Robert Browning Part 8

[Footnote 59: E.B.B. to Ruskin, _Letters_, ii. 199.]

[Footnote 60: Which, however, did not prevent certain errors noted in a letter of Browning to Dante Rossetti.]

[Footnote 61: Dante Gabriel Rossetti. His "Family Letters," i. 190, 191.]

[Footnote 62: Letters of D.G. Rossetti to William Allingham, 162. See Mrs Browning's letter to Mrs Tennyson in Memoir of Tennyson by his son, I vol. edition, p. 329.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: PORTRAIT OF FILIPPO LIPPI.

_By himself. A detail from the fresco in the Cathedral at Praia from a photograph by_ ALINARI.]

Chapter IX

Men and Women

Rossetti expresses his first enthusiasm about _Men and Women_ in a word when he calls the poems "my Elixir of Life." To Ruskin these, with other pieces which he now read for the first time, were as he declared in a rebellious mood, a ma.s.s of conundrums. "He compelled me," Rossetti adds, "to sit down before him and lay siege for one whole night; the result of which was that he sent me next morning a bulky letter to be forwarded to Browning, in which I trust he told him he was the greatest man since Shakespeare." The poems of the two new volumes were the gradual growth of a considerable number of years; since 1845 their author had published no group of short poems, and now, at the age of forty-three, he had attained the fulness of intellectual and imaginative power, varied experience of life and the artistic culture of Italy. The _Dramatis Personae_ of 1864 exhibits no decline from the high level reached in the volumes of 1855; but is there any later volume of miscellaneous poetry by Browning which, taken as a whole, approaches in excellence the collections of 1855 and 1864?

There is no need now to "lay siege" to the poems of _Men and Women_; they have expounded themselves, if ever they needed exposition; and the truth is that they are by no means nut-sh.e.l.ls into which mottoes meant for the construing of the intellect have been inserted, but fruits rich in colour and perfume, a feast for the imagination, the pa.s.sions, the spirit in sense, and also for the faculty of thought which lives in the heart of these. If a criticism or a doctrine of life lies in them--and that it should do so means that the poet's total mind has been taken up into his art--Browning conveys his doctrine not as such but as an enthusiasm of living; his generalized truth saturates a medium of pa.s.sion and of beauty. In the Prologue to _Fifine at the Fair_ he compares the joy of poetry to a swimmer's joy in the sea: the vigour that such disport in sun and sea communicates is the vigour of joyous play; afterwards, if we please, we can ascertain the const.i.tuents of sea-water by a chemical a.n.a.lysis; but the a.n.a.lysis will not convey to us the sensations of the sunshine and the dancing brine. One of the blank-verse pieces of _Men and Women_ rebukes a youthful poet of the transcendental school whose ambition is to set forth "stark-naked thought" in poetry. Why take the harp to his breast "only to speak dry words across the strings"? Better hollo abstract ideas through the six-foot Alpine horn of prose. Boys may desire the interpretation into bare ideas of those thronging objects which obsess their senses and their feelings; men need art for the delight of it, and the strength which comes through delight. Better than the meaning of a rose is the rose itself with its spirit enveloped in colour and perfume. And so the poet for men will resemble that old mage John of Halberstadt:

He with a 'look you!' vents a brace of rhymes, And in there breaks the sudden rose herself, Over us, under, round us every side,

Buries us with a glory, young once more, Pouring heaven into this shut house of life.

Browning in _Men and Women_ is in truth a John of Halberstadt; he enriches life with colour, warmth, music, romance, not dissociated from thought and intellectual energy, rather possessing and being possessed by these. Not a single poem is "stark-naked thought"; not a single poem is addressed solely to the intellect; even _Bishop Blougram_ is rather a presentation of character than a train of argument or a chain of ideas.

In few of these poems does Browning speak in his own person; the verses addressed to his wife, which present her with "his fifty men and women"

and tell of mysteries of love that can never be told, the lines, _Memorabilia_, addressed to one who had seen Sh.e.l.ley, and _Old Pictures in Florence_, are perhaps the only exceptions to the dramatic character of the contents of the two volumes. Yet through them all Browning's mind is clearly discernible; and even his central convictions, his working creed of life, can with no sense of uncertainty be gathered from them.

