these are only extreme examples of the abnormal nature which always
allured and detained Browning's imagination, though it was not always
the source of its highest achievement. Ivánovitch, executing justice
under the forms of murder, Caponsacchi, executing mercy under the forms
of an elopement, the savagery of Halbert and Hob unnerved by an abrupt
reminiscence,--it is in these suggestive and pregnant situations, at the
meeting-points of apparently irreconcilable classes and kinds, that
Browning habitually found or placed those of his characters who
represent any class or kind at all.
[Footnote 117: _By the Fireside_.]
The exploring, in-and-out scrutinising instincts of Browning's
imagination equally left their vivid impress upon his treatment of
character. If the sharp nodosities of character caught his eye, its
mysterious recesses and labyrinthine alleys allured his curiosity; this
lover of "clefts," this pryer among tangled locks and into the depths of
flower-bells, peered into all the nooks and chambers of the soul with
inexhaustible enterprise. It is hard to deny that even _The Ring and the
Book_ itself suffers something from the unflagging zest with which the
poet pursues all the windings of popular speculation, all the fretwork
of Angelo de Hyacinthis's forensic and domestic futilities. The poem is
a great poetic Mansion, with many chambers, and he will lead us sooner
or later to its inner shrine; but on the way there are "closets to
search and alcoves to importune,"--
"The day wears,
And door succeeds door,
We try the fresh fortune,
Range the wide house from the wing to the centre."
For the most part, after the not wholly successful experiment of direct
analysis in _Sordello_, he chose to make his men and women the
instruments of their own illumination; and this was a second source of
his delight in the dramatic monologue. He approached all problematic
character with a bias towards disbelieving appearances, which was fed,
if not generated, by that restlessly exploring instinct of an
imagination that spontaneously resolved surface and solidity into
integument and core. Not that Browning always displays the core; on the
contrary, after elaborately removing an imposing mask from what appears
to be a face, he will hint that the unmasked face is itself a mask. "For
Blougram, he believed, say, half he spoke." Browning is less concerned
to "save" the subjects of his so-called "Special Pleadings" than to
imagine them divested of the gross disguises of public rumour about
them; not naked as God made them, but clothed in the easy undress of
their own subtly plausible illusions about themselves. But the optimist
in him is always alert, infusing into the zest of exploration a cheery
faith that behind the last investiture lurks always some soul of
goodness, and welcoming with a sudden lift of verse the escape of some
diviner gleam through the rifts, such as Blougram's--
"Just when we're safest comes a sunset touch."
Yet it is hardly a paradox to say that his faith throve upon the
obstacles it overcame. He imagined yet more vividly than he saw, and the
stone wall which forbade vision but whetted imagination, acquired an
ideal merit in his eyes because it was not an open door. In later life
he came with growing persistence to regard the phenomenal world as a
barrier of illusion between man and truth. But instead of chilling his
faith, the obstacle only generated that poet's philosophy of the "value
of a lie" which perturbs the less experienced reader of _Fifine_.
"Truth" was "forced to manifest itself through falsehood," won thence by
the excepted eye, at the rare season, for the happy moment, till
"through the shows of sense, which ever proving false still promise to
be true," the soul of man worked its way to its final union with the
soul of God.[118]
[Footnote 118: _Fifine at the fair_, cxxiv.]
* * * * *
And here at length if not before we have a clear glimpse of the athlete
who lurks behind the explorer. Browning's joy in imagining impediment
and illusion was only another aspect of his joy in the spiritual energy
which answers to the spur of difficulty and "works" through the shows of
sense; and this other joy found expression in a poetry of soul yet more
deeply tinged with the native hue of his mind. "From the first, Power
was, I knew;" and souls were the very central haunt and focus of its
play. Not that strong natures, as such, have much part in Browning's
poetic-world; the strength that allured his imagination was not the
strength that is rooted in nerve or brain, slowly enlarging with the
build of the organism, but the strength that has suddenly to be begotten
or infused, that leaps by the magic of spiritual influence from heart to
heart. If Browning multiplies and deepens the demarcations among
material things, he gives his souls a rare faculty of transcending them.
Bright spiritual beings like Pippa shed their souls innocently and
unwittingly about like a spilth of "X-rays," and the irradiation
penetrates instantly the dense opposing integuments of passion,
cupidity, and worldliness. At all times in his life these accesses of
spiritual power occupied his imagination. Cristina's momentary glance
and the Lady of Tripoli's dreamed-of face lift their devotees to
completeness:--
"She has lost me, I have gained her,
Her soul's mine, and now grown perfect
I shall pass my life's remainder."
Forty years later, Browning told with far greater realistic power and a
grim humour suited to the theme, the "transmutation" of Ned Bratts.
Karshish has his sudden revealing flash as he ponders the letter of
Abib:--
"The very God! Think, Abib, dost thou think,--
So the All-great were the All-loving too"--
and the boy David his prophetic vision. A yet more splendid vision
breaks from the seemingly ruined brain of the dying Paracelsus, and he
has a gentler comrade in the dying courtier, who starts up from his
darkened chamber crying that--
"Spite of thick air and closed doors
God told him it was June,--when harebells grow,
And all that kings could ever give or take
Would not be precious as those blooms to me."
But it is not only in these magical transitions and transformations that
Browning's joy in soul was decisively coloured by his joy in power. A
whole class of his characters--the most familiarly "Browningesque"
division of them all--was shaped under the sway of this master-passion;
the noble army of "strivers" who succeed and of "strivers" who fail,
baffled artists and rejected lovers who mount to higher things on
stepping-stones of their frustrated selves, like the heroes of _Old
Painters in Florence_, and _The Last Ride Together_, and _The Lost
Mistress_; and on the other hand, the artists and lovers who fail for
want of this saving energy, like the Duke and Lady of the _Statue and
the Bust_, like Andrea del Sarto and the Unknown Painter. But his very
preoccupation with Art and with Love itself sprang mainly from his
peculiar joy in the ardent putting-forth of soul. No kind of vivid
consciousness was indifferent to him, but the luxurious receptivity of
the spectator or of a passively beloved mistress touched him little,
compared with the faintest pulsation of the artist's "love of loving,
rage of knowing, feeling, seeing the absolute truth of things," of the
lover's passion for union with another soul. When he describes effects
of music or painting, he passes instinctively over to the standpoint of
the composer or the performer; shows us Hugues and Andrea themselves at
the organ, or the easel; and instead of feeling the world turned into
"an unsubstantial faery place" by the magic of the cuckoo or the thrush,
strikes out playful theories of the professional methods of these
songsters,--the cuckoo's monopoly of the "minor third," the thrush's
wise way of repeating himself "lest you should think he never could
recapture his first fine careless rapture." Suffering enters Browning's
poetry almost never as the artless wail of the helpless stricken thing;
the intolerable pathos of _Ye Banks and Braes_, or of
"We twa hae paidl't in the burn
Frae morning sun till dine,"
belonged to a side of primitive emotion to which "artificial" poets like
Tennyson were far more sensitive than he. Suffering began to interest
him when the wail passed into the fierceness of vindictive passion, as
in _The Confessional_, or into the outward calm of a self-subjugated
spirit, as in _Any Wife to any Husband_, or _A Woman's Last Word_; or
into reflective and speculative, if bitter, retrospect, as in _The Worst
of It_ or _James Lee's Wife_. And happiness, equally,--even the lover's
happiness,--needed, to satisfy Browning, to have some leaven of
challenging disquiet; the lover must have something to fear, or
something to forgive, some hostility, or guilt, or absence, or death, to
brave. Or the rapturous union of lovers must be remembered with a pang,
when they have quarrelled; or its joy be sobered by recalling the
perilous hairbreadth chances incurred in achieving it (_By the
Fireside_)--
"Oh, the little more, and how much it is!
