and to be content with these as provisional truths, or as temporary illusions which lead on towards the truth. In the _Pisgah Sights_ of the _Pacchiarotto_ volume he had imagined this mood of acquiescence as belonging to the hour of death. But old age in reality is an earlier stage in the process of dying, and with all his ardour and his energy, Browning was being detached from the contentions and from some of the hopes and aspirations of life. And because he was detached he could take the world to his heart, though in a different temper from that of youth or middle age; he could limit his view to things that are near, because their claim upon his passions had diminished while their claim upon his tenderness had increased. He could smile amiably, for to the mood of acquiescence a smile seems to be worth more than an argument. He could recall the thoughts of love, and reanimate them in his imagination, and could love love with the devotion of an old man to the most precious of the things that have been. Some of an old man’s jests may be found in _Jocoseria_, some of an old man’s imaginative passion in _Asolando_, and in both volumes, and still more clearly in _Ferishtah’s Fancies_ may be seen an old man’s spirit of acquiescence, or to use a catch-word of Matthew Arnold, the epoch of concentration which follows an epoch of expansion. But the embrace of earth and the things of earth is like the embrace, with a pathos in its ardour, which precedes a farewell. From the first he had recognised the danger on the one hand of settling down to browse contentedly in the paddock of our earthly life, and on the other hand the danger of ignoring our limitations, the danger of attempting to “thrust in earth eternity’s concerns.” In his earlier years he had chiefly feared the first of these two dangers, and even while pointing out, as in _Paracelsus_, the errors of the seeker for absolute knowledge or for absolute love, he had felt a certain sympathy with such glorious transgressors. He had valued more than any positive acquisitions of knowledge those “grasps of guess, which pull the more into the less.” Now such guesses, such hopes were as precious to him as ever, but he set more store than formerly by the certainties–certainties even if illusions–of the general heart of man. These are the forms of thought and feeling divinely imposed upon us; we cannot do better than to accept them; but we must accept them only as provisional, as part of our education on earth, as a needful rung of the ladder by which we may climb to higher things. And the faith which leads to such acquiescence also results in the acceptance of hopes as things not be struggled for but rested in as a substantial portion of the divine order of our lives. In autumn come for spirits rightly attuned these pellucid halcyon days of the Indian summer.
In _Jocoseria_, which appeared in Browning’s seventy-first year (1883), he shows nothing of his boisterous humour, but smiles at our human infirmities from the heights of experience. The prop of Israel, the much-enlightened master, “Eximious Jochanan Ben Sabbathai,” when his last hour is at hand has to confess that all his wisdom of life lies in his theoric; in practice he is still an infant; striving presumptuously in boyhood to live an angel, now that he comes to die he is hardly a man. And Solomon himself is no more than man; the truth-compelling ring extorts the confession that an itch of vanity still tickles and teazes him; the Queen of Sheba, seeker for wisdom and patroness of culture, after all likes wisdom best when its exponents are young men tall and proper, and prefers to the solution of the riddles of life by elderly monarchs one small kiss from a fool. Lilith in a moment of terror acknowledges that her dignified reserve was the cloak of passion, and Eve acknowledges that her profession of love was transferred to the wrong man; both ladies recover their self-possession and resume their make-believe decorums, and Adam, like a gallant gentleman, will not see through what is transparent. These are harmless jests at the ironies of life. Browning’s best gifts in this volume, that looks pale beside its predecessors, are one or two short lyrics of love, which continue the series of his latest lyrical poems, begun in the exquisite prologue to _La Saisiaz_ and the graceful epilogue to _The Two Poets of Croisic_, and continued in the songs of _Ferishtah’s Fancies_ and _Asolando_–not the least valuable part of the work of his elder years. His strength in this volume of 1883 is put into that protest of human righteousness against immoral conceptions of the Deity uttered by Ixion from his wheel of torture. Rather than obey an immoral supreme Power, as John Stuart Mill put it, “to Hell I will go”–and such is the cry of Browning’s victim of Zeus. He is aware that in his recognition of righteousness he is himself superior to the evil god who afflicts him; and as this righteousness is a moral quality, and no creation of his own consciousness but rather imposed upon it as an eternal law, he rises past Zeus to the Potency above him, after which even the undeveloped sense of a Caliban blindly felt when he discovered a Quiet above the bitter god Setebos; but the Quiet of Caliban is a negation of those evil attributes of the supreme Being, which he reflects upwards from his own gross heart, not the energy of righteousness which Ixion demands in his transcendent “Potency.” Into this poem went the energy of Browning’s heart and imagination; some of his matured wisdom entered into _Jochanan Hakkadosh_, of which, however, the contents are insufficient to sustain the length. The saint and sage of Israel has at the close of his life found no solution of the riddle of existence. Lover, bard, soldier, statist, he has obtained in each of his careers only doubts and dissatisfaction. Twelve months added to a long life by the generosity of his admirers, each of whom surrenders a fragment of his own life to prolong that of the saint, bring him no clearer illumination–still all is vanity and vexation of spirit. Only at the last, when by some unexpected chance, a final opportunity of surveying the past and anticipating the future is granted him, all has become clear. Instead of trying to solve the riddle he accepts it. He sees from his Pisgah how life, with all its confusions and contrarieties, is the school which educates the soul and fits it for further wayfaring. The ultimate faith of Jochanan the Saint had been already expressed by Browning:
Over the ball of it,
Peering and prying,
How I see all of it,
Life there, outlying!
Roughness and smoothness,
Shine and defilement,
Grace and uncouthness:
One reconcilement.
But even to his favourite disciple the sage is unable so to impart the secret that Tsaddik’s mind shall really embrace it.
The spirit of the saint of Israel is also the spirit of that wise Dervish of Browning’s invention (1884), the Persian Ferishtah. The volume is frankly didactic, and Browning, as becomes a master who would make his lessons easy to children, teaches by parables and pictures. In reading _Ferishtah’s Fancies_ we might suppose that we were in the Interpreter’s House, and that the Interpreter himself was pointing a moral with the robin that has a spider in his mouth, or the hen walking in a fourfold method towards her chickens. The discourses of the Dervish are in the main theological or philosophical; the lyrics, which are interposed between the discourses or discussions, are amatory. In Persian Poetry much that at first sight might be taken for amatory has in its inner meaning a mystical theological sense. Browning reverses the order of such poetry; he gives us first his doctrine concerning life or God, and gives it clothed in a parable; then in a lyric the subject is retracted into the sphere of human affections, and the truth of theology condenses itself into a corresponding truth respecting the love of man and woman.
Throughout the series of poems it is not a Persian Dervish who is the speaker and teacher; we hear the authentic voice of the Dervish born in Camberwell in the year 1812–Ferishtah-Browning. The doctrine set forth is the doctrine of Browning; the manner of speech is the manner of the poet. The illustrations and imagery are often Oriental; the ideas are those of a Western thinker; yet no sense of discordance is produced. The parable of the starving ravens fed by an eagle serves happily as an induction; let us become not waiters on providence, but workers with providence; and to feed hungry souls is even more needful than to feed hungry bodies:
I starve in soul:
So may mankind: and since men congregate In towns, not woods–to Ispahan forthwith!
Such is the lesson of energetic charity. And the lesson for the acceptance of providential gifts is that put in words by the poor melon-seller, once the Shah’s Prime Minister–words spoken in the spirit of the afflicted Job–“Shall we receive good at the hand of God and shall we not receive evil?”[143] Or rather–Shall not our hearts even in the midst of evil be lifted up in gratitude at the remembrance of the good which we have received? Browning proceeds, under a transparent veil of Oriental fable, to consider the story of the life of Christ. Do we believe in that tale of wonder in the full sense of the word belief? The more it really concerns us, the more exacting grow our demands for evidence of its truth; an otiose assent is easy, but this has none of the potency of genuine conviction. And, after all, intellectual assent is of little importance compared with that love for the Divine which may co-exist as truly with denial as with assent. _The Family_ sets forth, through a parable, the wisdom of accepting and living in our human views of things transcendent. Why pray to God at all? Why not rather accept His will and His Providential disposition of our lives as absolutely wise, and right? That, Browning replies, may be the way of the angels. We are men, and it is God’s will that we should feel and think as men:
Be man and nothing more–
Man who, as man conceiving, hopes and fears, And craves and deprecates, and loves and loathes, And bids God help him, till death touch his eyes And show God granted most, denying all.
