The Maker of Plays--_(Continued)_
The women of the dramas, with one or two exceptions, are composed of
fewer elements than the men. A variety of types is presented, but each
personality is somewhat constrained and controlled by its idea; the free
movement, the iridescence, the variety in oneness, the incalculable
multiplicity in unity, of real character are not always present. They
admit of definition to a degree which places them at a distance from the
inexplicable open secrets of Shakespeare's creation; they lack the
simple mysteriousness, the transparent obscurity of nature. With a
master-key the chambers of their souls can one after another be
unlocked. Ottima is the carnal passion of womanhood, full-blown,
dazzling in the effrontery of sin, yet including the possibility, which
Browning conceives as existing at the extreme edge of every expansive
ardour, of being translated into a higher form of passion which
abolishes all thought of self. Anael, of _The Return of the Druses_, is
pure and measureless devotion. The cry of "Hakeem!" as she falls, is not
an act of faith but of love; it pierces through the shadow of the
material falsehood to her one illuminated truth of absolute love, like
that other falsehood which sanctifies the dying lips of Desdemona. The
sin of Mildred is the very innocence of sin, and does not really alter
the simplicity of her character; it is only the girlish rapture of
giving, with no limitation, whatever may prove a bounty to him whom she
loves:--
Come what, come will,
You have been happy.
The remorse of Mildred is the remorse of innocence, the anguish of one
wholly unlearned in the dark colours of guilt. This tragedy of Mildred
and Mertoun is the _Romeo and Juliet_ of Browning's cycle of dramas. But
Mildred's cousin Guendolen, by virtue of her swift, womanly penetration
and her brave protectiveness of distressed girlhood, is a kinswoman of
Beatrice who supported the injured daughter of Leonato in a comedy of
Shakespeare which rings with laughter.
Polyxena, the Queen of Sardinia--a daughter not of Italy but of the
Rhineland--is, in her degree, an eighteenth century representative of
the woman of the ancient Teutonic tribes, grave, resolute, wise, and
possessing the authority of wisdom. She, whose heart and brain work
bravely together like loyal comrades, is strongly but also simply,
conceived as the helpmate, the counsellor, and, in the old sense of the
word, the comforter of her husband. Something of almost maternal
feeling, as happens at times in real life, mingles with her wifely
affection for Charles, who indeed may prove on occasions a fractious
son. Like a wise guardian-angel she remembers on these occasions that he
is only a man, and that men in their unwisdom may grow impatient of
unalleviated guardian-angelhood; he will by and by discover his error,
and she can bide her time. Perhaps, like other heroines of Browning,
Polyxena is too constantly and uniformly herself; yet, no doubt, it is
right that opaline, shifting hues should not disturb our impression of
a character whose special virtue is steadfastness. The Queen of the
English Charles, who is eager to counsel, and always in her petulance
and folly to counsel ill, is slightly sketched; but she may be thanked
for one admirable speech--her first--when Strafford, worn and fevered in
the royal service, has just arrived from Ireland, and passing out from
his interview with the King is encountered by her:--
Is it over then?
Why he looks yellower than ever! Well
At least we shall not hear eternally
Of service--services: he's paid at least.
The Lady Carlisle of the same play--a creature in the main of Browning's
imagination--had the play been Elizabethan or Jacobean would have
followed her lord in a page's dress, have lived on half a smile a day,
and perhaps have succeeded in dying languishingly and happily upon his
sword; she is not quite unreal, nor yet quite real; something much
better than a stage property and not wholly a living woman; more of a
Beaumont and Fletcher personage of the boards--and as such
effective--than a Shakespearian piece of nature. The theatrical limbo to
which such almost but not quite embodied shadows ultimately troop, is
capacious.
In Browning's dramatic scene of 1853, _In a Balcony_, he created with
unqualified success "a very woman" in the enamoured Queen, whose heart
at fifty years beats only more wildly and desperately than a girl's.[30]
The young lovers, Constance and Norbert, are a highly meritorious pair,
who express their passion in excellent and eloquent periods; we have
seen their like before, and since. But the Queen, with her unslaked
thirst for the visionary wells under the palm-trees, who finds herself
still amid the burning sands, is an original and tragic figure--a royal
Mlle. de Lespinasse, and crowned with fiery and immitigable pain.
