Men and Women
Rossetti expresses his first enthusiasm about _Men and Women_ in a word
when he calls the poems "my Elixir of Life." To Ruskin these, with other
pieces which he now read for the first time, were as he declared in a
rebellious mood, a mass of conundrums. "He compelled me," Rossetti adds,
"to sit down before him and lay siege for one whole night; the result of
which was that he sent me next morning a bulky letter to be forwarded to
Browning, in which I trust he told him he was the greatest man since
Shakespeare." The poems of the two new volumes were the gradual growth
of a considerable number of years; since 1845 their author had published
no group of short poems, and now, at the age of forty-three, he had
attained the fulness of intellectual and imaginative power, varied
experience of life and the artistic culture of Italy. The _Dramatis
Personae_ of 1864 exhibits no decline from the high level reached in the
volumes of 1855; but is there any later volume of miscellaneous poetry
by Browning which, taken as a whole, approaches in excellence the
collections of 1855 and 1864?
There is no need now to "lay siege" to the poems of _Men and Women_;
they have expounded themselves, if ever they needed exposition; and the
truth is that they are by no means nut-shells into which mottoes meant
for the construing of the intellect have been inserted, but fruits rich
in colour and perfume, a feast for the imagination, the passions, the
spirit in sense, and also for the faculty of thought which lives in the
heart of these. If a criticism or a doctrine of life lies in them--and
that it should do so means that the poet's total mind has been taken up
into his art--Browning conveys his doctrine not as such but as an
enthusiasm of living; his generalized truth saturates a medium of
passion and of beauty. In the Prologue to _Fifine at the Fair_ he
compares the joy of poetry to a swimmer's joy in the sea: the vigour
that such disport in sun and sea communicates is the vigour of joyous
play; afterwards, if we please, we can ascertain the constituents of
sea-water by a chemical analysis; but the analysis will not convey to us
the sensations of the sunshine and the dancing brine. One of the
blank-verse pieces of _Men and Women_ rebukes a youthful poet of the
transcendental school whose ambition is to set forth "stark-naked
thought" in poetry. Why take the harp to his breast "only to speak dry
words across the strings"? Better hollo abstract ideas through the
six-foot Alpine horn of prose. Boys may desire the interpretation into
bare ideas of those thronging objects which obsess their senses and
their feelings; men need art for the delight of it, and the strength
which comes through delight. Better than the meaning of a rose is the
rose itself with its spirit enveloped in colour and perfume. And so the
poet for men will resemble that old mage John of Halberstadt:
He with a 'look you!' vents a brace of rhymes,
And in there breaks the sudden rose herself,
Over us, under, round us every side,
* * * * *
Buries us with a glory, young once more,
Pouring heaven into this shut house of life.
Browning in _Men and Women_ is in truth a John of Halberstadt; he
enriches life with colour, warmth, music, romance, not dissociated from
thought and intellectual energy, rather possessing and being possessed
by these. Not a single poem is "stark-naked thought"; not a single poem
is addressed solely to the intellect; even _Bishop Blougram_ is rather a
presentation of character than a train of argument or a chain of ideas.
In few of these poems does Browning speak in his own person; the verses
addressed to his wife, which present her with "his fifty men and women"
and tell of mysteries of love that can never be told, the lines,
_Memorabilia_, addressed to one who had seen Shelley, and _Old Pictures
in Florence_, are perhaps the only exceptions to the dramatic character
of the contents of the two volumes. Yet through them all Browning's mind
is clearly discernible; and even his central convictions, his working
creed of life, can with no sense of uncertainty be gathered from them.
To attribute to the writer the opinions and the feelings of his
_dramatis personae_ would of course be the crudest of mistakes. But when
an idea persists through many poems written at various times and
seasons, when it appears and reappears under various clothings of
circumstance, when it is employed as if it had a crucial value, when it
becomes a test or touchstone of character, we cannot doubt that it is an
intimate possession of the writer's mind. Such an idea is not a mere
playmate but rather a confidant. When, again, after a tangle of
casuistic reasoning or an embroilment of contending feelings, some idea
suddenly flashes forth, and like a sword sunders truth from falsehood
and darkness from light, we may be assured that it has more than a
dramatic value. And, once more, if again and again the same idea shows
its power over the feelings and inspires elevated lyrical utterance, or
if in pieces of casuistical brain-work it enters as a passionate element
and domineers by its own authority, if it originates not debate but song
or that from which song is made, we know that the writer's heart has
embraced it as a truth of the emotions.
