Book: The Poetry Of Robert Browning

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Perhaps the subtlest part of the poem is the impression left on us that
the woman knows all her pleading will be in vain, that she has fathomed
the weakness of her husband's character. He will not like to remember
that knowledge of hers; and her letting him feel it is a kind of
vengeance which will not help him to be faithful. It is also her worst
bitterness, but if her womanhood were perfect, she would not have had
that bitterness.

In these two poems, and in others, there is to be detected the
deep-seated and quiet half-contempt--contempt which does not damage
love, contempt which is half pity--which a woman who loves a man has for
his weakness under passion or weariness. Both the wives in these poems
feel that their husbands are inferior to themselves in strength of
character and of intellect. To feel this is common enough in women, but
is rarely confessed by them. A man scarcely ever finds it out from his
own observation; he is too vain for that. But Browning knew it. A poet
sees many things, and perhaps his wife told him this secret. It was like
his audacity to express it.

This increased knowledge of womanhood was probably due to the fact that
Browning possessed in his wife a woman of genius who had studied her own
sex in herself and in other women. It is owing to her, I think, that in
so many poems the women are represented as of a finer, even a stronger
intellect than the men. Many poets have given them a finer intuition;
that is a common representation. But greater intellectual power allotted
to women is only to be found in Browning. The instances of it are few,
but they are remarkable.

It was owing also to his wife, whose relation to him was frank on all
points, that Browning saw so much more clearly than other poets into the
deep, curious or remote phases of the passions, thoughts and vagaries of
womanhood. I sometimes wonder what women themselves think of the things
Browning, speaking through their mouth, makes them say; but that is a
revelation of which I have no hope, and for which, indeed, I have no
desire.

Moreover, he moved a great deal in the society where women, not having
any real work to do, or if they have it, not doing it, permit a greater
freedom to their thoughts and impulses than those of their sex who sit
at the loom of duty. Tennyson withdrew from this society, and his women
are those of a retired poet--a few real types tenderly and sincerely
drawn, and a few more worked out by thinking about what he imagined they
would be, not by knowing them. Browning, roving through his class and
other classes of society, and observing while he seemed unobservant,
drew into his inner self the lives of a number of women, saw them living
and feeling in a great diversity of circumstances; and, always on the
watch, seized the moment into which he thought the woman entered with
the greatest intensity, and smote that into a poem. Such poems,
naturally lyrics, came into his head at the opera, at a ball, at a
supper after the theatre, while he talked at dinner, when he walked in
the park; and they record, not the whole of a woman's character, but the
vision of one part of her nature which flashed before him and vanished
in an instant. Among these poems are _A Light Woman_, _A Pretty Woman_,
_Solomon and Balkis_, _Gold Hair_, and, as a fine instance of this
sheet-lightning poem about women--_Adam, Lilith and Eve. Too Late_ and
_The Worst of It_ do not belong to these slighter poems; they are on a
much higher level. But they are poems of society and its secret lives.
The men are foremost in them, but in each of them a different woman is
sketched, through the love of the men, with a masterly decision.

Among all these women he did not hesitate to paint the types farthest
removed from goodness and love. The lowest woman in the poems is she who
is described in _Time's Revenges_--

So is my spirit, as flesh with sin,
Filled full, eaten out and in
With the face of her, the eyes of her,
The lips, the little chin, the stir
Of shadow round her mouth; and she
--I'll tell you--calmly would decree
That I should roast at a slow fire,
If that would compass her desire
And make her one whom they invite
To the famous ball to-morrow night

Contrasted with this woman, from whose brutal nature civilisation has
stripped away the honour and passion of the savage, the woman of _In a
Laboratory_ shines like a fallen angel. She at least is natural, and
though the passions she feels are the worst, yet she is capable of
feeling strongly. Neither have any conscience, but we can conceive that
one of these women might attain it, but the other not. Both are examples
of a thing I have said is exceedingly rare in Browning's poetry--men
or women left without some pity of his own touched into their
circumstances or character.

_In a Laboratory_ is a full-coloured sketch of what womanhood could
become in a court like that of Francis I.; in which every shred of
decency, gentlehood and honour had disappeared. Browning's description,
vivid as it is, is less than the reality. Had he deepened the colours of
iniquity and indecency instead of introducing so much detailed
description of the laboratory, detail which weakens a little our
impression of the woman, he had done better, but all the same there is
no poet in England, living or dead, who could have done it so well. One
of the best things in the poem is the impression made on us that it is
not jealousy, but the hatred of envy which is the motive of the woman.
Jealousy supposes love or the image of love, but among those who
surrounded Francis, love did not exist at all, only lust, luxury and
greed of power; and in the absence of love and in the scorn of it, hate
and envy reign unchallenged. This is what Browning has realised in this
poem, and, in this differentiation, he has given us not only historical
but moral truth.

