MICHAEL ANGELO´S SONNETS
Michael Angelo is revealed by his sonnets. He wears the triple crown of painter, poet, and sculptor, and his genius was worshipped with a kind of awe even while he lived, yet we know the man best through these little pieces of himself which he broke off and gave to his friends. The fragments vibrated with the life of the man, and were recognized as wonderful things. Even in his lifetime they were treasured and collected in manuscript, and at a later day they were seized upon by the world at large.
The first published edition of the sonnets was prepared for the press many years after the death of the author by his grandnephew, who edited them to suit the taste of the seventeenth century. The extent and atrocity of his emendations can be realized by a comparison of texts. But the sonnets survived the improvements, and even made headway under them; and when, in 1863, Guasti gave the original readings to the public, the world was prepared for them. The bibliography of editions and translations which Guasti gives is enough to show the popularity of the sonnets, their universal character, their international currency.
There are upward of one hundred sonnets in every stage of perfection, and they have given rise not only to a literature of translations, but to a literature of comment. Some years ago Mrs. Ednah Cheney published a selection of the sonnets, giving the Italian text, together with English translations by various hands. This little volume has earned the gratitude of many to whom it made known the sonnets. The Italians themselves have gone on printing the corrupt text in contempt of Guasti's labors. But it has not been left to the Italians to protect the treasures of their land. The barbarians have been the devoutest worshippers at all times. The last tribute has come from Mr. John Addington Symonds, who has done the sonnets into the English of the pre-Raphaelites, and done them, on the whole, amazingly well. His translations of the more graceful sonnets are facile, apt, and charming, and rise at times into beauty. He has, however, insisted on polishing the rugged ones. Moreover, being deficient in reverence, Mr. Symonds fails to convey reverence. Nevertheless, to have boldly planned and carried out the task of translating them all was an undertaking of so much courage, and has been done with so much success, that every rival must give in his admiration.
The poems are exceedingly various, some being rough and some elegant, some obvious and some obscure, some humorous, some religious. Yet they have this in common, that each seems to be the bearer of some deep harmony, whose vibrations we feel and whose truth we recognize. From the very beginning they seem to have had a provocative and stimulating effect upon others; ever since they were written, cultivated people have been writing essays about them. One of them has been the subject of repeated academical disquisition. They absorb and reflect the spirit of the times; they appeal to and express the individual; they have done this through three centuries and throughout who shall say how many different educational conditions. Place them in what light you will, they gleam with new meanings. This is their quality. It is hard to say whence the vitality comes. They have often a brilliancy that springs from the juxtaposition of two thoughts,—a brilliancy like that produced by unblended colors roughly but well laid on. They have, as it were, an organic force which nothing can render. The best of them have the reflective power which gives back light from the mind of the reader. The profounder ones appear to change and glow under contemplation; they re-echo syllables from forgotten voices; they suggest unfathomable depths of meaning. These sonnets are protean in character; they represent different things to different people,—religion to one, love to another, philosophy to a third.
It is easy to guess what must be the fate of such poems in translation. The translator inevitably puts more of himself than of Michael Angelo into his version. Even the first Italian editor could not let them alone. He felt he must dose them with elegance. This itching to amend the sonnets results largely from the obscurity of the text. A translator is required to be, above all things, comprehensible, and, therefore, he must interpret, he must paraphrase. He is not at liberty to retain the equivocal suggestiveness of the original. The language of a translation must be chastened, or, at least, grammatical, and Michael Angelo's verse is very often neither the one nor the other.
The selections which follow are not given as representative of the different styles in the original. They have been chosen from among those sonnets which seemed most capable of being rendered into English.
The essential nature of the sonnet is replete with difficulty, and special embarrassments are encountered in the Italian sonnet. The Italian sonnet is, both in its form and spirit, a thing so foreign to the English idea of what poetry should be, that no cultivation can ever domesticate it into the tongue. The seeds of flowers from the Alps may be planted in our gardens, but a new kind of flower will come up; and this is what has happened over and over again to the skilled gardeners of English literature in their struggles with the Italian sonnet. In Italy, for six hundred years, the sonnet has been the authorized form for a disconnected remark of any kind. Its chief aim is not so much to express a feeling as an idea—a witticism—a conceit—a shrewd saying—a clever analogy—a graceful simile—a beautiful thought. Moreover, it is not primarily intended for the public; it has a social rather than a literary function.
The English with their lyrical genius have impressed the form, as they have impressed every other form, into lyrical service, and with some success, it must be admitted. But the Italian sonnet is not lyrical. It is conversational and intellectual, and many things which English instinct declares poetry ought not to be. We feel throughout the poetry of the Latin races a certain domination of the intelligence which is foreign to our own poetry. But in the sonnet form at least we may sympathize with this domination. Let us read the Italian sonnets, then, as if they were prose; let us seek first the thought and hold to that, and leave the eloquence to take care of itself. It is the thought, after all, which Michael Angelo himself cared about. He is willing to sacrifice elegance, to truncate words, to wreck rhyme, prosody, and grammar, if he can only hurl through the verse these thoughts which were his convictions.
The platonic ideas about life and love and art, which lie at the bottom of most of these sonnets, are familiar to us all. They have been the reigning commonplace ideas of educated people for the last two thousand years. But in these sonnets they are touched with new power; they become exalted into mystical importance. We feel almost as if it were Plato himself that is talking, and the interest is not lessened when we remember that it is Michael Angelo. It is necessary to touch on this element in the sonnets, for it exists in them; and because while some will feel chiefly the fiery soul of the man, others will be most struck by his great speculative intellect.
It is certain that the sonnets date from various times in Michael Angelo's life; and, except in a few cases, it must be left to the instinct of the reader to place them. Those which were called forth by the poet's friendship for Vittoria Colonna were undoubtedly written towards the close of his life. While he seems to have known Vittoria Colonna and to have been greatly attached to her for many years, it is certain that in his old age he fell in love with her. The library of romance that has been written about this attachment has added nothing to Condivi's simple words:—
"He greatly loved the Marchesana of Pescara, with whose divine spirit he fell in love, and was in return passionately beloved of her; and he still keeps many of her letters, which are full of most honest and tenderest love, such as used to issue from a heart like hers; and he himself had written her many and many a sonnet full of wit and tenderness. She often left Viterbo and other places, where she had gone for pleasure, and to pass the summer, and came to Rome for no other reason than to see Michael Angelo. And in return he bore her so much love that I remember hearing him say that he regretted nothing except that when he went to see her on her death-bed he had not kissed her brow and her cheek as he had kissed her hand. He was many times overwhelmed at the thought of her death, and used to be as one out of his mind."
It seems, from reading the sonnets, that some of those which are addressed to women must belong to a period anterior to his friendship with Vittoria. This appears from the internal evidence of style and feeling, as well as by references in the later sonnets.
One other fact must be mentioned,—both Vittoria and Michael Angelo belonged to, or at least sympathized with, the Piagnoni, and were in a sense disciples of Savonarola. Now, it is this religious element which makes Michael Angelo seem to step out of his country and out of his century and across time and space into our own. This religious feeling is of a kind perfectly familiar to us; indeed, of a kind inborn and native to us. Whether we be reading the English prayer-book or listening to the old German Passion Music, there is a certain note of the spirit which, when we hear it, we perfectly recognize as a part of ourselves. What we recognize is, in fact, the Protestantism which swept over Europe during the century of Michael Angelo's existence; which conquered Teutonic Europe, and was conquered, but not extinguished, in Latin Europe; and a part of which survives in ourselves. If one wishes to feel the power of Savonarola, one may do so in these sonnets. We had connected Michael Angelo with the Renaissance, but we are here face to face with the Reformation. We cannot help being a little surprised at this. We cannot help being surprised at finding how well we know this man.
Few of us are familiar enough with the language of the plastic arts to have seen without prompting this same modern element in Michael Angelo's painting and sculpture. We might, perhaps, have recognized it in the Pieta in St. Peter's. We may safely say, however, that it exists in all his works. It is in the Medicean statues; it is in the Julian marbles; it is in the Sistine ceiling. What is there in these figures that they leave us so awestruck, that they seem so like the sound of trumpets blowing from a spiritual world? The intelligence that could call them forth, the craft that could draw them, have long since perished. But the meaning survives the craft. The lost arts retain their power over us. We understand but vaguely, yet we are thrilled. We cannot decipher the signs, yet we subscribe to their import. The world from which Michael Angelo's figures speak is our own world, after all. That is the reason they are so potent, so intimate, so inimitably significant. We may be sure that the affinity which we feel with Michael Angelo, and do not feel with any other artist of that age, springs from experiences and beliefs in him which are similar to our own.
His work speaks to the moral sense more directly and more powerfully than that of any one,—so directly and so powerfully, indeed, that we whose physical senses are dull, and whose moral sense is acute, are moved by Michael Angelo, although the rest of the cinque cento culture remain a closed book to us.
It is difficult, this conjuring with the unrecoverable past, so rashly done by us all. Yet we must use what light we have. Remembering, then, that painting is not the reigning mode of expression in recent times, and that in dealing with it we are dealing with a vehicle of expression with which we are not spontaneously familiar, we may yet draw conclusions which are not fantastic, if we base them upon the identity of one man's nature some part of which we are sure we understand. We may throw a bridge from the ground in the sonnets, upon which we are sure we stand firmly, to the ground in the frescos, which, by reason of our own ignorance, is less certain ground to us, and we may walk from one side to the other amid the elemental forces of this same man's mind.
XXXVIII
Give me again, ye fountains and ye streams,
That flood of life, not yours, that swells your front
Beyond the natural fulness of your wont.
I gave, and I take back as it beseems.
And thou dense choking atmosphere on high
Disperse thy fog of sighs—for it is mine,
And make the glory of the sun to shine
Again on my dim eyes.—O, Earth and Sky
Give me again the footsteps I have trod.
Let the paths grow where I walked them bare,
The echoes where I waked them with my prayer
Be deaf—and let those eyes—those eyes, O God,
Give me the light I lent them.—That some soul
May take my love. Thou hadst no need of it.
This rough and exceedingly obscure sonnet, in which strong feeling has condensed and distorted the language, seems to have been written by a man who has been in love and has been repulsed. The shock has restored him to a momentary realization of the whole experience. He looks at the landscape, and lo! the beauty has dropped out of it. The stream has lost its power, and the meadow its meaning. Summer has stopped. His next thought is: "But it is I who had lent the landscape this beauty. That landscape was myself, my dower, my glory, my birthright," and so he breaks out with "Give me back the light I threw upon you," and so on till the bitter word flung to the woman in the last line. The same clearness of thought and obscurity of expression and the same passion is to be found in the famous sonnet—"Non ha l' ottimo artista alcun concetto,"—where he blames himself for not being able to obtain her good-will—as a bad sculptor who cannot hew out the beauty from the rock, although he feels it to be there; and in that heart-breaking one where he says that people may only draw from life what they give to it, and says no good can come to a man who, looking on such great beauty, feels such pain.
It is not profitable, nor is it necessary for the comprehension of the poems, to decide to whom or at what period each one was written. There is dispute about some of them as to whether they were addressed to men or women. There is question as to others whether they are prayers addressed to Christ or love poems addressed to Vittoria. In this latter case, perhaps, Michael Angelo did not himself know which they were.
Vittoria used to instruct him in religion, and he seems to have felt for her a love so deep, so reverent, so passionate, and so touching that the words are alive in which he mentions her.
"I wished," he writes beneath a sonnet which he sent her, evidently in return for some of her own religious poems, "I wished, before taking the things that you had many times deigned to give me, in order that I might receive them the less unworthily, to make something for you from my own hand. But then, remembering and knowing that the grace of God may not be bought, and that to accept it reluctantly is the greatest sin, I confess my fault, and willingly receive the said things, and when they shall arrive, not because they are in my house, but I myself as being in a house of theirs, shall deem myself in Paradise."
We must not forget that at this time Michael Angelo was an old man, that he carried about with him a freshness and vigor of feeling that most people lose with their youth. A reservoir of emotion broke loose within him at a time when it caused his hale old frame suffering to undergo it, and reillumined his undimmed intellect to cope with it. A mystery play was enacted in him,—each sonnet is a scene. There is the whole of a man in each of many of these sonnets. They do not seem so much like poems as like microcosms. They are elementally complete. The soul of man could be evolved again from them if the formula were lost.
XL
I know not if it be the longed for light
Of its creator which the soul perceives,
Or if in people's memory there lives
A touch of early grace that keeps them bright
Or else ambition,—or some dream whose might
Brings to the eyes the hope the heart conceives
And leaves a burning feeling when it leaves—
That tears are welling in me as I write.
The things I feel, the things I follow and the things
I seek—are not in me,—I hardly know the place
To find them. It is others make them mine.
It happens when I see thee—and it brings
Sweet pain—a yes,—a no,—sorrow and grace
Surely it must have been those eyes of thine.
There are others which give a most touching picture of extreme piety in extreme old age. And there are still others which are both love poems and religious poems at the same time.
LV
Thou knowest that I know that thou dost know
How, to enjoy thee, I did come more near.
Thou knowest, I know thou knowest—I am here.
Would we had given our greetings long ago.
If true the hope thou hast to me revealed,
If true the plighting of a sacred troth,
Let the wall fall that stands between us both,
For griefs are doubled when they are concealed.
If, loved one,—if I only loved in thee
What thou thyself dost love,—'tis to this end
The spirit with his belovéd is allied.
The things thy face inspires and teaches me
Mortality doth little comprehend.
Before we understand we must have died.
LI
Give me the time when loose the reins I flung
Upon the neck of galloping desire.
Give me the angel face that now among
The angels,—tempers Heaven with its fire.
Give the quick step that now is grown so old,
The ready tears—the blaze at thy behest,
If thou dost seek indeed, O Love! to hold
Again thy reign of terror in my breast.
If it be true that thou dost only live
Upon the sweet and bitter pains of man
Surely a weak old man small food can give
Whose years strike deeper than thine arrows can.
Upon life's farthest limit I have stood—
What folly to make fire of burnt wood.
The occasion of the following was probably some more than wonted favor shown to him by Vittoria.
XXVI.
Great joy no less than grief doth murder men.
The thief, even at the gallows, may be killed
If, while through every vein with fear he's chilled,
Sudden reprieve do set him free again.
Thus hath this bounty from you in my pain
Through all my griefs and sufferings fiercely thrilled,
Coming from a breast with sovereign mercy filled,
And more than weeping, cleft my heart in twain.
Good news, like bad, may bring the taker death.
The heart is rent as with the sharpest knife,
Be it pressure or expansion cause the rift.
Let thy great beauty which God cherisheth
Limit my joy if it desire my life—
The unworthy dies beneath so great a gift.
XXVIII
The heart is not the life of love like mine.
The love I love thee with has none of it.
For hearts to sin and mortal thought incline
And for love's habitation are unfit.
God, when our souls were parted from Him, made
Of me an eye—of thee, splendor and light.
Even in the parts of thee which are to fade
Thou hast the glory; I have only sight.
Fire from its heat you may not analyze,
Nor worship from eternal beauty take,
Which deifies the lover as he bows.
Thou hast that Paradise all within thine eyes
Where first I loved thee. 'T is for that love's sake
My soul's on fire with thine, beneath thy brows.
The German musicians of the seventeenth century used to write voluntaries for the organ, using the shorthand of the older notation; they jotted down the formulas of the successive harmonies expressed in terms of the chords merely. The transitions and the musical explanation were left to the individual performer. And Michael Angelo has left behind him, as it were, the poetical equivalents of such shorthand musical formulas. The harmonies are wonderful. The successions show a great grasp of comprehension, but you cannot play them without filling them out.
"Is that music, after all," one may ask, "which leaves so much to the performer, and is that poetry, after all, which leaves so much to the reader?" It seems you must be a Kapellmeister or a student, or dilettante of some sort, before you can transpose and illustrate these hieroglyphics. There is some truth in this criticism, and the modesty of purpose in the poems is the only answer to it. They claim no comment. Comment claims them. Call them not poetry if you will. They are a window which looks in upon the most extraordinary nature of modern times,—a nature whose susceptibility to impressions of form through the eye allies it to classical times; a nature which on the emotional side belongs to our own day.
Is it a wonder that this man was venerated with an almost superstitious regard in Italy, and in the sixteenth century? His creations were touched with a superhuman beauty which his contemporaries felt, yet charged with a profoundly human meaning which they could not fathom. No one epoch has held the key to him. There lives not a man and there never has lived a man who could say, "I fully understand Michael Angelo's works." It will be said that the same is true of all the very greatest artists, and so it is in a measure. But as to the others, that truth comes as an afterthought and an admission. As to Michael Angelo, it is primary and overwhelming impression. "We are not sure that we comprehend him," say the centuries as they pass, "but of this we are sure: Simil ne maggior uom non nacque mai."
THE FOURTH CANTO OF THE INFERNO
There are many great works of fiction where the interest lies in the situation and development of the characters or in the wrought-up climax of the action, and where it is necessary to read the whole work before one can feel the force of the catastrophe. But Dante's poem is a series of disconnected scenes, held together only by the slender thread of the itinerary. The scenes vary in length from a line or two to a page or two; and the power of them comes, one may say, not at all from their connection with each other, but entirely from the language in which they are given.
A work of this kind is hard to translate because verbal felicities, to use a mild term, are untranslatable. What English words can render the mystery of that unknown voice that calls out of the deep,—
"Onorate 'l altissimo poeta,
Torna sua ombra che era dipartita"?
The cry breaks upon the night, full of awful greeting, proclamation, prophecy, and leaves the reader standing next to Virgil, afraid now to lift up his eyes to the poet. Awe breathes in the cadence of the words themselves. And so with many of the most splendid lines in Dante, the meaning inheres in the very Italian words. They alone shine with the idea. They alone satisfy the spiritual vision.
Of all the greatest poets, Dante is most foreign to the genius of the English race. From the point of view of English-speaking people, he is lacking in humor. It might seem at first blush as if the argument of his poem were a sufficient warrant for seriousness; but his seriousness is of a nature strange to northern nations. There is in it a gaunt and sallow earnestness which appears to us inhuman.
In the treatment of the supernatural the Teutonic nations have generally preserved a touch of humor. This is so intrinsically true to the Teutonic way of feeling that the humor seems to go with and to heighten the terror of the supernatural. When Hamlet, in the scene on the midnight terrace, addresses the ghost as "old mole," "old truepenny," etc., we may be sure that he is in a frenzy of excitement and apprehension. Perhaps the explanation of this mixture of humor and terror, is that when the mind feels itself shaken to its foundations by the immediate presence of the supernatural,—palsied, as it were, with fear,—there comes to its rescue, and as an antidote to the fear itself, a reserve of humor, almost of levity. Staggered by the unknown, the mind opposes it with the homely and the familiar. The northern nations were too much afraid of ghosts to take them seriously. The sight of one made a man afraid he should lose his wits if he gave way to his fright. Thus it has come about that in the sincerest terror of the north there is a touch of grotesque humor; and this touch we miss in Dante. The hundred cantos of his poem are unrelieved by a single scene of comedy. The strain of exalted tragedy is maintained throughout. His jests and wit are not of the laughing kind. Sometimes they are grim and terrible, sometimes playful, but always serious and full of meaning. This lack of humor becomes very palpable in a translation, where it is not disguised by the transcendent beauty of Dante's style.
There is another difficulty peculiar to the translating of Dante into English. English is essentially a diffuse and prodigal language. The great English writers have written with a free hand, prolific, excursive, diffuse. Shakespeare, Sir Thomas Browne, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Browning, all the typical writers of English, have been many-worded. They have been men who said everything that came into their heads, and trusted to their genius to make their writings readable. The eighteenth century in England, with all its striving after classical precision, has left behind it no great laconic English classic who stands in the first rank. Our own Emerson is concise enough, but he is disconnected and prophetic. Dante is not only concise, but logical, deductive, prone to ratiocination. He set down nothing that he had not thought of a thousand times, and conned over, arranged, and digested. We have in English no prototype for such condensation. There is no native work in the language written in anything which approaches the style of Dante.
My heavy sleep a sullen thunder broke,
So that I shook myself, springing upright,
Like one awakened by a sudden stroke,
And gazed with fixed eyes and new-rested sight
Slowly about me,—awful privilege,—
To know the place that held me, if I might.
In truth I found myself upon the edge
That girds the valley of the dreadful pit,
Circling the infinite wailing with its ledge.
Dark, deep, and cloudy, to the depths of it
Eye could not probe, and though I bent mine low,
It helped my vain conjecture not a whit.
"Let us go down to the blind world below,"
Began the poet, with a face like death,
"I shall go first, thou second." "Say not so,"
Cried I when I again could find my breath,
For I had seen the whiteness of his face,
"How shall I come if thee it frighteneth?"
And he replied: "The anguish of the place
And those that dwell there thus hath painted me
With pity, not with fear. But come apace;
The spur of the journey pricks us." Thus did he
Enter himself, and take me in with him,
Into the first great circle's mystery
That winds the deep abyss about the brim.
Here there came borne upon the winds to us,
Not cries, but sighs that filled the concave dim,
And kept the eternal breezes tremulous.
The cause is grief, but grief unlinked to pain,
That makes the unnumbered peoples suffer thus.
I saw great crowds of children, women, men,
Wheeling below. "Thou dost not seek to know
What spirits are these thou seest?" Thus again
My master spoke. "But ere we further go,
Thou must be sure that these feel not the weight
Of sin. They well deserved,—and yet not so.—
They had not baptism, which is the gate
Of Faith,—thou holdest. If they lived before
The days of Christ, though sinless, in that state
God they might never worthily adore.
And I myself am such an one as these.
For this shortcoming—on no other score—
We are lost, and most of all our torment is
That lost to hope we live in strong desire."
Grief seized my heart to hear these words of his,
Because most splendid souls and hearts of fire
I recognized, hung in that Limbo there.
"Tell me, my master dear, tell me, my sire,"
Cried I at last, with eager hope to share
That all-convincing faith,—"but went there not
One,—once,—from hence,—made happy though it were
Through his own merit or another's lot?"
"I was new come into this place," said he,
Who seemed to guess the purport of my thought,
"When Him whose brows were bound with Victory
I saw come conquering through this prison dark.
He set the shade of our first parent free,
With Abel, and the builder of the ark,
And him that gave the laws immutable,
And Abraham, obedient patriarch,
David the king, and ancient Israel,
His father and his children at his side,
And the wife Rachel that he loved so well,
And gave them Paradise,—and before these men
None tasted of salvation that have died."
We did not pause while he was talking then,
But held our constant course along the track,
Where spirits thickly thronged the wooded glen.
And we had reached a point whence to turn back
Had not been far, when I, still touched with fear,
Perceived a fire, that, struggling with the black,
Made conquest of a luminous hemisphere.
The place was distant still, but I could see
Clustered about the fire, as we drew near,
Figures of an austere nobility.
"Thou who dost honor science and love art,
Pray who are these, whose potent dignity
Doth eminently set them thus apart?"
The poet answered me, "The honored fame
That made their lives illustrious touched the heart
Of God to advance them." Then a voice there came,
"Honor the mighty poet;" and again,
"His shade returns,—do honor to his name."
And when the voice had finished its refrain,
I saw four giant shadows coming on.
They seemed nor sad nor joyous in their mien.
And my good master said: "See him, my son,
That bears the sword and walks before the rest,
And seems the father of the three,—that one
Is Homer, sovran poet. The satirist
Horace comes next; third, Ovid; and the last
Is Lucan. The lone voice that name expressed
That each doth share with me; therefore they haste
To greet and do me honor;—nor do they wrong."
Thus did I see the assembled school who graced
The master of the most exalted song,
That like an eagle soars above the rest.
When they had talked together, though not long,
They turned to me, nodding as to a guest.
At which my master smiled, but yet more high
They lifted me in honor. At their behest
I went with them as of their company,
And made the sixth among those mighty wits.
Thus towards the light we walked in colloquy
Of things my silence wisely here omits,
As there 'twas sweet to speak them, till we came
To where a seven times circled castle sits,
Whose walls are watered by a lovely stream.
This we crossed over as it had been dry,
Passing the seven gates that guard the same,
And reached a meadow, green as Arcady.
People were there with deep, slow-moving eyes
Whose looks were weighted with authority.
Scant was their speech, but rich in melodies.
The walls receding left a pasture fair,
A place all full of light and of great size,
So we could see each spirit that was there.
And straight before my eyes upon the green
Were shown to me the souls of those that were,
Great spirits it exalts me to have seen.
Electra with her comrades I descried,
I saw Æneas, and knew Hector keen,
And in full armor Cæsar, falcon-eyed,
Camilla and the Amazonian queen,
King Latin with Lavinia at his side,
Brutus that did avenge the Tarquin's sin,
Lucrece, Cornelia, Martia Julia,
And by himself the lonely Saladin.
The Master of all thinkers next I saw
Amid the philosophic family.
All eyes were turned on him with reverent awe;
Plato and Socrates were next his knee,
Then Heraclitus and Empedocles,
Thales and Anaxagoras, and he
That based the world on chance; and next to these,
Zeno, Diogenes, and that good leech
The herb-collector, Dioscorides.
Orpheus I saw, Livy and Tully, each
Flanked by old Seneca's deep moral lore,
Euclid and Ptolemy, and within their reach
Hippocrates and Avicenna's store,
The sage that wrote the master commentary,
Averois, with Galen and a score
Of great physicians. But my pen were weary
Depicting all of that majestic plain
Splendid with many an antique dignitary.
My theme doth drive me on, and words are vain
To give the thought the thing itself conveys.
The six of us were now cut down to twain.
My guardian led me forth by other ways,
Far from the quiet of that trembling wind,
And from the gentle shining of those rays,
To places where all light was left behind.
ROBERT BROWNING
There is a period in the advance of any great man's influence between the moment when he appears and the moment when he has become historical, during which it is difficult to give any succinct account of him. We are ourselves a part of the thing we would describe. The element which we attempt to isolate for purposes of study is still living within us. Our science becomes tinged with autobiography. Such must be the fate of any essay on Browning written at the present time.
The generation to whom his works were unmeaning has hardly passed away. The generation he spoke for still lives. His influence seems still to be expanding. The literature of Browning dictionaries, phrase-books, treatises, and philosophical studies grows daily. Mr. Cooke in his Guide to Browning (1893) gives a condensed catalogue of the best books and essays on Browning, which covers many finely printed pages. This class of book—the text-book—is not the product of impulse. The text-book is a commercial article and follows the demand as closely as the reaper follows the crop. We can tell the acreage under cultivation by looking over the account books of the makers of farm implements. Thousands of people are now studying Browning, following in his footsteps, reading lives of his heroes, and hunting up the subjects he treated.
This Browningism which we are disposed to laugh at is a most interesting secondary outcome of his influence. It has its roots in natural piety, and the educational value of it is very great.
Browning's individuality created for him a personal following, and he was able to respond to the call to leadership. Unlike Carlyle, he had something to give his disciples beside the immediate satisfaction of a spiritual need. He gave them not only meal but seed. In this he was like Emerson; but Emerson's little store of finest grain is of a different soil. Emerson lived in a cottage and saw the stars over his head through his skylight. Browning, on the other hand, loved pictures, places, music, men and women, and his works are like the house of a rich man,—a treasury of plunder from many provinces and many ages, whose manners and passions are vividly recalled to us. In Emerson's house there was not a peg to hang a note upon,—"this is his bookshelf, this his bed." But Browning's palace craves a catalogue. And a proper catalogue to such a palace becomes a liberal education.
Robert Browning was a strong, glowing, whole-souled human being, who enjoyed life more intensely than any Englishman since Walter Scott. He was born among books; and circumstances enabled him to follow his inclinations and become a writer,—a poet by profession. He was, from early youth to venerable age, a centre of bounding vitality, the very embodiment of spontaneous life; and the forms of poetry in which he so fully and so accurately expressed himself enable us to know him well. Indeed, only great poets are known so intimately as we know Robert Browning.
Religion was at the basis of his character, and it was the function of religious poetry that his work fulfilled. Inasmuch as no man invents his own theology, but takes it from the current world and moulds it to his needs, it was inevitable that Robert Browning should find and seize upon as his own all that was optimistic in Christian theology. Everything that was hopeful his spirit accepted; everything that was sunny and joyful and good for the brave soul he embraced. What was distressing he rejected or explained away. In the world of Robert Browning everything was right.
The range of subject covered by his poems is wider than that of any other poet that ever lived; but the range of his ideas is exceedingly small. We need not apologize for treating Browning as a theologian and a doctor of philosophy, for he spent a long life in trying to show that a poet is always really both—'and he has almost convinced us. The expositors and writers of text-books have had no difficulty in formulating his theology, for it is of the simplest kind; and his views on morality and art are logically a part of it. The "message" which poets are conventionally presumed to deliver, was, in Browning's case, a very definite creed, which may be found fully set forth in any one of twenty poems. Every line of his poetry is logically dedicated to it.
He believes that the development of the individual soul is the main end of existence. The strain and stress of life are incidental to growth, and therefore desirable. Development and growth mean a closer union with God. In fact, God is of not so much importance in Himself, but as the end towards which man tends. That irreverent person who said that Browning uses "God" as a pigment made an accurate criticism of his theology. In Browning, God is adjective to man. Browning believes that all conventional morality must be reviewed from the standpoint of how conduct affects the actor himself, and what effect it has on his individual growth. The province of art and of all thinking and working is to make these truths clear and to grapple with the problems they give rise to.
The first two fundamental beliefs of Browning—namely: (1) that, ultimately speaking, the most important matter in the world is the soul of a man; and (2) that a sense of effort is coincident with development—are probably true. We instinctively feel them to be true, and they seem to be receiving support from those quarters of research to which we look for light, however dim. In the application of his dogmas to specific cases in the field of ethics, Browning often reaches conclusions which are fair subjects for disagreement. Since most of our conventional morality is framed to repress the individual, he finds himself at war with it—in revolt against it. He is habitually pitted against it, and thus acquires modes of thought which sometimes lead him into paradox—at least, to conclusions at odds with his premises. It is in the course of exposition, and incidentally to his main purpose as a teacher of a few fundamental ideas, that Browning has created his masterpieces of poetry.
Never was there a man who in the course of a long life changed less. What as a boy he dreamed of doing, that he did. The thoughts of his earliest poems are the thoughts of his latest. His tales, his songs, his monologues, his dramas, his jests, his sermons, his rage, his prayer, are all upon the same theme: whatever fed his mind nourished these beliefs. His interest in the world was solely an interest in them. He saw them in history and in music; his travels and studies brought him back nothing else but proofs of them; the universe in each of its manifestations was a commentary upon them. His nature was the simplest, the most positive, the least given to abstract speculation, which England can show in his time. He was not a thinker, for he was never in doubt. He had recourse to disputation as a means of inculcating truth, but he used it like a lawyer arguing a case. His conclusions are fixed from the start. Standing, from his infancy, upon a faith as absolute as that of a martyr, he has never for one instant undergone the experience of doubt, and only knows that there is such a thing because he has met with it in other people. The force of his feelings is so much greater than his intellect that his mind serves his soul like a valet. Out of the whole cosmos he takes what belongs to him and sustains him, leaving the rest, or not noting it.
There never was a great poet whose scope was so definite. That is the reason why the world is so cleanly divided into people who do and who do not care for Browning. One real glimpse into him gives you the whole of him. The public which loves him is made up of people who have been through certain spiritual experiences to which he is the antidote. The public which loves him not consists of people who have escaped these experiences. To some he is a strong, rare, and precious elixir, which nothing else will replace. To others, who do not need him, he is a boisterous and eccentric person,—a Heracles in the house of mourning.
Let us remember his main belief,—the value of the individual. The needs of society constantly require that the individual be suppressed. They hold him down and punish him at every point. The tyranny of order and organization—of monarch or public opinion—weights him and presses him down. This is the inevitable tendency of all stable social arrangements. Now and again there arises some strong nature that revolts against the influence of conformity which is becoming intolerable,—against the atmosphere of caste or theory; of Egyptian priest or Manchester economist; of absolutism or of democracy.
And this strong nature cries out that the souls of men are being injured, and that they are important; that your soul and my soul are more important than Cæsar—or than the survival of the fittest. Such a voice was the voice of Christ, and the lesser saviors of the world bring always a like message of revolt: they arise to fulfil the same fundamental need of the world.
Carlyle, Emerson, Victor Hugo, Browning, were prophets to a generation oppressed in spirit, whose education had oppressed them with a Jewish law of Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham and Malthus, of Clarkson and Cobden,—of thought for the million, and for man in the aggregate. "To what end is all this beneficence, all this conscience, all this theory?" some one at length cries out. "For whom is it in the last analysis that you legislate? You talk of man, I see only men." To men suffering from an age of devotion to humanity came Robert Browning as a liberator. Like Carlyle, he was understood first in this country because we had begun earlier with our theoretical and practical philanthropies, and had taken them more seriously. We had suffered more. We needed to be told that it was right to love, hate, and be angry, to sin and repent. It was a revelation to us to think that we had some inheritance in the joys and passions of mankind. We needed to be told these things as a tired child needs to be comforted. Browning gave them to us in the form of a religion. There was no one else sane or deep or wise or strong enough to know what we lacked.
If ever a generation had need of a poet,—of some one to tell them they might cry and not be ashamed, rejoice and not find the reason in John Stuart Mill; some one who should justify the claims of the spirit which was starving on the religion of humanity,—it was the generation for whom Browning wrote.
Carlyle had seized upon the French Revolution, which served his ends because it was filled with striking, with powerful, with grotesque examples of individual force. In his Hero Worship he gives his countrymen a philosophy of history based on nothing but worship of the individual. Browning with the same end in view gave us pictures of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in France and Italy. He glorified what we had thought crime and error, and made men of us. He was the apostle to the educated of a most complex period, but such as he was, he was complete. Those people to whom he has been a poet know what it is for the heart to receive full expression from the lips of another.
The second thesis which Browning insists on—the identity of spiritual suffering with spiritual growth—is the one balm of the world. It is said that recent physiological experiment shows that muscles do not develop unless exercised up to what is called the "distress point." If this shall prove to be an instance of a general law,—if the struggles and agony of the spirit are really signs of an increase of that spiritual life which is the only sort of life we can conceive of now or hereafter,—then the truth-to-feeling of much of Browning's poetry has a scientific basis. It cannot be denied that Browning held firmly two of the most moving and far-reaching ideas of the world, and he expanded them in the root, leaf, flower, and fruit of a whole world of poetic disquisition.
It is unnecessary at this day to point out the beauties of Browning or the sagacity with which he chose his effects. He gives us the sallow wife of James Lee, whose soul is known to him, Pippa the silk-spinning girl, two men found in the morgue, persons lost, forgotten, or misunderstood. He searches the world till he finds the man whom everybody will concur in despising, the mediaeval grammarian, and he writes to him the most powerful ode in English, the mightiest tribute ever paid to a man. His culture and his learning are all subdued to what he works in; they are all in harness to draw his thought. He mines in antiquity or drags his net over German philosophy or modern drawing-rooms,—all to the same end.
In that miracle of power and beauty—The Flight of the Duchess—he has improvised a whole civilization in order to make the setting of contrast which shall cause the soul of the little duchess to shine clearly. In Childe Roland he creates a cycle, an epoch of romance and mysticism, because he requires it as a stage property. In A Death in the Desert you have the East in the first century—so vividly given that you wish instantly to travel there, Bible in hand, to feel the atmosphere with which your Bible ought always to have been filled. His reading brings him to Euripides. He sees that Alcestis can be set to his theme; and with a week or two of labor, while staying in a country house, he draws out of the Greek fable the world of his own meaning and shows it shining forth in a living picture of the Greek theatre which has no counterpart for vitality in any modern tongue.
The descriptive and narrative powers of Browning are above, beyond, and outside of all that has been done in English in our time, as the odd moments prove which he gave to the Pied Piper, The Ride from Ghent to Aix, Incident in the French Camp. These chips from his workshop passed instantly into popular favor because they were written in familiar forms.
How powerfully his gifts of utterance were brought to bear upon the souls of men will be recorded, even if never understood, by literary historians. It is idle to look to the present generation for an intelligible account of One Word More, Rabbi Ben Ezra, Prospice, Saul, The Blot on the 'Scutcheon. They must be judged by the future and by men who can speak of them with a steady lip.
It must be conceded that the conventional judgments of society are sometimes right, and Browning's mission led him occasionally into paradox and jeux d'esprit. Bishop Blougram is an attempt to discover whether a good case cannot be made out for the individual hypocrite. The Statue and the Bust is frankly a reductio ad absurdum, and ends with a query.
There is more serious trouble with others. The Grammarian's Funeral is false to fact, and will appear so to posterity. The grammarian was not a hero, and our calmer moments show us that the poem is not a great ode. It gave certain people the glow of a great truth, but it remains a paradox and a piece of exaggeration. The same must be said of a large part of Browning. The New Testament is full of such paradoxes of exaggeration, like the parable of the unjust steward, the rich man's chance for heaven, the wedding garment; but in these, the truth is apparent,—we are not betrayed. In Browning's paradoxes we are often led on and involved in an emotion over some situation which does not honestly call for the emotion.
The most noble quality in Browning is his temper. He does not proceed, as liberators generally do, by railing and pulling down. He builds up; he is positive, not negative. He is less bitter than Christianity itself.
While there is no more doubt as to the permanent value of the content of Browning than of the value of the spiritual truths of the New Testament, there is very little likelihood that his poems will be understood in the remote future. At present, they are following the waves of influence of the education which they correct. They are built like Palladio's Theatre at Vicenza, where the perspective converges toward a single seat. In order to be subject to the illusion, the spectator must occupy the duke's place. The colors are dropping from the poems already. The feeblest of them lose it first. There was a steady falling off in power accompanied by a constant increase in his peculiarities during the last twenty years of his life, and we may make some surmise as to how Balaustion's Adventure will strike posterity by reading Parleyings with Certain People.
The distinctions between Browning's characters—which to us are so vivid—will to others seem less so. Paracelsus and Rabbi Ben Ezra, Lippo Lippi, Karshish, Caponsacchi, and Ferishtah will all appear to be run in the same mould. They will seem to be the thinnest disguises which a poet ever assumed. The lack of the dramatic element in Browning—a lack which is concealed from us by our intense sympathy for him and by his fondness for the trappings of the drama—will be apparent to the after-comers. They will say that all the characters in The Blot on the 'Scutcheon take essentially the same view of the catastrophe of the play; that Pippa and Pompilia and Phene are the same person in the same state of mind. In fact, the family likeness is great. They will say that the philosophic monologues are repetitions of each other. It cannot be denied that there is much repetition,—much threshing out of old straw. Those who have read Browning for years and are used to the monologues are better pleased to find the old ideas than new ones, which they could not understand so readily. When the later Browning takes us on one of those long afternoon rambles through his mind,—over moor and fen, through jungle, down precipice, past cataract,—we know just where we are coming out in the end. We know the place better than he did himself. Nor will posterity like Browning's manners,—the dig in the ribs, the personal application, and de te fabula of most of his talking. These unpleasant things are part of his success with us to whom he means life, not art. Posterity will want only art. We needed doctrine. If he had not preached, we would not have listened to him. But posterity evades the preachers and accepts only singers. Posterity is so dainty that it lives on nothing but choice morsels. It will cull such out of the body of Browning as the anthologists are beginning to do already, and will leave the great mass of him to be rediscovered from time to time by belated sufferers from the philosophy of the nineteenth century.
There is a class of persons who claim for Browning that his verse is really good verse, and that he was a master of euphony. This cannot be admitted except as to particular instances in which his success is due to his conformity to law, not to his violation of it.
The rules of verse in English are merely a body of custom which has grown up unconsciously, and most of which rests upon some simple requirement of the ear.
In speaking of the power of poetry we are dealing with what is essentially a mystery, the outcome of infinitely subtle, numerous, and complex forces.
The rhythm of versification seems to serve the purpose of a prompter. It lets us know in advance just what syllables are to receive the emphasis which shall make the sense clear. There are many lines in poetry which become obscure the instant they are written in prose, and probably the advantages of poetry over prose, or, to express it modestly, the excuse for poetry at all, is that the form facilitates the comprehension of the matter. Rhyme is itself an indication that a turning-point has been reached. It punctuates and sets off the sense, and relieves our attention from the strain of suspended interest. All of the artifices of poetical form seem designed to a like end. Naturalness of speech is somewhat sacrificed, but we gain by the sacrifice a certain uniformity of speech which rests and exhilarates. We need not, for the present, examine the question of euphony any further, nor ask whether euphony be not a positive element in verse,—an element which belongs to music.
The negative advantages of poetry over prose are probably sufficient to account for most of its power. A few more considerations of the same negative nature, and which affect the vividness of either prose or verse, may be touched upon by way of preface to the inquiry, why Browning is hard to understand and why his verse is bad.
Every one is more at ease in his mind when he reads a language which observes the ordinary rules of grammar, proceeds by means of sentences having subjects and predicates, and of which the adjectives and adverbs fall easily into place. A doubt about the grammar is a doubt about the sense. And this is so true that sometimes when our fears are allayed by faultless grammar we may read absolute nonsense with satisfaction. We sometimes hear it stated as a bitter epigram, that poetry is likely to endure just in proportion as the form of it is superior to the content. As to the "inferiority" of the content, a moment's reflection shows that the ideas and feelings which prevail from age to age, and in which we may expect posterity to delight, are in their nature, and of necessity, commonplace. And if by "superiority of form" it is meant that these ideas shall be conveyed in flowing metres,—in words which are easy to pronounce, put together according to the rules of grammar, and largely drawn from the vulgar tongue,—we need not wonder that posterity should enjoy it. In fact, it is just such verse as this which survives from age to age.
Browning possesses one superlative excellence, and it is upon this that he relies. It is upon this that he has emerged and attacked the heart of man. It is upon this that he may possibly fight his way down to posterity and live like a fire forever in the bosom of mankind.
His language is the language of common speech; his force, the immediate force of life. His language makes no compromises of any sort. It is not subdued to form. The emphasis demanded by the sense is very often not the emphasis demanded by the metre. He cuts off his words and forces them ruthlessly into lines as a giant might force his limbs into the armor of a mortal. The joints and members of the speech fall in the wrong places and have no relation to the joints and members of the metre.
He writes like a lion devouring an antelope. He rends his subject, breaks its bones, and tears out the heart of it. He is not made more, but less, comprehensible by the verse-forms in which he writes. The sign-posts of the metre lead us astray. He would be easier to understand if his poems were printed in the form of prose. That is the reason why Browning becomes easy when read aloud; for in reading aloud we give the emphasis of speech, and throw over all effort to follow the emphasis of the metre. This is also the reason why Browning is so unquotable—why he has made so little effect upon the language—why so few of the phrases and turns of thought and metaphor with which poets enrich a language have been thrown into English by him. Let a man who does not read poetry take up a volume of Familiar Quotations, and he will find page after page of lines and phrases which he knows by heart—from Tennyson, Milton, Wordsworth—things made familiar to him not by the poets, but by the men whom the poets educated, and who adopted their speech. Of Browning he will know not a word. And yet Browning's poetry is full of words that glow and smite, and which have been burnt into and struck into the most influential minds of the last fifty years.
But Browning's phrases are almost impossible to remember, because they are speech not reduced to poetry. They do not sing, they do not carry. They have no artificial buoys to float them in our memories.
It follows from this uncompromising nature of Browning that when, by the grace of inspiration, the accents of his speech do fall into rhythm, his words will have unimaginable sweetness. The music is so much a part of the words—so truly spontaneous—that other verse seems tame and manufactured beside his.
Rhyme is generally so used by Browning as not to subserve the true function of rhyme. It is forced into a sort of superficial conformity, but marks no epoch in the verse. The clusters of rhymes are clusters only to the eye and not to the ear. The necessity of rhyming leads Browning into inversions,—into expansions of sentences beyond the natural close of the form,—into every sort of contortion. The rhymes clog and distress the sentences.
As to grammar, Browning is negligent. Some of his most eloquent and wonderful passages have no grammar whatever. In Sordello grammar does not exist; and the want of it, the strain upon the mind caused by an effort to make coherent sentences out of a fleeting, ever-changing, iridescent maze of talk, wearies and exasperates the reader. Of course no one but a school-master desires that poetry shall be capable of being parsed; but every one has a right to expect that he shall be left without a sense of grammatical deficiency.
The Invocation in The Ring and the Book is one of the most beautiful openings that can be imagined.
"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
To God who best taught song by gift of thee,
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 splendor once thy very thought,
Some benediction anciently thy smile;—
Never conclude, but raising hand and head
Thither where eyes, that cannot reach, yet yearn
For all hope, all sustainment, all reward,
Their utmost up and on—so blessing back
In those thy realms of help, that heaven thy home,
Some whiteness, which, I judge, thy face makes proud,
Some wanness where, I think, thy foot may fall."
These sublime lines are marred by apparent grammatical obscurity. The face of beauty is marred when one of the eyes seems sightless. We re-read the lines to see if we are mistaken. If they were in a foreign language, we should say we did not fully understand them.
In the dramatic monologues, as, for instance, in The Ring and the Book and in the innumerable other narratives and contemplations where a single speaker holds forth, we are especially called upon to forget grammar. The speaker relates and reflects,—pours out his ideas in the order in which they occur to him,—pursues two or three trains of thought at the same time, claims every license which either poetry or conversation could accord him. The effect of this method is so startling, that when we are vigorous enough to follow the sense, we forgive all faults of metre and grammar, and feel that this natural Niagara of speech is the only way for the turbulent mind of man to get complete utterance. We forget that it is possible for the same thing to be done, and yet to be subdued, and stilled, and charmed into music.
Prospero is as natural and as individual as Bishop Blougram. His grammar is as incomplete, yet we do not note it. He talks to himself, to Miranda, to Ariel, all at once, weaving all together his passions, his philosophy, his narrative, and his commands. His reflections are as profuse and as metaphysical as anything in Browning, and yet all is clear,—all is so managed that it lends magic. The characteristic and unfathomable significance of this particular character Prospero comes out of it.