The Poetry Of Robert Browning Part 16

Tiburzio is a pale reflection of Luria. Husain alone has some personality, but even his Easternness, which isolates him, is merged in his love of Luria. All of them only exist to be the scaffolding by means of which Luria's character is built into magnificence, and they disappear from our sight, like scaffolding, when the building is finished.

There are fine things in the poem: the image of Florence; its men, its streets, its life as seen by the stranger-eyes of Luria; the contrast between the Eastern and the Latin nature; the picture of hot war; the sudden friendship of Luria and Tiburzio, the recognition in a moment of two high hearts by one another; the picture of Tiburzio fighting at the ford, of Luria tearing the letter among the shamed conspirators; the drawing of the rough honest soldier-nature in Puccio, and, chief of all, the vivid historic painting of the time and the type of Italian character at the time of the republics.

The first part of _A Soul's Tragedy_ is written in poetry and the second in prose. The first part is dull but the second is very lively and amusing; so gay and clever that we begin to wish that a good deal of Browning's dramas had been written in prose. And the prose itself, unlike his more serious prose in his letters and essays, is good, clear, and of an excellent style. The time of the play is in the sixteenth century; but there is nothing in it which is special to that time: no scenery, no vivid pictures of street life, no distinct atmosphere of the period. It might just as well be of the eighteenth or nineteenth century. The character of Chiappino may be found in any provincial town.

This compound of envy, self-conceit, superficial cleverness and real silliness is one of our universal plagues, and not uncommon among the demagogues of any country. And he contrasts him with Ogniben, the Pope's legate, another type, well known in governments, skilled in affairs, half mocking, half tolerant of the "foolish people," the alluring destroyer of all self-seeking leaders of the people. He also is as common as Chiappino, as modern as he is ancient. Both are representative types, and admirably drawn. They are done at too great length, but Browning could not manage them as well in Drama as he would have done in a short piece such as he placed in _Men and Women_. Why this little thing is called _A Soul's Tragedy_ I cannot quite understand. That t.i.tle supposes that Chiappino loses his soul at the end of the play. But it is plain from his mean and envious talk at the beginning with Eulalia that his soul is already lost. He is not worse at the end, but perhaps on the way to betterment. The tragedy is then in the discovery by the people that he who was thought to be a great soul is a fraud. But that conclusion was not Browning's intention. Finally, if this be a tragedy it is clothed with comedy. Browning's humour was never more wise, kindly, worldly and biting than in the second act, and Ogniben may well be set beside Bishop Blougram. It would be a privilege to dine with either of them.

Every one is in love with _Pippa Pa.s.ses_, which appeared immediately after _Sordello_. It may have been a refreshment to Browning after the complexities and metaphysics of _Sordello_, to live for a time with the soft simplicity of Pippa, with the clear motives of the separate occurrences at Asolo, with the outside picturesque world, and in a lyric atmosphere. It certainly is a refreshment to us. It is a pity so little was done by Browning in this pleasant, graceful, happy way. The substance of thought in it and its intellectual force are just as strong as in _Sordello_ or _Paracelsus_, and are concerned, especially in the first two pieces, with serious and weighty matters of human life. Beyond the pleasure the poem gives, its indirect teaching is full of truth and beauty; and the things treated of belong to many phases of human life, and touch their problems with poetic light and love. Pippa herself, in her affectionate, natural goodness, illuminates the greater difficulties of life in a single day more than Sordello or Paracelsus could in the whole course of their lives.

It may be that there are persons who think lightly of _Pippa Pa.s.ses_ in comparison with _Fifine at the Fair_, persons who judge poetry by the difficulties they find in its perusal. But _Pippa Pa.s.ses_ fulfils the demands of the art of poetry, and produces in the world the high results of lovely and n.o.ble poetry. The other only does these things in part; and when _Fifine at the Fair_ and even _Sordello_ are in the future only the study of pedants, _Pippa Pa.s.ses_ will be an enduring strength and pleasure to all who love tenderly and think widely. And those portions of it which belong to Pippa herself, the most natural, easy and simplest portions, will be the sources of the greatest pleasure and the deepest thought. Like Sordello's song, they will endure for the healing, comforting, exalting and impelling of the world.

