A Handbook to the Works of Browning Part 5

We know at least that the soul in him has conquered. His stamp upon the floor has brought Palma and Salinguerra to him in anxious haste. They find him dead:

"Under his foot the badge: still, Palma said, A triumph lingering in the wide eyes, Wider than some spent swimmer's if he spies Help from above in his extreme despair,...."

(vol. i. p. 279.)

Sordello is buried at Goito Castle, in an old font-tomb in which his mother lies, and beside whose sculptured female forms the child-poet had dreamed his earliest dreams of life and of love. Salinguerra makes peace with the Guelphs, marries a daughter of Eccelino the monk, and effaces himself once for all in the Romano house, leaving its sons Eccelino and Alberic to plague the world at their pleasure, and meet the fate they have deserved. He himself, after varied fortunes, dwindles into a "showy, turbulent soldier," less "astute" than people profess to think: whose qualities even foes admire; and whose aggressions they punish, but do not much resent. We see him for the last time at the age of eighty, a nominal prisoner in Venice.

The drama is played out. Its actors have vanished from the stage. One only lives on in Mr. Browning's fancy, in the pathos of his modest hopes, and acknowledged, yet scarcely comprehended failure--more human, and therefore more undying than Naddo himself: the poet Eglamor.

Sordello he recalls only to dismiss him with less sympathy than we should expect: as ending the ambition for what he could not become, by the well-meant renunciation of what he was born to be; made a hero of by legends which credited him with doing what his conscience had forbidden him to do; leaving the world to suffer by his self-sacrifice; a type of failure more rare and more brilliant than that of Eglamor, yet more full of the irony of life.

In one sense, however, he had lived for a _better thing_, and we are bidden look back, through the feverish years, on a bare-footed rosy child running "higher and higher" up a wintry hillside still crisp with the morning frost,

"... singing all the while Some unintelligible words to beat The lark, G.o.d's poet, swooning at his feet, So worsted is he...." (vol. i. p. 288-9)

The poet in him had failed with the man, but less completely.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 8: The quoted pa.s.sage is from the works of Cornelius Agrippa, a well-known professor of occult philosophy, and is indeed introductory to a treatise upon it. The writer is quite aware that his work may be scandalizing, hurtful, and even poisonous to narrow minds, but is sure that readers of a superior understanding will get no little good, and plenty of pleasure from it; and he concludes by claiming indulgence on the score of his youth, in case he should have given even the better judges any cause for offence. For those who read this preface with any previous knowledge of Mr. Browning's life and character, there will be an obvious inference to his own youthfulness in the exaggerated estimate thus implied of his imaginative sins; for the tendency of "Pauline" is both religious and moral; and no man has been more innocent than its author, from boyhood up, of tampering with any belief in the black art.

His hatred for that "spiritualism," which is its modern equivalent, is indeed matter of history. But the trick he has here played himself may confuse the mind of those who only know him from his works, and for whom his vivid belief in the supernatural may point to a different kind of mysticism.]

[Footnote 9: Vol. i. of the new uniform edition of 1888-89. This will be the one always referred to.]

[Footnote 10: The "Andromeda," described as "with" the speaker at pages 29 and 30, is that of Polidoro di Caravaggio, of which Mr. Browning possesses an engraving, which was always before his eyes as he wrote his earlier poems. The original was painted on the wall of a garden attached to the Palazzo Bufalo--or del Bufalo--in Rome. The wall has been pulled down since Mr. Browning was last there.]

[Footnote 11: Aristotle.]

[Footnote 12: He rose to meet him from the place at which he stood, saying, "Oh Mantuan, I am Sordello of thy land!" and they embraced each other.]

[Footnote 13: The name of Naddo occurs in this book, and will often reappear in the course of the story. This personage is the typical Philistine--the Italian Brown, Jones, or Robinson--and will represent genuine common-sense, or mere popular judgment, as the case may be.]

