The poetry of Robert Browning

^^m^^ifr^h:){^r^)::^'^

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

LIBRARY

BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME
OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT
FUND GIVEN IN 1 89 1 BY

HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE

Cornell University Library
PR 4238.B87

The poetry of Robert Browning,

3 1924 013 444 546

Cornell University
Library

The original of tliis book is in
tlie Cornell University Library.

There are no known copyright restrictions in
the United States on the use of the text.

http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013444546

THE POETRY OF

ROBERT BROWNING

SXOPFORD At BROOKE, M.A.

AUTHOR OF "TENNYSON, HIS ART AND RELATION
TO iiODERN LIFE"

NEW YORK

THOMAS Y. CROWELL & COMPANY

PUBLISHERS

Copyright, i9°»>

Bv THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO.

Published September, iv>^-

CONTENTS

I.

Browning and Tennyson .

I

• 11.

The Treatment of Nature

• in

. III.

The Treatment of Nature

■ 90

: - IV.

Browning's Theory of Human Life:

Pauline and Paracelsus

IIS

• V.

The Poet of Art ....

. 141

VI.

Sordello

177

VII.

Browning and Sordello .

200

. VIII.

The Dramas

219

IX.

Poems of the Passion of Love

242

X.

The Passions Other than Love

264

XI.

Imaginative Representations .

280

XII.

Imaginative Representations :

Renaissance

301

XIII.

Womanhood in Browning . . . .

323

XIV.

Womanhood in Browning:

The Dramatic Lyrics and Pompilia .

344

XV.

Balaustion

36s

XVI.

The Ring and the Book . . . .

391

XVII.

Later Poems

414

XVIII.

The Last Poems

43'

CHAPTER I

BROWNING AND TENNYSON

PARNASSUS, Apollo's mount, has two peaks,
and on these, for sixty years, from 1830 to
1890,* two poets sat, till their right to these lofty
peaks became unchallenged. Beneath them, during
these years, on the lower knolls of the mount of
song, many new poets sang; with diverse instru-
ments, on various subjects, and in manifold ways.
They had their listeners; the Muses were also
their visitants ; but none of them ventured seriously
to dispute the royal summits where Browning and
Tennyson sat, and smiled at one another across the
vale between.

Both began together ; and the impulses which
came to them from the new and excited world
which opened its fountains in and about 1832
continued to impel them till the close of their lives.
While the poetic world altered around them, while
two generations of poets made new schools of
poetry, they remained, for the most part, unaffected

* I state it roughly. The Poems of Two Brothers appeared in
1826, Tennyson's first single volume in 1830, his second in 1833,
his last in 1889. Browning's first poem was issued in 1833, his
last in 1S90. Paracelsus, in which his genius clearly disclosedv^
itself, was published in 1835, ^•''l^ Tennyson, seven years later,
proved his mastership in the two volumes of 1842.
B I

u

2 BROWNING

by these schools. There is nothing of Arnold and
Clough, of Swinburne, Rossetti or Morris, or of
any of the others, in Browning or Tennyson.
There is nothing even of Mrs. Browning in
Browning. What changes took place in them
were wrought, first, by the natural growth of their
own character; secondly, by the natural develop-
ment of their art-power ; and thirdly, by the slow
decaying of that power. They were, in com-
parison with the rest, curiously uninfluenced by
the changes of the world around them. The
main themes, with which they began, they retained
to the end. Their methods, their instruments, their
way of feeling into the world of man and of nature,
their relation to the doctrines of God and of Man,
did not, though on all these matters they held
diverse views, alter with the alteration of the
world. But this is more true of Browning than
of Tennyson. The political and social events of
those years touched Tennyson, as we see from
Maud and the Princess, but his way of looking at
them was not the way of a contemporary. It
might have been predicted from his previous career
and work. Then the new movements of Science
and Criticism which disturbed Clough and Arnold
so deeply, also troubled Tennyson, but not half so
seriously. He staggered for a time under the
attack on his old conceptions, but he never yielded
to it. He was angry with himself for every doubt
that beset him, and angry with the Science and
Criticism which disturbed the ancient ideas he was
determined not to change. Finally, he rested where
he had been when he wrote In Memoriam, nay
more, where he had been when he began to write.

BROWNING AND TENNYSON 3

There were no such intervals in Browning's
thought. One could scarcely say from his poetry,
except in a very few places, that he was aware of
the social changes of his time, or of the scientific
and critical movement which, while he lived, so
profoundly modified both theology and religion.*
Asolando, in 1890, strikes the same chords, but more
feebly, which Paracelsus struck in 1835.

But though, in this lofty apartness and self-
unity, Browning and Tennyson may fairly be said
to be at one, in themselves and in their song
they were different. There could scarcely be two
characters, two musics, two minds, two methods
in art, two imaginations, more distinct and con-
trasted than those which lodged in these men —
and the object of this introduction is to bring out
this contrast, with the purpose of placing in a
clearer light some of the peculiar elements in the
poetry of Browning, and in his position as a poet.

I. Their public fate was singularly different. In
1842 Tennyson, with his two volumes of Collected
Poems, made his position. The Princess, in 1847,
increased his reputation. In 1850, In Memoriam

* A Death in the Desert touches on the doubts which, when it
was written, had gathered from historical criticism round the
subject-matter of the Gospels, but the prophetic answer of St.
John is not critical. It is Browning's personal reply to the
critics, and is based on his own religious philosophy. The
critical part of the argument is left untouched, and the answer is
given from the poet's plane. It is the same when in the
Parleyings with certain People Furini is made to embody Browning's
belief in a personal God in contradistinction with the mere
evolutionist. He does not argue the points. He places one
doctrine over against the other and bids the reader choose.
Moreover, he claims his view as his own alone. He seeks to
impose it on no one.

4 BROWNING

raised him, it was said, above all the poets of his
time, and the book was appreciated, read, and loved
by the greater part of the English-speaking world.
The success and popular fame which now followed
were well deserved and wisely borne. They have
endured and will endure. A host of imitators,
who caught his music and his manner, filled the
groves and ledges which led up to the peak on
which he lived. His side of Parnassus was
thronged.

It was quite otherwise with his brother-poet.
Only a few clear-eyed persons cared to read
Paracelsus, which appeared in 1835. Strafford,
Browning's first drama, had a little more vogue ; it
was acted for a while. When Sordello, that
strange child of genius, was born in 1840, those
who tried to read its first pages declared they were
incomprehensible. It seems that critics in those
days had either less intelligence than we have, or
were more impatient and less attentive, for not
only Sordello but even In Memoriam was said to be
exceedingly obscure.

Then, from 1841 to 1846, Browning published at
intervals a series of varied poems and dramas, imder
the title of Bells and Pomegranates. These, one
might imagine, would have grasped the heart of
any public which had a care for poetry. Among
them were such diverse poems as Pippa Passes ;
A Blot in the 'Scutcheon ; Saul; The Pied Piper
of Hamelin ; My Last Duchess ; Waring. I only
mention a few (all different in note, subject and
manner from one another), in order to mark
the variety and range of imaginative power dis-
played in this wonderful set of little books. The

BROWNING AND TENNYSON 5

Bells of poetry's music, hung side by side with the
golden Pomegranates of thought, made the fringe
of the robe of this high priest of song. Rarely
have imagination and intellect, ideal faith and the
sense which handles daily life, passion and
quietude, the impulse and self-mastery of an
artist, the joy of nature and the fates of men,
grave tragedy and noble grotesque, been mingled
together more fully — bells for the pleasure and
fruit for the food of man.

Yet, on the whole, they fell dead on the public.
A few, however, loved them, and all the poems
were collected in 1849. In Memoriam and this
Collected Edition of Browning issued almost to-
gether ; but with how different a fate and fame we
see most plainly in the fact that Browning can
scarcely be said to have had any imitators. The
groves and ledges of his side of Apollo's mountain
were empty, save for a few enchanted listeners,
who said : " This is our music, and here we build
our tent."

As the years went on, these readers increased in
number, but even when the volumes entitled Men
and Women were published in 1855, ^"d the
Dramatis Personce in 1864, his followers were but-
a little company. For all this neglect Browning
cared as a bird cares who sings for the love of
singing, and who never muses in himself whether
the wood is full or not of listeners. Being always
a true artist, he could not stop versing and
playing ; and not one grain of villain en-^ touched
his happy heart when he looked across the valley
to Tennyson. He loved his mistress Art, and his
love made him always joyful in creating.

6 BROWNING

At last his time came, but it was not till nearly
twenty years after the Collected Poems of 1849
that The Ring and the Book astonished the reading
public so much by its intellectual tour de force that
it was felt to be unwise to ignore Browning any
longer. His past work was now discovered, read
and praised. It was not great success or world-
wide fame that he attained, but it was plea-
sant to him, and those who already loved his
poems rejoiced with him. Before he died he was
widely read, never so much as Tennyson, but far
more than he had ever expected. It had become
clear to all the world that he sat on a rival height
with Tennyson, above the rest of his fellow-poets.

Their public fate, then, was very different.
Tennyson had fifty years of recognition. Browning
barely ten. And to us who now know Browning
this seems a strange thing. Had he been one of
' the smaller men, a modem specialist like Arnold
or Rossetti, we could better understand it. But
Browning's work was not limited to any particular
or temporary phase of human nature. He set
himself to represent, as far as he could, all types
of human nature ; and, more audacious still, types
taken from many diverse ages, nations, and climates.
He told us of times and folk as far apart as Caliban
and Cleon, as Karshish and Waring, as Balaustion
and Fifine, as St. John and Bishop Blougram.
The range and the contrasts of his subjects are
equally great. And he did this work with a
searching analysis, a humorous keenness, a joyous
boldness, and an opulent imagination at once
penetrative and passionate. When, then, we realise
this as we realise it now, we are the more astonished

BROWNING AND TENNYSON 7

that appreciation of him lingered so long. Why
did it not come at first, and why did it come in the
end?

The first answer to that question is a general
one. During the years between i860 and 1890,
and especially during the latter half of these years,
science and criticism were predominant. Their
determination to penetrate to the roots of things
made a change in the general direction of thought
and feeling on the main subjects of life. Analysis
became dearer to men than synthesis, reasoning
than imagination. Doubtful questions were sub-
mitted to intellectual decision alone. The Under-
standing, to its great surprise, was employed on
the investigation of the emotions, and even the
artists were drawn in this direction. They, too,
began to dissect the human heart. Poets and
writers of fiction, students of human nature, were
keenly interested, not so much in our thoughts
and feelings as in exposing how and why we
thought or felt in this or that fashion. In such
analysis they seemed to touch the primal sources
of life. They desired to dig about the tree of
humanity and to describe all the windings of its
roots and fibres — not much caring whether they
withered the tree for a time — rather than to describe
and sing its outward beauty, its varied foliage, and
its ruddy fruit. And this liking to investigate the
hidden inwardness of motives — which many persons,
weary of self-contemplation, wisely prefer to keep
hidden — ran through the practice of all the arts.
They became, on the whole, less emotional, more
intellectual. The close marriage between passion
and thought, without whose cohabitation no work

8 BROWNING

of genius is born in the arts, was dissolved ; and
the intellect of the artist often worked by itself,
and his emotion by itself. Some of the partheno-
genetic children of these divorced powers were
curious products, freaks, even monsters of litera-
ture, in which the dry, cynical, or vivisecting temper
had full play, or the naked, lustful, or cruel ex-
posure of the emotions in ugly, unnatural, or
morbid forms was glorified. They made an im-
pudent claim to the name of Art, but they were
nothing better than disagreeable Science. But
this was an extreme deviation of the tendency.
The main line it took was not so detestable. It
was towards the ruthless analysis of li^e, and of
the soul of man; a part, in fact, of the general
scientific movement. The outward forms of things
charmed writers less than the motives which led
to their making. The description of the tangled
emotions and thoughts of the inner life, before
any action took place, was more pleasurable to
the writer, and easier, than any description of their
final result in act. This was borne to a weari-
some extreme in fiction, and in these last days a
comfortable reaction from it has arisen. In poetry
it did not last so long. Morris carried us out of it.
But long before it began, long before its entrance
into the arts. Browning, who on another side of
his genius delighted in the representation of action,
anticipated in poetry, and from the beginning of
his career, twenty, even thirty years before it be-
came pronounced in literature, this tendency to
the intellectual analysis of human nature. When
he began it, no one cared for it; and Paracelsus,
Sordello and the soul-dissecting poems in Bells and

BROWNING AND TENNYSON 9

Pomegranates fell on an unheeding world. But
Browning did not heed the unheeding of the world.
He had the courage of his aims in art, and while
he frequently shaped in his verse the vigorous
movement of life, even to its moments of fierce
activity, he went on quietly, amid the silence of the
world, to paint also the slowly interwoven and
complex pattern of the inner Ufe of men. And
then, when the tendency of which I speak had
collared the interest of society, society, with great and
ludicrous amazement, found him out. " Here is a
man," it said, " who has been doing in poetry for the
last thirty years the very thing of which we are so
fond, and who is doing it with delightful and varied
subtlety. We will read him now." So Browning,
anticipating by thirty years the drift of the world,
was not read at first; but, afterward, the world
having reached him, he became a favoured poet.
However, fond as he was of metaphysical
analysis, he did not fall into the extremes into
which other writers carried it. Paracelsus is,
indeed, entirely concerned with the inner history of
a soul, but Sordello combines with a similar history
a tale of political and warlike action in which men
and women, like Salinguerra and Palma, who live
in outward work rather than in inward thought,
are described ; while in poems like Pippa Passes
and some of the Dramas, emotion and thought,
intimately interwoven, are seen blazing, as it were,
into a lightning of swift deeds. Nor are other
poems wanting, in which, not long analysis, but
short passion, fiery outbursts of thought, taking
immediate form, are represented with astonishing
intensity.

10 BROWNING

2. This second remarkable power of his touches
the transition which has begun to carry us, in
the last few years, from the subjective to the
objective in art. The time came, and quite lately,
when art, weary of intellectual and minute investi-
gation, turned to realise, not the long inward life of
a soul with all its motives laid bare, but sudden
moments of human passion, swift and unoutlined
impressions on the senses, the moody aspects of
things, flared-out concentrations of critical hours of
thought and feeling which years perhaps of action
and emotion had brought to the point of eruption.
Impressionism was bom in painting, poetry, sculp-
ture, and music.

It was curious that, when we sought for a master
who had done this in the art of poetry, we found
that Browning — who had in long poems done the
very opposite of impressionism — had also, in a
number of short poems, anticipated impressionist
art by nearly forty years. Porphyria! s Lover,
many a scene in Sordello, My Last Duckess, The
Laboratory, Home Thoughts from Abroad, are only a
few out of many. It is pleasant to think of the
ultimate appearance of Waring, flashed out for a
moment on the sea, only to disappear. In method,
swiftness, and colour, but done in verse, it is an im-
pressionist picture, as vivid in transient scenery
as in colour. He did the same sort of work
in poems of nature, of human life, of moments
of passion, of states of the soul. That is another
reason why he was not read at first, and why he is
read now. He was impressionist long before
Impressionism arrived. * When it arrived he was
found out. And he stood alone, for Tennyson is

BROWNING AND TENNYSON ii

never impressionist, and never could have been.
Neither was Swinburne nor Arnold, Morris nor
Rossetti.

3. Again, in the leisured upper ranges of thought
and emotion, and in the extraordinary complexity of
human life which arose, first, out of the more inti-
mate admixture of all classes in our society ; and
secondly, out of the wider and more varied world-
life which increased means of travel and knowledge
afforded to men, Tennyson's smooth, melodious,
simple development of art-subjects did not represent
the clashing complexity of human life, whether
inward in the passions, the intellect, or the soul, or
in the active movement of the world. And the
other poets were equally incapable of representing
this complexity of which the world became clearly
conscious. Arnold tried to express its beginnings,
and failed, because he tried to explain instead of
representing them. He wrote about them ; he did
not write them down. Nor did he really belong
to this novel, quick, variegated, involved world
which was so pleased with its own excitement and
entanglement. He was the child of a'world which
was , then passing away, out of which life was
fading, which was tired like Obermann, and sought
peace in reflective solitudes. Sometimes he felt, as
in The New Age, the pleasure of the coming life of
the world, but he was too weary to share in it,
and he claimed quiet. But chiefly he saw the
disturbance, the unregulated life; and, unable to
realise that it was the trouble and wildness of
youth, he mistook it for the trouble of decay. He
painted it as such. But it was really young, and
out of it broke all kinds of experiments in social.

12 BROWNTNG

religious, philosophical, and political thought, such
as we have seen and read of for the last thirty
years. Art joined in the experiments of this youth-
ful time. It opened a new fountain and sent forth
from it another stream, to echo this attempting,
clanging, and complicated society ; and this stream
did not flow like a full river, making large or
sweet melody, but like a mountain torrent thick
with rocks, the thunderous whirlpools of whose
surface were white with foam. Changing and
sensational scenery haunted its lower banks where
it became dangerously navigable. Strange boats,
filled with outlandish figures, who played on
unknown instruments, and sang of deeds and
passions remote from common life, sailed by on its
stormy waters. Few were the concords, many the
discords, and some of the discords were never
resolved. But in one case at least — in the case of
Browning's poetry, and in very many cases in the
art of music — out of the discords emerged at last
a full melody of steady thought and controlled
emotion as (to recapture my original metaphor) the
rude, interrupted music of the mountain stream
reaches full and concordant harmony when it flows
in peace through the meadows of the valley.

These complex and intercleaving conditions of
thought and passion into which society had grown
Browning represented from almost the beginning
of his work. When society became conscious of
them — there it found him. And, amazed, it said,
" Here is a man who forty years ago lived in the
midst of our present life and wrote about it."
They saw the wild, loud complexity of their world
expressed in his verse ; and yet were dimly

BROWNING AND TENNYSON 13

conscious, to their consolation, that he was aware
of a central peace where the noise was quieted and
the tangle unravelled.

For Browning not only represented this dis-
cordant, varied hurly-burly of life, but also, out of
all the discords which he described, and which,
when he chose, even his rhythms and word-
arrangements reaHsed in sound, he drew aconcordant
melody at last, and gave to a world, troubled with
itself, the hope of a great concent into which all
the discords ran, and where they were resolved.
And this hope for the individual and the race was
one of the deepest elements in Browning's religion.
It was also the hope of Tennyson, but Tennyson
was often uncertain of it, and bewailed the uncer-
tainty. Browning was certain of his hope, and for
the most part resolved his discords. Even when
he did not resolve them, he firmly believed that
they would be resolved. This, his essential
difference from the other poets of the last fifty
years, marks not only his apartness from the self-
ignorance of English society, and the self-sceptical
scepticism which arises from that self-ignorance,
but also how steadily assured was the foundation
of his spiritual hfe. In the midst of the shifting
storms of doubt and trouble, of mockery, contradic-
tion, and assertion on religious matters, he stood
unremoved. Whatever men may think of his faith
and his certainties, they reveal the strength of his
character, the enduring courage of his soul, and
the inspiring joyousness that, born of his strength,
characterised him to the last poem he wrote.
While the other poets were tossing on the sea of
unresolved Question, he rested, musing and creating,

14 BROWNING

on a green island whose rocks were rooted on the
ocean-bed, and wondered, with the smiUng tolerance
of his life-long charity, how his fellows were of so
little faith, and why the sceptics made so much
noise. He would have reversed the Psalmist's cry.
He would have said, " Thou art not cast down, O
my soul; thou art not disquieted within me.
Thou hast hoped in God, who is the light of thy
countenance, and thy God."

At first the world, enamoured of its own com-
plex discords, and pleased, like boys in the street,
with the alarms it made, only cared for that part
of Browning which represented the tangle and the
clash, and ignored his final melody. But of late it
has begun, tired of the restless clatter of intellectual
atoms, to desire to hear, if possible, the majestic
harmonies in which the discords are resolved. And
at this point many at present and many more in
the future will find their poetic and religious
satisfaction in Browning. At the very end, then,
of the nineteenth century, in a movement which
had only just begun, men said to themselves,
" Browning felt beforehand what we are beginning
to hope for, and wrote of it fifty, even sixty years
ago. No one cared then for him, but we care
now."

Again, though he thus anticipated the movements
of the world, he did not, like the other poets,
change his view about Nature, Man, and God. He
conceived that view when he was young, and he
did not alter it. Hence, he did not follow or
reflect from year to year the opinions of his time on
these great matters. When Paracelsus was published
in 1835 Browning had fully thought out, and in that

BROWNING AND TENNYSON 15

poem fully expressed, his theory of God's relation
to man, and of man's relation to the universe
around him, to his fellow-men, and to the world
beyond. It was a theory which was original, if
any theory can be so called. At least, its form, as
he expressed it, was clearly original. Roughly
sketched in Pauline, fully rounded in Paracelsus, it
held and satisfied his mind till the day of his death.
But Tennyson had no clear theory about Man or
Nature or God when he began, nor was he
afterwards, save perhaps whien he wrote the last
stanzas of In Memoriam, a fully satisfied citizen of
the city that has foundations. He beUeved in that
city, but he could not always live in it. He grew
into this or that opinion about the relations of God
and man, and then grew out of it. He held
now this, now that, view of Nature, and of Man in
contact with Nature. There was always battle in
his soul ; although he won his battle in the end, he
had sixty years of war. Browning was at peace,
firm-fixed. It is true the inward struggle of
Tennyson enabled him to image from year to year
his own time better than Browning did. It is true
this struggle enabled him to have great variety in
his art-work when it was engaged with the emotions
which belong to doubt and faith ; but it also made
him unable to give to his readers that sense of
things which cannot be shaken, of faith in God and
in humanity wholly independent, in its depths, of
storms on the surface of this mortal life, which was
one of Browning's noblest legacies to that wavering,
faithless, pessimistic, analysis-tormented world
through which we have fought our way, and out of
which we are emerging. ,

i6 BROWUING

4. The danger in art, or for an artist, of so
settled a theory is that in expression it tends to
monotony; and sometimes, when we find almost
every poem of Browning's running up into his
theory, we arrive at the borders of the Land of
Weary-men. But he seems to have been aware of
this danger, and to have conquered it. He meets
it by the immense variety of the subjects he chooses,
and of the scenery in which he places them. I
do not think he ever repeats any one of his
examples, though he always repeats his theory.
And the pleasant result is that we can either ignore
the theory if we like, or rejoice over its universal
application, or, beyond it altogether, be charmed
and excited by the fresh examples alone. And
they are likely to charm, at least by variety, for
they are taken from all ages of history ; from as
many diverse phases of human act^character, and
ga^gian as there are poems which concern them ;
from many periods of the arts ; from most of the
countries of Europe, from France, Germany, Spain,
Italy (rarely from England), with their specialised
types of race and of landscape ; and from almost
every .class- of educated modern society. Moreover,
he had a guard within his own nature against
the danger of this monotony. It was the youthful
freshness with which, even in advanced age, he
followed his rapid impulses to art-creation. No
one was a greater child than he in the quickness
with which he received a sudden call to poetry
from passing events or scenes, and in the eager-
ness with which he seized them as subjects. He
took the big subjects now and then which the
world expects to be taken, and treated them with

BROWNING AND TENNYSON 17

elaborate thought and steadfast feeling, but he
was more often like the girl in his half-dramatic
poem, whom the transient occurrences and sights
of the day touched into song. He picked up his
subjects as a man culls flowers in a mountain walk,
moved by an ever-recurring joy and fancy in them
— a book on a stall, a bust in an Italian garden,
a face seen at the opera, the market chatter of
a Tuscan town, a story told by the roadside in
Brittany, a picture in some Accademia — so that,
though the ground-thought might incur the danger
of dulness through repetition, the joy of the artist
so filled the illustration, and his freshness of inven-
tion was so delighted with itself, that even to the
reader the theory seemed like a new star.

In this way he kept the use of having an
unwavering basis of thought which gave unity to
his sixty years of work, and yet avoided the peril
of monotony. An immense diversity animated
his unity, filled it with gaiety and brightness, and
secured impulsiveness of fancy. This also differ-
entiates him from Tennyson, who often wanted
freshness ; who very rarely wrote on a sudden
impulse, but after long and careful thought; to
whose seriousness we cannot always climb with
pleasure ; who played so little with the world.
These defects in Tennyson had the excellences
which belong to them in art, just as these excel-
lences in Browning had, in art, their own defects.
We should be grateful for the excellences, and not
trouble ourselves about the defects. However,
neither the excellences nor the defects concern us
in the present discussion. It is the contrast be-
tween the two men on which we dwell.

i8 BROWNING

5. The next point of contrast, which will further
illustrate why Browning was not read of old but is
now read, has to do with historical criticism. There
arose, some time ago, as part of the scientific and
critical movement of the last forty years, a desire
to know and record accurately the early life of
peoples, pastoral, agricultural, and in towns, and the
beginning of their arts and knowledges ; and not
only their origins, but the whole history of their
development. A close, critical investigation was
made of the origins of each people; accurate
knowledge, derived from contemporary documents,
of their life, laws, customs, and language was
attained ; the facts of their history were separated
from their mythical and legendary elements ; the
dress, the looks of men, the climate of the time,
the physical aspects of their country — all the
skeleton of things was fitted together, bone to
bone. And for a good while this merely critical
school held the field. It did admirable and neces-
sary work.

But when it was done, art claimed its place in
this work. The desire sprang up among historians
to conceive all this history in the imagination, to
shape vividly its scenery, to animate and individ-
ualise its men and women, to paint the life of the
human soul in it, to clothe it in flesh and |blood, to
make its feet move and its eyes flash — but to do
all these things within the limits of the accurate
knowledge which historical criticism had defined.
" Let us saturate ourselves," said the historians,
•'with clear knowledge of the needful facts, and
then, without violation of our knowledge, imagine
the human life, the landscape, the thinking and

BROWNING AND TENNYSON 19

feeling of a primaeval man, of his early religion, of
his passions ; of Athens when the Persian came, of
Rome when the Republic was passing into the
Empire, of a Provincial in Spain or Britain, of a
German town in the woods by the river. Let us
see in imagination as well as in knowledge an
English settlement on the Welsh border, an Italian
mediaeval town when its art was being born, a
Jewish village when Christ wandered into its
streets, a musician or a painter's life at a time
when Greek art was decaying, or when a new
impulse like the Renaissance or the French Revo-
lution came upon the world." When that effort of
the historians had established itself, and we have
seen it from blossoming to fruitage, people began
to wonder that no poet had ever tried to do this
kind of work. Ijt seemed eminently fitted for a
poet's hand, full bf subjects alluring to the penetra-
tive imagination. It needed, of course, some
scholarship, for it demanded accuracy in its grasp
of the main ideas of the time to be represented ; but
that being given, immense opportunities remained
for pictures of human life, full of colour, thought,
and passions; for subtle and brilliant representa-
tions of the eternal desires and thinkings of human
nature as they were governed by the special
circumstances of the time in which the poem was
placed ; and for the concentration into a single
poem, gathered round one person, of the ideas
whose new arrival formed a crisis in the history of
art.

Men looked for this in Tennyson and did not
find it. His Greek and mediaeval poems were
modernised. Their imaginative work was uncritical.

20 BROWNING

But when the historians and the critics of art and
of religious movements happened at last to look
into Browning, they discovered, to their delight
and wonder, that he had been doing, with a
curious knowledge, this kind of work for many
years. He had anticipated the results of that
movement of the imagination in historical work
which did not exist when he began to write; he
had worked that mine, and the discovery of this
made another host of people readers of his poetry.

We need scarcely give examples of this. Sordello,
in 1840 (long before the effort of which we speak
began), was such a poem — the history of a special-
ised soul, with all its scenery and history vividly
mediaeval. Think of the Spanish Cloister, The
Laboratory, A Grammarian's Funeral, the Bishop
orders his Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church, poems,
each of which paints an historical period or a vivid
piece of its life. Think of The Ring and the Book,
with all the world of Rome painted to the life, and
all the soul of the time !

The same kind of work was done for phases
and periods of the arts from Greek times to the
Renaissance, I may even say, from the Renaissance
to the present day. Balaustion's Prologue con-
centrates the passage of dramatic poetry from
Sophocles to Euripides. Aristophanes' Apology
realises the wild licence in which art and freedom
died in Athens — their greatness in their ruin — and
the passionate sorrow of those who loved what had
been so beautiful. Cleon takes us into a later time
when men had ceased to be original, and life and
art had become darkened by the pain of the soul.
We pass on to two different periods of the Renais-

BROWNING AND TENNYSON 21

sance in Fra Lippo Lippi and in Andrea del Sarto,
and are carried further through the centuries of
art when we read Abt Vogler and A Toccata of
Galuppt's. Each of these poems is a concentrated,
accurate piece of art-history, with the addition to
it of the human soul.

Periods and phases of religious history are equally
realised. Caliban upon Setebos begins the record —
that philosophic savage who makes his God out of
himself. Then follows study after study, from A
Death in the Desert to Bishop Blougram's Apology.
Some carry us from early Christianity through the
mediaeval faith ; others lead us through the Paganism
of the Renaissance and strange shows of Judaism
to Browning's own conception of religion in the
present day contrasted with those of the popular
religion in Christmas-Day and Easter-Day.

Never, in poetry, was the desiire of the historical
critic for accuracy of fact and portraiture, combined
with vivid presentation of life, so fully satisfied. No
wonder Browning was not read of old; but it is
no wonder, when the new History was made, when
he was once found out, that he passed from a few
to a multitude of readers.

6. Another contrast appears at the very begin-
ning of their career. Tennyson, in his two earliest
books in 1830 and 1833, though clearly original in
some poems, had clinging round his singing robes
some of the rags of the past. He wrote partly
in the weak and sentimental strain of the poets
between 1822 and 1832. Browning, on the con-
trary, sprang at once into an original poetic life
of his own. Pauline was unfinished, irregular in
form, harsh, abrupt, and overloaded, but it was

22 BROWNING

also entirely fresh and distinct. The influence of
Shelley echoes in it, but much more in admiration
than in imitation of him. The matter, the spirit
of the poem were his own, and the verse-movement
was his own. Had Browning been an imitator,
the first thing he would have imitated would have
been the sweet and rippling movement of Shelley's
melodies. But the form of his verse, such as it
was, arose directly out of his own nature and
was as original as his matter. Tennyson grew
into originality. Browning leaped into it ; born, not
of other poets, but of his own will. He begat
himself. It had been better for his art, so far as
technical excellence is concerned, had he studied
and imitated at first the previous masters. But
he did not ; and his dominant individuality, whole
in itself and creating its own powers, separates him
at the very beginning from Tennyson.

7. Tennyson became fully original, but he always
admitted, and sometimes encouraged in himself,
a certain vdlJ of^ conventionality. Hj_kept the
opinions of tjie_gast in the matter of caste. He
clun^ to certain political and social majcuns, and
could not see beyond them. He sometimes ex-
pressed them as if they were freshly discovered
truths or direct emanations from the Deity of
England. He belgnged to ascertain type of
English.SQciety, and he rarely got out of Jt in his
poetry. He inhabited a certain Park of morals,
and he had no sympathy with any self-ethical life
beyond its palings. What had been, what was proper
and recognised, somewhat enslaved in Tennyson
that distinctiveness and freedom of personality
which is of so much importance in poetry, and

BROWNING AND TENNYSON 23

which, had it had more liberty in Tennyson, would
have made him a still greater poet than he was.

Browning, on the other hand — much more a
person in society than Tennyson, much more a
man of the world, and obeying in society its
social conventions more than Tennyson — never
allowed this to touch his poems. As the artist, he
was quite free from the opinions, maxims, and class
conventions of the past or the present. His poetry
belongs to no special type of society, to no special
nationality, to no separate creed or church, to no
settled standard of social morality. What his own
thought and emotion urged him to say, he said
with an absolute carelessness of what the world
would say. And in this freedom he preceded and ,
prophesied the reaction of the last years of the
nineteenth century against the tyranny of maxims;
and conventions in society, in morals, and in religion.
That reaction has in many ways been carried
beyond the proper limits of what is just and
beautiful. But these excesses had to be, and the
world is beginning to avoid them. What remains
is the blessing of life set free, not altogether from j
the use of conventions, but from their tyranny and
oppression, and lifted to a higher level, where the
test of what is right and fitting in act, and just in
thought, is not the opinion of society, but that Law
of Love which gives us full liberty to develop our }
own nature and lead our own life in the way we \
think best independent of all conventions, provided 1
we do Jiot injure the life of others, or violate any \
of the great moral and spiritual truths by obedience \
to which the progress of mankind is promoted and
secured. Into that high and free region of thought

24 BROWNIIVG

and action Browning brought us long ago. Tenny-
son did not, save at intervals when the poet over-
rode the man. This differentiates the men. But
. it also tells us why Browning was not read fifty
\ years ago, when social conventions were tyrannous
and respectability a despot, and why he has been
read for the last fifteen years and is read now.

8. There is another contrast between these poets.
It is quite clear that Tennyson was a distinctively
English poet and a patriotic poet ; at times too much
of a patriot to judge tolerantly, or to write fairly,
about other countries. He had, at least, a touch of
national contempts, even of national hatreds. His
position towards France was much that of the Brit-
ish sailor of Nelson's time. His position towards
Ireland was that of the bishop, who has been a
schoolmaster, to the naughty curate who has a will
of his own. His position towards Scotland was
that of one who was aware that it had a geographical
existence, and that a regiment in the English army
which had a genius for fighting was drawn from its
Highlands. He condescends to write a poem at
Edinburgh, but then Edinburgh was of English
origin and name. Even with that help he cannot
be patient of the place. The poem is a recollection
of an Italian journey, and he forgets in memories
of the South — though surely Edinburgh might
have awakened some romantic associations —

the clouded Forth,
The gloom which saddens Heaven and Earth,

The bitter East, the misty summer
And gray metropolis of the North.

Edinburgh is English in origin, but Tennyson did
not feel England beyond the Border. There the

BROWNING AND TENNYSON 25

Celt intruded, and he looked askance upon the Celt.
The Celtic spirit smiled, and took its vengeance on
him in its own way. It imposed on him, as his
chief subject, a Celtic tale and a Celtic hero ; and
though he did his best to de-celticise the story, the
vengeance lasts, for the more he did this the more
he injured his work. However, being always a
noble artist, he made a good fight for his insularity,
and the expression of it harmonised with the pride
of England in herself, alike with that which is just
and noble in it, and with that which is neither the
one nor the other.

Then, too, his scenery (with some exceptions, and
those invented) was of his own land, and chiefly of
the places where he lived. It was quite excellent,
but it was limited. But, within the limit of England,
it was steeped in the love of England; and so
sweet and full is this love, and so lovely are its
results in song, that every Englishman has, for this j
reason if for no other, a deep and just affection for :
Tennyson. Nevertheless, in that point also his |
poetry was insular. A fault in the poet, not in j
the poetry. Perhaps, from this passionate con-!
centration, the poetry was all the lovelier.

Again, when Tennyson took a great gest of war
as his subject, he took it exclusively from the his-
tory of his own land. No one would know from
his writings that high deeds of sacrifice in battle
had been done by other nations. He knew of them,
but he did not care to write about them. Nor can
we trace in his work any care for national struggles
or national Uf e beyond this island — except in a few
sonnets and short pieces concerning Poland and
Montenegro — an isolation of interests which cannot

26 BROWNING

be imputed to any other great poet of the first part
of the nineteenth century, excepting Keats, who
had no British or foreign interests. Keats had no
country save the country of Beauty.

At all these points Browning differed from
Tennyson. He never displayed a special patriotism.
On the contrary, he is more Italian than English,
and he is more quick to see and sympathise with
the national characteristics of Spain or France or
Germany, than he is with those of England. No
insular feeling prevented him from being just to
foreigners, or from having a keen pleasure in
writing about them. Strafford is the only play he
wrote on an English subject, and it is rather a
study of a character which might find its place
in any aristocracy than of an English character.
Even Pym and Hampden fail to be truly English,
and it would not have been difficult for any one but
I Browning to take their eminent English elements
out of them. Paracelsus and Sordello belong to
Germany and Italy, and there are scarcely three
poems in the whole of the seven numbers of the
Bells and Pomegranates which even refer to Eng-
land. Italy is there, and chiefly Italy. In De Gtisti-
bus he contrasts himself with his friend who loves
England :

Your ghost will walk, you lover of trees,

(If our loves remain)

In an English lane
By a cornfield-side a-flutter with poppies.

* * * *

What I love best in all the world

Is a castle, precipice-encurled.

In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine.

" Look for me, old fellow of mine, if I get out of the

BROWmNG AND TENNYSON 27

grave, in a seaside house in South Italy," and he
describes the place and folk he loves, and ends :

Open my heart and you will see
Graved inside of it, " Italy."
Such lovers old are I and she :
So it always was, so shall ever be !

It is a poem written out of his very heart.

And then, the scenery ? It is not of our country
at all. It is of many lands, but, above all, it is
vividly Italian. There is no more minute and
subtly-felt description of the scenery of a piece of
village country between the mountains and the sea,
with all its life, than in the poem called The
Englishman in Italy. The very title is an outline
of Browning's position in this matter. We find
this English poet in France, in Syria, in Greece,
in Spain, but not in England. We find Rome, \
Florence, Venice, Mantua, Verona, and forgotten
towns among the Apennines painted with happy
love in verse, but not an English town nor an
English village. The flowers, the hills, the ways
of the streams, the talk of the woods, the doings of
the sea and the clouds in tempest and in peace, the
aspects of the sky at noon, at sunrise and sunset,
are all foreign, not English. The one little poem
which is of English landscape is written by him in
Italy (in a momentary weariness with his daily
adoration), and under a green impulse. Delightful
as it is, he would not have remained faithful to it
for a day. Every one knows it, but that we may
realise how quick he was to remember and to touch
a corner of early Spring in England, on a soft and
windy day — for all the blossoms are scattered — I
quote it here. It is well to read his sole contribu-

28 BROWNING

tion (except in Pauline and a few scattered illus-
trations) to the scenery of his own country :

Oh, to be in England
Now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
! Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,

While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England — now!

And after April, when May follows,

And the whitethroat builds, and aU the swallows!

Hark! where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge

Leans to the field and scatters on the clover

Blossoms and dewdrops — at the bent spray's edge —

That's the wise thrush ; he sings each song twice over,

Lest you should think he never could recapture

The first fine careless rapture !

And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,

All will be gay, when noontide wakes anew

The buttercups, the little children's dower ;

— Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

So it runs ; but it is only a momentary memory ;
and he knew, when he had done it, and to his
great comfort, that he was far away from England.
But when Tennyson writes of Italy — as, for instance,
in Mariana in the South — how apart he is ! How
great is his joy when he gets back to England !

Then, again, when Browning was touched by the
impulse to write about a great deed in war, he does
not choose, like Tennyson, English subjects. The
Cavalier Ttmes have no importance as patriot songs.
They are mere experiments. The poem. How
They brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix, has
twice their vigour. His most intense war-incident
is taken from the history of the French wars under
Napoleon. The most ringing and swiftest poem of

BROWNING AND TENNYSON 29

personal dash and daring — and at sea, as if lie was
tired of England's mistress-ship of the waves — a
poem one may set side by side with the fight of
The Revenge, is Hervi Riel. It is a tale of a Breton
sailor saving the French fleet from the EngHsh,
with the sailor's mockery of England embedded
in it ; and Browning sent the hundred pounds
he got for it to the French, after the siege of
Paris.

It was not that he did not honour his country,
but that, as an artist, he loved more the foreign
lands ; and that in his deepest life he belonged less j
to England than to the world of man. The great ;
deeds of England did not prevent him from feeling,
with as much keenness as Tennyson felt those of
England, the great deeds of France and Italy.
National self-sacrifice in critical hours, splendid
courage in love and war, belonged, he thought, to
all peoples. Perhaps he felt, with Tennyson's
insularity dominating his ears, that it was as well
to put the other side. I think he might have done
a little more for England. There is only one
poem, out of all his huge production, which
recognises the great deeds of our Empire in war ;
and this did not come of a life-long feeling, such as
he had for Italy, but from a sudden impulse which
arose in him, as sailing by, he saw Trafalgar and
Gibraltar, glorified and incarnadined by a battle-
sunset :

Nobly, nobly Cape Saint Vincent to the North-west died

away;
Sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz Bay ;
Bluish 'mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar lay ;
In the dimmest North-east distance dawned Gibraltar grand

and grey ;

30 BROWNING

"Here and here did England help me : how can I help

England ? " — say.
Whoso turns as I, this evening, turn to God to praise and

pray,
While Jove's planet rises yonder, silent over Africa.

It is a little thing, and when it leaves the sunset it
is poor. And there is twice the fervour of its sunset
in the description of the sunrise at Asolo in Pippa
Passes.

Again, there is scarcely a trace in his work of
any vital interest in the changes of thought and
feeling in England during the sixty years of his
life, such as appear everywhere in Tennyson. No
one would know from his poetry (at least until the
very end of his life, when he wrote Francis Furini)
that the science of life and its origins had been
revolutionised in the midst of his career, or, save
in A Death in the Desert, that the whole aspect of
theology had been altered, or that the democratic
movement had taken so many new forms. He
showed to these English struggles neither attraction
nor repulsion. They scarcely existed for him —
transient elements of the world, merely national,
not universal. Nor .did the literature or art of his
own country engage him half so much as the
literature and art of Italy. He loved both. Few
were better acquainted with Enghsh poetry, or
reverenced it more ; but he loved it, not because it
was English, but of that world of imagination
which has no special country. He cared also for
English art, but he gave all his personal love to
the art of Italy. Nor does he write, as Tennyson
loved to do, of the daily life of the English farmer
squire, miller, and sailor, and of English sweet-

BROWNING AND TENNYSON 31

hearting, nor of the English park and brook and
village-green and their indwellers, but of the work-
girl at Asolo, and the Spanish monk in his garden,
and the Arab riding through the desert, and of the
Duchess and her servant flying through the moun-
tains of Moldavia, and of the poor painters at
Fano and Florence, and of the threadbare poet at
Valladolid, and of the peasant-girl who fed the
Tuscan outlaw, and of the poor grammarian who
died somewhere in Germany (as I think Browning
meant it), and of the Jews at Rome, and of the
girl at Pornic with the gold hair and the peasant's
hand, and of a hundred others, none of whom are
English. All his common life, all his love-making,
sorrow, and joy among the poor, are outside this
country, with perhaps two exceptions ; and neither
of these has the English note which sounds so soft
and clear in Tennyson. This is curious enough,
and it is probably one of the reasons why English
people for a long time would have so little to do
with him. All the same, he was himself woven of \
England even more than of Italy. The English
elements in his character and work are more than
the Italian. His intellect was English, and had the
English faults as well as the English excellences. His (
optimism was English; his steadfast fighting quality,
his unyielding energy, his directness, his desire to
get to the root of things, were English. His religion
was the excellent English compromise or rather
balance of dogma, practice, and spirituality which
laymen make for their own life. His bold sense of
personal freedom was English. His constancy to
his theories, whether of faith or art, was English ;
his roughness of form was positively early Teutonic.

32 BROWNIN-G

Then his wit, his esprit* his capacity for induing
the skin and the soul of other persons at remote
times of history ; his amazing inventiveness and the
ease of it, at which point he beats Tennyson out of
the field; his play, so highly fantastical, with his
subjects, and the way in which the pleasure he took
in this play overmastered his literary self-control ;
his fantastic games with metre and with rhyme,
his want of reverence for the rules of his art;
his general lawlessness, belong to one side, but to
one side only, of the Celtic nature. But the
ardour of the man, the pathos of his passion and
the passion of his pathos, his impulse towards the
infinite and the constant rush he made into its
indefinite realms ; the special set of his imagination
towards the fulfilment of perfection in Love; his
vision of Nature as in colour, rather than in
light and shade ; his love of beauty and the kind of
[beauty that he loved ; his extraordinary delight in
iall kinds of art as the passionate shaping of part
iof the unapproachable Beauty — these were all old
'Italian.

* Much has been said of the humour of Browning. But it is
rather wit than humour which we perceive. The gentle pathos
which belongs to humour, the pitiful turn of the humourist upon
himself, his smile at his own follies and those of mankind, the
half light, like that of evening, in which humour dwells, are
wanting in Browning. It is true he has the charity of humour,
though not its pathetic power. Pity for the follies and sins of
men does fill Browning's poetry. But, all the same, he is too
keen, too brilliant, too fierce at times for a humourist. The light
in which we see the foolish, fantastic, amusing, or contemptible
things of life is too bright for humour. He is a Wit — vrith
charity — not a humourist. As to Tennyson, save in his Lincoln-
shire poems and Will Waterproofs Soliloquy, he was strangely
devoid either of humour or of wit.

BROWNING AND TENNYSON 33

Then I do not know whether Browning had
any Jewish blood in his body by descent, but he
certainly had Jewish elements in his intellect, spirit,
and character. His sense of an ever-victorious
Righteousness atthe centreof the universe, whomone
might always trust and be untroubled, was Jewish,
but he carried it forward with the New Testament
and made the Righteousness identical with absolute
Love. Yet, even in this, the Old Testament ele-
ments were more plainly seen than is usual among
Christians. The appearance of Christ as all-con-
quering love in Easter-Day ^nd the scenery which
surrounds him are such as Ezekiel might have con-
ceived and written. ' Then his intellectual subtlety,
the metaphysical minuteness of his arguments, his
fondness for parenthesis, the way in which he pursued
the absolute whileheloaded it with a hostof relatives,
and conceived the universal through a multitude of
particulars, the love he had for remote and un-
expected analogies, the craft with which his intellect
persuaded him that he could insert into his poems
thoughts, illustrations, legends, and twisted knots of
reasoning which a fine artistic sense would have
omitted, were all as Jewish as the Talmud. There
was also a Jewish quality in his natural description,
in the way he invented diverse phrases to express
different aspects of the same phenomenon, a thing
for which the Jews were famous ; and in the way in
which he peopled what he described with animal life
of all kinds, another remarkable habit of the Jewish -
poets. Moreover, his pleasure in intense colour, in
splashes and blots of scarlet and crimson and deep
blue and glowing green ; in precious stones for the :
sake of their colour — sapphire, ruby, emerald, :

34 BROWNING

chrysolite, pearl, onyx, chalcedony (he does not care
jfor the diamond); in the flame of gold, in the
1 crimson of blood, is Jewish. So also is his love
I of music, of music especially as bringing us nearest
to what is ineffable in God, of music with human
aspiration in its heart and sounding in its phrases.
It was this Jewish element in Browning, in all its
many forms, which caused him to feel with and to
write so much about the Jews in his poetry. The two
poems in which he most fully enshrines his view of
human life, as it may be in the thought of God and
as it ought to be conceived by us, are both in the
mouth of Jews, of Rabbi Ben Ezra and Jochanan
Hakkadosh. In Filippo Baldinucci the Jew has the
best of the battle; his courtesy, intelligence, and
physical power are contrasted with the coarseness,
feeble brains, and body of the Christians. In Holy-
Cross Day, the Jew, forced to listen to a Christian
sermon, begins with coarse and angry mockery, but
passes into solemn thought and dignified phrase.
No English poet, save perhaps Shakespeare, whose
exquisite sympathy could not leave even Shylock
unpitied, has spoken of the Jew with compassion,
knowledge, and admiration, till Browning wrote of
him. The Jew lay deep in Browning. He was a
complex creature ; and who would understand or
rather feel him rightly, must be able to feel some-
thing of the nature of all these races in himself.
But Tennyson was not complex. He was English
,' and only English.

But to return from this digression. Browning
does not stand alone among the poets in the apart-
ness from his own land of which I have written.
Byron is partly with him. Where Byron differs from

BROWNING AND TENNYSON 35

him is, first, in this — that Byron had no poetic love
for any special country as Browning had for Italy ;
and, secondly, that his country was, alas, himself,
until at the end, sick of his self-patriotism, he gave
himself to Greece. Keats, on the other hand, had no
country except, as I have said, the country of Love-
liness. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley were
not exclusively English. Shelley belonged partly
to Italy, but chiefly to that future of mankind in
which separate nationalities and divided patriotisms
are absorbed. Wordsworth and Coleridge, in their
early days, were patriots of humanity ; they actually
for a time abjured their country. Even in his later
days Wordsworth's sympathies reach far beyond
England. But none of these were so distinctively
English as Tennyson, and none of them were so \
outside of England as Browning. Interesting as it i
is, the completeness of this isolation from England '
was a misfortune, not a strength, in his poetry.

There is another thing to say in this connection.
The expansion of the interests of the English
poets beyond England was due in Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Shelley, and partly in Byron, to the
great tidal-wave of feeling for man as man, which,
rising long before the French Revolution, was
lifted into twice its height and dashed on the
shore of the world with overwhelming volume, by
the earthquake in France of 1789. Special national
sentiments were drowned in its waters. Patriotism
was the duty of man, not to any one nation but
to the whole of humanity, conceived of as the only
nation.

In 1832 there was little left of that influence in
England among the educated classes, and Tennyson's

36 BROWNING

insular patriotism represented their feeling for many
years, and partly represents it now. But the ideas
of the Revolution were at the same time taking a
wiser and more practical form among the English
democracy than they even had at their first outburst
in France, and this emerged, on one side of it, in
the idea of internationalism. It grew among the
propertied classes from the greater facilities of travel,
from the wide extension of commercial, and espe-
cially of literary, intercommunication. Literature,
even more than commerce, diminishes the oppositions
and increases the amalgamation of nations. On
her lofty plane nations breathe an air in which their
quarrels die. The same idea grew up of itself among
the working classes, not only in England, but in
Germany, Italy, France, America. They began, and
have continued, to lose their old belief in distinct
and warring nationalities. To denationalise the
nations into one nation only — the nation of man-
kind — is too vast an idea to grow quickly, but in
all classes, and perhaps most in the working class,
there are an increasing number of thinking men
who say to the varied nations, "We are all one ; our
interests, duties, rights, nature, and aims are one."
And, for my part, I believe that in the full develop-
ment of that conception the progress of mankind is
most deeply concerned, and will be best secured.

Now, when all these classes in Englandy brought
to much the same point by different paths, seek for a
poetry which is international rather than national, and
which recognises no special country as its own, they
do not find it in Tennyson, butthey do find Browning
writing, and quite naturally, as if he belonged to
other peoples as much as to his own, even more than

BROWmMG AND TENNYSON 37

to his own. And they also find that he had been
doing this for many years before their own inter-
national interests had been awakened. That, then,
differentiates him completely from Tennyson, and
is another reason why he was not read in the past
but is read in the present.

9. Again, with regard to politics and social
questions, Tennyson made us know what his general
politics were, and he has always pleased or displeased
men by his political position. The British Constitution
appears throughout his work seated like Zeus on
Olympus, with all the world awaiting its nod. Then,
also, social problems raise their storm-awakening
heads in his poetry : the Woman's Question ; War ;
Competition ; the State of the Poor ; Education ; a
State without Religion ; the Marriage Question ;
where Freedom lies ; and others. These are brought
by Tennyson, though tentatively, into the palace of
poetry and given rooms in it.

At both these points Browning differed from
Tennyson. He was not the politician, not the
SQciologist, only the poet. No trace of the British
Constitution is to be found in his poetry ; no one
could tell from it that he had any social views or
politics at all. Sixty years in close "contact with
this country and its movements, and not a line about
them!

He records the politics of the place and people
of whom or of which he is for the moment writing,
but he takes no side. We know what they thought
at Rome or among the Druses of these matters, but
we do not know what Browning thought. The art-
representation, the Vorstellung of the thing, is all ;
the personal view of the poet is nothing. It is the

38 BROWNING

same in social matters. What he says as a pod
concerning the ideas which should rule the temper
of the soul and human life in relation to our fellow-
men may be applied to our social questions, and
usefully ; but Browning is not on that plane. There
are no poems directly applied to them. This means
that he kept himself outside of the realm of political
and social discussions and in the realm of those
high emotions and ideas out of which imagination in
lonely creation draws her work to light. With
steady purpose he refused to make his poetry the
servant of the transient, of the changing elements
of the world. He avoided the contemporary. For
this high reserve we and the future of art will owe
him gratitude.

On the contrast between the theology we find in
Tennyson and Browning, and on the contrast
between their ethical positions, it will be wiser
not to speak in this introduction. These two con-
trasts would lead me too far afield, and they have
little or nothing to do with poetry. Moreover,
Browning's theology and ethics, as they are called,
have been discussed at wearying length for the last
ten years, and especially by persons who use his
poetry to illustrate from it their own systems of
theology, philosophy, and ethics.

10. I will pass, therefore, to another contrast —
the contrast between them as Artists,

A great number of persons who write about the
poets think, when they have said the sort of things
I have been saying, that they have said cither
enough, or the most important things. The things
;Lrc, indeed, useful to say; they enable us to realise
the poet and his character, and the elements of

BROWNING AND TENNYSON 39

which his poetry is made. They place him in a
clear relation to his time; they distinguish him
from other poets, and, taken all together, they
throw light upon his work. But they are not half
enough, nor are they the most important. They
leave out the essence of the whole matter ; they
leave out the poetry. They illuminate the surface
of his poetry, but they do not penetrate into his
interpretation, by means of his special art, and
under the influence of high emotion, of the beautiful •
and sublime Matter of thought and feeling which
arises out of Nature and Human Nature, the two
great subjects of song ; which Matter the poets rep-
resent in a fprm so noble and so lovely in itself
that, when it is received into a heart prepared for
it, it kindles in the receiver a love of beauty and
sublimity similar to that which the poet felt before
he formed, and while he formed, his poem. Such a
receiver, reading the poem, makes the poem, with
an individucJ difference, in himself. And this
is the main thing ; the eternal, not the temporary
thing.

Almost all I have already discussed with regard
to Tennyson and Browning belongs to the tem-
porary; and the varying judgments which their
public have formed of them, chiefly based on their
appeal to the tendencies of the time, do not at all
predict what the final judgment on these men as
poets is likely to be. That will depend, not on
feelings which belong to the temporary elements
of the passing day, but on how far the eternal and
unchanging elements of art appear in their work.
The things which fitted the poetry of Tennyson to
the years between 1840 and 1870 have already

40 BROWNING

passed away ; the things which, as I have explained,
fitted the poetry of Browning to the tendencies
of the years after 1870 will also disappear, and
I are already disappearing. Indeed, the excessive
transiency of nearly all the interests of cultivated
society during the last ten years is that in them
which most deeply impresses any man who sits
somewhat apart from them. And, at any rate, none
iof these merely contemporary elements, which often
seem to men the most important, will count a
hundred years hence in the estimate of the poetry
either of Tennyson or Browning. They will be of
Kistorical interest, and no more. Matters in their
poetry, now the subjects of warm discussion among
their critics, will be laid aside as materials for
judgment; and justly, for they are of quite imper-
manent value.

Whenever, theri, we try to judge them as poets,
we must do our best to discharge these temporary
things, and consider their poetry as it will seem a
hundred years hence to men who will think seriously
and feel sensitively, even passionately, towards
great and noble Matter of imaginative thought
and emotion concerning human life and the natural
world, and towards lovely creation of such matter
into Form. Their j udgment will be made apart from
the natural prejudices that arise from contemporary
movements. They will not be wiser in their judg-
ment of their own poets than we are about ours,
but they will be wiser in their judgment of our poets,
because, though they will have their own prejudices,
they will not have ours. Moreover, the long, growing,
and incessantly corrected judgment of those best
fitted to feel what is most beautiful in shaping and

BROWNING AND TENNYSON 41

most enduring in thought and feeling penetrated
and made infinite by imagination, will, by that time,
have separated the permanent from the imperma-
nent in the work of Browning and Tennyson.

That judgment will partly depend on the answers,
slowly, as it were unconsciously, given by the
world to two questions. First, how far does their
poetry represent truly and passionately what is
natural and most widely felt in loving human nature, ;
whether terrible or joyful, simple or complex, tragic!
or humorous 1 Secondly, how far is the repre-
sentation beautiful and noble in form, and true to
the laws of their art. That poetry which is nearest
to the most natural, the most universal elements of
human life when they are suffused with love — in
some at least of its various moods — and at the same
time the most beautiful in form, is the best. Iti
wins most affection from mankind, for it is about
noble matters of thought which the greater number
of men and women desire to contemplate, and
about noble matters of passion which the greater
number love and therefore enjoy. This poetry
lasts from generation to generation, is independent
of differences made by climate, by cast, by
nationality, by religion, by politics, by knowledge,
custom, tradition, or morals. These universal,
natural elements of human nature are, in all their
infinite variety and striving, beloved by men, of
undying interest in action, and of immortal plea-
sure in thought. The nearer a poet is to them,
especially to what is loveable, and therefore beauti-
ful in them, the greater and the more enduring
is his work. It follows that this greater work
will also be simple, that is, easy to feel with

42 BROWNING

the heart though it may be difficult to grasp by the
intelligence. Were it not simple in feeling, the
general answer of mankind to the call of love, in
all its forms, for sympathy would be unheard. And
if it be simple in feeUng, it does not much matter
if the deep waters of its thought are difficult for the
understanding to fathom.

It would be ridiculous to dogmatise on a matter
which can only be fully answered a century hence,
but this much is plain. Of these two poets, taking
into consideration the whole of their work,Tennysoii_
is the closest^to huinjaiuiaJau:fiinits__noble, comm^iij^
and loving forms, as Browning is, the .closest _tja„
wfiat is complex, subtle, and tjncpnimon in human ^
hatjffe. The representation both of the simple and
of the complex is a good thing, and both poets
have their place and honour. But the representation
of the complex is plainly the more limited in range
of influence, and appeals to a special class of minds
rather than to mankind at large. There are some,
indeed, who think that the appeal to the few, to
thinkers alone or high-wrought specialists in various
forms of culture, marks out the greater poet. It is
the tendency of literary castes to think that special-
ised work is the greatest. " This man," they say,
" is our poet, not the mob's. He stands apart, and
his apartness marks his greatness." These are
amusing persons, who practically say, " We alone'
understand him, therefore he is great."

Yet a phrase like " apartness makes greatness,"
when justly applied to a poet, marks, not his
superiority of rank, but his inferiority. It relegates
him at once to a lower place. The greatest poets
are loved by all, and understood by all who think

BROWNING AND TENNYSON 43

and feel naturally. Homer was loved by Pericles
and by the sausage-seller. Vergil was read with
joy by Maecenas and Augustus, and by the vine-
dressers of Mantua. Dante ^drew after him the
greatest minds in Italy, and yet is sung to-day by
the shepherds and peasants of the hill-villages of
Tuscany. Shakespeare pleases the most selected
spirits of the world and the galleries of the strolling
theatres.

And though Tennyson and Browning are far
below these mightier poets, yet when we apply to
them this rule, drawn from what we know to
be true of the greatest, Tennyson answers its de-
mand more closely than Browning. The highest
woi'k which poetry can do is to glorify what is
_jnQ5t..jOLatural.,and^,sinipj£. in the whole of loving
Jiumanjiature, and to show the excelling beauty,
not so mucff of the stranger and wilder doings of
the natural world, but of its everyday doings and
their common changes. In doing these two things
with simplicity, passion, and beauty is the finest
work of the arts, the eternal youth, the illimitable
material of poetry, and it will endure while
humanity endures in this world, and in that which
is to come. Among all our cultivated love of the
uncommon, the remote, the subtle, the involved, the
metaphysical, and the terrible — the representation
of which things has its due place, even its
necessity — it is well to think of that quiet truth,
and to keep it as a first principle in the judgment
of the arts. Indeed, the recovery of the natural,
simple, and universal ways of acting and feeling in
men and women who love as the finest subjects of
the arts has always regenerated them whenever, in

44 BROWNING

pursuit of the unnatural, the complicated, the
analytic, and the sensa-tionai, they have fallen into
decay.

Browning did not like this view, being conscious
that his poetry did not answer its demand. Not
only in early but also in later poems, he pictured
his critics stating it, and his picture is scornful
enough. There is an entertaining sketch of Naddo,
the Philistine critic, in the second book of Sordello ;
and the view I speak of is expressed by him among
a huddle of criticisms —

"Would you have your songs endure?
^ Build on the human heart ! — why, to be sure —
Yours is one sort of heart— But I mean theirs,
Ours, everyone's, the healthy heart one cares
To build on ! Central peace, mother of strength,
That's father of . . . ."

This is good fooling, and Naddo is an ass.
Nevertheless, though Naddo makes nonsense of the
truth, he was right in the main, and Browning as
well as Sordello suffered when they forgot or ignored
"— H;hat truth. And, of course. Browning did not
forget or ignore it in more than half his work.
Even in Sordello he tells us how he gave himself
up to recording with pity and love the doings of
the universal soul. He strove to paint the whole.
It was a bold ambition. Few have fulfilled it so
well. None, since Shakespeare, have had a wider
range. His^ortrajiure_oMife33.s..sQ_jnuGh_Jiuu^^
. ^aried t han that of Tennyson, so much more
extensive and detailed, that on this side he excels
Tennyson ; but such portraiture is not necessarily
poetic, and when it is fond of the complex, it is
always in danger of tending to prose. And

BROWNING AND TENNYSON 45

Browning, picturing human life, deviated too much
into the delineation of its more obscure and complex
forms. It was in his nature to do and love this
kind of work; and indeed it has to be done, if
human life is to be painted fully. Only, it is not
to be done too much, if one desires to be always
the poet. For the representation of the complex
and obscure is chiefly done by the analysing under-
standing, and its work and pleasure in it lures the
poet away from art. He loses the poetic turn pf
the thing of which he writes, and what he produces
is not better than rhythmical prose. Again and
again Browning, fell into that misfortune ; and it is
a strange problem how a man, who was in one part
of his nature a great poet, could, under the sway of
another, cease to be a poet. At this point his in-
feriority to Tennyson as a poet is plain. Tennyson
scarcely ever wrote a line which was not unmistak-
ably poetry, while Browning could write pages
which were unmistakably not poetry.

I do not mean, in saying all this, that Browning
did not-ap.peal to that which is..deegest.and^ uni-
versal in Nature and human n.ature, but only that
he did not appeal toit as much as Tennyson.
Browning is often simple, lovely, and universal.
And when he speaks out of that emotional
imagination wherein is the hiding of a poet's
power, and which is the legitimate sovereign of
his intellectual work, he will win and keep the
delight and love of the centuries to come. By
work of tl\is type he will be finally judged and finally
endure ; and, even now, every one who loves great
poetry knows what these master-poems are. As to
the others, the merely subtle, analytic poems in

46 BROWNING

which intellect, not imagination, is supreme, espe-
cially those into which he drifted in his later life
when the ardour of his poetic youth glowed less
warmly — they will always appeal to a certain class
of persons who would like to persuade themselves
that they like poetry but to whom its book is
sealed; and who, in finding out what Browning
means, imagine to their great surprise that they
find out that they care for poetry. What they
really care for is their own cleverness in discover-
ing riddles, and they are as far away from poetry
as Sirius is from the Sun.

There are, however, many true lovers of poetry
who are enthusiastic about these poems. And
parts of them deserve this enthusiasm, for they
have been conceived and made in a wild borderland
between analysis and imagination. They occupy a
place apart, a backwater in the noble stream of
English poetry, filled with strange plants ; and the
final judgment of Browning's rank as an artist will
not depend on them but on the earlier poems,
which, being more " simple, sensuous, and passion-
ate," are nearer to the common love and life of
man. When, then, we apply this test, the difference
of rank between him and Tennyson is not great,
but it is plain. Yet comparison, on this point, is
difficult. Both drew mankind. Tennyson is closer
to that which is most universal in the human heart,
Browning to the vast variety within it ; and men in
the f utiu-e will find their poetic wants best satisfied
by reading the work of both these poets. Let us
say then that in this matter they are equal Each
has done a different part of that portraiture of human
nature which is the chief work of a poet.

BROWNING AND TENNYSON 47

But this is not the only test we may apply to
these men as poets. The second question which
tries the endurance and greatness of poetic work
is this : " How far is any poet's representation of
what is true and loving in itself lovely ? " Their
stuff may be equally good. Is their form equally
good } Is it as beautiful as an artist, whose first
duty is to be true to beauty as the shape of love
and truth, ought to make it .' The judgment of the
future will also be formed on that ground, and
inevitably.

What we call form in poetry may be said to
consist of, or to depend on, three things: (i) on
a noble style; (2) on a harmonious composition,
varied but at unity; (3) on a clear, sweet_melady_of-
lawful movement in verse. These are not every-
thing in poetry, but they are the half of its whole.
The other half is that the "matter " — that is, the
deep substance of amalgamated Thought and Emo-
tion — shouldbe great, vital and fair. But both halves
are necessary, and when the half which regards form
is weak or unbeautiful, the judgment of the future
drops the poems which are faulty in form out of
memory, just as it drops out of its affections poems
which are excellent in form, but of ignoble, unim-
passioned, feeble, or thoughtless matter. There was,
for example, a whole set of poets towards the end
of the Elizabethan period who were close and
weighty thinkers, whose poetry is full of intellec-
tual surprises and difficulties, who were capable of
subtlety o^ expression and even of lovely turns and
phantasies of feeling ; whom students read to-day,
but whom the poetical world does not read at all.
And the reason is that their style, their melody, and

48 BROWNING

their composition do not match in excellence their
matter. Their stuff is good, their form is bad.
The judgment of the future gives them no high
rank. They do not answer well to the test of
which I speak.

I do not mean to apply that analogy altogether,
only partly, to Browning. He rises far above
these poets in style, composition, and melody, but
he skirts their faults. And if we are asked to com-
pare him to Tennyson, he is inferior to Tennyson
at all these points of Form.

I . His composition was rarely sufficiently careful.
It was broken up, overcrowded ; minor objects of
thought or feeling are made too remarkable for
the whole ; there is far too little of poetical per-
spective; the variety of the poem does not always
grow out of the subject itself, but out of the
external play of Browning's mind upon things
remotely connected with the subject ; too many side-
issues are introduced; everything he imagined is
cast upon the canvas, too Uttle is laid aside, so that
the poems run to a length which weakens instead
of strengthens the main impression. A number
of the poems have, that is, the faults of a composer
whose fancy runs away with him, who does not
ride it as a master; and in whom therefore, for a
time, imagination has gone to sleep. Moreover,
only too often, they have those faults of composition
which naturally belong to a poet when he writes
-as if intellect rather than passion were the ultimate
umpire of the work of his art. Of course, there
are many exceptions; and the study of those
exceptions, as exceptions, would make an inter-
esting essay. On the other hand, Tennyson's

BROWNIN-G AND TENNYSON 49

composition was for the most part excellent, and
always careful.

2. Then as to style. Browning had a style of
his own, wholly devoid of imitation, perfectly indi-
vidual, and this is one of the marks of a good
artist. It was the outcome of his poetic character,
and represented it. At this point his style is more
interesting than Tennyson's. Tennyson's style was
often too much worked, too consciously subjected
to the rules of his art, too worn down to smoothness
of texture. Moreover, the natural surprises of an
unchartered individuality do not sufficiently appear
in it (Tennyson repressed the fantastic), though the
whole weight of his character does magnificently
appear. But if Tennyson was too conscious of his
style — a great misfortune especially in passionate
song — Browning did not take any deliberate pains
with his style, and that is a greater misfortune.
His freedom ran into undue licence ; and he seems
to be over-conscious, even proud, of his fantastical
way of writing. His individuality runs riot in his
style. He' paid little attention to the well-estab-
lished rules of his art, in a revulsion, perhaps, from
any imitation of the great models. He had not
enough reverence for his art, and little for the public.
He flung his diction at our heads and said : " This
is myself; take it or leave it."

None of the greater artists of the world have ever
done this. They have not cared for what the world
said, but they have cared for their art. There are
-certain limits to individual capriciousness in style,
long since laid down, as it were, by Beauty herself ;
which, transgressed, lessen, injure, or lose beauty ;
and Browning continually transgressed those limits.

so BROWNING

Again, clearness is one of the first elements in
style, and on poetry attaining clearness, depends, in
great measure, its enduringness in the future. So far
as clearness carries him, Tennyson's poetry is sure to
last. So far as Browning's obscurity goes, his poetry
willnotlastlike Tennyson's. Itis all very well for his
students to say that he is not obscure ; he is. Nor
is it by any exceptional depth of thought or by any
specially profound analysis of the soul that Brown-
ing is obscure. It is by his style. By that he makes
what is easy difficult. The reader does not get at
what he means as he gets at what Homer, Dante,
and Shakespeare mean. Dante and Shakespeare
are often difficult through the depth and difficulty of
their matter ; they are not difficult, except Shake-
speare when he was learning his art, by obscurity
or carelessness of style. But Browning is difficult,
not by his thoughts, but by his expression of them.
A poet has no right to be so indifferent, so careless
of clearness in his art, I might almost say, so lazy.
Browning is negligent to a fault, almost to imperti-
nence. The great poets put the right words in the
right places, and Tennyson is with them in that.
Browning continually puts his words into the wrong
places. He leaves out words necessary for the easy
understanding of the passage, and for no reason ex-
cept his fancy. He leaves his sentences half-finished
and his meaning half-expressed. He begins a
sentence, and having begun it, three or four thoughts
connected with it slide into his mind, and instead of
putting them aside or using them in another place,
he jerks them into the middle of his sentence in a
series of parentheses, and then inserts the end of
the original sentence, or does not insert it at all.

BROWNING AND TENNYSON 51

This is irritating except to folk who like discovery
of the twisted rather than poetry ; and it is quite
needless. It is worse than needless, for it lowers
the charm and the dignity of the poetry.