To attribute to the writer the opinions and the feelings of his _dramatis personae_ would of course be the crudest of mistakes. But when an idea persists through many poems written at various times and seasons, when it appears and reappears under various clothings of circ.u.mstance, when it is employed as if it had a crucial value, when it becomes a test or touchstone of character, we cannot doubt that it is an intimate possession of the writer's mind. Such an idea is not a mere playmate but rather a confidant. When, again, after a tangle of casuistic reasoning or an embroilment of contending feelings, some idea suddenly flashes forth, and like a sword sunders truth from falsehood and darkness from light, we may be a.s.sured that it has more than a dramatic value. And, once more, if again and again the same idea shows its power over the feelings and inspires elevated lyrical utterance, or if in pieces of casuistical brain-work it enters as a pa.s.sionate element and domineers by its own authority, if it originates not debate but song or that from which song is made, we know that the writer's heart has embraced it as a truth of the emotions.

Because Browning had his own well-defined view of truth, he could confidently lend his mind away to his fifty or his hundred men and women. They served to give his ideas a concrete body. By sympathy and by intelligence he widened the basis of his own existence. If the poet loses himself to find himself again through sympathy with external nature, how much more and in how many enriching ways through sympathy with humanity! Thus new combinations of thought and feeling are effected. Thus a kind of experiment is made with our own ideas by watching how they behave when brought into connection with these new combinations. Truth is relative, and the best truth of our own is worth testing under various conditions and circ.u.mstances. The truth or falsehood which is not our own has a right to say the best for itself that can be said. Let truth and falsehood grapple. Let us hear the counter-truth or the rival falsehood which is the complement or the criticism of our own, and hear it stated with the utmost skill. A Luther would surely be the wiser for an evening spent in company with a Blougram; and Blougram has things to tell us which Luther never knew.

But precisely because truth is relative we must finally adhere to our own perceptions; they const.i.tute the light for us; and the justice we would do to others we must also render to ourselves. A wide survey may be made from a fixed centre. "Universal sympathies," Miss Barrett wrote in one of the letters to her future husband, "cannot make a man inconsistent, but on the contrary sublimely consistent. A church tower may stand between the mountains and the sea, looking to either, and stand fast: but the willow tree at the gable-end blown now toward the north and now toward the south, while its natural leaning is due east or west, is different altogether ... _as_ different as a willow tree from a church tower."[63]

The fifty poems of _Men and Women_, with a few exceptions, fall into three princ.i.p.al groups--those which interpret various careers or moods or moments of love; those which deal with the fine arts--painting, poetry, music--and with these we may cla.s.s, as kindred in spirit, that poem which has for its subject the pa.s.sionate pursuit of knowledge, _A Grammarian's Funeral_; and thirdly, those which are connected with religious thought and feeling, or present scenes from the history of religions. Two poems may be called descriptive; both are Italian; both are founded upon a rivalry of contrasts, but one, _Up at a Villa--Down in the City_, is made up of humorous observations of Italian city and country life, expressing the mundane tastes and prudent economies of an Italian person of quality; the other, "_De Gustibus_--," which contrasts the happy quietudes of English landscape with the pa.s.sionate landscape of the South, has romance at the heart of its realism and an ardour of sentiment underlying its pictorial vividness. _The Patriot_ is again Italian, suggested perhaps by the swift revolutions and restorations which Browning had witnessed in Florence, and again it uses with striking effect the principle of contrast; the patriot who a year ago had his intoxicating triumph is now on his way to the scaffold. His year's toil for the good of his people has turned into a year's misdeeds, his life is a failure; but Browning characteristically wrings a victory out of defeat; the crowd at the shambles' gate may hoot; it is better so, for now the martyr can throw himself upon G.o.d, the Paymaster of all his labourers at the close of day. The most remarkable of these poems, which refuse to take their places in a group, is that forlorn romance of weary and depressed heroism, _Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came_. It is in the main a fantaisie of description; but involved with the descriptive study is a romantic motive. The external suggestions for the poem were no more than the words from _King Lear_ which form the t.i.tle, a tower seen in the Carrara mountains, a painting seen in Paris, and the figure of a horse in the tapestry of the drawing-room of Casa Guidi.[64] In his own mind Browning may have put the question: Of all the feats of knight-errantry which is the hardest? Not to combat with dragons, or robbers, or salvage men; not to bear down rival champions in a rapture of battle. Not these, but to cling to a purpose amid all that depresses the senses at a time when the heart within us is also failing; to advance where there is nothing to arouse energy by opposition, and everything without and within to sap the very life of the soul. Childe Roland is himself hopeless and almost heartless; the plain to which the leering cripple had pointed and over which he rides is created in the utter indigence of nature--a very nightmare of poverty and mean repulsiveness. And yet he endures the test, and halts only when he faces the Dark Tower and blows the blast upon his horn. Browning was wise to carry his romance no further; the one moment of action is enough; it is the breaking of the spell, the waking from the nightmare, and at that point the long-enduring quester may be left. We are defrauded of nothing by the abrupt conclusion.

