those limits, a superb individuality of
choice. The acute observer was doubled with a poet whose vehement and
fiery energy and intense self-consciousness influenced what he observed,
and yet far more what he imagined and what he expressed. It is possible
to distinguish four main lines along which this determining bias told.
He gloried in the strong sensory-stimulus of glowing colour, of dazzling
light; in the more complex _motory_-stimulus of intricate, abrupt, and
plastic form,--feasts for the agile eye; in all the signs of power,
exciting a kindred joy by sympathy; and in all the signs of conscious
life or "soul," exciting a joy which only reaches its height when it is
enforced by those more elemental and primitive springs of joy, when he
is engaged with souls that glow like a flower or a gem, with souls
picturesquely complex and diversified, or vehement, aspiring, heroic. In
each of those four domains, light and colour, form, power, soul,
Browning had a profound, and in the fullest sense creative, joy, which
in endless varieties and combinations dominated his imagination,
controlled and pointed its flight, and determined the contents, the
manner, and the atmosphere of his poetic work. To trace these operations
in detail will be the occupation of the five following sections.
IV.
1. JOY IN LIGHT AND COLOUR.
Browning's repute as a thinker and "teacher" long overshadowed his glory
as a singer, and it still to some extent impedes the recognition of his
bold and splendid colouring. It is true that he is never a colourist
pure and simple; his joy in light and colour is never merely epicurean.
Poets so great as Keats often seem to sit as luxurious guests at their
own feasts of sense; Browning has rather the air of a magnificent
dispenser, who "provides and not partakes." His colouring is not subtle;
it recalls neither the æthereal opal of Shelley nor the dewy flushing
glow and "verdurous glooms" of Keats, nor the choice and cultured
splendour of Tennyson; it is bold, simple, and intense. He neglects the
indecisive and subdued tones; the mingled hues chiefly found in Nature,
or the tender "silvery-grey" of Andrea's placid perfection. He dazzles
us with scarlet and crimson; with rubies, and blood, and "the poppy's
red effrontery," with topaz, and amethyst, and the glory of gold, makes
the sense ache with the lustre of blue, and heightens the effect of all
by the boldest contrast. Who can doubt that he fell the more readily
upon one of his quaintest titles because of the priestly ordinance that
the "Pomegranates" were to be "of blue and of purple and of scarlet,"
and the "Bells" "of gold"? He loves the daybreak hour of the world's
awakening vitality as poets of another temper love the twilight; the
splendour of sunrise pouring into the chamber of Pippa, and steeping
Florence in that "live translucent bath of air"[64]; he loves the blaze
of the Italian mid-day--
"Great noontides, thunderstorms, all glaring pomps
That triumph at the heels of June the god."
Even a violet-bed he sees as a "flash" of "blue."[65] He loves the play
of light on golden hair, and rarely imagines womanhood without it, even
in the sombre South and the dusky East; Poiphyria and Lady Carlisle,
Evelyn Hope and the maid of Pornic, share the gift with Anael the Druse,
with Sordello's Palma, whose
"tresses curled
Into a sumptuous swell of gold, and wound
About her like a glory! even the ground
Was bright as with spilt sunbeams;"
and the girl in _Love among the Ruins_, and the "dear dead women" of
Venice. His love of fire and of the imagery of flame has one of its
sources in his love of light. Verona emerges from the gloom of the past
as "a darkness kindling at the core." He sees the "pink perfection of
the cyclamen," the "rose bloom o'er the summit's front of stone." And,
like most painters of the glow of light, he throws a peculiar intensity
into his glooms. When he paints a dark night, as in _Pan and Luna_, the
blackness is a solid jelly-like thing that can be cut. And even night
itself falls short of the pitchy gloom that precedes the Eastern vision,
breaking in despair "against the soul of blackness there," as the gloom
of Saul's tent discovers within it "a something more black than the
blackness," the sustaining tent-pole, and then Saul himself "gigantic
and blackest of all."
[Footnote 64: "I never grow tired of sunrises," he wrote in a letter,
recently published, to Aubrey de Vere, in 1851 (_A. de Vere: A Memoir_,
by Wilfrid Ward).]
[Footnote 65: _Two Poets of Croisic_.]
But mostly the foil is a vivid, even strident, contrast. He sees the
"old June weather" blue above, and the
"great opaque
Blue breadth of sea without a break"
under the walls of the seaside palazzo in Southern Italy, "where the
baked cicala dies of drouth"; and the blue lilies about the harp of
golden-haired David; and Solomon gold-robed in the blue abyss of his
cedar house, "like the centre spike of gold which burns deep in the
blue-bell's womb";[66] and the "gaze of Apollo" through the gloom of
Verona woods;[67] he sees the American pampas--"miles and miles of gold
and green," "where the sunflowers blow in a solid glow," with a
horse--"coal-black"--careering across it; and his swarthy Ethiop uses
the yellow poison-wattles of a lizard to divine with.[68] If he imagines
the "hairy-gold orbs" of the sorb-fruit, they must be ensconced in
"black glossy myrtle-berries," foils in texture as in hue;[69] and he
neglects the mellow harmonies of autumnal decay in order to paint the
leaf which is like a splash of blood intense, abrupt, across the flame
of a golden shield.[70] He makes the most of every hint of contrast he
finds, and delights in images which accentuate the rigour of antithesis;
Cleon's mingled black and white slaves remind him of a tesselated
pavement, and Blougram's fluctuating faith and doubt of a chess-board.
