Robert Browning

These stanzas finely hint at a second theme which wanders in and out among the strident notes of Browning's anti-critical "apologetics." Of all the springs of poetry none lay deeper in Browning than love; to the last he could sing of love with the full inspiration of his best time; and the finest things in this volume are concerned with it. But as compared with the love-lays of the Dramatic Lyrics or Men and Women there is something wistful, far off, even elegiac, in this love-poetry. A barrier, undefinable but impassable, seems to part us from the full tide of youthful passion. The richest in this tender sunset beauty is the St Martin's Summer, where the late love is suddenly smitten with the discovery that its apparent warmth is a ghost of old passion buried but unallayed. Again and again Browning here dwells upon the magic of love,—as if love still retained for the ageing poet an isolated and exceptional irradiating power in a world fast fading into commonplace and prose. The brief, exquisite snatches of song, Natural Magic, Magical Nature, are joyous tributes to the power of the charm, paid by one who remains master of his heart. Numpholeptos is the long-drawn enchanted reverie of one in the very toils of the spell—a thing woven of dreams and emotions, dark-glowing, iridescent to the eye, languorous to the ear, impalpable to the analytic intellect. In Bifurcation he puts again, with more of subtlety and of detachment, the problem of the conventional conflict of love with duty, so peremptorily decided in love's favour in The Statue and the Bust. A Forgiveness is a powerful reworking of the theme of My Last Duchess, with an added irony of situation: Browning, who excels in the drama of silent figures, has drawn none more effective than this guilty priest, who grinds his teeth behind the confessional grating as he listens perforce to the story of his own crime from the lips of the wronged husband, still cherishing the hope that he is unrecognised, or at the worst may elude vengeance in his cloister's solitude; until the avenger's last words throw off the mask:—

From these high matters of passion and tragedy we pass by easy steps into the jocular-colloquial region in which the volume opened. Painting in these later days of Browning's has ceased to yield high, or even serious poetry, and Baldinucci's tale of shabby trickery cannot be compared, even for grotesque humour, with the powerful grotesquerie of Holy-Cross Day, while it wholly lacks the great lift of Hebraic sublimity at the close. The Epilogue returns to the combative apologetics of the title poem; but, unlike that, does attempt some reply to the cavils of the discontented. They cannot have the strong and the sweet—body and bouquet—at once, he tells them in effect, and he chooses to be strong, to give the good grape and leave the cowslips growing in the meadow. The argument was but another sally of the poet's good-humoured chaff, and would not have stood the scrutiny of his subtler mind. Doubtless he, like Ben Jonson, inclined to see signs of the "strong" in the astringent and the gritty; but no one knew better, when he chose, to wed his "strength" with "sweetness." The falling-off of the present volume compared with Men and Women or Dramatis Personæ lay less in the lack of either quality than in his failure to bring them together. Of the "stiff brew" there is plenty; but the choicest aroma comes from that "wine of memories"—the fragrant reminiscences—which the poet affected to despise. The epilogue ends, incorrigibly, with a promise to "posset and cosset" the cavilling reader henceforward with "nettle-broth," good for the sluggish blood and the disordered stomach.

The following year brought a production which the cavilling reader might excusably regard as a fulfilment of this jocose threat. For the translation of the Agamemnon (1877) was not in any sense a serious contribution to the English knowledge and love of Greek drama. The Balaustion "transcripts" had betrayed an imperfect sensibility to the finer qualities of Greek dramatic style. But Browning seems to have gone to work upon the greatest of antique tragedies with the definite intention of showing, by a version of literal fidelity, how little the Greek drama at its best owed to Greek speech. And he has little difficulty in making the oracular brevity of Aeschylus look bald, and his sublime incoherences frigid.[61] The result is, nevertheless, very interesting and instructive to the student of Browning's mind. Nowhere else do we feel so acutely how foreign to his versatile and athletic intellect was the primitive and elemental imagination which interprets the heart and the conscience of nations. His acute individualism in effect betrayed him, and made his too faithful translation resemble a parody of this mighty fragment of the mind of Themistoclean Athens by one of the brilliant irresponsible Sophists of the next generation.

