Book: The Poetry Of Robert Browning

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A King lived long ago,
In the morning of the world,
When earth was nigher heaven than now:
And the King's locks curled,
Disparting o'er a forehead full
As the milk-white space 'twixt horn and horn
Of some sacrificial bull--
Only calm as a babe new-born:
For he was got to a sleepy mood,
So safe from all decrepitude,
Age with its bane, so sure gone by,
(The gods so loved him while he dreamed)
That, having lived thus long, there seemed
No need the King should ever die.

LUIGI. No need that sort of King should ever die!

Among the rocks his city was:
Before his palace, in the sun,
He sat to see his people pass,
And judge them every one
From its threshold of smooth stone
They haled him many a valley-thief
Caught in the sheep-pens, robber chief
Swarthy and shameless, beggar, cheat,
Spy-prowler, or rough pirate found
On the sea-sand left aground;

* * *

These, all and every one,
The King judged, sitting in the sun.

LUIGI. That King should still judge sitting in the sun!

His councillors, on left and right,
Looked anxious up,--but no surprise
Disturbed the King's old smiling eyes
Where the very blue had turned to white.
'Tis said, a Python scared one day
The breathless city, till he came,
With forty tongue and eyes on flame,
Where the old King sat to judge alway;
But when he saw the sweepy hair
Girt with a crown of berries rare
Which the god will hardly give to wear
To the maiden who singeth, dancing bare
In the altar-smoke by the pine-torch lights,
At his wondrous forest rites,--
Seeing this, he did not dare
Approach the threshold in the sun,
Assault the old king smiling there.
Such grace had kings when the world begun!

Then there are two other romantic pieces, not ringing with this early
note, but having in them a wafting scent of the Provencal spirit. One is
the song sung by Pippa when she passes the room where Jules and Phene
are talking--the song of Kate, the Queen. The other is the cry Rudel,
the great troubadour, sent out of his heart to the Lady of Tripoli whom
he never saw, but loved. The subject is romantic, but that, I think, is
all the romance in it. It is not Rudel who speaks but Browning. It is
not the twelfth but the nineteenth century which has made all that
analysis and over-worked illustration.

There remain, on this matter, _Childe Roland_ and the _Flight of the
Duchess_. I believe that _Childe Roland_ emerged, all of a sudden and to
Browning's surprise, out of the pure imagination, like the Sea-born
Queen; that Browning did not conceive it beforehand; that he had no
intention in it, no reason for writing it, and no didactic or moral aim
in it. It was not even born of his will. Nor does he seem to be
acquainted with the old story on the subject which took a ballad form
in Northern England. The impulse to write it was suddenly awakened in
him by that line out of an old song the Fool quotes in _King Lear_.
There is another tag of a song in _Lear_ which stirs a host of images in
the imagination; and out of which some poet might create a romantic
lyric:

Still through the hawthorn blows the cold wind.

But it does not produce so concrete a set of images as _Childe Roland to
the Dark Tower came_. Browning has made that his own, and what he has
done is almost romantic. Almost romantic, I say, because the
peculiarities of Browning's personal genius appear too strongly in
_Childe Roland_ for pure romantic story, in which the idiosyncrasy of
the poet, the personal element of his fancy, are never dominant. The
scenery, the images, the conduct of the tales of romance, are, on
account of their long passage through the popular mind, impersonal.

Moreover, Browning's poem is too much in the vague. The romantic tales
are clear in outline; this is not. But the elements in the original
story entered, as it were of their own accord, into Browning. There are
several curious, unconscious reversions to folk-lore which have crept
into his work like living things which, seeing Browning engaged on a
story of theirs, entered into it as into a house of their own, and
without his knowledge. The wretched cripple who points the way; the
blind and wicked horse; the accursed stream; the giant mountain range,
all the peaks alive, as if in a nature myth; the crowd of Roland's
predecessors turned to stone by their failure; the sudden revealing of
the tower where no tower had been, might all be matched out of
folk-stories. I think I have heard that Browning wrote the poem at a
breath one morning; and it reads as if, from verse to verse, he did not
know what was coming to his pen. This is very unlike his usual way; but
it is very much the way in which tales of this kind are unconsciously
up-built.

