The Maker of Plays
The publication of _Paracelsus_ did not gain for Browning a large
audience, but it brought him friends and acquaintances who gave his life
a delightful expansion in its social relations. John Forster, the
critic, biographer and historian, then unknown to him, reviewed the poem
in the _Examiner_ with full recognition of its power and promise.
Browning gratefully commemorated a lifelong friendship with Forster,
nearly a score of years later, in the dedication of the 1863 edition of
his poetical works. Mrs Orr recites the names of Carlyle, Talfourd, R.
Hengist Horne, Leigh Hunt, Procter, Monckton Milnes, Dickens,
Wordsworth, Landor, among those of distinguished persons who became
known to Browning at this period.[18] His "simple and enthusiastic
manner" is referred to by the actor Macready in his diary; "he looks and
speaks more like a youthful poet than any man I ever saw." Browning's
face was one of rare intelligence and full of changing expression. He
was not tall, but in early years he was slight, was graceful in his
movements, and held his head high. His dark brown hair hung in wavy
masses upon his neck. His voice had in early manhood a quality,
afterwards lost, which Mr Sharp describes as "flute-like, clear, sweet
and resonant." Slim, dark, and very handsome are the words chosen by Mrs
Bridell-Fox to characterise the youthful Browning as he reappeared to
her memory; "And--may I hint it?"--she adds, "just a trifle of a dandy,
addicted to lemon-coloured kid gloves and such things, quite 'the glass
of fashion and the mould of form.' But full of ambition, eager for
success, eager for fame, and, what is more, determined to conquer fame
and to achieve success." Yet the correct and conventional Browning could
also fire up for lawlessness--"frenetic to be free." He was hail-fellow
well-met, we are told--but is this part of a Browning legend?--with
tramps and gipsies, and he wandered gladly, whether through devout
sympathy or curiosity of mood we know not, into Little Bethels and other
tents of spiritual Ishmael.
From Camberwell Browning's father moved to a house at Hatcham,
transporting thither his long rows of books, together with those many
volumes which lay still unwritten in the "celle fantastyk" of his son.
"There is a vast view from our greatest hill," wrote Browning; a vast
view, though Wordsworth had scorned the Londoner's hill--"Hill? _we_
call that, such as that, a _rise_." Here he read and wrote, enjoyed his
rides on the good horse "York," and cultivated friendship with a toad in
the pleasant garden, for he had a peculiar interest, as his poems show,
in creatures that live a shy, mysterious life apart from that of man,
and the claim of beauty, as commonly understood, was not needed to win
his regard. Browning's eye was an instrument made for exact and minute
records of natural phenomena. "I have heard him say," Mr Sharp writes,
"that at that time"--speaking of his earlier years--"his faculty of
observation would not have appeared despicable to a Seminole or an
Iroquois." Such activity of the visual nerve differs widely from the
wise passiveness or brooding power of the Wordsworthian mode of
contemplation. Browning's life was never that of a recluse who finds in
nature and communion with the anima mundi a counterpoise to the
attractions of human society. Society fatigued him, yet he would not
abandon its excitements. A mystic--though why it should be so is hard to
say--does not ordinarily affect lemon-coloured kid gloves, as did the
Browning of Mrs Bridell-Fox's recollection. The mysticism of Browning's
temper of mind came not by withdrawal from the throng of positive facts,
but by pushing through these to the light beyond them, or by the
perception of some spear-like shaft of light piercing the denseness,
which was serviceable as the sheathe or foil. And of course it was among
men and women that he found suggestions for some of his most original
studies.
