Essays by Arthur Christopher Benson Part 13

This touch perhaps will explain why it is that we rather lose hold of Mrs. Browning after her marriage; England was connected in her mind with all the old trials of life which seemed to have fallen away with her new existence; ill-health, and mental struggle, bereavement and pain--even though it was pain triumphed over. With marriage and Italy a new life began. It became her adopted country--

And now I come, my Italy, My own hills! Are you 'ware of me, my hills, How I burn to you? Do you feel to-night The urgency and yearning of my soul.

And there the English reader is at fault. He cannot call Italy his own in any genuine sense; much as his yearnings may go out towards her, in days when his own ungenial climate is wrapping the hedge-rows and hill-farms in mist and driving sleet, much as he may long for a moment after her sun and warmth, her transparent skies and sleepy seas, yet he knows his home is here. Even when he finds himself among her vines, when the lizards dart powdered with green jewels from stone to stone, and the dust puffs up white in the road beside the bay, he finds himself murmuring in his heart Mr. Browning's own words.

Oh! to be in England now that April's there, And whoever wakes in England sees some morning unaware, That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough-- In England now!

That is what he really feels; and however much he loves to think as a picture of the poet and poetess transplanted into the warm lands, his heart does not go out to them, as it would have done had they stayed at home. And so it comes to pa.s.s that some of the lines into which Mrs.

Browning threw her most pa.s.sionate emphasis, "Casa Guidi Windows," the words that burn with an alien patriotism--alien, but sunk so deep, that her disappointed hopes made havoc of her life--reach him like murmuring music over water, sweet but fantastic--touching the ear a little and the heart a little, but bringing neither glow nor tears.

They say that the Treaty of Villa Franca snapped the cord; that the bitter disappointment of what had become a pa.s.sion rather than a dream broke the struggling spirit. It may be so--"With her golden verse linking Italy to England," wrote the grateful Florentines upon her monument. But England to Italy? No--"Italy," she wrote herself, "is one thing, England one." We feel that she pa.s.sed into a strange land, and in its sweetness somewhat forgot her own: the heart is more with her when she writes:

I saw Fog only, the great tawny weltering fog Involve the pa.s.sive city, strangle it Alive, and draw it off into the void, Spires, bridges, streets, and squares, as if a sponge Had wiped out London.

Or:

A ripple of land: such little hills, the sky Can stoop to tenderly, and the wheatfields climb.

Such nooks of valleys lined by orchises, Fed full of noises by invisible streams And open pastures, where you scarcely tell White daisies from white dew--at intervals The mythic oaks and elm trees standing out Self-poised upon their prodigy of shade; I thought my father's land was worthy too Of being Shakespeare's.

II

"Mr. Kenyon," wrote Miss Barrett, "was with me yesterday.... he accused me of writing a certain paper in the _Athenaeum_, and convicted me against my will; and when I could no longer deny and began to explain and pique myself upon my diplomacy, he threw himself back in his chair and laughed me to scorn as the least diplomatic of his acquaintance, '_You_ diplomatic!'"

Mr. Kenyon, without perhaps intending it, gave expression to a feeling which rises again and again half unconsciously in the mind even of the most sympathetic reader of Mrs. Browning's poetry: there is no diplomacy about it. The diplomatist achieves his successes not only by saying what he has to say in the most lucid possible manner--that is not enough--but by a discreet reticence, by implying possibilities rather than stating them, by guarded admissions, by suggestive silence.

There is a well-known rhetorical device, upon which Mrs. Browning in her cla.s.sical studies must have not unfrequently stumbled, called the Aposiopesis--in plain English, the art of breaking-off. Cla.s.sical writers are often hastily accused by young learners of having framed their writings with a view to introducing perplexing forms and intolerable constructions, so as unnecessarily to obscure the sense. But it is a matter of regret that Mrs. Browning did not employ this particular construction with greater frequency,--to use a colloquial expression--that she did not let you off a good deal. Many of her poems are weighted with a dragging moral; many of them fly with a broken wing, stopping and rising again, dispersing and returning with a kind of purposeless persistency, as if they were incapable of deciding where to have done. Poems with pa.s.sage after pa.s.sage of extraordinary depth of thought and amazing felicity of expression, every now and then droop and crawl like the rain on a November day, which will not fall in a drenching shower nor quite desist, but keeps dropping, dropping from the sky out of mere weakness or idleness.

To secure an audience a poet must be diplomatic; he must know whose ear he intends to catch. It is mere cant to say that the best poetry cannot be popular; that it should be read is its first requisite. When Gray wrote f????ta s??et??s?? on his Odes he meant that there would be many people to whom they would not appeal; but it is ridiculous to say that the merit of poetry is in proportion to the paucity of its admirers. If Mrs.