Although she has returned the "glare" of Constance with the glare of "a
panther," the Queen is large-hearted. The guards, it is true, arrive as
the curtain falls; but those readers who have wasted their tender
emotion on a couple of afflicted prisoners or decapitated young persons,
whom mother Nature can easily replace, are mistaken. If the Queen does
not die that night, she will rise next morning after sleepless hours,
haggard, not fifty but eighty years old, and her passion will,
heroically slay itself in an act of generosity.[31] Little more,
however, than a situation is represented in this dramatic scene. Of
Browning's full-length portraits of women in the dramas, the finest
piece of work is the portrait of the happiest woman--the play-Duchess of
Juliers, no longer Duchess, but ever
Our lady of dear Ravestein.
Colombe is no incarnated idea but a complete human being, irreducible to
a formula, whom we know the better because there is always in her more
of exquisite womanhood to be discovered. Even the too fortunate
Valence--all readers of his own sex must pronounce him too
fortunate--will for ever be finding her anew.
In the development of his dramatic style Browning more and more lost
sight of the theatre and its requirements; his stage became more and
more a stage of the mind. _Strafford_, his first play, is the work of a
novice, who has little of the instinct for theatrical effect, but who
sets his brain to invent striking tableaux, to prepare surprises, to
exhibit impressive attitudes, to calculate--not always successfully--the
angle of a speech, so that it may with due impact reach the pit. The
opening scene expounds the situation. In the second Wentworth and Pym
confront each other; the King surprises them; Wentworth lets fall the
hand of Pym, as the stage tradition requires; as Wentworth withdraws the
Queen enters to unmake what he has made, and the scene closes with a
tableau expressing the sentimental weakness of Charles:
Come, dearest!--look, the little fairy, now
That cannot reach my shoulder! Dearest, come!
And so proceeds the tragedy, with much that ought to be dear to the
average actor, which yet is somehow not always even theatrically happy.
The pathos of the closing scene where Strafford is discovered in The
Tower, sitting with his children, is theatrical pathos of the most
correct kind, and each little speech of little William and little Anne
is uttered as much for the audience as for their father, implying in
every word "See, how we, poor innocents, heighten the pity of it." The
hastily written _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_ is, perhaps, of Browning's
dramas the best fitted for theatrical representation. Yet it is
incurably weak in the motives which determine the action; and certain
passages are almost ludicrously undramatic. If Romeo before he flung up
his ladder of ropes had paused, like Mertoun, to salute his mistress
with a tenor morceau from the opera, it is to be feared that runaways'
and other eyes would not have winked, and that old Capulet would have
come upon the scene in his night-gown, prepared to hasten the
catastrophe with a long sword. Yet _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_, with its
breadth of outline, its striking situations, and its mastery of the
elementary passions--love and wrath and pride and pity--gives us
assurance that Browning might have taken a place of considerable
distinction had he been born in an age of great dramatic poetry. If it
is weak in construction so--though in a less degree--are Webster's
_Duchess of Malfi_, and Shakespeare's _Cymbeline_.
In _King Victor and King Charles_ Browning adopted, and no doubt
deliberately, a plain, unfigured and uncoloured style, as suiting both
the characters and the historical subject. The political background of
this play and that of _Strafford_ hardly entitles either drama to be
named political. Browning was a student of history, but it was
individuals and not society that interested him. The affairs of England
and the affairs of Sardinia serve to throw out the figures of the chief
_dramatis persons_; those affairs are not considered for their own sake.
Certain social conditions are studied as they enter into and help to
form an individual. The Bishop who orders his tomb at St Praxed's is in
part a product of the Italian Renaissance, but the causes are seen only
in their effects upon the character of a representative person. If the
plain, substantial style of _King Victor and King Charles_ is proper to
a play with such a hero as Charles and such a heroine as Polyxena, the
coloured style, rich in imagery, is no less right in _The Return of the
Druses_, where religious and chivalric enthusiasm are blended with the
enthusiasm of the passion of love. But already Browning was ceasing to
bear in mind the conditions of the stage. Certain pages where Djabal and
Khalil, Djabal and Anael, Anael and Loys are the speakers, might be
described as dialogues conducted by means of "asides," and even the
imagination of a reader resents a construction of scenes which requires
these duets of soliloquies, these long sequences of the
audible-inaudible. With the "very tragical mirth" of the second part of
Chiappino's story of moral and political disaster, the spectators and
the stage have wholly disappeared from Browning's theatre; the imaginary
dialogue is highly dramatic, in one sense of the word, and is admirable
in its kind, but we transport ourselves best to the market-place of
Faenza by sitting in an easy chair.