Because Browning had his own well-defined view of truth, he could
confidently lend his mind away to his fifty or his hundred men and
women. They served to give his ideas a concrete body. By sympathy and by
intelligence he widened the basis of his own existence. If the poet
loses himself to find himself again through sympathy with external
nature, how much more and in how many enriching ways through sympathy
with humanity! Thus new combinations of thought and feeling are
effected. Thus a kind of experiment is made with our own ideas by
watching how they behave when brought into connection with these new
combinations. Truth is relative, and the best truth of our own is worth
testing under various conditions and circumstances. The truth or
falsehood which is not our own has a right to say the best for itself
that can be said. Let truth and falsehood grapple. Let us hear the
counter-truth or the rival falsehood which is the complement or the
criticism of our own, and hear it stated with the utmost skill. A
Luther would surely be the wiser for an evening spent in company with a
Blougram; and Blougram has things to tell us which Luther never knew.
But precisely because truth is relative we must finally adhere to our
own perceptions; they constitute the light for us; and the justice we
would do to others we must also render to ourselves. A wide survey may
be made from a fixed centre. "Universal sympathies," Miss Barrett wrote
in one of the letters to her future husband, "cannot make a man
inconsistent, but on the contrary sublimely consistent. A church tower
may stand between the mountains and the sea, looking to either, and
stand fast: but the willow tree at the gable-end blown now toward the
north and now toward the south, while its natural leaning is due east or
west, is different altogether ... _as_ different as a willow tree from a
church tower."[63]
The fifty poems of _Men and Women_, with a few exceptions, fall into
three principal groups--those which interpret various careers or moods
or moments of love; those which deal with the fine arts--painting,
poetry, music--and with these we may class, as kindred in spirit, that
poem which has for its subject the passionate pursuit of knowledge, _A
Grammarian's Funeral_; and thirdly, those which are connected with
religious thought and feeling, or present scenes from the history of
religions. Two poems may be called descriptive; both are Italian; both
are founded upon a rivalry of contrasts, but one, _Up at a Villa--Down
in the City_, is made up of humorous observations of Italian city and
country life, expressing the mundane tastes and prudent economies of an
Italian person of quality; the other, "_De Gustibus_--," which contrasts
the happy quietudes of English landscape with the passionate landscape
of the South, has romance at the heart of its realism and an ardour of
sentiment underlying its pictorial vividness. _The Patriot_ is again
Italian, suggested perhaps by the swift revolutions and restorations
which Browning had witnessed in Florence, and again it uses with
striking effect the principle of contrast; the patriot who a year ago
had his intoxicating triumph is now on his way to the scaffold. His
year's toil for the good of his people has turned into a year's
misdeeds, his life is a failure; but Browning characteristically wrings
a victory out of defeat; the crowd at the shambles' gate may hoot; it is
better so, for now the martyr can throw himself upon God, the Paymaster
of all his labourers at the close of day. The most remarkable of these
poems, which refuse to take their places in a group, is that forlorn
romance of weary and depressed heroism, _Childe Roland to the Dark Tower
came_. It is in the main a fantaisie of description; but involved with
the descriptive study is a romantic motive. The external suggestions for
the poem were no more than the words from _King Lear_ which form the
title, a tower seen in the Carrara mountains, a painting seen in Paris,
and the figure of a horse in the tapestry of the drawing-room of Casa
Guidi.[64] In his own mind Browning may have put the question: Of all
the feats of knight-errantry which is the hardest? Not to combat with
dragons, or robbers, or salvage men; not to bear down rival champions
in a rapture of battle. Not these, but to cling to a purpose amid all
that depresses the senses at a time when the heart within us is also
failing; to advance where there is nothing to arouse energy by
opposition, and everything without and within to sap the very life of
the soul. Childe Roland is himself hopeless and almost heartless; the
plain to which the leering cripple had pointed and over which he rides
is created in the utter indigence of nature--a very nightmare of poverty
and mean repulsiveness. And yet he endures the test, and halts only when
he faces the Dark Tower and blows the blast upon his horn. Browning was
wise to carry his romance no further; the one moment of action is
enough; it is the breaking of the spell, the waking from the nightmare,
and at that point the long-enduring quester may be left. We are
defrauded of nothing by the abrupt conclusion.
In the poems which treat of the love of man and woman Browning regards
the union of soul with soul as the capital achievement of life, and also
as affording one of its chief tests. When we have formed these into a
group we perceive that the group falls in the main into two
divisions--poems which tell of attainment, and poems which tell of
failure or defeat. Certain persons whose centre is a little hard kernel
of egoism may be wholly disqualified for the test created by a generous
passion. Browning does not belabour with heavy invective the _Pretty
Woman_ of his poem, who is born without a heart; she is a flower-like
creature and of her kind is perfect; only the flower is to be gazed at,
not gathered; or, if it must be gathered, then at last to be thrown
away. The chief distinction between the love of man and the love of
woman, implied in various poems, is this--the man at his most blissful
moment cries "What treasures I have obtained!" the woman cries "What
treasures have I to surrender and bestow?" Hence the singleness and
finality in the election of passion made by a woman as compared with a
man's acquisitiveness of delight. The unequal exchange of a transitory
for an enduring surrender of self is the sorrow which pulsates through
the lines of _In a Year_, as swift and broken with pauses as the beating
of a heart:
Dear, the pang is brief,
Do thy part,
Have thy pleasure! How perplexed
Grows belief!