And the little less, and what worlds away!
How a sound shall quicken content to bliss,
Or a breath suspend the blood's best play,
And life be a proof of this!"
Further, his joy in soul drew into the sphere of his poetry large tracts
of existence which lay wholly or partly outside the domain of soul
itself. The world of the lower animals hardly touched the deeper chords
of his thought or emotion; but he watched their activities with a very
genuine and constant delight, and he took more account of their pangs
than he did of the soul-serving throes of man.[119] His imaginative
selection among the countless types of these "low kinds" follows the
lead of all those forms of primitive joy which we have traced in his
types of men and women: here it is the quick-glancing intricate flights
of birds or insects, the flitting of quick sandpipers in and out of the
marl, or of flies about an old wall; now the fierce contrasts of hue,
angularity, and grotesque deformity all at once in Caliban's beasts:--
"Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech;
Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam,
That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown
He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye
By moonlight;"
or it is the massive power of the desert lion, in _The Glove_ or the
bright æthereal purity of the butterfly fluttering over the swimmer's
head, with its
"membraned wings
So wonderful, so wide,
So sun-suffused;"[120]
or the cheery self-dependence of the solitary insect. "I always love
those wild creatures God sets up for themselves," he wrote to Miss
Barrett, "so independently, so successfully, with their strange happy
minute inch of a candle, as it were, to light them." [121]
[Footnote 119: _Donald_.]
[Footnote 120: Some of these examples are from Mr Brooke's excellent
chapter on Browning's Treatment of Nature.]
[Footnote 121: _To E.B.B._, 5th Jan. 1846.]
Finally, Browning's joy in soul flowed over also upon the host of
lifeless things upon which "soul" itself has in any way been spent. To
bear the mark of Man's art and toil, to have been hewn or moulded or
built, compounded or taken to pieces, by human handiwork, was to
acquire a certain romantic allurement for Browning's imagination hardly
found in any other poet in the same degree. The "artificial products" of
civilised and cultured life were for him not merely instruments of
poetic expression but springs of poetic joy. No poetry can dispense with
images from "artificial" things; Wordsworth himself does not always
reject them; with most poets they are commoner, merely because they are
better known; but for Browning the impress of "our meddling intellect"
added exactly the charm and stimulus which complete exemption from it
added for Wordsworth. His habitual imagery is fetched, not from flowers
or clouds or moving winds and waters, but from wine-cups, swords and
sheaths, lamps, tesselated pavements, chess-boards, pictures, houses,
ships, shops. Most of these appealed also to other instincts,--to his
joy in brilliant colour, abrupt line, intricate surface, or violent
emotion. But their "artificiality" was an added attraction. The wedge,
for instance, appeals to him not only by its angularity and its rending
thrust, but as a weapon contrived by man's wit and driven home by his
muscle. The cup appeals to him not only by its shape, and by the rush of
the foaming wine, but as fashioned by the potter's wheel, and flashing
at the festal board. His delight in complex technicalities, in the
tangled issues of the law-courts, and the intertwining harmonies of
Bach, sprang from his joy in the play of mind as well as from his joy in
mere intricacy as such. His mountains are gashed and cleft and carved
not only because their intricacy of craggy surface or the Titanic
turmoil of mountain-shattering delights him, but also because he loves
to suggest the deliberate axe or chisel of the warrior or the artist
Man. He turns the quiet vicissitudes of nature into dexterous
achievements of art. If he does not paint or dye the meads, he turns the
sunset clouds into a feudal castle, shattered slowly with a visible
mace; the morning sun pours into Pippa's chamber as from a wine-bowl;
and Fifine's ear is
"cut
Thin as a dusk-leaved rose carved from a cocoanut."[122]
[Footnote 122: _Fifine at the Fair_, ii. 325.]
Sordello's slowly won lyric speech is called
"a rude
Armour ... hammered out, in time to be
Approved beyond the Roman panoply
Melted to make it."[123]
[Footnote 123: _Sordello_, i. 135.]
And thirty years later he used the kindred but more recondite simile of
a ring with its fortifying alloy, to symbolise the welded _Wahrheit_ and
_Dichtung_ of his greatest poem.
Between _Dichtung_ and _Wahrheit_ there was, indeed, in Browning's mind,
a closer affinity than that simile suggests. His imagination was a
factor in his apprehension of truth; his "poetry" cannot be detached
from his interpretation of life, nor his interpretation of life from his
poetry. Not that all parts of his apparent teaching belong equally to
his poetic mind. On the contrary, much of it was derived from traditions
of which he never shook himself clear; much from the exercise of a
speculative reason which, though incomparably agile, was neither well
disciplined in its methods nor particularly original in its grasp of
principles. But with the vitalising heart of his faith neither tradition
nor reasoning had so much to do as that logic of the imagination by
which great poets often implicitly enunciate what the after-thinker
slowly works out. The characteristic ways of Browning's poetry, the
fundamental joys on which it fed, of which the present chapter attempts
an account, by no means define the range or the limits of his
interpreting intellect, but they mark the course of its deepest
currents, the permanent channels which its tides overflow, but to which
in the last resort they return. In the following chapter we shall have
to study these fluctuating movements of his explicit and formulated
thought, and to distinguish, if we may, the ground-tone of the deep
waters from the more resonant roll of the shifting tides.
CHAPTER X.
THE INTERPRETER OF LIFE.
His voice sounds loudest and also clearest for the things that as a
race we like best; ... the fascination of faith, the acceptance of
life, the respect for its mysteries, the endurance of its charges,
the vitality of the will, the validity of character, the beauty of
action, the seriousness, above all, of great human passion.
--HENRY JAMES.
I.
The trend of speculative thought in Europe during the century which
preceded the emergence of Browning may be described as a progressive
integration along several distinct lines of the great regions of
existence which common beliefs, resting on a still vigorous medievalism,
thrust apart. Nature was brought into nearer relation with Man, and Man
with God, and God with Nature and with Man. In one aspect, not the least
striking, it was a "return to Nature"; economists from Adam Smith to
Malthus worked out the laws of man's dependence upon the material world;
poets and idealists from Rousseau to Wordsworth discovered in a life
"according to nature" the ideal for man; sociologists from Hume to
Bentham, and from Burke to Coleridge, applied to human society
conceptions derived from physics or from biology, and emphasised all
that connects it with the mechanical aggregate of atoms, or with the
organism.
