London: Dramatis Personae
The grief of the desolate man was an uncontrollable passion; his heart
was strong and all its strength entered into its sorrow. Miss Blagden,
"perfect in all kindness," took motherly possession of the boy, and
persuaded his father to accompany Penini to her villa at Bellosguardo.
When all that was needful at Casa Guidi had been done, Browning's first
thought was to abandon Italy for many a year, and hasten to London,
there to have speech for a day or two at least with Mrs Browning's
sister Arabel. "The cycle is complete," he said, looking round the
sitting-room of Casa Guidi. "I want my new life," he wrote, "to resemble
the last fifteen years as little as possible." Yet while he stayed in
the accustomed rooms he held himself together; "when I was moved," he
says, "I began to go to pieces."[84] Yet something remained to sustain
him.
To one who has habitually given as well as received much not the least
of the pangs of separation arises from the incapacity to render any
further direct service. It fortified Browning's heart to know that much
could be done, and in ways which his wife would have approved and
desired, for her child. And as he himself had been also her care, it was
his business now to see that his life fulfilled itself aright. Yet he
breaks out in July: "No more 'house-keeping' for me, even with my
family. I shall grow still, I hope--but my root is taken, and remains."
From the outward paraphernalia of death Browning, as Mrs Orr notices,
shrank with aversion; it was partly the instinct by which a man seeks to
preserve what is most sacred and most strong in his own feelings from
the poor materialisms and the poor sentimentalisms of the grave; partly
a belief that any advance of the heart towards what has been lost may be
rather hindered than helped by the external circumstance surrounding the
forsaken body. Browning took measures that his wife's grave should be
duly cared for, given more than common distinction; but Florence became
a place from which even for his own sake and the sake of her whose
spirit lived within him he must henceforth keep aloof.
The first immediate claim upon Browning was that of duty to his father.
On August 1st he left Florence for Paris, accompanied by Isa Blagden,
who still watched over him and the boy. Two months were spent with his
sister and the old man, still hale and strong of heart, at a place
"singularly unspoiled, fresh and picturesque, and lovely to heart's
content"--so Browning describes it--St Enogat, near St Malo. The
solitary sea, the sands, the rocks, the green country gave him at least
a breathing-space. Then he proceeded to London, not without an outbreak
of his characteristic energy in over-coming the difficulties--which
involved two hours of "weary battling"--of securing a horse-box for
Pen's pony. At Amiens Tennyson, with his wife and children, was on the
platform. Browning pulled his hat over his face and was
unrecognised.[85] In "grim London," as he had called it, though with a
quick remorse at recollection of the kindness awaiting him, he had the
comfort of daily intercourse with Miss Arabel Barrett.
It was decided that an English education, but not that of a public
school, would be best for the boy; the critical time for taking "the
English stamp" must not be lost; his father's instruction, aided by that
of a tutor, would suffice to prepare him for the University, and he
would have the advantage of the motherly care of his mother's favourite
sister. Browning distrusted, he says to Story, "ambiguous natures and
nationalities." Thus he bound himself to England and to London, while at
times he sighed for the beauty of Italian hills and skies. He shrank
from society, although before long old friends, and especially Procter,
infirm and deaf, were not neglected. He found, or made, business for
himself; had "never so much to do or so little pleasure in doing it."
The discomfort of London lodgings was before long exchanged for the more
congenial surroundings of a house by the water-side in Warwick Crescent,
which he occupied until 1887, two years before his death. The furniture
and tapestries of Casa Guidi gave it an air of comfort and repose. "It
was London," writes Mrs Ritchie, referring to her visits of a later
date, "but London touched by some indefinite romance; the canal used to
look cool and deep, the green trees used to shade the Crescent.... The
house was an ordinary London house, but the carved oak furniture and
tapestries gave dignity to the long drawing-rooms, and pictures and
books lined the stairs. In the garden at the back dwelt, at the time of
which I am writing, two weird gray geese, with quivering silver wings
and long throats, who used to come and meet their master hissing and
fluttering." In 1866 an owl--for Browning still indulged a fantasy of
his own in the choice of pets--was "the light of our house," as a letter
describes this bird of darkness, "for his tameness and engaging ways."
