The Poetry Of Robert Browning Part 17

Another motive, used with varied circ.u.mstance in three or four poems, but fully expanded in _James Lee's Wife_, is the discovery, after years of love, that love on one side is lost irretrievably. Another motive is, that rather than lose love men or women will often sacrifice their conscience, their reason, or their liberty. This sacrifice, of all that makes our n.o.bler being for the sake of personal love alone, brings with it, because the whole being is degraded, the degradation, decay, and death of personal love itself.

Another set of poems describes with fanciful charm, sometimes with happy gaiety, love at play with itself. True love makes in the soul an unfathomable ocean in whose depths are the imaginations of love, serious, infinite, and divine. But on its surface the light of jewelled fancies plays--a thousand thousand sunny memories and hopes, flying thoughts and dancing feelings. A poet would be certain to have often seen this happy crowd, and to desire to trick them out in song. So Browning does in his poem, _In a Gondola_. The two lovers, with the dark shadow of fate brooding over them, sing and muse and speak alternately, imaging in swift and rival pictures made by fancy their deep-set love; playing with its changes, creating new worlds in which to place it, but always returning to its isolated individuality; recalling how it began, the room where it reached its aim, the pictures, the furniture, the balcony, her dress, all the scenery, in a hundred happy and glancing pictures; while interlaced through their gaiety--and the gaiety made keener by the nearness of dark fate--is coming death, death well purchased by an hour of love. Finally, the lover is stabbed and slain, and the pity of it throws back over the sunshine of love's fancies a cloud of tears. This is the stuff of life that Browning loved to paint--interwoven darkness and brightness, sorrow and joy trembling each on the edge of the other, life playing at ball, as joyous as Nausicaa and her maids, on a thin crust over a gulf of death.

Just such another poem--of the sportiveness of love, only this time in memory, not in present pleasure, is to be found in _A Lovers' Quarrel_, and the quarrel is the dark element in it. Browning always feels that mighty pa.s.sion has its root in tragedy, and that it seeks relief in comedy. The lover sits by the fireside alone, and recalls, forgetting pain for a moment, the joyful play they two had together, when love expressed its depth of pleasure in dramatic fancies. Every separate picture is done in Browning's impressionist way. And when the glad memories are over, and the sorrow returns, pa.s.sion leaps out--

It is twelve o'clock: I shall hear her knock In the worst of a storm's uproar, I shall pull her through the door, I shall have her for evermore!

This is partly a study of the memory of love; and Browning has represented, without any sorrow linked to it, memorial love in a variety of characters under different circ.u.mstances, so that, though the subject is the same, the treatment varies. A charming instance of this is _The Flowers Name_; easy to read, happy in its fancy, in its scenery, in the subtle play of deep affection, in the character of its lover, in the character of the girl who is remembered--a good example of Browning's power to image in a few verses two human souls so clearly that they live in our world for ever. _Meeting at Night--Parting at Morning_ is another reminiscence, mixed up with the natural scenery of the meeting and parting, a vivid recollection of a fleeting night of pa.s.sion, and then the abandonment of its isolation for a wider, fuller life with humanity.

I quote it for the fine impa.s.sioned way in which human feeling and natural scenery are fused together.

MEETING AT NIGHT.

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.

And quench its speed i' the slushy sand.

Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach; Three fields to cross till a farm appears; A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch And blue spurt of a lighted match, And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears.

Than the two hearts beating each to each!

PARTING AT MORNING.

Round the cape of a sudden came the sea, And the sun looked over the mountain's rim: And straight was a path of gold for him, And the need of a world of men for me.

The poem ent.i.tled _Confessions_ is another of these memories, in which a dying man, careless of death, careless of the dull conventions of the clergyman, cares for nothing but the memory of his early pa.s.sion for a girl one happy June, and dies in comfort of the sweetness of the memory, though he thinks--

How sad and bad and mad it was.

Few but Browning would have seen, and fewer still have recorded, this vital piece of truth. It represents a whole type of character--those who in a life of weary work keep their day of love, even when it has been wrong, as their one poetic, ideal possession, and cherish it for ever.

The wrong of it disappears in the ideal beauty which now has gathered round it, and as it was faithful, unmixed with other love, it escapes degradation. We see, when the man images the past and its scenery out of the bottles of physic on the table, how the material world had been idealised to him all his life long by this pa.s.sionate memory--

Do I view the world as a vale of tears?