_Pippa Passes_ is singular in its construction; scenes detached, though
not wholly disconnected, are strung pendant-wise upon the gold thread,
slender but sufficiently strong, of an idea; realism in art, as we now
call it, hangs from a fine idealism; this substantial globe of earth
with its griefs, its grossnesses, its heroism, swings suspended from the
seat of God. The idea which gives unity to the whole is not a mere
fantasy. The magic practised by the unconscious Pippa through her songs
is of that genuine and beautiful kind which the Renaissance men of
science named "Magia Naturalis." It is no fantasy but a fact that each
of us influences the lives of others more or less every day, and at
times in a peculiar degree, in ways of which we are not aware. Let this
fact be seized with imaginative intensity, and let the imagination
render it into a symbol--we catch sight of Pippa with her songs passing
down the grass-paths and under the pine-wood of Asolo. Her only service
to God on this one holiday of a toilsome year is to be glad. She
misconceives everything that concerns "Asolo's Four Happiest Ones"--to
her fancy Ottima is blessed with love, Jules is no victim of an envious
trick, Luigi's content in his lot is deep and unassailable, and
Monsignor is a holy and beloved priest; and, unawares to her, in modes
far other than she had imagined, each of her dreams comes true; even
Monsignor for one moment rises into the sacred avenger of God. Her own
service, though she knows it not, is more than a mere twelve-hours'
gladness; she, the little silk-winder, rays forth the influences of a
heart that has the potency ascribed to gems of unflawed purity; and such
influences--here embodied in the symbol of a song--are among the
precious realities of our life. Nowhere in literature has the virtue of
mere innocent gladness been more charmingly imagined than in her
morning outbreak of expectancy, half animal glee, half spiritual joy;
the "whole sunrise, not to be suppressed" is a limitless splendour, but
the reflected beam cast up from the splash of her ewer and dancing on
her poor ceiling is the same in kind; in the shrub-house up the
hill-side are great exotic blooms, but has not Pippa her one martagon
lily, over which she queens it? With God all service ranks the same, and
she shall serve Him all this long day by gaiety and gratitude.
_Pippa Passes_ is a sequence of dramatic scenes, with lyrics
interspersed, and placed in a lyrical setting; the figures dark or
bright, of the painting are "ringed by a flowery bowery angel-brood" of
song. But before his _Bells and Pomegranates_ were brought to a close
Browning had discovered in the short monodrama, lyrical or reflective,
the most appropriate vehicle for his powers of passion and of thought.
Here a single situation sufficed; characters were seen rightly in
position; the action of the piece was wholly internal; a passion could
be isolated, and could be either traced through its varying moods or
seized in its moment of culmination; the casuistry of the brain could be
studied apart,--it might have its say uninterrupted, or it might be
suddenly encountered and dissipated by some spearlike beam of light from
the heart or soul; the traditions of a great literary form were not here
a cause of embarrassment; they need not, as in work for the theatre, be
laboriously observed or injuriously violated; the poet might assert his
independence and be wholly original.
And original, in the best sense of the word--entirely true to his
highest self--Browning was in the "Dramatic Lyrics" of 1842, and the
"Dramatic Romances and Lyrics" of 1845. His senses were at once
singularly keen and energetic, and singularly capacious of delight; his
eyes were active instruments of observation, and at the same time were
possessed by a kind of rapture in form--and not least in fantastic
form--and a rapture still finer in the opulence and variety of colour.
In these poems we are caught into what may truly be called an enthusiasm
of the senses; and presently we find that the senses, good for their own
sakes, are good also as inlets to the spirit. Having returned from his
first visit to southern Italy, the sights and sounds, striking upon the
retina and the auditory nerve, with the intensity of a new experience,
still attack the eye and ear _as_ he writes his _Englishman in Italy_,
and by virtue of their eager obsession demand and summon forth the
appropriate word.[32] The fisherman from Amalfi pitches down his basket
before us,
All trembling alive
With pink and grey jellies, your sea-fruit,
--You touch the strange lumps,
And mouths gape there, eyes open, all manner
Of horns and of humps.