Men have tried to find in the poem an allegory of human life; but
Browning had no allegorising intention. However, as every story which
was ever written has at its root the main elements of human nature, it
is always possible to make an allegory out of any one of them. If we
like to amuse ourselves in that fashion, we may do so; but we are too
bold and bad if we impute allegory to Browning. _Childe Roland_ is
nothing more than a gallop over the moorlands of imagination; and the
skies of the soul, when it was made, were dark and threatening storm.
But one thing is plain in it: it is an outcome of that passion for the
mystical world, for adventure, for the unknown, which lies at the root
of the romantic tree.

The _Flight of the Duchess_ is full of the passion of escape from the
conventional; and no where is Browning more original or more the poet.
Its manner is exactly right, exactly fitted to the character and
condition of the narrator, who is the Duke's huntsman. Its metrical
movement is excellent, and the changes of that movement are in harmony
with the things and feelings described. It is astonishingly swift,
alive, and leaping; and it delays, as a stream, with great charm, when
the emotion of the subject is quiet, recollective, or deep. The
descriptions of Nature in the poem are some of the most vivid and true
in Browning's work. The sketches of animal life--so natural on the lips
of the teller of the story--are done from the keen observation of a
huntsman, and with his love for the animals he has fed, followed and
slain. And, through it all, there breathes the romantic passion--to be
out of the world of custom and commonplace, set free to wander for ever
to an unknown goal; to drink the air of adventure and change; not to
know to-day what will take place to-morrow, only to know that it will be
different; to ride on the top of the wave of life as it runs before the
wind; to live with those who live, and are of the same mind; to be loved
and to find love the best good in the world; to be the centre of hopes
and joys among those who may blame and give pain, but who are never
indifferent; to have many troubles, but always to pursue their far-off
good; to wring the life out of them, and, at the last, to have a new
life, joy and freedom in another and a fairer world. But let Browning
tell the end:

So, at the last shall come old age.
Decrepit as befits that stage;
How else would'st thou retire apart
With the hoarded memories of thy heart,
And gather all to the very least
Of the fragments of life's earlier feast,
Let fall through eagerness to find
The crowning dainties yet behind?
Ponder on the entire past
Laid together thus at last,
When the twilight helps to fuse
The first fresh with the faded hues.
And the outline of the whole
Grandly fronts for once thy soul.
And then as, 'mid the dark, a gleam
Of yet another morning breaks,
And, like the hand which ends a dream,
Death, with the might of his sunbeam,
Touches the flesh, and the soul awakes,
Then----

Then the romance of life sweeps into the world beyond. But even in that
world the duchess will never settle down to a fixed life. She will be,
like some of us, a child of the wandering tribes of eternity.

This romantic passion which never dies even in our modern society, is
embodied in the gipsy crone who, in rags and scarcely clinging to life,
suddenly lifts into youth and queenliness, just as in a society, where
romance seems old or dead, it springs into fresh and lovely life. This
is the heart of the poem, and it is made to beat the more quickly by the
wretched attempt of the duke and his mother to bring back the
observances of the Middle Ages without their soul. Nor even then does
Browning leave his motive. The huntsman has heard the gipsy's song; he
has seen the light on his mistress' face as she rode away--the light
which is not from sun or star--and the love of the romantic world is
born in him. He will not leave his master; there his duty lies. "I must
see this fellow his sad life through." But then he will go over the
mountains, after his lady, leaving the graves of his wife and children,
into the unknown, to find her, or news of her, in the land of the
wanderers. And if he never find her, if, after pleasant journeying,
earth cannot give her to his eyes, he will still pursue his quest in a
world where romance and formality are not married together.

So I shall find out some snug corner,
Under a hedge, like Orson the wood-knight,
Turn myself round and bid the world Good Night;
And sleep a sound sleep till the trumpet's blowing
Wakes me (unless priests cheat us laymen)
To a world where will be no further throwing
Pearls before swine that can't value them. Amen.

