Robert Browning Part 2

"G.o.d has conceded two sights to a man-- One, of men's whole work, time's completed plan, The other, of the minute's work, man's first Step to the plan's completion."

And the poor minute's work a.s.signed him by the divine law of justice and pity he accepts as his whole life's task. It is true that though he now clearly sees the end, he has not perhaps recognised the means. If Sordello contemplated political action as his mode of effecting that minute's work, he must soon have discovered, were his life prolonged, that not thus can a poet live in his highest faculty, or render his worthiest service. The poet--and speaking in his own person Browning makes confession of his faith--can adequately serve his mistress, "Suffering Humanity," only as a poet. Sordello failed to render into song the highest thoughts and aspirations of Italy; but Dante was to follow and was not to fail. The minstrel's last act--his renunciation of selfish power and pleasure, his devotion to what he held to be the cause of the people, the cause of humanity, was indeed his best piece of poetry; by virtue of that act Sordello was not a beaten man but a conqueror.

These prolonged studies--_Paracelsus, Sordello_, and, on a more contracted scale, _Pauline_--each a study in "the development of a soul," gain and lose through the immaturity of the writer. He had, as yet, brought only certain of his faculties into play, or, at least, he had not as yet connected with his art certain faculties which become essential characteristics of his later work. There is no humour in these early poems, or (since Naddo and the critic tribe of _Sordello_ came to qualify the a.s.sertion) but little; there is no wise casuistry, in which falsehood is used as the vehicle of truth; the psychology, however involved it may seem, is really too simple; the central personages are too abstract--knowledge and love and volition do not exhaust the soul; action and thought are not here incorporated one with the other; a deed is not the interpreter of an idea; an idea is first exhibited by the poet and the deed is afterwards set forth as its consequence; the conclusions are too patently didactic or doctrinaire; we suspect that they have been motives determining the action; our scepticism as to the disinterested conduct of the story is aroused by its too plainly deduced moral. We catch the powers at play which ought to be invisible; we fiddle with the works of the clock till it ceases to strike. Yet if only a part of Browning's mind is alive in these early poems, the faculties brought into exercise are the less impeded by one another; the love of beauty is not tripped up by a delight in the grotesque. And there is a certain pleasure in attending to prophecy which has not learnt to hide itself in casuistry. The a.n.a.lysis of a state of mind, pursued in _Sordello_ with an effort that is sometimes fatiguing and not always successful, is presently followed by a superb portrait--like that of Salinguerra--painted by the artist, not the a.n.a.lyst, and so admirable is it that in our infirmity we are tempted to believe that the process of flaying and dissection alters the person of a man or woman as Swift has said, considerably for the worse.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 15: The supposition of Mr Sharp and Mr Gosse that Browning visited Italy after having seen St Petersburg is an error. His first visit to Italy was that of 1838. I may note here that in a letter to E.B.B. (vol. ii. 443) Browning refers to having been in Holland some ten years since; the date of his letter is August 18, 1846.]

[Footnote 16: Mrs Bronson; Browning in Venice. _Cornhill Magazine_, Feb.

1902. pp. 160, 161.]

[Footnote 17: Mrs Orr's "Handbook to Browning," pp. 10, 11.]

Chapter III

The Maker of Plays

The publication of _Paracelsus_ did not gain for Browning a large audience, but it brought him friends and acquaintances who gave his life a delightful expansion in its social relations. John Forster, the critic, biographer and historian, then unknown to him, reviewed the poem in the _Examiner_ with full recognition of its power and promise.

Browning gratefully commemorated a lifelong friendship with Forster, nearly a score of years later, in the dedication of the 1863 edition of his poetical works. Mrs Orr recites the names of Carlyle, Talfourd, R.