An introduction to Macready which took place at Mr Fox's house towards
the close of November 1835 was fruitful in consequences. A month later
Browning was Macready's guest at Elstree, the actor's resting-place in
the country. His fellow-traveller, then unknown to him, in the coach
from London was John Forster; in Macready's drawing-room the poet and
his critic first formed a personal acquaintance. Browning had for long
been much interested in the stage, but only as a spectator. His
imagination now turned towards dramatic authorship with a view to
theatrical performance. A play on a subject from later Roman history,
_Narses_, was thought of and was cast aside. The success of Talfourd's
_Ion_, after the first performance of which (May 26, 1836) Browning
supped in the author's rooms with Macready, Wordsworth, and Landor,
probably raised high hopes of a like or a greater success for some
future drama of his own. "Write a play, Browning," said Macready, as
they left the house, "and keep me from going to America." "Shall it be
historical or English?" Browning questioned, as the incident is related
by Mrs Orr, "What do you say to a drama on Strafford?" The life of
Stafford by his friend Forster, just published, which during an illness
of the author had been revised in manuscript by Browning, probably
determined the choice of a subject.
By August the poet had pledged himself to achieve this first dramatic
adventure. The play was produced at Covent Garden on May 1st, 1837, by
Macready, who himself took the part of Strafford. Helen Faucit, then a
novice on the stage, gave an adequate rendering of the difficult part of
Lady Carlisle. For the rest, the complexion of the piece, as Browning
describes it, after one of the latest rehearsals, was "perfect gallows."
Great historical personages were presented by actors who strutted or
slouched, who whimpered or drawled. The financial distress at Covent
Garden forbade any splendour or even dignity of scenery or of
costumes.[19] The text was considerably altered--and not always
judiciously--from that of the printed play, which had appeared before
its production on the stage. Yet on the first night _Strafford_ was not
damned, and on the second it was warmly applauded.[20] After the fifth
performance the wretched Pym refused to save his mother England even
once more, and the play was withdrawn. Browning declared to his friends
that never again, as long as he might live, would he write a play.
Whining not being to his taste, he averted his eyes and set himself
resolutely to work upon _Sordello_.
"I sail this morning for Venice," Browning wrote to a friend on Good
Friday, 1838. He voyaged as sole passenger on a merchantman, and soon
was on friendliest terms with the rough kindly captain. For the first
fortnight the sea was stormy and Browning suffered much; as they passed
through the Straits of Gibraltar, Captain Davidson aided him to reach
the deck, and a pulsing of home-pride--not home-sickness--gave their
origin to the patriotic lines beginning, "Nobly, nobly Cape Saint
Vincent to the north-west died away." Under the bulwark of the _Norham
Castle_, off the African coast, when the fancy of a gallop on his Uncle
Reuben's horse suddenly presented itself in pleasant contrast with the
tedium of the hours on shipboard, he wrote in pencil, on the flyleaf of
Bartoli's Simboli, that most spirited of poems which tell of the glory
of motion--_How they brought the good news from Ghent to Aix_. The only
adventure of the voyage was the discovery of an Algerine pirate ship
floating keel uppermost; it righted suddenly under the stress of ropes
from the _Norham Castle_, and the ghastly and intolerable
dead--Algerines and Spaniards--could not scare the British sailors eager
for loot; at last the battered hulk was cast loose, and its blackness
was seen reeling slowly off "into the most gorgeous and lavish sunset in
the world." Having visited Venice, Vicenza and Padua--cities and
mountain solitudes, which gave their warmth and colour to his unfinished
poem--Browning returned home by way of Tyrol, the Rhine, Liege and
Antwerp. It was his first visit to Italy and was a time of enchantment.
Fifty years later he recalled the memories of these early days when his
delight had something insubstantial, magical in it, and the vision was
half perceived with the eye and half projected from within:--
How many a year my Asolo,
Since--one step just from sea to land--
I found you, loved yet feared you so--
For natural objects seemed to stand
Palpably fire-clothed![21]
Of evenings soon after his return to London Mrs Bridell-Fox writes: "He
was full of enthusiasm for Venice, that Queen of Cities. He used to
illustrate his glowing descriptions of its beauties, the palaces, the
sunsets, the moonrises, by a most original kind of etching. Taking up a
bit of stray notepaper, he would hold it over a lighted candle, moving
the paper about gently till it was cloudily smoked over, and then
utilising the darker smears for clouds, shadows, water, or what not,
would etch with a dry pen the forms of lights on cloud and palace, on
bridge or gondola on the vague and dreamy surface he had produced." The
anticipations of genius had already produced a finer etching than any of
these, in those lines of marvellous swiftness and intensity in
_Paracelsus_, which describe Constantinople at the hour of sunset.