[Footnote 14: Elys, the subject of this song, is any woman of the then prevailing type of Italian beauty: having fair hair, and a "pear-shaped"

face.]

[Footnote 15: Bocafoli and Plara, mannerists: one of the sensuous school, the other of the pompously pure; imaginary personages, but to whom we may give real names.]

[Footnote 16: The belief in personal experience is very strong here.]

[Footnote 17: The third of these, vol. i. p. 168, is very characteristic of the state of Sordello's, and therefore, at that moment, of his author's mind. The poet who _makes others see_ is he who deals with abstractions: who makes the mood do duty for the man.]

[Footnote 18: Walter Savage Landor.]

[Footnote 19: The word "Eyebright" at page 170 stands for Euphrasia its Greek equivalent, and refers to one of Mr. Browning's oldest friends.]

[Footnote 20: Here, as elsewhere, I give the spirit rather than the letter, or even the exact order of Sordello's words. The necessary condensation requires this.]

II.

NON-CLa.s.sIFIED POEMS.

DRAMAS.

Our attention is next attracted to Mr. Browning's dramas; for his first tragedy, "Strafford," was published before "Sordello," having been written in an interval of its composition, and his first drama, "Pippa Pa.s.ses," immediately afterwards. They were published, with the exception of "Strafford," and "In a Balcony," in the "Bells and Pomegranates"

series, 1841-1846, together with the "Dramatic Lyrics," and "Dramatic Romances," which will be found distributed under various headings in the course of this volume.

The dramas are:--

"Strafford." 1837.

"Pippa Pa.s.ses." 1841.

"King Victor and King Charles." 1842.

"The Return of the Druses." 1843.

"A Blot in the 'Scutcheon." 1843.

"Colombe's Birthday." 1844.

"A Soul's Tragedy." 1846.

"Luria." 1846.

"In a Balcony." (A Fragment.) 1853.

The five-act tragedy of "STRAFFORD" turns on the impeachment and condemnation of the man whose name it bears. Its keynote is Strafford's devotion to the King, which Mr. Browning has represented as the constant motive of his life, and also the cause of his death. When the action opens, England is without a Parliament. The question of ship-money is "burning." The Scotch Parliament has just been dissolved, and Charles is determined to subdue the Scots by force. Wentworth has been summoned from Ireland to a.s.sist in doing so. He is worn and weary, but the King needs him, and he comes.

He accepts the Scotch war against his better judgment: and next finds himself entrapped by the King's duplicity and selfishness, not only into the command of the expedition to Scotland, but into the appearance of having advised it. Pym has vainly tried to win him back to the popular cause. Lady Carlisle vainly warns him of his danger in subserving the King's designs. No danger can shake his allegiance. He leads the army to the north; is beaten; discovers that the popular party is in league with the Scotch; returns home to impeach it, and finds himself impeached. A Bill of Attainder is pa.s.sed against him; and Charles, who might prove by one word his innocence of the charges conveyed in it, promises to do so, evades his promise, and finally signs the warrant for Strafford's death.

Pym, who loved him best, who trusted him longest, is he who demands the signature.

Lady Carlisle forms a plan for Strafford's escape from the Tower; but it fails at the last moment, and we see him led away to execution. True to the end, he has no thought but for the master who has betrayed him--whose terrible weakness must betray himself--whose fate he sees foreshadowed in his own. He kneels to Pym for the King's life; and, seeing him inexorable, _thanks G.o.d that he dies first_. Pym's last speech is a tender farewell to the friend whom he has sacrificed to his country's cause, but whom he trusts soon to meet in the better land, where they will walk together as of old, all sin and all error purged away.

We are told in the preface to the first edition of Strafford that the portraits are, so the author thinks, faithful: his "Carlisle," only, being imaginary; and we may add that he regards his conception of her as, in the main, confirmed by a very recent historian of the reign of Charles I. The tragedy was performed in 1837, at Covent Garden Theatre, under the direction of Macready, by whose desire it had been written, and who sustained the princ.i.p.al part.