Hengist Horne, Leigh Hunt, Procter, Monckton Milnes, d.i.c.kens, Wordsworth, Landor, among those of distinguished persons who became known to Browning at this period.[18] His "simple and enthusiastic manner" is referred to by the actor Macready in his diary; "he looks and speaks more like a youthful poet than any man I ever saw." Browning's face was one of rare intelligence and full of changing expression. He was not tall, but in early years he was slight, was graceful in his movements, and held his head high. His dark brown hair hung in wavy ma.s.ses upon his neck. His voice had in early manhood a quality, afterwards lost, which Mr Sharp describes as "flute-like, clear, sweet and resonant." Slim, dark, and very handsome are the words chosen by Mrs Bridell-Fox to characterise the youthful Browning as he reappeared to her memory; "And--may I hint it?"--she adds, "just a trifle of a dandy, addicted to lemon-coloured kid gloves and such things, quite 'the gla.s.s of fashion and the mould of form.' But full of ambition, eager for success, eager for fame, and, what is more, determined to conquer fame and to achieve success." Yet the correct and conventional Browning could also fire up for lawlessness--"frenetic to be free." He was hail-fellow well-met, we are told--but is this part of a Browning legend?--with tramps and gipsies, and he wandered gladly, whether through devout sympathy or curiosity of mood we know not, into Little Bethels and other tents of spiritual Ishmael.

From Camberwell Browning's father moved to a house at Hatcham, transporting thither his long rows of books, together with those many volumes which lay still unwritten in the "celle fantastyk" of his son.

"There is a vast view from our greatest hill," wrote Browning; a vast view, though Wordsworth had scorned the Londoner's hill--"Hill? _we_ call that, such as that, a _rise_." Here he read and wrote, enjoyed his rides on the good horse "York," and cultivated friendship with a toad in the pleasant garden, for he had a peculiar interest, as his poems show, in creatures that live a shy, mysterious life apart from that of man, and the claim of beauty, as commonly understood, was not needed to win his regard. Browning's eye was an instrument made for exact and minute records of natural phenomena. "I have heard him say," Mr Sharp writes, "that at that time"--speaking of his earlier years--"his faculty of observation would not have appeared despicable to a Seminole or an Iroquois." Such activity of the visual nerve differs widely from the wise pa.s.siveness or brooding power of the Wordsworthian mode of contemplation. Browning's life was never that of a recluse who finds in nature and communion with the anima mundi a counterpoise to the attractions of human society. Society fatigued him, yet he would not abandon its excitements. A mystic--though why it should be so is hard to say--does not ordinarily affect lemon-coloured kid gloves, as did the Browning of Mrs Bridell-Fox's recollection. The mysticism of Browning's temper of mind came not by withdrawal from the throng of positive facts, but by pushing through these to the light beyond them, or by the perception of some spear-like shaft of light piercing the denseness, which was serviceable as the sheathe or foil. And of course it was among men and women that he found suggestions for some of his most original studies.

An introduction to Macready which took place at Mr Fox's house towards the close of November 1835 was fruitful in consequences. A month later Browning was Macready's guest at Elstree, the actor's resting-place in the country. His fellow-traveller, then unknown to him, in the coach from London was John Forster; in Macready's drawing-room the poet and his critic first formed a personal acquaintance. Browning had for long been much interested in the stage, but only as a spectator. His imagination now turned towards dramatic authorship with a view to theatrical performance. A play on a subject from later Roman history, _Na.r.s.es_, was thought of and was cast aside. The success of Talfourd's _Ion_, after the first performance of which (May 26, 1836) Browning supped in the author's rooms with Macready, Wordsworth, and Landor, probably raised high hopes of a like or a greater success for some future drama of his own. "Write a play, Browning," said Macready, as they left the house, "and keep me from going to America." "Shall it be historical or English?" Browning questioned, as the incident is related by Mrs Orr, "What do you say to a drama on Strafford?" The life of Stafford by his friend Forster, just published, which during an illness of the author had been revised in ma.n.u.script by Browning, probably determined the choice of a subject.

By August the poet had pledged himself to achieve this first dramatic adventure. The play was produced at Covent Garden on May 1st, 1837, by Macready, who himself took the part of Strafford. Helen Faucit, then a novice on the stage, gave an adequate rendering of the difficult part of Lady Carlisle. For the rest, the complexion of the piece, as Browning describes it, after one of the latest rehearsals, was "perfect gallows."