[Illustration: MAIN STREET OF ASOLO, SHOWING BROWNING'S HOUSE.
_From a drawing by_ Miss D. NOYES.]
The publication of _Sordello_ (1840) did not improve Browning's position
with the public. The poem was a challenge to the understanding of an
aspirant reader, and the challenge met with no response. An excuse for
not reading a poem of five or six thousand lines is grateful to so
infirm and shortlived a being as man. And, indeed, a prophet, if
prudent, may do well to postpone the privilege of being unintelligible
until he has secured a considerable number of disciples of both sexes.
The reception of _Sordello_ might have disheartened a poet of less
vigorous will than Browning; he merely marched breast forward, and let
_Sordello_ lie inert, until a new generation of readers had arisen. The
dramas, _King Victor and King Charles_ and _The Return of the Druses_
(at first named "Mansoor the Hierophant") now occupied his thoughts.
Short lyrical pieces were growing under his hand, and began to form a
considerable group. And one fortunate day as he strolled alone in the
Dulwich wood--his chosen resort of meditation--"the image flashed upon
him of one walking thus alone through life; one apparently too obscure
to leave a trace of his or her passage, yet exercising a lasting though
unconscious influence at every step of it."[22] In other words Pippa
had suddenly passed her poet in the wood.
A cheap mode of issuing his works now in manuscript was suggested to
Browning by the publisher Moxon. They might appear in successive
pamphlets, each of a single sheet printed in double-column, and the
series might be discontinued at any time if the public ceased to care
for it. The general title _Bells and Pomegranates_ was chosen; "beneath
upon the hem of the robe thou shalt make pomegranates of blue, and of
purple, and of scarlet, round about the hem thereof; and bells of gold
between them round about." Browning, as he explained to his readers in
the last number, meant to indicate by the title, "Something like an
alternation, or mixture, of music with discoursing, sound with sense,
poetry with thought"--such having been, in fact, one of the most
familiar of the Rabbinical interpretations designed to expound the
symbolism of this priestly decoration prescribed in "Exodus." From 1841
to 1846 the numbers of _Bells and Pomegranates_ successively appeared;
with the eighth the series closed. The first number--_Pippa Passes_--was
sold for sixpence; when _King Victor and King Charles_ was published in
the following year (1842), the price was raised to one shilling. The
third and the seventh numbers were made up of short pieces--_Dramatic
Lyrics_ (1842), _Dramatic Romances and Lyrics_ (1845). _The Return of
the Druses_ and _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_--Numbers 4 and 5--followed
each other in the same year 1843. _Colombe's Birthday_--the only number
which is known to survive in manuscript--came next in order (1844). The
last to appear was that which included _Luna_, Browning's favourite
among his dramas, and _A Soul's Tragedy_.[23] His sister, except in the
instance of _Colombe_, was Browning's amanuensis. On each title-page he
is named Robert Browning "Author of Paracelsus"--the "wholly
unintelligible" _Sordello_ being passed over. Talfourd, "Barry
Cornwall," and John Kenyon (the cousin of Elizabeth Barrett) were
honoured with dedications. In these pamphlets of Moxon, Browning's
wonderful apples of gold were certainly not presented to the public in
pictures or baskets of silver; yet the possessor of the eight parts in
their yellow paper wrappers may now be congratulated. Only one of the
numbers--_A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_--attained the distinction of a
second edition, and this probably because the drama as published was
helped to a comparative popularity by its representation on the stage.