Yet, there is something to say on the other side.
It is said, and with a certain justice, that " the
style is the man. Strip his style away, and where
is the man .' Where is the real Browning if we
get him to change a way of writing in which he
naturally shaped his thought .'' " Well, no one
would ask him to impose on himself a style which
did not fit his nature. That would be fatal. When
he has sometimes tried to do so, as in a few of the
dramas, we scarcely recognise our poet, and we
lose half of his intellectual and poetic charm. Just
as Carlyle when he wrote away from his natural
style, as in the life of Sterling and Schiller, is not
the great writer he is elsewhere, so was it with
Browning. Were we savage satirists, bUnded by
our savagery, we might then say both of Browning
..and Carlyle that half their power lay in their fan-
tastic, rocky style. We should be quite wrong.
Their style was the exact clothing of their thought.
They wrote exactly as they thought ; and when
they put their thought into other clothing, when
they doctored their style, they did not represent
what they really thought. No sensible person then
would have asked Browning to change his style, but
would have asked him not to exaggerate it into its
defects. It is plain he could have kept it within
bounds. He has done so frequently. But as fre-
quently he has allowed it to leap about as wildly as
a young colt. He should have submitted it to the
manige, and ridden it then where he pleased. A

52 BROWNING

very little trouble on his part, a very little sacrifice
of his unbridled fancifulness, would have spared us
a great deal of unnecessary trouble, and made his
poetry better and more enduring.

Another excuse may be made for his faults of
style. It may be said that in one sense the faults
are excellences. When a poet has to represent ex-
cessively subtle -pbases of thought and feeling, with
a crowd of side-thoughts and side-feelings intruding
on them; when he has to describe the excessive
oddities, the cur-ious_-turHa&-ot_h.uiiian,^i50tion in
strange inward conditions or outward circumstances
or when he has to deal with rugged or even savage
characters under the sway of the passions; he
cannot, we are told, do it otherwise than Browning
did it, and, instead of being lazy, he used these
quips and cranks of style deliberately.

The excuse has something in it. But, all the
same, an artist should have managed it otherwise.
Shakespeare was far more subtle in thought than
Browning, and he had to deal with every kind of
strange circumstance and character ; but his com-
position and his style illuminate the characters,
order the circumstances, and render clear, as, for
example, in the Sonnets, the subtleties of his
thought. A great artist, by his comprehensive
grasp of the main issue of his work, even in a
short lyric or a small picture, and by his luminous
representation of it, suggests, without direct expres-
sion of them, all the strange psychology, and the
play of character in the situations. And such an
artist does this excellent thing by his noble com-
position, and by his lofty, clear, and melodious
style. The excuse is, then, of some weight, but it

BROWNING AND TENNYSON 53

does not relieve Browning of the charge. Had he
been a greater artist, he would have been a
greater master of the right way of saying things
and a greater pleasurer of the future. Had he
taken more pains with his style, but without losing
its individual elements, he might have had as high
a poetic place as Tennyson in the judgment of
posterity.

3. In one thing more — in this matter of form —
the beauty of poetry lies. It is in sweetness of mel-
ody and its charm ; in exquisite fitness of its music
to its thought and its emotion ; in lawful change of
harmony making enchanting variety to the ear ; in
the obedience of the melodies to the laws of
the different kinds of poetry ; and in the lovely
conduct of the harmonies, through all their changes,
to that finished close which throws back its own
beauty on all that has preceded it. This part of the
loveliness of form in poetry, along with composi-
tion and style — for without these and without noble
matter of thought poetry is nothing but pleasant
noise — secures also the continuous delight of men
and the approving j udgment of the future ; and in this
also Tennyson, who gave to it the steady work of a
lifetime, stands above his brother-poet. Browning
was far too careless of his melody. He frequently
sacrificed it, and needlessly, to his thought. He
may have imagined that he strengthened the thing
he thought by breaking the melody. He did not,
he injured it. He injured the melody also by cast-
ing into the middle of it, Uke stones into a clear
water, rough parenthetic sounds to suit his paren-
thetic phrases. He breaks it sometimes into two
with violent clanging words, with discords which he

54 BROWNING

does not resolve, but forgets. And in the pleasure
he took in quaint oddities of sound, in jarring tricks
with his metre, in fantastic and difficult arrange-
ments of rhyme, in scientific displays of double
rhymes, he, only too often, immolates melody on
the altar of his own cleverness.

A great many of the poems in which the natural
loveliness of melody is thus sacrificed or maimed
will last, on account of the closely-woven work of
the intellect in them, and on account of their vivid
presentation of the travail of the soul ; that is, they
will last for qualities which might belong to prose ;
but they will not last as poetry. And other
poems, in which the melody is only interrupted
here and there, will lose a great deal of the con-
tinuity of pleasure they would have given to man
had they been more careful to obey those laws of
fine melody which Tennyson never disobeys.

It is fortunate that neither of these injuries can
be attributed to the whole of his work ; and I am
equally far from saying that his faults of style and
composition belong to all his poetry.

There are a number of poems the melody of
which is beautiful, in which, if there are discords,
they are resolved into a happy concord at their
close. There are others the melody of which is so
strange, brilliant, and capturing that their sound is
never forgotten. There are others the subtle, minor
harmonies of which belong to and represent remote
pathetic phases of human passion, and they, too,
are heard by us in lonely hours of pitiful feeling,
and enchant the ear and heart. And these will
endure for the noble pleasure of man.

There are also poems the style of which is fitted

BROWNING AND TENNYSON 55

most happily to the subject, like the Letter of
Karshish to his Friend, in which Browning has been
so seized by his subject, and yet has so mastered it,
that he has forgotten to intercalate his own fancies ;
and in which, if the style is broken, it is broken in
full harmony with the situation, and in obedience
to the unity of impression he desired to make.
There are others, like Abt Vogler, in which the
style is extraordinarily noble, clear, and uplifted ;
and there are long passages in the more important
poems, like Paracelsus, where the joy and glory of
the thought and passion of Browning inform the
verse with dignity, and make its march stately with
solemn and beautiful music. Where the style and
melody are thus fine the composition is also good.
The parts, in their variety, belong to one another
and to the unity of the whole. Style, melody, and
composition are always in the closest relation.
And this nobleness of composition, style, and
melody is chiefly found in those poems of his
which have to do with the great matter of poetry
— the representation of the universal and simple
passions of human nature with their attendant and
necessary thoughts. And there, in that part of
his work, not in that other part for which he is
unduly praised, and which belongs to the over-
subtilised and over-intellectual time in which our
self-conscious culture now is striving to resist its
decay, and to prove that its disease is health, is the
lasting power of Browning.

And then, beyond all these matters of form,
there is the poet himself, alone among his fellows
in his unique and individual power, who has fast-
ened himself into our hearts, added a new world

56 BROWNING

to our perceptions, developed our lives, and enlarged
our interests. And there are the separate and
distinguished excellences of his work — the virtues
which have no defects, the virtues, too, of his
defects, all the new wonders of his realm — the
many originalities which have justly earned for
him that high and lonely seat on Parnassus on
which his noble Shadow sits to-day, unchallenged
in our time save by that other Shadow with whom,
in reverence and love, we have been perhaps too
bold to contrast him.

CHAPTER II

THE TREATMENT OF NATURE

IT is a difficult task to explain or analyse the
treatment of Nature by Browning. It is easy
enough to point out his remarkable love of her colour,
his vivid painting of brief landscapes, his minute
observation, his flashing way of description, his feel-
ing for the breadth and freshness of Nature, his love
of flowers and animals, and the way he has of hitting
and emphasising the central point or light of a
landscape. This is easy work, but it is not so easy
to capture and define the way in which his soul,
when he was alone, felt with regard to the heavens,
and the earth, and all that therein is. Others, like
Wordsworth, have stated this plainly : Browning
has nowhere defined his way. What his intellect
held the Natural World to be, in itself; what it
meant for man ; the relation in which it stood to
God and God to it — these things are partly plain.
They have their attraction for us. It is always
interesting to know what an imaginative genius
thinks about such matters. But it is only a bio-
graphical or a half-scientific interest. But what
we want to discover is how Browning, as a poet,
felt the. world of Nature. We have to try and
catch the unconscious attitude of his soul when the

57

S8 BROWNING

Universe was at work around him, and he was for
the time its centre — and this is the real difficulty.

Sometimes we imagine we have caught and fixed
this elusive thing, but we finally give up the quest.
The best we can do is to try to find the two or three
general thoughts, the most frequently recurring
emotions Browning had when Nature at sundry
hours and in diverse manners displayed before him
her beauty, splendour, and fire, and seemed to ask
his worship ; or again, when she stood apart from
him, with the mocking smile she often wears, and
whispered in his ear, "Thou shalt pursue me
always, but never find my secret, never grasp my
streaming hair." And both these experiences are
to be found in Browning. Nature and he are some-
times at one, and sometimes at two; but seldom
the first, and generally the second.

The natural world Tennyson describes is for the
greater part of it a reflection of man, or used to
heighten man's feeling or to illustrate his action,
or sentimentalised by memorial associations of
humanity, or, finally, invented as a background for
a human subject, and with a distinct direction to-
wards that subject. Browning, with a few excep-
tions, does the exact opposite. His natural world
is not made by our thought, nor does it reflect
our passions. His illustrations, drawn from it, of
our actions, break down at certain points, as if the
illustrating material were alien from our nature.
Nature, it is true, he thinks, leads up to man, and
therefore has elements in her which are dim pro-
phecies and prognostics of us; but she is only
connected with us as the road is with the goal it
reaches in the end. She exists independently of

THE TREATMENT OF NATURE 59

US, but yet she exists to suggest to us what we
may become, to awaken in us dim longings and
desires, to surprise us into confession of our in-
adequacy, to startle us with perceptions of an
infinitude we do not possess as yet but may
possess; to make us feel our ignorance, weak-
ness, want of finish ; and by partly exhibiting the
variety, knowledge, love, power, and finish of God,
to urge us forward in humble pursuit to the infinite
in him. The day Browning climbs Mont Salfeve,
at the beginning of his poem La Saisiaz, after a
description of his climb in which he notes a host
of minute quaintnesses in rock and flower, and
especially little flares of colour, all of them unsenti-
mentalised, he suddenly stands on the mountain-top,
and is smitten with the glory of the view. What
does he see .? Himself in Nature > or Nature her-
self, like a living being? Not at all. He sees
what he thinks Nature is there to teach us — not
herself, but what is beyond herself. "I was sta-
tioned," he cries, deliberately making this point,
" face to face with — Nature .' — rather with Infini-
tude." We are not in Nature : a part of God
aspiring to the whole is there, but not the all of
God. And Nature shows forth her glory, not
to keep us with herself, but to send us on to
her Source, of whom the universe is but a shred.
The universe of what we call matter in all its
forms, which is the definition of Nature as I speak
of it here, is one form to Browning of the creative
joy of God, : we are another form of the same joy.
Nor does Browning conceive, as Wordsworth con-
ceived, of any pre-established harmony between us
and the natural world, so that Humanity and Nature

6o BROWNING

can easily converse and live together ; so that we can
express our thoughts and emotions in terms of
Nature ; or so that Nature can have, as it were, a
human soul. This is not Browning's conception.
If he had such a conception he would frequently
use in his descriptions what Ruskin calls the
" pathetic fallacy," the use of which is excessively
common in Tennyson. I can scarcely recall more
than a very few instances of this in all the poetry
of Browning. Even where it seems to occur,
where Nature is spoken of in human terms, it does
not really occur. Take this passage from James
Lees Wife:

Oh, good gigantic smile o' the brown old earth,
This autumn morning ! How he sets his bones

To bask i' the sun, and thrusts out knees and feet

For the ripple to run over in its mirth ;

Listening the while, where on the heap of stones

The white breast of the sea-lark twitters sweet.

The smile, the mirth, the listening, might be said
to impute humanity to Nature : but the Earth and
the Sea are plainly quite distinct from us. These are
great giant creatures who are not ourselves : Titans
who live with one another and not with us ; and
the terms of our humanity are used to make us
aware of their separate existence from us, not of
their being images only of our mind.

Another passage will illustrate the same habit
of Browning's mind with Nature. He describes, for
the purpose of his general thought, in Fifine at the
Fair, the course of a stormy sunset. The clouds,
the sun, the night, act like men, and are written of
in terms of humanity. But this is only to explain
matters to us; the mighty creatures themselves

THE TREATMENT OF NATURE 6i

have nothing to do with us. They live their own
vast, indifferent life ; and we see, like spectators,
what they are doing, and do not understand what
we see. The sunset seems to him the last act of an
ever-recurring drama, in which the clouds barricade
the Sun against his rest, and he plays with their
opposition hke the huge giant he is ; till Night,
with her terrific mace, angry with them for pre-
venting the Sun from repose, repose which will
make her Queen of the world, beats them into ruin.
This is the passage :

For as on edifice of cloud i' the grey and green

Of evening, — • built about some glory of the west,

To barricade the sun's departure, — manifest.

He plays, pre-eminently gold, gilds vapour, crag, and crest

Which bend in rapt suspense above the act and deed

They cluster round and keep their very own, nor heed

The world at watch ; while we, breathlessly at the base

O' the castellated bulk, note momently the mace

Of night fall here, fall there, bring change with every blow,

Alike to sharpened shaft and broadened portico

r the structure ; heights and depths, beneath the leaden stress

Crumble and melt and mix together, coalesce.

Reform, but sadder still, subdued yet more and more

By every fresh defeat, till wearied eyes need pore

No longer on the dull impoverished decadence

Of all that pomp of pile in towering evidence

So lately. — Fifine, cvi.

It is plain that Browning separates us altogether
from the elemental life of these gigantic beings.
And what is true of these passages is true, with one
or two exceptions, of all the natural descriptions of
Browning in <which the pathetic fallacy seems to be
used by him. I need not say how extraordinarily
apart this method of his is from that of Tennyson.
Then Tennyson, like Coleridge — only Tennyson

62 BROWNING

is as vague and wavering in this belief as Coleridge
is firm and clear in it — sometimes speaks as if
Nature did not exist at all apart from our thought :

Her life the eddying of our living soul —

a possible, even a probable explanation. But it
is not Browning's view. There is a celebrated
passage in Paracelsus which is quite inconsistent
with it. All Nature, from the beginning, is made
to issue forth from the joy God has in making, in
embodying his thought in form; and when one
form has been made and rejoiced in, in making
another still more lovely on the foundation of the
last. So, joy after joy, the world was built, till,
in the life of all he has made, God sees his ancient
rapture of movement and power, and feels his
delight renewed. I will not quote it here, but only
mark that we and the " eddying of our living soul "
have nothing to do with the making of this Nature.
It is not even the thoughts of God in us. God and
Nature are alone, and were alone together countless
years before we were born. But man was the
close of all. Nature was built up, through every
stage, that man might know himself to be its
close — its seal — but not it. It is a separate, un-
human form of God. Existing thus apart, it does
a certain work on us, impressing us from without.
The God in it speaks to the God in us. It may
sometimes be said to be interested in us, but not
like a man in a man. He even goes so far as to
impute to Nature, but rarely, such an interest in us;
but in reality he rather thinks that we, being Nature's
end, have at such times touched for a moment some
of those elements in her which have come down to

THE TREATMENT OF NATURE 63

US — elements apart from the soul. And Browning
takes care, even when he represents Nature as sud-
denly at one with us, to keep up the separateness.
The interest spoken of is not a human interest, nor
resembles it. It is like the interest Ariel takes in
Prospero and Miranda — an elemental interest, that
of a creature whose nature knows its radical differ-
ence from human nature. If Nature sees us in
sorrow or in joy, she knows, in these few passages
of Browning's poetry, or seems to know, that we
mourn or rejoice, and if she could feel with us she
would ; but she cannot quite do so. Like Ariel, she
would be grieved with the grief of Gonzalo, were her
affections human. She has then a wild, unhuman,
unmoral, unspiritual interest in us, like a being
who has an elemental life, but no soul. But
sometimes' she is made to go farther, and has
the same kind of interest in us which Oberon
has in the loves of Helena and Hermia. When
we are loving, and on the verge of such untroubled
joy as Nature has always in her being, then she
seems able, in Browning's poetry, to actually work
for us, and help us into the fulness of our joy. f In
his poem, By the Fireside, he tells how he and the
woman he loved were brought to know their love.
It is a passage full of his peculiar view of Nature.
The place where the two lovers stay their footsteps
on the hill knows all about them. " It is silent and
aware." But it is apart from them also :

,It has had its scenes, its joys, and crimes,
But that is its own affair.

And its silence also is its own. Those who linger
there think that the place longs to speak ; its bosom

64 BROWNING

seems to heave with all it knows ; but the desire is
its own, not ours transferred to it. But when the
two lovers were there, Nature, of her own accord,
made up a spell for them and troubled them into
speech :

A moment after, and hands unseen
Were hanging the night around us fast ;

But we knew that a bar was broken between
Life and life : we were mixed at last

In spite of the mortal screen.

The forests had done it ; there they stood ;

We caught for a moment the powers at play :
They had mingled us so, for once and good,

Their work was done — we might go or stay,
They relapsed to their ancient mood.

Not one of the poets of this century would have
thought in that fashion concerning Nature. Only
for a second, man happened to be in harmony with
the Powers at play in Nature. They took the two
lovers up for a moment, made them one, and
dropped them. " They relapsed to their ancient
mood." The line is a whole lesson in Browning's
view of Nature. But this special interest in us is
rare, for we are seldom in the blessed mood of unself-
conscious joy and love. When we are, on the other
hand, self-conscious, or in doubt, or out of harmony
with love and joy, or anxious for the transient
things of the world — Nature, unsympathetic wholly,
mocks and plays with us like a faun. When
Sordello climbs the ravine, thinking of himself as
Apollo, the wood, "proud of its observer," a
mocking phrase, "tried surprises on him, strata-
gems, and games."

Or, our life is too small for her greatness. When

THE TREATMENT OF NATURE 65

ve are unworthy our high lineage, noisy or mean,

hen we ., , ^ . ,

quail before a quiet sky

Or sea, too little for their quietude.

That is a phrase which might fall in with Words-
vorth's theory of Nature, but this which follows
rom The Englishman in Italy, is only Browning's.
The man has climbed to the top of Calvano,

And God'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.

ie is worthy of the glorious sight; full of
;ternal thoughts. Wordsworth would then have
nade the soul of Nature sympathise with his soul.
But Browning makes Nature manifest her apart-
less from the man. The mountains know nothing
)f his soul : they amuse themselves with him ; they
ire even half angry with him for his intrusion —
L foreigner who dares an entrance into their untres-
)assed world. Tennyson could not have thought
hat way. It is true the mountains are alive in the
)oet's thought, but not with the poet's life : nor
loes 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, fjefore 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.

66 BROWNING

Total apartness from us ! Nature mocking, sur-
prising 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 clefl :
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, ignoble country in
Childe Roland, one of the finest pieces of descrip-
tion 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 aUve 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

THE TREATMENT OF NATURE 67

does explain it in a passage 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 assemble to discuss

When the sun drops behind their trunks which glare

Like gates of hell : 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 fece :

— 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 enter-
prise, 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
Uke ours to Nature, but he saw joy and rapture and

68 BROWNING

play, even love, moving in everything ; and some-
times he added 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
Nighfs Dream. The Hfe, 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 accu-
rately and as vividly as Tennyson, even more vividly,
because of his extraordinary eye for colour. And
Nature, so described, is of great interest in Brown-
ing'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, Shelley, Byron, and
Keats, is rarely, if ever, found in Browning. This
places him apart. What he loved was man ; and

THE TREATMENT OF NATURE 69

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 gods and
goddesses, 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 passion in Browning's mind.

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

By the Fireside illustrates the same point. No
description can be better, more close, more ob-
served, than of the whole walk over the hill ; but
it is mere scenery for the lovers. The real passion
lies in their hearts.

70 BROWNING

We have then direct description of Nature ; direct
description of man sometimes as influenced by
Nature ; sometimes Nature used as the scenery of
human passion ; 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 pro-
ceeded from the creative joy of God.

Of course this way of thinking permits of the
things of Nature being used to illustrate the doings,
thinkings, and character of man ; and in none of
his poems is such illustration better used than in
Sordello. There is a famous passage, in itself a
noble 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 passage. It describes
Sordello, and it could not better describe Italy :

Sordello foremost in the regal class

Nature has broadly severed from the mass

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

THE TREATMENT OF NATURE 71

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 imagi-
native play to the airy and audacious labour of the
spider. He, that is, Sordello,

O'er-festooning every interval,
As the adventurous spider, malcing 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, fancLfulness, 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 passing wind of impulse, and gemmed
with the dew and sunlight of youth.

Again, in A Bean-Stripe : also Apple-Eating, Fer-
ishtah 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
illustration :

3 BROWNING

Mark the flying orb !
Think'st thou the halo, painted still afresh
At each new cloud-fleece pierced and passaged 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 illustrations are, intimate and
ninute, they are only a few out of a multitude of
hose comparisons which in Browning image what
s in man from that which is within Nature — hints,
jrognostics, prophecies, as he would call them, of
lumanity, but not human.

There is, however, one human passion which
3rowning conceives as existing in Nature — the
Dassion of joy. But it is a different joy from ours.
;t is not dashed by any sorrow, and it is very rarely
hat we are so freed from pain or from self-con-
emplation as to be able to enter even for a brief
lour into the rapture of Nature. That rapture, in
Browning's thought, was derived from the creative
bought of God exercising itself with delight in the
ncessant making of Nature. And its manifestation
vas life, that joyful rush of life in all things into
uller and fuller being. No poet felt this ecstasy
)f mere living in Nature more deeply than Browning,
^is own rapture (the word is not too strong) in it
ippears again and again in his poetry, and when it
loes. Browning is not a man sympathising from

THE TREATMENT OF NATURE 73

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 up-
wards through growth to higher forms of being,
swifter powers of Hving. 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 Thamuris in Aristophanes' Apology.
Thamuris, 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.

'4 BROWNmG

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, impassioned 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 de-
scribe 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. Shelley did this with great stateliness
and subtlety. Browning does not do it, except,

THE TREATMENT OF NATURE 75

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 passion 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 noble 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

76 BROWNING

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 circumflexed,

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 callec
it landscape work. But then the sky is frequent!}
treated alone by Browning ; and is always presen
in power over his landscapes — it, and the winds h
it. This is natural enough for one who lived s<
much in Italy, where the scenery of the sky is mon
superb than that of the earth — so various, noble
and surprising that when Nature plays there, as \
poet, her tragedy and comedy, one scarcely takei
the trouble of considering the earth.

However, we find an abundance of true land
scapes in Browning. They are, with a few excep
tions, Italian ; and they have that grandeur an(
breadth, that intensity given by blazing coloui
that peculiar tint either of labyrinthine or of tragi
sentiment which belong to Italy. I select a fe\
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.

THE TREATMENT OF NATURE 77

River and bridge and street and square
Lay mine, as much at my beck and call,

Tlirough 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 grasses everywhere !
Silence and passion, 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 fer 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 Passes — a glorious outburst of
light, colour, and splendour, impassioned and rush-
ing, the very upsoaring of Apollo's head behind his
furious steeds. It begins with one word, hke 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.

78 BROWNING

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 grey
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 Duchess,
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 hoar of the great sea-shore.

Or we may read the Grammarian s Funeral,vr\itre
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, Brown-
ing 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 spaces of

THE TREATMENT OF NATURE 79

Nature. There is the garden at the beginning
of Paracelsus ; the ravine, step by step, in Pauline ;
the sea-beach, and its little cabihet landscapes, in
James Lees 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 slpwly 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 pic-
tures are larger and nobler, when the natural thing
described is in itself charged with power, terror, or

8o BROWNING

dignity. I give one instance of this, where the
fierce Italian thunderstorm is enhanced by being
the messenger of God's vengeance on guilt. It is
from Pippa Passes. 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 God'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
EngUsh 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

THE TREATMENT OF NATURE 8l

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
mom breaks.

Blaze like a wyvern flying round the sun ;

the woodland bralf:e whose withered fern Dawn
feeds with gold; the moon carried off at sunrise
in purple fire ; the larch-blooms crisp and pink ; the
sanguine heart of the pomegranate ; the filberts rus-
set-sheathed and velvet-capped; the poppies crimson
to blackness ; the red fans of the butterfly 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 passionate seizures of colour. And,
for the last of these colour remembrances, in quieter
tints — almost in black and white — I quote this lovely
vesseixora 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.

8z BROWNING

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 begin-
ning 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 eyeballs 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 classes and the natural objects that encom-
passed them ; not cataloguing them dryly, but shoot-
ing 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 shell of the Sorrento plain,
its sea and mountains, and all the doings of the

THE TREATMENT OF NATURE 83

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. i

Again, there is no poet whose love of animals i
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 pricked a tufted ear ;
Lust of my blood inflamed his yellow balls.

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

84 BROWNING

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-transmuting 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

THE TREATMENT OF NATURE 85

hermit-bee, the soft, small, unfrighted thing, light-
ing on the dead vine-leaf, and twirling and filing
all day. He strikes out the grasshopper at a
touch —

Chirrups the contumacious grasshopper.

He has a swift vision of the azure damsel-fly flitter-
ing 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 chahce of the cam-
panula, and the wasps pricking the papers round
the peaches, and the gnats and early moths craving
their food from God 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 Ufe
his landscapes.

Many of the points I have attempted here to
make are illustrated 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

86 BROWNING

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 Unes, — 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 passage in verse x. where he describes the
loosening of a thick bed of snow from the
mountain-side * — an occurrence which also drew
the interest of Shelley in the Prometheus — which
illustrates what I have said of Browning's con-
ception of the separate hfe, as of giant Titans, 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, Ufts 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 repre-
sents all Nature as full of emotion, as gathered into
a fuller life, by David's prophecy of the coming of

* 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.

THE TREATMENT OF NATURE 87

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, impassioned 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 1
this chapter. Browning, unHke Tennyson, did
not invent his landscapes. He drew directly
from Nature. The landscapes in Pauline and/
Sordello, and in the lyrical poems are plainly recol-j
lections 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 shell on the seashore. Even the imagina-
tive 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
CEnone 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 falUng night. They may be compared with
the walk in Pauline, and indeed one of them with

88 BROWNING

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 fig-
ures, 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

THU TREATMENT OF NATURE 89

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 grass and daisies small
On a certain mound by a churchyard wall.

Daisies and grass be my heart's bed-fellows,

On the mound wind spares and sunshine mellows :

Dance you, reds and whites and yellows !

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 illustrated; 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 descrip-
tions 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, more-
over, 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 Ught.

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 Shelley in the Alastor, and I have no doubt was
influenced by him. The two others, and the more
finished, have already escaped from Shelley, and are
almost pre-Raphaelite, as much so as Keats, in their
detail. Yet all the three are original, not imitative.
They suggest Shelley and Keats, and no more, and
it is only the manner and not the matter of these
90

THE TREATMENT OF NATURE 91

poets that they suggest. Browning became in-
stantly 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 treasure-
able matter for us. It is not often the gods 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 in-
dividuality sufficiently to mark, learn, and inwardly
digest the noble 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 expres-
sion ; 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 obscu-
rities of diction and angularities of expression. He
would have reached more continuously the splendid
level he often attained. This is plentifully illustrated
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 ag^d 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.

92 BROWNING

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 Shelley
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 cele-
brates, but in the spring. It was in his nature, even
in old age, to love with passion the beginnings of
things ; dawn, morning, spring, and youth, and their
quick blood ; their changes, impulses, their unpre-
meditated 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 mass
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 illustrate what Shelley was to him
— the woodland spring which became a mighty river.
Shelley, as first conceived by Browning, seemed to
him like a sacred spring :

THE TREATMENT OF NATURE 93

Scarce worth a moth's flitting, which long grasses 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 illustration of humanity. It is Shelley —
Shelley in his lonely withdrawn character, Shelley
hidden in the wood of his own thoughts, and, like
a spring in that wood, bubbling upwards into per-
sonal 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 Shelley also of whom he thinks
— Shelley 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 something lieth half of life
Before God'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 !

94 BROWNING

How good some of that is ; how bad it is else-
where ! How much it needs thought, concentra-
tion, and yet how vivid also and original! And
the faults of it, of grammar, of want of clearness, of
irritating parenthesis, of broken threads of thought,
of inabiUty to leave out the needless, are faults of
which Browning never quite cleared his work. I do
not think he ever cared to rid himself of them.

The next description is not an illustration of man
by means of Nature. It is almost the only set
description of Nature, without reference to man,
which occurs in the whole of Browning's work. It
is introduced by his declaration (for in this I think
he speaks from himself) of his power of living in
the life of all living things. He does not think of
himself as living in the whole Being of Nature, as
Wordsworth or Shelley might have done. There
was a certain matter-of-factness in him which pre-
vented his belief in any theory of that kind. But
he does transfer himself into the rejoicing life of the
animals and plants, a life which he knows is akin
to his own. And this distinction is true of all his
poetry of Nature. " I can mount with the bird,"
he says.

Leaping airily his pyramid of leaves
And twisted boughs of some tall mountain tree,
Or lilce a fish breathe deep the morning air
In the misty sun- warm water.

This introduces the description of a walk of
twenty-four hours through various scenes of
natural beauty. It is long and elaborate — the
scenery he conceives round the home where he
and Pauline are to live. And it is so close, and so
much of it is repeated in other forms in his later

THE TREATMENT OF NATURE 95

poetry, that I think it is drawn direct from Nature ;
that it is here done of set purpose to show his
band in natural description. It begins with night,
but soon leaves night for the morning and the
aoon. Here is a piece of it :

Morning, the rocks and valleys and old woods.
How the sun brightens in the mist, and here.
Half in the air, like * creatures of the place.
Trusting the elements, living on high boughs
That sway in the wind — look at the silver spray
Flung from the foam-sheet of the cataract
Amid the broken rocks ! Shall we stay here
With the wild hawks ? No, ere the hot noon come
Dive we down — safe ! See, this is our new retreat
Walled in with a. sloped mound of matted shrubs,.
Dark, tangled, old, and green, still sloping down
To a small pool whose waters lie asleep,
Amid the trailing boughs turned water-plants :
And tall trees overarch to keep us in.
Breaking the sunbeams into emerald shafts,
And in the dreamy water one small group
Of two or three strange trees are got together
Wondering at all around —

This is nerveless work, tentative, talkative, no
:lear expression of the whole ; and as he tries to
sxpand it further in lines we may study with
interest, for the very failures of genius are
interesting, he becomes even more feeble. Yet the
Feebleness is traversed by verses of power, like
lightning flashing through a mist upon the sea.
The chief thing to say about this direct, detailed
svork is that he got out of its manner as fast as he
:ould. He never tried it again, but passed on to
suggest the landscape by a few sharp, high-coloured
;vords ; choosing out one or two of its elements and
* Creatures accordant with the place ?

96 BROWNING

flashing them into prominence. The rest was left
to the imagination of the reader.

He is better when he comes forth from the
shadowy woodland-pool into the clear air and open
landscape :

Up for the glowing day, leave the old woods !
See, they part like a ruined arch : the sky !
Blue sunny air, where a great cloud floats laden
With light, like a dead whale that white birds pick,
Floating away in the sun in some north sea.
Air, air, fresh life-blood, thin and searching air.
The clear, dear breath of God that loveth us.
Where small birds reel and winds take their delight !

The last three lines are excellent, but nothing
could be worse than the sensational image of the
dead whale. It does not fit the thing he desires
to illustrate, and it violates the sentiment of the
scene he is describing, but its strangeness pleased his
imagination, and he put it in without a question.
Alas, in after times, he only too often, both in the
poetry of Nature and of the human soul, hurried
into his verse illustrations which had no natural
relation to the matter in hand, just because it
amused him to indulge his fancy. The finished
artist could not do this ; he would hear, as it were,
the false note, and reject it. But Browning, a
natural artist, never became a perfect one. Never-
theless, as his poetry went on, he reached, by
natural power, splendid description, as indeed I
have fully confessed ; but, on the other hand, one is
never sure of him. He is never quite " inevitable."

The attempt at deliberate natural description
in Pauline, of which I have now spoken, is not
renewed in Paracelsus. By the time he wrote that

THE TREATMENT OF NATURE 97

poem the movement and problem of the spirit of
man had all but quenched his interest in natural
scenery. Nature is only introduced as a back-
ground, almost a scenic background for the
players, who are the passions, thoughts, and
aspirations of the intellectual Hfe of Paracelsus.
It is only at the beginning of Part II. that we
touch a landscape :

Over the waters in the vaporous West
The sun goes down as in a sphere of gold
Behind the arm of the city, which between.
With all the length of domes and minarets,
Athwart the splendour, black and crooked runs
Like a Turk verse along a scimitar.

That is all ; nothing but an introduction. Para-
celsus turns in a moment from the sight, and
absorbs himself in himself, just as Browning was
then doing in his own soul. Nearly two thousand
lines are then written before Nature is again
touched upon, and then Festus and Paracelsus are
looking at the dawn ; and it is worth saying how
in this description Browning's work on Nature has
so greatly improved that one can scarcely believe
he is the same poet who wrote the wavering descrip-
tions of Pauline. This is close and clear :

Morn must be near.

Festus. Best ope the casement : see,

The night, late strewn with clouds and flying stars.
Is blank and motionless ; how peaceful sleep
The tree-tops all together ! Like an asp ^
The wind slips whispering from bough to bough.
******

1 Browning, even more than Shelley, was fond of using the
snake in his poetry. Italy is in that habit.
H

98 BROWNING

Paracelsus. See, morn at length. The heavy dark-
ness seems
Diluted, grey and clear without the stars ;
The shrubs bestir and rouse themselves as if
Some snake, that weighed them down all night, let go
His hold ; and from the East, fuller and fuller,
Day, like a mighty river, flowing in ;
But clouded, wintry, desolate, and cold.

That is good, clear, and sufficient; and there the
description should end. But Browning, driven by
some small demon, adds to it three lines of mere
observant fancy.

Yet see how that broad prickly star-shaped plant.
Half-down in the crevice, spreads its woolly leaves,
All thick and glistening with diamond dew.

What is that for .' To give local colour or reality .'
It does neither. It is mere childish artistry. Ten-
nyson could not have done it. He knew when to
stay his hand.*

The finest piece of natural description in Para-

* There is a fine picture of the passing of a hurricane in
Paracelsus (p. 67, vol. i.) which illustrates this inability to stop
when he has done all he needs. Paracelsus speaks :

The hurricane is spent,
And the good boat speeds through the brightening weather;
But is it earth or sea that heaves below ?
The gulf rolls like a meadow-swell, o'erstrewn
With ravaged boughs and remnants of the shore;
And now, some islet, loosened from the land,
Swims past with all its trees, sailing to ocean :
And now the air is full of uptorn canes.
Light strippings from the fan-trees, tamarisks
Unrooted, with their birds still clinging to them.
All high in the wind. Even so my varied life
Drifts by me.

I think that the lines I have italicised should have been left
out. They weaken what he has well done.

THE TREATMENT OF NATURE 99

celsus is of the coming of Spring. It is full of
the joy of life; it is inspired by a passionate
thought, lying behind it, concerning man. It is
still more inspired by his belief that God himself
was eternal joy and filled the universe with rapture.
Nowhere did Browning reach a greater height in
his Nature poetry than in these lines, yet they are
more a description, as usual, of animal life than of
the beauty of the earth and sea :

Then all is still ; earth is a wintry clod :

But spring-wind, like a dancing psaltress, passes

Over its breast to waken it, rare verdure

Buds tenderly upon rough banks, between

The withered tree-roots and the cracks of frost.

Like a smile striving with a wrinkled face ;

The grass grows bright, the bows are swoln with blooms

Like chrysalids impatient for the air.

The shining dorrs are busy, beetles run

Along the furrows, ants make their ado ;

Above, birds fly in merry flocks, the lark

Soars up and up, shivering for very joy ;

Afar the ocean sleeps ; white fishing-gulls

Flit where the strand is purple with its tribe

Of nested limpets ; savage creatures seek

Their loves in wood and plain — and God renews

His ancient rapture.

Once more, in Paracelsus, there is the lovely
lyric about the flowing of the Mayne. I have
driven through that gracious country of low hill and
dale and wide water-meadows, where under flowered
banks only a foot high the slow river winds in
gentleness ; and this poem is steeped in the sentiment
of the scenery. But, as before, Browning quickly
slides away from the beauty of inanimate nature
into a record of the animals that haunt the stream.
He could not get on long with mountains and rivers

loo BROWNING

alone. He must people them with breathing, feel-
ing things ; anything for life !

Thus the Mayne glideth
Where my Love abideth.
Sleep's no softer ; it proceeds
On through lawns, on through meads,
On and on, whatever befell,
Meandering and musical,
Though the niggard pasturage
Bears not on its shaven ledge
Aught but weeds and waving grasses
To view the river as it passes,
Save here and there a scanty patch
Of primroses too faint to catch
A weary bee.

And scarce it pushes
Its gentle way through strangling rushes
Where the glossy kingfisher
Flutters when noon-heats are near.
Glad the shelving banks to shun
Red and steaming in the sun,
Where the shrew-mouse with pale throat
Burrows, and the speckled stoat ;
Where the quick sandpipers flit
In and out the marl and grit
That seems to breed them, brown as they :
Naught disturbs its quiet way.
Save some lazy stork that springs,
Trailing it with legs and wings.
Whom the shy fox from the hill
Rouses, creep he ne'er so still.

" My heart, they loose my heart, those simple
words," cries Paracelsus, and he was right. They
tell of that which to see and love is better, wiser,
than to probe and know all the problems of know-
ledge. But that is a truth not understood, not
believed. And few there be who find it. And if
Browning had found the secret of how to live more
outside of his understanding than he did, or having

THE TREATMENT OF NATURE lol

found it, had not forgotten it, he would not perhaps
have spoken more wisely for the good of man, but
he would have more continuously written better
poetry.

The next poem in which he may be said to touch
Nature is Sordello. Strafford does not count, save
for the charming song of the boat in music and
moonlight, which the children sing. In Sordello,
the problem of life, as in Paracelsus, is still the
chief matter, but outward life, as not in Paracelsus,
takes an equal place with inward life. And natur-
ally, Nature, its changes and beauty, being outward,
are more fully treated than in Paracelsus. But it
is never treated for itself alone. It is made to
image or reflect the sentiment of the man who sees
it, or to illustrate a phase of his passion or his
thought. But there is a closer grip upon it than
before, a clearer definition, a greater power of con-
centrated expression of it, and especially, a fuller
use of colour. Browning paints Nature now like
a Venetian ; the very shadows of objects are in
colour. This new power was a kind of revelation
to him, and he frequently uses it with a personal
joy in its exercise. Things in Nature blaze in
his poetry now and afterwards in gold, purple, the
crimson of blood, in sunlit green and topaz, in
radiant blue, in dyes of earthquake and eclipse.
Then, when he has done his landscape thus in
colour, he adds more ; he places in its foreground
one drop, one eye of still more flaming colour, to
vivify and inflame the whole.

The main landscape of Sordello is the plain and
the low pine-clad hills around Mantua; the half-
circle of the deep lagoon which enarms the

I02 BROWNING

battlemented town ; and the river Mincio, seen by
Sordello when he comes out of the forest on the hill,
as it enters and leaves the lagoon, and winds, a silver
ribbon,' through the plain. It is the landscape Vergil
must have loved. A long bridge of more than a
hundred arches, with towers of defence, crosses the
marsh from the towered gateway of the walls to the
mainland, and in the midst of the lagoon the deep
river flows fresh and clear with a steady swiftness.
Scarcely anywhere in North Italy is the upper sky
more pure at dawn and even, and there is no view
now so mystic in its desolation. Over the lagoon,
and puffing from it, the mists, daily encrimsoned by
sunrise and sunset, continually rise and disperse.

The character and the peculiarities of this land-
scape Browning has seized and enshrined in verse.
But his descriptions are so arranged as to reflect
certain moments of crisis in the soul of Sordello.
He does not describe this striking landscape for its
own sake, but for the sake of his human subject.
The lines I quote below describe noon-day on the
lagoon, seen from the golden woods and black pines;
and the vision of the plain, city, and river, suddenly
opening out from the wood, symbolises the soul
of Sordello opening out from solitude "into the
veritable business of mankind."

Then wide
Opened the great morass, shot every side
With flashing water through and through ; a-shine,
Thick-steaming, all-alive. Whose shape divine
Quivered i' the farthest rainbow-vapour, glanced
Athwart the flying herons ? He advanced,
But warily ; though Mincio leaped no more,
Each footfall burst up in the marish-floor
A diamond jet.

THE TREATMENT OF NATURE 103

And then he somewhat spoils this excellent thing
by a piece of detail too minute for the largeness of
the impression. But how clear and how full of true
sentiment it is ; and how the image of Palma rain-
bowed in the mist, and of Sordello seeing her, fills
the landscape with youthful passion !

Here is the same view in the morning, when
Mincio has come down in flood and filled the marsh :

Mincio, in its place,
Laughed, a broad water, in next morning's face,
And, where the mists broke up immense and white
r the steady wind, burned like a spilth of light
Out of the crashing of a million stars.

It were well to compare that brilliant piece of
light with the grey water-sunset at Ferrara in the
beginning of the VI. Book.

While eve slow sank
Down the near terrace to the farther bank,
And only one spot left from out the night
Glimmered upon the river opposite —
A breadth of watery heaven like a bay,
A sky-like space of water, ray for ray.
And star for star, one richness where they mixed
As this and that wing of an angel, fixed,
Tumultuary splendours folded in
To die.

As usual, Spring enchants him. The second
book begins with her coming, and predicates the
coming change in Sordello' s soul.

The woods were long austere with snow ; at last
Pink leaflets budded on the beech, and fast
Larches, scattered through pine-tree solitudes.
Brightened, as in the slumbrous heart of the woods
Our buried year, a witch, grew young again
To placid incantations, and that stain
About were from her cauldron, green smoke blent
With those black pines.

104 BROWNING

Nor does he omit in Sordello to recall two other
favourite aspects of Nature, long since recorded in
Pauline, the ravine and the woodland spring. Just
as Turner repeated in many pictures of the same
place what he had first observed in it, so Browning
recalled in various poems the first impressions of
his youth. He had a curious love for a ravine with
overhanging trees and a thin thread of water, loop-
ing itself round rocks. It occurs in the Fireside, it
is taken up in his later poems, and up such a ravine
Sordello climbs among the pines of Goito :

He climbed with (June at deep) some close ravine
Mid clatter of its million pebbles sheen,
Over which, singing soft, the runnel slipped
Elate with rains.

Then, in Sordello, we come again across the foun-
tain in the grove he draws in Pauline, now greatly
improved in clearness and word-brightness — a real
vision. Fate has given him here a fount

Of pure loquacious pearl, the soft tree-tent
Guards, with its face of reate and sedge, nor fail
The silver globules and gold-sparkling grail
At bottom —

where the impulse of the water sends up the sand
in a cone — a solitary loveliness of Nature that
Coleridge and Tennyson have both drawn with a
finer pencil than Browning. The other examples
of natural description in Sordello, as well as those in
Balaustion I shall reserve till I speak of those poems.
As to the dramas, they are wholly employed with
humanity. In them man's soul has so overmastered
Browning that they are scarcely diversified half-a-
dozen times by any illustrations derived from
Nature.

THE TREATMENT OF NATURE 105

We now come, with The Ring and the Book, to a
clear division in his poetry of Nature. From this
time forth Nature decays in his verse. Man masters
it and drives it out. In The Ring and the Book, huge
as it is, Nature rarely intrudes ; the human passion
of the matter is so great that it swallows up all
Browning's interest. There is a little forky flashing
description of the entrance to the Val d'Ema in
Guido's first statement. Caponsacchi is too in-
tensely gathered round the tragedy to use a single
illustration from Nature. The only person who
does use illustrations from Nature is the only one
who is by age, by his life, by the apartness of his
high place, capable of sufficient quiet and contem-
plation to think of Nature at all. This is the Pope.

He illustrates with great vigour the way in which
Guido destroyed all the home life which clung about
him and himself remained dark and vile, by the
burning of a nest-like hut in the Campagna, with
all its vines and ivy and flowers; till nothing
remains but the blackened walls of the malicious
tower round which the hut had been built.

He illustrates the sudden event which, breaking
in on Caponsacchi' s life, drew out of him his latent
power and his inward good, by this vigorous
description :

As when a thundrous midnight, with black air
That burns, rain-drops that blister, breaks a spell,
Draws out the excessive virtue of some sheathed
Shut unsuspected flower that hoards and hides
Immensity of sweetness.

And the last illustration, in which the Pope hopes
that Guido's soul may yet be saved by the sudden-
ness of his death, is one of the finest pieces of natural

io6 BROWNING

description in Browning, and reads like one of his
own memories :

I stood at Naples once, a night so dark

I could have scarce conjectured there was earth

Anywhere, sky or sea or world at all :

But the night's black was burst through by a blaze —

Thunder- struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore,

Through her whole length of moimtain visible :

There lay the city thick and plain with spires.

And, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea.

So may the truth be flashed out by one blow.

And Guido see, one instant, and be saved.

After The Ring and the Book, poor Nature, as
one of Browning's mistresses, was somewhat
neglected for a time, and he gave himself up to
ugly representations of what was odd or twisted in
humanity, to its smaller problems, like that con-
tained in Fifine at the Fair, to its fantastic impulses,
its strange madnesses, its basenesses, even its
commonplace crimes. These subj ects were redeemed
by his steady effort to show that underneath these
evil developments of human nature lay immortal
good; and that a wise tolerance, based on this
underlying godlikeness in man, was the true atti-
tude of the soul towards the false and the stupid
in mankind. This had been his attitude from the
beginning. It differentiates him from Tennyson,
who did not maintain that view ; and at that point
he is a nobler poet than Tennyson.

But he became too much absorbed in the intel-
lectual treatment of these side-issues in human
nature. And I think that he was left unprotected
from this or not held back from it by his having
almost given up Nature in her relation to man as a
subject for his poetry. To love that great, solemn.

THE TREATMENT OF NATURE 107

and beautiful Creature, who even when she seems
most merciless retains her glory and loveliness,
keeps us from thinking too much on the lower
problems of humanity, on its ignobler movements ;
holds before us infinite grandeur, infinite beauty,
infinite order, and suggests and confirms within us
eternal aspiration. Those intimations of the ideal
and endless perfectness which are dimmed within
us by the meaner aspects of human life, or by the
sordid difficulties of thought which a sensual and
wealth-seeking society present to us, are restored
to us by her quiet order and beauty. When he
wrote Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Red Cotton
Night-cap Country, and The Inn Album, Nature
had ceased to awaken the poetic passion in him,
and his poetry suffered from the loss. Its interest
lies in the narrow realm of intellectual analysis,
not in the large realm of tragic or joyous passion.
He became the dissector of corrupt bodies, not the
creator of living beings.

Nevertheless, in Fifine at the Fair there are
several intercalated illustrations from Nature, all
of which are interesting and some beautiful. The
sunset over Sainte-Marie and the lie Noirmoutier,
with the birds who sing to the dead, and the com-
ing of the night wind and the tide, is as largely
wrought as the description of the mountain rill —
the " infant of mist and dew," and its voyage to
the sea is minute and delicate. There is also that
magnificent description of a sunset which I have
already quoted. It is drawn to illustrate some
remote point in the argument, and is far too mag-
nificent for the thing it illustrates. Yet how few
in this long poem, how remote from Browning's

io8 BROWNING

heart, are these touches of Nature. Again, in
The Inn Album there is a description of an Eng-
lish elm-tree, as an image of a woman who
makes marriage life seem perfect, which is inter-
esting because it is the third, and only the third,
reference to English scenery in the multitude of
Browning's verses. The first is in Pauline, the
second in that poem, " Oh, to be in England," and
this is the third. The woman has never ceased
to gaze

On the great elm-tree in the open, posed
Pladdly fall in front, smooth bole, broad branch,
And leafage, one green plenitude of May.

. . . bosomful
Of lights and shades, murmurs and silences.
Sun-warmth, dew-coolness, squirrel, bee, bird,
High, higher, highest, till the blue proclaims
" Leave Earth, there's nothing better till next step
Heavenward ! "

This, save in one line, is not felt or expressed with
any of that passion which makes what a poet says
completely right.

Browning could not stay altogether in this con-
dition, in which, moreover, his humour was also in
abeyance ; and in his next book, Pacchiarotto, &c.,
he broke away from these morbid subjects, and,
with that recovery, recovered also some of his old
love of Nature. The prologue to that book is
poetry ; and Nature (though he only describes an
old stone wall in Italy covered with straying plants)
is interwoven with his sorrow and his love. Then,
all through the book, even in its most fantastic
humour, Nature is not altogether neglected for hu-
manity; and the poetry, which Browning seemed
to have lost the power to create, has partly

THE TREATMENT OF NATURE 109

returned to him. That is also the case in La
Saisiaz, and I have already spoken of the peculiar
elements of the Nature-poetry in that work. In the
Dramatic Idyls, of which he was himself fond ; and
va. Jocoseria, there is very little natural description.
The subjects did not allow of it, but yet Nature
sometimes glides in, and when she does, thrills the
verse into a higher humanity. In Ferisktak's
Fancies, a book full of flying charm. Nature has
her proper place, and in the lyrics which close the
stories she is not forgotten ; but still there is not
the care for her which once ran like a full river of
delight through his landscape of human nature.
He loved, indeed, that landscape of mankind the
most, the plains and hills and woods of human
life ; but when he watered it with the great river
of Nature his best work was done. Now, as life
grew to a close, that river had too much dried up
in his poetry.

It was not that he had not the power to describe
Nature if he cared. But he did not care. I have
spoken of the invented descriptions of morn and noon
and sunset in Gerard de Lairesse in the book which
preceded Asolando. They have his trenchant
power, words that beat out the scene like strokes
on an anvil, but, curiously enough, they are quite
unsuffused with human feeling ; as if, having once
divorced Nature from humanity, he never could
bring them together again. Nor is this a mere
theory. The Prologue to Asolando supports it.

That sonrowful poem, written, it seems, in the
year he died (1889), reveals his position towards
Nature when he had lost the power of youth to pour
fire on the world. It is full of his last thinking.

no BROWNING

" The poet's age is sad," he says. " In youth his
eye lent to everything in the natural world the
colours of his own soul, the rainbow glory of
imagination :

" And now a flower is just a flower :

Man, bird, beast are but beast, bird, man —

Simply themselves, uncinct by dower
Of dyes which, when life's day began,

Round each in glory ran."

" Ah ! what would you have .' " he says.
" What is the best : things draped in colour, as by
a lens, or the naked things themselves ? truth
ablaze, or falsehood's fancy haze ? I choose the
first."

It is an old man's effort to make the best of age.
For my part, I do not see that the things are
the better for losing the colour the soul gives them.
The things themselves are indifferent. But as seen
by the soul, they are seen in God, and the colour
and light which imagination gives them are them-
selves divine. Nor is their colour or light only in
our imagination, but in themselves also, part of the
glory and beauty of God. A flower is never only
a flower, or a beast a beast. And so Browning
would have said in the days when he was still a
lover of Nature as well as of man, when he was
still a faithful soldier in the army of imagination, a
poet more than a philosopher at play. It is a sad
business. He has not lost his eagerness to advance,
to cUmb beyond the flaming walls, to find God in
his heaven. He has not lost the great hopes
with which he began, nor the ideals he nursed of
old. He has not lost his fighting power, nor his
cheerful cry that life is before him in the fulness of

THE TREATMENT OF NATURE in

the world to come. The Reverie and the Epi-
logue to Asolando are noble statements of his
courage, faith, and joy. There is nothing sad
there, nothing to make us beat the breast. But
there is sadness in this abandonment of the imagi-
native glory with which once he clothed the world
of nature ; and he ought to have retained it. He
would have done so had he not forgotten Nature in
anatomising man.

However, he goes on with his undying effort to
make the best of things, and though he has lost his
rapture in Nature, he has not lost his main theory
of man's life and of the use of the universe. The
end of this Prologue puts it as clearly as it was put
in Paracelsus. Nothing is changed in that.

" At Asolo," he continues, " my Asolo, when I
was young, all natural objects were palpably clothed
with fire. They mastered me, not I them. Terror
was in their beauty. I was like Moses before the
Bush that burned. I adored the splendour I saw.
Then I was in danger of being content with it ; of
mistaking the finite for the infinite beauty. To be
satisfied — that was the peril. Now I see the
natural world as it is, without the rainbow hues the
soul bestowed upon it. Is that well .' In one sense
yes.

" And now ? The lambent flame is — where ?
Lost from the naked world : earth, sky,

Hill, vale, tree, flower — Italia's rare
O'er-running beauty crowds the eye —

But flame ? — The Bush is bare.

" All is distinct, naked, clear, Nature and nothing
else. Have I lost anything in getting down to fact
instead of to fancy.? Have I shut my eyes in

112 BROWNING

pain — pain for disillusion? No — now I know
that my home is not in Nature ; there is no awe
and splendour in her which can keep me with her.
Oh, far beyond is the true splendour, the infinite
source of awe and love which transcends her :

" No, for the purged ear apprehends
Earth's import, not the eye late dazed :

The Voice said ' Call my works thy friends !
At Nature dost thou shrink amazed ?

God is it who transcends.' "

All Browning is in that way of seeing the matter ;
but he forgets that he could see it in the same fashion
while he still retained the imaginative outlook on
the world of Nature. And the fact is that he did
do so in Paracelsus, in Easter-Day, in a host of other
poems. There was then no need for him to reduce
to naked fact the glory with which young imagina-
tion clothed the world, in order to realise that
God transcended Nature. He had conceived that
truth and believed it long ago. And this explana-
tion, placed here, only tells us that he had lost
his ancient love of Nature, and it is sorrowful to
understand it of him.

Finally, the main contentions of this chapter,
which are drawn from a chronological view of
Browning's treatment of Nature, are perhaps worth
a summary. The first is that, though the love of
Nature was always less .in him than his love of
human nature, yet for the first half of his work
it was so interwoven with his human poetry that
Nature suggested to him humanity and humanity
Nature. And these two, as subjects for thought
and feeling, were each uplifted and impassioned,
illustrated and developed, by this intercommunion.

THE TREATMENT OF NATURE 113

That was a true and high position. Humanity was
first, Nature second in Browning's poetry, but both
were hnked together in a noble marriage ; and at
that time he wrote his best poetry.

The second thing this chronological treatment of
his Nature-poetry shows, is that his interest in human
nature pushed out his love of Nature, gradually at
first, but afterwards more swiftly, till Nature became
almost non-existent in his poetry. With that his
work sank down into intellectual or ethical exer-
cises, in which poetry decayed.

It shows, thirdly, how the love of Nature, re-
turning, but returning with diminished power, en-
tered again into his love of human nature, and
renewed the passion of his poetry, its singing,
and its health. But reconciliations of this kind
do not bring back all the ancient affection and
happiness. Nature and humanity never lived
together in his poetry in as vital a harmony as
before, nor was the work done on them as good
as it was of old. A broken marriage is not re-
paired by an apparent condonation. Nature and
humanity, though both now dwelt in him, kept
separate rooms. Their home-life was destroyed.
Browning had been drawn away by a Fifine of
humanity. He never succeeded in living happily
again with Elvire; and while our intellectual in-
terest in his work remained, our poetic interest
in it lessened. We read it for mental and ethical
entertainment, not for ideal joy.

No; if poetry is to be perfectly written ; if the
art is to be brought to its noblest height ; if it is to
continue to lift the hearts of men into the realm
where perfection lives ; if it is to glow, an unwearied

114 BROWNING

fire, in the world ; the love of Nature must be justly
mingled in it with the love of humanity. The love
of humanity must be first, the love of Nature sec-
ond, but they must not be divorced. When they
are, when the love of Nature forms the only sub-
ject, or when the love of Man forms the only sub-
ject, poetry decays and dies.

CHAPTER IV

BROWNING'S THEORY OF HUMAN LIFE
PAULINE AND PARACELSUS

TO isolate Browning's view of Nature, and to
leave it behind us, seemed advisable before
speaking of his work as a poet of mankind. We
can now enter freely on that which is most dis-
tinctive, most excellent in his work — his human
poetry ; and the first thing that meets us and in his
very first poems, is his special view of human
nature, and of human life, and of the relation of
both to God. It marks his originality that this
view was entirely his own. Ancient thoughts of
course are to be found in it, but his combination of
them is original amongst the English poets. It
marks his genius that he wrought out this con-
ception while he was yet so young. It is partly
shaped in Pauline ; it is fully set forth in Paracelsus.
And it marks his consistency of mind that he never
changed it. I do not think he ever added to it or
developed it. It satisfied him when he was a
youth, and when he was an old man. We have
already seen it clearly expressed in the Prologue
to Asolando.

That theory needs to be outlined, for till it is
understood Browning's poetry cannot be understood
"5

li6 BROWNIlSrG

or loved as fully as we should desire to love it.
It exists in Pauline, but all its elements are in
solution; uncombined, but waiting the electric
flash which will mix them, in due proportions, into
a composite substance, having a lucid form, and
capable of being used. That flash was sent through
the confused elements of Pauline, and the result
was Paracelsus.

I will state the theory first, and then, lightly
passing through Pauline and Paracelsus, re-tell it.
It is fitting to apologise for the repetition which
this method of treatment will naturally cause ; but,
considering that the theory underlies every drama
and poem that he wrote during sixty years, such
repetition does not seem unnecessary. There are
many who do not easily grasp it, or do not grasp it
at all, and they may be grateful. As to those who
do understand it, they will be happy in their anger
with any explanation of what they know so well.

He asks what is the secret of the world: "of
man and man's true purpose, path, and fate." He
proposes to understand " God and his works and
all God's intercourse with the human soul."

We are here, he thinks, to grow enough to be
able to take our part in another life or lives. But
we are surrounded by limitations which baffle and
retard our growth. That is miserable, but not so
much as we think ; for the failures these limita-
tions cause prevent us — and this is a main point
in Browning's view — from being content with our
condition on the earth. There is that within us
which is always endeavouring to transcend those
limitations, and which believes in their final dis-
persal. This aspiration rises to something higher

BROWNING'S THEORY OF HUMAN LIFE 117

than any possible actual on earth. It is never
worn out; it is the divine in us; and when it
seems to decay, God renews it by spiritual influ-
ences from without and within, coming to us from
Nature as seen by us, from humanity as felt by us,
and from himself who dwells in us.

But then, unless we find out and submit to those
limitations, and work within them, life is useless,
so far as any life is useless. But while we work
within them, we see beyond them an illimitable
land, and thirst for it. This battle between the
dire necessity of working in chains and longing for
freedom, between the infinite destiny of the soul
and the baffling of its effort to realise its infini-
tude on earth, makes the storm and misery of life.
We may try to escape that tempest and sorrow
by determining to think, feel, and act only within
our limitations, to be content with them as Goethe
' said ; but if we do, we are worse off than before.
We have thrown away our divine destiny. If we
take this world and are satisfied with it, cease to
aspire, beyond our limits, to full perfection in God ;
if our soul should ever say, " I want no more ;
what I have here — the pleasure, fame, knowledge,
beauty, or love of this world — is all I need or care
for," then we are indeed lost. That is the last
damnation. The worst failure, the deepest misery,
is better than contentment with the success of
earth; and seen in this light, the failures and '
misery of earth are actually good things, the cause
of a chastened joy. They open to us the larger
light. They suggest, and in Browning's belief they j
proved, that this life is but the threshold of an
infinite life, that our true life is beyond, that there 1

Il8 BROWNING

is an infinite of happiness, of knowledge, of love,
of beauty which we shall attain. Our failures are
I prophecies of eternal successes. To choose the
' finite life is to miss the infinite Life ! O fool, to
claim the little cup of water earth's knowledge
offers to thy thirst, or the beauty or love of earth,
when the immeasurable waters of- the Knowledge,
Beauty, and Love of the Eternal Paradise are thine
beyond the earth.

Two things are then clear : i. The attainment
of our desires for perfection, the satisfaction of our
/ passion for the infinite, is forbidden to us on earth
by the limitations of life. We are made imperfect;
' we are kept imperfect here ; and we must do all
our work within the limits this natural imperfection
makes. 2^ We must, nevertheless, not cease to
strive towards the perfection unattainable on earth,
but which shall be attained hereafter. Our des-
tiny, the God within us, demands that. And we
lose it, if we are content with our earthly life, even
with its highest things, with knowledge, beauty, or
with love.

Hence, the foundation of Browning's theory is
a kind of Original Sin in us, a natural defective-
ness deliberately imposed on us by God, which pre-
vents us attaining any absolute success on earth.
And this defectiveness of nature is met by the
truth, which, while we aspire, we know — that God
will fulfil all noble desire in a life to come.
I We must aspire then, but at the same time all
I aspiring is to be conterminous with steady work
1 within our limits. Aspiration to the perfect is not to
Imake us idle, indifferent to the present, but to drive
us on. Its passion teaches us, as it urges into action

BROWNING'S THEORY OF HUMAN LIFE 119

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 hfe 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, ori
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 God 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 God, 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 God 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.

120 BROWNING

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. God 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 as-
pirations which took him beyond himself. When he

BROWNING'S THEORY OF HUMAN LIFE 121

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 God,

who, as he sat in the sunshine on her knees singing
of heaven, saw the mockery in her eyes and van-
ished, tells of how the early ravishment departed,
slain by self-scorn that followed on self-worship.
But one love and reverence remained — that for
Shelley, the Sun-treader, and kept him from being
" wholly lost." To strengthen this one self-forget-
ful 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.
God 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 personaUty, linked to a principle of restless-
ness.

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

3 BROWmNG

tid this would plunge him into the depths of self
;re it not for that Imagination in him whose
iwer never fails to bear him beyond himself ; and
finally in him a need, a trust, a yearning after
3d ; whom, even when he is most lost, he feels
always acting on him, and at every point of life
mscending him.

And Imagination began to create, and made him
one with all men and women of whom he had
ad (the same motive is repeated in Sordello), but
pecially at one with those out of the Greek world
I loved — "a God wandering after Beauty" — a
gh-crested chief

Sailing with troops of friends to Tenedos.

ever was anything more clear than these lives he
ed beyond himself ; and the lines 'in which he
cords the vision have all the sharpness and
auty of his after-work —

I had not seen a work of lofty art,

Nor woman's beauty nor sweet Nature's &ce,"]

Yet, I say, never morn broke dear as those

On the dim-clustered 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
ned low ; lost in immediate wants, striving only
: the mortal and the possible, while all the time
:re lived in him, breathing with keen desire,
wers which, developed, would make him at one
th the infinite Life of God.

But having thus been untrue to his early aspiration,
fell into the sensual life, like Paracelsus, and

BROWNING'S THEORY OF HUMAN LIFE ll^

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 no^
won by repression of the noble passions, 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 ennobling 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 passion 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
systpms and schemes of philosophy and govern-
ment, 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 gods and earth as 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

24 BROWNING

nd unreachable, he gained the world, and success
n it. All the powers of the mere Intellect, that
;rey-haired deceiver whose name is Archimago,
irere his ; — wit, mockery, analytic force, keen rea-
oning on the visible, the Understanding's absolute
lelief in itself; its close grasp on what it called
acts, and its clear application of knowledge for clear
;nds. God, too, had vanished in this intellectual
atisf action ; and in the temple of his soul, where
le had been worshipped, troops of shadows now
melt to the man whose intellect, having grasped
ill knowledge, was content ; and hailed him as king.

The position he describes is like that Words-
vorth states in the Prelude to have been his, when,
ifter the vanishing of his aspirations for man
vhich followed the imperialistic fiasco of the
French Revolution, he found himself without love
)r hope, but with full power to make an intellectual
malysis of Nature and of human nature, and was
lestroyed thereby. It is the same position which
r'aracelsus attains and which is followed by the
lame ruin. It is also, so far as its results are
loncerned, the position of the Soul described by
Tennyson in The Palace of Art.

Love, emotion, God are shut out. Intellect and
knowledge of the world's work take their place.
\nd the result is the slow corrosion of the soul
)y pride. " I have nursed up energies," says
Browning, "they will prey on me." He feels
his and breaks away from its death. " My
leart must worship," he cries. The "shadows"
mow this feeling is against them, and they shout
n answer:

"Thyself, thou art our king!"

BROWNING'S THEORY OF HUMAN LIFE 125

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 aspi-
ration 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

126 BROWNING

yet tried Nature herself. She seems to have un-
dying 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 noble
description of a lovely country into which he
passes from a mountain glen — morning, noon,
afternoon, and evening all described — and the
emotion of the whole rises till it reaches the top-
most 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 God, 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 God ?

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 per-
fection to come. He claims the infinite beyond.
" I believe," he cries, " in God 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 flash-
ing and clashing of sharp scimitars. Out of the
same quarry from which Pauline was hewn the rest

BROWNING'S THEORY OF HUMAN LIFE 127

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.

This, then, is Pauline ; I pass on to Paracelsus.
Paracelsus, in order to give the poem a little local
colour, opens at Wiirzburg in a garden, and in the
year 1512. But it is not a poem which has to do
with any place or any time. It belongs only to
the country of the human soul. The young student
Paracelsus is sitting with his friends Festus and
Michal, on the eve of his departure to conquer the
whole world by knowledge. They make a last
effort to retain him, but even as he listens to their
arguments his eyes are far away —

As if where'er he gazed there stood a star,

so strong, so deep is desire to attain his aim.

For Paracelsus aims to know the whole of know-
ledge. Quiet and its charms, this homelike garden
of still work, make their appeal in vain. "God
has called me," he cries ; " these burning desires to
know all are his voice in me ; and if I stay and
plod on here, I reject his call who has marked me
from mankind. I must reach pure knowledge. That
is my only aim, my only reward."

Then Festus replies : " In this solitariness of
aim, all other interests of humanity are left out.
Will knowledge, alone, give you enough for life }
You, a man ! " And again : " You discern your

128 BROWNING

purpose clearly ; have you any security of attaining
it ? Is it not more than mortal power is capable
of winning?" Or again: "Have you any know-
ledge of the path to knowledge ? " Or, once more,
" Is anything in your mind so clear as this, your
own desire to be singly famous ? "

" All this is nothing," Paracelsus answers ; " the
restless force within me will overcome all difficul-
ties. God does not give that fierce energy with-
out giving also that which it desires. And, I am
chosen out of all the world to win this glory."

"Why not then," says Festus, "make use of
knowledge already gained .? Work here ; what
knowledge will you gain in deserts t "

"I have tried all the knowledge of the past,"
Paracelsus replies, " and found it a contemptible
, failure. Others were content with the scraps they
won. Not I ! I want the whole ; the source and
sum of divine and human knowledge, and though
I craze as even one truth expands its infinitude
before me, I go forth alone, rejecting all that
others have done, to prove my own soul. I shall
arrive at last. And as to mankind, in winning
perfect knowledge I shall serve them ; but then, all
intercourse ends between them and me. I will not
be served by those I serve."

" Oh," answers Festus, " is that cause safe which
produces carelessness of human love.-" You have
thrown aside all the helps of human knowledge;
now you reject all sympathy. No man can thrive
who dares to claim to serve the race, while he is
bound by no single tie to the race. You would
be a being knowing not what Love is — a monstrous
spectacle ! "

BROWNING-'S THEORY OF HUMAN LIFE 129

"That may be true," Paracelsus replies, "but
for the time I will have nothing to do with feeling.
My aifections shall remain at rest, and then, when
I have attained my single aim, when knowledge is
all mine, my affections will awaken purified and
chastened by my knowledge. Let me, unhampered
by sympathy, win my victory. And I go forth
certain of victory."

Are there not, Festus, are there not, dear Michal,
Two points in the adventure of the diver :
One — when, a beggar, he prepares to plunge;
One — when, a prince, he rises with his pearl ?
Festus, I plunge !
Festus. We wait you when you rise.

So ends the first part, and the second opens ten
years afterwards in a Greek Conjurer's house in
Constantinople, with Paracelsus writing down the
result of his work. And the result is this :

" I have made a few discoveries, but I could not
stay to use them. Nought remains but a ceaseless,
hungry pressing forward, a vision now and then of
truth ; and I — I am old before my hour : the adage
is true —

Time fleets, youth fades, life is an empty dream ;

and now I would give a world to rest, even in
failure !

" This is all my gain. Was it for this," he cries,
" I subdued my life, lost my youth, rooted out love ;
for the sake of this wolfish thirst of knowledge ? "
No dog, said Faust, in Goethe's poem, driven to
the same point by the weariness of knowledge, no
dog would longer live this life. " My tyrant aim
has brought me into a desert; worse still, the

130 BROWNING

purity of my aim is lost. Can I truly say that I
have worked for man alone ? Sadder still, if I had
found that which I sought, should I have had power
to use it ? O God, Thou who art pure mind, spare
my mind. Thus far, I have been a man. Let me
conclude, a man ! Give me back one hour of my
young energy, that I may use and finish what I
know.

" And God is good : I started sure of that ; and
he may still renew my heart.