And when, long after the tragic break-up of his Italian home, he
reverted in thought to Miss Blagden's Florentine garden, the one
impression that sifted itself out in his tell-tale memory was of spots
of colour and light upon dark backgrounds,--"the herbs in red flower,
and the butterflies on the top of the wall under the olive-trees."[71]
[Footnote 66: _Popularity_.]
[Footnote 67: _Sordello_.]
[Footnote 68: Ibid.]
[Footnote 69: _Englishman in Italy_.]
[Footnote 70: _By the Fireside_.]
[Footnote 71: Mrs Orr, _Life_, p. 258.]
Browning's colouring is thus strikingly expressive of the build of his
mind, as sketched above. It is the colouring of a realist in so far as
it is always caught from life, and never fantastic or mythical. But it
is chosen with an instinctive and peremptory bias of eye and
imagination--the index of a mind impatient of indistinct confusions and
placid harmony, avid of intensity, decision, and conflict.
V.
2. JOY IN FORM.
If the popular legend of Browning ignores his passion for colour, it
altogether scouts the suggestion that he had a peculiar delight in form.
By general consent he lacked the most ordinary and decent attention to
it. No doubt he is partly responsible for this impression himself. His
ideals of literary form were not altogether those commonly recognised in
literature. If we understand by form the quality of clear-cut outline
and sharply defined articulation, there is a sense in which it was one
of the most ingrained instincts of his nature, indulged at times with
even morbid excess. Alike in life and in art he hated sloth,--the
slovenliness of the "ungirt loin" and of the indecisive touch. In
conduct, this animus expressed itself in a kind of punctilious
propriety. The forms of social convention Browning observed not merely
with the scrupulous respect of the man of fashion, but with the
enthusiasm of the virtuoso. Near akin in genius to the high priests of
the Romantic temple, Browning rarely, even in the defiant heyday of
adolescence, set more than a tentative foot across the outer precincts
of the Romantic Bohemia. His "individualism" was not of the type which
overflows in easy affectations; he was too original to be eccentric, too
profoundly a man of letters to look "like a damned literary man." In his
poetry this animus took a less equivocal shape. Not a little, both of
its vividness and of its obscurity, flows from the undisciplined
exuberance of his joy in form. An acute criticism of Mrs Browning's--in
some points the very best critic he ever had--puts one aspect of this
admirably. _The Athenæum_ had called him "misty." "Misty," she retorts,
"is an infamous word for your kind of obscurity. You never are misty,
not even in _Sordello_--never vague. Your graver cuts deep sharp lines,
always,--and there is an extra distinctness in your images and thoughts,
from the midst of which, crossing each other infinitely, the general
significance seems to escape."[72] That is the overplus of form
producing obscurity. But through immense tracts of Browning the effect
of the extra-distinctness of his images and thoughts, of the deep sharp
lines cut by his graver, is not thus frustrated, but tells to the full
in amazingly vivid and unforgettable expression. Yet he is no more a
realist of the ordinary type here than in his colouring. His deep sharp
lines are caught from life, but under the control of a no less definite
bias of eye and brain. Sheer nervous and muscular energy had its part
here also. As he loved the intense colours which most vigorously
stimulate the optic nerve, so he delighted in the angular, indented,
intertwining, labyrinthine varieties of line and surface which call for
the most delicate, and at the same time the most agile, adjustments of
the muscles of the eye. He caught at the edges of things--the white line
of foam against the shore, the lip of the shell, and he could compare
whiteness as no other poet ever did to "the bitten lip of hate." He once
saw with delight "a solitary bee nipping a leaf round till it exactly
fitted the front of a hole."[73] Browning's joy in form was as little
epicurean as his joy in colour; it was a banquet of the senses in which
the sense of motion and energy had the largest part. Smooth, flowing,
rounded, undulating outlines, which the eye glides along without check,
are insipid and profitless to him, and he "welcomes the rebuff" of every
jagged excrescence or ragged fray, of every sudden and abrupt breach of
continuity. His eye seizes the crisp indentations of ferns as they "fit
their teeth to the polished block" of a grey boulder-stone;[74] seizes
the "sharp-curled" olive-leaves as they "print the blue sky" above the
morning glories of Florence;[75] seizes the sharp zigzag of lightning
against the Italian midnight, the fiery west through a dungeon grating
or a lurid rift in the clouds,[76]--"one gloom, a rift of fire, another
gloom,"--the brilliant line of Venice suspended "between blue and blue."