Great historical personages were presented by actors who strutted or slouched, who whimpered or drawled. The financial distress at Covent Garden forbade any splendour or even dignity of scenery or of costumes.[19] The text was considerably altered--and not always judiciously--from that of the printed play, which had appeared before its production on the stage. Yet on the first night _Strafford_ was not d.a.m.ned, and on the second it was warmly applauded.[20] After the fifth performance the wretched Pym refused to save his mother England even once more, and the play was withdrawn. Browning declared to his friends that never again, as long as he might live, would he write a play.

Whining not being to his taste, he averted his eyes and set himself resolutely to work upon _Sordello_.

"I sail this morning for Venice," Browning wrote to a friend on Good Friday, 1838. He voyaged as sole pa.s.senger on a merchantman, and soon was on friendliest terms with the rough kindly captain. For the first fortnight the sea was stormy and Browning suffered much; as they pa.s.sed through the Straits of Gibraltar, Captain Davidson aided him to reach the deck, and a pulsing of home-pride--not home-sickness--gave their origin to the patriotic lines beginning, "n.o.bly, n.o.bly Cape Saint Vincent to the north-west died away." Under the bulwark of the _Norham Castle_, off the African coast, when the fancy of a gallop on his Uncle Reuben's horse suddenly presented itself in pleasant contrast with the tedium of the hours on shipboard, he wrote in pencil, on the flyleaf of Bartoli's Simboli, that most spirited of poems which tell of the glory of motion--_How they brought the good news from Ghent to Aix_. The only adventure of the voyage was the discovery of an Algerine pirate ship floating keel uppermost; it righted suddenly under the stress of ropes from the _Norham Castle_, and the ghastly and intolerable dead--Algerines and Spaniards--could not scare the British sailors eager for loot; at last the battered hulk was cast loose, and its blackness was seen reeling slowly off "into the most gorgeous and lavish sunset in the world." Having visited Venice, Vicenza and Padua--cities and mountain solitudes, which gave their warmth and colour to his unfinished poem--Browning returned home by way of Tyrol, the Rhine, Liege and Antwerp. It was his first visit to Italy and was a time of enchantment.

Fifty years later he recalled the memories of these early days when his delight had something insubstantial, magical in it, and the vision was half perceived with the eye and half projected from within:--

How many a year my Asolo, Since--one step just from sea to land-- I found you, loved yet feared you so-- For natural objects seemed to stand Palpably fire-clothed![21]

Of evenings soon after his return to London Mrs Bridell-Fox writes: "He was full of enthusiasm for Venice, that Queen of Cities. He used to ill.u.s.trate his glowing descriptions of its beauties, the palaces, the sunsets, the moonrises, by a most original kind of etching. Taking up a bit of stray notepaper, he would hold it over a lighted candle, moving the paper about gently till it was cloudily smoked over, and then utilising the darker smears for clouds, shadows, water, or what not, would etch with a dry pen the forms of lights on cloud and palace, on bridge or gondola on the vague and dreamy surface he had produced." The antic.i.p.ations of genius had already produced a finer etching than any of these, in those lines of marvellous swiftness and intensity in _Paracelsus_, which describe Constantinople at the hour of sunset.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MAIN STREET OF ASOLO, SHOWING BROWNING'S HOUSE.

_From a drawing by_ Miss D. NOYES.]

The publication of _Sordello_ (1840) did not improve Browning's position with the public. The poem was a challenge to the understanding of an aspirant reader, and the challenge met with no response. An excuse for not reading a poem of five or six thousand lines is grateful to so infirm and shortlived a being as man. And, indeed, a prophet, if prudent, may do well to postpone the privilege of being unintelligible until he has secured a considerable number of disciples of both s.e.xes.

The reception of _Sordello_ might have disheartened a poet of less vigorous will than Browning; he merely marched breast forward, and let _Sordello_ lie inert, until a new generation of readers had arisen. The dramas, _King Victor and King Charles_ and _The Return of the Druses_ (at first named "Mansoor the Hierophant") now occupied his thoughts.

