Robert Browning Part 3

[Footnote 22: Mrs Orr, "Handbook to the Works of Robert Browning," p. 54 (1st ed.).]

[Footnote 23: _A Soul's Tragedy_ was written in 1843 or 1844, and revised immediately before publication. See Letters of R.B. and E.B.B., i. 474.]

[Footnote 24: Letters of D.G. Rossetti to William Allingham, p. 168.]

[Footnote 25: The above statement is substantially that of Browning; but on certain points his memory misled him. Whoever is interested in the matter should consult Professor Lounsbury's valuable article "A Philistine View of a Browning Play" in _The Atlantic Monthly_, December 1899, where questions are raised and some corrections are ingeniously made.]

[Footnote 26: An uncle seems to have accompanied him. See _Letters of R.B. and E.B.B_., i. 57: and (for Sh.e.l.ley's Grave) i. 292; for "Sordello" at Naples, i., 349.]

[Footnote 27: In later years no friendship existed between the two. We read in Mr. W.M. Rossetti's Diary for 1869, "4th July.... I see Browning dislikes Trelawny quite as much as Trelawny dislikes him (which is not a little.)" _Rossetti Papers_, p. 401.]

[Footnote 28: See Mr R. Holt Hutton's article on Browning in "Essays Theological and Literary."]

[Footnote 29: Luria withdraws from life "to prevent the harm Florence will do herself by striking him." _Letters of R.B. and E.B.B_., i. 427.]

Chapter IV

The Maker of Plays--_(Continued)_

The women of the dramas, with one or two exceptions, are composed of fewer elements than the men. A variety of types is presented, but each personality is somewhat constrained and controlled by its idea; the free movement, the iridescence, the variety in oneness, the incalculable multiplicity in unity, of real character are not always present. They admit of definition to a degree which places them at a distance from the inexplicable open secrets of Shakespeare's creation; they lack the simple mysteriousness, the transparent obscurity of nature. With a master-key the chambers of their souls can one after another be unlocked. Ottima is the carnal pa.s.sion of womanhood, full-blown, dazzling in the effrontery of sin, yet including the possibility, which Browning conceives as existing at the extreme edge of every expansive ardour, of being translated into a higher form of pa.s.sion which abolishes all thought of self. Anael, of _The Return of the Druses_, is pure and measureless devotion. The cry of "Hakeem!" as she falls, is not an act of faith but of love; it pierces through the shadow of the material falsehood to her one illuminated truth of absolute love, like that other falsehood which sanctifies the dying lips of Desdemona. The sin of Mildred is the very innocence of sin, and does not really alter the simplicity of her character; it is only the girlish rapture of giving, with no limitation, whatever may prove a bounty to him whom she loves:--

Come what, come will, You have been happy.

The remorse of Mildred is the remorse of innocence, the anguish of one wholly unlearned in the dark colours of guilt. This tragedy of Mildred and Mertoun is the _Romeo and Juliet_ of Browning's cycle of dramas. But Mildred's cousin Guendolen, by virtue of her swift, womanly penetration and her brave protectiveness of distressed girlhood, is a kinswoman of Beatrice who supported the injured daughter of Leonato in a comedy of Shakespeare which rings with laughter.

Polyxena, the Queen of Sardinia--a daughter not of Italy but of the Rhineland--is, in her degree, an eighteenth century representative of the woman of the ancient Teutonic tribes, grave, resolute, wise, and possessing the authority of wisdom. She, whose heart and brain work bravely together like loyal comrades, is strongly but also simply, conceived as the helpmate, the counsellor, and, in the old sense of the word, the comforter of her husband. Something of almost maternal feeling, as happens at times in real life, mingles with her wifely affection for Charles, who indeed may prove on occasions a fractious son. Like a wise guardian-angel she remembers on these occasions that he is only a man, and that men in their unwisdom may grow impatient of unalleviated guardian-angelhood; he will by and by discover his error, and she can bide her time. Perhaps, like other heroines of Browning, Polyxena is too constantly and uniformly herself; yet, no doubt, it is right that opaline, shifting hues should not disturb our impression of a character whose special virtue is steadfastness. The Queen of the English Charles, who is eager to counsel, and always in her petulance and folly to counsel ill, is slightly sketched; but she may be thanked for one admirable speech--her first--when Strafford, worn and fevered in the royal service, has just arrived from Ireland, and pa.s.sing out from his interview with the King is encountered by her:--

Is it over then?