"Cup-mosses and ferns and spotty yellow leaves--all that I love
heartily," he wrote to E.B.B.[77] Roses and moss strike most men's
senses by a soft luxuriance in which all sharp articulation of parts is
merged; but what Browning seizes on in the rose is its "labyrinthine"
intricacy, while the moss becomes a little forest of "fairy-cups and elf
needles." And who else would have thought of saying that "the fields
look _rough_ with hoary dew"?[78] In the _Easter-Day_ vision he sees the
sky as a network of black serrated ridges. He loves the intricate play
of light and shade, and the irregular, contorted, honeycombed surface
which produces it; craggy, scarred, indented mountains, "like an old
lion's cheek-teeth";[79] old towns with huddled roofs and towers picked
out "black and crooked," like "fretwork," or "Turkish verse along a
scimitar"; old walls, creviced and crannied, intertwined with creepers,
and tenanted by crossing swarms of ever-busy flies,--such things are the
familiar commonplace of Browning's sculpturesque fancy. His metrical
movements are full of the same joy in "fretwork" effects--verse-rhythm
and sense-rhythm constantly crossing where the reader expects them to
coincide.[80]
[Footnote 72: _E.B. to R.B._, Jan. 19, 1846.]
[Footnote 73: _To E.B.B._, Jan. 5, 1846.]
[Footnote 74: _By the Fireside_.]
[Footnote 75: _Old Pictures in Florence_.]
[Footnote 76: _Sordello_, i. 181.]
[Footnote 77: Jan. 5, 1846, apropos of a poem by Horne. The "love" may
refer to Horne's description of these things, but it matters little for
the present purpose.]
[Footnote 78: _Home Thoughts_.]
[Footnote 79: _Karshish_, i. 515. Cf. _Englishman in Italy_, i. 397.]
[Footnote 80: Cf., _e.g._, his treatment of the six-line stanza.]
Nor was his imaginative sculpture confined to low-relief. Every rift in
the surface catches his eye, and the deeper and more intricate the
recess, the more curiously his insinuating fancy explores it. Sordello's
palace is "a maze of corridors,"--"dusk winding stairs, dim galleries."
He probes the depths of the flower-bell; he pries after the warmth and
scent that lie within the "loaded curls" of his lady, and irradiates the
lizard, or the gnome,[81] in its rock-chamber, the bee in its amber
drop,[82] or in its bud,[83] the worm in its clod. When Keats describes
the closed eyes of the sleeping Madeline he is content with the
loveliness he sees:--
"And still she slept an _azure-lidded_ sleep."
Browning's mining fancy insists on showing us the eye of the dead
Porphyria "ensconced" within its eyelid, "like a bee in a bud." A cleft
is as seductive to his imagination as a cave to Shelley's. In a cleft of
the wind gashed Apennines he imagines the home he would best love in all
the world;[84] in a cleft the pine-tree, symbol of hardy song,[85]
strikes precarious root, the ruined eagle finds refuge,[86] and
Sibrandus Schaffnaburgensis a watery Inferno. A like instinct allures
him to other images of deep hollow things the recesses of which
something else explores and occupies,--the image of the sheath; the
image of the cup. But he is equally allured by the opposite, or salient,
kind of angularity. Beside the Calabrian seaside house stands a "sharp
tree--a cypress--rough iron-spiked, ripe fruit o'er-crusted,"--in all
points a thoroughly Browningesque tree.
[Footnote 81: _Sordello_.]
[Footnote 82: This turn of fancy was one of his points of affinity with
Donne; cf. _R.B. to E.B.B._, i. 46: "Music should enwrap the thought, as
Donne says an amber drop enwraps a bee."]
[Footnote 83: _Porphyria_.]
[Footnote 84: _De Gustibus_.]
[Footnote 85: _Pan and Luna_.]
[Footnote 86: E.g., _Balaustion's Adventure_; Proem.]
And so, corresponding to the cleft-like array of sheaths and cups, a not
less prolific family of _spikes_ and _wedges_ and _swords_ runs riot in
Browning's work. The rushing of a fresh river-stream into the warm ocean
tides crystallises into the "crystal spike between two warm walls of
wave;"[87] "air thickens," and the wind, grown solid, "edges its wedge
in and in as far as the point would go."[88] The fleecy clouds embracing
the flying form of Luna clasp her as close "as dented spine fitting its
flesh."[89] The fiery agony of John the heretic is a plucking of sharp
spikes from his rose.[90] Lightning is a bright sword, plunged through
the pine-tree roof. And Mont Blanc himself is half effaced by his
"earth-brood" of aiguilles,--"needles red and white and green, Horns of
silver, fangs of crystal, set on edge in his demesne."[91]
[Footnote 87: _Caliban on Setebos_.]
[Footnote 88: _A Lover's Quarrel_.]
[Footnote 89: _Pan and Luna_.]
[Footnote 90: _The Heretic's Tragedy_.]
[Footnote 91: _La Saisiaz_.]
Browning's joy in abrupt and intricate form had then a definite root in
his own nervous and muscular energy. It was no mere preference which
might be indulged or not, but an instinctive bias, which deeply affected
his way not only of imagining but of conceiving the relations of things.
In this brilliant visual speech of sharply cut angles and saliences, of
rugged incrustations, and labyrinthine multiplicity, Browning's romantic
hunger for the infinite had to find its expression; and it is clear that
the bias implicit in speech imposed itself in some points upon the
matter it conveyed. Abrupt demarcations cut off soul from body, and man
from God; the infinite habitually presented itself to him as something,
not transcending and comprehending the finite, but _beginning where the
finite stopped_,--Eternity at the end of Time. But the same imaginative
passion for form which imposed some concrete limitations upon the
Absolute deprived it also of the vagueness of abstraction. Browning's
divinity is very finite, but also amazingly real and near; not
"interfused" with the world, which is full of stubborn distinctness, but
permeating it through and through, "curled inextricably round about" all
its beauty and its power,[92] "intertwined" with earth's lowliest
existence, and thrilling with answering rapture to every throb of life.
