An Introduction to the Study of Browning Part 20

_Gerard de Lairesse_ contains a charming little "Spring Song" of three stanzas; and _Charles Avison_ a sounding train-bands' chorus, written to the air of one of Avison's marches.

The volume as a whole is full of weight, brilliance, and energy; and it is not less notable for its fineness of versification, its splendour of sound and colour, than for its depth and acuteness of thought and keen grasp of intricate argument. Indeed, the quality which more than any other distinguishes it from Browning's later work is the careful writing of the verse, and the elaborate beauty of certain pa.s.sages. Much of Browning's later work would be ill represented by a selection of the "purple patches." His strength has always lain, but of late has lain much more exclusively, in the _ensemble_. Here, however, there is not merely one pa.s.sage of more than a hundred and fifty lines, the like of which (I do not say in every sense the equal, but certainly the like of which) we must go back to _Sordello_ or to _Paracelsus_ to find; but, again and again, wherever we turn, we meet with more than usually fine and impressive pa.s.sages, single lines of more than usually exquisite quality. The glory of the whole collection is certainly the "Walk," or description, in rivalry with Gerard de Lairesse, of a whole day's changes, from sunrise to sunset. To equal it in its own way, we must look a long way back in our Browning, and nowhere out of Browning. Where all is good, any preference must seem partial; but perhaps nothing in it is finer than this picture of morning.

"But morning's laugh sets all the crags alight Above the baffled tempest: tree and tree Stir themselves from the stupor of the night And every strangled branch resumes its right To breathe, shakes loose dark's clinging dregs, waves free In dripping glory. p.r.o.ne the runnels plunge, While earth, distent with moisture like a sponge, Smokes up, and leaves each plant its gem to see, Each gra.s.s-blade's glory-glitter. Had I known The torrent now turned river?--masterful Making its rush o'er tumbled ravage--stone And stub which barred the froths and foams: no bull Ever broke bounds in formidable sport More overwhelmingly, till lo, the spasm Sets him to dare that last mad leap: report Who may--his fortunes in the deathly chasm That swallows him in silence! Rather turn Whither, upon the upland, pedestalled Into the broad day-splendour, whom discern These eyes but thee, supreme one, rightly called Moon-maid in heaven above and, here below, Earth's huntress-queen? I note the garb succinct Saving from smirch that purity of snow From breast to knee--snow's self with just the tint Of the apple-blossom's heart-blush. Ah, the bow Slack-strung her fingers grasp, where, ivory-linked Horn curving blends with horn, a moonlike pair Which mimic the brow's crescent sparkling so-- As if a star's live restless fragment winked Proud yet repugnant, captive in such hair!

What hope along the hillside, what far bliss Lets the crisp hair-plaits fall so low they kiss Those lucid shoulders? Must a morn so blithe Needs have its sorrow when the tw.a.n.g and hiss Tell that from out thy sheaf one shaft makes writhe Its victim, thou unerring Artemis?

Why did the chamois stand so fair a mark, Arrested by the novel shape he dreamed Was bred of liquid marble in the dark Depths of the mountain's womb which ever teemed With novel births of wonder? Not one spark Of pity in that steel-grey glance which gleamed At the poor hoof's protesting as it stamped Idly the granite? Let me glide unseen From thy proud presence: well may'st thou be queen Of all those strange and sudden deaths which damped So oft Love's torch and Hymen's taper lit For happy marriage till the maidens paled And perished on the temple-step, a.s.sailed By--what except to envy must man's wit Impute that sure implacable release Of life from warmth and joy? But death means peace."

32. ASOLANDO: FANCIES AND FACTS.

[Dated 1890, but published December 12, 1889. _Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol. XVII., pp. iv., 131.]

_Asolando_ (a name taken from the invented verb _Asolare_, "to disport in the open air") was published on the day of Browning's death. He died in Venice, and his body was brought to England, and buried in Westminster Abbey on the last day of the year. The Abbey was invisible in the fog, and, inside, dim yellow fog filled all the roof, above the gas and the candles. The coffin, carried high, came into the church to the sound of processional music, and as one waited near the grave one saw the coffin and the wreaths on it, over the heads of the people, and heard, in Dr. Bridge's setting, the words: "He giveth his beloved sleep."