This tragedy of young love and death was written hastily--in four or
five days--for Macready. Browning while at work on his play, as we learn
from a letter of Dante Rossetti to Allingham, was kept indoors by a
slight indisposition; his father on going to see him "was each day
received boisterously and cheerfully with the words: 'I have done
another act, father.'"[24] Forster read the tragedy aloud from the
manuscript for Dickens, who wrote of it with unmeasured enthusiasm in a
letter, known to Browning only when printed after the lapse of some
thirty years: "Browning's play has thrown me into a perfect passion of
sorrow.... I know no love like it, no passion like it, no moulding of a
splendid thing after its conception like it." Things had gone ill with
Macready at Drury Lane, and when the time for _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_
drew near it is evident that he feared further losses and would gladly
have been released from his promise to produce the play; but Browning
failed to divine the true state of affairs. The tragedy was read to the
company by a grotesque, wooden-legged and red-nosed prompter, and it was
greeted with laughter. To make amends, Macready himself undertook to
read it aloud, but he declared himself unable, in the disturbed state of
his mind, to appear before the public: his part--that of Lord
Tresham--must be taken by Phelps. From certain rehearsals Phelps was
unavoidably absent through illness. Macready who read his lines on these
occasions, now was caught by the play, and saw possibilities in the part
of Tresham which fired his imagination. He chose, almost at the last
moment, to displace his younger and less distinguished colleague.
Browning, on the other hand, insisted that Phelps, having been assigned
the part, should retain it. To baffle Macready in his design of
presenting the play to the public in a mutilated form, Browning, aided
by his publisher, had the whole printed in four-and-twenty hours.[25] A
rupture of the long-standing friendship with Macready followed, nor did
author and actor meet again until after the great sorrow of Browning's
life. "Mr Macready too"--writes Mrs Orr--"had recently lost his wife,
and Mr Browning could only start forward, grasp the hand of his old
friend, and in a voice choked with emotion say, 'O Macready!'"
The tragedy was produced at Drury Lane on February nth, 1843, with
Phelps, who acted admirably as Tresham, and Helen Faucit as Mildred.
Although it had been ill rehearsed and not a shilling had been spent on
scenery or dresses, it was received with applause. To a call for the
author, Browning, seated in his box, declined to make any response.
Thus, not without some soreness of heart, closed his direct connection
with the theatre. He heard with pleasure when in Italy that _A Blot in
the 'Scutcheon_ was given by Phelps at Sadler's Wells Theatre in
November 1848, and with unquestionable success. A rendering of
_Colombe's Birthday_ was projected by Charles Kean in 1844, but the long
delays, which were inevitable, could not be endured by Browning, who
desired to print his play forthwith among the _Bells and Pomegranates_.
It was not until nine years later that this play, a veritable "All for
love, or the world well lost," was presented at the Haymarket, Helen
Faucit appearing as the Duchess. Soon after _Colombe's Birthday_ had
been published, Browning sailed once more, in the autumn of 1844, for
Italy.[26] As he journeyed northwards and homewards, from Naples (where
they were performing an opera named _Sordello_) and Rome he sought and
obtained at Leghorn an interview with Trelawny, the generous-hearted
friend of Shelley, by whose grave he had lately stood.[27]
Browning's work as a playwright, consisting of eight pieces, or nine if
we include the later _In a Balcony_, is sufficiently ample to enable us
to form a trustworthy estimate of his genius as seen in drama. Dramatic,
in the sense that he created and studied minds and hearts other than his
own, he pre-eminently was; if he desired to set forth or to vindicate
his most intimate ideas or impulses, he effected this indirectly, by
detaching them from his own personality and giving them a brain and a
heart other than his own in which to live and move and have their being.