Apart from these lighter and momentary poems about women there are
those written out of his own ideal of womanhood, built up not only from
all he knew and loved in his wife, but also out of the dreams of his
heart. They are the imaginings of the high honour and affection which a
man feels for noble, natural and honest womanhood. They are touched here
and there by complex thinking, but for the most part are of a beloved
simplicity and tenderness, and they will always be beautiful. There is
the sketch of the woman in _The Italian in England_, a never to be
forgotten thing. It is no wonder the exile remembered her till he died.
There is the image we form of the woman in _The Flowers Name_. He does
not describe her; she is far away, but her imagined character and
presence fill the garden with an incense sweeter than all the flowers,
and her beauty irradiates all beauty, so delicately and so plenteously
does the lover's passion make her visible. There is _Evelyn Hope_, and
surely no high and pure love ever created a more beautiful soul in a
woman than hers who waits her lover in the spiritual world. There are
those on whom we have already dwelt--Pippa, Colombe, Mildred, Guendolen.
There is the woman in the _Flight of the Duchess_; not a sketch, but a
completed picture. We see her, just emerged from her convent, thrilling
with eagerness to see the world, believing in its beauty, interested in
everything, in the movement of the leaves on the trees, of the birds in
the heaven, ready to speak to every one high or low, desirous to get at
the soul of all things in Nature and Humanity, herself almost a creature
of the element, akin to air and fire.

She is beaten into silence, but not crushed; overwhelmed by dry old
people, by imitation of dead things, but the life in her is not slain.
When the wandering gipsy claims her for a natural life, her whole nature
blossoms into beauty and joy. She will have troubles great and deep, but
every hour will make her conscious of more and more of life. And when
she dies, it will be the beginning of an intenser life.

Finally, there is his wife. She is painted in these lyric poems with a
simplicity of tenderness, with a reticence of worship as sacred as it is
fair and delicate, with so intense a mingling of the ideal and the real
that we never separate them, and with so much passion in remembrance of
the past and in longing for the future, that no comment can enhance the
picture Browning draws of her charm, her intellect and her spirit.

These pictures of womanhood were set forth before 1868, when a collected
edition of his poems was published in six volumes. They were chiefly
short, even impressionist studies, save those in the dramas, and Palma
in _Sordello_. Those in the dramas were troubled by his want of power to
shape them in that vehicle. It would have then been a pity if, in his
matured strength, he had not drawn into clear existence, with full and
careful, not impressionist work, and with unity of conception, some
women who should, standing alone, become permanent personages in poetry;
whom men and women in the future, needing friends, should love, honour
and obey, and in whom, when help and sympathy and wisdom were wanted,
these healing powers should be found. Browning did this for us in
_Pompilia_ and _Balaustion_, an Italian and a Greek girl--not an English
girl. It is strange how to the very end he lived as a poet outside of
his own land.

In 1868, Pompilia appeared before the world, and she has captured ever
since the imagination, the conscience and the sentiment of all who love
womanhood and poetry. Her character has ennobled and healed mankind.
Born of a harlot, she is a star of purity; brought up by characters who
love her, but who do not rise above the ordinary meanness and small
commercial honesty of their class, she is always noble, generous,
careless of wealth, and of a high sense of honour. It is as if Browning
disdained for the time all the philosophy of heredity and environment;
and indeed it was characteristic of him to believe in the sudden
creation of beauty, purity and nobility out of their contraries and in
spite of them. The miracle of the unrelated birth of genius--that out of
the dunghill might spring the lily, and out of the stratum of crime the
saint--was an article of faith with him. Nature's or God's surprises
were dear to him; and nothing purer, tenderer, sweeter, more natural,
womanly and saintly was ever made than Pompilia, the daughter of a
vagrant impurity, the child of crime, the girl who grew to womanhood in
mean and vulgar circumstances.

The only hatred she earns is the hatred of Count Guido her husband, the
devil who has tortured and murdered her--the hatred of evil for good.
When Count Guido, condemned to death, bursts into the unrestrained
expression of his own nature, he cannot say one word about Pompilia
which is not set on fire by a hell of hatred. Nothing in Browning's
writing is more vivid, more intense, than these sudden outbursts of
tiger fierceness against his wife. They lift and enhance the image of
Pompilia.

