death–for now the position is reversed and the king shall receive her living, and yet believe her dead–Herakles contrives to put Admetos to that precise test which is alone sufficient to assure Alkestis of his fidelity. Words are words; but here is a deed, and Admetos not only adheres to his pledge, but demonstrates to her that for him to violate it is impossible. She may well accept him as at length proved to be her very own.
Browning, who delights to show how good is brought out of evil, or what appears such to mortal eyes, is not content with this. He must trace the whole process of the purification of the soul of Admetos, by sorrow and its cruel yet beneficent reality, and in his commentary he emphasises each point of development in that process. When his wife lies at the point of death the sorrow of Admetos is not insincere, but there was a childishness in it, for he would not confront the fact that the event was of his own election. Presently she has departed, and he begins to taste the truth, to distinguish between a sorrow rehearsed in fancy and endured in fact. In greeting Herakles he rises to a manlier strain, puts tears away, and accepts the realities of life and death; he will not add ill to ill, as the sentimentalist does, but will be just to the rights of earth that remain; he catches some genuine strength from the magnanimous presence of the hero-god. He renders duty to the dead; is quieted; and enters more and more into the sternness of his solitary wayfaring. In dealing with the ignoble wrangle with old Pheres the critic is hard set; but Balaustion, speaking as interpreter for Browning, explains that for a little the king lapses back from the firmer foothold which he had attained. Perhaps it would have been wiser to admit that Euripides has marred his own work by this grim tragic-comic encounter of crabbed age and youth. But it is true that one who has much to give, like Alkestis, gives freely; and one who has little to give, like Pheres, clutches that little desperately and is starved not only in possessions but in soul. For Browning the significance of the scene lies in the idea, which if not just is ingenious, that the encounter with Pheres has an educational value for Admetos; he detests his father because he sees in him an image of his own egoism, and thus he learns more profoundly to hate his baser self. When the body of Alkestis has been borne away and the king re-enters his desolate halls the full truth breaks in upon him; nothing can be as it has been before–“He stared at the impossible mad life”; he has learnt that life, which yet shall be rightly lived, is a harder thing than death:
He was beginning to be like his wife.
And those around him felt that having descended in grief so far to the truth of things, he could not but return to the light an altered and a better man. Instructed so deeply in the realities of sorrow, Admetos is at last made worthy to receive the blessed realities of joy with the words,
When I betray her, though she is no more, May I die.
The regeneration of Admetos is accomplished. How much in all this exposition is derived from the play, how much is added to it, may be left for the consideration of the reader who will compare the original with the transcript.
If the character of Admetos is somewhat lowered by Browning beneath the conception of the Greek dramatist, to allow room for its subsequent elevation, the conception of Herakles is certainly heightened. We shall not say that Balaustion is the speaker and that Herakles is somewhat of a woman’s hero. Browning himself fully enters into Balaustion’s enthusiasm. And the presence of the strong, joyous helper of men is in truth an inspiring one. The great voice that goes before him is itself a _Sursum corda!_–a challenge and a summons to whatever manliness is in us. And the best of it is that sauntering the pavement or crossing the ferry we may happen to encounter this face of Herakles:
Out of this face emerge banners and horses–O superb! I see what is coming; I see the high pioneer-caps–I see the slaves of runners clearing the way, I hear victorious drums.
This face is a life-boat.
For Walt Whitman too had seen Brother Jonathan Herakles, and indeed the face of the strong and tender wound-dresser was itself as the face of a calmer Herakles to many about to die. The speeches of the demigod in Browning’s transcript require an abundant commentary, but it is the commentary of an irrepressible joy, an outbreak of enthusiasm which will not be controlled. The glorious Gargantuan creature, in the best sense Rabelaisian, is uplifted by Browning into a very saint of joyous effort; no pallid ascetic, indeed, beating his breast with the stone, but a Christian saint of Luther’s school, while at the same time a somewhat over-boisterous benevolent Paynim giant:
Gladness be with thee, Helper of our world! I think this is the authentic sign and sea! Of Godship, that it ever waxes glad,
And more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts Into a rage to suffer for mankind,
And recommence at sorrow.
Something of the Herakles ideal appears again and again in other poems of Browning. His Breton sailor, Herve Riel, has more than a touch of the Heraclean frankness of gaiety in arduous effort. His Ivan Ivanovitch wields the axe and abolishes a life with the Heraclean joy in righteousness. And in the last of Browning’s poems, not without a pathetically over-boisterous effort and strain, there is the suggestion of an ideal conception of himself as a Herakles-Browning; the old man tries at least to send his great voice before him.
The new Admetos, new Alkestis, imagined by Balaustion at the close of the poem, are wedded lovers who, like the married in Pompilia’s dream of heaven, “know themselves into one.” For them the severance of death has become an impossible thing; and therefore no place is left for Herakles in this treatment of the story. It expresses Browning’s highest conception of the union of soul with soul:
Therewith her whole soul entered into his, He looked the look back, and Alkestis died–
died only to be rejected by Hades, as still living, and with a more potent life, in her husband’s heart and will. Yet the mortal cloud is round these mortals still; they cannot see things as the gods see. And, for all their hopes and endeavours, the earth which they would renew and make as heaven, remains the old incredulous, unconverted earth,–“Such is the envy Gods still bear mankind.” And in such an earth, if not for them, assuredly for others, Herakles may find great deeds to do.
Balaustion has the unique distinction of being heroine throughout two of Browning’s poems; and of both we may say that the genius of Euripides is the hero. _Aristophanes’ Apology_ is written from first to last with unflagging energy; the translation of the “Herakles” which it includes is a masculine and masterly effort to transport the whole sense and spirit of the original into English verse, and the rendering of the choral passages into lyric form gives it an advantage over the transcript of the “Alkestis.” Perhaps not a little of the self-defence of Aristophanes and his statement of the case against Euripides could have been put as well or better in a critical essay in prose; but the method of Browning enables him to mingle, in a dramatic fashion, truth with sophistry, and to make both serve his purpose of presenting not only the case but the character of the great Greek maker of comedy. Balaustion is no longer the ardent girl of the days of her first adventure; she is a wife, with the dignity, the authority of womanhood and wifehood; she has known the life of Athens with its evil and its good; she has been the favoured friend of Euripides; she is capable of confronting his powerful rival in popular favour, and of awing him into sobriety and becoming manners; with an instinctive avoidance she recoils from whatever is gross or uncomely; yet she can do honour to the true light of intellect and genius even though it shines through earth-born vapours and amid base surroundings.
Athens, “the life and light of the whole world,” has sunk under the power of Sparta, and it can be henceforth no home for Balaustion and her Euthukles. The bark that bears them is bounding Rhodesward, and the verse has in it the leap and race of the prow. Balaustion, stricken at heart, yet feels that this tragedy of Athens brings the tragic katharsis; the justice of the gods is visible in it; and above man’s wickedness and folly she reaches to “yon blue liberality of heaven.” It seems as if the spirit which might have saved Athens is that of the loins girt and the lamp lit which was embodied in the strenuous devotion of Euripides to the highest things; and the spirit which has brought Athens to its ruin is that expressed with a splendid power through the work of Aristophanes. But Aristophanes shall plead for himself and leave nothing unsaid that can serve to vindicate him as a poet and even as a moralist Thus only can truth in the end stand clear, assured of its supremacy over falsehood and over half-truth.
Nothing that Browning has written is more vividly imagined than the encounter of Balaustion with Aristophanes and his crew of revellers on the night when the tidings of the death of Euripides reached Athens; it rouses and controls the feelings with the tumult of life and the sanctity of death, while also imposing itself on the eye as a brilliant and a solemn picture. The revellers scatter before the presence of Balaustion, and she and the great traducer of Euripides stand face to face. Nowhere else has Browning presented this conception of the man of vast disorderly genius, who sees and approves the better way and splendidly follows the worse:
Such domineering deity
Hephaistos might have carved to cut the brine For his gay brother’s prow, imbrue that path Which, purpling, recognised the conqueror.
It is as if male force, with the lust of the eye, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life behind it, were met and held in check by the finer feminine force resting for its support upon the divine laws. But in truth Aristophanes is half on the side of Balaustion and of Euripides; he must, indeed, make his stand; he is not one to falter or quail; and yet when the sudden cloud falls upon his face he knows that it is his part to make the worse appear the better cause, knowing this all the more because the justice of Balaustion’s regard perceives and recognises his higher self. Suddenly the Tuphon, “madding the brine with wrath or monstrous sport,” is transformed into something like what the child saw once from the Rhodian sea-coast (the old romantic poet in Browning is here young once more):
All at once, large-looming from his wave, Out leaned, chin hand-propped, pensive on the ledge, A sea-worn face, sad as mortality,
Divine with yearning after fellowship. He rose but breast-high. So much god she saw; So much she sees now, and does reverence.
But in a moment the sea-god is again the sea-monster, with “tail-splash, frisk of fin”; the majestic Aristophanes relapses into the most wonderful of mockers.
No passage in the poem is quite so impressive as this through its strangeness in beauty. But the entry of Sophocles–“an old pale-swathed majesty,”–at the supper which followed the performance of the play, is another of those passages to find which _in situ_ is a sufficient reward for reading many laborious pages that might almost as well have been thrown into an imaginary conversation in prose:
Then the grey brow sank low, and Sophokles Re-swathed him, sweeping doorward: mutely passed ‘Twixt rows as mute.
The critical study of comedy, its origin, its development, its function, its decline, is written with admirable vigour, but the case of Aristophanes can be read elsewhere. It is interesting, however, to note the argument in support of the thesis that comedy points really to ideals of humanity which are beyond human attainment; that its mockery of man’s infirmities implies a conception of our nature which in truth is extra-human; while tragedy on the contrary accepts man as he is, in his veritable weakness and veritable strength, and wrings its pity and its terror out of these. It is Aristophanes who thus vindicates Euripides before the revellers who have assembled in his own honour, and they accept what seems to them a paradox as his finest stroke of irony. But he has indeed after the solemn withdrawal of Sophocles looked for a moment through life and death, and seen in his hour of highest success his depth of failure. For him, in this testing-time of life, art has been the means of probation; he has squandered the gifts bestowed upon him, which should have been concentrated in the special task to which he was summoned. He should have known–he did in fact know–that the art which “makes grave” is higher than that which “makes grin”; his own peculiar duty was to advance his art one step beyond his predecessors; to create a drama which should bring into harmony the virtue of tragedy and the virtue of comedy; to discover the poetry which
Makes wise, not grave,–and glad,
Not grinning: whereby laughter joins with tears.
Instead of making this advance he had retrograded; and it remained for a poet of a far-off future in the far-off Kassiterides–the Tin Isle which has Stratford at its heart–to accomplish the task on which Aristophanes would not adventure. One way a brilliant success was certain for Aristophanes; the other and better way failure was possible; and he declined to make the venture of faith. It is with this sense of self-condemnation upon him that he essays his own defence, and it is against this sense of self-condemnation more than against the genius and the methods of Euripides that he struggles. When towards the close of the poem he takes in hand the psalterion, and chants in splendid strains the story of Thamuris, who aspired and failed, as he himself will never do, the reader is almost won over to his side. Browning, who felt the heights and depths of the lyric genius of Aristophanes, would seem to have resolved that in this song of “Thamuris marching,” moving in ecstasy amid the glories of an autumn morning, he would dramatically justify his conception of the poet; and never in his youth did Browning sing with a finer rapture of spirit. But reading what follows, the record of the subjugation of Athens, when the Athenian people accept the ruin of their defences as if it were but a fragment of Aristophanic comedy, we perceive that this song, which breaks off with an uproar of laughter, is the condemnation as well as the glory of the singer.