The bird would kiss its master on the face, tweak his hair, and if one
said "Poor old fellow!" in a commiserating voice would assume a
sympathetic air of depression.[86] Miss Barrett lived hard by, in
Delamere Terrace. With her on Sundays Browning listened at Bedford
Chapel to the sermons of a non-conformist preacher, Thomas Jones, to
some of which when published in 1884, he prefixed an introduction. "The
Welsh poet-preacher" was a man of humble origin possessed of a natural
gift of eloquence, which, with his "liberal humanity," drew Browning to
become a hearer of his discourses.
He made no haste to give the public a new volume of verse. Mrs Browning
had mentioned to a correspondent, not long before her death, that her
husband had then a considerable body of lyrical poetry in a state of
completion. An invitation to accept the editorship of the _Cornhill
Magazine_, on Thackeray's retirement, was after some hesitation
declined. He was now partly occupied with preparing for the press
whatever writings by his wife seemed suitable for publication. In 1862
he issued with a dedication "to grateful Florence" her _Last Poems_; in
1863, her _Greek Christian Poets_; in 1865 he prepared a volume of
Selections from her poems, and had the happiness of knowing that the
number of her readers had rather increased than diminished. The efforts
of self-constituted biographers to make capital out of the incidents of
her life, and to publish such letters of hers as could be laid hands on,
moved him to transports of indignation, which break forth in a letter to
his friend Miss Blagden with unmeasured violence: what he felt with the
"paws" of these blackguards in his "very bowels" God knows; beast and
scamp and knave and fool are terms hardly strong enough to relieve his
wrath. Such sudden whirls of extreme rage were rare, yet were
characteristic of Browning, and were sometimes followed by regret for
his own distemperature. In 1862 a gratifying task was laid on him--that
of superintending the three volume edition of his Poetical Works which
was published in the following year. At the same time his old friend
Forster, with help from Procter, was engaged in preparing the first--and
the best--of the several Selections from Browning's poems; it was at
once an indication of the growing interest in his writings and an
effective means towards extending their influence. He set himself
steadily to work out what was in him; he waited no longer upon his
casual moods, but girded his loins and kept his lamp constantly lit. His
genius, such as it was--this was the field given him to till, and he
must see that it bore fruit. "I certainly will do my utmost to make the
most of my poor self before I die"--so he wrote in 1865. There were
gains in such a resolved method of work; but there were also losses. A
man of so active a mind by planting himself before a subject could
always find something to say; but it might happen that such sheer
brain-work was carried on by plying other faculties than those which
give its highest value to poetry.[87]
In the late summer and early autumn of 1862 Browning, in company with
his son, was among the Pyrenees at "green pleasant little Cambo, and
then at Biarritz crammed," he says, "with gay people of whom I know
nothing but their outsides." The sea and sands were more to his liking
than the gay people.[88] He had with him one book and no other--a
Euripides, in which he read vigorously, and that the readings were
fruitful his later poetry of the Greek drama bears witness. At present
however his creative work lay in another direction; the whole of "the
Roman murder story"--the story of Pompilia and Guido and Caponsacchi--he
describes as being pretty well in his head. It needed a long process of
evolution before the murder story could uncoil its sinuous lengths in a
series of volumes. The visit to Ste-Marie "a wild little place in
Brittany" near Pornic, in the summer of 1863--a visit to be repeated in
the two summers immediately succeeding--is directly connected with two
of the poems of _Dramatis Personae_. The story of _Gold Hair_ and the
landscape details of _James Lee's Wife_ are alike derived from Pornic.
The solitude of the little Breton hamlet soothed Browning's spirit. The
"good, stupid and dirty" people of the village were seldom visible
except on Sunday; there were solitary walks of miles to be had along the
coast; fruit and milk, butter and eggs in abundance, and these were
Browning's diet. "I feel out of the very earth sometimes," he wrote, "as
I sit here at the window.... Such a soft sea, and such a mournful wind!"