Why he looks yellower than ever! Well At least we shall not hear eternally Of service--services: he's paid at least.

The Lady Carlisle of the same play--a creature in the main of Browning's imagination--had the play been Elizabethan or Jacobean would have followed her lord in a page's dress, have lived on half a smile a day, and perhaps have succeeded in dying languishingly and happily upon his sword; she is not quite unreal, nor yet quite real; something much better than a stage property and not wholly a living woman; more of a Beaumont and Fletcher personage of the boards--and as such effective--than a Shakespearian piece of nature. The theatrical limbo to which such almost but not quite embodied shadows ultimately troop, is capacious.

In Browning's dramatic scene of 1853, _In a Balcony_, he created with unqualified success "a very woman" in the enamoured Queen, whose heart at fifty years beats only more wildly and desperately than a girl's.[30]

The young lovers, Constance and Norbert, are a highly meritorious pair, who express their pa.s.sion in excellent and eloquent periods; we have seen their like before, and since. But the Queen, with her unslaked thirst for the visionary wells under the palm-trees, who finds herself still amid the burning sands, is an original and tragic figure--a royal Mlle. de Lespina.s.se, and crowned with fiery and immitigable pain.

Although she has returned the "glare" of Constance with the glare of "a panther," the Queen is large-hearted. The guards, it is true, arrive as the curtain falls; but those readers who have wasted their tender emotion on a couple of afflicted prisoners or decapitated young persons, whom mother Nature can easily replace, are mistaken. If the Queen does not die that night, she will rise next morning after sleepless hours, haggard, not fifty but eighty years old, and her pa.s.sion will, heroically slay itself in an act of generosity.[31] Little more, however, than a situation is represented in this dramatic scene. Of Browning's full-length portraits of women in the dramas, the finest piece of work is the portrait of the happiest woman--the play-d.u.c.h.ess of Juliers, no longer d.u.c.h.ess, but ever

Our lady of dear Ravestein.

Colombe is no incarnated idea but a complete human being, irreducible to a formula, whom we know the better because there is always in her more of exquisite womanhood to be discovered. Even the too fortunate Valence--all readers of his own s.e.x must p.r.o.nounce him too fortunate--will for ever be finding her anew.

In the development of his dramatic style Browning more and more lost sight of the theatre and its requirements; his stage became more and more a stage of the mind. _Strafford_, his first play, is the work of a novice, who has little of the instinct for theatrical effect, but who sets his brain to invent striking tableaux, to prepare surprises, to exhibit impressive att.i.tudes, to calculate--not always successfully--the angle of a speech, so that it may with due impact reach the pit. The opening scene expounds the situation. In the second Wentworth and Pym confront each other; the King surprises them; Wentworth lets fall the hand of Pym, as the stage tradition requires; as Wentworth withdraws the Queen enters to unmake what he has made, and the scene closes with a tableau expressing the sentimental weakness of Charles:

Come, dearest!--look, the little fairy, now That cannot reach my shoulder! Dearest, come!

And so proceeds the tragedy, with much that ought to be dear to the average actor, which yet is somehow not always even theatrically happy.

The pathos of the closing scene where Strafford is discovered in The Tower, sitting with his children, is theatrical pathos of the most correct kind, and each little speech of little William and little Anne is uttered as much for the audience as for their father, implying in every word "See, how we, poor innocents, heighten the pity of it." The hastily written _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_ is, perhaps, of Browning's dramas the best fitted for theatrical representation. Yet it is incurably weak in the motives which determine the action; and certain pa.s.sages are almost ludicrously undramatic. If Romeo before he flung up his ladder of ropes had paused, like Mertoun, to salute his mistress with a tenor morceau from the opera, it is to be feared that runaways'

and other eyes would not have winked, and that old Capulet would have come upon the scene in his night-gown, prepared to hasten the catastrophe with a long sword. Yet _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_, with its breadth of outline, its striking situations, and its mastery of the elementary pa.s.sions--love and wrath and pride and pity--gives us a.s.surance that Browning might have taken a place of considerable distinction had he been born in an age of great dramatic poetry. If it is weak in construction so--though in a less degree--are Webster's _d.u.c.h.ess of Malfi_, and Shakespeare's _Cymbeline_.