The translation of _Agamemnon_, the preface to which is dated “October 1st, 1877,” was undertaken at the request or command of Carlyle. The argument of the preface fails to justify Browning’s method. A translation “literal at every cost save that of absolute violence to our language” may be highly desirable; it is commonly called a “crib”; and a crib contrived by one who is not only a scholar but a man of genius will now and again yield a word or a phrase of felicitous precision. But that a translation “literal at every cost” should be put into verse is a wrong both to the original and to the poetry of the language to which the original is transferred; it assumes a poetic garb which in assuming it rends to tatters. A translation into verse implies that a certain beauty of form is part of the writer’s aim; it implies that a poem is to be reproduced as a poem, and not as that bastard product of learned ill judgment–a glorified crib; and a glorified crib is necessarily a bad crib. Mrs Orr, who tells us that Browning refused to regard even the first of Greek writers as models of literary style, had no doubt that the translation of the _Agamemnon_ was partly made for the pleasure of exposing the false claims made on their behalf. Such a supposition does not agree well with Browning’s own Preface; but if he had desired to prove that the _Agamemnon_ can be so rendered as to be barely readable, he has been singularly successful. From first to last in the genius of Browning there was an element, showing itself from time to time, of strange perversity.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 103: Was this a “baffled visit,” as described by Mr Henry James in his “Life of Story” (ii. 197), when the hostess was absent, and the guests housed in an inn?]
[Footnote 104: Letter quoted by Mrs Orr, p. 288.]
[Footnote 105: The attitude is reproduced in a photograph from which a woodcut is given in Mme. Blanc’s article “A French Friend of Browning.”]
[Footnote 106: “Records of Tennyson, Ruskin and Browning,” by Annie Ritchie, pp. 291, 292.]
[Footnote 107: “A Bibliography of the Writings of Robert Browning,” by T.J. Wise, pp. 157, 158.]
[Footnote 108: _Aristophanes’ Apology_ is connected with these poems by its character as a casuistical self-defence of the chief speaker.]
[Footnote 109: North’s “Plutarch,” 1579, p. 599.]
[Footnote 110: “Les Deux Masques,” ii. 281.]
[Footnote 111: A comment of Paul de Saint-Victor on the silence of the recovered Alkestis deserves to be quoted: “Hercule apprend a Admete qu’il lui est interdit d’entendre sa voix avant qu’elle soit purifiee de sa consecration aux Divinites infernales. J’aime mieux voir dans cette reserve un scrupule religieux du poete laissant a la morte sa dignite d’Ombre. Alceste a ete nitiee aux profonds mysteres de la mort; elle a vu l’invisible, elle a entendu l’ineffable; toute parole sortie de ses levres serait une divulgation sacrilege. Ce silence mysterieux la spiritualise et la rattache par un dernier lien au monde eternel.”]
Chapter XIV
Problem and Narrative Poems
_Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_, which appeared in December 1871, four months after the publication of _Balaustions Adventure_, was written by Browning during a visit to friends in Scotland. His interest in modern politics was considerable, but in general it remained remote from his work as a poet. He professed himself a liberal, but he was a liberal who because he was such, claimed the right of independent judgment. He had rejoiced in the enfranchisement of Italy. During the American Civil War he was strongly on the side of the North, as letters to Story, written when his private grief lay heavy upon him, abundantly show. He was at one time a friend of the movement in favour of granting the parliamentary suffrage to women, but late in life his opinion on this question altered. He was as decidedly opposed to the proposals for a separate or subordinate Parliament for Ireland as were his friends Carlyle and Tennyson and Matthew Arnold. After the introduction of the Home Rule Bill he could not bring himself, though requested by a friend, to write words which would have expressed or implied esteem for the statesman who had made that most inopportune experiment in opportunism[112] and whose talents he admired. Yet for a certain kind of opportunism–that which conserves rather than destroys–Browning thought that much might fairly be said. To say this with a special reference to the fallen Emperor of France he wrote his _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_.
Browning’s instinctive sympathies are not with the “Saviour of Society,” who maintains for temporary reasons a tottering edifice. He naturally applauds the man who builds on sure foundations, or the man who in order to reach those foundations boldly removes the accumulated lumber of the past. But there are times when perhaps the choice lies only between conservation of what is imperfect and the attempt to erect an airy fabric which has no basis upon the solid earth; and Browning on the whole preferred a veritable _civitas hominum_, however remote from the ideal, to a sham _civitas Dei_ or a real Cloudcuckootown. “It is true, that what is settled by custom, though it be not good, yet at least it is fit; and those things, which have long gone together, are as it were confederate within themselves; whereas new things piece not so well; but though they help by their utility, yet they trouble by their inconformity.” These words, of one whose worldly wisdom was more profoundly studied than ever Browning’s was, might stand as a motto for the poem. But the pregnant sentence of Bacon which follows these words should be added–“All this is true if time stood still.” Browning’s pleading is not a merely ingenious defence of the untenable, either with reference to the general thesis or its application to the French Empire. He did not, like his wife, think of the Emperor as if he were a paladin of modern romance; but he honestly believed that he had for a time done genuine service–though not the highest–to France and to the world. “My opinion of the solid good rendered years ago,” he wrote in September 1863 to Story, “is unchanged. The subsequent deference to the clerical party in France and support of brigandage is poor work; but it surely is doing little harm to the general good.” And to Miss Blagden after the publication of his poem: “I thought badly of him at the beginning of his career, _et pour cause_; better afterward, on the strength of the promises he made, and gave indications of intending to redeem. I think him very weak in the last miserable year.” It seemed to Browning a case in which a veritable _apologia_ was admissible in the interests of truth and justice, and by placing this _apologia_ in the mouth of the Emperor himself certain sophistries were also legitimate that might help to give the whole the dramatic character which the purposes of poetry, as the exposition of a complex human character, required.
The misfortune was that in making choice of such a subject Browning condemned himself to write with his left hand, to fight with one arm pinioned, to exhibit the case on behalf of the “Saviour of Society” with his brain rather than with brain and heart acting together. He was to demonstrate that in the scale of spiritual colours there is a respectable place for drab. This may be undertaken with skill and vigour, but hardly with enthusiastic pleasure. _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_ is an interesting intellectual exercise, and if this constitutes a poem, a poem it is; but the theme is fitter for a prose discussion. Browning’s intellectual ability became a snare by which the poet within him was entrapped. The music that he makes here is the music of Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha:
So your fugue broadens and thickens, Greatens and deepens and lengthens,
Till one exclaims–“But where’s music, the dickens!”
The mysterious Sphinx who expounds his riddle and dissertates on himself in an imaginary Leicester Square says many things that deserve to be considered; but they are addressed to our understanding in the first instance, and only in a secondary and indirect way reach our feelings and our imagination. The interest of the poem is virtually exhausted in a single reading; to a true work of art we return again and again for renewed delight. We return to _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_ as to a valuable store-house of arguments or practical considerations in defence of a conservative opportunism; but if we have once appropriated these, we do not need the book. There is a spirit of conservation, like that of Edmund Burke, which has in it a wise enthusiasm, we might almost say a wise mysticism. Browning’s Prince is not a conservator possessed by this enthusiasm. Something almost pathetic may be felt in his sense that the work allotted to him is work of mere temporary and transitory utility. He has no high inspirations such as support the men who change the face of the world. The Divine Ruler who has given him his special faculties, who has enjoined upon him his special tasks, holds no further communication with him. But he will do the work of a mere man in a man’s strength, such as it is; he cannot make new things; he can use the thing he finds; he can for a term of years “do the best with the least change possible”; he can turn to good account what is already half-made; and so, he believes, he can, in a sense, co-operate with God. So long as he was an irresponsible dreamer, a mere voice in the air, it was permitted him to indulge in glorious dreams, to utter shining words. Now that his feet are on the earth, now that his thoughts convert themselves into deeds, he must accept the limitations of earth. The idealists may put forth this programme and that; his business is not with them but with the present needs of the humble mass of his people–“men that have wives and women that have babes,” whose first demand is bread; by intelligence and sympathy he will effect “equal sustainment everywhere” throughout society; and when the man of genius who is to alter the world arises, such a man most of all will approve the work of his predecessor, who left him no mere “shine and shade” on which to operate, but the good hard substance of common human life.
All this is admirably put, and it is interesting to find that Browning, who had rejoiced with Herakles doing great deeds and purging the world of monsters, could also honour a poor provisional Atlas whose task of sustaining a poor imperfect globe upon his shoulders is less brilliant but not perhaps less useful. Nor would it be just to overlook the fact that in three or four pages the poet asserts himself as more than the prudent casuist. The splendid image of society as a temple from which winds the long procession of powers and beauties has in it something of the fine mysticism of Edmund Burke.[113] The record of the Prince’s early and irresponsible aspirations for a free Italy–
Ay, still my fragments wander, music-fraught, Sighs of the soul, mine once, mine now, and mine For ever!–
with what immediately follows, would have satisfied the ardent spirit of Mrs Browning.[114] And the characterisation of the genius of the French nation, whose lust for war and the glory of war Browning censures as “the dry-rot of the race,” rises brilliantly out of its somewhat gray surroundings:–
The people here,
Earth presses to her heart, nor owns a pride Above her pride i’ the race all flame and air And aspiration to the boundless Great, The incommensurably Beautiful–
Whose very faulterings groundward come of flight Urged by a pinion all too passionate
For heaven and what it holds of gloom and glow: Bravest of thinkers, bravest of the brave Doers, exalt in Science, rapturous
In Art, the–more than all–magnetic race To fascinate their fellows, mould mankind.
It is a passage conceived in the same spirit as the great chaunt “O Star of France!” written, at the same date, and with a recognition of both the virtues and the shames of France, by the American poet of Democracy. To these memorable fragments from _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_ one other may be added–that towards the close of the poem which applies the tradition of the succession by murder of the priesthood at the shrine of the Clitumnian god to the succession of men of genius in the priesthood of the world–“The new power slays the old, but handsomely.”
In _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_ there is nothing enigmatical. “It is just what I imagine the man might, if he pleased, say for himself,” so Browning wrote to Miss Blagden soon after the publication of the volume. Many persons, however, have supposed that in _Fifine at the Fair_ (1872) a riddle rather than a poem was given to the world by the perversity of the writer. When she comes to speak of this work Browning’s biographer Mrs Orr is half-apologetic; it is for her “a piece of perplexing cynicism.” The origin of the poem was twofold. The external suggestion came from the fact that during one of his visits to Pornic, Browning had seen the original of his Fifine, and she lived in his memory as a subject of intellectual curiosity and imaginative interest. The internal suggestion, as Mrs Orr hints, lay in a certain mood of resentment against himself arising from the fact that the encroachments of the world seemed to estrange in some degree a part of his complex being from entire fidelity to his own past. The world, in fact, seemed to be playing with Browning the part of a Fifine. If this were so, it would be characteristic of Browning that he should face round upon the world and come to an explanation with his adversary. But this could not in a printed volume be done in his own person; he was not one to take the public into his confidence. The discussion should be removed as far as possible from his own circumstances and even his own feelings. It should be a dramatic debate on the subject of fidelity and infidelity, on the bearings of the apparent to the true, on the relation of reality in this our mortal life to illusion. As he studied the subject it assumed new significances and opened up wider issues. An actual Elvire and an actual Fifine may be the starting points, but by-and-by Elvire shall stand for all that is permanent and substantial in thought and feeling, Fifine for all that is transitory and illusive. The question of conjugal fidelity is as much the subject of _Fifine at the Fair_ as the virtue of tar-water is the subject of Berkeley’s _Siris_. The poem is in fact Browning’s _Siris_–a chain of thoughts and feelings, reaching with no break in the chain, from a humble basis to the heights of speculation.
But before all else _Fifine at the Fair_ is a poem. Of all the longer poems which followed _The Ring and the Book_ it is the most sustained and the most diversified in imaginative power. To point out passages of peculiar beauty, passages vivid in feeling, original in thought, would here be out of place; for the brilliance and vigour are unflagging, and what we have to complain of is the lack of some passages of repose. The joy in freedom–freedom accepting some hidden law–of these poor losels and truants from convention, who stroll it and stage it, the gypsy figure of Fifine in page-costume, the procession of imagined beauties–Helen, Cleopatra, the Saint of Pornic Church–the half-emerging, half-undelivered statue by Michelagnolo, the praise of music as nearer to the soul than words, sunset at Saint-Marie, the play of the body in the sea at noontide (with all that it typifies), woman as the rillet leaping to the sea, woman as the dolphin that upbears Orion, the Venetian carnival, which is the carnival of human life, darkness fallen upon the plains, and through the darkness the Druidic stones gleaming–all these are essentially parts of the texture of the poem, yet each has a lustre or a shimmer or grave splendour of its own.