In another aspect it was a return to God. If the scientific movement
tended to subjugate man to a Nature in which, as Laplace said, there was
no occasion for God, Wordsworth saw both in Nature and in man a spirit
"deeply interfused"; and the great contemporary school of German
philosophy set all ethical thinking in a new perspective by its original
handling of the old thesis that duty is a realisation of the will of
God.
But, in yet another aspect, it was a return to Man. If Man was brought
nearer to Nature and to God, it was to a Nature and to a God which had
themselves acquired, for him, closer affinities with humanity. He
divined, with Wordsworth, his own joy, with Shelley his own love, in the
breathing flower; he saw with Hegel in the Absolute Spirit a power
vitally present in all man's secular activities and pursuits. And these
interpreting voices of poets and philosophers were but the signs of less
articulate sensibilities far more widely diffused, which were in effect
bringing about a manifold expansion and enrichment of normal, mental,
and emotional life. Scott made the romantic past, Byron and Goethe, in
their different ways, the Hellenic past, a living element of the
present; and Fichte, calling upon his countrymen to emancipate
themselves, in the name not of the "rights of men" but of the genius of
the German people, uttered the first poignant recognition of national
life as a glorious vesture arraying the naked body of the individual
member, not an aggregate of other units competing with or controlling
him.
In this complicated movement Browning played a very notable and
memorable part. But it was one of which the first generation of his
readers was entirely, and he himself to a great extent, unconscious, and
which his own language often disguises or conceals. Of all the poets of
the century he had the clearest and most confident vision of the working
of God in the world, the most buoyant faith in the divine origin and
destiny of man. Half his poetry is an effort to express, in endless
variety of iteration, the nearness of God, to unravel the tangled
circumstance of human life, and disclose everywhere infinity enmeshed
amid the intricacies of the finite.
On the side of Nature his interest was less keen and his vision less
subtle. His "visitations of the living God" came to him by other avenues
than those opened by Wordsworth's ecstatic gaze, "in love and holy
passion," upon outward beauty. Only limited classes of natural phenomena
appealed to him powerfully at all, the swift and sudden upheavals and
catastrophes, the ardours and accesses, the silence that thrills with
foreboding and suspense. For continuities, both of the mechanical and
the organic kind, he lacked sense. We have seen how his eye fastened
everywhere upon the aspects of life least suggestive of either iron
uniformity or harmonious evolution. The abrupt demarcations which he
everywhere imposes or discovers were the symptom of a primitive
ingrained atomism of thought which all the synthetic strivings of a
God-intoxicated intellect could not entirely overcome.
II.
His metaphysical thinking thus became an effort to reconcile an
all-embracing synthesis with a sense of individuality as stubborn and
acute as ever man had. Body and Soul, Nature and Spirit, Man and God,
Good and Evil, he presented now as co-operative or alien, now as hostile
antagonists or antitheses. That their opposition is not ultimate, that
evil is at bottom a form of good, and all finite existence a passing
mode of absolute being, was a conviction towards which his thought on
one side constantly strove, which it occasionally touched, but in which
it could not securely rest. Possessed by the thirst for absoluteness, he
vindicated the "infinity" of God and the soul by banishing all the
"finiteness" of sense into a limbo of illusion. The infinite soul,
imprisoned for life in a body which at every moment clogs its motion and
dims its gaze, fights its way through the shows of sense,[124] "which
ever proving false still promise to be true," until death opens the
prison-gate and restores the captive to its infinity. Sorrow and evil
were stains imposed by Time upon the white radiance of an eternal being;
and Browning sometimes rose, though with a less sure step, to the
dizzier height of holding Time itself to be unreal, and the soul's
earthly life not an episode in an endless sequence, but a dream of
progressive change imposed upon a changeless and timeless essence.
[Footnote 124: _Fifine at the Fair._]
But there were, as has been said, elements in Browning's mental make
which kept this abstract and formal theory, fortified though it was by
theological prepossessions, in check. His most intense consciousness,
his most definite grip upon reality, was too closely bound up with the
collisions and jostlings, the limits and angularities, of the world of
the senses, for the belief in their illusoriness easily to hold its
ground. This "infinite soul" palpably had its fullest and richest
existence in the very heart of finite things. Wordsworth had turned for
"intimations of immortality" to the remembered intuitions of childhood;
Browning found them in every pang of baffled aspiration and frustrate
will. Hence there arose in the very midst of this realm of illusion a
new centre of reality; the phantoms took on solid and irrefragable
existence, and refused to take to flight when the cock-crow announced
that "Time was done, Eternity begun."
Body and Time had in general too strong a grip upon him to be resolved
into illusion. His actual pictures of departed souls suggest a state
very unlike that reversion of the infinite spirit which had been thrust
upon Matter and distended in Time, to the timeless Infinitude it had
forgone. It does not escape from Time, but only passes on from the
limited section of Time known as life, into another section, without
limit, known as Eternity. And if it escapes from Body, at least Browning
represents his departed soul more boldly than any other modern poet in a
garb of flesh. Evelyn Hope, when she wakens in another world, will find
her unknown lover's leaf in her hand, and "remember, and understand."
And just as Matter and Time invade Browning's spiritual eternity, so his
ideal of conduct for man while still struggling with finite conditions
casts its shadow on to the state of immortal release. Two conceptions,
in fact, of the life after death, corresponding to divergent aspects of
his thought, contend in Browning's mind. Now it is a state of
emancipation from earthly limits,--when the "broken arcs" become
"perfect rounds" and "evil" is transformed into "so much good more," and
"reward and repose" succeed the "struggles"[125] by which they have been
won. But at times he startles the devout reader by foreshadowing not a
sudden transformation but a continuation of the slow educative process
of earth in a succession of preliminary heavens before the consummate
state is reached. "Progress," in short, was too deeply ingrained in
Browning's conception of what was ultimately good, and therefore
ultimately real, not to find entrance into his heaven, were it only by
some casual backdoor of involuntary intuition. Even in that more
gracious state "achievement lacked a gracious somewhat"[126] to his
indomitable fighting instinct.
[Footnote 125: _Saul_, xvii.]
[Footnote 126: _One Word More_.]
"Soul resteth not, and mine must still advance,"
he had said in _Pauline_, and the soul that ceased to advance ceased for
Browning, in his most habitual mood, to exist. The "infinity" of the
soul was not so much a gift as a destiny, a power of hungering for ever
after an ideal completeness which it was indefinitely to pursue and to
approach, but not to reach. Far from having to await a remote
emancipation to become completely itself, the soul's supremest life was
in its hours of heroic stress, when it kept some dragon of unbelief
quiet underfoot, like Michael,
"Who stands calm, just because he feels it writhe."