Well, this cold clay clod
Was man's heart:
Crumble it and what comes next?
Is it God?
And with no chilling of love on the man's part, this is the point of
central pain, in that poem of exquisite and pathetic distrust at the
heart of trust and admiration, _Any Wife to any Husband_; noble and
faithful as the husband has been, still he is only a man. But elsewhere
Browning does justice to the pure chivalry of a man's devotion.
Caponsacchi's joy is the joy of a saviour who himself is saved; the
great event of his life by which he is lifted above self is single and
ultimate; his soul is delivered from careless egoism once and for ever;
the grace of love is here what the theologians called invincible grace,
and invincible grace, we know, results in final perseverance. Even here
in _Men and Women_ two contrasted poems assure us that, while the
passion of a man may be no more than _Love in a Life_, it may also be
an unweariable _Life in a Love_.
Of the poems of attainment one--_Respectability_--has the spirit of
youth and gaiety in it. Here love makes its gallant bid for freedom,
fires up for lawlessness, if need be, and at least sets convention at
defiance:
The world's good word!--the Institute!
Guizot receives Montalembert!
Eh? Down the court three lampions flare:
Set forward your best foot!
But, after all, this love may be no more than an adventure of the
boulevard and the attic in the manner of Béranger's gay Bohemianism. The
distance is wide between such élan of youthful passion and the fidelity
which is inevitable, and on which age has set its seal, in that poem of
perfect attainment, _By the Fireside_. This is the love which completes
the individual life and at the same time incorporates it with the life
of humanity, which unites as one the past and the present, and which,
owing no allegiance of a servile kind to time, becomes a pledge for
futurity. Browning's personal experience is here taken up into his
imagination and transfigured, but its substance remains what it had been
in literal fact.
The poems of failure are more numerous, and they range through various
degrees and kinds of failure. It is not death which can bring the sense
of failure to love. In _Evelyn Hope_ all the passion has been on the
man's side; all possibilities of love in the virginal heart of the dead
girl, all her warmth and sweetness, had been folded in the bud. But
death, in the mood of infinite tenderness and unfulfilled aspiration
which the poem expresses, seems no bar to some far-off attainment, of
which the speaker's passion, breaking through time, is the assurance, an
attainment the nature of which he cannot divine but which will surely
explain the meaning of things that are now obscure. Perhaps the saddest
and the most hopeless kind of failure is that in which, to borrow an
image from the old allegory, the arrow of love all but flies to the mark
and yet just misses it. This is the subject of a poem equally admirable
in its descriptive and its emotional passages, _Two in the Campagna_.
The line "One near one is too far," might serve as its motto.
Satisfaction is all but reached and never can be reached. Two hearts
touch and never can unite. One drop of the salt estranging sea is as
unplumbed as the whole ocean. And the only possible end is
Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.[65]
Compared with such a failure as this an offer of love rejected, rejected
with decision but not ungenerously, may be accounted a success. There is
something tonic to a brave heart in the putting forth of will, even
though it encounter an obstacle which cannot be removed. Such is the
mood which is presented in _One Way of Love_; the foiled lover has at
least made his supreme effort; it has been fruitless, but he thinks with
satisfaction that he has played boldly for the prize, and never can he
say that it was not worth risking all on the bare chance of success:
She will not give me heaven? 'Tis well!
Lose who may--I still can say
Those who win heaven, blest are they!
So, too, in _The Last Ride together_, the lover is defeated but he is
not cast down, and he remains magnanimous throughout the grief of
defeat. Who in this our life--he reflects--statesman or soldier,
sculptor or poet, attains his complete ideal? He has been granted the
grace of one hour by his mistress' side, and he will carry the grateful
recollection of this with him into the future as his inalienable and his
best possession. With these generous rejections and magnanimous
acceptances of failure stands in contrast _A Serenade at the Villa_,
where the lover's devotion is met only by obdurate insensibility or,
worse, by an irritated sense of the persecution and plague of such love,
and where all things seem to conspire to leave his pain mere pain,
bitter and unredeemed.
In these examples, though love has been frustrated in its aim, the cause
of failure did not lie in any infirmity of the lover's heart or will.
But what if the will itself be supine, what if it dallies and delays,
consults the convenience of occasions, observes the indications of a
shallow prudence, slackens its pace towards the goal, and meanwhile the
passion languishes and grows pale from day to day, until the day of love
has waned, and the passion dies in a twilight hour through mere
inanition? Such a failure as this seems to Browning to mean the
perishing of a soul, or of more souls than one. He takes in _The Statue
and the Bust_ a case where the fulfilment of passion would have been a
crime. The lady is a bride of the Riccardi; to win her, now a wedded
wife, would be to violate the law of God and man. Nevertheless it is her
face which has "filled the empty sheath of a man" with a blade for a
knight's adventure--The
Duke grew straightway brave and wise.
