R630200A. General Review Essay.
Fraser’s Magazine, February 1863, pp. 240–256.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 376–385.
It is about time that we began to do justice to Robert Browning. A nation should be able to make up its mind on the merits and demerits of its leaders in the course of thirty years. Thirty years have passed since Robert Browning’s first volume of poems was published; and thirty years ago he was almost as widely known as he is to-day. He is like to share the fate of Milton, and of several other Englishmen,—and women too.
’Tis only when they spring to heaven that angels
Reveal themselves to you: they sit all day
Beside you, and lie down at night by you
Who care not for their presence—muse or sleep—
And all at once they leave you, and you know them;
We are so fooled, so cheated!
Browning’s is, indeed, a curious fame. No one (except an unfrequent traveller, who remembers somewhat sadly now the kindly greetings which met him within that pleasant English household “at Florence, on the hill of Bellosguardo”) knows him personally: his works are read by an insignificant minority, few of whom profess to understand a tithe of what they read; only here and there do you meet vigorous and somewhat disagreeable people, addicted to sarcasm and other evil courses, who take him as a kind of tonic (he braces the nerves, they say, and rids them of mental effeminacy), and who fancy that an age which has Robert Browning and the Bible cannot be so very badly off after all.
I confess that this profound neglect and unpopularity has always rather surprised me. One who understands the people of England is of course prepared for many anomalous and inexplicable phenomena. Trial by jury is the palladium of our liberties; yet an English or Scotch jury (not to speak of an Irish) is the very last tribunal to which a wise man would be inclined to submit his cause. “May God send thee a good deliverance” is not by any means the language of hope, when addressed to a friend who has to undergo this ordeal. The verdicts of the English public are often in like manner very incomprehensible; yet it is difficult to account for Browning’s prolonged unpopularity. For he has many of the qualities which recommend a poet to the people. He is a master of the passions. His humour is bright and keen. He has a fine eye for colour. There is a rich and daring melody in his verse. He observes with minute and absolute fidelity. He is a philosophical poet; but the direct human element is always strong in his philosophy. Tennyson (our popular poet) is essentially an intellectual poet; but Browning is at once a more masculine, and a more intricate and subtle, thinker than the laureate.
Yet his unpopularity may be accounted for. He is not the poet to be perused with profit in the nursery or in a railway-carriage. He does not relish a platitude as Mr. Longfellow does, nor does his verse move with the same supple smoothness and graceful facility. He is not a rhetorician, like Lord Macaulay. Unlike Pope’s, his couplet does not carry a sting in its tail. He does not care to be “effective.” “Point” is not his strong point. His meaning, besides, does not always lie on the surface. It has to be sought with diligence and close attention. Thus, to those who read while they run, he is commonly obscure, and often incomprehensible. He is never insipid, but—brusque, quaint, rugged, intricately ingenious, involved, ironical—he perplexes the dull and startles the timid.
Voluptuousness, grotesqueness, ghastliness
Environ my devotedness, as quaintly
As round about some antique altar wreathe
The rose festoons, goats’ horns, and oxens’ skulls. [p. 241→]
Yet these defects have been exaggerated, and are not wilful. The occasional obscurity of his language, and the irregularity of the poetic forms which he uses, cannot be attributed to affectation. They are the natural and appropriate garniture of a peculiar and complex genius. As such, it will be well to look a little more closely into their origin, ere we go farther.
A vein of obscurity necessarily runs through the subjects which occupy, or at least attract, Mr. Browning’s muse. There are certain aspects of life which are by no means easily read. You may address an ode to your mistress’ eyebrow, or celebrate the virtues of your lady’s sparrow, if not with the grace of Catullus, at all events in language that is perfectly intelligible. Within this limited circle you are safe enough. The slope of the bank is very gradual at first; but, once you are out a few yards, it shelves down suddenly into deep water. There are mysteries enough even upon the earth’s surface, and only a light crust lies between us and the infinite—infinite light or infinite darkness. No thoughtful poet can altogether avoid these topics, nor avert his eyes from the grave issues of life—death, immortality, hell, heaven. The cry for light will not be silenced, though we crown ourselves with roses, and pour the hundred-yeared Opimian before the shrine of Apollo. And whenever the poet essays to decipher those high instincts, “which, be they what they may, are yet the fountain-light of all our day,” perfect lucidity of style is hardly to be looked for. Mr. Browning has not been able to escape the perilous fascination which, as he has pointed out, peculiarly affects the Christian poet. Modern society has ceased to write epigrams—except occasionally in provincial newspapers, when the parish doctor or divine, who has failed to ask the editor to dinner, is flayed into fame—of a Saturday. Pagan art is perfect in its way; we falter and hesitate, are perplexed and inconsistent. Why? Because our horizon is wider.
To-day’s brief passion limits their range:
It seethes with the morrow for us, and more.
Only in one work, however—his Christmas Eve—has Mr. Browning essayed persistently to pierce into the dark. He is commonly content to adopt General M‘Clellan’s “strategic movement,”—sometimes discharging a scrap of irony or a light jest as he flies.
There remaineth a rest for the people of God,
And I have had troubles enough, for one;—
or—
’Tis an awkward thing to play with souls,
And matter enough to save one’s own;—
or—
As for Venice and its people, merely born to bloom and drop,
Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the crop.
What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?—
are the parting shafts that cover his retreat. There is never, however, any foolish levity in Browning’s laughter. His irony plays over his melancholy humour—that intricate, exquisite sadness, that heroic pensiveness—as the rainbow plays upon its cloud. Though baffled, he never ceases to recognise the reality and magnitude of the problem.
Only I discern
Infinite passion and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.