It was at this point that the athletic energy of Browning's nature told
most palpably upon the complexion of his thought. It did not affect its
substance, but it altered the bearing of the parts, giving added weight
to all its mundane and positive elements. It gave value to every
challenging obstruction akin to that which allured him to every angular
and broken surface, to all the "evil" which balks our easy perception of
"good."[127] Above all, by idealising effort, it created a new ethical
end which every strenuous spirit could not merely strive after but
fulfil, every day of its mortal life; and thus virtually transferred the
focus of interest and importance from "the next world's reward and
repose" to the vital "struggles in this."
[Footnote 127: _Bishop Blougram_.]
Browning's characteristic conception of the nature and destiny of man
was thus not a compact and consistent system, but a group of intuitions
nourished from widely different regions of soul and sense, and
undergoing, like the face of a great actor, striking changes of
expression without material change of feature under the changing
incidence of stress and glow. The ultimate gist of his teaching was
presented through the medium of conceptions proper to another school of
thought, which, like a cryptogram, convey one meaning but express
another, He had to work with categories like finite and infinite, which
the atomic habits of his mind thrust into exclusive opposition; whereas
the profoundest thing that he had to say was that the "infinite" has to
be achieved in and through the finite, that just the most definitely
outlined action, the most individual purpose, the most sharply
expressive thought, the most intense and personal passion, are the
points or saliency in life which most surely catch the radiance of
eternity they break. The white light was "blank" until shattered by
refraction; and Browning is less Browning when he glories in its
unbroken purity than when he rejoices in the prism, whose obstruction
alone
"shows aright
The secret of a sunbeam, breaks its light
Into the jewelled bow from blankest white."[128]
[Footnote 128: _Deaf and Dumb_.]
We have now to watch Browning's efforts to interpret this profound and
intimate persuasion of his in terms of the various conceptions at his
disposal.[129]
[Footnote 129: On the matter of this section cf. Mr A.C. Pigou's acute
and lucid discussions, _Browning as a Religious Teacher_, ch. viii. and
ix.]
III.
Beside the soul, there was something else that "stood sure" for
Browning--namely, God. Here, too, a theological dogma, steeped in his
ardent mind, acquired a new potency for the imagination, and a more
vital nexus with man and nature than any other poet of the century had
given it. And here, too, the mystic and the positive strains of
Browning's genius wrought together, impressing themselves equally in
that wonderful Browningesque universe in which every germ seems to be
itself a universe "needing but a look to burst into immense life," and
infinity is ever at hand, behind a closed door. The whole of his
theology was an attempt to express consistently two convictions, rarely
found of the same intensity in the same brain, of the divineness of the
universe and the individuality of man.
The mechanical Creator of Paley and the deists could never have
satisfied him. From the first he "saw God everywhere." There was in him
the stuff of which the "God-intoxicated" men are made, and he had
moments, like that expressed in one of his most deliberate and emphatic
personal utterances, in which all existence seemed to be the visible
Face of God--
"Become my universe that feels and knows."[130]
[Footnote 130: _Epilogue_.]
He clearly strained towards the sublime pantheistic imaginings of the
great poets of the previous generation,--Wordsworth's "Something far
more deeply interfused," Shelley's "One spirit's plastic stress," and
Goethe's _Erdgeist_, who weaves the eternal vesture of God at the loom
of Time. The dying vision of Paracelsus is as sublime as these, and
marks Browning's nearest point of approach to the ways of thought they
embody. In all the vitalities of the world, from the uncouth play of the
volcano to the heaven-and-earth transfiguring mind of man, God was
present, sharing their joy. But even here the psychological barrier is
apparent, against which all the surge of pantheistic impulse in Browning
broke in vain. This God of manifold joys was sharply detached from his
universe; he was a sensitive and sympathetic spectator, not a pervading
spirit. In every direction human personality opposed rigid frontiers
which even the infinite God could not pass, and no poet less needed the
stern warning which he addressed to German speculation against the
"gigantic stumble"[131] of making them one. The mystic's dream of
seeing all things in God, the Hegelian thesis of a divine mind realising
itself in and through the human, found no lodgment in a consciousness of
mosaic-like clearness dominated by the image of an incisively individual
and indivisible self. In later life the sharp lines which he drew from
the first about individual personality became a ring-fence within which
each man "cultivated his plot,"[132] managing independently as he might
the business of his soul. The divine love might wind inextricably about
him,[133] the dance of plastic circumstance at the divine bidding
impress its rhythms upon his life,[134] he retained his human identity
inviolate, a "point of central rock" amid the welter of the waves.[135]
His love might be a "spark from God's fire," but it was his own, to use
as he would; he "stood on his own stock of love and power."[136]
[Footnote 131: _Christmas-Eve._]
[Footnote 132: _Ferishtah_.]
[Footnote 133: _Easter-Day_.]
[Footnote 134: _Rabbi ben Ezra_.]
[Footnote 135: _Epilogue_.]
[Footnote 136: _Christmas-Eve_.]
IV.
In this sharp demarcation of man's being from God's, Browning never
faltered. On the contrary, the individualising animus which there found
expression impelled him to raise more formidable barriers about man, and
to turn the ring-fence which secured him from intrusion into a high wall
which cut off his view. In other words, the main current of Browning's
thought sets strongly towards a sceptical criticism of human knowledge.
At the outset he stands on the high _à priori_ ground of Plato. Truth in
its fulness abides in the soul, an "imprisoned splendour," which
intellect quickened by love can elicit, which moments of peculiar
insight, deep joy, and sorrow, and the coming on of death, can release.
But the gross flesh hems it in, wall upon wall, "a baffling and
perverting carnal mesh,"[137] the source of all error. The process of
discovery he commonly conceived as an advance through a succession of
Protean disguises of truth, each "one grade above its last
presentment,"[138] until, at the rare moment, by the excepted eye, the
naked truth was grasped. But Browning became steadily more reluctant to
admit that these fortunate moments ever occurred, that the Proteus was
ever caught. Things would be known to the soul as they were known to God
only when it was emancipated by death. Infinity receded into an ever
more inaccessible remoteness from the finite. For the speaker in
_Christmas-Eve_ man's mind was the image of God's, reflecting trace for
trace his absolute knowledge; for Francis Furini the bare fact of his
own existence is all he knows, a narrow rock-spit of knowledge enisled
in a trackless ocean of ignorance. Thus for Browning, in differing moods
and contexts, the mind of man becomes now a transparent pane, opening
directly upon the truth as God sees it, now a coloured lens, presenting
truth in blurred refraction, now an opaque mirror idly bodying forth his
futile and illusive dreams.
[Footnote 137: _Paracelsus_.]
[Footnote 138: _Fifine_, cxxiv.]
