Robert Browning Part 11

He made no haste to give the public a new volume of verse. Mrs Browning had mentioned to a correspondent, not long before her death, that her husband had then a considerable body of lyrical poetry in a state of completion. An invitation to accept the editorship of the _Cornhill Magazine_, on Thackeray's retirement, was after some hesitation declined. He was now partly occupied with preparing for the press whatever writings by his wife seemed suitable for publication. In 1862 he issued with a dedication "to grateful Florence" her _Last Poems_; in 1863, her _Greek Christian Poets_; in 1865 he prepared a volume of Selections from her poems, and had the happiness of knowing that the number of her readers had rather increased than diminished. The efforts of self-const.i.tuted biographers to make capital out of the incidents of her life, and to publish such letters of hers as could be laid hands on, moved him to transports of indignation, which break forth in a letter to his friend Miss Blagden with unmeasured violence: what he felt with the "paws" of these blackguards in his "very bowels" G.o.d knows; beast and scamp and knave and fool are terms hardly strong enough to relieve his wrath. Such sudden whirls of extreme rage were rare, yet were characteristic of Browning, and were sometimes followed by regret for his own distemperature. In 1862 a gratifying task was laid on him--that of superintending the three volume edition of his Poetical Works which was published in the following year. At the same time his old friend Forster, with help from Procter, was engaged in preparing the first--and the best--of the several Selections from Browning's poems; it was at once an indication of the growing interest in his writings and an effective means towards extending their influence. He set himself steadily to work out what was in him; he waited no longer upon his casual moods, but girded his loins and kept his lamp constantly lit. His genius, such as it was--this was the field given him to till, and he must see that it bore fruit. "I certainly will do my utmost to make the most of my poor self before I die"--so he wrote in 1865. There were gains in such a resolved method of work; but there were also losses. A man of so active a mind by planting himself before a subject could always find something to say; but it might happen that such sheer brain-work was carried on by plying other faculties than those which give its highest value to poetry.[87]

In the late summer and early autumn of 1862 Browning, in company with his son, was among the Pyrenees at "green pleasant little Cambo, and then at Biarritz crammed," he says, "with gay people of whom I know nothing but their outsides." The sea and sands were more to his liking than the gay people.[88] He had with him one book and no other--a Euripides, in which he read vigorously, and that the readings were fruitful his later poetry of the Greek drama bears witness. At present however his creative work lay in another direction; the whole of "the Roman murder story"--the story of Pompilia and Guido and Caponsacchi--he describes as being pretty well in his head. It needed a long process of evolution before the murder story could uncoil its sinuous lengths in a series of volumes. The visit to Ste-Marie "a wild little place in Brittany" near p.o.r.nic, in the summer of 1863--a visit to be repeated in the two summers immediately succeeding--is directly connected with two of the poems of _Dramatis Personae_. The story of _Gold Hair_ and the landscape details of _James Lee's Wife_ are alike derived from p.o.r.nic.

The solitude of the little Breton hamlet soothed Browning's spirit. The "good, stupid and dirty" people of the village were seldom visible except on Sunday; there were solitary walks of miles to be had along the coast; fruit and milk, b.u.t.ter and eggs in abundance, and these were Browning's diet. "I feel out of the very earth sometimes," he wrote, "as I sit here at the window.... Such a soft sea, and such a mournful wind!"

But the lulling charm of the place which, though so different, brought back the old Siena mood, did not convert him into an idler. The mornings, which began betimes, were given to work; in his way of desperate resolve to be well occupied he informs Miss Blagden (Aug. 18, 1863) that having yesterday written a poem of 120 lines, he means to keep writing whether he likes it or not.[89]

"With the spring of 1863," writes Mr Gosse, "a great change came over Browning's habits. He had refused all invitations into society; but now, of evenings, after he had put his boy to bed, the solitude weighed intolerably upon him. He told the present writer [Mr Gosse] long afterwards, that it suddenly occurred to him on one such spring night in 1863 that this mode of life was morbid and unworthy, and, then and there, he determined to accept for the future every suitable invitation which came to him." "Accordingly," goes on Mr Gosse, "he began to dine out, and in the process of time he grew to be one of the most familiar figures of the age at every dinner-table, concert-hall, and place of refined entertainment in London. This, however, was a slow process." Mrs Ritchie refers to spoken words of Browning which declared that it was "a mere chance whether he should live in the London house that he had taken and join in social life, or go away to some quiet retreat, and be seen no more." It was in a modified form the story of the "fervid youth grown man," in his own "Daniel Bartoli," who in his desolation, after the death of his lady,

Trembled on the verge Of monkhood: trick of cowl and taste of scourge He tried: then, kicked not at the p.r.i.c.ks perverse, But took again, for better or for worse, The old way of the world, and, much the same Man o' the outside, fairly played life's game.