The same spirit of acceptance of our intellectual and moral limitations is applied in _The Sun_ to the defence of anthropomorphic religion. Our spirit, burdened with the good gifts of life, looks upward for relief in gratitude and praise; but we can praise and thank only One who is righteous and loving, as we conceive righteousness and love. Let us not strive to pass beyond these human feelings and conceptions. Perhaps they are wholly remote from the unknown reality. They are none the less the conceptions proper to humanity; we have no capacities with which to correct them; let us hold fast by our human best, and preserve, as the preacher very correctly expressed it, “the integrity of our anthropomorphism.” The “magnified non-natural man,” and “the three Lord Shaftesburys” of Matthew Arnold’s irony are regarded with no fine scorn by the intellect of Browning. His early Christian faith has expanded and taken the non-historical form of a Humanitarian Theism, courageously accepted, not as a complete account of the Unknowable, but as the best provisional conception which we are competent to form. This theism involves rather than displaces the truth shadowed forth in the life of Christ. The crudest theism would seem to him far more reasonable than to direct the religious emotions towards a “stream of tendency.”
The presence of evil in a world created and governed by One all-wise, all-powerful, all-loving, is justified in _Mirhab Shah_ as a necessity of our education. How shall love be called forth unless there be the possibility of self-sacrifice? How shall our human sympathy be perfected unless there be pain? What room is there for thanks to God or love of man if earth be the scene of such a blank monotony of well-being as may be found in the star Rephan? But let us not call evil good, or think pain in itself a gain. God may see that evil is null, and that pain is gain; for us the human view, the human feeling must suffice. This justification of pain as a needful part of an education is, however, inapplicable to never-ending retributive punishment. Such a theological horror Browning rejects with a hearty indignation, qualified only by a humorous contempt, in his apologue of _A Camel-driver_; her driver, if the camel bites, will with good cause thwack, and so instruct the brute that mouths should munch not bite; he will not, six months afterwards, thrust red-hot prongs into the soft of her flesh to hiss there. And God has the advantage over the driver of seeing into the camel’s brain and of knowing precisely what moved the creature to offend. The poem which follows is directed against asceticism. Self-sacrifice for the sake of our fellows is indeed “joy beyond joy.” As to the rest–the question is not whether we fast or feast, but whether, fasting or feasting, we do our day’s work for the Master. If we would supply joy to our fellows, it is needful that we should first know joy ourselves–
Therefore, desire joy and thank God for it!
Browning’s argument is not profound, and could adroitly be turned against himself; but his temperament would survive his argument; his capacity for manifold pleasures was great, and he not only valued these as good in themselves, but turned them to admirable uses. A feast of the senses was to him as spiritually precious as a fast might be to one who only by fasting could attain to higher joys than those of sense. And this, he would maintain, is a better condition for a human being than that which renders expedient the plucking out of an eye, the cutting off of a hand. Joy for Browning means praise and gratitude; and in recognising the occasions for such praise and thanks let us not wind ourselves too high. Let us praise God for the little things that are so considerately fitted to our little human wants and desires. The morning-stars will sing together without our help; if we must choose our moment for a _Te Deum_, let it be when we have enjoyed our plate of cherries. The glorious lamp in the Shah’s pavilion lightens other eyes than mine; but to think that the Shah’s goodness has provided slippers for my feet in my own small chamber, and of the very colour that I most affect! Nor, in returning thanks, should it cause us trouble that our best thanks are poor, or even that they are mingled with an alloy of earthly regards, “mere man’s motives–“
Alas, Friend, what was free from this alloy,– Some smatch thereof,–in best and purest love Preferred thy earthly father? Dust thou art, Dust shall be to the end.
Our little human pleasures–do they seem unworthy to meet the eye of God? That is a question put by distrust and spiritual pride. God gives each of us His little plot, within which each of us is master. The question is not what compost, what manure, makes fruitful the soil; we need not report to the Lord of the soil the history of our manures; let us treat the ground as seems best, if only we bring sacks to His granary in autumn. Nay, do not I also tickle the palate of my ass with a thistle-bunch, so heartening him to do his work?
In _A Pillar at Sebzevah_, Ferishtah-Browning confronts the objection that he has deposed knowledge and degraded humanity to the rank of an ass whose highest attainment is to love–what? “Husked lupines, and belike the feeder’s self.” The Dervish declares without shrinking the faith that is in him:–
“Friend,” quoth Ferishtah, “all I seem to know Is–I know nothing save that love I can Boundlessly, endlessly.”
[Illustration]
If there be knowledge it shall vanish away; but charity never faileth. As for knowledge, the prize is in the process; as gain we must mistrust it, not as a road to gain:–
Knowledge means
Ever-renewed assurance by defeat
That victory is somehow still to reach, But love is victory, the prize itself.
Grasping at the sun, a child captures an orange: what if he were to scorn his capture and refuse to suck its juice? The curse of life is this–that every supposed accession to knowledge, every novel theory, is accepted as a complete solution of the whole problem, while every pleasure is despised as transitory or insubstantial. In truth the drop of water found in the desert sand is infinitely precious; the mirage is only a mirage. Browning, who in this volume puts forth his own doctrine of theism, his justification of prayer, his belief in a superintending providence, his explanation of the presence of evil in the world, is, of course, no Pyrrhonist. He profoundly distrusts the capacity of the intellect, acting as a pure organ of speculation, to unriddle the mysteries of existence; he maintains, on the other hand, that knowledge sufficient for the conduct of our lives is involved in the simple experiences of good and evil, of joy and sorrow. In reality Browning’s attitude towards truth approaches more nearly what has now begun to style itself “Pragmatism” than it approaches Pyrrhonism; but philosophers whose joy is to beat the air may find that it is condemnatory of their methods.
In his distrust of metaphysical speculation and in regarding the affections as superior to the intellect, Browning as a teacher has something in common with Comte; but there is perhaps no creed so alien to his nature as the creed of Positivism. The last of Ferishtah’s discourses is concerned with the proportion which happiness bears to pain in the average life of man, or rather–for Browning is nothing if he is not individualistic–in the life of each man as an individual. The conclusion arrived at is that no “bean-stripe”–each bean, white or black, standing for a day–is wholly black, and that the more extended is our field of vision the more is the general aspect of the “bean-stripe” of a colour intermediate between the extremes of darkness and of light. Before the poem closes, Browning turns aside to consider the Positivist position. Why give our thanks and praise for all the good things of life to God, whose existence is an inference of the heart derived from its own need of rendering gratitude to some Being like ourselves? Are not these good things the gifts of the race, of Humanity, and its worthies who have preceded us and who at the present moment constitute our environment of loving help? Ferishtah’s reply, which is far from conclusive, must be regarded as no discussion of the subject but the utterance of an isolated thought. Praise rendered to Humanity and the heroes of the race simply reverts to the giver of the praise; his own perceptions of what is praiseworthy alone render praise possible; he must first of all thank and praise the giver of such perceptions–God. It is strange that Browning should fail to recognise the fact that the Positivist would immediately trace the power of moral perception to the energies of Humanity in its upward progress from primitive savagery to our present state of imperfect development.
It has been necessary to transcribe in a reduced form the teaching of Ferishtah, for this is the clearest record left by Browning of his own beliefs on the most important of all subjects, this is an essential part of his criticism of life, and at the same time it is little less than a passage of autobiography. The poems are admirable in their vigour, their humour, their seriousness, their felicity of imagery. Yet the wisdom of _Ferishtah’s Fancies_ is an old man’s wisdom; we perceive in it the inner life, as Baxter puts it, in speaking of changes wrought by his elder years, quitting the leaves and branches and drawing down to the root. But when in prologue or epilogue to this volume or that Browning touches upon the great happiness, the great sorrow of his own life, he is always young. Here the lyrical epilogue is inspired by a noble enthusiasm, and closes with a surprise of beauty. What if all his happy faith in the purpose of life, and the Divine presence through all its course, were but a reflex from the private and personal love that had once been his and was still above and around him? Such a doubt contained its own refutation:
Only, at heart’s utmost joy and triumph, terror Sudden turns the blood to ice: a chill wind disencharms All the late enchantment! What if all be error– If the halo irised round my head were, Love, thine arms?
