The Poetry Of Robert Browning Part 3

And 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 What was and shall be.

He is worthy of the glorious sight; full of eternal thoughts. Wordsworth would then have made the soul of Nature sympathise with his soul. But Browning makes Nature manifest her apartness from the man. The mountains know nothing of his soul: they amuse themselves with him; they are even half angry with him for his intrusion--a foreigner who dares an entrance into their untrespa.s.sed world. Tennyson could not have thought that way.

It is true the mountains are alive in the poet's thought, but not with the poet's life: nor does he touch them with his sentiment.

Oh, those mountains, their infinite movement Still moving with you; For, ever some new head and heart of them Thrusts into view To observe the intruder; you see it If quickly you turn And, before they escape you surprise them.

They grudge you should learn How the soft plains they look on, lean over And love (they pretend)-- Cower beneath them.

Total apartness from us! Nature mocking, surprising us; watching us from a distance, even pleased to see us going to our destruction. We may remember how the hills look grimly on Childe Roland when he comes to the tower. The very sunset comes back to see him die:

before it left, The dying sunset kindled through a cleft: The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay, Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay.--

Then, as if they loved to see the death of their quarry, cried, without one touch of sympathy:

"Now stab and end the creature--to the heft!"

And once, so divided from our life is her life, she pities her own case and refuses our pity. Man cannot help her. The starved, ign.o.ble country in _Childe Roland_, one of the finest pieces of description in Browning, wicked, waste and leprous land, makes Nature herself sick with peevish wrath. "I cannot help my case," she cries. "Nothing but the Judgment's fire can cure the place."

On the whole, then, for these instances might be supported by many more, Nature is alive in Browning, but she is not humanised at all, nor at all at one with us. Tennyson does not make her alive, but he does humanise her. The other poets of the century do make her alive, but they harmonise her in one way or another with us. Browning is distinct from them all in keeping her quite divided from man.

But then he has observed that Nature is expressed in terms of man, and he naturally, for this conflicts with his general view, desires to explain this. He does explain it in a pa.s.sage in _Paracelsus_. Man once descried, imprints for ever

His presence on all lifeless things; the winds Are henceforth voices, wailing or a shout, A querulous mutter or a quick gay laugh, Never a senseless gust now man is born.

The herded pines commune and have deep thoughts A secret they a.s.semble to discuss When the sun drops behind their trunks which glare Like grates of h.e.l.l: the peerless cup afloat Of the lake-lily is an urn, some nymph Swims bearing high above her head: no bird Whistles unseen, but through the gaps above That let light in upon the gloomy woods, A shape peeps from the breezy forest-top, Arch with small puckered mouth and mocking eye.

The morn has enterprise, deep quiet droops With evening, triumph takes the sunset hour.

Voluptuous transport ripens with the corn Beneath a warm moon like a happy face: --And this to fill us with regard for Man.

He does not say, as the other poets do, that the pines really commune, or that the morn has enterprise, or that nymphs and satyrs live in the woods, but that this _seems_ to be, because man, as the crown of the natural world, throws back his soul and his soul's life on all the grades of inferior life which preceded him. It is Browning's contradiction of any one who thinks that the pathetic fallacy exists in his poetry.

Nature has then a life of her own, her own joys and sorrows, or rather, only joy. Browning, indeed, with his intensity of imagination and his ineradicable desire of life, was not the man to conceive Nature as dead, as having no conscious being of any kind. He did not impute a personality like ours to Nature, but he saw joy and rapture and play, even love, moving in everything; and sometimes headded to this delight she has in herself--and just because the creature was not human--a touch of elemental unmoral malice, a tricksome sportiveness like that of Puck in _Midsummer Night's Dream_. The life, then, of Nature had no relation of its own to our life; but we had some relation to it because we were conscious that we were its close and its completion.

It follows from this idea of Browning's that he was capable of describing Nature as she is, without adding any deceiving mist of human sentiment to his descriptions; and of describing her as accurately and as vividly as Tennyson, even more vividly, because of his extraordinary eye for colour. And Nature, so described, is of great interest in Browning's poetry.

But, then, in any description of Nature, we desire the entrance into such description of some human feeling so that it may be a more complete theme for poetry. Browning does this in a different way from Tennyson, who gives human feelings and thoughts to Nature, or steeps it in human memories. Browning catches Nature up into himself, and the human element is not in Nature but in him, in what _he_ thinks and feels, in all that Nature, quite apart from him, awakens in him. Sometimes he even goes so far as to toss Nature aside altogether, as unworthy to be thought of in comparison with humanity. That joy in Nature herself, for her own sake, which was so distinguishing a mark of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Sh.e.l.ley, Byron and Keats, is rarely, if ever, found in Browning. This places him apart. What he loved was man; and save at those times of which I have spoken, when he conceives Nature as the life and play and wrath and fancy of huge elemental powers like G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses, he uses her as a background only for human life. She is of little importance unless man be present, and then she is no more than the scenery in a drama. Take the first two verses of _A Lovers' Quarrel_,

Oh, what a dawn of day!

How the March sun feels like May!

All is blue again After last night's rain, And the South dries the hawthorn-spray.

That is well done--he has liked what he saw. But what is it all, he thinks; what do I care about it? And he ends the verse:

Only, my Love's away!

I'd as lief that the blue were grey.

Then take the next verse:

Runnels, which rillets swell.

Must be dancing down the dell, With a foaming head On the beryl bed Paven smooth as a hermit's cell.

It is excellent description, but it is only scenery for the real pa.s.sion in Browning's mind.