True, I am worn ;
But who clothes summer, who is life itself ?
God, that created all things, can renew ! "

At this moment the voice of Aprile is heard
singing the song of the poets, who, having great
gifts, refused to use them, or abused them, or were
too weak ; and who therefore live apart from God,
mourning for ever; who gaze on life, but live no
more. He breaks in on Paracelsus, and, in a long
passage of overlapping thoughts, Aprile — who
would love infinitely and be loved, aspiring to
realise every form of love, as Paracelsus has
aspired to realise the whole of knowledge — makes
Paracelsus feel that love is what he wants. And
then, when Paracelsus realises this, Aprile in turn
reaUses that he wants knowledge. Each recognises
that he is the complement of the other, that
knowledge is worthless without love, and love
incapable of realising its aspirations without know-
ledge — as if love did not contain the sum of know-
ledge necessary for fine being. Both have failed ;
and it seems, at first, that they failed because they
did not combine their aims. But the chief reason

BROWNING'S THEORY OF HUMAN LIFE 131

of their failure — and this is, indeed, Browning's
main point — is that each of them tried to do more
than our limits on earth permit. Paracelsus would
have the whole sum of knowledge, Aprile nothing
less than the whole of love, and, in this world.
It is impossible ; yet, were it possible, could they
have attained the sum of knowledge and of love on
earth and been satisfied therewith, they would have
shut out the infinite of knowledge and love beyond
them in the divine land, and been, in their satis-
faction, more hopelessly lost than they are in
their present wretchedness. Failure that leaves
an unreached ideal before the soul is in reality a
greater boon than success which thinks perfect
satisfaction has been reached. Their aim at
perfection is right: what is wrong is their view
that failure is ruin, and not a prophecy of a greater
glory to come. Could they have thought perfection
were attained on earth — were they satisfied with
anything this world can give, no longer stung with
hunger for the infinite — all Paradise, with the
illimitable glories, were closed to them !

Few passages are more beautiful in English
poetry than that in which Aprile narrates his
youthful aspiration : how, loving all things in-
finitely, he wished to throw them into absolute
beauty of form by means of all the arts, for the
love of men, and receive from men love for having
revealed beauty, and merge at last in God, the
Eternal Love. This was his huge aim, his full
desire.

Few passages are more pathetic than that in
which he tells his failure and its cause. "Time
is short; the means of life are limited; we have

BROWNING

means answering to our desires. Now I am
5cked ; for the multitudinous images of beauty
ich filled my mind forbade my seizing upon one
ich I could have shaped. I often wished to
e one to the world, but the others came round
1 baffled me ; and, moreover, I could not leave

multitude of beauty for the sake of one beauty,
less I could embody all I would embody none.
'And, afterwards, when a cry came from man,
Ive one ray even of your hoarded light to us,'
1 I tried for man's sake to select one, why, then,
its came — old memories of a thousand sweet-
;ses, a storm of images — till it was impossible to
)ose ; and so I failed, and life is ended.
' But could I live I would do otherwise. I would
e a trifle out of beauty, as an example by which
n could guess the rest and love it all; one
lin from an angel's song ; one flower from the
tant land, that men might know that such things
re. Then, too, I would put common life into
eliness, so that the lowest hind would find me
lide him to put his weakest hope and fear into
)le language. And as I thus lived with men,
1 for them, I should win from them thoughts
sd for their progress, the very commonest of
ich would come forth in beauty, for they would
rt, been born in a soul filled full of love. This
luld now be my aim : no longer that desire to
brace the whole of beauty which isolates a man
m his fellows ; but to realise enough of loveliness
jive pleasure to men who desire to love. There-
e, I should live, still aspiring to the whole, still
:ontent, but waiting for another life to gain the
ole ; but at the same time content, for man's sake,

BROWNING'S THEORY OF HUMAN LIFE 133

to work within the limitations of life ; not grieving
either for failure, because love given and received
makes failure pleasure. In truth, the failure to
grasp all on earth makes, if we love, the certainty
of a success beyond the earth."

And Paracelsus listening and applying what
Aprile says to his old desire to grasp, apart from
men, the whole of knowledge as Aprile had desired
to grasp the whole of love, learns the truth at last,
and confesses it :

Love me henceforth, Aprile, while I learn
To love ; and, merciful God, forgive us both !
We wake at length from weary dreams ; but both
Have slept in fairy-land : though dark and drear
Appears the world before us, we no less
Wake with our wrists and ankles jewelled still.
I too have sought to know as thou to love —
Excluding love as thou refusedst knowledge.

We are halves of a dissevered world, and we
must never part till the Knower love, and thou, the
Lover, know, and both are saved.

" No, no ; that is not all," Aprile answers, and
dies. " Our perfection is not in ourselves but in
God. Not our strength, but our weakness is our
glory. Not in union with me, with earthly love
alone, will you find the pierfect life. I am not that
you seek. It is God the King of Love, his world
beyond, and the infinite creations Love makes in it."

But Paracelsus does not grasp that last conclu-
sion. He only understands that he has left out
love in his aim, and therefore failed*. He does not
give up the notion of attainment upon earth. He
cannot lose the first imprint of his idea of himself
— his lonely grasp of the whole of Knowledge.

The next two parts of the poem do not strengthen

134 BROWNING

much the main thoughts. Paracelsus tries to work
out the lesson learnt from Aprile — to add love to
knowledge, to aspire to that fulness in God. But
he does not love enough. He despises those who
follow him for the sake of .his miracles, yet he
desires their worship. Moreover, the pride of
knowledge still clings to him; he cannot help
thinking it higher than love ; and the two together
drive him into the thought that this world must
give him satisfaction. So, he puts aside the ideal
aim. But here also he is baffled. Those who
follow him as the great teacher ask of him signs.
He gives these ; and he finds at Basel that he has
sunk into the desire of vulgar fame, and prostituted
his knowledge ; and, sick of this, beaten back from
his noble ambitions, he determines to have some-
thing at least out of earth, and chooses at Colmar the
life of sensual pleasure. " I still aspire," he cries.
" I will give the night to study, but I will keep the
day for the enjoyment of the senses. Thus,
intellect and sense woven together, I shall at least
have attained something. If I do not gain know-
ledge I shall have gained sensual pleasure. Mai/
I despise and hate, and God has deceived met
I take the world." But, even while he says this!
his ancient aspiration lives so much in him that he
scorns himself for his fall as much as he scorns the
crowd.

Then comes the last scene, when, at Salzburg, he
returns to find his friend Festus, and to die. In
the hour of his death he reviews his whole life, his
aims, their failure and the reason of it, and yet dies
triumphant for he has found the truth.

I pass over the pathetic delirium in which

BROWNING'S THEORY OF HUMAN LIFE 135

Paracelsus thinks that Aprile is present, and cries
for his hand and sympathy while Festus is watch-
ing by the couch. At last he wakes, and knows his
friend, and that he is dying. " I am happy," he
cries ; " my foot is on the threshold of boundless
life ; I see the whole whirl and hurricane of Uf e
behind me; all my life passes by, and I know
its purpose, to what end it has brought me,
and whither I am going. I will tell you all the
meaning of life. Festus, my friend, tell it to the
world.

"There was a time when I was happy; the
secret of life was in that happiness." " When,
when was that .? " answers Festus, " all I hope that
answer will decide."

Par. When, but the time I vowed myself to man ?
Fest. Great God, thy judgments are inscrutable !

Then he explains. " There are men, so majes-
tical is our nature, who, hungry for joy and truth,
win more and more of both, and know that life is
infinite progress in God. This they win by long
and slow battle. But there are those, of whom I
was one " — and here Browning draws the man of
genius — " who are born at the very point to which
these others, the men of talent, have painfully
attained. By intuition genius knows, and I knew
at once, what God is, what we are, what life is.
Alas ! I could not use the knowledge aright. There
is an answer to the passionate longings of the heart
for fulnessy and I knew it. And the answer is this :
Live in all things outside of yourself by love and
you will have joy. That is the life of God ; it ought
to be our life. In him it is accomplished and perfect ;

136 BROWNTNG

but in all created things it is a lesson learned slowly
against difficulty.

" Thus I knew the truth, but I was led away
from it. I broke down from thinking of myself,
my fame, and of this world. I had not love enough,
and I lost the truth for a time. But whatever my
failures were, I never lost sight of it altogether. I
never was content with myself or with the earth.
Out of my misery I cried for the joy God has in
living outside of himself in love of all things."

Then, thrilled with this thought, he breaks forth
into a most noble description — new in English
poetry, new in feeling and in thought, enough of
itself to lift Browning on to^his lofty peak — first of
the joy of God in the Universe he makes incessantly
by pouring out of himself his life, and, secondly, of
the joy of all things in God. " Where dwells en-
joyment there is He." But everyrealised enjoyment
looks forward, even in God, to a new and higher
sphere of distant glory, and when that is reached,
to another sphere beyond —

thus climbs
Pleasure its heights for ever and for ever.

Creation is God's joyous self -giving. The building
of the frame of earth was God's first joy in Earth.
That made him conceive a greater joy — the joy of
clothing the earth, of making life therein — of the
love which in animals, and last in man, multiplies
life for ever.

So there is progress of all things to man, and all
created things before his coming have — inbeauty,in
power, in knowledge, in dim shapes of love and trust
in the animals — had prophecies of him which man

BROWNING'S THEORY OF HUMAN LIFE 137

has realised, hints and previsions, dimly picturing
the higher race, till man appeared at last, and one
stage of being was complete. But the law of pro-
gress does not cease now man has come. None of
his faculties are perfect. They also by their imper-
fection suggest a further Hfe, in which as all that
was unfinished in the animals suggested man, so
also that which is unfinished in us suggests our-
selves in higher place and form. Man's self is not
yet Man.

We learn this not only from our own boundless
desires for higher life, and from our sense of im-
perfection. We learn it also when we look back
on the whole of Nature that was before we were.
We illustrate and illuminate all that has been.
Nature is humanised, spiritualised by us. We have
imprinted ourselves on all things ; and this, as we
realise it, as we give thought and passion to lifeless
Nature, makes us understand how great we are, and
how much greater we are bound to be. We are the
end of Nature but not the end of ourselves. We
learn the same truth when among us the few men
of genius appear ; stars in the darkness. We do
not say — These stand alone ; we never can become
as they. On the contrary, we cry : All are to be
what these are, and more. They longed for more,
and we and they shall have it. All shall be per-
fected ; and then, and not till then, begins the new
age and the new life, new progress and new joy.
This is the ultimate truth.

And as in inferior creatures there were prog-
nostics of man — and here Browning repeats him-
self — so in man there are prognostics of the future
and loftier humanity.

138 BROWNING

August anticipations, symbols, types

Of a dim splendour ever on before

In that eternal cycle life pursues.

For men begin to pass their nature's bound —

ceaselessly outgrowing themselves in history, and
in the individual life — and some, passionately aspir-
ing, run ahead of even the general tendency, and
conceive the very highest, and live to reveal it,
and in revealing it lift and save those who do not
conceive it.

"I, Paracelsus," he cries — and now Browning
repeats the whole argument of the poem — " was
one of these. To do this I vowed myself, soul
and limb.

" But I mistook my means, I took the wrong path,
led away by pride. I gazed on power alone, and
on power won by knowledge alone. This I thought
was the only note and aim of man, and it was to be
won, at once and in the present, without any care
for all that man had already done. I rejected all
the past. I despised it as a record of weakness
and disgrace. Man should be aU-sufficient now ;
a single day should bring him to maturity. He has
power to reach the whole of knowledge at one
leap.

" In that, I mistook the conditions of life. I did
not see our barriers ; nor that progress is slow ; nor
that every step of the past is necessary to know
and to remember ; nor that, in the shade of the past,
the present stands forth bright ; nor that the future
is not to be all at once, but to dawn on us, in zone
after zone of quiet progress. I strove to laugh
down all the limits of our life, and then the smallest
things broke me down — me, who tried to realise the

BROWNING'S THEORY OF HUMAN LIFE 139

impossible on earth. At last I knew that the power
I sought was only God's, and then I prayed to die.
All my life was failure.

" At this crisis I met Aprile, and learned my
deep mistake. I had left love out; and love and
knowledge, and power through knowledge, must
go together. And Aprile had also failed, for he
had sought love and rejected knowledge. Life can
only move when both are hand in hand :

" love preceding
Power, and with much power, always much more love :
Love still too straitened in its present means,
And earnest for new power to set love free.
I learned this, and supposed the whole was learned.

" But to learn it, and to fulfil it, are two different
things. I taught the simple truth, but men would
not have it. They sought the complex, the sensa-
tional, the knowledge which amazed them. And
for this knowledge they praised me. I loathed and
despised their praise ; and when I would not give
them more of the signs and wonders I first gave
them, they avenged themselves by casting shame
on my real knowledge. Then I was tempted, and
became the charlatan ; and yet despised myself for
seeking man's praise for that which was most con-
temptible in me. Then I sought for wild pleasure
in the senses, and I hated myself still more. And
hating myself I came to hate men ; and then all that
Aprile taught to me was lost.

" But now I know that I did not love enough to
trace beneath the hate of men their love. I did not
love enough to see in their follies the grain of
divine wisdom.

40 BROWmNG

" To see a good in evil, and a hope
In ill-success ; to sympathise, be proud
Of their half-reasons, faint aspirings, dim
Struggles for truth, their poorest fallacies.
Their prejudice and fears and cares and doubts ;
All with a touch of nobleness, despite
Their error, upward tending all though weak.

" I did not see this, I did not love enough to see
his, and I failed.

" Therefore let men regard me, who rashly longed
know all for power's sake; and regard Aprile, the
)oet, who rashly longed for the whole of love for
)eauty's sake — and regarding both, shape forth a
hird and better-tempered spirit, in whom beauty
ind knowledge, love and power, shall mingle into
)ne, and lead Man up to God, in whom all these
bur are One. In God alone is the goal.

" Meanwhile I die in peace, secure of attainment.
NhdX I have failed in here I shall attain there. I
lave never, in my basest hours, ceased to aspire ;
jod will fulfil my aspiration :

"If I stoop
Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud.
It is but for a time ; I press God's lamp
Close to my breast ; its splendour, soon or late.
Will pierce the gloom : I shall emerge one day.
You understand me ? I have said enough ?

Aprile ! Hand in hand with you, Aprile !"
^nd so he dies.

CHAPTER V
THE POET OF ART

THE theory of^human life which Browning con-
"Teived, and which I attempted in the last
chapter to explain out of Pauline and Paracelsus,
underlies the poems w hich.havg,to do with tihe arts.
Browning as the poet of Art is as fascinating a
subject as Browning the poet of Nature; even
more so, for he directed of set purpose a great deal
of his poetry to the various arts, especially to music
and painting. Nor has he neglected to write about
his own art. The lover in Pauline is a poet.
Paracelsus and Aprile have both touched that art.
Sordello is a poet, and so are many others in the
poems. Moreover, he treats continually of himself
as a poet, and of the many criticisms on his work.
All through this work on the arts, the theory of
which we have written appears continuously. It
emerges fully in the close of Easter-Day. It is
carefully wrought into poems like Abt Vogler and
A Grammarian's Funeral, in which the pursuit of
grammar is conceived of as the pursuit of an art.
It is introdueed by the way in the midst of subjects
belonging to the art of painting, as in Old Pictures
in Florence and Andrea del Sarto. Finally, in those
poems which represent in vivid colour and selected
141

142 BROWNING

personalities special times and forms of art, the
theory still appears, but momentarily, as a dryad
might show her face in a wood to a poet passing by.
I shall be obliged then to touch again and again on
this theory of his in discussing Browning as the
poet of the arts. This is a repetition which cannot
be helped, but for which I request the pardon of
my readers.

The subject of the arts, from the time when
Caliban " fell to make something " to the re-birth of
naturalism in Florence, from the earliest music and
poetry to the latest, interested Browning profoundly;
and he speaks of them, not as a critic from the out-
side, but out of the soul of them, as an artist. He
is, for example, the only poet of the nineteenth
century till we come to Rossetti, who has cele-
brated painting and sculpture by the art of poetry ;
and Rossetti did not link these arts to human life
and character with as much force and penetration as
Browning. Morris, when he wrote poetry, did not
care to write about the other arts, their schools or
history. He liked to describe in verse the beautiful
things of the past, but not to argue on their how and
why. Nor did he ever turn in on himself as artist,
and ask how he wrote poetry or how he built
up a pattern. What he did as artist was to make,
and when he had made one thing to make another.
He ran along like Pheidippides to his goal, without
halting for one instant to consider the methods of
his running. And all his life long this was his
way.

Rossetti described a picture in a sonnet with
admirable skill, so admirable that we say to our-
selves — " Give me the picture or the sonnet, not

THE POET OF ART 143

both. They blot out one another." But to de-
scribe a picture is not to write about art. The
one place where he does go down to its means and
soul is in his little prose masterpiece, Hand and
Soul, in which we see the path, the goal, the
passion, but not the power of art. But he never,
in thought, got, like Browning, to the bottom-joy
of it. He does not seem to see, as clearly as
Browning saw, that the source of all art was love ;
and that the expression of love in beautiful form
was or ought to be accomplished with that exult-
ing joy which is the natural child of self-forgetful-
ness. This story of Rossetti's was in prose. In
poetry, Rossetti, save in description from the out-
side, left art alone ; and Browning's special work
on art, and particularly his poetic studies of it, are
isolated in English poetry, and separate him from
other poets.

I cannot wish that he had thought less and
written less about other arts than poetry. But I
do wish he had given more time and trouble to his
own art, that we might have had clearer and lovelier
poetry. Perhaps, if he had developed himself with
more care as an artist in his own art, he would not
have troubled himself or his art by so much devo-
tion to abstract thinking and intellectual analysis.
A strange preference also for naked facts some-
times beset him, as if men wanted these from a
poet. It was as if some scientific demon entered
into him for a time and turned poetry out, till
Browning got weary of his guest and threw him
out of the window. These reversions to some far
off Browning in the past, who was deceived into
thinking the intellect the king of life, enfeebled and

144 BROWNING

sometimes destroyed the artist in him ; and though
he escaped for the best part of his poetry from
this position, it was not seldom in his later years
as a brand plucked from the burning. Moreover,
he recognised this tendency in himself; and pro-
tested against it, sometimes humorously, sometimes
seriously. At least so I read what he means in a
number of poems, when he turns, after an over-
wrought piece of analysis, upon himself, and bursts
out of his cobwebs into a solution of the question by
passion and imagination. Nevertheless the charm
of this merely intellectual play pulled at him con-
tinually, and as he could always embroider it with
fancy it seemed to him close to imagination ; and
this belief grew upon him as he got farther away
from the warmth and natural truth of youth. It is
the melancholy tendency of some artists, as they
feel the weakness of decay, to become scientific;
and a fatal temptation it is. There is one poem of
his in which he puts the whole matter clearly and
happily, with a curious and suggestive title, " Trans-
cendentalism : A Poem in Twelve Books."

He speaks to a young poet who will give to
men " naked thought, good, true, treasurable stuff,
solid matter, without imaginative imagery, without
emotion."

Thought's what they mean by verse, and seek in verse.

Boys seek for images and melody,

Men must have reason — so, you aim at men.

It is " quite otherwise," Browning tells him, and he
illustrates the matter by a story.

Jacob Bohme did not care for plants. All he
cared for was his mysticism. But one day, as if

THE POET OF ART 145

the magic of poetry had slipped into his soul, he
heard all the plants talking, and talking to him ;
and behold, he loved them and knew what they
meant. Imagination had done more for him than
all his metaphysics. So we give up our days to
collating theory with theory, criticising, philoso-
phising, till, one morning, we wake " and find Ufe's
summer past."

What remedy } What hope .' Why, a brace of
rhymes ! And then, in life, that miracle takes place
which John of Halberstadt did by his magic. We
feel like a child ; the world is new ; every bit of life
is run over and enchanted by the wild rose.

And in there breaks the sudden ros,e herself,
Over us, under, round us every side,
Nay, in and out the tables and the chairs
And musty volumes, Bohme's book and all —
Buries us with a glory, young once more,
Pouring heaven into this shut house of life.

So come, the harp back to your heart again !

I return, after this introduction, to Browning's
doctrine of life as it is connected with the arts. It
appears with great clearness in Easter-Day. He
tells of an experience he had when, one night,
musing on life, and wondering how it would be
with him were he to die and be judged in a
moment, he walked on the wild common outside the
little Dissenting Chapel he had previously visited
on Christmas-Eve and thought of the Judgment.
And Common-sense said : " You have done your
best ; do not be dismayed ; you will only be sur-
prised, and when the shock is over you will smile at
your fear." And as he thought thus the whole sky
became a sea of fire. A fierce and vindictive

46 BROWNING

cribble of red quick flame ran across it, and the
miverse was burned away. " And I knew," thought
Browning, " now that Judgment had come, that I
lad chosen this world, its beauty, its knowledge,
ts good — that, though I often looked above, yet to
•enounce utterly the beauty of this earth and man
vas too hard for me." And avoice came : "Eternity
s here, and thou art judged." And then Christ
itood before him and said : " Thou hast preferred the
inite when the infinite was in thy power. Earthly
oys were palpable and tainted. The heavenly joys
litted before thee, faint, and rare, and taintless,
rhou hast chosen those of this world. They are
bine."

" O rapture ! is this the Judgment .' Earth's
jxquisite treasures of wonder and delight for me ! "
"So soon made happy," said the voice. "The
oveliness of earth is but like one rose flung from
he Eden whence thy choice has excluded thee.
The wonders of earth are but the tapestry of the
mte-chamber in the royal house thou hast aban-
loned."

All partial beauty was a pledge

Of beauty in its plenitude :

But since the pledge sufficed thy mood,

Retain it ! plenitude be theirs

Who looked above !

"O sharp despair! but since the joys of earth
'ail me, I take art. Art gives worth to Nature ; it
;tamps it with man. I'll take the Greek sculpture,
he perfect painting of Italy — that world is mine ! "

"Then obtain it," said the voice: "the one
ibstract form, the one face with its one look — all
:hey could manage. Shall I, the illimitable beauty.

THE POET OF ART 147

be judged by these single forms ? What of that
perfection in their souls these artists were conscious
of, inconceivably exceeding all they did ? What of
their failure which told them an illimitable beauty
was before them ? What of Michael Angelo now,
who did not choose the world's success or earth's
perfection, and who now is on the breast of the Di-
vine? All the beauty of art is but furniture for life's
first stage. Take it then. But there are those, my
saints, who were not content, like thee, with earth's
scrap of beauty, but desired the whole. They are
now filled with it. Take thy one jewel of beauty
on the beach ; lose all I had for thee in the bound-
less ocean."

"Then I take mind; earth's knowledge carries
me beyond the finite. Through circling sciences,
philosophies, and histories I will spin with rapture ;
and if these fail to inspire, I will fly to verse, and
in its dew and fire break the chain which binds me
to the earth; — nay, answer me not, I know what
Thou wilt say : What is highest in knowledge, even
those fine intuitions which lead the finite into the
infinite, and which are best put in noble verse, are
but gleams of a light beyond them, sparks from the
sum of the whole. I give that world up also, and
I take Love. All I ask is leave. to love."

" Ah," said the voice, " is this thy final choice .'
Love is the best; 'tis somewhat late. Yet all
the power and beauty, nature and art and know-
ledge of this earth were only worth because of
love. Through them infinite love called to thee;
and even now thou clingest to earth's love as all.
It is precious, but it exists to bear thee beyond the
love of earth into the boundless love of God in me."

148 BROWNING

At last, beaten to his last fortress, all broken down,

he cries :

Thou Love of God ! Or let me die,

Or grant what shall seem heaven almost !

Let me not know that all is lost.

Though lost it be — leave me not tied

To this despair — this corpse-like bride!

Let that old life seem mine — no more —

With limitation as before,

With darkness, hunger, toil, distress :

Be all the earth a wilderness ! '

Only let me go on, go on,

Still hoping ever and anon

To reach one eve the Better Land !

This is put more strongly, as in the line : " Be
all the earth a wilderness ! " than Browning himself
would have put it. But he is in the passion of the
man who speaks, and heightens the main truth into
an extreme. But the theory is there, and it is
especially applied to the love of beauty and there-
fore to the arts. The illustrations are taken from
music and painting, from sculpture and poetry.
Only in dwelling too exclusively, as perhaps the
situation demands, on the renunciation of this
world's successes, he has left out that part of his
theory which demands that we should, accepting
our limits, work within them for the love of man,
but learn from their pressure and pain to transcend
them always in the desire of infinite perfection.
In Rabbi Ben Ezra, a masterpiece of argumentative
and imaginative passion — such a poem as only
Browning could have written, who, more than other
poets, equalised, when most inspired, reasoning,
emotions, and intuitions into one material for poetry
— he applies this view of his to the whole of
man's life here and in the world to come, when the

THE POET OF ART 149

Rabbi in the quiet of old age considers what his
life has been, and how God has wrought him
through it for eternity. But I leave that poem,
which has nothing to do with art, for Abt Vogler,
which is dedicated to music.

" When Solomon pronounced the Name of God,
all the spiritSj good and bad, assembled to do his
will and build his palace. And when I, Abt Vogler,
touched the keys, I called the Spirits of Sound to
me, and they have built my palace of music; and
to inhabit it all the Great Dead came back, till in
the vision I made a perfect music. Nay, for a
moment, I touched in it the infinite perfection ; but
now it is gone; I cannot bring it back. Had I
painted it, had I written it, I might have explained it.
But in music, out of the sounds something emerges
which is above the sounds, and that ineffable thing
I touched and lost. I took the well-known sounds
of earth, and out of them came a fourth sound, nay,
not a sound — but a star. This was a ilash of God's
will which opened the Eternal to me for a moment;
and I shall find it again in the eternal life. There-
fore, from the achievement of earth and the failure
of it, I turn to God, and in him I see that every
image, thought, impulse, and dream of knowledge or
of beauty — which, coming whence we know not, flit
before us in human life, breathe for a moment, and
then depart ; which, like mymusic, build a sudden
pIlMJe in imagination; which abidej or an instant
aij«te issolve, but which memory and hope retain as

as und of aspiration — are not lost to us though
. seem to die in their immediate passage. Their
h hu : has its home in the Will of God and we
shki( find them completed there."

I JO BROWNING

All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist;

Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist

When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,

The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard ;

Enough that he heard it once : we shall hear it by-and-by.
* * * If- Id *

■\^£ll, '■\^^ \^j^r\\\ viiitlj. rpp ■ silence resumes her reign :

I will be patient and proud, and soberly acquiesce.
Give me the keys. I feel for the common chord again,

Sliding by semitones, till I sink to the minor, — yes.

And I blunt it into a ninth, and I stand on alien ground.

Surveying awhile the heights I rolled from into the deep ;

Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting-place is

found,

The C Major of this life : so, now I will try to sleep.

With that he returns to human life, content to
labour in its Umits — the common chord is his.
But he has been where he shall be, and he is not
likely to be satisfied with the C major of life.
This, in Browning's thought, is the true comfort
and strength of the life of the artist/ to whom these
fallings from us, vanishings, these transient visits
of the infinite Divine, like swallows that pass in full
flight, are more common than to other men. They
teirhim of the unspeakable beauty ; they let loose
,his spirit to fly into the third heaven.

So much for the theory in this poem. As to the
artist and his art in it, that is quite a different
matter; and as there are few of Browning's, ^oems
which reach a higher level than this bottd As^to,
thought, and spiritual passion, it ma}agrofe, >
while, for once, to examine a poem of ;..hey ipy
\ Browning's imagination conceived in-nusicfof ^^t
\ the musician's experience from end to end ;U fc'the

THE. POET OF ART 151

form of the experience arose along with the con-
ception. ' He saw Abt Vogler in the silent church,
pla)dng to himself before the golden towers of the
organ, and slipping with sudden surprise into a
strain which is less his than God's. He saw the
I vision which accompanied the music, and the man's
\ heart set face to face with the palace of music he
\had built. He saw him live in it and then pass
to heaven with it and lose it. And he saw the
close of the experience, with all its scenery in the
church and in Abt Vogler' s heart, at the same time,
in one vision. In this unconscipus shaping of his
thought into a human incident, with its soul and
scenery, is the imagination creating, like a god, a
thing unknown, unseen before.

Having thus shaped the form, the imagination
passed on to make the ornament. It creates that
far-off image of Solomon and his spirits building
their palace for the Queen of Sheba which exalts the
whole conception and enlarges the reader's imagi-
nation through all the legends of the great King —
and then it makes, for fresh adornment, the splendid
piling up of the sounds into walls of gold, pinnacles,
splendours and meteor moons; and lastly, with
upward sweeping of its wings, bids the sky to fall
in love with the glory of the palace, and the mighty
forms of the noble Dead to walk in it. This is
the imagination at play with its conception, adorn-
ing, glorifying, heightening the full impression, but
keeping every imaged ornament misty, impalpable,
as in a dream — for so the conception demanded.

And then, to fill the conception with the spirit of
humanity, the personal passion of the poet rises
and falls through the description, as the music

152 BROWNING

rises and falls. We feel his breast beating againsi
ours; till the time comes when, like a sudden
change in a great song, his emotion changes intc
ecstasy in the outburst of the 9th verse :

Therefore to whom turn I but to thee, the ineflfable Name?

It almost brings tears into the eyes. This is art-
creation — this is what imagination, intense emo-
tion, and individuality have made of the material oi
thought — poetry, not prose.

Even at the close, the conception, the imagina-
tion, and the personal passion keep their art. The
rush upwards of the imaginative feeling dies slowly
away; it is as evanescent as the Vision of the
Palace, but it dies into another picture of humanity
which even more deeply engages the human heart.
Browning sees the organ-loft now silent and dark,
and the silent figure in it, alone and bowed ovei
the keys. The church is still, but aware of what
has been. The golden pipes of the organ are lost
in the twilight and the music is over — all the
double vision of the third heaven into which he
has been caught has vanished away. The form
of the thing rightly fits the idea. Then, when the
form is shaped, the poet fills it with the deep
emotion of the musician's soul, and then with his
own emotion ; and close as the air to the earth are
the sorrow and exultation of Abt Vogler and
Browning to the human heart — sorrow for the
vanishing and the failure, exultant joy because what
has been is but an image of the infinite beauty
they will have in God. In the joy they do not
sorrow for the failure. It is nothing but an om.en oi
success. Their soul, greater than the vision, takes

THE POET OF ART 153

up common life with patience and silent hope. We
hear them sigh and strike the chord of C.

This is lyric imagination at work in lyric
poetry. There are two kinds of lyrics among
many others. One is where the strong emotion of
the poet, fusing all his materials into one creation,
comes to a height and then breaks off suddenly.
It is like a thunderstorm, which, doubling and re-
doubling its flash and roar, ends in the zenith with
the brightest flash and loudest clang of thunder.
There is another kind. It is when the storm of
emotion reaches, like the first, its climax, but does
not end with it. The lyric passion dies slowly
away from the zenith to the horizon, and ends in
quietude and beauty, attended by soft colour and
gentle sounds ; like the thunderstorm which faints
with the sunset and gathers its clouds to be adorned
with beauty. This lyric of Browning's is a noble
example of the second type.

I take another poem, the Grammarian^ s Funeral,
to illustrate his art. The main matter of thought
in it is the same as that of Abt Vogler, with the
variation that the central figure is not a musician
but a grammarian ; that what he pursued was critical
knowledge, not beauty, and that he is not a modem,
like Abt Vogler, but one of the Renaissance folk,
and seized, as men were seized then, with that
insatiable curiosity which characterised the outbreak
of the New Learning. The matter of thought in it
is of less interest to us than the poetic creation
wrought out of it, or than the art with which it is
done. We see the form into which the imaginative
conception is thrown — the group of sorrowing
students carrying their master's corpse to the high

154 BROWNIN'G

platform of the mountain, singing what he was, iiiy
admiration and honour and delight that he had^
mastered life and won eternity ; a conception full of
humanity, as full of the life of the dead master's soul
as of the students' enthusiasm. This thrills us into
creation, with the poet, as we read. Then the im-
agination which has made the conception into form
adorns it. It creates the plain, the encircling moun-
tains, one cloudy peak higher than the rest; as we
mount we look on the plain below ; we reach the
city on the hill, pass it, and climb the hill-top;
there are all the high-flying birds, the meteors, the
lightnings, the thickest dew. And we lay our dead
on the peak, above the plain. This is the scenery,
the imaginative ornament, and all through it we are
made to hear the chant of the students ; and so
lifting is the melody of the verse we seem to taste
the air, fresher and fresher as we climb. Then,
finally, into the midst of this flows for us the eager
intensity of the scholar. Dead as he is, we feel
him to be alive ; never resting, pushing on inces-
santly, beating failure beneath his feet, making it
the step for further search for the infinite, resolute
to live in the dull limits of the present work, but
never content save in waiting for that eternity
which will fulfil the failure of earth ; which, missing
earth's success, throws itself on God, dying to gain
the highest. This is the passion of the poem, and
Browning is in it like a fire. It was his own, his
very life. He pours it into the students who re-
joice in the death of their master, and he gives it to
us as we read the poem. And then, because con-
ception, imagination, and intensity of thought and
emotion all here work together, as in Abt Vogler,

THE POET OF ART 155

the melody of the poem is lovely, save in one verse
which ought to be out of the poem. As to the
conclusion, it is priceless. Such a conclusion can
only emerge when all that precedes it finely con-
tains it, and I have often thought that it pictures
Browning himself. I wish he had been buried
on a mountain-top, all Italy below him.

Well, here's the platform, here's the proper place :

Hail to your purlieus,
All ye high-flyers of the feathered race,

Swallows and curlews !
Here's the top-peak ; the multitude below

Live, for they can, there :
This man decided not to Live but Know —

Bury this man there ?

Here — here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form,

Lightnings are loosened.
Stars come and go ! Let joy break with the storm,

Peace let the dew send !
Lofty designs must close in like effects :

Loftily lying,
Leave him — still loftier than the world suspects,

Living and dying.

This is the artist at work, and I doubt whether
all the laborious prose written, in history and
criticism, on the revival of learning, will ever ex-
press better than this short poem the inexhaust-
ible thirst of the Renaissance in its pursuit of
knowledge, or the enthusiasm of the pupils of a
New Scholar for his desperate strife to know in a
short life the very centre of the Universe.

Another poem on the arts which is mixed up
with Browning's theory of life is Andrea del Sarto.
Into it the theory slips, like an uninvited guest into
a dinner-party of whom it is felt that he has some
relation to some one of the guests, but for whom

IS6 BROWNING

no cover is laid. The faulty and broken life of
Andrea, in its contrast with his flawless drawing,
has been a favourite subject with poets. Alfred
de Musset and others have dramatised it, and it
seems strange that none of our soul-wrecking and
vivisecting novehsts have taken it up for their
amusement. Browning has not left out a single
point of the subject. The only criticism I should
make of this admirable poem is that, when we"
come to the end, we dislike the woman and despise
the man more than we pity either of them ; and in
tragic art-work of a fine quality, pity for human
nature with a far-off tenderness in it should remain
as the most lasting impression. All the greater^
artists, even while they went to the bottom of
sorrow and wickedness, have done this wise and
beautiful thing, and Browning rarely omits it.

The first art-matter in the poem is Browning's
sketch of the sudden genesis of a picture. Andrea is
sitting with his wife on the window-seat looking
out to Fiesole. As he talks she smiles a weary,
lovely, autumn smile, and, born in that instant and
of her smile, he sees his picture, knows its atmos-
phere, reaUses -its tone of colour, feels its prevailing
sentiment. How he will execute it is another
.question, and depends on other things ; but no
better sketch could be given of the sudden spiritual
fashion in which great pictures are generated.
Here are the lines, and they also strike the keynote
of Andrea's soul — that to which his life has brought
him.

You smile ? why, there's my picture ready made,

There's what we painters call our harmony !

A common greyness silvers everything, —

All in a twilight, you and I alike —

THE POET OF ART IS7

You, at the point of your first pride in me

(That's gone, you know), — but I, at every point ;

My youth, my hope, my art, being all toned down

To yonder sober pleasant Fiesole.

There's the bell clinking from the chapel-top ;

That length of convent-wall across the way

Holds the trees safer, huddled more inside ;

The last monk leaves the garden ; days decrease,

And autumn grows, autumn in everything.

Eh ? the whole seems to fall into a shape

As if I saw alike my work and self

And all that I was born to be and do,

A twilight piece. Love, we are in God's hand.

In God's hand .' Yes, but why being free are we
so fettered } And here slips in the unbidden guest
of the theory. Andrea has chosen earthly lovef'
Lucrezia is all in all ; and he has reached absolute
perfection in drawing —

I do what many dream of, all their lives.

He can reach out beyond himself no more. He
has got the earth, lost the heaven. He makes no
error, and has, therefore, no impassioned desire
which, flaming through the faulty picture, makes it
greater art than his faultless work. " The soul is
gone from me, that vext, suddenly-impassioned,
upward-rushing thing, with its play, insight, broken
sorrows, sudden joys, pursuing, uncontented life.
These men reach a heaven shut out from me,
though they cannot draw like me. No praise or
blame affects me. I know my handiwork is perfect.
But there burns a truer light of God in them.
Lucrezia, I. am judged."

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp.
Or what's a heaven for ? All is silver-grey,
Placid and perfect with my art : — the worse !

158 BROWNING ^

" Here," he says, " is a piece of Rafael. The
arm is out of drawing, and I could make it right.
But the passion, the soul of the thing is not in me.
Had you, my love, but urged me upward, to glory
and God, I might have been uncontent; I might
have done it for you. No," and again he sweeps,
round on himself, out of his excuses, " perhaps notJ
' incentives come from the soul's self ' ; and mine ia
gone. I've chosen the love of you, Lucrezia, earth's
love, and I cannot pass beyond my faultless draw-
ing into the strife to paint those divine imaginations
the soul conceives." "i^

That is the meaning of Browning. The faultless,
almost mechanical art, the art which might be born
of an adulterous connexion between science and
art, is of little value to men. Not in the flawless
painter is true art found, but in those who painted
inadequately, yet whose pictures breathe

Infinite passion and the pain -^a

Of finite hearts that yearn.

In this incessant strife to create new worlds, and
in their creation, which, always ending in partial
failure, forces fresh effort, lies, Browning migh't
have said, the excuse for God having deliberately
made us defective. Had we been made good, had
we no strife with evil ; had we the power to embody
at once the beauty we are capable of seeing ; could
we have laid our hand on truth, and grasped her
without the desperate struggle we have to win one
fruit from her tree ; had we had no strong crying
and tears, no agony against wrong, against our own
passions and their work, against false views of
things — we might have been angels; but we

THE POET OF ART 159

should not have had humanity and all its wild
history, and &11 its work ; we should not have had
that which, for all I know, may be unique in the
universe; no, nor any of the great results of
the battle and its misery. Had it not been for the
defectiveness, the sin and pain, we should have
had nothing of the interest of the long evolution
of science, law, and government, of the charm of
discovery, of pursuit, of the slow upbuilding of
moral right, of the vast variety of philosophy.
Above all, we should have had none of the great
art men love so well, no Odyssey, Divine Comedy,
no Hamlet, no CEdipus, no Handel, no Beethoven,
n^spainting or sculpture where the love and sorrow
of the soul breathe in canvas, fresco, marble, and
bronze, no, nor any of the great and loving lives
who suffered and overcame, from Christ to the poor
woman who dies for love in a London lane. All
these are made through the struggle and the
sorrow. We should not have had, I repeat,
humanity ; and provided no soul perishes for ever
but lives to fiijd union with undying love, the game,
with all its terrible sorrow, pays for the candle.
We may find out, some day, that the existence
and wcJr'k of humanity, crucified as it has been,
are of untold interest and use to the universe
— which things the angels desire to look into. If
Browning had listened to that view, he would, I
think, have accepted it.

Old Pictures in Florence touches another side of
his theory. "^In itself, it is one of Browning's half-
humorous poems ; a pleasantly-composed piece,
glancing here and glancing there, as a man's mind
does when leaning over a hill-villa's parapet on a

l6o BROWNING

sunny morning in Florence. I have elsewhere
quoted its beginning. It is a fine example of his
Nature-poetry : it creates the scenery and atmos-
phere of the poem ; and the four lines with which
the fourth verse closes sketch what Browning
thought to be one of his poetic gifts —

And mark through the winter afternoons,
'i By a gift God grants me now and then,

\ In the mild decline of those suns like moons,

Who walked in Florence, besides her men.

This, then, is a poem of many moods, beginning
with Giotto's Tower ; then wondering why Giotto
did not tell the poet who loved him so much that
one of his pictures was lying hidden in a shop where
some one else picked it up ; then, thinking of all
Giotto's followers, whose ghosts he imagines are
wandering through Florence, sorrowing for the
decay of their pictures.

" But at least they have escaped, and have their
holiday in heaven, and do not care one straw for
our praise or blame. They did their work, they
and the great masters. We call them old Masters,
but they were new in their time ; their old Masters
were the Greeks. They broke away from the
Greeks and revolutionised art into a new life. In
our turn we must break away from them."

And now glides in the theory. " When Greek
art reached its perfection, the hmbs which infer the
soul, and enough of the soul to inform the Umbs,
were faultlessly represented. Men said the best
had been done, and aspiration and growth in art
ceased. Content with what had been done, men
imitated, but did not create. But man cannot
remain without change in a past perfection; for

THE POET OF ART l6l

then he remains in a kind of death. Even with
failure, with faulty work, he desires to make new
things, and in making, to be alive and feel his life.
Therefore Giotto and the rest began to create a
fresh aspect of humanity, which, however imperfect
in form, would suggest an infinite perfection. The
Greek perfection ties us down to earth, to a few
forms, and the sooner, if it forbids us to go on, we
reject its ideal as the only one, the better for art
and for mankind.

'Tis a life-long toil till our lump be leaven —
The better ! What's come to perfection perishes.

Things learned on earth, we shall practise in heaven :
Works done least rapidly, Art most cherishes.

" The great Campanile is still unfinished ; " so he
shapes his thoughts into his scenery. Shall man
be satisfied in art with the crystallised joy of Apollo,
or the petrified grief of Niobe, when there are a
million more expressions of joy and grief to render .-"
In that way felt Giotto and his crew. " We will
paint the whole of man," they cried, " paint his
new hopes and joys and pains, and never pause,
because we shall never quite succeed. We will
paint the soul in all its infinite variety — bring the
invisible full into play. Of course we shall miss per-
fection — who can get side by side with infinitude ?
— but we shall grow out of the dead perfection of
the past, and live and move, and have our being.

" Let the visible go to the dogs — what matters ? "

Thus art began again. Its spring-tide came,
dim and dewy; and the world rejoiced.

And that is what has happened again and again
in the history of art. Browning has painted a

l62 BROWNING

universal truth. It was that which took place
when Wordsworth, throwing away the traditions
of a century and all the finished perfection, as men
thought, of the Augustan age, determined to write
of man as man, whatever the issue; to live with
the infinite variety of human nature, and in its
natural simplicities. What we shall see, he thought,
may be faulty, common, unideal, imperfect. What
we shall write will not have the conventional per-
fection of Pope and Gray, which all the cultivated
world admires, and in which it rests content —
growth and movement dead— but it will be true,
natural, alive, running onwards to a far-off goal.
And we who write — our loins are accinct, our
lights burning, as men waiting for the revelation of
the Bridegroom. Wordswor th_brou^ht back the
soul to Poetry.. _She made her failures, but she was
alive. Spring was blossoming around her with dews
and living airs, and the infinite opened before her.
So, too, it was when Turner recreated land-
scape-art. There was the perfect Claudesque land-
scape, with all its parts arranged, its colours chosen
the composition balanced, the tree here, the river
there, the figures in the foreground, the accurate
distribution and gradation of the masses of light
and shade. "There," the critics said, "we have
had perfection. Let us rest in that." And all growth
in landscape-art ceased. Then came Turner, who,
when he had followed the old for a time' and got
its good, broke away from it, as if in laughter.
"What," he felt, "the infinite of Nature is before
me ; inconceivable change and variety in earth,
and sky, and sea — and shall I be tied down to one
form of painting landscape, one arrangement of

TliE POET OF ART 163

arttstic^^roperties ? Let the old gerfection^go,"
And we had our revolution in landscape-art :
nothing, perhaps, so faultless as Claude's composi-
tion, but life, love of Nature, and an illimitable
range; incessant change, movement, and aspira-
tion which have never since allowed the landscape
artist to think that he has attained.

On another side of the art of painting, Rossetti,
Millais, Hunt arose ; and they said, " We will paint
men as they actually were in the past, in the
moments of their passion, and with their emotions
on their faces, and with the scenery around them
as it was ; and whatever background of Nature there
was behind them, it shall be painted direct from the
very work of Nature herself, and in her very colours.
In doing this our range will become infinite. No
doubt we shall fail. We cannot grasp the whole of
Nature and humanity, but we shall be in their life :
aspiring, alive, and winning more and more of
truth." And the world of art howled at them, asi
the world of criticism howled at Wordsworth. But|
a new life and joy began to move in painting. Its
winter was over, its spring had begun, its summer
was imagined. Their drawing was faulty ; their
colour was called crude ; they seemed to know little
or nothing of composition ; but the Sjgirit of Life
was in them, and their faults were worth more
than the best successes of the school that followed
Rafael ; for their faults proved that passion, aspi-
ration, and originality were again alive :

Give these, I exhort you, their guerdon and glory
For daring so much, before they well did it.

If ever the artist should say to himself, " What

i64 BROWNING

I desire has been attained : I can but imitate or
follow it " ; or if the people who care for any art
should think, " The best has been reached ; let us
be content to rest in that perfection " ; the death
of art has come.

The next poem belonging to this subject is the
second part of Pippa Passes. What concerns us
here is that Jules, the French artist, loves Phene ;
and on his return from his marriage pours out his
soul to her concerning his art.

In his work, in hisj pursuit of beauty through his
aspirations to the oIE Greek idealj he has found
his full content — his heaven upon earth. But
now, living love of a woman has stolen in. How
can he now, he asks, pursue that old ideal when he
has the real? how carve Tydeus, with her about
the room.? He is disturbed, thrilled, uncontent.
A new ideal rises. How can he now

Bid each conception stand while, trait by trait,
My Iiand transfers its lineaments to stone?
Will my mere fancies live near you, their truth —
The live truth, passing and repassing me.
Sitting beside me ?

Before he had seen her, all the varied stuff of
Nature, every material in her workshop, {tended to
one form of beauty! to the human archetype. But
now she, Phene, represents the archetype; and
though Browning does not express this, we feel
that if Jules continue in that opinion, his art will die.
Then, carried away by his enthusiasm for his art, he
passes, through a statement that Nature suggests
in all her doings man and his life and his beauty —
a statement Browning himself makes in Paracelsus
— to a description of the capabilities of various stuffs

THE POET OF ART 165

in Nature under the sculptor's hand, and especially
of marble as having in it the capabilities of all the
other stuffs and also something more ; a living
spirit in itself which aids the sculptor and even
does some of his work.

This is a subtle thought peculiarly characteristic
of Browning's thinking about painting, music, poetry,
or sculpture. I believe he felt, and if he did not,
it is still true, that the vehicle of any art brought
something out of itself into the work of the artist.
Abt Vogler feels this as he plays on the instrument
he made. Any musician who plays on two in-
struments knows that the distinct instrument does
distinct work, and loves each instrument for its own
spirit ; because each makes his art, expressed in it,
differentfromhisartexpressedin another. Even the
same art-creation is different in two instruments : the
vehicle does its own part of the work. Any painter
will say the same, according as he works in fresco
or on canvas, in water-colour, or in oil. Even a
material like charcoal makes him work the same
conception in a different way. I will quote the
passage ; it goes to the root of the matter ; and
whenever I read it, I seem to hear a well-known
sculptor as he talked one night to me of the spirit-
ual way in which marble, so soft and yet so firm,
answered like living material to his tool, sending
flame into it, and then seemed, as with a voice,
to welcome the emotion which, flowing from him
through the chisel, passed into the stone.

But of the stuffs one can be master of,
How I divined their capabilities !
From the soft-rinded smoothening facile chalk
That yields your outline to the air's embrace,

1 66 BROWNING

Half-softened by a halo's pearly gloom :
Down to the crisp imperious steel, so sure
To cut its one confided thought clean out
Of all the world. But marble ! — 'neath my tools
More pliable than jelly — as it were
Some clear primordial creature dug from depths
In the earth's heart, where itself breeds itself,
And whence all baser substance may be worked ;
Refine it oif to air, you may — condense it
Down to the diamond ; — is not metal there,
When o'er the sudden speck my chisel trips ?
— Not flesh, as flake ofi' flake I scale, approach.
Lay bare those bluish veins of blood asleep ?
Lurks flame in no strange windings where, surprised
By the swift implement sent home at once,
Flushes and glo wings radiate and hover
About its track ?

But Jules finds that Phene, whom he has been
deceived into beUeving an intelligence equal to his
own, does not understand one word he has said, is
nothing but an uneducated girl; and his dream
of perfection in the marriage of Art and Love
vanishes away, and with the deception the aims and
hopes of his art as it has been. And Browning
makes this happen of set purpose, in order that,
having lost satisfaction in his art-ideal, and then
his satisfaction in that ideal reahsed in a woman —
having failed in Art and Love — he may pass on into
a higher aim, with a higher conception, both of art
and love, and make a new world, in the woman
and in the art. He is about to accept the failure,
to take only to revenge on his deceivers, when
Pippa sings as she is passing, and the song touches
him into finer issues of thought. He sees that
Phene's soul is, like a butterfly, half-loosed from its
chrysaiis, and ready for flight. The sight and song
awake a tfuer love, for as yet he has loved Phene

THE POET OF ART 167

only through his art. Now he is impassioned with
pity for a human soul, and his first new sculpture
will be the creation of her soul.

Shall to produce form out of unshaped stuff

Be Art — and further, to evoke a soul

From form be nothing ? This new soul is mine !

At last, he is borne into self-forgetfulness by
love, and iinds a man's salvation. And in that loss
of self he drinks of the deep fountain of art. Aprile
found that out. Sordello dies as he discovers it, and
Jules, the moment he has touched its waters with
his lip, sees a new realm of art arise, and loves it
with such joy that he knows he will have power to
dwell in its heart, and create from its joy.

One may do whate'er one likes

In Art ; the only thing is, to make sure

That one does like it — which takes pains to know.

He breaks all his models up. They are paltry,
dead things belonging to a dead past. " I begin,"
he cries, " art afresh, in a fresh world,

Some unsuspected isle in far-off seas."

The ideal that fails means the birth of a new
ideal. The very centre of Browning as an artist is
there :

Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake !

Sordello is another example of his theory, of a
different type from Aprile, or that poet in Pauline
who gave Browning the sketch from which Sordello
was conceived. But Browning, who, as I have said,
repeated his theory, never repeated his examples :
and Sordello is not only clearly varied from Aprile

i68 BROWmNG

and the person in Pauline, but the variations them-
selves are inventively varied. The complex teiftpera-
ment of Sordello incessantly alters its form, not only
as he grows from youth to manhood, but as circum-
stances meet him. They give him a shock, as a
sUght blow does to a kaleidoscope, and the whole
pattern of his mind changes. But as with the bits
of coloured glass in the kaleidoscope, the elements
of Sordello's mind remain the same. It is only
towards the end of his career, on the forcible intro-
duction into his Ufe of new elements from the
outward world, that his character radically changes,
and his soul is born. He wins that which he has
been without from the beginning. He wins, as we
should say, a heart. He not only begins to love
Palma otherwise than in his dreams, but with that
love the love of man arises — for, in characters like
Sordello, personal love, once really stirred, is sure
to expand beyond itself — and then, following on
the love of man, conscience is quickened into Ufe,
and for the first time recognises itself and its duties.
In this new light of love and conscience, directed
towards humanity, he looks back on his life as an
artist, or rather. Browning means us to do so ; and
we understand that he has done nothing worthy in
his art ; and that even his gift of imagination has
been without the fire of true passion. His aspira-
tions, his phantasies, his songs, done only for his
own sake, have been cold, and left the world cold.
He has aspired to a life in the realm of pure
imagination, to winning by imagination alone all
knowledge and all love, and the power over men
which flows from these. He is, in this aspiration,
Paracelsus and Aprile in one. But he has neither

THE POET OF ART 169

the sincerity of Paracelsus nor the passion of Aprile.
He lives in himself alone, beyond the world of
experience, and only not conscious of those barriers
which limit our life on which Browning dwells so
much, because he does not bring his aspirations or
his imaginative work to the test by shaping them
outside of himself. He fails, that is, to create
anything which will please or endure; fails in
the iirst aim, the first duty of an artist. He comes
again and again to the verge of creating something
which may give delight to men, but only once
succeeds, when by chance, in a moment of excited
impulse, caused partly by his own vanity, and partly
by the waves of humanity at Palma's Court of
Love beating on his soul, he breaks for a passing
hour into the song which conquers Eglamor. When,
at the end, he does try to shape himself without
for the sake of men he is too late for this life.
He dies of the long struggle, of the revelation
of his failure and the reasons of it, of the supreme
light which falls 'on his wasted life ; and yet not
wasted, since even in death he has found his soul
and all it means. His imagination, formerly only
intellectual, has become emotional as well ; he loves
mankind, and sacrifices fame, power, and knowledge
to its welfare. He no longer thinks to avoid, by
living only in himself, the baffling limitations which
inevitably trouble human life; but now desires,
working within these limits, to fix his eyes on the
ineffable Love ; failing but making every failure a
ladder on which to climb to higher things. This
— the true way of life — he finds out as he dies. To
have that spirit, and to work in it, is the very
life of art. To pass for ever out of and beyond

170 BROWNING

one's self is to the artist the lesson of Sordello's
story.

It is hardly learnt. The self in Sordello, the self
of imagination unwarmed by love of men, is driven
out of the artist with strange miseries, battles, and
despairs, and these Browning describes with such
inventiveness that at the last one is inclined to say,
with all the pitiful irony of Christ, " This kind goeth
not forth but with prayer and fasting."

The position in the poem is at root the same
as that in Tennyson's Palace of Art. These two
poets found, about the same time, the same idea, and,
independently, shaped it into poems. Tennyson put
it into the form of a vision, the defect of which was
that it was too far removed from common experience.
Browning put it into the story of a man's life.
Tennyson expressed it with extraordinary clearness,
simplicity, and with a wealth of lovely ornament, so
rich that it somewhat overwhelmed the main lines
of his conception. Browning expressed it with
extraordinary complexity, subtlety, and obscurity of
diction. But when we take the trouble of getting
to the bottom of Sordello, we find ourselves where
we do not find ourselves in The Palace of Art — we
find ourselves in close touch and friendship with
a man, living with him, sympathising with him,
pitying him, blessing him, angry and delighted with
him, amazingly interested in his labyrinthine way of
thinking and feeling ; we follow with keen interest
his education, we see a soul in progress; we
wonder what he will do next, what strange turn
we shall come to in his mind, what new effort he
will make to realise himself ; and, loving him right
through from his childhood to his death, we are

THE POET OF ART 171

quite satisfied when he dies. At the back of this,
and complicating it still more; but, when we
arrive at seeing it clearly, increasing the interest of
the poem, is a great to-and-f ro of humanity at a time
when humanity was alive and keen and full of at-
tempting ; when men were savagely original, when
life was lived to its last drop, and when a new world
was dawning. Of all this outside humanity there
is not a trace in Tennyson, and Browning could
not have got on without it. Of course, it made his
poetry difficult. We cannot get excellences without
their attendant defects. We have a great deal to
forgive in Sordello. But for the sake of the vivid
humanity we forgive it all.

Sordello begins as a boy, living alone in a castle
near Mantua, built in a gorge of the low hills, and
the description of the scenery of the castle, without
and within, is one example of the fine ornament of
which Sordello is so full. There, this rich and
fertile nature lives, fit to receive delight at every
sense, fit to shape what is received into imaginative
pictures within, but not without ; content with the
contemplation of his own imaginings. At first it
is Nature from whom Sordello receives impressions,
and he amuses himself with the fancies he draws
from her. But he never shapes his emotion into
actual song. Then tired of Nature, he dreams him-
self into the skin and soul of all the great men of
whom he has read. He becomes them in himself,
as Pauline's lover has done before him ; but one
by one they fade into unreality — for he knows
nothing of men — and the last projection of himself
into Apollo, the Lord of Poetry, is the most unreal
of them all : at which phantasy all the woods and

172 BROWNING

streams and sunshine round Goito are infinitely
amused. Thus, when he wants sympathy, he does
not go down to Mantua and make song for the
crowd of men ; he invaits in dreams a host of
sympathisers, all of whom are but himself in other
forms. Even when he aims at perfection, and,
making himself Apollo, longs for a Daphne to
double his Uf e, his soul is still such stuff as dreams
are made of, till he wakes one morning to ask
himself : " When will this dream be truth ? "

This is the artist's temperament in youth when
he is not possessed of the greater qualities of gen-
ius — his imaginative visions, his aspirations, his
pride in apartness from men, his self-contentment,
his sloth, the presence in him of barren imagination,
the absence from it of the spiritual, nothing in him
which as yet desires, through the sorrow and strife
of life, God's infinitude, or man's love; a natural
life indeed, forgivable, gay, sportive, dowered with
happy self-love, good to pass through and enjoy,
but better to leave behind. But Sordello will not
become the actual artist till he lose his self-
involvement and find his soul, not only in love of
his Daphne but in love of man. And the first
thing he will have to do is that which Sordello
does not care to do — to embody before men in
order to give them pleasure or impulse, to console
or exalt them, some of the imaginations he has
enjoyed within himself. Nor can Sordello's imagi-
nation reach true passion, for it ignores that which
chiefly makes the artist ; union with the passions
of mankind. Only when near to death does he
outgrow the boy of Goito, and then we find that
he has ceased to be the artist. Thus, the poem is

THE POET OF ART 173

the history of the far are of a man with an artistic
temperament to be an artist. Or rather, that is
part of the story of the poem, and, as Browning
was an artist himself, a part which is of the greatest
interest.

Sordello, at the close of the first book, is wearied
of dreams. Even in his solitude, the limits of life
begin to oppress him. Time fleets, fate is tardy,
life will be over before he lives. Then an accident
helps him —

Which breaking on Sordello's mixed content
Opened, like any flash that cures the blind,
The veritable business of mankind.

This accident is the theme of the second book.
It belongs to the subject of this chapter, for it
contrasts two types of the artist, Eglamor and
Sordello, and it introduces Naddo, the critic, with
a good knowledge of poetry, with a great deal of
common sense, with an inevitable sliding into the
opinion that what society has stamped must be
good — a mixed personage, and a sketch done with
Browning's humorous and pitying skill.

The contrast between Eglamor and Sordello runs
through the whole poem. Sordello recalls Eglamor
at the last, and Naddo appears again and again to
give the worldly as well as the common-sense
solution of the problems which Sordello makes for
himself. Eglamor is the poet who has no genius,
whom one touch of genius burns into nothing, but
who, having a charming talent, employs it well ;
and who is so far the artist that what he feels he
is able to shape gracefully, and to please mankind
therewith; who, moreover loves, enjoys, and is

174 BROWNING

wholly possessed with what he shapes in song.
This is good ; but then he is quite satisfied with
what he does ; he has no aspiration, and all the
infinitude of beauty is lost to him. And when
Sordello takes up his incomplete song, finishes it,
inspires, expands what Eglamor thought perfect, he
sees at last that he has only a graceful talent, that
he has lived in a vain show, hke a gnome in a cell
of the rock of gold. Genius, momentarily realising
itself in Sordello, reveals itself to Eglamor with all
its infinities ; Heaven and Earth and the universe
open on Eglamor, and the revelation of what he is,
and of the perfection beyond, kills him. That is a
fine, true, and piteous sketch.

But Sordello, who is the man of possible genius,
is not much better off. There has been one out-
break into reality at Palma's Court of Love. Every
one, afterwards, urges him to sing. The critics
gather round him. He makes poems, he becomes
the accepted poet of Northern Italy. But he
cannot give continuous delight to the world. His
poems are not like his song before Palma. They
have no true passion, being woven like a spider's
web out of his own inside. His case then is more
pitiable, his failure more complete, than Eglamor' s.
Eglamor could shape something ; he had his own
enjoyment, and he gave pleasure to men. Sordello,
lured incessantly towards abstract ideals, lost in
their contemplation, is smitten, like Aprile, into
helplessness by the multitudinousness of the images
he sees, refuses to descend into real life and submit
to its limitations, is driven into the slothfulness of
that 'dreaming imagination which is powerless to
embody its images in the actual song. Sometimes

THE POET OF ART 175

he tries to express himself, longing for reality.
When he tries he fails, and instead of making
failure a step to higher effort, he falls back
impatiently on himself, and is lost in himself.
Moreover, he tries always within himself, and with
himself for judge. He does not try the only thing
which would help him — the submission of his
work to the sympathy and judgment of men. Out
of touch with any love save love of his own im-
aginings, he cannot receive those human impres-
sions which kindle the artist into work, nor answer
the cry which comes from mankind, with such
eagerness, to genius — " Express for us in clear
form that which we vaguely feel. Make us see and
admire and love." Then he ceases even to love song,
because, though he can imagine everything, he can
do nothing; and deaf to the voices of men, he
despises man. Finally he asks himself, like so
many young poets who have followed his way,
What is the judgment of the world worth .' Nothing
at all, he answers. With that ultimate folly, the
favourite resort of minor poets, Sordello goes
altogether wrong. He pleases nobody, not even
himself ; spends his time in arguing inside himself
why he has not succeeded ; and comes to no con-
clusion, except that total failure is the necessity of
the world. At last one day, wandering from Mantua,
he finds himself in his old environment, in the
mountain cup where Goito and the castle lie. And
the old dream, awakened by the old associations,
that he was Apollo, Lord of Song, rushed back
upon him and enwrapped him wholly. He feels, in
the blessed silence, that he is no longer what he
has been of late.

176 BROWNING

a pettish minstrel meant
To wear away his soul in discontent,
Brooding on fortune's malice,

but himself once more, freed from the world of
Mantua ; alone again, but in his loneliness really
more lost than he was at Mantua, as we soon find
out in the third book.

I return, in concluding this chapter, to the point
which bears most clearly on Browning as the poet of
art. The only time when Sordello realises what it is
to be an artist is when, swept out of himself by the
kindled emotion of the crowd at the Court of Love
and inspired also by the true emotion of Eglamor's
song, which has been made because he loved it —
his imagination is impassioned enough to shape for
man the thing within him, outside of himself, and
to sing for the joy of singing — having forgotten
himself, in mankind, in their joy and in his own.

But it was little good to him. When he stole
home to Goito in a dream, he sat down to think
over the transport he had felt, why he felt it, how
he was better than Eglamor ; and at last, having
missed the whole use of the experience (which was
to draw him into the service of man within the
limits of hfe but to always transcend the limits in
aspiration), he falls away from humanity into his
own self again; and perfectly happy for the moment,
but lost as an artist and a man, lies lazy, filleted and
robed on the turf, with a lute beside him, looking
over the landscape below the castle and fancying
himself Apollo. This is to have the capacity to be
an artist, but it is not to be an artist. And we leave
Sordello lying on the grass enjoying himself, but not
destined on that account to give any joy to man.

CHAPTER VI

BORDELLO

THE period in which the poem of Sordello
opens is at the end of the first quarter of the
thirteenth century, at the time when the Guelf
cities allied themselves against the Ghibellines in
Northern Italy. They formed the Lombard League,
and took their private quarrels up into one great
quarrel — that between the partisans of the Em-
pire and those of the Pope. Sordello is then a
young man of thirty years. He was born in 1194,
when the fierce fight in the streets of Vicenza took
place which Salinguerra describes, as he looks back
on his Kfe, in the fourth canto of this poem. The
child is saved in that battle, and brought from
Vicenza by Adelaide, the second wife of Ezzelino
da Romano II.,* to Goito. He is really the son of
Salinguerra and Retrude, a connection of Fred-
erick II., but Adelaide conceals this, and brings
him up as her page, alleging that he is the son of
Elcorte, an archer. Palma (or Cunizza), Ezzelino's
daughter by Agnes Este, his first wife, is also at
Goito in attendance on Adelaide. Sordello and she
meet as girl and boy, and she becomes one of the

* Browning spells this name Ecelin, probably for easier use in
verse.

N 177

178 BROWNING

dreams with which his lonely youth at Goito is
adorned.

At Adelaide's death Palma discovers the real
birth of Sordello. She has heard him sing some
time before at a Love-court, where he won the
prize ; where she, admiring, began to love him ; and
this love of hers has been increased by his poetic
fame which has now filled North Italy. She
summons him to her side at Verona, makes him
understand that she loves him, and urges him, as
Salinguerra's son, to take the side of the Ghibel-
lines to whose cause Salinguerra, the strongest
military adventurer in North Italy, has now de-
voted himself. When the poem begins, Salin-
guerra has received from the Emperor the badge
which gives him the leadership of the Ghibelline
party in North Italy.

Then Palma, bringing Sordello to see Salinguerra,
reveals to the great partisan that Sordello is his
son, and that she loves him. SaUnguerra, seeing
in the union of Palma, daughter of the Lord of
Romano, with his son, a vital source of strength to
the Emperor's party, throws the Emperor's badge
on his son's neck, and offers him the leadership
of the Ghibellines. Palma urges him to accept it ;
but Sordello has been already convinced that the
Guelf side is the right one to take for the sake of
mankind. Rome, he thinks, is the great uniting
power ; only by Rome can the cause of peace and
the happiness of the people be in the end secured.
That cause — the cause of a happy people — is the
one thing for which, after many dreams centred in
self, Sordello has come to care. He is sorely
tempted by the love of Palma and by the power

SORDELLO 179

offered him to give up that cause or to palter
with it ; yet in the end his soul resists the tempta-
tion. But the part of his life, in which he has
neglected his body, has left him without physical
strength ; and now the struggle of his soul to do
right in this spiritual crisis gives the last blow to
his weakened frame. His heart breaks, and he
dies at the moment when he dimly sees the true
goal of life. This is a masterpiece of the irony of
the Fate-Goddess; and a faint suspicion of this
irony, underlying Uf e, even though Browning turns
it round into final good, runs in and out of the
whole poem in a winding thread of thought.

This is the historical background of the poem,
and in front of it are represented Sordello, his life,
his development as an individual soul, and his
death. I have, from one point of view, slightly
analysed the first two books of the poem, but to
analyse the whole would be apart from the purpose
of this book. My object in this and the following
chapter is to mark out, with here and there a piece
of explanation, certain characteristics of the poem
in relation, first, to the time in which it is placed ;
secondly, to the development of Sordello in contact
with that time ; and thirdly, to our own time ; then
to trace the connection of the poem with the poetic
evolution of Browning ; and finally, to dwell through-
out the whole discussion on its poetic qualities.

I. The time in which the poem's thought and
action are placed is the beginning of the thirteenth
century in North Italy, a period in which the
religious basis of life, laid so enthusiastically in the
eleventh century, and gradually weakening through
the twelfth, had all but faded away for the mediae-

i8o BROWJSrmG

val noble and burgher, and even for the clergy.
Religion, it is true, was confessed and its dogmas
believed in; the Cistercian revival had restored
some of its lost influence, but it did not any longer
restrain the passions, inodify the wickedness, control
the ambitions, or subdue the world, in the heart of
men, as it had done in the eleventh century. There
was in Italy, at least, an unbridled Ucence of life, a
fierce individuality, which the existence of a num-
ber of small republics encouraged; and, in conse-
quence, a wild confusion of thought and act in every
sphere of human life. Moreover, all through the
twelfth century there had been a reaction among the
artistic and literary _men against the theory of life
laid down by the monks, and against the merely
saintly aims and practice of the religious, of which
that famous passage in Aucassin and Nicolete is an
embodiment. Then, too, the love poetry (a poetry
which tended to throw monkish purity aside) started
in the midst of the twelfth century; then the trouba-
dours began to sing; and then the love-songs of
Germany arqse. And Italian poetry, a poetry which
tended to repel the religion of the spirit for the re-
ligion of enjoyment, had begun in Sicily and Siena
in 1172-78, and was nurtured in the Sicilian Court
of Frederick II., while Sordello was a youth. All
over Europe, poetry drifted into a secular poetry of
love and war and romance. The religious basis of
Hfe had lost its strength. As to North Italy,
where our concern lies, humanity there was welter-
ing Hke a sea, tossing up and down, with no direc-
tion in its waves. It was not till Francis of Assisi
came that a new foundation for religious life, a new
direction for it, began to be established. As to

SORDELLO i8i

Law, Government, Literature, and Art, all their
elements were in equal confusion. Every noble,
every warrior who reached ascendency, or was
born to it, made his own laws and governed as ,he
liked. Every little city had its own fashions and
its own aims ; and was continually fighting, driven
by jealousy, envy, hatred, or emulation, with its
neighbours. War was the incessant business of
life, and was carried on not only against neighbour-
ing cities, but by each city in its own streets, from
its own towers, where noble fought against noble,
citizen with citizen, and servant with servant.
Literature was only trying to begin, to find its
form, to find its own Itallian tongue, to understand
what it desired. It took more than a century after
Sordello's youth to shape itself into the poetry of
Dante and Petrarch, into their prose and the prose
of Boccaccio. The Vita Nuova was set forth in
1290-93, the Decameron in 1350-53, and Petrarch
was crowned at Rome in 1341. And the arts of
sculpture and painting were in the same condition.
They were struggling towards a new utterance, but
as yet they could not speak.

It is during this period of impassioned confusion
and struggle towards form, during this carnival of
individuality, that Sordello, as conceived by Brown-
ing, a modern in the midst of medisevalism, an
exceptional character wholly unfitted for the time,
is placed by Browning. And the clash between
himself and his age is too much for him. He dies
of it ; dies of the striving to find an anchorage for
life, and of his inability to find it in this chartless
sea. But the world of men, incessantly recruited
by new generations, does not die like the individual,

i82 ■ BROWNING

and what Sordello could not do, it did. It emerged
from this confusion in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries, with S. Francis, Dante, Petrarch, and Boc-
caccio, the Pisani, Giotto, and the Commonwealth
of Florence. Religion, Poetry, Prose, Sculpture,
Painting, Government, and Law found new foun-
dations. The Renaissance began to dawn, and
during its dawn kept, among the elect of mankind,
all or nearly all the noble impulses and faith of
mediaevalism.