Short lyrical pieces were growing under his hand, and began to form a considerable group. And one fortunate day as he strolled alone in the Dulwich wood--his chosen resort of meditation--"the image flashed upon him of 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."[22] In other words Pippa had suddenly pa.s.sed her poet in the wood.

A cheap mode of issuing his works now in ma.n.u.script was suggested to Browning by the publisher Moxon. They might appear in successive pamphlets, each of a single sheet printed in double-column, and the series might be discontinued at any time if the public ceased to care for it. The general t.i.tle _Bells and Pomegranates_ was chosen; "beneath upon the hem of the robe thou shalt make pomegranates of blue, and of purple, and of scarlet, round about the hem thereof; and bells of gold between them round about." Browning, as he explained to his readers in the last number, meant to indicate by the t.i.tle, "Something like an alternation, or mixture, of music with discoursing, sound with sense, poetry with thought"--such having been, in fact, one of the most familiar of the Rabbinical interpretations designed to expound the symbolism of this priestly decoration prescribed in "Exodus." From 1841 to 1846 the numbers of _Bells and Pomegranates_ successively appeared; with the eighth the series closed. The first number--_Pippa Pa.s.ses_--was sold for sixpence; when _King Victor and King Charles_ was published in the following year (1842), the price was raised to one shilling. The third and the seventh numbers were made up of short pieces--_Dramatic Lyrics_ (1842), _Dramatic Romances and Lyrics_ (1845). _The Return of the Druses_ and _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_--Numbers 4 and 5--followed each other in the same year 1843. _Colombe's Birthday_--the only number which is known to survive in ma.n.u.script--came next in order (1844). The last to appear was that which included _Luna_, Browning's favourite among his dramas, and _A Soul's Tragedy_.[23] His sister, except in the instance of _Colombe_, was Browning's amanuensis. On each t.i.tle-page he is named Robert Browning "Author of Paracelsus"--the "wholly unintelligible" _Sordello_ being pa.s.sed over. Talfourd, "Barry Cornwall," and John Kenyon (the cousin of Elizabeth Barrett) were honoured with dedications. In these pamphlets of Moxon, Browning's wonderful apples of gold were certainly not presented to the public in pictures or baskets of silver; yet the possessor of the eight parts in their yellow paper wrappers may now be congratulated. Only one of the numbers--_A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_--attained the distinction of a second edition, and this probably because the drama as published was helped to a comparative popularity by its representation on the stage.

This tragedy of young love and death was written hastily--in four or five days--for Macready. Browning while at work on his play, as we learn from a letter of Dante Rossetti to Allingham, was kept indoors by a slight indisposition; his father on going to see him "was each day received boisterously and cheerfully with the words: 'I have done another act, father.'"[24] Forster read the tragedy aloud from the ma.n.u.script for d.i.c.kens, who wrote of it with unmeasured enthusiasm in a letter, known to Browning only when printed after the lapse of some thirty years: "Browning's play has thrown me into a perfect pa.s.sion of sorrow.... I know no love like it, no pa.s.sion like it, no moulding of a splendid thing after its conception like it." Things had gone ill with Macready at Drury Lane, and when the time for _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_ drew near it is evident that he feared further losses and would gladly have been released from his promise to produce the play; but Browning failed to divine the true state of affairs. The tragedy was read to the company by a grotesque, wooden-legged and red-nosed prompter, and it was greeted with laughter. To make amends, Macready himself undertook to read it aloud, but he declared himself unable, in the disturbed state of his mind, to appear before the public: his part--that of Lord Tresham--must be taken by Phelps. From certain rehearsals Phelps was unavoidably absent through illness. Macready who read his lines on these occasions, now was caught by the play, and saw possibilities in the part of Tresham which fired his imagination. He chose, almost at the last moment, to displace his younger and less distinguished colleague.

Browning, on the other hand, insisted that Phelps, having been a.s.signed the part, should retain it. To baffle Macready in his design of presenting the play to the public in a mutilated form, Browning, aided by his publisher, had the whole printed in four-and-twenty hours.[25] A rupture of the long-standing friendship with Macready followed, nor did author and actor meet again until after the great sorrow of Browning's life. "Mr Macready too"--writes Mrs Orr--"had recently lost his wife, and Mr Browning could only start forward, grasp the hand of his old friend, and in a voice choked with emotion say, 'O Macready!'"