Reading _Asolando_ once more, and remembering that coffin one had looked down upon in the Abbey, only then quite feeling that all was indeed over, it is perhaps natural that the book should come to seem almost consciously testamentary, as if certain things in it had been really meant for a final leave-taking. The Epilogue is a clear, brave looking-forward to death, as to an event now close at hand, and imagined as actually accomplished. It breaks through for once, as if at last the occasion demanded it, a reticence never thus broken through before, claiming, with a supreme self-confidence, calmly, as an acknowledged right, the "Well done" of the faithful servant at the end of the long day's labour. In _Reverie_, in _Rephan_, and in other poems, the teachings of a lifetime are enforced with a final emphasis, there is the same joyous readiness to "aspire yet never attain;" the same delight in the beauty and strangeness of life, in the "wild joy of living," in woman, in art, in scholarship; and in _Rosny_ we have the vision of a hero dead on the field of victory, with the comment, "That is best."

To those who value Browning, not as the poet of metaphysics, but as the poet of life, his last book will be singularly welcome. Something like metaphysics we find, indeed, but humanised, made poetry, in the blank verse of _Development_, the lyrical verse of the _Prologue_, and the third of the _Bad Dreams_, with their subtle comments and surmises on the relations of art with nature, of nature with truth. But it is life itself, a final flame, perhaps mortally bright, that burns and shines in the youngest of Browning's books. The book will be not less welcome to those who feel that the finest poetic work is usually to be found in short pieces, and that even _The Ring and the Book_ would scarcely be an equivalent for the fifty _Men and Women_ of those two incomparable volumes of 1855. Nor is _Asolando_ without a further attractiveness to those who demand in poetry a certain fleeting and evanescent grace.

"Car nous voulons la Nuance encor, Pas la Couleur, rien que la Nuance,"

as Paul Verlaine says, somewhat exclusively, in his poetical confession of faith. It is, indeed, _la Nuance_, the last fine shade, that Browning has captured and fixed for us in those lovely love-poems, _Summum Bonum_, _Poetics_, _a Pearl, a Girl_, and the others, so young-hearted, so joyous and buoyant; and in the woody piping of _Flute Music, with an Accompaniment_. Simple and eager in _Dubiety_, daintily, prettily pathetic in _Humility_, more intense in _Speculative_, in the fourteen lines called _Now_, the pa.s.sion of the situation leaps like a cry from the heart, and one may say that the poem is, rather than renders, the very fever of the supreme moment, "the moment eternal."

"Now.

Out of your whole life give but a moment: All of your life that has gone before, All to come after it,--so you ignore, So you make perfect the present,--condense, In a rapture of rage, for perfection's endowment, Thought and feeling and soul and sense-- Merged in a moment which gives me at last You around me for once, you beneath me, above me-- Me--sure that despite of time future, time past,-- This tick of our life-time's one moment you love me!

How long such suspension may linger? Ah, Sweet-- The moment eternal--just that and no more-- When ecstasy's utmost we clutch at the core, While cheeks burn, arms open, eyes shut and lips meet!"

Here the whole situation is merged in the single cry, the joy, "unbodied" and "embodied," of any, of every lover; in several of the poems a more developed story is told or indicated. One of the finest pieces in the volume is the brief dramatic monologue called _Inapprehensiveness_, which condenses a whole tragedy into its thirty-two lines, in the succinct, suggestive manner of such poems as _My Last d.u.c.h.ess_. Only Heine, Browning, and George Meredith in _Modern Love_, each in his entirely individual way, have succeeded in dealing, in a tone of what I may call sympathetic irony, with the unheroic complications of modern life; so full of poetic matter really, but of matter so difficult to handle. The poem is a mere incident, such as happens every day: we are permitted to overhear a sc.r.a.p of trivial conversation; but this very triviality does but deepen the effect of what we surmise, a dark obstruction, underneath the "babbling runnel" of light talk. A study not entirely dissimilar, though, as its name warns us, more difficult to grasp, is the fourth of the _Bad Dreams_: how fine, how impressive, in its dream-distorted picture of a man's remorse for the love he has despised or neglected till death, coming in, makes love and repentance alike too late! With these may be named that other electric little poem, _Which?_ a study in love's casuistries, reminding one slightly of the finest of all Browning's studies in that kind, _Adam, Lilith, and Eve_.

It is in these small poems, dealing varyingly with various phases of love, that the finest, the rarest, work in the volume is to be found.