* * * * *




CHAPTER XI

_IMAGINATIVE REPRESENTATIONS_


All poems might be called "imaginative representations." But the class
of poems in Browning's work to which I give that name stands apart. It
includes such poems as _Cleon, Caliban on Setebos, Fra Lippo Lippi_, the
_Epistle of Karshish_, and they isolate themselves, not only in
Browning's poetry, but in English poetry. They have some resemblance in
aim and method to the monologues of Tennyson, such as the _Northern
Farmer_ or _Rizpah_, but their aim is much wider than Tennyson's, and
their method far more elaborate and complex.

What do they represent? To answer this is to define within what limits I
give them the name of "imaginative representations." They are not only
separate studies of individual men as they breathed and spoke; face,
form, tricks of body recorded; intelligence, character, temper of mind,
spiritual aspiration made clear--Tennyson did that; they are also
studies of these individual men--Cleon, Karshish and the rest--as
general types, representative images, of the age in which they lived; or
of the school of art to which they belonged; or of the crisis in
theology, religion, art, or the social movement which took place while
the men they paint were alive, and which these men led, on formed, or
followed. That is their main element, and it defines them.

They are not dramatic. Their action and ideas are confined to one
person, and their circumstance and scenery to one time and place. But
Browning, unlike Tennyson, filled the background of the stage on which
he placed his single figure with a multitude of objects, or animals, or
natural scenery, or figures standing round or in motion; and these give
additional vitality and interest to the representation. Again, they are
short, as short as a soliloquy or a letter or a conversation in a
street. Shortness belongs to this form of poetic work--a form to which
Browning gave a singular intensity. It follows that they must not be
argumentative beyond what is fitting. Nor ought they to glide into the
support of a thesis, or into didactic addresses, as _Bishop Blougram_
and _Mr. Sludge_ do. These might be called treatises, and are apart from
the kind of poem of which I speak. They begin, indeed, within its
limits, but they soon transgress those limits; and are more properly
classed with poems which, also representative, have not the brevity, the
scenery, the lucidity, the objective representation, the concentration
of the age into one man's mind, which mark out these poems from the
rest, and isolate them into a class of their own.

The voice we hear in them is rarely the voice of Browning; nor is the
mind of their personages his mind, save so far as he is their creator.
There are a few exceptions to this, but, on the whole, Browning has, in
writing these poems, stripped himself of his own personality. He had, by
creative power, made these men; cast them off from himself, and put them
into their own age. They talk their minds out in character with their
age. Browning seems to watch them, and to wonder how they got out of his
hands and became men. That is the impression they make, and it
predicates a singular power of imagination. Like the Prometheus of
Goethe, the poet sits apart, moulding men and then endowing them with
life. But he cannot tell, any more than Prometheus, what they will say
and do after he has made them. He does tell, of course, but that is not
our impression. Our impression is that they live and talk of their own
accord, so vitally at home they are in the country, the scenery, and the
thinking of the place and time in which he has imagined them.

Great knowledge seems required for this, and Browning had indeed an
extensive knowledge not so much of the historical facts, as of the
tendencies of thought which worked in the times wherein he placed his
men. But the chief knowledge he had, through his curious reading, was of
a multitude of small intimate details of the customs, clothing,
architecture, dress, popular talk and scenery of the towns and country
of Italy from the thirteenth century up to modern times. To every one of
these details--such as are found in _Sordello_, in _Fra Lippo Lippi_, in
the _Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's Church_--his vivid and
grasping imagination gave an uncommon reality.

But even without great knowledge such poems may be written, if the poet
have imagination, and the power to execute in metrical words what has
been imagined. _Theology in the Island_ and the prologue to a _Death in
the Desert_ are examples of this. Browning knew nothing of that island
in the undiscovered seas where Prosper dwelt, but he made all the
scenery of it and all its animal life, and he re-created Caliban. He had
never seen the cave in the desert where he placed John to die, nor the
sweep of rocky hills and sand around it, nor the Bactrian waiting with
the camels. Other poets, of course, have seen unknown lands and alien
folks, but he has seen them more vividly, more briefly, more forcibly.
His imagination was objective enough.

But it was as subjective as it was objective. He saw the soul of Fra
Lippo Lippi and the soul of his time as vividly as he saw the streets of
Florence at night, the watch, the laughing girls, and the palace of the
Medici round the corner. It was a remarkable combination, and it is by
this combination of the subjective and objective imagination that he
draws into some dim approach to Shakespeare; and nowhere closer than in
these poems.