In _King Victor and King Charles_ Browning adopted, and no doubt deliberately, a plain, unfigured and uncoloured style, as suiting both the characters and the historical subject. The political background of this play and that of _Strafford_ hardly ent.i.tles either drama to be named political. Browning was a student of history, but it was individuals and not society that interested him. The affairs of England and the affairs of Sardinia serve to throw out the figures of the chief _dramatis persons_; those affairs are not considered for their own sake.

Certain social conditions are studied as they enter into and help to form an individual. The Bishop who orders his tomb at St Praxed's is in part a product of the Italian Renaissance, but the causes are seen only in their effects upon the character of a representative person. If the plain, substantial style of _King Victor and King Charles_ is proper to a play with such a hero as Charles and such a heroine as Polyxena, the coloured style, rich in imagery, is no less right in _The Return of the Druses_, where religious and chivalric enthusiasm are blended with the enthusiasm of the pa.s.sion of love. But already Browning was ceasing to bear in mind the conditions of the stage. Certain pages where Djabal and Khalil, Djabal and Anael, Anael and Loys are the speakers, might be described as dialogues conducted by means of "asides," and even the imagination of a reader resents a construction of scenes which requires these duets of soliloquies, these long sequences of the audible-inaudible. With the "very tragical mirth" of the second part of Chiappino's story of moral and political disaster, the spectators and the stage have wholly disappeared from Browning's theatre; the imaginary dialogue is highly dramatic, in one sense of the word, and is admirable in its kind, but we transport ourselves best to the market-place of Faenza by sitting in an easy chair.

_Pippa Pa.s.ses_ is singular in its construction; scenes detached, though not wholly disconnected, are strung pendant-wise upon the gold thread, slender but sufficiently strong, of an idea; realism in art, as we now call it, hangs from a fine idealism; this substantial globe of earth with its griefs, its grossnesses, its heroism, swings suspended from the seat of G.o.d. The idea which gives unity to the whole is not a mere fantasy. The magic practised by the unconscious Pippa through her songs is of that genuine and beautiful kind which the Renaissance men of science named "Magia Naturalis." It is no fantasy but a fact that each of us influences the lives of others more or less every day, and at times in a peculiar degree, in ways of which we are not aware. Let this fact be seized with imaginative intensity, and let the imagination render it into a symbol--we catch sight of Pippa with her songs pa.s.sing down the gra.s.s-paths and under the pine-wood of Asolo. Her only service to G.o.d on this one holiday of a toilsome year is to be glad. She misconceives everything that concerns "Asolo's Four Happiest Ones"--to her fancy Ottima is blessed with love, Jules is no victim of an envious trick, Luigi's content in his lot is deep and una.s.sailable, and Monsignor is a holy and beloved priest; and, unawares to her, in modes far other than she had imagined, each of her dreams comes true; even Monsignor for one moment rises into the sacred avenger of G.o.d. Her own service, though she knows it not, is more than a mere twelve-hours'

gladness; she, the little silk-winder, rays forth the influences of a heart that has the potency ascribed to gems of unflawed purity; and such influences--here embodied in the symbol of a song--are among the precious realities of our life. Nowhere in literature has the virtue of mere innocent gladness been more charmingly imagined than in her morning outbreak of expectancy, half animal glee, half spiritual joy; the "whole sunrise, not to be suppressed" is a limitless splendour, but the reflected beam cast up from the splash of her ewer and dancing on her poor ceiling is the same in kind; in the shrub-house up the hill-side are great exotic blooms, but has not Pippa her one martagon lily, over which she queens it? With G.o.d all service ranks the same, and she shall serve Him all this long day by gaiety and grat.i.tude.