It is strange that any reader should have supposed either the Prologue or the Epilogue to be uttered by the imaginary speaker of the poem. Both shadow forth the personal feelings of Browning; the prologue tells of the gladness he still found both in the world of imagination and the world of reality, over which hovers the spirit that had once been so near his own, the spirit that is near him still, yet moving on a different plane, perhaps wondering at or pitying this life of his, which yet he accepts with cheer and will turn to the best account; the epilogue veils behind its grim humour the desolate feeling that came upon him again and again as a householder in this house of life, for behind the happiness which he strenuously maintained, there lay a great desolation. But the last word of the epilogue–“Love is all and Death is nought” is a word of sustainment wrung out of sorrow. These poems have surely in them no “perplexing cynicism,” nor has the poem enclosed between them, when it is seen aright. Browning’s idea in the poem he declared in reply to a question of Dr Furnivall, “was to show merely how a Don Juan might justify himself, partly by truth, somewhat by sophistry.” No more unhappy misnomer than this “Don Juan” could have been devised for the curious, ingenious, learned experimenter in life, no man of pleasure, in the vulgar sense of the word, but a deliberate explorer of thoughts and things, who argues out his case with so much fine casuistry and often with the justest conceptions of human character and conduct. If we could discover a dividing line between his truth and his sophistry, we might discover also that the poem is no exceptional work of Browning, for which an apology is required, but of a piece with his other writings and in harmony with the body of thought and feeling expressed through them. Now it is certain that as Browning advanced in years he more and more distrusted the results of the intellect in its speculative research; he relied more and more upon the knowledge that comes through or is embodied in love. Love by its very nature implies a relation; what is felt is real for us. But the intellect, which aspires to know things as they are, forever lands us in illusions–illusions needful for our education, and therefore far from unprofitable, to be forever replaced by fresh illusions; and the only truth we thus attain is the conviction that truth there assuredly is, that we must forever reach after it, and must forever grasp its shadow. Theologies, philosophies, scientific theories–these change like the shifting and shredding clouds before our eyes, and are forever succeeded by clouds of another shape and hue. But the knowledge involved in love is veritable and is verified at least for us who love. While in his practice he grew more scientific in research for truth, and less artistic in his desire for beauty, such was the doctrine which Browning upheld.
The speaker in _Fifine at the Fair_ is far more a seeker for knowledge than he is a lover. And he has learnt, and learnt aright, that by illusions the intellect is thrown forward towards what may relatively be termed the truth; through shadows it advances upon reality. When he argues that philosophies and theologies are the fizgigs of the brain, its Fifines the false which lead us onward to Elvire the true, he expresses an idea which Browning has repeatedly expressed in _Ferishtah’s Fancies_ and which, certainly, was an idea he had made his own. And if a man approaches the other sex primarily with a view to knowledge, with a view to confirm and to extend his own self-consciousness and to acquire experience of the strength and the weakness of womanhood, it is true that he will be instructed more widely, if not more deeply, by Elvire supplemented by Fifine than by Elvire alone. The sophistry of the speaker in Browning’s poem consists chiefly in a juggle between knowledge and love, and in asserting as true of love what Browning held to be, in the profoundest sense, true of knowledge. The poet desires, as Butler in his “Analogy” desired, to take lower ground than his own; but the curious student of man and woman, of love and knowledge–imagination aiding his intellect–is compelled, amid his sophistical jugglings, to work out his problems upon Browning’s own lines, and he becomes a witness to Browning’s own conclusions. Saul, before the poem closes, is also among the prophets. For him, as for Browning, “God and the soul stand sure.” He sees, as Browning sees, man reaching upward through illusions–religious theories, philosophical systems, scientific hypotheses, artistic methods, scholarly attainments–to the Divine. The Pornic fair has become the Venice carnival, and this has grown to the vision of man’s life, in which the wanton and coquette named a philosophy or a theology has replaced the gipsy in tricot. The speaker misapplies to love and the truths obtained by love Browning’s doctrine concerning knowledge. And yet, even so, he is forced to confess, however inconsistent his action may be with his belief, that the permanent–which is the Divine–can be reached through a single, central point of human love, but not through any vain attempt to manufacture an infinite by piecing together a multitude of detached points:
His problem posed aright
Was–“From a given point evolve the infinite!” Not–“Spend thyself in space, endeavouring to joint Together, and so make infinite, point and point: Fix into one Elvire a Fair-ful of Fifines!”
If he continues his experiments, they are experiments of the senses or of the intellect, which he knows can bring no profit to the heart: “Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee, thou wicked servant.” He will undoubtedly–let this be frankly acknowledged–grow in a certain kind of knowledge, and as certainly he will dwindle in the higher knowledge that comes through love. The poem is neither enigmatical nor cynical, but in entire accord with Browning’s own deepest convictions and highest feelings.[115]
Although in his later writings Browning rendered ever more and more homage to the illuminating power of the affections, his methods unfortunately became, as has been said, more and more scientific, or–shall we say?–pseudo-scientific. Art jealously selects its subjects, those which possess in a high degree spiritual or material beauty, or that more complete beauty which unites the two. Science accepts any subject which promises to yield its appropriate truth. Browning, probing after psychological truth, became too indifferent to the truth of beauty. Or shall we say that his vision of beauty became enlarged, so that in laying bare by dissection the anatomy of any poor corpse, he found an artistic joy in studying the enlacements of veins and nerves? To say this is perhaps to cheat oneself with words. His own defence would, doubtless, have been a development of two lines which occur near the close of _Red Cotton Night-Cap Country_:
Love bids touch truth, endure truth, and embrace Truth, though, embracing truth, love crush itself.
And he would have pleaded that art, which he styles
The love of loving, rage
Of knowing, seeing, feeling the absolute truth of things For truth’s sake, whole and sole,
may “crush itself” for sake of the truth which is its end and aim. But the greatest masters have not sought for beauty merely or mainly in the dissection of ugliness, nor did they find their rejoicing in artistic suicide for the sake of psychological discovery. To Browning such a repulsive story as that of _Red Cotton Night-Cap Country_ served now as well as one which in earlier days would have attracted him by its grandeur or its grace. Here was a fine morbid growth, an exemplary moral wen, the enormous product of two kinds of corruption–sensuality and superstition, and what could be a more fortunate field for exploration with aid of the scalpel? The incidents of the poem were historical and were recent. Antoine Mellerio, the sometime jeweller of Paris, had flung himself from his belvedere in 1870; the suit, which raised the question of his sanity at the date when his will had been signed, was closed in 1872; the scene of his death was close to Browning’s place of summer sojourn, Saint-Aubin. The subject lay close to Browning’s hand. It was an excellent subject for a short story of the kind that gets the name of realistic. It was an unfortunate subject for a long poem. But the botanist who desires to study vegetable physiology does not require a lily or a rose. Browning who viewed things from the ethical as well as the psychological standpoint was attracted to the story partly because it was, he thought, a story with a moral. He did not merely wish to examine as a spiritual chemist the action of Castilian blood upon a French brain, to watch and make a report upon the behaviour of inherited faith when brought into contact with acquired scepticism–the scepticism induced by the sensual temperament of the boulevards; he did not merely wish to exhibit the difficulties and dangers of a life divided against itself. His purpose was also to rebuke that romantic sentimentalism which would preserve the picturesque lumber of ruined faiths and discredited opinions, that have done their work, and remain only as sources of danger to persons who are weak of brain and dim of sight. Granted the conditions, it was, Browning maintains, an act of entire sanity on the part of his sorry hero, Monsieur Leonce Miranda, to fling himself into mid air, to put his faith to the final test, and trust to our Blessed Lady, the bespangled and bejewelled Ravissante, to bear him in safety through the air. But the conditions were deplorable; and those who declined to assist in carting away the rubbish of medievalism are responsible for Leonce Miranda’s bloody night-cap.
The moral is just, and the story bears it well. Yet Browning’s own conviction that man’s highest and clearest faith is no more than a shadow of the unattainable truth may for a moment give us pause. An iconoclast, even such an iconoclast as Voltaire, is ordinarily a man of unqualified faith in the conclusions of the intellect. If our best conceptions of things divine be but a kind of parable, why quarrel with the parables accepted by other minds than our own? The answer is twofold. First Browning was not a sceptic with respect to the truths attained through love, and he held that mankind had already attained through love truths that condemned the religion of self-torture and terrified propitiations, which led Leonce Miranda to reduce his right hand and his left to carbonised stumps and dragged him kneeling along the country roads to manifest his devotion to the image of the Virgin. Secondly he held that our education through intellectual illusions is a progressive education, and that to seek to live in an obsolete illusion is treason against humanity. Therefore his exhortation is justified by his logic:
Quick conclude
Removal, time effects so tardily, Of what is plain obstruction; rubbish cleared, Let partial-ruin stand while ruin may, And serve world’s use, since use is manifold.
The tower which once served as a belfry may possibly be still of use to some Father Secchi to “tick Venus off in transit”; only never bring bell again to the partial-ruin,
To damage him aloft, brain us below, When new vibrations bury both in brick.
For which sane word, if not for all the pages of his poem, we may feel gratefully towards the writer. It is the word of Browning the moralist. The study of the double-minded hero belongs to Browning the psychologist. The admirable portrait of Clara, the successful adventuress, harlot and favoured daughter of the Church, is the chief gift received through this poem from Browning the artist. She is a very admirable specimen of her kind–the _mamestra brassicae_ species of caterpillar, and having with beautiful aplomb outmanoeuvred and flouted the rapacious cousinry, Clara is seen at the last, under the protection of Holy Church, still quietly devouring her Miranda leaf–such is the irony of nature, and the merit of a perfect digestive apparatus.
The second narrative poem of this period, _The Inn Album_ (1875), is in truth a short series of dramatic scenes, placed in a narrative frame-work. It is as concentrated as _Red Cotton Night-Cap Country_ is diffuse; and the unities of time and place assist the tragic concentration. A recast of _The Inn Album_ might indeed have appeared as a drama on the Elizabethan stage side by side with such a brief masterpiece, piteous and terrible, as “A Yorkshire Tragedy”; it moves with a like appalling rapidity towards the climax and the catastrophe. The incident of the attempted barter of a discarded mistress to clear off the score of a gambling debt is derived from the scandalous chronicle of English nineteenth century society.[116] Browning’s tale of crime was styled on its appearance by a distinguished critic of Elizabethan drama the story of a “penny dreadful.” He was right; but he should have added that some of the most impressive and elevated pieces of our dramatic literature have had sources of no greater dignity. The story of the “penny dreadful” is here rehandled and becomes a tragedy of which the material part is only a translation into external deed of a tragedy of the soul. The _dramatis personae_, as refashioned from the crude fact and the central passions of the poem, were such as would naturally call forth what was characteristic in Browning’s genius. A martyr of love, a traitor to love, an avenger of love,–these are the central figures. The girlish innocence of the cousin is needed only as a ray of morning sunlight to relieve the eye that is strained and pained by the darkness and the pallor of the faces of the exponents of passion. And a like effect is produced by the glimpses of landscape, rich in the English qualities of cultured gladness and repose, which Browning so seldom presented, but which are perfectly rendered here:
The wooded watered country, hill and dale And steel-bright thread of stream, a-smoke with mist, A-sparkle with May morning, diamond drift O’ the sun-touched dew.
We must feel that life goes on with leisurely happiness outside the little room that isolates its tragic occupants; the smoke from fires of turf and wood is in the air; cottagers are at their morning cookery. After all the poet of the inn album was well inspired in his eloquent address:–“Hail, calm acclivity, salubrious spot!” and only certain incidents, which time will soon efface, have touched the salutation with irony.
