The Poetry Of Robert Browning Part 18

I would we were boys as of old In the field, by the fold: His outrage, G.o.d's patience, man's scorn Were so easily borne!

I stand here now, he lies in his place; Cover the face.

Again, there are few studies in literature of contempt, hatred and revenge more sustained and subtle than Browning's poem ent.i.tled _A Forgiveness_; and the t.i.tle marks how, though the justice of revenge was accomplished on the woman, yet that pity, even love for her, accompanied and followed the revenge. Our natural revolt against the cold-blooded work of hatred is modified, when we see the man's heart and the woman's soul, into pity for their fate. The man tells his story to a monk in the confessional, who has been the lover of his wife. He is a statesman absorbed in his work, yet he feels that his wife makes his home a heaven, and he carries her presence with him all the day. His wife takes the first lover she meets, and, discovered, tells her husband that she hates him. "Kill me now," she cries. But he despises her too much to hate her; she is not worth killing. Three years they live together in that fashion, till one evening she tells him the truth. "I was jealous of your work. I took my revenge by taking a lover, but I loved you, you only, all the time, and lost you--

I thought you gave Your heart and soul away from me to slave At statecraft. Since my right in you seemed lost, I stung myself to teach you, to your cost, What you rejected could be prized beyond Life, heaven, by the first fool I threw a fond Look on, a fatal word to.

"Ah, is that true, you loved and still love? Then contempt perishes, and hate takes its place. Write your confession, and die by my hand.

Vengeance is foreign to contempt, you have risen to the level at which hate can act. I pardon you, for as I slay hate departs--and now, sir,"

and he turns to the monk--

She sleeps, as erst Beloved, in this your church: ay, yours!

and drives the poisoned dagger through the grate of the confessional into the heart of her lover.

This is Browning's closest study of hate, contempt, and revenge. But bitter and close as it is, what is left with us is pity for humanity, pity for the woman, pity for the lover, pity for the husband.

Again, in the case of Sebald and Ottima in _Pippa Pa.s.ses_, pity also rules. Love pa.s.sing into l.u.s.t has led to hate, and these two have slaked their hate and murdered Luca, Ottima's husband. They lean out of the window of the shrub-house as the morning breaks. For the moment their false love is supreme. Their crime only creeps like a snake, half asleep, about the bottom of their hearts; they recall their early pa.s.sion and try to brazen it forth in the face of their murder, which now rises, dreadful and more dreadful, into threatening life in their soul. They reanimate their hate of Luca to lower their remorse, but at every instant his blood stains their speech. At last, while Ottima loves on, Sebald's dark horror turns to hatred of her he loved, till she lures him back into desire of her again. The momentary l.u.s.t cannot last, but Browning shoots it into prominence that the outburst of horror and repentance may be the greater.

I kiss you now, dear Ottima, now and now!

This way? Will you forgive me--be once more My great queen?

At that moment Pippa pa.s.ses by, singing:

The year's at the spring And day's at the morn; Morning's at seven; The hill-side's dew-pearled; The lark's on the wing; The snail's on the thorn; G.o.d's in his heaven-- All's right with the world!

Something in it smites Sebald's heart like a hammer of G.o.d. He repents, but in the cowardice of repentance curses her. That baseness I do not think Browning should have introduced, no, nor certain carnal phrases which, previously right, now jar with the spiritual pa.s.sion of repentance. But his fury with her pa.s.ses away into the pa.s.sion of despair--

My brain is drowned now--quite drowned: all I feel Is ... is, at swift recurring intervals, A hurry-down within me, as of waters Loosened to smother up some ghastly pit: There they go--whirls from a black fiery sea!

lines which must have been suggested to Browning by verses, briefer and more intense, in Webster's

_d.u.c.h.ess of Malfi_. Even Ottima, lifted by her love, which purifies itself in wishing to die for her lover, repents.

Not me,--to him, O G.o.d, be merciful!

Thus into this cauldron of sin Browning steals the pity of G.o.d. We know they will be saved, so as by fire.

Then there is the poem on the story of _Cristina and Monaldeschi_; a subject too odious, I think, to be treated lyrically. It is a tale of love turned to hatred, and for good cause, and of the pitiless vengeance which followed. Browning has not succeeded in it; and it may be so because he could get no pity into it. The Queen had none. Monaldeschi deserved none--a coward, a fool, and a traitor! Nevertheless, more might have been made of it by Browning. The poem is obscure and wandering, and the effort he makes to grip the subject reveals nothing but the weakness of the grip. It ought not to have been published.