Such a poem as _Imperante Augusto natus est_ (strong, impressive, effective as it is) cannot but challenge comparison with what is incomparable, the dramatic monologues of _Men and Women_, and in particular with the _Epistle of Karshish_. In _Beatrice Signorini_ we have one of the old studies in lovers' casuistries; and it is told with gusto, but is after all scarcely more than its last line claims for it: "The pretty incident I put in rhyme." In the _Ponte dell' Angela, Venice_, we find one of the old grotesques, but more loosely "hitched into rhyme" (it is his own word) than the better among those poems which it most resembles. But there is something not precisely similar to anything that had gone before in the dainty simplicity, the frank, beautiful fervour, of such lyrics as _Summum Bonum_, in which exquisite expression is given to the merely normal moods of ordinary affection. In most of Browning's love poems the emotion is complex, the situation more or less exceptional. It is to this that they owe their singular, penetrating quality of charm. But there is a charm of another kind, and a more generally appreciated one,

"that commonplace Perfection of honest grace,"

which lies in the expression of feelings common to everyone, feelings which everyone can without difficulty make or imagine his own. In the lyrics to which I am referring, Browning has spoken straight out, in just this simple, direct way, and with a delicate grace and smoothness of rhythm not always to be met with in his later work. Here is a poem called _Speculative_:

"Others may need new life in Heaven-- Man, Nature, Art--made new, a.s.sume!

Man with new mind old sense to leaven, Nature--new light to clear old gloom, Art that breaks bounds, gets soaring-room.

I shall pray: 'Fugitive as precious-- Minutes which pa.s.sed--return, remain!

Let earth's old life once more enmesh us, You with old pleasure, me--old pain, So we but meet nor part again.'"

How hauntingly does that give voice to the instinctive, the universal feeling! the lover's intensity of desire for the loved and lost one, for herself, the "little human woman full of sin," for herself, unchanged, unglorified, as she was on earth, not as she may be in a vague heaven.

To the lover in _Summum Bonum_ all the delight of life has been granted; it lies in "the kiss of one girl," and that has been his. In the delicious little poem called _Humility_, the lover is content in being "proudly less," a thankful pensioner on the crumbs of love's feast, laid for another. In _White Witchcraft_ love has outlived injury; in the first of the _Bad Dreams_ it has survived even heart-break.

"Last night I saw you in my sleep: And how your charm of face was changed!

I asked 'Some love, some faith you keep?'

You answered, 'Faith gone, love estranged.'

Whereat I woke--a twofold bliss: Waking was one, but next there came This other: 'Though I felt, for this, My heart break, I loved on the same.'"

Not subtlety, but simplicity, a simplicity pungent as only Browning could make it, is the characteristic of most of the best work in this last volume of a poet preeminently subtle. This characteristic of simplicity is seen equally in the love-poems and in the poems of satire, in the ballads and in the narrative pieces, and notably in the story of _The Pope and the Net_, an anecdote in verse, told with the frank relish of the thing, and without the least attempt to tease a moral out of it.

There are other light ballads, as different in merit as _Muckle-mouth Meg_ on the one hand and _The Cardinal and the Dog_ and _The Bean-Feast_ on the other, with s.n.a.t.c.hes of moralising story, as cutting as _Arcades Ambo_, which is a last word written for love of beasts, and as stinging as _The Lady and the Painter_, which is a last word written for love of birds and of the beauty of nakedness. One among these poems, _The Cardinal and the Dog_, indistinguishable in style from the others, was written fifty years earlier. It is as if the poet, taking leave of that "British public" which had "loved him not," and to whose caprices he had never condescended, was, after all, anxious to "part friends." The result may be said, in a measure, to have been attained.

So far I wrote in 1889, when Browning was only just dead, and I went on, in words which I keep for their significance to-day, because time has already brought in its revenges, and Browning has conquered. That Browning, I said then, could ever become a popular poet, in the sense in which Tennyson is popular, must be seen by everyone to be an impossibility. His poetry is obviously written for his own pleasure, without reference to the tastes of the bulk of readers. The very t.i.tles of his poems, the barest outline of their prevailing subjects, can but terrify or bewilder an easy-going public, which prefers to take its verse somnolently, at the season of the day when the newspaper is too substantial, too exciting. To appreciate Browning you must read with your eyes wide open. His poetry is rarely obscure, but it is often hard.