This dawn of the Renaissance is nearly a hundred
years away at the time of this poem, yet two of its
characteristics vitally moved through this transi
tion period; and, indeed, while they continued even
to the end of the Renaissance, were powers which
brought it about. The first of these was a boundless
curiosity about life, and the second was an intense
individuality. No one can read the history of the
Italian Republics in the thirteenth century without
incessantly coming into contact with both these
elements working fiercely, confusedly, without ap-
parently either impulse or aim, but producing a
wonderful activity of life, out of which, by com-
mand as it were of the gods, a new-created world
might rise into order. It was as if chaos were
stirred, like a cauldron with a stick, that suns
and planets, moving by living law, might emerge
in beauty. Sordello Uved in the first whirling of
these undigested elements, and could only dream
of what might be ; but it was life in which he
moved, disorderly life, it is true, but not the
dread disorder of decay. Browning paints it
with delight.

This unbridled curiosity working in men of un-

SORDELLO 183

bridled individuality produced a tumbling confusion
in life. Men, full of eagerness, each determined to
fulfil his own will, tried every kind of life, attempted
every kind of pursuit, strove to experience all the
passions, indulged their passing impulses to the full,
and when they were wearied of any experiment in
living passed on to the next, not with weariness
but with fresh excitement. Cities, small republics,
did the same collectively — Ferrara, Padua, Verona,
Mantua, Milan, Parma, Florence, Pisa, Siena, Pe-
rugia. Both cities and citizens lived in a nervous
storm, and at every impulse passed into furious
activity. In five minutes a whole town was up in
the market-place, the bells rang, the town banner
was displayed, and in an hour the citizens were
marching out of the gates to attack the neighbouring
city. A single gibe in the streets, or at the church
door, interchanged between one noble and another
of opposite factions, and the gutters of the streets
ran red with the blood of a hundred men. This
then was the time of Sordello, and splendidly has
Browning represented it.

2. Sordello is the image of this curiosity and
individuality, but only inwardly. In the midst of
this turbulent society Browning creates him with
the temperament of a poet, living in a solitary
youth, apart from arms and the wild movement of
the world. His soul is full of the curiosity of the
time. The inquisition of his whole life is, " What
is the life most worth living .' How shall I attain
it, in what way make it mine .' " and then, " What
sort of lives are lived by other men ? " and, finally,
" What is the happiest life for the whole .' " The
curiosity does not drive him, like the rest of the

i84 BROWN-ING

world, into action in the world. It expands only
in thought and dreaming. But however he may
dream, however wrapt in self he may be, his
curiosity about these matters never lessens for a
moment. Even in death it is his ruling passion.
Along with this he shares fully in the impassioned
individuality of the time. Browning brings that
forward continually. All the dreams of his youth
centre in himself ; Nature becomes the reflection of
himself ; all histories of great men he represents as
in himself ; finally, he becomes to himself Apollo,
the incarnation of poetry. But he does not seek
to realise his individuality, any more than his
curiosity, in action. When he is drawn out of
himself at Mantua and sings for a time to please
men, he finds that the public do not understand
him, and flies back to his solitude, back to his
own soul. And Mantua, and love, and adventure
all die within him. " I have all humanity," he says,
" within myself — why then should I seek human-
ity .? " This is the way the age's passion for individ-
uality shows itself in him. Other men put it into
love, war, or adventure. He does not; he puts it
into the lonely building-up of his own soul. Even
when he is brought into the midst of the action of
the time we see that he is apart from it. As he
wanders through the turmoil of the streets of Fer-
rara in Book iv., he is dreaming still of his own
life, of his own soul. His curiosity, wars, and
adventures are within. The various lives he is
anxious to live are lived in lonely imaginations.
The individuality he realises is in thought. At
this point then he is apart from his century — an
exceptional temperament set in strong contrast to

SORDELLO i8s

the world around him — the dreamer face to face
with a mass of men all acting with intensity. And
the common result takes place; the exceptional
breaks down against the steady and terrible pull of
the ordinary. It is Hamlet over again, and when
Sordello does act it is just as Hamlet does, by a
sudden impulse which lifts him from dreaming into
momentary action, out of which, almost before he
has realised he is acting, he slips back again into
dreams. And his action seems to him the dream,
and his dream the activity. That saying of Hamlet's
would be easy on the lips of Sordello, if we take "bad
dreams" to mean for him what they meant for Ham-
let the moment he is forced to action in the real
world — "I could be bounded in a nut-shell and
think myself king of infinite space, had I not bad
dreams." When he is surprised into action at the
Court of Love at Mantua, and wins the prize of song,
he seems to slip back into a sleepy cloud. But Palma,
bending her beautiful face over him and giving him
her scarf, wins him to stay at Mantua ; and for a
short time he becomes the famous poet. But he is
disappointed. That which he felt himself to be (the
supernal greatness of his individuality) is not recog-
nised, and at last he feels that to act and fight his
way through a world which appreciates his isolated
greatness so little as to dare to criticise him, is im-
possible. We have seen in the last chapter how he
slips back to Goito, to his contemplation of himself in
Nature, to his self-communion, to the dreams which
do not contradict his opinion of himself. The mo-
mentary creator perishes in the dreamer. He gives
up life, adventure, love, war, and he finally sur-
renders his art. No more poetry for him.

i86 BROWNING

It is thus that a character feeble for action, but
mystic in imagination, acts in the petulance of
youth when it is pushed into a clashing, claiming
world. In this mood a year passes by in vague
content. Yet a little grain of conscience makes
him sour. He is vexed that his youth is gone with
all its promised glow, pleasure, and action ; and the
vexation is suddenly deepened by seeing a great
change in the aspect of Nature. " What," he thinks,
when he sees the whole valley filled with Mincio in
flood, "can Nature in this way renew her youth,
and not I .' Alas ! I cannot so renew myself; youth
is over." But if youth be dead, manhood remains ;
and the curiosity and individuality of the age stir in
him again. "I must find," he thinks, "the fitting
kind of life. I must make men feel what I am.
But how ; what do I want for this .' I want some
outward power to draw me forth and upward, as
the moon draws the waters ; to lead me to a life in
which I may know mankind, in order that I may
take out of men all I need to make myself xxAo per-
fect form — a full poet, able to impose my genius
on mankind, and to lead them where I will. What
force can draw me out of these dreaming solitudes
in which I fail to reahse my art .' Why, there is
none so great as love. Palma who smiled on me,
she shall be my moon." At that moment, when
he is again thrilled with curiosity concerning life,
again desirous to realise his individuality in the
world of men, a message comes from Palma. " Come,
there is much foryou to do — come to me at Verona."
She lays a political career before him. " Take the
Kaiser's cause, you and I together; build a new
Italy under the Emperor." And Sordello is fired by

SORDELLO 187

the thought, not as yet for the sake of doing good
to man, but to satisfy his curiosity in a new life,
and to edify his individual soul into a perfection
unattained as yet. " I will go," he thinks, " and be
the spirit in this body of mankind, wield, animate,
and shape the people of Italy, make them the form
in which I shall express myself. It is not enough
to act, in imagination, all that man is, as I have
done. I will now make men act by the force of my
spirit : North Italy shall be my body, and thus I
shall realise myself " — as if one could, with that
self-contemplating motive, ever realise personality.

This, then, is the position of Sordello in the
period of history I have pictured, and it carries him
to the end of the third book of the poem. It has
embodied the history of his youth — of his first
contact with the world ; of his retreat from it into
thought over what he has gone through ; and of
his reawakening into a fresh questioning — how he
shall realise life, how manifest himself in action.
" What shall I do as a poet, and a man ? "

3. The next thing to be said of Sordello is its
vivid realisation of certain aspects of mediaeval life.
Behind this image of the curious dreamer lost in
abstractions, and vividly contrasted with it, is the
fierce activity of mediaeval cities and men in inces-
sant war ; each city, each man eager to make his
own individuality supreme ; and this is painted by
Browning at the very moment when the two great
parties were formed, and added to personal war the
intensifying power of two ideals. This was a field
for imagination in which Browning was sure to revel,
like a wild creature of the woods on a summer day.
He had the genius of places, of portraiture, and of

i88 BROWNING

sudden flashes of action and passion ; and the tim
of which he wrote supplied him with full matte
for these several capacities of genius.

When we read in Sordello of the fierce outburst
of war in the cities of North Italy, we know th:
Browning saw them with his eyes and shared the:
fury and delight. Verona is painted in the firs
book just as the news arrives that her prince i
captive in Ferrara. It is evening, a still and flan
ing sunset, and soft sky. In dreadful contrast t
this burning silence of Nature is the wrath an
hate which are seething in the market-plac(
Group talked with restless group, and not a fac

But wrath made livid, for among them were

Death's staunch purveyors, such as have in care

To feast him. Fear had long since taken root

In every breast, and now these crushed its fruit,

The ripe hate, lilce a wine ; to note the way

It worked while each grew drunk ! Men grave and grey

Stood, with shut eyelids, rocking to and fro,

Letting the silent luxury trickle slow

About the hollows where a heart should be ;

But the young gulped with a delirious glee

Some foretaste of their first debauch in blood

At the fierce news.

Step by step the varying passions, varying wit
the men of the varied cities of the League assen
bled at Verona, are smitten out on the anvil c
Browning's imagination. Better still is the coi
tinuation of the same scene in the third book, whe
the night has come, and the raging of the peopL
reaching its height, declares war. Palma an
Sordello, who are in the palace looking on th
square, lean out to see and hear. On the blac
balcony beneath them, in the still air, amid a gus

BORDELLO 189

of torch-fire, the grey-haired counsellors harangue
the people ;

then
Sea-like that people surging to and fro
Shouted, "Hale forth the carroch — trumpets, ho,
A flourish ! Run it in the ancient grooves !
Back from the bell ! Hammer — that whom behoves
May hear the League is up !

Then who will may read the dazzling account
of the streets of Ferrara thick with corpses; of
Padua, of Bassano streaming blood ; of the wells
chokef ul of carrion, of him who catches in his spur,
as he is kicking his feet when he sits on the well
and singing, his own mother's face by the grey
hair ; of the sack of Vicenza in the fourth book ; of
the procession of the envoys of the League through
the streets of Ferrara, with ensigns, war-cars, and
clanging bells; of the wandering of Sordello at
night through the squares blazing with fires, and
the soldiers camped around them singing and
shouting ; of his soUtary silent thinking contrasted
with their noise and action — and he who reads
will know, as if he lived in them, the fierce Italian
towns of the thirteenth century.

Nor is his power less when he describes the soli-
tary silent places of mediaeval castles, palaces, and
their rooms ; of the long, statue-haunted, cypress-
avenued gardens, a waste of flowers and wild
undergrowth. We wander, room by room, through
Adelaide's castle at Goito, we see every beam in
the ceiling, every figure on the tapestry ; we walk
with Browning through the dark passages into the
dim-lighted chambers of the town palace at Verona,
and hang over its balconies ; we know the gardens

igo BROWNING

at Goito, and the lonely woods ; and we keep pac«
with Sordello through those desolate paths and
ilex-groves, past the fountains lost in the wilderness
of foliage, climbing from terrace to terrace where
the broken statues, swarming with wasps, gleam
among the leering aloes and the undergrowth, in
the garden that SaUnguerra made for his Sicilian
wife at Ferrara. The words seem as it were to
flare the ancient places out before the eyes.

Mixed up with all this painting of towns, castles,
and gardens there is some natural description.
Browning endeavours, it is plain, to keep that
within the mediaeval sentiment. But that he should
succeed in that was impossible. The mediaeval
folk had little of our specialised sentiment for
landscape, and Browning could not get rid of it

The modern philosophies of Nature do not, how-
ever, appear in Sordello as they did in Pauline or
Paracelsus. Only once in the whole of Sordello is
Nature conceived as in analogy with man, and
Browning says this in a parenthesis. " Life is in
the tempest," he cries, " thought

" Clothes the keen hill-top ; mid-day woods are fiaught
With fervours " :

but, in spite of the mediaeval environment, the
modern way of seeing Nature enters into all his
descriptions. They are none the worse for it, and
do not jar too much with the mediaeval mise-
en-scine. We expect our modern sentiment, and
Sordello himself, being in many ways a modern,
seems to licence these descriptions. Most of them
also occur when he is on the canvas, and are a
background to his thought. Moreover, they are

SORDELLO 191

not set descriptions; they are flashed out, as it
were, in a few lines, as if they came by chance,
and are not pursued into detail. Indeed, they are
not done so much for the love of Nature herself,
as for passing illustrations of Sordello's ways of
thought and feeling upon matters which are not
Nature. As such, even in a mediaeval poem, they
are excusable. And vivid they are in colour, in
light, in reality. Some I have already isolated.
Here are a few more, just to show his hand. This
is the castle and its scenery, described in Book i. :

In Mantua territory half is slough,
Half pine-tree forest : maples, scarlet oaks
Breed o'er the river-beds ; even Mincio chokes
With sand the summer through : but 'tis morass
In winter up to Mantua's walls. There was,
Some thirty years before this evening's coil,
One spot reclaimed from the surrounding spoil,
Goito ; just a castle built amid
A few low mountains ; firs and larches hid
Their main defiles, and rings of vineyard bound
The rest. Some captured creature in a pound,
Whose artless wonder quite precludes distress,
Secure beside in its own loveliness,
So peered, with airy head, below, above
The castle at its toils, the lapwings love
To glean among at grape time.

And this is the same place from the second book :

And thus he wandered, dumb
Till evening, when he paused, thoroughly spent.
On a blind hill-top : down the gorge he went,
Yielding himself up as to an embrace.
The moon came out ; like features of a face,
A querulous fraternity of pines,
Sad blackthorn clumps, leafless and grovelling vines
Also came out, made gradually lip
The picture ; 'twas Goito's mountain-cup
And castle.

192 BROWNING

And here, from Book iii., is Spring when Palma,
dreaming of the man she can love, cries that the
waking earth is in a thrill to welcome him —
"Waits he not the waking year?
His almond-blossoms must be honey-ripe
By this ; to welcome him fresh runnels stripe
The thawed ravines ; because of him the wind
Walks like a herald."

This is May from Book ii. ; and afterwards, in the
third book, the months from Spring to Summer —

My own month came ;
'Twas a sunrise of blossoming and May.
Beneath a flowering laurel thicket lay
Sordello ; each new sprinkle of white stars
That smell fainter of wine than Massic jars
Dug up at Baiae, when the south wind shed
The ripest, made him happier.
Not any stroUings now at even-close
Down the field path, Sordello ! by thorn-rows
Alive with lamp-flies, swimming spots of fire
And dew, outlining the black cypress-spire
She waits you at, Elys, who heard you first
Woo her, the snow month through, but, ere she durst
Answer 'twas April. Linden-flower-time long
Her eyes were on the ground ; 'tis July, strong
Now ; and, because white dust-clouds overwhelm
The woodside, here, or by the village elm
That holds the moon, she meets you, somewhat pale.

And here are two pieces of the morning, one of
the wide valley of Naples ; another with which the
poem ends, pure modern, for it does not belong to
Sordello's time, but to our own century. This is
from the fourth book.

Broke
Morning o'er earth ; he yearned for all it woke —
From the volcano's vapour-flag, winds hoist
Black o'er the spread of sea, — down to the moist
Dale's silken barley-spikes sullied with rain,
Swayed earthwards, heavily to rise again.

SORDELLO 193

And this from the last book —

Lo, on a heathy brown and nameless hill

By sparkling Asolo, in mist and chill,

Morning just up, higher and higher runs

A child barefoot and rosy. See ! the sun's

On the square castle's inner-court's low wall

Like the chine of some extinct animal

Half-turned to earth and flowers ; and through the haze,

(Save where some slender patches of grey maize

Are to be over-leaped) that boy has crossed

The whole hill-side of dew and powder-frost

Matting the balm and mountain camomile.

Up and up goes he, singing all the while

Some unintelligible words to beat

The lark, God's poet, swooning at his feet.

As alive, and even clearer in outline than these
natural descriptions, are the portraits in Sordello
of the people of the time. No one can mistake
them for modern folk. I do not speak of the
portrait of Sordello — that is chiefly of the soul,
not of the body — but of the personages who fill
the background, the heads of noble houses, the
warriors, priests, soldiers, singers, the women, and
chiefly Adelaide and Palma. These stand before us
as Tintoret or Veronese might have painted them
had they lived on into the great portrait-century.
Their dress, their attitudes, their sudden gestures,
their eyes, hair, the trick of their mouths, their
armour, how they walked and talked and read and
wrote, are all done in quick touches and jets of
colour. Each is distinct from the others, each a
type. A multitude of cabinet sketches of men
are made in the market-places, in castle rooms,
on the roads, in the gardens, on the bastions
of the towns. Take as one example the Pope's
Legate :

194 BROWNING

With eyes, like fresh-blown thrush-eggs on a thread,

Faint-blue and loosely floating in his head,

Large tongue, moist open mouth ; and this long while

That owner of the idiotic smile

Serves them !

Nor does Browning confine himself to personages
of Sordello's time. There are admirable portraits,
but somewhat troubled by unnecessary matter, of
Dante, of Charlemagne, of Hildebrand. One elab-
orate portrait is continued throughout the poem.
It is that of Salinguerra, the man of action as con-
trasted with Sordello the dreamer. Much pains
are spent on this by Browning. We see him first
in the streets of Ferrara.

Men understood
, Living was pleasant to him as he wore

His careless surcoat, glanced some missive o'er,
Propped on his truncheon in the public way.

Then at the games at Mantua, when he is told
Sordello will not come to sing a welcome to him.
What cares he for poet's whims .'

The easy-natured soldier smiled assent.
Settled his portly person, smoothed his chin,
And nodded that the bull-bait might begin.

Then mad with fighting frenzy in the sacking of
Vicenza, then in his palace nursing his scheme to
make the Emperor predominant, then pacing like a
lion, hot with hope of mastering all Italy, when he
finds out that Sordello is his son : " hands clenched,
head erect, pursuing his discourse — crimson ear,
eyeballs suffused, temples full fraught."

Then in the fourth book there is a long portrait
of him which I quote as a full specimen of the
power with which Browning could paint a partisan

SORDELLO 195

of the thirteenth century. Though sixty years old,
Salinguerra looked Uke a youth —

So agile, quick
And graceful turned the head on the broad chest
Encased in pliant steel, his constant vest,
Whence split the sun off in a spray of fire
Across the room ; and, loosened of its tire
Of steel, that head let breathe the comely brown
Large massive locks discoloured as if a crown
Encircled them, so frayed the basnet where
A sharp white line divided clean the hair ;
Glossy above, glossy below, it swept
Curling and fine about a brow thus kept
Calm, laid coat upon coat, marble and sound :
This was the mystic mark the Tuscan found.
Mused of, turned over books about. Square-faced,
No lion more ; two vivid eyes, enchased
In hollows filled with many a shade and streak
Settling from the bold nose and bearded cheek.
Nor might the half-smile reach them that deformed
A lip supremely perfect else • — unwarmed,
Unwidened, less or more ; indifferent
Whether on trees or men his thoughts were bent,
Thoughts rarely, after all, in trim and train
As now a period was fulfilled again :
Of such, a series made his life, compressed
In each, one story serving for the rest.

This is one example of a gallery of vivid por-
traiture in all Browning's work, such as Carlyle
only in the nineteenth century has approached in
England. It is not a national, but an international
gallery of portraits. The greater number of the
portraits are ItaUan, and they range over all classes
of society from the Pope to the peasant. Even
Bishop Blougram has the Italian subtlety, and, like
the Monsignore in Pippa Passes, something of the
politic morality of Machiavelli. But Israel, Greece,
France, Spain, Germany, and the days before the

196 BROWNING

world was brought together, furnish him with men
drawn as alive. He has painted their souls, but
others have done this kind of painting as well, if
not so minutely. But no others have painted so
livingly the outside of men — their features one by
one, their carriage, their gestures, their clothing,
their walk, their body. All the colours of their
dress and eyes and lips are given. We see them
live and move and have their being. It is the same
with his women, but I keep these for further treat-
ment.

4. The next thing I have to say about Sordello
concerns what I call its illustrative episodes.
Browning, wishing to illuminate his subject, some-
times darts off from it into an elaborate simile
as Homer does. But in Homer the simile is
carefully set, and explained to be a comparison.
It is not mixed up with the text. It is short,
rarely reaching more than ten hnes. In Browning,
it is glided into without any preparation, and
at first seems part of the story. Nor are
we always given any intimation of its end.
And Browning is led away by his imaginative
pleasure in its invention to work it up with
adventitious ornament of colour and scenery;
having, in his excitement of invention, lost all
power of rejecting any additional touch which
occurs to him, so that the illustration, swelling
out into a preposterous length, might well be
severed from the book and made into a separate
poem. Moreover, these long illustrations are often
but faintly connected with the subject they are
used to illumine ; and they delay the movement of
the poem while they confuse the reader. The

SORDELLO 197

worst of these, worst as an illustration, but in itself
an excellent fragment to isolate as a picture-poem,
is the illustration of the flying slave who seeks his
tribe beyond the Mountains of the Moon. It is
only to throw Hght on a moment of Salinguerra's
discursive thought, and is far too big for that. It
is more like an episode than an illustration. I
quote it not only to show what I mean, but also for
its power. It is in Book iv.

As, shall I say, some Ethiope, past pursuit

Of all enslavers, dips a shackled foot

Burnt to the blood, into the drowsy black

Enormous watercourse which guides him back

To his own tribe again, where he is king ;

And laughs because he guesses, numbering

The yellower poison-wattles on the pouch

Of the first lizard wrested fi-om its couch

Under the slime (whose skin, the while, he strips

To cure his nostril with, and festered lips.

And eyeballs bloodshot through the desert-blast)

That he has reached its boundary, at last

May breathe ; — thinks o'er enchantments of the South

Sovereign to plague his enemies, their mouth,

Eyes, nails, and hair ; but, these enchantments tried

In fancy, puts them soberly aside

For truth, projects a cool return with friends,

The likelihood of winning mere amends

Ere long; thinks that, takes comfort silently.

Then, from the river's brink, his wrongs and he.

Hugging revenge close to their hearts, are soon

OflF-striding for the Mountains of the Moon.

The best of these is where he illustrates the
restless desire of a poet for the renewal of energy,
for finding new worlds to sing. The poet often
seems to stop his work, to be satisfied. " Here I
will rest," he says, " and do no more." But he
only waits for a fresh impulse.

198 BROWNING

'Tis but a sailor's promise, weather-bound :
" Strike sail, slip cable, here the bark be moored
For once, the awning stretched, the poles assured !
Noontide above ; except the wave's crisp dash,
Or buzz of colibri, or tortoise' splash,
The margin's silent : out with every spoil
Made in our tracking, coil by mighty coil,
This serpent of a river to his head
I' the midst ! Admire each treasure, as we spread
The bank, to help us tell our history
Aright ; give ear, endeavour to descry ,
The groves of giant rushes, how they grew
Like demons' endlong tresses we sailed through.
What mountains yawned, forests to give us vent
Opened, each doleful side, yet on we went
Till . . . may that beetle (shake your cap) attest
The springing of a land-wind from the West ! "
— Wherefore ? Ah yes, you frolic it to-day!
To-morrow, and the pageant moved away
Down to the poorest tent-pole, we and you
Part company : no other may pursue
Eastward your voyage, be informed what fate
Intends, if triumph or decline await
The tempter of the everlasting steppe !

This, from Book iii., is the best because it is
closer than the rest to the matter in hand; but
how much better it might have been ! How curi-
ously overloaded it is, how difficult what is easy
has been made !

The fault of these illustrations is the fault of
the whole poem. Sordello is obscure, Browning's
idolaters say, by concentration of thought. It is
rather obscure by want of that wise rejection of un-
necessary thoughts which is the true concentration.
It is obscure by a reckless misuse of the ordinary
rules of language. It is obscure by a host of
parentheses introduced to express thoughts which
are only suggested, half -shaped, and which are

SORDELLO 199

frequently interwoven with parentheses introduced
into the original parentheses. It is obscure by the
worst punctuation I ever came across, but this was
improved in the later editions. It is obscure by
multitudinous fancies put in whether they have to
do with the subject or not, and by multitudinous
deviations within those fancies. It is obscure by
Browning's effort to make words express more
than they are capable of expressing.

It is no carping criticism to say this of Brown-
ing's work in Sordello, because it is the very criticism
his after-practice as an artist makes. He gave up
these efforts to force, like Procrustes, language to
stretch itself or to cut itself down into forms it
could not naturally take ; and there is no more
difificulty in most of his earlier poems than there
is in Paracelsus. Only a little of the Sordellian
agonies remains in them, only that which was
natural to Browning's genius. The interwoven
parentheses remain, the rushes of invention into
double and triple illustrations, the multipUcation
of thought on thought ; but for these we may even
be grateful. Opulence and plenitude of this kind
are not common ; we are not often granted a man
who flings imaginations, fancies, and thoughts from
him as thick and bright as sparks from a grinder's
wheel. It is not every poet who is unwilling to
leave off, who finds himself too full to stop.
"These bountiful wits," as Lamb said, "always
give full measure, pressed down, and running
over."

CHAPTER VII

BROWNING AND BORDELLO

THERE are certain analogies between Brown-
ing as a poet and the Sordello of the poem ;
between his relation to the world of his time and
that of Sordello to his time ; and finally, between
Browning's language in this poem and the change
in the Italian language which he imputes to the
work of Sordello. This chapter will discuss these
analogies, and close with an appreciation of Brown-
ing's position between the classic and romantic
schools of poetry.

The analogies of which I write may be denied,
but I do not think they can be disproved. Brown-
ing is, no doubt, separate from Sordello in his
own mind, but underneath the young poet he
is creating, he is continually asking himself the
same question which Sordello asks — What shall I
do as an artist 1 To what conclusion shall I come
with regard to my life as a poet .■' It is no small
proof of this underlying personal element in the
first three books of the poem that at the end of the
third book Browning flings himself suddenly out of
the mediaeval world and the men he has created,
and waking into 1835-40 at Venice, asks himself —
What am I writing, and why 1 What is my aim in

BROWNING AND SORDELLO 201

being a poet ? Is it worth my while to go on with
Sordello's story, and why is it worth the telling ?
In fact, he allows us to think that he has been de-
scribing in Sordello's story a transitory phase of his
own career. And then, having done this, he tells
how he got out of confusion into clearer light.

The analogy between Browning's and Sordello's
time is not a weak one. The spirit of the world,
between 1830 and 1840 in England, resembled in
many ways the spirit abroad at the beginning of
the thirteenth century. The country had awakened
out of a long sleep, and was extraordinarily curious
not only with regard to life and the best way to
live it, but also with regard to government, law,
the condition of the people, the best kind of rehgion
and how best to live it, the true aims of poetry and
how it was to be written, what subjects it should
work on, what was to be the mother-motive of it,
that is, what was the mother-motive of all the arts.
And this curiosity deepened from year to year for
fifty years. But even stronger than the curiosity
was the eager individualism of this time, which ex-
tended into every sphere of human thought and
action, and only began about 1866 to be balanced
by an equally strong tendency towards collectivism.

These two elements in the time-spirit did not
produce, in a settled state like England, the outward
war and confusion they produced in the thirteenth
century, though they developed after 1840, in '48,
into a European storm — but they did produce a
confused wdter of mingled thoughts concerning the
sources and ends of human life, the action it should
take, and why it should take it. The poetry of
Arnold and Clough represents with great clearness

202 BROWNING

the further development in the soul of man of this
confusion. I think that Browning has represented
in the first three books of Sordello his passage
through this tossing sea of thought.

He had put into Paracelsus all that he had worked
out with clearness during his youth; his theory of life
is stated with lucidity in that poem. But when it was
finished, and he had entered, like Sordello from Goito
into Mantua, into the crowd and clash of the world ;
when, having published Pauline and Paracelsus,
he had, like Sordello, met criticism and misunder-
standing, his Paracelsian theory did not seem to
explain humanity as clearly as he imagined. It
was only a theory; Would it stand the test of life
among mankind, be a saving and healing prophecy ?
Life lay before him, now that the silent philosophis-
ing of poetic youth was over, in all its inexplicable,
hurried, tormented, involved, and multitudinously
varied movement. He had built up a transcen-
dental building* in Paracelsus. Was it all to fall
in ruin .■' No answer came when he looked forth
on humanity over whose landscape the irony of
the gods, a bitter mist, seemed to brood. At what
then shall he aim as a poet .? What shall be his
subject-matter ? How is life to be lived ">.

Then he thought that he would, as a poet, de-
scribe his own time and his own soul under the
character of Sordello, and place Sordello in a time
more stormy than his own. And he would make
Sordello of an exceptional temper like himself, and

* He makes a simile of this in Sordello. See Book iii. before
his waking up in Venice, the lines beginning

" Rather say
My transcendental platan ! "

BROWNING AND SORDELLO 203

to clash with his time as he was then clashing
with his own. With these thoughts he wrote
the first books of Sordello, and Naddo, the critic
of Sordello's verses, represents the critics of
Paracelsus and the early poems. I have expe-
rienced, he says of himself in Sordello, something
of the spite of fate.

Then, having done this, he leaves Sordello at
the end of the third book, and turns, beset with
a thousand questions, to himself and his art in a
personal digression. Reclining on a ruined palace
step at Venice, he thinks of Eglamor who made
a flawless song, the type of those who reach their
own perfection here; and then of Sordello who
made a song which stirred the world far more
than Eglamor's, which yet was not flawless, not
perfect ; but because of its imperfection looked for-
ward uncontented to a higher song. Shall he.
Browning the poet, choose Eglamor or Sordello ;
even though Sordello perish without any achieve-
ment ? And he chooses to sail for ever towards the
infinite, chooses the imperfection which looks for-
ward. A sailor who loves voyaging may say, when
weather-bound, " Here rest, unlade the ship, sleep
on this grassy bank." 'Tis but a moment on his
path ; let the wind change, and he is away again,
whether triumph or shipwreck await him, for ever

The tempter of the everlasting steppe.

That much is then settled for life and for poetry.
And in that choice of endless aspiration Browning
confirms all that he thought, with regard to half of
his theory of life, in Paracelsus. This is his first
thought for life, and it is embodied in the whole

204 BROWNING

of Sordello's career. Sordello is never content
with earth, either when he is young, or when he
passes into the world, or when he dies not having
attained or been already perfect — a thought which
is as much at the root of romanticism as of
Christianity. Then comes the further question :
To whom shall I dedicate the service of my art .'
Who shall be my motive, the Queen whom I shall
love and write of ; and he thinks of Sordello who
asks that question and who, for the time, answers
" Palma," that is, the passion of love.

" But now, shall I, Browning, take as my Queen "
— and he symbolises his thought in the girls he sees
in the boats from his palace steps — " that girl from
Bassano, or from Asolo, or her from Padua ; that
is, shall I write of youth's love, of its tragic or its
comedy, of its darkness, joy, and beauty only..'
No," he answers, "not of that stuff shall I make
my work, but of that sad dishevelled ghost of a girl,
half in rags, with eyes inveterately full of tears ;
of wild, worn, care-bitten, ravishing, piteous, and
pitiful Humanity, who begs of me and offers me
her faded love in the street corners. She shall be
my Queen, the subject of my song, the motive of
my poetry. She may be guilty, warped awry
from her birth, and now a tired harlotry ; but she
shall rest on my shoulder and I shall comfort her.
She is false, mistaken, degraded, ignorant, but she
moves blindly from evil to good, and from lies to
truth, and from ignorance to knowledge, and from
all to love ; and all her errors prove that she-has
another world in which, the errors being worked
through, she will develop into perfectness. Slowly
she moves, step by step ; but not a millionth part

BROWNING AND SORDELLO 205

is here done of what she will do at last. That is
the matter of my poetry, which, in its infinite
change and hopes, I shall express in my work. I
shall see it, say what I have seen, and it may be

Impart the gift of seeing to the rest.

Therefore I have made Sordello, thus far, with all
his weakness and wrong —

moulded, made anew
A Man, and give him to be turned and tried,
Be angry with or pleased at."

And then Browning severs himself from Sordello.
After this retirement of thought into himself,
described as taking place in Venice during an
hour, but I dare say ranging over half a year in
reality, he tells the rest of Sordello's story from
the outside, as a spectator and describer.

Browning has now resolved to dedicate his art,
which is his life, to love of Humanity, of that pale
dishevelled girl, unlovely and lovely, evil and
good ; and to tell the story of individual men and
women, and of as many as possible ; to paint the
good which is always mixed with their evil; to
show that their failures and sins point to a success
and goodness beyond, because they emerged from
aspiration and aspiration from the divinity at the
root of human nature. But to do this, a poet
must not live like Sordello, in abstractions, nor
shrink from the shock of men and circumstance,
nor refuse to take men and life as they are — but
throw himself into the vital present, with its diffi-
culties, baffling elements and limitations ; take its
failures for his own; go through them while he
looks beyond them, and, because he looks beyond

206 BROWNING

them, never lose hope, or retreat from life, or cease
to fight his way onward. And, to support him in
this, there is but one thing — infinite love, pity, and
sympathy for mankind, increased, not lessened by
knowledge of the sins and weakness, the failure
and despairs of men. This is Browning's second
thought for life. But this is the very thing Sordello,
as conceived by Browning, did not and could not do.
He lived in abstractions and in himself ; he tried to
discard his human nature, or to make it bear more
than it could bear. He threw overboard the natu-
ral physical hfe of the body because it limited, he
thought, the outgoings of the imaginative soul, and
only found that in weakening the body he enfeebled
the soul. At every point he resented the limits of
human life and fought against them. Neither
would he live in the world allotted to him, nor
among the men of his time, nor in its turmoil ; but
only in imagination of his own inner world, among
men whom he created for himself, of which world
he was to be sole king. He had no love for men ;
they wearied, jarred, and disturbed his ideal world.
All he wanted was their applause or their silence,
not their criticism, not their affection. And of
course human love and sympathy for men and
insight into them, departed from him, and with
them his art departed. He never became a true
poet.

It is this failure, passing through several phases
of life in which action is demanded of Sordello,
that Browning desired to record in the last three
books of the poem. And he thinks it worth doing
because it is human, and the record of what is hu-
man is always of worth to man. He paints Sordello's

BROWNING AND SORDELLO 207

passage through phase after phase of thought
and act in the outside world, in all of which he
seems for the moment to succeed or to touch the
verge of success, but in which his neglect of the
needs of the body, and the uncontentment of his
soul produces failure. At last, at the very moment
of death he knows why he failed, and sees, as
through a glass darkly, the failure making the
success of the world to come. The revelation
bursts his heart.

And now what is the end, what is the result for
man of this long striving of Sordello .' Nothing !
Nothing has been done. Yet no, there is one re-
sult. The imperfect song he made when he was
young at Goito, in the flush of happiness, when he
forgot himself in love of Nature and of the young
folk who wandered rejoicing through the loveliness
of Nature — that song is still alive, not in the great
world among the noble women and warriors of the
time, but on the lips of the peasant girls of Asolo
who sing it on dewy mornings when they climb the
castle hill. This is the outcome of Bordello's life,
and it sounds like irony on Browning's lips. It is
not so ; the irony is elsewhere in the poem, and is
of another kind. Here, the conclusion is, — that
the poem, or any work of art, made in joy, in
sympathy with human life, moved by the love of
loveliness in man or in Nature, lives and lasts in
beauty, heals and makes happy the world. And it
has its divine origin in the artist's loss of himself
in humanity, and his finding of himself, through
union with humanity, in union with God the
eternal poet. In this is hidden the life of an
artist's greatness. And here the little song, which

2o8 BROWNING

gives joy to a child, and fits in with and enhances
its joy, is greater in the eyes of the immortal judges
than all the glory of the world which Sordello
sought so long for himself alone. It is a truth
Browning never failed to record, the greatness and
power of the things of love; for, indeed, love
being infinite and omnipotent, gives to its smallest
expression the glory of all its qualities.

The second of these analogies between Browning
and Sordello relates to Browning's treatment of
the English language in the poem of Sordello and
what he pictures Sordello as doing for the Italian
language in the poem. The passage to which I
refer is about half-way in the second book. As
there is no real ground for representing Sordello
as working any serious change in the Italian tongue
of literature except a slight phrase in a treatise of
Dante's, the representation is manifestly an in-
vention of Browning's added to the character of
Sordello as conceived by himself. As such it
probably comes out of, and belongs to, his own
experience. The Sordello who acts thus with
language represents the action of Browning him-
self at the time he was writing the poem. If so,
the passage is full of interest.

All we know about SordeUo as a poet is that he
wrote some Italian poems. Those by which he
was famous were in Provengal. In Dante's trea-
tise on the use of his native tongue, he suggests
that Sordello was one of the pioneers of Uterary
Italian. So, at least, Browning seems to infer
from the passage, for he makes it the motive of
his little " excursus " on Sordello's presumed effort
to strike out a new form and method in poetic Ian-

BROWNING AND SORDELLO 209

guage. Nothing was more needed than such an
effort if any fine literature were to arise in Italy.
In this unformed but slowly forming thirteenth
century the language was in as great a confusion

— and, I may say, as individual (for each poet
wrote in his own dialect) as the life of the century.

What does Browning make Sordello do.' He
has brought him to Mantua as the accepted master
of song; and Sordello burns to be fully recog-
nised as the absolute poet. He has felt for some
time that while he cannot act well he can imagine
action well. And he sings his imaginations. But
there is at the root of his singing a love of the
applause of the people more than a love of song
for itself. And he fails to please. So Sordello
changes his subject and sings no longer of himself
in the action of the heroes he imagines, but of
abstract ideas, philosophic dreams, and problems.
The very critics cried that he had left human nature
behind him. Vexed at his failure, and still longing
to catch the praise of men, that he may confirm his
belief that he is the loftiest of poets, he makes
another effort to amaze the world. " I'll write no
more of imaginary things," he cries ; " I will
catch the crowd by reorganising the language of
poetry, by new arrangements of metre and words,
by elaborate phraseology, especially by careful
concentration of thought into the briefest possible
frame of words. I will take the stuff of thought,

— that is, the common language, — beat it on the
anvil into new shapes, break down the easy flow
of the popular poetry, and scarcely allow a tithe
of the original words I have written to see the
light,

210 BROWNING

welding words into the crude
Mass from the new speech round him, till a rude
Armour was hammered out, in time to be
Approved beyond the Roman panoply
Melted to make it.

That is, he dissolved the Roman dialect to beat out
of it an Italian tongue. And in this new armour
of language ^he clothed his thoughts. But the
language broke away from his thoughts : neither
expressed them nor made them clear. The people
failed to understand his thought, and at the new
ways of using language the critics sneered. " Do
get back," they said, " to the simple human heart,
and tell its tales in the simple language of the
people."

I do not think that the analogy can be missed.
Browning is really describing — with, perhaps, a
half-scornful reference to his own desire for public
appreciation — what he tried to do in Sordello for
the language in which his poetry was to be written.
I have said that when he came to write Sordello
his mind had fallen back from the clear theory of
life laid down in Paracelsus into a tumbled sea
of troubled thoughts ; and Sorddlo is a welter of
thoughts tossing up and down, now appearing, then
disappearing, and then appearing again in conjunc-
tion with new matter, like objects in a sea above
which a cyclone is blowing. Or we may say that
his mind, before and during the writing of Sordello,
was like the thirteenth century, pressing blindly in
vital disturbance towards an unknown goal. That
partly accounts for the confused recklessness of the
language of the poem. But a great many of the
tricks Browning now played with his poetic language

BROWNING AND SORDELLO 211

were deliberately done. He had tried — like Sor-
dello at the Court of Love — a love-poem in Pauline.
It had not succeeded. He had tried in Paracelsus
to expose an abstract theory of life, as Sordello
had tried writing on abstract imaginings. That
also had failed. Now he determined — as he repre-
sents Sordello doing — to alter his whole way of
writing. " I will concentrate now," he thought,
"since they say I am too loose and too diffuse;
cut away nine-tenths of all I write, and leave out
every word I can possibly omit. I will not express
completely what I think; I shall only suggest it by
an illustration. And if anything occur to me likely
to illuminate it, I shall not add it afterwards but
insert it in a parenthesis. I will make a new
tongue for my poetry." And the result was the
style and the strange manner in which Sordello
was written. This partly excuses its obscurity, if
deliberation can be an excuse for a bad manner
in literature. Malice prepense does not excuse a
murder, though it makes it more interesting.
Finally, the manner in which Sordello was written
did not please him. He left it behind him, and
Pippa Passes, which followed Sordello, is as clear
and simple as its predecessor is obscure in style.

Thirdly, the language of Sordello, and, in a lesser
degree, that of all Browning's poetry, proves — if
his whole way of thought and passion did not also-
prove it — that Browning was not a classic, that
he deliberately put aside the classic traditions in
poetry. In this he presents a strong contrast to
Tennyson. Tennyson was possessed by those
traditions. His masters were Homer, Vergil,
Milton, and the rest of those who wrote with

212 BROWNING

measure, purity, and temperance; and from whose
poetry proceeded a spirit of order, of tranquillity,
of clearness, of simplicity; who were reticent in
ornament, in illustration, and stern in rejection of
unnecessary material. None of these classic ex-
cellences belong to Browning, nor did he ever
try to gain them, and that was, perhaps, a pity.
But, after all, it would have been of no use had he
tried for them. We cannot impose from without
on ourselves that which we have not within ; and
Browning was, in spirit, a pure Romantic, not a
Classic. Tennyson never allowed what romanti-
cism he possessed to have its full swing. It always
wore the classic dress, submitted itself to the
classic traditions, used the classic forms. In the
Idylls of the King he took a romantic story ; but
nothing could be more unromantic than many of
the inventions and the characters ; than the
temper, the morality, and the conduct of the poem.
The Arthurian poets, Malory himself, would have
jumped out their skin with amazement, even with
indignation, had they read it. And a great deal
of this oddity, this unfitness of the matter to the
manner, arose from the romantic story being ex-
pressed in poetry written in accordance with classic
traditions. Of course, there were other sources for
these inharmonies in the poem, but that was one,
and not the least of them.

Browning had none of these classic traditions.
He had his own matter, quite new stuff it was;
and he made his own manner. He did not go
back to the old stories, but, being filled with the'
romantic spirit, embodied it in new forms, and
drenched with it his subjects, whether he took

BROWNING AND SORDELLO 213

them from ancient, mediaeval, Renaissance, or
modern life. He felt, and truly, that it is of the
essence of romanticism to be always arising into
new shapes, assimilating itself, century by century,
to the needs, the thought, and the passions of grow-
ing mankind ; progressive, a lover of change ; in
steady opposition to that dull conservatism the
tendency to which besets the classic literature.

Browning had the natural faults of the romantic
poet ; and these are most remarkable when such a
poet is young. The faults are the opposites of the
classic poet's excellences : want of measure, want
of proportion, want of clearness and simplicity,
want of temperance, want of that selective power
which knows what to leave out or when to stop.
And these frequently become positive and end in
actual disorder of composition, huddling of the
matters treated of into ill-digested masses, vio-
lence in effects and phrase, bewildering obscurity,
sought-out even desperate strangeness of subject
and expression, uncompromising individuality, crude
ornament, and fierce colour. Many examples of
these faults are to be found in Sordello and through-
out the work of Browning. They are the extremes
into which the Romantic is frequently hurried.

But, then. Browning has the natural gifts and
excellences of the romantic poet, and these ele-
ments make him dearer than the mere Classic to a
multitude of imaginative persons. One of them is
endless and impassioned curiosity, for ever unsat-
isfied, always finding new worlds of thought and
feeling into which to make dangerous and thrilling
voyages of discovery — voyages that are filled from
end to end with incessantly changing adventure,

214 BROWNING

or delight in that adventure. This enchants the
world. And it is not only in his subjects that the
romantic poet shows his curiosity. He is just as
curious of new methods of tragedy, of lyric work,
of every mode of poetry ; of new ways of express-
ing old thoughts ; new ways of treating old metres ;
of the invention of new metres and new ways of
phrasing ; of strange and startling word-combina-
tions, to clothe fittingly the strange and startling
things discovered in human nature, in one's own
soul, or in the souls of others. In ancient days
such a temper produced the many tales of inven-
tion which filled the romantic cycles.

Again and again, from century to century, this
romantic spirit has done its re-creating work in the
development of poetry in France, Germany, Italy,
Spain, and England. And in 1840, and for many
years afterwards, it produced in Browning, and for
our pleasure, his dramatic lyrics as he called them;
his psychological studies, which I may well call
excursions, adventures, battles, pursuits, retreats,
discoveries of the soul ; for in the soul of man lay,
for Bro'wning, the forest of Broceliande, the wild
country of Morgan le Fay, the cliffs and moors
of Lyonnesse. It was there, over that unfooted
country, that Childe Roland rode to the Dark
Tower. Nor can anything be niore in the temper
of old spiritual romance — though with a strangely
modern mise-en-sckne — than the great adventure
on the dark common with Christ in Christmas-Eve
and Easter-Day.

Another root of the romantic spirit was the
sense of, and naturally the belief in, a world not
to be felt of the senses or analysed by the under-

BROWNING AND SORDELLO 215

standing ; which was within the apparent world as
its substance or soul, or beyond it as the power
by which it existed ; and this mystic belief took,
among poets, philosophers, theologians, warriors,
and the common people, a thousand forms, ranging
from full-schemed philosophies to the wildest super-
stitions. It tended, in its extremes, to make this
world a shadow, a dream; and our life only a
real life when it habitually dwelt in the mystic
region mortal eye could not see, whose voices
mortal ear could not receive. Out of this root,
which shot its first fibres into the soul of human-
ity in the days of the earliest savage and separated
him by an unfathomable gulf from the brute, arose
all the myths and legends and mystic stories which
fill romance. Out of it developed the unquench-
able thirst of those of the romantic temper for
communion with the spiritual beings of this mys-
tic world ; a thirst which, however repressed for a
time, begins again, and is even now arising, among
the poets of to-day.

In Browning's view of the natural world some
traces of this element of the romantic spirit may be
distinguished, but in his poetry of Man it scarcely
appears. Nor, indeed, is he ever the true mystic.
He had too much of the sense which handles daily
life ; he saw the facts of life too clearly, to fall into
the vaguer regions of mysticism. But one part of
its region, and of the romantic spirit, so incessantly
recurs in Browning that it may be said to underlie
the whole of his work. It is that into which the
thoughts and passions of the romantic poets in all
ages ran up, as into a goal — the conception of a
perfect world, beyond this visible, in which the

2i6 BROWNIN-G

noble hopes, loves, and work of humanity — baffled,
limited, and ruined here — should be fulfilled and
satisfied. The Greeks did not frame this concep-
tion as a people, though Plato outreached towards
it ; the Romans had it not, though Vergil seems
to have touched it in hours of inspiration. The
Teutonic folk did not possess it till Christianity
invaded them. Of course, it was alive like a
beating heart in Christianity, that most romantic
of all religions. But the Celtic peoples did con-
ceive it before Christianity and with a surprising
fulness, and wherever they went through Europe
they pushed it into the thought, passions, and action
of human life. And out of this conception, which
among the Irish took form as the Land of Eternal
Youth, love, and joy, where human trouble ceased,
grew that element in romance which is perhaps the
strongest in it — the hunger for eternity, for infi-
nite perfection of being, and, naturally, for unre-
mitting pursuit of it; and among Christian folk
for a life here which should fit them for perfect
life to come. Christian romance threw itself with
fervour into that ideal, and the pursuit, for exam-
ple, of the Holy Grail is only one of the forms of
this hunger for eternity and perfection.

Browning possessed this element of romance
with remarkable fulness, and expressed it with un-
diminished ardour for sixty years of poetic work.
From Pauline to Asolando it reigns supreme. It
is the fountain-source of Sordello — by the perva-
siveness of which the poem consists. Immortal
life in God's perfection ! Into that cry the Roman-
tic's hunger for eternity had developed in the soul
of Browning. His heroes, in drama and lyric, in

BROWNING AND BORDELLO 217

Paracelsus and Sordello, pass into the infinite, there
to be completed.

And if I may here introduce a kind of note, it is
at this moment that we ought to take up the Purga-
torio, and see Sordello as Dante saw him in that flow-
ery valley of the Ante-Purgatory when he talked with
Dante and Vergil. He is there a very different
person from the wavering creature Browning drew.
He is on the way to that perfect fulfilment in God
which Browning desired for him and all mankind.

Nevertheless, in order to complete this statement,
Browning, in his full idea of life, was not altogether
a Romantic. He saw there was a great danger
that the romantic mysticism might lead its pursuers
to neglect the duties of life, or lessen their interest
in the drama of mankind. Therefore he added
to his cry for eternity and perfection, his other
cry : " Recognise your limitations, and work within
them, while you must never be content with them.
Give yourself in love and patience to the present
labour of mankind; but never imagine for a
moment that it ends on earth." He thus combined
with the thirst of the Romantic for eternity the full
ethical theory of life, as well as the classic poet's
determination to represent the complete aspect of
human life on earth. At this point, but with
many fantastic deviations due to his prevailing
romanticism, he was partly of the classic temper.
The poem of Sordella is not without an image of
this temper, set vigorously in contrast with Sordello
himself. This is Salinguerra, who takes the world
as it is, and is only anxious to do what lies before
him day by day. ■ His long soUloquy, in which for
the moment he indulges in dreams, ends in the

2l8 BROWNING

simple resolution to fight on, hour by hour, as cir-
cumstances call on him.

Browning's position, then, is a combination of the
romantic and classical, of the Christian and ethical,
of the imaginative and scientific views of human
life ; of the temper which says, " Here only is our
life, here only our concern," and that which says,
" Not here, but hereafter is our life." " Here, and
hereafter," answered Browning. " Live within
earth's limits with all your force; never give in,
fight on ; but always transcend your fullest action
in aspiration, faith, and love."

It amuses me sometimes the way he is taken by
his readers. The romantic and the Christian folk
often claim him as the despiser of this world, as one
who bids us live wholly for the future, or in the mys-
tic ranges of thought and passion. The scientific,
humanitarian, and ethical folk accept that side of
him which agrees with their views of human life —
views which exclude God, immortality, and a world
beyond — that is, they take as the whole of Brown-
ing the lesser part of his theory of life. This is
not creditable to their understanding, though it is
natural enough. We may accept it as an innocent
example of the power of a strong bias in human
nature. But it is well to remember that the
romantic. Christian, mystic elements of human life
are more important in Browning's eyes than the
ethical or scientific ; that the latter are nothing to
him without the former ; that the best efforts of the
latter for humanity are in his belief not only hope-
less, but the stuff that dreams are made of, with-
out the former. In the combination of both is
Browning's message to mankind.

CHAPTER VIII

THE DRAMAS

OF the great poets who, not being born
dramatists, have attempted to write dramas
in poetry, Browning was the most persevering. I
suppose that, being conscious of his remarkable
power in the representation of momentary action
and of states of the soul, he thought that he could
harmonise into a whole the continuous action of a
number of persons, and of their passions in sword-
play with one another; and then conduct to a
catastrophe their interaction. But a man may be
capable of writing dramatic lyrics and dramatic
romances without being capable of writing a
drama. Indeed, so different are the two capabili-
ties that I think the true dramatist could not write
such a lyric or romance as Browning calls dramatic ;
his genius would carry one or the other beyond the
just limits of this kind of poetry into his own kind.
And the writer of excellent lyrics and romances of
this kind will be almost sure to fail in real drama.
I wish, in order to avoid confusion of thought, that
the term " dramatic " were only used of poetry which
belongs to drama itself. I have heard Chaucer
called dramatic. It is a complete misnomer. His
genius would have for ever been unable to produce
219

220 BROWNING

a good drama. Had he lived in Elizabeth's time, he
would, no doubt, have tried to write one, but he must
have failed. The genius for story-telling is just the
genius which is incapable of being a fine dramatist.
And the opposite is also true. Shakespeare, great
as his genius was, would not have been able to write
a single one of the Canterbury Tales. He would
have been driven into dramatising them.

Neither Tennyson nor Browning had dramatic
genius — that is, the power to conceive, build, co-
ordinate, and finish a drama. But they thought
they had, and we may pardon them for trying their
hand. I can understand the hunger and thirst
which beset great poets, who had, like these two
men, succeeded in so many different kinds of
poetry, to succeed also in the serious drama,
written in poetry. It is a legitimate ambition ; but
poets should be acquainted with their limitations,
and not waste their energies or our patience on
work which they cannot do well. That men like
Tennyson and Browning, who were profoundly
capable of understanding what a great drama
means, and is; who had read what the master-
tragedians of Greece have done ; who knew their
Shakespeare, to say nothing of the other EUzabethan
dramatists; who had seen Moli^re on the stage;
who must have felt how the thing ought to be
done, composed, and versed; that they, having
written a play like Harold or Strafford, should
really wish to stage it, or having heard and seen it
on the stage should go on writing more dramas,
would seem incomprehensible, were it not that
power to do one thing very well is so curiously
liable to self-deceit.

THE DRAMAS 221

The writing of the first drama is not to be
blamed. It would be unnatural not to try one's
hand. It is the writing of the others which is
amazing in men like Tennyson and Browning.
They ought to have felt, being wiser than other men
in poetry, that they had no true dramatic capacity.
Other poets who also tried the drama did know
themselves better. Byron wrote several dramas,
but he made little effort to have them represented
on the stage. He felt they were not fit for that ;
and, moreover, such scenic poems as Manfred and
Cain were not intended for the stage, and do not
claim to be dramas in that sense. To write things
of this kind, making no claim to public represen-
tation, with the purpose of painting a situation of
the soul, is a legitimate part of a poet's work, and
among them, in Browning's work, might be classed
In a Balcony, which I suppose his most devoted
worshipper would scarcely call a drama.

Walter Scott, than whom none could conduct a
conversation better in a novel, or make more liv-
ing the clash of various minds in a critical event,
whether in a cottage or a palace ; whom one would
select as most likely to write a drama well — had
self-knowledge enough to understand, after his early
attempts, that true dramatic work was beyond his
power. Wordsworth also made one effort, and
then said good-bye to drama. Coleridge tried, and
staged Remorse. It failed and deserved to fail.
To read it is to know that the writer had no sense
of an audience in his mind as he wrote it — a fatal
want in a dramatist. Even its purple patches of
fine poetry and its noble melody of verse did not
redeem it. Shelley did better than these brethren

222 BROWNING

of his, and that is curious. One would say, after
reading his previous poems, that he was the least
hkely of men to write a true drama. Yet the Cenci
approaches that goal, and the fragment of Charles
the First makes so great a grip on the noble
passions and on the intellectual eye, and its few
scenes are so well woven, that it is one of the un-
fulfilled longings of literature that it should have
been finished. Yet Shelley himself gave it up. He
knew, like the others, that the drama was beyond
his power.

Tennyson and Browning did not so easily recog-
nise their limits. They went on writing dramas,
not for the study, which would have been natural
and legitimate, but for the stage. This is a curious
psychological problem, and there is only one man
who could have given us, if he had chosen, a
poetic study of it, and that is Browning himself.
I wish, having in his mature age read Strafford
over, and then read his other dramas — all of them
full of the same dramatic weaknesses as Strafford
— he had analysed himself as "the poet who
would be a dramatist and could not." Indeed, it
is a pity he did not do this. He was capable of
smiling benignly at himself, and sketching himself as
if he were another man ; a thing of which Tennyson,
who took himself with awful seriousness, and walked
with himself as a Druid might have walked in the
sacred grove of Mona, was quite incapable.

However, the three important dramas of Tenny-
son are better, as dramas, than Browning's. That
is natural enough. For Browning's dramas were
written when he was young, when his knowledge
of the dramatic art was small, and when his

THE DRAMAS 223

intellectual powers were not fully developed.
Tennyson wrote his when his knowledge of the
drama was great, and when his intellect had under-
gone years of careful training. He studied the
composition and architecture of the best plays ; he
worked at the stage situations ; he created a blank
verse for his plays quite different from that he
used in his poems, and a disagreeable thing it is ;
he introduced songs, like Shakespeare, at happy
moments ; he imitated the old work, and at the
same time strove hard to make his own original.
He laboured at the history, and Becket and Harold
are painfully historical. History should not master
a play, but the play the history. The poet who is
betrayed into historical accuracy so as to injure the
development of his conception in accordance with
imaginative truth, is lost ; and Harold and Becket
both suffer from Tennyson falling into the hands of
those critical historians whom Tennyson consulted.
Nevertheless, by dint of laborious intellectual
work, but not by the imagination, not by dramatic
genius, Tennyson arrived at a relative success.
He did better in these long dramas than Coleridge,
Wordsworth, Scott, or Byron. Queen Mary, Harold,
and Becket get along in one's mind with some
swiftness when .one reads them in an armchair by
the fire. Some of the characters are interesting
and wrought with painful skill. We cannot forget
the pathetic image of Queen Mary, which dwells
in the mind when the play has disappeared ; nor
the stately 'representation in Becket of the mighty
and overshadowing power of Rome, claiming as its
own possession the soul of the world. But the
minor characters ; the action ; the play of the

224 BROWNING

I characters, great and small, and of the action and
circumstance together towards the catastrophe —
these things were out of Tennyson's reach, and still
more out of Browning's. They could both build up
characters, and Browning better than Tennyson;
they could both set two people to talk together,
and by their talk to reveal their character to us ;

I but to paint action, and the action of many men

i and women moving to a plotted end ; to paint
human life within the limits of a chosen subject,
changing and tossing and unconscious of its fate, in
a town, on a battlefield, in the forum, in a wild
wood, in the King's palace or a shepherd farm ; and
to image this upon the stage, so that nothing done
or said should be unmotived, unrelated to the end,

; or unnatural ; of that they were quite incapable,
and Browning more incapable than Tennyson.

There is another thing to say. The three long
dramas of Tennyson are better as dramas than
the long ones of Browning. But the smaller
dramatic pieces of Browning are much better than
the smaller ones of Tennyson. The Promise of
May is bad in dialogue, bad in composition, bad
in delineation of character, worst of all in its
subject, in its plot, and in its motives. The Cup,
and The Falcon, a beautiful story beautifully written
by Boccaccio, is strangely dulled, even vulgarised,
by Tennyson. The Robin Hood play has gracious
things in it, but as a drama it is worthless, and
it is impossible to forgive Tennyson for his fairies.
All these small plays are dreadful examples of what
a great poet may do when he works in a vehicle
— if I may borrow a term from painting — for which
he has no natural capacity, but for which he thinks

THE DRAMAS 225

he has. He is then like those sailors, and meets
justly the same fate, who think that because they
can steer a boat admirably, they can also drive a
coach and four. The love scene in Becket between
Rosamund and Henry illustrates my meaning. It
was a subject in itself that Tennyson ought to have
done well, and would probably have done well in
another form of poetry ; but, done in a form for
which he had no genius, he did it badly. It is
the worst thing in the play. Once, however, he
did a short drama fairly well. The Cup has
some dramatic movement, its construction is clear,
its verse imaginative, its scenery well conceived ;
and its motives are simple and easily understood.
But then, as in Becket, Irving stood at his right
hand, and advised him concerning dramatic changes
and situations. Its passion is, however, cold ; it
leaves us unimpressed.

On the contrary, Browning's smaller dramatic
pieces — I cannot call them dramas — are much
better than those of Tennyson. Pippa Passes,
A Soul's Tragedy, In a Balcony, stand on a much
higher level, aim higher, and reach their aim more
fully than Tennyson's shorter efforts. They have
not the qualities which fit them for representation,
but they have those which fit them for thoughtful
and quiet reading. No one thinks much of the
separate personalities ; our chief interest is in fol-
lowing Browning's imagination as it invents new
phases of his subject, and plays like a sword
in sunlighf, in and out of these phases. As
poems of the soul in severe straits, made under a
quasi-dramatic form, they reach a high excellence,
but all that we like best in them, when we follow

Q

226 BROWNING

them as situations of the soul, we should most
dislike when represented on the stage.

Strafford is, naturally, the most immature of the
dramas, written while he was still writing Para-
celsus, and when he was very young. It is strange
to compare the greater part of its prosaic verse with
the rich poetic verse of Paracelsus ; and this further
illustrates how much a poet suffers when he writes
in a form which is not in his genius. There are
only a very few passages in Strafford which re-
semble poetry until we come to the fifth act, where
Browning passes from the jerky, allusive but
rhythmical prose of the previous acts into that
talk between Strafford and his children which has
poetic charm, clearness, and grace. The change
does not last long, and when Hollis, Charles, and
Lady Carlisle, followed by Pym, come in, the whole
act is in confusion. Nothing . is clear, except ab-
sence of the clearness required for a drama. But
the previous acts are even more obscure ; not
indeed for their readers, but for hearers in a
theatre who — since they are hurried on at once to
new matter — are forced to take in on the instant
what the dramatist means. It would be impossi-
ble to tell at first hearing what the chopped-up
sentences, the interrupted phrases, the interjected
" nots " and " buts " and " yets " are intended to
convey. The conversation is mangled. This vice
does not prevail in the other dramas to the same
extent as in Strafford. Browning had learnt his
lesson, I suppose, when he saw Strafford rep-
resented. But it sorely prevails in Colomb^s
Birthday.

THE DRAMAS 227

Strafford is brought before us as a politician, as
the leader of the King's side in an austere crisis of
England's history. The first scene puts the great
quarrel forward as the ground on which the drama
is to be wrought. An attempt is made to repre-
sent the various elements of the popular storm in
the characters of Pym, Hampden, the younger
Vane, and others, and especially in the relations
between Pym and Strafford, who are set over, one
against the other, with some literary power. But the
lines on which the action is wrought are not simple.
No audience could follow the elaborate network of
intrigue which, in Browning's effort to represent
too much of the history, he has made so confused.
Strong characterisation perishes in this effort to
write a history rather than a drama. What we
chiefly see of the crisis is a series of political in-
trigues at the Court carried out by base persons,
of whom the Queen is the basest, to ruin Strafford ;
the futility of Strafford's sentimental love of the
King, whom he despises while he loves him ; Straf-
ford's blustering weakness and blindness when
he forces his way into the Parliament House, and
the contemptible meanness of Charles. The low
intrigues of the Court leave the strongest impres-
sion on the mind, not the mighty struggle, not the
fate of the Monarchy and its dark supporter.

Browning tries — as if he had forgotten that
which should have been first in his mind — to lift
the main struggle into importance in the last act,
but he fails. That which ought to be tragic is
merely sentimental. Indeed, sentimentality is the
curse of the play. Strafford's love of the King is
almost maudlin. The scenes between Strafford and

228 BROWNING

Pym in which their ancient friendship is introduced
are over-sentimentaUsed, not only for their charac-
ters, but for the great destinies at stake. Even at
the last, when Pym and Strafford forgive each other
and speak of meeting hereafter, good sense is vio-
lated, and the natural dignity of the scene, and the
characters of the men. Strafford is weaker here,
if that were possible, than he is in the rest of the
drama. Nothing can be more unlike the man.

Pym is intended to be especially strong. He is
made a blusterer. He was a gentleman, but in
this last scene he is hateful. As to Charles, he
was always a selfish liar, but he was not a coward,
and a coward he becomes in this play. He, too, is
sentimentalised by his uxoriousness. Lady Car-
lisle is invented. I wish she had not been. Straf-
ford's misfortunes were deep enough without having
her in love with him. I do not believe, moreover,
that any woman in the whole world from the very
beginning was ever so obscure in her speech to
the man she loves as Lady Carlisle was to Straf-
ford. And the motive of her obscurity — that if
she discloses the King's perfidy she robs Strafford
of that which is dearest to him — his belief in the
King's affection for him — is no doubt very fine,
but the woman was either not in love who argued
in that way, or a fool ; for Strafford knew, and lets
her understand that he knew, the treachery of the
King. But Browning meant her to be in love, and
to be clever.

The next play Browning wrote, undeterred by
the fate of Strafford, was King Victor and King
Charles. The subject is historical, but it is modified

THE DRAMAS 229

by Browning, quite legitimately, to suit his own
purposes. In itself the plot is uninteresting. King
Victor, having brought the kingdom to the verge
of ruin, abdicates and hands the crown to his son,
believing him to be a weak-minded person whose
mistakes will bring him — Victor — back to the
throne, when he can throw upon the young King
the responsibility of the mess he has himself made
of the kingdom. Charles turns out to be a strong
character, sets right the foreign affairs of the
kingdom, and repairs his father's misgovernment.
Then Victor, envious and longing for power, con-
spires to resume the throne, and taken prisoner,
begs back the crown. Charles, touched as a son,
and against his better judgment, restores his father,
who immediately and conveniently dies. It is a
play of Court intrigue and of politics, and these are
not made interesting by any action, such as we call
dramatic, in the play. From end to end there is
no inter-movement of public passion. There are
only four characters. D'Ormea, the minister, is a
mere stick in a prime-minister's robes and serves
Victor and Charles with equal ease, in order to
keep his place. He is not even subtle in his rdle.
When we think what Browning would have made
of him in a single poem, and contrast it with what
he has made of him here, we are again impressed
with Browning's strange loss of power when he
is writing drama. Victor and Charles are better
drawn than any characters in Strafford ; and
Polyxena is a great advance on Lady Carlisle.
But this piece is not a drama ; it is a study of soul-
situations, and none of them are of any vital im-
portance. There is far too great an improbability

230 BROWNING

in the conception of Charles. A weak man in
private becomes a strong man in public life. To
represent him, having known and felt his strength,
as relapsing into his previous weakness when it
endangers all his work, is quite too foolish. He
did not do it in history. Browning, with astonish-
ing want of insight, makes him do it here, and
adds to it a foolish anger with his wife because
she advises him against it. And the reason he
does it and is angry with his wife, is a merely
sentimental one — a private, unreasoning, childish
love of his father, such a love as Strafford is
supposed to have for Charles I. — the kind of love
which intruded into public affairs ruins them, and
which, being feeble and for an unworthy object,
injures him who gives it and him who receives it.
Even as a study of characters, much more as a
drama, this piece is a failure, and the absence of
poetry in it is amazing.

The Return of the Druses approaches more
nearly to a true drama than its predecessors; it
is far better written ; it has several fine motives
which are intelligently, but not dramatically, worked
out ; and it is with great joy that one emerges at
last into a little poetry. Browning, having more or
less invented his subject, is not seduced, by the
desire to be historical, to follow apparent instead
of imaginative truth ; nor are we wearied by his
unhappy efforts to analyse, in disconnected con-
versations, political intrigue. Things are in this
play as the logic of imaginative passion wills, as
Browning's conception drove him. But, unfortu-
nately for its success as a true drama. Browning

THE DRAMAS 231

doubles and redoubles the motives which impel his
characters. Djabal, Anael, Loys, have each of
them two different and sometimes opposite aims
working in them. They are driven now by one,
now by the other, and the changes of speech and
action made by the different motives surging up,
alternately or together, within their will, are so
swift and baffling that an audience would be utterly
bewildered. It is amusing to follow the prestidigita-
tion of Browning's intellect creating this confused
battle in souls as long as one reads the play at
home, though even then we wonder why he cannot,
at least in a drama, make a simple situation. If
he loved difficult work, this would be much more
difficult to do well than the confused situation he
has not done well. Moreover, the simplified situa-
tion would be effective on the stage ; and it would
give a great opportunity for fine poetry. As it is,
imaginative work is replaced by intellectual exer-
cises, poetry is lost in his analysis of complex states
of feeling. However, this involved in-and-out of
thought is entertaining to follow in one's study, if
not on the stage. It is done with a loose power
no one else in England possessed, and our only
regret is that he did not bridle and master his
power. Finally, with regard to this play, I should
Uke to isolate from it certain imaginative represen-
tations of characters which embody types of the men
of the time, such as the Prefect and the Nuncio.
The last interview between Loys and the Prefect,
taken out of the drama, would be a little master-
piece of characterisation.

The Blot in the 'Scutcheon is the finest of all these

232 BROWNING

dramas. It might well be represented on the stage
as a literary drama before those who had already
read it, and who would listen to it for its passion and
poetry; but its ill-construction and the unnatural-
ness of its situations will always prevent, and justly,
its public success as a drama. It is full of pathetic
and noble poetry ; its main characters are clearly
outUned and of a refreshing simplicity. It has few
obtrusive metaphysical or intellectual subtleties —
things which Browning could not keep out of his
dramas, but which only a genius like Shakespeare
can handle on the stage. It has real intensity of
feeling, and the various passions interlock and clash
together with some true dramatic interaction. Their
presentatiofi awakens our pity, and wonder for the
blind fates of men. The close leaves us in sorrow,
yet in love with human nature. The pathos of the
catastrophe is the most pathetic thing in Browning.
I do not even except the lovely record of Pompilia.
The torture of the human heart, different but
equal, of Tresham and Mildred in the last scene, is
exceedingly bitter in its cry — too cruel almost to
hear and know, were it not relieved by the beauty
of their tenderness and forgiveness in the hour of
death. They die of their pain, but die loving, and
are glad to die. They have all of them — Mildred,
Tresham, and Mertoun — sinned as it were by error.
Death unites them in righteousness, loveliness, and
love. A fierce, swift storm sweeps out of a clear
heaven upon them, destroys them, and saves them.
It is all over in three days. They are fortunate ;
their love deserved that the ruin should be brief,
and the reparation be transferred, in a moment, to
the grave justice of eternity.