And then follow delays of convenience, excuses, postponements, and the
Duke's flood of passion dwindles to a thread, and is lost in the sandy
flats of life:
So weeks grew months, years; gleam by gleam
The glory dropped from their youth and love,
And both perceived they had dreamed a dream.
Their end was a crime, but Browning's contention is that a crime may
serve for a test as well as a virtue; in that test the Duke and the lady
had alike failed through mere languor of soul:
And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost
Is--the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin,
Though the end in sight was a vice, I say.
Had Tennyson treated the same subject he would probably have glorified
their action as a victorious obedience to the law of self-reverence and
self-control.
The reunion and the severance of lovers are presented in three poems.
Winter, chill without but warm within, with its pastimes of passion, the
energies of joy breaking forth in play, is contrasted in _A Lovers'
Quarrel_ with springtime, all gladness without and a strange void and
shiver at the heart of things, because alienation has taken the place of
camaraderie between the lover and his mistress. The mass and intensity
of colour in the stanza which dashes in a sketch of the Pampas, with its
leagues of sunflowers, and a wild horse, "black neck and eyeballs keen"
appearing through them, almost afflict the reader's sense of sight.
There is a fine irony in the title of the other poem of contention, _A
Womans Last Word_: In a quarrel a woman will have the last word, and
here it is--the need of quietude for a little while that she may recover
from the bewildering stroke of pain, and then entire oblivion of the
wrong with unmeasured self-surrender. The poem of union, _Love among the
Ruins_, is constructed in a triple contrast; the endless pastures
prolonged to the edge of sunset, with their infinity of calm, are
contrasted with the vast and magnificent animation of the city which
once occupied the plain and the mountain slopes. The lover keeps at
arm's-length from his heart and brain what yet fills them all the while;
here in this placid pasture-land is one vivid point of intensest life;
here where once were the grandeur and tumult of the enormous city is
that which in a moment can abolish for the lover all its glories and its
shames. His eager anticipation of meeting his beloved, face to face and
heart to heart, is not sung, after the manner of Burns, as a jet of
unmingled joy; he delays his rapture to make its arrival more entirely
rapturous; he uses his imagination to check and to enhance his passion;
and the poem, though not a simple cry of the heart, is entirely true as
a rendering of emotion which has taken imagination into its service. In
like manner _By the Fireside, A Serenade at the Villa_, and _Two in the
Campagna_, include certain studies of nature and its moods, sometimes
with a curiously minute observation of details; and these serve as the
overture to some intense moment of joy or pain, or form the
orchestration which sustains or reinforces a human voice.
Of the pieces relating to art those connected with the art of poetry are
the least valuable. _Transcendentalism_ sets forth the old doctrine that
poetry must be sensuous and passionate, leaving it to philosophy to
deal with the naked abstractions of the intellect. _How it strikes a
Contemporary_ shows by a humorous example how a poet's character and
private life may be misconceived and misrepresented by those among whom
he moves. _Popularity_ maintains that the poet who is in the highest
sense original, an inventor of new things, may be wholly disregarded for
long, while his followers and imitators secure both the porridge and the
praise; one day God's hand, which holds him, will open and let out all
the beauty. The thought is an obvious one enough, but the image of the
fisher and the murex, in which the thought is embodied, affords
opportunity for stanzas glowing with colour. Two poems, and each of them
a remarkable poem, are interpretations of music. One, _Master Hugues of
Saxe-Gotha_, is a singularly successful _tour de force_, if it is no
more. Poetry inspired by music is almost invariably the rendering of a
sentiment or a mood which the music is supposed to express; but here, in
dealing with the fugue of his imaginary German composer, Browning finds
his inspiration not in the sentiment but in the structure of the
composition; he competes, as it were, in language with the art or
science of the contrapuntist, and evolves an idea of his own from its
complexity and elaboration. The poem of Italian music, _A Toccata of
Galuppi's_, wholly subordinates the science to the sentiment of the
piece. It is steeped in the melancholy of pleasure; Venice of the
eighteenth century lives before us with its mundane joys, its transitory
passions, its voluptuous hours; and in the midst of its warmth and
colour a chill creeps upon our senses and we shiver. Browning's
artistic self-restraint is admirable; he has his own truth to utter
aloud if he should please; but here he will not play the prophet; the
life of eighteenth-century Venice is dust and ashes; the poet will say
not a word more than the musician has said in his toccata; the
ruthlessness of time and death make him a little remorseful; it is
enough, and too much, that through this music of the hours of love and
pleasure we should hear, as it were, the fall of the clay upon a
coffin-lid.
Shelley was more impressed by the sculpture than the paintings of Italy.