The tragedy was produced at Drury Lane on February nth, 1843, with Phelps, who acted admirably as Tresham, and Helen Faucit as Mildred.

Although it had been ill rehea.r.s.ed and not a shilling had been spent on scenery or dresses, it was received with applause. To a call for the author, Browning, seated in his box, declined to make any response.

Thus, not without some soreness of heart, closed his direct connection with the theatre. He heard with pleasure when in Italy that _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_ was given by Phelps at Sadler's Wells Theatre in November 1848, and with unquestionable success. A rendering of _Colombe's Birthday_ was projected by Charles Kean in 1844, but the long delays, which were inevitable, could not be endured by Browning, who desired to print his play forthwith among the _Bells and Pomegranates_.

It was not until nine years later that this play, a veritable "All for love, or the world well lost," was presented at the Haymarket, Helen Faucit appearing as the d.u.c.h.ess. Soon after _Colombe's Birthday_ had been published, Browning sailed once more, in the autumn of 1844, for Italy.[26] As he journeyed northwards and homewards, from Naples (where they were performing an opera named _Sordello_) and Rome he sought and obtained at Leghorn an interview with Trelawny, the generous-hearted friend of Sh.e.l.ley, by whose grave he had lately stood.[27]

Browning's work as a playwright, consisting of eight pieces, or nine if we include the later _In a Balcony_, is sufficiently ample to enable us to form a trustworthy estimate of his genius as seen in drama. Dramatic, in the sense that he created and studied minds and hearts other than his own, he pre-eminently was; if he desired to set forth or to vindicate his most intimate ideas or impulses, he effected this indirectly, by detaching them from his own personality and giving them a brain and a heart other than his own in which to live and move and have their being.

There is a kind of dramatic art which we may term static, and another kind which we may term dynamic. The former deals especially with characters in position, the latter with characters in movement.[28]

Pa.s.sion and thought may be exhibited and interpreted by dramatic genius of either type; to represent pa.s.sion and thought and action--action incarnating and developing thought and pa.s.sion--the dynamic power is required. And by action we are to understand not merely a visible deed, but also a word, a feeling, an idea which has in it a direct operative force. The dramatic genius of Browning was in the main of the static kind; it studies with extraordinary skill and subtlety character in position; it attains only an imperfect or a laboured success with character in movement. The _dramatis personae_ are ready at almost every moment, except the culminating moments of pa.s.sion, to fall away from action into reflection and self-a.n.a.lysis. The play of mind upon mind he recognises of course as a matter of profound interest and importance; but he catches the energy which spirit transfers to spirit less in the actual moment of transference than after it has arrived. Thought and emotion with him do not circulate freely through a group of persons, receiving some modification from each. He deals most successfully with each individual as a single and separate ent.i.ty; each maintains his own att.i.tude, and as he is touched by the common influence he proceeds to scrutinise it. Mind in these plays threads its way dexterously in and out of action; it is not itself sufficiently incorporated in action. The progress of the drama is now r.e.t.a.r.ded; and again, as if the author perceived that the story had fallen behind or remained stationary, it is accelerated by sudden jerks. A dialogue of retrospection is a common device at the opening of popular plays, with a view to expound the position of affairs to the audience; but a dramatic writer of genius usually works forward through his dialogue to the end which he has set before him. With Browning for the purpose of mental a.n.a.lysis a dialogue of retrospection may be of higher value than one which leans and presses towards the future. The invisible is for him more important than the visible; and so in truth it may often be; but the highest dramatist will not choose to separate the two. The invisible is best captured and is most securely held in the visible.