But the lulling charm of the place which, though so different, brought
back the old Siena mood, did not convert him into an idler. The
mornings, which began betimes, were given to work; in his way of
desperate resolve to be well occupied he informs Miss Blagden (Aug. 18,
1863) that having yesterday written a poem of 120 lines, he means to
keep writing whether he likes it or not.[89]
"With the spring of 1863," writes Mr Gosse, "a great change came over
Browning's habits. He had refused all invitations into society; but now,
of evenings, after he had put his boy to bed, the solitude weighed
intolerably upon him. He told the present writer [Mr Gosse] long
afterwards, that it suddenly occurred to him on one such spring night in
1863 that this mode of life was morbid and unworthy, and, then and
there, he determined to accept for the future every suitable invitation
which came to him." "Accordingly," goes on Mr Gosse, "he began to dine
out, and in the process of time he grew to be one of the most familiar
figures of the age at every dinner-table, concert-hall, and place of
refined entertainment in London. This, however, was a slow process." Mrs
Ritchie refers to spoken words of Browning which declared that it was
"a mere chance whether he should live in the London house that he had
taken and join in social life, or go away to some quiet retreat, and be
seen no more." It was in a modified form the story of the "fervid youth
grown man," in his own "Daniel Bartoli," who in his desolation, after
the death of his lady,
Trembled on the verge
Of monkhood: trick of cowl and taste of scourge
He tried: then, kicked not at the pricks perverse,
But took again, for better or for worse,
The old way of the world, and, much the same
Man o' the outside, fairly played life's game.
Probably Browning had come to understand that in his relation to the
past he was not more loyal in solitude than he might be in society; it
was indeed the manlier loyalty to bear his full part in life. And as to
his art, he felt that, with sufficient leisure to encounter the labour
he had enjoined upon himself, it mattered little whether the remaining
time was spent in a cave or in a court; strength may encounter the
seductions either of the hermitage or of the crowd and still be the
victor:
Strength may conclude in Archelaos' court,
And yet esteem the silken company
So much sky-scud, sea-froth, earth-thistledown,
For aught their praise or blame should joy or grieve.
Strength amid crowds as late in solitude
May lead the still life, ply the wordless task.[90]
One cannot prescribe a hygiene to poets; the poet of passionate
contemplation, such as was Wordsworth, could hardly quicken or develop
his peculiar faculty by devotion to the entertainments of successive
London seasons. And perhaps it is not certain that the genius of
Browning was wholly a gainer by the superficial excitations of the
dinner table and the reception room. But the truth is, as Mrs Browning
had observed, that his energy was not exhausted by literary work, and
that it preyed upon himself if no means of escape were found. If he was
not at the piano, or shaping clay, or at the drawing-board, or walking
fast and far, inward disturbances were set up which rent and frayed his
mind. The pleasures of society both fatigued and rested Browning; they
certainly relieved him from the troubles of super-abundant force.
In 1864 _Dramatis Personae_ was published. It might be described as
virtually a third volume of _Men and Women_. And yet a certain change of
tone is discernible. Italy is no longer the background of the human
figures. There is perhaps less opulence of colour; less of the manifold
"joys of living." If higher points in the life of the spirit are not
touched, the religious feeling has more of inwardness and is more
detached from external historical fact than it had ever been before;
there is more sense of resistance to and victory over whatever may seem
adverse to the life of the soul. In the poems which deal with love the
situations and postures of the spirit are less simple and are sometimes
even strained; the fantastic and the grotesque occupy a smaller place; a
plain dignity, a grave solemnity of style is attained in passages of _A
Death in the Desert_, which had hardly been reached before. Yet
substantially the volume is a continuation of the poems of 1855; except
in one instance, where Tennyson's method in _Maud_, that of a sequence
of lyrics, is adopted, the methods are the same; the predominating
themes of _Men and Women_, love, art, religion, are the predominating
themes of _Dramatis Personae._ A slight metrical complication--the
internal rhyme in the second line of each stanza of _Dîs aliter visum_
and in the third line of the quatrains of _May and Death_--may be noted
as indicating Browning's love of new metrical experiments. In the former
of these poems the experiment cannot be called a success; the clash of
sounds, "a mass of brass," "walked and talked," and the like, seems too
much as if an accident had been converted into a rule.