Ah, reverend sir, not I.

It might be well to compare with this another treatment of the memory of love in _St. Martin's Summer_. A much less interesting and natural motive rules it than _Confessions_; and the characters, though more "in society" than the dying man, are grosser in nature; gross by their inability to love, or by loving freshly to make a new world in which the old sorrow dies or is transformed. There is no humour in the thing, though there is bitter irony. But there is humour in an earlier poem--_A Serenade at the Villa_, where, in the last verse, the bitterness of wrath and love together (a very different bitterness from that of _St.

Martin's Summer_), breaks out, and is attributed to the garden gate. The night-watch and the singing is over; she must have heard him, but she gave no sign. He wonders what she thought, and then, because he was only half in love, flings away--

Oh how dark your villa was, Windows fast and obdurate!

How the garden grudged me gra.s.s Where I stood--the iron gate Ground its teeth to let me pa.s.s!

It is impossible to notice all these studies of love, but they form, together, a book of transient phases of the pa.s.sion in almost every cla.s.s of society. And they show how Browning, pa.s.sing through the world, from the Quartier Latin to London drawing-rooms, was continually on the watch to catch, store up, and reproduce a crowd of motives for poetry which his memory held and his imagination shaped.

There is only one more poem, which I cannot pa.s.s by in this group of studies. It is one of sacred and personal memory, so much so that it is probable the loss of his life lies beneath it. It rises into that highest poetry which fuses together into one form a hundred thoughts and a hundred emotions, and which is only obscure from the mingling of their mult.i.tude. I quote it, I cannot comment on it.

Never the time and the place And the loved one all together!

This path--how soft to pace!

This May--what magic weather!

Where is the loved one's face?

In a dream that loved one's face meets mine But the house is narrow, the place is bleak Where, outside, rain and wind combine With a furtive ear, if I strive to speak, With a hostile eye at my flushing cheek, With a malice that marks each word, each sign!

O enemy sly and serpentine, Uncoil thee from the waking man!

Do I hold the Past Thus firm and fast Yet doubt if the Future hold I can?

This path so soft to pace shall lead Through the magic of May to herself indeed!

Or narrow if needs the house must be, Outside are the storms and strangers: we-- Oh, close, safe, warm sleep I and she, --I and she!

That, indeed, is pa.s.sionate enough.

Then there is another group--tales which embody phases of love. _Count Gismond_ is one of these. It is too long, and wants Browning's usual force. The outline of the story was, perhaps, too simple to interest his intellect, and he needed in writing poetry not only the emotional subject, but that there should be something in or behind the emotion through the mazes of which his intelligence might glide like a serpent.[10]

_The Glove_ is another of these tales--a good example of the brilliant fashion in which Browning could, by a strange kaleidoscopic turn of his subject, give it a new aspect and a new ending. The world has had the tale before it for a very long time. Every one had said the woman was wrong and the man right; but here, poetic juggler as he is, Browning makes the woman right and the man wrong, reversing the judgment of centuries. The best of it is, that he seems to hold the truth of the thing. It is amusing to think that only now, in the other world, if she and Browning meet, will she find herself comprehended.

Finally, as to the mightier kinds of love, those supreme forms of the pa.s.sion, which have neither beginning nor end; to which time and s.p.a.ce are but names; which make and fill the universe; the least grain of which predicates the whole; the spirit of which is G.o.d Himself; the breath of whose life is immortal joy, or sorrow which means joy; whose vision is Beauty, and whose activity is Creation--these, united in G.o.d, or divided among men into their three great ent.i.ties--love of ideas for their truth and beauty; love of the natural universe, which is G.o.d's garment; love of humanity, which is G.o.d's child--these pervade the whole of Browning's poetry as the heat of the sun pervades the earth and every little grain upon it. They make its warmth and life, strength and beauty. They are too vast to be circ.u.mscribed in a lyric, represented in a drama, bound up even in a long story of spiritual endeavour like _Paracelsus_. But they move, in dignity, splendour and pa.s.sion, through all that he deeply conceived and n.o.bly wrought; and their triumph and immortality in his poetry are never for one moment clouded with doubt or subject to death. This is the supreme thing in his work. To him Love is the Conqueror, and Love is G.o.d.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] There is one simple story at least which he tells quite admirably, _The Pied Piper of Hamelin_. But then, that story, if it is not troubled by intellectual matter, is also not troubled by any deep emotion. It is told by a poet who becomes a child for children.