There is a kind of dramatic art which we may term static, and another
kind which we may term dynamic. The former deals especially with
characters in position, the latter with characters in movement.[28]
Passion and thought may be exhibited and interpreted by dramatic genius
of either type; to represent passion and thought and action--action
incarnating and developing thought and passion--the dynamic power is
required. And by action we are to understand not merely a visible deed,
but also a word, a feeling, an idea which has in it a direct operative
force. The dramatic genius of Browning was in the main of the static
kind; it studies with extraordinary skill and subtlety character in
position; it attains only an imperfect or a laboured success with
character in movement. The _dramatis personae_ are ready at almost every
moment, except the culminating moments of passion, to fall away from
action into reflection and self-analysis. The play of mind upon mind he
recognises of course as a matter of profound interest and importance;
but he catches the energy which spirit transfers to spirit less in the
actual moment of transference than after it has arrived. Thought and
emotion with him do not circulate freely through a group of persons,
receiving some modification from each. He deals most successfully with
each individual as a single and separate entity; each maintains his own
attitude, and as he is touched by the common influence he proceeds to
scrutinise it. Mind in these plays threads its way dexterously in and
out of action; it is not itself sufficiently incorporated in action. The
progress of the drama is now retarded; and again, as if the author
perceived that the story had fallen behind or remained stationary, it is
accelerated by sudden jerks. A dialogue of retrospection is a common
device at the opening of popular plays, with a view to expound the
position of affairs to the audience; but a dramatic writer of genius
usually works forward through his dialogue to the end which he has set
before him. With Browning for the purpose of mental analysis a dialogue
of retrospection may be of higher value than one which leans and presses
towards the future. The invisible is for him more important than the
visible; and so in truth it may often be; but the highest dramatist will
not choose to separate the two. The invisible is best captured and is
most securely held in the visible.
As a writer of drama, Browning, who delights to study the noblest
attitudes of the soul, and to wring a proud sense of triumph out of
apparent failure, finds his proper field in tragedy rather than in
comedy. _Colombe's Birthday_ has a joyous ending, but the joy is very
grave and earnest, and the body of the play is made up of serious
pleadings and serious hopes and fears. There is no light-hearted mirth,
no real gaiety of temper anywhere in the dramas of Browning. Pippa's
gladness in her holiday from the task of silk-winding is touched with
pathos in the thought that what is so bright _is_ also so brief, and it
is encompassed, even within delightful Asolo, by the sins and sorrows of
the world. Bluphocks, with his sniggering wit and his jingles of rhyme
is a vagabond and a spy, who only covers the shame of his nakedness with
these rags of devil-may-care good spirits. The genial cynicism of
Ogniben is excellent of its kind, and pleases the palate like an olive
amid wines; but this man of universal intellectual sympathies is at
heart the satirist of moral illusions, the unmasker of self-deception,
who with long experience of human infirmities, has come to chuckle
gently over his own skill in dealing with them; and has he not--we may
ask--wound around his own spirit some of the incurable illusions of
worldly wisdom? No--this is not gaiety; if Browning smiles with his
Ogniben, his smile is a comment upon the weakness and the blindness of
the self-deceiver.
Browning's tragedies are tragedies without villains. The world is here
the villain, which has baits and bribes and snares wherewith to entangle
its victims, to lure down their mounting aspirations, to dull their
vision for the things far-off and faint; perhaps also to make them
prosperous and portly gentlemen, easy-going, and amiably cynical,
tolerant of evil, and prudently distrustful of good. Yet truth is truth,
and fact is fact; worldly wisdom is genuine wisdom after its kind; we
shall be the better instructed if we listen to its sage experience, if
we listen, understand, and in all justice, censure. Ogniben can blandly
and skilfully conduct a Chiappino to his valley of humiliation--"let him
that standeth take heed lest he fall." But what would the wisdom of
Ogniben be worth in its pronouncements on a Luria or a Colombe? Perhaps
even in such a case not wholly valueless. The self-pleased, keen-sighted
Legate might after all have applauded a moral heroism or a high-hearted
gallantry which would ill accord with his own ingenious and versatile
spirit. Bishop Blougram--sleek, ecclesiastical opportunist--was not
insensible to the superior merits of "rough, grand, old Martin Luther."