_Mr Sludge, "the Medium_" the longest piece in the volume, has been
already noticed. The story of the poor girl of Pornic, as Browning in a
letter calls her, attracted him partly because it presented a
psychological curiosity, partly because he cared to paint her hair in
words,--gold in contrast with that pallid face--as much as his friend
Rossetti might have wished to display a like splendour with the strokes
of his brush:
Hair such a wonder of flix and floss,
Freshness and fragrance--floods of it too!
Gold, did I say? Nay, gold's mere dross.
The story, which might gratify a cynical observer of human nature, is
treated by Browning without a touch of cynicism, except that ascribed to
the priest--good easy man--who has lost a soul and gained an altar. A
saint _manqué_, whose legend is gruesome enough, but more pathetic than
gruesome, becomes for the poet an involuntary witness of the Christian
faith, and a type of the mystery of moral evil; but the psychological
contrasts of the ambiguous creature, saint-sinner, and the visual
contrast of
that face, like a silver wedge
'Mid the yellow wealth,
are of more worth than the sermon which the writer preaches in
exposition of his tale. Had the form of the poem been Browning's
favourite dramatic monologue, we can imagine that an ingenious apologia,
convincing at least to Half-Pornic, could have been offered for the
perversity of the dying girl's rifting every golden tress with gold.
No poem in the volume of _Dramatis Personae_ is connected with pictorial
art, unless it be the few lines entitled _A Face_, lines of which Emily
Patmore, the poet's wife, was the subject, and written, as Browning
seldom wrote, for the mere record of beauty. That "little head of hers"
is transferred to Browning's panel in the manner of an early Tuscan
piece of ideal loveliness; in purity of outline and of colour the
delicate profile, the opening lips, the neck, the chin so naturally ally
themselves to painting that nature is best comprehended through its
imaginative transference to art. As _Master Hugues_ of the earlier
collection of poems converts a bewildering technique of music into
poetry, and discovers in its intricate construction a certain
interposing web spun by the brain between the soul and things divine, so
_Abt Vogler_ interprets music on the other side--that of immediate
inspiration, to which the constructive element--real though slight--is
subordinate. In the silence and vacuity which follow the impromptu on
his orchestrion, the composer yearns, broods, aspires. Never were a
ghostly troop of sounds reanimated and incarnated into industrious life
more actually than by Browning's verse. They climb and crowd, they mount
and march, and then pass away; but the musician's spirit is borne onward
by the wind of his own mood, and it cannot stay its flight until it has
found rest in God; all that was actual of harmonious sound has
collapsed; but the sense of a mystery of divine suggestion abides in his
heart; the partial beauty becomes a pledge of beauty in its plenitude;
and then by a gentle return upon himself he resumes the life of every
day, sobered, quieted and comforted. The poem touches the borderland
where art and religion meet. The _Toccata of Galuppi_ left behind as its
relics the melancholy of mundane pleasure and a sense of its transitory
existence. The extemporising of _Abt Vogler_ fills the void which it has
opened with the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things
unseen.
Faith, victor over loss, in _Abt Vogler_, is victor over temporal decay
in _Rabbi Ben Ezra_. The poem is the song of triumph of devout old age.