The spring and summer of 1877 were not productive. The summer holiday was spent in a new haunt among the Savoy Alps, and Browning missed the familiar stimulus of the sea-air. But the early autumn brought an event which abruptly shattered his quiescence, and called forth, presently, the most intimately personal poem of his later years. Miss Ann Egerton-Smith, his gifted and congenial companion at London concerts, and now, for the fourth year in succession, in the summer villeggiatura, died suddenly of heart disease at dawn on Sept. 14, as she was preparing for a mountain expedition with her friends. It was not one of those losses which stifle thought or sweep it along on the vehement tide of lyric utterance; it was rather of the kind which set it free, creating an atmosphere of luminous serenity about it, and allaying all meaner allurements and distractions. Elegy is often the outcome of such moods; and the elegiac note is perceptible in the grave music of La Saisiaz. Yet the poem as a whole does not even distantly recall, save in the quiet intensity of its ground tone, the noble poems in which Milton or Shelley, Arnold or Tennyson, commemorated their dead friends. He himself commemorated no other dead friend in a way like this; to his wife's memory he had given only the sacred silence, the impassioned hymn, the wealth of poetry inspired by her spirit but not addressed to her. This poem, also, was written "once, and only once, and for one only." La Saisiaz recalls to us, perversely perhaps, poems of his in which no personal sorrow beats. The glory of the dawn and the mountain-peak—Salève with its outlook over the snowy splendour of Mont Blanc—instils itself here into the mourner's mood, as, long before, a like scene had animated the young disciples of the Grammarian; while the "cold music" of Galuppi's Toccata seems to be echoed inauspiciously in these lingering trochaics. Something of both moods survives, but the dominant tone is a somewhat grey and tempered hope, remote indeed from the oppressive sense of evanescence, the crumbling mortality, of the second poem, remote no less from the hushed exaltation, the subdued but rapturous confidence of the first.

The poet is growing old; the unity of poetic vision is breaking up into conflicting aspects only to be adjusted in the give and take of debate; he puts off his singing robes to preside as moderator, while Fancy and Reason exchange thrust and parry on the problem of immortality; delivering at last, as the "sad summing up of all," a balanced and tentative affirmation. And he delivers the decision with an oppressive sense that it is but his own. He is "Athanasius contra mundum"; and he dwells, with a "pallid smile" which Athanasius did not inspire, upon the marvellous power of fame. Nay, Athanasius himself has his doubts. Even his sober hope is not a secure possession; but in the gloom of London's November he remembers that he had hoped in the sunset glory of Salève, and "saves up" the memory of that pregnant hour for succour in less prosperous times.

The Two Poets of Croisic, published with La Saisiaz, cannot be detached from it. The opening words take up the theme of "Fame," there half mockingly played with, and the whole poem is a sarcastic criticism of the worship of Fame. The stories of René Gentilhomme and Paul Desfarges Maillard are told with an immense burly vivacity, in the stanza, and a Browningesque version of the manner, of Beppo. Both stories turned upon those decisive moments which habitually caught Browning's eye. Only, in their case, the decisive moment was not one of the revealing crises which laid bare their utmost depths, but a crisis which temporarily invested them with a capricious effulgence. Yet these instantaneous transformations have a peculiar charm for Browning; they touch and fall in with his fundamental ideas of life; and the delicious prologue and epilogue hint these graver analogies in a dainty music which pleasantly relieves the riotous uncouthness of the tale itself. If René's life is suddenly lighted up, so is the moss bank with the "blue flash" of violets in spring; and the diplomatic sister through whose service Paul wins his laurels has a more spiritual comrade in the cicada, who, with her little heart on fire, sang forth the note of the broken string and won her singer his prize. Browning's pedestrian verse passes into poetry as he disengages from the transient illusions, the flickerings and bickerings, of Fame, the eternal truth of Love. But it is only in the closing stanzas of the main poem that his thought clearly emerges; when, having exposed the vanity of fame as a test of poetic merit, he asks how, then, poets shall be tried; and lays down the characteristic criterion, a happy life. But it is the happiness of Rabbi ben Ezra, a joy three parts pain, the happiness won not by ignoring evil but by mastering it!—