I have written of her and of other parts of the poem elsewhere. It only remains to say that nowhere is the lyric element in Browning's genius more delightfully represented than in this little piece of mingled song and action. There is no better love-lyric in his work than

You'll love me yet!--and I can tarry Your love's protracted growing;

and the two s.n.a.t.c.hes of song which Pippa sings when she is pa.s.sing under Ottima's window and the Monsignore's--"The year's at the spring" and "Overhead the tree-tops meet"--possess, independent of the meaning of the words and their poetic charm, a freshness, dewiness, morning ravishment to which it is difficult to find an equal. They are filled with youth and its delight, alike of the body and the soul. What Browning's spirit felt and lived when he was young and his heart beating with the life of the universe, is in them, and it is their greatest charm.

CHAPTER IX

_POEMS OF THE Pa.s.sION OF LOVE_

When we leave _Paracelsus_, _Sordello_ and the _Dramas_ behind, and find ourselves among the host of occasional poems contained in the _Dramatic Lyrics_ and _Romances_, in _Men and Women_, in _Dramatis Personae_, and in the later volumes, it is like leaving an unenc.u.mbered sea for one studded with a thousand islands. Every island is worth a visit and different from the rest. Their variety, their distinct scenery, their diverse inhabitants, the strange surprises in them, are as continual an enchantment for the poetic voyager as the summer isles of the Pacific.

But while each of them is different from the rest, yet, like the islands in the Pacific, they fall into groups; and to isolate these groups is perhaps the best way to treat so varied a collection of poems. To treat them chronologically would be a task too long and wearisome for a book.

To treat them zoologically, if I may borrow that term, is possible, and may be profitable. This chapter is dedicated to the poems which relate to Love.

Commonly speaking, the term _Love Poems_ does not mean poems concerning the absolute Love, or the love of Ideas, such as Truth or Beauty, or Love of mankind or one's own country, or the loves that belong to home, or the love of friends, or even married love unless it be specially bound up, as it is in Browning's poem of _By the Fireside_, with ante-nuptial love--but poems expressing the isolating pa.s.sion of one s.e.x for the other; chiefly in youth, or in conditions which resemble those of youth, whether moral or immoral. These celebrate the joys and sorrows, rapture and despair, changes and chances, moods, fancies, and imaginations, quips and cranks and wanton wiles, all the tragedy and comedy, of that pa.s.sion, which is half of the sense and half of the spirit, sometimes wholly of the senses and sometimes wholly of the spirit. It began, in one form of it, among the lower animals and still rules their lives; it has developed through many thousand years of humanity into myriads of shapes in and outside of the soul; into stories whose varieties and mult.i.tudes are more numerous than the stars of heaven or the sand of the seash.o.r.e; and yet whose mult.i.tudinous changes and histories have their source in two things only--in the desire to generate, which is physical; in the desire to forget self in another, which is spiritual. The union of both these desires into one pa.s.sion of thought, act and feeling is the fine quintessence of this kind of love; but the latter desire alone is the primal motive of all the other forms of love, from friendship and maternal love to love of country, of mankind, of ideas, and of G.o.d.

With regard to love-poems of the sort we now discuss, the times in history when they are most written are those in which a nation or mankind renews its youth. Their production in the days of Elizabeth was enormous, their pa.s.sion various and profound, their fancy elaborate, their ornament extravagant with the extravagance of youth; and, in the hands of the greater men, their imagination was as fine as their melody.