Neither the shrunken sadness of Matthew Arnold's poem on old age, nor
the wise moderation and acquiescence in the economy of force which an
admirable poem by Emerson expresses, can be found here; and perhaps some
stress and strain may be felt in Browning's effort to maintain his
position. It is no "vale of years" of which _Rabbi Ben Ezra_ tells; old
age is viewed as an apex, a pinnacle, from which in thin translucent air
all the efforts and all the errors of the past can be reviewed; the
gifts of youth, the gifts of the flesh are not depreciated; but the
highest attainment is that of knowledge won by experience--knowledge
which can divide good from evil and what is true from what merely
seems, knowledge which can put a just valuation not only on deeds but on
every faint desire and unaccomplished purpose, and not only on
achievements but failures. Possessed of such knowledge, tried in the
probation of life and not found wanting, accepting its own peculiar
trials, old age can enter into the rest of a clear and solemn vision,
confident of being qualified at last to start forth upon that "adventure
brave and new" to which death is a summons, and assured through
experience that the power which gives our life its law is equalled by a
superintending love. Ardour, and not lethargy, progress and not decline,
are here represented as the characteristics of extreme old age. An
enthusiasm of effort and of strenuous endurance, an enthusiasm of rest
in knowledge, an enthusiasm of self-abandonment to God and the divine
purpose make up the poem. At no time did Browning write verse which
soars with a more steadfast and impassioned libration of wing. Death in
_Rabbi Ben Ezra_ is death as a friend. In the lines entitled _Prospice_
it is death the adversary that is confronted and conquered; the poem is
an act of the faith which comes through love; it is ascribed to no
imaginary speaker, and does not, indeed, veil its personal character. No
lonely adventure is here to reward the victor over death; the
transcendent joy is human love recovered, which being once recovered,
let whatever God may please succeed. The verses are a confession which
gives the reason of that gallant beating up against the wind, noticeable
in many of Browning's later poems. He could not cease from hope; but
hope and faith had much to encounter, and sometimes he would reduce the
grounds of his hope to the lowest, as if to make sure against illusion
and to test the fortitude of hope even at its weakest. The hope of
immortality which was his own inevitably extended itself beyond himself,
and became an interpreter of the mysteries of our earthly life. In
contrast with the ardent ideality of _Rabbi Ben Ezra_ may be set the
uncompromising realism of _Apparent Failure_, with its poetry of the
Paris morgue. The lover of life will scrutinise death at its ugliest and
worst, blinking no hideous fact. Yet, even so, the reverence for
humanity--
Poor men, God made, and all for that!--
is not quenched, nor is the hope quenched that
After Last returns the First,
Though a wide compass round be fetched,
That what began best, can't end worst.
The optimism is unreasoned, and rightly so, for the spirit of the poem,
with its suggestive title, is not argumentative. The sense of "the pity
of it" in one heart, remorse which has somehow come into existence out
of the obscure storehouse of nature, or out of God, is the only
justification suggested for a hope that nature or God must at the last
intend good and not evil to the poor defeated abjects, who most abhorred
their lives in Paris yesterday. And the word "Nature" here would be
rejected by Browning as less than the truth.
In 1864 under somewhat altered conditions, and from a ground somewhat
shifted, Browning in _A Death in the Desert_ and the _Epilogue_ to
"Dramatis Personae" continued his apology for the Christian faith. The
apologetics are, however, in the first instance poems, and they remain
poems at the last. The imaginary scene of the death of the Evangelist
John is rendered with the finest art; its dignity is that of a certain
noble bareness; in the dim-lighted grotto are the aged disciple and the
little group of witnesses to whom he utters his legacy of words; at the
cave's edge is the Bactrian crying from time to time his bird-like cry
of assurance:
Outside was all noon and the burning blue.
The slow return of the dying man to consciousness of his surroundings is
as true as if it were studied from a death-bed; his sudden awakening at
the words "I am the Resurrection and the Life" arrives not as a dramatic
surprise but as the simplest surprise of nature--light breaking forth
before sunset. The chief speaker of the poem is chosen because the
argument is one concerning faith that comes through love, and St John
was the disciple who had learnt love's deepest secrets. The dialectic
proceeds along large lines, which have only the subtlety of simplicity.
The verse moves gravely, tenderly, often weighted with monosyllables; a
pondering, dwelling verse; and great single lines arise so naturally
that while they fill the mind with a peculiar power, they are felt to be
of one texture with the whole: this, for example,--
We would not lose
The last of what might happen on his face;
and this:--
When there was mid sea and the mighty things;
and this:--
Lie bare to the universal prick of light;
and these:--
The Bactrian was but a wild childish man,
And could not write nor speak, but only loved.