Since the catastrophe of 1861 Browning had not entered Italy. In the autumn of 1878 he once more bent his steps thither. Florence, indeed, he refused to revisit; it was burnt in upon his brain by memories intolerably dear. But in Venice the charm of Italy reasserted itself, and he returned during his remaining autumns with increasing frequency to the old-fashioned hostelry, Dell' Universo, on the Grand Canal, or latterly, to the second home provided by the hospitality of his gifted and congenial American friend, Mrs Arthur Bronson. Asolo, too, the town of Pippa, he saw again, after forty years' absence, with poignant feelings,—"such things have begun and ended with me in the interval!" But the poignancy of memory did not restore the magic of perception which had once been his. The mood described ten years later in the Prologue to Asolando was already dominant: the iris glow of youth no longer glorified every common object of the natural world, but "a flower was just a flower." The glory still came by moments; some of his most thrilling outbursts of song belong to this time. But he built up no more great poems. He was approaching seventy, and it might well seem that if so prolific a versifier was not likely to become silent his poetry was rapidly resolving itself into wastes of theological argument, of grotesque posturing, or intellectualised anecdotage. The Dramatic Idyls of 1879 and 1880 showed that these more serious forebodings were at least premature. There was little enough in them, no doubt, of the qualities traditionally connected with "idyll." Browning habitually wore his rue with a difference, and used familiar terms in senses of his own. There is nothing here of "enchanted reverie" or leisurely pastoralism. Browning's "idyls" are studies in life's moments of stress and strain, not in its secluded pleasances and verdurous wooded ways. It is for the most part some new variation of his familiar theme—the soul taken in the grip of a tragic crisis, and displaying its unsuspected deeps and voids. Not all are of this kind, however; and while his keenness for intense and abnormal effects is as pronounced as ever, he seeks them in an even more varied field. Italy, the main haunt of his song, yields—it can hardly be said to have inspired—one only of the Idyls—Pietro of Abano. Old memories of Russia are furbished up in Iván Ivánovitch, odd gatherings from the byways of England and America in Ned Bratts, Halbert and Hob, Martin Relph; and he takes from Virgil's hesitating lips the hint of a joyous pagan adventure of the gods, and tells it with his own brilliant plenitude and volubility. The mythic treatment of nature had never appealed much to Browning, even as a gay decorative device; he was presently to signalise his rejection of it in Gerard de Lairesse, a superb example of what he rejected. In all mythology there was something foreign to the tenacious humanity of his intellect; he was most open to its appeal where it presented divinity stretching forth a helping hand to man. The noble "idyl" of Echetlos is thus a counterpart, in its brief way, to the great tragic tale of Herakles and Alkestis. Echetlos, the mysterious ploughman who shone amid the ranks at Marathon,

is one of the many figures which thrill us with Browning's passion for Greece, and he is touched with a kind of magic which it did not lie in his nature often to communicate. But the great successes of the Dramatic Idyls are to be found mainly among the tales of the purely human kind that Browning had been used to tell. Pheidippides belongs to the heroic line of How they brought the Good News and Hervé Riel. The poetry of crisis, of the sudden, unforeseen, and irremediable critical moment, upon which so much of Browning's psychology converges, is carried to an unparalleled point of intensity in Clive and Martin Relph. And in most of these "idyls" there emerges a trait always implicit in Browning but only distinctly apparent in this last decade—the ironical contrasts between the hidden deeps of a man's soul and the assumptions or speculations of his neighbours about it. The two worlds—inner and outer—fall more sharply apart; stranger abysses of self-consciousness appear on the one side, more shallow and complacent illusions on the other. Relph's horror of remorse—painted with a few strokes of incomparable intensity, like his 'Get you behind the man I am now, you man that I used to be!'—is beyond the comprehension of the friendly peasants; Clive's "fear" is as much misunderstood by his auditor as his courage by the soldiers; the "foolishness" of Muleykeh equally illudes his Arab comrades; the Russian villagers, the Pope, and the lord have to fumble through a long process of argument to the conclusion which for Iván had been the merest matter of fact from the first. Admirable in its quiet irony is the contrast between the stormy debate over his guilt or innocence and his serene security of mind as he sits cutting out a toy for his children:—

With the "wild men" Halbert and Hob it is the spell of a sudden memory which makes an abrupt rift between the men they have seemed to be and the men they prove. Browning in his earlier days had gloried in these moments of disclosure; now they served to emphasise the normal illusion. "Ah me!" sounds the note of the proem to the second series, scornful and sad:—

The volume called Jocoseria (1883) contains some fine things, and abounds with Browning's invariable literary accomplishment and metrical virtuosity, but on the whole points to the gradual disintegration of his genius. "Wanting is—what?" is the significant theme of the opening lyric, and most of the poetry has something which recalls the "summer redundant" of leaf and flower not "breathed above" by vitalising passion. Compared with the Men and Women or the Dramatis Personæ, the Jocoseria as a whole are indeed

