The Poetry Of Robert Browning Part 4

Say not the birds flew! they forebore their right-- Swam, revelling onward in the roll of things.

Say not the beasts' mirth bounded! that was flight--

How could the creatures leap, no lift of wings?

Such earth's community of purpose, such The ease of earth's fulfilled imaginings,--

So did the near and far appear to touch I' the moment's transport,--that an interchange Of function, far with near, seemed scarce too much;

And had the rooted plant aspired to range With the snake's licence, while the insect yearned To glow fixed as the flower, it were not strange--

No more than if the fluttery tree-top turned To actual music, sang itself aloft; Or if the wind, impa.s.sioned chantress, earned

The right to soar embodied in some soft Fine form all fit for cloud companionship, And, blissful, once touch beauty chased so oft.

Thamuris, marching, let no fancy slip Born of the fiery transport; lyre and song Were his, to smite with hand and launch from lip--

The next thing to touch on is his drawing of landscape, not now of separate pieces of Nature, but of the whole view of a land seen under a certain aspect of the heavens. All the poets ought to be able to do this well, and I drew attention to the brief, condensed, yet fan-opening fashion in which Tennyson has done it. Sometimes the poets describe what they see before them, or have seen; drawing directly from Nature.

Sometimes they invent a wide or varied landscape as a background for a human subject, and arrange and tone it for that purpose. Sh.e.l.ley did this with great stateliness and subtlety. Browning does not do it, except, perhaps, in _Christmas-Eve_, when he prepares the night for the appearance of Christ. Nevertheless, even in _Christmas-Eve_, the description of the lunar rainbow is of a thing he has seen, of a not-invented thing, and it is as clear, vivid and natural as it can be; only it is heightened and thrilled through by the expectancy and the thrill in Browning's soul which the reader feels and which the poet, through his emotion, makes the reader comprehend. But there is no suggestion that any of this feeling exists in Nature. The rainbow has no consciousness of the vision to come or of the pa.s.sion in the poet (as it would have had in Wordsworth), and therefore is painted with an accuracy undimmed by any transference to Nature of the soul of the poet.

I quote the piece; it is a n.o.ble specimen of his landscape work:

But lo, what think you? suddenly The rain and the wind ceased, and the sky Received at once the full fruition Of the moon's consummate apparition.

The black cloud barricade was riven, Ruined beneath her feet, and driven Deep in the West; while, bare and breathless, North and South and East lay ready For a glorious thing that, dauntless, deathless, Sprang across them and stood steady.

'Twas a moon-rainbow, vast and perfect, From heaven to heaven extending, perfect As the mother-moon's self, full in face.

It rose, distinctly at the base With its severe proper colours chorded Which still, in the rising, were compressed, Until at last they coalesced, And supreme the spectral creature lorded In a triumph of whitest white,-- Above which intervened the night.

But above night too, like only the next, The second of a wondrous sequence, Reaching in rare and rarer frequence, Till the heaven of heavens were circ.u.mflexed, Another rainbow rose, a mightier, Fainter, flushier and flightier,-- Rapture dying along its verge.

Oh, whose foot shall I see emerge, Whose, from the straining topmost dark, On to the key-stone of that arc?

This is only a piece of sky, though I have called it landscape work. But then the sky is frequently treated alone by Browning; and is always present in power over his landscapes--it, and the winds in it. This is natural enough for one who lived so much in Italy, where the scenery of the sky is more superb than that of the earth--so various, n.o.ble and surprising that when Nature plays there, as a poet, her tragedy and comedy, one scarcely takes the trouble of considering the earth.

However, we find an abundance of true landscapes in Browning. They are, with a few exceptions, Italian; and they have that grandeur and breadth, that intensity given by blazing colour, that peculiar tint either of labyrinthine or of tragic sentiment which belong to Italy. I select a few of them:

The morn when first it thunders in March The eel in the pond gives a leap, they say; As I leaned and looked over the aloed arch Of the villa gate this warm March day, No flash snapped, no dumb thunder rolled In the valley beneath where, white and wide Washed by the morning water-gold, Florence lay out on the mountain side River and bridge and street and square Lay mine, as much at my beck and call, Through the live translucent bath of air, As the sights in a magic crystal ball.