There are few evidences of the influence of the most ideal of the arts
that appeal to the mind through the eye in Browning's poetry; and his
sympathies would be more apt to respond to such work as Michael
Angelo's, which sends the spectator beyond itself, than to the classical
work which has the absoluteness and the calm of attained perfection.[66]
The sensuous and the spiritual qualities of colour were vividly felt by
him; a yellowing old marble seemed perhaps to impose itself with a cold
authority upon the imagination. But the suggestion of two portrait busts
of the period of classical decadence, one in marble representing a boy,
and the other the powerful head of a man in granite, gave rise to
_Protus_, one of the few flawless poems of Browning. His mastery over
the rhymed couplet is nowhere seen to greater advantage, unless it be in
a few passages of _Sordello_. The poem is, however, more a page from
history than a study in the fine arts; and Browning's imagination has
made it a page which lives in our memory through a pathos veiled under
strong objective touches, never protruding itself sentimentally in
quest of tenderness or pity.
"I spent some most delightful time," Rossetti wrote to Allingham shortly
after the publication of _Men and Women_, "with Browning at Paris, both
in the evenings and at the Louvre, where (and throughout conversation) I
found his knowledge of early Italian art beyond that of any one I ever
met--_encyclopedically_ beyond that of Ruskin himself." The poem _Old
Pictures at Florence_, which Rossetti calls "a jolly thing," and which
is that and much more, is full of Browning's learned enthusiasm for the
early Italian painters, and it gives a reason for the strong attraction
which their adventures after new beauty and passion had for him as
compared with the faultless achievements of classical sculpture. Greek
art, according to Browning, by presenting unattainable ideals of
material and mundane perfection, taught men to submit. Early Christian
art, even by faultily presenting spiritual ideals, not to be attained on
earth but to be pursued through an immortal life, taught men to aspire.
The aim of these painters was not to exhibit strength or grace, joy or
grief, rage or love in their complete earthly attainment, but rather to
Make new hopes shine through the flesh they fray,
New fears aggrandize the rags and tatters:
To bring the invisible full into play!
Let the visible go to the dogs--what matters?
[Illustration: ANDREA DEL SARTO.
_From a print after the portrait by himself in the Uffizi Gallery,
Florence_.]
The prophecy with which the poem concludes, of a great revival of
Italian art consequent on the advent of political and intellectual
liberty, has not obtained fulfilment in the course of the half century
that has elapsed since it was uttered. Browning's doctrine that
aspiration towards what is higher is more to be valued in art than
the attainment of what is lower is a leading motive in the admirable
dramatic monologue placed in the lips of Andrea del Sarto, the faultless
painter. His craftsmanship is unerring; whatever he imagines he can
achieve; nothing in line or in colour is other than it ought to be; and
yet precisely because he has succeeded, his failure is profound and
irretrievable:
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for? All is silver-grey
Placid and perfect with my art: the worse!
He could set right the arm which is wrongly put in Rafael's work that
fronts him; but "all the play, the insight and the stretch" of Rafael
are lacking in his own faultless lines. He looks back regretfully to his
kingly days at Fontainebleau with the royal Francis, when what seemed a
veritable fire was in his heart. And he tries to find an excuse for his
failure as artist and as man in the coldness of his beautiful
Lucrezia--for he who has failed in the higher art has also failed in the
higher love--Lucrezia, who values his work only by the coins it brings
in, and who needs those coins just now for one whose whistle invites her
away. All might be so much better otherwise! Yet otherwise he cannot
choose that it should be; his art must remain what it is--not golden but
silver-grey; and his Lucrezia may attend to the Cousin's whistle if only
she retains the charm, not to be evaded, of her beauty.[67]
Browning does not mean that art in its passionate pursuit of the
highest ends should be indifferent to the means, or that things
spiritual do not require as adequate a sensuous embodiment as they are
capable of receiving from the painter's brush or the poet's pen. Were
art a mere symbol or suggestion, two bits of sticks nailed crosswise
might claim to be art as admirable as any. What is the eye for, if not
to see with vivid exactness? what is the hand for, if not to fashion
things as nature made them? It is through body that we reach after the
soul; and the passion for truth and reality is a passion for the
invisible which is expressed in and through these. Such is the pleading
of Fra Lippo Lippi, the tonsured painter caught out of bounds, in that
poem in which the dramatic monologue of Browning attains its perfection
of life and energy. Fra Lippo is intoxicated by the mere forms and
colours of things, and he is assured that these mean intensely and mean
well:
The beauty and the wonder and the power,
The shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades,
Changes, surprises--and God made it all!
These are the gospel to preach which he girds loin and lights the lamp,
though he may perforce indulge a patron in shallower pieties of the
conventional order, and though it is not all gospel with him, for now
and again, when the moon shines and girls go skipping and singing down
Florence streets--"Zooks, sir, flesh and blood, that's all I'm made of!"