_Pippa Pa.s.ses_ is a sequence of dramatic scenes, with lyrics interspersed, and placed in a lyrical setting; the figures dark or bright, of the painting are "ringed by a flowery bowery angel-brood" of song. But before his _Bells and Pomegranates_ were brought to a close Browning had discovered in the short monodrama, lyrical or reflective, the most appropriate vehicle for his powers of pa.s.sion and of thought.

Here a single situation sufficed; characters were seen rightly in position; the action of the piece was wholly internal; a pa.s.sion could be isolated, and could be either traced through its varying moods or seized in its moment of culmination; the casuistry of the brain could be studied apart,--it might have its say uninterrupted, or it might be suddenly encountered and dissipated by some spearlike beam of light from the heart or soul; the traditions of a great literary form were not here a cause of embarra.s.sment; they need not, as in work for the theatre, be laboriously observed or injuriously violated; the poet might a.s.sert his independence and be wholly original.

And original, in the best sense of the word--entirely true to his highest self--Browning was in the "Dramatic Lyrics" of 1842, and the "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics" of 1845. His senses were at once singularly keen and energetic, and singularly capacious of delight; his eyes were active instruments of observation, and at the same time were possessed by a kind of rapture in form--and not least in fantastic form--and a rapture still finer in the opulence and variety of colour.

In these poems we are caught into what may truly be called an enthusiasm of the senses; and presently we find that the senses, good for their own sakes, are good also as inlets to the spirit. Having returned from his first visit to southern Italy, the sights and sounds, striking upon the retina and the auditory nerve, with the intensity of a new experience, still attack the eye and ear _as_ he writes his _Englishman in Italy_, and by virtue of their eager obsession demand and summon forth the appropriate word.[32] The fisherman from Amalfi pitches down his basket before us,

All trembling alive With pink and grey jellies, your sea-fruit, --You touch the strange lumps, And mouths gape there, eyes open, all manner Of horns and of humps.

Or it is the "quick rustle-down of the quail-nets," or the "whistling pelt" of the olives, when Scirocco is loose, that invades our ears. And by and by among the mountains the play of the senses expands, and the soul has its great word to utter:

G.o.d's own profound Was above me, and round me the mountains, And under, the sea, And within me, my heart to bear witness hat was and shall be.

Not less vivid is the vision of the light craft with its lateen sail outside Triest, in which Waring--the Flying Englishman--is seen "with great gra.s.s hat and kerchief black," looking up for a moment, showing his "kingly throat," till suddenly in the sunset splendour the boat veers weather-ward and goes off, as with a bound, "into the rose and golden half of the sky." And what animal-painter has given more of the leonine wrath in mane and tail and fixed wide eyes than Browning has conveyed into his lion of King Francis with three strokes of the brush?

Or it is only a bee upon a sunflower on which the gazer's eye is fixed, and we get the word of Rudel:

And therefore bask the bees On my flower's breast, as on a platform broad.

Or--a grief to booklovers!--the same eye is occupied by all the grotesquerie of insect life in the revel over that unhappy tome lurking in the plum tree's crevice of Browning's _Garden Fancy_, which creeps and crawls with beetle and spider, worm and eft.[33] Or it is night and moonlight by the sandy sh.o.r.e, and for a moment--before love enters--all the mind of the impressionist artist lives merely in the eye:

The grey sea and the long black land; And the yellow half-moon large and low; And the startled little waves that leap In fiery ringlets from their sleep As I gain the cove with pushing prow.

If Browning did not rejoice in perfect health and animal spirits--and in the letters to Miss Barrett we hear of frequent headaches and find a reference to his pale thin face as seen in a mirror--he had certainly the imagination of perfect vitality and of those "wild joys of living,"

sung by the young harper David in that poem of _Saul_, which appeared as a fragment in the _Bells and Pomegranates_, and as a whole ten years later, with the awe and rapture of the spirit rising above the rapture of the senses.[34]