As a writer of drama, Browning, who delights to study the n.o.blest att.i.tudes of the soul, and to wring a proud sense of triumph out of apparent failure, finds his proper field in tragedy rather than in comedy. _Colombe's Birthday_ has a joyous ending, but the joy is very grave and earnest, and the body of the play is made up of serious pleadings and serious hopes and fears. There is no light-hearted mirth, no real gaiety of temper anywhere in the dramas of Browning. Pippa's gladness in her holiday from the task of silk-winding is touched with pathos in the thought that what is so bright _is_ also so brief, and it is encompa.s.sed, even within delightful Asolo, by the sins and sorrows of the world. Bluphocks, with his sn.i.g.g.e.ring wit and his jingles of rhyme is a vagabond and a spy, who only covers the shame of his nakedness with these rags of devil-may-care good spirits. The genial cynicism of Ogniben is excellent of its kind, and pleases the palate like an olive amid wines; but this man of universal intellectual sympathies is at heart the satirist of moral illusions, the unmasker of self-deception, who with long experience of human infirmities, has come to chuckle gently over his own skill in dealing with them; and has he not--we may ask--wound around his own spirit some of the incurable illusions of worldly wisdom? No--this is not gaiety; if Browning smiles with his Ogniben, his smile is a comment upon the weakness and the blindness of the self-deceiver.

Browning's tragedies are tragedies without villains. The world is here the villain, which has baits and bribes and snares wherewith to entangle its victims, to lure down their mounting aspirations, to dull their vision for the things far-off and faint; perhaps also to make them prosperous and portly gentlemen, easy-going, and amiably cynical, tolerant of evil, and prudently distrustful of good. Yet truth is truth, and fact is fact; worldly wisdom is genuine wisdom after its kind; we shall be the better instructed if we listen to its sage experience, if we listen, understand, and in all justice, censure. Ogniben can blandly and skilfully conduct a Chiappino to his valley of humiliation--"let him that standeth take heed lest he fall." But what would the wisdom of Ogniben be worth in its p.r.o.nouncements on a Luria or a Colombe? Perhaps even in such a case not wholly valueless. The self-pleased, keen-sighted Legate might after all have applauded a moral heroism or a high-hearted gallantry which would ill accord with his own ingenious and versatile spirit. Bishop Blougram--sleek, ecclesiastical opportunist--was not insensible to the superior merits of "rough, grand, old Martin Luther."

In Browning's nature a singularly keen, exploring intelligence was united with a rare moral and spiritual ardour, a pa.s.sion for high ideals. In creating his chief _dramatis persona_ he distributes among them what he found within himself, and they fall into two princ.i.p.al groups--characters in which the predominating power is intellect, and characters in which the mastery lies with some lofty emotion. The intellect dealing with things that are real and positive, those persons in whom intelligence is supreme may too easily become the children of this world; in their own sphere they are wiser than the children of light; and they are skilled in a moral casuistry by which they justify to themselves the darkening of the light that is in them. The pa.s.sionate natures have an intelligence of their own; they follow a gleam which is visible to them if not to others; they discover, or rather they are discovered by, some truth which flashes forth in one inspired moment--the master-moment of a lifetime; they possess the sublime certainty of love, loyalty, devotion; if they err through a heroic folly and draw upon themselves ruin in things temporal, may there not be some atom of divine wisdom at the heart of the folly, which is itself indestructible, and which ensures for them a welfare out of time and s.p.a.ce? Prophet and casuist--Browning is both; and to each he will endeavour to be just; but his heart must give a casting vote, and this cannot be in favour of the casuist. Every self-transcending pa.s.sion has in it a divine promise and pledge; even the pa.s.sion of the senses if it has hidden within it one spark of self-annihilating love may be the salvation of a soul. It is Ottima, lifted above her own superb voluptuousness, who cries--"Not me--to him, O G.o.d, be merciful." The region of untrammelled, unclouded pa.s.sion, of spiritual intuition, and of those great words from heaven, which pierce "even to the dividing asunder of the joints and marrow," is, for Browning's imagination, the East. The nations of the West--and, before all others, the Italian race--are those of a subtly developed intelligence. The worldly art of a Church-man, ingenuities of theology having aided in refining ingenuities of worldliness, is perhaps the finest exemplar of unalloyed western brain-craft. But Italy is also a land of pa.s.sion; and therefore at once, for its ardours of the heart--seen not in love alone but in carven capital and on frescoed wall--and for its casuistries of intellect, Browning looks to Italy for the material best fitted to his artistry.