Again, not only the main character of each of these poems, but all the
figures introduced (sometimes only in a single line) to fill up the
background, are sketched with as true and vigorous a pencil as the main
figure; are never out of place or harmony with the whole, and are justly
subordinated. The young men who stand round the Bishop's bed when he
orders his tomb, the watchmen in _Fra Lippo Lippi_, the group of St.
John's disciples, are as alive, and as much in tune with the whole, as
the servants and tenants of Justice Shallow. Again, it is not only the
lesser figures, but the scenery of these poems which is worth our study.
That also is closely fitted to the main subject. The imagination paints
it for that, and nothing else. It would not fit any other subject. For
imagination, working at white heat, cannot do what is out of harmony; no
more than a great musician can introduce a false chord. All goes
together in these poems--scenery, characters, time, place and action.

Then, also, the extent of their range is remarkable. Their subjects
begin with savage man making his god out of himself. They pass through
Greek mythology to early Christian times; from Artemis and Pan to St.
John dying in the desert. Then, still in the same period, while Paul was
yet alive, he paints another aspect of the time in Cleon the rich
artist, the friend of kings, who had reached the top of life, included
all the arts in himself, yet dimly craved for more than earth could
give. From these times the poems pass on to the early and late
Renaissance, and from that to the struggle for freedom in Italy, and
from that to modern life in Europe. This great range illustrates the
penetration and the versatility of his genius. He could place us with
ease and truth at Corinth, Athens or Rome, in Paris, Vienna or London;
and wherever we go with him we are at home.

One word more must be said about the way a great number of these poems
arose. They leaped up in his imagination full-clad and finished at a
single touch from the outside. _Caliban upon Setebos_ took its rise from
a text in the Bible which darted into his mind as he read the _Tempest_.
_Cleon_ arose as he read that verse in St. Paul's speech at Athens, "As
certain also of your own poets have said." I fancy that _An Epistle of
Karshish_ was born one day when he read those two stanzas in _In
Memoriam_ about Lazarus, and imagined how the subject would come to him.
_Fra Lippo Lippi_ slipped into his mind one day at the Belle Arti at
Florence as he stood before the picture described in the poem, and
walked afterwards at night through the streets of Florence. These fine
things are born in a moment, and come into our world from poet, painter,
and musician, full-grown; built, like Aladdin's palace, with all their
jewels, in a single night. They are inexplicable by any scientific
explanation, as inexplicable as genius itself. When have the
hereditarians explained Shakespeare, Mozart, Turner? When has the
science of the world explained the birth of a lyric of Burns, a song of
Beethoven's, or a drawing of Raffaelle? Let these gentlemen veil their
eyes, and confess their inability to explain the facts. For it is fact
they touch. "Full fathom five thy father lies"--that song of Shakespeare
exists. The overture to Don Giovanni is a reality. We can see the
Bacchus and Ariadne at the National Gallery and the Theseus at the
Museum. These are facts; but they are a million million miles beyond the
grasp of any science. Nay, the very smallest things of their kind, the
slightest water-colour sketch of Turner, a half-finished clay sketch of
Donatello, the little song done in the corner of a provincial paper by a
working clerk in a true poetic hour, are not to be fathomed by the most
far-descending plummet of the scientific understanding. These things are
in that superphysical world into which, however closely he saw and
dealt with his characters in the world of the senses, the conscience, or
the understanding, Browning led them all at last.

The first of these poems is _Natural Theology on the Island; or, Caliban
upon Setebos_. Caliban, with the instincts and intelligence of an early
savage, has, in an hour of holiday, set himself to conceive what
Setebos, his mother's god, is like in character. He talks out the
question with himself, and because he is in a vague fear lest Setebos,
hearing him soliloquise about him, should feel insulted and swing a
thunder-bolt at him, he not only hides himself in the earth, but speaks
in the third person, as if it was not he that spoke; hoping in that
fashion to trick his God.

Browning, conceiving in himself the mind and temper of an honest,
earthly, imaginative savage--who is developed far enough to build
nature-myths in their coarse early forms--architectures the character of
Setebos out of the habits, caprices, fancies, likes and dislikes, and
thoughts of Caliban; and an excellent piece of penetrative imagination
it is. Browning has done nothing better, though he has done as well.