And now I turn to pa.s.sions more delightful, that this chapter may close in light and not in darkness--pa.s.sions of the imagination, of the romantic regions of the soul. There is, first, the longing for the mystic world, the world beneath appearance, with or without reference to eternity. Secondly, bound up with that, there is the longing for the unknown, for following the gleam which seems to lead us onward, but we know not where. Then, there is the desire, the deeper for its constant suppression, for escape from the prison of a worldly society, from its conventions and maxims of morality, its barriers of custom and rule, into liberty and unchartered life. Lastly, there is that longing to discover and enjoy the lands of adventure and romance which underlies and wells upwards through so much of modern life, and which has never ceased to send its waters up to refresh the world. These are romantic pa.s.sions. On the whole, Browning does not often touch them in their earthly activities. His highest romance was beyond this world. It claimed eternity, and death was the entrance into its enchanted realm.

When he did bring romantic feeling into human life, it was for the most part in the hunger and thirst, which, as in _Abt Vogler_, urged men beyond the visible into the invisible. But now and again he touched the Romantic of Earth. _Childe Roland_, _The Flight of the d.u.c.h.ess_, and some others, are alive with the romantic spirit.

But before I write of these, there are a few lyrical poems, written in the freshness of his youth, which are steeped in the light of the story-telling world; and might be made by one who, in the morning of imagination, sat on the dewy hills of the childish world. They are full of unusual melody, and are simple and wise enough to be sung by girls knitting in the sunshine while their lovers bend above them. One of these, a beautiful thing, with that touch of dark fate at its close which is so common in folk-stories, is hidden away in _Paracelsus_.

"Over the sea," it begins:

Over the sea our galleys went, With cleaving prows in order brave To a speeding wind and a bounding wave, A gallant armament: Each bark built out of a forest-tree Left leafy and rough as first it grew, And nailed all over the gaping sides, Within and without, with black bull-hides, Seethed in fat, and suppled with flame, To bear the playful billows' game.

It is made in a happy melody, and the curious mingling in the tale, as it continues, of the rudest ships, as described above, with purple hangings, cedar tents, and n.o.ble statues,

A hundred shapes of lucid stone,

and with gentle islanders from Graecian seas, is characteristic of certain folk-tales, especially those of Gascony. That it is spoken by Paracelsus as a parable of the state of mind he has reached, in which he clings to his first fault with haughty and foolish resolution, scarcely lessens the romantic element in it. That is so strong that we forget that it is meant as a parable.

There is another song which touches the edge of romance, in which Paracelsus describes how he will bury in sweetness the ideal aims he had in youth, building a pyre for them of all perfumed things; and the last lines of the verse I quote leave us in a castle of old romance--

And strew faint sweetness from some old Egyptian's fine worm-eaten shroud Which breaks to dust when once unrolled; Or shredded perfume, like a cloud From closet long to quiet vowed, With mothed and dropping arras hung, Mouldering her lute and books among, As when a queen, long dead, was young.

The other is a song, more than a song, in _Pippa Pa.s.ses_, a true piece of early folk-romance, with a faint touch of Greek story, wedded to Eastern and mediaeval elements, in its roving imaginations. It is admirably pictorial, and the air which broods over it is the sunny and still air which, in men's fancy, was breathed by the happy children of the Golden Age. I quote a great part of it:

A King lived long ago, In the morning of the world, When earth was nigher heaven than now: And the King's locks curled, Disparting o'er a forehead full As the milk-white s.p.a.ce 'twixt horn and horn Of some sacrificial bull-- Only calm as a babe new-born: For he was got to a sleepy mood, So safe from all decrepitude, Age with its bane, so sure gone by, (The G.o.ds so loved him while he dreamed) That, having lived thus long, there seemed No need the King should ever die.

LUIGI. No need that sort of King should ever die!

Among the rocks his city was: Before his palace, in the sun, He sat to see his people pa.s.s, And judge them every one From its threshold of smooth stone They haled him many a valley-thief Caught in the sheep-pens, robber chief Swarthy and shameless, beggar, cheat, Spy-prowler, or rough pirate found On the sea-sand left aground;

These, all and every one, The King judged, sitting in the sun.

LUIGI. That King should still judge sitting in the sun!

His councillors, on left and right, Looked anxious up,--but no surprise Disturbed the King's old smiling eyes Where the very blue had turned to white.

'Tis said, a Python scared one day The breathless city, till he came, With forty tongue and eyes on flame, Where the old King sat to judge alway; But when he saw the sweepy hair Girt with a crown of berries rare Which the G.o.d will hardly give to wear To the maiden who singeth, dancing bare In the altar-smoke by the pine-torch lights, At his wondrous forest rites,-- Seeing this, he did not dare Approach the threshold in the sun, a.s.sault the old king smiling there.

Such grace had kings when the world begun!