Between that group of personages whom we may call his characters of pa.s.sion and that group made up of his characters of intelligence, lie certain figures of peculiar interest, by birth and inheritance children of the East, and by culture partakers, in a greater or a less degree, of the characteristics of the West--a Djabal, with his Oriental heart entangled by Prankish tricks of sophistry; a Luria, whose Moorish pa.s.sion is enthralled by the fascination of Florentine intellect, and who can make a return upon himself with a half-painful western self-consciousness.

Loyalties, devotions, to a person, to a cause, to an ideal, and the sacrifice of individual advantages, worldly prosperity, temporal successes to these--such, stated in a broad and general way, is the theme of special interest to Browning in his dramas. These loyalties may be well and wisely fixed, or they may contain a portion of error and illusion. But in either case they furnish a test of manly and womanly virtue. With a woman the test is often proposed by love--by love as set over against ease, or high station, or the pride of power. Colombe of Ravestein is offered on the one hand the restoration of her forfeited Duchy, the prospective rank of Empress and partnership with a man, who, if he cannot give love, is yet no ign.o.ble wooer, a man of honour, of intellect, and of high ambition; on the other hand pleads the advocate of Cleves, a nameless provincial, past his days of youth, lean and somewhat worn, and burdened with the griefs and wrongs of his townsfolk.

Mere largeness in a life is something, is much; but the quality of a life is more. Valence has set the cause of his fellow-citizens above himself; he has made the heart of the d.u.c.h.ess for the first time thrill in sympathy with the life of her people; he has placed his loyalty to her far above his own hopes of happiness; he has urged his rival's claims with unfaltering fidelity. It is not with any backward glances of regret, any half-doubts, prudent reserves, or condescending qualifications that Colombe gives herself to the advocate of the poor.

She, in her youth and beauty, has been happy during her year of idlesse as play-d.u.c.h.ess of Juliers; she is happier now as she abandons the court and, sure in her grave choice, turns with a light and joyous laugh to welcome the birthday gift of freedom and of love that has so unexpectedly come to her. Having once made her election, Colombe can throw away the world as gaily as in some girlish frolic she might toss aside a rose.

The loyalty of men, their supreme devotion and their test may, as with women, spring from the pa.s.sion of love; but other tests than this are often proposed to them. With King Charles of Sardinia it is duty to his people that summons him, from those modest and tranquil ways of life of which he dreamed, to the cares and toils of the crown. He has strength to accept without faltering the burden that is laid upon him. And if he falters at the last, and would resign to his father, who reclaims it, the crown which G.o.d alone should have removed, shall we a.s.sert confidently that Browning's dramatic instinct has erred? The pity of it--that his great father, daring in battle, profound in policy, should stand before him an outraged, helpless old man, craving with senile greed a gift from his son--the pity of it revives an old weakness, an old instinct of filial submission, in the heart of Charles. He has tasked himself without sparing; he has gained the affections of his subjects; he has conciliated a hostile Europe; is not this enough? Or was it also in the bond that he should tread a miserable father into the dust? The test again of Luigi, in the third part of _Pippa Pa.s.ses_, is that of one who sees all the oppression of his people, who is enamoured of the antique ideal of liberty, and whose choice lies between a youth of luxurious ease and the virtue of one heroic crime, to be followed by the scaffold-steps, with youth cut short. To him that overcometh and endureth unto the end will G.o.d give the morning-star:

The gift of the morning-star! Have I G.o.d's gift Of the morning-star?

And Luigi will adventure forth--it may be in a kind of divine folly--as a doomsman commissioned by G.o.d to free his Italy. The devotion of Luria to Florence is partly of the imagination, and perhaps it is touched with something of illusion. But the actual Florence, with her astute politicians, her spies who spy upon spies, her incurable distrusts, her sinister fears, her ingrained ingrat.i.tude, is clearly exposed to him before the end. Shall he turn the army, which is as much his own as the sword he wields, joined with the forces of Pisa, against the beautiful, faithless city? Or will his pa.s.sionate loyalty endure the test? Luria withdraws from life, but not until he has made every provision for the victory of Florence over her enemy; nor does he die a defeated man; his moral greatness has subdued all envies and all distrusts; at the close everyone is true to him:

The only fault's with time; All men become good creatures: but so slow.[29]

Once again in Browning's earliest play, the test for the patriot Pym lies in the choice between two loyalties--one to England and to freedom, the other to his early friend and former comrade in politics.