In this poem Browning reverts to his earlier method of clearly and simply dividing the evil from the good. We are not embarrassed by the mingling of truth with sophistry; our instinctive sympathies are not held in check, but are on the contrary reinforced by the undisguised sympathies of the writer. We are no more in doubt where wrong and where justice lie than if Count Gismond were confronting Count Gauthier. The avenger, indeed, is no champion of romance; he is only a young English snob, a little slow of brain, a little unrefined in manner, a “clumsy giant handsome creature,” who for a year has tried to acquire under an accomplished tutor the lore of cynical worldliness, and has not succeeded, for he is manly and honest, and has the gentleness of strength; “for ability, all’s in the rough yet.” Of his education the best part is that he has once loved and been thwarted in his love. And now in a careless-earnest regard for his cousin his need is that of occupation for his big, idle boy’s heart; he wants something to do, someone also to serve. Browning wishes to show the passion of righteousness, which suddenly flames forth and abolishes an evil thing as springing from no peculiar knightly virtue but from mere honest human nature. The huge boy, somewhat crude, somewhat awkward, with a moral temper still unclarified, has enough of our good, common humanity in him to hold no parley with utter wickedness, when once he fully apprehends its nature; therefore he springs upon it in one swift transport of rage and there and then makes an end of it. His big red hands are as much the instruments of divine justice as is the axe of Ivan Ivanovitch.
The traitor of the poem is “refinement every inch from brow to boot-heel”; and in this respect it cannot be said that Browning’s villain departs widely from the conventional, melodramatic villain of the stage. He has perhaps like the stage villain a little too much of that cheap knowingness, which is the theatrical badge of the complete man of the world, but which gentlemen in actual life do not ordinarily affect. There is here and elsewhere in Browning’s later poetry somewhat too free an indulgence in this cheap knowingness, as if with a nod and a wink he would inform us that he has a man of the world’s acquaintance with the shady side of life; and this is not quite good art, nor is it quite good manners. The vulgarity of the man in the street may have a redeeming touch of animal spirits, if not of _naivete_, in it; the vulgarity of the man in the club, “refinement every inch” is beyond redemption. The exhibition of Browning’s traitor as having slipped lower and lower down the slopes of baseness because he has been false to his one experience of veritable love may remind us also of the melodramatic stage villain; but the tragic and pathetic motives of melodrama, its demonstrative heroisms, its stage generosities, its striking attitudes, are really fictions founded upon fact, and the facts which give some credit to the stage fictions remain for the true creator of tragedy to discover and interpret aright. The melodramatic is often the truth falsely or feebly handled; the same truth handled aright may become tragic. There is much in Shakespeare’s plays which if treated by an inferior artist would at once sink from tragedy to melodrama. Browning escapes from melodrama but not to such a safe position that we can quite forget its neighbourhood. When the traitor of this poem is withdrawn–as was Guido–
Into that sad obscure sequestered state Where God unmakes but to remake the soul He else made first in vain,
there will be found in him that he knew the worth of love, that he saw the horror of the void in which he lived, and that for a moment–though too late–a sudden wave of not ignoble passion overwhelmed his baser self, even if only to let the fangs of the treacherous rock reappear in their starkness and cruelty.
The lady, again, with her superb statue-like beauty, her low wide brow
Oppressed by sweeps of hair
Darker and darker as they coil and swathe The crowned corpse-wanness whence the eyes burn black,
her passion, her despair, her recovery through chilling to ice the heart within her, her reawakening to life, and the pain of that return to sensation, her measureless scorn of her betrayer, her exposure of his last fraud, and her self-sought death–the lady is dangerously near the melodramatic heroine, and yet she is not a melodramatic but a tragic figure. Far more than Pompilia, who knew the joy of motherhood, is she the martyr of love. And yet, before she quits life, in her protective care of that somewhat formidable, somewhat ungainly baby, the huge boy, her champion, hero and snob, she finds a comforting maternal instinct at work:
Did you love me once?
Then take love’s last and best return! I think Womanliness means only motherhood;
All love begins and ends there,–roams enough, But, having run the circle, rests at home.
Her husband, good man, will not suffer acutely for her loss; he will be true to duty, and continue to dose his flock with the comfortable dogma of hell-fire, in which not one of them believes.
The _Pacchiarotto_ volume of 1876 was the first collection of miscellaneous poetry put forth by Browning since the appearance, twelve years previously, of _Dramatis Personae_[117] There is, of course, throughout the whole the presence of a vigorous personality; we can in an occasional mood tumble and toss even in the rough verse of _Pacchiarotto_, as we do on a choppy sea on which the sun is a-shine, and which invigorates while it–not always agreeably–bobs our head, and dashes down our throat. But vigour alone does not produce poetry, and it may easily run into a kind of good-humoured effrontery. The speciality of the volume as compared with its predecessors is that it contains not a little running comment by Browning upon himself and his own work, together with a jocular-savage reply to his unfriendly critics. There is a little too much in all this of the robustious Herakles sending his great voice before him. An author ought to be aware of the fact that no pledge to admire him and his writings has been administered to every one who enters the world, and that as sure as he attracts, so surely must he repel. In the _Epilogue_ the poet informs his readers that those who expect from him, or from any poet, strong wine of verse which is also sweet demand the impossible. Sweet the strong wine can become only after it has long lain mellowing in the cask. The experience of Browning’s readers contradicted the assertion. Some who drank the good wines of 1855 and of 1864 in the year of the vintages found that they were strong and needed no keeping to be sweet. Wine-tasters must make distinctions, and the quality of the yield of 1876 does not entitle it to be remembered as an extraordinary year.
The poem from which the volume was named tells in verse, “timed by raps of the knuckle,” how the painter Pacchiarotto must needs become a world-reformer, or at least a city-reformer in his distressed Siena, with no good results for his city and with disastrous results for himself. He learns by unsavoury experience his lesson, to hold on by the paint-brush and maul-stick, and do his own work, accepting the mingled evil and good of life in a spirit of strenuous–not indolent–_laissez-faire_, playing, as energetically as a human being can, his own part, and leaving others to play theirs, assured that for all and each this life is the trial-time and test of eternity, the rehearsal for the performance in a future world, and “Things rarely go smooth at Rehearsal.” Browning’s joy in difficult rhyming as seen in this serio-grotesque jingle was great; some readers may be permitted to wish that many of his rhymes were not merely difficult but impossible. At a dinner given by Sir Leslie Stephen he met successfully the challenge to produce a rhyme for “rhinoceros,” and for Tennyson’s diversion he delivered himself of an impromptu in which rhymes were found for “Ecclefechan” and “Craigenputtock.” But in rhyming ingenuity Browning is inferior to the author of “Hudibras,” in a rhymer’s elegant effrontery he is inferior to the author of “Don Juan.” Browning’s good-humoured effrontery in his rhymes expects too much good-humour from his reader, who may be amiable enough to accept rough and ready successes, but cannot often be delighted by brilliant gymnastics of sound and sense. In like manner it asks for a particularly well-disposed reader to appreciate the wit of Browning’s retort upon his critics: “You are chimney-sweeps,” he sings out in his great voice, “listen! I have invented several insulting nicknames for you. Decamp! or my housemaid will fling the slops in your faces.” This may appear to some persons to be genial and clever. It certainly has none of the exquisite malignity of Pope’s poisoned rapier. Perhaps it is a little dull; perhaps it is a little outrageous.
The Browning who masks as Shakespeare in _At the Mermaid_ disclaims the ambition of heading a poetical faction, condemns the Byronic _Welt-schmerz_, and announces his resolvedly cheerful acceptance of life. Elsewhere he assures his readers that though his work is theirs his life is his own; he will not unlock his heart in sonnets. Such is the drift of the verses entitled _House_; a peep through the window is permitted, but “please you, no foot over threshold of mine.” This was not Shakespeare’s wiser way; if he hid himself behind his work, it was with the openness and with the taciturnity of Nature. He did not stand in the window of his “House” declaring that he was not to be seen; he did not pull up and draw down the blind to make it appear that he was at home and not at home. In the poem _Shop_ Browning continues his assurances that he is no Eglamor to whom verse is “a temple-worship vague and vast.” Verse-making is his trade as jewel-setting and jewel-selling is the goldsmith’s–but do you suppose that the poet lives no life of his own?–how and where it is not for you to guess, only be certain it is far away from his counter and his till. These poems were needless confidences to the public that no confidences would be vouchsafed to them.
But the volume of 1876 contains better work than these pieces of self-assertion. The two love-lyrics _Natural Magic_ and _Magical Nature_ have each of them a surprise of beauty; the one tells of the fairy-tale of love, the other of its inward glow and gem-like stability. _Bifurcation_ is characteristic of the writer; the woman who chooses duty rather than love may have done well, but she has chosen the easier way and perhaps has evaded the probation of life; the man who chooses passion rather than duty has slipped and stumbled, but his was the harder course and perhaps the better. Which of the two was sinner? which was saint? To be impeccable may be the most damning of offences. In _St Martin’s Summer_ the eerie presence of ghosts of dead loves, haunting a love that has grown upon the graves of the past, is a check upon passion, which by a sudden turn at the close triumphs in a victory that is defeat. _Fears and Scruples_ is a confession of the trials of theistic faith in a world from which God seems to be an absentee. What had been supposed to be letters from our friend are proved forgeries; what we called his loving actions are the accumulated results of the natural law of heredity. Yet even if theism had to be abandoned, it would have borne fruit:
All my days I’ll go the softlier, sadlier For that dream’s sake! How forget the thrill Through and through me as I thought “The gladlier Lives my friend because I love him still?”
And the friend will value love all the more which persists through the obstacles of partial ignorance.[118] The blank verse monologue _A Forgiveness_, Browning’s “Spanish Tragedy,” is a romance of passion, subtle in its psychology, tragic in its action. Out of its darkness gleams especially one resplendent passage–the description of those weapons of Eastern workmanship–
Horror coquetting with voluptuousness–
one of which is the instrument chosen by the husband’s hatred, now replacing his contempt, to confer on his wife a death that is voluptuous. The grim-grotesque incident from the history of the Jews in Italy related in _Filippo Baldinucci_ recalls the comedy and the pathos of _Holy Cross Day_, to which it is in every respect inferior. The Jew of the centuries of Christian persecution is for Browning’s imagination a being half-sublime and half-grotesque, and wholly human. _Cenciaja_, a note in verse connected with Shelley’s _Cenci_, would be excellent as a note in prose appended to the tragedy, explaining, as it does, why the Pope, inclining to pardon Beatrice, was turned aside from his purposes of mercy; it rather loses than gains in value by having been thrown into verse. To recover our loyalty to Browning as a poet, which this volume sometimes puts to the test, we might well reserve _Numpholeptos_ for the close. The pure and disempassioned in womanly form is brought face to face with the passionate and sullied lover, to whom her charm is a tyranny; she is no warm sun but a white moon rising above this lost Endymion, who never slumbers but goes forth on hopeless quests at the bidding of his mistress, and wins for all his reward the “sad, slow, silver smile,” which is now pity, now disdain, and never love. The subjugating power of chaste and beautiful superiority to passion over this mere mortal devotee is absolute and inexorable. Is the nymph an abstraction and incarnation of something that may be found in womanhood? Is she an embodiment of the Ideal, which sends out many questers, and pities and disdains them when they return soiled and defeated? Soft and sweet as she appears, she is _La belle Dame sans merci_, and her worshipper is as desperately lost as the knight-at-arms of Keats’s poem.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 112: See Morley’s “Life of Gladstone,” vol. iii. p. 417.]
[Footnote 113: Pages 46, 47 of the first edition.]
[Footnote 114: Pages 58-60.]
[Footnote 115: It may here be noted that Dante Rossetti in a morbid mood supposed that certain passages of _Fifine_ were directed against himself; and so ceased his friendship with Browning.]
[Footnote 116: Fanny Kemble also derived from the story of Lord De Ros the subject of her “English Tragedy.”]
[Footnote 117: Some sentences in what follows are taken from a notice of the volume which I wrote on its appearance for _The Academy_.]
[Footnote 118: See Browning’s letter to Mr Kingsland in “Robert Browning” by W. G. Kingsland (1890), pp. 32, 33.]