As that age grew older they were not replaced but were dominated by more serious subjects; and though love in its fantasies was happily recorded in song during the Caroline period, pa.s.sion in English love-poetry slowly decayed till the ideas of the Revolution, before the French outbreak, began to renew the youth of the world. The same career is run by the individual poet. The subject of his youth is the pa.s.sion of love, as it was in Browning's _Pauline_. The subjects of his manhood are serious with other thought and feeling, sad with another sadness, happy with another happiness. They traverse a wider range of human feeling and thought, and when they speak of love, it is of love in its wiser, steadier, graver and less selfish forms. It was so with Browning, who far sooner than his comrades, escaped from the tangled wilderness of youthful pa.s.sion. It is curious to think that so young a creature as he was in 1833 should have left the celebration of the love of woman behind him, and only written of the love which his _Paracelsus_ images in Aprile. It seems a little insensitive in so young a man. But I do not think Browning was ever quite young save at happy intervals; and this falls in with the fact that his imagination was more intellectual than pa.s.sionate; that while he felt love, he also a.n.a.lysed, even dissected it, as he wrote about it; that it scarcely ever carried him away so far as to make him forget everything but itself. Perhaps once or twice, as in _The Last Ride Together_, he may have drawn near to this absorption, but even then the man is thinking more of his own thoughts than of the woman by his side, who must have been somewhat wearied by so silent a companion. Even in _By the Fireside_, when he is praising the wife whom he loved with all his soul, and recalling the moment of early pa.s.sion while yet they looked on one another and felt their souls embrace before they spoke--it is curious to find him deviating from the intensity of the recollection into a discussion of what might have been if she had not been what she was--a sort of _excursus_ on the chances of life which lasts for eight verses--before he returns to that immortal moment. Even after years of married life, a poet, to whom pa.s.sion has been in youth supreme, would scarcely have done that. On the whole, his poetry, like that of Wordsworth, but not so completely, is dest.i.tute of the love-poem in the ordinary sense of the word; and the few exceptions to which we might point want so much that exclusiveness of a lover which shuts out all other thought but that of the woman, that it is difficult to cla.s.s them in that species of literature. However, this is not altogether true, and the main exception to it is a curious-piece of literary and personal history. Those who read _Asolando_, the last book of poems he published, were surprised to find with what intensity some of the first poems in it described the pa.s.sion of s.e.xual love. They are fully charged with isolated emotion; other thoughts than those of love do not intrude upon them. Moreover, they have a sincere lyric note. It is impossible, unless by a miracle of imagination, that these could have been written when he was about eighty years of age. I believe, though I do not know, that he wrote them when he was quite a young man; that he found them on looking over his portfolios, and had a dim and scented pleasure in reading and publishing them in his old age. He mentions in the preface that the book contains both old and new poems. The new are easily isolated, and the first poem, the introduction to the collection, is of the date of the book. The rest belong to different periods of his life.

The four poems to which I refer are _Now_, _Summum Bonum_, _A Pearl--A Girl_, and _Speculative_. They are beautiful with a beauty of their own; full of that natural abandonment of the whole world for one moment with the woman loved, which youth and the hours of youth in manhood feel. I should have been sorry if Browning had not shaped into song this abandonment. He loved the natural, and was convinced of its rightness; and he had, as I might prove, a tenderness for it even when it pa.s.sed into wrong. He was the last man in the world to think that the pa.s.sion of n.o.ble s.e.xual love was to be despised. And it is pleasant to find, at the end of his long poetic career, that, in a serious and wise old age, he selected, to form part of his last book, poems of youthful and impa.s.sioned love, in which the senses and the spirit met, each in their pre-eminence.

The two first of these, _Now_ and _Summum Bonum_, must belong to his youth, though from certain turns of expression and thought in them, it seems that Browning worked on them at the time he published them. I quote the second for its lyric charm, even though the melody is ruthlessly broken,

All the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one bee: All the wonder and wealth of the mine in the heart of one gem: In the core of one pearl all the shade and the shine of the sea: Breath and bloom, shade and shine,--wonder, wealth, and --how far above them-- Truth, that's brighter than gem, Trust, that's purer than pearl,-- Brightest truth, purest trust in the universe--all were for me In the kiss of one girl.