Such lines, however, are made to be read _in situ_.
The faith of these latter days is the same as that of the first century,
and is not the same. The story and the teaching of Christ had alike one
end--to plant in the human consciousness the assurance of Divine Love,
and to make us, in our degree, conscious partakers of that love. Where
love is, there is Christ. Our conceptions of God are relative to our own
understanding; but God as power, God as a communicating intelligence,
God as love--Father, Son and Spirit--is the utmost that we can conceive
of things above us. Let us now put that knowledge--imperfect though it
may be--to use. Power, intelligence, love--these surround us everywhere;
they are not mere projections from our own brain or hand or heart; and
by us they are inconceivable otherwise than as personal attributes. The
historical story of Christ is not lost, for it has grown into a larger
assurance of faith. We are not concerned with the linen clothes and
napkins of the empty sepulchre; Christ is arisen. Why revert to discuss
miracles? The work of miracles--whatever they may have been--was long
ago accomplished. The knowledge of the Divine Love, its appropriation by
our own hearts, and the putting forth of that love in our lives--such
for us is the Christian faith, such is the work of Christ accomplishing
itself in humanity at the present time. And the Christian story is no
myth but a reality, not because we can prove true the beliefs of the
first century, but because those beliefs contained within them a larger
and more enduring belief. The acorn has not perished because it has
expanded into an oak.
This, reduced here to the baldest statement, is in substance the dying
testimony of Browning's St John. It is thrown into lyrical form as his
own testimony in the _Epilogue_ to the volume of 1864. The voices of
singers, the sound of the trumpets of the Jewish Dedication Day, when
the glory of the Lord in His cloud filled His house, have fallen silent.
We are told by some that the divine Face, known to early Christian days
as love, has withdrawn from earth for ever, and left humanity enthroned
as its sole representative:
Oh, dread succession to a dizzy post,
Sad sway of sceptre whose mere touch appals.
Browning's reply is that to one whose eyes are rightly informed the
whole of nature and of human life shows itself as a perpetual mystery of
providential care:
Why, where's the need of Temple, when the walls
O' the world are that? What use of swells and falls
From Levites' choir, Priests' cries, and trumpet calls?
That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows,
Or decomposes but to recompose,
Become my universe that feels and knows.[91]
In the great poem of 1868-69, _The Ring and the Book_, one speaker, the
venerable Pope, like St John of _A Death in the Desert_, has almost
reached the term of a long life: he is absorbed in the solemn weighing
of truth and falsehood, good and evil; his soul, like the soul of the
dying Evangelist:
Lies bare to the universal prick of light.
He, if any of the speakers in that sequence of monologues, expresses
Browning's own highest thought. And the Pope's exposition of the
Christianity of our modern age is identical with that of John. Man's
mind is but "a convex glass" in which is represented all that by us can
be conceived of God, "our known unknown." The Pope has heard the
Christian story which is abroad in the world; he loves it and finds it
credible. God's power--that is clearly discernible in the universe; His
intelligence--that is no less evidently present. What of love? The dread
machinery of sin and sorrow on this globe of ours seems to negative the
idea of divine love. The surmise of immortality may indeed justify the
ways of God to man; this "dread machinery" may be needed to evolve man's
highest moral qualities. The acknowledgment of God in Christ, the divine
self-sacrifice of love, for the Pope, as for St John, solves
All questions in the earth and out of it.
But whether the truth of the early centuries be an absolute historic
fact,
Or only truth reverberate, changed, made pass
A spectrum into mind, the narrow eye--
The same and not the same, else unconceived--
the Pope dare not affirm. Nor does he regard the question as of urgent
importance at the present day; the effect of the Christian
tale--historic fact, or higher fact expressed in myth--remains:
So my heart be struck,
What care I,--by God's gloved hand or the bare?
By some means, means divinely chosen even if but a child's fable-book,
we have got our truth, and it suffices for our training here on earth.