Fra Lippo with his outbreaks of frank sensuality is far nearer to
Browning's kingdom of heaven than is the faultless painter; he presses
with ardour towards his proper goal in art; he has full faith in the
ideal, but with him it is to be sought only through the real; or rather
it need not be sought at all, for one who captures any fragment of
reality captures also undesignedly and inevitably its divine
significance.[68]
The same doctrine which is applied to art in _Old Pictures in Florence_,
that high aims, though unattained, are of more worth than a lower
achievement, is applied, and with a fine lyrical enthusiasm, to the
pursuit of knowledge in _A Grammarian's Funeral_. The time is "shortly
after the Revival of Learning in Europe"; the place--
a tall mountain, citied to the top,
Crowded with culture!--
is imagined to suit the idea of the poem. The dead scholar, borne to the
summit for burial on the shoulders of his disciples, had been possessed
by the aspiration of Paracelsus--to know; and, unlike Paracelsus, he had
never sought on earth both to know and to enjoy. He has been the saint
and the martyr of Renaissance philology. For the genius of such a writer
as the author of _Hudibras_, with his positive intellect and dense
common sense, there could hardly have been found a fitter object for
mockery than this remorseless and indefatigable pedant. Browning,
through the singing voices of the dead master's disciples, exalts him to
an eminence of honour and splendid fame. To a scholar Greek particles
may serve as the fittest test of virtue; this glorious pedant has
postponed life and the enjoyments of life to future cycles of existence;
here on earth he expends a desperate passion--upon what? Upon the
dryasdust intricacies of grammar; and it is not as though he had already
attained; he only desperately follows after:
That low man seeks a little thing to do,
Sees it and does it:
This high man, with a great thing to pursue,
Dies ere he knows it.
But again the grammarian, like the painter, does not strive after a
vague, transcendental ideal; he is not as one that beateth the air; his
quest for knowledge is definite and positive enough; he throws all care
for infinite things, except the infinite of philological accuracy, upon
God; and the viaticum of his last moments is one more point of grammar.
Two of the poems of _Men and Women_ are pages tragic-grotesque and
pathetic-grotesque from the history of religion. In _The Heretic s
Tragedy_ John, Master of the Temple, burns alive in Paris square for his
sins against the faith and Holy Church; the glow of the blazing larch
and pine almost reaches the reader of the stanzas; the great petals of
this red rose of flame bend towards him; the gust of sulphur offends his
nostrils. And the rage of piety is hotter than the fire; it is a mingled
passion, compounded of delight in the fierce spectacle, a thrilling
ecstacy at the sight of a fellow-creature tortured, the self-complacency
of conscious orthodoxy, and the horrible zeal of the Lord's house. Yet
though the event is sung by one of the rejoicing orthodox, somehow we
are made to feel that when John the apostate, bound in the flames and
gagged, prays to Jesus Christ to save him, that prayer may have been
answered. This passage from the story of the age of faith was not
selected with a view to please the mediaeval revivalists of the
nineteenth century, but in truth its chief value is not theological or
historical but artistic. _Holy Cross Day_, a second fragment from
history, does not fall from the sublime to the ridiculous but rises from
the ridiculous to the sublime. The picture of the close-packed Jews
tumbling or sidling churchwards to hear the Christian sermon (for He
saith "Compel them to come in") and to partake of heavenly grace has in
it something of Rembrandt united with something of Callot. Such a crew
of devout impostors is at once comic and piteous. But while they are
cared for in the merciful bowels of the Church, and groan out the
expected compunction, their ancient piety is not extinct; their hearts
burn in them with the memory of Jacob's House and of Jerusalem. Christ
at least was of their kindred, and if they wronged Him in past time,
they will not wrong Him now by naming these who outrage and insult them
after His name.
The historical distortions of the religion of Christ do not, however,
disturb the faith of Browning in the Christian revelation of Divine
love. In _Cleon_ he exhibits the failure of Paganism, even in its forms
of highest culture, to solve the riddle of life and to answer the
requirements of the human spirit. All that regal power liberally and
wisely used can confer belongs to Protus in his Tyranny; all that
genius, and learning and art can confer is the possession of Cleon; and
a profound discouragement has settled down upon the soul of each. The
race progresses from point to point; self-consciousness is deepened and
quickened as generation succeeds generation; the sympathies of the
individual are multiplied and extended. But he that increases knowledge,
increases sorrow; most progress is most failure; the soul climbs the
heights only to perish there. Every day the sense of joy grows more
acute; every day the soul grows more enlarged; and every day the power
to put our best attainments to use diminishes. "And how dieth the wise
man? As the fool. Therefore I hated life; yea, I hated all my labour
that I had taken under the sun." The poem is, indeed, an Ecclesiastes of
pagan religion. The assurance of extinction is the worm which gnaws at
the heart of the rose:
It is so horrible
I dare at times imagine to my need
Some future state revealed to us by Zeus,
Unlimited in capability
For joy, as this is in desire for joy.