These conflicting views were rooted in different elements of Browning's
many-sided nature. His vivid intuition of his own self-consciousness
formed a standing type of seemingly absolute immediate knowledge, to
which he stubbornly clung. When the optimism of the "Head" was
discredited, passion-fraught instinct, under the name of the Heart, came
to the rescue, and valiantly restored its authority. On the other hand,
a variety of subtle attractions drew him on to give "illusion" a wider
and wider scope. Sheer joy in battle had no small share. The immortal
and infinite soul, projected among the shows of sense, could not be
expected to do its part worthily if it saw through them: it had to
believe its enemies real enemies, and its warfare a rational warfare; it
had to accept time and place, and good and evil, as the things they
seem. To have a perfectly clear vision of truth as it is in God was to
be dazzled with excess of light, to grope and fumble about the world as
it is for man, like the risen Lazarus--
"witless of the size, the sum,
The value in proportion of all things,
Or whether it be little or be much."
The mystic who withdrew from the struggle with phantoms to gaze upon
eternal realities was himself the victim of the worst illusions; while
the hero who plunged into that struggle was training his soul, and
thereby getting a grip upon ultimate truth. Thus Browning's passionate
and reiterated insistence upon the illusiveness of knowledge was rooted
in his inalienable faith in the worth and reality of moral conflict. The
infinite soul realised itself most completely when it divested itself of
the trappings of its infinity, and it worked out God's law most
implicitly when it ignored God's point of view.
V.
Such a result could not be finally satisfying, and Browning's thought
fastened with increasing predilection and exclusiveness upon one intense
kind of vitality in which the hard antagonism of good and evil seems to
be transcended, and that complete immersion of the soul in a nature not
its own appears not as self-abnegation but as self-fulfilment. He did
not himself use this phraseology about Love; it is that of a school to
which he, at no time, it would seem, made any conscious approach. But it
is clear that he found in the mysterious union and transfusion of
diverse being which takes place in Love, as Hegel found in the union of
opposites, the clue to the nature of reality, the very core of the heart
of life. He did not talk of the union of opposites, but of "infinitude
wreaking itself upon the finite." God himself would have been less
divine, and so, as God, less real, had he remained aloof in lonely
infinity instead of uniting himself with all creation in that love
which "moves the world and the other stars"; the "loving worm," to
quote his pregnant saying once more, were diviner than a loveless God.
We saw how his theology is double-faced between the pantheistic yearning
to find God everywhere and the individualist's resolute maintenance of
the autonomy of man. God's Love, poured through the world, inextricably
blended with all its power and beauty, thrilled with answering rapture
by all its joy, and striving to clasp every human soul, provided the
nearest approach to a solution of that conflict which Browning's
mechanical metaphysics permitted. One comprehends, then, the profound
significance for him of the actual solution apparently presented by
Christian theology. In one supreme, crucial example the union of God
with man in consummate love had actually, according to Christian belief,
taken place, and Browning probably uttered his own faith when he made St
John declare that
"The acknowledgment of God in Christ
Acknowledged by thy reason solves for thee
All questions in the earth and out of it."[139]
[Footnote 139: _Death in the Desert_. These lines, however "dramatic,"
mark with precision the extent, and the limits, of Browning's Christian
faith. The evidence of his writings altogether confirms Mrs Orr's
express statement that Christ was for him, from first to last, "a
manifestation of divine love," by human form accessible to human love;
but not the Redeemer of the orthodox creed.]
For to acknowledge this was to recognise that love was divine, and that
mankind at large, in virtue of their gift of love, shared in God's
nature, finite as they were; that whatever clouds of intellectual
illusion they walked in, they were lifted to a hold upon reality as
unassailable as God's own by the least glimmer of love. Whatever else is
obscure or elusive in Browning, he never falters in proclaiming the
absolute and flawless worth of love. The lover cannot, like the
scientific investigator, miss his mark, he cannot be baffled or misled;
the object of his love may be unworthy, or unresponsive, but in the mere
act of loving he has his reward.
"Knowledge means
Ever renewed assurance by defeat
That victory is somehow still to reach;
But love is victory, the prize itself."[140]
[Footnote 140: _Pillar of Sebzevir_.]
This aspect of Browning's doctrine of love, though it inspired some of
his most exalted lyrics, throws into naked relief the dearth of social
consciousness in Browning's psychology. Yet it is easy to see that the
absolute self-sufficiency into which he lifted the bare fact of love was
one of the mainsprings of his indomitable optimism. In Love was
concentrated all that emancipates man from the stubborn continuities of
Nature. It started up in corrupt or sordid hearts, and swept all their
blind velleities into its purifying flame of passion--
"Love is incompatible
With falsehood,--purifies, assimilates
All other passions to itself."[141]
[Footnote 141: _Colombe's Birthday_.]
And the glimmer of soul that lurked in the veriest act of humanity the
breath of love could quicken into pervading fire.[142] Love was only the
most intense and potent of those sudden accesses of vitality which are
wont, in Browning, suddenly to break like a flame from the straw and
dross of a brutish or sophisticated consciousness, confounding foresight
and calculation, but giving endless stimulus to hope. Even in the
contact with sin and sorrow Browning saw simply the touch of Earth from
which Love, like Antaeus, sprang into fuller being; they were the "dread
machinery" devised to evolve man's moral qualities, "to make him love in
turn and be beloved."[143]
[Footnote 142: _Fifine_.]
[Footnote 143: _The Pope_.]
But with all its insurgent emancipating vehemence Love was for Browning,
also, the very ground of stable and harmonious existence, "the energy of
integration," as Myers has finely said, "which makes a cosmos of the sum
of things," the element of permanence, of law. True, its harmony was of
the kind which admits discord and eschews routine; its law that which is
of eternity and not of yesterday; its stability that which is only
assured and fortified by the chivalry that plucks a Pompilia, or an
Alcestis, from their legal doom. The true anarchist, as he sometimes
dared to hint, was the cold unreason of duty which, as in _Bifurcation_,
keeps lovers meant for each other apart. It is by love that the soul
solves the problem--so tragically insoluble to poor Sordello--of
"fitting to the finite its infinity," and satisfying the needs of Time
and Eternity at once;[144] for Love, belonging equally to both spheres,
can bring the purposes of body and soul into complete accord:
"Like yonder breadth of watery heaven, a bay
And that sky-space of water, ray for ray
And star for star, one richness where they mixed,
As this and that wing of an angel, fixed
Tumultuary splendours."
[Footnote 144: _Sordello, sub fin_.]
In a life thus thrilled into harmony heaven was already realised on
earth; and Eternity itself could but continue what Time had begun.
Death, for such a soul, was not an awaking, for it had not slept; nor an
emancipation, for it was already free; nor a satisfying of desire, for
the essence of Love was to want; it was only a point at which the "last
ride together" might pass into an eternal "riding on"--
"With life for ever old, yet new,
Changed not in kind but in degree,
The instant made Eternity,--
And Heaven just prove that I and she
Ride, ride together, for ever ride!"
VI.
