Book: The Poetry Of Robert Browning

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

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

Just such another poem--of the sportiveness of love, only this time in
memory, not in present pleasure, is to be found in _A Lovers' Quarrel_,
and the quarrel is the dark element in it. Browning always feels that
mighty passion has its root in tragedy, and that it seeks relief in
comedy. The lover sits by the fireside alone, and recalls, forgetting
pain for a moment, the joyful play they two had together, when love
expressed its depth of pleasure in dramatic fancies. Every separate
picture is done in Browning's impressionist way. And when the glad
memories are over, and the sorrow returns, passion leaps out--

It is twelve o'clock:
I shall hear her knock
In the worst of a storm's uproar,
I shall pull her through the door,
I shall have her for evermore!

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

MEETING AT NIGHT.

The grey sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow.
And quench its speed i' the slushy sand.
Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears.
Than the two hearts beating each to each!


PARTING AT MORNING.

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

The poem entitled _Confessions_ is another of these memories, in which a
dying man, careless of death, careless of the dull conventions of the
clergyman, cares for nothing but the memory of his early passion for a
girl one happy June, and dies in comfort of the sweetness of the memory,
though he thinks--

How sad and bad and mad it was.

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

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

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

Oh how dark your villa was,
Windows fast and obdurate!
How the garden grudged me grass
Where I stood--the iron gate
Ground its teeth to let me pass!

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

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

Never the time and the place
And the loved one all together!
This path--how soft to pace!
This May--what magic weather!
Where is the loved one's face?
In a dream that loved one's face meets mine
But the house is narrow, the place is bleak
Where, outside, rain and wind combine
With a furtive ear, if I strive to speak,
With a hostile eye at my flushing cheek,
With a malice that marks each word, each sign!
O enemy sly and serpentine,
Uncoil thee from the waking man!
Do I hold the Past
Thus firm and fast
Yet doubt if the Future hold I can?
This path so soft to pace shall lead
Through the magic of May to herself indeed!
Or narrow if needs the house must be,
Outside are the storms and strangers: we--
Oh, close, safe, warm sleep I and she,
--I and she!

That, indeed, is passionate enough.

Then there is another group--tales which embody phases of love. _Count
Gismond_ is one of these. It is too long, and wants Browning's usual
force. The outline of the story was, perhaps, too simple to interest his
intellect, and he needed in writing poetry not only the emotional
subject, but that there should be something in or behind the emotion
through the mazes of which his intelligence might glide like a
serpent.[10]

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

Finally, as to the mightier kinds of love, those supreme forms of the
passion, which have neither beginning nor end; to which time and space
are but names; which make and fill the universe; the least grain of
which predicates the whole; the spirit of which is God Himself; the
breath of whose life is immortal joy, or sorrow which means joy; whose
vision is Beauty, and whose activity is Creation--these, united in God,
or divided among men into their three great entities--love of ideas for
their truth and beauty; love of the natural universe, which is God's
garment; love of humanity, which is God's child--these pervade the whole
of Browning's poetry as the heat of the sun pervades the earth and every
little grain upon it. They make its warmth and life, strength and
beauty. They are too vast to be circumscribed in a lyric, represented in
a drama, bound up even in a long story of spiritual endeavour like
_Paracelsus_. But they move, in dignity, splendour and passion, through
all that he deeply conceived and nobly wrought; and their triumph and
immortality in his poetry are never for one moment clouded with doubt or
subject to death. This is the supreme thing in his work. To him Love is
the Conqueror, and Love is God.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] There is one simple story at least which he tells quite admirably,
_The Pied Piper of Hamelin_. But then, that story, if it is not troubled
by intellectual matter, is also not troubled by any deep emotion. It is
told by a poet who becomes a child for children.

* * * * *




CHAPTER X

_THE PASSIONS OTHER THAN LOVE_


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

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

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

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

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

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

How he lies in his rights of a man!
Death has done all death can.
And, absorbed in the new life he leads,
He recks not, he heeds

Nor his wrong nor my vengeance; both strike
On his senses alike,
And are lost in the solemn and strange
Surprise of the change.