But this is no better than a dream; Zeus could not but have revealed it,
were it possible. Browning does not bring his Cleon, as Pater brings his
Marius, into the Christian catacombs, where the image of the Shepherd
bearing his lamb might interpret the mystery of death, nor to that house
of Cecilia where Marius sees a new joy illuminating every face. Cleon
has heard of Paulus and of Christus, but who can suppose that a mere
barbarian Jew
Hath access to a secret shut from us?
The doctrine of Christ, preached on the island by certain slaves, is
reported by an intelligent listener to be one which no sane man can
accept. And Cleon will not squander the time that might be well
employed in studying the proportions of a man or in combining the moods
of music--the later hours of a philosopher and a poet--on the futile
creed of slaves.
Immortality and Divine love--these were the great words pronounced by
Paul and by Christ. _Cleon_ is the despairing cry of Pagan culture for
the life beyond the grave which would attune to harmony the dissonances
of earth, and render intelligible its mournful obscurities. _Saul_, in
the completed form of 1855, and _An Epistle of Karshish_ are, the one a
prophecy, the other a divination, of the mystery of the love of God in
the life and death of his Son. The culminating moment in the effort of
David by which he rouses to life the sunken soul of the King, the moment
towards which all others tend, is that in which he finds in his own
nature love as God's ultimate gift, and assured that in this, as in
other gifts, the creature cannot surpass the Creator, he breaks forth
into a prophecy of God's love made perfect in weakness:
O Saul, it shall be
A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like to me
Thou shalt love and be loved by, for ever: a Hand like this hand
Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the Christ stand!
What follows in the poem is only the awe, the solemnity of this
discovery which has come not through any processes of reasoning but by a
passionate interpretation of the enthusiasm of love and self-sacrifice
in David's own heart; only this awe, and the seeming extension of his
throbbing emotion and pent knowledge over the face of external nature,
until night passes and with the dawn earth and heaven resume their
wonted ways. The case of Lazarus as studied by Karshish the Arabian
physician results not in a rapturous prophecy like that of David, but in
a stupendous conjecture of the heart which all the scepticism of the
brain of a man of science cannot banish or reduce to insignificance. The
unaccountable fascination of this case of mania, subinduced by epilepsy,
is not to be resisted; Karshish would write, if he could, of more
important matters than the madman of Bethany; he would record his
discoveries in scalp-disease, describe the peculiar qualities of Judea's
gum-tragacanth, and disclose the secret of those virtues derived from
the mottled spiders of the tombs. But the face of Lazarus, patient or
joyous, the strange remoteness in his gaze, his singular valuations of
objects and events, his great ardour, his great calm, his possession of
some secret which gives new meanings to all things, the perfect logic of
his irrationality, his unexampled gentleness and love--these are
memories which the keen-sighted Arabian physician is unable to put by,
so curious, so attaching a potency lies in the person of this man who
holds that he was dead and rose again, Karshish has a certain sense of
shame that he, a man learned in all the wisdom of his day, should be so
deeply moved. And yet how the thought of the secret possessed by this
Judean maniac--it is the secret of Jesus--fills and expands the soul!
The very God! think, Abib: dost thou think?
So, the All-Great were the All-Loving too--
So through the thunder comes a human voice
Saying "O heart I made, a heart beats here!
Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself!
Thou hast no power nor mayst conceive of mine,
But love I gave thee, with myself to love,
And thou must love me who have died for thee!"
Science has at least something to consider in a thought so strangely
potent.
A nineteenth-century sceptic's exposition of his Christian faith is the
paradoxical subject of _Bishop Blougram's Apology_, and it is one which
admirably suited that side of Browning's genius which leaned towards
intellectual casuistry. But the poem is not only skilful casuistry--and
casuistry, let it be remembered, is not properly the art of defending
falsehood but of determining truth,--it is also a character-study chosen
from the age of doubt; a dramatic monologue with an appropriate _mise en
scène_; a display of fence and thrust which as a piece of art and wit
rewards an intelligent spectator. That Cardinal Wiseman sat for the
Bishop's portrait is a matter of little consequence; the merit of the
study is independent of any connection with an individual; it answers
delightfully the cynical--yet not wholly cynical--question: How, for our
gain in both worlds, can we best economise our scepticism and make a
little belief go far?[69] The nineteenth century is not precisely the
age of the martyrs, or, if we are to find them, we must in general turn
to politics and to science; Bishop Blougram does not pique himself on a
genius for martyrdom; if he fights with beasts, it is on this occasion
with a very small one, a lynx of the literary tribe, and in the arena of
his own dining-room over the after-dinner wine. He is pre-eminently a
man of his time, when the cross and its doctrine can be comfortably
borne; both he and his table-companion, honoured for this one occasion
only with the episcopal invitation, appreciate the good things of this
world, but the Bishop has a vast advantage over the maker of "lively
lightsome articles" for the reviews, and he uses his advantage, it must
be confessed, to the full. We are in company with no petty man while we
read the poem and hear the great Bishop roll out, with easy affluence,
his long crumpled mind. He is delightfully frank and delightfully
subtle; concealing himself by self-disclosure; opulent in ideas;
shifting the pea of truth dexterously under the three gilded thimbles;
blandly condescending and amiably contemptuous; a little feline, for he
allows his adversary a moment's freedom to escape and then pounces upon
him with the soft-furred claws; assured of his superiority in the game,
yet using only half his mind; fencing with one arm pinioned;
chess-playing with a rook and pawn given to his antagonist; or shall we
say chess-playing blindfold and seeing every piece upon the board? Is
_Bishop Blougram's Apology_ a poem at all? some literary critics may
ask. And the answer is that through it we make acquaintance with one of
Browning's most genial inventions--the great Bishop himself, and that if
Gigadibs were not present we could never have seen him at the particular
angle at which he presents himself in his condescending play with truths
and half-truths and quarter-truths, adapted to a smaller mind than his
own. The sixteenth century gave us a Montaigne, and the seventeenth
century a Pascal. Why should not the nineteenth century of mundane
comforts, of doubt troubled by faith, and faith troubled by doubt,
produce a new type--serious yet humorous--in an episcopal
Pascal-Montaigne?