Of these poems of 1842 and 1845 one _The Pied Piper_, was written in the spirit of mere play and was included in _Bells and Pomegranates_ only to make up a number, for which the printer required more copy. One or two--the flesh and blood incarnations of the wines of France and Hungary, _Claret_ and _Tokay_, are no more than clever caprices of the fancy. One, _The Lost Lender_, remotely suggested by the conservatism of Wordsworth's elder days, but possibly deflected by some of the feeling attributed to Pym in relation to Strafford of the drama, and certainly detached from direct personal reference to Wordsworth, expresses Browning's liberal sentiment in politics. One, the stately _Artemis Prologuizes_, is the sole remaining fragment of a cla.s.sical drama, "Hippolytus and Aricia," composed in 1840, "much against my endeavour,"

wrote the poet,--a somewhat enigmatical phrase--"while in bed with a fever." A considerable number of the poems may be grouped together as expressions or demonstrations of various pa.s.sions, central among which is the pa.s.sion of love. A few, and these conspicuous for their masterly handling of novel themes, treat of art, and the feeling for art as seen in the painter of pictures or in the connoisseur. Nor is the interpretation of religious emotion--though in a phase that may be called abnormal--wholly forgotten.

With every pa.s.sion that expands the spirit beyond the bounds of self, Browning, as the dramas have made evident to us, is in cordial sympathy.

The reckless loyalty, with its animal spirits and its dash of grief, the bitterer because grief must be dismissed, of the _Cavalier Tunes_, is true to England and to the time in its heartiness and gallant bluffness.

The leap-up of pride and joy in a boy's heart at the moment of death in his Emperor's cause could hardly be more intensely imagined than it is in the poem of the French camp, and all is made more real and vivid by the presence of that motionless figure, intent on victory and sustaining the weight of imperial anxieties, which yet cannot be quite impa.s.sive in presence of a death so devoted. And side by side with this poem of generous enthusiasm is placed the poem of pa.s.sion reduced to its extreme of meanness, its most contracted form of petty spite and base envy--the _Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister_; a grotesque insect, spitting ineffectual poison, is placed under the magnifying-gla.s.s of the comic spirit, and is discovered to be--a brother in religion! A n.o.ble hatred, transcending personal considerations, mingles with a n.o.ble and solemn love--the pa.s.sion of country--in the Italian exile's record of his escape from Austrian pursuers; with the clear-obscure of his patriotic melancholy mingles the proud recollection of the Italian woman who was his saviour, over whose conjectured happiness as peasant wife and peasant mother the exile bows with a tender joy. The examples of abnormal pa.s.sion are two--that of the amorous homicide who would set on one perfect moment the seal of eternity, in _Porphyria's Lover_, and that of the other occupier of the mad-house cells, Johannes Agricola, whose pa.s.sion of religion is pushed to the extreme of a mystical antinomianism.

Browning's poems of the love of man and woman are seldom a simple lyrical cry, but they are not on this account the less true in their presentment of that curious masquer and disguiser--Love. When love takes possession of a nature which is complex, affluents and tributaries from many and various faculties run into the main stream. With Browning the pa.s.sion is indeed a regal power, but intellect, imagination, fancy are its office-bearers for a time; then in a moment it resumes all authority into its own hands, resolves of a sudden all that is complex into the singleness of joy or pain, fuses all that is manifold into the unity of its own life and being. His dramatic method requires that each single faculty should be seen in the environment of a character, and that its operations should be clothed more or less in circ.u.mstance. And since love has its ingenuities, its fine-spun and far-flung threads of a.s.sociation, its occult symbolisms, Browning knows how to press into the service of the central emotion objects and incidents and imagery which may seem remote or curious or fantastic or trivial or even grotesque.

In _Rudel to the Lady of Tripoli_ love which cometh by the hearing of the ear (for Rudel is a sun-worshipper who has never seen his sun) is a pure imaginative devotion to the ideal. In _Count Gismond_ love is the deliverer; the motive of the poem is essentially that of the Perseus and Andromeda myth refined upon and mediaevalised. In _Cristine_ love is the interpreter of life; a moment of high pa.s.sion explains, and explains away, all else that would obscure the vision of what is best and most real in this our world and in the worlds that are yet unattained. From a few lines written to ill.u.s.trate a Venetian picture by Maclise _In a Gondola_ was evolved. If Browning was not entirely accurate in his topography of Venice, he certainly did not fail in his sense of the depth and opulence of its colour. Here the abandonment to pa.s.sion is relieved by the quaint ingenuities and fancies of love that seeks a momentary refuge from its own excess, and then returns more eagerly upon itself; and the shadow of death is ever at hand, but like the shadows of a Venetian painter it glows with colour.

