The Poetry Of Robert Browning Part 5

Again, there is no poet whose love of animals is greater than Browning's, and none who has so frequently, so carefully, so vividly described them. It is amazing, as we go through his work, to realise the largeness of his range in this matter, from the river-horse to the lizard, from the eagle to the wren, from the loud singing bee to the filmy insect in the sunshine. I give a few examples. Mortal man could not see a lynx more clearly than Karshish--

A black lynx snarled and p.r.i.c.ked a tufted ear; l.u.s.t of my blood inflamed his yellow b.a.l.l.s.

And the very soul of the Eagle is in this question--

Ask the geier-eagle why she stoops at once Into the vast and unexplored abyss, What full-grown power informs her from the first, Why she not marvels, strenuously beating The silent boundless regions of the sky!

He has watched the heavy-winged osprey in its haunts, fain to fly,

but forced the earth his couch to make Far inland, till his friend the tempest wake,

on whose fiercer wings he can flap his own into activity.

In _Caliban upon Setebos_, as would naturally be the case, animal life is everywhere; and how close to truth, how keenly observed it is, how the right points for description are chosen to make us feel the beast and bird in a single line; how full of colour, how flashed into words which seem like colours, the descriptions are, any animal-lover may hear in the few lines I quote:

Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech; Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam, That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye.

By moonlight.

That is enough to prove his power. And the animals are seen, not as a cultured person sees them, but as a savage, with his eyes untroubled by thoughts, sees them; for Browning, with his curious self-trans.m.u.ting power, has put himself into the skin of Caliban. Then again, in that lovely lyric in _Paracelsus_,

Thus the Mayne glideth,

the banks and waves are full of all the bird and beast life of a river.

Elsewhere, he sees the falcon spread his wings like a banner, the stork clapping his bill in the marsh, the coot dipping his blue breast in the water, the swallow flying to Venice--"that stout sea-farer"--the lark shivering for joy, and a hundred other birds; and lastly, even the great bird of the Imagination, the Phoenix, flying home; and in a splendid verse records the sight:

As the King-bird with ages on his plumes Travels to die in his ancestral glooms.

Not less wonderful, and more unique in English poetry, is his painting of insects. He describes the hermit-bee, the soft, small, unfrighted thing, lighting on the dead vine-leaf, and twirling and filing all day.

He strikes out the gra.s.shopper at a touch--

Chirrups the contumacious gra.s.shopper.

He has a swift vision of the azure damsel-fly flittering in the wood:

Child of the simmering quiet, there to die.

He sees all the insect population of an old green wall; fancies the fancies of the crickets and the flies, and the carousing of the cicala in the trees, and the bee swinging in the chalice of the campanula, and the wasps p.r.i.c.king the papers round the peaches, and the gnats and early moths craving their food from G.o.d when dawn awakes them, and the fireflies crawling like lamps through the moss, and the spider, sprinkled with mottles on an ash-grey back, and building his web on the edge of tombs. These are but a few things out of this treasure-house of animal observation and love. It is a love which animates and populates with life his landscapes.

Many of the points I have attempted here to make are ill.u.s.trated in _Saul_. In verse v. the sheep are pictured, with all a shepherd's delightful affection, coming back at evening to the folding; and, with David's poetic imagination, compared to the stars following one another into the meadows of night--

And now one after one seeks his lodging, as star follows star Into eve and the blue far above us,--so blue and so far!--

In verse vi. the quails, and the crickets, and the jerboa at the door of his sand house, are thrilled into quicker life by David's music. In verse ix. the full joy of living in beasts and men is painted in the midst of landscape after landscape, struck out in single lines,--till all nature seems crowded and simmering with the intense life whose rapture Browning loved so well. These fully reveal his poetic communion with animals. Then, there is a fine pa.s.sage in verse x. where he describes the loosening of a thick bed of snow from the mountain-side[4]--an occurrence which also drew the interest on Sh.e.l.ley in the _Prometheus_--which ill.u.s.trates what I have said of Browning's conception of the separate life, as of giant t.i.tans, of the vaster things in Nature. The mountain is alive and lives his life with his own grim joy, and wears his snow like a breastplate, and discharges it when it pleases him. It is only David who thinks that the great creature lives to guard us from the tempests. And Hebron, high on its crested hill, lifts itself out of the morning mist in the same giant fashion,

For I wake in the grey dewy covert, while Hebron upheaves The dawn struggling with night on his shoulder, and Kidron retrieves Slow the damage of yesterday's sunshine.

