The Poetry Of Robert Browning Part 8

We must aspire then, but at the same time all aspiring is to be conterminous with steady work within our limits. Aspiration to the perfect is not to make us idle, indifferent to the present, but to drive us on. Its pa.s.sion teaches us, as it urges into action all our powers, what we can and what we cannot do. That is, it teaches us, through the action it engenders, what our limits are; and when we know them, the main duties of life rise clear. The first of these is, to work patiently within our limits; and the second is the apparent contradiction of the first, never to be satisfied with our limits, or with the results we attain within them. Then, having worked within them, but always looked beyond them, we, as life closes, learn the secret. The failures of earth prove the victory beyond: "For--

what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence For the fulness of the days? Have we withered or agonised?

Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue thence?

Why rushed the discords in but that harmony should be prized?

Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear.

Each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and the woe: But G.o.d has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear; The rest may reason, and welcome: 'tis we musicians know."

_Abt Vogler_.

Finally, the root and flower of this patient but uncontented work is Love for man because of his being in G.o.d, because of his high and immortal destiny. All that we do, whether failure or not, builds up the perfect humanity to come, and flows into the perfection of G.o.d in whom is the perfection of man. This love, grounded on this faith, brings joy into life; and, in this joy of love, we enter into the eternal temple of the Life to come. Love opens Heaven while Earth closes us round. At last limitations cease to trouble us. They are lost in the vision, they bring no more sorrow, doubt or baffling. Therefore, in this confused chaotic time on earth--

Earn the means first. G.o.d surely will contrive Use for our earning.

Others mistrust, and say: "But time escapes; Live now or never!"

He said, "What's time? Leave Now for dogs and apes!

Man has Forever."

_A Grammarian's Funeral_.

This is a sketch of his explanation of life. The expression of it began in _Pauline_. Had that poem been as imitative, as poor as the first efforts of poets usually are, we might leave it aside. But though, as he said, "good draughtsmanship and right handling were far beyond the artist at that time," though "with repugnance and purely of necessity"

he republished it, he did republish it; and he was right. It was crude and confused, but the stuff in it was original and poetic; wonderful stuff for a young man.

The first design of it was huge. _Pauline_ is but a fragment of a poem which was to represent, not one but various types of human life. It became only the presentation of the type of the poet, the first sketch of the youth of Sordello. The other types conceived were worked up into other poems.

The hero in _Pauline_ hides in his love for Pauline from a past he longed to forget. He had aspired to the absolute beauty and goodness, and the end was vanity and vexation. The shame of this failure beset him from the past, and the failure was caused because he had not been true to the aspirations which took him beyond himself. When he returned to self, the glory departed. And a fine simile of his soul as a young witch whose blue eyes,

As she stood naked by the river springs, Drew down a G.o.d,

who, as he sat in the sunshine on her knees singing of heaven, saw the mockery in her eyes and vanished, tells of how the early ravishment departed, slain by self-scorn that followed on self-worship. But one love and reverence remained--that for Sh.e.l.ley, the Sun-treader, and kept him from being "wholly lost." To strengthen this one self-forgetful element, the love of Pauline enters in, and the new impulse brings back something of the ancient joy. "Let me take it," he cries, "and sing on again

fast as fancies come; Rudely, the verse being as the mood it paints,"--

a line which tells us how Browning wished his metrical movement to be judged. This is the exordium, and it is already full of his theory of life--the soul forced from within to aspire to the perfect whole, the necessary failure, the despair, the new impulse to love arising out of the despair; failure making fresh growth, fresh uncontentment. G.o.d has sent a new impulse from without; let me begin again.

Then, in the new light, he strips his mind bare. What am I? What have I done? Where am I going?

The first element in his soul, he thinks, is a living personality, linked to a principle of restlessness,

Which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all.

And this would plunge him into the depths of self were it not for that Imagination in him whose power never fails to bear him beyond himself; and is finally in him a need, a trust, a yearning after G.o.d; whom, even when he is most lost, he feels is always acting on him, and at every point of life transcending him.

And Imagination began to create, and made him at one with all men and women of whom he had read (the same motive is repeated in _Sordello_), but especially at one with those out of the Greek world he loved--"a G.o.d wandering after Beauty"--a high-crested chief

Sailing with troops of friends to Tenedos.

Never was anything more clear than these lives he lived beyond himself; and the lines in which he records the vision have all the sharpness and beauty of his after-work--

I had not seen a work of lofty art.

Nor woman's beauty nor sweet Nature's face, Yet, I say, never morn broke clear as those On the dim-cl.u.s.tered isles in the blue sea, The deep groves and white temples and wet caves: And nothing ever will surprise me now-- Who stood beside the naked Swift-footed, Who bound my forehead with Proserpine's hair.

Yet, having this infinite world of beauty, he aimed low; lost in immediate wants, striving only for the mortal and the possible, while all the time there lived in him, breathing with keen desire, powers which, developed, would make him at one with the infinite Life of G.o.d.

But having thus been untrue to his early aspiration, he fell into the sensual life, like Paracelsus, and then, remorseful, sought peace in self-restraint; but no rest, no contentment was gained that way. It is one of Browning's root-ideas that peace is not won by repression of the n.o.ble pa.s.sions, but by letting them loose in full freedom to pursue after their highest aims. Not in restraint, but in the conscious impetuosity of the soul towards the divine realities, is the wisdom of life. Many poems are consecrated to this idea.