THE DRAMAS 233

The first two acts bear no comparison with
the third. The first scene, with all the servants,
only shows how Browning failed in bringing a
number of characters together, and in making them
talk with ease and connectedly. Then, in two
acts, the plot unfolds itself. It is a marvel of bad
construction, grossly improbable, and offends that
popular common sense of what is justly due to the
characters concerned and to human nature itself,
to which a dramatist is bound to appeal.

Mildred and Mertoun have loved and sinned.
Mertoun visits her every night. Gerard, an old
gamekeeper, has watched him climbing to her
window, and he resolves to tell this fatal tale to
Tresham, Mildred's brother, whose strongest feel-
ing is pride in the unblemished honour of his house.
Meantime Mertoun has asked Tresham for Mil-
dred's hand in marriage, and these lovers, receiv-
ing his consent, hope that their sin will be purged.
Then Gerard tells his story. Tresham summons
Mildred. She confesses the lover, and Tresham
demands his name. To reveal the name would have
saved the situation, as we guess from Tresham's
character. His love would have had time to con-
quer his pride. But Mildred will not tell the name,
and when Tresham says : " Then what am I to say
to Mertoun } " she answers, " I will marry him."
This, and no wonder, seems the last and crowning
dishonour to Tresham, and he curses, as if she were
a harlot, the sister whom he passionately loves.

This is a horrible situation which Browning had
no right to make. The natural thing would be for
Mildred to disclose that her lover and Lord Mertoun,
whom she was to marry, were one and the same.

234 BROWNING

There is no adequate reason, considering the des-
perate gravity of the situation, for her silence;
it ought to be accounted for and it is not, nor could
it be. Her refusal to tell her lover's name, her
confession of her dishonour and at the same time
her acceptance of Mertoun as a husband at her
brother's hands, are circumstances which shock
probability and common human nature.

Then it is not only this which irritates a reader;
it is also the stupidity of Tresham. That also is
most unnatural. He beheves that the girl whom
he has loved and honoured all his life, whose purity
was as a star to him, will accept Mertoun while
she was sinning with another! He should have
felt that this was incredible, and immediately under-
stood, as Guendolen does, that her lover and Mer-
toun were the same. Dulness and blindness so
improbable are unfitting in a drama, nor does
the passion of his overwhelming pride excuse him.
The central situation is a protracted irritation.
Browning was never a good hand at construction,
even in his poems. His construction is at its very
worst in this drama.

But now, when we have, with wrath, accepted
this revolting situation — which, of course. Brown-
ing made in order to have his tragic close, but
which a good dramatist would have arranged so
differently — we pass into the third act, the tragic
close ; and that is simple enough in its lines, quite
naturally wrought out, beautifully felt, and of
exquisite tenderness. Rashness of wrath and
pride begin it; Mertoun is slain by Tresham as
he climbs to Mildred's window, though why he
should risk her honour any more when she is

THE DRAMAS 235

affianced to him is another of Browning's madden-
ing improbabilities. And then wrath and ptide
pass away, and sorrow and love and the joy of
death are woven together in beauty. If we must
go through the previous acts to get to this, we
forgive, for its sake, their wrongness. It has
turns of love made exquisitely fair by inevitable
death, unfathomable depths of feeling. We touch
in these last scenes the sacred love beyond the
world in which forgiveness is forgotten.

Colombo s Birthday is of all these plays the near-
est to a true drama. It has been represented in
America as well as in England, and its skilful char-
acterisation of Valence, Colombe, and Berthold has
won deserved praise; but it could not hold the
stage. The subject is too thin. Colombe finds out
on her birthday that she is not the rightful heir to
the Duchy; but as there is some doubt, she re-
solves to fight the question. In her perplexities she
is helped and supported by Valence, an advocate
from one of the cities of the Duchy, who loves her,
but whom she believes to serve her from loyalty
alone. Berthold, the true heir, to avoid a quarrel,
offers to marry Colombe, not because he loves her,
but as a good piece of policy. She then finds out
that she loves Valence, and refusing the splendid al-
liance, leaves the Court a private person, with love
and her lover. This slight thing is spun out into five
acts by Browning's metaphysics of love and friend-
ship. There is but little action, or pressure of
the characters into one another. The intriguing
courtiers are dull, and their talk is not knit
together. The only thing alive in them is their

236 BROWNING

universal meanness. That meanness, it is true,
enhances the magnanimity of Valence and Ber-
thold, but its dead level in so many commonplace
persons lowers the dramatic interest of the piece.
The play is rather an interesting conversational
poem about the up-growing of love between two
persons of different but equally noble character;
who think love is of more worth than power or
wealth, and who are finally brought together by
a bold, rough warrior who despises love in com-
parison with policy. Its real action takes place
in the hearts of Valence and Colombe, not in the
world of human life ; and what takes place in their
hearts is at times so quaintly metaphysical, so
curiously apart from the simplicities of human
love, so complicated, even beyond the complexity
of the situation — for Browning loved to pile com-
plexity on complexity — that it makes the play unfit
for public representation but all the more interest-
ing for private reading. But, even in the quiet of
our room, we ask why Browning put his subject
into a form which did not fit it ; why he overloaded
the story of two souls with a host of characters who
have no vital relation to it, and, having none, are
extremely wearisome.' It might have been far
more successfully done in the form of In a Balcony,
which Browning himself does not class as a drama.

Luria, the last of the dramas in date of composi-
tion, may be said to have no outward action, except
in one scene where Tiburzio breaks in suddenly to
defend Luria, who, like a wounded stag, stands at
bay among the dogs and hunters who suspect his
fidelity to Florence. It is a drama of inward action.

THE DRAMAS 237

of changes in the souls of men. The full purifica-
tion of Luria is its one aim, and the motive of
Luria himself is a single motive. The play occu-
pies one day only, and passes in one place.

Luria is a noble Moor who commands the armies
of Florence against Pisa, and conquers Pisa. He
is in love with the city of Florence as a man is
with a woman. Its beauty, history, great men, and
noble buildings attract his Eastern nature, by their
Northern qualities, as much as they repel his
friend and countryman Husain. He lives for her
with unbrokeri faithfulness, and he dies for her
with piteous tenderness when he finds out that
Florence distrusts him. When he is suspected of
treachery, his heart breaks, and to explain his
broken heart, he dies. There is no other way left
to show to Florence that he has always been true
to her. And at the moment of his death, all who
spied on him, distrusted and condemned him, are
convinced of his fidelity. Even before he dies, his
devotion to his ideal aim, his absolute unselfishness,
have won over and ennobled all the self-interested
characters which surround him — Puccio, the gen-
eral who is jealous of him; Domizia, the woman
who desires to use him as an instrument of her
hate to Florence ; even Braccio, the Machiavellian
Florentine who thinks his success must be danger-
ous to the state. Luria conquers them all. It is
the triumph of self-forgetfulness. And the real
aim of the play is not dramatic. It is too isolated
an aim to be dramatic. It is to build up and image
the noble character of Luria, and it reaches that
end with dignity.

The other characters are but foils to enhance the

238 BROWNING

solitary greatness of Luria. Braccio is a mere
voice, a theory who talks, and at the end where
he becomes more human, he seems to lose his in-
telligence. The Secretaries have no individuality.
Domizia causes nothing, and might with advantage
be out of the play. However, when, moved by
the nobleness of Luria, she gives up her revenge
on Florence, she speaks well, and her outburst is
poetical. Puccio is a real personage, but a poor
fellow. Tiburzio is a pale reflection of Luria.
Husain alone has some personality, but even his
Easternness, which isolates him, is merged in his
love of Luria. All of them only exist to be the
scaffolding by means of which Luria's character-is
built into magnificence, and they disappear from
our sight, like scaffolding, when the building is
finished.

There are fine things in the poem : the image of
Florence; its men, its streets, its life as seen by
the stranger-eyes of Luria; the contrast between
the Eastern and the Latin nature ; the picture of
hot war; the sudden friendship of Luria and
Tiburzio, the recognition in a moment of two high
hearts by one another;' the picture of Tiburzio
fighting at the ford, of Luria tearing the letter
among the shamed conspirators ; the drawing of the
rough honest soldier-nature in Puccio, and, chief of
all, the vivid historic painting of the time and the
type of Italian character at the time of the republics.

The first part of A Soul's Tragedy is written in
poetry and the second in prose. The first part is
dull but the second is very Uvely and amusing;
so gay and clever that we begin to wish that a

THE DRAMAS 239

good deal of Browning's dramas had been written
in prose. And the prose itself, unlike his more
serious prose in his letters and essays, is good,
clear, and of an excellent style. The time of the
play is in the sixteenth century; but there is
nothing in it which is special to that time : no
scenery, no vivid pictures of street hfe, no distinct
atmosphere of the period. It might just as well
be of the eighteenth or nineteenth century. The
character of Chiappino may be found in any pro-
vincial town. This compound of envy, self-conceit,
superficial cleverness, and real silliness is one of
our universal plagues, and not uncommon among
the demagogues of any country. And he contrasts
him with Ogniben, the Pope's legate, another type,
well known in governments, skilled in affairs, half
mocking, half tolerant of the "foolish people,"
the alluring destroyer of all self-seeking leaders of
the people. He also is as common as Chiappino,
as modern as he is ancient. Both are representa-
tive types, and admirably drawn. They are done
at too great length, but Browning could not man-
age them as well in drama as he would have done
in a short piece such as he placed in Men and
Women. Why this little thing is called A Soul's
Tragedy I cannot quite understand. That title sup-
poses that Chiappino loses his soul at the end of the
play. But it is plain from his mean and envious
talk at the beginning with Eulalii that his soul is
already lost. He is not worse at tije end, but per-
haps on the way to betterment. The tragedy is
then in the discovery by the people that he who was
thought to be a great soul is a fraud. But that con-
clusion was not Browning's intention. Finally, if

240 brownhstg

this be a tragedy it is clothed with comedy. Brown-
ing's humour was never more wise, kindly, worldly,
and biting than in the second act, and Ogniben
may well be set beside Bishop Blougram. It would
be a privilege to dine with either of them.

Every one is in love with Pippa Passes, which
appeared immediately after Sordello. It may have
been a refreshment to Browning after the com-
plexities and metaphysics of Sordello, to live for a
time with the soft simpUcity of Pippa, with the
clear motives of the separate occurrences at Asolo,
with the outside picturesque world, and in a lyric
atmosphere. It certainly is a refreshment to us.
It is a pity so little was done by Browning in this
pleasant, graceful, happy way. The substance of
thought in it and its intellectual force are just as
strong as in Sordello or Paracelsus, and are con-
cerned, especially in the first two pieces, with
serious and weighty matters of human life. Be-
yond the pleasure ' the poem gives, its indirect
teaching is full of truth and beauty; and the
things treated of belong to many phases of human
life, and touch their problems with poetic light and
love. Pippa herself, in her affectionate, natural
goodness, illuminates the greater difficulties of life
in a single day more than Sordello or Paracelsus
could in the whole course of their lives.

It may be that there are persons who think lightly
of Pippa Passes in comparison with Fifine at the
Fair, persons who judge poetry by the difficulties
they find in its perusal. But Pippa Passes fulfils
the demands of the art of poetry, and produces in
the world the high results of lovely and noble
poetry. The other only does these things in part;

THE DRAMAS 241

and when Fifine at the Fair and even Sordello are
in the future only the study of pedants, Pippa
Passes will be an enduring strength and pleasure
to all who love tenderly and think widely. And
those portions of it which belong to Pippa herself,
the most natural, easy, and simplest portions, will
be the sources of the greatest pleasure and the
deepest thought. Like Sordello's song, they will
endure for the healing, comforting, exalting, and
impelling of the world.

I have written of her and of other parts of the
poem elsewhere. It only remains to say that
nowhere is the lyric element in Browning's genius
more delightfully represented than in this little
piece of mingled song and action. There is no
better love-lyric in his work than

You'll love me yet ! — and I can tarry
Your love's protracted growing ;

and the two snatches of song which Pippa sings
when she is passing under Ottima's window and
the Monsignore's — " The year's at the spring " and
" Overhead the tree-tops meet " — possess, inde-
pendent of the meaning of the words and their
poetic charm, a freshness, dewiness, morning
ravishment to which it is difficult to find an equal.
They are filled with youth and its delight, alike of the
body and the soul. What Browning's spirit felt
and lived when he was young and his heart beating
with the life of the universe, is in them, and it is
their greatest charm.

CHAPTER IX

POEMS OF THE PASSION OF LOVE

WHEN we leave Paracelsus, Sordello, and the
Drainas behind, and find ourselves among
I the host of occasional poems contained in the
I Dramatic Lyrics and Romances, in Men and Women,
in Dramatis Personce, and in the later volumes, it is
like leaving an unencumbered sea for one studded
with a thousand islands. Every island is worth a
visit and different from the rest. Their variety,
their distinct scenery, their diverse inhabitants, the
strange surprises in them, are as continual an
enchantment for the poetic voyager as the summer
isles of the Pacific. But while each of them is
different from the rest, yet, like the islands in the
Pacific, they fall into groups; and to isolate these
groups is perhaps the best way to treat so varied
a collection of poems. To treat them chrono-
logically would be a task too long and wearisome
for a book. To treat them zoologically, if I may
borrow that term, is possible, and may be profit-
able. This chapter is dedicated to the poems
which relate to Love.

Commonly speaking, the term Love Poems does
not mean poems concerning theabsolute Love, or the
love of Ideas, such as Truth or Beauty, or Love of
242

POEMS OF THE PASSION OF LOVE 243

mankind or one's own country, or the loves that
belong to home, or the love of friends, or even
married love unless it be specially bound up, as it
is in Browning's poem of By the Fireside, with ante-
nuptial love — but poems expressing the isolating
passion of one sex for the other ; chiefly in youth,
or in conditions which resemble those of youth,
whether moral or immoral. These celebrate the
joys and sorrows, rapture and despair, changes and
chances, moods, fancies, and imaginations, quips
and cranks and wanton wiles, all the tragedy and
comedy, of that passion, which is half of the sense
and half of the spirit, sometimes wholly of the
senses and sometimes wholly of the spirit. It
began, in one form of it, among the lower animals
and still rules their lives ; it has developed through
many thousand years of humanity into myriads of
shapes in and outside of the soul ; into stories
whose varieties and multitudes are more numerous
than the stars of heaven or the sand of the sea-
shore; and yet whose multitudinous changes and
histories have their source in two things only — in
the desire to generate, which is physical; in the
desire to forget self in another, which is spiritual.
The union of both these desires into one passion of
thought, act, and feeling is the fine quintessence of
this kind of love ; but the latter desire alone is the
primal motive of all the other forms of love, from
friendship and maternal love to love of country, of
mankind, of ideas, and of God.

With regard to love poems of the sort we now
discuss, the times in history when they are most
written are those in which a nation or mankind
renews its youth. Their production in the days of

244 BROWNING

Elizabeth was enormous, their passion various and
profound, their fancy elaborate, their ornament ex-
travagant with the extravagance of youth ; and, in
the hands of the greater men, their imagination
was as fine as their melody. As that age grew
older they were not replaced but were dominated
by more serious subjects ; and though love in its
fantasies was happily recorded in song during the
Caroline period, passion in English love-poetry
slowly decayed till the ideas of the Revolution, be-
fore the Frenoh outbreak, began to renew the youth
of the world, r The same career is run by the individ-
ual poet. Tne subject of his youth is the passion of
love, as it was in Browning's Pauline. The sub-
jects of his manhood are serious with other thought
and feeling, sad with another sadness, happy with
another happiness. They traverse a wider range
of human feeling and thought, and when they speak
of love, it is of love in its wiser, steadier, graver, and
less selfish forms. It was so with Browning, who far
sooner than his comrades, escaped from the tangled
wilderness of youthful passion. It is curious to
think that so young a creature as he was in 1833
should have left the celebration of the love of
woman behind him, and only written of the love
which his Paracelsus images in Aprile. It seems
a little insensitive in so young a man. But I do not
think Browning was ever quite young save at happy
intervals; and this falls in with the fact that! his
imagination was more intellectual than passionate ;
that while he felt love, he also analysed, even dis-
sected it, as he wrote about it ; that it scarcely ever
carried him away s<j far as to make him forget
everything but itself. Perhaps once or twice, as

POEMS OF THE PASSION" OF LOVE 245

in Tke Last Ride Together, he may have dr.awn near
to this absorption, but even then the man is think-
ing more of his own thoughts than of the woman
by his side, who must have been somewhat wearied
by so silent a companion. Even in By the Fireside,
when he is praising the wife whom he loved with
all his soul, and recalling the moment of early
passion while yet they looked. on one another and
felt their souls embrace before they spoke — it is
curious to find him deviating from the intensity of
the recollection into a discussion of what might
have been if she had not been what she was — a
sort of excursus on the chances of life which lasts
for eight verses — before he returns to that im-
mortal moment. Even after years of married
life, a poet, to whom passion has been in youth
supreme, would scarcely have done that. ' On thel-
whole, his poetry, lifeeHi-hafe^-ef—Wordsworth, ..hut'
not so comple telvt is destitute of the Love-poem in
the ordinary sense of the word ; and the few ex-,
captions to which we might point want so much
that exclusiveness of a lover which shuts out all
other thought but that of the woman, that it is
difficult to class them in that species of literature.
However, this is not altogether true, and the main
exception to it is a curious piece of literary and
personal history. Those who read Asolando, the
last book of poems he published, were surprised to
find with what intensity some of the first poems in
it described the passion of sexual love. They are
fully charged with isolated emotion ; other thoughts
than those of love do not intrude upon them.
Moreover, they have a sincere lyric note. It is
impossible, unless by a miracle of imagination, that

246 BROWNING

these could have been written when he was about
eighty years of age. I believe, though I do not
know, that he wrote them when lie was quite a
young man ; that he found them on looking over
his portfolios, and had a dim and scented pleasure
in reading and publishing them in his old age. He
mentions in the preface that the book contains both
old and new poems. The new are easily isolated,
and the first poem, the introduction to the collec-
tion, is of the date of the book. The rest belong
to different periods of his life. The four poems to
which I refer are Now, Summum Bonum, A Pearl
— A Girl, and Speculative. They are beautiful with
a beauty of their own ; full of that natural abandon-
ment of the whole world for one moment with the
woman loved, which youth and the hours of youth
in manhood feel. I should have been sorry if
Browning had not shaped into song this abandon-
ment. He loved the natural, and was convinced
of its rightness ; and he had, as I might prove, a
tenderness for it even when it passed into wrong.
He was the last -man in the world to think that the
passion of noble sexual love was to be despised.
And it is pleasant to find, at the end of his long
poetic career, that, in a serious and wise old age,
he selected, to form part of his last book, poems of
youthful and impassioned love, in which the senses
and the spirit met, each in their pre-eminence.

The two first of these, Now and Summum Bonum,
must belong to his youth, though from certain turns
of expression and thought in them, it seems that
Browning worked on them at the time he published
them. I quote the second for its lyric charm, even
though the melody is ruthlessly broken.

POEMS OF THE PASSION OF LOVE 247

All the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one
bee:
All the wonder and wealth of the mine in the heart of one
gem:
In the core of one pearl all the shade and the shine of the sea :
Breath and bloom, shade and shine, — wonder, wealth, and
— how far above them —

Truth, that's brighter than gem,
Trust, that's purer than pearl, —
Brightest truth, purest trust in the universe — all were for me
In the kiss of one girl.

The next two poems are knit to this and to Now by
the strong emotion of earthly love, of the senses as
well as of the spirit, for one woman; but they differ
in the period at which they were written. The
first, A Pearl — A Girl, recalls that part of the,
poem By the Fireside, when one look, one word, '
opened the infinite world of love to Browning. If
written when he was young, it has been revised in
after life.

A simple ring with a single stone
To the vulgar eye no stone of price :

Whisper the right word, that alone —
Forth starts a sprite, like fire from ice,

And lo, you are lord (says an Eastern scroll)

Of heaven and earth, lord whole and sole
Through the power in a pearl.

A woman ('tis I this time that say)
With little the world counts worthy praise

Utter the true word — out and away
Escapes her soul : I am wrapt in blaze,

Creation's lord, of heaven and earth

Lord whole and sole — by a minute's birth —
Through the love in a girl !

The second — Speculative — also d|scribes a
monaeDlof^ love-longm g, but has the characteristics
of his later poetry. It may be of the same date as
the book, or not much earlier. It may be of his

248 BROWNING

later manhood, of the time when he lost his wife.
At any rate, it is intense enough. It looks back
on the love he has lost, on passion with the
woman he loved. And he would surrender all —
Heaven, Nature, Man, Art — in this momentary fire
of desire; for indeed such passion is momentary.
iMomentariness is the essence of the poem.'] "Even
in heaveii I will cry for the wild hours now gone by
— Give me back the Earth and Thyself." Specvr
lative, he calls it, in an after irony.

Others may need new life in Heaven —
Man, Nature, Art; — made new, assume!

Man with new mind old sense to leaven.
Nature — new light to clear old gloom,

Art that breaks bounds, gets soaring-room.

I shall pray : " Fugitive as precious —
Minutes which passedp^ return, remain!

Let earth's old life once more enmesh us,
You with old pleasure, me — old pain,
So we but meet nor part again I "

Nor was this reversion to the passion of youth-
ful love altogether a new departure. The lyrics
in Ferishtah' s Fancies are written to represent,
from the side of emotion, the intellectual and ethi-
cal ideas worked out in the poems. The greater
number of them are beautiful, and they would gain
rather than lose if they were published separately
from the poems. Some are plainly of the same
date as the poems. Others, I think, were written in
Browning's early time, and the preceding poems
are made to fit them. But whatever be their origin,
they nearly all treat of love, and one of them with
a crude claim on the love of the senses alone, as if
that — as if the love of the body, even alone — were

POEMS OF THE PASSION OF LOVE 249

not apart from the consideration of a poet who
wished to treat of the whole of human nature.
Browning, when he wished to make a thought or a
fact quite plain, frequently stated it without any of
its modifications, trusting to his readers not to mis-
take him; knowing, indeed, that if they cared to
find the other side — in this case the love which
issues from the senses and the spirit together, or
from the spirit alone — they would find it stated
just as soundly and clearly. He meant us to com-
bine both statements, and he has done so himself
with regard to love.

When, however, we have considered these excep-
tions, it still remains curious how little the passion-
ate Love-poem, with its strong personal touch,
exists in Browning's poetry. One reason may be
that Love-poems of this kind are naturally lyrical,
and demand a sweet melody in the verse, and
[Browning's genius was not especially lyrical, nor
could he inevitably command a melodious move-
ment in his verse. But the main reason is that he
was taken up with other and graver matters, and
chiefly with the right theory of life ; with the true
relation of God and man ; and with the picturing

— for absolute Love's sake, and in order to win
men to love one another by the awakening of pity

— of as much of humanity as he could grasp in
thought and feeling. Isolated and personal love
was only a small part of this large design.

One personal love, however, he possessed fully
and intensely. It was his love for his wife, and
! three poems embody it. The first is By the Fireside.
It does not take raffk as a true love lyric ; it is too
long, too many-motived for a lyric. It is a medi-

ajo BROWNING

tative poem of recoUective tenderness wandering
through the past ; and no poem written on married
love in England is more beautiful. The poet, sit-
ting silent in the room where his wife sits with
him, sees all his life with her unrolled, muses on
what has been, and is, since she came to bless his
life, or what will be, since she continues to bless
it; and all the fancies and musings which, in a
usual love lyric, would not harmonise with the
intensity of love-passion in youth, exactly fit in
with the peace and satisfied joy of a married life
at home with God and Nature and itself. The
poem is full of personal charm."^ Quiet thought,
profound feeling, and sweet memory, like a sunlit
mist, soften the aspect of the room, the image
of his wife, and all the thoughts, emotions, and
scenery described. It is a finished piece of art.l

The second of these poems is the Epilogue to
the volumes of Men and Women, entitled One Word
More. It ! also is a finished piece of art,' carefully
conceived, upbuilded stone by stone, touch by
touch, each separate thought with its own emotion,
each adding something to the whole, each pushing
Browning's emotion and picture into our souls, till
the whole impression is received. It is full, and
full to the brim, with the long experience of peace-
ful joy in married lovel And the subtlety of the
close of it, and of Browning's play with his own
fancy about the moon, do not detract from the
tenderness of it ; for f it speaks not of transient
passion but of the love of a whole life lived from
end to end in music.

The last of these is^ entitled Prospice. When he
wrote it he had lost his wife. It tells what shei

POEMS OF THE PASSION OF LOVE 251

had made of him; it reveals alike his steadfast
sadness that she had gone from him and the stead-
fast resolution, due to her sweet and enduring^ower,
with which, after her^deathThe promised, bearing
with him his sorrow and his memory of joy, to
stand and withstand in the battle of life, ever a
fighter_tOLjiL£Lclose — and well he kept his word.
It ends with the expression of his triumphant cer-
tainty of meeting her, and breaks forth at last into
so great a cry of pure passion that ear and heart
alike rejoice. Browning at his best. Browning in
the central fire of his character, is in it.

Fear death ? — to feel the fog in my throat,

The mist in my face,
When the snows begin, and the blasts denote

I am nearing the place,
The power of the night, the press of the storm,

The post of the foe ;
Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,

Yet the strong man must go :
For the journey is done and the summit attained

And the barriers fall.
Though a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained,

The reward of it all.
I was ever a fighter, so — one fight more,

The best and the last !
I would hate that Death bandaged my eyes, and forbore,

And bade me creep past.
No ! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers

The heroes of old.
Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears

Of pain, darkness, and cold.
For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,

The black minute's at end.
And the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave,

Shall dwindle, shall blend.
Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain,

Then a light, then thy breast,
O thou soul of my soul ! I shall clasp thee again,

And with God be the rest !

252 BROWNING

Leaving now these personal poems on Love, we
come to those we may caltimpersonal. They are
poems about love, not in its simplicities, but in its
subtle moments ^ moments that Browjaing loved
to analyse, and which he informed not so much
with the passion of love, as with his profound love
of human nature.^ He describes in them, with the
seriousness of one who has left youth behind, the
moods of love, its changes, vagaries, certainties,
failures, and conquests. It is a man writing, not
of the love of happy youth, but of love tossed on
the stormy seas- of manhood and womanhood, and
modified from its singular personal intensity by the
deeper thought, feeling, and surprising chances of
our mortal life. Love does nat stand alone, as in
the true love lyric, but with many other grave
matters. As such it is a more interesting subject
for Browning. For Love then becomes full of
strange turns, unexpected thoughts, impulses un-
known before creating varied circumstances, and
created by them ; and these his intellectual-spiritu-
ality delighted to cope with, and to follow, laby-
.rinth after labyrinth. I shall give examples of
these separate studies, which have always an idea
beyond the love out of which the poem arises. In
some of them the love is finally absorbed in the
idea. In all of them their aim is beyond the love
of which they speak.

Love among the Ruins tells of a lover going to
meet his sweetheart. There are many poems with
this expectant motive in the world bf song, and no
motive has been written of with greater emotion.
If we are to believe these poems, or have ever^
waited ourselves, the hour contains nothing but her

POEMS OF THE PASSION OF LOVE 253

presence, what she is doing, how she is coming,
why she delays, what it will he when she comes —
a thousand things, each like white fire round her
image. But Browning's lover, through nine verses,
cares only for the wide meadows over which he
makes his way and the sheep wandering over them,
and their flowers and the ruins in the , midst of
them ; musing on the changes and contrasts of the
world — the lonely land and the populous glory
which was of old in the vast city. It is only then,
and only in two lines, that he thinks of the girl
who is waiting for him in the ruined tower. Even
then his imagination cannot stay with her, but
glances from her instantly — thinking that the
ancient King stood where she is waiting, and
looked, full of pride, from the high tower on his
splendid city. When he has elaborated this sec-
ond excursion of thought he comes at last to the
girl. Then is the hour of passion, but even in
its fervour he draws a conclusion, belonging to a
higher world than youthful love, as remote from
it as his description of the scenery and the ruins.
" Splendour of arms, triumph of wealth, centuries \
of glory and pride, they are nothing to love. Love
is best." It is a general, not a particular conclu- i
sion. In a true Love-poem it would be particular. \

Another poem of waiting love is In Three Days.
And this has the spirit of a true love lyric^ in it.
It reads like a personal thing ; it breathes exalta-
tion ; it is quick, hurried, and thrilled. The deli-
cate fears of chance and change in the three days,
or in the years to come, belong of right and na-
ture to the waiting, and are subtly varied and
condensed. It is, however, the thoughtful love of

254 BROWNING

a man who can be metaphysical in love, not the
excluding mastery of passion./

Two in the Campagna is another poem in which
love passes away into a deeper thought than love —
a strange and fascinating poem of twofold desire.
The man loves a woman and desires to be at peace
with her in love, but there is a more imperative
passion in his soul — to rest in the infinite, in
accomplished perfection. And his livelong and
vain pursuit of this has wearied him so much that
he has no strength left to realise earthly love. Is
it possible that she who now walks with him in the
Campagna can give him in her love the peace of
the infinite which he desires, and if not, why —
where is the fault.' For a moment he seems to
catch the reason, and asks his love to see it with him
and to grasp it. In a moment, like the gossamer
thread he traces only to see it vanish, it is gone —
and nothing is left, save

Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.

Least of all is the woman left. She has quite dis-
appeared. This is not a Love-poem at all, it is
the cry of Browning's hunger for eternity in the
midst of mortality, in which all the hunger for
earthly love is burnt to dust.

The rest are chiefly studies of di£ferent_kinds_of
loygi, or of prises in^ love ; moments in its course, in
its origin, or its failure. There are many examples
in the shorter dramatic pieces, as In a Balcony ;
and even in the longer dramas certain sharp
climaxes of love are recorded, not as if they be-
longed to the drama, but as if they were distinct
studies introduced by chance or caprice. In the

POEMS OF THE PASSION OF LOVE 255

short poems called " dramatic " these studies 'are
numerous, and I group a few of them together
according to their motives, leaving out some which
I shall hereafter treat of when I come to discuss
the women in Browning. \ Evelyn Hope has noth-
ing to do with the passion of love. The physical
element of love is entirely excluded by the subject.
It is a beautiful expression of a love purely spiritual;
to be realised in its fulness ^ly after death, spirit
with spirit, but yet to be kept as the master of daily
Uf e, to whose la w^all thought and action are referred.
The thought is noble, the expression of it simple,
fine, and clear. It is, moreover, close to truth —
there are hundreds of men who live quietly in love
of that kind, and die in its embrace.

In Cristina the love is just as spiritual, but the
motive of the poem is not one, as in Evelyn Hope,
but two. The woman is not dead, and she has
missed her chance. But the lover has not. He
has seen her and- in a moment loved her. She
also looked on him and'^felt her soul matched by
his as they " rushed together." But the world
carried her away and she lost the fulness of life./
He, on the contrary, kept the moment for ever, and
with it, her and all she might have been with him.

Her soul's mine : and thus grown perfect,
I shall pass my life's remainder.

This is not the usual Love-poem. It is a love as
spiritual, as mystid, even more mystic, since the
woman lives, than the lover felt for Evelyn Hope.
The second motive in Cristina of the lover who
meets the true partner of his soul or hers, and
either seizes the happy hour and possesses joy for
ever, or misses it and loses all, is a favourite with

2S6 BROWNING

Browning. He repeats it frequently under diverse
circumstances, for it opened out so many various
endings, and! afforded so much opportunity for his
beloved analysis. Moreover, optimist as he was;
in his final thought of man, he was deeply con-
scious of the ironies of life, of the ease with which ,
things go wrong, of the impossibility of setting
them right from without. And in the matter of
love he marks in at least four poems how the
moment was held and life was therefore conquest.
Then in Youth and Art, in Dts Aliter Visum, in
Bifurcation, in The Lost Mistress, and in Too Late,
he records the opposite fate, and in characters so i
distinct that the repetition of the motive is not^
monotonous. These are studies of the Might-have- \
beens of love. "" '■

Another motive, used with varied circumstance
in three or four poems, but fully expanded in
James Lee's Wife, is the discovery, after years of
love, that love on one side is lost irretrievably.
Another motive is, that rather than lose love men
or women will often sacrifice their conscience, their
reason, or their liberty. This sacrifice, of all that
makes our nobler being for the sake of personal
love alone, brings with it, because the whole being
is degraded, the degradation, decay, and death of
personal love itself.

Another set of poems describes with fanciful
charm, sometimes with happy gaiety, love at play
with itself. True love makes in the soul an un-
fathomable ocean in whose depths are the imagina-
tions of love, serious, infinite, and divine. But on
its surface the Hght of jewelled fancies plays — 2J'
thousand thousand sunny memories and hopes,

POEMS OF THE PASSION OF LOVE 257

flying thoughts and dancing feelings. A poet would
be certain to have often seen this happy crowd, and
to desire to trick them out in song. So Browning
does in his poem, In a Gondola. The two lovers,
with the dark shadow of fate brooding over them,
sing and muse and speak alternately, imaging in
swift and rival pictures made by fancy their deep-
set love ; playing with its changes, creating new
worlds in which to place it, but always returning
to its isolated individuality ; recalling how it began,
the room where it reached its aim, the pictures,
the furniture, the balcony, her dress, all the scenery,
in a hundred happy and glancing pictures ; while
interlaced through their gaiety — and the gaiety
made keener by the nearness of dark fate — is
coming death, death well purchased by an hour of
love. Finally, the lover is stabbed and slain, and
the pity of it throws back over the sunshine of
love's fancies a cloud of tears. This is the stuff
of life that Browning loved to paint — interwoven
darkness and brightness, sorrow and joy trembling
each on the edge of the other, life playing at ball,
as joyous as Nausicaa and her maids, on a thin
crust over a gulf of death.

Just such another poem— f of the sportiveness
of love, only this time in meinory, not in present
pleasure,' is to be found in A Lovers' Quarrel, and
the quarrel is the dark element in it. Browning,
always feels that mighty passion has its root in
tragedy, and that it seeks relief in comedy. The
lover sits by the fireside alone, and recalls, forgetting
pain for a moment, the joyful play they two had
together, when love expressed its depth of pleasure
in dramatic fancies. Every separate picture is done|

2S8 BROWNING

in Browning's impressionist way. And when the
glad memories are over, and the sorrow returns,
passion leaps out —

It is twelve o'clock :

I shall hear her knock
In the worst of a storm's uproar,

I shall pull her through the door,
I shall have her for evermore!

This is partly a study of the memory of love ;
and Browning has represented, without any sorrow
linked to it, rnemorial love in a variety of charac-
ters under different circumstances, so that, though
the subject is the same, the treatment varies. .A
charming instance of this is The Flower's Name;
easy to read, happy in its fancy, in its scenery, in
the subtle play of deep affection, in the character
of its lover, in the character of the girl who is
remembered — a good example of Browning's
power to image in a few verses two human souls
so clearly that they live in our world for ever. Meet-
ing at Night — Parting at Morning is another remi-
niscence, mixed up with the natural scenery of the.
meeting and parting, a vivid recollection of a fleet-j
ing night of passion, and then the abandonment of
its isolation for a wider, fuller life with humanity.
I quote it for the fine impassioned way in which
human feeling and natural scenery are fused
together.

Meeting at Night

The grey sea and the long black land ;

And the yellow half-moon large and low ;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep.

As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed i' the slushy sand.

POEMS OF THE PASSION OF LOVE 259

Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach ;

Three fields to cross till a farm appears ;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,

And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each !

Parting at Morning

Round the cape of a sudden came the sea,
And the sun looked over the mountain's rim :
And straight was a path of gold for him.

And the need of a world of men for me.

^he poem entitled Cojifessions is another of these
memories, in which a dying man, careless of death,'
careless of the dull conventions of the clergyman, >
cares for nothing but the memory of his early i
passion for a girl one happy June, and dies inl
comfort of the sweetness of the memory, though
he thinks —

How sad and bad and mad it was.

Few but Browning would have seen, and fewer still
have recorded, this vi^al piece of truth. It repre-'
sents a whole type of character — those who in a life '
of weary work keep their day of love, even when
it has been . wrong, as their one poetic, ideal
possession, and cherish it for ever. The wrong of
it disappears in the ideal beauty which now has
gathered round it, and as it was faithful, unmixed
with other love, it escapes degradation. We see,
when the man images the past and its scenery out
of the bottles of physic on the table, how the
material world had been idealised to him all his
life long by this passionate memory —

Do I view the world as a vale of tears?
Ah, reverend sir, not I.

26o BROWNING

It might be well to compare with this another
treatment of the memory of love in St. Martin! s
Summer. A much less interesting and natural
motive rules it than Confessions ; and the characters,
though more " in society " than the dying man, are
grosser in nature ; gross by their inability to love,
or by loving freshly to make a new world in which
the old sorrow dies or is transformed. There is no
humour in the thing, though there is bitter irony.
But there is humour in an earlier poem — A Serenade
at the Villa, where, in the last verse, the bitter-
ness of wrath and love together (a very different
bitterness from that of St. Martin's Summer),
breaks out, and is attributed to the garden gate.
The night-watch and the singing is over; she
must have heard him, but she gave no sign. He
wonders what she thought, and then, because he
was only half in love, flings away —

Oh how dark your villa was,

Windows fast and obdurate !
How the garden grudged me grass

Where I stood — the iron gate
Ground its teeth to let me pass!

It is impossible to notice all these studies of
love, but they form, together, a book of transient;
phases of the passion in almost every class of'
society. And they show how Browning, passing
through the world, from the Quartier Latin toj
London drawing-rooms, was continually on the
watch to catch, store up, and reproduce a crowd
of motives for poetry which his memory held and
his imagination shaped.

There is only one more poem, which I cannot
pass by in this group of studies. It is one of

POEMS OF THE PASSION OF LOVE 261

sacred and personal memory, so much so that it
is probable the loss of his life lies beneath it. It
rises into that highest poetry which fuses together
into one form a hundred thoughts and a hundred
emotions, and which is only obscure from the
mingling of their multitude. I quote it, I cannot
comment on it.

Never the time and the place

And the loved one all together !
This path — how soft to pace !

This May — what magic weather!
Where is the loved one's face?
In a dream that loved one's face meets mine
But the house is narrow, the place is bleak
Where, outside, rain and wind combine
With a furtive ear, if I strive to speak,
With a hostile eye at my flushing cheek,
With a malice that marks each word, each sign !
O enemy sly and serpentine,
Uncoil thee from the waking man !
Do I hold the Past
Thus firm and fast
Yet doubt if the Future hold I can?
This path so soft to pace shall lead
Through the magic of May to herself indeed!
Or narrow if needs the house must be,
Outside are the storms and strangers : we —
Oh, close, safe, warm sleep I and she,
— I and she!

That, indeed, is passionate enough.

Then there is another group — tj.les jvhich |
embody phases of love. Count Gismond is one of 1
these. It is too long, and wants Browning's usual
force. Tha outline of the story was, perhaps, too
simple to interest his intellect, and he needed m\
writing poetry not only the emotional subject, but'
that there should be something in or behind the

262 BROWNING

emotion through the mazej^jjfjw^ichjijsjntelligfiiice"]
might glide like a serpent.* ~ ^

The Glove is another of these tales — a good
example of the brilliant fashion in which Browning
could, by a strange kaleidoscopic turn of his subject,
give it a new aspect and a new ending. The world
has had the tale before it for a very long time.
Every one had said the woman was wrong and
the man right; but here, poetic juggler as he is,
Browning makes the woman right and the man
wrong, reversing the judgment of centuries. The
best of it is, that he seems to hold the truth of the
thing. It is amusing to think that only now, in the
other world, if she and Browning meet, will she
find herself comprehended.

Finally, as to the mightier kinds of love, those
supreme forms of the passion, which have neither
beginning nor end ; to which time and space are
but names ; which make and fill the universe ; the
least grain of which predicates the whole ; the spirit
of which is God Himself ; the breath of whose life
is immortal joy, or sorrow which means joy ; whose
vision is Beauty, and whose activity is Creation —
these, united in God, or divided among men into
their three great entities — love of ideas for their
truth and beauty; love of the natural universe,
which is God's garment ; love of humanity, which is
God's child — these pervade the whole of Browning's
poetry as the heat of the sun pervades the earth and
every little grain upon it. They make its warmth

* There is one simple story at least which he tells quite ad-
mirably, The Pied Piper of Hamelin. But then, that story, if it is
not troubled by intellectual matter, is also not troubled by any
deep emotion. It is told by a poet who becomes a child for
children.

POEMS OF THE PASSION OF LOVE 263

and life, strength and beauty. They are too vast
to be circumscribed in a lyric, represented in a
drama, bound up even in a long story of spiritual^
endeavour Jike Paracelsus. But they move, in
digm^Tsplendour, and passion, through all that he
deeply conceived and nobly wrought; and their
triumph and immortality in his poetry are never
for one moment clouded with doubt or subject to
death. This is the supreme thing in his work.
To him Love is the Conqueror, and Love is God.

CHAPTER X

THE PASSIONS OTHER THAN LOVE

THE poems on which I have dwelt in the last
chapter, though they are mainly concerned
with love between the sexes, illustrate the other
noble passions, all of which, such as joy, are forms
of, or rather children of, self -forgetful love. They
do not illustrate the evil or ignoble passions — envy,
jealousy, hatred, base fear, despair, revenge, avarice,
and remorse — which, driven by the emotion that
so fiercely and swiftly accumulates around them,
master the body and soul, the intellect and the
will, like some furious tyrant, and in their extremes
hurry their victim into madness. Browning took
some of these terrible powers and made them
subjects in his poetry. Short, sharp-outlined
sketches of them occur in his dramas and longer
poems. There is no closer image in literature of
long-suppressed fear breaking out into its agony of
despair than in the hnes which seal Guido's pleading

in The Ring and the Book.

Life is all!
I was just stark mad, — let the madman live
, Pressed by as many chains as you please pile!
Don't open! Hold me from them! I am yours,
I am the Grand Duke's — no, I am the Pope's !
Abate — Cardinal — Christ — Maria — God . . .
Pompilia, will you let them murder me ?
264

THE PASSIONS OTHER THAN LOVE 265

But there is no elaborate, long-continued study
of these sordid and evil things in Browning. He
was not one of our modern realists who love to
paddle and splash in the sewers of humanity. Not
only was he too healthy in mind to dwell on them,
but he justly held them as not fit subjects for art
unless they were bound up with some form of pity,
as jealousy and envy are in Shakespeare's treatment
of the story of Othello ; or imaged along with so
much of historic scenery that we lose in our interest
in the decoration some of the hatefulness of the
passion. The combination, for example, of envy
and hatred resolved on vengeance in The Labora-
tory is too intense for any pity to intrude, but
Browning realises not only the evil passions in
the woman but the historical period also and its
temper ; and he fills the poem with scenery which,
though it leaves the woman first in our eyes,
yet lessens the malignant element. The same, but
of course with the difference Browning's variety
creates, may be said of the story of the envious king,
where envy crawls into hatred, hatred almost mo-
tiveless — the Instans Tyrannus. A faint vein of
humour runs through it. The king describes what
has been ; his hatred has passed. He sees how
small and fanciful it was, and the illustrations he
uses to express it tell us that; though they carry
with them also the contemptuous intensity of his past
hatred. The swell of the hatred remains, though
the hatred is past. So we are not left face to face
with absolute evil, with the corruption hate en-
genders in the soul. God has intervened, and
the worst of it has passed away.

Then there is the study of hatred in the Soliloquy

266 BROWNING

of the Spanish Cloister. The hatred is black and
deadly, the instinctive hatred of a brutal nature for
a delicate one, which, were it unrelieved, would be
too vile for the art of poetry. But it is relieved,
not only by the scenery, the sketch of the monks in
the refectory, the garden of flowers, the naughty
girls seated on the convent bank washing their black
hair, but also by the admirable humour which ripples
like laughter through the hopes of his hatred, and
by the brilliant sketching of the two men. We see
them, know them, down to their little tricks at din-
ner, and we end by reaUsing hatred, it is true, but
in too agreeable a fashion for just distress.

In other poems of the evil passions the relieving
element is pity. There are the two poems entitled
Before and After, that is, before and after the duel.
Before is the statement of one of the seconds, with
curious side-thoughts introduced by Browning's
mental play with the subject, that the duel is abso-
lutely necessary. The challenger has been deeply
wronged ; and he cannot and will not let forgiveness
intermit his vengeance. The man in us agrees with
that; the Christian in us says, "Forgive, let God
do the judgment." But the passion for revenge has
here its way and the guilty falls. And now let Brown-
ing speak — Forgiveness is right and the vengeance-
fury wrong. The dead man has escaped, the living
has not escaped the wrath of conscience ; pity is all.

Take the cloak from his fece, and at first
Let the corpse do its worst !

How he lies in his rights of a man !

Death has done all death can.
And, absorbed in the new life he leads,

He recks not, he heeds

THE PASSIONS OTHER THAN LOVE 267

Nor his wrong nor my vengeance ; both strike

On his senses alike,
And are lost in the solemn and strange

Surprise of the change.

Ha, what avails death to erase

His offence, my disgrace ?
I would we were boys as of old

In the field, by the fold : I

His outrage, God'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 con-
tempt, hatred, and revenge more sustained and subtle
than Browning's poem entitled A Forgiveness ; and
the title 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 hat^l is modified, when we see the man's heart
and ^ywoman's soul, into pity for their fate. The
mai^fcls his story to a monk in the confessional,
who has been the lover of his wife. He is a states-
man absorbed in his work, yet he feels that his wife
makes his home a heaven, and he carries her pres-
ence with him all the day. His wife takes the first
lover she msf ts. and, djscovetedi tells her husband
that she hStes him! " Kill me now," she cries.
But he despises her too mudh to hate her ; she is
not worth killing. Three y^ars 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 loveiJ^you, you
only, all the time, and lost you —

268 BROWNING

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 fetal 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 i^krhat is
left with us is pity for humanity, pity for th^^pman,
pity for the lover, pity for the husband. ^^

Again, in the case of Sebald and Ottima ixTPippa
Passes, pity also rules. Love passing into lust 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 morn-
ing 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 passion 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

THE PASSIONS OTHER THAN LOVE 269

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 lust 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 passes 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 ;
/God's in his heaven —
(All's right with the world !

Som^ing in it smites Sebald's heart like a
hamni|K)f God. He repents, but in the cowardice
of rejBptance 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 passion of repentance. But
his fury with her passes away into the passion 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

270 BROWNING

Duchess of Malfi. Even Ottima, lifted by her love,
which purifies itself in wishing to die for her lover,
repents.

Not me, — to him, O God, be merciful !

Thus into this cauldron of sin Browning steals the
pity of God. 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 weaknqj^ of the
grip. It ought not to have been publishe

iqAof

And now I turn to passions more delightful, that
this chapter may close in light and not in darkness
— passions 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

THE PASSIONS OTHER THAN LOVE 271

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 adven-
ture and romance which underlies and wells up-
wards through so much of modern life, and which
has never ceased to send its waters up to refresh
the world. These are romantic passions. 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 Duchess, 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 beauti-
ful 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 :

272 BROWNING

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 noble 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
Passes, a true piece of early folk-romance, with a

THE PASSIONS OTHER THAN LOVE 273

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 space 'twixt horn and horn

Of some sacrificial bull —

Only calm as a babe new-bom :

For he was got to a sleepy mood,

So safe from all decrepitude,

Age with its bane, so sure gone by,

(The gods so loved him while he dreamed)

That, having lived thus long, there seemed

No need that King should ever die.
LDiGi. 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 pass,

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 t

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.

T

274 BROWNING

'Tis said, a Python scared one day

The breathless city, till he came,

With forky 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 god 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.

Assault 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 passes 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
roniance in it. It is not Rudel who speaks but
Browning. It is not the twelfth but the nineteenth
century which has made all that analysis and over-
worked illustration.

There remain, on this matter, Childe Roland and
the Flight of the Duchess. 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

THE PASSIONS OTHER THAN LOVE 275

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 passage 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 know-
ledge. 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 pre-

276 BROWNING

decessors 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 th6 main elements of
human nature, it is always possible to make an
allegory out of any one of them. If we Uke 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 passion for the mystical
world, for adventure, for the unknown, which lies
at the root of the romantic tree.

The Flight of the Duchess is full of the passion
of escape from the conventional; and nowhere is
Browning more original or more the poet. Its
manner is exactly right, exactly fitted to the cha-
racter and condition of the narrator, who is the
duke's huntsman. Its metrical movement is ex-
cellent, 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 PASSIONS OTHER THAN LOVE 277

the emotion of the subject is quiet, recoUective, 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 ha has fed, followed, and slain.
And, through it all, there breathes the romantic
passion — 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 hoarded 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
T^t 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.

278 BROWNING

And then as, 'mid the dark, a gleam
Of yet another morning breaks,
And, like the hand which ends a dream,
Death, with the might of his sunbeam,
Touches the flesh, and the soul awakes,
Then

Then the romance of life sweeps into the world
beyond. But even in that world the duchess will
never settle down to a fixed life. She will be, like
some of us, a child of the wandering tribes of
eternity.

This romantic passion which never dies even
in our modern society, is embodied in the gipsy
crone who, in rags and scarcely clinging to life,
suddenly lifts into youth and queenliness, just as
in a society, where romance seems old or dead, it
springs into fresh and lovely life. This is the heart
of the poem, and it is made to beat the more
quickly by the wretched attempt of the duke and
his mother to bring back the observances of the
Middle Ages without their soul. Nor even then
does Browning leave his motive. The huntsman
has heard the gipsy's song ; he has seen the light
on his mistress' face as she rode away — the light
which is not from sun or star — and the love of the
romantic world is botn in him. He will not leave
his master ; there his duty lies. " I must see this
fellow his sad life through." But then he will go
over the mountains, after his lady, leaving the
graves of his wife and children, into the unknown,
to find her, or news of her, in the land of the
wanderers. And if he never find her, if, after
pleasant journeying, earth cannot give her to his
eyes, he will still pursue his quest in a world where
romance and formality are not married together.

THE PASSIONS OTHER THAN LOVE 279

So I shall find out some snug corner,
Under a hedge, like Orson the wood-knight,
Turn myself round and bid the world Good Night ;
And sleep a sound sleep till the trumpet's blowing
Wakes me (unless priests cheat us Jaymen)-
To a world where will be no further throwing
Pearls before swine that can't value them. Amen !

CHAPTER XI

IMAGINATIVE REPRESENTATIONS

ALL poems might be called " imaginative repre-
sentations." But the class of poems in
Browning's work to which I give that name stands
apart. It includes such poems as Clean, Caliban
on Setebos, Fra Lippo Lippi, the Epistle of Karshish,
and they isolate themselves, not only in Browning's
poetry, but in English poetry. They have some
resemblance in aim and method to the monologues
of Tennyson, such as the Northern Farmer or
Rizpah, but their aim is much wider than Tenny-
son's, and their method far more elaborate and
complex.

What do they represent } To answer this is to
define within what limits I give them the name of
" imaginative representations." They are not only
separate studies of individual men as they breathed
and spoke; face, form, tricks of body recorded;
intelligence, character, temper of mind, spiritual
aspiration made clear — Tennyson did that; they
are also studies of these individual men — Cleon,
Karshish, and the rest — as general types, repre-
sentative images, of the age in which they lived ;
or of the school of art to which they belonged;
or of the crisis in theology, religion, art, or the
280

IMAGINATIVE REPRESENTATIONS 281

social movement which took place while the men
they paint were alive, and which these men led, or
formed, or followed. That is their main element,
and it defines them.

They are not dramatic. Their action and ideas
are confined to one person, and their circumstance
and scenery to one time and place. But Browning,
unlike Tennyson, filled the background of the stage
on which he placed his single figure with a multi-
tude of objects, or animals, or natural scenery, or
figures standing round or in motion; and these
give additional vitality and interest to the repre-
sentation. Again, they are short, as short as a
soliloquy or a letter or a conversation in a street.
Shortness belongs to this form of poetic work —
a form to which Browning gave a singular in-
tensity. It follows that they must not be argu-
mentative beyond what is fitting. Nor ought they
to glide into the support of a th e sis, or into didiir-
tic arlHTffi ReSr a.s Bi ^hnp. ^fn^g-rnm. and Mr. Sludge
do. These might be called treatises, and are apart
from the kind of poem of which I speak. They
begin, indeed, within its limits, but they soon
transgress those limits; and are more properly
classed with poems which, also representative, have
not the brevity, the scenery, the lucidity, the
objective representation, the concentration of the
age into one man's mind, which mark out these
poems from the rest, and isolate them into a class
of their own.

The voiee we hear in them is rarely the voice of
Browning ; nor is the mind of their personages his
mind, save so far as he is their creator. There are
a few exceptions to this, but, on the whqle, Brown-

282 \ BROWNING

ing has, in writing these poems, stripped himself of
his own personality. He had, by creative power,
made these men ; cast them off from himself, and
put them into their own age. They talk their
minds out in character with their age. Browning
seems to watch them, and to wonder how they got
out of his hands and became men. That is the
impression they make, and it predicates a singular
power of imagination. Like the Prometheus of
Goethe, the poet sits apart, moulding men and then
endowing them with life. But he cannot tell, any
more than Prometheus, what they will say and do
after he has made them. He does tell, of course,
but that is not our impression. Our impression is
that they live and talk of their own accord, so
vitally at home they are in the country, the scenery,
and the thinking of the place and time in which
he has imagined them.

Great knowledge seems required for this, and
Browning had indeed an extensive knowledge not
so much of the historical facts, as of the tendencies
of thought which worked in the times wherein he
placed his men. But the chief knowledge he had,
through his curious reading, was of a multitude of
small intimate details of the customs, clothing,
architecture, dress, popular talk, and scenery of the
towns and country of Italy from the thirteenth
century up to modern times. To every one of
these details — such as are found in Sordello, in
Fra Lippo Lippi, in the Bishop orders his Tomb
at St. Praxed's Church — his vivid and grasping
imagination gave an uncommon reality.

But even without great knowledge such poems
may be written, if the poet have imagination, and

JMAGIJVATIVE REPRESENTATIONS 283

the power to execute in metrical words wliat has
been imagined. Theology in the Island and the
prologue to a Death in the Desert are examples of
this. Browning knew nothing of that island in
the undiscovered seas where Prosper dwelt, but he
made all the scenery of it and all its animal life,
and he re-created CaUban. He had never seen
the cave in the desert where he placed John to die,
nor the sweep of rocky hills and sand around it,
nor the Bactrian waiting with the camels. Other
poets, of course, have seen unknown lands and
alien folks, but he has seen them more vividly,
more briefly, more forcibly. His imagination was
objective enough.

But it was as subjective as it was objective. He
saw the soul of Fra Lippo Lippi and the soul of his
time as vividly as he saw the streets of Florence at
night, the watch, the laughing girls, and the palace
of the Medici round the corner. It was a remark-
able combination, and it is by this combination of
the subjective and objective imagination that he
draws into some dim approach to Shakespeare ;
and nowhere closer than in these poems.

Again, not only the main character of each of
these poems, but all the figures introduced (some-
times only in a single line) to fill up the back-
ground, are sketched with as true and vigorous a
pencil as the main figure ; are never out of place
or harmony with the whole, and are justly sub-
ordinated. The young men who stand round the
Bishop's bed when he orders his tomb, the watch-
men in Fra Lippo Lippi, the group of St. John's
disciples, are as alive, and as much in tune with
the whole, as the servants and tenants of Justice

284 BROWNING

Shallow. Again, it is not only the lesser figures,
but the scenery of these poems which is worth our
study. That also is closely fitted to the main sub-
ject. The imagination paints it for that, and noth-
ing else. It would not fit any other subject. For
imagination, working at white heat, cannot do what
is out of harmony ; no more than a great musician
can introduce a false chord. All goes together in
these poems — scenery, characters, time, place, and
action.

Then, also, the extent of their range is remark-
able. Their subjects begin with savage man making
his god out of himself. They pass through Greek
mythology to early Christian times ; from Artemis
and Pan to St. John dying in the desert. Then,
still in the same period, while Paul was yet alive,
he paints another aspect of the time in CleonJ^e
rifi h artist, jhe f riend of kin^s. who had reached
the top of life, included all the arts in himself, yet
dimly craved for more than earth could give. From
these times the poems pass on to the early and late
Renaissance, and from that to the struggle for free-
dom in Italy, and from that to modem life in
Europe. This great range illustrates the penetra-
tion and the versatiUty of his genius. He could
place us with ease and truth at Corinth, Athens, or
Rome, in Paris, Vienna, or London ; and wherever
we go with him we are at home.

One word more must be said about the way a
great number of these poems arose. They leaped
up in his imagination full-clad and finished at a
single touch from the outside. Caliban upon Setebos
took its rise from a text in the Bible which darted
into his mind as he read the Tempest. Clean arose

IMAGINATIVE REPRESENTATIONS 285

as he reaid that verse in St. Paul's speech at
Athens, " As certain also of your own poets have
said." I fancy that An Epistle of Karshish was
born one day. when he read those two stanzas in
In Memoriam about Lazarus, and imagined how
the subject would come to him. Fra Lippo Lippi
slipped into his mind one day at the Belle Arti at
Florence as he stood before the picture described in
the poem, and walked afterwards at night through
the streets of Florence. These fine things are born
in a moment, and come into our world from poet,}
painter, and musician, full-grown; built, like Alad-
din's palace, with all their jewels, in a single night. 1
They are inexplicable by any scientific explana-i
tion, as inexplicable as genius itself. When have
the hereditarians explained Shakespeare, Mozart, j
Turner ? When has the science of the world ex- 1
plained the birth of a lyric of Burns, a song of)
Beethoven, or a drawing of Rafael.' Let thesel
gentlemen veil their eyes, and confess their inability 1
to explain the facts. For it is fact they touch.
" Full fathom five thy father lies " — that song of I
Shakespeare exists. The overture to Don Giovanni
is a reality. We can see the Bacchus and Ariadne
at the National Gallery and the Theseus at the
Museum. These are facts ; but they are a million 1
million miles beyond the grasp of any science.
Nay, the very smallest things of their kind, the\
slightest water-colour sketch of Turner, a half-
finished clay sketch of Donatello, the little song
done in the corner of a provincial paper by a work-
ing clerk in a true poetic hour, are not to be fathomed
by the most far-descending plummet of the scientific
understanding. These things are in that super-

286 BROWNING

physical world into which, however closely he saw
and dealt with his characters in the world of the
senses, the conscience, or the understanding, Brown-
ing led them all at last.

The first of these poems is Natural Theology on
the Island; or, Caliban upon Setebos. Caliban, with
the instincts and intelligence of an early savage,
has, in an Jipur of hoUday. set himself to conceive
what .SetP.hnSr his mother's |>-od, is like in, rhaTprtpt^
He talks out the question with himself, and because
he is in a vague fear lest Setebos, hearing him
soliloquise about him, should feel insulted and
swing a thunder-bolt at him, .he not only hides
himself in the earth, but speaks in the third person,
as if it was not he that spoke ; hoping in that
fashion to trick his God.

Browning, conceiving in himself the mind and
temper of an honest, earthly, imaginative savage —
who is developed far enough to build nature-myths
in their coarse early forms — architectures the
character of Setebos out of the habits, caprices,
fancies, likes and dislikes, and thoughts of Caliban ;
and an excellent piece of penetrative imagination it
is. Browning has done nothing better, though he
has done as well.

But Browning's Caliban is not a single personage.
No one savage, at no one time, would have all these
thoughts of his God. He is the representative of
what has been thought, during centuries, by many
thousands of men ; the concentration into one mind
of the ground-thoughts of early theology. At one
point, as if Browning wished to sketch the beginning
of a new theological period, Caliban represents a
more advanced thought than savage man conceives.

IMAGINATIVE REPRESENTATION'S 287

This is CalibajilainiagirialimuaJUJi^^
SetehosjadiQ is the capricious creator and power of
the-earth — of the " Quiet," who is master of Setebos
and whose temper is quite different ; who also
made the stars, things which Caliban, with a touch
of Browning's subtle thought, separates from the
sun and moon and earth. It is plain from this, and
from the whole argument which is admirably con-
ducted, that Caliban is an intellectual personage,
too long neglected ; and Prospero, could he have
understood his nature, would have enjoyed his con-
versation. Renan agreed with Browning in this
estimate of his intelligence, and made him the
foundation of a philosophical play.

There is some slight reason for this in Shake-
speare's invention. He lifts Caliban in intellect,
even in feeling, far above Trinculo, Stephano, the
Boatswain, and the rest of the common men. The
objection, however, has been made that Browning
makes him too intelligent. The answer is that
Browning is not drawing Caliban only, but em-
bodying in an ima gined person age the thoughts
about__God- likely to be invented by early ma n
duriQg_tho3isands_of_years — and this accounts for
the insequences in Caliban's thinking. They are
not the thoughts of one but of several nien. Yet
a certain poetic unity is given to them by the
unity of place. The continual introduction of the
landscape to be seen from his fefuge knits the
discursive thinking of the savage into a kind of
unity. We watch him_l^iag.ia-t_hs_tiii£li, water-
slime of the -hollow, his h^ad. on .the rim of .it
propped by his hands, under the cave's mouth,
hidden, by, the gadding gourds and. vines ;Jooking

288 BROWNING

out to sea and watching the wild animals that pass
him by — and out of this place he does not stir.

In Shakespeare's Tempest Caliban is the gross,
brutal element of the earth and is opposed to Ariel,
the light, swift, fine element of the air. Caliban
curses Prospero with the evils of the earth, with
the wicked dew of the fen and the red plague of the
sea-marsh. Browning's Caliban does not curse at
all. When he is not angered, or in a caprice, he
is a gQpd^n^tured cr^eature, fullMjyaimalxajsymen^
He loves to lie in the cool slush, like a lias-lizard,
shivering with earthy pleasure when his spine is
tickled by the small eft-things that course along it.

Run in and out each ann, and make him laugh. ,

The poem is full of these good, close, vivid realisa-
tions of the brown prolific earth.

Browning had his own sympathy with Caliban.
Nor does Shakespeare make him altogether brutish.
He has been so educated by his close contact with
Nature that his imagination has been kindled. His
very cursing is imaginative :

As wicked dew as e'er my mother brushed
With raven's feather from unwholesome fen
Drop on you both ; a south-west blow on you
And blister you all o'er.

Stephano and Trinculo, vulgar products of civili-
sation, could never have said that. Moreover,
Shakespeare's Caliban, like Browning's, has the
poetry of the earth-man in him. When Ariel plays,
Trinculo and Stephano think it must be the devil,
and Trinculo is afraid : but Caliban loves and
enjoys the music for itself:

IMAGINATIVE REPRESENTATIONS 289

Be not afear'd ; the isle is fall of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices

That, if I then had waked after long sleep,

Will make me sleep again.

Stephano answers, like a modern millionaire :

This will prove a brave kingdom for me, where I shall have
my music for nothing.

Browning' s Caliban_ isj.Iso somsthing,. of a. poet,
and lo ves the Nature of whom he is a child. We
are not surprised when he

looks out o'er yon sea which sunbeams cross
And recross till they weave a spider web
(Meshes of fire some great fish breaks at times)

though the phrase is full of a poet's imagination, for
so the living earth would see and feel the sea. It
belongs also to Caliban's nearness to the earth that
he should have the keenest of eyes for animals, and
that poetic pleasure in watching their life which,
having seen them vividly, could describe them
vividly. I quote one example from the poem ; there
are many others :

'Thinketh, He made thereat the sun, this isle.

Trees and the fowls here, beast and creeping thing.

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 ; and the pie with the long tongue

That pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm.

And says a plain word when she finds her prize,

But will not eat the ants ; the ants themselves

That build a wall of seeds and settled stalks

About their hole —

There are two more remarks to make about this

290 BROWNING

poem. First, that Browning makes Caliban create a
dramatic world in which Miranda, Ariel, and he
himself play their parts, and in which he assumes
the part of Prosper. That is, Caliban invents a new
world out of the persons he knows, but different
from them, and a second self outside himself. No
lower animal has ever conceived of such a creation.
Secondly, Browning makes Caliban, in order to
exercise his wit and his sense of what is beautiful,
fall to making something — a bird, an insect, or a
building which he ornaments, which satisfies him
for a time, and which he then destroys to make a
better. This is art in its beginning ; and the high-
est animal we know of is incapable of it. We know
that the men of the caves were capable of it. When
they made a drawing, a piece of carving, they were
unsatisfied until they had made a better. When
they made a story out of what they knew and saw,
they went on to make more. Creation, invention,
art — this, itdependent entirely of the religious
desire, makes the infinite gulf which divides man
from the highest animals.

I do not mean, in this book, to speak of the
theology of Caliban, though the part of the poem
which concerns the origin of sacrifice is well worth
our attention. But the poem may be recommended
to those theological persons who say there" is no
God; and to that large class of professional theo-
logians, whose idea of a capricious, jealous, sud-
denly-angered God, without any conscience except
his sense of power to do as he pleases, is quite in
harmony with Caliban's idea of Setebos.

The next of these "imaginative representations"
is the poem called Clean. Cleon is a rich and

IMAGINATIVE REPRESENTATIONS 291

fgmniis artist nf ttin l^rf u f^ian, ■ islg . ' i ^ p .a.livR whil e
St, Paul was still making his miss ionary journ eys,
just at the time when the Graeco-Roman culture
had attained a height of refinement, but had lost
originating power; when it thought it had mastered
all the means for a perfect life, but was, in reality,
trembling in a deep dissatisfaction on the edge of
its first descent into exhaustion. Then, as every-
thing good had been done in the art of the past,
cultivated men began to ask " Was there anything
worth doing .' " " Was life itself worth living } " ;
questions never asked by those who are living. Or
" What is life in its perfection, and when shall we
have it .' " ; a question also not asked by those who
live in the morning of a new sera, when the world —
as in Elizabeth's days, as in 1789, as perhaps it
may be in a few years — is born afresh ; but which
is asked continually in the years when a great
movement of life has passed its culminating point
and has begun to decline. Again and again the
world has heard these questions ; in Cleon's time,
and when the Renaissance had spent its force, and
at the end of the reign of Louis XIV., and before
Elizabeth's reign had closed, and about 1820 in
England, and of late years also in our society.
This is the temper and the time that Browning
embodies in Cl eon. who is the incarnation of a
culture3fluch.is ^ready-feeling that-.li£e„ is^going
oui_2£J.t.

Protus, the King, has written to him, and the
poeinia.i;j£QnI§ answer . to the King. Browning
takes care, as usual, to have his background of
scenery quite clear and fair. It is a courtyard to
Cleon's house in one of the sprinkled isles —

3 BROWNING

Lily on lily, that o'erlace the sea,

And laugh their pride when the light wave lisps " Greece."

I quote it; it marks the man and the age of
xurious culture.

They give thy letter to me, even now ;

I read and seem as if I heard thee speak.

The master of thy galley still unlades

Gift after gift ; they block my court at last

And pUe themselves along its portico

Royal with sunset, like a thought of thee ;

And one white she-slave from the group dispersed

Of black and white slaves (like the chequer work

Pavement, at once my nation's work and gift,

Now covered with this settle-down of doves),

One lyric woman, in her crocus vest

Woven of sea-wools, with her two white hands

Commends to me the strainer and the cup

Thy lip hath bettered ere it blesses mine.

ut he is more than luxurious. He desires the
ghest life, and he praises the King because he
is acknowledged by his gifts the joy that Art
ves to life; and most of all he praises him,
:cause he too aspires, building a mighty tower,
Dt that men may look at it, but that he may
ize from its height on the sun, and think what
igher he may attain. The tower is the symbol of
le cry of the King's soul.

Then he answers the King's letter. " It is true.
King, I am poet, sculptor, painter, architect,
ailosopher, musician ; all arts are mine. Have I
)ne as well as the great men of old .' No, but I
ive combined their excellences into one man, into
yself.

" I have not chanted verse like Homer, no —
Nor swept string like Terpander — no — nor carved
And painted men like Phidias and his friend :
I am not great as they are, point by point.

IMAGINATIVE REPRESENTATIONS 293

But I have entered into sympathy
With these four, running these into one soul,
Who, separate, ignored each other's art.
Say, is it nothing that I know them all ?

"This, since the best in each art has already
been done, was the only progress possible, and I
have made it. It is not unworthy. King !

" Well, now thou askest, if having done this, ' I
have not attained the very crown of life ; if I can-
not now comfortably and fearlessly meet death ? '
' I, Cleon, leave,' thou sayest, ' my life behind me
in my poems, my pictures ; I am immortal in my
work. What more can life desire ? ' "

It is the question so many are asking now, and
it is the answer now given. What better im-
mortality than in one's work left behind to move
in men } What more than this can life desire .'
But Cleon does not agree with that. " If thou, O
King, with the light now in thee, hadst looked at
creation before man appeared, thou wouldst have
said, ' All is perfect so far.' But questioned if any-
thing more perfect in joy might be, thou wouldst
have said, ' Yes ; a being may be made, unlike these
who do not know the joy they have, who shall be con-
scious of himself, and know that he is happy. Then
his life will be satisfied with daily joy.' " O King,
thou wouldst have answered foolishly. The higher
the soul climbs in joy the more it sees of joy, and
when it sees the most, it perishes. Vast capabilities
of joy open round it ; it craves for all it presages ;
desire for more deepening with every attainment.
And then the body intervenes. Age, sickness,
decay, forbid attainment. Life is inadequate to
joy. What have the gods done? It cannot be

294 , BROWNING

their malice, no, nor carelessness ; but — to let us
see oceans of joy, and only give us power to hold
a cupful — is that to live ? It is misery, and the
more of joy my artist nature makes me capable of
feeling, the deeper my misery.