But Browning's Caliban is not a single personage. No one savage, at no
one time, would have all these thoughts of his God. He is the
representative of what has been thought, during centuries, by many
thousands of men; the concentration into one mind of the ground-thoughts
of early theology. At one point, as if Browning wished to sketch the
beginning of a new theological period, Caliban represents a more
advanced thought than savage man conceives. This is Caliban's
imagination of a higher being than Setebos who is the capricious creator
and power of the earth--of the "Quiet," who is master of Setebos and
whose temper is quite different; who also made the stars, things which
Caliban, with a touch of Browning's subtle thought, separates from the
sun and moon and earth. It is plain from this, and from the whole
argument which is admirably conducted, that Caliban is an intellectual
personage, too long neglected; and Prospero, could he have understood
his nature, would have enjoyed his conversation. Renan agreed with
Browning in this estimate of his intelligence, and made him the
foundation of a philosophical play.

There is some slight reason for this in Shakespeare's invention. He
lifts Caliban in intellect, even in feeling, far above Trinculo,
Stephano, the Boatswain and the rest of the common men. The objection,
however, has been made that Browning makes him too intelligent. The
answer is that Browning is not drawing Caliban only, but embodying in an
imagined personage the thoughts about God likely to be invented by early
man during thousands of years--and this accounts for the insequences in
Caliban's thinking. They are not the thoughts of one but of several men.
Yet a certain poetic unity is given to them by the unity of place. The
continual introduction of the landscape to be seen from his refuge knits
the discursive thinking of the savage into a kind of unity. We watch him
lying in the thick water-slime of the hollow, his head on the rim of it
propped by his hands, under the cave's mouth, hidden by the gadding
gourds and vines; looking out to sea and watching the wild animals that
pass him by--and out of this place he does not stir.

In Shakespeare's _Tempest_ Caliban is the gross, brutal element of the
earth and is opposed to Ariel, the light, swift, fine element of the
air. Caliban curses Prospero with the evils of the earth, with the
wicked dew of the fen and the red plague of the sea-marsh. Browning's
Caliban does not curse at all. When he is not angered, or in a caprice,
he is a good-natured creature, full of animal enjoyment. He loves to lie
in the cool slush, like a lias-lizard, shivering with earthy pleasure
when his spine is tickled by the small eft-things that course along it,

Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh.

The poem is full of these good, close, vivid realisations of the brown
prolific earth.

Browning had his own sympathy with Caliban Nor does Shakespeare make him
altogether brutish. He has been so educated by his close contact with
nature that his imagination has been kindled. His very cursing is
imaginative:

As wicked dew as e'er my mother brushed
With raven's feather from unwholesome fen
Drop on you both; a south-west blow on you
And blister you all o'er.

Stephano and Trinculo, vulgar products of civilisation, could never have
said that. Moreover, Shakespeare's Caliban, like Browning's, has the
poetry of the earth-man in him. When Ariel plays, Trinculo and Stephano
think it must be the devil, and Trinculo is afraid: but Caliban loves
and enjoys the music for itself:

Be not afear'd; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep.
Will make me sleep again.

Stephano answers, like a modern millionaire:

This will prove a brave kingdom for me, where I shall have
my music for nothing.

Browning's Caliban is also something of a poet, and loves the Nature of
whom he is a child. We are not surprised when he

looks out o'er yon sea which sunbeams cross
And recross till they weave a spider web
(Meshes of fire some great fish breaks at times)

though the phrase is full of a poet's imagination, for so the living
earth would see and feel the sea. It belongs also to Caliban's nearness
to the earth that he should have the keenest of eyes for animals, and
that poetic pleasure in watching their life which, having seen them
vividly, could describe them vividly. I quote one example from the poem;
there are many others:

'Thinketh, He made thereat the sun, this isle,
Trees and the fowls here, beast and creeping thing.
Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech;
Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam,
That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown
He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye
By moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue
That pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm,
And says a plain word when she finds her prize,
But will not eat the ants; the ants themselves
That build a wall of seeds and settled stalks
About their hole--

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