Probably Browning had come to understand that in his relation to the past he was not more loyal in solitude than he might be in society; it was indeed the manlier loyalty to bear his full part in life. And as to his art, he felt that, with sufficient leisure to encounter the labour he had enjoined upon himself, it mattered little whether the remaining time was spent in a cave or in a court; strength may encounter the seductions either of the hermitage or of the crowd and still be the victor:

Strength may conclude in Archelaos' court, And yet esteem the silken company So much sky-scud, sea-froth, earth-thistledown, For aught their praise or blame should joy or grieve.

Strength amid crowds as late in solitude May lead the still life, ply the wordless task.[90]

One cannot prescribe a hygiene to poets; the poet of pa.s.sionate contemplation, such as was Wordsworth, could hardly quicken or develop his peculiar faculty by devotion to the entertainments of successive London seasons. And perhaps it is not certain that the genius of Browning was wholly a gainer by the superficial excitations of the dinner table and the reception room. But the truth is, as Mrs Browning had observed, that his energy was not exhausted by literary work, and that it preyed upon himself if no means of escape were found. If he was not at the piano, or shaping clay, or at the drawing-board, or walking fast and far, inward disturbances were set up which rent and frayed his mind. The pleasures of society both fatigued and rested Browning; they certainly relieved him from the troubles of super-abundant force.

In 1864 _Dramatis Personae_ was published. It might be described as virtually a third volume of _Men and Women_. And yet a certain change of tone is discernible. Italy is no longer the background of the human figures. There is perhaps less opulence of colour; less of the manifold "joys of living." If higher points in the life of the spirit are not touched, the religious feeling has more of inwardness and is more detached from external historical fact than it had ever been before; there is more sense of resistance to and victory over whatever may seem adverse to the life of the soul. In the poems which deal with love the situations and postures of the spirit are less simple and are sometimes even strained; the fantastic and the grotesque occupy a smaller place; a plain dignity, a grave solemnity of style is attained in pa.s.sages of _A Death in the Desert_, which had hardly been reached before. Yet substantially the volume is a continuation of the poems of 1855; except in one instance, where Tennyson's method in _Maud_, that of a sequence of lyrics, is adopted, the methods are the same; the predominating themes of _Men and Women_, love, art, religion, are the predominating themes of _Dramatis Personae._ A slight metrical complication--the internal rhyme in the second line of each stanza of _Dis aliter visum_ and in the third line of the quatrains of _May and Death_--may be noted as indicating Browning's love of new metrical experiments. In the former of these poems the experiment cannot be called a success; the clash of sounds, "a ma.s.s of bra.s.s," "walked and talked," and the like, seems too much as if an accident had been converted into a rule.

_Mr Sludge, "the Medium_" the longest piece in the volume, has been already noticed. The story of the poor girl of p.o.r.nic, as Browning in a letter calls her, attracted him partly because it presented a psychological curiosity, partly because he cared to paint her hair in words,--gold in contrast with that pallid face--as much as his friend Rossetti might have wished to display a like splendour with the strokes of his brush:

Hair such a wonder of flix and floss, Freshness and fragrance--floods of it too!

Gold, did I say? Nay, gold's mere dross.

The story, which might gratify a cynical observer of human nature, is treated by Browning without a touch of cynicism, except that ascribed to the priest--good easy man--who has lost a soul and gained an altar. A saint _manque_, whose legend is gruesome enough, but more pathetic than gruesome, becomes for the poet an involuntary witness of the Christian faith, and a type of the mystery of moral evil; but the psychological contrasts of the ambiguous creature, saint-sinner, and the visual contrast of

that face, like a silver wedge 'Mid the yellow wealth,

are of more worth than the sermon which the writer preaches in exposition of his tale. Had the form of the poem been Browning's favourite dramatic monologue, we can imagine that an ingenious apologia, convincing at least to Half-p.o.r.nic, could have been offered for the perversity of the dying girl's rifting every golden tress with gold.

No poem in the volume of _Dramatis Personae_ is connected with pictorial art, unless it be the few lines ent.i.tled _A Face_, lines of which Emily Patmore, the poet's wife, was the subject, and written, as Browning seldom wrote, for the mere record of beauty. That "little head of hers"