No intellectual formula, no phrase, no word, can express the whole
purport of those intense and intimate fusions of sensation, passion, and
thought which we call poetic intuition, and which all strictly poetic
"philosophy" or "criticism of life" is an attempt to interpret and
articulate. Browning was master of more potent weapons of the strictly
intellectual kind than many poets of his rank, and his work is charged
with convictions which bear upon philosophic problems and involve
philosophic ideas. But they were neither systematic deductions from a
speculative first principle nor fragments of tradition eclectically
pieced together; by their very ambiguity and Protean many-sidedness they
betrayed that, however tinged they might be on the surface with
speculative or traditional phrases, the nourishing roots sprang from the
heart of joyous vitality in a primitive and original temperament. In
Browning, if in any man, Joy sang that "strong music of the soul" which
re-creates all the vitalities of the world, and endows us with "a new
Earth and a new Heaven." And if joy was the root of Browning's
intuition, and life "in widest commonalty spread" the element in which
it moved, Love, the most intimate, intense, and marvellous of all vital
energies, was the ideal centre towards which it converged. In Love, as
Browning understood it, all those elementary joys of his found
satisfaction. There he saw the flawless purity which rejoiced him in
Pompilia's soul, which "would not take pollution, ermine-like armed from
dishonour by its own soft snow." There he saw sudden incalculableness of
power abruptly shattering the continuities of routine, throwing life
instantly into a new perspective, and making barren trunks break into
sudden luxuriance like the palm; or, again, intimately interpenetrating
soul with soul,--"one near one is too far"; or entangling the whole
creation in the inextricable embrace of God.
But if all his instincts and imaginative proclivities found their ideal
in Love, they also insensibly impressed their own character upon his
conception of it. The "Love" which has so deep a significance for
Browning is a Love steeped in the original complexion of his mind, and
bearing the impress of the singular position which he occupies in the
welter of nineteenth-century intellectual history. His was one of the
rare natures in which revolutionary liberalism and spiritual reaction,
encountering in nearly equal strength, seem to have divided their
principles and united their forces. Psychologically, the one had its
strongest root in the temper which reasons, and values ideas; the other
in that which feels, and values emotions. Sociologically, the one stood
for individualism, the other for solidarity. In their ultimate
presuppositions, the one inclined to the standpoint of the senses and
experience; the other to a mostly vague and implicit idealism. In their
political ideals, the one strove for progress, and for freedom as its
condition; the other for order, and for active legal intervention as its
safeguard.
In two of these four points of contrast, Browning's temperament ranged
him more or less decisively on the Liberal side. Individualist to the
core, he was conspicuously deficient in the kind of social mind which
makes a poet the voice of an organised community, a nation, or a class.
Progress, again, was with him even more an instinct than a principle;
and he became the _vates sacer_ of unsatisfied aspiration. On the other
hand, that he was not without elements of the temper which makes for
order was shown by his punctilious, almost eager, observance of social
conventions, and, in the last years of his life, by the horror excited
in him by what he took to be the anarchy of Women's Suffrage and Home
Rule. In the other two fields of opposition he belonged decisively to
the spiritual and emotional reaction. Spirit was for him the ultimate
fact of existence, the soul and God were the indissoluble realities. But
his idealism was not potent and pure enough either to control the
realist suggestions of his strong senses and energetic temperament, or
to interpret them in its own terms. And in the conflict between reason
and feeling, or, as he put it, between "head" and "heart," as sources of
insight, and factors in human advancement, feeling found its most
brilliant champion in Browning, and its most impressive statement in his
doctrine of Love. An utilitarian reduction of welldoing to a
distribution of properly calculated doses of satisfaction he dismissed
with a scorn as derisive as Carlyle's; "general utility" was a favourite
of "that old stager the devil."[145] Yet no critic of intellect ever
used intellect more vigorously, and no preacher of the rights of the
heart ever dealt less in flaccid sentiment. Browning was Paracelsus as
well as Aprile, and sharply as he chose to dissever "Knowledge" and
"Love," Love was for him never a foe of intellect, but a more gifted
comrade who does the same work more effectively, who dives deeper, soars
higher, welds more potently into more enduring unities, and flings upon
dry hearts with a more infallible magic the seed of more marvellous new
births. Browning as the poet of Love is thus the last, and assuredly not
the least, in the line which handed on the torch of Plato. The author of
the _Phoedrus_ saw in the ecstasy of Love one of the avenues to the
knowledge of the things that indeed are. To Dante the supreme realities
were mirrored in the eyes of Beatrice. For Shelley Love was interwoven
through all the mazes of Being; it was the source of the strength by
which man masters his gods. To all these masters of idealism Browning's
vision of Love owed something of its intensity and of its range. With
the ethical Love of Jesus and St Paul his affinities were more apparent,
but less profound. For him, too, love was the sum of all morality and
the root of all goodness. But it resembled more the joyous
self-expansion of the Greek than the humility and self-abnegation of
Christian love. Not the saintly ascetic nor the doer of good works, but
the artist and the "lover," dominated his imagination when he wrote of
Love; imbuing even God's love for the world with the joy of creation and
the rapture of embrace. Aprile's infinite love for things impelled him
to body them visibly forth. Deeper in Browning than his Christianity,
and prior to it, lay his sense of immeasurable worth in all life, the
poet's passion for being.
[Footnote 145: _Red-cotton Night-cap Country_.]
Browning's poetry is thus one of the most potent of the influences which
in the nineteenth century helped to break down the shallow and
mischievous distinction between the "sacred" and the "secular," and to
set in its place the profounder division between man enslaved by apathy,
routine, and mechanical morality, and man lifted by the law of love into
a service which is perfect freedom, into an approximation to God which
is only the fullest realisation of humanity.
INDEX.
Note--The names of the Persons are given in small capitals; titles of
literary works in _italics_; other names in ordinary type; *black figures*
indicate the more detailed references. Only the more important of the
incidental quotations are included. Poems are referred to only under
their authors' names.
AESCHYLUS, 215.
ALLINGHAM, W., 87.
American fame of Browning, 87.
ARISTOPHANES, 77, 207 f.
ARNOLD, M., 26.
Asolo, 27, 50, 220, 232.
_Athenæum, The_, 172, 251.
BALZAC, 42, 49, 86, 117.
BARRETT, ELIZABETH. See Browning, E.B.
BARTOLI, his _Simboli_, 27.
BENCKHAUSEN, Russian Consul-General, 14.
BÉRANGER, 86.
BLAGDEN, ISA. See BROWNING, R., letters.
BRONSON, Mrs ARTHUR, 220, 231.
BRONTE, EMILY, her character "Heathcliff," 66.
BROWNING, ROBERT (grandfather), 2.
BROWNING, ROBERT (father), 3, 6, 18, 149 n., 173.