Chapter XV
Solitude and Society
The volume which consists of _La Saisiaz_ and _The Two Poets of Croisic_ (1878) brings the work of this decade to a close.[119] _La Saisiaz_, the record of thoughts that were awakened during that solitary clamber to the summit of Saleve after the death of Miss Egerton-Smith, is not an elegy, but it remains with us as a memorial of friendship. In reading it we discern the tall white figure of the “stranger lady,” leaning through the terrace wreaths of leaf and bloom, or pacing that low grass-path which she had loved and called her own. It serves Browning’s purpose in the poem that she should have been one of those persons who in this world have not manifested all that lies within them. Does she still exist, or is she now no more than the thing which lies in the little enclosure at Collonge? The poem after its solemn and impressive prelude becomes the record of an hour’s debate of the writer with himself–a debate which has a definite aim and is brought to a definite issue. In conducting that debate on immortality, Browning is neither Christian nor anti-Christian. The Christian creed involves a question of history; he cannot here admit historical considerations; he will see the matter out as he is an individual soul, on the grounds suggested by his individual consciousness and his personal knowledge. It may be that any result he arrives at is a result for himself alone.
But why conduct an argument in verse? Is not prose a fitter medium for such a discussion? The answer is that the poem is more than an argument; it is the record in verse of an experience, the story of a pregnant and passionate hour, during which passion quickened the intellect; and the head, while resisting all illusions of the heart, was roused to that resistance by the heart itself. Such an hour is full of events; it may be almost epic in its plenitude of action; but the events are ideas. The frame and setting of the discussion also are more than frame and setting; they co-operate with the thoughts; they form part of the experience. The poet is alone among the mountains, with dawn and sunset for associates, Jura thrilled to gold at sunrise, Saleve in its evening rose-bloom, Mont-Blanc which strikes greatness small; or at night he is beneath the luminous worlds which
One by one came lamping–chiefly that prepotency of Mars.
While he climbs towards the summit he is aware of “Earth’s most exquisite disclosures, heaven’s own God in evidence”; he stands face to face with Nature–“rather with Infinitude.” All through his mountain ascent the vigour of life is aroused within him; and, as he returns–there is her grave.
The idea of a future life, for which this earthly life serves as an education and a test, is so central with Browning, so largely influences all his feelings and penetrates all his art, that it is worth while to attend to the course of his argument and the nature of his conclusion. He puts the naked question to himself–What does death mean? Is it total extinction? Is it a passage into life?–without any vagueness, without any flattering metaphor; he is prepared to accept or endure any answer if only it be the truth. Whether his discussion leads to a trustworthy result or not, the sincerity and the energy of his endeavour after truth serve to banish all supine and half-hearted moods. The debate, of which his poem is a report, falls into two parts: first, a statement of facts; secondly, a series of conjectures–conjectures and no more–rising from the basis of facts that are ascertained. To put the question, “Shall I survive death?” is to assume that I exist and that something other than myself exists which causes me now to live and presently to die. The nature of this power outside myself I do not know; we may for convenience call it “God.” Beyond these two facts–myself and a power environing me–nothing is known with certainty which has any bearing on the matter in dispute. I am like a floating rush borne onward by a stream; whither borne the rush cannot tell; but rush and stream are facts that cannot be questioned.
Knowing that I exist–Browning goes on–I know what for me is pain and what is pleasure. And, however it may be with others, for my own part I can pronounce upon the relation of joy to sorrow in this my life on earth:–
I must say–or choke in silence—-“Howsoever came my fate, Sorrow did and joy did nowise–life well weighed–preponderate.”
If this failure be ordained by necessity, I shall bear it as best I can; but, if this life be all, nothing shall force me to say that life has proceeded from a cause supreme in goodness, wisdom, and power. What I find here is goodness always intermixed with evil; wisdom which means an advance from error to the confession of ignorance; power that is insufficient to adapt a human being to his surroundings even in the degree in which a worm is fitted to the leaf on which it feeds.
Browning tacitly rejects the idea that the world is the work of some blind, force; and undoubtedly our reason, which endeavours to reduce all things in nature to rational conceptions, demands that we should conceive the world as rational rather than as some wild work of chance. Upon one hypothesis, and upon one alone, can the life of man upon this globe appear the result of intelligence:
I have lived then, done and suffered, loved and hated, learnt and taught This–there is no reconciling wisdom with a world distraught, Goodness with triumphant evil, power with failure in the aim, If (to my own sense, remember! though none other feel the same!) If you bar me from assuming earth to be a pupil’s place, And life, time,–with all their chances, changes,–just probation–space, Mine for me.
Grant this hypothesis, and all changes from irrational to rational, from evil to good, from pain to a strenuous joy:–
Only grant a second life, I acquiesce In this present life as failure, count misfortune’s worst assaults Triumph, not defeat, assured that loss so much the more exalts Gain about to be.
Thus out of defeat springs victory; never are we so near to knowledge as when we are checked at the bounds of ignorance; beauty is felt through its opposite; good is known through evil; truth shows its potency when it is confronted by falsehood;
While for love–Oh how but, losing love, does whoso loves succeed By the death-pang to the birth-throe–learning what is love indeed?
Yet at best this idea of a future life remains a conjecture, an hypothesis, a hope, which gives a key to the mysteries of our troubled earthly state. Browning proceeds to argue that such a hope is all that we can expect or ought to desire. The absolute assurance of a future life and of rewards and punishments consequent on our deeds in the present world would defeat the very end for which, according to the hypothesis, we are placed here; it would be fatal to the purpose of our present life considered as a state of probation. What such a state of probation requires is precisely what we have–hope; no less than this and no more. Does our heaven overcloud because we lack certainty? No:
Hope the arrowy, just as constant, comes to pierce its gloom, compelled By a power and by a purpose which, if no one else beheld, I behold in life, so–hope!
Such is the conclusion with Browning of the whole matter. It is in entire accordance with a letter which he wrote two years previously to a lady who supposed herself to be dying, and who had thanked him for help derived from his poems: “All the help I can offer, in my poor degree, is the assurance that I see ever _more_ reason to hold by the same hope–and that by no means in ignorance of what has been advanced to the contrary…. God bless you, sustain you, and receive you.” To Dr Moncure Conway, who had lost a son, Browning wrote: “If I, who cannot, would restore your son, He who can, will.” And Mr Rudolph Lehmann records his words in conversation: “I have doubted and denied it [a future life], and I fear have even printed my doubts; but now I am as deeply convinced that there is something after death. If you ask me what, I no more know it than my dog knows who and what I am. He knows that I am there and that is enough for him.”[120]
Browning’s confession in _La Saisias_ that the sorrow of his life outweighed its joy is not inconsistent with his habitual cheerfulness of manner. Such estimates as this are little to be trusted. One great shock of pain may stand for ever aloof from all other experiences; the pleasant sensations of many days pass from our memory. We cannot tell. But that Browning supposed himself able to tell is in itself worthy of note. In _The Two Poets of Croisic_, which was written in London immediately after _La Saisiaz_, and which, though of little intrinsic importance, shows that Browning was capable of a certain grace in verse that is light, he pleads that the power of victoriously dealing with pain and transforming it into strength may be taken as the test of a poet’s greatness:
Yoke Hatred, Crime, Remorse,
Despair: but ever ‘mid the whirling fear, Let, through the tumult, break the poet’s face Radiant, assured his wild slaves win the race.
This is good counsel for art; but not wholly wise counsel for life. Sorrow, indeed, is not wronged by a cheerfulness cultivated and strenuously maintained; but gladness does suffer a certain wrong. Sunshine comes and goes; the attempt to substitute any unrelieved light for sunshine is somewhat of a failure at the best. Shadows and brightness pursuing each other according to the course of nature make more for genuine happiness than does any stream of moral electricity worked from a dynamo of the will. It is pleasanter to encounter a breeze that sinks and swells, that lingers and hastens, than to face a vigorous and sustained gale even of a tonic quality. Browning’s unfailing cheer and cordiality of manner were admirable; they were in part spontaneous, in part an acceptance of duty, in part a mode of self-protection; they were only less excellent than the varying moods of a simple and beautiful nature.
When _La Saisiaz_ appeared Browning was sixty-six years old. He lived for more than eleven years longer, during which period he published six volumes of verse, showing new powers as a writer of brief poetic narrative and as a teacher through parables; but he produced no single work of prolonged and sustained effort–which perhaps was well. His physical vigour continued for long unabated. He still enjoyed the various pleasures and excitements of the London season; but it is noted by Mrs Orr that after the death of Miss Egerton-Smith he “almost mechanically renounced all the musical entertainments to which she had so regularly accompanied him.” His daily habits were of the utmost regularity, varying hardly at all from week to week. He was averse, says Mrs Orr, “to every hought of change,” and chose rather to adapt himself to external conditions than to enter on the effort of altering them; “what he had done once he was wont, for that very reason, to continue doing.” A few days after Browning’s death a journalist obtained from a photographer, Mr Grove, who had formerly been for seven years in Browning’s service, the particulars as to how an ordinary day during the London season went by at Warwick Crescent. Browning rose without fail at seven, enjoyed a plate of whatever fruit–strawberries, grapes, oranges–were in season; read, generally some piece of foreign literature, for an hour in his bedroom; then bathed; breakfasted–a light meal of twenty minutes; sat by the fire and read his _Times_ and _Daily News_ till ten; from ten to one wrote in his study or meditated with head resting on his hand. To write a letter was the reverse of a pleasure to him, yet he was diligent in replying to a multitude of correspondents. His lunch, at one, was of the lightest kind, usually no more than a pudding. Visits, private views of picture exhibitions and the like followed until half-past five. At seven he dined, preferring Carlowitz or claret to other wines, and drinking little of any. But on many days the dinner was not at home; once during three successive weeks he dined out without the omission of a day. He returned home seldom at a later hour than half-past twelve; and at seven next morning the round began again. During his elder years, says Mr Grove, he took little interest in politics. He was not often a church-goer, but discussed religious matters earnestly with his clerical friends. He loved not only animals but flowers, and when once a Virginia creeper entered the study window at Warwick Crescent, it was not expelled but trained inside the room. To his servants he was a considerate friend rather than a master.
So far Mr Grove as reported in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ (Dec 16, 1889).
Many persons have attempted to describe Browning as he appeared in society; there is a consensus of opinion as to the energy and cordiality of his way of social converse; but it is singular that, though some records of his out-pourings as a talker exist, very little is on record that possesses permanent value. Perhaps the best word that can be quoted is that remembered by Sir James Paget–Browning’s recommendation of Bach’s “Crucifixus–et sepultus–et resurrexit” as a cure for want of belief. He did not fling such pointed shafts as those of Johnson which still hang and almost quiver where they struck. His energy did not gather itself up into sentences but flowed–and sometimes foamed–in a tide. Cordial as he was, he could be also vehemently intolerant, and sometimes perhaps where his acquaintance with the subject of his discourse was not sufficient to warrant a decided opinion.[121] He appeared, says his biographer, “more widely sympathetic in his works than in his life”; with no moral selfishness he was, adds Mrs Orr, intellectually self-centred; and unquestionably the statement is correct. He could suffer fools, but not always gladly. Speaking of earlier days in Italy, T.A. Trollope observes that, while he was never rough or discourteous even to the most exasperating fool, “the men used to be rather afraid of Browning.” His cordiality was not insincere; but it belonged to his outer, not his inner self. With the exception of Milsand, he appears to have admitted no man to his heart, though he gave a portion of his intellect to many. His friends, in the more intimate sense of the word, were women, towards whom his feeling was that of comradeship and fraternal affection without over-much condescension or any specially chivalric sentiment. When early in their acquaintance Miss Barrett promised Browning that he would find her “an honest man on the whole,” she understood her correspondent, who valued a good comrade of the other sex, and had at the same time a vivid sense of the fact that such a comrade was not so unfortunate as to be really a man.