The doctrine of God's "immanence" was almost a commonplace with
Browning's generation. Browning turned the doctrine into imaginative
speech equalled in impressiveness by that of Carlyle and by that of
Emerson, but distinguished from both by an eager articulating concrete
sensibility which lifts into touch with supreme Good all the
labyrinthine multiplicity of existence which Carlyle impatiently
suppressed, while it joyously accentuates the sharp dissonances which
Emerson's ideality ignored.
[Footnote 92: _Easter-Day_, xxx.]
VI.
3. JOY IN POWER.
Browning was thus announced, we have seen, even by his splendour of
colouring and his rich and clear-cut plasticity, as something more than
a feaster upon colour and form. In his riot of the senses there was more
of the athlete than of the voluptuary. His joy was that of one to whom
nervous and muscular tension was itself a stimulating delight. In such a
temperament the feeling of energy was an elementary instinct, a
passionate obsession, which projected itself through eye and ear and
imagination into the outer world, filling it with the throbbing
pulsations or the clashing conflict of vehement powers. We know that it
was thus with Browning. "From the first Power was, I knew," he wrote in
the last autumn of his life.[93] It was a primitive instinct, and it
remained firmly rooted to the last. As Wordsworth saw Joy everywhere,
and Shelley Love, so Browning saw Power. If he later "saw Love as
plainly," it was the creative and transforming, not the emotional,
aspect of Love which caught his eye. His sense of Power played a yet
more various part in the shaping of his poetic world than did his sense
of form. But intellectual growth inevitably modified the primitive
instinct which it could not uproot; and his sense of Power traverses the
whole gamut of dynamic tones, from the lusty "barbaric" joy in the
sheer violence of ripping and clashing, to the high-wrought sensibility
which throbs in sympathy with the passionate heart-beats of the stars.
[Footnote 93: _Asolando: Reverie._]
No one can miss the element of savage energy in Browning. His associates
tell us of his sudden fits of indignation, "which were like
thunder-storms"; of his "brutal scorn" for effeminacy, of the "vibration
of his loud voice, and his hard fist upon the table," which made short
work of cobwebs.[94] The impact of hard resisting things, the jostlings
of stubborn matter bent on going its own way, attracted him as the
subtle compliances of air appealed to Shelley; and he runs riot in the
vocabulary (so abundantly developed in English) which conveys with
monosyllabic vigour to the ear these jostlings and impacts.
[Footnote 94: Mr E. Gosse, in _Dict. of N.B._]
"Who were the stragglers, what war did they wage;
Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank
Soil to a plash?"
he asks in _Childe Roland_,--altogether an instructive example of the
ways of Browning's imagination when working, as it so rarely did, on a
deliberately fantastic theme. Hear again with what savage joy his Moon
"rips the womb" of the cloud that crosses it; Shelley's Moon, in keeping
with the ways of his more tender-hefted universe, merely _broke its
woof_. So the gentle wife of James Lee sees in a vineyard "the vines
writhe in rows each impaled on its stake."
His "clefts" and "wedges" owe their attraction not only to their
intricate angularity but to the violent cleavings and thrustings apart
which they result from or produce. And his clefts are as incomplete
without some wild bit of fierce or frightened life in their grip as are
Shelley's caves without some form of unearthly maidenhood in their
embrace.[95] His mountains--so rarely the benign pastoral presences of
Wordsworth--are not only craggy and rough, but invisible axes have hewn
and mutilated them,--they are fissured and cloven and "scalped" and
"wind-gashed." When they thrust their mighty feet into the plain and
"entwine base with base to knit strength more intensely,"[96] the image
owes its grandeur to the double suggestion of sinewy power and
intertwined limbs. Still grander, but in the same style, is the sketch
of Hildebrand in _Sordello_:--
"See him stand
Buttressed upon his mattock, Hildebrand
Of the huge brain-mask welded ply o'er ply
As in a forge; ... teeth clenched,
The neck tight-corded too, the chin deep-trenched,
As if a cloud enveloped him while fought
Under its shade, grim prizers, thought with thought
At deadlock."[97]
[Footnote 95: Cf. _Prometheus Unbound_, passim.]
[Footnote 96: _Saul_.]
[Footnote 97: _Sordello_, i. 171.]
When the hoary cripple in _Childe Roland_ laughs, his mouth-edge is
"pursed and scored" with his glee; and his scorn must not merely be
uttered, but _written_ with his crutch "in the dusty thoroughfare."
This idea is resumed yet more dramatically in the image of the palsied
oak, cleft like "a distorted mouth that splits its rim gaping at death."