Ha, what avails death to erase
His offence, my disgrace?
I would we were boys as of old
In the field, by the fold:
His outrage, God's patience, man's scorn
Were so easily borne!

I stand here now, he lies in his place;
Cover the face.

Again, there are few studies in literature of contempt, hatred and
revenge more sustained and subtle than Browning's poem entitled _A
Forgiveness_; and the title marks how, though the justice of revenge was
accomplished on the woman, yet that pity, even love for her, accompanied
and followed the revenge. Our natural revolt against the cold-blooded
work of hatred is modified, when we see the man's heart and the woman's
soul, into pity for their fate. The man tells his story to a monk in the
confessional, who has been the lover of his wife. He is a statesman
absorbed in his work, yet he feels that his wife makes his home a
heaven, and he carries her presence with him all the day. His wife takes
the first lover she meets, and, discovered, tells her husband that she
hates him. "Kill me now," she cries. But he despises her too much to
hate her; she is not worth killing. Three years they live together in
that fashion, till one evening she tells him the truth. "I was jealous
of your work. I took my revenge by taking a lover, but I loved you, you
only, all the time, and lost you--

I thought you gave
Your heart and soul away from me to slave
At statecraft. Since my right in you seemed lost,
I stung myself to teach you, to your cost,
What you rejected could be prized beyond
Life, heaven, by the first fool I threw a fond
Look on, a fatal word to.

"Ah, is that true, you loved and still love? Then contempt perishes, and
hate takes its place. Write your confession, and die by my hand.
Vengeance is foreign to contempt, you have risen to the level at which
hate can act. I pardon you, for as I slay hate departs--and now, sir,"
and he turns to the monk--

She sleeps, as erst
Beloved, in this your church: ay, yours!

and drives the poisoned dagger through the grate of the confessional
into the heart of her lover.

This is Browning's closest study of hate, contempt, and revenge. But
bitter and close as it is, what is left with us is pity for humanity,
pity for the woman, pity for the lover, pity for the husband.

Again, in the case of Sebald and Ottima in _Pippa Passes_, pity also
rules. Love passing into lust has led to hate, and these two have slaked
their hate and murdered Luca, Ottima's husband. They lean out of the
window of the shrub-house as the morning breaks. For the moment their
false love is supreme. Their crime only creeps like a snake, half
asleep, about the bottom of their hearts; they recall their early
passion and try to brazen it forth in the face of their murder, which
now rises, dreadful and more dreadful, into threatening life in their
soul. They reanimate their hate of Luca to lower their remorse, but at
every instant his blood stains their speech. At last, while Ottima loves
on, Sebald's dark horror turns to hatred of her he loved, till she lures
him back into desire of her again. The momentary lust cannot last, but
Browning shoots it into prominence that the outburst of horror and
repentance may be the greater.

I kiss you now, dear Ottima, now and now!
This way? Will you forgive me--be once more
My great queen?

At that moment Pippa passes by, singing:

The year's at the spring
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side's dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in his heaven--
All's right with the world!

Something in it smites Sebald's heart like a hammer of God. He repents,
but in the cowardice of repentance curses her. That baseness I do not
think Browning should have introduced, no, nor certain carnal phrases
which, previously right, now jar with the spiritual passion of
repentance. But his fury with her passes away into the passion of
despair--

My brain is drowned now--quite drowned: all I feel
Is ... is, at swift recurring intervals,
A hurry-down within me, as of waters
Loosened to smother up some ghastly pit:
There they go--whirls from a black fiery sea!

lines which must have been suggested to Browning by verses, briefer and
more intense, in Webster's

_Duchess of Malfi_. Even Ottima, lifted by her love, which purifies
itself in wishing to die for her lover, repents.

Not me,--to him, O God, be merciful!

Thus into this cauldron of sin Browning steals the pity of God. We know
they will be saved, so as by fire.