In Browning's nature a singularly keen, exploring intelligence was
united with a rare moral and spiritual ardour, a passion for high
ideals. In creating his chief _dramatis persona_ he distributes among
them what he found within himself, and they fall into two principal
groups--characters in which the predominating power is intellect, and
characters in which the mastery lies with some lofty emotion. The
intellect dealing with things that are real and positive, those persons
in whom intelligence is supreme may too easily become the children of
this world; in their own sphere they are wiser than the children of
light; and they are skilled in a moral casuistry by which they justify
to themselves the darkening of the light that is in them. The passionate
natures have an intelligence of their own; they follow a gleam which is
visible to them if not to others; they discover, or rather they are
discovered by, some truth which flashes forth in one inspired
moment--the master-moment of a lifetime; they possess the sublime
certainty of love, loyalty, devotion; if they err through a heroic
folly and draw upon themselves ruin in things temporal, may there not be
some atom of divine wisdom at the heart of the folly, which is itself
indestructible, and which ensures for them a welfare out of time and
space? Prophet and casuist--Browning is both; and to each he will
endeavour to be just; but his heart must give a casting vote, and this
cannot be in favour of the casuist. Every self-transcending passion has
in it a divine promise and pledge; even the passion of the senses if it
has hidden within it one spark of self-annihilating love may be the
salvation of a soul. It is Ottima, lifted above her own superb
voluptuousness, who cries--"Not me--to him, O God, be merciful." The
region of untrammelled, unclouded passion, of spiritual intuition, and
of those great words from heaven, which pierce "even to the dividing
asunder of the joints and marrow," is, for Browning's imagination, the
East. The nations of the West--and, before all others, the Italian
race--are those of a subtly developed intelligence. The worldly art of a
Church-man, ingenuities of theology having aided in refining ingenuities
of worldliness, is perhaps the finest exemplar of unalloyed western
brain-craft. But Italy is also a land of passion; and therefore at once,
for its ardours of the heart--seen not in love alone but in carven
capital and on frescoed wall--and for its casuistries of intellect,
Browning looks to Italy for the material best fitted to his artistry.
Between that group of personages whom we may call his characters of
passion and that group made up of his characters of intelligence, lie
certain figures of peculiar interest, by birth and inheritance children
of the East, and by culture partakers, in a greater or a less degree,
of the characteristics of the West--a Djabal, with his Oriental heart
entangled by Prankish tricks of sophistry; a Luria, whose Moorish
passion is enthralled by the fascination of Florentine intellect, and
who can make a return upon himself with a half-painful western
self-consciousness.
Loyalties, devotions, to a person, to a cause, to an ideal, and the
sacrifice of individual advantages, worldly prosperity, temporal
successes to these--such, stated in a broad and general way, is the
theme of special interest to Browning in his dramas. These loyalties may
be well and wisely fixed, or they may contain a portion of error and
illusion. But in either case they furnish a test of manly and womanly
virtue. With a woman the test is often proposed by love--by love as set
over against ease, or high station, or the pride of power. Colombe of
Ravestein is offered on the one hand the restoration of her forfeited
Duchy, the prospective rank of Empress and partnership with a man, who,
if he cannot give love, is yet no ignoble wooer, a man of honour, of
intellect, and of high ambition; on the other hand pleads the advocate
of Cleves, a nameless provincial, past his days of youth, lean and
somewhat worn, and burdened with the griefs and wrongs of his townsfolk.
Mere largeness in a life is something, is much; but the quality of a
life is more. Valence has set the cause of his fellow-citizens above
himself; he has made the heart of the Duchess for the first time thrill
in sympathy with the life of her people; he has placed his loyalty to
her far above his own hopes of happiness; he has urged his rival's
claims with unfaltering fidelity. It is not with any backward glances
of regret, any half-doubts, prudent reserves, or condescending
qualifications that Colombe gives herself to the advocate of the poor.