All the more, if this were so, must the speaker’s heart turn Godwards in gratitude. The whole design of the volume with its theological parables and its beautiful lyrics of human love implies that there is a correspondency between the truths of religion and the truths of the passion of love between man and woman.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 141: Mr Gosse: “Dictionary of National Biography,” Supplement, i. 317.]
[Footnote 142: Of the mother in this poem, a writer in the “Browning Society’s Papers,” Miss E.D. West, said justly: “There is discernible in her no soul which could be cleansed from guilt by any purgatorial process…. Her fault had not been moral, had not been sin, to be punished by pain inflicted on the soul; it was merely the uncounteracted primary instinct of self-preservation, and as such it is fitliest dealt with by the simple depriving her, without further penalty, of the very life which she had secured for herself at so horrible a cost.”]
[Footnote 143: The story of the melon-seller was related by a correspondent of _The Times_ in 1846, and is told by Browning in a letter to Miss Barrett of Aug. 6 of that year. Thus subjects of verse rose up in his memory after many years.]
Chapter XVII
Closing Works and Days
_Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day_, published in 1887, Browning’s last volume but one, betrays not the slightest decline in his mental vigour. It suffers, however, from the fact that several of the “Parleyings” are discussions–emotional, it is true, as well as intellectual–of somewhat abstract themes, that these discussions are often prolonged beyond what the subject requires, and that the “People of Importance” are in some instances not men and women, but mere sounding-boards to throw out Browning’s own voice. When certain aspects or principles of art are considered in _Fra Lippo Lippi_, before us stands Brother Lippo himself, a living, breathing figure, on whom our interest must needs fasten whatever may be the subject of his discourse. There is of course a propriety in connecting a debate on evil in the world as a means to good with the name of the author of “The Fable of the Bees,” there is no impropriety in connecting a study of the philosophy of music with the name of Charles Avison the Newcastle organist; but we do not make acquaintance through the parleyings with either Avison or Mandeville. This objection does not apply to all the poems. The parleying _With Daniel Bartoli_ is a story of love and loss, admirable in its presentation of the heroine and the unheroic hero. We are interested in Francis Furini, “good priest, good man, good painter,” before he begins to preach his somewhat portentous sermon on evolution. And in the case of Christopher Smart, the question why once and only once he was a divinely inspired singer is the question which most directly leads to a disclosure of his character as a poet. The volume, however, as a whole, while Browning’s energy never flags, has a larger proportion than its predecessors of what he himself terms “mere grey argument”; and, as if to compensate this, it is remarkable for sudden outbursts of imagination and passion, as if these repressed for a time had carried away the dykes and dams, and went on their career in full flood. The description of the glory of sunrise in _Bernard de Mandeville_, the description of the Chapel in _Christopher Smart_, the praise of a woman’s beauty in _Francis Furini_, the amazing succession of mythological _tours de force_ in _Gerard de Lairesse_, the delightful picture of the blackcap tugging at his prize, a scrap of rag on the garden wall, amid the falling snow of March, in the opening of _Charles Avison_–these are sufficient evidence of the abounding force of Browning’s genius as a poet at a date when he had passed the three score years and ten by half an added decade. Nor would we willingly forget that magical lyric of life and death, of the tulip beds and the daisied grave-mound–“Dance, yellows and whites and reds”–which closes _Gerard de Lairesse_. Wordsworth’s daffodils are hardly a more jocund company than Browning’s wind-tossed tulips; he accepts their gladness, and yet the starved grass and daisies are more to him than these:
Daisies and grass be my heart’s bed-fellows On the mound wind spares and sunshine mellows: Dance you, reds and whites and yellows!
Of failure in intellectual or imaginative force the _Parleyings_ show no symptom. But the vigour of Browning’s will did a certain wrong to his other powers. He did not wait, as in early days, for the genuine casual inspirations of pleasure. He made it his task to work out all that was in him. And what comes to a writer of genius is better than what is laboriously sought. We may gather wood for the altar, but the true fire must descend from heaven. The speed and excitement kindled by one’s own exertions are very different from the varying stress of a wind that bears one onward without the thump and rattle of the engine-room. It would have been a gain if Browning’s indomitable steam-engines had occasionally ceased to ply, and he had been compelled to wait for a propitious breeze.
Philosophy, Love, Poetry, Politics, Painting (the nude, with a discourse concerning evolution), Painting again (the modern _versus_ the mythological in art), Music, and, if we add the epilogue, the Invention of Printing–these are the successive themes of Browning’s _Parleyings_, and they are important and interesting themes. Unfortunately the method of discussion is neither sufficiently abstract for the lucid exposition of ideas, nor sufficiently concrete for the pure communication of poetic pleasure. Abstract and concrete meet and take hands or jostle, too much as skeleton and lady might in a _danse Macabre_. The spirit of acquiescence–strenuous not indolent acquiescence–with our intellectual limitations is constantly present. Does man groan because he cannot comprehend the mind outside himself which manifests itself in the sun? Well, did not Prometheus draw the celestial rays into the pin-point of a flame which man can order, and which does him service? Is the fire a little thing beside the immensity in the heavens above us?
Little? In little, light, warmth, life are blessed– Which, in the large, who sees to bless?
Or again–it is Christopher Smart, who triumphs for once so magnificently in his “Song to David,” and fails, with all his contemporaries, in the poetry of ambitious instruction. And why? Because for once he was content with the first step that poetry should take–to confer enjoyment, leaving instruction–the fruit of enjoyment–to come later. True learning teaches through love and delight, not through pretentious didactics,–a truth forgotten by the whole tribe of eighteenth century versifiers. And once more–does Francis Furini paint the naked body in all its beauty? Right! let him study precisely this divine thing the body, before he looks upward; let him retire from the infinite into his proper circumscription:
Only by looking low, ere looking high, Comes penetration of the mystery.
So also with our view of the mingled good and evil in the world; perhaps to some transcendent vision evil may wholly disappear; perhaps we shall ourselves make this discovery as we look back upon the life on earth. Meanwhile it is as men that we must see things, and even if evil be an illusion (as Browning trusts), it is a needful illusion in our educational process, since through evil we become aware of good. Thus at every point Browning accepts here, as in _Ferishtah’s Fancies_, a limited provisional knowledge as sufficient for our present needs, with a sustaining hope which extends into the future. On the other hand, if your affair is not the sincerity of thought and feeling, but a design to rule the mass of men for your own advantage, you must act in a different spirit. Do not, in the manner of Bubb Doddington, attempt to impose upon your fellows with the obvious and worn-out pretence that all you do has been undertaken on their behalf and in their interests. There is a newer and a better trick than that. Assume the supernatural; have a “mission “; have a “message”; be earnest, with all the authority of a divine purpose. Play boldly this new card of statesmanship, and you may have from time to time as many inconsistent missions and messages as ambitious statecraft can suggest to you. Through all your gyrations the admiring crowd will still stand agape. Was Browning’s irony of a cynical philosophy of statesmanship suggested by his view of the procedure of a politician, whom he had once admired, whose talents he still recognised, but from whom he now turned away with indignant aversion? However this may have been, his poems which touch on politics do not imply that respect for the people thinking, feeling, and moving, in masses which is a common profession with the liberal leaders of the platform. Browning’s liberalism was a form of his individualism; he, like Shakespeare, had a sympathy with the wants and affections of the humblest human lives; and, like Shakespeare, he thought that foolish or incompetent heads are often conjoined with hearts that in a high degree deserve respect.