Mr. Browning, moreover, does not care to study, what I may call the stock passions. He seldom pursues an obvious train of thought or feeling. He delights in tracking the byeways of the imagination. With grim fun, with tender irony, with unfrequent tears, he lays bare the waste and solitary places of the heart. The public does not like [p. 242→] this. Vice should be vice; virtue, virtue; moral distinctions are confounded if Lucifer does not wear a complete suit of black, or if there be any speck on Michael’s wings. It is undoubtedly quite true that the writer who does not conform to this rule often fails to make his outline sharp and articulate. The acute angles which the mind grasps without exertion are wanting. Most of those who have read King Charles and King Victor complain that they have been unable to form any exact conception of the politic and passionate D’Ormea. Is he an angel of light or a minister of darkness? The man himself, and those who knew him best, would have been puzzled to answer the question; and we cannot require his biographer to be better informed. The shadowy border-land that lies between the good and the evil passions, where they meet as on a kind of neutral ground, is more thickly peopled than we are willing to admit; and the dramatist who paints its occupants with entire fidelity cannot undertake to “turn out” a rogue who is all roguery, or an honest man whose honesty is free from every base alloy.
Nor (as might be anticipated from what has just been said) are the verdicts which Mr. Browning pronounces calculated to win popular favour. There is a species of rhetorical morality which has been current for a long time, especially on the stage and in juvenile literature. Wicked Don Giovanni is removed by the fiends. The good prince and princess are united, and live happy ever afterwards. The vindictive uncle relents, and leaves the virtuous apprentice his blessing and his estate. Most thoughtful men, however, are unwilling to commit themselves to any exact theory of retribution. The characters on the wall are hard to interpret, and are better, perhaps, left unread. “O, the pity of it, the pity of it, Iago!” That is enough for Mr. Thackeray and for us: permitte Divis cætera. But Mr. Browning does not rest here. He will not accept the meaning that lies quite on the surface. He deliberately prefers the difficult reading. He does not merely repudiate the verdict of the vulgar, but he undertakes to show where it is defective. King Victor returns to claim the crown which he had renounced. The irresolute Charles is profoundly agitated. He owes obedience to his father—that is the duty which lies nearest to him, and which will win the applause of those who relish an effective moral interlude. It is at this moment that Polyxena, his high-souled wife, appeals to him. The speech is so fine, and so aptly illustrates Mr. Browning’s habitual mood, that I am unwilling to curtail it:
King Charles! Pause here upon this strip of time
Allotted you out of eternity!
Crowns are from God—in his name you hold yours.
Your life’s no least thing, were it fit your life
Should be abjured along with rule; but now
Keep both! Your duty is to live and rule.
You, who would vulgarly look fine enough
In the world’s eye, deserting your soul’s charge,—
Ay, you would have men’s praise—this Rivoli
Would be illumined; while, as ’tis, no doubt
Something of stain will ever rest on you;
No one will rightly know why you refused
To abdicate; they’ll talk of deeds you could
Have done, no doubt,—nor do I much expect
Future achievements will blot out the past,
Envelope it in haze—nor shall we two
Be happy any more; ’twill be, I feel,
Only in moments that the duty’s seen
As palpably as now—the months, the years
Of painful indistinctness are to come,
While daily must we tread these palace rooms [p. 243→]
Pregnant with memories of the past; your eye
May turn to mine and find no comfort there,
Through fancies that beset me, as yourself,
Of other courses with far other issues,
We might have taken this great night—such bear,
As I will bear! What matters happiness?
Duty! There’s man’s one moment—this is yours!
In The Glove this analytic propensity is seen in full play. The poem is founded upon the well-known incident of De Lorge and the lion, and Peter Ronsard is the narrator.
“Heigho,” yawned one day King Francis,
“Distance all value enhances.
Here we’ve got peace; and aghast I’m
Caught thinking war the true pastime!
Is there a reason in metre?
Give us your speech, Master Peter?”
I who, if mortal dare say so,
Ne’er am at loss with my Naso,
“Sire,” I replied, “joys prove cloudlets;
Men are the merest Ixions—”
There the King whistled aloud, “Let’s—
Heigho—go look at our lions!”
Such are the sorrowful chances
If you talk fine to King Francis.
So they visit Blue-beard, the great lion (a splendid fellow), and as soon as King Francis declares that no man is fool-hardy enough to leap into the den, a lady’s glove flutters over the rails.
The sentence no sooner was uttered
Than over the rails a glove fluttered,
Fell close to the lion, and rested;
The dame ’twas, who flung it and jested
With life so, De Lorge had been wooing
For months past; he sate there pursuing
His suit, weighing out with nonchalance
Fine speeches like gold from a balance.
Sound the trumpet, no true knight’s a tarrier!
De Lorge made one leap at the barrier,
Walked straight to the glove,—while the lion
Ne’er moved, kept his far-reaching eye on
The palm-tree-edged desert-spring’s sapphire
And the musky oiled skin of the Kaffir,—
Picked it up, and as calmly retreated,
Leaped back where the lady was seated,
And full in the face of its owner
Flung the glove—
King and courtiers applaud the conduct of the lover—
“’Twas mere vanity,
Not love, set that task to humanity!”
Lords and ladies alike turned with loathing
From such a proved wolf in sheep’s clothing.
But the poet is not so quickly satisfied, and when the lady leaves the court “amid hooting and laughter,” he follows her. Why did she set such a task? What does her conduct mean? This is her explanation. Her lover had told her, over and over, that he would brave death for her sake.
When I looked on your lion it brought
All the dangers at once to my thought,
Encountered by all sorts of men
Before he was lodged in his den,—
From the poor slave whose club or bare hands
Dug the trap, set the snare on the sands, [p. 244→]
With no king and no court to applaud,
By no shame, should he shrink, overawed,
Yet to capture the creature made shift
That his rude boys might laugh at the gift:
To the page who last leaped o’er the fence
Of the pit, on no greater pretence
Than to get back the bonnet he dropped,
Lest his pay for a week should be stopped.