The next two poems are knit to this and to _Now_ by the strong emotion of earthly love, of the senses as well as of the spirit, for one woman; but they differ in the period at which they were written. The first, _A Pearl--A Girl_, recalls that part of the poem _By the Fireside_, when one look, one word, opened the infinite world of love to Browning. If written when he was young, it has been revised in after life.

A simple ring with a single stone To the vulgar eye no stone of price: Whisper the right word, that alone-- Forth starts a sprite, like fire from ice, And lo, you are lord (says an Eastern scroll) Of heaven and earth, lord whole and sole Through the power in a pearl.

A woman ('tis I this time that say) With little the world counts worthy praise Utter the true word--out and away Escapes her soul: I am wrapt in blaze, Creation's lord, of heaven and earth Lord whole and sole--by a minute's birth-- Through the love in a girl!

The second--_Speculative_--also describes a moment of love-longing, but has the characteristics of his later poetry. It may be of the same date as the book, or not much earlier. It may be of his later manhood, of the time when he lost his wife. At any rate, it is intense enough. It looks back on the love he has lost, on pa.s.sion with the woman he loved.

And he would surrender all--Heaven, Nature, Man, Art--in this momentary fire of desire; for indeed such pa.s.sion is momentary. Momentariness is the essence of the poem. "Even in heaven I will cry for the wild hours now gone by--Give me back the Earth and Thyself." _Speculative_, he calls it, in an after irony.

Others may need new life in Heaven-- Man, Nature, Art--made new, a.s.sume!

Man with new mind old sense to leaven, Nature--new light to clear old gloom, Art that breaks bounds, gets soaring-room.

I shall pray: "Fugitive as precious-- Minutes which pa.s.sed,--return, remain!

Let earth's old life once more enmesh us, You with old pleasure, me--old pain, So we but meet nor part again!"

Nor was this reversion to the pa.s.sion of youthful love altogether a new departure. The lyrics in _Ferishtah's Fancies_ are written to represent, from the side of emotion, the intellectual and ethical ideas worked out in the poems. The greater number of them are beautiful, and they would gain rather than lose if they were published separately from the poems.

Some are plainly of the same date as the poems. Others, I think, were written in Browning's early time, and the preceding poems are made to fit them. But whatever be their origin, they nearly all treat of love, and one of them with a crude claim on the love of the senses alone, as if that--as if the love of the body, even alone--were not apart from the consideration of a poet who wished to treat of the whole of human nature. Browning, when he wished to make a thought or a fact quite plain, frequently stated it without any of its modifications, trusting to his readers not to mistake him; knowing indeed, that if they cared to find the other side--in this case the love which issues from the senses and the spirit together, or from the spirit alone--they would find it stated just as soundly and clearly. He meant us to combine both statements, and he has done so himself with regard to love.

When, however, we have considered these exceptions, it still remains curious how little the pa.s.sionate Love-poem, with its strong personal touch, exists in Browning's poetry. One reason may be that Love-poems of this kind are naturally lyrical, and demand a sweet melody in the verse, and Browning's genius was not especially lyrical, nor could he inevitably command a melodious movement in his verse. But the main reason is that he was taken up with other and graver matters, and chiefly with the right theory of life; with the true relation of G.o.d and man; and with the picturing--for absolute Love's sake, and in order to win men to love one another by the awakening of pity--of as much of humanity as he could grasp in thought and feeling. Isolated and personal love was only a small part of this large design.

One personal love, however, he possessed fully and intensely. It was his love for his wife, and three poems embody it. The first is _By the Fireside_. It does not take rank as a true love lyric; it is too long, too many-motived for a lyric. It is a meditative poem of recollective tenderness wandering through the past; and no poem written on married love in England is more beautiful. The poet, sitting silent in the room where his wife sits with him, sees all his life with her unrolled, muses on what has been, and is, since she came to bless his life, or what will be, since she continues to bless it; and all the fancies and musings which, in a usual love lyric, would not harmonise with the intensity of love-pa.s.sion in youth, exactly fit in with the peace and satisfied joy of a married life at home with G.o.d and nature and itself. The poem is full of personal charm. Quiet thought, profound feeling and sweet memory like a sunlit mist, soften the aspect of the room, the image of his wife, and all the thoughts, emotions and scenery described. It is a finished piece of art.