She, in her youth and beauty, has been happy during her year of idlesse
as play-Duchess of Juliers; she is happier now as she abandons the court
and, sure in her grave choice, turns with a light and joyous laugh to
welcome the birthday gift of freedom and of love that has so
unexpectedly come to her. Having once made her election, Colombe can
throw away the world as gaily as in some girlish frolic she might toss
aside a rose.
The loyalty of men, their supreme devotion and their test may, as with
women, spring from the passion of love; but other tests than this are
often proposed to them. With King Charles of Sardinia it is duty to his
people that summons him, from those modest and tranquil ways of life of
which he dreamed, to the cares and toils of the crown. He has strength
to accept without faltering the burden that is laid upon him. And if he
falters at the last, and would resign to his father, who reclaims it,
the crown which God alone should have removed, shall we assert
confidently that Browning's dramatic instinct has erred? The pity of
it--that his great father, daring in battle, profound in policy, should
stand before him an outraged, helpless old man, craving with senile
greed a gift from his son--the pity of it revives an old weakness, an
old instinct of filial submission, in the heart of Charles. He has
tasked himself without sparing; he has gained the affections of his
subjects; he has conciliated a hostile Europe; is not this enough? Or
was it also in the bond that he should tread a miserable father into the
dust? The test again of Luigi, in the third part of _Pippa Passes_, is
that of one who sees all the oppression of his people, who is enamoured
of the antique ideal of liberty, and whose choice lies between a youth
of luxurious ease and the virtue of one heroic crime, to be followed by
the scaffold-steps, with youth cut short. To him that overcometh and
endureth unto the end will God give the morning-star:
The gift of the morning-star! Have I God's gift
Of the morning-star?
And Luigi will adventure forth--it may be in a kind of divine folly--as
a doomsman commissioned by God to free his Italy. The devotion of Luria
to Florence is partly of the imagination, and perhaps it is touched with
something of illusion. But the actual Florence, with her astute
politicians, her spies who spy upon spies, her incurable distrusts, her
sinister fears, her ingrained ingratitude, is clearly exposed to him
before the end. Shall he turn the army, which is as much his own as the
sword he wields, joined with the forces of Pisa, against the beautiful,
faithless city? Or will his passionate loyalty endure the test? Luria
withdraws from life, but not until he has made every provision for the
victory of Florence over her enemy; nor does he die a defeated man; his
moral greatness has subdued all envies and all distrusts; at the close
everyone is true to him:
The only fault's with time;
All men become good creatures: but so slow.[29]
Once again in Browning's earliest play, the test for the patriot Pym
lies in the choice between two loyalties--one to England and to
freedom, the other to his early friend and former comrade in politics.
His faith in Strafford dies hard; but it dies; he flings forward his
hopes for the grand traitor to England beyond the confines of this life,
and only the grieved unfaltering justiciary remains. Browning's Pym is a
figure neither historically true nor dramatically effective; he is
self-conscious and sentimental, a patriot armed in paste-board rhetoric.
But the writer, let us remember, was young; this was his first
theatrical essay, and he was somewhat showy of fine intentions. The
loyalty of Strafford to the King is too fatuous an instinct to gain our
complete sympathy. He rides gallantly into the quicksand, knowing it to
be such, and the quicksand, as certainly as the worm of Nilus, will do
its kind. And yet though this is the vain romance of loyalty, in it, as
Browning conceives, lies the test of Strafford. A self-renouncing
passion of any kind is not so common that we can afford to look on his
king-worship with scorn.
Over against these devotees of the ideal Browning sets his worldlings,
ranging from creatures as despicable as the courtiers of Duchess Colombe
to such men of power and inexhaustible resource as the Nuncio who
confronts Djabal with his Druses, or the Papal Legate whose easier and
half-humorous task is to dismiss to his private affairs at Lugo the
four-and-twentieth leader of revolt. To the same breed with the
courtiers of Colombe belong old Vane and Savile of the court of Charles.