CHAPTER X

_THE Pa.s.sIONS OTHER THAN LOVE_

The poems on which I have dwelt in the last chapter, though they are mainly concerned with love between the s.e.xes, ill.u.s.trate the other n.o.ble pa.s.sions, all of which, such as joy, are forms of, or rather children of, self-forgetful love. They do not ill.u.s.trate the evil or ign.o.ble pa.s.sions--envy, jealousy, hatred, base fear, despair, revenge, avarice and remorse--which, driven by the emotion that so fiercely and swiftly acc.u.mulates around them, master the body and soul, the intellect and the will, like some furious tyrant, and in their extremes hurry their victim into madness. Browning took some of these terrible powers and made them subjects in his poetry. Short, sharp-outlined sketches of them occur in his dramas and longer poems. There is no closer image in literature of long-suppressed fear breaking out into its agony of despair than in the lines which seal Guido's pleading in the _The Ring and the Book_.

Life is all!

I was just stark mad,--let the madman live Pressed by as many chains as you please pile!

Don't open! Hold me from them! I am yours, I am the Grand Duke's--no, I am the Pope's!

Abate,--Cardinal,--Christ,--Maria,--G.o.d, ...

Pompilia, will you let them murder me?

But there is no elaborate, long-continued study of these sordid and evil things in Browning. He was not one of our modern realists who love to paddle and splash in the sewers of humanity. Not only was he too healthy in mind to dwell on them, but he justly held them as not fit subjects for art unless they were bound up with some form of pity, as jealousy and envy are in Shakespeare's treatment of the story of Oth.e.l.lo; or imaged along with so much of historic scenery that we lose in our interest in the decoration some of the hatefulness of the pa.s.sion. The combination, for example, of envy and hatred resolved on vengeance in _The Laboratory_ is too intense for any pity to intrude, but Browning realises not only the evil pa.s.sions in the woman but the historical period also and its temper; and he fills the poem with scenery which, though it leaves the woman first in our eyes, yet lessens the malignant element. The same, but of course with the difference Browning's variety creates, may be said of the story of the envious king, where envy crawls into hatred, hatred almost motiveless--the _Instans Tyrannus_. A faint vein of humour runs through it. The king describes what has been; his hatred has pa.s.sed. He sees how small and fanciful it was, and the ill.u.s.trations he uses to express it tell us that; though they carry with them also the contemptuous intensity of his past hatred. The swell of the hatred remains, though the hatred is past.

So we are not left face to face with absolute evil, with the corruption hate engenders in the soul. G.o.d has intervened, and the worst of it has pa.s.sed away.

Then there is the study of hatred in the _Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister_. The hatred is black and deadly, the instinctive hatred of a brutal nature for a delicate one, which, were it unrelieved, would be too vile for the art of poetry. But it is relieved, not only by the scenery, the sketch of the monks in the refectory, the garden of flowers, the naughty girls seated on the convent bank washing their black hair, but also by the admirable humour which ripples like laughter through the hopes of his hatred, and by the brilliant sketching of the two men. We see them, know them, down to their little tricks at dinner, and we end by realising hatred, it is true, but in too agreeable a fashion for just distress.

In other poems of the evil pa.s.sions the relieving element is pity. There are the two poems ent.i.tled _Before_ and _After_, that is, before and after the duel. _Before_ is the statement of one of the seconds, with curious side-thoughts introduced by Browning's mental play with the subject, that the duel is absolutely necessary. The challenger has been deeply wronged; and he cannot and will not let forgiveness intermit his vengeance. The man in us agrees with that; the Christian in us says, "Forgive, let G.o.d do the judgment." But the pa.s.sion for revenge has here its way and the guilty falls. And now let Browning speak--Forgiveness is right and the vengeance-fury wrong. The dead man has escaped, the living has not escaped the wrath of conscience; pity is all.

Take the cloak from his face, and at first Let the corpse do its worst!

How he lies in his rights of a man!

Death has done all death can.

And, absorbed in the new life he leads, He recks not, he heeds

Nor his wrong nor my vengeance; both strike On his senses alike, And are lost in the solemn and strange Surprise of the change.

Ha, what avails death to erase His offence, my disgrace?