Browning and His Century Part 9

This is only one of many instances which go to show that Browning's conception of love might include, on the one hand, a complete freedom from the trammels imposed upon it by conventional codes of morality, but on the other, was so real and permanent a sympathy between two souls, and so absolute a revelation of divine beauty, that its morality far transcended that of the conventional codes, which under the guise of lawful alliances permit and even encourage marriages based upon the most external of attractions, or those entered into for merely social or commercial reasons. A sin against love seems in Browning's eyes to come the nearest of all human failings to the unpardonable sin.

It must not be supposed from what has been said that he had any anarchistic desire to do away with the solemnization of marriage, but his eyes were wide open to the fact that there might be sin within the marriage bond, and just as surely that there might be love pure and true outside of it.

Another ill.u.s.tration of Browning's belief in the existence of a love such as Shakespeare describes, which looks on tempests and is never shaken, is given in the "Inn Alb.u.m." Here, again, the characters are all English, and the story is based upon an actual occurrence. Such changes as Browning has made in the story are with the intention of pitting against the villainy of an aristocratic seducer of the lowest type a bourgeois young man, who has been in love with the betrayed woman, and who when he finds out that it was this man, his friend, who had stood between them, does not swerve from his loyalty and truth to her, and in the end avenges her by killing the aristocratic villain. The young man is betrothed to a girl he cares nothing for, the woman has married a man she cares nothing for. All is of no moment in the presence of a genuine loyal emotion which shows itself capable of a life of devotion with no thought of reward.

Browning has nowhere translated into more n.o.ble action the love of a man than in the pa.s.sage where the hero of the story gives himself unselfishly to the woman who has been so deeply wronged:

"Take heart of hers, And give her hand of mine with no more heart Than now, you see upon this brow I strike!

What atom of a heart do I retain Not all yours? Dear, you know it! Easily May she accord me pardon when I place My brow beneath her foot, if foot so deign, Since uttermost indignity is spared-- Mere marriage and no love! And all this time Not one word to the purpose! Are you free?

Only wait! only let me serve--deserve Where you appoint and how you see the good!

I have the will--perhaps the power--at least Means that have power against the world. Fortune-- Take my whole life for your experiment!

If you are bound--in marriage, say--why, still, Still, sure, there's something for a friend to do, Outside? A mere well-wisher, understand!

I'll sit, my life long, at your gate, you know, Swing it wide open to let you and him Pa.s.s freely,--and you need not look, much less Fling me a '_Thank you!--are you there, old friend?_'

Don't say that even: I should drop like shot!

So I feel now, at least: some day, who knows?

After no end of weeks and months and years You might smile! '_I believe you did your best!_'

And that shall make my heart leap--leap such leap As lands the feet in Heaven to wait you there!

Ah, there's just one thing more! How pale you look!

Why? Are you angry? If there's after all, Worst come to worst--if still there somehow be The shame--I said was no shame,--none, I swear!-- In that case, if my hand and what it holds,-- My name,--might be your safeguard now,--at once-- Why, here's the hand--you have the heart."

The genuine lovers in Browning's gallery will occur to every reader of Browning: lovers who are not deterred by obstacles, like Norbert, lovers like Miranda, devoted to a woman with a "past"; like the lover in "One Way of Love," who still can say, "Those who win heaven, blest are they."

Sometimes there is a problem to be solved, sometimes not. Whenever there is a problem, however, it is solved by Browning on the side of sincerity and truth, never on the side of convention.

Take, for example, "The Statue and the Bust," which many have considered to uphold an immoral standard and of which its defenders declare that the moral point of the story lies not in the fact that the lady and the Duke wished to elope with each other but that they never had strength enough of mind to do so. Considering what an entirely conventional and loveless marriage this of the lady and the Duke evidently was we cannot suppose, in the light of Browning's solution of similar situations, that he would have thought it any great crime if the Duke and the lady had eloped, since there was so genuine an attraction between them. But he does word his climax, it must be confessed, in a way to leave a loophole of doubt on the subject for those who do not like to be scandalized by their Browning: "Let a man contend to the uttermost for his life's set prize, be it what it will!"

There is a saving grace to be extracted from the last line.