It deals by preference with hard matter, with "men and the ideas of men," with life and thought. Other poets before him have written with equally independent aims; but had Milton, had Wordsworth, a larger and more admiring audience in his own day? If the audience of Milton and of Wordsworth has widened, it would be the merest paradox to speak of either Milton or Wordsworth as a popular poet. By this time, every one at least knows them by name, though it would be a little unkind to consider too curiously how large a proportion of the people who know them by name have read many consecutive lines of _Paradise Lost_ or _The Excursion_. But to be so generally known by name is something, and it has not yet fallen to the lot of Browning. "Browning is dead," said a friend of mine, a hunting man, to another hunting man, a friend of his.

"Dear me, is he?" said the other doubtfully; "did he 'come out' your way?" By the time Browning has been dead as long as Wordsworth, I do not think anyone will be found to make these remarks. Death, not only from the Christian standpoint, is the necessary pathway to immortality. As it is, Browning's fame has been steadily increasing, at first slowly enough, latterly with even a certain rapidity. From the first he has had the exceptional admiration of those whose admiration is alone really significant, whose applause can alone be really grateful to a self-respecting writer. No poet of our day, no poet, perhaps, of any day, has been more secure in the admiring fellowship of his comrades in letters. And of all the poets of our day, it is he whose influence seems to be most vital at the moment, most pregnant for the future. For the time, he has also an actual sort of church of his own. The churches pa.s.s, with the pa.s.sing away of the worshippers; but the spirit remains, and must remain if it has once been so vivid to men, if it has once been a refuge, a promise of strength, a gift of consolation. And there has been all this, over and above its supreme poetic quality, in the vast and various work, Shakesperean in breadth, Shakesperean in penetration, of the poet whose last words, the appropriate epilogue of a lifetime, were these:

"At the midnight, in the silence of the sleep-time, When you set your fancies free, Will they pa.s.s to where--by death, fools think, imprisoned-- Low he lies who once so loved you, whom you loved so, --Pity me?

Oh to love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken!

What had I on earth to do With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly?

Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel --Being--who?

One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, Sleep to wake.

No, at noonday in the bustle of man's work-time Greet the unseen with a cheer!

Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be, 'Strive and thrive!' cry 'Speed,--fight on, fare ever There as here!'"

APPENDIX

I

A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ROBERT BROWNING

The following list of the published writings of Robert Browning, in the order of their publication, has been compiled mainly from Dr.

Furnivall's very complete and serviceable Browning Bibliography, contained in the first part of the Browning Society's Papers (pp.

21-71). Volumes of "Selections" are not noticed in this list: there have been many in England, some in Germany, and in the Tauchnitz Collection, and a large number in America, where an edition of the complete works was first published, in seven volumes, by Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston.

1. PAULINE: a Fragment of a Confession. London: Saunders and Otley, Conduit Street. 1833, pp. 71.

2. PARACELSUS. By Robert Browning. London. Published by Effingham Wilson, Royal Exchange. MDCCCx.x.xV., pp. xi., 216.

3. Five Poems contributed to _The Monthly Repository_ (edited by W.J.

Fox), 1834-6; all signed "Z."--I. Sonnet ("Eyes, calm beside thee, Lady, couldst thou know!"), Vol. VIII., New Series, 1834, p. 712. Not reprinted. II. The King--(Vol. IX., New Series, pp. 707-8). Reprinted, with six fresh lines, and revised throughout, in _Pippa Pa.s.ses_ (1841), where it is Pippa's song in Part III.-III., IV. Porphyria and Johannes Agricola. (Vol. X., pp. 43-6.) Reprinted in _Dramatic Lyrics_ (1842) under the t.i.tle of _Madhouse Cells_.--V. Lines. (Vol. X., pp. 270-1.) Reprinted, revised, in _Dramatis Personae_ (1864) as the first six stanzas of -- VI. of _James Lee_.

4. STRAFFORD: an Historical Tragedy. By Robert Browning, Author of "Paracelsus." London: Printed for Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, Paternoster Row. 1837, pp. vi., 131.

5. SORDELLO. By Robert Browning. London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street.

MDCCCXL., pp. iv., 253.

6. BELLS AND POMEGRANATES: No. I.--PIPPA Pa.s.sES. By Robert Browning, Author of "Paracelsus." London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street. MDCCCXLI., pp. 16. (Price 6_d_., sewed.)

7. BELLS AND POMEGRANATES: No. II.--KING VICTOR AND KING CHARLES. By Robert Browning, Author of "Paracelsus." London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street. MDCCCXLII., pp. 20. (Price 1_s_., sewed).