Browning aimed at any particular cla.s.s it was perhaps at intellectual sentimentalists. As the two characteristics are rarely found united, in fact are liable to exclude one another, it may perhaps be the reason why she is so little appreciated in her entirety: she is perhaps too learned for women and too emotional for men.

Let us consider for a moment where her intellectual training came from.

Roughly speaking, the basis of it was Greek from first to last; at nine years old she measured her life by the years of the siege of Troy, and carved a figure out of the turf in her garden to represent a rec.u.mbent warrior, naming it Hector. Then came her version of the "Prometheus Vinctus"; her long studious mornings over Plato and Theocritus with the blind scholar, Mr. Boyd, whom she commemorates in "Wine of Cyprus," when she read, as she writes, "the Greek poets, with Plato, from end to end"; her dolorous excursion with the Fathers; and at last, in the Casa Guidi, the little row of miniature cla.s.sics, annotated in her own hand, standing within easy reach of her couch. Of course she was an omnivorous reader besides. She speaks of reading the Hebrew Bible, "from Genesis to Malachi,--never stopped by the Chaldean,--and the flood of all possible and impossible British and foreign novels and romances, with slices of metaphysics laid thick between the sorrows of the mult.i.tudinous Celestinas." But it was evidently in Greek, in the philosophical poetry of Euripides and the poetical philosophy of Plato, that she found her deepest satisfaction.

At the same time she was not in the true sense learned, though possessing learning far greater than commonly falls to a woman's lot to possess. Her education in Greek must have been unsystematic and unscholarly; her cla.s.sical allusions, which fall so thick in letters and poems have seldom quite the genuine ring; we do not mean that she did not get nearer the heart of the Greek writers and appreciate their spirit more intimately than many a far more erudite scholar; that was to be expected, for she brought enthusiasm and insight and genius to the task; but her learning is not an animated part of her; it is sometimes almost an incubus. The character of her allusions too is often remote and fanciful. They fall, it is true, from a teeming brain, but they are not the simple direct comparisons which would occur to a man who had made Greek literature his own, but rather the unexpected, modern turns which so often surprise a student, like the red bunches of valerian which thrust out of the sand-stone frieze of a Sicilian temple--such comparisons, for instance, as the celebrated one in _Aurora Leigh_ of the peasant who might have been gathering brushwood in the ear of a colossus had Xerxes carried out his design of carving Athos into the likeness of a man. Her characterization of the cla.s.sical poets in "The Poet's Vow" will also ill.u.s.trate this; now so extraordinarily felicitous and clear-sighted, as for instance in the case of Shakespeare and Ossian, and now so alien to the true spirit of the men described.

Sophocles With that king's-look which down the trees Followed the dark effigies

Of the lost Theban. Hesiod old, Who, somewhat blind and deaf and cold, Cared most for G.o.ds and bulls.

The fact was that she read the Greeks as a woman of genius was sure to do; she pa.s.sed by their majestic grace, amazed at their solemn profundity, and yet unaware that she was projecting into them a feeling, a sentimental outlook which they did not possess, attributing directly to them a deliberate power which was merely the effect of their unconscious, antique, and limited vision upon the emotional child of a later age.

The strangest thing is that a woman of such complex and sensitive faculties should have given in her allegiance to such models. Never was there a writer in whom the best characteristics of the Greeks were more conspicuously absent. Their balance, their solidity, their calm, their gloomy acquiescence in the bitter side of life, have surely little in common with the pa.s.sionate spirit that beat so wildly against the bars, and asked the stars and hills so eagerly for their secrets. Such a pa.s.sage as the following, grand as is the central idea, is surely enough to show the utter incompatibility which existed between them: "I thought that had aeschylus lived after the incarnation and crucifixion of our Lord Jesus Christ, he might have turned, if not in moral and intellectual, yet in poetic faith, from the solitude of Caucasus to the deeper desertness of that crowded Jerusalem, where none had any pity,--from the faded white flower of a t.i.tanic brow to the withered gra.s.s of a heart trampled on by its own beloved--from the glorying of him who gloried that he could not die, to the sublime meekness of the Taster of death for every man: from the taunt stung into being by the torment, to his more awful silence, when the agony stood dumb before the love." ... It was characteristic of a woman to bring the two personalities together, to dwell on what might have been; but this is not Greek.