Let us give over the endless task of unproving and re-proving the
already proved; rather let us straightway put our truth to its proper
uses.[92]
If the grotesque occupies a comparatively small place in _Dramatis
Personae_, the example given is of capital importance in this province
of Browning's art. The devil of Notre Dame, looking down on Paris, is
more effectively placed, but is hardly a more impressive invention of
Gothic fantasy than Caliban sprawling in the pit's much mire,
With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin,
while he discourses, with a half-developed consciousness, itself in the
mire and scarcely yet pawing to get free, concerning the nature of his
Creator. The grotesque here is not merely of the kind that addresses the
eye; the poem is an experiment in the grotesque of thought; and yet
fantastic as it seems, the whole process of this monstrous Bridgewater
treatise is governed by a certain logic. The poem, indeed, is
essentially a fragment of Browning's own Christian apologetics; it
stands as a burly gate-tower from which boiling pitch can be flung upon
the heads of assailants. The poet's intention is not at all to give us a
chapter in the origins of religion; nor is Caliban a representative of
primitive man. A frequently recurring idea with Browning is that
expressed by Pope Innocent in the passage already cited; the external
world proves the power of God; it proves His intelligence: but the proof
of love is derived exclusively from the love that lives in the heart of
man. Are you dissatisfied with such a proof? Well, then, see what a god
we can construct out of intelligence and power, with love left out! If
this world is not a place of trial and training appointed by love, then
it is a scene of capricious cruelty or capricious indifference on the
part of our Maker; His providence is a wanton sporting with our weakness
and our misery. Why were we brought into being? To amuse His solitary
and weary intelligence, and to become the victims or the indulged
manifestations of His power. Why is one man selected for extreme agony
from which a score of his fellows escape? Because god Setebos resembles
Caliban, when through mere caprice he lets twenty crabs march past him
unhurt and stones the twenty-first,
Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.
If any of the phenomena of nature lead us to infer or imagine some law
superior to the idle artistry and reckless will of Setebos, that law is
surely very far away; it is "the Quiet" of Caliban's theology which
takes no heed of human life and has for its outposts the cold unmoving
stars.
Except the short piece named _May and Death_, which like Rossetti's
poem of the wood-spurge, is founded upon one of those freaks of
association that make some trival object the special remembrancer of
sorrow, the remaining poems of _Dramatis Personae_, as originally
published, are all poems of love. _A Likeness_, skilfully contrived in
the indirect directness of its acknowledgment of love, its jealous
privacy of passion, and its irresistible delight in the homage rendered
by one who is not a lover, is no exception. Not one of these poems tells
of the full assurance and abiding happiness of lovers. But the warmth
and sweetness of early passion are alive under the most disastrous
circumstances in _Confessions_. The apothecary with his bottles provides
a chart of the scene of the boy-and-girl adventures; the professional
gravities of the parson put an edge on the memory of the dear
indiscretions; "summer's distillation," to borrow a word from
Shakespeare, makes faint the odour of the bottle labelled "Ether"; the
mummy wheat from the coffin of old desire sprouts up and waves its green
pennons. _Youth and Art_ may be placed beside the earlier
_Respectability_ as two pages out of the history of the encounters of
prudence and passion; youth and maiden alike, boy-sculptor and
girl-singer, prefer the prudence of worldly success to the infinite
prudence of love; and they have their reward--that success in life which
is failure. Like the tedious brief scene of young Pyramus and Thisbe,
this is a poem of "very tragical mirth." And no less tragically mirthful
is _Dîs Aliter Visum_, a variation on the same or a kindred theme, where
our young Bohemian sculptor is replaced by the elderly poet, bent,
wigged, and lamed, but sure of the fortieth chair in the Academy, and
the lone she-sparrow of the house-top by a young beauty, who adds to her
other attractions a vague, uninstructed yearning for culture and
entirely substantial possessions in the three-per-cents. But the moral