is transferred to Browning's panel in the manner of an early Tuscan piece of ideal loveliness; in purity of outline and of colour the delicate profile, the opening lips, the neck, the chin so naturally ally themselves to painting that nature is best comprehended through its imaginative transference to art. As _Master Hugues_ of the earlier collection of poems converts a bewildering technique of music into poetry, and discovers in its intricate construction a certain interposing web spun by the brain between the soul and things divine, so _Abt Vogler_ interprets music on the other side--that of immediate inspiration, to which the constructive element--real though slight--is subordinate. In the silence and vacuity which follow the impromptu on his orchestrion, the composer yearns, broods, aspires. Never were a ghostly troop of sounds reanimated and incarnated into industrious life more actually than by Browning's verse. They climb and crowd, they mount and march, and then pa.s.s away; but the musician's spirit is borne onward by the wind of his own mood, and it cannot stay its flight until it has found rest in G.o.d; all that was actual of harmonious sound has collapsed; but the sense of a mystery of divine suggestion abides in his heart; the partial beauty becomes a pledge of beauty in its plenitude; and then by a gentle return upon himself he resumes the life of every day, sobered, quieted and comforted. The poem touches the borderland where art and religion meet. The _Toccata of Galuppi_ left behind as its relics the melancholy of mundane pleasure and a sense of its transitory existence. The extemporising of _Abt Vogler_ fills the void which it has opened with the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.

Faith, victor over loss, in _Abt Vogler_, is victor over temporal decay in _Rabbi Ben Ezra_. The poem is the song of triumph of devout old age.

Neither the shrunken sadness of Matthew Arnold's poem on old age, nor the wise moderation and acquiescence in the economy of force which an admirable poem by Emerson expresses, can be found here; and perhaps some stress and strain may be felt in Browning's effort to maintain his position. It is no "vale of years" of which _Rabbi Ben Ezra_ tells; old age is viewed as an apex, a pinnacle, from which in thin translucent air all the efforts and all the errors of the past can be reviewed; the gifts of youth, the gifts of the flesh are not depreciated; but the highest attainment is that of knowledge won by experience--knowledge which can divide good from evil and what is true from what merely seems, knowledge which can put a just valuation not only on deeds but on every faint desire and unaccomplished purpose, and not only on achievements but failures. Possessed of such knowledge, tried in the probation of life and not found wanting, accepting its own peculiar trials, old age can enter into the rest of a clear and solemn vision, confident of being qualified at last to start forth upon that "adventure brave and new" to which death is a summons, and a.s.sured through experience that the power which gives our life its law is equalled by a superintending love. Ardour, and not lethargy, progress and not decline, are here represented as the characteristics of extreme old age. An enthusiasm of effort and of strenuous endurance, an enthusiasm of rest in knowledge, an enthusiasm of self-abandonment to G.o.d and the divine purpose make up the poem. At no time did Browning write verse which soars with a more steadfast and impa.s.sioned libration of wing. Death in _Rabbi Ben Ezra_ is death as a friend. In the lines ent.i.tled _Prospice_ it is death the adversary that is confronted and conquered; the poem is an act of the faith which comes through love; it is ascribed to no imaginary speaker, and does not, indeed, veil its personal character. No lonely adventure is here to reward the victor over death; the transcendent joy is human love recovered, which being once recovered, let whatever G.o.d may please succeed. The verses are a confession which gives the reason of that gallant beating up against the wind, noticeable in many of Browning's later poems. He could not cease from hope; but hope and faith had much to encounter, and sometimes he would reduce the grounds of his hope to the lowest, as if to make sure against illusion and to test the fort.i.tude of hope even at its weakest. The hope of immortality which was his own inevitably extended itself beyond himself, and became an interpreter of the mysteries of our earthly life. In contrast with the ardent ideality of _Rabbi Ben Ezra_ may be set the uncompromising realism of _Apparent Failure_, with its poetry of the Paris morgue. The lover of life will scrutinise death at its ugliest and worst, blinking no hideous fact. Yet, even so, the reverence for humanity--

Poor men, G.o.d made, and all for that!--

is not quenched, nor is the hope quenched that

After Last returns the First, Though a wide compa.s.s round be fetched, That what began best, can't end worst.

The optimism is unreasoned, and rightly so, for the spirit of the poem, with its suggestive t.i.tle, is not argumentative. The sense of "the pity of it" in one heart, remorse which has somehow come into existence out of the obscure storehouse of nature, or out of G.o.d, is the only justification suggested for a hope that nature or G.o.d must at the last intend good and not evil to the poor defeated abjects, who most abhorred their lives in Paris yesterday. And the word "Nature" here would be rejected by Browning as less than the truth.

In 1864 under somewhat altered conditions, and from a ground somewhat shifted, Browning in _A Death in the Desert_ and the _Epilogue_ to "Dramatis Personae" continued his apology for the Christian faith. The apologetics are, however, in the first instance poems, and they remain poems at the last. The imaginary scene of the death of the Evangelist John is rendered with the finest art; its dignity is that of a certain n.o.ble bareness; in the dim-lighted grotto are the aged disciple and the little group of witnesses to whom he utters his legacy of words; at the cave's edge is the Bactrian crying from time to time his bird-like cry of a.s.surance:

Outside was all noon and the burning blue.