In the poems which treat of the love of man and woman Browning regards the union of soul with soul as the capital achievement of life, and also as affording one of its chief tests. When we have formed these into a group we perceive that the group falls in the main into two divisions--poems which tell of attainment, and poems which tell of failure or defeat. Certain persons whose centre is a little hard kernel of egoism may be wholly disqualified for the test created by a generous pa.s.sion. Browning does not belabour with heavy invective the _Pretty Woman_ of his poem, who is born without a heart; she is a flower-like creature and of her kind is perfect; only the flower is to be gazed at, not gathered; or, if it must be gathered, then at last to be thrown away. The chief distinction between the love of man and the love of woman, implied in various poems, is this--the man at his most blissful moment cries "What treasures I have obtained!" the woman cries "What treasures have I to surrender and bestow?" Hence the singleness and finality in the election of pa.s.sion made by a woman as compared with a man's acquisitiveness of delight. The unequal exchange of a transitory for an enduring surrender of self is the sorrow which pulsates through the lines of _In a Year_, as swift and broken with pauses as the beating of a heart:

Dear, the pang is brief, Do thy part, Have thy pleasure! How perplexed Grows belief!

Well, this cold clay clod Was man's heart: Crumble it and what comes next?

Is it G.o.d?

And with no chilling of love on the man's part, this is the point of central pain, in that poem of exquisite and pathetic distrust at the heart of trust and admiration, _Any Wife to any Husband_; n.o.ble and faithful as the husband has been, still he is only a man. But elsewhere Browning does justice to the pure chivalry of a man's devotion.

Caponsacchi's joy is the joy of a saviour who himself is saved; the great event of his life by which he is lifted above self is single and ultimate; his soul is delivered from careless egoism once and for ever; the grace of love is here what the theologians called invincible grace, and invincible grace, we know, results in final perseverance. Even here in _Men and Women_ two contrasted poems a.s.sure us that, while the pa.s.sion of a man may be no more than _Love in a Life_, it may also be an unweariable _Life in a Love_.

Of the poems of attainment one--_Respectability_--has the spirit of youth and gaiety in it. Here love makes its gallant bid for freedom, fires up for lawlessness, if need be, and at least sets convention at defiance:

The world's good word!--the Inst.i.tute!

Guizot receives Montalembert!

Eh? Down the court three lampions flare: Set forward your best foot!

But, after all, this love may be no more than an adventure of the boulevard and the attic in the manner of Beranger's gay Bohemianism. The distance is wide between such elan of youthful pa.s.sion and the fidelity which is inevitable, and on which age has set its seal, in that poem of perfect attainment, _By the Fireside_. This is the love which completes the individual life and at the same time incorporates it with the life of humanity, which unites as one the past and the present, and which, owing no allegiance of a servile kind to time, becomes a pledge for futurity. Browning's personal experience is here taken up into his imagination and transfigured, but its substance remains what it had been in literal fact.

The poems of failure are more numerous, and they range through various degrees and kinds of failure. It is not death which can bring the sense of failure to love. In _Evelyn Hope_ all the pa.s.sion has been on the man's side; all possibilities of love in the virginal heart of the dead girl, all her warmth and sweetness, had been folded in the bud. But death, in the mood of infinite tenderness and unfulfilled aspiration which the poem expresses, seems no bar to some far-off attainment, of which the speaker's pa.s.sion, breaking through time, is the a.s.surance, an attainment the nature of which he cannot divine but which will surely explain the meaning of things that are now obscure. Perhaps the saddest and the most hopeless kind of failure is that in which, to borrow an image from the old allegory, the arrow of love all but flies to the mark and yet just misses it. This is the subject of a poem equally admirable in its descriptive and its emotional pa.s.sages, _Two in the Campagna_.