The two poems which are the best instances of the cla.s.sical mood, are the two of which Pan, the spirit of the solitary country, half beast, half G.o.d, is the hero. In these Mrs. Browning appears in her strength and in her weakness. In "The Dead Pan," in spite of its solemn refrain, the lengthy disordered mode of thought is seen to the worst advantage: the progression of ideas is obscure, the workmanship is not hurried, but deliberately distressing; the rhymes, owing to that unfortunate fancy for double rhyming, being positively terrific; the brief fury of the lyric mood pa.s.sing into the utterances of a digressive moralist. But when we turn to the other, "A Musical Instrument," what a relief we experience. "What was he doing, the great G.o.d Pan, down in the reeds by the river?" The splendid shock of the rhythm, like the solid plunge of a cataract into a mountain-pool, captivates, for all its roughness, the metrical ear. There is not a word or a thought too much: the scene shapes itself, striking straight out into the thought; the waste and horror that encircle the birth of the poet in the man; the brutish elements out of which such divinity is compounded--these are flung down in simple, delicate outlines: such a lyric is an eternal possession of the English language.

As a natural result of a certain discursiveness of mind, there is hardly any kind of writing unrepresented in Mrs. Browning's poems. She had at one time a fancy for pure romantic writing, since developed to such perfection by Rossetti. There is a peculiar charm about such composition. In such works we seem to breathe a freer air, separated as we are from special limitations of time and place; the play of pa.s.sion is more simple and direct, and the pa.s.sion itself is of a less complex and restrained character. Besides, there is a certain element of horror and mystery, which the modern spirit excludes, while it still hungers for it, but is not unnatural when mediaevalized. Nothing in Mrs. Browning can bear comparison with "Sister Helen" or "The Beryl Stone"; but "The Romaunt of the Page" and the "Rhyme of the d.u.c.h.ess May" stand among her most successful pieces.

The latter opens with a simple solemnity:

To the belfry, one by one, went the ringers from the sun, _Toll slowly_.

And the oldest ringer said, "Ours is music for the dead, When the rebecks are all done."

Six abeles i' the churchyard grow on the north side in a row, _Toll slowly_.

And the shadow of their tops rock across the little slopes Of the gra.s.sy graves below.

On the south side and the west a small river runs in haste, _Toll slowly_.

And between the river flowing and the fair green trees agrowing, Do the dead lie at their rest.

On the east I sat that day, up against a willow grey: _Toll slowly_.

Through the rain of willow-branches I could see the low hill ranges, And the river on its way.

This is like the direct opening notes of the overture of a dirge.

Whatever may be said about such writing we feel at once that it comes from a master's hand. So the poem opens, but alas for the close! Some chord seems to snap; it is no longer the spirit of the ancient rhymer, but Miss Mitford's friend who catches up the lyre and will have her last word. The poem pa.s.ses, still in the same metre, out of the definite materialism, the ghastly excitements of the story into a species of pious churchyard meditation; and the pity of it is that we cannot say that this is not characteristic.

Then closely connected with the last comes a cla.s.s of poems, of so-called modern life, of which "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" shall stand for an example. This is a poem of nineteenth-century adventure, which is as impossible in design and as fantastic in detail as a poem may well be. The reader does not know whether to be most amazed at the fire and glow of the whole story, or at the hopeless ignorance of the world betrayed by it. The impossible Earls with their immeasurable pride and intolerable pomposities; the fashionable ladies with their delicate exteriors and callous hearts,--these are like the creations of Charlotte Bronte, and recall Blanche and Baroness Ingram of Ingram Park. And at the same time, when we have said all this, we read the poem and we can forgive all or nearly all--the spirit is so high, the pa.s.sion is so fierce and glowing, the poetry that bursts out, stanza after stanza, contrives to involve even these dolorous mistakes in such a glamour, that we can only admire the genius that could contend against such visionary errors.

But we must turn to what after all is Mrs. Browning's most important and most characteristic work, _Aurora Leigh_. Unfortunately its length alone, were there not any other reasons, would prevent its ever being popular. Ten thousand lines of blank verse is a serious thing. The fact that the poem is to a great extent autobiographical, combined with the comparative mystery in which the auth.o.r.ess was shrouded and the romance belonging to a marriage of poets--these elements are enough to account for the general enthusiasm with which the poem was received. Landor said that it made him drunk with poetry,--that was the kind of expression that its admirers allowed themselves to make use of with respect to it.

And yet in spite of these credentials, the fact remains that it is a difficult volume to work through. It is the kind of book that one begins to read for the first time with intense enjoyment, congratulating oneself after the first hundred pages that there are still three-hundred to come. Then the mood gradually changes; it becomes difficult to read without a marker; and at last it goes back to the shelf with the marker about three-fourths of the way through. As she herself wrote,

The prospects were too far and indistinct.

'Tis true my critics said "A fine view that."

The public scarcely cared to climb my book For even the finest;--and the public's right.