Then there are two other romantic pieces, not ringing with this early note, but having in them a wafting scent of the Provencal spirit. One is the song sung by Pippa when she pa.s.ses the room where Jules and Phene are talking--the song of Kate, the Queen. The other is the cry Rudel, the great troubadour, sent out of his heart to the Lady of Tripoli whom he never saw, but loved. The subject is romantic, but that, I think, is all the romance in it. It is not Rudel who speaks but Browning. It is not the twelfth but the nineteenth century which has made all that a.n.a.lysis and over-worked ill.u.s.tration.

There remain, on this matter, _Childe Roland_ and the _Flight of the d.u.c.h.ess_. I believe that _Childe Roland_ emerged, all of a sudden and to Browning's surprise, out of the pure imagination, like the Sea-born Queen; that Browning did not conceive it beforehand; that he had no intention in it, no reason for writing it, and no didactic or moral aim in it. It was not even born of his will. Nor does he seem to be acquainted with the old story on the subject which took a ballad form in Northern England. The impulse to write it was suddenly awakened in him by that line out of an old song the Fool quotes in _King Lear_.

There is another tag of a song in _Lear_ which stirs a host of images in the imagination; and out of which some poet might create a romantic lyric:

Still through the hawthorn blows the cold wind.

But it does not produce so concrete a set of images as _Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came_. Browning has made that his own, and what he has done is almost romantic. Almost romantic, I say, because the peculiarities of Browning's personal genius appear too strongly in _Childe Roland_ for pure romantic story, in which the idiosyncrasy of the poet, the personal element of his fancy, are never dominant. The scenery, the images, the conduct of the tales of romance, are, on account of their long pa.s.sage through the popular mind, impersonal.

Moreover, Browning's poem is too much in the vague. The romantic tales are clear in outline; this is not. But the elements in the original story entered, as it were of their own accord, into Browning. There are several curious, unconscious reversions to folk-lore which have crept into his work like living things which, seeing Browning engaged on a story of theirs, entered into it as into a house of their own, and without his knowledge. The wretched cripple who points the way; the blind and wicked horse; the accursed stream; the giant mountain range, all the peaks alive, as if in a nature myth; the crowd of Roland's predecessors turned to stone by their failure; the sudden revealing of the tower where no tower had been, might all be matched out of folk-stories. I think I have heard that Browning wrote the poem at a breath one morning; and it reads as if, from verse to verse, he did not know what was coming to his pen. This is very unlike his usual way; but it is very much the way in which tales of this kind are unconsciously up-built.

Men have tried to find in the poem an allegory of human life; but Browning had no allegorising intention. However, as every story which was ever written has at its root the main elements of human nature, it is always possible to make an allegory out of any one of them. If we like to amuse ourselves in that fashion, we may do so; but we are too bold and bad if we impute allegory to Browning. _Childe Roland_ is nothing more than a gallop over the moorlands of imagination; and the skies of the soul, when it was made, were dark and threatening storm.

But one thing is plain in it: it is an outcome of that pa.s.sion for the mystical world, for adventure, for the unknown, which lies at the root of the romantic tree.

The _Flight of the d.u.c.h.ess_ is full of the pa.s.sion of escape from the conventional; and no where is Browning more original or more the poet.

Its manner is exactly right, exactly fitted to the character and condition of the narrator, who is the Duke's huntsman. Its metrical movement is excellent, and the changes of that movement are in harmony with the things and feelings described. It is astonishingly swift, alive, and leaping; and it delays, as a stream, with great charm, when the emotion of the subject is quiet, recollective, or deep. The descriptions of Nature in the poem are some of the most vivid and true in Browning's work. The sketches of animal life--so natural on the lips of the teller of the story--are done from the keen observation of a huntsman, and with his love for the animals he has fed, followed and slain. And, through it all, there breathes the romantic pa.s.sion--to be out of the world of custom and commonplace, set free to wander for ever to an unknown goal; to drink the air of adventure and change; not to know to-day what will take place to-morrow, only to know that it will be different; to ride on the top of the wave of life as it runs before the wind; to live with those who live, and are of the same mind; to be loved and to find love the best good in the world; to be the centre of hopes and joys among those who may blame and give pain, but who are never indifferent; to have many troubles, but always to pursue their far-off good; to wring the life out of them, and, at the last, to have a new life, joy and freedom in another and a fairer world. But let Browning tell the end:

So, at the last shall come old age.

Decrepit as befits that stage; How else would'st thou retire apart With the h.o.a.rded memories of thy heart, And gather all to the very least Of the fragments of life's earlier feast, Let fall through eagerness to find The crowning dainties yet behind?

Ponder on the entire past Laid together thus at last, When the twilight helps to fuse The first fresh with the faded hues.

And the outline of the whole Grandly fronts for once thy soul.