"--The sin I impute to each frustrate ghost Is--the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin, Though the end in sight was a vice, I say."

In "The Ring and the Book," the problem is similar to that in the "Inn Alb.u.m," except that the villain in the case is the lawful husband. The lover, Caponsacchi, under different conditions demanding that he shall not give the slightest expression to his love, rises to a reverential height which even some of Browning's readers seem to doubt as possible.

Caponsacchi is, however, too much under the spell of Catholic theology to see the mystical meaning of the love which he acknowledges in his own soul for Pompilia. In this poem it is Pompilia who is given the divine vision.

If I may resay what I have said in another connection,[3] there is no moral struggle in Pompilia's short life such as that in Caponsacchi's.

Both were alike in the fact that up to a certain point in their lives their full consciousness was unawakened: hers slept, through innocence and ignorance; his, in spite of knowledge, through lack of aspiration. She was rudely awakened by suffering; he by the sudden revelation of a possible ideal. Therefore, while for him, conscious of his past failures, a struggle begins: for her, conscious of no failure in her duty, which she had always followed according to her light, there simply continues duty according to the new light. Neither archbishop nor friendly "smiles and shakes of head" could weaken her conviction that, being estranged in soul from her husband, her att.i.tude toward him was inevitable. No qualms of conscience troubled her as to her inalienable right to fly from him. That she submitted as long as she did was only because no one could be found to aid her. And how quick and certain her defence of Caponsacchi, threatened by Guido, when he overtakes them at the Inn! As she thinks over it calmly afterward, she makes no apology, but justifies her action as the voice of G.o.d.

"If I sinned so--never obey voice more.

O, the Just and Terrible, who bids us 'Bear.'

Not--'Stand by; bear to see my angels bear!'"

The gossip over her flight with Caponsacchi does not trouble her as it does him. He saved her in her great need; the supposition that their motives for flight had any taint of impurity in them is too puerile to be given a thought, yet with the same sublime certainty of the right, characteristic of her, she acknowledges, at the end, her love for Caponsacchi, and looks for its fulfilment in the future when marriage shall be an interpenetration of souls that know themselves into one.

Having attained so great a good she can wish none of the evil she has suffered undone. She goes a step farther. Not only does she accept her own suffering for the sake of the final supreme good to herself, but she feels a.s.sured that good will fall at last to those who worked the evil.

In her absolute certainty of her realization of an unexpressed love in a future existence, she is only equaled in Browning's poetry by the speaker in "Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead."

That Browning's belief in the mystical quality of personal love never changed is shown by the fact that near the end of his life, in the "Parleying" with Daniel Bartoli, he treats a love romance based upon fact in a way to emphasize this same truth which so constantly appears in his earlier work. The lady in this case, who is of the people, having been offered a bribe by the King which will mean the dishonoring of herself and her husband, and which if she does not accept will mean her complete separation from her husband, instantly decides against the bribe. She prefers love in spirit in a convent to the accepting of the King's promise that she will be made much of in court if she will sign a paper agreeing that her husband shall at once cede his dukedoms to the King. She explains her att.i.tude to the Duke, who hesitates in his decision, whereupon she leaves and saves his honor for him, but his inability to decide at once upon the higher ground of spiritual love reveals to her the inadequacy of his love as compared with her own and kills her love for him. She later, however, marries a man who was only a boy of ten at the time of this episode, and their life together was a dream of happiness.

But she dies and the devoted husband becomes a man of the world again. The Duke, however, has a streak of genuineness in his nature after all.

Although carried away by the charms of a bold, black-eyed, tall creature, a development in keeping with the nature of the Duke in the true story, Browning is equal to the occasion, and makes him declare that the real man in him is dead and is still faithful to the old love. All she has is his ghost. Some day his soul will again be called into life by his ideal love.

The poet frequently expresses a doubt of man's power to be faithful to the letter in case of a wife's death. "Any wife to any husband" reveals that feeling as it comes to a woman. The poet's answer to this doubt is invariably, that where the love was true other attraction is a makeshift by which a desolate life is made tolerable, or, as in "Fifine at the Fair," an ephemeral indulgence in pleasure which does not touch the reality of the spiritual love.