Browning's moral sympathies, we may rest assured, do not go with one
who like Blougram finds satisfaction in things realised on earth; one
who declines--at least as he represents himself for the purposes of
argument--to press forward to things which he cannot attain but might
nobly follow after. But Browning's intellectual interest is great in
seeing all that a Blougram can say for himself; and as a destructive
piece of criticism directed against the position of a Gigadibs what he
says may really be effective. The Bishop frankly admits that the
unqualified believer, the enthusiast, is more fortunate than he; he,
Sylvester Blougram, is what he is, and all that he can do is to make the
most of the nature allotted to him. That there has been a divine
revelation he cannot absolutely believe; but neither can he absolutely
disbelieve. Unbelief is sterile; belief is fruitful, certainly for this
world, probably for the next, and he elects to believe. Having chosen to
believe, he cannot be too pronounced and decisive in his faith; he will
never attempt to eliminate certain articles of the _credenda_, and so
"decrassify" his faith, for to this process, if once begun, there is no
end; having donned his uniform, he will wear it, laces and spangles and
all. True, he has at times his chill fits of doubt; but is not this the
probation of faith? Does not a life evince the ultimate reality that is
within us? Are not acts the evidence of a final choice, of a deepest
conviction? And has he not given his vote for the Christian religion?
With me faith means perpetual unbelief
Kept quiet like the snake 'neath Michael's foot,
Who stands calm just because he feels it writhe.
When the time arrives for a beatific vision Blougram will be ready to
adapt himself to the new state of things. Is not the best pledge of his
capacity for future adaptation to a new environment this--that being in
the world he is worldly? We must not lose the training of each
successive stage of evolution by for ever projecting ourselves half way
into the next. So rolls on the argument to its triumphant conclusion--
Fool or knave?
Why needs a bishop be a fool or knave
When there's a thousand diamond weights between?
Only at the last, were it not that we know that there is a firmer ground
for Blougram than this on which he takes his stand in after-dinner
controversy, we might be inclined to close the subject by adapting to
its uses the title of a pamphlet connected with the Kingsley and Newman
debate--"But was not Mr Gigadibs right after all?" Worsted in sword-play
he certainly was; but the soul may have its say, and the soul, armed
with its instincts of truth, is a formidable challenger.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 63: Letters of R.B. and E.B.B., i. 388.]
[Footnote 64: Mrs Orr's Handbook to Browning's Works, 266, note. For the
horse, see stanzas xiii. xiv. of the poem.]
[Footnote 65: This poem is sometimes expounded as a sigh for the
infinite, which no human love can satisfy. But the simpler conception of
it as expressing a love almost but not altogether complete seems the
truer.]
[Footnote 66: Browning's delight a few years later in modelling in clay
was great.]
[Footnote 67: Mrs Andrew Crosse, in her article, "John Kenyon and his
Friends" (_Temple Bar Magazine_, April 1900), writes: "When the
Brownings were living in Florence, Kenyon had begged them to procure for
him a copy of the portrait in the Pitti of Andrea del Sarto and his
wife. Mr Browning was unable to get the copy made with any promise of
satisfaction, and so wrote the exquisite poem of Andrea del Sarto--and
sent it to Kenyon!"]
[Footnote 68: The writer of this volume many years ago pointed out to
Browning his transposition of the chronological places of Fra Lippo
Lippi and Masaccio ("Hulking Tom") in the history of Italian art.
Browning vigorously maintained that he was in the right; but recent
students do not support his contention. At the same time an error in
_Transcendentalism_, where Browning spoke of "Swedish Boehme," was
indicated. He acknowledged the error and altered the text to "German
Boehme."]
[Footnote 69: Browning maintained to Gavan Duffy that his treatment of
the Cardinal was generous.]