BROWNING, ROBERT,
cosmopolitan in sympathies, English by his art, 1, 2;
his birth, 3;
likeness to his mother, 4 n.;
character of his home, 5;
boyhood, 5, 6;
early sense of rhythm, 7;
reads Shelley, Keats, and Byron, 8 f.;
journey to St Petersburg, 14;
first voyage to Italy, 26 f.;
second voyage to Italy, 61;
correspondence with E.B. Barrett, 78;
marriage, 81;
settlement in Italy, 84;
friendships and society at Florence, 84 f.;
Italian politics, 88;
Italian scenery, 91;
Italian painting, 98 f.;
and music, 103 f.;
religion, 110 f.;
his interpretation of _In a Balcony_, 145 n.;
death of Mrs Browning, 147;
return to London, 148;
society, 150;
summer sojourns in France, 153 f., 202 f.;
in the Alps, 216;
death of Miss Egerton-Smith, 216;
Italy once more, 220;
Asolo and Venice, 231 f.;
death, 234.
Works--
_Abt Vogler_, 71, *158* f.
_Agamemnon_ (translation of), 215 f.
_Andrea del Sarto_, 70 f., *100* f.
_Another Way of Love_, 142.
_Any Wife to Any Husband_, 140.
_Appearances_, 212.
_Aristophanes' Apology_, *206* f.
_Artemis Prologizes_, 68, 190.
_Asolando_, 220, *232* f.
_At the Mermaid_, 211.
_Bad Dreams_, 232.
_Balaustion's Adventure_, 75, *190* f.
_Baldinucci_, 214.
_Bells and Pomegranates_, 16, 41 f., 74.
_Bifurcation_, 213.
_Bishop of St Praxed's, The_, 70, 113, 275.
_Blot in the 'Scutcheon, A_, *52* f.
_Blougram's Apology_, 14, 57, 60, 90, 113, *129* f., 277 f.
_Boy and the Angel, The_, 113, 116.
_By the Fireside_, 94, *135* f., 275.
_Caliban upon Setebos_, *162* f.
_Cavalier Tunes_, 67.
_Childe Roland_, *95* f., 262 f.
_Christmas-Eve and Easter Day_, 81, *114* f., 162.
_Cleon_, 113, *126* f.
_Clive_, 223.
_Colombe's Birthday_, 53, *55* f.
_Confessional, The_, 40, 66.
_Cristina_, 48, *68* f.
_Deaf and Dumb_, 295.
_Death in the Desert, A_, 152, *160* f.
_De Gustibus_, 90, 92, 254.
_Dis Aliter Visum_, 152, 156.
_Dramas_, 37 f.
_Dramatic Idylls_, *221* f.
_Dramatic Lyrics_, 38 f., *65* f., 79.
_Dramatic Romances_, 38, 79.
_Dramatis Personæ_, *151-168*, 213.
_Echetlos_, 222.
_Englishman in Italy, The_, 93.
_Epilogue to Dramatis Personæ_, 154, *167* f., 296.
_Epistle of Karshish, An_, 113, *123* f.
_Eurydice to Orpheus_, 157.
_Evelyn Hope_, 138, 293.
_Fears and Scruples_, 212.
_Ferishtah's Fancies_, *227* f.
_Fifine at the Fair_, 92 f., 149, *197* f., 209, 242.
_Flight of the Duchess, The_, *69* f., 199.
_Flower's Name, The_, 68.
_Forgiveness, A_, 213.
_Fra Lippo Lippi_, 71, *101* f., 112.
_Francis Furini_, 298.
_Gerard de Lairesse_, 222.
_Gismond_, 41, 57, 67.
_Glove, The_, 69, *70*.
_Grammarian's Funeral, The_, *109* f.
_Guardian Angel, The_, 99.
_Halbert and Hob_, *222*.
_Helen's Tower_, sonnet, 188.
_Heretic's Tragedy, A_, *128* f., 263.
_Hervé Riel_, *189* f., 222.
_Holy Cross Day_, 4 n., *128*.
_Home Thoughts from Abroad_ (quoted), 265.
_Home Thoughts from the Sea_, 26.
_House_, 211.
_How it Strikes a Contemporary_, 108 f.
_How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix_, 27, 67, 222.
_Hugues of Saxe Gotha, Master_, 71, *105* f., 113.
_In a Balcony_, *143* f.
_In a Gondola_, 67.
_In a Year_, 140.
_Incondita_, 8.
_Inn Album, The_, 188, *208* f.
_Instans Tyrannus_, 66, 90.
_In Three Days_, 137, 141.
_Italian in England, The_, 91.
_Iván Ivánovitch_, 14, 221, *223*.
_Ixion_, *225* f.
_James Lee's Wife_, 153 f.
_Jochanan Halkadosh_, 225.
_Jocoseria_, *224* f.
_Johannes Agricola_, 15 f.
_King Victor and King Charles_, 15, *45*, 50.
_Laboratory, The_, 38, 66.
_La Saisiaz_, *216* f.
_Last Ride Together, The_, 68, *138* f., 304.
_Life in a Love_, 137.
_Light Woman, A_, 142.
_Lost Leader, The_, 66.
_Lost Mistress, The_, 68, 156.
_Love in a Life_, 137.
_Luria_, 60, *61* f.
_Madhouse Cells_, 16.
_Martin Relph_, 222 f., 275.
_Men and Women_, 25, 60, 72, 74, *87-147*, 152, 213.
_Muleykeh_, 223.
_My Last Duchess_, 66, 70, 213.
_My Star_, 140.
_Natural Magic_, 213.
_Ned Bratts_, 222.
_Never the Time and the Place_, 226.
_Now_, 233.
_Numpholeptos_, 213.
_Old Pictures in Florence_, 90, 102 f.
_One Way of Love_, 137.
_One Word More_, 97 f., *146* f.
_Pacchiarotto_, 109, 162, 188, *210* f.
_Pan and Luna_, 248.
_Paracelsus_, 16 f., 25, 29, 38, 42.
_Parleyings with Certain People of Importance_, 229 f.
_Patriot, The_, 90.
_Pauline_, 11 f.
_Pearl, a Girl, A_, 233.
_Pheidippides_, 222.
_Pictor Ignolus_, 70 f.
_Pied Piper, The_, 71 f., 269.
_Pippa Passes_, *49* f., 59, 79, 91, 151, 181.
_Popularity_, 109.
_Porphyria's Lover_, 16.
_Pretty Woman, A_, 142.
_Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_, 14, *194* f.
_Prospice_, 109, 157.
_Rabbi ben Ezra_, 4 n., 109, *157* f.
_Red-cotton Night-cap Country_, 90
(Miranda), 188, *203* f.
_Return of the Druses, The_, 45, *46* f., 64.
_Reverie_, 233.
_Ring and the Book, The_, 151 f., *169-186*, 276 f.
_Rudel_, 68.
_Saint Martin's Summer_, 213.
_Saul_, 48, *72* f., 113, *121* f.
_Serenade at the Villa_, 137.
_Shelley, Essay on_, 20, *106* f., 109 f.
_Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis_, 67, 79.
_Sludge, Mr, the Medium_, 90, *165* f.
_Solomon and Balkis_, 225.
_Sordello_, 15, *25* f., 238.
_Soul's Tragedy, A_, 59 f.
_Spanish Cloister, The_, 79.
_Statue and the Bust, The_, 142, 213.