_Asolando_, the last volume of a long array, was published in London on the last day of Browning’s life. As he lay dying in Venice, telegraphed tidings reached his son of the eager demand for copies made in anticipation of its appearance and of the instant and appreciative reviews; Browning heard the report with a quiet gratification. It is happy when praise in departing is justified, and this was the case with a collection of poems which to some readers seemed like a revival of the poetry of its author’s best years of early and mid manhood. _Asolando_ is, however, in the main distinctly an autumn gathering, a handful of flowers and fruit belonging to the Indian summer of his genius. The Prologue is a confession, like that of Wordsworth’s great Ode, that a glory has passed away from the earth. When first he set eyes on Asolo, some fifty years previously, the splendour of Italian landscape seemed that of
Terror with beauty, like the Bush
Burning yet unconsumed
Now, while the beauty remains, the flame is extinct–“the Bush is bare.” Browning finds his consolation in the belief that he has come nearer to the realities of earth by discarding fancies, and that his wonder and awe are more wisely directed towards the transcendent God than towards His creatures. But in truth what the mind confers is a fact and no fancy; the loss of what Browning calls the “soul’s iris-bow” is the loss of a substantial, a divine possession. The _Epilogue_ has in it a certain energy, but the thews are those of an old athlete, and through the energy we are conscious of the strain. The speaker pitches his voice high, as if it could not otherwise be heard at a distance. The _Reverie_, a speculation on the time when Power will show itself fully and therefore be known as love, has some of that vigorous intellectual garrulity which had grown on Browning during the years when unhappily for his poetry he came to be regarded chiefly as a prophet and a sage. An old man rightly values the truths which experience has made real for him; he repeats them again and again, for they constitute the best gift he can offer to his disciples; but his utterances are not always directly inspired; they are sometimes faintly echoed from an earlier inspiration. In the _Reverie_, while accepting our limitations of knowledge, which he can term ignorance in its contrast with the vast unknown, Browning discovers in the moral consciousness of man a prophecy of the ultimate triumph of good over what we think of as evil, a prophecy of the final reconciliation of love with power. And among the laws of life is not merely submission but aspiration:
Life is–to wake not sleep,
Rise and not rest, but press
From earth’s level where blindly creep Things perfected, more or less,
To the heaven’s height, far and steep, Where amid what strifes and storms
May wait the adventurous quest,
Power is love.
The voice of the poet of _Paracelsus_ and of _Rabbi Ben Ezra_ is still audible in this latest of his prophesyings. And therefore he welcomes earth in his _Rephan_, earth, with its whole array of failures and despairs, as the fit training-ground for man. Better its trials and losses and crosses than a sterile uniformity of happiness; better its strife than rest in any golden mean of excellence. Nor are its intellectual errors and illusions without their educational value. It is better, as _Development_, with its recollections of Browning’s childhood, assures us that the boy should believe in Troy siege, and the combats of Hector and Achilles, as veritable facts of history, than bend his brow over Wolfs Prolegomena or perplex his brain with moral philosophies to grapple with which his mind is not yet competent. By and by his illusions will disappear while their gains will remain.
The general impression left by _Asolando_ is that of intellectual and imaginative vigour. The series of _Bad Dreams_ is very striking and original in both pictorial and passionate power. _Dubiety_ is a poem of the Indian Summer, but it has the beauty, with a touch of the pathos, proper to the time. The love songs are rather songs of praise than of passion, but they are beautiful songs of praise, and that entitled _Speculative_, which is frankly a poem of old age, has in it the genuine passion of memory. _White Witchcraft_ does in truth revive the manner of earlier volumes. The
Infinite passion and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn
told of in a poem of 1855 is present, with a touch of humour to guard it from its own excess in the admirable _Inapprehensiveness_. The speaker who may not liberate his soul can perhaps identify a quotation, and he gallantly accepts his humble role in the tragi-comedy of foiled passion:–
“No, the book
Which noticed how the wall-growths wave,” said she, “Was not by Ruskin.”
I said “Vernon Lee.”
And in the uttered “Vernon Lee” lies a vast renunciation half comical and wholly tragic. There are jests in the volume, and these, with the exception of _Ponte dell’ Angelo_, have the merit of brevity; they buzz swiftly in and out, and do not wind about us with the terror of voluminous coils, as sometimes happens when Browning is in his mood of mirth. There are stories, and they are told with spirit and with skill. In _Beatrice Signorini_ the story-teller does justice to the honest jealousy of a wife and to the honest love of a husband who returns from the wanderings of his imagination to the frank fidelity of his heart. Cynicism grows genial in the jest of _The Pope and the Net_. In _Muckle-Mouth Meg_, laughter and kisses, audible from the page, and a woman’s art in love-craft, turn tragedy in a hearty piece of comedy. _The Bean-Feast_ presents us with the latest transformation of the Herakles ideal, where a good Christian Herakles, Pope Sixtus of Rome, makes common cause with his spiritual children in their humble pleasures of the senses. And in contrast with this poem of the religion of joy is the story of another ruler of Rome, the too fortunate Emperor Augustus, who, in the shadow of the religion of fear and sorrow, must propitiate the envy of Fate by turning beggar once a year. A shivering thrill runs through us as we catch a sight of the supreme mendicant’s “sparkling eyes beneath their eyebrows’ ridge”:
“He’s God!” shouts Lucius Varus Rufus: “Man And worms’-meat any moment!” mutters low Some Power, admonishing the mortal-born.
There were nobler sides of Paganism than this with which Browning seems never to have had an adequate sympathy. And yet the religion even of Marcus Aurelius lacked something of the joy of the religion of the thankful Pope who feasted upon beans.[144]
In the winter which followed his change of abode from Warwick Crescent to the more commodious house in De Vere Gardens, the winter of 1887-1888, Browning’s health and strength visibly declined; a succession of exhausting colds lowered his vitality; yet he maintained his habitual ways of life, and would not yield. In August 1888 he started ill for his Italian holiday, and travelled with difficulty and distress. But the rest among the mountains at Primiero restored him. At Venice he seemed as vigorous as he was joyous. And when he returned to London in February 1889 the improvement in his strength was in a considerable measure maintained. Yet it was evident that the physical vigour which had seemed invincible was on the ebb. In the early summer he paid the last of those visits, which he so highly valued, to Balliol College, Oxford. The opening week of June found him at Cambridge. Mr Gosse has told how on the first Sunday of that month Browning and he sat together “in a sequestered part of the beautiful Fellows’ Garden of Trinity,” under a cloudless sky, amid the early foliage with double hawthorns in bloom, and how the old man, in a mood of serenity and without his usual gesticulation, talked of his own early life and aspirations. He shrank that summer, says Mrs Orr, from the fatigue of a journey to Italy and thought of Scotland as a place of rest. But unfavourable weather in early August forbade the execution of the plan. An invitation from Mrs Bronson to her house at Asolo, to be followed by the pleasure of seeing his son and his son’s wife in the Palazzo Rezzonico, Venice, were attractions not to be resisted, and in company with Miss Browning, he reached the little hill-town that had grown so dear to him without mishap and even without fatigue.
To the early days of July, shortly before his departure for Italy, belong two incidents which may be placed side by side as exhibiting two contrasted sides of Browning’s character. On the 5th of that month he dined with the Shah, who begged for the gift of one of his books. Next day he chose a volume the binding of which might, as he says, “take the imperial eye”; but the pleasure of the day was another gift, a gift to a person who was not imperial. “I said to myself,” he wrote to his young friend the painter Lehmann’s daughter, addressed in the letter as “My beloved Alma”–“I said to myself ‘Here do I present my poetry to a personage for whom I do not care three straws; why should I not venture to do as much for a young lady I love dearly, who, for the author’s sake, will not impossibly care rather for the inside than the outside of the volume?’ So I was bold enough to take one and offer it for your kind acceptance, begging you to remember in days to come that the author, whether a good poet or not, was always, my Alma, your affectionate friend, Robert Browning.” A gracious bowing of old age over the grace and charm of youth! But the work of two days later, July 8th, was not gracious. The lines “To Edward Fitzgerald,” printed in _The Athenaeum_, were dated on that day. It is stated by Mrs Orr that when they were despatched to the journal in which they appeared, Browning regretted the deed, though afterwards he found reasons to justify himself. Fitzgerald’s reference to Mrs Browning caused him a spasm of pain and indignation, nor did the pain for long subside. The expression of his indignation was outrageous in manner, and deficient in real power. He had read a worse meaning into the unhappy words than had been intended, and the writer was dead. Browning’s act was like an involuntary muscular contraction, which he could not control. The lines sprang far more from love than from hate. “I felt as if she had died yesterday,” he said. We cannot regret that Browning was capable of such an offence; we can only regret that what should have controlled his cry of pain and rage did not operate at the right moment.