Browning, the poet of the divining imagination, is less apparent here than the astute ironical observer who delights in pricking the bubbles of affectation, stripping off the masks of sham, and exhibiting human nature in unadorned nakedness. Donald is an exposure, savage and ugly, of savagery and ugliness in Sport; Solomon and Balkis a reduction, dainty and gay, of these fabled paragons of wisdom to the dimensions of ordinary vain and amorous humanity. Lilith and Eve unmask themselves under stress of terror, as Balkis and Solomon at the compulsion of the magic ring, and Adam urbanely replaces the mask. Jochanan Hakka-dosh, the saintly prop of Israel, expounds from his deathbed a gospel of struggle and endurance in which a troubled echo of the great strain of Ben Ezra may no doubt be heard; but his career is, as a whole, a half-sad, half-humorous commentary on the vainness of striving to extend the iron frontiers of mortality. Lover, poet, soldier, statist have each contributed a part of their lives to prolong and enrich the saint's: but their fresh idealisms have withered when grafted upon his sober and sapless brain; while his own garnered wisdom fares no better when committed to the crude enthusiasm of his disciples. But twice, in this volume, a richer and fuller music sounds. In the great poem of Ixion, human illusions are still the preoccupying thought; but they appear as fetters, not as specious masks, and instead of the serio-comic exposure of humanity we see its tragic and heroic deliverance. Ixion is Browning's Prometheus. The song that breaks from his lips as he whirls upon the penal wheel of Zeus is a great liberating cry of defiance to the phantom-god—man's creature and his ape—who may plunge the body in torments but can never so baffle the soul but that

And in Never the Time and the Place, the pang of love's aching void and the rapture of reunion blend in one strain of haunting magical beauty, the song of an old man in whom one memory kindles eternal youth, a song in which, as in hardly another, the wistfulness of autumn blends with the plenitude of spring.

Browning spent the summer months of 1883 at Gressoney St Jean, a lonely spot high up in the Val d'Aosta, living, as usual when abroad, on the plainest of vegetable diet. "Delightful Gressoney!" he wrote,

And a mood of serene acquiescence in keeping with the scene breathes from the poem which occupied him during this pleasant summer. To Browning's old age, as to Goethe's, the calm wisdom and graceful symbolism of Persia offered a peculiar attraction. In the Westöstlicher Divan, seventy years earlier, Goethe, with a subtler sympathy, laid his finger upon the common germs of Eastern and Western thought and poetry. Browning, far less in actual touch with the Oriental mind, turned to the East in quest of picturesque habiliments for his very definitely European convictions—"Persian garments," which had to be "changed" in the mind of the interpreting reader.

The Fancies have the virtues of good fables,—pithy wisdom, ingenious moral instances, homely illustrations, easy colloquial dialogue; and the ethical teaching has a striking superficial likeness to the common-sense morality of prudence and content, which fables, like proverbs, habitually expound. "Cultivate your garden, don't trouble your head about insoluble riddles, accept your ignorance and your limitations, assume your good to be good and your evil to be evil, be a man and nothing more"—such is the recurring burden of Ferishtah's counsel. But such preaching on Browning's lips always carried with it an implicit assumption that the preacher had himself somehow got outside the human limitations he insisted on; that he could measure the plausibility of man's metaphysics and theology, and distinguish between the anthropomorphism which is to be acquiesced in because we know no better, and that which is to be spurned because we know too much. Ferishtah's thought is a game of hide-and-seek, and its movements have all the dexterity of winding and subterfuge proper to success in that game. Against the vindictive God of the creeds he trusts his human assurance that pain is God's instrument to educate us into pity and love; but when it is asked how a just God can single out sundry fellow-mortals

instead of admitting a like appeal to the same human assurance, he falls back upon the unfathomable ways of Omnipotence. If the rifts in the argument are in any sense supplied, it is by the brief snatches of song which intervene between the Fancies, as the cicada-note filled the pauses of the broken string. These exquisite lyrics are much more adequate expressions of Browning's faith than the dialogues which professedly embody it. They transfer the discussion from the jangle of the schools and the cavils of the market-place to the passionate persuasions of the heart and the intimate experiences of love, in which all Browning's mysticism had its root. Thus Ferishtah's pragmatic, almost philistine, doctrine of "Plot-culture," by which human life is peremptorily walled in within its narrow round of tasks, "minuteness severed from immensity," is followed by the lyric which tells how Love transcends those limits, making an eternity of time and a universe of solitude. Finally, the burden of these wayward intermittent strains of love-music is caught up, with an added intensity drawn from the poet's personal love and sorrow, in the noble Epilogue. As he listens to the call of Love, the world becomes an enchanted place, resounding with the triumph of good and the exultant battle-joy of heroes. But a "chill wind" suddenly disencharms the enchantment, a doubt that buoyant faith might be a mirage conjured up by Love itself:—

He disdains to answer; for the last words glow with a fire which of itself dispels the chill wind. A faith founded upon love had for Browning a surer guarantee than any founded upon reason; it was secured by that which most nearly emancipated men from the illusions of mortality, and enabled them to see things as they are seen by God.

The Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day (1887) is a more laboured and, save for one or two splendid episodes, a less remarkable achievement than Ferishtah. All the burly diffuseness which had there been held in check by a quasi-oriental ideal of lightly-knit facility and bland oracular pithiness, here has its way without stint, and no more songs break like the rush of birds' wings upon the dusty air of colloquy. Thrusting in between the lyrics of Ferishtah and Asolando, these Parleyings recall those other "people of importance" whose intrusive visit broke in upon "the tenderness of Dante." Neither their importance in their own day nor their relative obscurity, for the most part, in ours, had much to do with Browning's choice. They do not illustrate merely his normal interest in the obscure freaks and out-of-the-way anomalies of history. The doings of these "people" had once been "important" to Browning himself, and the old man's memory summoned up these forgotten old-world friends of his boyhood to be championed or rallied by their quondam disciple. The death of the dearest friend of his later life, J. Milsand, in 1886, probably set these chords vibrating; the book is dedicated to his memory. Perhaps the Imaginary Conversations of an older friend and master of Browning's, one even more important in Browning's day and in ours than in his own, and the master of his youth, once more suggested the scheme. But these Parleyings are conversations only in name. They are not even monologues of the old brilliantly dramatic kind. All the dramatic zest of converse is gone, the personages are the merest shadows, nothing is seen but the old poet haranguing his puppets or putting voluble expositions of his own cherished dogmas into their wooden lips. We have glimpses of the boy, when not yet able to compass an octave, beating time to the simple but stirring old march of Avison "whilom of Newcastle organist"; and before he has done, the memory masters him, and the pedestrian blank verse breaks into a hymn "rough, rude, robustious, homely heart athrob" to Pym the "man of men." Or he calls up Bernard Mandeville to confute the formidable pessimism of his old friend Carlyle—"whose groan I hear, with guffaw at the end disposing of mock—melancholy." Gerard de Lairesse, whose rococo landscapes had interested him as a boy, he introduces only to typify an outworn way of art—the mythic treatment of nature; but he illustrates this "inferior" way with a splendour of poetry that makes his ironic exposure dangerously like an unwitting vindication. These visions of Prometheus on the storm-swept crag, of Artemis hunting in the dawn, show that Browning was master, if he had cared to use it, of that magnificent symbolic speech elicited from Greek myth in the Hyperion or the Prometheus Unbound. But it was a foreign idiom to him, and his occasional use of it a tour de force.

Two years only now remained for Browning, and it began to be apparent to his friends that his sturdy health was no longer secure. His way of life underwent no change, he was as active in society as ever, and acquaintances, old and new, still claimed his time, and added to the burden, always cheerfully endured, of his correspondence. In October 1887 the marriage of his son attached him by a new tie to Italy, and the Palazzo Rezzonico on the Grand Canal, where "Pen" and his young American wife presently settled, was to be his last, as it was his most magnificent, abode. To Venice he turned his steps each autumn of these last two years; lingering by the way among the mountains or in the beautiful border region at their feet. It was thus that, in the early autumn of 1889, he came yet once again to Asolo. His old friend and hostess, Mrs Arthur Bronson, had discovered a pleasant, airy abode on the old town-wall, overhanging a ravine, and Asolo, seen from this "castle precipice-encurled," recovered all its old magic. It was here that he put together the disconnected pieces, many written during the last two years in London, others at Asolo itself, which were finally published on the day of his death. The Tower of Queen Cornaro still overlooked the little town, as it had done half a century before; and he attached these last poems to the same tradition by giving them the pleasant title said to have been invented by her secretary. Asolando—Facts and Fancies, both titles contain a hint of the ageing Browning,—the relaxed physical energy which allows this strenuous waker to dream (Reverie; Bad Dreams); the flagging poetic power, whose fitful flashes could no longer transfigure the world for him, but only cast a fantastic flicker at moments across its prosaic features. The opening lines sadly confess the wane of the old vision:—