So wiser I judged it to make
One trial what “death for my sake”
Really meant, while the power was yet mine,
Than to wait until time should define
Such a phrase not so simply as I,
Who took it to mean just “to die.”
The blow a glove gives is but weak—
Does the mark yet discolour my cheek?
But when the heart suffers a blow,
Will the pain pass as soon, do you know?
“Mere vanity” is the popular verdict. “By no means,” the poet replies. “Your rude verdicts are as mischievous as your coarse penalties. You know the points of a horse or a sword well enough; but the human mind, with its delicate works and complicated springs, is quite beyond your beat.” A poet who habitually treats the vulgar with indifference or contempt, cannot expect, and probably does not desire, to be understood by them.
It may be admitted, however, that Mr. Browning’s muse is occasionally obscure from other causes. He lacks patience. He is too abrupt. He passes from one conclusion to another, without clasping the intermediate links of the chain. This is scarcely fair to the ordinary reader who cannot be expected to follow an argument that is at once abstruse and elliptical. The question of course is one of degree, and depends mainly upon the audience that the writer desires. You do not speak to a child as you speak to a man. Illustrations that are essential to the beginner become “vain repetitions” to the practised thinker. On the other hand, as unveiled beauty is less seductive than the hint of the hidden charm, allusion is sometimes more pregnant and suggestive than detail. And at all events a strictly logical method is out of place in a poem, even in a philosophical poem.
I am disposed to think that what is called “irregularity” in Mr. Browning’s genius, is not a cardinal defect. His “ruggedness,” at any rate, is most distasteful to those who know him least. It is easy to be musical on conditions. In a poem like Tannhaüser—manifesting manipulative dexterity, and coloured by a hectic flush of poetic sentiment, but revealing neither the creative force nor the purified light of the imagination—everything is sacrificed to melodious expression. The immediate object is attained, but the melody is meretricious, and soon loses its charm. Any poetry, indeed, which relies exclusively upon effective and musical wording, does not spring from, and cannot retain a permanent hold on, the heart. It is a mere husk. There is no kernel of thought or feeling. Mr. Browning’s ruggedness arises mainly from his determination to say precisely what he wants to say. He allows no consideration to deter him from expressing his thought with perfect exactness. Grace, purity of language, symmetry of form, are admirable, whenever they are consistent with absolute truthfulness; but they become tawdry ornaments, sentimental toys, the indications of an effeminate and slothful nature, when attained at its expense. I do not mean that Mr. Browning is specially “conscientious” (to use the word in vogue), because he renders with fidelity the intricate subtleties of the imagination; he does so spontaneously, and because he entertains a genuine artistic distaste for the gaudy and pretentious work, which does not stand the [p. 245→] test of time, of prolonged examination, and intimate acquaintance.
So that Mr. Browning’s poems are irregular only in the sense that Shakspeare’s plays are irregular. The irregularity in both cases is a sign of intellectual affluence. The writers rejoice in their writing, as the builders of mediæval cathedrals, or the illuminators of old missals, rejoiced in the grotesque demons and flowery margins which enrich their work. Browning takes the sincerest delight in quaint ingenious combinations; no poet ever lighted upon more whimsical rhymes, or managed more intricate metres. Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks, and the hand designs. The grotesque rhymes of Browning, like the poetic conceits of Shakspeare, are merely the holiday frolic of a rich and vivacious imagination. Healthy masculine vigour is apt to run riot at times. It is very significant also, that Browning, who has tried his hand at almost every form of verse, has never written a sonnet. The sonneteer, it must be owned, is, very often, a bit of a “prig.” He cannot well help being so, indeed. Sonnet-writing is a pretty, but rather solemn, dexterity—a slight-of-hand business—the knack of “doing” an emotion in a given number of lines. The thought or feeling must be of the regulation bore, not too wide and not too narrow. The passionate and affluent genius of Browning rejects this yoke. A state dress prevents the play of his muscles. He needs space and breathing-room. He cannot work with comfort unless he enjoys perfect freedom. “The weight of too much liberty,” which oppresses timid and feeble minds, does not embarrass him. He is a law to himself, and does not require to be restrained. It must be kept in mind, moreover, that Shakspeare and Shakspeare’s followers, war against the letter, but not against the spirit, of the law of form. They entertain no preference for a savage and barbarian uncouthness. Browning, in particular, has a fine feeling of proportion, and a true dramatic conception of the whole. But it is precisely because he possesses this sense that he cannot allow an effeminate fastidiousness about the cadence of a sentence or the jingle of a rhyme to interfere with the life that he seeks to create or to restore. Life must be attained at any cost. The flower must reach the light. It may be sadly knotted and stained before it attains maturity; but it has acted in obedience to the highest law of its life, and having done so, remains through a thousand varieties, true to its essential type.
Having reviewed the charges which have been most frequently pressed against Mr. Browning, it will be well, before proceeding to determine the place which he occupies in the poetic world, to glance in passing at some of the specialties of his genius, which I shall illustrate (as the most efficacious argument) rather by example than by comment.
Mr. Browning, I have said, is an accurate observer. And his power of observation is at once wide and microscopical. He has studied men and art and books as well as nature. Windermere was always in Wordsworth’s best verse. He was never quite at ease in the city; seldom essentially or vitally true except in the presence of nature. He became dry, restrained, and rhetorical, when diverted from his favourite pursuits. But Browning is as much at home with pictures and histories as with ferns and mountain mists. An originally prolific soil has been elaborately cultivated. Mr. Ruskin has observed that The Bishop’s Tomb at St. Praxed’s displays an unique and marvellous insight into the spirit of the Renaissance.