" But then, O King, thou sayest ' that I leave
behind me works that will live ; works, too, which
paint the joy of life.' Yes, but to show what the
joy-of4i£e-is, is.not to have it. If I carve the young
Phoebus, am I therefore young "i I can write odes
of the deUght of love, but grown too grey to be
beloved, can I have its delight .' That fair slave
of yours, and the rower with the muscles all a
ripple on his back who lowers the sail in the bay,
can write no love odes nor can they paint the joy
of love; but they can have it — not I."

The knowledge, he thinks, of_ what joy is. of all
that ..Ufe . can give, which increases jn the artist
as his feebleness increases, makes his Jate^he
deadlier. What is it to him that his works live .'
He does not live. The hand of death grapples the
throat of life at the moment when he sees most
clearly its infinite possibilities. Decay paralyses
his hand when he knows best how to use his tools.
It is accomplished wretchedness.

I quote his outburst. It is in the soul of thou-
sands who have no hope of a life to come.

" But," sayest thou — (and I marvel, I repeat,

To find thee trip on such a mere word) " what

Thou writest, paintest, stays ; that does not die :

Sappho survives, because we sing her songs,

And iEschylus, because we read his plays ! "

Why, if they live still, let them come and take

Thy slave in my despite, drink from thy cup,

Speak in my place ! " Thou diest while I survive ? " —

IMAGINATIVE REPRESENTATIONS 295

Say rather that my fate is deadlier still,

In this, that every day my sense of joy

Grows more acute, my soul (intensified

By power and insight) more enlarged, more keen ;

While every day my hairs fall more and more.

My hand shakes, and the heavy years increase —

The horror quickening still from year to year,

The consummation coming past escape

When I shall know most, and yet least enjoy —

When all my works wherein I prove my worth,

Being present still to mock me in men's mouths,

Alive still, in the praise of such as thou,

I, I the feeling, thinking, acting man.

The man who loved his life so overmuch.

Sleep in my urn. It is so horrible

I dare at times imagine to my need

Some future state revealed to us by Zeus,

Unlimited in capability

For joy, as this is in desire of joy,

— To seek which the joy-hunger forces us :

That, stung by straitness of our life, made strait

On purpose to make prized the life at large —

Freed by the throbbing impulse we call death.

We burst there as the worm into the fly,

Who, while a worm still, wants his wings. But no !

Zeus has not yet revealed it ; and alas.

He must have done so, were it possible !

This is one only of Browning's statements of
what he held to be the fierce necessity for another
Ufe. Without it, nothing is left for humanity,
having arrived at full culture, knowledge, at
educated love of beauty, at finished morality and
unselfishness — nothing in the end but Cleon's cry
— sorrowful, somewhat stern, yet gentle — to Protus,

Live long and happy, and in that thought die,

Gladtfor what was. Farewell.

But for those who are not Cleon and Protus, not
kings in comfort or poets in luxury, who have had no
gladness, what end — what is to be said of them?

296 BROWNIIVG

I will not stay to speak of A Death in the Desert,
which is another of these poems, because the most
part of it is concerned with questions of modern
theology. St. John awakes into clear consciousness
just before his death in the cave where he lies
tended by a few disciples. He foresees some of
the doubts of this century and meets them as he
can. The bulk of this poem, very interesting in
its way, is Browning's exposition of his own belief,
not an imaginative representation of what St. John
actually would have said. It does not therefore
come into my subject. What does come into it
is the extraordinary naturalness and vitality of the
description given by John's disciple of the place
where they were, and the fate of his companions.
This is invented in Browning's most excellent way.
It could not be better done.

The next poem is the E pistle of Kamhish, the
Arab^ Pbysician^^. to- -Ms- ■mastery-=.Gonceaiin,g_his
Strang^ medical,ejcpgrience. The time is just be-
fore the last siege of Jerusalem, and Karshish,
journeying through Jericho, and up the pass, stays
for a few days at Bethany and meets Lazarus.
His case amazes him, and though he thinks his
interest in it unworthy of a man of science in com-
parison with the new herbs and new diseases he
has discovered, yet he is carried away by it and
gives a full account of it to his master.

I do not think that Browning ever wrote a poem
the writing of which he more enjoyed. The crea-
tion of Karshish suited his humour and his quaint
play with recondite knowledge. He describes the
physician till we see him alive and thinking, in
body and soul. The creation of Lazarus is even a

IMAGINATIVE REPRESENTATIONS 297

higher example of the imaginative power of Brown-
ing ; and that it is shaped for us through the mind
of Karshish, and in tune with it, makes the im- '^
aginative effort the more remarkable. Then, the •
problem — how to express the c.Quditla cLQf a man's
hprly and qoul.' who. havin ^_for. three days accord-
ing_ia-th£.-iS£QrjL.as. Browning .conceives , it IJKed
conscjftusly in the eternal .and^perfect world, ^has
come back to dwell in this world — was so diffi-
cult and so involved in metaphysical strangenesses,
that it delighted him.

Of course, he carefully prepares his scenery to
give a true semblance to the whole. Karshish
comes up the flinty pass from Jericho; he is
attacked by thieves twice and beaten, and the wild
beasts endanger his path ;

A black lynx snarled and pricked a tufted ear,
Lust of my blood inflamed his yellow balls ;
I cried and threw my staff and he was gone,

and then, at the e nd of the pass, he met Laza rus.
See how vividly the scenery is realised —

I crossed a ridge of short, sharp, broken hills
Like an old lion's cheek-teeth. Out there came
A moon made like a face with certain spots,
Multiform, manifold, and menacing :
Then a wind rose behind me. So we met
In this old sleepy town at unaware
The man and L

And the weird evening, Karshish thinks, had
something to do with the strange impression the
man has made on him. Then we are placed in the
dre amy village of Be-^any. We hear of its elders,
its diseases, its flowers, its herbs, and gums, of the
insects which may help medicine —

298 BRO WIPING

There is a spider here
Weaves no web, watches on the ledge of tombs,
Sprinkled with mottles on an ash-grey back ;

and then, how the countryside is all on fire with
news^ of Vespasian marching into Judaea. So we
have the place, the village, the hills, the animals,
and the time, all clear, and half of the character of
Karshish. The inner character of the man emerges
as clearly when he comes to deal with Lazarus.
This is not a case of the body, he thinks, but of the
soul. "The Syrian," he tells his master, "has had
catalepsy, and a learned leech of his nation, slain
soon afterwards, healed him and brought him back
to life after three days. He says he was dead,
and made alive again, but that is his madness;
though the man seems sane enough. At any rate,
his disease has disappeared, he is as well as you
and I. But the mind and soul of the man, that is
the strange matter, and in that he is entirely unlike
other men. Whatever he has gone through has
rebathed him, as in clear water of another life,
and penetrated his whole being. He views the
world like a child, he scarcely Ustens to what goes
on about him, yet he is no fool. If one could
fancy a man endowed with perfect knowledge be-
yond the fleshly faculty, and while he has this
heaven in him forced to live on earth, such a man
is he. His heart and brain move there, his feet stay
here. He has lost all sense of our values of things.
Vespasian besieging Jerusalem and a mule passing
with gourds awaken the same interest. But speak
of some little fact, little as we think, and he
stands astonished with its prodigious import. If
his child sicken to death it does not seem to matter

IMAGIISrATIVE REPRESENTATIONS 299

to him, but a gesture, a glance from the child, starts
him into an agony of fear and anger, as if the child
were undoing the universe. He lives like one be-
tween two regions, one of distracting glory, of which
he is conscious but must not enter yet; and the
other into which he has been exiled back again —
and between this region where his soul moves and
the earth where his body is, there is so little har-
mony of thought or feeUng that he cannot under-
take any human activity, nor unite the demands
of the two worlds. He knows that what ought to
be cannot be in the world he has returned to, so
that his life is perplexed; but in this incessant
perplexity he falls back on prone submission to
the heavenly will. The time will come when
death will restore his being to equilibrium ; but
now he is out of harmony, for the soul knows
more than the body and the body clouds the soul."

" I probed this seeming indifference. ' Beast, to
be so still and careless when Rome is at the gates
of thy town.* He merely looked with his large
eyes at me. Yet the man is not apathetic, but
loves old and young, the very brutes and birds and
flowers of the field. His only impatience is with
wrongdoing, but he curbs that impatience."

At last Karshish tells, with many apologies for
his foolishness, the strangest thing of all. Lazarus
thinks that his curer was God Himself who came
and dwelt in flesh among those He had made, and
went in and out among them healing and teaching,
and then died. " It is strange, but why write of
trivial matters when things of price call every
moment for remark .' Forget it, my master, par-
don me and farewell."

300 BROWNIN'G

Then comes the postscript, that impression
which, in spite of all his knowledge, is left in
Karshish's mind —

The very God ! think, Abib ; dost thou think?
So, the All-Great were the All-Loving too —
So, through the thunder comes a human voice
Saying : " O heart I made, a heart beats here !
Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself !
Thou hast no power, nor may'st conceive of mine,
But love I gave thee, with myself to love.
And thou must love me who have died for thee ! " —
The madman said He said so ; it is strange.

CHAPTER XII

IMAGINATIVE REPRESENTATIONS
RENAISSANCE

THE Imaginative Representations to be dis-
cussed in this chapter are those which belong
to the time of the Renaissance. We take a great
leap when we pass from Karshish and Cleon to
Fra Lippo Lippi, from early Christian times to the
early manhood of the Renaissance. But these
leaps are easy to a poet, and Browning is even
more at his ease and in his strength in the fifteenth
century than in the first.

We have seen with what force in Sordello he
realised the life and tumult of the thirteenth century.
The fourteenth century does not seem to have at-
tracted him much, though he frequently refers to
its work in Florence ; but when the Renaissance
in the fifteenth century took its turn with decision
towards a more open freedom of Hfe and thought,
abandoning one after another the conventions of
the past ; when the moral limits, which the Church
still faintly insisted on, were more and more with-
drawn and finally blotted out ; when, as the century
passed intothenext, the Church led the revolt against
decency, order, and morality ; when scepticism took
the place of faith, even of duty, and criticism the
301

302 BROWNIN^G

place of authority, then Browning became inter-
ested, not of course in the want of faith and in im-
morality, but in "the swift variety and intensity of
the movement of intellectual and social life, and in
the interlacing changes of the movement. This was
an enchanting world for him, and as he was natu-
rally most interested in the arts, he represented the
way in which the main elements of the Renaissance
appeared to him in poems which were concerned
with music, poetry, painting, and the rest of the arts,
but chiefly with painting. Of course, when the
Renaissance began to die down into senile pride
and decay, Browning, who never ceased to choose
and claim companionship with vigorous life, who
abhorred decay either in Nature or nations, in
societies or in cliques of culture, who would have
preferred a blood-red pirate to the daintiest of
decadents — did not care for it, and in only one
poem, touched with contemptuous pity and humour,
represented its disease and its disintegrating ele-
ments, with so much power, however, with such
grasping mastery, that it is like a painting by
Velasquez. Ruskin said justly that the Bishop
orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's Church concentrated
into a few lines all the evil elements of the
Renaissance. But this want of care for the decay-
ing Renaissance was contrasted by the extreme
pleasure with which he treated its early manhood
in Fra Lippo Lippi.

\ The Renaissance had a life and seasons, like

• those of a human being. It went through its

childhood and youth like a boy of genius under

the care of parwits from whose opinions and mode

of life he is sure to sever himself in the end ; but

IMAGINATIVE REPRESENTATIONS 303

who, having made a deep impression on his nature,
retain power over, and give direction to, his first
efforts at creation. The first art. of the Re-
naissance, awakened by the discovery of the classic
remnants, retained a great deal of the faith and
superstition, the philosophy, theology, and childlike
naivete of the middle ages. Its painting and
sculpture, but chiefly the first of these, gave them-
selves chiefly to the representation of the -soul
upon the face, and of the untutored and unconscious
movements of the body under the influence of
religious passion; th^t is, such movements as
expressed devotion, fervent love of Christ, horror
of sin, were chosen, and harmonised with the ex-
pression of the face. Painting dedicated its work
to the representation of the heavenly life, either on
earth in the story of the gospels and in the lives of
the saints, or in its glory in the circles of heaven.
Then, too, it represented the thought, philosophy,
and knowledge of its own time and of the past in
symbolic series of quiet figures, in symbolic pictures
of the struggle of good with evil, of the Church
with the world, of the virtues with their opposites.
Naturally, then, the expression on the face of
secular passions, the movement of figures in war
and trade and social Ufe and the whole vast field
of human Ufe in the ordinary world, were neglected
as unworthy of representation; and the free, full
life of the body, its beauty, power, and charm, the
objects which pleased its senses, the frank repre-
sentation of its movement under the influence of the
natural as contrasted with the spiritual passions,
were looked upon with religious dismay. Such,
but less in sculpture than in painting, was the art

304 BROWNING

of the Renaissance in its childhood and youth, and
Browning has scarcely touched that time. He had
no sympathy with a neglect of the body, a con-
tempt of the senses or of the beauty they perceived.
He claimed the physical as well as the intellectual
and spiritual life of man as by origin and of right
divine. When, then, in harmony with a great
change in social and literary life, the art of the
Renaissance began to turn, in its early manhood,
from the representation of the soul to the repre-
sentation of the body in natural movement and
beauty ; from the representation of saints, angels,
and virtues to the representation of actual men and
women in the streets and rooms of Florence ; from
symbolism to reality — Browning thought, "This
suits me ; this is what I love ; I will put this
mighty change into a poem." And he wrote Fra
Lippo Lippi.

As long as this vivid representation bf actual
human life lasted, the art of the Renaissance was
active, original, and interesting; and as it moved
on, developing into higher and finer forms, and
producing continually new varieties in its dev^op-
ment, it reached its strong and eager manhood.
In its art then, as well as in other matters, the
Renaissance completed its new and clear theory
of life ; it remade the grounds of life, of its action
and passion ; -and it reconstituted its aims. Brown-
ing loved this summer time of the Renaissance,
which began with the midst of the fifteenth cen-
tury. But he loved its beginnings even more
than its fulness. That was characteristic. I have
said that even when he was eighty years old, his
keenest sympathies were with spring rather than

IMAGINATIVE REPRESENTATIONS 305

summer, with those times of vital change when
fresh excitements disturbed the world, when its eyes
were smiling with hope, and its feet eager with
the joy of pursuit. He rejoiced to analyse and
embody a period which was shaking off the past,
living intensely in the present, and prophesying the
future. It charms us, as we read him, to see his
intellect and his soul like two hunting dogs, and with
all their eagerness, questing; roving, quartering,
with the greatest joy and in incessant movement,
over a time like this, where so many diverse, clash-
ing, and productive elements mingled themselves
into an enchanting confusion and glory of Ufe.
Out of that pleasure of hunting in a morning-tide
of humanity, was born Fra Lippo Lippi; and there
is scarcely an element of the time, except the politi-
cal elements, which it does not represent; not dwelt
on, but touched for the moment and left ; uncon-
sciously produced as two men of the time would
produce them in conversation. The poem seems as
easy as a chat in Pall Mall last night between some
intelligent men, which, read two hundred years hence,
would inform the reader of the trend of thought and
feeling in this present day. But in reality to do this
kind of thing well is to do a very difficult thing.
It needs a full knowledge, a full imagination, and a
masterly execution. Yet when we read the poem,
it seems as natural as the breaking out of blossoms.
This is that divine thing, the ease of genius.

The scenery of the poem is as usual clear. We
are in fifteenth-century Florence at night. There
is no set description, but the slight touches are
enough to make us see the silent lonely streets, the
churches, the high walls of the monastic gardens.

3o6 BROWNING

the fortress-palaces. The sound of the fountains is
in our ears ; the little crowds of revelling men and
girls appear and disappear like ghosts ; the surly-
watch with their weapons and torches bustle round
the corner. Nor does Browning neglect to paint by
slight enlivening touches, introduced into Lippo
Lippi's account of himself as a starving boy, the
aspect by day and the character of the Florence of
the fifteenth century. This painting of his, slight
as it is, is more alive than all the elaborate descrip-
tions in Romola.

As to the poem itself, Browning plunges at once
into his matter; no long approaches, no elaborate
porches belong to his work. The man and his
character are before us in a moment —

I am poor brother Lippo, by your leave !

You need not clap your torches to my face.

Zooks, what's to blame? You think you see a monk !

What, 'tis past midnight, and you go the rounds,

And here you catch me at an alley's end

Where sportive ladies leave their doors ajar?

For three weeks he has painted saints, and saints,
and saints again, for Cosimo in the Medici felace ;
but now the time of bl^SOIKs has come. Florence
is now awake at nights ; the secret of the spring
moves in his blood ; the man leaps up, the monk
retires.

Ouf ! I leaned out of window for fresh air.

There came a hurry of feet and little feet,

A sweep of lute-strings, laughs, and whifts of song.

Flower o' the broom.

Take away love, and our earth is a tomb !

Flower of the quince,

I let Lisa go, and what good in life since f

Flower of the thyme — and so on. ,Rbund they went.

IMAGIIVATIVE REPRESENTATIONS 307

Scarce had they turned the corner when a titter,

Like the skipping of rabbits by moonlight, — three slim shapes.

And a face that looked uji . . . zooks, sir, flesh and blood,

That's all I'm made of ! :Into shreds it went.

Curtain and counterpane and coverlet.

All the bed-fiirniture — a dozen knots,

There was a ladder ! Down I let myself,

Hands and feet, scrambling somehow, and so dropped,

And after them. I cam^ up with the fun

Hard by St. Laurence, Hail fellow, well met, —

Flower o' the rose, \

IfTve been merry ^ what matter who knows ?

It is a picture, not only of the man, but of the
time and its temper, when religion and morality, as
well as that simplicity of life which Dante de-
scribes, had lost their ancient power over society in
Florence ; when the claim to give to human nature
all it desired had stolen into the Church itself.
Even in the monasteries, the long seclusion from
natural human life had produced a reaction, which
soon, indulging itself as Fra Lippo Lippi did, ran
into an extremity of licence. Nevertheless, some-
thing of the old religious life lasted at the time of
this poem. It stretched one hand back to the piety
of the past, and retained, though faith and devotion
had left them, its observances and conventions ; so
that, at first, when Lippo was painting, the new
only peeped out of the old, like the saucy face of
a nymph from the ilexes of a sacred grove. This
is the historical nfoment Browning illustrates.
Lippo Lippi was forced to paint the worn religious
subjects : Jerome knocking his breast, the choirs of
angels and martyrs, the scenes of the Gospel ; but
out of all he did the eager modern life began to
glance! Natural, quaint, original faces and atti-
tudes appeared ; the angels smiled Uke Florentine

3o8 BROWNING

women ; the saints wore the air of Bohemians.
There is a picture by Lippo Lippi in the National
Gallery of some nine of them sitting on a bench
under a hedge of roses, and it is no paradox to say
that they might fairly represent the Florentines
who tell the tales of the Decavteron.

The transition as it appeared in art is drawn in
this poem. Lippo Lippi became a monk by chance ;
it was not his vocation. A starving boy, he roamed
the streets of Florence ; and the widespread intelli-
gence of the city is marked by Browning's account
of the way in which the boy observed all the life of
the streets for eight years. Then the coming change
of the aims of art is indicated by the way in which,
when he was allowed to paint, he covered the walls
of the Carmine, not with saints, virgins, and angels,
but with the daily life of the streets — the boy
patting the dog, the murderer taking refuge at the
altar, the white wrath of the avenger coming up
the aisle, the girl going to market, the crowd round
the stalls in the market, the monks, white, grey, and
black — thir^^^as they were.,? ,!^)!^^ as *^" P'^''^ ^"
the reality ; fleshand^ ^^°q4.. Bi"^ p3-i"tgd, nntskin
arid'bone7"not'tK?"expression on the face alone, but"
the whole body in speakin g movemenf T~nothinef
conventional, nothing imitative of old models, but
actual life as it lay before the painter's eyes.
Into this fresh sera of art Lippo Lippi led the
way with the joy of youth. But he was too
soon. The Prior, all the representatives of the
conservative elements in the convent, were sorely
troubled. " Why, this will never do : faces, arms,
legs, and bodies like the true ; life as it is ; Nature
as she is ; quite impossible." And Browning, in

IMAGIIVATIVE REPRESENTATIONS 309

Lippo's defence of himself,,paiQts the conflict of
the'p^t^ith the coming art. in a passage too long
to quote, too admirable to shorten.

The new art conquered the old. The whole life
of Florence was soon painted as it was : the face
of the town, the streets, the churches, the towers,
the winding river, the mountains round about it;
the country, the fields and hills and hamlets, the
peasants at work, ploughing, sowing, and gathering
fruit, the cattle feeding, the birds among the trees
and in the sky ; nobles and rich burghers hunting,
hawking ; the magistrates, the citizens, the street-
boys, the fine ladies, the tradesmen's wives, the
heads of the guilds ; the women visiting their
friends ; the interior of the houses. We may see
this art of human life in the apse of Santa Maria
Novella, painted by the hand of Ghirlandajo : in
the Riccardi Palace, painted by Benozzo Gozzoli ;
in more than half the pictures of the painters who
succeeded Fra Lippo Lippi. Only, so much of
the old clings that all this actual Florentine life is
painted into the ancient religious subjects — the
life of the Baptist and the Virgin, the embassage
of the Wise Men, the life of Christ, the legends of
the saints, the lives of the virgins and martyrs, Jeru-
salem and its life painted as if it were Florence
and its life — all the spiritual religion gone out of
it, it is true, but yet, another kind of religion bud-
ding in it — the religion, not of the monastery, but
of daily common life.

the world
— The beauty and the wonder and the power.
The shapes of ihings, their colours, lights, and shades,
Changes, surprises — and God made it all !

3IO BROWNING

Who paints these things as if they were alive, and
loves them while he paints, paints the garment of
God ; and men not only understand their own life
better because they see, through the painting, what
they did not see before ; but also the movement of
God's spirit in the beauty of the world and in the
life of men. Art interprets to man all that is, and
God in it.

Oh, oh.
It makes me mad to think what men shall do
And we in our graves ! This world's no blot for us,
No blank ; it means intensely, and means good :
To find its meaning is my meat and drink.

He could not do it; the time was not ripe
enough. But he began it. And the spirit of its
coming breaks out in all he did.

We take a leap of more than half a century when
we pass from Fra Lippo Lippi to Andrea del Sarto.
That advance in art to which Lippo Lippi looked
forward with a kind of rage at his own powerless-
ness had been made. In its making, the art of the
Renaissance had painted men and women, both
body and soul, in every kind of life, both of war and
peace ; and better than they had ever been painted
before. Having fulfilled that, the painters asked,
" What more .' What new thing shall we do ?
What new aim shall we pursue.-"' And there
arose among them a desire to paint all that was
paintable, and especially the human body, with
scientific perfection. "In our desire to paint the
whole of life, we have produced so much that we
were forced to paint carelessly or inaccurately.
In our desire to be original, we have neglected
technique. In our desire to paint the passions

IMAGINATIVE REPRESENTATIONS 311

on the face and in the movements of men, we have
lost the calm and harmony of the ancient classic
work, which made its ethical impression . of the
perfect balance of the divine nature by the ideal
arrangement, in accord with a finished science, of
the various members of the body to form a finished
whole. Let the face no longer then try to represent
the individual soul. One type of face for each
class of art-representation is enough. Let our
effort be to represent beauty by the perfect draw- \l
ing of the body in repose and in action, and by
chosen attitudes and types.. Let our composition
follow certain guiding hues and rules, in accordance
with whose harmonies all pictures shall be made.
We will follow the Greek ; compose as he did, and
by his principles; and for that purpose make a
scientific study of the body of man ; observing in
all painting, sculpture, and architecture the general
forms and proportions that ancient art, after many
experiments, selected as the best. And, to match
that, we must have perfect . drawing in all we
do."

This great change, which, as art's adulterous j
connection with science deepened, led to such un- |
happy results, Browning represents, when its aim
had been reached, in his poem, Andrea del Sarto ;
and he tells us — through Andrea's talk with his
wife Lucretia ■ — what he thought of it ; and what
Andrea himself, whose broken hfe may have opened
his eyes to the truth of things, may himself have
thought of it. On that element in the poem I have
aheady dwelt, and shall only touch on the scenery
and tragedy, of the piece :

We sit with Andrea, looking out to Fiesole.

312 BROWNING

sober, pleasant Fiescle.
There's the bell clinking from the chapel top ;
That length of convent-wall across the way
Holds the trees safer, huddled more inside ;
The last monk leaves the garden ; 'days decrease,
And autumn grows, autumn in everything.

- As the poem goes on, the night falls, falls with the
meepenmg_ofJhe4DaiintejrIs.depressi(^ ; _,the-awls cry
(from the hill, F'lorence wears the grey hue of the
heart of Andrea ; and Browning weaves the autumn
and the night into the tragedy of the painter's life.
V^JThat tragedy was pitiful. Andrea del Sarto was
a faultless painter and a weak character; and it
\fell to his lot to love with passion a faithless
woman. His natural weakness was doubled by
the weakness engendered by unconquerable pas-
sion ; and he ruined his life, his art, and his honour,
to please his wife. He wearied her, as women
are wearied, by passion unaccompanied by power ;
and she endured him only while he could give her
money and pleasures. . She despised him for that
endurance, and all the more that he knew she was
guilty, but said nothing lest she should leave him.
f Browning fills his main subject — his theory of the
I true aim of art — with this tragedy ; "and his treat-
ment of it is a fine example of his passionate human-
ity; and the passion of it is knitted up with close
reasoning and illuminated by his intellectual play.
""^ It is worth a reader's while to read, along with
this poem, Alfred de Musset's short play, Andri
del Sarto. The tragedy of the situation is deep-
ened by the French poet, and the end is told.
Unlike Browning, only a few lines sketch the time,
its temper, and its art. It is the depth of the
tragedy which De Musset paints, and that alone ;

IMAGINATIVE REPRESENTATIONS 313

and in t)rder to deepen it, Andrea is made a much
nobler character than he is in Browning's poem.
The betrayal is also made more complete, more
overwhelming. Lucretia is false to Andrea with
his favourite pupil, with Cordiani, to whom he had
given all he had, whom he loved almost as much
as he loved his wife. Terrible, inevitable Fate
broods over this brief and masterly ■ little play.

The next of these imaginative representations
of the Renaissance is. The Bishop or ders h is Tomb ,
at St. Praxed's Church. We arqf'placfio> in the
full decadfillce_of the RenalssSicE

ofreligion, even in the Church ; its immorality —
the bishop's death-bed is surroundeH-BjTKJs natural
sons and the wealth he leaves has been purchased
by every Jdxid.-Q£-Jmq«it3L-==Jts,_prids_Df-~lMe ^ its
Juxjo^; its sjemiiEagaQism ; it s imitative classicism ;
itsin consistency : its love of jewels, and fine stones,
andrich marbles ; its jealousy and envy ; its plea-
sure in the adornment of death ; its delight in the
outsides of things, in mere workmanship ; its loss
of originality; its love of scholarship for scholar-
ship's sake alone; its contempt of the common
people; its exhaustion — are one and all revealed
or suggested in this astonishing poem.

These are the three greater poems dedicated to
this period ; but there are some minor poems which
represent different phases of its life. One of these^
is the Pictor Ignotus. There must have been many
men, during the vital time of the Renaissance, who,
born, as it were, into the art-ability of the period,
reached without trouble a certain level in painting,
but who had no genius, who could not create ; or
who, if they had some touch of genius, had no

314 BROWNING

boldness to strike it into fresh forms of beauty;
shy, retiring men, to whom the criticism of the
world was a pain they knew they could not bear.
These men are common at a period when life is
racing rapidly through the veins of a vivid city Uke
Florence. The general intensity of the life lifts
them to a height they would never reach in a dull
and sleepy age. The life they have is not their
own, but the life of the whole town. And this
keen perception of life outside of them persuades
them that they can do all that men of real power
can do. In reality, they can do nothing and make
nothing worth a people's honour. Browning, who
himself was compact of boldness, who loved ex-
periment in what was new, and who shaped what
he conceived without caring for criticism, felt for
these men, of whom he must have met many ; and,
asking himself " How they would think ; what they
would do ; and how life would seem to them," wrote
this poem. In what way will poor human nature
excuse itself for failure ? How will the weakness
in the man try to prove that it was power .' How,
having lost the joy of hfe, will he attempt to show
that his loss is gain, his failure a success ; and, be-
ing rejected of the world, approve himself within ?

This was a subject to please Browning; meat
such as his soul loved : a nice, involved, Daedalian,
labyrinthine sort of thing, a mixture of real senti-
ment and self-deceit; and he surrounded it with
his pity for its human weakness.

" I could have painted any picture that I pleased,"
cries this painter; " refiresented on the face any
passion, any virtue." If he could he would have
done it, or tried it. Genius cannot hold itself, in.

IMAGINATIVE REPRESENTATIONS 315

" I have dreamed of sending forth some picture
which should enchant the world (and he alludes to
Cimabue's picture) —

" Bound for some great state,
Or glad aspiring little burgh, it went —
Flowers cast upon the car which bore the freight.
Through old streets named afresh from the event.

"That would have been, had I willed it. But
mixed with the praisers there would have been cold,
critical faces; judges who would press on me and
mock. And I — I could not bear it." Alas ! had
he had genius, no fear would have stayed his hand,
no judgment of the world delayed his work. What
' stays a river breaking from its fountain-head .'

So he sank back, saying the world was not
worthy of his labours. " What .' Expose my
noble work (things he had conceived but not done)
to the prate and pettiness of the common buyers
who hang it on their walls ! No, I will rather
paint the same monotonous round of Virgin, Child,
and Saints in the quiet church, in the sanctuary's
gloom. No merchant then will traffic in my heart. My
pictures will moulder and die. Let them die. I have
not vulgarised myself or them." Brilliant and nobly
wrought as the first three poems are of which I have
written, this quiet little piece needed and received a
finer workmanship, and was more difficult than they.

Then there is How it strikes a/Contemporary —
the story of the gossip of a Spanish town about a
poor poet, who, because he wanders everywhere
about the streets observing all things, is mistaken
for a spy of the King. The long pages he writes
are said to be letters to the King ; the misfortunes

3i6 J BROWNING

of this or that man are caused by his information.
The world thinks him a wonder of cleverness ; he is
but an inferior poet. It imagines that he lives in
Assyrian luxury; he lives and dies in a naked
garret. This imaginative representation might be
of any time in a provincial town of an ignorant
country like Spain. It is a sUght study of what
superstitious imagination and gossip will work up
round any man whose nature and manners, like
those of a poet, isolate him from the common herd.
Force is added to this study by its scenery. The
Moorish windows, the shops, the gorgeous magis-
trates pacing down the promenade, are touched in
with a flying pencil ; and then, moving through the
crowd, the lean, black-coated figure, with his cane
and dog and his peaked hat, clear flint eyes and,
beaked nose, is seen, as if alive, in the vivid sun-
shine of Valladolid. But what Browning wished
most to describe in this poem was one of the first
marks of a poet, even of a poor one like this gentle-
man — the power of seeing and observing every-
thing. Nothing was too small, nothing uninteresting
in this man's eyes. His very hat was scrutinising.

He stood and watched the cobbler at his trade,
The man who slices lemons into drink,
The coifee-roaster's brazier, and the boys
That volunteer to help him turn its winch.
He glanced o'er books on stalls with half an eye,
And fly-leaf ballads on the vendor's string,
And broad-edged bold-print posters by the wall.
He took such cognisance of man and things,
If any beat a horse you felt he saw ;
If any cursed a woman, he took note ;
Yet stared at nobody, you stared at him,
And found, less to your pleasure than surprise,
He seemed to know you and expect as much.

\

it

IMAGIISrATIVE REPRESENTA-n^NS 317;

That is the artist's way. It wai" Browning's
way. He is describing himself. In that fashion
he roamed through Venice or Florence, stopping
every moment, attracted by the smallest thing,
finding a poem in everything, lost in himself yet
seeing all that surrounded him, isolated in thinking,
different from and yet like the rest of the world.

Another poem — My Last Duchess — must be
mentioned. It is plainly placed in the midst of the
period of the Renaissance by the word Ferrara,
which is added to its title. But it is rather a
picture of two temperaments which may exist in
any cultivated society, and at any modern time.
There are numbers of such men as the Duke and
such women as the Duchess in our midst. Both
are, however, drawn with mastery. Browning has
rarely done his work with more insight, with
greater keenness of portraiture, with happier brevity
and selection. As in the Flight of the Duchess,
untoward fate has bound together two temperaments
sure to clash with each other — and no gipsy comes
to deliver the woman in this case. The man's
nature kills her. It happens every day. The
Renaissance society may have built up more men of
this type than ours, but they are not peculiar to it.

Germany, not Italy, is, I think, the country in
which Browning intended to place two other poems
which belong to the time of the Renaissance —
Johannes Agricola in Meditation and A Gramma-
rian's Funeral. Their note is as different from that
of the Italian poems as the national temper of Ger-
many is from that of Italy. They have no sense of
beauty for beauty's sake alone. Their atmosphere
is not soft or gay but somewhat stern. The logical

3i8 BROWNING

arrangement of them is less one of feeling than of
thought. There is a stronger manhood in them, a
grimmer view of life. The sense of duty to God
and Man, but little represented in the Italian poems
of the Renaissance, does exist in these two German
poems. Moreover, there is in them a full repre-
sentation of aspiration to the world beyond. But
the Italian Renaissance Uved for the earth alone, and
its loveliness ; too close to earth to care for heaven.

It pleased Browning to throw himself fully into
the soul of Johannes Agricola ; and he does it with
so much personal fervour that it seems as if, in one of
his incarnations, he had been the man, and, for the
moment of his writing, was dominated by him. The
mystic-passion fills the poetry with keen and dazzling
light, and it is worth while, from this point of view,
to compare the poem with Tennyson's Sir Galahad,
and on another side, with St. Simeon Stylites.

Johannes Agricola was one of the products of the
reforming spirit of the sixteenth century in Germany,
one of its wild extremes. He believes that God
had chosen him among a few to be his for ever and
for his own glory from the foundation of the world.
He did not say that all sin was permitted to the
saints, that what the flesh did was no matter, Uke
those wild fanatics, one of whom Scott draws in
Woodstock ; but he did say, that if he sinned it
made no matter to his election by God. Nay, the
immanence of God in him turned the poison to
health, the filth to jewels. Goodness and badness
make no matter ; God's choice is all. The martyr
for truth, the righteous man whose life has saved
the world, but who is not elected, is damned for
ever in burning hell. " I am eternally chosen ; for

IMAGINATIVE REPRESENTATIONS 319

that I praise God. I do not understand it. If I
did, could I praise Him .' But I know my settled
place in the divine decrees." I quote the begin-
ning. It is pregnant with superb spiritual audacity,
and kindled with imaginative pride.

There's heaven above, and night by night

I look right through its gorgeous roof;
No suns and moons though e'er so bright

Avail to stop me ; splendour-proof

Keep the broods of stars aloof:
For I intend to get to God,

For 'tis to God I speed so fast,
For in God's breast, my own abode.

Those shoals of dazzling glory, passed,

I lay my spirit down at last.
I lie where I have always lain,

God smiles as he has always smiled ;
Ere suns and moons could wax and wane.

Ere stars were thunder-girt, or piled

The heavens, God thought on me his child ;
Ordained a life for me, arrayed

Its circumstances every one
To the minutest ; ay, God said

This head this hand should rest upon

Thus, ere he fashioned star or sun.
And having thus created me.

Thus rooted me, he bade me grow,
Guiltless for ever, like a tree

That buds and blooms, nor seeks to know

The law by which it prospers so :
But sure that thought and word and deed

All go to swell his love for me,
Me, made because that love had need

Of something irreversibly

Pledged solely its content to be.

As to A Grammarian' s Funeral, that poem also
belongs to the German rather than to the ItaUan
spirit. The Renaissance in Italy lost its religion ;
at the same time, in Germany, it added a reformation

320 BROWNING

of religion to the New Learning. The Renaissance
in Italy desired the fulness of knowledge in this
world, and did not look for its infinities in the world
beyond. In Germany the same desire made men
call for the infinities of knowledge beyond the
earth. A few Italians, like Savonarola, like M.
Angelo, did the same, and failed to redeem their
world ; but eternal aspiration dwelt in the soul of
every German who had gained a religion. In
Italy, as the Renaissance rose to its luxury and
trended to its decay, the pull towards personal
righteousness made by belief in an omnipotent
goodness who demands the subjection of our will
to his, ceased to be felt by artists, scholars, and
cultivated society. A man's will was his only
law. On the other hand, the life of the New
Learning in Germany and England was weighted
with a sense of duty to an eternal Righteousness.
The love of knowledge or beauty was modified into
seriousness of life, carried beyond this Ufe in
thought, kept clean, and, though filled with inces-
sant labour on the earth, aspired to reach its fru-
ition only in the life to come.

This is the spirit and the atmosphere of the
Grammarian's Funeral, and Browning's little note
at the beginning says that its time " was shortly
after the revival of learning in Europe." I have
really no proof that Browning laid the scene of
his poem in Germany, save perhaps the use of such
words as " thorp " and " croft," but there is a clean,
pure morning light playing through the verse, a
fresh, health-breathing northern air, which does not
fit in with Italy ; a joyous, buoyant youthfulness in
the song and march of the students who carry their

IMAGINATIVE REPRESENTATIONS 321

master with gay strength up the mountain to the
very top, all of them filled with his aspiring spirit,
all of them looking forward with gladness and
vigour to life — which has no relation whatever to
the temper of F-lorentine or Roman life during the
age of the Medici. The bold brightness, moral
earnestness, pursuit of the ideal, spiritual intensity,,
reverence for good work and for the man who did
it, which breathe in the poem, differ by a whole
world from the atmosphere of life in Andrea del
Sarto. This is a crowd of men who are moving
upwards, who, seizing the Renaissance elements,
knitted them through and through with reformation
of life, faith in God, and hope for man. They had
a future and knew it. The semi-Paganism of the
Renaissance had not, and did not know it had not.
We may close this series of Renaissance repre-
sentations by A Toccata of Galuppi's. It cannot
take rank with the others as a representative poem.
It is of a different class; a changeful dream of
images and thoughts which came to Browning
as he was playing a piece of eighteenth-century
Venetian music. But in the dream there is a
sketch of that miserable life of fruitless pleasure,
the other side of which was dishonourable pov-
erty, into which Venetian society had fallen in the
eighteenth century. To this the pride, the irre-
Hgion, the immorality, the desire of knowledge
and beauty for their own sake alone, had brought
the noblest, wisest, and most useful city in Italy.
That part of the poem is representative. It is the
end of such a society as is drawn in The Bishop
orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's Church. That
tomb is placed in Rome, but it is in Venice that

332 BROWNING

this class of tombs reached their greatest splendour
of pride, opulence, folly, debasement, and irreligion.
Finally, there are a few poems which paint the
thoughts, the sorrows, the pleasures, and the poli-
tical passions of modern Italy. There is the Italian
in England, full of love for the Italian peasant and
of pity for the patriot forced to live and die far
from his motherland. Mazzini used to read it to
his fellow-exiles to show them how fully an Eng-
lish poet could enter into the temper of their soul.
So far it may be said to represent a type. But
it scarcely comes under the range of this chapter.
But Up in a Villa, down in the City, is so vivid a
representation of all that pleased a whole type of
the city-bred and poor nobles of Italy at the time
when Browning wrote the Dramatic Lyrics that
I cannot omit it. It is an admirable piece of
work, crowded with keen descriptions of Nature
in the Casentino, and of life in the streets of Flor-
ence. And every piece of description is so filled
with the character of the " Italian person of qual-
ity" who describes them — a petulant, humorous,
easily angered, happy, observant, ignorant, poor
gentleman — that Browning entirely disappears.
The poem retains for us in its verse, and indeed
in its light rhythm, the childlikeness, the natveti,
the simple pleasures, the ignorance, and the hon-
est boredom with the solitudes of Nature — of a
whole class of Italians, not only of the time when
it was written, but of the present day. It is a
delightful, inventive piece of gay and pictorial
humour.

^CHAPTER XIII

WOMANHOOD IN BROWNING

THE first woman we meet in Browning's poetry
is Pauline ; a twofold person, exceedingly un-
like the woman usually made by a young poet.
She is not only the Pauline ideaUsed and also
materialised by the selfish passion of her lover, but
also the real woman whom Browning has conceived
underneath the lover's image of her. This doubling
of his personages, as seen under two diverse aspects
or by two different onlookers, in the same poem, is
not unfrequent in his poetry, and it pleased his
intellect to make these efforts. When the thing
was well done, its cleverness was amazing, even
imaginative ; when it was ill done, it was confusing.
Tennyson never did this ; he had not analytic power
enough. What he sees of his personages is all
one, quite clearly drawn and easy to understand.
But we miss in them, and especially in his women,
the intellectual play, versatility, and variety of
Browning. Tennyson's women sometimes border
on dulness, are without that movement, change, and
surprises, which in women disturb mankind for evil
or for good. If Tennyson had had a little more of
Browning's imaginative analysis, and Browning a
little less of it, both would have been better artists.

323

324 BROWNING

The Pauline of the lover is the commonplace
woman whom a young man so often invents out of
a woman for his use and pleasure. She is to be
his salvation, to sympathise with his ideals, joys,
and pains, to give him everything, with herself,
and to live for him and him alone. Nothing can
be more naif and simple than this common selfish-
ness which forgets that a woman has her own
life, her own claim on the man, and her own in-
dividuality to develop ; and this element in the
poem, which never occurs again in Browning's
poetry, may be the record of an early experience.
If so, he had escaped from this youthful error be-
fore he had finished the poem, and despised it, per-
haps too much. It is excusable and natural in
the young. His contempt for this kind of love
is embodied in the second Pauline. She is not the
woman her lover imagines her to be, but farolderand
more experienced than her lover ; who has known
long ago what love was ; who always liked to be
loved, who therefore suffers her lover to expatiate
as wildly as he pleases; but whose life is quite
apart from him, enduring him with pleasurable
patience, criticising him, wondering how he can
be so excited. There is a dim perception in the
lover's phrases of these elements in his mistress'
character; and that they are in her character is
quite plain from the patronising piece of criticism
in French which Browning has put into her mouth.
The first touch of his humour appears in the con-
trast of the gentle and lofty boredom of the letter
with the torrents of love in the poem. And if we
may imagine that the lover is partly an image of
what Browning once felt in a youthful love, we

WOMANHOOD IN BROWNING 325

may also think that the making of the second and
critical Pauline was his record, when his love had
passed, of what he thought about it all.

This mode of treatment, so much more analytic
than imaginative, belongs to Browning as an artist.
He seems, while he wrote, as if half of him sat
apart from the personages he was making, con-
templating them in his observant fashion, discus-
sing them coolly in his mind while the other half
of him wrote about them with emotion ; placing
them in different situations and imagining what
they would then do ; inventing trials for them and
recombining, through these trials, the elements of
their characters ; arguing about and around them,
till he sometimes loses the unity of their person-
ality. This is a weakness in his work when he
has to create characters in a drama who may be
said, like Shakespeare's, to have, once he has
created them, a life of their own independent of the
poet. His spinning of his own thoughts about their
characters makes us often realise, in his dramas,
the individuality of Browning more than the in-
dividuality of the characters. We follow him at
this work with keen intellectual pleasure, but we do
not always follow him with a passionate humanity.

On the contrary, this habit, which was one
cause of his weakness as an artist in the drama,
increased his strength as an artist when he made
single pictures of men and women at isolated crises
in their lives ; or when he pictured them as they
seemed at the moment to one, two, or three differ-
ently tempered persons — pictorial sketches and
studies which we may hang up in the chambers
of the mind for meditation or discussion. Their

326 BROWNING

intellectual power and the emotional interest they
awaken, the vivid imaginative lightning which
illuminates them in flashes, arise out of that part
of his nature which made him a weak dramatist.

Had he chosen, for example, to paint Lady
Carlisle as he conceived her, in an isolated por-
trait, and in the same circumstances as in his drama
of Strafford, we should have had a clear and intimate
picture of her moving, alive at every point, amidst
the decay and shipwreck of the Court. But in the
play she is a shade who comes and goes, unout-
lined, confused, and confusing, scarcely a woman at
all. The only clear hints of what Browning meant
her to be are given in the asides of Strafford.

Browning may have been content with Strafford
as a whole, but, with his passion for vitality, he
could not have been content with either Lady
Carlisle or the Queen as representatives of women.
Indeed, up to this point, when he had written Paii-
line, Paracelsus, and Strafford, he must have felt
that he had left out of his poetry one half of the
human race; and his ambition was to represent
both men and women. Pauline's chief appearance
is in French prose. Michel, in Paracelsus, is a
mere silhouette of the sentimental German Frau,
a soft sympathiser with her husband and with the
young eagle Paracelsus, who longs to leave the home
she would not leave for the world — an excellent and
fruitful mother. She is set in a pleasant garden
landscape. Twice Browning tries to get more out
of her and to lift her into reality. But the men
carry him away from her, and she remains undrawn.
These mere images, with the exception of the woman
in Porphyrias Lover, who, with a boldness which

WOMANHOOD IN BROWNING 327

might have astonished even Byron but is charac-
teristic of Browning in his audacious youth, leaves
the ball to visit her lover in the cottage in the
garden — are all that he had made of womanhood
in 1837, four years after he had begun to pubhsh
poetry.

It was high time he should do something better,
and he had now begun to know more of the
variousness of women and of their resolute grip
on life and affairs. So, in Sordello, he created
Palma. She runs through the poem, and her ap-
pearances mark turning points in Sordello's devel-
opment ; but thrice she appears in full colour and
set in striking circumstances — first, in the secret
room of the palace at Verona with Sordello when
she expounds her policy, and afterwards leans with
him amid a gush of torch-fire over the balcony,
whence the grey-haired councillors spoke to the
people surging in the square and shouting for the
battle. The second time is in the streets of Ferrara,
full of camping men and fires ; and the third is
when she waits with Taurello in the vaulted room
below the chamber where Sordello has been left to
decide what side he shall take, for the Emperor
or the Pope. He dies while they wait, but there
is no finer passage in the poem than this of Palma
and Taurello talking in the dim corridor of the
new world they would make for North Italy with
Sordello. It is not dramatic characterisation, but
magnificent individualisation of the woman and the
man.

We see Palma first as a girl at Goito, where she
fills Sordello with dreams, and Browning gives her
the beauty of the Venetians Titian painted.

328 BROWNING

How the tresses curled
Into a sumptuous swell of gold and wound
About her like a glory ! even the ground
Wjis bright as with spilt sunbeams :

Full consciousness of her beauty is with her, frank
triumph in it ; but she is still a child. At the Court
of Love she is a woman, not only conscious of her
loveliness, but able to use it to bind and loose,
having sensuous witchery and intellectual power,
that terrible combination. She lays her magic on
Sordello.

But she is not only the woman of personal magic
and beauty. Being of high rank and mixed with
great events, she naturally becomes the political
woman, a common type in the thirteenth century.
And Browning gives her the mental power to
mould and direct affairs. She uses her personal
charm to lure Sordello into politics.

Her wise
And lulling words are yet about the room,
Her presence wholly poured upon the gloom
Down even to her vesture's creeping stir.
And so reclines he, saturate with her.

* * * if *

But when she felt she held her fnend indeed
Safe, she threw back her curls, began implant
Her lessons ;

Her long discourse on the state of parties, and
how Sordello may, in mastering them, complete his
being, fascinates him and us by the charm of her
intelligence.

But the political woman has often left love
behind. Politics, like devotion, are a woman's
reaction from the weariness of loving and being
loved. But Palma is young, and in the midst of

WOMANHOOD IN BROWNING 329

her politics she retains passion, sentiment, tender-
ness, and charm. She dreams of some soul beyond
her own, who, coming, should call on all the force
in her character ; enable her, in loving him, to give
consummation to her work for Italy ; and be him-
self the hand and sword of her mind. Therefore
she held herself in leash till the right man came,
till she loved. "Waits he not," her heart cries,
and mixes him with coming Spring:

Waits he not the waking year?
His almond blossoms must be honey-ripe
By this ; to welcome him, fresh runnels stripe
The thawed ravines ; because of him, the wind
Walks like a herald. I shall surely find
Him now.

She finds him in Sordello, and summons him,
when the time is ripe, to Verona. Love and ambi-
tion march together in her now. In and out of all
her schemes Sordello moves. The glory of her
vision of North Italian rule is like a halo round his
brow. Not one political purpose is lost, but all are
transfigured in her by love. Softness and strength,
intellect and feeling meet in her. This is a woman
nobly carved, and the step from Michel, Pauline,
and Lady Carlisle to her is an immense one.

By exercise of his powers Browning's genius had
swiftly developed. There comes a time, sooner or
later, to a great poet when, after many experiments,
the doors of his intellect and soul fly open, and his
genius is flooded with the action and thought of
what seems a universe. And with this revelation
of Man and Nature, a tidal wave of creative power,
new and impelling, carries the poet far beyond the
station where last he rested. It came to Browning

330 BROWNING

now. The creation of Palma would be enough to
prove it, but there is not a character or scene in
Sordello which does not also prove it.

In this new outrush of his genius he created a
very different woman from Palma. He created
Pippa, the Asolan girl, at the other end of society
from Palma, at the other end of feminine character.
Owing to the host of new thoughts which in this
early summer of genius came pouring into his soul
— all of which he tried to express, rejecting none,
choosing none out of the rest, expressing only half
of a great number of them ; so delighted with them
all that he could leave none out — he became
obscure in Sordello. Owing also to the great com-
plexity of the historical mise-en-sc^ne in which he
placed his characters in that poem, he also became
obscure. Had he been an experienced artist he
would have left out at least a third of the thoughts
and scenes he inserted. As it was, he threw all his
thoughts and all the matters he had learnt about the
politics, cities, architecture, customs, war, gardens,
religion, and poetry of North Italy in the thirteenth
century, pell-mell into this poem, and left them, as
it were, to find their own places. This was very
characteristic of a young man when the pot of his
genius was boiling over. Nothing bolder, more
incalculable, was ever done by a poet in the period
of his storm and stress. The boundless and to ex-
press it, was never sought with more audacity. It
was impossible, in this effort, for him to be clear, and
we need not be vexed with him. The daring, the
rush, the unconsciousness, and the youth of it all,
are his excuse, but not his praise. And when the

WOMANHOOD JJV BROWNING 331

public comes to understand that the dimness and
complexity of Sordello arise from plenteousness
not scarcity of thought, and that they were not a
pose of the poet's but the natural leaping of a full
fountain just let loose from its mountain chamber,
it will have a personal hking, not perhaps for the
poem but for Browning. " I will not read the
book," it will say, " but I am glad he had it in him."

Still it was an artistic failure, and when Brown-
ing understood that the public could not compre-
hend him — and we must remember that he desired
to be comprehended, for he loved mankind — he
thought he would use his powers in a simpler
fashion, and please the honest folk. So, in the joy
of having got rid in Sordello of so many of his
thoughts by expression and of mastering the rest ;
and determined, since he had been found difficult,
to be the very opposite — loving contrast like a
poet — he wrote Pippa Passes. I need not describe
its plan. Our business is with the women in it.

Ottima, alive with carnal passion, in the fire of
which the murder of her husband seems a mere
incident, is an audacious sketch, done in splashes
of ungradated colour. Had Browning been more
in the woman's body and soul he would not have
done her in jerks as he has done. Her trick of
talking of the landscape, as if she were on a hoUday
like Pippa, is not as subtly conceived or executed
as it should be, and is too far away from her
dominant carnality to be natural. And her sen-
sualism is too coarse for her position. A cer-
tain success is attained, but the imagination is
frequently jarred. The very outburst of unsensual
love at the end, when her love passes from the

332 BROWNING

flesh into the spirit, when self-sacrifice dawns upon
her and she begins to suffer the first agonies of
redemption, is plainly more due to the poet's pity
than to the woman's spirit. Again, Sebald is the
first to feel remorse after the murder. Ottima
only begins to feel it when she thinks her lover is
ceasing to love her. I am not sure that to reverse
the whole situation would not be nearer to the
truth of things ; but that is matter of discussion.
Then the subject-matter is sordid. Nothing re-
lieves the coarseness of Sebald, Ottima, and Luca,
and their relations to one another but the few de-
scriptions of Nature and the happy flash of inno-
cence when Pippa passes by. Nor are there any
large fates behind the tale or large effects to follow
which might lift the crime into dignity. This mean,
commonplace, ugly kind of subject had a strange
attraction for Browning, as we see in The Inn
Album, in Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, and else-
where. I may add that it is curious to find him,
in 1 84 1, writing exactly like a modem realist,
nearly fifty years before realism of this kind had
begun. And this illustrates what I have said of
the way in which he anticipated by so many years
the kind of work to which the literary world should
come. The whole scene between Sebald and Ottima
might have been written by a powerful, relentless,
modern novelist.

We have more of this realism, but done with
great skill, humanity, even tenderness, in the meet-
ing and talk of the young harlotry on the steps of
the Duomo near the fountain. When we think of
this piece of bold, clear, impressionist reality cast
into the midst of the proprieties of literature in

WOMANHOOD IN BROWNING 333

1 84 1, it is impossible not to wonder and smile.
The girls are excellently drawn and varied from
each other. Browning's pity gathers round them,
and something of underlying purity, of natural
grace of soul, of tenderness in memory of their
youth emerges in them; and the charm of their
land is round their ways. There was also in his
mind, I think, a sense of picturesqueness in their
class when they were young, which, mingling with
his pity for them, attracted his imagination, or
touched into momentary life that roving element
in a poet which resents the barriers made by social
and domestic purity. Fifine at the Fair is partly a
study of that temper which comes and goes, goes
and comes in the life not only of poets but of
ordinary men and women.

Then, to illustrate this further, there is in
Sordello a brilliant sketch of girls of this kind
at Venice, full of sunlight, colour, and sparkling
water, in which he has seen these butterflies of
women as a painter would see them, or as a poet
who, not thinking then of moral questions or feel-
ing pity for their fate, is satisfied for the flying
moment with the picture they make, with the
natural freedom of their life.

But he does not leave that picture without a
representation of the other side of this class of
womanhood. It was a daring thing, when he
wished to say that he would devote his whole
work to the love and representation of humanity
to symbolise it by a sorrowful street-girl in Venice
who wistfully asks an alms ; worn and broken
with sorrow and wrong; whose eyes appeal for
pity, for comprehension of her good and for his

334 BROWNING

love ; and whose fascination and beauty are more
to him than those of her unsuffering companions.
The other side of that class of women is here
given with clear truth and just compassion, and the
representation is lifted into imaginative strength,
range, and dignity of thought and feeling by her
being made the image of the whole of humanity.
" This woman," he thought, " is humanity, whom
I love, who asks the poet in me to reveal her as
she is, a divine seed of God to find some day its
flowering — the broken harlot of the universe, who
will be, far off, the Magdalen redeemed by her
ineradicable love. That, and with every power I
have, I will, as poet, love and represent."

This is the imagination working at its best, with
its most penetrative and passionate power, and
Browning is far greater as a poet in this Thing of
his, where thought and love are knit into union to
give birth to moral, intellectual, and spiritual beauty,
than he is in those lighter and cleverer poems in
which he sketches with a facile but too discursive
a pencil, the transient moments, grave or light, of
the lives of women. Yet this and they show his
range, his variety, the embracing of his sympathy.

Over against these girls in the market-place,
against Ottima in her guilt, and Phene who is as
yet a nonentity (her speech to the sculptor is too
plainly Browning's analysis of the moment, not her
own thinking — no girl of fourteen brought up by
Natalia would talk in that fashion) is set Pippa,
the light, life, and love of the day, the town, the
people, and the poem. She passes like an angel
by and touches with her wing events and persons
and changes them to good. She has some natural

WOMANHOOD IN BROWNING 335

genius, and is as unconscious of her genius as she
is of the good she does. In her unconsciousness is
the fountain of her charm. She lives like a flower
of the field that knows not it has blest and com-
forted with its beauty the travellers who have
passed it by. She has only one day in the whole
year for her own, and for that day she creates a
fresh personality for herself. She clothes her soul,
intellect, imagination, and spiritual aspiration in
holiday garments for the day, becoming for the time
a new poetic self, and able to choose any other
personality in A solo from hour to hour — the queen
and spirit of the town ; not wishing to be, actually,
the folk she passes by, but only, since she is so
isolated, to be something in their lives, to touch
them for help and company.

The world of Nature speaks to her and loves
her. She sees all that is beautiful, feeds on it,
and grasps the matter of thought that underlies the
beauty. And so much is she at home with Nature
that she is able to describe with ease in words
almost as noble as the thing itself the advent of
the sun. When she leaps out of her bed to meet
the leap of the sun, the hymn of description she
sings might be sung by the Hours themselves as
they dance round the car of the god. She can
even play with the great Mother as with an equal,
or like her child. The charming gaiety with which
she speaks to the sunlights that dance in her room,
and to the flowers which are her sisters, prove,
however isolated her life may be, that she is never
alone. Along with this brightness she has serious-
ness, the sister of her gaiety ; the deep seriousness
of imagination, the seriousness also of the evening

336 BROWmNG

when meditation broods over the day and its doings
before sleep. These, with her sweet humanity,
natural piety, instinctive purity, compose her of
soft sunshine and soft shadow. Nor does her
sadness at the close, which is overcome by her
trust in God, make her less but more dear to us.
She is a beautiful creation. There are hosts of
happy women like her. They are the salt of the
earth. But few poets have made so much of them
and so happily, or sung about these birds of God
so well as Browning has in Pippa Passes.

That was in 1841. Pleased with his success in
this half -lyrical, half-dramatic piece, he was lured
towards the drama again, and also to try his hand
at those short lyrics — records of transient emotion
on fanciful subjects — or records of short but intense
moments of thought or feeling. It is a pity that
he did not give to dramatic lyrics (in which species
of poetry he is quite our first master) the time he
gave to dramas, in which he is not much better
than an amateur. Nevertheless, we cannot omit
the women in the dramas. I have already written
of Lady Carlisle. Polyxena, in King Victor and
King Charles, is partly the political woman and
partly the sensible and loving wife of a strangely
tempered man. She is fairly done, but is not
interesting. Good womanly intelligence in affairs,
good womanly support of her man ; clear womanly
insight into men and into intrigue — a woman of
whom there are hundreds of thousands in every
rank of life. In her, as in so much of Browning's
work, the intellect of the woman is of a higher
quality than the intellect of the man.

Next, among his women, is Anael in the Return

WOMANHOOD IN BROWNING 337

of the Druses. She is placed in too unnatural a
situation to allow her nature to have fair play.
In the preternatural world her superstition creates,
she adores Djabal, murders the Prefect, and dies
by her own hand. She is, in that world, a study
of a young girl's enthusiasm for her faith and her
country, and for the man she thinks divine ; and
were the subject, so far as it relates to her cha-
racter, well or clearly wrought, she might be made
remarkable. As it is wrought, it is so intertwisted
with complex threads of thought and passion that
any clear outline of her character is lost. Both
Djabal and she are like clouds illuminated by
flashes of sheet lightning which show an infinity
of folds and shapes of vapour in each cloud, but
show them only for an instant; and then, when
the flashes come again, show new folds, new involu-
tions. The characters are not allowed by Browning
to develop themselves.

Anael, when she is in the preternatural world,
loves Djabal as an incarnation of the divine, but
in the natural world of her girlhood her heart goes
out to the Knight of Malta who loves her. The
in-and-out of these two emotional states — one in
the world of religious enthusiasm, and one in her
own womanhood, as they cross and re-cross one
another — is elaborated with merciless analysis ;
and Anael's womanhood appears, not as a whole,
but in bits and scraps. How will this young girl,
divided by two contemporaneous emotions, one in
the supernatural and one in the natural world, act
in a crisis of her hfe ? Well, the first, conquering
the second, brings about her death the moment she
tries to transfer the second into the world of the

338 BROWNING

first — her dim, half -conscious love for Lois into,
her conscious adoration of Djabal.

Mildred and Guendolen are the two women in
A Blot in the 'Scutcheon. Guendolen is the incar-
nation of high-hearted feminine commonsense, of
clear insight into the truth of things, born of the
power of love in her. Amid all the weaknesses of
the personages and the plot ; in the wildered situa-
tion made by a confused clashing of pride and inno-
cence and remorse, in which Browning, as it were
on purpose to make a display of his intellectual
ability, involves those poor folk — Guendolen is the
rock on which we can rest in peace ; the woman of
the world, yet not worldly ; full of experience, yet
having gained by every experience more of love ;
just and strong yet pitiful, and with a healthy but
compassionate contempt for the intelligence of the
men who belong to her.

Contrasted with her, and the quality of her love
contrasted also, is Mildred, the innocent child girl
who loves for love's sake, and continues to be lost
in her love. But Browning's presentation of her
innocence, her love, is spoiled by the over-remorse,
shame, and fear under whose power he makes her
so helpless. They are in the circumstances so un-
naturally great that they lower her innocence and
love, and the natural courage of innocence and love.
These rise again to their first level, but it is only
the passion of her lover's death which restores
them. And when they recur, she is outside of
girlhood. One touch of the courage she shows in
the last scene would have saved in the previous
scene herself, her lover, and her brother. The lie she
lets her brother infer when she allows him to think

WOMANHOOD IN BROWNING 339

that the lover she has confessed to is not the Earl,
yet that she will marry the Earl, degrades her
altogether and justly in her brother's eyes, and
is so terribly out of tune with her character that I
repeat I cannot understand how Browning could
invent that situation. It spoils the whole pre-
sentation of the girl. It is not only out of her
character, it is out of Nature. Indeed, in spite of
the poetry, in spite of the pathetic beauty of the
last scene, Mildred and Tresham are always over-
heightened, over-strained beyond the concert-pitch
of Nature. But the drawing of the woman's cha-
racter suffers more from this than the man's, even
though Tresham, in the last scene, is half turned
into a woman. Sex seems to disappear in that
scene.

A different person is Colombe, the Duchess in
Colombe's Birthday. That play, as I have said,
gets on, but it gets on because Colombe moves
every one in the play by her own motion. From
beginning to end of the action she is the fire and
the soul of it. Innocent, frank, and brave, simple
and constant among a group of false and worldly
courtiers, among whom she moves like the white
Truth, untouched as yet by love or by the fates of
her position, she is suddenly thrown into a whirl-
pool of affairs and of love ; and her simplicity,
clearness of intelligence, unconscious Tightness of
momentary feeling, which comes of her not thinking
about her feelings — that rare and precious element
in character — above all, her belief in love as the
one worthy thing in the world, bring her out of
the whirlpool, unshipwrecked, unstained by a single
wave of ill-feeling or mean thinking, into a quiet

340 BROWNING

harbour of affection and of power. For she will
influence Berthold all his life long.

She is herself lovely. Valence loves her at
sight. Her love for Valence is born before she
knows it, and the touch of jealousy, which half
reveals it to her, is happily wrought by Browning.
When she finds out that Valence did for love of
her what she thought was done for loyalty alone to
her, she is a little revolted ; her single-heartedness
is disappointed. She puts aside her growing love,
which she does not know as yet is love, and says
she will find out if Berthold wishes to marry her
because he loves her, or for policy. Berthold is
as honest as she is, and tells her love has nothing
to do with the matter. The thought of an untrue
life with Berthold then sends her heart with a
rush back to Valence, and she chooses love and
obscurity with Valence. It is the portrait of incar-
nate truth, in vivid contrast to Constance, who is
a liar in grain.

Constance is the heroine of the fragment of a
drama called In a Balcony. Norbert, a young
diplomat, has served the Queen, who is fifty years
old, for a year, all for the love of Constance, a
cousin and dependent of the Queen. He tells
Constance he will now, as his reward, ask the
Queen for her hand. Constance says, " No ; that
will ruin us both ; temporise ; tell the Queen, who
is hungry for love, that you love her ; and that, as
she cannot marry a subject, you will be content
with me, whom the Queen loves." Norbert objects,
and no wonder, to this lying business, but he does
it ; and the Queen runs to Constance, crying, " I
am loved, thank God ! I will throw everything

WOMANHOOD IN BROWNING 341

aside and marry him. I thought he loved you, but
he loves me." Then Constance, wavering from
truth again, says that the Queen is right. Norbert
does love her. And this is supposed by some to
be a noble self-sacrifice, done in pity for the Queen.
It is much more like jealousy.

Then, finding that all Norbert's future depends
on the Queen, she is supposed to sacrifice herself
again, this time for Norbert's sake. She will give
him up to the Queen, for the sake of his career ;
and she tells the Queen, before Norbert, that he
has confessed to her his love for the Queen — an-
other lie ! Norbert is indignant — he may well be
' — and throws down all this edifice of falsehood.
The Queen knows then the truth, and leaves them
in a fury. Constance and Norbert fly into each
other's arms, and the tramp of the soldiers who
come to arrest them is heard as the curtain falls.

I do not beheve that Browning meant to make
self-sacrifice the root of Constance's doings. If he
did, he has made a terrible mess of the whole thing.
He was much too clear-headed a moralist to link
self-sacrifice to systematic lying. Self-sacrifice is
not self-sacrifice at all when it sacrifices truth.
It may wear the clothes of Love, but, in injuring
righteousness, it injures the essence of love. It has
a surface beauty, for it imitates love, but if mankind
is allured by this beauty, mankind is injured. It
is the false Florimel of self-sacrifice. Browning,
who had studied self-sacrifice, did not exhibit it in-
Constance.' There is something else at the root
of her actions, and I believe he meant it to be
jealousy. The very first lie she urges her lover to
tell (that is, to let the Queen imagine he loves her)

342 BROWNING

is just the thing a jealous woman would invent to
try her lover and the Queen, if she suspected the
Queen of loving him, and him of being seduced
from her by the worldly advantage of marrying
the Queen. And all the other lies are best ex-
plained on the supposition of jealous experiments.
At the last she is satisfied ; the crowning test had
been tried. Through a sea of lying she had made
herself sure of Norbert's love, and she falls into his
arms. Had Browning meant Constance to be an
image of self-sacrifice, he would scarcely have writ-
ten that line when Norbert, having told the truth
of the matter to the Queen, looks at both women,
and cries out, "You two glare, each at each, Uke
panthers now." A woman, filled with the joy and
sadness of pure self-sacrifice, would not have felt
at this moment hke a panther towards the woman
for whom she had sacrificed herself.

Even as a study of jealousy, Constance is too
subtle. Jealousy has none of these labyrinthine
methods ; it goes straight with fiery passion to its
end. It may be said, then, that Constance is not
a study of jealousy. But it may be a study by
Browning of what he thought in his intellect jeal-
ousy would be. At any rate, Constancy, as a study
of self-sacrifice, is a miserable failure. Moreover,
it does not make much matter whether she is a
study of this or that, because she is eminently
wrong-natured. Her lying is unendurable, only to
be explained or excused by the madness of jealousy,
and she, though jealous, is not maddened enough
by jealousy to excuse her lies. The situations she
causes are almost too ugly. Whenever the truth is
told, either by the Queen or Norbert, the situations

WOMANHOOD IN BROWNING 343

break up in disgrace for her. It is difficult to
imagine how Norbert could go on loving her. His
love would have departed Lf they had come to live
together. He is radically true, and she is radically
false. A fatal split would have been inevitable.
Nothing could be better for them both — after their
momentary outburst of love at the end — than death.

From the point of view of art, Constance is
interesting. It is more than we can say of
Domizia in Luria. She is nothing more than a
passing study whom Browning uses to voice his
theories. Eulalia in A Soul's Tragedy is also a
transient thing, only she is more colourless, more a
phantom than Domizia.

By this time, by the year 1846, Browning had
found out that he could not write dramas well,
or even such dramatic proverbs as In a Balcony.
And he gave himself up to another species of his
art. The women he now draws (some of which
belong to the years during which he wrote dramas)
are done separately, in dramatic lyrics as he called
them, and in narrative and philosophical poems.
Some are touched only at moments of their lives,
and we are to infer from the momentary action and
feeling the whole of the woman. Others are carer
fully and lovingly drawn from point to point in a
variety of action, passion, and circumstance. In
these we find Browning at his best in the drawing
of women. I know no women among the second-
rate poets so sweetly, nobly, tenderly, and wisely
drawn as Pompilia and Balaustion.

CHAPTER XIV

WOMANHOOD IN BROWNING
{THE DRAMATIC LYRICS AND POMPILIA)

NO modern poet has written of women with
such variety as Browning. Coleridge, ex-
:ept in a few Love-poeras, scarcely touched them.
A^'ordsworth did not get beyond the womanhood of
he home affections, except in a few lovely and
piritual sketches of girlhood which are unique in
lur literature, in which maidenhood and the soul
if Nature so interchange their beauty that the girl
eems born of the lonely loveliness of Nature and
ives with her mother like a child.