is the same--the folly of being overwise, the wisdom of acting upon the
best promptings of the heart. In _Too Late_ Browning attempts to render
a mood of passionate despair;--love and the hopes of love are defeated
by a woman's sentence of rejection, her marriage, and, last, her death;
it reads, more than any other poem of the writer, like a leaf torn out
of "Wuthering Heights." There is a fixity of grief which is more
appalling than this whirlblast; the souls that are wedged in ice occupy
a lower circle in the region of sorrow than those which are driven
before the gale. _The Worst of it_--another poem of the failures of
love--reverses the conventional attitude of the wronged husband; he
ought, according to all recognised authorities of drama and novel, rage
against his faithless wife, and commiserate his virtuous self; here he
endeavours, though vainly, to transfer every stain and shame to himself
from her; his anguish is all on her behalf, or if on his own chiefly
because he cannot restore her purity or save her from her wrong done
against herself. It is a poem of moral stress and strain, imagined with
great intensity. Browning in general isolates a single moment or mood of
passion, and studies it, with its shifting lights and shadows, as a
living microcosm; often it is a moment of crisis, a moment of
culmination. For once in _James Lee's Wife_ (named in the first edition
by a stroke of perversity _James Lee_), he represents in a sequence of
lyrics a sequence of moods, and with singular success. The season of the
year is autumn, and autumn as felt not among golden wheatfields, but on
a barren and rocky sea-coast; the processes of the declining year, from
the first touch of change to bareness everywhere, accompany and accord
with those of the decline of hope in the wife's heart for any return of
her love. Her offence is that she has loved too well; that she has laid
upon her husband too great a load of devotion; hostility might be met
and vanquished; but how can she deal with a heart which love itself only
petrifies? It should be a warning to critics who translate dramatic
poems into imaginary biography to find that Browning, who had known so
perfect a success in the one love of his life, should constantly present
in work of imagination the ill fortunes of love and lovers. Looking a
little below the surface we see that he could not write directly, he
could not speak effusively, of the joy that he had known. But in all
these poems he thinks of love as a supreme possession in itself and as a
revelation of infinite things which lie beyond it; as a test of
character, and even as a pledge of perpetual advance in the life of the
spirit.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 84: Letter to Story in Henry James's "W.W. Story," vol. ii. p.
91 and p. 97.]
[Footnote 85: H. James's "W.W. Story," vol. ii. p. 100.]
[Footnote 86: "Rossetti Papers," p. 302.]
[Footnote 87: In 1863 Browning gave time and pains to revising his
friend Story's _Roba di Roma_.]
[Footnote 88: In 1864 Browning again "braved the awful Biarritz" and
stayed at Cambo. On this occasion he visted Fontarabia. An interesting
letter from Cambo, undated as to time, is printed in Henry James's "W.W.
Story," vol. ii. pp. 153-156. The year--1864--may be ascertained by
comparing it with a letter addressed to F.T. Palgrave, given in
Palgrave's Life, the date of this letter being Oct. 19, 1864. Browning
in the letter to Story speaks of "the last two years in the dear rough
Ste.-Marie."]
[Footnote 89: Was the poem _Gold Hair_? If three stanzas were added to
the first draft before the poem appeared in _The Atlantic Monthly_ the
number of lines would have been 120. Stanzas 21, 22 and 23 were added in
the _Dramatis Personae_ version.]
[Footnote 90: _Aristophanes' Apology_ (spoken of Euripides).]
[Footnote 91: Compare with _Epilogue: Third Speaker_ the lines from _A
Death in the Desert_:
Then stand before that fact, that Life and Death,
Stay there at gaze, till it dispart, dispread,
As though a star should open out, all sides,
Grow the world on you, as it is my world.
[Footnote 92: Statements by Mrs Orr with respect to Browning's relations
to Christianity will be found on p. 319 and p. 373 of her Life of
Browning. She regarded "La Saisiaz" as conclusive proof of his
"heterodox attitude." Robert Buchanan, in the Epistle dedicatory to "The
Outcast," alleges that he questioned Browning as to whether he were a
Christian, and that Browning "thundered No!" The statement embodied in
my text above is substantially not mine but Browning's own. See on
_Ferishtah's Fancies_ in chapter xvi.]