Now what is the reason of this? In the first place it is a romance with a rather intricate plot, and a romance requires continuous reading and cannot be laid aside for a few days with impunity. Secondly, it requires hard and continuous study; there is hardly a page without two or three splendid thoughts, and several weighty expressions; it is a perfect mine of felicitous though somewhat lengthy quotations upon almost every question of art and life, yet it is sententious without being exactly epigrammatic. Thirdly, it is very digressive, distressingly so when you are once interested in the story. Lastly, it is not dramatic; whoever is speaking, Lord Howe, Aurora, Romney Leigh, Marian Earle, they all express themselves in a precisely similar way; it is even sometimes necessary to reckon back the speeches in a dialogue to see who has got the ball. In fact it is not they who speak, but Mrs. Browning. To sum up, it is the attempted union of the dramatic and meditative elements that is fatal to the work from an artistic point of view.

Perhaps, if we are to try and disentangle the motive of the whole piece, to lay our finger on the main idea, we may say that it lies in the contrast between the solidity and unity of the artistic life, as opposed to the tinkering philanthropy of the Sociologist. _Aurora Leigh_ is an attempt from an artistic point of view to realise in concrete form the truth that the way to attack the bewildering problem of the nineteenth century, the moral elevation of the democracy, is not by attempting to cure in detail the material evils, which are after all nothing but the symptoms of a huge moral disease expressing itself in concrete fact, but by infusing a spirit which shall raise them from within. To attack it from its material side is like picking off the outer covering of a bud to a.s.sist it to blow, rather than by watering the plant to increase its vitality and its own power of internal action; in fact, as our clergy are so fond of saying, a spiritual solution is the only possible one, with this difference, that in _Aurora Leigh_ this attempt is made not so much from the side of dogmatic religion as of pure and more general enthusiasms. The insoluble enigma is unfortunately, whether, under the pressure of the present material surroundings, there is any hope of eliciting such an instinct at all; whether it is not actually annihilated by want and woe and the diseased transmission of hereditary sin.

It is of course totally impossible to give any idea of a poem of this kind by quotations, partly, too, because as with most meditative poetry, the extracts are often more impressive by themselves than in their context, owing to the fact that the run of the poem is interfered with rather than a.s.sisted by them. But we may give a few specimens of various kinds. "I," she says,

Will write my story for my better self, As when you paint your portrait for a friend Who keeps it in a drawer, and looks at it Long after he has ceased to love you, just To hold together what he was and is.

And this is one of those mysterious, sudden images that take the fancy; she is describing the high edge of a chalk down:

You might see In apparition in the golden sky ... the sheep run Along the fine clear outline, small as mice That run along a witch's scarlet thread.

And this is a wonderful rendering of the effect, which never fails to impress the thought, of the mountains of a strange land rising into sight over the sea's rim:

I felt the wind soft from the land of souls: The old miraculous mountain heaved in sight One straining past another along the sh.o.r.e The way of grand, tall Odyssean ghosts, Athirst to drink the cool blue wine of seas And stare on voyagers.

We may conclude with this enchanting picture of an Italian evening:

Fire-flies that suspire In short soft lapses of transported flame Across the tingling dark, while overhead The constant and inviolable stars Outrun those lights-of-love: melodious owls (If music had but one note and was sad, 'Twould sound just so): and all the silent swirl Of bats that seem to follow in the air Some grand circ.u.mference of a shadowy dome To which we are blind; and then the nightingales Which pluck our heart across a garden-wall, (When walking in the town) and carry it So high into the bowery almond-trees We tremble and are afraid, and feel as if The golden flood of moonlight unaware Dissolved the pillars of the steady earth, And made it less substantial.

It would seem in studying Mrs. Browning's work as though either she herself or her advisers did not appreciate her special gift. The longest of her poems are the work of her later years, whereas her strength did not lie so much in sustained narrative effort, in philosophical construction, or patriotic sentiment, as in the true lyrical gift. It seems more and more clear as time goes on that the poems by which she will be best remembered are some of her shortest--the expression of a single overruling mood--the parable without the explanation--the burst of irrepressible feeling.

I should be inclined, if I had to make a small selection out of the poems, to name seven lyrics as forming the truest and most characteristic work she ever produced--characteristic that is of her strength, and showing the fewest signs of her weakness. These are: "Loved Once," "The Romance of the Swan's Nest," "Catarina to Camoens,"

"Cowper's Grave," "The Cry of the Children," "The Mask," and lastly "Confessions," which seems to me one of the stormiest and most pathetic poems in the language. A few words of critical examination may be given to each.

The first fact that strikes a reader is that all of these, with one exception, depend to a certain extent upon the use of a refrain. Of course the refrain is a species of metrical trick; but there is no possibility of denying, that, if properly used, it gives a peculiar satisfaction to that special sense--whatever it be, for there is no defining it--to which metre and rhyme both appeal. At the same time there is one condition attached to this device, that it should not be prolonged into monotony. At what precise moment this lapse into monotony takes place, or by what other devices it may be modified, must be left to the sensitive taste of the writer, but if the writer does not discover when it becomes monotonous the reader will do so; and this is certainly the case in "The Dead Pan," though the refrain is there varied.