In Asolo, beside “the gate,” Mrs Bronson had found and partly made what Mr Henry James describes as “one of the quaintest possible little places of _villegiatura_”–La Mura, the house, “resting half upon the dismantled, dissimulated town-wall. No sweeter spot in all the sweetnesses of Italy.” Browning’s last visit to Asolo was a time of almost unmingled enjoyment. “He seemed possessed,” writes Mrs Orr, “by a strange buoyancy, an almost feverish joy in life.” The thought that he was in Asolo again, which he had first seen in his twenty-sixth year, and since then had never ceased to remember with affection, was a happy wonder to him. He would stand delighted on the loggia of La Mura, looking out over the plain and identifying the places of historical interest, some of which were connected with his own “Sordello.” Nor was the later story forgotten of Queen Caterina Cornaro, whose palace-tower overlooks Asolo, and whose secretary, Cardinal Bembo, wrote _gli Asolani_, from which came the suggestion for the title of Browning’s forthcoming volume. At times, as Mrs Bronson relates, the beauty of the prospect was enough, with no historical reminiscences, the plain with its moving shadows, the mountain-ranges to the west, and southwards the delicate outline of the Euganean Hills. “I was right,” said he, “to fall in love with this place fifty years ago, was I not?”
The procedure of the day at Asolo was almost as regular as that of a London day. The morning walk with his sister, when everything that was notable was noted by his keen eyes, the return, English newspapers, proof-sheets, correspondence, the light mid-day meal, the afternoon drive in Mrs Branson’s carriage, tea upon the loggia, the evening with music or reading, or visits to the little theatre–these constituted an almost unvarying and happy routine. On his walks he delighted to recognise little details of architecture which he had observed in former years; or he would peer into the hedgerows and watch the living creatures that lurked there, or would “whistle softly to the lizards basking on the low walls which border the roads, to try his old power of attracting them.”[145] Sometimes a longer drive (and that to Bassano was his favourite) required an earlier start in the carriage with luncheon at some little inn. “If we were ever late in returning to Asolo,” Mrs Bronson writes, “he would say ‘Tell Vittorio to drive quickly; we must not lose the sunset from the loggia.’ … Often after a storm, the effects of sun breaking through clouds before its setting, combined with the scenery of plain and mountain, were such as to rouse the poet to the greatest enthusiasm. Heedless of cold or damp, forgetting himself completely, though warmly wrapped to please others, he would gaze on the changing aspects of earth and sky until darkness covered everything from his sight.”
When in the evenings Browning read aloud he did not, like Tennyson, as described by Mr Rossetti, allow his voice to “sway onward with a long-drawn chaunt” which gave “noble value and emphasis to the metrical structure and pauses.” His delivery was full and distinctive, but it “took much less account than Tennyson’s of the poem as a rhythmical whole; his delivery had more affinity to that of an actor, laying stress on all the light and shade of the composition–its touches of character, the conversational points, its dramatic give-and-take. In those qualities of elocution in which Tennyson was strong, and aimed to be strong, Browning was contentedly weak; and _vice versa_.”[146] Sometimes, like another great poet, Pope, he was deeply affected by the passion of beauty or heroism or pathos in what he read, and could not control his feelings. Mrs Orr mentions that in reading aloud his translation of the _Herakles_, he, like Pope in reading a passage of his _Iliad_, was moved to tears. Dr Furnivall tells of the mounting excitement with which he once delivered in the writer’s hearing his _Ixion_. When at La Mura after his dreamy playing, on a spinet of 1522, old airs, melodious, melancholy airs, Browning would propose to read aloud, it was not his own poetry that he most willingly chose. “No R.B. to-night,” he would say; “then with a smile, ‘Let us have some real poetry'”; and the volume would be one by Shelley or Keats, or Coleridge or Tennyson. It was as a punishment to his hostess for the crime of having no Shakespeare on her shelves that he threatened her with one of his “toughest poems”; but the tough poem, interpreted by his emphasis and pauses, became “as clear and comprehensible as one could possibly desire.” In his talk at Asolo “he seemed purposely to avoid deep and serious topics. If such were broached in his presence he dismissed them with one strong, convincing sentence, and adroitly turned the current of conversation into a shallower channel.”
A project which came very near his heart was that of purchasing from the municipal authorities a small piece of ground, divided from La Mura by a ravine clothed with olive and other trees, “on which stood an unfinished building”–the words are Mrs Bronson’s–“commanding the finest view in Asolo.” He desired much to have a summer or autumn abode to which he might turn with the assurance of rest in what most pleased and suited him. In imagination, with his characteristic eagerness, he had already altered and added to the existing structure, and decided on the size and aspect of the loggia which was to out-rival that of La Mura. “‘It shall have a tower,’ he said, ‘whence I can see Venice at every hour of the day, and I shall call it “Pippa’s Tower”…. We will throw a rustic bridge across the streamlet in the ravine.'” And then, in a graver mood: “It may not be for me to enjoy it long–who can say? But it will be useful for Pen and his family…. But I am good for ten years yet.” And when his son visited Asolo and approved of the project of Pippa’s Tower, Browning’s happiness in his dream was complete. It was on the night of his death that the authorities of Asolo decided that the purchase might be carried into effect.
[Illustration: THE PALAZZO REZZONICO, VENICE.
_From a drawing by_ Miss KATHERINE KIMBALL.]
For a time during this last visit to Asolo Browning suffered some inconvenience from shortness of breath in climbing hills, but the discomfort passed away. He looked forward to an early return to England, spoke with pleasant anticipation of the soft-pedal piano which his kind friend Mrs Bronson desired to procure at Boston and place in his study in De Vere Gardens, and he dreamed of future poetical achievements. “Shall I whisper to you my ambition and my hope?” he asked his hostess. “It is to write a tragedy better than anything I have done yet. I think of it constantly.” With the end of October the happy days at Asolo were at an end. On the first of November he was in Venice, “magnificently lodged,” he says, “in this vast palazzo, which my son has really shown himself fit to possess, so surprising are his restorations and improvements.” At Asolo he had parted from his American friend Story with the words, “More than forty years of friendship and never a break.” In Venice he met an American friend of more recent years, Professor Corson, who describes him as stepping briskly, with a look that went everywhere, and as cheerfully anticipating many more years of productive work.[147] Yet in truth the end was near. Dining with Mr and Mrs Curtis, where he read aloud some poems of his forthcoming volume, he met a London physician, Dr Bird. Next evening Dr Bird again dined with Browning, who expressed confident satisfaction as to his state of health, and held out his wrist that his words might be confirmed by the regularity and vigour of his pulse. The physician became at once aware that Browning’s confidence was far from receiving the warrant in which he believed. Still he maintained his customary two hours’ walk each day. Towards the close of November, on a day of fog, he returned from the Lido with symptoms of a bronchial cold. He dealt with the trouble as he was accustomed, and did not take to his bed. Though feeling scarcely fit to travel he planned his departure for England after the lapse of four or five days. On December 1st, an Italian physician was summoned, and immediately perceived the gravity of the case. Within a few days the bronchial trouble was subdued, but failure of the heart was apparent. Some hours before the end he said to one of his nurses, “I feel much worse. I know now that I must die.” The ebbing away of life was painless. As the clocks of Venice were striking ten on the night of Thursday, December 12, 1889, Browning died.[148]
He had never concerned himself much about his place of burial. A lifeless body seemed to him only an old vesture that had been cast aside. “He had said to his sister in the foregoing summer,” Mrs Orr tells us, “that he wished to be buried wherever he might die; if in England, with his mother; if in France, with his father; if in Italy, with his wife.” The English cemetery in Florence had, however, been closed. The choice seemed to lie between Venice, which was the desire of the city, or, if the difficulties could be overcome by the intervention of Lord Dufferin, the old Florentine cemetery. The matter was decided otherwise; a grave in Westminster Abbey was proposed by Dean Bradley, and the proposal was accepted.[149] A private service took place in the _Palazzo Rezzonico_; the coffin, in compliance with the civic requirements, was conveyed with public honours to the chapel on the island of San Michele; and from thence to the house in De Vere Gardens. On the last day of the year 1889, in presence of a great and reverent crowd, with solemn music arranged for the words of Mrs Browning’s poem, “He giveth his beloved sleep,” the body of Browning was laid in its resting-place in Poets’ Corner.
To attempt at the present time to determine the place of Browning in the history of English poetry is perhaps premature. Yet the record of “How it strikes a contemporary” may itself have a certain historical interest. When estimates of this kind have been revised by time even their errors are sometimes instructive, or, if not instructive, are amusing. It is probable that Tennyson will remain as the chief representative in poetry of the Victorian period. Browning, who was slower in securing an audience, may be found to possess a more independent individuality. Yet in truth no great writer is independent of the influences of his age.