The lump of lapis lazuli
Big as a Jew’s head cut off at the nape,
Blue as a vein o’er the Madonna’s breast,— [p. 246→]
Or—
The bas-relief in bronze ye promised me;
Those Pans and Nymphs ye wot of, and perchance
Some tripod, thyrsus, with a vase or so,
The Saviour at his Sermon on the Mount,
St. Praxed in a glory, and one Pan
Ready to twitch the Nymph’s last garment off,
And Moses with the tables,——
Or—
One block, pure green as a pistachio-nut—
There’s plenty jasper somewhere in the world—
And have I not St. Praxed’s ear to pray
Horses for ye, and brown Greek manuscripts,
And mistresses with great smooth marbly limbs?—
are only the finishing touches of a sketch that is worked up with consummate consistency. The great picture which Fra Lippo Lippi designs to paint for his convent—
God in the midst, Madonna and her babe,
Ringed by a bowery, flowery angel-brood,
Lilies and vestments and white faces, sweet
As puff on puff of grated orris-root,
When ladies crowd to church at midsummer.
And then in the front of course a saint or two,—
and the jovial painter himself in one corner, led in by “a sweet angelic slip of a thing;” the illustrated walls of the Venetian palace—
The fight of giants and the feast of gods,
Sages in senate, beauties at the bath,
Chaces and battles, the whole earth’s display,
Landscape and sea-piece, down to flowers and fruit;—
the bust of Protus—
Among these latter busts we count by scores,
Half emperors and quarter emperors,
Each with his bay-leaf fillet, loose-thonged vest,
Loric and low-browed Gorgon on the breast;
One loves a baby face, with violets, there,
Violets instead of laurel in the hair,
As those were all the little locks could bear,—
these, and innumerable others, are the work of a man who is intimately acquainted with the different schools of European art, and who has entered into their life. But this elaborate culture has not hurt his simplicity, nor his relish for natural beauty. Pause for a moment over this exquisite picture of the idle Mayne. How close the observation, yet how soft in tone and suggestive in effect!—
The river pushes
Its gentle way through strangling rushes,
Where the glossy kingfisher
Flutters when noon-heats are near,
Glad the shelving banks to shun,
Red and steaming in the sun,
Where the shrew-mouse with pale throat
Burrows, and the speckled stoat;
Where the quick sand-pipers flit
In and out the marl and grit
That seems to breed them, brown as they.
Nought disturbs the river’s way
Save some lazy stork that springs,
Trailing it with legs and wings,
Whom the shy fox from the hill
Rouses, creep he ne’er so still. [p. 247→]
A man who understands art so well, ought to be a good colourist. Few poets, in truth, have been better. Mr. Browning’s pictures are full of colour,—rich, yet accurately toned, and in perfect keeping. Such lines as—
Hear the last news of her
From some old thief and son of Lucifer,
His forehead chapletted green with wreathy hop,
Sunburned all over like an Æthiop,—
or those on the Tyrian Dye—
Yet there’s the dye,—in that rough mesh
The sea has only just o’er-whispered,
Live whelks, the lips’-beard dripping fresh,
As if they still the water’s lisp heard
Through foam the rock-weeds thresh.
Enough to furnish Solomon
Such hangings for his cedar-house
That when gold-robed he took the throne
In that abyss of blue, the spouse
Might swear his presence shone
Most like the centre spike of gold
Which burns deep in the blue-bell’s womb,
What time, with ardours manifold,
The bee goes singing to her groom
Drunken and over bold,—
might have been written by Paul Veronese or Tintoret, and produce the same effect on the mind that a picture by either of these artists, or a bunch of grapes, or a Spanish fruit-girl’s basket of melons or peaches, does.
Mr. Browning is constitutionally sarcastic. Yet he is not so, to the exclusion of qualities that are not often found in union with a sarcastic temper. He is tranquil; but his tranquillity is the repose of conscious strength. His demeanour is composed; yet fire burns below. He is ironical; but he is passionate. No man is more capable of understanding the subtle abandonment and the mighty extravagance of love. He can appreciate the full force of Shakspeare’s great line—“When maidens sue, men give like gods.” The girl is ready to yield up her very soul to her lover—
’Tis said the Arab sage
In practising with gems can loose
Their subtle spirit in his cruce
And leave but ashes; so, sweet Mage,
Leave them my ashes when thy use
Sucks out my soul, thy heritage!
She will plait no vulgar jewel in the hair that he has praised—
Now pluck a great blade of that ribbon-grass
To plait in where the foolish jewel was
I flung away: since you have praised my hair,
’Tis proper to be choice in what I wear.
And when he is dying, basely stabbed, upon her breast—
It was ordained to be so, Sweet, and best
Comes now, beneath thine eyes, and on thy breast.
Still kiss me! Care not for the cowards! Care
Only to put aside thy beauteous hair
My blood will hurt!
She has refused his suit; but she gives him leave to ride by her side this one afternoon.
I and my mistress, side by side,
Shall be together, breathe and ride:
So one day more am I deified.
Who knows but the world may end to-night? [p. 248→]
And the true wife waits for her husband—be he faithful or faithless—on the farther shore—
It all comes to the same thing in the end,
Since mine thou wast, mine art, and mine shall be,
Faithful or faithless, sealing up the sum
Or lavish of my treasure, thou must come
Back to the heart’s place here I keep for thee!
Such sentences burn with passionate feeling. The eye lights, the pulse throbs, language moves on eloquently and vehemently, like a noble river. But the passion is always pure. It is never smutched by sensuality. It is like the fire upon a Christian altar, or—under a different guise, and fixed upon an earthly object—the fervour of the martyr, who can die—
How gladly!—if I made acquist
Through the brief minute’s fierce annoy
Of God’s eternity of joy.