To the same breed with the Nuncio and the Legate, belongs Monsignor, who
proves himself more than a match for his hireling, the scoundrel
Intendant. In a happy moment Monsignor is startled into indignant
wrath; he does not exclaim with the Edmund of Shakespeare's tragedy
"Some good I mean to do before I die;" but his "Gag the villain!" is a
substantial contribution to the justice of our world. Under the
ennobling influence of Charles and his Polyxena, the craft of D'Ormea is
uplifted to a level of real dignity; if he cannot quite attain the
position of a martyr for the truth, he becomes something better than one
who serves God at the devil's bidding. And Braccio, plotter and
betrayer, yet always with a certain fidelity towards his mother-city, is
won over to the side of simple truth and righteousness by the
overmastering power of Luria's magnanimity. So precious, after
all--Browning would say--is the mere capacity to recognise facts; if
only a little grain of virtue remains in the heart, this faculty of
vision may make some sudden discovery which shall prove to a worldling
that there exist facts, undeniable and of immense potency, hitherto
unknown to his philosophy of chicane. Browning's vote is given, as has
been said, and with no uncertain voice, for his devotees of the ideal;
but the men of fine worldly brain-craft have a fascination for him as
they have for his Eastern Luria. In Djabal, at once enthusiast and
impostor, Browning may seem, as often afterwards, to offer an apology
for the palterer with truth; but in the interests of truth itself, he
desires to study the strange phenomenon of the deceiver who would fain
half-deceive himself.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 18: Dr Moncure Conway in "The Nation" vol. i. (an article
written on the occasion of Browning's death) says that he was told by
Carlyle of his first meeting with Browning--as Carlyle rode upon
Wimbledon Common a "beautiful youth," walking there alone, stopped him
and asked for his acquaintance. The incident has a somewhat legendary
air.]
[Footnote 19: Lady Martin (Helen Faucit), however, wrote in 1891 to Mrs
Ritchie: "The play was mounted in all matters with great care ... minute
attention to accuracy of costume prevailed.... The scenery was alike
accurate."]
[Footnote 20: On which occasion Browning--muffled up in a cloak--was
asked by a stranger in the pit whether he was not the author of "Romeo
and Juliet" and "Othello." "No, so far as I am aware," replied Browning.
Two burlesques of Shakespeare by a Mr Brown or Brownley were in course
of performance in London. _Letters of R.B. and E.B.B._, ii. 132.]
[Footnote 21: From the Prologue to _Asolando_, Browning's last volume.]
[Footnote 22: Mrs Orr, "Handbook to the Works of Robert Browning," p. 54
(1st ed.).]
[Footnote 23: _A Soul's Tragedy_ was written in 1843 or 1844, and
revised immediately before publication. See Letters of R.B. and E.B.B.,
i. 474.]
[Footnote 24: Letters of D.G. Rossetti to William Allingham, p. 168.]
[Footnote 25: The above statement is substantially that of Browning; but
on certain points his memory misled him. Whoever is interested in the
matter should consult Professor Lounsbury's valuable article "A
Philistine View of a Browning Play" in _The Atlantic Monthly_, December
1899, where questions are raised and some corrections are ingeniously
made.]
[Footnote 26: An uncle seems to have accompanied him. See _Letters of
R.B. and E.B.B_., i. 57: and (for Shelley's Grave) i. 292; for
"Sordello" at Naples, i., 349.]
[Footnote 27: In later years no friendship existed between the two. We
read in Mr. W.M. Rossetti's Diary for 1869, "4th July.... I see Browning
dislikes Trelawny quite as much as Trelawny dislikes him (which is not a
little.)" _Rossetti Papers_, p. 401.]
[Footnote 28: See Mr R. Holt Hutton's article on Browning in "Essays
Theological and Literary."]
[Footnote 29: Luria withdraws from life "to prevent the harm Florence
will do herself by striking him." _Letters of R.B. and E.B.B_., i. 427.]