Later on, thrusting his spear into the gloom, he fancies it "tangled in
a dead man's hair or beard." Similarly, Browning is habitually lured
into expressive detail by the idea of smooth surfaces frayed or
shredded,--as of flesh torn with teeth or spikes: Akiba,--
"the comb
Of iron carded, flesh from bone, away,"[98]
or Hippolytus, ruined on the "detested beach" that was "bright with
blood and morsels of his flesh."[99]
[Footnote 98: _Joch. Halk._]
[Footnote 99: _Artemis Prol._]
This savageness found vent still more freely in his rendering of sounds.
By one of those apparent paradoxes which abound in Browning, the poet
who has best interpreted the glories of music in verse, the poet of
musicians _par excellence_, is also the poet of grindings and jostlings,
of jars and clashes, of grating hinges and flapping doors; civilisation
mated with barbarism, "like Jove in a thatched house."
Music appealed to him by its imaginative suggestiveness, or by its
intricate technique; as the mine from which Abt Vogler reared his
palace, the loom on which Master Hugues wove the intertwining harmonies
of his fugue. But the most dulcet harmony aroused him less surely to
vivacious expression than some "gruff hinge's invariable scold,"[100] or
the quick sharp rattle of rings down the net-poles,[101] or the
hoof-beat of a galloping horse, or the grotesque tumble of the old
organist, in fancy, down the "rotten-runged, rat-riddled stairs" of his
lightless loft. There was much in him of his own Hamelin rats' alacrity
of response to sounds "as of scraping tripe" and squeezing apples, and
the rest. Milton contrasted the harmonious swing of the gates of
Paradise with the harsh grinding of the gates of hell. Browning would
have found in the latter a satisfaction subtly allied to his zest for
other forms of robust malignity.
[Footnote 100: _Christmas Eve_, i. 480.]
[Footnote 101: _Englishman in Italy_, i. 396.]
And with his joy in savage images went an even more pronounced joy in
savage words. He loved the grinding, clashing, and rending sibilants and
explosives as Tennyson the tender-hefted liquids. Both poets found their
good among Saxon monosyllables, but to Tennyson they appealed by limpid
simplicity, to Browning by gnarled and rugged force. Dante, in a famous
chapter of the _De Vulgari Eloquio_[102] laid down a fourfold
distinction among words on the analogy of the varying texture of the
hair; enjoining the poet to avoid both the extremes of smoothness and
roughness,--to prefer the "combed" and the "shaggy" to the "tousled" and
the "sleek." All four kinds had their function in the versatile
technique of Browning and Tennyson; but it is safe to say that while
Tennyson's vocabulary is focussed among the "combed" in the direction of
the "sleek," Browning's centres in the "shaggy," verging towards the
"tousled."[103] The utmost sweetness is his when he will; it is the
counterpart of his pure intensity of colouring, and of the lyric
loveliness of his Pippas and Pompilias; but
"All the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one bee,"
though genuine Browning, is not distinctively and unmistakably his, like
"Irks care the crop-full bird? Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?"
[Footnote 102: _De Vulg. Eloq._, ii. 8.]
[Footnote 103: Making allowance, of course, for the more "shaggy" and
"tousled" character of the English vocabulary as a whole, compared with
Italian.]
Browning's genial violence continually produced strokes which only
needed a little access of oddity or extravagance to become grotesque. He
probably inherited a bias in this direction; we know that his father
delighted in drawing grotesque heads, and even "declared that he could
not draw a pretty face."[104] But his grotesqueness is never the mere
comic oddness which sometimes assumes the name. It is a kind of
monstrosity produced not by whimsical mutilations, but by a riot of
exuberant power. And he has also a grave and tragic use of the
grotesque, in which he stands alone. He is, in fact, by far the greatest
English master of grotesque. _Childe Roland_, where the natural bent of
his invention has full fling, abounds with grotesque traits which,
instead of disturbing the romantic atmosphere, infuse into it an
element of strange, weird, and uncanny mirth, more unearthly than any
solemnity; the day shooting its grim red leer across the plain, the old
worn-out horse with its red, gaunt, and colloped neck a-strain; or, in
_Paracelsus_, the "Cyclops-like" volcanoes "staring together with their
eyes on flame," in whose "uncouth pride" God tastes a pleasure. Shelley
had recoiled from the horrible idea of a host of these One-eyed
monsters;[105] Browning deliberately invokes it. But he can use
grotesque effects to heighten tragedy as well as romance. One source of
the peculiar poignancy of the _Heretic's Tragedy_ is the eerie blend in
it of mocking familiarity and horror.
[Footnote 104: H. Corkran, _Celebrities and I_.]
[Footnote 105: Cf. Locock, _Examination of the Shelley MSS. in the
Bodleian_, p. 19. At the words "And monophalmic (_sic_) Polyphemes who
haunt the pine-hills, flocked," the writing becomes illegible and the
stanza is left incomplete. Mr Forman explains the breaking-off in the
same way.]
Yet it was not always in this brutal and violent guise that Browning
imagined power. He was "ever a fighter," and had a sense as keen as
Byron's, and far more joyous, for storm and turbulence; but he had also,
as Byron had not, the finer sense which feels the universe tense with
implicit energies, and the profoundest silences of Nature oppressive
with the burden of life straining to the birth. The stars in _Saul_
"beat with emotion" and "shot out in fire the strong pain of pent
knowledge," and a "gathered intensity" is "brought to the grey of the
hills"; upon the lovers of _In a Balcony_ evening comes "intense with
yon first trembling star." Wordsworth's "quiet" is lonely, pensive, and
serene; his stars are not beating with emotion, but "listening quietly."