Let witnesses be cited and each give his fragment of evidence. Mr W.J. Stillman, an excellent observer, was specially impressed in his intercourse with Browning, by the mental health and robustness of a nature sound to the core; “an almost unlimited intellectual vitality, and an individuality which nothing could infringe on, but which a singular sensitiveness towards others prevented from ever wounding even the most morbid sensibility; a strong man armed in the completest defensive armour, but with no aggressiveness.”[122] A writer in the first volume of _The New Review_, described Browning as a talker in general society so faithfully that it is impossible to improve on what he has said: “It may safely be alleged,” he writes, “that no one meeting Mr Browning for the first time, and unfurnished with a clue, would guess his vocation. He might be a diplomatist, a statesman, a discoverer, or a man of science. But, whatever were his calling, we should feel that it must be essentially practical…. His conversation corresponds to his appearance. It abounds in vigour, in fire, in vivacity. Yet all the time it is entirely free from mystery, vagueness, or technical jargon. It is the crisp, emphatic and powerful discourse of a man of the world, who is incomparably better informed than the mass of his congeners. Mr Browning is the readiest, the blithest, and the most forcible of talkers. Like the Monsignore in _Lothair_ he can ‘sparkle with anecdote and blaze with repartee,’ and when he deals in criticism the edge of his sword is mercilessly whetted against pretension and vanity. The inflection of his voice, the flash of his eye, the pose of his head, the action of his hand, all lend their special emphasis to the condemnation.” The mental quality which most impressed Mr W.M. Rossetti in his communications with Browning was, he says, “celerity “–“whatever he had to consider or speak about, he disposed of in the most forthright style.” His method was of the greatest directness; “every touch told, every nail was hit on the head.” He was not a sustained, continuous speaker, nor exactly a brilliant one; “but he said something pleasant and pointed on whatever turned up; … one felt his mind to be extraordinarily rich, while his facility, accessibility, and _bonhomie_, softened but did not by any means disguise the sense of his power.”[123] Browning’s discourse with a single person who was a favoured acquaintance was, Mr Gosse declares, “a very much finer phenomenon than when a group surrounded him.” Then “his talk assumed the volume and the tumult of a cascade. His voice rose to a shout, sank to a whisper, ran up and down the gamut of conversational melody…. In his own study or drawing-room, what he loved was to capture the visitor in a low arm-chair’s “sofa-lap of leather”, and from a most unfair vantage of height to tyrannize, to walk round the victim, in front, behind, on this side, on that, weaving magic circles, now with gesticulating arms thrown high, now grovelling on the floor to find some reference in a folio, talking all the while, a redundant turmoil of thoughts, fancies, and reminiscences flowing from those generous lips.”[124]
Mr Henry James in his “Life of Story”[125] is less pictorial, but he is characteristically subtle in his rendering of the facts. He brings us back, however, to Browning as seen in society. He speaks of the Italian as a comparatively idyllic period which seemed to be “built out,” though this was not really the case, by the brilliant London period. It was, he says, as if Browning had divided his personal consciousness into two independent compartments. The man of the world “walked abroad, showed himself, talked, right resonantly, abounded, multiplied his connections, did his duty.” The poet–an inscrutable personage–“sat at home and knew, as well he might, in what quarters of _that_ sphere to look for suitable company.” “The poet and the ‘member of society’ were, in a word, dissociated in him as they can rarely elsewhere have been…. The wall that built out the idyll (as we call it for convenience) of which memory and imagination were virtually composed for him, stood there behind him solidly enough, but subject to his privilege of living almost equally on both sides of it. It contained an invisible door, through which, working the lock at will, he could softly pass, and of which he kept the golden key–carrying about the same with him even in the pocket of his dinner waistcoat, yet even in his most splendid expansions showing it, happy man, to none.” Tennyson, said an acquaintance of Miss Anna Swanwick, “hides himself behind his laurels, Browning behind the man of the world.” She declares that her experience was more fortunate; that she seldom heard Browning speak without feeling that she was listening to the poet, and that on more than one occasion he spoke to her of his wife[126]. But many witnesses confirm the impression which is so happily put into words by Mr Henry James. The “member of society” protected the privacy of the poet. The questions remain whether the poet did not suffer from such protection; whether, beside the superfluous forces which might be advantageously disposed of at the drawing-board or in thumping wet clay, some of the forces proper to the poet were not drawn away and dissipated by the incessant demands of Society; whether while a sufficient fund of energy for the double life was present with Browning, the peculiar energy of the poet did not undergo a certain deterioration. The doctrine of the superiority of the heart to the intellect is more and more preached in Browning’s poetry; but the doctrine itself is an act of the intellect. The poet need not perhaps insist on the doctrine if he creates–as Browning did in earlier years–beautiful things which commend themselves, without a preacher, to our love.
In the autumn of 1878, after seventeen years of absence from Italy, Browning was recaptured by its charm, and henceforward to the close of his life Venice and the Venetian district became his accustomed place of summer refreshment and repose. For a time, with his sister as his companion, he paused at a hotel near the summit of the Spluegen, enjoyed the mountain air, walked vigorously, and wrote, with great rapidity, says Mrs Orr, his poem of Russia, _Ivan Ivanovitch_. When a boy he had read in Bunyan’s “Life and Death of Mr Badman” the story of “Old Tod”, and with this still vivid in his memory, he added to his Russian tale the highly unidyllic “idyl” of English life, _Ned Bratts_. It was thus that subjects for poems suddenly presented themselves to Browning, often rising up as it were spontaneously out of the remote past. “There comes up unexpectedly,” he wrote in a letter to a friend, “some subject for poetry, which has been dormant, and apparently dead, for perhaps dozens of years. A month since I wrote a poem of some two hundred lines [‘Donald’] about a story I heard more than forty years ago, and never dreamed of trying to repeat, wondering how it had so long escaped me; and so it has been with my best things.”[127] Before the close of September the travellers were in a rough but pleasant albergo at Asolo, which Browning had not seen since his first Italian journey more than forty years previously. “Such things,” he writes, “have begun and ended with me in the interval!” Changes had taken place in the little city; yet much seemed familiar and therefore the more dreamlike. The place had indeed haunted him in his dreams; he would find himself travelling with a friend, or some mysterious stranger, when suddenly the little town sparkling in the sunshine would rise before him. “Look! look there is Asolo,” he would cry, “do let us go there!” And always, after the way of dreams, his companions would declare it impossible and he would be hurried away.[128] From the time that he actually saw again the city that he loved this recurring dream was to come no more. He wandered through the well-known places, and seeking for an echo in the Rocca, the ruined fortress above the town, he found that it had not lost its tongue. A fortnight at Venice in a hotel where quiet and coolness were the chief attractions, prepared the way for many subsequent visits to what he afterwards called “the dearest place in the world.” Everything in Venice, says Mrs Bronson, charmed him: “He found grace and beauty in the _popolo_ whom he paints so well in the Goldoni sonnet. The poorest street children were pretty in his eyes. He would admire a carpenter or a painter, who chanced to be at work in the house, and say to me ‘See the fine poise of the head … those well-cut features. You might fancy that man in the crimson robe of a Senator as you see them in Tintoret’s canvas.'”
But these are reminiscences of later days. It was in 1880 that Browning made the acquaintance of his American friend Mrs Arthur Bronson, whose kind hospitalities added to the happiness of his visits to Asolo and to Venice, who received, as if it were a farewell gift, the dedication of his last volume, and who, not long before her death in 1901, published interesting articles on “Browning in Asolo” and “Browning in Venice” in _The Century Magazine_. The only years in which he did not revisit Venice were 1882, 1884 and 1886, and in each of these years his absence was occasioned by some unforeseen mis-adventure. In 1882 the floods were out, and he proceeded no farther than Verona. Could he have overcome the obstacles and reached Venice, he feared that he might have been incapable of enjoying it. For the first time in his life he was lamed by what he took for an attack of rheumatism, “caught,” he says, “just before leaving St Pierre de Chartreuse, through my stupid inadvertence in sitting with a window open at my back–reading the Iliad, all my excuse!–while clad in a thin summer suit, and snow on the hills and bitterness every where.”[129] In 1884 his sister’s illness at first forbade travel to so considerable a distance. The two companions were received by another American friend, Mrs Bloomfield Moore, at the Villa Berry, St Moritz, and when she was summoned across the Atlantic, at her request they continued to occupy her villa. The season was past; the place deserted; but the sun shone gloriously. “We have walked every day,” Browning wrote at the end of September, “morning and evening–afternoon I should say–two or three hours each excursion, the delicious mountain air surpassing any I was ever privileged to breathe. My sister is absolutely herself again, and something over: I was hardly in want of such doctoring.”[130] Two years later Miss Browning was ailing again, and they did not venture farther than Wales. At the Hand Hotel, Llangollen, they were at no great distance from Brintysilio, the summer residence of their friends Sir Theodore and Lady Martin–in earlier days the Lady Carlisle and Colombe of Browning’s plays.[131] Mrs Orr notices that Browning, Liberal as he declared himself, was now very favourably impressed by the services to society of the English country gentleman. “Talk of abolishing that class of men!” he exclaimed, “they are the salt of the earth!” She adds, as worthy of remark, that he attended regularly the afternoon Sunday service in the parish church at Llantysilio, where now a tablet of Lady Martin’s placing marks the spot. Churchgoing was not his practice in London; “but I do not think,” says Mrs Orr, “he ever failed in it at the Universities or in the country.” At Venice it was his custom to be present with his sister at the services of a Waldensian chapel, where “a certain eloquent pastor,” as Mrs Bronson describes him, was the preacher. A year before his death Browning in a letter to Lady Martin recalls the happy season in the Vale of Llangollen–“delightful weeks–each tipped with a sweet starry Sunday at the little church leading to the House Beautiful where we took our rest of an evening spent always memorably.”
[Illustration: THE PALAZZO GIUSTINIANI, VENICE.
_From a drawing by_ Miss N. ERICHSEN.]
Before passing on to Venice, where repose was mingled with excitement, Browning was accustomed to seek a renewal of physical energy, after the fatigues of London, in some place not too much haunted by the English tourist, where he could walk for hours in the clear mountain air. In 1881 and 1882 it was St Pierre de Chartreuse, from which he visited the Grande Chartreuse, and heard the midnight mass; in 1883 and 1885 it was Gressoney St Jean in the Val d’Aosta–the “delightful Gressoney” of the Prologue to _Ferishtah’s Fancies_, where “eggs, milk, cheese, fruit” sufficed “for gormandizing”; in 1888 it was the yet more beautiful Primiero, near Feltre. In the previous year he had, for the second time, stayed at St Moritz. These were seasons of abounding life. St Pierre was only “a wild little clump of cottages on a mountain amid loftier mountains,” with the roughest of little inns for its hotel; but its primitive arrangements suited Browning well and were bravely borne by his sister.[132] From Gressoney in September 1885 he wrote: “We are all but alone, the brief ‘season’ being over, and only a chance traveller turning up for a fortnight’s lodging. We take our walks in the old way; two and a half hours before breakfast, three after it, in the most beautiful country I know. Yesterday the three hours passed without our meeting a single man, woman, or child; one man only was discovered at a distance at the foot of a mountain we had climbed.”[133] All things pleased him; an August snowstorm at St Moritz was made amends for by “the magnificence of the mountain and its firs black against the universal white”; it served moreover as an illustration of a passage in the Iliad, the only book that accompanied him from England: “The days glide away uneventfully, _nearly_, and I breathe in the pleasant idleness at every pore. I have no few acquaintances here–nay, some old friends–but my intimates are the firs on the hillside, and the myriad butterflies all about it, every bright wing of them under the snow to-day, which ought not to have been for a fortnight yet.”[134] And from Primiero in 1888, when his strength had considerably declined, a letter tells of unabated pleasure; of mountains “which morning and evening, in turn, transmute literally to gold,” with at times a silver change; of the valley “one green luxuriance”; of the tiger-lilies in the garden above ten feet high, every bloom and every leaf faultless; and of the captive fox, “most engaging of little vixens,” who, to Browning’s great joy, broke her chain and escaped.[135] As each successive volume that he published seemed to him his best, so of his mountain places of abode the last always was the loveliest.
At Venice for a time the quiet Albergo dell’ Universo suited Browning and his sister well, but when Mrs Bronson pressed them to accept the use of a suite of rooms in the Palazzo Giustiniani Recanati and the kind offer was accepted, the gain was considerable; and the _Palazzo_ has historical associations dating from the fifteenth century which pleased Browning’s imagination. It was his habit to rise early, and after a light breakfast to visit the Public Gardens with his sister. He had many friends–Mrs Bronson is our informant–whose wants or wishes he bore in mind–the prisoned elephant, the baboon, the kangaroo, the marmosets, the pelicans, the ostrich; three times, with strict punctuality, he made his rounds, and then returned to his apartment. At noon appeared the second and more substantial breakfast, at which Italian dishes were preferred. Browning wrote passionately against the vivisection of animals, and strenuously declaimed against the decoration of a lady’s hat with the spoils of birds–
Clothed with murder of His best
Of harmless beings.