Alive to these rich, exquisite, and diversified influences, the poet must relish life keenly. Most poets, when not bilious, do so; but Mr. Browning’s intense enjoyment is peculiar, and very characteristic of the man:—
Oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to rock—
The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree—the cool silver shock
Of the plunge in a pool’s living water,—the hunt of the bear,
And the sultriness shewing the lion is couched in his lair.
How good is man’s life, the mere living! how fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses, for ever in joy!
If life, “mere living,” be indeed such a lovely thing, where is the good of experimenting upon it? How much better is it than art, or philosophy, or poetry? What reward has the poet who describes it, or the painter who copies it? “If I carve the young Phœbus,” Cleon exclaims, “am I therefore young?[”] No!—art has aged me before my time. ‘To know’ is something, no doubt, and to prove how the beauty of the world may be enjoyed is more,—
But knowing nought, to enjoy is something too.
Yon rower with the moulded muscles there,
Lowering the sail, is nearer it than I.
I can write love-odes—thy fair slave’s an ode.
I get to sing of love, when grown too grey
For being loved: she turns to that young man,
The muscles all a-ripple on his back.
I know the joy of kingship; well—thou art king!
How poor, indeed, are the highest achievements of art, when compared with the life which it strives to perpetuate!
And you, great sculptor—so you gave
A score of years to art, her slave,
And that’s your Venus—whence we turn
To yonder girl that fords the burn!
Men grow famous, no doubt—poets, philosophers, soldiers, statesmen, are spoken about after they have died. But what is fame? A single throb of the pulse is worth the history of a world which has perished.
We ride and I see her bosom heave.
There’s many a crown for who can reach.
Ten lines, a statesman’s life in each!
The flag stuck on a heap of bones,
A soldier’s doing!—what atones?
They scratch his name on the Abbey-stones.
My riding is better, by their leave. [p. 249→]
Possessed of this eager and direct enjoyment of existence, we need not wonder that Mr. Browning’s power of presentment should be exceedingly vivid. The faculty of clear and picturesque presentment is a most valuable gift. The sunlight comes into the picture. The breeze wanders among the apple-blossoms, and shakes the rushes. The curls are dusted with gold. The cheek flushes. There is life there. And the fight is not a common one. The pictures of all men who do not possess it; of all mere critics, philosophers, and divines, want firmament as much as a bit of pre-raphaelite orchard-wall does, have less air in them than a jar of preserved salmon, hermetically sealed, has, are as flat as a flounder’s back, and as stiff as a saint by an Old Master. Mere words, or mere accumulations of words, however appropriate, however cleverly selected, never produce the effect. The poet’s spirit—pure, delicate, subtle, like the vanishing perfume of some rare drug, like the retreating echoes of the hunter’s music among the hills—must move among them, “soothing with finer fancies, touching with lighter thought.” There is often more real “air, earth, and water,” in one line by Mr. Browning, than in a dozen pages of rhetorical novel painting.
It were easy to fill a paper with such passages from his work; but, although I have yet much to say, the space at my command begins sensibly to diminish, and I must restrict myself to one or two that lie at hand. Take this,—of a lateen-boat in the Mediterranean,—
We are sailing by Triest,
Where a day or two we harboured;
A sunset was in the West
When, looking over the vessel’s side,
One of our company espied
A sudden speck to larboard.
And, as a sea-duck flies and swims
At once, so came the light craft up,
With its sole lateen sail that trims
And turns (the water round its rims
Dancing, as round a drinking cup),
And by us like a fish it curled,
And drew itself up close beside,
Its great sail on the instant furled,—
—then the boat,
I know not how, turned sharply round,
Laying her whole side on the sea
As a leaping fish does; from the lee
Into the weather, cut somehow
Her sparkling path beneath our bow;
And so went off, as with a bound,
Into the rose and golden half
Of the sky.
Or this of the rough German duke pining to death among court lackeys,—
They should have set him on rough Berold,
Mad with pride, like fire to manage!
They should have got his cheek fresh tannage
Such a day as to-day in the merry sunshine!
Had they stuck on his fist a rough-foot merlin!
—Hark! the wind’s on the heath at its game.
Oh! for a noble falcon-lanner,
To flap each broad wing like a banner,
And turn in the wind, and dance like flame!—
Had they broached a cask of white beer from Berlin!
Or, if you incline to prescribe mere wine,
Put to his lips when they saw him pine,
A cup of our own Moldavia fine,
Cotnar, for instance, green as May sorrel,
And ropy with sweet,—we shall not quarrel. [p. 250→]
Or this picture of the girl, leaning over the balcony of the Giudecca palace to catch her truant loory,—
Ah, the autumn day
I, passing, saw you overhead!
First out a cloud of curtain blew,
Then a sweet cry, and last, came you—
To catch your loory, that must needs
Escape just then, of all times then,
To peck a tall plant’s fleecy seeds,
And make me happiest of men.
I scarce could breathe to see you reach
So far back o’er the balcony,
(To catch him ere he climbed too high
Above you in the Smyrna peach),
That quick the round smooth cord of gold,
This coiled hair on your head, unrolled,
Fell down you like a gorgeous snake.
The Roman girls were wont, of old,
When Rome there was, for coolness’ sake,
To let lie curling o’er their bosoms.
Dear loory! may his beak retain
Ever its delicate rose stain,
As if the wounded lotus-blossoms
Had marked their thief, to know again!
There is a passage in Pippa Passes—the dialogue which occurs when Jules brings Phoene into his studio—which I am very anxious to quote; but in the meantime I must hurry on, in the hope that when we arrive at Mr. Browning’s dramas I may find space for a marvellously vivid and touching scene.