Browning was well aware that the ordinary woman had a stronger sense of the eternal in love than the ordinary man. In relation to the Duke in the poem previously mentioned he remarks:

"One leans to like the duke, too; up we'll patch Some sort of saintship for him--not to match Hers--but man's best and woman's worst amount So nearly to the same thing, that we count In man a miracle of faithfulness If, while unfaithful somewhat, he lay stress On the main fact that love, when love indeed, Is wholly solely love from first to last-- Truth--all the rest a lie."

It may be said that all this is the romantic love about which the poets have always sung, and has as much existence in real life as the ideal of disinterested helpfulness to lovelorn damsels sung about in the days of chivalry. True, others have sung of the exaltation and the immortality of love, and few have been those who have found it, but nowhere has the distinctively human side been touched with such reverence as in Browning.

It is not Beatrice translated into a divine personage to be adored by a worshipping devotee, but a wholly human woman who loves and is loved, who touches divinity in Browning's mind. Human love is then not an impossible ideal of which he writes in poetic language existing only in the realm of fancy; it is a living religion, bringing those who love nearer to G.o.d through the exaltation of their feeling than any other revelation of the human soul. Other states of consciousness reveal to humanity the existence of the absolute, but this gives a premonition of what divine love may have in store for the aspiring soul.

In holding to such an ideal of love as this Browning has ranged himself entirely apart from the main tendencies of thought of the century, on the relations of men and women, which have, on the one hand, been wholly conventional, marriage being a contract under the law binding for life except in cases of definite breaches of conduct, and under the Church of affection which is binding only for life; and have, on the other hand, gone extreme lengths in the advocacy of entire freedom in the relations of the s.e.xes. The first degrades love by making it too much a matter of law, the second by making it an ephemeral pa.s.sion from which almost everything truly beautiful in the relationship of two human beings is, of necessity, eliminated.

To either of these extreme factions Browning's att.i.tude is equally incomprehensible. The first cries out against his liberalness, the second, declaring that human emotion should be untrammeled by either Church, law or G.o.d, would find him a pernicious influence against freedom; there are, however, many shades of opinion between the two extremes which would feel sympathy with his ideals in one or more directions.

The chief difficulty in the acceptance of the ideal for most people is that they have not yet developed to the plane where feeling comes to them with the intensity, the concentration, the depth or the constancy that brings with it the sense of revelation. For many people law or the Church is absolutely necessary to preserve such feeling as they are capable of from dissipating itself in shallow sentimentalism; while one or the other will always be necessary in some form because love has its social as well as its personal aspect.

Yet the law and the Church should both allow sufficient freedom for the breaking of relations from which all sincerity has departed, even though humanity as a whole has not yet and probably will not for many ages arrive at Browning's conception of human love.

Truth to one's own highest vision in love being a cardinal principle with Browning, it follows that truth to one's nature in any direction is desirable. He even carries this doctrine of truth to the individual nature so far as to base upon it an apology for the most unmitigated villain he has portrayed, Guido, and to put this apology into the mouth of the person he had most deeply wronged, Pompilia. With exquisite vision she, even, can say:

"But where will G.o.d be absent! In his face Is light, but in his shadow healing too: Let Guido touch the shadow and be healed!

And as my presence was unfortunate,-- My earthly good, temptation and a snare,-- Nothing about me but drew somehow down His hate upon me,--somewhat so excused Therefore, since hate was thus the truth of him,-- May my evanishment for evermore Help further to relieve the heart that cast Such object of its natural loathing forth!

So he was made; he nowise made himself: I could not love him, but his mother did."

It is this notion that every nature must express its own truth which underlies a poem like "Fifine at the Fair." Through expressing the truth of itself, and so grasping at half truths, even at the false, it finally reaches a higher truth. A nature like Guido's was not born with a faculty for development. He simply had to live out his own hate. The man in "Fifine" had the power of perceiving an ideal, but not the power of living up to it without experimentation upon lower planes of living, probably the most common type of man to-day. There are others like Norbert or Mertoun, in whom the ideal truth is the real truth of their natures and for whom life means the constant expansion of this ideal truth within them. In many of the varying types of men and women portrayed by Browning there is the recognition of the possibility of psychic development either by means of experience or by sudden intuitions, and if, as in the case of Guido, there is no development in this life, there is hope in a future existence in a universe ruled by a G.o.d of love.

