The prevalence of thought in Mr. Browning's poetry has created in many
minds an impression that he is more a thinker than a poet: that his
poems not only are each inspired by some leading idea, but have grown up
in subservience to it; and those who hold this view both do him
injustice as a poet, and underrate, however unconsciously, the
intellectual value of what his work conveys. For in a poet's
imagination, the thought and the thing--the idea and its image--grow up
at the same time; each being a different aspect of the other.[86] He
sees, therefore, the truths of Nature, as Nature herself gives them;
while the thinker, who conceives an idea first, and finds an
illustration for it afterwards, gives truth only as it presents itself
to the human mind--in a more definite, but much narrower form. Mr.
Browning often _treats_ his subject as a pure thinker might, but he has
always _conceived_ it as a poet; he has always seen in one flash,
everything, whether moral or physical, visible or invisible, which the
given situation could contain.[87] This fact may be recognized in many
of the smaller poems, which, for that reason, I shall find it impossible
to class; but it is best displayed in a couple of longer ones, which I
have placed under the head "Romantic." They are distinct from the
majority of the "Dramatic Romances," although included in them. For with
these the word "romantic" denotes an imaginary experience, which may be
frankly supernatural, as in "The Boy and the Angel;" or only improbable,
as in "Mesmerism;" or semi-historical and local, as in "In a Gondola;"
or simply human, and possible anywhere and anywhen, as in "The Last Ride
Together;" or in "Dîs aliter Visum," and "James Lee's Wife," which might
be classed with them. I am now using it to mark certain cases, in which
the author's imagination has not brought itself to the test of _any_
consistent experience, but simply presents us with certain groups of
material and mental--of real and ideal possibilities, which we may each
interpret for ourselves. They occur in
"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came." ("Dramatic Romances."
Published in "Men and Women." 1855.)
"The Flight of the Duchess." ("Dramatic Romances." Published
in "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics." 1845.)[88]
The first of these has been taken by some intelligent critics to be a
moralizing allegory; the second, a moralizing fairy-tale. They are,
therefore, a useful type both of Mr. Browning's poetic genius, and of
the misunderstanding, to which its constantly intellectual employment
has exposed him.
"CHILDE ROLAND TO THE DARK TOWER CAME," describes a brave knight
performing a pilgrimage, in which hitherto all who attempted it have
failed. The way through which he struggles is unknown to him; its
features are hideous; a deadly sense of difficulty and danger hangs over
every step; and though Childe Roland's courage is pledged to the
undertaking, the thought of failure at last comes to him as a relief. He
reaches the goal just as failure appears inevitable. The plain has
suddenly closed in; weird and unsightly eminences encompass him on every
side. In one flash he perceives that he is in a trap; in another, that
the tower stands before him; while round it, against the hill-sides, are
ranged the "lost adventurers" who have preceded him--their names and
story clanging loudly and more loudly in his ears--their forms revealed
with ghastly clearness in the last fires of the setting sun.
So far the picture is consistent; but if we look below its surface
discrepancies appear. The Tower is much nearer and more accessible than
Childe Roland has thought; a sinister-looking man, of whom he asked the
way, and who, as he believed, was deceiving him, has really put him on
the right track; and as he describes the country through which he
passes, it becomes clear that half its horrors are created by his own
heated imagination, or by some undefined influence in the place itself.
We are left in doubt whether those who have found failure in this quest,
have not done so through the very act of attainment in it; and when,
dauntless, Childe Roland sounds his slughorn and announces that he has
come, we should not know, but that he lives to tell the tale, whether in
doing this he incurs, or is escaping, the general doom. We can connect
no idea of definite pursuit or attainment with a series of facts so
dreamlike and so disjointed: still less extract from it a definite
moral; and we are reduced to taking the poem as a simple work of fancy,
built up of picturesque impressions which have, separately or
collectively, produced themselves in the author's mind.[89]
But these picturesque impressions had, also, their ideal side, which Mr.