When she comes into contact with other characters such as the Archbishop
and the Governor, men overlaid with long-deposited crusts of convention,
she wins a vague pity from them, but her simplicity, naturalness and
saintliness are nearly as repugnant to social convention as her goodness
is to villany; and Browning has, all through the poem, individualised in
Pompilia the natural simplicity of goodness in opposition to the
artificial moralities of conservative society. But when Pompilia touches
characters who have any good, however hidden, in them, she draws forth
that good. Her so-called parents pass before they die out of meanness
into nobility of temper. Conti, her husband's cousin, a fat, waggish man
of the world, changes into seriousness, pity and affection under her
silent influence. The careless folk she meets on her flight to Rome
recognise, even in most suspicious circumstances, her innocence and
nobleness; and change at a touch their ordinary nature for a higher. And
when she meets a fine character like Caponsacchi, who has been led into
a worldly, immoral and indifferent life, he is swept in a moment out of
it by the sight alone of this star of innocence and spiritual beauty,
and becomes her true mate, daily self-excelled. The monk who receives
her dying confession, the Pope, far set by his age above the noise of
popular Rome, almost at one with the world beyond death and feeling what
the divine judgment would be, both recognise with a fervour which
carries them beyond the prejudices of age and of their society the
loveliness of Heaven in the spirit of this girl of seventeen years, and
claim her as higher than themselves.

It is fitting that to so enskied and saintly a child, when she rests
before her death, the cruel life she had led for four years should seem
a dream; and the working out of that thought, and of the two checks of
reality it received in the coming of her child and the coming of
Caponsacchi, is one of the fairest and most delicate pieces of
work that Browning ever accomplished. She was so innocent and so
simple-hearted--and the development of that part of her character in the
stories told of her childhood is exquisitely touched into life--so
loving, so born to be happy in being loved, that when she was forced
into a maze of villany, bound up with hatred, cruelty, baseness and
guilt, she seemed to live in a mist of unreality. When the pain became
too deep to be dreamlike she was mercifully led back into the dream by
the approach of death. As she lay dying there, all she had suffered
passed again into unreality. Nothing remained but love and purity, the
thrill when first she felt her child, the prayer to God which brought
Caponsacchi to her rescue so that her child might be born, and lastly
the vision of perfect union hereafter with her kindred soul, who, not
her lover on earth, would be her lover in eternity. Even her boy, who
had brought her, while she lived, her keenest sense of reality (and
Browning's whole treatment of her motherhood, from the moment she knew
she was in child, till the hour when the boy lay in her arms, is as true
and tender as if his wife had filled his soul while he wrote), even her
boy fades away into the dream. It is true she was dying, and there is no
dream so deep as dying. Yet it was bold of Browning, and profoundly
imagined by him, to make the child disappear, and to leave the woman at
last alone with the thought and the spiritual passion of her union with
Caponsacchi--

O lover of my life, O soldier saint,
No work begun shall ever pause for death.

It is the love of Percival's sister for Galahad.

It is not that she is naturally a dreamer, that she would not have felt
and enjoyed the realities of earth. Her perceptions are keen, her nature
expansive. Browning, otherwise, would not have cared for her. It was
only when she was involved in evil, like an angel in hell (a wolfs arm
round her throat and a snake curled over her feet), that she seemed to
be dreaming, not living. It was incredible to her that such things
should be reality. Yet even the dream called the hidden powers of her
soul into action. In realising these as against evil she is not the
dreamer. Her fortitude is unbroken; her moral courage never fails,
though she is familiar with fear; her action, when the babe has leaped
in her womb, is prompt, decisive and immediate; her physical courage,
when her husband overtakes her and befouls her honour, is like a man's.
She seizes his sword and would have slain the villain. Then, her natural
goodness, the genius of her goodness, gives her a spiritual penetration
which is more than an equivalent in her for an educated intelligence.
Her intuition is so keen that she sees through the false worldliness of
Caponsacchi to the real man beneath, and her few words call it into
goodness and honour for ever. Her clear sense of truth sees all the
threads of the net of villany in which she has been caught, and the only
means to break through it, to reveal and bring it into condemnation.
Fortitude, courage, intuition and intelligence are all made to arise out
of her natural saintliness and love. She is always the immortal child.

For a time she has passed on earth through the realms of pain; and now,
stabbed to her death, she looks back on the passage, and on all who have
been kind and unkind to her--on the whole of the falsehood and villany.
And the royal love in her nature is the master of the moment. She makes
excuses for Violante's lie. "She meant well, and she did, as I feel now,
little harm." "I am right now, quite happy; dying has purified me of the
evil which touched me, and I colour ugly things with my own peace and
joy. Every one that leaves life sees all things softened and bettered."
As to her husband, she finds that she has little to forgive him at the
last. Step by step she goes over all he did, and even finds excuses for
him, and, at the end, this is how she speaks, a noble utterance of
serene love, lofty intelligence, of spiritual power and of the
forgiveness of eternity.