Such passages manifest a very rare power of presentment: but Mr. Browning’s illustrative faculty is quite as remarkable. Metaphor is the language of the imagination. “All things are double, one against another;” and the poet is the interpreter of this mystical union. He discovers the body which the thought naturally assumes when translated into shape and invested with local habitation, and he joins them together. Any bungler may practise the rite, as in Scotland you can be married by the blacksmith; but it requires the nicest poetic feeling, tact, and sense, to reflect a perfect image. The chief end of imagery is to illustrate. It is the argument of the poem. Emotion is subtle, evanescent, apt to escape. It shuns the captivity of speech. Fitful moods, transient feelings, the vague longings and impulses of the heart (and these the poet undertakes to express) require to be mirrored before we can apprehend them with exactness. There are other uses which the metaphor answers; but the illustrative, though not its highest, is its most serviceable function. Mr. Browning’s figures are always original and apposite, and heighten the impression of intellectual richness which his work never fails to convey. I must string a few of these pearls together—though, like all finished work of this kind, they suffer sadly when divorced from the material into which they have been wrought, and with which they were designed to blend. The nymph listens to the wind murmuring on her lute, as the limpet listens for the sea,—
And while such murmurs flow, the nymph
Bends o’er the harp-top from the shell,
As the dry limpet for the lymph
Come with a tune he knows so well.
The Duke tells Colombe that he will keep her honour safe,—
With mine I trust you, as the sculptor trusts
Yon marble woman with the marble rose,
Loose on her hand, she never will let fall,
In graceful, slight, silent security. [p. 251→]
The self-same spirit works to divers issues,—
As one spring-wind unbinds the mountain snow
And comforts violets in their hermitage.
Light flows in like a river,—
And from the East, fuller and fuller,
Day, like a mighty river, is flowing in,
But clouded, wintry, desolate, and cold.
The imperfections of love are like the stains on a chance-sown seedling,
Love,—not serenely pure,
But strong from weakness, like a chance-sown plant,
Which, cast on stubborn soil, puts forth changed buds
And softer stains, unknown in happier climes.
Festus had imagined that the ostentatious air of defeat which Paracelsus had assumed was only the pause before the spring,—
That careless bearing, free from all pretence,
Even of contempt for what it ceased to seek,
Smiling humility, praising much, yet waiving
What it professed to praise;—
That ostentatious show of past defeat,
That ready acquiescence in contempt—
I deem’d no other than the letting-go
His shivered sword, of one about to spring
Upon his foe’s throat.
Paracelsus vindicates his ambition in a passage of wonderful beauty. From childhood a fire has burned within him—the inspiration of an angel, he believes, rather than the working of his own soul.
I knew not then
What whispered in the evening, and spoke out
At midnight. If some mortal, born too soon,
Were laid away in some great trance—the ages
Coming and going all the while—till dawned
His true time’s advent, and could then record
The words they spoke who kept watch by his bed,—
Then I might tell more of the breath so light
Upon my eyelids, and the fingers warm
Among my hair. Youth is confused; yet never
So dull was I but, when that spirit passed,
I turned to him, scarce consciously, as turns
A watersnake when fairies cross his sleep.
These are figures which simply illustrate; but there is another class which probably infer for their production keener and more direct excitement. At certain times the forms of external nature are appropriated by intense or exalted feeling, and transformed into instruments of vengeance or blessing. The lightning ceases to be a simple natural phenomenon, and becomes to the guilty lovers the avenging arm of the Lord.
Buried in woods we lay, you recollect;
Swift ran the searching tempest overhead,
And ever and anon some bright white shaft
Burnt thro’ the pine-tree roof—here burnt and there,
As if God’s messenger thro’ the close wood screen
Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture,
Feeling for guilty thee and me; then broke
The thunder like a whole sea overhead.
Rarer, purer, and loftier than any of the others is that exercise of the faculty which dispenses with the material form altogether. The poetic conception comes in its room, and pushes it aside. We [p. 252→] have had many admirable pictures of the dawn. That pale pure light, growing momentarily upon the horizon, and then rousing the veiled and purple sea, ushers in a moment of complete and exquisite repose, more complete and profound than the repose of the night. For all night long, watched by a silent and expectant throng, a great drama has been transacting upon the heavens. But the night-watchers have departed with the dawn, and there is a brief interval and breathing-space before the morning breeze begins to stir and the husbandman is abroad in his fields. This solemn pause becomes to the poet’s mind a visible shape. The Angel of Night, leaning on his spear, and gazing on the earth the while, waits to be relieved from his ward.
’Twas the last watch of night,
Except what brings the morning quite,
When the armed angel, conscience clear,
His task nigh done, leans o’er his spear
And gazes on the earth he guards;
Safe on night more thro’ all its wards,
Till God relieve him at his post.
That is drawn by a hand that does not falter. There is no crowding, confusion, inconsequence, or incompleteness there. The picture is perfectly finished. Nothing could be added, nothing taken away, without incalculable mischief.
Old-fashioned critics and divines mapped the mind into distinct provinces, which we, who have come to regard it as a whole, one and indivisible, are rather apt to treat with disrespect. Still the method was of use; and we may recur, not without advantage, to their angular demarcations and formal lines. Poetry—to use this language—admits of a three-fold division—lyric, dramatic, and philosophic. The lyric is the most inartificial form of poetic speech. The man feels joy or grief, and he expresses his joy of grief in this natural music, as the enjoyment of a thrush is expressed in its song. The one is barely more reflective than the other. The dramatic and the philosophic follow: the dramatic when by observation he finds that his own impressions are not the impressions of other men; the philosophic when by reflection he essays to determine the relations which he and other men maintain to things. They all of course presuppose the imagination. The imagination fuses the hard fact into flexible poetic life. Without imagination the dramatist remains a mimic, the philosopher a logician or a statesman.