Browning as a poet had his origins in the romantic school of English poetry; but he came at a time when the romance of external action and adventure had exhausted itself, and when it became necessary to carry romance into the inner world where the adventures are those of the soul. On the ethical and religious side he sprang from English Puritanism. Each of these influences was modified by his own genius and by the circumstances of its development. His keen observation of facts and passionate inquisition of human character drew him in the direction of what is termed realism. This combination of realism with romance is even more strikingly seen in an elder contemporary on whose work Browning bestowed an ardent admiration, the novelist Balzac. His Puritanism received important modifications from his wide-ranging artistic instincts and sympathies, and again from the liberality of a wide-ranging intellect. He has the strenuous moral force of Puritanism, but he is wholly free from asceticism, except in the higher significance of that word–the hardy discipline of an athlete. Opinions count for less than the form and the habitual attitudes of a soul. These with Browning were always essentially Christian. He regarded our life on earth as a state of probation and of preparation; sometimes as a battle-field in which our test lies in the choice of the worse or the better side and the energy of devotion to the cause; sometimes as a school of education, in the processes of which the emotions play a larger part than the intellect. The degrees in that school are not to be taken on earth. And on the battle-field the final issue is not to be determined here, so that what appears as defeat may contain within it an assured promise of ultimate victory. The attitudes of the spirit which were most habitual with him were two–the attitude of aspiration and the attitude of submission. These he brought into harmony with each other by his conception of human life as a period of training for a higher life; we must make the most vigorous and joyous use of our schooling, and yet we must press towards what lies beyond it.
From the romantic poetry of the early years of the nineteenth century comes a cry or a sigh of limitless desire. Under the inspiration of the Revolutionary movement passion had broken the bounds of the eighteenth century ideal of balance and moderation. With the transcendental reaction against a mechanical view of the relation of God to the universe and to humanity the soul had put forth boundless claims and unmeasured aspirations. In his poetic method each writer followed the leadings of his own genius, without reference to common rules and standards; the individualism of the Revolutionary epoch asserted itself to the full. These several influences helped to determine the character of Browning’s poetry. But meeting in him the ethical and religious tendencies of English Puritanism they acquired new significances and assumed new forms. The cry of desire could not turn, as it did with Byron, to cynicism; it must not waste itself, as sometimes happened with Shelley, in the air or the ether. It must be controlled by the will and turned to some spiritual uses. The transcendental feeling which Wordsworth most often attained through an impassioned contemplation of external nature must rest upon a broader basis and include among its sources or abettors all the higher passions of humanity. The Revolutionary individualism must be maintained and extended; in his methods Browning would acknowledge no master; he would please himself and compel his readers to accept his method even if strange or singular. As for the mediaeval revival, which tried to turn aside, and in part capture, the transcendental tendencies of his time, Browning rejected it, in the old temper of English Puritanism, on the side of religion; but on the side of art it opened certain avenues upon which he eagerly entered. The scientific movement of the nineteenth century influenced him partly as a force to be met and opposed by his militant transcendentalism. Yet he gives definite expression in _Paracelsus_ to an idea of evolution both in nature and in human society, an idea of evolution which is, however, essentially theistic. “All that seems proved in Darwin’s scheme,” he wrote to Dr Furnivall in 1881, “was a conception familiar to me from the beginning.” The positive influences of the scientific age in which he lived upon Browning’s work were chiefly these–first it tended to intellectualise his instincts, compelling him to justify them by a definite theory; and secondly it co-operated with his tendency towards realism as a student of the facts of human nature; it urged him towards research in his psychology of the passions; it supported him in his curious inquisition of the phenomena of the world of mind.
Being a complete and a sane human creature, Browning could not rest content with the vicious asceticism of the intellect which calls itself scientific because it refuses to recognise any facts that are not material and tangible. Science itself, in the true sense of the word, exists and progresses by ventures of imaginative faith. And in all matters which involve good and evil, hopes and fears, in all matters which determine the conduct of life, no rational person excludes from his view the postulates of our moral nature or should exclude the final option of the will. The person whose beliefs are determined by material facts alone and by the understanding unallied with our other powers is the irrational and unscientific person. Being a complete and sane human creature, Browning was assured that the visible order of things is part of a larger order, the existence of which alone makes human life intelligible to the reason. The understanding being incapable of arriving unaided at a decision between rival theories of life, and neutrality between these being irrational and illegitimate, he rightly determined the balance with the weight of emotion, and rightly acted upon that decision with all the energy of his will. His chief intellectual error was not that he undervalued the results of the intellect, but that he imagined the existence as a part of sane human nature, of a wholly irrational intellect which in affairs of religious belief and conduct is indifferent to the promptings of the emotions and the moral nature.
Browning’s optimism has been erroneously ascribed to his temperament. He declared that in his personal experience the pain of life outweighed its pleasure. He remembered former pain more vividly than he remembered pleasure. His optimism was part of the vigorous sanity of his moral nature; like a reasonable man, he made the happiness which he did not find. If any person should censure the process of giving objective validity to a moral postulate, he has only to imagine some extra-human intelligence making a study of human nature; to such an intelligence our moral postulates would be objective facts and have the value of objective evidence. That whole of which our life on earth forms a part could not be conceived by Browning as rational without also being conceived as good.
All the parts of Browning’s nature were vigorous, and they worked harmoniously together. His senses were keen and alert; his understanding was both penetrating and comprehensive; his passions had sudden explosive force and also steadfastness and persistency; his will supported his other powers and perhaps it had too large a share in his later creative work. His feeling for external nature was twofold; he enjoyed colour and form–but especially colour–as a feast for the eye, and returned thanks for his meal as the Pope of his poem did for the bean-feast. This was far removed from that passionate spiritual contemplation of nature of the Wordsworthian mood. But now and again for Browning external nature was, not indeed suffused as for Wordsworth, but pierced and shot through with spiritual fire. His chief interest, however, was in man. The study of passions in their directness and of the intellect in its tortuous ways were at various times almost equally attractive to him. The emotions which he chiefly cared to interpret were those connected with religion, with art, and with the relations of the sexes.
In his presentation of character Browning was far from exhibiting either the universality or the disinterestedness of Shakespeare. His sympathy with action was defective. The affections arising from hereditary or traditional relations are but slenderly represented in his poetry; the passions which elect their own objects are largely represented. Those graceful gaieties arising from a long-established form of society, which constitute so large a part of Shakespeare’s comedies, are almost wholly absent from his work. His humour was robust but seldom fine or delicate. In an age of intellectual and spiritual conflict and trouble, his art was often deflected from the highest ends by his concern on behalf of ideas. He could not rest satisfied, it has been observed, with contemplating the children of his imagination, nor find the fulfilment of his aim in the fact of having given them existence.[150] It seems often as if his purpose in creating them was to make them serve as questioners, objectors, and answerers in the great debate of conflicting thoughts which proceeds throughout his poems. His object in transferring his own consciousness into the consciousness of some imagined personage seems often to be that of gaining a new stand-point from which to see another and a different aspect of the questions concerning which he could not wholly satisfy himself from any single point of view. He cannot be content to leave his men and women, in Shakespeare’s disinterested manner, to look in various directions according to whatever chanced to suit best the temper and disposition he had imagined for them. They are placed by him with their eyes turned in very much the same direction, gazing towards the same problems, the same ideas. And somehow Browning himself seems to be in company with them all the time, learning their different reports of the various aspects which those problems or ideas present to each of them, and choosing between the different reports in order to give credence to that which seems true. The study of no individual character would seem to him of capital value unless that character contained something which should help to throw light upon matters common to all humanity, upon the inquiries either as to what it is, or as to what are its relations to the things outside humanity. This is not quite the highest form of dramatic poetry. There is in it perhaps something of the error of seeking too quick returns of profit, and of drawing “a circle premature,” to use Browning’s own words, “heedless of far gain.” The contents of characters so conceived can be exhausted, whereas when characters are presented with entire disinterestedness they may seem to yield us less at first, but they are inexhaustible. The fault–if it be one–lay partly in Browning’s epoch, partly in the nature of his genius. Such a method of deflected dramatic characterisation as his is less appropriate to regular drama than to the monologue; and accordingly the monologue, reflective or lyrical, became the most characteristic instrument of his art.