Then, at the end of the poem, Browning represents all Nature as full of emotion, as gathered into a fuller life, by David's prophecy of the coming of immortal Love in Christ to man. This sympathy of Nature with humanity is so rare a thought in Browning, and so apart from his view of her, that I think he felt its strangeness here; so that he has taken some pains to make us understand that it is not Nature herself who does this, but David, in his uplifted inspiration, who imputes it to her. If that is not the case, it is at least interesting to find the poet, impa.s.sioned by his imagination of the situation, driven beyond his usual view into another land of thought.

There is one more thing to say in closing this chapter. Browning, unlike Tennyson, did not invent his landscapes. He drew directly from nature.

The landscapes in _Pauline_ and _Sordello_, and in the lyrical poems are plainly recollections of what he has seen and noted in his memory, from the sweep of the mountainous or oceanic horizon to the lichen on the rock and the painted sh.e.l.l on the seash.o.r.e. Even the imaginative landscape of _Childe Roland_ is a memory, not an invention. I do not say he would have been incapable of such invented landscape as we find in _Oenone_ and the _Lotos-Eaters_, but it was not his way to do this.

However, he does it once; but he takes care to show that it is not real landscape he is drawing, but landscape in a picture. In _Gerard de Lairesse_, one of the poems in _Parleyings with Certain People_, he sets himself to rival the "Walk" in Lairesse's _Art of Painting_, and he invents as a background to mythological or historic scenes, five landscapes, of dawn, morning, and noon, evening and falling night. They may be compared with the walk in _Pauline_, and indeed one of them with its deep pool watched over by the trees recalls his description of a similar pool in _Pauline_--a lasting impression of his youth, for it is again used in _Sordello_. These landscapes are some of his most careful natural description. They begin with the great thunderstorm of dawn in which Prometheus is seen riveted to his rock and the eagle-hound of Zeus beside him. Then the morning is described and the awakening of the earth and Artemis going forth, the huntress-queen and the queen of death; then noon with Lyda and the Satyr--that sad story; then evening charged with the fate of empires; and then the night, and in it a vast ghost, the ghost of departing glory and beauty. The descriptions are too long to quote, but far too short to read. I would that Browning had done more of this excellent work; but that these were created when he was an old man proves that the fire of imagination burnt in him to the end. They are full of those keen picture-words in which he smites into expression the central point of a landscape. They realise the glory of light, the force, fierceness, even the quiet of Nature, but they have lost a great deal of the colour of which once he was so lavish. Nevertheless, the whole scheme of colour in these pictures, with their figures, recalls the pictures of Tintoret. They have his _furia_, his black, gold, and sombre purple, his white mist and barred clouds and the thunder-roar in his skies. Nor are Prometheus and Artemis, and Lyda on her heap of skins in the deep woods, unworthy of the daring hand of the great Venetian.

They seem to stand forth from his canvas.

The poem closes with a charming lyric, half-sad, half-joyful, in which he hails the spring, and which in itself is full of his heart when it was close to the hopefulness he drew from natural beauty. I quote it to close this chapter:

Dance, yellows and whites and reds, Lead your gay orgy, leaves, stalks, heads Astir with the wind in the tulip-beds.

There's sunshine; scarcely a wind at all Disturbs starved gra.s.s and daisies small On a certain mound by a churchyard wall.

Daisies and gra.s.s be my heart's bed-fellows, On the mound wind spares and sunshine mellows: Dance you, reds and whites and yellows.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] David could only have seen this on the upper slopes of Hermon. But at the time of the poem, when he is the shepherd-youth, he could scarcely have visited the north of Palestine. Indeed, he does not seem all his life long to have been near Hermon. Browning has transferred to David what he himself had seen in Switzerland.

CHAPTER III

_THE TREATMENT OF NATURE_

In the previous chapter, some of the statements made on Browning as a poet of Nature were not sufficiently ill.u.s.trated; and there are other elements in his natural description which demand attention. The best way to repair these deficiencies will be to take chronologically the natural descriptions in his poems and to comment upon them, leaving out those on which we have already touched. New points of interest will thus arise; and, moreover, taking his natural description as it occurs from volume to volume, we may be able--within this phase of his poetic nature--to place his poetic development in a clearer light.