Mr. Browning, though possessing much simple and natural ease of expression, is specifically a dramatic and philosophic poet. He is seldom a pure lyrist. The meditative intellect prefers to use the eyes and to speculate through the brain of another. He himself says of the poems least reflective or mimetic in structure, that “though for the most part lyric in expression, they are always dramatic in principle, and so many utterances of so many imaginary persons.” It is Cleon, or Karshish, or Fra Lippo Lippi, or Andrea del Sarto, who declaims, not Robert Browning. Their talk, indeed, is often lyrical talk; but then such a combination implies more than the untutored expression of personal feeling; it implies besides that that mental operation has been performed which enables a writer to use other eyes than his own, and to conceive how the feeling affected other men. But when the mental operation is once completed, when the author has thoroughly identified himself with the character which he is delineating, the question may indeed arise whether the lyric faculty does not again come purely into play, or whether there be not always a more or less distinct consciousness on the part of the writer that he is attitudinising, playing the part of a mouthpiece, [p. 253→] saying something which he does not feel, but which reflection and experience induce him to believe is felt by others. The problem is a nice one. There is probably in such cases a curious mixture of spontaneous and reflective action. A great actor identifies himself with his creations; but the grief which he experiences when his wife dies is not the grief he experiences when representing Hamlet or Macbeth. There can never be in dramatic that absolute surrender to the feeling of the moment from which lyric poetry derives its natural grace. In this sense, indeed, it is not true that the writer who “identifies himself most completely with his creations” is the greatest or most effective dramatist. A writer who did so would probably want that regulative faculty which enables the dramatist to hold his characters in subjection, to keep them in their proper places and on their own feet. If each character uttered a perfect lyric, the author would be unable, it seems to me, to maintain that equipoise, that sovereign impartiality, which permits Shakspeare to pass without pain from the mind of one into the mind of another—from the vehement irritation of Elizabeth to Gloster’s tranquil will.
Mr. Browning has written, no doubt, a few charming lyrics. Every reader knows, or ought to know, the ride from Ghent to Aix—a ride which for spirited and rapid movement recalls the pace of Sir Walter’s moss-troopers across the border, or Leonore’s midnight gallop behind her taciturn groom. How manly ire and passionate regret breathe through The Lost Leader! What pale purity, child-like yet death-like, in Evelyn Hope! What grotesque glory of colour and light in Pippa’s Song of the Python! What oriental perfume in the ode in Paracelsus! What loving extravagance in The Flower’s Name! What indolent opulence in the Venetian Lyric! Which of these gems can we prefer? This is the ode in Paracelsus:
Heap cassia, sandal-buds, and stripes
Of labdanum, and aloe-balls
Smeared with dull nard an Indian wipes
From out her hair;—such balsam falls
Down sea-side mountain pedestals,
From mountain summits where tired winds are fain,
Spent with the vast and howling main,
To treasure half their island-gain.
And strew faint sweetness from some old
Egyptian’s fine worm-eaten shroud,
Which breaks to dust when once unrolled;
And shed dim perfume, like a cloud
From chamber long to quiet vowed,
With mothed and dropping arras hung,
Mouldering the lute and books among
Of queen, long dead, who lived there young.
This is from Pippa’s song:
’Tis said a python scared one day
The breathless city, till he came,
With forky tongue and eyes on flame,
Where the old king sate to judge alway;
But when he saw the sweepy hair,
Girt with a crown of berries rare,
Which the God will hardly give to wear
To the maiden who singeth, dancing bare
In the altar-smoke by the pine-torch lights,
At his wondrous forest rites,—
Beholding this he did not dare
Approach that threshold in the sun,
Assault the old king smiling there.
Such grace had kings when the world begun! [p. 254→]
Now contrast with the intense lights and shadows of Eastern life this stainless picture of an English maiden:
Sixteen years old when she died!
Perhaps she had scarcely heard my name—
It was not her time to love; beside,
Her life had many a hope and aim,
Duties enough and little cares,
And now was quiet, now astir—
Till God’s hand beckoned unawares,
And the sweet white brow is all of her.
I loved you, Evelyn, all the while;
My heart seemed full as it could hold;
There was place and to spare for the frank young smile,
And the red young mouth and the hair’s young gold.
So, hush! I will give you this leaf to keep;
See, I shut it inside the sweet cold hand.
There, that is our secret! Go to sleep;
You will wake, and remember, and understand.
It may be said without any exaggeration that Mr. Browning is one of our greatest dramatists,—perhaps in modern times our very greatest. The greatness of the old dramatists consisted mainly in this—that they did not weary the emotion which they sought to rouse on a succession of incidents. They did not hurt the simplicity of interest. The meanest detail was a part of a whole. The tragedy gradually but steadily approached. The talk of serving-women, or the babble of pages, led up to the catastrophe. Mr. Browning understands this art. All the incidents—as in The Blot on [sic] the Scutcheon, one of the most perfectly conceived and perfectly executed tragedies in the language—are grouped around the supreme crisis out of which they spring, and to which they are organically related. The tragedy may cover a life-time; but the one moment, big with fate, burns, like a baneful star, in the centre. He has also a fine eye for the tragic situations which are calculated to elicit our pity, and his plays abound in quick and effective dramatic turns. There are some fine specimens of the latter in Luria, in King Charles and King Victor, and in Paracelsus. The great-hearted general of Florence—whose rich southern nature rises so magnanimously above the acute and politic Florentines whom he serves—has resigned his command to his subordinate Puccio, and taken poison. His last moment, which he waits with supreme tranquillity, is close at hand, when an officer enters the tent. What is amiss? Their enemies, the Lucchese, are on the move.