The famous Epilogue is the last cheer of an old warrior in whom the stout fibre of heroism still held out when the finer nerve of vision decayed; but A Reverie shows how heavy a strain it had to endure in sustaining his faith that the world is governed by Love. Of outward evidence for that conviction Browning saw less and less. But age had not dimmed his inner witness, and those subtle filaments of mysterious affinity which, for Browning, bound the love of God for man to the love of man for woman, remained unimpaired. The old man of seventy-seven was still, in his last autumn, singing songs redolent, not of autumn, but of the perfume and the ecstasy of spring and youth,—love-lyrics so illusively youthful that one, not the least competent, of his critics has refused to accept them as work of his old age. Yet Now and Summum Bonum, and A Pearl, a Girl, with all their apparent freshness and spontaneity, are less like rapt utterances of passion than eloquent analyses of it by one who has known it and who still vibrates with the memory. What preoccupies and absorbs him is not the woman, but the wonder of the transfiguration wrought for him by her word or kiss,—the moment made eternal, the "blaze" in which he became "lord of heaven and earth." But some of the greatest love-poetry of the world—from Dante onwards—has reflected an intellect similarly absorbed in articulating a marvellous experience. For the rest, Asolando is a miscellany of old and new,—bright loose drift from the chance moods of genius, or bits of anecdotic lumber carefully recovered and refurbished, as in prescience of the nearing end.

Yet no such prescience appears to have been his. His buoyant confidence in his own vitality held its own. He was full of schemes of work. At the end of October the idyllic days at Asolo ended, and Browning repaired for the last time to the Palazzo Rezzonico. A month later he caught a bronchial catarrh; failure of the heart set in, and on the evening of December 12 he peacefully died. On the last day of the year his body was laid to rest in "Poets' Corner."

"I have, you are to know," Browning once wrote to Miss Haworth, "such a love for flowers and leaves ... that I every now and then in an impatience at being unable to possess them thoroughly, to see them quite, satiate myself with their scent,—bite them to bits." "All poetry," he wrote some twenty years later to Ruskin, "is the problem of putting the infinite into the finite." Utterances like these, not conveyed through the lips of some "dramatic" creation, but written seriously in his own person to intimate friends, give us a clue more valuable it may be than some other utterances which are oftener quoted and better known, to the germinal impulses of Browning's poetic work. "Finite" and "infinite" were words continually on his lips, and it is clear that both sides of the antithesis represented instincts rooted in his mental nature, drawing nourishment from distinct but equally fundamental springs of feeling and thought. Each had its stronghold in a particular psychical region. The province and feeding-ground of his passion for "infinity" was that eager and restless self-consciousness which he so vividly described in Pauline, seeking to "be all, have, see, know, taste, feel all," to become all natures, like Sordello, yet retain the law of his own being. "I pluck the rose and love it more than tongue can speak," says the lover in Two in the Campagna. Browning had his full portion of the romantic idealism which, under the twofold stimulus of literary and political revolution, had animated the poetry of the previous generation. But while he clearly shared the uplifted aspiring spirit of Shelley, it assumed in him a totally different character. Shelley abhors limits, everything grows evanescent and ethereal before his solvent imagination, the infinity he aspires after unveils itself at his bidding, impalpable, undefined, "intense," "inane." Whereas Browning's restlessly aspiring temperament worked under the control of an eye and ear that fastened with peculiar emphasis and eagerness upon all the limits, the dissonances, the angularities that Shelley's harmonising fancy dissolved away. The ultimate psychological result was that the brilliant clarity and precision of his imagined forms gathered richness and intensity of suggestion from the vaguer impulses of temperament, and that an association was set up between them which makes it literally true to say that, for Browning, the "finite" is not the rival or the antithesis, but the very language of the "infinite,"—that the vastest and most transcendent realities have for him their points d'appui in some bit of intense life, some darting bird or insect, some glowing flower or leaf. Existence ebbs away from the large, featureless, monotonous things, to concentrate itself in a spiked cypress or a jagged mountain cleft. A placid soul without "incidents" arrests him less surely than the fireflies on a mossy bank. Hence, while "the finite" always appears, when explicitly contrasted with "the infinite," as the inferior,—as something soi-disant imperfect and incomplete,—its actual status and function in Browning's imaginative world rather resembles that of Plato's περας in relation to the απειρον,—the saving "limit" which gives definite existence to the limitless vague.

II.