Or it is the "quick rustle-down of the quail-nets," or the "whistling
pelt" of the olives, when Scirocco is loose, that invades our ears. And
by and by among the mountains the play of the senses expands, and the
soul has its great word to utter:
God's own profound
Was above me, and round me the mountains,
And under, the sea,
And within me, my heart to bear witness
hat was and shall be.
Not less vivid is the vision of the light craft with its lateen sail
outside Triest, in which Waring--the Flying Englishman--is seen "with
great grass hat and kerchief black," looking up for a moment, showing
his "kingly throat," till suddenly in the sunset splendour the boat
veers weather-ward and goes off, as with a bound, "into the rose and
golden half of the sky." And what animal-painter has given more of the
leonine wrath in mane and tail and fixed wide eyes than Browning has
conveyed into his lion of King Francis with three strokes of the brush?
Or it is only a bee upon a sunflower on which the gazer's eye is fixed,
and we get the word of Rudel:
And therefore bask the bees
On my flower's breast, as on a platform broad.
Or--a grief to booklovers!--the same eye is occupied by all the
grotesquerie of insect life in the revel over that unhappy tome lurking
in the plum tree's crevice of Browning's _Garden Fancy_, which creeps
and crawls with beetle and spider, worm and eft.[33] Or it is night and
moonlight by the sandy shore, and for a moment--before love enters--all
the mind of the impressionist artist lives merely in the eye:
The grey sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep
As I gain the cove with pushing prow.
If Browning did not rejoice in perfect health and animal spirits--and in
the letters to Miss Barrett we hear of frequent headaches and find a
reference to his pale thin face as seen in a mirror--he had certainly
the imagination of perfect vitality and of those "wild joys of living,"
sung by the young harper David in that poem of _Saul_, which appeared as
a fragment in the _Bells and Pomegranates_, and as a whole ten years
later, with the awe and rapture of the spirit rising above the rapture
of the senses.[34]
Of these poems of 1842 and 1845 one _The Pied Piper_, was written in the
spirit of mere play and was included in _Bells and Pomegranates_ only to
make up a number, for which the printer required more copy. One or
two--the flesh and blood incarnations of the wines of France and
Hungary, _Claret_ and _Tokay_, are no more than clever caprices of the
fancy. One, _The Lost Lender_, remotely suggested by the conservatism of
Wordsworth's elder days, but possibly deflected by some of the feeling
attributed to Pym in relation to Strafford of the drama, and certainly
detached from direct personal reference to Wordsworth, expresses
Browning's liberal sentiment in politics. One, the stately _Artemis
Prologuizes_, is the sole remaining fragment of a classical drama,
"Hippolytus and Aricia," composed in 1840, "much against my endeavour,"
wrote the poet,--a somewhat enigmatical phrase--"while in bed with a
fever." A considerable number of the poems may be grouped together as
expressions or demonstrations of various passions, central among which
is the passion of love. A few, and these conspicuous for their masterly
handling of novel themes, treat of art, and the feeling for art as seen
in the painter of pictures or in the connoisseur. Nor is the
interpretation of religious emotion--though in a phase that may be
called abnormal--wholly forgotten.
With every passion that expands the spirit beyond the bounds of self,
Browning, as the dramas have made evident to us, is in cordial sympathy.
The reckless loyalty, with its animal spirits and its dash of grief, the
bitterer because grief must be dismissed, of the _Cavalier Tunes_, is
true to England and to the time in its heartiness and gallant bluffness.