The second of these poems is the Epilogue to the volumes of _Men and Women_, ent.i.tled _One Word More_. It also is a finished piece of art, carefully conceived, upbuilded stone by stone, touch by touch, each separate thought with its own emotion, each adding something to the whole, each pushing Browning's emotion and picture into our souls, till the whole impression is received. It is full, and full to the brim, with the long experience of peaceful joy in married love. And the subtlety of the close of it, and of Browning's play with his own fancy about the moon, do not detract from the tenderness of it; for it speaks not of transient pa.s.sion but of the love of a whole life lived from end to end in music.

The last of these is ent.i.tled _Prospice_. When he wrote it he had lost his wife. It tells what she had made of him; it reveals alike his steadfast sadness that she had gone from him and the steadfast resolution, due to her sweet and enduring power, with which, after her death, he promised, bearing with him his sorrow and his memory of joy, to stand and withstand in the battle of life, ever a fighter to the close--and well he kept his word. It ends with the expression of his triumphant certainty of meeting her, and breaks forth at last into so great a cry of pure pa.s.sion that ear and heart alike rejoice. Browning at his best, Browning in the central fire of his character, is in it.

Fear death?--to feel the fog in my throat, The mist in my face, When the snows begin, and the blasts denote I am nearing the place, The power of the night, the press of the storm, The post of the foe; Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form, Yet the strong man must go: For the journey is done and the summit attained And the barriers fall, Though a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained, The reward of it all.

I was ever a fighter, so--one fight more, The best and the last!

I would hate that Death bandaged my eyes, and forbore, And bade me creep past.

No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers The heroes of old, Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears Of pain, darkness and cold.

For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave, The black minute's at end, And the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave, Shall dwindle, shall blend, Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain, Then a light, then thy breast, O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again, And with G.o.d be the rest!

Leaving now these personal poems on Love, we come to those we may call impersonal. They are poems about love, not in its simplicities, but in its subtle moments--moments that Browning loved to a.n.a.lyse, and which he informed not so much with the pa.s.sion of love, as with his profound love of human nature. He describes in them, with the seriousness of one who has left youth behind, the moods of love, its changes, vagaries, certainties, failures and conquests. It is a man writing, not of the love of happy youth, but of love tossed on the stormy seas of manhood and womanhood, and modified from its singular personal intensity by the deeper thought, feeling and surprising chances of our mortal life. Love does not stand alone, as in the true love lyric, but with many other grave matters. As such it is a more interesting subject for Browning.

For Love then becomes full of strange turns, unexpected thoughts, impulses unknown before creating varied circ.u.mstances, and created by them; and these his intellectual spirituality delighted to cope with, and to follow, labyrinth after labyrinth. I shall give examples of these separate studies, which have always an idea beyond the love out of which the poem arises. In some of them the love is finally absorbed in the idea. In all of them their aim is beyond the love of which they speak.

_Love among the Ruins_ tells of a lover going to meet his sweetheart.

There are many poems with this expectant motive in the world of song, and no motive has been written of with greater emotion. If we are to believe these poems, or have ever waited ourselves, the hour contains nothing but her presence, what she is doing, how she is coming, why she delays, what it will be when she comes--a thousand things, each like white fire round her image. But Browning's lover, through nine verses, cares only for the wide meadows over which he makes his way and the sheep wandering over them, and their flowers and the ruins in the midst of them; musing on the changes and contrasts of the world--the lonely land and the populous glory which was of old in the vast city. It is only then, and only in two lines, that he thinks of the girl who is waiting for him in the ruined tower. Even then his imagination cannot stay with her, but glances from her instantly--thinking that the ancient king stood where she is waiting, and looked, full of pride, from the high tower on his splendid city. When he has elaborated this second excursion of thought he comes at last to the girl. Then is the hour of pa.s.sion, but even in its fervour he draws a conclusion, belonging to a higher world than youthful love, as remote from it as his description of the scenery and the ruins. "Splendour of arms, triumph of wealth, centuries of glory and pride, they are nothing to love. Love is best."