Browning's is hectic, bodeful, high-strung. The vast featureless
Campagna is instinct with "passion," and its "peace with joy."[106]
"Quietude--that's a universe in germ--
The dormant passion needing but a look
To burst into immense life."[107]
[Footnote 106: _Two in the Campagna._]
[Footnote 107: _Asolando: Inapprehensiveness_.]
Half the romantic spell of _Childe Roland_ lies in the wonderful
suggestion of impending catastrophe. The gloom is alive with mysterious
and impalpable menace; the encompassing presences which everything
suggests and nothing betrays, grow more and more oppressively real,
until the decisive moment when Roland's blast suddenly lets them loose.
For the power that Browning rejoiced to imagine was pre-eminently
sudden; an unforeseen cataclysm, abruptly changing the conditions it
found, and sharply marking off the future from the past. The same bias
of imagination which crowded his inner vision of space with abrupt
angular forms tended to resolve the slow, continuous, organic energies
of the world before his inner vision into explosion and catastrophe. His
geology neglects the æons of gradual stratification; it is not the slow
stupendous upheaval of continents, but the volcanic uprush of the molten
ore among the rocks, which renew the ancient rapture of the Paracelsian
God. He is the poet of the sudden surprises of plant-life: the bud
"bursting unaware" into flower, the brushwood about the elm-tree
breaking, some April morning, into tiny leaf, the rose-flesh mushroom
born in a night. The "metamorphoses of plants,"[108] which fascinated
Goethe by their inner continuity, arrest Browning by their outward
abruptness: that the flower is implicit in the leaf was a fact of much
less worth for him than that the bud suddenly passes into something so
unlike it as the flower. The gradual coming on of spring among the
mountains concentrates itself for him in one instant of epic
sublimity,--that in which the mountain unlooses its year's load of
sound, and
"Fold on fold all at once it crowds thunderously down to his
feet."[109]
[Footnote 108: _Metamorphose der Pflanzen_.]
[Footnote 109: _Saul_.]
Even in the gradual ebb of day he discovers a pregnant instant in which
day dies:--
"For note, when evening shuts,
A certain moment cuts
The deed off, calls the glory from the grey."
Hence his love of images which convey these sudden transformations,--the
worm, putting forth in autumn its "two wondrous winglets,"[110] the
"transcendental platan," breaking into foliage and flower at the summit
of its smooth tall bole; the splendour of flame leaping from the dull
fuel of gums and straw. In such images we see how the simple joy in
abrupt changes of sensation which belonged to his riotous energy of
nerve lent support to his peremptory way of imagining all change and
especially all vital and significant becoming. For Browning's trenchant
imagination things were not gradually evolved; a sudden touch loosed the
springs of latent power, or an overmastering energy from without rushed
in like a flood. With all his connoisseur's delight in technique,
language and sound were only spells which unlocked a power beyond their
capacity to express. Music was the "burst of pillared cloud by day and
pillared fire by night," starting up miraculously from the barren
wilderness of mechanical expedients,[111] and poetry "the sudden
rose"[112] "breaking in" at the bidding of a "brace of rhymes." That in
such transmutations Browning saw one of the most marvellous of human
powers we may gather from the famous lines of _Abt Vogler_ already
quoted:--
"And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man,
That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star."
[Footnote 110: _Sordello_ (Works, i. 123).]
[Footnote 111: _Fifine_, xlii.]
[Footnote 112: _Transcendentalism_.]
VII.
4. JOY IN SOUL.
No saying of Browning's is more familiar than that in which he declared
"incidents in the development of souls"[113] to be to him the supreme
interest of poetry. The preceding sections of this chapter have
sufficiently shown how far this formula was from exhausting the vital
springs of Browning's work. "Little else" might be "worth study"; but a
great many other things had captured those rich sensibilities, without
which the "student's analytic zeal" might have devoured the poet. On the
other hand, his supreme interest in "incidents in the development of
souls" was something very different from the democratic enthusiasm for
humanity, or the Wordsworthian joy in the "common tears and mirth" of
"every village." The quiet routine existence of uneventful lives hardly
touched him more than the placid quiescence of animal and vegetable
existence; the commonplace of humanity excited in him no mystic rapture;
the human "primrose by the river's brim," merely as one among a throng,
was for him pretty much what it was to Peter Bell. There was no doubt a
strain of pantheistic thought in Browning which logically involved a
treatment of the commonplace as profoundly reverent as Wordsworth's own.