He praised God–for pleasure as he teaches us is praise–by heartily enjoying ortolans, “a dozen luscious lumps” provided by the cook of the Giustiniani-Recanati palace; to vary his own phrasing, he was
Fed with murder of His best
Of harmless beings,
and laughed, innocently enough, with his good sister over the delicious “mouthfuls for cardinals.”[136] As if the pleasure of the eye in beauty gained at a bird’s expense were more criminal than the gusto of the tongue in lusciousness, curbed by piquancy, gained at the expense of a dozen other birds! At three o’clock came the gondola, and it was often directed to the Lido. “I walk, even in wind and rain, for a couple of hours on Lido,” Browning wrote when nearly seventy, “and enjoy the break of sea on the strip of sand as much as Shelley did in those old days.”[137] And to another friend: “You don’t know how absolutely well I am after my walking, not on the mountains merely, but on the beloved Lido. Go there, if only to stand and be blown about by the sea wind.”[138] At one time he even talked of completing an unfinished villa on the Lido from which “the divine sunsets” could be seen, but the dream-villa faded after the manner of such dreams. Sunsets, however, and sunrises never faded from Browning’s brain. “I will not praise a cloud however bright,” says Wordsworth, although no one has praised them more ardently than he. From Pippa’s sunrise to the sunrises of mornings when his life drew towards its close, Browning lavished his praise upon the scenery of the sky. A passage quoted by Mrs Orr from a letter written a little more than a year before his death is steeped in colour; when _Pippa Passes_ becomes the prey of the annotating editor it will illuminate his page: “Every morning at six I see the sun rise…. My bedroom window commands a perfect view: the still, grey lagune, the few sea-gulls flying, the islet of S. Giorgio in deep shadow, and the clouds in a long purple rack, behind which a sort of spirit of rose burns up till presently all the rims are on fire with gold, and last of all the orb sends before it a long column of its own essence apparently: so my day begins.” The sea-gulls of which this extract speaks were, Mrs Bronson tells us, a special delight to Browning. On a day of gales “he would stand at the window and watch them as they sailed to and fro, a sure sign of heavy storms in the Adriatic.” To him, as he declared, they were even more interesting than the doves of St Mark.
Sometimes his walks, guided by Mrs Bronson’s daughter, “the best cicerone in the world,” he said, were through the narrowest by-streets of the city, where he rejoiced in the discovery, or what he supposed to be discovery, of some neglected stone of Venice. Occasionally he examined curiously the monuments of the churches. His American friend tells at length the story of a search in the Church of San Niccolo for the tomb of the chieftain Salinguerra of Browning’s own _Sordello_. At times he entered the bric-a-brac shops, and made a purchase of some piece of old furniture or tapestry. His rule “never to buy anything without knowing exactly what he wished to do with it” must have been interpreted liberally, for when about to move in June 1887 from Warwick Crescent to De Vere Gardens many treasures acquired in Italy were, Mrs Orr tells us, stowed away in the house which he was on the point of leaving. And the latest bibelot was always the most enchanting: “Like a child with a new toy,” says Mrs Bronson, “he would carry it himself (size and weight permitting) into the gondola, rejoice over his chance in finding it, and descant eloquently upon its intrinsic merits.” Thus, or with his son’s assistance, came to De Vere Gardens brass lamps that had hung in Venetian chapels, the silver Jewish “Sabbath lamp,” and the “four little heads”–the seasons–after which, Browning declared, he would not buy another thing for the house.[139] Returning from his walks on the Lido or wanderings through the little _calli_, he showed that unwise half-disdain, which an unenlightened masculine Herakles might have shown, for the blessedness of five o’clock tea. At dinner he was in his toilet what Mr Henry James calls the “member of society,” never the poet whose necktie is a dithyramb. Good sense was his habit if not his foible. And why should we deny ourselves here the pleasure of imagining Miss Browning at these pleasant ceremonies, as Mrs Bronson describes her, wearing “beautiful gowns of rich and sombre tints, and appearing each day in a different and most dainty French cap and quaint antique jewels”? If other guests were not present, sometimes a visit to the theatre followed. The Venetian comedies of Gallina especially pleased Browning; he went to his spacious box at the Goldoni evening after evening, and did not fail to express his thanks to his “brother dramatist” for the enjoyment he had received. In his _Toccata of Galuppi_ he had expressed the melancholy which underlies the transitory gaiety of eighteenth-century life in Venice; but he could also remember its innocent gladnesses without this sense of melancholy. When in 1883 the committee of the Goldoni monument asked Browning to contribute a poem to their Album he immediately complied with the request. It was “scribbled off,” according to Mrs Orr, while Professor Molmenti’s messenger was waiting; it was ready the day after the request reached him, says Mrs Bronson, and was probably “carefully thought out before he put pen to paper.” It catches, in the happiest temper, the spirit of Goldoni’s sunniest plays:
There throng the People: how they come and go, Lisp the soft language, flaunt the bright garb–see– On Piazza, Calle, under Portico
And over Bridge! Dear King of Comedy, Be honoured! Thou that didst love Venice so, Venice, and we who love her, all love thee!
The brightness and lightness of southern life soothed Browning’s northern strenuousness of mood. He would enumerate of a morning the crimes of “the wicked city” as revealed by the reports of the public press–a gondolier’s oars had been conveyed away, a piece of linen a-dry had corrupted the virtue of some lightfingered Autolycus of the canals![140] Yet all the while much of his heart remained with his native land. He could not be happy without his London daily paper; Mrs Orr tells us how deeply interested he was in the fortunes of the British expedition for the relief of General Gordon.
In 1885 Browning’s son for the first time since his childhood was in Italy. With Venice he was in his father’s phrase “simply infatuated.” For his son’s sake, but also with the thought of a place of retreat when perhaps years should bring with them feebleness of body, Browning entered into treaty with the owner, an Austrian and an absentee, for the purchase of the Manzoni Palazzo on the Grand Canal. He considered it the most beautiful house in Venice. Ruskin had described it in the “Stones of Venice” as “a perfect and very rich example of Byzantine Renaissance.” It wholly captured the imagination of Browning. He not only already possessed it in his dream, but was busy opening new windows to admit the morning sunshine, and throwing out balconies, while leaving undisturbed the rich facade with its medallions in coloured marble. The dream was never realised. The vendor, Marchese Montecucculi, hoping to secure a higher price, drew back. Browning was about to force him by legal proceedings to fulfil his bargain, when it was discovered that the walls were cracked and the foundations were untrustworthy. To his great mortification the whole scheme had to be abandoned. It was not until his son in 1888, the year after his marriage, acquired possession of the Palazzo Rezzonico–“a stately temple of the rococo” is Mr Henry James’s best word for it–that Browning ceased to think with regret of the lost Manzoni. At no time, however, did he design a voluntary abandonment of his life in England. When in full expectation of becoming the owner of the Palazzo Manzoni he wrote to Dr Furnivall: “Don’t think I mean to give up London till it warns me away; when the hospitalities and innumerable delights grow a burden…. Pen will have sunshine and beauty about him, and every help to profit by these, while I and my sister have secured a shelter when the fogs of life grow too troublesome.”
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 119: Some parts of what follows on _La Saisiaz_ have already appeared in print in a forgotten article of mine on that poem.]
[Footnote 120: “An Artist’s Reminiscences,” by R. Lehmann (1894), p. 231.]
[Footnote 121: Thus he declaimed to Robert Buchanan against Walt Whitman’s writings, with which, according to Buchanan, he had little acquaintance.]
[Footnote 122: “Autobiography of a Journalist,” ii. 210.]
[Footnote 123: From the first of three valuable articles by Mr Rossetti in _The Magazine of Art_ (1890) on “Portraits of Robert Browning.”]
[Footnote 124: Robert Browning, “Personalia,” by Edmund Gosse, pp. 81, 82.]
[Footnote 125: Vol. ii. pp. 88, 89.]
[Footnote 126: Anna Swanwick, “A Memoir by Mary L. Bruce,” pp. 130, 131. To Dr Furnivall he often spoke of Mrs Browning.]
[Footnote 127: From Mrs Bronson’s article in _The Century Magazine_, “Browning in Venice.”]
[Footnote 128: Related more fully in Mrs Bronson’s article “Browning in Asolo” in _The Century Magazine_.]
[Footnote 129: Mrs Bronson’s “Browning in Venice” in _The Century Magazine_.]
[Footnote 130: To Dr Furnivall, Sept. 28, 1884.]
[Footnote 131: Some notices of Browning in Wales occur in Sir T. Martin’s “Life of Lady Martin.”]
[Footnote 132: Letter to Dr Furnivall, August 29, 1881.]
[Footnote 133: To Dr Furnivall, Sept. 7, 1885.]
[Footnote 134: To Dr Furnivall, August 21, 1887.]
[Footnote 135: See for fuller details the letter in Mrs Orr’s _Life of Browning_, pp. 407, 408.]
[Footnote 136: So described by Mrs Bronson.]
[Footnote 137: To Dr Furnivall, Oct. 11, 1881.]
[Footnote 138: Quoted by Mrs Bronson.]
[Footnote 139: Mrs Orr, “Life of Browning,” p. 400.]
[Footnote 140: Mrs Bronson records this.]
Chapter XVI
Poet and Teacher in Old Age
During the last decade of his life Browning’s influence as a literary power was assured. The publication indeed of _The Ring and the Book_ in 1868 did much to establish his reputation with those readers who are not watchers for a new planet but revise their astronomical charts upon authority. He noted with satisfaction that fourteen hundred copies of _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_ were sold in five days, and says of _Balaustion’s Adventure_ “2500 in five months is a good sale for the likes of me.” The later volumes were not perhaps more popular, but they sent readers to the earlier poems, and successive volumes of Selections made these easily accessible. That published by Moxon in 1865, and dedicated in words of admiration and friendship to Tennyson, by no means equalled in value the earlier Selections made by John Forster. The volume of 1872–dedicated also to Tennyson–which has been frequently reprinted, was arranged upon a principle, the reference of which to the poems chosen is far from clear–“by simply stringing together certain pieces”; Browning wrote, “on the thread of an imaginary personality, I present them in succession, rather as the natural development of a particular experience than because I account them the most noteworthy portion of my work.” We can perceive that some poems of love are brought together, and some of art, and that the series closes with poems of religious thought or experience, but such an order is not strictly observed, and the “imaginary personality”–the thread–seems to be imaginary in the fullest sense of the word. Yet it is of interest to observe that something of a psychological-dramatic arrangement was at least designed. A second series of Selections followed in 1880. Browning was accepted by many admirers not only as a poet but as a prophet. “Tennyson and I seem now to be regarded as the two kings of Brentford,” he said laughingly in 1879.[141] The later-enthroned king was soon to have an interesting court. In 1881 The Browning Society, founded by Dr Furnivall–initiator of so much work that is invaluable to the student of our literature–and Miss E.H. Hickey, herself a poet, began its course. At first, according to Mrs Orr, Browning “treated the project as a joke,” but when once he understood it to be serious, “he did not oppose it.” He felt, however, that before the public he must stand aloof from its work: “as Wilkes was no Wilkeite,” he wrote to Edmund Yates, “I am quite other than a Browningite.” With a little nervousness as to the discretion which the Society might or might not show, he felt grateful for the interest in his writings demonstrated by persons many of whom had been unknown to him even by name. He was always ready to furnish Dr Furnivall with a note of facts or elucidation. His old admirers had made him somewhat too much of a peculiar and private possession. A propaganda of younger believers could not be unwelcome to one who had for so many years been commonly regarded as an obscure heretic–not even an heresiarch–of literature.