In his views upon human character and its possibilities of development Browning is, of course, in touch with the scientific views on the subject which filled the air in all later nineteenth-century thought, changing the orthodox ideal of a static humanity born in sin and only to be saved by belief in certain dogmas to that of a humanity born to develop; changing the notion that sin was a terrible and absolutely defined ent.i.ty, against which every soul had ceaselessly to war, into the notion that sin is a relative evil, consequent upon lack of development, which, as the human soul advances on its path, led by its inborn consciousness of the divine to be attained, will gradually disappear.

But the evil which results from this lack of development in individuals to other individuals, and to society at large, brings a problem which as we have already seen in the first chapter is not so easy of solution. Yet Browning solves it, for is it not through the combat with this evil that the soul is given its real opportunity for development? Pain and suffering give rise to the thirst for happiness and joy, and through the arousing of sympathy and pity, the desire that others shall have happiness and joy, therefore to be despairing and pessimistic about evil or to wish for its immediate annihilation would really be suicidal to the best interests of the human race; nay, he even goes farther than this, as is hinted in one of his last poems, "Rephan," and imagines that any other state than one of flux between good and evil would be monotonous:

"Startle me up, by an Infinite Discovered above and below me--height And depth alike to attract my flight,

"Repel my descent: by hate taught love.

Oh, gain were indeed to see above Supremacy ever--to move, remove,

"Not reach--aspire yet never attain To the object aimed at! Scarce in vain,-- As each stage I left nor touched again.

"To suffer, did pangs bring the loved one bliss, Wring knowledge from ignorance:--just for this-- To add one drop to a love--abyss!

"Enough: for you doubt, you hope, O men, You fear, you agonize, die: what then?

Is an end to your life's work out of ken?

"Have you no a.s.surance that, earth at end, Wrong will prove right? Who made shall mend In the higher sphere to which yearnings tend?"

In his att.i.tude toward the existence of evil Browning takes issue with Carlyle, as already noted in the second chapter. Carlyle, as Browning represents him, cannot reconcile the existence of evil with beneficent and omniscient power. He makes the opponent, who is an echo of Carlyle in the argument in "Bernard de Mandeville," exclaim:

"Where's Knowledge, where power and will in evidence 'Tis Man's-play merely! Craft foils rect.i.tude, Malignity defeats beneficence, And grant, at very last of all, the feud 'Twixt good and evil ends, strange thoughts intrude Though good be garnered safely and good's foe Bundled for burning. Thoughts steal even so-- Why grant tares leave to thus o'ertop, o'ertower Their field-mate, boast the stalk and flaunt the flower, Triumph one sunny minute?"

No attempt must be made to show G.o.d's reason for allowing evil. Any such attempt will fail. This pa.s.sage comes as near as any in Browning to a plunge into the larger social questions which during the nineteenth century have come more and more to the front, and is an index of just where the poet stood in relation to the social movements of the century's end. His gaze was so centered upon the individual and the power of the individual to work out his own salvation and the need of evil in the process that his philosophical att.i.tude toward evil quite overtops the militant interest in overcoming it.

Carlyle, on the other hand, saw the immense evil of the social conditions in England, and raged and stormed against them, but could see no light by which evil could be turned into good. He little realized that his own storming at the inept.i.tude, the imbecility, the fool-ness of society, and his own despair over the, to him, unaccountable evils of existence, were in themselves a positive good growing out of the evil. Though he was not to suggest practical means for leading the ma.s.ses out of bondage, he was to call attention in trumpet tones to the fact that the bondage existed.

By so doing he was taking a first step or rather drawing aside the curtain and revealing the dire necessity that steps should be taken and taken soon. While Carlyle was militantly shouting against evil to some purpose which would later mean militant action against it, Browning was settling in his own mind just what relation evil should hold to good in the scheme of the universe, and writing a poem to tell why he was a liberal. In fine, Carlyle was opening the way toward the socialism of the latter part of the century, while Browning was still found in the camp of what the socialist of to-day calls the middle-cla.s.s individualist.