Hence Browning, while a romantic in temper, was, in comparison with his predecessors, a thorough realist in method. All the Romantic poets of the previous generation had refused and decried some large portion of reality. Wordsworth had averted his ken from half of human fate; Keats and Shelley turned from the forlornness of human society as it was to the transfigured humanity of myth. All three were out of sympathy with civilisation; and their revolt went much deeper than a distaste for the types of men it bred. They attacked a triumphant age of reason in its central fastness, the brilliant analytic intelligence to which its triumphs were apparently due. Keats declaimed at cold philosophy which undid the rainbow's spells; Shelley repelled the claim of mere understanding to settle the merits of poetry; Wordsworth, the profoundest, though by no means the most cogent or connected, thinker of the three, denounced the "meddling intellect" which murders to dissect, and strove to strip language itself of every element of logic and fancy, as distortions of the truth, only to be uttered in the barest words, which comes to the heart that watches and receives. On all these issues Browning stands in sharp, if not quite absolute, contrast. "Barbarian," as he has been called, and as in a quite intelligible sense he was, he found his poetry pre-eminently among the pursuits, the passions, the interests and problems, of civilised men. His potent gift of imagination never tempted him, during his creative years, to assail the sufficiency of intellect, or to disparage the intellectual and "artificial" elements of speech; on the contrary, he appears from the outset employing in the service of poetry a discursive logic of unsurpassed swiftness and dexterity, and a vast heterogeneous army of words gathered, like a sudden levy, with a sole eye to their effective force, from every corner of civilised life, and wearing the motley of the most prosaic occupations. It was only in the closing years that he began to distrust the power of thought to get a grip upon reality. His delight in poetic argument is often doubtless that of the ironical casuist, looking on at the self-deceptions of a soul; but his interest in ideas was a rooted passion that gave a thoroughly new, and to many readers most unwelcome, "intellectuality" to the whole manner as well as substance of his poetic work.

While Browning thus, in Nietzsche's phrase, said "Yes" to many sides of existence which his Romantic predecessors repudiated or ignored, he had some very definite limitations of his own. He gathered into his verse crowded regions of experience which they neglected; but some very glorious avenues of poetry pursued by them he refused to explore. Himself the most ardent believer in the supernatural among all the great poets of his time, the supernatural, as such, has hardly any explicit place in his poetry. To the eternal beauty of myth and folk-lore,—dream-palaces "never built at all and therefore built for ever,"—all that province of the poetical realm which in the memorable partition of 1797 Coleridge had taken for his own, splendidly emulated by Shelley and by Keats, Browning the Platonist maintained on the whole the attitude of the utilitarian man of facts. "Fairy-poetry," he agreed with Elizabeth Barrett in 1845-46, was "impossible in the days of steam." With a faith in a transcendent divine world as assured as Dante's or Milton's, he did not aspire to "pass the flaming bounds of Space or Time," or "to possess the sun and stars." No reader of Gerard de Lairesse at one end of his career, or of the vision of Paracelsus at the other, or Childe Roland in the middle, can mistake the capacity; but habit is more trustworthy than an occasional tour de force; and Browning's imagination worked freely only when it bodied forth a life in accord with the waking experience of his own day. "A poet never dreams," said his philosophical Don Juan, "we prose folk always do"; and the epigram brilliantly announced the character of Browning's poetic world,—the world of prose illuminated through and through in every cranny and crevice by the keenest and most adventurous of exploring intellects.

In physical organisation Browning's endowment was decidedly of the kind which prompts men to "accept the universe" with joyful alacrity. Like his contemporary Victor Hugo, he was, after all reserves have been made, from first to last one of the healthiest and heartiest of men. If he lacked the burly stature and bovine appetite with which young Hugo a little scandalised the delicate sensibilities of French Romanticism, he certainly "came eating and drinking," and amply equipped with nerve and muscle, activity, accomplishment, social instinct, and savoir faire. The isolating loneliness of genius was checkmated by a profusion of the talents which put men en rapport with their kind. The reader of his biography is apt to miss in it the signs of that heroic or idealist detachment which he was never weary of extolling in his verse. He is the poet par excellence of the glory of failure and dissatisfaction: but his life was, in the main, that of one who succeeded and who was satisfied with his success. In the vast bulk of his writings we look in vain for the "broken arc," the "half-told tale," and it is characteristic that he never revised. Even after the great sorrow of his life, the mood of Prospice, though it may have underlain all his other moods, did not suppress or transform them; he "lived in the world and loved earth's way," and however assured that this earth is not his only sphere, did not wish