Other honours accompanied his old age. In 1884 he received the LL.D. of the University of Edinburgh, and again declined to be nominated for the Lord Rectorship of the University of St Andrews. Next year he accepted the Honorary Presidency of the Five Associated Societies of Edinburgh. In 1886 he was appointed Foreign Correspondent to the Royal Academy, a sinecure post rendered vacant by the death of Lord Houghton. Though so vigorous in talk, Browning could not make a public speech, or he shrank from such an effort; none of the honours which he accepted were such as to put him to this test. During many years he was President of the New Shakspere Society. His veneration for Shakespeare is expressed in a sonnet entitled _The Names_, written for the Book of the Show held in the Albert Hall, May 1884, on behalf of the Fulham Road Hospital for Women; it was not included in the edition of his works which he was superintending during the last two years of his life. Browning was not wholly uninterested in the attempts made to transfer the glory of the Shakespearian drama to Bacon; he agreed with Spedding that whatever else might be a matter of doubt, it was certain that the author of the “Essays” could not have been the author of the plays. On another question it is perhaps worth recording his opinion–he could see nothing of Shakespeare, he declared, in the tragedy of _Titus Andronicus_.
In 1879 appeared _Dramatic Idyls_ and in the following year _Dramatic Idyls, Second Series_. They differed in two respects from the volumes of miscellaneous poetry which Browning had previously published. Hitherto the contents of his collections of verse in the main fell into three groups–poems which were interpretations of the passion of love, poems which dealt with art and artists, poems which were inspired by the ideas and emotions of religion. Unless we regard _Ned Bratts_ as a poem of religious experience, we may say that these themes are wholly absent from the _Dramatic Idyls_. Secondly, the short story in verse for the first time becomes predominant, or rather excludes other forms, and the short story here is in general not romantic or fantastic, but what we understand by the word “realistic.” The outward body of the story is in several instances more built up by cumulative details than formerly, which gives it an air of solidity or massiveness, and is less expressed through a swift selection of things essential. And this may lead a reader to suppose that the story is more a narrative of external incidents than is actually the case. In truth, though the “corporal rind” of the narrative bulks upon our view, the poet remains essentially the psychologist. The narrative interest is not evenly distributed over the whole as it is in the works of such a writer as Chaucer, who loves narrative for its own sake. There is ordinarily a crisis, a culmination, a decisive and eventful invasion or outbreak of spiritual passion to which we are led up by all that precedes it. If the poem should be humorous, it works up to some humorous point, or surprise. The narrative is in fact a picture that hangs from a nail, and the nail here is some vivid moment of spiritual experience, or else some jest which also has its crisis. A question sometimes arises as to whether the central motive is sufficient to bear the elaborate apparatus; for the parts of the poem do not always justify themselves except by reference to their centre, in the case, for example, of _Doctor_—-, the thesis is that a bad wife is stronger than death; the jest culminates at the point where the Devil upon sight of his formidable spouse flies from the bed’s-head of one who is about to die, and thus allows his victim to escape the imminent death. The question, “Will the jest sustain a poem of such length?” is a fair one, and a good-natured reader will stretch a point and say that he has not after all been so ill amused, which he might also say of an Ingoldsby Legend; but even a good-natured reader will hardly return to _Doctor_ —- with pleasure. Chaucer with as thin a jest could have made an admirable poem, for the interest would have been distributed by his lightness of touch, by his descriptive power, by slyness, by geniality, by a changeful ripple of enjoyment over the entire piece. With Browning, when we have arrived at the apex of the jest, we are fatigued by the climb, and too much out of breath to be capable of laughter. In like manner few persons except the Browning enthusiast, who is not responsible for his fervour, will assert that either the jest or the frankly cynical moral of _Pietro of Abano_ compensates for the jolting in a springless waggon over a rough road and a long. We make the acquaintance of a magician who with knowledge uninspired by love has kicks and cuffs for his reward, and the acquaintance of an astute Greek, who, at least in his dream of life, imposed upon him by the art of magic, exploits the talents of his friend Pietro, and gains the prize of his astuteness, having learnt to rule men by the potent spell of “cleverness uncurbed by conscience.” The cynicism is only inverted morality, and implies that the writer is the reverse of cynical; but it lacks the attractive sub-acid flavour of a delicate cynicism, which insinuates its prophylactic virus into our veins, and the humour of the poem, ascending from stage to stage until we reach Pietro’s final failure, is cumbrous and mechanical.
The two series of _Dramatic Idyls_ included some conspicuous successes. The classical poems _Pheidippides_, _Echetlos_, _Pan and Luna_, idyls heroic and mythological, invite us by their beauty to return to them again and again. Browning’s sympathy with gallantry in action, with self-devotion to a worthy cause, was never more vividly rendered than in the first of these poems. The runner of Athens is a more graceful brother of the Breton sailor who saved a fleet for France; but the vision of majestical Pan in “the cool of a cleft” exalts our human heroism into relation with the divine benevolence, and the reward of release from labour is proportionally higher than a holiday with the “belle Aurore.” Victory and then domestic love is the human interpretation of Pan’s oracular promise; but the gifts of the gods are better than our hopes and it proves to be victory and death:
He flung down his shield,
Ran like fire once more: and the space ‘twixt the Fennel-field And Athens was stubble again, a field which a fire runs through, Till in he broke: “Rejoice, we conquer!” Like wine through clay, Joy in his blood bursting his heart, he died–the bliss!
The companion poem of Marathon, the story of the nameless clown, the mysterious holder of the ploughshare, is not less inspiring. The unknown champion, so plain in his heroic magnitude of mind, so brilliant as he flashes in the van, in the rear, is like the incarnated genius of the soil, which hides itself in the furrow and flashes into the harvest; and it is his glory to be obscured for ever by his deed–“the great deed ne’er grows small.” Browning’s development of the Vergilian myth–“si credere dignum est”–of Pan and Luna astonishes by its vehement sensuousness and its frank chastity; and while the beauty of the Girl-moon and the terror of her betrayal are realised with the utmost energy of imagination, we are made to feel that all which happens is the transaction of a significant dream or legend.
In contrast with these classical pieces, _Halbert and Hob_ reads like a fragment from some Scandinavian saga telling of the life of forlorn and monstrous creatures, cave-dwellers, who are less men than beasts. Yet father and son are indeed men; the remorse which checks the last outrage against paternity is the touch of the finger of God upon human hearts; and though old Halbert sits dead,
With an outburst blackening still the old bad fighting face,
and young Hob henceforth goes tottering, muttering, mumbling with a mindless docility, they are, like Browning’s men of the Paris morgue, only “apparent failures”; there was in them that spark of divine illumination which can never be wholly extinguished. Positive misdeeds, the presence of a wild crew of evil passions, do not suffice to make Browning’s faith or hope falter. It is the absence of human virtue which appals him; if the salt have lost its savour wherewith shall it be salted? This it is which condemns to a swift, and what the poem represents as a just, abolishment from earth the mother who in _Ivan Ivanovitch_ has given her children to the wolves, and has thereby proved the complete nullity of her womanhood. For her there is no possible redemption; she must cease to cumber the ground. Ivan acts merely as the instinctive doomsman of Nature or of God, and the old village Pope, who, as the veil of life grows thin, is feeling after the law above human law, justifies the wielder of the axe, which has been no instrument of vengeance but simply an exponent of the wholesome vitality of earth. The objection that carpenters and joiners, who assume the Heraklean task of purging the earth of monsters, must be prepared to undergo a period of confinement at the pleasure of the Czar in a Criminal Lunatic Asylum is highly sensible, and wholly inappropriate, belonging, as it does, to a plane of thought and feeling other than that in which the poem moves. But perhaps it is not a defect of feeling to fail in admiration of that admired final tableau in which the formidable carpenter is discovered building a toy Kremlin for his five children. We can take for granted that the excellent homicide, having done so simple a bit of the day’s work as that of decapitating a fellow-creature, proceeds tranquilly to other innocent pleasures and duties; we do not require the ostentatious theatrical group, with limelight effects on the Kremlin and the honey-coloured beard, displayed for our benefit just before the curtain is rung down.[142]
[Illustration: SPECIMEN OF BROWNING’S HANDWRITING.
_From a letter to D.S. CURTIS, Esq._]
_Martin Relph_ is a story of life-long remorse, self-condemnation and self-denunciation; there is something approaching the supernatural, and yet terribly real, in the figure of the strange old man with a beard as white as snow, standing, on a bright May day, in monumental grief, and exposing his ulcerated heart to the spectators who form for him a kind of posterity. One instant’s failure in the probation of life, one momentary syncope of his better nature long years ago, has condemned his whole after-existence to become a climbing of the purgatorial mount, with an agony of pain annually renewed at the season when the earth rejoices. Only a high-strung delicate spirit is capable of such a perennial passion of penitence. _Ned Bratts_ may be described as a companion, but a contrasted piece. It is a story of sudden conversion and of penitence taking an immediate and highly effective form. The humour of the poem, which is excellent of its kind, resembles more the humour of Rowlandson than that of Hogarth. The Bedford Court House on the sweltering Midsummer Day, the Puritan recusants, reeking of piety and the cow-house conventicle, the Judges at high jinks upon the bench–to whom, all in a muck-sweat and ablaze with the fervour of conversion, enter Black Ned, the stout publican, and big Tab, his slut of a wife,–these are drawn after the broad British style of humorous illustration, which combines a frank exaggeration of the characteristic lines with, at times, a certain grace in deformity. Here at least is downright belief in the invisible, here is genuine conviction driven home by the Spirit of God and the terror of hell-fire. Black Ned and the slut Tabby as yet may not seem the most suitable additions to the company of the blessed who move singing
In solemn troops and sweet societies;
but when a pair of lusty sinners desire nothing so much as to be hanged, and that forthwith, we may take it that they are resolved, as “Christmas” was, to quit the City of Destruction; and the saints above have learnt not to be fastidious as they bend over repentant rogues. Thanks to the grace of God and John Bunyan’s book, husband and wife triumphantly aspire to and attain the gallows; “they were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided.” A wise economy of spiritual force!–for while their effectual calling cannot be gainsaid, the final perseverance of these interesting converts, had they lingered on the pilgrims’ way, as Ned is painfully aware, might have been less of a certainty.
Browning’s method as a story-teller may be studied with special advantage in _Clive_. The circumstances under which the tale is related have to be caught at by the reader, which quickens his attention and keeps him on the alert; this device is, of course, not in itself difficult, but to employ it with success is an achievement requiring skill; it is a device proper to the dramatic or quasi-dramatic form; the speaker, who is by no means a Clive, has to betray something of his own character, and at the same time to set forth the character of the hero of his tale; the narrative must tend to a moment of culmination, a crisis; and that this should involve a paradox–Clive’s fear, in the present instance, being not that the antagonist’s pistol, presented at his head, should be discharged but rather that it should be remorsefully or contemptuously flung away–gives the poet an opportunity for some subtle or some passionate casuistry. The effect of the whole is that of a stream or a shock from an electric battery of mind, for which the story serves as a conductor. It is not a simple but a highly complex species of narrative. In _Muleykeh_, one of the most delightful of Browning’s later poems, uniting, as it does, the poetry of the rapture of swift motion with the poetry of high-hearted passion, the narrative leads up to a supreme moment, and this resolves itself through a paradox of the heart. Shall Hoseyn recover his stolen Pearl of a steed, but recover her dishonoured in the race, or abandon her to the captor with her glory untarnished? It is he himself who betrays himself to loss and grief, for to perfect love, pride in the supremacy of the beloved is more than possession; and thus as Clive’s fear was courage, as Ivan’s violation of law was obedience to law, so Hoseyn’s loss is Hoseyn’s gain. In each case Browning’s casuistry is not argumentative; it lies in an appeal to some passion or some intuition that is above our common levels of passion or of insight, and his power of uplifting his reader for even a moment into this higher mood is his special gift as a poet. We can return safely enough to the common ground, but we return with a possession which instructs the heart.
A mood of acquiescence, which does not displace the moods of aspiration and of combat but rather floats above them as an atmosphere, was growing familiar to Browning in these his elder years. He had sought for truth, and had now found all that earth was likely to yield him, of which not the least important part was a conviction that much of our supposed knowledge ends in a perception of our ignorance. He was now disposed to accept what seemed to be the providential order that truth and error should mingle in our earthly life, that truth should be served by illusion; he would not rearrange the disposition of things if he could. He was inclined to hold by the simple certainties of our present life