Each with a tale to tell-- Could my Love but attend as well.

_By the Fireside_ ill.u.s.trates the same point. No description can be better, more close, more observed, than of the whole walk over the hill; but it is mere scenery for the lovers. The real pa.s.sion lies in their hearts.

We have then direct description of Nature; direct description of man sometimes as influenced by Nature; sometimes Nature used as the scenery of human pa.s.sion; but no intermingling of them both. Each is for ever distinct. The only thing that unites them in idea, and in the end, is that both have proceeded from the creative joy of G.o.d.

Of course this way of thinking permits of the things of Nature being used to ill.u.s.trate the doings, thinkings and character of man; and in none of his poems is such ill.u.s.tration better used than in _Sordello_.

There is a famous pa.s.sage, in itself a n.o.ble description of the opulent generativeness of a warm land like Italy, in which he compares the rich, poetic soul of Sordello to such a land, and the lovely line in it,

And still more labyrinthine buds the rose,

holds in its symbolism the whole essence of a great artist's nature. I quote the pa.s.sage. It describes Sordello, and it could not better describe Italy:

Sordello foremost in the regal cla.s.s Nature has broadly severed from the ma.s.s Of men, and framed for pleasure, as she frames Some happy lands, that have luxurious names, For loose fertility; a footfall there Suffices to upturn to the warm air Half-germinating spices; mere decay Produces richer life; and day by day New pollen on the lily-petal grows, And still more labyrinthine buds the rose.

That compares to the character of a whole country the character of a whole type of humanity. I take another of such comparisons, and it is as minute as this is broad, and done with as great skill and charm.

Sordello is full of poetic fancies, touched and glimmering with the dew of youth, and he has woven them around the old castle where he lives.

Browning compares the young man's imaginative play to the airy and audacious labour of the spider. He, that is, Sordello,

O'er-festooning every interval, As the adventurous spider, making light Of distance, shoots her threads from depth to height, From barbican to battlement: so flung Fantasies forth and in their centre swung Our architect,--the breezy morning fresh Above, and merry,--all his waving mesh Laughing with lucid dew-drops rainbow-edged.

It could not be better done. The description might stand alone, but better than it is the image it gives of the joy, fancifulness and creativeness of a young poet, making his web of thoughts and imaginations, swinging in their centre like the spider; all of them subtle as the spider's threads, obeying every pa.s.sing wind of impulse, and gemmed with the dew and sunlight of youth.

Again, in _A Bean-stripe: also Apple-Eating_, Ferishtah is asked--Is life a good or bad thing, white or black? "Good," says Ferishtah, "if one keeps moving. I only move. When I stop, I may stop in a black place or a white. But everything around me is motionless as regards me, and is nothing more than stuff which tests my power of throwing light and colour on them as I move. It is I who make life good or bad, black or white. I am like the moon going through vapour"--and this is the ill.u.s.tration:

Mark the flying orb Think'st thou the halo, painted still afresh At each new cloud-fleece pierced and pa.s.saged through This was and is and will be evermore Coloured in permanence? The glory swims Girdling the glory-giver, swallowed straight By night's abysmal gloom, unglorified Behind as erst before the advancer: gloom?

Faced by the onward-faring, see, succeeds From the abandoned heaven a next surprise.

And where's the gloom now?--silver-smitten straight, One glow and variegation! So, with me, Who move and make,--myself,--the black, the white.

The good, the bad, of life's environment.

Fine as these ill.u.s.trations are, intimate and minute, they are only a few out of a mult.i.tude of those comparisons which in Browning image what is in man from that which is within Nature--hints, prognostics, prophecies, as he would call them, of humanity, but not human.

There is, however, one human pa.s.sion which Browning conceives as existing in Nature--the pa.s.sion of joy. But it is a different joy from ours. It is not dashed by any sorrow, and it is very rarely that we are so freed from pain or from self-contemplation as to be able to enter even for a brief hour into the rapture of Nature. That rapture, in Browning's thought, was derived from the creative thought of G.o.d exercising itself with delight in the incessant making of Nature. And its manifestation was life, that joyful rush of life in all things into fuller and fuller being. No poet felt this ecstasy of mere living in Nature more deeply than Browning. His own rapture (the word is not too strong) in it appears again and again in his poetry, and when it does, Browning is not a man sympathising from without with Nature. He is then a part of Nature herself, a living piece of the great organism, having his own rejoicing life in the mightier life which includes him; and feeling, with the rest, the abounding pleasure of continuous life reaching upwards through growth to higher forms of being, swifter powers of living. I might give many examples, but one will suffice, and it is the more important because it belongs not to his ardent youth, but to his mature manhood. It is part of the song of Thamyris in _Aristophanes'

Apology_. Thamyris, going to meet the Muses in rivalry, sings as he walks in the splendid morning the song of the rapture of the life of Earth, and is himself part of the rejoicing movement.

Thamuris, marching, laughed "Each flake of foam"

(As sparklingly the ripple raced him by) "Mocks slower clouds adrift in the blue dome!"

For Autumn was the season; red the sky Held morn's conclusive signet of the sun To break the mists up, bid them blaze and die.

Morn had the mastery as, one by one All pomps produced themselves along the tract From earth's far ending to near heaven begun.

Was there a ravaged tree? it laughed compact With gold, a leaf-ball crisp, high brandished now, Tempting to onset frost which late attacked.

Was there a wizened shrub, a starveling bough, A fleecy thistle filched from by the wind, A weed, Pan's trampling hoof would disallow?

Each, with a glory and a rapture twined About it, joined the rush of air and light And force: the world was of one joyous mind.