Hussein. A movement of the Lucchese troops
Southward.
Luria. Toward Florence? Have out instantly—
Ah! old use clings! Puccio must care henceforth!
The aged Victor recovers his crown; but death is upon him; and the failing intellect returns mechanically to the youthful victories of the dying king.
I seek for phrases
To vindicate my right. ’Tis of a piece!
All is alike gone by with me—who beat
Once D’Orleans in his lines—his very lines!
To have been Eugene’s comrade, Louis’ rival,
And now—
Or, again—
No matter. Guile has made me king again.
Louis—’twas in King Victor’s time—long since, [p. 255→]
When Louis reigned—and, also, Victor reign’d—
How the world talks already of us two!
God of eclipse and each discoloured star,
Why do I linger then?
And Paracelsus, sick with insult, moody with failure, bitterly incensed, is suddenly softened when he learns that Michal is dead. Very touching, deeply pathetic, is the quick revulsion of feeling which the wounded sage experiences.
Paracelsus. Have you felt sorrow, Festus?—’tis because
You love me. Sorrow, and sweet Michal yours!
Well thought on: never let her know this last
Dull winding up of all; these miscreants dared
Insult me—me she loved: so grieve her not.
Festus. Your ill success can little grieve her now.
Paracelsus. Michal is dead! pray Christ we do not craze!
Festus. Aureole, dear Aureole, look not on me thus!
Fool, fool! this is the heart grown sorrow-proof—
I cannot bear those eyes.
Paracelsus. Nay, really dead?
Festus. ’Tis scarce a month.
Paracelsus. Stone dead!—then you have laid her
Among the flowers ere this. Now, do you know,
I can reveal a secret which shall comfort
Even you? I have no julep, as men think,
To cheat the grave; but a far better secret.
Know then you did not ill to trust your love
To the cold earth; I have thought much of it;
For I believe we do not wholly die.
Festus. Aureole—
Paracelsus. Nay: do not laugh: there is a reason
For what I say: I think the soul can never
Taste death. I am, just now, as you may see,
Very unfit to put so strange a thought
In an intelligible dress of words;
But take it as my trust, she is not dead.
Festus. But not on this account alone? You surely—
Aureole, you have believed this all along?
Paracelsus. And Michal sleeps among the roots and dews,
While I am moved at Basil, and full of schemes
For Nuremberg, and hoping and despairing,
As though it mattered how the farce plays out,
So it be quickly played. Away, away!
Have your will rabble! while we fight the prize,
Troop you in safety to the snug back seats,
And leave a clear arena for the brave
About to perish for your sport!—Behold!
I have said that Mr. Browning is a philosophical poet. Many readers will think none the better of him on that account. Poetry, they hold, ought to have no connexion with Philosophy. I cannot agree with them. The one is the helpmate of the other. There are thoughts which the minstrel alone strikes out. The argument of the poet is sometimes more effective than the logician’s. He can explain many things which the metaphysician cannot. The radiant imagination of Mr. Browning has wrestled with not a few of the hardest problems of the schools. As a thinker, he is essentially original. The Two Voices—Tennyson’s most directly philosophical poem—is composed of a series of rather commonplace reflections,—profusely adorned, no doubt. It is like a common water-jug, stuck all over with gems and precious stones. No very intricate speculations, no very keen doubts, find expression in that elaborately-polished verse. Mr. Browning does not only adorn,—he originates as [p. 256→] well. His imagination flashes light into the dark places. The chasing is rich indeed,—but the pitcher has been designed by Cellini. Paracelsus and Christmas Eve deal with the weighty issues of the life—divine and human. Paracelsus (on which I would willingly linger, as in many respects the most remarkable of Mr. Browning’s works, but time fails me) is the record of high hopes defeated, of lofty purposes thwarted, of pure aspirations and an unselfish ambition rendered fruitless. Caricatures of religious fanaticism, coarse, but vigorous and vivacious as Hogarth’s, pictures of material nature, pure as summer dawn, frescoes of judgment, heavy with the gloom and pomp of the Sistine, are grotesquely bound up together in Christmas Eve. Throughout that singular poem, in verse that halts, and stumbles, and aspires, the poet strives to read, honestly, patiently, courageously, humbly, “the riddle of the painful earthy.”
To conclude. As the dramatic is the poetic form which Mr. Browning prefers, we can seldom be sure that we meet the man himself in his poetry. It is, at nearest, one of his many moods—moods which cannot be safely identified with permanent character. On rare occasions, however, we find him appearing in propriâ personâ. At these times—in the later years at least—a passion for Italian freedom, and a tender regard for that “E. B. B.” to whom he offers his latest work, are most noticeable. His voice softens when he speaks of Italy; her name is written upon his heart: and he longs for the day when the national tricolour shall wave over liberated Florence. “Shall I be alive that morning?” he asks. He has seen the desire of his eyes: and Florence is duly grateful to her English lover.
“This faith was shown
To Italy, our mother;—she
Uses my hand and blesses thee.”
The nearer and dearer tie has now been hallowed by “the covenant of the grave.” “Till death us part, merely?” the great English poetess wistfully inquires in one of her earlier works. “Till death us part—O poor to be our best for Love the deathless.” Not so, is the burden of that One Word More with which the husband closes his volumes. Here I can only lay these poor verses at your feet; but hereafter I may find a worthier return for the great love with which I have been blessed.
This of verse alone, one life allows me;
Verse, and nothing else, have I to give you:
Other heights in other lives, God willing—
All the gifts from all the heights, your own, Love.
So—“God willing”—let it be.
Shirley [John Skelton].
Reviewed:
General Review Essay (RB).
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