The leap-up of pride and joy in a boy's heart at the moment of death in
his Emperor's cause could hardly be more intensely imagined than it is
in the poem of the French camp, and all is made more real and vivid by
the presence of that motionless figure, intent on victory and sustaining
the weight of imperial anxieties, which yet cannot be quite impassive in
presence of a death so devoted. And side by side with this poem of
generous enthusiasm is placed the poem of passion reduced to its extreme
of meanness, its most contracted form of petty spite and base envy--the
_Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister_; a grotesque insect, spitting
ineffectual poison, is placed under the magnifying-glass of the comic
spirit, and is discovered to be--a brother in religion! A noble hatred,
transcending personal considerations, mingles with a noble and solemn
love--the passion of country--in the Italian exile's record of his
escape from Austrian pursuers; with the clear-obscure of his patriotic
melancholy mingles the proud recollection of the Italian woman who was
his saviour, over whose conjectured happiness as peasant wife and
peasant mother the exile bows with a tender joy. The examples of
abnormal passion are two--that of the amorous homicide who would set on
one perfect moment the seal of eternity, in _Porphyria's Lover_, and
that of the other occupier of the mad-house cells, Johannes Agricola,
whose passion of religion is pushed to the extreme of a mystical
antinomianism.
Browning's poems of the love of man and woman are seldom a simple
lyrical cry, but they are not on this account the less true in their
presentment of that curious masquer and disguiser--Love. When love takes
possession of a nature which is complex, affluents and tributaries from
many and various faculties run into the main stream. With Browning the
passion is indeed a regal power, but intellect, imagination, fancy are
its office-bearers for a time; then in a moment it resumes all authority
into its own hands, resolves of a sudden all that is complex into the
singleness of joy or pain, fuses all that is manifold into the unity of
its own life and being. His dramatic method requires that each single
faculty should be seen in the environment of a character, and that its
operations should be clothed more or less in circumstance. And since
love has its ingenuities, its fine-spun and far-flung threads of
association, its occult symbolisms, Browning knows how to press into the
service of the central emotion objects and incidents and imagery which
may seem remote or curious or fantastic or trivial or even grotesque.
In _Rudel to the Lady of Tripoli_ love which cometh by the hearing of
the ear (for Rudel is a sun-worshipper who has never seen his sun) is a
pure imaginative devotion to the ideal. In _Count Gismond_ love is the
deliverer; the motive of the poem is essentially that of the Perseus and
Andromeda myth refined upon and mediaevalised. In _Cristine_ love is the
interpreter of life; a moment of high passion explains, and explains
away, all else that would obscure the vision of what is best and most
real in this our world and in the worlds that are yet unattained. From a
few lines written to illustrate a Venetian picture by Maclise _In a
Gondola_ was evolved. If Browning was not entirely accurate in his
topography of Venice, he certainly did not fail in his sense of the
depth and opulence of its colour. Here the abandonment to passion is
relieved by the quaint ingenuities and fancies of love that seeks a
momentary refuge from its own excess, and then returns more eagerly upon
itself; and the shadow of death is ever at hand, but like the shadows of
a Venetian painter it glows with colour.
The motives of two narrative poems, _The Glove_ and _The Flight of the
Duchess_, have much in common; they lie in the contrast between the
world of convention and the world of reality. In each the insulter of
proprieties, the breaker of bounds is a woman; in each the choice lies
between a life of pretended love and vain dignities and a life of
freedom and true love; and in each case the woman makes her glad escape
from what is false to what is true. In restating the incident of the
glove Browning brings into play his casuistry, but casuistry is here
used to justify a passion which the poet approves, to elucidate, not to
obscure, what he represents as the truth of the situation. _The Flight
of the Duchess_ in part took its rise "from a line, 'Following the Queen
of the Gipsies, O!'--the burden of a song, which the poet, when a boy,
heard a woman singing on a Guy Fawkes' day." Some two hundred lines were
given to Hood for his magazine, at a time when Hood needed help, and
death was approaching him. The poem was completed some months later. It
is written, like _The Glove_, in verse that runs for swiftness' sake,
and that is pleased to show its paces on a road rough with boulder-like
rhymes. The little Duchess is a wild bird caged in the strangely twisted
wirework of artificial modes and forms. She is a prisoner who is starved
for real life, and stifles; the fresh air and the open sky are good, are
irresistible--and that is the whole long poem in brief. Such a small
prisoner, all life and fire, was before many months actually delivered
from her cage in Wimpole Street, and Robert Browning himself, growing in
stature amid his incantations, played the part of the gipsy.