The line "One near one is too far," might serve as its motto.

Satisfaction is all but reached and never can be reached. Two hearts touch and never can unite. One drop of the salt estranging sea is as unplumbed as the whole ocean. And the only possible end is

Infinite pa.s.sion, and the pain Of finite hearts that yearn.[65]

Compared with such a failure as this an offer of love rejected, rejected with decision but not ungenerously, may be accounted a success. There is something tonic to a brave heart in the putting forth of will, even though it encounter an obstacle which cannot be removed. Such is the mood which is presented in _One Way of Love_; the foiled lover has at least made his supreme effort; it has been fruitless, but he thinks with satisfaction that he has played boldly for the prize, and never can he say that it was not worth risking all on the bare chance of success:

She will not give me heaven? 'Tis well!

Lose who may--I still can say Those who win heaven, blest are they!

So, too, in _The Last Ride together_, the lover is defeated but he is not cast down, and he remains magnanimous throughout the grief of defeat. Who in this our life--he reflects--statesman or soldier, sculptor or poet, attains his complete ideal? He has been granted the grace of one hour by his mistress' side, and he will carry the grateful recollection of this with him into the future as his inalienable and his best possession. With these generous rejections and magnanimous acceptances of failure stands in contrast _A Serenade at the Villa_, where the lover's devotion is met only by obdurate insensibility or, worse, by an irritated sense of the persecution and plague of such love, and where all things seem to conspire to leave his pain mere pain, bitter and unredeemed.

In these examples, though love has been frustrated in its aim, the cause of failure did not lie in any infirmity of the lover's heart or will.

But what if the will itself be supine, what if it dallies and delays, consults the convenience of occasions, observes the indications of a shallow prudence, slackens its pace towards the goal, and meanwhile the pa.s.sion languishes and grows pale from day to day, until the day of love has waned, and the pa.s.sion dies in a twilight hour through mere inanition? Such a failure as this seems to Browning to mean the perishing of a soul, or of more souls than one. He takes in _The Statue and the Bust_ a case where the fulfilment of pa.s.sion would have been a crime. The lady is a bride of the Riccardi; to win her, now a wedded wife, would be to violate the law of G.o.d and man. Nevertheless it is her face which has "filled the empty sheath of a man" with a blade for a knight's adventure--The

Duke grew straightway brave and wise.

And then follow delays of convenience, excuses, postponements, and the Duke's flood of pa.s.sion dwindles to a thread, and is lost in the sandy flats of life:

So weeks grew months, years; gleam by gleam The glory dropped from their youth and love, And both perceived they had dreamed a dream.

Their end was a crime, but Browning's contention is that a crime may serve for a test as well as a virtue; in that test the Duke and the lady had alike failed through mere languor of soul:

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

Had Tennyson treated the same subject he would probably have glorified their action as a victorious obedience to the law of self-reverence and self-control.

The reunion and the severance of lovers are presented in three poems.

Winter, chill without but warm within, with its pastimes of pa.s.sion, the energies of joy breaking forth in play, is contrasted in _A Lovers'

Quarrel_ with springtime, all gladness without and a strange void and shiver at the heart of things, because alienation has taken the place of camaraderie between the lover and his mistress. The ma.s.s and intensity of colour in the stanza which dashes in a sketch of the Pampas, with its leagues of sunflowers, and a wild horse, "black neck and eyeb.a.l.l.s keen"

appearing through them, almost afflict the reader's sense of sight.

There is a fine irony in the t.i.tle of the other poem of contention, _A Womans Last Word_: In a quarrel a woman will have the last word, and here it is--the need of quietude for a little while that she may recover from the bewildering stroke of pain, and then entire oblivion of the wrong with unmeasured self-surrender. The poem of union, _Love among the Ruins_, is constructed in a triple contrast; the endless pastures prolonged to the edge of sunset, with their infinity of calm, are contrasted with the vast and magnificent animation of the city which once occupied the plain and the mountain slopes. The lover keeps at arm's-length from his heart and brain what yet fills them all the while; here in this placid pasture-land is one vivid point of intensest life; here where once were the grandeur and tumult of the enormous city is that which in a moment can abolish for the lover all its glories and its shames. His eager antic.i.p.ation of meeting his beloved, face to face and heart to heart, is not sung, after the manner of Burns, as a jet of unmingled joy; he delays his rapture to make its arrival more entirely rapturous; he uses his imagination to check and to enhance his pa.s.sion; and the poem, though not a simple cry of the heart, is entirely true as a rendering of emotion which has taken imagination into its service. In like manner _By the Fireside, A Serenade at the Villa_, and _Two in the Campagna_, include certain studies of nature and its moods, sometimes with a curiously minute observation of details; and these serve as the overture to some intense moment of joy or pain, or form the orchestration which sustains or reinforces a human voice.