His faith in Strafford dies hard; but it dies; he flings forward his hopes for the grand traitor to England beyond the confines of this life, and only the grieved unfaltering justiciary remains. Browning's Pym is a figure neither historically true nor dramatically effective; he is self-conscious and sentimental, a patriot armed in paste-board rhetoric.

But the writer, let us remember, was young; this was his first theatrical essay, and he was somewhat showy of fine intentions. The loyalty of Strafford to the King is too fatuous an instinct to gain our complete sympathy. He rides gallantly into the quicksand, knowing it to be such, and the quicksand, as certainly as the worm of Nilus, will do its kind. And yet though this is the vain romance of loyalty, in it, as Browning conceives, lies the test of Strafford. A self-renouncing pa.s.sion of any kind is not so common that we can afford to look on his king-worship with scorn.

Over against these devotees of the ideal Browning sets his worldlings, ranging from creatures as despicable as the courtiers of d.u.c.h.ess Colombe to such men of power and inexhaustible resource as the Nuncio who confronts Djabal with his Druses, or the Papal Legate whose easier and half-humorous task is to dismiss to his private affairs at Lugo the four-and-twentieth leader of revolt. To the same breed with the courtiers of Colombe belong old Vane and Savile of the court of Charles.

To the same breed with the Nuncio and the Legate, belongs Monsignor, who proves himself more than a match for his hireling, the scoundrel Intendant. In a happy moment Monsignor is startled into indignant wrath; he does not exclaim with the Edmund of Shakespeare's tragedy "Some good I mean to do before I die;" but his "Gag the villain!" is a substantial contribution to the justice of our world. Under the enn.o.bling influence of Charles and his Polyxena, the craft of D'Ormea is uplifted to a level of real dignity; if he cannot quite attain the position of a martyr for the truth, he becomes something better than one who serves G.o.d at the devil's bidding. And Braccio, plotter and betrayer, yet always with a certain fidelity towards his mother-city, is won over to the side of simple truth and righteousness by the overmastering power of Luria's magnanimity. So precious, after all--Browning would say--is the mere capacity to recognise facts; if only a little grain of virtue remains in the heart, this faculty of vision may make some sudden discovery which shall prove to a worldling that there exist facts, undeniable and of immense potency, hitherto unknown to his philosophy of chicane. Browning's vote is given, as has been said, and with no uncertain voice, for his devotees of the ideal; but the men of fine worldly brain-craft have a fascination for him as they have for his Eastern Luria. In Djabal, at once enthusiast and impostor, Browning may seem, as often afterwards, to offer an apology for the palterer with truth; but in the interests of truth itself, he desires to study the strange phenomenon of the deceiver who would fain half-deceive himself.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 18: Dr Moncure Conway in "The Nation" vol. i. (an article written on the occasion of Browning's death) says that he was told by Carlyle of his first meeting with Browning--as Carlyle rode upon Wimbledon Common a "beautiful youth," walking there alone, stopped him and asked for his acquaintance. The incident has a somewhat legendary air.]

[Footnote 19: Lady Martin (Helen Faucit), however, wrote in 1891 to Mrs Ritchie: "The play was mounted in all matters with great care ... minute attention to accuracy of costume prevailed.... The scenery was alike accurate."]

[Footnote 20: On which occasion Browning--m.u.f.fled up in a cloak--was asked by a stranger in the pit whether he was not the author of "Romeo and Juliet" and "Oth.e.l.lo." "No, so far as I am aware," replied Browning.

Two burlesques of Shakespeare by a Mr Brown or Brownley were in course of performance in London. _Letters of R.B. and E.B.B._, ii. 132.]

[Footnote 21: From the Prologue to _Asolando_, Browning's last volume.]