I begin, therefore, with _Pauline_. The descriptions of nature in that poem are more deliberate, more for their own sake, than elsewhere in Browning's poetry. The first of them faintly recalls the manner of Sh.e.l.ley in the _Alastor_, and I have no doubt was influenced by him. The two others, and the more finished, have already escaped from Sh.e.l.ley, and are almost pre-Raphaelite, as much so as Keats, in their detail. Yet all the three are original, not imitative. They suggest Sh.e.l.ley and Keats, and no more, and it is only the manner and not the matter of these poets that they suggest. Browning became instantly original in this as in other modes of poetry. It was characteristic of him from the beginning to the end of his career, to possess within himself his own methods, to draw out of himself new matter and new shapings.

From one point of view this was full of treasureable matter for us. It is not often the G.o.ds give us so opulent an originality. From another point of view it was unfortunate. If he had begun by imitating a little; if he had studied the excellences of his predecessors more; if he had curbed his individuality sufficiently to mark, learn and inwardly digest the n.o.ble style of others in natural description, and in all other matters of poetry as well, his work would have been much better than it is; his original excellences would have found fitter and finer expression; his faults would have been enfeebled instead of being developed; his style would have been more concise on one side, less abrupt on another, and we should not have been wrongly disturbed by obscurities of diction and angularities of expression. He would have reached more continuously the splendid level he often attained. This is plentifully ill.u.s.trated by his work on external nature, but less perhaps than by his work on humanity.

The first natural description he published is in the beginning of _Pauline_:

Thou wilt remember one warm morn when winter Crept aged from the earth, and spring's first breath Blew soft from the moist hills; the blackthorn boughs, So dark in the bare wood, when glistening In the sunshine were white with coming buds, Like the bright side of a sorrow, and the banks Had violets opening from sleep like eyes.

That is fairly good; he describes what he has seen; but it might have been better. We know what he means, but his words do not accurately or imaginatively convey this meaning. The best lines are the first three, but the peculiar note of Sh.e.l.ley sighs so fully in them that they do not represent Browning. What is special in them is his peculiar delight not only in the morning which here he celebrates, but in the spring. It was in his nature, even in old age, to love with pa.s.sion the beginnings of things; dawn, morning, spring and youth, and their quick blood; their changes, impulses, their unpremeditated rush into fresh experiment.

Unlike Tennyson, who was old when he was old, Browning was young when he was old. Only once in _Asolando_, in one poem, can we trace that he felt winter in his heart. And the lines in _Pauline_ which I now quote, spoken by a young man who had dramatised himself into momentary age, are no ill description of his temper at times when he was really old:

As life wanes, all its care and strife and toil Seem strangely valueless, while the old trees Which grew by our youth's home, the waving ma.s.s Of climbing plants heavy with bloom and dew, The morning swallows with their songs like words.

All these seem clear and only worth our thoughts: So, aught connected with my early life, My rude songs or my wild imaginings, How I look on them--most distinct amid The fever and the stir of after years!

The next description in _Pauline_ is that in which he describes--to ill.u.s.trate what Sh.e.l.ley was to him--the woodland spring which became a mighty river. Sh.e.l.ley, as first conceived by Browning, seemed to him like a sacred spring:

Scarce worth a moth's flitting, which long gra.s.ses cross, And one small tree embowers droopingly-- Joying to see some wandering insect won To live in its few rushes, or some locust To pasture on its boughs, or some wild bird Stoop for its freshness from the trackless air.

A piece of careful detail, close to nature, but not close enough; needing to be more detailed or less detailed, but the first instance in his work of his deliberate use of Nature, not for love of herself only, (Wordsworth, Coleridge or Byron would have described the spring in the woods for its own sake), but for ill.u.s.tration of humanity. It is Sh.e.l.ley--Sh.e.l.ley in his lonely withdrawn character, Sh.e.l.ley hidden in the wood of his own thoughts, and, like a spring in that wood, bubbling upwards into personal poetry--of whom Browning is now thinking. The image is good, but a better poet would have dwelt more on the fountain and left the insects and birds alone. It is Sh.e.l.ley also of whom he thinks--Sh.e.l.ley breaking away from personal poetry to write of the fates of men, of liberty and love and overthrow of wrong, of the future of mankind--when he expands his tree-shaded fountain into the river and follows it to the sea:

And then should find it but the fountain head, Long lost, of some great river washing towns And towers, and seeing old woods which will live But by its banks untrod of human foot.

Which, when the great sun sinks, lie quivering In light as some thing lieth half of life Before G.o.d's foot, waiting a wondrous change; Then girt with rocks which seek to turn or stay Its course in vain, for it does ever spread Like a sea's arm as it goes rolling on, Being the pulse of some great country--so Wast thou to me, and art thou to the world!