The appearance of "Strafford" coincides so closely with at least the conception of "Sordello" as to afford a strong proof of the variety of the author's genius. The evidence is still stronger in "Pippa Pa.s.ses,"

in which he leaps directly from his most abstract mode of conception to his most picturesque; and, from the prolonged strain of a single inward experience, to a quick succession of pictures, in which life is given from a general and external point of view. The humour which found little place in the earlier work has abundant scope here; and the descriptive power which was so vividly apparent in all of them, here shows itself for the first time in those touches of local colour which paint without describing. Mr. Browning is now fully developed, on the artistic and on the practical side of his genius.

Mr. Browning was walking alone, in a wood near Dulwich, when the image flashed upon him of some one walking thus alone through life; one apparently too obscure to leave a trace of his or her pa.s.sage, yet exercising a lasting though unconscious influence at every step of it; and the image shaped itself into the little silk-winder of Asolo, Felippa, or Pippa.

"PIPPA Pa.s.sES" represents the course of one day--Pippa's yearly holiday; and is divided into what is virtually four acts, being the occurrences of "Morning," "Noon," "Evening," and "Night." Pippa rises with the sun, determined to make the best of the bright hours before her; and she spends them in wandering through the town, singing as she goes, and all the while thinking of its happiest men and women, and fancying herself they. These happy ones are four, each the object of a different love.

Ottima, whose aged husband is the owner of the silk mills, has a lover in Sebald. Phene, betrothed to the French sculptor Jules, will be led this morning to her husband's home. Luigi (a conspiring patriot) meets his mother at eve in the turret. The Bishop, blessed by G.o.d, will sleep at Asolo to-night. Which love would she choose? The lover's? It gives cause for scandal. The husband's? It may not last. The parent's? it alone will guard us to the end of life. G.o.d's love? That is best of all.

It is Monsignore she decides to be.

Ottima and her lover have murdered her husband at his villa on the hillside. She is the more reckless of the two, and she is striving by the exercise of her attractions to silence Sebald's remorse. She has succeeded for the moment, when Pippa pa.s.ses--singing. Something in her song strikes his conscience like a thunderbolt, and its reviving force awakens Ottima's also. Both are spiritually saved.

Jules has brought home his bride, and is discovering that some students who owed him a grudge have practised a cruel cheat upon him; and that the refined woman by whom he fancied himself loved is but an ignorant girl of the lowest cla.s.s, of whom also his enemies have made a tool. Her remorse at seeing what man she has deceived disarms his anger, and marks the dawning of a moral sense in her; and he is dismissing her gently, with all the money he can spare, when Pippa pa.s.ses--singing.[21]

Something in her song awakens his truer manhood. Why should he dismiss his wife? Why cast away a soul which needs him, and which he himself has called into existence? He does not cast Phene away. Her salvation and his happiness are secured.

Luigi and his mother are in the turret on the hillside above Asolo. He believes it his mission to kill the Austrian Emperor. She entreats him to desist; and has nearly conquered his resolution by the mention of the girl he loves, when Pippa pa.s.ses--singing. Something in her song revives his flagging patriotism. He rushes from the tower, thus escaping the police, who were on his track; and the virtuous, though mistaken motive, secures his liberty, and perhaps his life.

Monsignore and his "Intendant" are conferring in the palace by the Duomo; and the irony of the situation is now at its height. Pippa's fancy has been aspiring to three separate existences, which would each in its own way have been wrecked without her. The divinely-guarded one which she especially covets is at this moment bent on her destruction.

For she is the child of the brother at whose death the Bishop has connived, and whose wealth he is enjoying. She is still in his way, and he is listening to a plan for removing her also, when Pippa pa.s.ses--singing. Something in her song stings his conscience or his humanity to life. He starts up, summons his attendants, has his former accomplice bound hand and foot, and the sequel may be guessed.