The motives of two narrative poems, _The Glove_ and _The Flight of the d.u.c.h.ess_, have much in common; they lie in the contrast between the world of convention and the world of reality. In each the insulter of proprieties, the breaker of bounds is a woman; in each the choice lies between a life of pretended love and vain dignities and a life of freedom and true love; and in each case the woman makes her glad escape from what is false to what is true. In restating the incident of the glove Browning brings into play his casuistry, but casuistry is here used to justify a pa.s.sion which the poet approves, to elucidate, not to obscure, what he represents as the truth of the situation. _The Flight of the d.u.c.h.ess_ in part took its rise "from a line, 'Following the Queen of the Gipsies, O!'--the burden of a song, which the poet, when a boy, heard a woman singing on a Guy Fawkes' day." Some two hundred lines were given to Hood for his magazine, at a time when Hood needed help, and death was approaching him. The poem was completed some months later. It is written, like _The Glove_, in verse that runs for swiftness' sake, and that is pleased to show its paces on a road rough with boulder-like rhymes. The little d.u.c.h.ess is a wild bird caged in the strangely twisted wirework of artificial modes and forms. She is a prisoner who is starved for real life, and stifles; the fresh air and the open sky are good, are irresistible--and that is the whole long poem in brief. Such a small prisoner, all life and fire, was before many months actually delivered from her cage in Wimpole Street, and Robert Browning himself, growing in stature amid his incantations, played the part of the gipsy.

Another d.u.c.h.ess, who pined for freedom and never attained it, has her cold obituary notice from her bereaved Duke's lips in the _Dramatic Lyrics_ of 1842. _My Last d.u.c.h.ess_ was there made a companion poem to _Count Gismond_; they are the pictures of the bond-woman and of the freed-woman in marriage. The Italian d.u.c.h.ess revolts from the law of wifehood no further than a misplaced smile or a faint half-flush, betraying her inward breathings and beamings of the spirit; the noose of the ducal proprieties is around her throat, and when it tightens "then all smiles stopped together." Never was an agony hinted with more gentlemanly reserve. But the poem is remarkable chiefly as gathering up into a typical representative a whole phase of civilisation. The Duke is Italian of Renaissance days; insensible in his egoistic pride to the beautiful humanity alive before him; yet a connoisseur of art to his finger-tips; and after all a d.u.c.h.ess can be replaced, while the bronze of Glaus of Innsbruck--but the glory of his possessions must not be pressed, as though his nine hundred years old name were not enough. The true gift of art--Browning in later poems frequently insists upon this--is not for the connoisseur or collector who rests in a material possession, but for the artist who, in the zeal of creation, presses through his own work to that unattainable beauty, that flying joy which exists beyond his grasp and for ever lures him forward. In _Pictor Ignotus_ the earliest study in his lives of the painters was made by the poet. The world is gross, its touch unsanctifies the sanct.i.ties of art; yet the brave audacity of genius is able to penetrate this gross world with spiritual fire. Browning's unknown painter is a delicate spirit, who dares not mingle his soul with the gross world; he has failed for lack of a robust faith, a strenuous courage. But his failure is beautiful and pathetic, and for a time at least his Virgin, Babe, and Saint will smile from the cloister wall with their "cold, calm, beautiful regard." And yet to have done otherwise to have been other than this; to have striven like that youth--the Urbinate--men praise so!

More remarkable, as the summary of a civilisation, than _My Last d.u.c.h.ess_, is the address of the worldling Bishop, who lies dying, to the "nephews" who are sons of his loins. In its Paganism of Christianity--which lacks all the manly virtue of genuine Paganism--that portion of the artistic Renaissance which leans towards the world and the flesh is concentrated and is given as in quintessential form. The feeble fingers yet cling to the vanities of earth; the speaker babbles not of green fields but of his blue lump of lapis-lazuli; and the last word of all is alive only with senile luxury and the malice of perishing recollection.

FOOTNOTES: