Robert Browning

As her problem is another life-setting of his, so she feels her way towards its solution through processes which cannot have been strange to him. She walks "along the Beach," or "on the Cliff," or "among the rocks," and the voices of sea and wind ("Such a soft sea and such a mournful wind!" he wrote to Miss Blagden) become speaking symbols in her preoccupied mind. Not at all, however, in the fashion of the "pathetic fallacy." She is too deeply disenchanted to imagine pity; and Browning puts into her mouth (part vi.) a significant criticism of some early stanzas of his own, in which he had in a buoyant optimistic fashion interpreted the wailing of the wind.[41] If Nature has aught to teach, it is the sterner doctrine, that nothing endures; that Love, like the genial sunlight, has to glorify base things, to raise the low nature by its throes, sometimes divining the hidden spark of God in what seemed mere earth, sometimes only lending its transient splendour to a dead and barren spirit,—the fiery grace of a butterfly momentarily obliterating the dull turf or rock it lights on, but leaving them precisely what they were.

James Lee's Wife is a type of the other idyls of love which form so large a part of the Dramatis Personæ. The note of dissonance, of loss, which they sound had been struck by Browning before, but never with the same persistence and iteration. The Dramatic Lyrics and Men and Women are not quite silent of the tragic failure of love; but it is touched lightly in "swallow flights of song," like the Lost Mistress, that "dip their wings in tears and skim away." And the lovers are spiritual athletes, who can live on the memory of a look, and seem to be only irradiated, not scorched, by the tragic flame. But these lovers of the 'Sixties are of less ætherial temper; they are more obviously, familiarly human; the loss of what they love comes home to them, and there is agony in the purifying fire. Such are the wronged husband in The Worst of It, and the finally frustrated lover in Too Late. In the group of "Might-have-been" lyrics the sense of loss is less poignant and tragic but equally uncompensated. "You fool!" cries the homely little heroine of Dis Aliter Visum to the elderly scholar who ten years before had failed to propose to her,—

Nor is there much of the glory of failure in Kate Brown's bitter smile, as she sums up the story of Youth and Art:—

It is no accident that with the clearer recognition of sharp and absolute loss Browning shows increasing preoccupation with the thought of recovery after death. For himself death was now inseparably intertwined with all that he had known of love, and the prospect of the supreme reunion which death, as he believed, was to bring him, drew it nearer to the core of his imagination and passion. Not that he looked forward to it with the easy complacency of the hymn-writer. Prospice would not be the great uplifting song it is were the note of struggle, of heroic heart to bear the brunt and pay in one moment all "life's arrears of pain, darkness, and cold," less clearly sounded; and were the final cry less intense with the longing of bereavement. How near this thought of rapturous reunion lay to the springs of Browning's imagination at this time, how instantly it leapt into poetry, may be seen from the Eurydice to Orpheus which he fitly placed immediately after these—

But in two well-known poems of the Dramatis Personæ Browning has splendidly unfolded what is implicit in the strong simple clarion—note of Prospice. Abt Vogler and Rabbi ben Ezra are among the surest strongholds of his popular fame. Rabbi ben Ezra is a great song of life, bearing more fully perhaps than any other poem the burden of what he had to say to his generation, but lifted far above mere didacticism by the sustained glow in which ethical passion, and its imaginative splendour, indistinguishably blend. It is not for nothing that Browning put this loftiest utterance of all that was most strenuous in his own faith into the mouth of a member of the race which has beyond others known how to suffer and how to transfigure its suffering. Ben Ezra's thoughts are not all Hebraic, but they are conceived in the most exalted temper of Hebrew prophecy; blending the calm of achieved wisdom with the fervour of eagerly accepted discipline, imperious scorn for the ignorance of fools, and heroic ardour, for the pangs and throes of the fray. Ideals which, coolly analysed, seem antithetical, and which have in reality inspired opposite ways of life, meet in the fusing flame of the Rabbi's impassioned thought: the body is the soul's beguiling sorceress, but also its helpful comrade; man is the passive clay which the great Potter moulded and modelled upon the Wheel of Time, and yet is bidden rage and strive, the adoring acquiescence of Eastern Fatalism mingling with the Western gospel of individual energy. And all this complex and manifold ethical appeal is conveyed in verse of magnificent volume and resonance, effacing by the swift recurrent anvil crash of its rhythm any suggestion that the acquiescence of the "clay" means passivity.

In Abt Vogler the prophetic strain is even more daring and assured; only it springs not from "old experience," but from the lonely ecstasy of artistic creation. Browning has put into the mouth of his old Catholic musician the most impassioned and undoubting assertion to be found in his work of his faith that nothing good is finally lost. The Abbé's theology may have supplied the substance of the doctrine, but it could not supply the beautiful, if daring, expansion of it by which the immortality of men's souls is extended to "all we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good." This was the work of music; and the poem is in truth less remarkable for this rapturous statement of faith than for the penetrating power with which the mystical and transcendental suggestions of music are explored and unfolded,—the mysterious avenues which it seems to open to kinds of experience more universal than ours, exempt from the limitations of our narrow faculties, even from the limitations of time and space themselves. All that is doctrinal and speculative in Abt Vogler is rooted in musical experience,—the musical experience, no doubt, of a richly imaginative mind, for which every organ-note turns into the symbol of a high romance, till he sees heaven itself yearning down to meet his passion as it seeks the sky. Of the doctrine and speculation we may think as we will; of the psychological force and truth of the whole presentment there can be as little question as of its splendour and glow. It has the sinew, as well as the wing, of poetry. And neither in poetry nor in prose has the elementary marvel of the simplest musical form been more vividly seized than in the well-known couplet—

A Death in the Desert, though a poem of great beauty, must be set, in intrinsic value, below these two. To attack Strauss through the mouth of the dying apostle was a smart pamphleteering device; but it gave his otherwise noble verse a disagreeable twang of theological disputation, and did no manner of harm to Strauss, who had to be met on other ground and with other weapons,—the weapons of history and comparative religion—in which Browning's skill was that only of a brilliant amateur. But the impulse which created it had deeper springs than this. What is most clearly personal and most deeply felt in it is the exaltation of love, which seems to have determined the whole imaginative fabric. Love, Browning's highest expression of spiritual vitality, was the cardinal principle of his creed; God was vital to him only as a loving God, and Christ only as the human embodiment and witness of God's love. The traditional story of Christ was in this sense of profound significance for him, while he turned away with indifference or disgust from the whole doctrinal apparatus of the Atonement, which, however closely bound up with the popular conception of God's love, had nothing to do with his conception of it, and he could thus consistently decline the name of Christian, as some witnesses aver that he did.[42] It was thus in entire keeping with his way of approaching Christianity that he imagined this moving episode,—the dying apostle whose genius had made that way so singularly persuasive, the little remnant of doomed and hunted fugitives who seem to belong to earth only by the spiritual bond of their love to him, as his own physical life is now a firebrand all but extinct,—"all ashes save the tip that holds a spark," but that still glowing with undiminished soul. The material fabric which enshrines this fine essence of the Christian spirit is of the frailest; and the contrast is carried out in the scenic setting,—the dim cool cavern, with its shadowy depth and faint glimmerings of day, the hushed voices, the ragged herbage, and the glory in the face of the passing saint within; without, the hard dazzling glare of the desert noon, and the burning blue, and the implacable and triumphant might of Rome.

The discourse of the "aged friend" is full of subtle and vivid thinking, and contains some of Browning's most memorable utterances about Love, in particular the noble lines—

Nowhere, either, do we see more clearly how this master-conception of his won control of his reasoning powers, framing specious ladders to conclusions towards which his whole nature yearned, but which his vision of the world did not uniformly bear out. Man loved, and God would not be above man if He did not also love. The horrible spectre of a God who has power without love never ceased to lurk in the background of Browning's thought, and he strove with all his resources of dialectic and poetry to exorcise it. And no wonder. For a loving God was the very keystone of Browning's scheme of life and of the world, and its withdrawal would have meant for him the collapse of the whole structure.

It is no accident that the Death in the Desert is followed immediately by a theological study in a very different key, Caliban upon Setebos. For in this brilliantly original "dramatic monologue" Caliban—the "savage man"—appears "mooting the point 'What is God?'" and constructing his answer frankly from his own nature. It was quite in Browning's way to take a humorous delight in imagining grotesque parallels to ideas and processes in which he profoundly believed; a proclivity aided by the curious subtle relation between his grotesquerie and his seriousness, which makes Pacchiarotto, for instance, closely similar in effect to parts of Christmas-Eve. Browning is one of three or four sons of the nineteenth century who dared to fill in the outlines, or to complete the half-told tale, of Shakespeare's Caliban.[43] Kenan's hero is the quondam disciple of Stephano and Trinculo, finished and matured in the corrupt mob-politics of Europe; a caustic symbol of democracy, as Renan saw it, alternately trampling on and patronising culture. Browning's Caliban is far truer to Shakespeare's conception; he is the Caliban of Shakespeare, not followed into a new phase but observed in a different attitude,—Caliban of the days before the Storm, an unsophisticated creature of the island, inaccessible to the wisdom of Europe, and not yet the dupe of its vice. His wisdom, his science, his arts, are all his own. He anticipates the heady joy of Stephano's bottle with a mash of gourds of his own invention. And his religion too is his own,—no decoction from any of the recognised vintages of religious thought, but a home-made brew cunningly distilled from the teeming animal and plant life of the Island. It is a mistake to call Caliban's theology a study of primitive religion; for primitive religion is inseparable from the primitive tribe, and Caliban the savage, who has never known society, was a conception as unhistorical as it was exquisitely adapted to the individualist ways of Browning's imagination. Tradition and prescription, which fetter the savage with iron bonds, exist for Caliban only in the form of the faith held by his dam, which he puts aside in the calm decisive way of a modern thinker, as one who has nothing to fear from the penalties of heresy, and has even outlived the exultation of free thought:—

Caliban's theology has, moreover, very real points of contact with Browning's own. His god is that sheer Power which Browning from the first recognised; it is because Setebos feels heat and cold, and is therefore a weak creature with ungratified wants, that Caliban decides there must be behind him a divinity that "all it hath a mind to, doth." Caliban is one of Browning's most consummate realists; he has the remorselessly vivid perceptions of a Lippo Lippi and a Sludge. Browning's wealth of recondite animal and plant lore is nowhere else so amazingly displayed; the very character of beast or bird will be hit off in a line,—as the pie with the long tongue

or the lumpish sea-beast which he blinded and called Caliban (an admirable trait)—

And all this curious scrutiny is reflected in Caliban's god. The sudden catastrophe at the close

is one of Browning's most superb surprises, breaking in upon the leisured ease of theory with the suddenness of a horrible practical emergency, and compelling Caliban, in the act of repudiating his theology, to provide its most vivid illustration.

Shakespeare, with bitter irony, brought his half-taught savage into touch with the scum of modern civilisation, and made them conspire together against its benignity and wisdom. The reader is apt to remember this conjunction when he passes from Caliban to Mr Sludge. Stephano and Trinculo, almost alone among Shakespeare's rascals, are drawn without geniality, and Sludge is the only one of Browning's "casuists" whom he treats with open scorn. That some of the effects were palpably fraudulent, and that, fraud apart, there remained a residuum of phenomena not easy to explain, were all irritating facts. Yet no one can mistake Sludge for an outflow of personal irritation, still less for an act of literary vengeance upon the impostor who had beguiled the lofty and ardent intelligence of his wife. The resentful husband is possibly there, but so elementary an emotion could not possibly have taken exclusive possession of Browning's complex literary faculty, or baulked the eager speculative curiosity which he brought to all new and problematic modes of mind. His attitude towards spiritualism was in fact the product of strangely mingled conditions. Himself the most convinced believer in spirit among the poets of his time, he regarded the bogus demonstrations of the "spiritualist" somewhat as the intellectual sceptic regards the shoddy logic by which the vulgar unbeliever proves there is no God. But even this anger had no secure tenure in a nature so rich in solvents for disdain. It is hard to say where scorn ends and sympathy begins, or where the indignation of the believer who sees his religion travestied passes over into the curious interest of the believer who recognises its dim distorted reflection in the unlikeliest quarters. But Sludge is clearly permitted, like Blougram before and Juan and Hohenstiel-Schwangau after him, to assume in good faith positions, or at least to use, with perfect sincerity, language, which had points of contact with Browning's own. He has an eye for "spiritual facts" none the less genuine in its gross way that it has been acquired in the course of professional training, and is valued as a professional asset. But his supernaturalism at its best is devoid of spiritual quality. His "spiritual facts" are collections of miraculous coincidences raked together by the anteater's tongue of a cool egoist, who waits for them

Like Caliban, who also finds the anteater an instructive symbol, he sees "the supernatural" everywhere, and everywhere concerned with himself. But Caliban's religion of terror, cunning, and cajolery is more estimable than Sludge's business-like faith in the virtue of wares for which he finds so profitable a market, and which he gets on such easy terms. Caliban tremblingly does his best to hitch his waggon to Setebos's star—when Setebos is looking; Sludge is convinced that the stars are once for all hitched to his waggon; that heaven is occupied in catering for his appetite and becoming an accomplice in his sins. Sludge's spiritual world was genuine for him, but it had nothing but the name in common with that of the poet of Ben Ezra, and of the Epilogue which immediately follows.[44]

This Epilogue is one of the few utterances in which Browning draws the ambiguous dramatic veil from his personal faith. That he should choose this moment of parting with the reader for such a confession confirms one's impression that the focus of his interest in poetry now, more than ever before, lay among those problems of life and death, of God and man, to which nearly all the finest work of this collection is devoted. Far more emphatically than in the analogous Christmas-Eve, Browning resolves not only the negations of critical scholarship but the dogmatic affirmations of the Churches into symptoms of immaturity in the understanding of spiritual things; in the knowledge how heaven's high with earth's low should intertwine. The third speaker voices the manifold protest of the nineteenth century against all theologies built upon an aloofness of the divine and human, whether the aloof God could be reached by special processes and ceremonies, or whether he was a bare abstraction, whose "pale bliss" never thrilled in response to human hearts. The best comment upon his faith is the saying of Meredith, "The fact that character can be and is developed by the clash of circumstances is to me a warrant for infinite hope."[45] Only, for Browning, that "infinite hope" translates itself into a sense of present divine energies bending all the clashing circumstance to its benign end, till the walls of the world take on the semblance of the shattered Temple, and the crowded life within them the semblance of the seemingly vanished Face, which

After four years of silence, the Dramatis Personæ was followed by The Ring and the Book. This monumental poem, in some respects his culminating achievement, has its roots in an earlier stratum of his life than its predecessor. There is little here to recall the characteristic moods of his first years of desolate widowhood—the valiant Stoicism, the acceptance of the sombre present, the great forward gaze upon the world beyond. We are in Italy once more, our senses tingle with its glowing prodigality of day, we jostle the teeming throng of the Roman streets, and are drawn into the vortex of a vast debate which seems to occupy the entire community, and which turns, not upon immortality, or spiritualism, or the nature of God, or the fate of man, but on the guilt or innocence of the actors in one pitiful drama,—a priest, a noble, an illiterate girl.

With the analytic exuberance of one to whom the processes of Art were yet more fascinating than its products, Browning has described how he discovered this forgotten tale and forged its glowing metal into the Ring. The chance finding of an "old square yellow book" which aroused his curiosity among the frippery of a Florentine stall, was as grotesquely casual an inception as poem ever had. But it was one of those accidents which, suddenly befalling a creative mind, organise its loose and scattered material with a magical potency unattainable by prolonged cogitation. The story of Pompilia took shape in the gloom and glare of a stormy Italian night of June 1860, as he watched from the balcony of Casa Guidi. The patient elaboration of after-years wrought into consummate expressiveness the donnée of that hour. But the conditions under which the elaboration was carried out were pathetically unlike those of the primal vision. Before the end of June in the following year Mrs Browning died, and Browning presently left Florence for ever. For the moment all the springs of poetry were dried up, and it is credible enough that, as Mrs Orr says, Browning abandoned all thought of a poem, and even handed over his material to another. But within a few months, it is clear, the story of Pompilia not merely recovered its hold upon his imagination, but gathered a subtle hallowing association with what was most spiritual in that vanished past of which it was the last and most brilliant gift. The poem which enshrined Pompilia was thus instinct with reminiscence; it was, with all its abounding vitality, yet commemorative and memorial; and we understand how Browning, no friend of the conventions of poetic art, entered on and closed his giant task with an invocation to the "Lyric Love," as it were the Urania, or heavenly Muse, of a modern epic.

The definite planning of the poem in its present shape belongs to the autumn of 1862. In September 1862 he wrote to Miss Blagden from Biarritz of "my new poem which is about to be, and of which the whole is pretty well in my head—the Roman murder-story, you know."[47] After the completion of the Dramatis Personæ in 1863-64, the "Roman murder-story" became his central occupation. To it three quiet early morning hours were daily given, and it grew steadily under his hand. For the rest he began to withdraw from his seclusion, to mix freely in society, to "live and like earth's way." He talked openly among his literary friends of the poem and its progress, rumour and speculation busied themselves with it as never before with work of his, and the literary world at large looked for its publication with eager and curious interest. At length, in November 1868, the first instalment was published. It was received by the most authoritative part of the press with outspoken, even dithyrambic eulogies, in which the severely judicial Athenæum took the lead. Confirmed sceptics or deriders, like Edward FitzGerald, rubbed their eyes and tried once again, in vain, to make the old barbarian's verses construe and scan. To critics trained in classical traditions the original structure of the poem was extremely disturbing; and most of FitzGerald's friends shared, according to him, the opinion of Carlyle, who roundly pronounced it "without Backbone or basis of Common-sense," and "among the absurdest books ever written by a gifted Man." Tennyson, however, admitted (to FitzGerald) that he "found greatness" in it,[48] and Mr Swinburne was in the forefront of the chorus of praise. The audience which now welcomed Browning was in fact substantially that which had hailed the first fresh runnels of Mr Swinburne's genius a few years before; the fame of both marked a wave of reaction from the austere simplicity and attenuated sentiment of the later Idylls of the King. Readers upon whom the shimmering exquisiteness of Arthurian knighthood began to pall turned with relish to Browning's Italian murder story, with its sensational crime, its mysterious elopement, its problem interest, its engaging actuality.

And undoubtedly this was part of the attraction of the theme for Browning himself. He had inherited his father's taste for stories of mysterious crime.[49] And to the detective's interest in probing a mystery, which seems to have been uppermost in the elder Browning, was added the pleader's interest in making out an ingenious and plausible case for each party. The casuist in him, the lover of argument as such, and the devoted student of Euripides,[50] seized with delight upon a forensic subject which made it natural to introduce the various "persons of the drama," giving their individual testimonies and "apologies." He avails himself remorselessly of all the pretexts for verbosity, for iteration, for sophistical invention, afforded by the cumbrous machinery of the law, and its proverbial delay. Every detail is examined from every point of view. Little that is sordid or revolting is suppressed. But then it is assuredly a mistake to represent, with one of the liveliest of Browning's recent exponents, that the story was for him, even at the outset, in the stage of "crude fact," merely a common and sordid tale like a hundred others, picked up "at random" from a rubbish-heap to be subjected to the alchemy of imagination by way of showing the infinite worth of "the insignificant." Rather, he thought that on that broiling June day, a providential "Hand" had "pushed" him to the discovery, in that unlikely place, of a forgotten treasure, which he forthwith pounced upon with ravishment as a "prize." He saw in it from the first something rare, something exceptional, and made wondering inquiries at Rome, where ecclesiasticism itself scarcely credited the truth of a story which told "for once clean for the Church and dead against the world, the flesh, and the devil."[51] The metal which went to the making of the Ring, and on which he poured his imaginative alloy, was crude and untempered, but it was gold. Its disintegrated particles gleamed obscurely, as if with a challenge to the restorative cunning of the craftsman. Above all, of course, and beyond all else, that arresting gleam lingered about the bald record of the romance of Pompilia and Caponsacchi. It was upon these two that Browning's divining imagination fastened. Their relation was the crucial point of the whole story, the point at which report stammered most lamely, and where the interpreting spirit of poetry was most needed "to abolish the death of things, deep calling unto deep." This process was itself, however, not sudden or simple. This first inspiration was superb, visionary, romantic,—in keeping with "the beauty and fearfulness of that June night" upon the terrace at Florence, where it came to him.

Such a vision might have been rendered without change in the chiselled gold and agate of the Idylls of the King. But Browning's hero could be no Sir Galahad; he had to be something less; and also something more. The idealism of his nature had to force its way through perplexities and errors, beguiled by the distractions and baffled by the duties of his chosen career. Born to be a lover, in Dante's great way, he had groped through life without the vision of Beatrice, seeking to satisfy his blind desire, as perhaps Dante after Beatrice's death did also, with the lower love and scorning the loveless asceticism of the monk. The Church encouraged its priest to be "a fribble and a coxcomb"; and a fribble and a coxcomb, by his own confession, Caponsacchi became. But the vanities he mingled with never quite blinded him. He walked in the garden of the Hesperides bent on great adventure, plucked in ignorance hedge-fruit and feasted to satiety, but yet he scorned the achievement, laughing at such high fame for hips and haws.[53] Then suddenly flashed upon him the apparition, in the theatre, of

The gaze burnt to his soul, and the beautiful, sad, strange smile haunted him night and day; but their first effect was to crush and scatter all thoughts of love. The young priest found himself haunting the solemn shades of the Duomo instead of serenading countesses; vowed to write no more canzonets, and doubted much whether Marini were a better poet than Dante after all. His patron jocularly charged him with playing truant in Church all day long:—

The forged love-letters he instantly sees through. They are the scorpion—blotch feigned to issue miraculously from Madonna's mouth. And then Pompilia makes her appeal. "Take me to Rome!" The Madonna has turned her face upon him indeed, "to summon me and signify her choice," and he at once receives and accepts

in the presence of which all hesitation vanished,—nay, thought itself fell back before the tide of revealing emotion:—

The bonds of his old existence snapped, the former heaven and earth died for him, and that death was the beginning of life:—

But when once again he is confronted with the strange sad face, and hears once more the pitiful appeal, all hesitations vanish, and he sees no duty

With the security of perfect innocence he flings at his judges as "the final fact"—

Thus, through all the psychologic subtlety of the portrait the groundwork of spiritual romance subsists. The militant saint of legend reappears, in the mould and garb of the modern world, subject to all its hampering conditions, and compelled to make his way over the corpses, not of lions and dragons only, but of consecrated duties and treasured instincts. And the matter-of-course chivalry of professed knighthood is as inferior in art as in ethics to the chivalry to which this priest, vowed to another service, is lifted by the vision of Pompilia.

Pompilia is herself, like her soldier saint, vowed to another service. But while he only after a struggle overcomes the apparent discrepancy between his duty as a priest and as a knight, she rises with the ease and swiftness of a perfectly pure and spiritual nature from the duty of endurance to the duty of resistance—

And she carries the same fearless simplicity into her love. Caponsacchi falters and recoils in his adorations of her, with the compunction of the voluptuary turned ascetic; he hardly dares to call his passion by a name which the vulgar will mumble and misinterpret: she, utterly unconscious of such peril, glories in the immeasurable devotion

Pompilia is steeped in the remembrance of the poet's "Lyric Love." Remote enough this illiterate child must seem from the brilliant and accomplished Elizabeth Browning. But Browning's conception of his wife's nature had a significant affinity to his portrayal of Pompilia. She, he declared, was "the poet," taught by genius more than by experience; he himself "the clever person," effectively manipulating a comprehensive knowledge of life. Pompilia does indeed put her narrow experience to marvellous use; her blending of the infantine with the profound touches the bounds of possible consistency; but her naïve spiritual instinct is ever on the alert, and fills her with a perpetual sense of the strangeness of the things that happen, a "childlike, wondering yet subtle perception of the anomalies of life."

In contrast with these two, who shape their course by the light of their own souls, the authorised exponents of morality play a secondary and for the most part a sorry part. The old Pope mournfully reflects that his seven years' tillage of the garden of the Church has issued only in the "timid leaf and the uncertain bud," while the perfect flower, Pompilia, has sprung up by the wayside 'neath the foot of the enemy, "a mere chance-sown seed."