There is little of repose in Browning’s poetry. He feared lethargy of heart, the supine mood, more than he feared excess of passion. Once or twice he utters a sigh for rest, but it is for rest after strife or labour. Broad spaces of repose, of emotional tranquillity are rare, if not entirely wanting, in his poetry. It is not a high table-land, but a range, or range upon range, of sierras. In single poems there is often a point or moment in which passion suddenly reaches its culmination. He flashes light upon the retina; he does not spread truth abroad like a mantle but plunges it downwards through the mists of earth like a searching sword-blade. And therefore he does not always distribute the poetic value of what he writes equally; one vivid moment justifies all that is preparatory to that great moment. His utterance, which is always vigorous, becomes intensely luminous at the needful points and then relapses, to its well-maintained vigour, a vigour not always accompanied by the highest poetical qualities. The music of his verse is entirely original, and so various are its kinds, so complex often are its effects that it cannot be briefly characterised. Its attack upon the ear is often by surprises, which, corresponding to the sudden turns of thought and leaps of feeling, justify themselves as right and delightful. Yet he sometimes embarrasses his verse with an excess of suspensions and resolutions. Browning made many metrical experiments, some of which were unfortunate: but his failures are rather to be ascribed to temporary lapses into a misdirected ingenuity than to the absence of metrical feeling.
His chief influence, other than what is purely artistic, upon a reader is towards establishing a connection between the known order of things in which we live and move and that larger order of which it is a part. He plays upon the will, summoning it from lethargy to activity. He spiritualises the passions by showing that they tend through what is human towards what is divine. He assigns to the intellect a sufficient field for exercise, but attaches more value to its efforts than to its attainments. His faith in an unseen order of things creates a hope which persists through the apparent failures of earth. In a true sense he may be named the successor of Wordsworth, not indeed as an artist but as a teacher. Substantially the creed maintained by each was the same creed, and they were both more emphatic proclaimers of it than any other contemporary poets. But their ways of holding and of maintaining that creed were far apart. Wordsworth enunciated his doctrines as if he had never met with, and never expected to meet with, any gainsaying of them. He discoursed as a philosopher might to a school of disciples gathered together to be taught by his wisdom, not to dispute it. He feared chiefly not a counter creed but the materialising effects of the industrial movement of his own day. Expecting no contradiction, Wordsworth did not care to quit his own standpoint in order that he might see how things appear from the opposing side. He did not argue but let his utterance fall into a half soliloquy spoken in presence of an audience but not always directly addressed to them. Browning’s manner of speech was very unlike this. He seems to address it often to unsympathetic hearers of whose presence and gainsaying attitude he could not lose sight. The beliefs for which he pleaded were not in his day, as they had been in Wordsworth’s, part of a progressive wave of thought. He occupied the disadvantageous position of a conservative thinker. The later poet of spiritual beliefs had to make his way not with, but against, a great incoming tide of contemporary speculation. Probably on this account Browning’s influence as a teacher will extend over a far shorter space of time than that of Wordsworth. For Wordsworth is self-contained, and is complete without reference to the ideas which oppose his own. His work suffices for its own explanation, and will always commend itself to certain readers either as the system of a philosophic thinker or as the dream of a poet. Browning’s thought where it is most significant is often more or less enigmatical if taken by itself: its energetic gestures, unless we see what they are directed against, seem aimless beating the air. His thought, as far as it is polemical, will probably cease to interest future readers. New methods of attack will call forth new methods of defence. Time will make its discreet selection from his writings. And the portion which seems most likely to survive is that which presents in true forms of art the permanent passions of humanity and characters of enduring interest.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 144: Mrs Orr gives the dates of composition of several of the _Asolando_ poems. _Rosny_, _Beatrice Signorini_ and _Flute-Music_ were written in the winter of 1887-1888. Two or three of the _Bad Dreams_ are, with less confidence, assigned to the same date. The _Ponte dell’ Angelo_ “was imagined during the next autumn in Venice” (see Mrs Bronson’s article “Browning in Venice”). “_White Witchcraft_ had been suggested in the same summer (1888) by a letter from a friend in the Channel Islands which spoke of the number of toads to be seen there.” _The Cardinal and the Dog_, written with the _Pied Piper_ for Macready’s son, is a poem of early date. Mrs Bronson in her article “Browning in Asolo” (_Century Magazine_, April 1900) relates the origin at Asolo 1889 of _The Lady and the Painter_.]
[Footnote 145: Mrs Orr, _Life_, p. 414.]
[Footnote 146: W.M. Rossetti, Portraits of Browning, i., _Magazine of Art_, 1890, p. 182. Mr Rossetti’s words refer to an earlier period.]
[Footnote 147: “The Nation,” vol. 1., where reminiscences by Moncure Conway may also be found.]
[Footnote 148: “My father died without pain or suffering other than that of weakness or weariness”–so Mr R. Barrett Browning wrote to Mrs Bloomfield-Moore. “His death was what death ought to be, but rarely is–so said the doctor.” (Quoted in an article on Browning by Mrs Bloomfield-Moore in Lippincott’s Magazine–Jan.–June 1890, p. 690.)]
[Footnote 149: A grave in the Abbey was at the same time offered for the body of Browning’s wife; the removal of her body from Florence would have been against both the wishes of Browning and of the people of Florence. It was therefore declined by Mr R. Barrett Browning. See his letter in Mrs Bloomfield-Moore’s article in Lippincott’s Magazine, vol. xiv.]
[Footnote 150: E.D. West in the first of two papers, “Browning as a Preacher,” in _The Dark Blue Magazine_. Browning esteemed these papers highly and in what follows I appropriate, with some modifications, a passage from the first of them. The writer has consented to the use here made of the passage, and has contributed a passage towards the close.]
Index
[_The names of Robert Browning, the subject of this volume, and of Elizabeth Barrett Browning are not included in the Index_.]
_Abt Vogler_
Adams, Sarah Flower
Aeschylus (see _Agamemnon_)
_Agamemnon_
Alford, Lady M.
Ancona
Andersen, Hans
_Andrea del Sarto_
_Any Wife to any Husband_
_Apparent Failure_
_Aristophanes’ Apology_
Arnold, Matthew
Arnould, Joseph
Arran, Isle of
_Artemis Prologuizes_
Asceticism
Ashburton, Lady
_Asolando_
Asolo
_At the Mermaid_
Audierne
_Aurora Leigh_
B
Bach
Bacon, Francis
_Bad Dreams_
_Balaustion’s Adventure_
Balzac, H. de
Barrett, Arabella
Barrett, Edward M.
Barrett, Henrietta (Mrs Surtees Cook) Bayley, Miss
_Bean Feast_
_Beatrice Signorini_
_Bells and Pomegranates_
Benckhausen, Mr
_Bernard de Mandeville_
Biarritz
_Bifurcation_
Bird, Dr
_Bishop Blougram_
_Bishop orders his Tomb_
Blagden, Isa
Blanc, Mme.
_Blot in the ‘Scutcheon_
Bottinius
Bowring, Sir J.
Boyd, H.S.
Boyle, Miss
Bradley, Dean
Bridell-Fox, Mrs
Bronson, Mrs A.
Browning, Robert (grandfather)
Browning, Robert (father)
Browning, Robert, W.B. (son)
Browning, Sarah Anna (mother)
Browning, Sarah Anna, or Sarianna (sister) Buchanan, Robert
Burne-Jones, E.
_By the Fireside_
C
_Caliban upon Setebos_
Cambo
Cambridge
Caponsacchi
Carlyle, Mrs
Carlyle, Thomas
Casa Guidi
_Cavalier Tunes_
Cavour
_Cenciaja_
Chapman & Hall
Chappell, Arthur
_Charles Avison_
_Childe Roland_
_Christmas Eve and Easter Day_
_Christopher Smart_
“Clarissa”
Clayton, Rev. Mr
_Cleon_
_Clive_
Cobbe, Miss F.P.
_Colombe’s Birthday_
Conway, Dr M.