The slow return of the dying man to consciousness of his surroundings is as true as if it were studied from a death-bed; his sudden awakening at the words "I am the Resurrection and the Life" arrives not as a dramatic surprise but as the simplest surprise of nature--light breaking forth before sunset. The chief speaker of the poem is chosen because the argument is one concerning faith that comes through love, and St John was the disciple who had learnt love's deepest secrets. The dialectic proceeds along large lines, which have only the subtlety of simplicity.

The verse moves gravely, tenderly, often weighted with monosyllables; a pondering, dwelling verse; and great single lines arise so naturally that while they fill the mind with a peculiar power, they are felt to be of one texture with the whole: this, for example,--

We would not lose The last of what might happen on his face;

and this:--

When there was mid sea and the mighty things;

and this:--

Lie bare to the universal p.r.i.c.k of light;

and these:--

The Bactrian was but a wild childish man, And could not write nor speak, but only loved.

Such lines, however, are made to be read _in situ_.

The faith of these latter days is the same as that of the first century, and is not the same. The story and the teaching of Christ had alike one end--to plant in the human consciousness the a.s.surance of Divine Love, and to make us, in our degree, conscious partakers of that love. Where love is, there is Christ. Our conceptions of G.o.d are relative to our own understanding; but G.o.d as power, G.o.d as a communicating intelligence, G.o.d as love--Father, Son and Spirit--is the utmost that we can conceive of things above us. Let us now put that knowledge--imperfect though it may be--to use. Power, intelligence, love--these surround us everywhere; they are not mere projections from our own brain or hand or heart; and by us they are inconceivable otherwise than as personal attributes. The historical story of Christ is not lost, for it has grown into a larger a.s.surance of faith. We are not concerned with the linen clothes and napkins of the empty sepulchre; Christ is arisen. Why revert to discuss miracles? The work of miracles--whatever they may have been--was long ago accomplished. The knowledge of the Divine Love, its appropriation by our own hearts, and the putting forth of that love in our lives--such for us is the Christian faith, such is the work of Christ accomplishing itself in humanity at the present time. And the Christian story is no myth but a reality, not because we can prove true the beliefs of the first century, but because those beliefs contained within them a larger and more enduring belief. The acorn has not perished because it has expanded into an oak.

This, reduced here to the baldest statement, is in substance the dying testimony of Browning's St John. It is thrown into lyrical form as his own testimony in the _Epilogue_ to the volume of 1864. The voices of singers, the sound of the trumpets of the Jewish Dedication Day, when the glory of the Lord in His cloud filled His house, have fallen silent.

We are told by some that the divine Face, known to early Christian days as love, has withdrawn from earth for ever, and left humanity enthroned as its sole representative:

Oh, dread succession to a dizzy post, Sad sway of sceptre whose mere touch appals.

Browning's reply is that to one whose eyes are rightly informed the whole of nature and of human life shows itself as a perpetual mystery of providential care:

Why, where's the need of Temple, when the walls O' the world are that? What use of swells and falls From Levites' choir, Priests' cries, and trumpet calls?

That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows, Or decomposes but to recompose, Become my universe that feels and knows.[91]

In the great poem of 1868-69, _The Ring and the Book_, one speaker, the venerable Pope, like St John of _A Death in the Desert_, has almost reached the term of a long life: he is absorbed in the solemn weighing of truth and falsehood, good and evil; his soul, like the soul of the dying Evangelist:

Lies bare to the universal p.r.i.c.k of light.

He, if any of the speakers in that sequence of monologues, expresses Browning's own highest thought. And the Pope's exposition of the Christianity of our modern age is identical with that of John. Man's mind is but "a convex gla.s.s" in which is represented all that by us can be conceived of G.o.d, "our known unknown." The Pope has heard the Christian story which is abroad in the world; he loves it and finds it credible. G.o.d's power--that is clearly discernible in the universe; His intelligence--that is no less evidently present. What of love? The dread machinery of sin and sorrow on this globe of ours seems to negative the idea of divine love. The surmise of immortality may indeed justify the ways of G.o.d to man; this "dread machinery" may be needed to evolve man's highest moral qualities. The acknowledgment of G.o.d in Christ, the divine self-sacrifice of love, for the Pope, as for St John, solves

All questions in the earth and out of it.

But whether the truth of the early centuries be an absolute historic fact,

Or only truth reverberate, changed, made pa.s.s A spectrum into mind, the narrow eye-- The same and not the same, else unconceived--

the Pope dare not affirm. Nor does he regard the question as of urgent importance at the present day; the effect of the Christian tale--historic fact, or higher fact expressed in myth--remains:

So my heart be struck, What care I,--by G.o.d's gloved hand or the bare?

By some means, means divinely chosen even if but a child's fable-book, we have got our truth, and it suffices for our training here on earth.

Let us give over the endless task of unproving and re-proving the already proved; rather let us straightway put our truth to its proper uses.[92]