But his passionate faith in the divine love pervading the universe did
not prevent his turning away resolutely from regions of humanity, as of
nature, for which his poetic alchemy provided no solvent. His poetic
throne was not built on "humble truth"; and he, as little as his own
Sordello, deserved the eulogy of the plausible Naddo upon his verses as
based "on man's broad nature," and having a "staple of common-sense."[114]
The homely toiler as such, all members of homely undistinguished classes
and conditions of men, presented, _as_ embodiments of those classes
and conditions, no coign of vantage to his art. In this point,
human-hearted and democratic as he was, he fell short not only of the
supreme portrayers of the eternal commonplaces of peasant life,--of a
Burns, a Wordsworth, a Millet, a Barnes,--but even of the fastidious
author of _The Northern Farmer_. Once, in a moment of exaltation, at
Venice, Browning had seen Humanity in the guise of a poor soiled and
faded bit of Venetian girlhood, and symbolically taken her as the future
mistress of his art. The programme thus laid down was not, like
Wordsworth's similarly announced resolve to sing of "sorrow barricadoed
evermore within the walls of cities," simply unfulfilled; but it was far
from disclosing the real fountain of his inspiration.
[Footnote 113: Preface to _Sordello_, ed. 1863.]
[Footnote 114: _Sordello_, ii. 135.]
And as Browning deals little with the commonplace in human nature, so he
passes by with slight concern the natural relationships into which men
are born, as compared with those which they enter by passion or choice.
The bond of kinship, the love between parents and children, brothers and
sisters, so prolific of poetry elsewhere, is singularly rare and
unimportant in Browning, to whom every other variety of the love between
men and women was a kindling theme. The names of husband, of wife, of
lover, vibrate for him with a poetry more thrilling than any that those
names excite elsewhere in the poetry of his generation; but the mystic
glory which in Blake and Wordsworth and Coleridge gathered about
unconscious childhood is all but fled. Children--real children, naïve
and inarticulate, like little Fortù--rarely appear in his verse, and
those that do appear seem to have been first gently disengaged, like
Pippa, David, Theocrite, from all the clinging filaments of Home. In its
child pathos _The Pied Piper_--addressed to a child--stands all but
alone among his works. His choicest and loveliest figures are lonely and
unattached. Pippa, David, Pompilia, Bordello, Paracelsus, Balaustion,
Mildred, Caponsacchi, have no ties of home and blood, or only such as
work malignly upon their fate. Mildred has no mother, and she falls;
Sordello moves like a Shelleyan shadow about his father's house;
Balaustion breaks away from the ties of kindred to become a spiritual
daughter of Athens; Paracelsus goes forth, glorious in the possession of
"the secret of the world," which is his alone; Caponsacchi, himself
sisterless and motherless, releases Pompilia from the doom inflicted on
her by her parents' calculating greed; the song of Pippa releases Luigi
from the nobler but yet hurtful bondage of his mother's love.
More considerable, but yet relatively slight, is the part played in
Browning's poetry by those larger and more complex communities, like the
City or the State, whose bond of membership, though less involuntary
than that of family, is still for the most part the expression of
material necessity or interest, not of spiritual discernment, passion,
or choice. Patriotism, in this sense, is touched with interest but
hardly with conviction, or with striking power, by Browning. Casa Guidi
windows betrayed too much. Two great communities alone moved his
imagination profoundly; just those two, namely, in which the bond of
common political membership was most nearly merged in the bond of a
common spiritual ideal. And Browning puts the loftiest passion for
Athens in the mouth of an alien, and the loftiest Hebraism in the mouth
of a Jew of the dispersion. Responsive to the personal cry of the
solitary hero, Browning rarely caught or cared to reproduce the vaguer
multitudinous murmur of the great mass. In his defining, isolating
imagination the voice of the solitary soul rings out with thrilling
clearness, but the "still sad music of humanity" escapes. The inchoate
and the obsolescent, the indistinctness of immaturity, the incipient
disintegration of decay, the deepening shadow of oblivion, the
half-instinctive and organic bond of custom, whatever stirs the blood
but excites only blurred images in the brain, and steals into character
without passing through the gates of passion or of thought, finds
imperfect or capricious reflection in his verse.
Browning's interest in "soul" was not, then, a diffused enjoyment of
human nature as such. But, on the other hand, human nature stood for too
much with him, his sense of what all personality at the lowest implies
was too keen, to allow him to relish, or make much use of, those
unpsychological amalgams of humanity and thought,--the personified
abstractions. Whether in the base form branded by Wordsworth, or in the
lofty and noble form of Keats's "Autumn" and Shelley's "West Wind," this
powerful instrument of poetic expression was touched only in fugitive
and casual strokes to music by Browning's hand. Personality, to interest
him, had to possess a possible status in the world of experience. It had
to be of the earth, and like its inhabitants. The stamp of fashioning
intelligence, or even of blind myth-making instinct, alienates and warns
him off. He climbs to no Olympus or Valhalla, he wanders through no
Empyrean. His rare divinities tread the visible and solid ground. His
Artemis "prologizes" to, his Herakles plays a part in, a human drama;
and both are as frankly human themselves as the gods of Homer. Shelley
and Keats had rekindled about the faded forms of the Greek gods the
elemental Nature-worship from which they had started; Apollo, Hyperion,
are again glorious symbols of the "all-seeing" and all-vitalising Sun.
Browning, far from seeking to recover their primitive value, treats
their legends, with the easy rationalism of Euripides or Ferishtah, as a
mine of ethical and psychological illustration. He can play charmingly,
in later years, with the myth of Pan and Luna, of Arion and the
dolphin,[115] or of Apollo and the Fates, but idyl gets the better of
nature feeling; "maid-moon" Luna is far more maid than moon. The spirit
of autumn does not focus itself for him, as for Keats, in some symbolic
shape, slumbering among the harvest swathes or at watch over the
fragrant cider-press; it breaks up into the vivid concrete traits of
_The Englishman in Italy_. The spirit of humanity is not shadowed forth
in a Prometheus, but realised in a Caponsacchi.