_Strafford_, 15, 25, *42* f.
_Summum Bonum_, 233.
_Time's Revenges_, 66.
_Toccata of Galuppi's, A_, 104 f.,153.
_Too Late_, 153.
_Transcendentalism_, 108.
_Two in the Campagna_, 93, 134, *140*, 238.
_Two Poets of Croisic, The_, *218* f.
_Woman's Last Word, A_, 140.
_Women and Roses_, 143.
_Worst of It, The_, 156.
_Youth and Art_, 152, 156.
Letters,
to E.B.B., 4 n., 6, 8, 49, 59 n., 62, 63, 65, 67, 72, 75, 78-83
passim, 85, 114 f., 241, 252 f., 283;
to Miss Blagden, 153, 171, 173 n., 249;
to Miss Flower, 43;
to Miss Haworth, 26 n., 44, 237;
to Ruskin, 237;
to Aubrey de Vere, 247 n.
BROWNING, ELIZABETH BARRETT MOULTON-BARRETT (wife).
First allusion to Browning, 75;
reads _Paracelsus_, 75 n.;
her character, early life, and poetry, 76 f.;
correspondence with Browning, 78 f.;
marriage, 81;
settlement in Italy, 84;
friendships, society at Florence, 84 f.;
death, 147;
her relation to Pompilia, 180.
_Aurora Leigh_, 81, 87, 151, 209.
_Songs before Congress_, 90.
_Sonnets from the Portuguese_, 87.
_Casa Guidi Windows_, 90.
Letters to R.B., 49, 65, 77 n., 78-83 _passim_, 114, 251.
Letter to Ruskin, 77 n.
Letters to others, 85, 89, 92, 99, 245.
BROWNING, SARAH ANNA (mother), 4.
BURNS, R., 40, 281.
BYRON, LORD, 7, 8, 104, 198, 218, 263.
CARLYLE, THOMAS, 36, 42, 87, 150, 172, 230, 256, 307.
_Carnival_, Schumann's, 202.
Casa Guidi, 84 f., 97.
CELLINI, BENVENUTO, 98.
CHAUCER, G., 41.
COLERIDGE, S. T., 8, 95 f., 134.
CORNARO, CATHARINE, 50, 331.
_Cornhill Magazine, The_, 190.
DANTE, 29 f., 33, 35, 66, 120 f, 261 f., 308.
DICKENS, CHARLES, 42, 49.
DOMETT, ALFRED (referred to), 99.
DONNE, JOHN, 6, 254 n.
Dulwich, 6, 49, 97.
EGERTON-SMITH, ANN, 216.
EMERSON, R.W., 256.
EURIPIDES, 173 n., 191, 208.
Fano, the Brownings at, 99.
FAUCIT, HELEN (Lady Martin), 43.
FICHTE, J.E., 288 f.
FITZGERALD, EDWARD, 172, 188.
Florence, 84 f. _passim._
FLOWER, ELIZA, 11, 43.
FORSTER, JOHN, 42.
FOX, W.J., 8, 14, 42, 86.
Germany. German strain in Browning, 4 n.
GIOTTO, 99, 103.
GOETHE, J.W. VON, 5, 288;
_Faust_, 19, 31, 50, 198, 296;
_Iphigenie_, 30 n.;
_Metamorphose der Pflanzen_, 265;
_Tasso_, 30;
_Westöstlicher Divan_, 226.
Greek, early studies in, 8.
Gressoney, 226.
HAWORTH, EUPHRASIA FANNY, 27.
HORNE, author of _Orion_, 80.
HUGO, VICTOR, 86, 242.
IBSEN, H., _The Wild Duck_, 59.
JAMESON, ANNA, 84.
Jews. Browning's attitude towards the Jewish race, 4 n.
JONSON, BEN, 38, 214.
_Junius, Letters of_, 6.
KEATS, J., 9, 73, 240 f., 254.
KENYON, JOHN, 73, 78, 80, 82, 86.
LANDOR, W.S., 30 n., 40 f., 87 f., 96, 229.
LEIGHTON, Sir FREDERIC, 71, 150.
Lucca, the Brownings at, 92.
MACLISE, 67.
MACREADY, 42 f., 32.
MAETERLINCK, M., 144, 162 n.
MALORY, 104.
MEREDITH, Mr G., 168.
Metres, Browning's, 186, 253, 261.
MICHELANGELO, 103.
MILL, JOHN STUART, 11 f.
MILSAND, JOSEPH, 86, 188, 203, 230.
MILTON, J., 71, 261.
_Monthly Repository_, 14.
MOXON, EDWARD, publisher, 59 n.
MUSSET, ALFRED DE, 141 f.
NAPOLEON III., Emperor, 88 f., 194.
OSSIAN, 7.
PALESTRINA, 103.
Paris, 85 f., 92, 106, 204.
PAUL, SAINT, 308.
PHELPS, actor, 58.
Pisa, 84.
PLATO, 12, 239, 307.
PRINSEP, V., 150.
QUARLES, FRANCIS, 6.
Rezzonico Palace, 231.
RIPERT-MONCLAR, COMTE AMÉDÉE DE, 17.
Rome, the Brownings in, 87.
ROSSETTI, D.G., 13 f., 86 f., 150.
ROSSETTI, Mr W.M., 171 n.
RUSKIN, JOHN, 77 n., 150, 237.
SAND, GEORGE, 85.
SCHILLER, F., 70, 209.
SCOTT, Sir W., 93.
SHAKESPEARE, W., 65, 200, 211;
_Romeo and Juliet_, 38;
_The Tempest_, 50 f., 162 f.;
_Loves Labour's Lost_, 56;
_Hamlet_, 58;
_Julius Cæsar_, 63;
_Othello_, 62;
_As You Like It_, 95.
SHELLEY, P.B., 8, 9, 12 f., 20, 34, 90, 110 f., 183, 238, 240, 254, 257,
263, 271, 296.
SMART, CHRISTOPHER, his _Song to David_, 72.
SOUTHEY, R., 8.
Spiritualism, 87.
SWINBURNE, Mr A.C., 151.
TENNYSON, ALFRED LORD, 1, 19, 31, 86 f., 130, 150, 172, 175, 261 f.
TENNYSON, FREDERICK, 150.
THACKERAY, ANNIE (Mrs Ritchie), 203.
THACKERAY, W.M., 150.
TITTLE, MARGARET, the poet's grandmother, 3.
TRELAWNEY, E.J., 61.
_Trifler, The_, 15.
Venice, 27, 37.
VERDI, 103.
VILLON, 105.
Virgil, Dante's, 30.
Vocabulary, Browning's, 261.
VOLTAIRE, 6.
WALPOLE, HORACE, 6.
WIEDEMANN, WILLIAM, the poet's maternal grandfather, 4.
WISEMAN, CARDINAL, 130.
WOOLNER, 150.
WORDSWORTH, 8, 32, 93 f., 244, 264, 268, 273, 284.
York (a horse), 27.
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