Another Duchess, who pined for freedom and never attained it, has her
cold obituary notice from her bereaved Duke's lips in the _Dramatic
Lyrics_ of 1842. _My Last Duchess_ was there made a companion poem to
_Count Gismond_; they are the pictures of the bond-woman and of the
freed-woman in marriage. The Italian Duchess revolts from the law of
wifehood no further than a misplaced smile or a faint half-flush,
betraying her inward breathings and beamings of the spirit; the noose of
the ducal proprieties is around her throat, and when it tightens "then
all smiles stopped together." Never was an agony hinted with more
gentlemanly reserve. But the poem is remarkable chiefly as gathering up
into a typical representative a whole phase of civilisation. The Duke is
Italian of Renaissance days; insensible in his egoistic pride to the
beautiful humanity alive before him; yet a connoisseur of art to his
finger-tips; and after all a Duchess can be replaced, while the bronze
of Glaus of Innsbruck--but the glory of his possessions must not be
pressed, as though his nine hundred years old name were not enough. The
true gift of art--Browning in later poems frequently insists upon
this--is not for the connoisseur or collector who rests in a material
possession, but for the artist who, in the zeal of creation, presses
through his own work to that unattainable beauty, that flying joy which
exists beyond his grasp and for ever lures him forward. In _Pictor
Ignotus_ the earliest study in his lives of the painters was made by the
poet. The world is gross, its touch unsanctifies the sanctities of art;
yet the brave audacity of genius is able to penetrate this gross world
with spiritual fire. Browning's unknown painter is a delicate spirit,
who dares not mingle his soul with the gross world; he has failed for
lack of a robust faith, a strenuous courage. But his failure is
beautiful and pathetic, and for a time at least his Virgin, Babe, and
Saint will smile from the cloister wall with their "cold, calm,
beautiful regard." And yet to have done otherwise to have been other
than this; to have striven like that youth--the Urbinate--men praise so!
More remarkable, as the summary of a civilisation, than _My Last
Duchess_, is the address of the worldling Bishop, who lies dying, to the
"nephews" who are sons of his loins. In its Paganism of
Christianity--which lacks all the manly virtue of genuine Paganism--that
portion of the artistic Renaissance which leans towards the world and
the flesh is concentrated and is given as in quintessential form. The
feeble fingers yet cling to the vanities of earth; the speaker babbles
not of green fields but of his blue lump of lapis-lazuli; and the last
word of all is alive only with senile luxury and the malice of perishing
recollection.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 30: _In a Balcony_, published in _Men and Women_, 1855, is
said to have been written two years previously at the Baths of Lucca.]
[Footnote 31: I had written the above--and I leave it as I wrote
it--before I noticed the following quoted from the letter of a friend by
Mrs Arthur Bronson in her article Browning in Venice: "Browning seemed
as full of dramatic interest in reading 'In a Balcony' as if he had just
written it for our benefit. One who sat near him said that it was a
natural sequence that the step of the guard should be heard coming to
take Norbert to his doom, as, with a nature like the queen's, who had
known only one hour of joy in her sterile life, vengeance swift and
terrible would follow on the sudden destruction of her happiness. 'Now I
don't quite think that,' answered Browning, as if he were following out
the play as a spectator. 'The queen has a large and passionate
temperament, which had only once been touched and brought into intense
life. She would have died by a knife in her heart. The guard would have
come to carry away her dead body.' 'But I imagine that most people
interpret it as I do,' was the reply. 'Then,' said Browning, with quick
interest, 'don't you think it would be well to put it in the stage
directions, and have it seen that they were carrying her across the back
of the stage?'"]
[Footnote 32: Browning's eyes were in a remarkable degree unequal in
their power of vision; one was unusually long-sighted; the other, with
which he could read the most microscopic print, unusually
short-sighted.]
[Footnote 33: See a very interesting passage on Browning's "odd liking
for 'vermin'" in _Letters of R.B. and E.B.B._. i. 370, 371: "I always
liked all those wild creatures God '_sets up for themselves_.'" "It
seemed awful to watch that bee--he seemed so _instantly_ from the
teaching of God."]
[Footnote 34: Of the first part of _Saul_ Mr Kenyon said finely that "it
reminded him of Homer's shield of Achilles thrown into lyrical whirl and
life" _(Letters R.B. and E.B.B_. i. 326).]