It is a general, not a particular conclusion. In a true Love-poem it would be particular.

Another poem of waiting love is _In Three Days_. And this has the spirit of a true love lyric in it. It reads like a personal thing; it breathes exaltation; it is quick, hurried, and thrilled. The delicate fears of chance and change in the three days, or in the years to come, belong of right and nature to the waiting, and are subtly varied and condensed. It is, however, the thoughtful love of a man who can be metaphysical in love, not the excluding mastery of pa.s.sion.

_Two in the Campagna_ is another poem in which love pa.s.ses away into a deeper thought than love--a strange and fascinating poem of twofold desire. The man loves a woman and desires to be at peace with her in love, but there is a more imperative pa.s.sion in his soul--to rest in the infinite, in accomplished perfection. And his livelong and vain pursuit of this has wearied him so much that he has no strength left to realise earthly love. Is it possible that she who now walks with him in the Campagna can give him in her love the peace of the infinite which he desires, and if not, why--where is the fault? For a moment he seems to catch the reason, and asks his love to see it with him and to grasp it.

In a moment, like the gossamer thread he traces only to see it vanish, it is gone--and nothing is left, save

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

Least of all is the woman left. She has quite disappeared. This is not a Love-poem at all, it is the cry of Browning's hunger for eternity in the midst of mortality, in which all the hunger for earthly love is burnt to dust.

The rest are chiefly studies of different kinds of love, or of crises in love; moments in its course, in its origin or its failure. There are many examples in the shorter dramatic pieces, as _In a Balcony_; and even in the longer dramas certain sharp climaxes of love are recorded, not as if they belonged to the drama, but as if they were distinct studies introduced by chance or caprice. In the short poems called "dramatic" these studies are numerous, and I group a few of them together according to their motives, leaving out some which I shall hereafter treat of when I come to discuss the women in Browning. _Evelyn Hope_ has nothing to do with the pa.s.sion of love. The physical element of love is entirely excluded by the subject. It is a beautiful expression of a love purely spiritual, to be realised in its fulness only after death, spirit with spirit, but yet to be kept as the master of daily life, to whose law all thought and action are referred. The thought is n.o.ble, the expression of it simple, fine, and clear. It is, moreover, close to truth--there are hundreds of men who live quietly in love of that kind, and die in its embrace.

In _Cristina_ the love is just as spiritual, but the motive of the poem is not one, as in _Evelyn Hope_, but two. The woman is not dead, and she has missed her chance. But the lover has not. He has seen her and in a moment loved her. She also looked on him and felt her soul matched by his as they "rushed together." But the world carried her away and she lost the fulness of life. He, on the contrary, kept the moment for ever, and with it, her and all she might have been with him.

Her soul's mine: and thus grown perfect, I shall pa.s.s my life's remainder.

This is not the usual Love-poem. It is a love as spiritual, as mystic, even more mystic, since the woman lives, than the lover felt for Evelyn Hope.

The second motive in _Cristina_ of the lover who meets the true partner of his soul or hers, and either seizes the happy hour and possesses joy for ever, or misses it and loses all, is a favourite with Browning. He repeats it frequently under diverse circ.u.mstances, for it opened out so many various endings, and afforded so much opportunity for his beloved a.n.a.lysis. Moreover, optimist as he was in his final thought of man, he was deeply conscious of the ironies of life, of the ease with which things go wrong, of the impossibility of setting them right from without. And in the matter of love he marks in at least four poems how the moment was held and life was therefore conquest. Then in _Youth and Art_, in _Dis Aliter Visum_, in _Bifurcation_, in _The Lost Mistress_, and in _Too Late_, he records the opposite fate, and in characters so distinct that the repet.i.tion of the motive is not monotonous. These are studies of the Might-have-beens of love.