So, cleansing his soul by enn.o.bling desire, he sought to realise his dreams in the arts, in the creation and expression of pure Beauty. And he followed Poetry and Music and Painting, and chiefly explored pa.s.sion and mind in the great poets. Fed at these deep springs, his soul rose into keen life; his powers burst forth, and gazing on all systems and schemes of philosophy and government, he heard ineffable things unguessed by man. All Plato entered into him; he vowed himself to liberty and the new world where "men were to be as G.o.ds and earth us heaven." Thus, yet here on earth, not only beyond the earth, he would attain the Perfect. Man also shall attain it; and so thinking, he turned, like Sordello, to look at and learn mankind, pondering "how best life's end might be attained--an end comprising every joy."

And even as he believed, the glory vanished; everything he had hoped for broke to pieces:

First went my hopes of perfecting mankind, Next--faith in them, and then in freedom's self And virtue's self, then my own motives, ends And aims and loves, and human love went last.

And then, with the loss of all these things of the soul which bear a man's desires into the invisible and unreachable, he gained the world, and success in it. All the powers of the mere Intellect, that grey-haired deceiver whose name is Archimago, were his;--wit, mockery, a.n.a.lytic force, keen reasoning on the visible, the Understanding's absolute belief in itself; its close grasp on what it called facts, and its clear application of knowledge for clear ends. G.o.d, too, had vanished in this intellectual satisfaction; and in the temple of his soul, where He had been worshipped, troops of shadows now knelt to the man whose intellect, having grasped all knowledge, was content; and hailed him as king.

The position he describes is like that Wordsworth states in the _Prelude_ to have been his, when, after the vanishing of his aspirations for man which followed the imperialistic fiasco of the French Revolution, he found himself without love or hope, but with full power to make an intellectual a.n.a.lysis of nature and of human nature, and was destroyed thereby. It is the same position which Paracelsus attains and which is followed by the same ruin. It is also, so far as its results are concerned, the position of the Soul described by Tennyson in _The Palace of Art_.

Love, emotion, G.o.d are shut out. Intellect and knowledge of the world's work take their place. And the result is the slow corrosion of the soul by pride. "I have nursed up energies," says Browning, "they will prey on me." He feels this and breaks away from its death. "My heart must worship," he cries. The "shadows" know this feeling is against them, and they shout in answer:

"Thyself, thou art our king!"

But the end of that is misery. Therefore he begins to aspire again, but still, not for the infinite of perfection beyond, but for a finite perfection on, the earth.

"I will make every joy here my own," he cries, "and then I will die." "I will have one rapture to fill all the soul." "All knowledge shall be mine." It is the aspiration of Paracelsus. "I will live in the whole of Beauty, and here it shall be mine." It is the aspiration of Aprile.

"Then, having this perfect human soul, master of all powers, I shall break forth, at some great crisis in history, and lead the world." It is the very aspiration of Sordello.

But when he tries for this, he finds failure at every point. Everywhere he is limited; his soul demands what his body refuses to fulfil; he is always baffled, falling short, chained down and maddened by restrictions; unable to use what he conceives, to grasp as a tool what he can reach in Thought; hating himself; imagining what might be, and driven back from it in despair.

Even in his love for Pauline, in which he has skirted the infinite and known that his soul cannot accept finality--he finds that in him which is still unsatisfied.

What does this puzzle mean? "It means," he answers, "that this earth's life is not my only sphere,

Can I so narrow sense but that in life Soul still exceeds it?"

Yet, he will try again. He has lived in all human life, and his craving is still athirst. He has not yet tried Nature herself. She seems to have undying beauty, and his feeling for her is now, of course, doubled by his love for Pauline. "Come with me," he cries to her, "come out of the world into natural beauty"; and there follows a n.o.ble description of a lovely country into which he pa.s.ses from a mountain glen--morning, noon, afternoon and evening all described--and the emotion of the whole rises till it reaches the topmost height of eagerness and joy, when, suddenly, the whole fire is extinguished--

I am concentrated--I feel; But my soul saddens when it looks beyond: I cannot be immortal, taste all joy.

O G.o.d, where do they tend--these struggling aims?

What would I have? What is this "sleep" which seems To bound all? Can there be a "waking" point Of crowning life?

And what is that I hunger for but G.o.d?

So, having worked towards perfection, having realised that he cannot have it here, he sees at last that the failures of earth are a prophecy of a perfection to come. He claims the infinite beyond. "I believe," he cries, "in G.o.d and truth and love. Know my last state is happy, free from doubt or touch of fear."

That is Browning all over. These are the motives of a crowd of poems, varied through a crowd of examples; never better shaped than in the trenchant and magnificent end of _Easter-Day_, where the questions and answers are like the flashing and clashing of sharp scimitars. Out of the same quarry from which _Pauline_ was hewn the rest were hewn. They are polished, richly sculptured, hammered into fair form, but the stone is the same. Few have been so consistent as Browning, few so true to their early inspiration. He is among those happy warriors

Who, when brought Among the tasks of real life, have wrought Upon the plan that pleased their boyish thought.