Then there is the poem on the story of _Cristina and Monaldeschi_; a
subject too odious, I think, to be treated lyrically. It is a tale of
love turned to hatred, and for good cause, and of the pitiless vengeance
which followed. Browning has not succeeded in it; and it may be so
because he could get no pity into it. The Queen had none. Monaldeschi
deserved none--a coward, a fool, and a traitor! Nevertheless, more might
have been made of it by Browning. The poem is obscure and wandering, and
the effort he makes to grip the subject reveals nothing but the weakness
of the grip. It ought not to have been published.

* * * * *

And now I turn to passions more delightful, that this chapter may close
in light and not in darkness--passions of the imagination, of the
romantic regions of the soul. There is, first, the longing for the
mystic world, the world beneath appearance, with or without reference to
eternity. Secondly, bound up with that, there is the longing for the
unknown, for following the gleam which seems to lead us onward, but we
know not where. Then, there is the desire, the deeper for its constant
suppression, for escape from the prison of a worldly society, from its
conventions and maxims of morality, its barriers of custom and rule,
into liberty and unchartered life. Lastly, there is that longing to
discover and enjoy the lands of adventure and romance which underlies
and wells upwards through so much of modern life, and which has never
ceased to send its waters up to refresh the world. These are romantic
passions. On the whole, Browning does not often touch them in their
earthly activities. His highest romance was beyond this world. It
claimed eternity, and death was the entrance into its enchanted realm.
When he did bring romantic feeling into human life, it was for the most
part in the hunger and thirst, which, as in _Abt Vogler_, urged men
beyond the visible into the invisible. But now and again he touched the
Romantic of Earth. _Childe Roland_, _The Flight of the Duchess_, and
some others, are alive with the romantic spirit.

But before I write of these, there are a few lyrical poems, written in
the freshness of his youth, which are steeped in the light of the
story-telling world; and might be made by one who, in the morning of
imagination, sat on the dewy hills of the childish world. They are full
of unusual melody, and are simple and wise enough to be sung by girls
knitting in the sunshine while their lovers bend above them. One of
these, a beautiful thing, with that touch of dark fate at its close
which is so common in folk-stories, is hidden away in _Paracelsus_.
"Over the sea," it begins:

Over the sea our galleys went,
With cleaving prows in order brave
To a speeding wind and a bounding wave,
A gallant armament:
Each bark built out of a forest-tree
Left leafy and rough as first it grew,
And nailed all over the gaping sides,
Within and without, with black bull-hides,
Seethed in fat, and suppled with flame,
To bear the playful billows' game.

It is made in a happy melody, and the curious mingling in the tale, as
it continues, of the rudest ships, as described above, with purple
hangings, cedar tents, and noble statues,

A hundred shapes of lucid stone,

and with gentle islanders from Graecian seas, is characteristic of
certain folk-tales, especially those of Gascony. That it is spoken by
Paracelsus as a parable of the state of mind he has reached, in which he
clings to his first fault with haughty and foolish resolution, scarcely
lessens the romantic element in it. That is so strong that we forget
that it is meant as a parable.

There is another song which touches the edge of romance, in which
Paracelsus describes how he will bury in sweetness the ideal aims he had
in youth, building a pyre for them of all perfumed things; and the last
lines of the verse I quote leave us in a castle of old romance--

And strew faint sweetness from some old
Egyptian's fine worm-eaten shroud
Which breaks to dust when once unrolled;
Or shredded perfume, like a cloud
From closet long to quiet vowed,
With mothed and dropping arras hung,
Mouldering her lute and books among,
As when a queen, long dead, was young.

The other is a song, more than a song, in _Pippa Passes_, a true piece
of early folk-romance, with a faint touch of Greek story, wedded to
Eastern and mediaeval elements, in its roving imaginations. It is
admirably pictorial, and the air which broods over it is the sunny and
still air which, in men's fancy, was breathed by the happy children of
the Golden Age. I quote a great part of it:

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