[Footnote 115: _Fifine at the Fair_, lxxviii.]
VIII.
What, then, in the vast multifarious field of soul-life were the points
of special attraction for Browning? To put it in a word, the same
fundamental instincts of the senses and the imagination which we have
watched shaping the visible world of his poetry, equally determined the
complexion of its persons. The joy in pure and intense colour, in
abruptness of line and intricacy of structure, in energetic movement and
sudden disclosure and transformation,--all these characteristics have
their analogies in Browning's feeling for the complexion, morphology,
and dynamics of what he calls the soul. Just as this lover of crowded
labyrinthine forms surprises us at first by his masses of pure and
simple colour, untroubled by blur or modulation, so in the long
procession of Browning's men of the world, adepts in the tangled lore of
experience, there mingle from time to time figures radiant with a pure,
intense, immaculate spiritual light,--Pippa, Pompilia, the David of the
earlier _Saul_. Something of the strange charm of these naïvely
beautiful beings springs from their isolation. That detachment from the
bonds of home and kindred which was noticed above in its negative
aspect, appears now as a source of positive expressiveness. They start
into unexplained existence like the sudden beauty of flames from straw.
Browning is no poet of the home, but he is peculiarly the poet of a kind
of spirituality which subsists independently of earthly ties without
disdaining them, lonely but unconscious of loneliness. Pippa would
hardly be so recognisably steeped as she is in the very atmosphere of
Browning's mind, but for this loneliness of hers,--the loneliness
neither of the exile nor of the anchorite, but native, spontaneous, and
serene. Wordsworth sometimes recalls it, but he is apt to invest his
lonely beings with a mystic glamour which detaches them from humanity as
well as from their fellow-men. The little "H.C., six years old," is "a
dewdrop which the morn brings forth," that
"at the touch of wrong, without a strife,
Slips in a moment out of life."
Pippa, with all her ideality and her upward gaze, has her roots in
earth; she is not the dewdrop but the flower.
But loneliness belongs in a less degree to almost all characters which
seriously engaged Browning's imagination. His own intense isolating
self-consciousness infused itself into them. Each is a little island
kingdom, judged and justified by its own laws, and not entirely
intelligible to the foreigner. Hence his persistent use of the dramatic
monologue. Every man had his point of view, and his right to state his
case. "Where you speak straight out," Browning wrote in effect, as we
saw, in one of his earliest letters to his future wife, "I break the
white light in the seven colours of men and women"[116]; and each colour
had its special truth and worth. His study of character is notoriously
occupied with failures of transit between mind and mind. His lovers miss
the clue; if they find it, as in _By the Fireside_, the collapse of the
barrier walls is told with triumph, and the spell of the forests invoked
to explain it.
[Footnote 116: _R.B. to E.B.B._, i. 6.]
And within the viewless intrenchments thus drawn about character
Browning's imagination was prone to reproduce the abrupt and intricate
play of line and surface which fascinated his outward eye. "The
care-bit, erased, broken-up beauties ever took my taste," says, in
_Sordello_, the creator of the pure flame-like soul-beauty of Pompilia
and Pippa; very much as the crumbling and blistering of the frescoed
walls are no less needful to the charm he feels in his Southern villa
than the "blue breadth of sea without break" expanding before it. The
abruptness, the sharp transitions, the startling and picturesque
contrasts which mark so much of the talk of his persons, reflect not
merely his agility of mind but his æsthetic relish for the Gothic
richness and fretted intricacy that result. The bishop of St Praxed's
monologue, for instance, is a sort of live mosaic,--anxious entreaty to
his sons, diapered with gloating triumph over old Gandulph. The larger
tracts of soul-life are apt in his hands to break up into shifting
phases, or to nodulate into sudden crises; here a Blougram, with his
"chess-board" of faith diversified by doubt, there a Paracelsus,
advancing by complex alternations of "aspiring" and "attainment."
Everywhere in Browning the slow continuities of existence are obscured
by vivid moments,--the counterpart of his bursts of sunlight through
rifts and chinks. A moment of speech with Shelley stands out, a
brilliant handbreadth of time between the blank before and after; a
moment of miserable failure blots out the whole after-life of Martin
Relph; a moment of heroism stamps once for all the quality of Clive; the
whole complex story of Pompilia focuses in the "splendid minute and no
more" in which she is "saved"; the lover's whole life is summed up in
"some moment's product" when "the soul declares itself,"[117] or utters
the upgarnered poetry of its passion; or else, conversely, he looks back
on a moment equally indelible, when the single chance of love was
missed. "It once might have been, once only," is the refrain of the
lover's regret in Browning, as "once and only once and for one only" is
the keynote of his triumph. In the contours of event and circumstance,
as in those of material objects, he loves jagged angularity, not
harmonious curve. "Our interest's in the dangerous edge of things,"--
"The honest thief, the tender murderer,
The superstitious atheist;"