What motherhood in its deep grief and joy,
i^hat sisterhood and wifehood may be, have never
leen sung with more penetration and exquisiteness
han Wordsworth sang them. But of the immense
ange, beyond, of womanhood he could not sing.
Jyron's women are mostly in love with Byron
inder various names, and he rarely strays beyond
he woman who is loved or in love. The woman
/ho is most vital, true, and tender is Haid^e in
Ion Juan. Shelley's women melt into philosophic
:iist, or are used to build up a political or social
heory, as if they were " properties " of literature,
-ythna, Rosalind, Asia, Emilia, are ideas, not
344

WOMAN-HOOD IN BROWNING 345

realities. Beatrice is alive, but she was drawn
for him in the records of her trial. Even the
woman of his later lyrics soon ceases to be flesh
and blood. Keats let women alone, save in
Isabella, and all that is of womanhood in her is
derived from Boccaccio. Madeliiie is nothing but
a picture. It is curious that his remarkable want
of interest in the time in which he lived should
be combined with as great a want of interest in
women, as if the vivid life of any period in the
history of a people were bound up with the vivid
Ufe of women in that period. When women
awake no full emotion in a poet, the life of the
time, as in the case of Keats, awakes little emotion
in him. He will fly to the past for his subjects.
Moreover, it is perhaps worth saying that when the
poets cease to write well about women, the phase
of poetry they represent, however beautiful it be, is
beginning to decay. When poetry is born into a
new life, women are as living in it as men. » Woman-
hood became at once one of its dominai^' subjects
in Tennyson and Browning. Among the new poli-
tical, social, rehgious, philosophic, and artistic ideas
which were then borne like torches through Eng-
land, the idea of the free development of women was
also born ; and it carried with it a strong emotion.
They claimed the acknowledgment of their sepa-
rate individuality, of their distinct use and power
in the progress of the world. This was embodied
with extraordinary fulness in Aurora Leigh, and its
emotion drove itself into the work of Tennyson and
Browning. How Tennyson treated the subject in
the Princess is well known. His representation
of women in his other poems does not pass beyond

346 BROWNING

a few simple, well-known types both of good and
bad women. But the particular types into which
the variety of womanhood continually throws itself,
the quick individualities, the fantastic simplicities
and subtleties, the resolute extremes, the unconsid-
ered impulses, the obstinate good and evil, the bold
cruelties and the bold self-sacrifices, the fears and
audacities, the hidden work of the thoughts and
passions of women in the far-off worlds within them
where their soul claims and possesses its own de-
sires — these were beyond the power of Tennyson
to describe, even, I think, to conceive. But they
were in the power of Browning, and he made them,
at least in lyric poetry, a chief part of his work.

In women he touched great variety and great
individuality ; two things each of which includes
the other, and both of which were dear to his
imagination. With his longing for variety of
representation, he was not content to pile woman-
hood up into a few classes, or to dwell on her uni-
versal qualities. He took each woman separately,
marking out the points which differentiated her
from, not those which she shared with, the rest of
her sex. He felt that if he dwelt only on the deep-
seated roots of the tree of womanhood, he would
miss the endless play, fancy, movement, interaction,
and variety of its branches, foliage, and flowers.
Therefore, in his lyrical work, he leaves out for
the most part the simpler elements of womanhood
and draws the complex, the particular, the impulsive,
and the momentarj^. Each of his women is distinct
from the rest. That is a great comfort in a world
which, through laziness, wishes to busy itself with
classes rather than with personalities. I do not

WOMANHOOD IN BROWNING 347

believe that Browning ever met man or woman
without saying to himself — Here is a new world;
it may be classed, but it also stands alone. What
distinguishes it from the rest — that I will know
and that describe.

When women are not enslaved to conventions —
and the new movement towards their freedom of
development which began shortly after 1840 had
enfranchised and has continued ever since to
enfranchise a great number from this slavery —
they are more individual and various than men are
allowed to be. They carry their personal desires,
aspirations, and impulses into act, speech, and into
extremes with much greater licence than is possible
to men. One touches with them much more easily
the original stuff of humanity. It was this original,
individual, and various Thing in women on which
Browning seized with delight. He did not write
half as much as other poets had done of woman
as being loved by man or as loving him. I have
said that the mere Love-poem is no main element
in his work. He wrote of the original stuff of
womanhood, of its good and bad alike, sometimes
of it as all good, as in Pompilia ; but for the most
part as mingled of good and ill, and of the good as
destined to conquer the ill.

He did not exalt her above man. He thought
her as vital, interesting, and important for progress
as man, but not more interesting, vital, or impor-
tant. He neither lowered her nor idealised her
beyond natural humanity. She stands in his poetry
side by side with man on an equality of value to
the present and future of mankind. And he has
wrought this out not by elaborate statement of

348 BROWNING

it in a theory, as Tennyson did in the Princess
wkh a conscious patronage of womanhood, but by

.vtmconscious representation of it in the multitude of

^ women whom he invented.

But though the wholes were equal, the particulars
of which the wholes were composed differed in their
values ; and women in his view were more keenly
alive than men, at least more various in their
manifestation of life. It was their intensity of
life which most attracted him. He loved nothing
so much as hf e — in plant or animal or man. His
longer poems are records of the larger movement of
human life, the steadfast record in quiet verse as in
Paracelsus, or the clashing together in abrupt verse
as in Sordello, of the turmoil and meditation, the

'trouble and joy of the living soul of humanity.

\When he, this archangel of reaUty, got into touch
with pure fact of the human soul, beating with life,
he was enchanted. And this was his vast happiness
in his longest poem, The Ring and the Book —

Do you see this square old yellow book I toss

I' the air, and catch again, and twirl about

By the crumpled vellum covers — pure crude fact

Secreted from man's life when hearts beat hard

And brains, high blooded, ticked two centuries hence?

Give it me back. The thing's restorative

I' the touch and sight.

But in his lyrics, it was not the steady development
of life on which he loved to write, but the unexpected,
original movement of life under the push of quick
thought and sudden passion into some new form
of action which broke through the commonplace of
existence. Men and women, and chiefly women,
when they spoke and acted'pn a keen edge of life

WOMANHOOD IN BROWNING 349

with a precipice below them or on the summit of
the moment, with straight and clear intensity, and
out of the original stuff of their nature — were his
darling lyric subjects. And he did this work in
lyrics, because the lyric is the poem of the moment.
There was one of these critical moments which
attracted him greatly — that in which all after-
life is contained and decided ; when a step to the
right or left settles, in an instant, the spiritual
basis of the soul. I have already mentioned some
of these poems — those concerned with love, such
as By the Fireside or Cristina — and the woman is
more prominent in them than the man. One of
the best of them, so far as the drawing of a woman
is concerned, is Dis Aliter Visum. We see the
innocent girl, and ten years after what the world
has made of her. But the heart of the girl lies
beneath the woman of the world. And she recalls
to the man the hour when they lingered near the
church on the cliff ; when he loved her, when he
might have claimed her, and did not. He feared
they might repent of it ; sacrificing to the present
their chance of the eternities of love. " Fool ! who
ruined four lives — mine and your opera-dancer's,
your own and my husband's ! " Whether her
outburst now be quite true to her whole self or
not Browning does not let us know ; but it is
true to that moment of her, and it is full of the
poetry of the moment she recalls. Moreover, these
thirty short verses paint as no other man could
have done the secret soul of a woman in society.
I quote her outburst. It is full of Browning's keen
poetry ; and the first verse of it may well be com-
pared with a similar moment in By the Fireside,

350 BROWNING

where Nature is made to play the same part, but
succeeds as here she fails :

Now I may speak : you fool, for all

Your lore ! Who made things plain in vain?
What was the sea for? What, the grey
Sad church, that solitary day,

Crosses and graves and swallows' call?

Was there nought better than to enjoy ?

No feat which, done, would make time break,
And let us pent-up creatures through
Into eternity, our due?

No forcing earth teach heaven's employ?

No wise beginning, here and now.

What cannot grow complete (earth's feat)
And heaven must finish, there and then?
No tasting earth's true food for men,

Its sweet in sad, its sad in sweet?

No grasping at love, gaining a share

O' the sole spark from God's life at strife
With death, so, sure of range above
The limits here? For us and love.

Failure ; but, when God &ils, despair.

This you call wisdom? Thus you add

Good unto good again, in vain?

You loved, with body worn and weak ;

I loved, with faculties to seek :
Were both loves worthless since ill-clad?

Let the mere star-fish in his vault
Crawl in a wash of weed, indeed,
Rose-jacynth to the finger tips :
He, whole in body and soul, outstrips

Man, found with either in default.

But what's whole, can increase no more,
Is dwarfed and dies, since here's its sphere.
The devil laughed at you in his sleeve!
You knew not? That I weU believe ;

Or you had saved two souls : nay, four.

WOMANHOOD IN BROWNING 351

For Stephanie sprained last night her wrist,
Ankle or something. "Pooh," cry you?
At any rate she danced, all say,
Vilely ; her vogue has had its day.

Here comes my husband from his whist.

Here the woman speaks for herself. It is cha-
racteristic of Browning's boldness that there are
a whole set of poems in which he imagines the
unexpressed thoughts which a woman revolves in
self-communion under the questionings and troubles
of the passions, and chiefly of the passion of love.
The most elaborate of these is James Lee's Wife,
which tells what she thinks of when after long years
she has been unable to retain her husband's love.
Finally, she leaves him. The analysis of her
thinking is interesting, but the woman is not. She
is not the quick, natural woman Browning was able
to paint so well when he chose. His own analytic
excitement, which increases in mere intellectuality
as the poem moves on, enters into her, and she
thinks more through Browning the man than
through her womanhood. Women are complex
enough, more complex than men, but they are not
complex in the fashion of this poem. Under the
circumstances Browning has made, her thought
would have been quite clear at its root, and indeed
in its branches. She is represented as in love
with her husband. Were she really in love, she
would not have been so involved, or able to argue
out her life so anxiously. Love or love's sorrow
knows itself at once and altogether, and its cause
and aim are simple, But Browning has uncon-
sciously made the woman clear enough for us to
guess the real cause of her departure. That de-

352 BROWmNG

parture is believed by some to be a self-sacrifice.
There are folk who s^ self-sacrifice in everything
Browning wrote about women. Browning may
have originally intended her action to be one of
self-sacrifice, but the thing, as he went on, was
taken out of his hands, and turns out to be quite a
different matter. The woman really leaves her
husband because her love for him was tired out.
She talks of leaving her husband free, and perhaps,
in women's way, persuades herself that she is sac-
rificing herself; but she desires in reality to set
herself free from an unavailing struggle to keep his
love. There comes a time when the striving for
love wearies out love itself. And James Lee's
wife had reached that moment. Her departure,
thus explained, is the most womanly thing in the
poem, and I should not wonder if Browning meant
it so. He knew what self-sacrifice really was, and
this departure of the woman was not a true self-
sacrifice.

Another of these poems in which a woman
speaks out her heart is Any Wife to any Husband.
She is dying, and she would fain claim his un-
dying fidelity to his love of her ; but though she
believes in his love, she thinks, when her presence
is not with him, that his nature will be drawn
towards other women. Then what he brings her,
when he meets her again, will not be perfect.
Womanly to the core, and her nature is a beautiful
nature, she says nothing which is not kind and
true, and the picture she draws of faithfulness,
without one stain of wavering, is natural and lovely.
But, for all that, it is jealousy that speaks, the
desire to claim all for one's self. " Thou art mine.

WOMANHOOD IN BROWNING 353

and mine only " — that fine selfishness which injures
love so deeply in the end, because it forbids its
expansion, that is, forbids the essential nature of
love to act. That may be pardoned, unless in its
extremes, during life, if the pardon does not in-
crease it ; but this is in the hour of death, and it is
unworthy of the higher world. To carry jealousy
beyond the grave is a phase of that selfish passion
over which this hour, touched by the larger thought
of the infinite world, should have uplifted the
woman. Still, what she says is in Nature, and
Browning's imagination has closed passionately
round his subject. But he has left us with pity
for the woman rather than with admiration of her.

Perhaps the subtlest part of the poem is the
impression left on us that the woman knows all her
pleading will be in vain, that she has fathomed the
weakness of her husband's character. He will not
like to remember that knowledge of hers ; and her
letting him feel it is a kind of vengeance which will
not help him to be faithful. It is also her worst
bitterness, but if her womanhood were perfect, she
would not have had that bitterness.

In these two poems, and in others, there is to be
detected the deep-seated and quiet half-contempt
— contempt which does not damage love, contempt
which is half pity — which a woman who loves
a man has for his weakness under passion or weari-
ness. Both the wives in these poems feel that their
husbands are inferior to themselves in strength
of charadter and of intellect. To feel this is
common enough in women, but is rarely confessed
by them. A man scarcely ever finds it out from
his own observation ; he is too vain for that. But

354 BROWNING

Browning knew it. A poet sees many things, and
perhaps his wife told him this secret. It was like
his audacity to express it.

This increased knowledge of womanhood was
probably due to the fact that Browning possessed in
his wife a woman of genius who had studied her
own sex in herself and in other women. It is
owing to her, I think, that in so many poems the
women are represented as of a finer, even a
stronger intellect than the men. Many poets have
given them a finer intuition; that is a common
representation. But greater intellectual power
allotted to women is only to be found in Browning.
The instances of it are few, but they are remarkable.

It was owing also to his wife, whose relation to
him was frank on all points, that Browning saw so
much more clearly than other poets into the deep,
curious, or remote phases of the passions, thoughts,
and vagaries of womanhood. I sometimes wonder
what women themselves think of the things Brown-
ing, speaking through their mouth, makes them say;
but that is a revelation of which I have no hope, and
for which, indeed, I have no desire.

Moreover, he moved a great deal in the society
where women, not having any real work to do, or
if they have it, not doing it, permit a greater
freedom to their thoughts and impulses than those
of their sex who sit at the loom of duty. Tenny-
son withdrew from this society, and his women are
those of a retired poet — a few real types tenderly
and sincerely drawn, and a few more worked out by
thinking about what he imagined they would be,
not by knowing them. Browning, roving through
this class and other classes of society, and observ-

WOMANHOOD IN BROWNING 355

rig while he seemed unobservant, drew into his
aner self the lives of a number of women, saw
hem living and feeling in a great diversity of
ircumstances ; and, always on the watch, seized
he moment into which he thought the woman
;ntered with the greatest intensity, and smote that
nto a poem. Such poems, naturally lyrics, came
nto his head at the opera, at a ball, at a supper
iter the theatre, while he talked at dinner, when
le walked in the park ; and they record, not the
vhole of a woman's character, but the vision of one
jart of her nature which flashed before him and
vanished in an instant. Among these poems are
4 Light Woman, A Pretty Woman, Solomon and
Balkis, Gold Hair, and, as a fine instance of this
iheet-lightning poem about women — Adam, Lilith,
md Eve. Too Late and The Worst of It do not
jelong to these slighter poems ; they are on a much
ligher level. But they are poems of society and its
secret lives. The men are foremost in them, but in
;ach of them a different woman is sketched, through
:he love of the men, with a masterly decision.

Among all these women he did not hesitate to
Daint the types farthest removed from goodness
md love. The lowest woman in the poems is she
(vho is described in Time's Revenges —

So is my spirit, as flesh with sin.
Filled full, eaten out and in
With the face of her, the eyes of her,
The lips, the little chin, the stir
Of shadow round her mouth ; and she
— I'll tell you — calmly would decree
That I should roast at a slow fire,
If that would compass her desire
And make her one whom they invite
To the famous ball to-morrow night.

3S6 BROWNING

Contrasted with this woman, from whose brutal
nature civilisation has stripped away the honour
and passion of the savage, the woman of In a
Laboratory shines like a fallen angel. She at least
is natural, and though the passions she feels are
the worst, yet she is capable of feeling strongly.
Neither have any conscience, but we can conceive
that one of these women might attain it, but the
other not. Both are examples of a thing I have
said is exceedingly rare in Browning's poetry —
men or women left without some pity of his own
touched into their circumstances or character.

In a Laboratory is a full-coloured sketch of what
womanhood could become in a court like that of
Francis I. ; in which every shred of decency, gentle-
hood, and honour had disappeared. Browning's
description, vivid as it is, is less than the reality.
Had he deepened the colours of iniquity and in-
decency instead of introducing so much detailed
description of the laboratory, detail which weakens
a little our impression of the woman, he had done
better, but all the same there is no poet in England,
living or dead, who could have done it so well.
One of the best things in the poem is the impres-
sion made on us that it is not jealousy, but the hatred
of envy which is the motive of the woman. Jealousy
supposes love or the image of love, but among
those who surrounded Francis, love did not exist at
all, only lust, luxury, and greed of power; and in
the absence of love and in the scorn of it, hate and
envy reign unchallenged. This is what Browning
has realised in this poem, and, in this differentia-
tion, he has given us not only historical but moral
truth.

WOMANHOOD IN BROWNING 357

Apart from these lighter and momentary poems
about women there are those written out of his own
ideal of womanhood, built up not only from all he
knew and loved in his wife, but also out of the
dreams of his heart. They are the imaginings of
the high honour and affection which a man feels
for noble, natural, and honest womanhood. They
are touched here and there by complex thinking,
but for the most part are of a beloved simplicity
and tenderness, and they will always be beautiful.
There is a sketch of the woman in The Italian in
England, a never to be forgotten thing. It is no
wonder the exile remembered her till he died.
There is the image we form of the woman in The
Flower's Name. He does not describe her ; she is
far away, but her imagined character and presence
fill the garden with an incense sweeter than all the
flowers, and her beauty irradiates all beauty, so
delicately and so plenteously does the lover's
passion make her visible. There is Evelyn Hope,
and surely no high and pure love ever created a
more beautiful soul in a woman than hers who
waits her lover in the spiritual world. There are
those on whom we have already dwelt — Pippa,
Colombe, Mildred, Guendolen. There is the woman
in the Flight of the Duchess ; not a sketch, but a
completed picture. We see her, just emerged from
her convent, thrilling with eagerness to see the
world, believing in its beauty, interested in every-
thing, in the movement of the leaves on the trees,
of the birds in the heaven, ready to speak to every
one high or low, desirous to get at the soul of all
things in Nature and Humanity, herself almost a
creature of the element, akin to air and fire.

358 BROWNING

She is beaten into silence, but not crushed ; over-
whelmed by dry old people, by imitation of dead
things, but the life in her is not slain. When the
wandering gipsy claims her for a natural life, her
whole nature blossoms into beauty and joy. She
will have troubles great and deep, but every hour
will make her conscious of more and more of life.
And when she dies, it will be the beginning of an
intenser life.

Finally, there is his wife. She is painted in these
lyric poems with a simplicity of tenderness, with a
reticence of worship as sacred as it is fair and
delicate, with so intense a mingling of the ideal
and the real that we never separate them, and with
so much passion in remembrance of the past and
in longing for the future, that no comment can
enhance the picture Browning draws of her charm,
her intellect, and her spirit.

These pictures of womanhood were set forth
before 1868, when a collected edition of his poems
was published in six volumes. They were chiefly
short, even impressionist studies, save those in the
dramas, and Palma in Sordello. Those in the
dramas were troubled by his want of power to
shape them in that vehicle. It would have then
been a pity if, in his matured strength, he had not
drawn into clear existence, with full and careful,
not impressionist work, and with unity of conception,
some women who should, standing alone, become
permanent personages in poetry; whom men and
women in the future, needing friends, should love,
honour, and obey, and in whom, when help and
sympathy and wisdom were wanted, these healing
powers should be found. Browning did this for us

WOMANHOOD IN BROWNING 359

in Pompilia and Balaustion, an Italian and a Greek
girl — not an English girl. It is strange how to
the very end he lived as a poet outside of his own
land.

In 1868, Pompilia appeared before the world,
and she has captured ever since the imagination, the
conscience, and the sentiment of all who love woman-
hood and poetry. Her character has ennobled
and healed mankind. Born of a harlot, she is a
star of purity ; brought up by characters who love
her, but who do not rise above the ordinary mean-
ness and small commercial honesty of their class,
she is always noble, generous, careless of wealth,
and of a high sense of honour. It is as if Browning
disdained for the time all the philosophy of heredity
and environment ; and indeed it was characteristic
of him to believe in the sudden creation of beauty,
purity, and nobility out of their contraries and in
spite of them. The miracle of the unrelated birth
of genius — that out of the dunghill might spring
the lily, and out of the stratum of crime the saint
— was an article of faith with him. Nature's or
God's surprises were dear to him ; and nothing
purer, tenderer, sweeter, more natural, womanly,
and saintly was ever made than Pompilia, the
daughter of a vagrant impurity, the child of crime,
the girl who grew to womanhood in mean and
vulgar circumstances.

The only hatred she earns is the hatred of Count
Guido her husband, the devil who has tortured and
murdered her — the hatred of evil for good. When ■
Count Guido, condemned to death, bursts into the
unrestrained expression of his own nature, he can-
not say one word about Pompilia which is not set

36o BROWNING

on fire by a hell of hatred. Nothing in Browning's
writing is more vivid, more intense, than these
sudden outbursts of tiger fierceness against his wife.
They lift and enhance the image of Pompilia.

When she comes into contact with other cha-
racters such as the Archbishop and the Governor,
men overlaid with long-deposited crusts of con-
vention, she wins a vague pity from them, but her
simplicity, naturalness, and sainthness are nearly as
repugnant to social convention as her goodness is
to villany ; and Browning has, all through the poem,
individualised in PompiUa the natural simpUcity
of goodness in opposition to the artificial morali-
ties of conservative society. But when Pompilia
touches characters who have any good, however
hidden, in them, she draws forth that good. Her
so-called parents pass before they die out of mean-
ness into nobility of temper. Conti, her husband's
cousin, a fat, waggish man of the world, changes
into seriousness, pity, and affection under her silent
influence. The careless folk she meets on her
flight to Rome recognise, even in most suspicious
circumstances, her innocence and nobleness; and
change at a touch their ordinary nature for a
higher. And when she meets a fine character like
Caponsacchi, who has been led into a worldy, im-
moral, and indifferent life, he is swept in a moment
out of it by the sight alone of this star of innocence
and spiritual beauty, and becomes her true mate,
daily self-excelled. The monk who receives her
dying confession, the Pope, far set by his age above
the noise of popular Rome, almost at one with the
world beyond death and feeUng what the divine
judgment would be, both recognise with a fervour

WOMANHOOD IN BROWNING 361

which carries them beyond the prejudices of age
and of their society the loveliness of Heaven in the
spirit of this girl of seventeen years, and claim her
as higher than themselves.

>^ It is fitting that to so enskied and saintly a child,
when she rests before her death, the cruel life she
had led for four years should seem a dream; and the
working out of that thought, and of the two checks
of reality it received in the coming of her child and
the coming of Caponsacchi, is one of the fairest and
most delicate pieces of work that Browning ever
accomplished. ' She was so innocent and so simple-
hearted — and the development of that part of her
character in the stories told of her childhood is
exquisitely touched into life — so loving, so born to
be happy in being loved, that when she was forced
into a maze of villany, bound up with hatred, cruelty,
baseness, and guilt, she seemed to live in a mist of •
unreality. When the pain became too deep to be
dreamlike she was mercifully led back into the dream
by the approach of death. As she lay dying there,
all she had suffered passed again into unreality.
Nothing remained but love and purity, the thrill
when first she felt her child, the prayer to God
which brought Caponsacchi to her rescue so that
her child might be born, and lastly the vision of
perfect union hereafter with her kindred soul, who,
not her lover on earth, would be her lover in
eternity. Even her boy, who had brought her,
while she lived, her keenest sense of reality (and
Browning's whole treatment of her motherhood,
from the moment she knew she was in child, till
the hour when the boy lay in her arms, is as true and
tender as if his wife had filled his soul while he

362 BROWNING

wrote), even her boy fades away into the dream.
It is true she was dying, and there is no dream so
deep as dying. Yet it was bold of Browning, and
profoundly imagined by him, to make the child
disappear, and to leave the woman at last alone
with the thought and the spiritual passion of her
union with Caponsacchi —

O lover of my life, O soldier saint,

No work begun shall ever pause for death.

I It is the love of Percival's sister for Galahad.

It is not that she is naturally a dreamer, that
she would not have felt and enjoyed the realities
of earth. Her perceptions are keen, her nature
expansive. Browning, otherwise, would not have
cared for her. It was only when she was involved
in evil, like an angel in hell (a [wolf's arm round
her throat and a snake curled over her feet), that
she seemed to be dreaming, not living. It was
incredible to her that such things should be reality.
Yet even the dream called the hidden powers of her
soul into action. In realising these as against evil
she is not the dreamer. Her fortitude is unbroken ;
her moral courage never fails, though she is familiar
with fear; her action, when the babe has leaped
in her womb, is prompt, decisive, and immediate ;
her physical courage, when her husband overtakes
her and befouls her honour, is like a man's. She
seizes his sword and would have slain the villain.
Then, her natural goodness, the genius of her
goodness, gives her a spiritual penetration which is
more than an equivalent in her for an educated
intelligence. Her intuition is so keen that she sees
through the false worldliness of Caponsacchi to the

WOMANHOOD IN BROWNING 363

real man beneath, and her few words call it into
goodness and honour for ever. Her clear sense of
truth sees all the threads of the net of villany in which
she has been caught, and the only means to break
through it, to reveal and bring it into condemnation.
Fortitude, courage, intuition, and intelligence are all
made to arise out of her natural saintliness and
love. She is always the immortal child.

For a time she has passed on earth through the
realms of pain ; and now, stabbed to her death, she
looks back on the passage, and on all who have been
kind and unkind to her — on the whole of the
falsehood and villany. And the royal love in her
nature is the master of the moment. She makes
excuses for Violante's lie. " She meant well, and
she did, as I feel now, little harm." " I am right
now, quite happy; dying has purified me of the
evil which touched me, and I colour ugly things
with my own peace and joy. Every one that
leaves life sees all things softened and bettered."
As to her husband, she finds that she has Uttle to
forgive him at the last. Step by step she goes
over all he did, and even finds excuses for him,
and, at the end, this is how she speaks, a noble
utterance of serene love, lofty intelligence, of spirit-
ual power and of the forgiveness of eternity.

For that most woeful man my husband once,
Who, needing respite, still draws vital breath,
I — pardon him ? So far as lies in me,
I give him for his good the life he takes,
Praying the world will therefore acquiesce.
Let him make God amends, — none, none to me
Who thank him rather that, whereas strange fate
Mockingly styled him husband and me wife,
Himself this way at least pronounced divorce,
Blotted the marriage bond : this blood of mine

364 BROWNING

Flies forth esmltingly at any door,

Washes the parchment white, and thanks the blow.

We shall not meet in this world nor the next.

But where will God be absent? In His face

Is light, but in His shadow healing too :

Let Guido touch the shadow and be healed!

And as my presence was importunate, t—

My earthly good, temptation and a snare, —

Nothing about me but drew somehow down

His hate upon me, — somewhat so excused

Therefore, since hate was thus the truth of him, —

May my evanishment for evermore

Help further to relieve the heart that cast

Such object of its natural loathing forth!

So he was made ; he nowise made himself:

I could not love him, but his mother did.

His soul has never lain beside my soul :

But for the unresisting body, — thanks !

He burned that garment spotted by the flesh.

Whatever he touched is rightly ruined : plague

It caught, and disinfection it had craved

Still but for Guido ; I am saved through him

So as by fire ; to him — thanks and fereweU!

Thus, pure at heart and sound of head, a natural,
true woman ^in her childhood, in her girlhood, and
when she is tried in the fire — by nature gay,
yet steady in suffering ; brave in a hell of fears and
shame ; clear-sighted in entanglements of villany ;
resolute in self-rescue; seeing and claiming the
right help and directing it rightly ; rejoicing in her
motherhood and knowing it as her crown of glory,
though the child is from her infamous husband;
happy in her motherhood for one fortnight; slain
like a martyr ; loving the true man with immortal
love; forgiving all who had injured her, even her
murderer ; dying in full faith and love of God, though
her life had been a crucifixion; Pompilia passes
away, and England's men and women will be always
grateful to Browning for her creation.

CHAPTER XV

BALAUSTION

AMONG the women whom Browning made,
Balaustion is the crown. So vivid is her
presentation that she seems with us in our daily
life. And she also fills the historical imagination.

One would easily fall in love with her, Uke those
sensitive princes in the Arabian Nights, who, hear-
ing only of the charms of a princess, set forth to
find her over the world. Of all Browning's women,
she is the most luminous, the most at unity with
herself. She has the Greek gladness and life, the
Greek intelligence and passion, and the Greek
harmony. All that was common, prattling, coarse,
sensual, and spluttering in the Greek, (and we
know from Aristophanes how strong these lower
elements were in the Athenian people,) never
shows a trace of its influence in Balaustion. Made
of the finest clay, exquisite and delicate in grain,
she is yet strong, when the days of trouble come,
to meet them nobly and to change their sorrows
into spiritual powers.

And the mise-en-scine in which she is placed

exalts her into a heroine, and adds to her the

light, colour, and humanity of Greek romance.

Born at Rhodes, but of an Athenian mother, she is

36s

366 BROWNING

fourteen when the news arrives that the Athenian
fleet under Nikias, sent to subdue Syracuse, has
been destroyed, and the captive Athenians driven to
labour in the quarries. All Rhodes, then in alUance
with Athens, now cries, " Desert Athens, side with
Sparta against Athens." Balaustion alone resists
the traitorous cry. " What, throw off Athens, be
disloyal to the source of art and intelligence —

to the life and liglit
Of the whole world worth calling world at all ! "

And she spoke so well that her kinsfolk and
others joined her and took ship for Athens. Now,
a wind drove them off their course, and behind
them came a pirate ship, and in front of them
loomed the land. "Is it Crete.'" they thought;
" Crete, perhaps, and safety." But the oars flagged
in the hands of the weary men, and the pirate
gained. Then Balaustion, springing to the altar by
the mast, white, rosy, and uplifted, sang on high
that song of .^schylus which saved at Salamis —

' O sons of Greeks, go, set your country free,
Free your wives, free your children, free the fanes
O' the Gods, your fathers founded, — sepulchres
They sleep in ! Or save all, or all be lost.'

The crew, impassioned by the girl, answered the
song, and drove the boat on, " churning the black
water white," till the land shone clear, and the wide
town and the harbour, and lo, 'twas not Crete,
but Syracuse, luckless fate! Out came a galley
from the port. "Who are you; Sparta's friend
or foe .' " " Of Rhodes are we, Rhodes that has
forsaken Athens ! "

" How, then, that song we heard .' All Athens

BALAUSTION 367

was in that ^schylus. Your boat is full of
Athenians — back to the pirate ; we want no
Athenians here. . . . Yet, stay, that song was
^schylus ; every one knows it — how about Euri-
pides ? Might you know any of his verses ? " For
nothing helped the poor Athenians so much if any
of them had his mouth stored with

Old glory, great plays that had long ago

Made themselves wings to fly about the world, —

But most of all those were cherished who could
recite Euripides to Syracuse, so mighty was poetry
in the ancient days to make enemies into friends,
to build, beyond the wars and jealousies of the
world, a land where all nations are one.

At this the captain cried : " Praise the God, we
have here the very girl who will fill you with
Euripides," and the passage brings Balaustion
into full light.

Therefore, at mention of Euripides,

The Captain crowed out, " Euoi, praise the God !

Oop, boys, bring our owl-shield to the fore !

Out with our Sacred Anchor! Here she stands,

Balaustion ! Strangers, greet the lyric girl !

Euripides ? Babai ! what a word there 'scaped

Your teeth's enclosure, quoth my grandsire's song !

Why, fast as snow in Thrace, the voyage through,

Has she been falling thick in flakes of him !

Frequent as figs at Kaunos, Kaunians said.

Balaustion, stand forth and confirm my speech !

Now it was some whole passion of a play ;

Now, peradventure, but a honey-drop

That slipt its comb i' the chorus. If there rose

A star, before I could determine steer

Southward or northward — if a cloud surprised

Heaven, ere I fairly hollaed ' Furl the sail ! ' —

She had at fingers' end both cloud and star ;

Some thought that perched there, tame and tuneable,

368 BROWNING

Fitted with wings, and still, as off it flew,
' So sang Euripides,' she said, ' so sang
The meteoric poet of air and sea.
Planets and the pale populace of heaven,
The mind of man, and all that's made to soar ! '
And so, although she has some other name,
We only call her Wild-pomegranate-flower,
Balaustion ; since, where'er the red bloom bums
r the dull dark verdure of the bounteous tree,
Dethroning, in the Rosy Isle, the rose.
You shall find food, drink, odour, all at once ;
Cool leaves to bind about an aching brow,
And, never much away, the nightingale.
Sing them a strophe, with the turn-again,
Down to the verse that ends all, proverb like,
And save us, thou Balaustion, bless the name!"

And she answered : " I will recite the last play
he wrote from first to last — Alkestis — his strang-
est, saddest, sweetest song."

Then because Greeks are Greeks, and hearts are hearts,

And poetry is power, — they all outbroke

In a great joyous laughter with much love :

" Thank Herakles for the good holiday !

Make for the harbour ! Row, and let voice ring,

' In we row, bringing more Euripides ! ' "

All the crowd, as they lined the harbour now,

" More of Euripides ! " — took up the cry.

We landed ; the whole city, soon astir,

Came rushing out of gates in common joy

To the suburb temple ; there they stationed me

O' the topmost step ; and plain I told the play,

Just as I saw it ; what the actors said,

And what I saw, or thought I saw the while,

At our Kameiros theatre, clean scooped

Out of a hill side, with the sky above

And sea before our seats in marble row :

Told it, and, two days more, repeated it

Until they sent us on our way again

With good words and great wishes.

So, we see Balaustion's slight figure under the

BALAUSTION 369

blue sky, and the white temple of Herakles from
the steps of which she spoke ; and among the crowd,
looking up to her with rapture, the wise and young
Sicilian who took ship with her when she was sent
back to Athens, wooed her, and found answer before
they reached Piraeus. And there in Athens she
and her lover saw Euripides, and told the Master
how his play had redeemed her from captivity.
Then they were married ; and one day, with four
of her girl friends, under the grape-vines by the
streamlet side, close to the temple, Baccheion, in
the cool afternoon, she tells the tale ; interweaving
with the play (herself another chorus) what she
thinks, how she feels concerning its personages
and their doings, and in the comment discloses her
character. The woman is built up in this way
for us. The very excuse she makes for her in-
serted words reveals one side of her delightful
nature — her love of poetry, her love of beauty,
her seeing eye, her delicate distinction, her min-
gled humility and self-knowledge.

Look at Baccheion's beauty opposite,

The temple with the pillars at the porch!

See you not something beside masonry?

What if my words wind in and out the stone

As yonder ivy, the God's parasite ?

Though they leap all the way the pillar leads,

Festoon about the marble, foot to frieze,

And serpentiningly enrich the roof,

Toy with some few bees and a bird or two, —

What then ? The column holds the cornice up,

As the ivy is to the pillar that supports the cor-
nice, so are her words to the Alkestis on which she
comments.

That is her charming way. She also is, like

370 BROWNING

Pompilia, young. But no contrast can be greater
than that between Pompilia at seventeen years of
age, and Balaustion at fifteen. In Greece, as in
Italy, women mature quickly. Balaustion is born
with that genius which has the experience of age in
youth and the fire of youth in age. Pompilia has
the genius of pure goodness, but she is uneducated,
her intelligence is untrained, and her character is
only developed when she has suffered. Balaustion,
on the contrary, has all the Greek capacity, a
thorough education, and that education also which
came in the air of that time to those of the
Athenian temper. She is born into beauty and
the knowledge of it, into high thinking and keen
feeling ; and she knows well why she thought and
how she felt. So finely wrought is she by passion
and intelligence alike, with natural genius to make
her powers tenfold, that she sweeps her kinsfolk
into agreement with her, subdues the sailors to her
will, enchants the captain, sings the whole crew into
energy, would have, I believe, awed and enthralled
the pirate, conquers the Syracusans, delights the
whole city, draws a talent out of the rich man which
she leaves behind her for the prisoners, is a dear
friend of sombre Euripides, lures Aristophanes, the
mocker, into seriousness, mates herself with him in
a whole night's conversation, and wrings praise
and honour from the nimblest, the most cynical,
and the most world-wise intellect in Athens.

Thus, over against Pompilia, she is the image of
fine culture, held back from the foolishness and
vanity of culture by the steadying power of genius.
Then her judgment is always balanced. Each
thing to her has many sides. She decides moral

BALAUSTION 371

and intellectual questions and action with justice,
but with mercy to the wrong opinion and the wrong
thing, because her intellect is clear, tolerant, and
forgiving through intellectual breadth and power.
Pompilia is the image of natural goodness and of
its power. A spotless soul, though she is passed
through hell, enables her, without a trained intellect,
with ignorance of all knowledge, and with as little
vanity as Balaustion, to give as clear and firm a
judgment of right and wrong. She is as tolerant,
as full of excuses for the wrong thing, as forgiving,
as Balaustion, but it is by the power of goodness
and love in her, not by that of intellect. Browning
never proved his strength more than when he made
these two, in vivid contrast, yet in their depths in
harmony ; both equal, though so far apart, in noble
womanhood. Both are beyond convention; both
have a touch of impulsive passion, of natural wild-
ness, of flower-beauty. Both are, in hours of crisis,
borne beyond themselves, and mistress of the hour.
Both mould men, for their good, like wax in their
fingers. But Pompilia is the white rose, touched
with faint and innocent colour ; and Balaustion is
the wild pomegranate flower, burning in a crimson
of love among the dark green leaves of steady and
sure thought, her powers latent till needed, but
when called on and brought to light, flaming with
decision and revelation.

In this book we see her in her youth, her powers
as yet untouched by heavy sorrow. In the next,
in Aristophanes' Apology, we first find her in matured
strength, almost mastering Aristophanes ; and after-
wards in the depth of grief, as she flies with her
husband over the seas to Rhodes, leaving behind

372 BROWNING

her Athens, the city of her heart, ruined and
enslaved. The deepest passion in her, the
patriotism of the soul, is all but broken-hearted.
Yet, she is the life and support of all who are with
her; even a certain gladness breaks forth in her,
and she secures for all posterity the intellectual
record of Athenian life and the images, wrought to
vitality, of some of the greater men of Athens. So
we possess her completely. Her life, her soul, its
growth and strength, are laid before us. To follow
her through these two poems is to follow their
poetry. Whenever we touch her we touch imagi-
nation. Aristophanes' Apology is illuminated by
Balaustion's eyes. A glimpse here and there of
her enables us to thread our way without too great
weariness through a thorny undergrowth of modern
and ancient thought mingled together on the subject
of the Apology.

In Balaustion's Adventure she tells her tale, and
recites, as she did at Syracuse, the Alkestis to her
four friends. But she does more ; she comments
on it, as she did not at Syracuse. The comments
are, of course, Browning's, but he means them also
to reveal Balaustion. They are touched through-
out with a woman's thought and feeling, inflamed
by the poetic genius with which Browning has
endowed her. Balaustion is his dehberate picture
of genius, the great miracle.

The story of the Alkestis begins before the play.
Apollo, in his exile, having served King Admetos
as shepherd, conceives a friendship for the King,
helps him to his marriage, and knowing that he is
doomed to die in early life, descends to hell and
begs the Fates to give him longer life. That is a

BALAUSTION 373

motive, holding in it strange thoughts of life and
death and fate, which pleased Browning, and he
treats it separately, and with s^ardonie humour, in
the Prologue to one of his later volumes. The
Fates refuse to lengthen Admetos' hfe, unless
some one love him well enough to die for him.
They must have their due at the allotted time.

The play opens when that time arrives. We see,
in a kind of Prologue, Apollo leaving the house
of Admetos and Death coming to claim his victim.
Admetos has asked his father, mother, relations,
and servants to die instead of him. None will do
it ; but his wife, Alkestis, does. Admetos accepts
her sacrifice. Her dying, her death, the sorrow
of Admetos is described with all the poignant
humanity of Euripides. In the meantime Herakles
has come on the scene, and Admetos, though
steeped in grief, conceals his wife's death and
welcomes his friend to his house. As Alkestis is
the heroine of self-sacrifice, Admetos is the hero
of hospitality. Herakles feasts, but the indignant
bearing of an old servant attracts his notice, and he
finds out the truth. He is shocked, but resolves to
attack Death himself, who is bearing away Alkestis.
He meets and conquers Death and brings back
Alkestis alive to her husband. So the strong man
conquers the Fates, whom even Apollo could not
subdue.

This is a fine subject. Every one can see in how
many different ways it may be treated, with what
different ^conceptions, how variously the characters
may be built up, and what different ethical and
emotional situations may be imaginatively treated
in it. Racine himself thought it the finest of the

374 BROWNING

Greek subjects, and began a play upon it. But he
died before he finished it, and ordered his manu-
script to be destroyed. We may well imagine how
the quiet, stately genius of Racine would have
conceived and ordered it ; with the sincere passion,
held under restraint by as sincere a dignity, which
characterised his exalted style.

Balaustion treats it with an equal moral force,
and also with that modern moral touch which
Racine would have given it; which, while it re-
moved the subject at certain points from the Greek
morality, would yet have exalted it into a more
spiritual world than even the best of the Greeks
conceived. The commentary of Balaustion is her
own treatment of the subject. It professes to ex-
plain Euripides : it is in reaUty a fresh conception
of the characters and their motives, especially of
the character of Herakles. Her view of the cha-
racter of Alkestis, especially in her death, is not,
I think, the view which Euripides took. Her con-
demnation of Admetos is unmodified by those other
sides of the question which Euripides suggests.
The position Balaustion takes up with regard to
self-sacrifice is far more subtle, with its half-
Christian touches, than the Greek simplicity would
have conceived. Finally, she feels so strongly that
the subject has not been adequately conceived that,
at the end, she recreates for herself. Even at the
beginning she rebuilds the Euripidean matter.
When Apollo and Death meet, Balaustion conceives
the meeting for herself. She images the dread
Apollo as somewhat daunted, and images the divine
meeting of these two with modern, not Greek
imagination. It is like the meeting, she thinks, of

BALAUSTIOIV 375

a ruined eagle, caught as he swooped in a gorge,
half heedless, yet. terrific, with a lion, the haunter
of the gorge, the lord of the ground, who pauses,
ere he try the worst with the frightful, unfamiliar
creature, known in the shadows and silences of the
sky but not known here. It is the first example
we have of Balaustion's imaginative power working
for itself. There is another, farther on, where she
stays her recitation to describe Death's rush in on
Alkestis when the dialogue between him and Apollo
is over —

And, in the fire-flash of the appalling sword,
The uprush and the outburst, the onslaught
Of Death's portentous passage through the door,
ApoUon stood a pitying moment-space :
I caught one last gold gaze upon the night,
Nearing the world now : and the God was gone,
And mortals left to deal with misery.

So she speaks, as if she saw more than Euripides,
as if to her the invisible were visible — as it was.
To see the eternal unseen is the dower of imagina-
tion in its loftiest mood.

She is as much at home with the hero of earth,
the highest manhood, as she is with the gods.
When Herakles comes on the scene she cannot
say enough about him; and she conceives him
apart from the Herakles of Euripides. She paints
in him, and Browning paints through her, the idea
of the full, the perfect man ; and it is not the ideal
of the cultivated, of the sensitive folk. It is more
also a woman's than a man's ideal. For, now,
suddenly, into the midst of the sorrow of the house,
every one wailing, life full of penury and inactivity,
there leaps the " gay cheer of a great voice," the

376 BROWNING

full presence of the hero, his " weary happy face,
half god, half man, which made the god-part god
the more." His very voice, which smiled at sorrow,
and his look, which, saying sorrow was to be con-
quered, proclaimed to all the world " My life is
in my hand to give away, to make men glad,"
seemed to dry up all misery at its source, for his
love of man makes him always joyful. When
Admetos opened the house to him, and did not tell
him of his wife's death, Balaustion comments
" The hero, all truth, took him at his word, and
then strode off to feast." He takes, she thought,
the present rest, the physical food and drink as
frankly as he took the mighty labours of his fate.
And she rejoices as much in his jovial warmth, his
joy in eating and drinking and singing, and festivity,
as in his heroic soul. They go together, these
things, in a hero.

Making the most o' the minute, that the soul
And body, strained to height a minute since,
Might lie relaxed in joy, this breathing space,
For man's sake more than ever ;

He slew the pest of the marish, yesterday; to-
day he takes his fill of food, wine, song, and
flowers ; to-morrow he will slay another plague of
mankind.

So she sings, praising aloud the heroic temper,
as mighty in the natural joys of natural life, in the
strength and honour of the body, as in the saving
of the world from pain and evil. But this pleasure
of the senses, though in the great nature, is in it
under rule, and the moment Herakles hears of
Alkestis dead, he casts aside, in " a splendour of
resolve," the feast, wine, song, and garlands, and

BALAUSTION- 377

girds himself to fight with Death for her rescue.
And Balaustion, looking after him as he goes, cries
out the judgment of her soul on all heroism. It is
Browning's judgment also, one of the deepest things
in his heart; a constant motive in his poetry, a
master-thought in his life.

Gladness be with thee, Helper of our world!

I think this is the authentic sign and seal

Of Godship, that it ever waxes glad,

And more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts

Into a rage to suffer for mankind,

And recommence at sorrow : drops like seed

After the blossom, ultimate of all.

Say, does the seed scorn earth and seek the sun?

Surely it has no other end and aim

Than to drop, once more die into the ground,

Taste cold and darkness and oblivion there :

And thence rise, tree-like grow through pain to joy,

More joy and most joy, — do man good again.

That is the truth Browning makes this woman
have the insight to reveal. Gladness of soul, be-
coming at one with sorrow and death and rising
out of them the conqueror, but always rejoicing, in
itself, in the joy of the universe and of God, is the
root-heroic quality.

Then there is the crux of the play — Alkestis is
to die for Admetos, and does it. What of the con-
duct of Admetos ? What does Balaustion, the
woman, think of that ">. She thinks Admetos is a
poor creature for having allowed it. When Alkestis
is brought dying on the stage, and Admetos follows,
mourning over her, Balaustion despises him, and
she traces in the speech of Alkestis, which only
relates to her children's fate and takes no notice of
her husband's protestations, that she has judged her
husband, that love is gone in sad contempt, that all

378 BROWNING

Admetos has given her is now paid for, that her
death is a business transaction which has set her free
to think no more about him, only of her children.
For, what seems most pertinent for him to say, if
he loved, "Take, O Fates, your promise back, and
take my life, not hers," he does not say. That is
not really the thought of Euripides.

Then, and this is subtly but not qtiite justly
wrought into Euripides by Balaustion, she traces
through the play the slow awakening of the soul
of Admetos to the low-hearted thing he had done.
He comes out of the house, having disposed all
things duteously and fittingly round the dead, and
Balaustion sees in his grave quietude that the
truth is dawning on him ; when suddenly Pheres,
his father, who had refused to die for him, comes
to lay his offering on the bier. This, Balaustion
thinks, plucks Admetos back out of unselfish
thought into that lower atmosphere, in which he
only sees his own advantage in the death of
Alkestis ; and in which he now bitterly reproaches
his father because he did not die to save Alkestis.
And the reproach is the more bitter because — and
this Balaustion, with her subtle morality, suggests
— an undernote of conscience causes him to see
his own baser self, now prominent in his acceptance
of Alkestis' sacrifice, finished and hardened in the
temper of his father — young Admetos in old Pheres.
He sees with dread and pain what he may become
when old. This hatred of himself in his father is,
Balaustion thinks, the source of his extreme violence
with his father. She, with the Greek sense of what
was due to Nature, seeks to excuse this unfitting
scene. Euripides has gone too far for her. She

BALAUSTION 379

thinks that, if Sophocles had to do with the matter,
he would have made the Chorus explain the man.

But the unnatural strife would not have been
explained by Sophocles as Balaustion explains it.
That fine ethical twist of hers — "that Admetos
hates himself in his father," is too modern for a
Greek. It has the casuistical subtlety which the
over-developed conscience of the Christian Church
encouraged. It is intellectual, too, rather than real,
metaphysical more than moral, Browning rather
than Sophocles. Nor do I believe that a Rhodian
girl, even with all Athens at the back of her brain,
would have conceived it at all. Then Balaustion
makes another comment on the situation, in
which there is more of Browning than of her-
self. "Admetos," she says, "has been kept back
by the noisy quarrel from seeing into the truth of
his own conduct, as he was on the point of doing,
for • with the low strife comes the little mind.' "
But when his father is gone, and Alkestis is borne
away, then, in the silence of the house and the
awful stillness in his own heart, he sees the truth.
His shame, the whole woe and horror of his failure
in love, break, like a toppling wave, upon him, and
the drowned truth, so long hidden from him by
self, rose to the surface, and appalled him by its
dead face. His soul in seeing true, is saved, yet
so as by fire. At this moment Herakles comes in,
leading Alkestis, redeemed from death ; and find-
ing, so Balaustion thinks, her husband restored to
his right mind.

But, then, we ask, how Alkestis, having found
him fail, will live with him again, how she, having
topped nobility, will endure the memory of the

38o BROWNING

ignoble in him? That would be the interesting
subject, and the explanation Euripides suggests
does not satisfy Balaustion. The dramatic situa-
tion is unfinished. Balaustion, with her fine instinct,
feels that, to save the subject, it ought to be other-
wise treated, and she invents a new Admetos, a
new Alkestis. She has heard that Sophocles meant
to make a new piece of the same matter, and her
balanced judgment, on which Browning insists so
often, makes her say, " That is well. One thing has
many sides ; but still, no good supplants a good, no
beauty undoes another ; still I will love the Alkestis
which I know. Yet I have so drunk this poem, so
satisfied with it my heart and soul, that I feel as if I,
too, might make a new poem on the same matter."

Ah, that brave
Bounty of poets, the one royal race
That ever was, or will be, in this world !
They give no gift that bounds itself and ends
I' the giving and the taking : theirs so breeds
I' the heart and soul o' the taker, so transmutes
The man who only was a man before.
That he grows godlike in his turn, can give —
He also : share the poet's privilege,
Bring forth new good, new beauty, from the old.

And she gives her conception of the subject, and
it further unfolds her character.

When Apollo served Admetos, the noble nature
of the God so entered into him that all the beast
was subdued in the man, and he became the ideal
King, living for the ennoblement of his people.
Yet, while doing this great work, he is to die, still
young, and he breaks out, in a bitter calm, against
the fate which takes him from the work of his life.

" Not so," answers Alkestis, " I knew what was

BALAUSTION 381

coming, and though Apollo urged me not to disturb
the course of things, and not to think that any
death prevents the march of good or ends a life,
yet he yielded ; and I die for you — all happiness."

" It shall never be," replies Admetos ; " our two
lives are one. But I am the body, thou art the
soul ; and the body shall go, and not the soul. I
claim death."

" No," answered Alkestis ; " the active power to
rule and weld the people into good is in the man.
Thou art the acknowledged power. And as to the
power which, thou sayest, I give thee, as to the soul
of me — take it, I pour it into thee. Look at me."
And as he looks, she dies, and the King is left —
still twofold as before, with the soul of Alkestis in
him — himself and her. So is Fate cheated, and
Alkestis in Admetos is not dead. A passage follows
of delicate and simple poetry, written by Browning
in a manner in which I would he had oftener written.
To read it is to regret that, being able to do this, he
chose rather to write, from time to time, as if he
were hewing his way through tangled underwood.
No lovelier image of Proserpina, has been made in
poetry, not even in Tennyson's Demeter, than this —

And even while it lay, i' the look of him,

Dead, the dimmed body, bright Alkestis' soul

Had penetrated through the populace

Of ghosts, was got to Kord, — throned and crowned

The pensive queen o' the twilight, where she dwells

For ever in a muse, but half away

From flowery earth she lost and hankers for, —

And theVe demanded to become a ghost

Before the time.

Whereat the softened eyes
Of the lost maidenhood that lingered still
Straying among the flowers in Sicily,

382 BROWNING

Sudden was startled back to Hades' throne
By that demand : broke through humanity
Into the orbed omniscience of a God,
Searched at a glance Alkestis to the soul
And said . . .

" Hence, thou deceiver ! This is not to die,
If, by the very death which mocks me now,
The life, that's left behind and past my power,
Is formidably doubled . . ."

And so, before the embrace relaxed a whit,
The lost eyes opened, still beneath the look ;
And lo, Alkestis was alive again,
And of Admetos' rapture who shall speak ?

The old conception has more reality. This is in
the vague world of modem psychical imagination.
Nevertheless it has its own beauty, and it enlarges
Browning's picture of the character of Balaustion.

Her character is still further enlarged in Aris-
tophanes' Apology. That poem, if we desire in-
tellectual exercise, illuminated by flashings of
imagination, is well worth reading, but to com-
prehend it fully, one must know a great deal of
Athenian life and of the history of the Comic
Drama. It is the defence by Aristophanes of his
idea of the business, the method, and the use of
Comedy. How far what he says is Browning
speaking for Aristophanes, and how far it is Brown-
ing speaking for himself, is hard to tell. And it
would please him to leave that purposely obscure.
What is alive and intense in the poem is, first, the
realisation of Athenian life in several scenes,
pictured with all Browning's astonishing force of
presentation, as, for instance, the feast after the
play, and the grim entrance of Sophocl e s , black
from head to foot, among the glittering and drunken
revellers, to announce the death of Euripides.

BALAUSTION 383

Secondly, there is the presentation of Aristo-
phanes. Browning has created him for us —

And no ignoble presence ! On the bulge

Of the clear baldness, — all his head one brow, —

True, the veins swelled, blue network, and there surged

A red from cheek to temple, — then retired

As if the dark-leaved chaplet damped a flame, —

Was never nursed by temperance or health.

But huge the eyeballs rolled back native fire.

Imperiously triumphant : nostrils wide

Waited their incense ; while the pursed mouth's pout

Aggressive, while the beak supreme above.

While the head, face, nay, pillared throat thrown back.

Beard whitening under like a vinous foam.

There made a glory, of such insolence —

I thought, — such domineering deity

Hephaistos might have carved to cut the brine

For his gay brother's prow, imbrue that path

Which, purphng, recognised the conqueror.

Impudent and majestic : drunk, perhaps.

But that's religion ; sense too plainly snuffed :

Still, sensuality was grown a rite.

We see the man, the natural man, to the life.
But as the poem goes on, we company with his in-
tellect, his soul, with the struggle of sensualism
with his knowledge of a more ideal life ; above all,
with one, who indulging the appetites and senses
of the natural man, is yet, at a moment, their
master. The coarse chambers of his nature are
laid bare, his sensuous pleasure in the lower forms
of human life, his joy in satirising them, his con-
tempt for the good or the ideal life, if it throw the
sensual man away. Then, we are made to know
the power he has to rise above this — without
losing it — into the higher imaginative region
where, for the time, he feels the genius of
Sophocles, Euripides, the moral power of Balaus-

384 BROWNING

tion, and the beauty of the natural world. Indeed,
in that last we find him in his extant plays. Few
of the Greeks could write with greater exquisiteness
of natural beauty than this wild poet who loved
the dunghill. And Browning does not say this,
but records in this Apology how when Aristophanes
is touched for an instant by Balaustion's reading of
the Herakles, and seizing the psalterion sings the
song of Thamuris marching to his trial with the
Muses through a golden autumn morning — it is
the glory and loveliness of Nature that he sings.
This portraiture of the poet is scattered through
the whole poem. It is too minute, too full of detail
to dwell on here. It has a thousand touches of
life and intimacy. And it is perhaps the finest
thing Browning has done in portraiture of cha-
racter. But then there was a certain sympathy in
Browning for Aristophanes. The natural man was
never altogether put aside by Browning.

Lastly, there is the fresh presentation of Balaus-
tion, of the matured and experienced woman whom
we have known as a happy girl. Euthycles and
she are married, and one night, as she is sitting
alone, he comes in, bringing the grave news that
Euripides is dead, but had proved at the court of
Archelaos of Macedonia his usefulness as counsellor
to King and State, and his power still to sing —

Clashed thence Alkaion, maddened Peniheus' up ;
Then music sighed itself away, one moan
Iphigeneia made by Aulis' strand ;
With her and music died Euripides.

And Athens, hearing, ceased to mock and cried
" Bury Euripides in Peiraios, bring his body back."
" Ah," said Balaustion, " Death alters the point of

BALAUSTION 385

view. But our tribute is in our hearts ; and more,
his soul will now for ever teach and bless the world.

Is not that day come? What if you and I
Re-sing the song, inaugurate the fame?

For, hke Herakles, in his own Alkestis, he now
strides away (and this is the true end of the Al-
kestis) to surmount all heights of destiny." While
she spoke thus, the Chorus of the Comedy, girls,
boys, and men, in drunken revel and led by Ari-
stophanes, thundered at the door and claimed ad-
mittance. Balaustion is drawn confronting them
— tall and superb, like Victory's self ; her warm
golden eyes flashing under her black hair, " earth
flesh with sun fire," statuesque, searching the crowd
with her glance. And one and all dissolved before
her silent splendour of reproof, all save Aristo-
phanes. She bids him welcome. "Glory to the
Poet," she cries. " Light, light, I hail it every-
where ; no matter for the murk, that never should
have been such orb's associate." Aristophanes
changes as he sees her ; a new man confronts her.

" So ! " he smiled, " piercing to my thought at once,

You see myself ? Balaustion's fixed regard

Can strip the proper Aristophanes

Of what our sophists, in their jargon, style

His accidents ? "

He confesses her power to meet him in discourse,
unfolds his views and plans to her, and having
contrasted himself with Euripides, bids her use
her thrice-refined refinement, her rosy strength, to
match his argument. She claims no equality with
him, the consummate creator; but only, as a woman,
the love of all things lovable with which to meet

386 BROWNING

him who has degraded Comedy. She appeals to
the high poet in the man, 'and finally bids him
honour the deep humanity in Euripides. To prove
it, and to win his accord, she reads the Herakles,
the last of Euripides.

It is this long night of talk which Balaustion
dictates to Euthyces as she is sailing, day after
day, from Athens back to Rhodes. The aspect of
sea and sky, as they sail, is kept before us, for
Balaustion uses its changes as illustrations, and the
clear descriptions tell, even more fully than before,
how quick this woman was to observe natural
beauty and to correlate it with humanity. Here
is one example. In order to describe a change in
the temper of Aristophanes from wild licence to
momentary gravity, Balaustion seizes on a cloud-
incident of the voyage — Euthyces, she cries,

..." o'er the boat side, quick, what change,

Watch — in the water ! But a second since,

It laughed a ripply spread of sun and sea,

Ray fused with wave, to never disunite.

Now, sudden, all the surface hard and black,

Lies a quenched light, dead motion : what the cause?

Look up, and lo, the menace of a cloud

Has solemnised the sparkling, spoiled the sport!

Just so, some overshadow, some new care

Stopped all the mirth and mocking on his face.

Her feeUng for Nature is as strong as her feeling
for man, and both are woven together.

All her powers have now ripened, and the last
touch has been given to them by her ideal sorrow
for Athens, the country of her soul, where high
intelligence and imagination had created worlds.
She leaves it now, ruined and degraded, and the
passionate outbreak of her patriotic sorrow with

BALAUSTION 387

which the poem opens lifts the character and im-
agination of Balaustion into spiritual splendour.
Athens, "hearted in her heart," has perished
ignobly. Not so, she thinks, ought this beauty
of the world to have died, its sea-walls razed to
the ground to the fluting and singing of harlots ;
but in some vast overwhelming of natural energies

— in the embrace of fire to join the gods ; or in a
sundering of the earth, when the Acropolis should
have sunken entire and risen in Hades to console
the ghosts with beauty; or in the multitudinous
over-swarming of ocean. This she could have
borne, but, thinking of what has been, of the mis-
ery and disgrace, " Oh," she cries, " bear me away

— wind, wave, and bark ! " But Browning does not
leave Balaustion with only this deep emotion in her
heart. He gives her the spiritual passion of genius.
She is swept beyond her sorrow into that invisible
world where the soul lives with the gods, with the
pure Ideas of justice, truth, and love ; where im-
mortal life awaits the disembodied soul and we
shall see Euripides. In these high thoughts she
will outlive her sorrow.

Why should despair be? Since, distinct above

Man's wickedness and folly, flies the wind

And floats the cloud, free transport for our soul

Out of its fleshly durance dim and low, —

Since disembodied soul anticipates

(Thought-borne as now, in rapturous unrestraint)

Above all crowding, crystal silentness,

Above all noise, a silver solitude : —

Surely^ where thought so bears soul, soul in time

May permanently bide, " assert the wise,"

There live in peace, there work in hope once more —

O nothing doubt, Philemon! Greed and strife,

Hatred and cark and care, what place have they

388 BROWNING

In yon blue liberality of heaven?

How the sea helps! How rose-smit earth will rise

Breast-high thence, some bright morning, and be Rhodes!

Heaven, earth, and sea, my warrant — in their name,

Believe — o'er falsehood, truth is surely sphered,

O'er ugliness beams beauty, o'er this world

Extends that realm where, " as the wise assert,"

Philemon, thou shalt see Euripides

Clearer than mortal sense perceived the man!

We understand that she has drunk deep of
Socrates, that her spiritual sense reached onward
to the Platonic Socrates. In this supersensuous
world of thought she is quieted out of the weak-
ness which made her miserable over the fall of
Athens ; and in the quiet, Browning, who will lift
his favourite into perfectness, adds to her spiritual
imagination the dignity of that moral judgment
which the intellect of genius gathers from the facts
of history. In spite of her sorrow, she grasps the
truth that there was justice in the doom of Athens.
Let justice have its way. Let the folk die who
pulled her glory down. This is her prophetic
strain, the strength of the Hebrew in the Greek.

And then the prophet in the woman passes, and
the poet in her takes the lyre. She sees the splen-
did sunset. Why should its extravagance of glory
run to waste .' Let me build out of it a new Athens,
quarry out the golden clouds and raise the Acropo-
lis, and the rock-hewn Place of Assembly, whence
new orators may thunder over Greece; and the
theatre where .(Eschylus, Sophocles, Euripides,
god-Uke still, may contend for the prize. Yet — and
there is a further change of thought — yet that may
not be. To build that poetic vision is to slip away
from reality, and the true use of it. The tragedy

BALAUSTION 389

is there — irrevocable. Let it sink deep in us till
we see Rhodes shining over the sea. So great, so
terrible, so piteous it is, that, dwelt on in the soul
and seen in memory, it will do for us what the
great tragedians made their tragic themes do for
their hearers. It will purify the heart by pity and
terror from the baseness and littleness of life. Our
small hatreds, jealousies, and prides, our petty
passions will be rebuked, seem nothing in its
mighty sorrow.

What else in life seems piteous any more
After such pity, or proves terrible
Beside such terror ;

This is the woman — the finest creature Brown-
ing drew, young and fair and stately, with her dark
hair and amber eyes, lovely — the wild pomegranate
flower of a girl — as keen, subtle, and true of intellect
as she is lovely, able to comment on and check
Euripides, to conceive a new play out of his subject,
to be his dearest friend, to meet oh equality Aristo-
phanes ; so full of lyric sympathy, so full of eager
impulse that she thrills the despairing into action,
enslaves a city with her eloquence, charms her
girl-friends by the Ilissus, and so sends her spirit
into her husband that, when the Spartans advise
the razing of Athens to the ground, he saves
the city by those famous lines of Euripides, of
which Milton sang ; so at one with natural beauty,
with all beauty, that she makes it live in the
souls of ' men ; so clear in judgment that she
sees the right even when it seems lost in the
wrong, that she sees the justice of the gods in the
ruin of the city she most loved ; so poetic of temper

390 BROWNING

that everything speaks to her of life, that she
acknowledges the poetry which rises out of the
foulness she hates in Aristophanes, that she loves
all humanity, bad or good, and Euripides chiefly
because of his humanity ; so spiritual, that she can
soar out of her most overwhelming sorrow into the
stormless world where the gods breathe pure thought
and for ever love ; and, abiding in its peace, use the
griefs of earth for the ennoblement of the life of
men, because in all her spiritual apartness, however
far it bear her from earth, she never loses her close
sympathy with the fortunes of mankind. Nay, from
her lofty station she is the teacher of truth and love
and justice, in splendid prophecy. It is with an
impassioned exaltation, worthy of Sibyl and Pytho-
ness in one, of divine wisdom both Roman and
Greek, that she cries to the companions of her
voyage words which embody her soul and the soul
of all the wise and loving of the earth, when they
act for men ; bearing their action, thought, and
feeling beyond man to God in man —

Speak to the infinite intelligence.
Sing to the everlasting sympathy !

CHAPTER XVI

THE RING AND THE BOOK

WHEN Browning published The Ring and the
Book, he was nearly fifty years old. All
his powers (except those which create the lyric) are
used therein with mastery ; and the ease with which
he writes is not more remarkable than the exultant
pleasure which accompanies the ease. He has, as
an artist, a hundred tools in hand, and he uses them
with certainty of execution. The wing of his in-
vention does not falter through these twelve books,
nor droop below the level at which he began them ;
and the epilogue is written with as much vigour as
the prologue. The various books demand various
powers. In each book the powers are proportionate
to the subject ; but the mental force behind each
exercise of power is equal throughout. He writes
as well when he has to make the guilty soul of
Guido speak, as when the innocence of Pompilia
tells her story. The gain-serving lawyers, each
distinctly isolated, tell their worldly thoughts as
clearly as Caponsacchi reveals his redeemed and
spiritualised soul. The parasite of an aristocratic
and thoughtless society in Tertium Qmdis not more
vividly drawn than the Pope, who has left in his old
age the conventions of society behind him, and

391

392 BROWNING

speaks in his silent chamber face to face with God.
And all the minor characters, of whom there are a
great number, ranging from children to old folk,
from the peasant to the Cardinal, through every
class of society in Italy — are drawn, even when they
are slashed out in only three lines, with such force,
certainty, colour, and life that we know them better
than our friends. The variousness of the product
would seem to exclude an equality of excellence in
drawing and invention. But it does not. It
reveals and confirms it. The poem is a miracle of
intellectual power.

This great length, elaborate detail, and the repeti-
tion so many times of the same story, would
naturally suggest to an intending reader that the
poem might be wearisome. Browning, suspecting
this, and in mercy to a public who does not care for
a work of longue haleine, published it at first in four
volumes, with a month's interval between each
volume. He thought that the story told afresh by
characters widely different would strike new, if each
book were read at intervals of ten days. There
were three books in each volume. And if readers
desire to realise fully the intellectual tour deforce
contained in telling the same story twelve times
over, and making each telling interesting, they
cannot do better than read the book as Browning
wished it to be read. " Give the poem four months,
and let ten days elapse between the reading of each
book," is what he meant us to understand. More-
over, to meet this possible weariness, Browning,
consciously, or probably unconsciously, since genius
does the right thing without asking why, continu-
ally used a trick of his own which, at intervals,

THE RING AND THE BOOK 393

stings the reader into wakefulness and pleasure, and
sends him on to the next page refreshed and happy.
After fifty, or it may be a hundred lines of somewhat
dry analysis, a vivid illustration, which concentrates
all the matter of the previous lines, flashes on the
reader as a snake might flash across a traveller's
dusty way : or some sudden description of an Italian
scene in the country or in the streets of Rome
enlivens the well-known tale with fresh humanity.
Or a new character leaps up out of the crowd, and
calls us to note his ways, his dress, his voice, his
very soul in some revealing speech, and then passes
away from the stage, while we turn, refreshed (and
indeed at times we need refreshment), to the main
speaker, the leading character.

But to dwell on the multitude of portraits with
which Browning's keen observation, memory, and
love of human nature have embellished The Ring
and the Book belongs to another part of this chapter.
At present the question rises : " What place does
The Ring and the Book hold in Browning's develop-
ment?" It holds a central place. There was always
a struggle in Browning between two pleasures;
pleasure in the exercise of his intellect — his wit, in
the fullest sense of the word ; pleasure in the exer-
cise of his poetic imagination. Sometimes one of
these had the upper hand in his poems, sometimes
the other, and sometimes both happily worked to-
gether. When the exercise of his wit had the
upper hand, it tended to drive out both imagination
and passion. Intellectual play may be without any
emotion except its delight in itself. Then its mere
cleverness attracts its user, and gives him an easily
purchased pleasure. When a poet falls a complete

394 BROWNING

victim to this pleasure, imagination hides her face
from him, passion runs away, and what he produces
resembles, but is not, poetry. And JBrowning, who
had got perilously near to the absence of poetry in
Bishop Blougram's Apology, succe&AedmMr. Sludge,
the Medium, in losing poetry altogether. In The
Ring and the Book there are whole books, and long
passages in its other books in which poetry almost
ceases to exist and is replaced by brilliant clever-
ness, keen analysis, vivid description, and a com-
bination of wit and fancy which is rarely rivalled ;
but no emotion, no imagination such as poets use
inflames the coldness of these qualities into the
glow of poetry. The indefinable difference which
makes imaginative work into poetry is not there.
There is abundance of invention ; but that, though
a part of imagination, belongs as much to the art of
prose as to the art of poetry.

Browning could write thus, out of his intellect
alone. None of the greater poets could. Their
genius could not work without fusing into their
intellectual work intensity of feeling ; and that com-
bination secured poetic treatment of their subject.
It would have been totally impossible for Milton,
Shakespeare, Dante, Vergil, or even the great mass
of second-rate poets, to have written some of Brown-
ing's so-called poetry — no matter how they tried.
There was that in Browning's nature which enabled
him to exercise his intellectual powers alone, without
passion, and so far he almost ceases to deserve the
name of poet. And his pleasure in doing this grew
upon him, and having done it with dazzling power
in part of The Ring and the Book, he was carried
away by it and produced a number of so-called

THE RING AND THE BOOK 395

poems ; terrible examples of what a poet can come
to when he has allowed his pleasure in clever
analysis to tyrannise over him — Prince Hohenstiel-
Schwangau, The Inn Album, Red Cotton Night-Cap
Country, and a number of shorter poems in the
volumes which followed. In these, what Milton
meant by passion, simplicity, and sensuousness were
banished, and imagination existed only as it exists
in a prose writer.