Of the pieces relating to art those connected with the art of poetry are the least valuable. _Transcendentalism_ sets forth the old doctrine that poetry must be sensuous and pa.s.sionate, leaving it to philosophy to deal with the naked abstractions of the intellect. _How it strikes a Contemporary_ shows by a humorous example how a poet's character and private life may be misconceived and misrepresented by those among whom he moves. _Popularity_ maintains that the poet who is in the highest sense original, an inventor of new things, may be wholly disregarded for long, while his followers and imitators secure both the porridge and the praise; one day G.o.d's hand, which holds him, will open and let out all the beauty. The thought is an obvious one enough, but the image of the fisher and the murex, in which the thought is embodied, affords opportunity for stanzas glowing with colour. Two poems, and each of them a remarkable poem, are interpretations of music. One, _Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha_, is a singularly successful _tour de force_, if it is no more. Poetry inspired by music is almost invariably the rendering of a sentiment or a mood which the music is supposed to express; but here, in dealing with the fugue of his imaginary German composer, Browning finds his inspiration not in the sentiment but in the structure of the composition; he competes, as it were, in language with the art or science of the contrapuntist, and evolves an idea of his own from its complexity and elaboration. The poem of Italian music, _A Toccata of Galuppi's_, wholly subordinates the science to the sentiment of the piece. It is steeped in the melancholy of pleasure; Venice of the eighteenth century lives before us with its mundane joys, its transitory pa.s.sions, its voluptuous hours; and in the midst of its warmth and colour a chill creeps upon our senses and we shiver. Browning's artistic self-restraint is admirable; he has his own truth to utter aloud if he should please; but here he will not play the prophet; the life of eighteenth-century Venice is dust and ashes; the poet will say not a word more than the musician has said in his toccata; the ruthlessness of time and death make him a little remorseful; it is enough, and too much, that through this music of the hours of love and pleasure we should hear, as it were, the fall of the clay upon a coffin-lid.

Sh.e.l.ley was more impressed by the sculpture than the paintings of Italy.

There are few evidences of the influence of the most ideal of the arts that appeal to the mind through the eye in Browning's poetry; and his sympathies would be more apt to respond to such work as Michael Angelo's, which sends the spectator beyond itself, than to the cla.s.sical work which has the absoluteness and the calm of attained perfection.[66]

The sensuous and the spiritual qualities of colour were vividly felt by him; a yellowing old marble seemed perhaps to impose itself with a cold authority upon the imagination. But the suggestion of two portrait busts of the period of cla.s.sical decadence, one in marble representing a boy, and the other the powerful head of a man in granite, gave rise to _Protus_, one of the few flawless poems of Browning. His mastery over the rhymed couplet is nowhere seen to greater advantage, unless it be in a few pa.s.sages of _Sordello_. The poem is, however, more a page from history than a study in the fine arts; and Browning's imagination has made it a page which lives in our memory through a pathos veiled under strong objective touches, never protruding itself sentimentally in quest of tenderness or pity.

"I spent some most delightful time," Rossetti wrote to Allingham shortly after the publication of _Men and Women_, "with Browning at Paris, both in the evenings and at the Louvre, where (and throughout conversation) I found his knowledge of early Italian art beyond that of any one I ever met--_encyclopedically_ beyond that of Ruskin himself." The poem _Old Pictures at Florence_, which Rossetti calls "a jolly thing," and which is that and much more, is full of Browning's learned enthusiasm for the early Italian painters, and it gives a reason for the strong attraction which their adventures after new beauty and pa.s.sion had for him as compared with the faultless achievements of cla.s.sical sculpture. Greek art, according to Browning, by presenting unattainable ideals of material and mundane perfection, taught men to submit. Early Christian art, even by faultily presenting spiritual ideals, not to be attained on earth but to be pursued through an immortal life, taught men to aspire.