Here is the Roman Campagna and its very sentiment:

The champaign with its endless fleece Of feathery gra.s.ses everywhere!

Silence and pa.s.sion, joy and peace, An everlasting wash of air-- Rome's ghost since her decease.

And this might be in the same place:

Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles, Miles and miles On the solitary pastures where our sheep Half-asleep Tinkle homeward through the twilight--

This is a crimson sunset over dark and distant woods in autumn:

That autumn eve was stilled: A last remains of sunset dimly burned O'er the far forests, like a torch-flame turned By the wind back upon its bearer's hand In one long flare of crimson; as a brand The woods beneath lay black. A single eye From all Verona cared for the soft sky.

And if we desire a sunrise, there is the triumphant beginning of _Pippa Pa.s.ses_--a glorious outburst of light, colour and splendour, impa.s.sioned and rushing, the very upsoaring of Apollo's head behind his furious steeds. It begins with one word, like a single stroke on the gong of Nature: it continues till the whole of the overarching vault, and the world below, in vast disclosure, is flooded with an ocean of gold.

Day!

Faster and more fast, O'er night's brim, day boils at last; Boils, pure gold, o'er the cloud-cup's brim Where spurting and suppressed it lay.

For not a froth-flake touched the rim Of yonder gap in the solid gray Of the eastern cloud, an hour away; But forth one wavelet, then another, curled.

Till the whole sunrise, not to be suppressed, Rose, reddened, and its seething breast Flickered in bounds, grew gold, then overflowed the world.

This is chiefly of the sky, but the description in that gipsy-hearted poem, _The Flight of the d.u.c.h.ess_, brings before us, at great length, league after league of wide-spreading landscape. It is, first, of the great wild country, cornfield, vineyards, sheep-ranges, open chase, till we arrive at last at the mountains; and climbing up among their pines, dip down into a yet vaster and wilder country, a red, drear, burnt-up plain, over which we are carried for miles:

Till at the last, for a bounding belt, Comes the salt sand h.o.a.r of the great sea-sh.o.r.e.

Or we may read the _Grammarian's Funeral_, where we leave the city walls and climb the peak on whose topmost ledge he is to be buried. As we ascend the landscape widens; we see it expanding in the verse. Moreover, with a wonderful power, Browning makes us feel the air grow keener, fresher, brighter, more soundless and lonelier. That, too, is given by the verse; it is a triumph in Nature-poetry.

Nor is he less effective in narrow landscape, in the description of small shut-in s.p.a.ces of Nature. There is the garden at the beginning of _Paracelsus_; the ravine, step by step, in _Pauline_; the sea-beach, and its little cabinet landscapes, in _James Lee's Wife_; the exquisite pictures of the path over the Col di Colma in _By the Fireside_--for though the whole of the landscape is given, yet each verse almost might stand as a small picture by itself. It is one of Browning's favourite ways of description, to walk slowly through the landscape, describing step by step those parts of it which strike him, and leaving to us to combine the parts into the whole. But _his_ way of combination is to touch the last thing he describes with human love, and to throw back this atmosphere of feeling over all the pictures he has made. The verses I quote do this.

Oh moment, one and infinite!

The water slips o'er stock and stone; The West is tender, hardly bright; How grey at once is the evening grown-- One star, its chrysolite!

We two stood there with never a third, But each by each, as each knew well: The sights we saw and the sounds we heard, The lights and the shades made up a spell Till the trouble grew and stirred.

Oh, the little more, and how much it is!

And the little less, and what worlds away!

How a sound shall quicken content to bliss, Or a breath suspend the blood's best play, And life be a proof of this!

There are many such miniatures of Nature in Browning's poetry.

Sometimes, however, the pictures are larger and n.o.bler, when the natural thing described is in itself charged with power, terror or dignity. I give one instance of this, where the fierce Italian thunderstorm is enhanced by being the messenger of G.o.d's vengeance on guilt. It is from _Pippa Pa.s.ses_. The heaven's pillars are over-bowed with heat. The black-blue canopy descends close on Ottima and Sebald.