This condition was slowly arrived at. It had not
been fully reached when he wrote The Ring and the
Book. His poetic powers resisted their enemies for
many years, and had the better in the struggle. If
it takes a long time to cast a devil out, it takes a
longer time to depose an angel. And the devil may
be utterly banished, but the angel never. And
though the devil of mere wit and the little devils of
analytic exercise — devils when they usurp the throne
in a poet's soul and enslave imaginative emotion —
did get the better of Browning, it was only for a
time. Towards the end of his life he recovered, but
never as completely as he had once possessed them,
the noble attributes of a poet. The evils of the
struggle clung to him; the poisonous pleasure he
had pursued still affected him ; he was again and
again attacked by the old malaria. He was as a
brand plucked from the burning.

The Ring and the Book is t\ie central point of this
struggle. It is full of emotion and thought con-
centrated on the subject, and commingled by imagi-
nation to' produce beauty. And whenever this is the
case, as in the books which treat of Capon sacchi
and Pompilia, we are rejoiced by poetry. In their
lofty matter of thought and feeling, in their simplicity

396 BROWNING

and nobleness of spiritual beauty, poetry is domi-
nant. In them also his intellectual powers, and his
imaginative and passionate powers, are fused into
one fire. Nor is the presentation of Guido Fran-
ceschini under two faces less powerful, or that of
the Pope, in his meditative silence. But in these
books the poetry is less, and is mingled, as would
naturally indeed be the case, with a searching
analysis, which intrudes too much into their imagi-
native work. Over-dissection makes them cold.
In fact, in fully a quarter of this long poem, the
analysing understanding, that bustling and self-
conscious person, who plays only on the surface
of things and separates their elements from one
another instead of penetrating to their centre ; who
is incapable of seeing the whole into which the
various elements have combined — is too masterful
for the poetry. It is not, then, imaginative, but
intellectual pleasure, which, as we read, we gain.

Then again there is throughout a great part of
the poem a dangerous indulgence of his wit; the
amusement of remote analogies; the use of far-
fetched illustrations ; quips and cranks and wanton
wiles of the reasoning fancy in deviating self-
indulgence; and an allusiveness which sets com-
mentators into note-making effervescence. All
these, and more, which belong to wit, are often
quite ungoverned, allowed to disport themselves as
they please. Such matters delight the unpoetic
readers of Browning, and indeed they are excellent
entertainment. But let us call them by their true
name ; let us not call them poetry, nor mistake their
art for the art of poetry. Writing them in blank
verse does not make them poetry. In Half-Rome,

THE RING AND THE BOOK 397

in The Other Half-Rome, and in Tertium Quid, these
elements of analysis and wit are exhibited in three-
fourths of the verse ; but the other fourth — in de-
scription of scenes, in vivid portraiture, in transient
outbursts out of which passion, in glimpses, breaks
— rises into the realm of poetry. In the books
which sketch the lawyers and their pleadings, there
is wit in its finest brilliancy, analysis in its keenest
veracity, but they are scarcely a poet's work. The
whole book is then a mixed book, extremely mixed.
All that was poetical in Browning's previous work is
represented in it, and all the unpoetical elements
which had gradually been winning power in him,
and which showed themselves previously in Bishop
Blougram and Mr. Sludge, are also there in full
blast. It was, as I have said, the central battlefield
of two powers in him. And when the The Ring
and the Book was finished, the inferior power had
for a time the victory.

To sum up then. There are books in the poem
wherg matter of passion and matter of thought are
imaginatively wrought together. There are others
where psychological thought and metaphysical
reasoning are dominant, but where passionate feel-
ing has also a high place. There are others where
analysis and wit far excel the elements of imagina-
tive emotion; and there are others where every
kind of imagination is absent, save that which is
consistent throughout and which never fails — the
power of creating men and women into distinct
individualities. That is left, but it is a power which
is not special to a poet. A prose writer may possess
it with the same fulness as a poet. Carlyle had it
as remarkably as Browning, or nearly as remarkably.

398 BROWNING

He also had wit — a heavier wit than Browning's,
less lambent, less piercing, but as forcible.

One thing more may be said. The poem is far
too long, and the subject does not bear its length.
The long poems of the world (I do not speak of
those by inferior poets) have a great subject, are
concerned with manifold fates of men, and are
naturally full of various events and varied scenery.
They interest us with new things from book to
book. In The Ring and the Book the subject is not
great, the fates concerned are not important, and the
same event runs through twelve books and is de-
scribed twelve times. However we may admire the
intellectual force which actually makes the work
interesting, and the passion which often thrills us
in it — this is more than the subject bears, and than
we can always endure. Each book is spun out far
beyond what is necessary ; a great deal is inserted
which would be wisely left out. No one could be
more concise than Browning when he pleased.
His power of flashing a situation or a thought into
a few words is well known. But he did not always
use this power. And in The Ring and the Book, as
in some of the poems that followed it, he seems
now and then to despise that power.

And now for the poem itself. Browning tells the
story eight times by different persons, each from a
different point of view, and twice more by the same
person before and after his condemnation and, of
course, from two points of view. Then he practi-
cally tells it twice more in the prologue and the
epilogue — twelve times in all — and in spite of what
I have said about the too great length of the poem,
this is an intellectual victory that no one else but

THE RING AND THE BOOK 399

Browning could have won against its difficulties.
Whether it was worth the creation by himself of the
difficulty is another question. He chose to do it,
and we had better submit to him and get the good
of his work. At least we may avoid some of the
weariness he himself feared by reading it in the way
I have mentioned, as Browning meant it to be read.
Poems — being the highest product of the highest
genius of which man is capable — ought to be ap-
proached with some reverence. And a part of that
reverence is to read them in accordance with the
intention and desire of the writer.

We ought not to forget the date of the tale when
we read the book. It is just two hundred years
ago. The murder of Pompilia took place in 1698 ;
and the book completes his studies of the Renaissance
in its decay. If Sordello is worth our careful reading
as a study of the thirteenth century in North Italy,
this book is as valuable as a record of the society of
its date. It is, in truth, a mine of gold ; pure crude
ore is secreted from man's life, then moulded into
figures of living men and women by the insight
and passion of the poet. In it is set down Rome as
she was — her customs, opinions, classes of society;
her dress, houses, streets, lanes, byeways, and
squares ; her architecture, fountains, statues, courts
of law, convents, gardens ; her fashion and its
drawing-rooms, the various professions and their
habits, high life and middle class, tradesmen and
beggars, priest, friar, lay-ecclesiastic, . cardinal, and
Pope. Nowhere is this pictorial and individualising
part of Browning's genius more delighted with its
work. Every description is written by a lover of
humanity, and with joy.

400 BROWNmG

Nor is he less vivid in the mise-en-scine in which
he places this multitude of personages. In Half-
Rome we mingle with the crowd between Palazzo
Fiano and Ruspoli, and pass into the church of
Lorenzo in Lucina where the murdered bodies are
exposed. The mingled humours of the crowd, the
various persons and their characters are combined
with and enhanced by the scenery. Then there is
the Market Place by the Capucin convent of the
Piazza Barberini, with the fountains leaping ; then
the Reunion at a palace, and the fine fashionable
folk among the mirrors and the chandeliers, each
with their view of the question; then the Court-
house, with all its paraphernalia, where Guido and
Caponsacchi plead; then, the sketches, as new
matters turn up, of the obscure streets of Rome,
of the country round Arezzo, of Arezzo itself, of
the post road from Arezzo to Rome and the country
inn near Rome, of the garden house in the suburbs,
of the households of the two advocates and their
different ways of living ; of the Pope in his closet
and of Guido in the prison cell ; and last, the full
description of the streets and the Piazza del Popolo
on the day of the execution — all with a hundred
vivifying, illuminating, minute details attached to
them by this keen-eyed, observant, questing poet
who remembered everything he saw, and was able
to use each detail where it was most wanted.
Memories are good, but good usage of them is the
fine power. The mise-en-sckne is then excellent, and
Browning was always careful to make it right, fitting,
and enlivening. Nowhere is this better done than in
the Introduction where he finds the book on a stall
in the Square of San Lorenzo, and describes modern

THE RING AND THE BOOK 401

Florence in his walk from the Square past the
Strozzi, the Pillar, and the Bridge to Casa Guidi
on the other side of the Arno opposite the little
Church of San Felice. During the walk he read
the book through, yet saw everything he passed
by. The description will show how keen were his
eyes, how masterly his execution.

That memorable day,
(June was the month, Lorenzo named the Square)
I leaned a little and overlooked my prize
By the low railing round the fountain-source
Close to the statue, where a step descends :
While clinked the cans of copper, as stooped and rose
Thick-ankled girls who brimmed them, and made place
For marketmen glad to pitch basket down.
Dip a broad melon-leaf that holds the wet.
And whisk their faded fresh. And on I read
Presently, though my path grew perilous
Between the outspread straw-work, piles of plait
Soon to be flapping, each o'er two black eyes
And swathe of Tuscan hair, on festas fine :
Through fire-irons, tribes of tongs, shovels in sheaves,
Skeleton bedsteads, wardrobe-drawers agape.
Rows of tall slim brass lamps with dangling gear, —
And worse, cast clothes a-sweetening in the sun :
None of them took my eye from oiF my prize.
Still read I on, from written title page
To written index, on, through street and street,
At the Strozzi, at the Pillar, at the Bridge ;
Till, by the time I stood at home again
In Casa Guidi by Felice Church,
Under the doorway where the black begins
With the first stone-slab of the staircase cold,
I had mastered the contents, knew the whole truth
Gathered together, bound up in this book.
Print three-fifths, written supplement the rest.

This power, combined with his power of por-
traiture, makes this long poem alive. No other
man of his century could paint like him the to and

402 ■ BROWNING

fro of a city, the hurly-burly of humanity, the crowd,
the movement, the changing passions, the loud or
quiet clash of thoughts, the gestures, the dress, the
interweaving of expression on the face, the whole
play of humanity in war or peace. As we read, we
move with men and women ; we are pressed every-
where by mankind. We listen to the sound of
humanity, sinking sometimes to the murmur we
hear at night from some high window in London ;
swelling sometimes, as in Sordello, into a roar of
violence, wrath, revenge, and war. And it was all
contained in that little body, brain, and heart ; and
given to us, who can feel it, but not give it. This
is the power which above all endears him to us as
a poet. We feel in each poem not only the waves
of the special event of which he writes, but also the
large vibration of the ocean of humanity.

He was not unaware of this power of his. We
are told in Sordello that he dedicated himself to
the picturing of humanity; and he came to think
that a Power beyond ours had accepted this dedi-
cation, and directed his work. He declares in the
introduction that he felt a Hand (" always above
my shoulder — mark the predestination"), that
pushed hifti to the stall where he found the fated
book in whose womb lay his child — The Ring and
the Book. And he beUeved that he had certain
God-given qualities which fitted him for this work.
These he sets forth in this introduction, and the
self-criticism is of the greatest interest.

The first passage is, when he describes how,
having finished the book and got into him all the
gold of its fact, he added from himself that to the
gold which made it workable — added to it his live

THE RING AND THE BOOK 403

soul, informed, transpierced it through and through
with imagination ; and then, standing on his balcony
over the street, saw the whole story from the begin-
ning shape itself out on the night, alive and clear,
not in dead memory but in living movement ; saw
right away out on the Roman road to Arezzo, and
all that there befell ; then passed to Rome again
with the actors in the tragedy, a presence with them
who heard them speak and think and act. The " life
in him abolished the death of things — deep call-
ing unto deep." For " a spirit laughed and leaped
through his every limb, and lit his eye, and lifted
him by the hair, and let him have his will " with
Pompilia, Guido, Caponsacchi, the lawyers, the
Pope, and the whole of Rome. And they rose from
the dead ; the old woe stepped on the stage again at
the magician's command ; and the rough gold of fact
was rounded to a ring by art. But the ring should
have a posy, and he makes that in a passionate cry
to his dead wife — a lovely spell where high think-
ing and full feeling meet and mingle like two deep
rivers. Whoso reads it feels how her spirit, living
still for him, brooded over and blest his masterpiece :

O lyric Love, half angel and half bird

And all a wonder and a wild desire, —

Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun,

Took sanctuary within the holier blue,

And sang a kindred soul out to his face, —

Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart —

When the first summons from the darkling earth

Reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue.

And bared them of the glory — to drop down,

To toil for man, to suffer or to die, —

This is the same voice : can thy soul know change?

Hail then, and hearken from the realms of help !

Never may I commence my song, my due

Xp God who best taught song by gift of thee,

404 BROWNING

Except with bent head and beseeching hand —
That still, despite the distance and the dark,
What was, again may be ; some interchange
Of grace, some splendour once thy very thought,
Some benediction anciently thy smile : J
— Never conclude, but raising hand and head
Thither where eyes, that cannot reach, yet yearn
. Elgr all hope, all sustainment, all reward,
llllir utmost up and on, — so blessing back
ISMpose thy realms of help, that heaven thy home,
^me whiteness which, I judge, thy face makes proud,
Soitie wanness where, I think, thy foot may fall! — —

The ^oem begins with the view that one half ol
Rome took of the events. At the very commence-
ment we touch one of the secondary interests of
the book, the incidental characters. Guido, Capon-
sacchi, Pompilia, the Pope, and, in a lesser degree,
Violante and Pietro, ^fe the chief characters, and the
main interest contracts;around them. But, through
all they say and do, aS a motley crowd through a
street, a great nutnber of minor characters move to
and fro ; and Bjrowning, whose eye sees every face,
and through me face into the soul, draws them one
by one, some more fully than others in perhaps a
hundred lines, some only in ten. Most of them are
types of a class, a profession or a business, yet
there is always a touch or two which isolates each
of them so that they do not only represent a class
but a personal character. He hated, like Morris, the
withering of the individual, nor did he believe, nor
any man who knows and feels mankind, that by that
the world grew more and moi^. The poem is full of
such individualities. It were^fell, as one example,
to read the whole account of We people who come
to see the murdered bodies laid out in the Church
of Lorenzo. The old, curious, doddering gossip of

THE RING AND THE BOOK 405

the Roman street is not less alive than the Cardinal,
and the clever pushing Curato ; and around them
are heard the buzz of talk, the movement of the
crowd. The church, the square are humming with
humanity.

He does the same clever work at the deathbed of
Pompilia. She lies in the House of the dying, and
certain folk are allowed to see her. Each one is
made alive by this creative pencil ; and all are dif-
ferent, one from the other — the Augustinian monk,
old mother Baldi chattering like a jay who thought
that to touch Pompilia's bedclothes would cure her
palsy, Cavalier Carlo who fees the porter to paint
her face just because she was murdered and famous,
the folk who argue on theology over her wounded
body. Elsewhere we possess the life-history of
Pietro and Violante, Pompilia's reputed parents;
several drawings of the retired tradesmen class, with
their gossips and friends, in the street of a poor
quarter in Rome; then, the Governor and Archbishop
of Arezzo, the friar who is kindly but fears the
world and all the busy-bodies of this provincial town.
Arezzo, its characters and indwellers, stand in clear
light. The most vivid of these sketches is Dominus
Hyacinthus, the lawyer who defends Guido. I do
not know anything better done, and more amusingly,
than this man and his household — a paternal
creature, full of his boys and their studies, making
us, in his garrulous pleasure, at home with them and
his fat wife. Browning was so fond of this sketch
that he drew him and his boys over again in the
epilogue.

These represent the episodical characters in this
drama of life ; and Browning has scattered them, as

4o6 BROWNING

it were, behind the chief characters, whom some-
times they illustrate and sometimes they contrast.
Of these the whitest, simplest, loveliest is PompiUa,
of whom I have already written. The other chief
characters are Count Guido and Giuseppe Capon-
sacchi ; and to the full development of these two
characters Browning gives all his powers. They
are contrasted types of the spirit of good and the
spirit of evil conquering in man. Up to a certain
point in life their conduct is much alike. Both
belong to the Church — one as a priest, one as a
layman affiliated to the Church. The lust of money
and self, when the character of Pompilia forces act,
turns Guido into a beast of greed and hate. The
same character, when it forces act, lifts Caponsacchi
into almost a saint. This was a piece of contrasted
psychology in which thegenius6f Browning revelled,
and he followed all the windings of it in both
these hearts with the zest of an explorer. They
were labyrinthine, but the more labyrinthine the
better he was pleased. Guide's first speech is
made before the court in his defence. We see dis-
closed the outer skin of the man's soul, all that he
would have the world know of him — cynical, mock-
ing, not cruel, not affectionate, a man of the world
whom life had disappointed, and who wishing to es-
tablish himself in a retired life by marriage had been
deceived and betrayed, he pleads, by his wife and
her parents — ^^an injured soul who, stung at last into
fury at having a son foisted on him, vindicates his
honour. And in this vindication his hypocrisy slips
at intervals from him, because his hatred of his wife
is too much for his hypocrisy.

This is the only touch of the wolf in the man — ■

THE RING AND THE BOOK 407

his cruel teeth shown momentarily through the
smooth surface of his defence. A weaker poet
would have left him there, not having capacity for
more. But Browning, so rich in thought he was,
had only begun to draw him. Guido is not only
painted by three others — by Caponsacchi, by Pom-
pilia, by the Pope — but he finally exposes his real
self with his own hand. He is condemned to death.
Two of his friends visit him the night before his
execution, in his cell. Then, exalted into eloquence
by the fierce passions of fear of death and hatred of
Pompilia, he lays bare as the night his very soul,
mean, cruel, cowardly, hungry for revenge, crying
for life, black with hate — a revelation such as in
literature can best be paralleled by the soliloquies
of lago. Baseness is supreme in his speech, hate
was never better given; the words are like the
gnashing of teeth ; prayers for life at any cost were
never meaner, and the outburst of terror and
despair at the end is their ultimate expression.

Over against him is set Caponsacchi, of noble
birth, of refined manner, one of those polished and
cultivated priests of whom Rome makes such excel-
lent use, and of whom Browning had drawn already
a different type in Bishop Blougram. He hesitated,
being young and gay, to enter the Church. But the
Archbishop of that easy time, two hundred years
ago,, told him the Church was strong 6il6Xigh to
bear a few light priests, and that he wO'uld be ket
free from many ecclesiastical duties if, by assiduity"'
in socifety and with women, he strengthened thj6'
social weight of the Church. In that w«y, makiiig
his madrigals and confessing fine ladies, he liv^d for
four years. This is an admirable sketch of a type

4o8 BROWNING

of Church society of that date, indeed, of any date
in any Church ; it is by no means confined to Rome.
On this worldly, careless, indifferent, pleasure-
seeking soul Pompilia, in her trouble and the pity
of it, rises like a pure star seen through mist that
opens at intervals to show her excelling brightness ;
and in a moment, at the first glimpse of her in the
theatre, the false man drops away ; his soul breaks
up, stands clear, and claims its divine birth. He is
born again, and then transfigured. The life of con-
vention, of indifference, dies before Pompilia's eyes ;
and on the instant he is true to himself, to her, and
to God. The fleeting passions which had absorbed
him, and were of the senses, are burned up, and the
spiritual love for her purity, and for purity itself
— that eternal, infinite desire — is now master of
his life. Not as Miranda and Ferdinand changed
eyes in youthful love, but as Dante and Beatrice
look on one another in Paradise, did Pompilia and
Caponsacchi change eyes, and know at once that
both were true, and see without speech the central
worth of their souls. They trusted one another and
they loved for ever. So, when she cried to him in
her distress, he did her bidding and bore her away
to Rome. He tells the story of their flight, and tells
it with extraordinary beauty and vehemence in her
defence. So noble is the tale that he convinces the
judges who at first had disbelieved him ; and the
Pope confesses that his imprudence was a higher
good than priestly prudence would have been.
When he makes his defence he has heard that
Pompilia has been murdered. Then we understand
that in his conversion to goodness he has not lost
but gained passion. Scorn of the judges, who could

THE RING AND THE BOOK 409

not see that neither he was guilty nor Porapilia ; fiery-
indignation with the murderer ; infinite grief for the
lamb slain by the wolf, and irrevocable love for the
soul of Pompilia, whom he will dwell with eternally
when they meet in Heaven, a love which Pompilia,
dying, declares she has for him, and in which,
growing and abiding, she will wait for him — burn
on his lips. He is fully and nobly a man ; yet, at
the end — and he is no less a man for it — the wild
sorrow at his heart breaks him down into a cry :
O great, just, good God ! Miserable me !
Pompilia ends her words more quietly, in the
faith that comes with death. Caponsacchi has to
live on, to bear the burden of the world. But
Pompilia has borne all she had to bear. All pain
and horror are behind her, as she lies in the stillness,
dying. And in the fading of this life, she knows she
loves Caponsacchi in the spiritual world and will
love him for ever. Each speaks according to the
circumstance, but she most nobly :

He is ordained to call and I to come!

Do not the dead wear flowers when dressed for God?

Say, — I am all in flowers from head to foot!

Say, — not one flower of all he said and did,

Might seem to flit unnoticed, fade unknown,

But dropped a seed, has grown a balsam-tree

Whereof the blossoming perfumes the place

At this supreme of moments ! He is a priest ;

He cannot marry therefore, which is right :

I think he would not marry if he could.

Marriage on earth seems such a counterfeit.

Mere imitation of the inimitable :

In heaven we have thejsal and true and sure.

'Tis there they neither marry nor are given

In marriage but are as tl(ie angels : right.

Oh how right that is, hoiy like Jesus Christ

410 BROWNING

To say that! Marriage-making for the earth,
With gold so much, — birth, power, repute so much,
Or beauty, youth so much, in lack of these !
Be as the angels rather, who, apart,
Know themselves into one, are found at length
Married, but marry never, no, nor give
In marriage ; they are man and wife at once
When the true time is ; here we have to wait
Not so long neither ! Could we by a wish
Have what we will and get the future now.
Would we wish aught done undone in the past?
So, let him wait God's instant men call years ;
Meantime hold hard by truth and his great soul,
Do out the duty ! Through such souls alone
God stooping shows sufficient of His light
For us i' the dark to rise by. And I rise.

Last of these main characters, the Pope appears.
Guido, condemned to death by the law, appeals from
the law to the head of the Church, because, being
half an ecclesiastic, his death can only finally be
decreed by the ecclesiastical arm. An old, old man, ,
with eyes clear of the quarrels, conventions, class/
prejudices of the world, the Pope has gone over all
the case during the day, and now night has fallen.
Far from the noise of Rome, removed from the pas- 1
sions of the chief characters, he is sitting in the still- 'j
ness of his closet, set on his decision. We see the
whole case now, through his mind, in absolute quiet. '
He has been on his terrace to look at the stars, and .
their solemn peace is with him. He feels that he is
now alone with God and his old age. And being

I alone, he is not concise, but garrulous and discursive.

I Browning makes him so on purpose. But discursive
as his mind is, his judgment is clear, his sentence
determined. Only, before he speaks, he will weigh
all the characters, and face any doubts that may

THE RING AND THE BOOK 411

shoot into his conscience. He passes Guido and
the rest before his spiritual tribunal, judging not
from the legal point of view, but from that which
his Master would take at the Judgment Day. How
have they lived ; what have they made of life .''
When circumstances invaded them with temptation,
how did they meet temptation .' Did they declare
by what they did that they were on God's side or
the devil's .-' And on these lines he delivers his
sentence on PompiUa, Caponsacchi, Guido, Pietro,
Violante, and the rest. He feels he speaks as the
Vicegerent of God.

This solemn, silent, lonely, unworldly judgment
of the whole case, done in God's presence, is, after
the noisy, crowded, worldly judgment of it by Rome,
after the rude humours of the law, and the terrible
clashing of, human passions, most impressive ; and
it rises into the majesty of old age in the summing
up of the characters of Pompilia, Caponsacchi, and
Guido. I wish Browning had left it there. But
he makes a sudden doubt invade the Pope with a
chill. Has he judged rightly in thinking that divine
truth is with him.' Is there any divine truth on
which he may infallibly repose .'

And then for many pages we are borne away
into a theological discussion, which I take leave to
say is wearisome; and which, after all, lands the
Pope exactly at the point from which he set out —
a conclusion at which, as we could have told him
beforehand, he would be certain to arrive. We
might have been spared this. It is an instance of
Browning's pleasure in intellectual discourse which
had, as I have said, such sad results on his imagina-
tive work. However, at the end, the Pope resumes

412 BROWNING

his interest in human life. He determines ; and
quickly — " Let the murderer die to-morrow."

Then comes the dreadful passion of Guido in the
condemned cell, of which I have spoken. And
then, one would think the poem would have closed.
But no, the epilogue succeeds, in which, after all
the tragedy, humour reigns supreme. It brings us
into touch with all that happened in this case after
the execution of Guido ; the letters written by the
spectators, the lawyer's view of the deed, the gossip
of Rome upon the interesting occasion. No piece
of humour in Browning's poetry, and no portrait-
sketching, is better than the letter written by a Vene-
tian gentleman in Rome giving an account of the
execution. It is high comedy when we are told
that the Austrian Ambassador, who had pleaded
for Guido's life, was so vexed by the sharp " no "
of the Pope (even when he had told the Pope that
he had probably dined at the same table with
Guido), that he very nearly refused to come to the
execution, and would scarcely vouchsafe it more
than a glance when he did come — as if this con-
duct of his were a slight which the Pope would
feel acutely. Nor does Browning's invention stop
with this inimitable letter. He adds two other
letters which he found among the papers; and
these give to the characters of the two lawyers,
new turns, new images of their steady professional
ambition not to find truth, but to gain the world.

One would think, after this, that invention would
be weary. Not at all ! The Augustinian monk
who attended PompiUa has not had attention
enough ; and this is the place. Browning thinks,
to show what he thought of the case, and how he

THE RING AND THE BOOK 413

used it in his profession. So, we are given a
great part of the sermon he preached on the occa-
sion, and the various judgments of Rome upon it.
It is wonderful, after invention has been actively
at work for eleven long books, pouring forth its
waters from an unfailing fountain, to find it, at the
end, as gay, as fresh, as keen, as youthful as ever.
This, I repeat, is the excellence of Browning's genius
— fulness of creative power, with imagination in it
like a fire. It does not follow that all it produces is,;
poetry ; and what it has produced in The Rmgand\
the Book is sometimes, save for the metre, nothing
better than prose. But this is redeemed by the
noble poetry of a great part of it. The book is, as
I have said, a mixed book — the central arena of
that struggle in Browning between prose and
poetry with a discussion of which this chapter
began, and with the mention of which I finish it.

CHAPTER XVII

LATER POEMS

A JUST appreciation of the work which Brown-
ing published after The Ring and the Book is
a difficult task. The poems are of various kinds, on
widely separated subjects ; and with the exception
of those which treat of Balaustion, they have no
connection with one another. Many of them must
belong to the earlier periods of his life, and been
introduced into the volumes out of the crowd of
unpublished poems every poet seems to possess.
These, when we come across them among their
middle-aged companions, make a strange impres-
sion, as if we found a white-thorn flowering in an
autumnal woodland ; and in previous chapters of
this book I have often fetched them out of their
places, and considered them where they ought to be
— in the happier air and Hght in which they were
born. I will not discuss them again, but in forming
any judgment of the later poems they must be
discarded.

The struggle to which I have drawn attention
between the imaginative and intellectual elements in
Browning, and which was equally balanced in The
Ring and the Book, continued after its publication,
but with a steady lessening of the imaginative and
414

LATER POEMS 415

a steady increase of the intellectual elements. One
poem, however, written before the publication of
The Ring and the Book, does not belong to this
struggle. This is HervS Kiel, a ballad of fire and
joy and triumph. It is curiously French in sentiment
and expression, and the eager sea-delight in it is
plainly French, not English in feeling. Nor is it
only French; it is Breton in audacity, in self-
forgetfulness, in carelessness of reward, and in
loyalty to country, to love, and to home. If Browning
had been all English, this transference of himself
into the soul of another nationaUty would have been
wonderful, nay, impossible. As it is, it is wonderful
enough ; and this self-transference — one of his
finest poetic powers — is nowhere better accom-
plished than in this poem, full of the salt wind and
the leap and joy of the sea-waves; but even more
full, as was natural to Browning, of the Breton soul
of Herv6 Riel.

In Balaustion's Adventure (1871) which next ap-
peared, the imaginative elements, as we have seen,
are still alive and happy; and though they only
emerge at intervals in its continuation, Aristophanes'
Apology (187s), yet they do emerge. Meanwhile,
between Balaustion's Adventure and the end of
i875,,he produced four poems — Prince Hohenstiel-
Schwangau, Saviour of Society ; Fifine at the Fair ;
Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, or Turf and Towers ;
and The Inn Album. They are all long, and were
published in four separate volumes. In them the
intellectual elements have all but completely con-
quered the imaginative. They are, however, favour-
ite " exercise-places " for some of his admirers, who
think that they derive poetic pleasures from their

41 6 iBROWmNG

study. The pleasure these poems give, when they
give it, is not altogether a poetic pleasure. It is
chiefly the pleasure of the understanding called
to solve with excitement a huddle of metaphysical
problems. They have the name but not the nature
of poetry.

They are the work of my Lord Intelligence —
attended by wit and fancy — who sits at the desk of
poetry, and with her pen in his hand. He uses the
furniture of poetry, but the goddess herself has left
the room. Yet something of her influence still fills
the air of the chamber. In the midst of the brilliant
display that fancy, wit, and intellect are making, a
soft steady light of pure song burns briefly at in-
tervals, and then is quenched; like the light of
stars seen for a moment of quiet effulgence among
the crackling and dazzling of fireworks.

The poems are, it is true, original. We cannot
class them with any previous poetry. They cannot
be called didactic or satirical. The didactic and
satirical poems of England are, for the most part,
artificial, concise, clear. These poems are not
artificial, clear, or concise. Nor do they represent
the men and women of a cultured, intellectual, and
conventional society, such as the poetry of Dryden
and Pope addressed. The natural man is in them
— the crude, dull, badly-baked man — what the later
nineteenth century called the real man. We see his
ugly, sordid, contemptible, fettered soul, and long
for Salinguerra, or Lippo Lippi, or even Caliban.
The representations are then human enough, with
this kind of humanity, but they might have been
left to prose. Poetry has no business to build its
houses on the waste and leprous lands of human

LATER POEMS 417

nature; and less business to call its work art.
Realism of this kind is not art, it is science.

Yet the poems are not scientific, for they have no
clarity of argument. Their wanderings of thought
are as intertangled as the sheep-walks on league
after league of high grasslands. When one has a
fancy to follow them, the pursuit is entertaining ;
but unless one has the fancy, there are livelier
employments. Their chief interest is the impres-
sion they give us of a certain side of Browning's
character. They are his darling debauch of clever-
ness, of surface-psychology. The analysis follows
no conventional lines, does not take or oppose any
well-known philosophical side. It is not much more
than his own serious or fantastic thinking indulging
itself with reckless abandon — amusing itself with
itself. And this gives them a humanity — a Brown-
ing humanity — outside of their subjects.

The subjects too, though not delightful, are
founded on facts of human life. Bishop Blougram
was conceived from Cardinal Wiseman's career,
Mr. Sludge from Mr. Home's. Prince Hohenstiel-
Schwangau explains and defends the expediency by
which Napoleon III. directed his political action.
The Inn Album, Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, are
taken from actual stories that occurred while Brown-
ing was alive, and Fifine at the Fair analyses a com-
mon crisis in the maturer lives of men and women.
The poems thus keep close to special cases, yet —
and in this the poet appears — they have an extension
which l:arries them beyond the particular subjects
into the needs and doings of a wider humanity.
Their little rivers run into the great sea. They have
then their human interest for a reader who does not

41 8 BROWNING

wish for beauty, passion, imagination, or the desires
of the spirit in his poetry ; but who hankers at his
solitary desk after realistic psychology, fanciful eth-
ics, curiosities of personal philosophy, cold intellec-
tual play with argument, and honest human ugliness.

Moreover, the method Browning attempts to use
in them for the discovery of truth is not the method
of poetry, nor of any of the arts. It is almost a
commonplace to say that the world of mankind and
each individual in it only arrives at the truth on
any matter, large or small, by going through and
exhausting the false forms of that truth — and a
very curious arrangement it seems to be. It is
this method Browning pursues in these poems.
He represents one after another various false or
half-true views of the matter in hand, and hopes
in that fashion to clear the way to the truth. But
he fails to convince partly because it is impossible
to give all or enough of the false or half-true views
of any one truth, but chiefly because his method is
one fitted for philosophy or science, but not for
poetry. Poetry claims to see and feel the truth at
once. When the poet does not assert that claim,
and act on it, he is becoming faithless to his art.

Browning's method in these poems is the method
of a scientific philosopher, not of an artist. He
gets his man into a debatable situation ; the man
debates it from various points of view ; persons are
introduced who take other aspects of the question,
or personified abstractions such as Sagacity, Reasoti,
Fancy give their opinions. Not satisfied with this.
Browning discusses it again from his own point of
view. He is then like the chess-player who himself
plays both red and white ; who tries to keep both

LATER POEMS 419

distinct in his mind, but cannot help now and again
taking one side more than the other ; and who is
frequently a third person aware of himself as play-
ing red, and also of himself as playing white ; and
again of himself as outside both the players and
criticising their several games. This is no exag-
gerated account of what is done in these poems.
Three people, even when the poems are monologues,
are arguing in them, and Browning plays all their
hands, even in The Inn Album, which is not a mono-
logue. In Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, when he
has told the story of the man and woman in all its
sordid and insane detail, with comments of his own,
he brings the victim of mean pleasure and mean
superstition to the top of the tower whence he
throws himself down, and, inserting his intelligence
into the soul of the man, explains his own view of
the situation. In Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, we
have sometimes what Browning really thinks, as in
the beginning of the poem, about the matter in
hand, and then what he thinks the Prince would
think, and then, to complicate the affair still more,
the Prince divides himself, and makes a personage
called Sagacity argue with him on the whole situation.
As to Fifine at the Fair — a poem it would not be
fair to class altogether with these — its involutions
resemble a number of live eels in a tub of water.
Don Juan changes his personality and his views
like a player on the stage who takes several parts ;
Elvire is a gliding phantom with gliding opinions ;
Fifine* is real, but she remains outside of this
shifting scenery of the mind ; and Browning, who
continually intrudes, is sometimes Don Juan and
sometimes himself and sometimes both together, and

420 BROWNING

sometimes another thinker who strives to bring, as
in the visions in the poem, some definition into this
changing cloudland of the brain. And after all, not
one of the questions posed in any of the poems is
settled in the end. I do not say that the leaving
of the questions unsettled is not like life. It is very
like life, but not like the work of poetry, whose
high office it is to decide questions which cannot
be solved by the understanding.
r Bishop Blougram thinks he has proved his points.
Gfigadibs is half convinced he has. But the Bishop,
on looking back, thinks he has not been quite sincere,
that his reasonings were only good for the occasion.
He has evaded the centre of the thing. What he
has said was no more than intellectual fencing. It
certainly is intellectual fencing of the finest kind.
Both the Bishop and his companion are drawn to
the life ; yet, and this is the cleverest thing in the
poem, we know that the Bishop is in reality a dif-
ferent man from the picture he makes of himself.
And the truth which in his talk underlies its
appearance acts on Gigadibs and sends him into a
higher life. The discussion — as it may be called
though the Bishop only speaks — concerning faith
and doubt is full of admirable wisdom, and urges me
to modify my statement that Browning took little
or no interest in the controversies of his time. Yet,
all through the fencing, nothing is decided. The
button is always on the Bishop's foil. He never
sends the rapier home. And no doubt that is
the reason that his companion, with " his sudden
healthy vehemence " did drive his we^on home
into life — and started for Australia. \

Mr. Sludge, the medium, excuses his imposture,

LATER POEMS 421

and then thinks "it may not altogether be imposture.
For all he knows there may really be spirits at the
bottom of it. He never meant to cheat ; yet he did
cheat. Yet, even if he lied, lies help truth to live ;
and he must live himself ; and God may have made
fools for him to live on ; " and many other are the
twists of his defence. The poem is as lifelike in its
insight into the mind of a supple cheat as it is a
brilliant bit of literature ; but Browning leaves the
matter unconcluded, as he would not have done, I
hold, had he been writing poetry. Prince Hohenstiel's
defence of expediency in poUtics is made by Browning
to seem now right, now wrong, because he assumes
at one time what is true as the ground of his
argument, and then at another what is plainly false,
and in neither case do the assumptions support the
arguments. What really is concluded is not the
question, but the slipperiness of the man who
argues. And at the end of the poem Browning
comes in again to say that words cannot be trusted
to hit truth. Language is inadequate to express it.
Browning was fond of saying this. It does not
seem worth saying. In one sense it is a truism ; in
another it resembles nonsense. Words are the only
way by which we can express truth, or our nearest
approach to what we think it is. At any rate,
silence, in spite of Maeterlinck, does not express it.
Moreover, with regard to the matter in hand.
Browning knew well enough how a poet would
decide the question of expediency he has here
brought into debate. He has decided it elsewhere ;
but here he chooses not to take that view, that he
may have the fun of exercising his clever brain.
There is no reason why he should not entertain

423 BROWNING

himself and us in this way ; but folk need not call
this intellectual jumping to and fro a poem, or try
to induce us to believe that it is the work of art.

When he had finished these products of a time
when he was intoxicated with his intellect, and of
course somewhat proud of it, the poet in him began
to revive. This resurrection had begun in Fifine at
the Fair. I have said it would not be just to class
this poem with the other three. It has many an
oasis of poetry where it is a happiness to rest. But
the way between their palms and wells is some-
what dreary walking, except to those who adore
minute psychology. The poem is pitilessly long.
If throughout its length it were easy to follow we
might excuse the length, but it is rendered difficult
by the incessant interchange of misty personalities
represented by one personality. Elvire, Fifine only
exist in the mind of Don Juan ; their thoughts are
only expressed in his words ; their outlines not only
continually fade into his, but his thought steals into
his presentation of their thought, till it becomes
impossible to individualise them. The form in
which Browning wrote the poem, by which he
made Don Juan speak for them, makes this want
of clearness and sharpness inevitable. The work
is done with a terrible cleverness, but it is weari-
some at the last.

The length also might be excused if the subject
were a great one or had important issues for man-
kind. But, though it has its interest and is human
enough, it does not deserve so many thousand lines
nor so much elaborate analysis. A few lyrics or a
drama of two acts might say all that is worth saying
on the matter. What Browning has taken for subject

LATER POEMS 423

is an every-day occurrence. We are grateful to him
for writing on so universal a matter, even though
it is unimportant; and he has tried to make it
uncommon and important by weaving round it an
intricate lace-work of psychology ; yet, when we get
down to its main lines, it is the ordinary event,
especially commonplace in any idle society which
clings to outward respectability and is dreadfully
wearied of it. Our neighbours across the Channel
call it La Crise when, after years of a quiet, not
unhappy, excellent married existence, day succeed-
ing day in unbroken continuity of easy affection and
limited experience, the man or the woman, in full
middle life, suddenly wearies of the apparent mo-
notony, the uneventful love, the slow encroaching
tide of the commonplace, and looks on these as
fetters on their freedom, as walls which shut them
in from the vivid interests of the outside world, from
the gipsy roving of the passions. The time arrives,
when this becomes, they think, too great for en-
durance, and their impatience shows itself in a daily
irritability quite new in the household, apparently
causeless, full of sudden, inexplicable turns of
thought and act which turn the peaceful into a
tempestuous home. It is not that the husband or
the wife are inconstant by nature — to call Fifine at
the Fair a defence of inconstancy is to lose the truth
of the matter — but it is the desire of momentary
change, of a life set free from conventional barriers,
of an outburst into the unknown, of the desire for
new experiences, for something which will bring
into play those parts of their nature of which they
are vaguely conscious but which are as yet unused
— new elements in their senses, intellect, imagina-

424 BROWNING

tion, even in their spirit, but not always in their con-
science. That, for the time being, as in this poem,
is often shut up in the cellar, where its voice can-
not be heard.

This is, as I said, a crisis of common occurrence.
It may be rightly directed, its evil controlled, and
a noble object chosen for the satisfaction of the
impulse. Here, that is not the case ; and Browning
describes its beginning with great freshness and
force as Juan walks down to the fair with Elvire.
Nor has he omitted to treat other forms of it in his
poetry. He knew how usual it was, but he has
here made it unusual by putting it into the heart
of a man who, before he yielded to it, was pleased
to make it the subject of a wandering metaphysi-
cal analysis ; who sees not only how it appears to
himself in three or four moods, but how it looks to
the weary, half-jealous wife to whom he is so rude
while he strives to be courteous, and to the bold,
free, conscienceless child of Nature whose favour
he buys, and with whom, after all his barren meta-
physics, he departs, only to attain, when his brief
spell of foolish freedom is over, loneliness and
cynic satiety. It may amuse us to circle with him
through his arguments, though every one knows he
will yield at last and that yielding is more honest
than his talk ; but what we ask is — Was the matter
worth the trouble of more than two thousand lines
of long-winded verse .' Was it worth an artist's de-
votion ? or, to ask a question I would not ask if the
poem were good art, is it of any real importance
to mankind ? Is it, finally, anything more than an
intellectual exercise of Browning on which solitary
psychologists may, in their turn, employ their neat

LATER POEMS

42s

intelligence? This poem, with the exceptions of
some episodes of noble poetry, is, as well as the
three others, a very harlequinade of the intellect.

I may say, though this is hypercritical, that the
name of Don Juan is a mistake. Every one knows
Don Juan, and to imagine him arguing in the
fashion of this poem is absurd. He would instantly,
without a word, have left Elvire, and abandoned
Fifine in a few days. The connection then of the
long discussions in the poem with his name throws
an air of unreality over the whole of it. The Don
Juan of the poem had much better have stayed
with Elvire, who endured him with weary patience.
I have no doubt that he bored Fifine to extinction.

The poems that follow these four volumes are
mixed work, half imaginative, half intellectual.
Sometimes both kinds are found, separated, in the
same poem; sometimes in one volume half the
poems will be imaginative and the other half not.
Could the imaginative and intellectual elements
have now been fused as they were in his earlier
work, it were well; but they were not. They
worked apart. His witful poems are all wit, his
analytical poems are all analysis, and his imagina-
tive poems, owing to this want of fusion, have not
the same intellectual strength they had in other
days. Numpholeptos, for instance, an imaginative
poem, full too of refined and fanciful emotion, is
curiously wanting in intellectual foundation.

The Numpholeptos is in the volume entitled Pac-
chiarotto, and how he worked in Distemper, Part of
the poems in it are humorous, such as Pacchiarotto
and Filippo Baldinucci, excellent pieces of agreeable
wit, containing excellent advice concerning life. One

426 BROWNING

reads them, is amused by them, and rarely desires
to read them again. In the same volume there are
some severe pieces, sharply ridiculing his critics.
In the old days, when he wrote fine imaginative
poetry, out of his heart and brain working together,
he did not mind what the critics said, and only
flashed a scoff or two at them in his creation of
Naddq in Sordello. But now when he wrote a great
deal of his poetry out of his brain alone, he became
sensitive to criticism. For that sort of poetry does
not rest on the sure foundation which is given by
the consciousness the imagination has of its absolute
Tightness. He expresses his needless soreness with
plenty of wit in Pacchiarotto and in the Epilogue,
criticises his critics, and displays his good opinion of
his work — no doubt of these later poems, like The
Inn Album and the rest — with a little too much of
self-congratulation. " The poets pour us wine," he
says, " and mine is strong — the strong wine of the
loves and hates and thoughts of man. But it is not
sweet as well, and my critics object. Were it so, it
would be more popular than it is. Sweetness and
strength do not go together, and I have strength."
But that is not the real question. The question
is — Is the strength poetical .' Has it imagination .'
It is rough, powerful, full of humanity, and that is
well. But is it half prose, or wholly prose } Or is
it poetry, or fit to be called so } He thinks that
Prince Hohenstiel, or Red Cotton Night-Cap Country,
are poetry. They are, it is true, strong ; and they
are not sweet. But have they the strength of poetry
in them, and not the strength of something else
altogether } That is the question he ought to have
answered, and it does not occur to him.

LATER POEMS 427

Yet, he was, in this very book, half-way out of
this muddle. There are poems in it, just as strong
as The Inn Album, but with the ineffable spirit of
imaginative emotion and thought clasped together
in them, so that the strong is stronger, and the
humanity deeper than in the pieces he thought,
being deceived by the Understanding, were more
strong than the poems of old. In Bifurcation, in St.
Martin's Summer, the diviner spirit breathes. There
is that other poem called Forgiveness of which I have
already spoken — one of his masterpieces. Cenciaja,
which may be classed ^iHa. Forgiveness as a study of
the passion of hatred, is not so good as its comrade,
but its hatred is shown in a mean character and for
a meaner motive. And the Prologue, in its rhythm
and pleasure, its subtlety of thought, its depth of
feeling, and its close union of both, recalls his
earlier genius.

The first of the Pisgah Sights is a jewel. It is
like a poem by Goethe, only Goethe would have
seen the " sight " not when he was dying, but when
he was alive to his finger-tips. The second is not
like Goethe's work, nor Browning's ; but it is a true
picture of what many feel and are. So is Fears and
Scruples. As to Natural Magic, surely it is the
most charming of compliments, most enchantingly
expressed.

The next volume of original poems was La
Saisias and the Two Poets of Croisic. The Croisic
Poets are agreeable studies, written with verve and
lucidity, of two fantastic events which lifted these
commonplace poets suddenly into fame. They do
well to amuse an idle hour. The end of both is
interesting. That of the first, which begins with
stanza lix., discusses the question: "Who cares,

428 BROWNING

Stanza lix., discusses the question : " Who cares
how such a mediocrity as Rend lived after the
fame of his prophecy died out ? " * And Browning
answers —

Well, I care — intimately care to have

Experience how a human creature felt
In after life, who bore the burthen grave

Of certainly believing God had dealt
For once directly with him : did not rave

— A maniac, did not find his reason melt
— An idiot, but went on, in peace or strife,
The world's way, lived an ordinary life.

The solution Browning offers is interesting, be-
cause it recalls a part of the experiences of Lazarus
in the Epistle to Karshish. Ren6, like Lazarus, but
only for a moment, has lived in the eternal.

Are such revelations possible, is his second
question. Yes, he answers; and the form of the
answer belongs to the theory of life laid down in
Paracelsus. Such sudden openings of the greater
world are at intervals, as to Abt Vogler, given by
God to men.

The end of the second asks what is the true test
of the greater poet, when people take on them to
weigh the worth of poets — who was better, best,
this, that, or the other bard ? When I read this I
trembled, knowing that I had compared him with
Tennyson. But when I heard the answer I trem-
bled no more. " The best poet of any two is the

* Renfi Gentilhomme, page to Prince Conde, heir of France
since Louis XIII, and his brother Gaston were childless, is sur-
prised, while writing a love poem, by a lightning flash which
shatters a marble ducal crown. He thinks this a revelation from
God, and he prophesies that a Dauphin will be born to the child-
less Queen. The Dauphin was born, and Rene pushed suddenly
into fame.

LATER POEMS 429

one who leads the happier life. The strong and
joyful poet is the greater." But this is a test of the
greatness of a man, not necessarily of a poet. And,
moreover, in this case, Tennyson and Browning both
lived equally happy Hves. Both were strong to the
end, and imaginative joy was their companion. But
the verse in which Browning winds up his answer
is one of the finest in his poetry.

So, force is sorrow, and each sorrow, force ;
What then? since Swiftness gives the charioteer

The palm, his hope be in the vivid horse

Whose neck God clothed with thunder, not the steer

Sluggish and safe ! Yoke Hatred, Crime, Remorse,
Despair ; but ever mid the whirling fear.
Let, through the tumult, break the poet's face
Radiant, assured his wild slaves win the race !

La Saisias is a more important poem : it describes
the sudden death of his friend, Ann Egerton Smith,
and passes from that, and all he felt concerning it,
into an argument on the future life of the soul, with
the assumption that God is, and the soul. The
argument is interesting, but does not concern us
here. What does concern us is that Browning has
largely recovered his poetical way of treating a
subject. He is no longer outside of it, but in it.
He does not use it as a means of exercising his
brains only. It is steeped in true and vital feeling,
and the deep friendship he had for his friend fills
even the theological argument with a passionate
intensity. Nevertheless, the argument is perilously
near the work of the understanding alone — as if a
question like that of immortality could receive any
solution from the hands of the understanding.
Only each man, in the recesses of his own spirit
with God, can solve that question for himself, and

430 BROWNING

not for another. That is Browning's position when
he writes as a poet, and no one has written more
positively on the subject. But when he submits
the question to reasoning, he wavers, as he does
here, and leaves the question more undecided than
anywhere else in his work. This is a pity, but it is
the natural penalty of his partial abandonment of
the poetic for the prosaic realm, of the imagination
for the understanding, of the Reason for reason-
ing.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE LAST POEMS

TWO Volumes of Dramatic Idyls, one in 1879,
the other in 1880, followed La Saisiaz and
The Two Poets of Croisic. These are also mixed
books, composed, partly of studies of character
written .in rhythmical prose, and partly of poems
wrought out of the pure imagination. Three of
them — if they were written at this time — show how
the Greek legends still dwelt with Browning ; and
they brought with them the ocean-scent, heroic life,
and mythical charm of Athenian thought. It would
be difficult, if one could write of them at all, not to
write of them poetically ; a.nd.Pheidippides,Echetlos,
Pan and Luna are alive with force, imaginative joy,
and the victorious sense the poet has of having
conquered his material. Pheidippides is as full of
fire, of careless heroism, as Herv^ Riel, and told in
as ringing verse. The versing of Echetlos, its rugged,
rousing sound, its movement, are in most excellent
harmony with the image of the rude, giant " Holder
of the ploughshare," who at Marathon drove his
furrows through the Persians and rooted up the
Mede. Browning has gathered into one picture and
one sound the whole spirit of the story. Pan and
Luna is a bold re-rendering of the myth that Vergil

431

432 BROWNING

enshrines, and the greater part of it is of such poetic
freshness that I think it must be a waif from the
earlier years of his poetry. Nor is there better
imaginative work in his descriptive poetry than the
image of the naked moon, in virginal distress, flying
for refuge through the gazing heaven to the
succourable cloud — fleece on fleece of piled-up
snow, drowsily patient — where Pan lay in ambush
for her beauty.

Among these more gracious idyls, one of singular
rough power tells the ghastly tale of the mother who
gave up her little children to the wolves to save
herself. Browning liked this poem, and the end he
added to the story — how the carpenter, Ivan, when
the poor, frightened woman confessed, lifted his axe
and cut off her head; how he knew that he did
right, and was held to have done right by the village
and its pope. The sin by which a mother sacrificed
the lives of her children to save her own was out of
Nature : the punishment should be outside of ordinary
law. It is a piteous tale, and few things in Browning
equal the horror of the mother's vain attempt to hide
her crime while she confesses it. Nor does he often
show greater imaginative skill in metrical movement
than when he describes in galloping and pattering
verse the grey pack emerging from the forest, their
wild race for the sledge, and their demon leader.

The other idyls in these two volumes are full of
interest for those who care for psychological studies
expressed in verse. What the vehicle of verse does
for them is to secure conciseness and suggestiveness
in the rendering of remote, daring, and unexpected
turns of thought and feeling, and especially of con-
science. Yet the poems themselves cannot be called

THE LAST POEMS 433

concise. Their subjects are not large enough, nor
indeed agreeable enough, to excuse their length.
Goethe would have put them into a short lyrical
form. It is impossible not to regret, as we read
them, the Browning of the Dramatic Lyrics. More-
over, some of them are needlessly ugly. Halbert
and Hob — and in Jocoseria — Donald, are hateful
subjects, and their treatment does not redeem them ;
unlike the treatment of Ivan Ivanovitch which
does lift the pain of the story into the high realms
of pity and justice. Death, swift death, was not
only the right judgment, but also the most pitiful.
Had the mother lived, an hour's memory would have
been intolerable torture. Nevertheless, if Browning,
in his desire to represent the whole of humanity,
chose to treat these lower forms of human nature, I
suppose we must accept them as an integral part of
his work ; and, at least, there can be no doubt of
their ability, and of the brilliancy of their psycho-
logical surprises. Ned Bratts is a monument of
cleverness, as well as of fine characterisation of a
momentary outburst of conscience in a man who had
none before ; and who would have lost it in an hour,
had he not been hanged on the spot. The quick,
agile, unpremeditated turns of wit in this poem, as
in some of the others, are admirably easy, and
happily expressed. Indeed, in these later poems
of character and event, ingenuity or nimbleness
of intellect is the chief element, and it is ac-
companied by a facile power which is sometimes
rude, often careless, always inventive, fully fan-
tastical, and rarely imaginative in the highest
sense of the word. Moreover, as was not the case
of old, they have, beyond the story, a direct teaching

434 BROWNING

aim, which, while it lowers them as art, is very
agreeable to the ethical psychologist.

Jocoseria has poems of a higher quality, some of
which, like the lovely Never the Time and Place,
have been already quoted. Ixion is too obscurely
put to attain its end with the general public. But
it may be recommended, though vainly, to those
theologians who, hungry for the Divine Right of
torture, build their God, like Caliban, out of their
own minds; who, foolish enough to believe that
the everlasting endurance of evil is a necessary
guarantee of the everlasting endurance of good, are
still bold and bad enough to proclaim the abominable
lie of eternal punishment. They need that spirit
of the little child whom Christ placed in the midst
of his disciples J and in gaining which, after living the
life of the lover, the warrior, the poet, the statesman,
Jockanan Hakkadosltimxj^di absolute peace and joy.
Few poems contain moreOf Browning's matured
theory of life than this of the Jewish Rabbi ; and
its seriousness is happily mingled with imaginative
illustrations and with racy wit. The sketch of
Tsaddik, who puts us in mind of Wagner in the
Faust, is done with a sarcastic joy in exposing the
Philistine, and with a delight in its own cleverness
which is fascinating.

Ferishtah's Fancies and Parleyings with Certain
People followed Jocoseria in 1884 and 1887. The
first of these books is much the better of the
two. A certain touch of romance is given by the
Dervish, by the Fables with which he illustrates his
teaching, and by the Eastern surroundings. Some
of the stories are well told, and their scenery is
truthfully wrought and in good colour. The sub-

THE LAST POEMS 435

jects are partly theological, with always a reference
to human life ; and partly of the affections and their
working. It is natural to a poet, and delightful in
Browning, to find him in his old age dwelling from
poem to poem on the pre-eminence of love, on love
as the ultimate judge of all questions. He asserts
this again and again ; with the greatest force in
A Pillar at Sebzevar, and, more lightly, in Cherries.
Yet, and this is a pity, he is not satisfied with the
decision of love, but spends pages in argumentative
discussions which lead him away from that poetical
treatment of the subjects which love alone, as the
master, would have enabled him to give. However,
the treatment that love gives we find in the lyrics at
the end of each Fancy ; and some of these lyrics are
of such delicate and subtle beauty that I am tempted
to think that they were written at an earlier period,
and their Fancies composed to fit them. If they
were written now, it is plain that age had not
disenabled him from walking with pleasure and
power among those sweet, enamelled meadows of
poetry in whose soil he now thought great poetry did
not grow. And when we read the lyrics, our regret
is all the more deep that he chose the thorn-clad and
desert lands, where barren argument goes round
and round its subjects without ever finding the true
path to their centre.

He lost himself more completely in this error in
Parleyings with Certain People, in which book,
with the exception of the visionary landscapes in
Gerard de Lairesse, and some few passages in
Francis Furini and Charles Avison, imagination,
such as belongs to a poet, has deserted Browning.
He feels himself as if this might be said of him ;

436 BROWNING

and he asks in Gerard de Lairesse if he has lost
the poetic touch, the poetic spirit, because he writes
of the soul, of facts, of things invisible — not of
fancy's feignings, not of the things perceived by
the senses ? " I can do this," he answers, " if I
like, as well as you," and he paints the landscape of
a whole day filled with mythological figures. The
passage is poetry ; we see that he has not lost his
poetic genius. But, he calls it " fooling," and then
contrasts the spirit of Greek lore with the spirit of
immortal hope and cheer which he possesses, with
his faith that there is for man a certainty of Spring.
But that is not the answer to his question. It only
says that the spirit which animates him now is
higher than the Greek spirit. It does not answer
the question — Whether Daniel Bartoli or Charles
Avis on or any of these Parleyings even approach as
poetry Paracelsus, the Dramatic Lyrics, or Men and
Women. They do not. Nor has their intellectual
work the same force, unexpectedness, and certainty
it had of old. Nevertheless, these Parleyings, at
the close of the poet's life, and with biographical
touches which give them vitality, enshrine Brown-
ing's convictions with regard to some of the greater
and lesser problems of human hfe. And when his
personality is vividly present in them, the argu-
ment, being thrilled with passionate feeling, rises,
but heavily Uke a wounded eagle, into an imagina-
tive world.

The sub-consciousness in Browning's mind to
which I have alluded — that these later produc-
tions of his were not as poetical as his earlier work
and needed defence — is the real subject of a re-
markable little poem at the end of the second vol-

THE LAST POEMS i^yj

ume of the Dramatic Idyls. He is thinking of
himself as poet, perhaps of that double nature in
him which on one side was quick to see and love
beauty; and on the other, to see facts and love
their strength. Sometimes the sensitive predomi-
nated. He was only the lover of beauty whom
everything that touched him urged into song.

" Touch him ne'er so lightly, into song he broke :
Soil so quick-receptive, — not one feather-seed.
Not one flower-dust fell but straight its fall awoke
Vitalizing virtue : song would song succeed
Sudden as spontaneous — prove a poet-soul ! "

This, which Browning puts on the lips of another,
is not meant, we are told, to describe himself. But
it does describe one side of him very well, and the
origin and conduct of a number of his earlier
poems. But now, having changed his manner,
even the principles of his poetry, he describes him-
self as different from that — as a sterner, more iron
poet, and the work he now does as more likely to
endure, and be a power in the world of men. He
was curiously mistaken.

Indeed, he cries, is that the soil in which a poet
grows }

" Rock's the song-soil rather, surface hard and bare :
Sun and dew their mildness, storm and frost their rage

Vainly both expend, — few flowers awaken there :
Quiet in its cleft broods — what the after-age
Knows and names a pine, a nation's heritage."

In this sharp division, as in his Epilogue to
Pacchiarotto, he misses the truth. It is almost
needless to say that a poet can be sensitive to beauty,
and also to the stern facts of the moral and spiritual
struggle of mankind through evil to good. All the

438 BROWNING

great poets have been sensitive to both and mingled
them in their work. They were ideal and real in
both the flower and the pine. They are never forced
to choose one or other of these aims or lives in their
poetry. They mingled facts and fancies, the in-
tellectual and the imaginative. They lived in the
whole world of the outward and the inward, of the
senses and the soul. Truth and beauty were one to
them. This division of which Browning speaks was
the unfortunate result of that struggle between
his intellect and his imagination on which I have
dwelt. In old days it was not so with him. His
early poetry had sweetness with strength, stern
thinking with tender emotion, love of beauty with
love of truth, idealism with realism. Nature with
humanity, fancy with fact. And this is the equip-
ment of the great poet. When he divides these
qualities each from the other, and is only a£sthetic
or only severe in his realism ; only the worshipper of
Nature or only the worshipper of human nature ;
only the poet of beauty or only the poet of austere
fact ; only the idealist or only the realist ; only of
the senses or only of the soul — he may be a poet,
but not a great poet. And as the singular pursuit of
the realistic is almost always bound up with pride,
because realism does not carry us beyond ourselves
into the infinite where we are humbled, the realistic
poetry loses imagination; its love of love tends
to become self-love, or love of mere cleverness.
And then its poetic elements slowly die.

There was that, as I have said, in Browning which
resisted this sad conclusion, but the resistance was
not enough to prevent a great loss of poetic power.
But whatever he lost, there was one poetic temper

THE LAST POEMS 439

of mind which never failed him, the heroic temper
of the faithful warrior for God and man ; there was
one ideal view of humanity which dominated all his
work ; there was one principle which directed all his
verse to celebrate the struggle of humanity towards
the perfection for which God, he believed, had
destined it. These things underlie all the poems in
Ferishtah's Fancies and the Parleyings with Certain
People, and give to them the uplifted, noble trumpet
note with which at times they are animated. The
same temper and principle, the same view of
humanity emerge in that fine lyric which is the
Epilogue to FerishtaKs Fancies, and in the Epilogue
to Asolando.

The first sees a vision of the present and the
future in which all the battle of our life passes into
a glorious end ; nor does the momentary doubt that
occurs at the close of the poem — that his belief
in a divine conclusion of our strife may only have
been caused by his own happiness in love — really
trouble his conviction. That love itself is part of
the power which makes the noble conclusion sure.
The certainty of this conclusion made his courage
in the fight unwavering, despair impossible, joy in
battle, duty; and to be "ever a fighter" in the
foremost rank the highest privilege of man.

Then the cloud-rift broadens, spanning earth that's under.
Wide our world displays its worth, man's strife and strife's
success :

All the good and beauty, wonder crowning wonder,
Till my heart and soul applaud perfection, nothing less.

And for that reason, because of the perfectness to
come. Browning lived every hour of his life for good
and against wrong. He said with justice of himself,

440 BROWNrNG

and with justice he brought the ideal aim and the
real effort together :

I looked beyond the world for truth and beauty :

Sought, found, and did my duty.

Nor, almost in the very grasp of death, did this
faith fail him. He kept, in the midst of a fretful,
slothful, wailing world, where prophets like Carlyle
and Ruskin were as impatient and bewildered, as
lamenting and despondent, as the decadents they
despised, the temper of his Herakles in Balaiistion.
He left us that temper as his last legacy, and he
could not have left us a better thing. We may hear
it in his last poem, and bind it about our hearts in
sorrow and joy, in battle and peace, in the hour of
death and the days of judgment.

At the midnight in the silence of the sleep-time,

When you set your fancies free.
Will they pass to where — by death, fools think, imprisoned —
Low he lies who once so loved you, whom you loved so,

— Pity me?

Oh to love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken !

What had I on earth to do
With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly ?
Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel

— Being — who ?

One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward,

Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would

triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.

No, at noonday in the bustle of man's work-time

Greet the unseen with a cheer !
Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be,
" Strive and thrive ! " cry " Speed, — fight on, fare ever
There as here ! "

THE LAST POEMS 441

With these high words he ended a long life, and ,
his memory still falls upon us, like the dew which
fell on Paradise. It was a life lived fully, kindly,
lovingly, at its just height from the beginning to
the end. No fear, no vanity, no lack of interest,
no complaint of the world, no anger at criticism,
no villain fancies disturbed his soul. No laziness, \
no feebleness in effort injured hig work, no desire
for money, no faltering of aspiration, no pander-
ing of his gift and genius to please the world,
no surrender of art for the sake of fame or filthy
lucre, no falseness to his ideal, no base pessimism,
no slavery to science yet no boastful ignorance
of its good, no morbid naturalism, no devotion to
the false forms of beauty, no despair of man, no
retreat from men into a world of sickly or vain ;
beauty, no abandonment of the great ideas or dis- j
belief in their mastery, no enfeeblement of reason
such as at this time walks hand in hand with the
worship of the mere discursive intellect, no lack
of joy and healthy vigour and keen inquiry and
passionate interest in humanity. Scarcely any
special bias can be found running through his
work ; on the contrary an incessant change of sub-
ject and manner, combined with a strong but not
overweening individuality, raced, like blood through
the body, through every vein of his labour. Crea-
tive and therefore joyful, receptive and therefore
thoughtful, at one with humanity and therefore
loving ; aspiring to God and believing in God, and
therefore steeped to the tips in radiant Hope; at
one with the past, passionate with the present, and
possessing by faith an endless and glorious future
— this was a life lived on the top of the wave, and

442 BROWNING

moving with its motion from youth to manhood,
from manhood to old age.

There is no need to mourn for his departure.
Nothing feeble has been done, nothing which lowers
the note of his life, nothing we can regret as less
than his native strength. His last poem was like
the last look of the Phoenix to the sun before the
sunlight Ughts the odorous pyre from which the
new-created Bird will spring. And as if the Muse
of Poetry wished to adorn the image of his death,
he passed away amid a world of beauty, and in the
midst of a world endeared to him by love. Italy
was his second country. In Florence lies the wife
of his heart. In every city he had friends, friends
not only among men and women, but friends in
every ancient wall, in every fold of Apennine and
Alp, in every breaking of the blue sea, in every
forest of pines, in every Church and Palace and
Town Hall, in every painting that great art had
wrought, in every storied market place, in every
great life which had adorned, honoured, and made
romantic Italy ; the great mother of Beauty, at
whose breasts have hung and whose milk have
sucked all the arts and all the literatures of modem
Europe. Venice saw and mourned his death. The
sea and sky and mountain glory of the city he
loved so well encompassed him with her beauty;
and their soft graciousness, their temperate power
of joy and life made his departure peaceful. Strong
and tender in life, his death added a new fairness
to his life. Mankind is fortunate to have so noble
a memory, so full and excellent a work, to rest
upon and love.

Missing Page

Missing Page

INDEX 445

Gerard de Lairesse, 87, 435.
Glove, The, 262.
Gold Hair, 356.
1 Grammarian's Funeral, A, 20, 78, 120, 141, 1S3-155, 319-321.

Halbert and Hob, 433.
Half- Rome, 396, 400.
Herve Rial, 28, 415.
Holy Cross Day, 34.
-Home Thoughts from Abroad, 10.
flSVITStriKes a (Jontemporary, 315.
' How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix, 28.

IcciON, 434.

In aBalcony, 254, 340-343.

In a Gondola, 257.

In a Laboratory, 356^""*" ~ ^

Inn Album, The, 107, 108, 332, 395, 417, 419, 427.

Instans Tyrannus, 265,

In Three Days, 253.

Italian in England, 322, 357.

James Lee's Wife, 60, 79, 81, 256, 351.
Jochanan Hakkadosh, 34, 434.
Jocoseria, 109, 433, 434.
Johannes Agricola in Meditation, 3 1 7-3 1 9.

King Victor and King CJiarles, 336.

Laboratory, The, 10, 20, 265. ' ~
La Saisiaz, 59, 109, 427.
Last Ride Together, The, 245.
Light Woman, A, 355^^».
Lost Mistress, The, 256.'^*''^
Love among the Ruins, 252. ^^
Lovers' QuarreirSrBjr^STr- ■
Lunia, 343.'

Meeting at Night — Farting at Morning, 258.
Men and Women, 5. /

IMy Last Duchess, 4, 10, 317.

446 INDEX

Natural Magic, 427.

Natural Theology on the Island ; or, Caliban upon Setebos,

286-290.
Ned Bralto, 427.
Never the Time and Place, 434.

Now, 246. /

Numpholeptos, 425.

Old Pictures in Florence, 141, 159-161.
One Word More, 250. •'^
Other Half-Rome, 397.

Pacchiarotto, 108, 425, 426.

Pan and Luna, 431.

Paracelsus, 3, 4, 8, 9, 14, 26, 55, 62, 67, 79, 84, 96-100, 115, 127-

140, 190, 202, 244, 271, 272, 348, 428.
Parleyings with Certain People, 434, 435, 439.
Pauline, 15, 21, 79, 87, 90-96, 104, 115, 120-127, 190, 244, 323-325.
Pearl — A girl, A, 246.
Pheidippides, 431.

^Pictor Ignotus, 3i3r 3JLS«_ -' *\

Pied Piper of Hamelin, The, 4.

Pillar at Selzevar, A, 435.

vPippa Passes, 4, 9, 30, 77, 80, 164-167, 268, 272-274, 320-322,

334-335- ,2, 4 CI
Pisgah Sights, 427.
Pompilia, 359-364.
-f-Porphyria's Lover, 10, 326.
Pretty Woman, A, 355.

Prince Hohenstiel Schwangan, 107, 395, 417, 419, 426.
Prospice, 250-251.

I^Rabbi Ben Ezra, 34, 148.

Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, 107, 332, 395, 417, 419, 426.

Return of the Druses, 337.

Ring and the Book, The, 6, 20, 105-106, 264, 348, 391, 398-399.

Saul, 4, 85.

Serenade at the Villa, A, 260.
Sludge, the Medium, Mr., 394, 397.
^-Soliloquy of the^peHtislr€l<agter, 266^

INDEX 447

Solomon and Balkis, 355.

SordeUo, 4, 8, 9, 11, 20, 26, 44, 70, 87, lOX-104, 167-176, 177-199,

201, 208, 282, 387-329, 333, 348. ^^^^

Soul's Tragedy, A, 343.
Spanish Qoister, The, 20.
' Speculative, 246.
St. Martin's Summer, 260, 427.
Strafford, 4, 26, 326.
Summum Bonum, 246.

Tertium Quid, 391, 397.

Theology in the Island, 283.

Time's Revenges, 355.

Toccata of Galng pi's. A, 21, 321.

Too Late, 256, 355r

Transcendentalism, 144.

Two in the Campagna, 254. ^^

Two Poets of Croisic, 427. ''^

4^

p at a Villa — Down in the City, 83, 322.

Waring, 4.

Worst of it, The, 355.

Youth and Art, 256, ,