Browning as spontaneously reproduced; and we may all recognize under the
semblance of the enchanted country and the adventurous knight, a poetic
vision of life: with its conflicts, contradictions, and mockeries; its
difficulties which give way when they seem most insuperable; its
successes which look like failures, and its failures which look like
success. The thing we may not do is to imagine that an intended lesson
is conveyed by it.
"THE FLIGHT OF THE DUCHESS" is the adventure of a young girl, who was
brought out of a convent to marry a certain Duke. The Duke was
narrow-hearted, pompous, and self-sufficient; the mother who shared his
home, a sickly woman, as ungenial as himself. The young wife, on the
other hand, was a bright, stirring creature, who would have been the
sunshine of a labourer's home. She pined amidst the dreariness and the
formality of her conjugal existence, and seized the first opportunity
of escape from it. A retainer of the Duke's, whose chivalry her position
had aroused, connived at her escape, and tells the story of it.
The Duke had decreed a hunt. Custom prescribed that his wife should
attend it. She had excused herself on the plea of her ill-health; and he
was riding forth in no amiable mood, when an old gipsy woman, well known
in the neighbourhood, accosted him with the usual prayer for alms. He
was curtly dismissing her, when she mentioned her desire to pay her
respects to the young Duchess. It then occurred to him that the sight of
this ragged crone, and the chronicle of her woes, might be an excellent
medicine for his "froward," ungrateful wife, and teach her to know when
she was well off; and after speaking in confidence with the old woman,
he bade him who recounts the adventure escort her into the lady's
presence. The interview took place. The Duchess accompanied her visitor
to the castle gate, ordered her palfrey to be saddled, mounted it with
the gipsy behind her, and bounded away, never to return. The attendant
had watched and obeyed her as in a dream. She left in his hand, in
gratitude for what she knew he felt for her, a little plait of hair.
These are the real facts of the story. But we have also its ideal
possibilities, as reflected by the imagination of the narrator. He had
seen the gipsy metamorphosed as she received the Duke's command, from a
ragged, decrepit crone into a stately woman, whose clothing bore the
appearance of wealth; and as he mounted guard on the balcony which
commanded the Duchess's room, he saw the wonder grow. A sound as of
music first attracted his attention; and as he looked in at the window
he saw the Duchess sitting at the feet of a real gipsy-queen: her head
upturned--her whole being expanding--as the gipsy's hands waved over
her, and the gipsy's eyes, preternaturally dilated, poured their floods
of life into her own. Then the music broke up into words, and he knew
what hope and promise that fainting spirit was drinking in: for he heard
what the gipsy said. She was telling the young Duchess that she was one
of themselves--that she bore their mystic mark in the two veins which
met and parted on her brow--that after fiery trial she should return to
her tribe, and be shielded by their devotion for evermore. She was
telling her how good a thing is love--how strong and beautiful the
double existence of those whom love has welded together--how full of
restful memories the old age of those who have lived in and for it--how
sure and gentle their awakening into the better world.... Here the words
again lost themselves in music, and he understood no more. When the two
appeared at the castle gate, the gipsy had shrunk back into her original
character; but the Duchess remained transformed. She had become, in her
turn, a queen.
The suggestion of her gipsy origin forms a connecting link between the
real and the ideal aspects of the Duchess's flight. We might imagine her
fervid nature as being affected by the message of deliverance precisely
in the manner described: while the beautified image of her deliverer
transferred itself through some magnetic influence to the spectator's
mind from her own. He does not, however, present himself as a probable
subject for such impressions. He is a jovial, matter-of-fact person, in
spite of the vein of sentiment which runs through him; and the
imaginative part of his narrative was more probably the result of a
huntsman's breakfast which had found its way into his brain. As in the
case of Childe Roland, the poetic truth of the Duchess's romance is
incompatible with rational explanation, and independent of it. Various
dramatic details complete the story.