Cook, Captain Surtees
Cook, Mrs Surtees, _see_ Barrett, Henrietta Cornhill Magazine
_Count Gismond_
Coup d’etat
_Cristine_
Croisic
Crosse, Mrs Andrew
Curtis, Mr and Mrs
D
_Daniel Bartoli_
Dante
Davidson, Captain
_Death in the Desert_
_De Gustibus_
_Development_
De Vere Gardens
Dickens, Charles
_Dis Aliter Visum_
_Doctor_ —-
Domett, Alfred
Dominus Hyacinthus
_Donald_
_Dramatic Idyls_ (First and Second Series) _Dramatic Lyrics_
_Dramatic Romances and Lyrics_
_Dramatis Personae_
_Dubiety_
Dufferin, Lord
Duffy, C. Gavan_
E
_Easter Day_, see _Christmas Eve and Easter Day Echetlos_
Eckley, Mr
Egerton-Smith, Miss
Elgin, Lady
Eliot, George
_Englishman in Italy_
_Epilogue_ (to “Asolando”)
_Epilogue_ (to “Dramatis Personae”) _Epilogue_ (to “Pacchiarotto” volume)
_Epilogue_ (to “Two Poets of Croisic”) _Epistle to Karshish_
Etretat
_Evelyn Hope_
F
_Face, A_
Fano
Faraday
Faucit, Helen
_Fears and Scruples_
_Ferishtah’s Fancies_
_Fifine at the Fair_
_Filippo Baldinucci_
Fisher, W.
Fitzgerald, Edward
Flaubert, G.
_Flight of the Duchess_
Flower, Eliza
Flower, Sarah
Flush
_Forgiveness_
Forster, John
_Founder of the Feast_
Fox, Caroline
Fox, W.J.
_Fra Lippo Lippi_
_Francis Farini_
Fuller, Margaret (see Ossoli, Countess d’) Furnivall, F.J.
G
Gagarin, Prince
_Garden Fancy_
_Gerard de Lairesse_
Gibson, J.
Gladstone, W.E.
_Glove_
_Gold Hair_
Goldoni
Gosse, E.
_Grammarian’s Funeral_
_Greek Christian Poets_
Gresonowsky, Dr
Gressoney
Grove, Mr
_Guardian Angel_
Guido Franceschini
H
_Halbert and Hob_
Hatcham
Havre
Hawthorne, N.
“Helen’s Tower”
Herakles
_Heretic’s Tragedy_
_Herve Riel_
Hickey, Miss E.H.
Hillard, G.S.
_Hippolytus and Aricia_
_Holy Cross Day_
Home, D.D.
Hosmer, Harriet
_House_
_How it strikes a Contemporary_
_How they brought the Good News_
Hugo, Victor
Hunt, Leigh
I
_Imperante Augusta natus est_
_In a Balcony_
_In a Gondola_
_Inapprehensiveness_
_In a Year_
_Inn Album_
_Ion_
_Italian in England_
_Ivan Ivanovitch_
_Ixion_
J
James, Henry
_James Lee’s Wife_
Jameson, Anna
_Jochanan Hakkadosh_,
_Jocoseria_
_Johannes Agricola_
Jones, Thomas
Jowett, Benjamin
K
Kean, Charles
Kemble, Fanny
Kenyon, F.G.
Kenyon, John
Kingsley, Charles
_King Victor and King Charles_
Kirkup, Seymour
L
“La Dame aux Camelias”
Lamartine
La Mura
Landor, W.S.
_La Saisiaz_
_Last Poems_
_Last Ride_
Lehmann, R.
Leighton, F.
Lever, Charles
Lido
_Life in a Love_
_Likeness_
Llangollen, Vale of
Lockhart, J.G.
Long, Professor
_Lost Leader_
Lounsbury, Professor
_Love among the Ruins_
_Love in a Life_
_Lover s Quarrel_
Lucca, Baths of
_Luria_
Lytton, Robert
M
Maclise, Daniel
Macready, W.C.
“Madame Bovary”
_Magical Nature_
_Mansoor the Hierophant_
Marston, Westland
Martin, Lady (_see_ also Faucit, Helen) Martin, Sir T.
_Martin Relph_
_Master Hugues_
“Maud” (Tennyson’s)
_May and Death_
Mazzini
Mellerio, A.
_Memorabilia_
_Men and Women_
Merrifield, Mr and Mrs
Mers
Mignet
Milsand, Joseph
Mill, J.S.
Milnes, Monckton
Milton
Mitford, Miss
Monclar, A. de Ripert
Monodrama
Montecuccoli, Marchese
Moore, Mrs Bloomfield
Moxon, E.
_Mr Sludge the Medium_
_Muleykeh_
Musset, A. de
_My Last Duchess_
N
_Names_
Napoleon, Louis
_Narses_
_Natural Magic_
_Ned Bratts_
Nightingale, Florence
“Nobly, nobly Cape St Vincent”
_Numpholeptos_
O
Ogle, Miss
_Old Pictures in Florence_
_One Way of Love_
_Only a Player-Girl_
Orr, Mrs
Ossian, Macpherson’s
Ossoli, Countess d’
P
_Pacchiarotto_
Page, Mr
Paget, Sir James
Palazzo Giustiniani Recanati
Palazzo Manzoni
Palazzo Rezzonico
Palgrave, F.T.
_Paracelsus_
Paris
Parker, Theodore
_Parleyings with Certain People_
Patmore, Emily
_Patriot_
_Pauline_
_Pheidippides_
Phelps
_Pictor Ignotus_
_Pied Piper_
_Pietro of Abano_
Pio Nono
_Pippa Passes_
Pippa’s Tower
_Pisgah Sights_
Pisa
Plutarch
_Poems before Congress_
Pompilia
Pope (in “Ring and Book”)
_Pope and the Net_
_Popularity_
Pornic
_Porphyria’s Lover_
Portraits
Powers, H.
_Pretty Woman_
Primiero
_Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_
Prinsep, V.
Procter (“Barry Cornwall”)
_Prologue_ (to “La Saisiaz”)
_Prospice_
_Protus_
Prout, Father
“Puseyism”
R
_Rabbi ben Ezra_
Ready, Rev. T.
_Red Cotton Night-Cap Country_
_Rephan_
_Respectability_
_Return of the Druses_
_Reverie_
Rhyming
_Ring and the Book_
Ristori
Ritchie, Mrs A. Thackeray
Rome
Rossetti, D.G.
Rossetti, W.M.
_Rudel_
Ruskin, John
S
Saint-Aubin
Saint-Enogat
_St Martin’s Summer_
St Moritz
St Pierre de Chartreuse
Sainte-Marie
Saint-Victor, Paul de
Saleve
Salvini
Sand, George
Sartoris, Adelaide
_Saul_
_Selections_ (from Browning)
_Serenade at the Villa_
Shah, the
Shakespeare
Sharp, William
Shelley, P.B.
_Shop_
Siena
Silverthorne, James
Smith, Mr
Society, The Browning
_Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister_
_Solomon and Balkis_
_Sonnets from the Portuguese_
_Sordello_
_Soul’s Tragedy_
_Speculative_
Spiritualism
Stanhope, Lord
_Statue and the Bust_
Stead, Mr F.H.
Stephen, Sir L.
Sterling, John
Stillmann, W.J.
Story, W.W.
Stowe, Harriet B.
_Strafford_
Swanwick
Swedenborg
T
Talfourd
Taylor, Bayard
Tennyson, Alfred
Tennyson, Frederick
Tennyson, Hallam
Thackeray, Miss, _see_ Ritchie, Mrs Thackeray, W.M.
_The Worst of It_
_Toccata of Galuppi’s_
_Too Late_
_Transcendentalism_
Trelawny, E.J.
Trollope, Mrs
Trollope, T.A.
_Twins_
_Two in the Campagna_
_Two Poems by E.B.B. and R. B_.
_Two Poets of Croisic_
U
_Up at a Villa_
V
Vallombrosa
Venice, 47, 137, 334, 335, 339, 386-388 Villers
W
_Waring_
Warwick Crescent
White, Rev. E.
_White Witchcraft_
Whitman, Walt
_Why am I a Liberal_?
Wiedemann, William
Wilson (Mrs Browning’s maid)
Wise, T.J.
Wiseman, Cardinal
_Woman’s Last Word_
Wordsworth, W.
Y
Yates, Edmund
“York” (a horse)
York Street Chapels
_Youth and Art_