Buried in woods we lay, you recollect; Swift ran the searching tempest overhead; And ever and anon some bright white shaft Burned thro' the pine-tree roof, here burned and there, As if G.o.d's messenger thro' the close wood-screen Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture, Feeling for guilty thee and me; then broke The thunder like a whole sea overhead--

That is as splendid as the thing itself.

Again, no one can help observing in all these quotations the extraordinary love of colour, a love Tennyson has in far fainter measure, but which Browning seems to possess more than any other English poet. Only Sir Walter Scott approaches him in this. Scott, knowing the Highlands, knew dark magnificence of colour. But Browning's love of colour arose from his having lived so long in Italy, where the light is so pure, clear, and brilliant that colour is more intense, and at dawn and sunset more deep, delicate, and various than it is in our land.

Sometimes, as Ruskin says, "it is not colour, it is conflagration"; but wherever it is, in the bell of a flower, on the edge of a cloud, on the back of a lizard, on the veins of a lichen, it strikes in Browning's verse at our eyes, and he only, in English poetry, has joy enough in it to be its full interpreter.

He sees the wild tulip blow out its great red bell; he sees the thin clear bubble of blood at its tip; he sees the spike of gold which burns deep in the bluebell's womb; the corals that, like lamps, disperse thick red flame through the dusk green universe of the ocean; the lakes which, when the morn breaks,

Blaze like a wyvern flying round the sun;

the woodland brake whose withered fern Dawn feeds with gold; the moon carried oft at sunrise in purple fire; the larch-blooms crisp and pink; the sanguine heart of the pomegranate; the filberts russet-sheathed and velvet-capped; the poppies crimson to blackness; the red fans of the b.u.t.terfly falling on the rock like a drop of fire from a brandished torch; the star-fish, rose-jacynth to the finger-tips; and a hundred other pa.s.sionate seizures of colour. And, for the last of these colour remembrances, in quieter tints--almost in black and white--I quote this lovely verse from _James Lee's Wife_:

The swallow has set her six young on the rail, And looks seaward: The water's in stripes like a snake, olive pale To the leeward,-- On the weather-side, black, spotted white with the wind.

"Good fortune departs, and disaster's behind"-- Hark, the wind with its wants and its infinite wail!

So, not only do we possess all these landscapes but we possess them in colour. They are painted as well as drawn. It is his love of colour which made at least half of the impulse that drove him at times into Impressionism. Good drawing is little to the impressionist painters. It is the sudden glow, splash or flicker of colour that moves them, which makes on them the swift, the momentary impression they wish to record.

And colour acted on Browning in the same way. I said he had been impressionist, when he liked, for forty years before Impressionism was born in modern art. He was so, because from the beginning he saw things in colour, more than in light and shade. It is well worth a reader's while to search him for colour-impressions. I take one, for example, with the black horse flung in at the end exactly in the way an artist would do it who loved a flash of black life midst of a dead expanse of gold and green:

Fancy the Pampas' sheen!

Miles and miles of gold and green Where the sunflowers blow In a solid glow, And--to break now and then the screen-- Black neck and eyeb.a.l.l.s keen, Up a wild horse leaps between!

Having, then, this extraordinary power of sight, needing no carefulness of observation or study, but capable of catching and holding without trouble all that his eye rested or glanced upon, it is no wonder that sometimes it amused him to put into verse the doings of a whole day: the work done in it by men of all cla.s.ses and the natural objects that encompa.s.sed them; not cataloguing them dryly, but shooting through them, like rays of light, either his own fancies and thoughts, or the fancies and thoughts of some typical character whom he invented. This he has done specially in two poems: _The Englishman in Italy_, where the vast sh.e.l.l of the Sorrento plain, its sea and mountains, and all the doings of the peasantry, are detailed with the most intimate delight and truth. The second of these poems is _Up at a Villa--Down in the City_, where a farm of the Casentino with its surroundings is contrasted with the street-life of Florence; and both are described through the delightful character whom he invents to see them. These poems are astonishing pieces of intimate, joyful observation of scenery.