Whatever affinities Browning may have with the mystic or the symbolist for whom the whole sense-world is but the sign of spiritual realities, it is plain that this way of envisaging existence found little support in the character of his senses. He had not the brooding eye, beneath which, as it gazes, loveliness becomes far lovelier, but an organ aggressively alert, minutely inquisitive, circumstantially exact, which perceived the bearings of things, and explored their intricacies, noted how the mortar was tempered in the walls and if any struck a woman or beat a horse, but was as little prone to transfigure these or other things with the glamour of mysterious suggestion as the eye of Peter Bell himself. He lacked the stranger and subtler sensibilities of eye and ear, to which Nature poetry of the nineteenth century owes so much. His senses were efficient servants to an active brain, not magicians flinging dazzling spells into the air before him or mysterious music across his path. By a curious and not unimportant peculiarity he could see a remote horizon clearly with one eye, and read the finest print in twilight with the other; but he could not, like Wordsworth, hear the "sound of alien melancholy" given out from the mountains before a storm. The implicit realism of his eye and ear was fortified by acute tactual and muscular sensibilities. He makes us vividly aware of surface and texture, of space, solidity, shape. Matter with him is not the translucent, tenuous, half-spiritual substance of Shelley, but aggressively massive and opaque, tense with solidity. And he had in an eminent degree the quick and eager apprehension of space—relations which usually goes with these developed sensibilities of eye and muscle. There is a hint of it in an early anecdote. "Why, sir, you are quite a geographer!" he reported his mother to have said to him when, on his very first walk with her, he had given her an elaborate imaginary account of "his houses and estates."[62] But it was only late in life that this acute plasticity and concreteness of his sensibility found its natural outlet. When in their last winter at Rome (1860-61) he took to clay-modelling, it was with an exultant rapture which for the time thrust poetry into the shade. "The more tired he has been, and the more his back ached, poor fellow," writes his wife, "the more he has exulted and been happy—no, nothing ever made him so happy before."[63] This was the immense joy of one who has at length found the key after half a lifetime of trying at the lock.

III.

And yet realism as commonly understood is a misleading term for Browning's art. If his keen objective senses penned his imagination, save for a few daring escapades, within the limits of a somewhat normal actuality, it exercised, within those limits, a superb individuality of choice. The acute observer was doubled with a poet whose vehement and fiery energy and intense self-consciousness influenced what he observed, and yet far more what he imagined and what he expressed. It is possible to distinguish four main lines along which this determining bias told. He gloried in the strong sensory-stimulus of glowing colour, of dazzling light; in the more complex motory-stimulus of intricate, abrupt, and plastic form,—feasts for the agile eye; in all the signs of power, exciting a kindred joy by sympathy; and in all the signs of conscious life or "soul," exciting a joy which only reaches its height when it is enforced by those more elemental and primitive springs of joy, when he is engaged with souls that glow like a flower or a gem, with souls picturesquely complex and diversified, or vehement, aspiring, heroic. In each of those four domains, light and colour, form, power, soul, Browning had a profound, and in the fullest sense creative, joy, which in endless varieties and combinations dominated his imagination, controlled and pointed its flight, and determined the contents, the manner, and the atmosphere of his poetic work. To trace these operations in detail will be the occupation of the five following sections.

IV.

1. JOY IN LIGHT AND COLOUR.

Browning's repute as a thinker and "teacher" long overshadowed his glory as a singer, and it still to some extent impedes the recognition of his bold and splendid colouring. It is true that he is never a colourist pure and simple; his joy in light and colour is never merely epicurean. Poets so great as Keats often seem to sit as luxurious guests at their own feasts of sense; Browning has rather the air of a magnificent dispenser, who "provides and not partakes." His colouring is not subtle; it recalls neither the æthereal opal of Shelley nor the dewy flushing glow and "verdurous glooms" of Keats, nor the choice and cultured splendour of Tennyson; it is bold, simple, and intense. He neglects the indecisive and subdued tones; the mingled hues chiefly found in Nature, or the tender "silvery-grey" of Andrea's placid perfection. He dazzles us with scarlet and crimson; with rubies, and blood, and "the poppy's red effrontery," with topaz, and amethyst, and the glory of gold, makes the sense ache with the lustre of blue, and heightens the effect of all by the boldest contrast. Who can doubt that he fell the more readily upon one of his quaintest titles because of the priestly ordinance that the "Pomegranates" were to be "of blue and of purple and of scarlet," and the "Bells" "of gold"? He loves the daybreak hour of the world's awakening vitality as poets of another temper love the twilight; the splendour of sunrise pouring into the chamber of Pippa, and steeping Florence in that "live translucent bath of air"[64]; he loves the blaze of the Italian mid-day—