For that most woeful man my husband once,
Who, needing respite, still draws vital breath,
I--pardon him? So far as lies in me,
I give him for his good the life he takes,
Praying the world will therefore acquiesce.
Let him make God amends,--none, none to me
Who thank him rather that, whereas strange fate
Mockingly styled him husband and me wife,
Himself this way at least pronounced divorce,
Blotted the marriage bond: this blood of mine
Flies forth exultingly at any door,
Washes the parchment white, and thanks the blow
We shall not meet in this world nor the next,
But where will God be absent? In His face
Is light, but in His shadow healing too:
Let Guido touch the shadow and be healed!
And as my presence was importunate,--
My earthly good, temptation and a snare,--
Nothing about me but drew somehow down
His hate upon me,--somewhat so excused
Therefore, since hate was thus the truth of him,--
May my evanishment for evermore
Help further to relieve the heart that cast
Such object of its natural loathing forth!
So he was made; he nowise made himself:
I could not love him, but his mother did.
His soul has never lain beside my soul:
But for the unresisting body,--thanks!
He burned that garment spotted by the flesh.
Whatever he touched is rightly ruined: plague
It caught, and disinfection it had craved
Still but for Guido; I am saved through him
So as by fire; to him--thanks and farewell!

Thus, pure at heart and sound of head, a natural, true woman in her
childhood, in her girlhood, and when she is tried in the fire--by nature
gay, yet steady in suffering; brave in a hell of fears and shame;
clear-sighted in entanglements of villany; resolute in self-rescue;
seeing and claiming the right help and directing it rightly; rejoicing
in her motherhood and knowing it as her crown of glory, though the child
is from her infamous husband; happy in her motherhood for one fortnight;
slain like a martyr; loving the true man with immortal love; forgiving
all who had injured her, even her murderer; dying in full faith and love
of God, though her life had been a crucifixion; Pompilia passes away,
and England's men and women will be always grateful to Browning for her
creation.

* * * * *




CHAPTER XV

_BALAUSTION_


Among the women whom Browning made, Balaustion is the crown. So vivid is
her presentation that she seems with us in our daily life. And she also
fills the historical imagination.

One would easily fall in love with her, like those sensitive princes in
the _Arabian Nights_, who, hearing only of the charms of a princess, set
forth to find her over the world. Of all Browning's women, she is the
most luminous, the most at unity with herself. She has the Greek
gladness and life, the Greek intelligence and passion, and the Greek
harmony. All that was common, prattling, coarse, sensual and spluttering
in the Greek, (and we know from Aristophanes how strong these lower
elements were in the Athenian people), never shows a trace of its
influence in Balaustion. Made of the finest clay, exquisite and delicate
in grain, she is yet strong, when the days of trouble come, to meet them
nobly and to change their sorrows into spiritual powers.

And the _mise-en-scene_ in which she is placed exalts her into a
heroine, and adds to her the light, colour and humanity of Greek
romance. Born at Rhodes, but of an Athenian mother, she is fourteen
when the news arrives that the Athenian fleet under Nikias, sent to
subdue Syracuse, has been destroyed, and the captive Athenians driven to
labour in the quarries. All Rhodes, then in alliance with Athens, now
cries, "Desert Athens, side with Sparta against Athens." Balaustion
alone resists the traitorous cry. "What, throw off Athens, be disloyal
to the source of art and intelligence--

to the life and light
Of the whole world worth calling world at all!"

And she spoke so well that her kinsfolk and others joined her and took
ship for Athens. Now, a wind drove them off their course, and behind
them came a pirate ship, and in front of them loomed the land. "Is it
Crete?" they thought; "Crete, perhaps, and safety." But the oars flagged
in the hands of the weary men, and the pirate gained. Then Balaustion,
springing to the altar by the mast, white, rosy, and uplifted, sang on
high that song of AEschylus which saved at Salamis--

'O sons of Greeks, go, set your country free,
Free your wives, free your children, free the fanes
O' the Gods, your fathers founded,--sepulchres
They sleep in! Or save all, or all be lost.'

The crew, impassioned by the girl, answered the song, and drove the boat
on, "churning the black water white," till the land shone clear, and the
wide town and the harbour, and lo, 'twas not Crete, but Syracuse,
luckless fate! Out came a galley from the port. "Who are you; Sparta's
friend or foe?" "Of Rhodes are we, Rhodes that has forsaken Athens!"

"How, then, that song we heard? All Athens was in that AEschylus. Your
boat is full of Athenians--back to the pirate; we want no Athenians
here.... Yet, stay, that song was AEschylus; every one knows it--how
about Euripides? Might you know any of his verses?" For nothing helped
the poor Athenians so much if any of them had his mouth stored with

Old glory, great plays that had long ago
Made themselves wings to fly about the world,--

But most of all those were cherished who could recite Euripides to
Syracuse, so mighty was poetry in the ancient days to make enemies into
friends, to build, beyond the wars and jealousies of the world, a land
where all nations are one.

At this the captain cried: "Praise the God, we have here the very girl
who will fill you with Euripides," and the passage brings Balaustion
into full light.

Therefore, at mention of Euripides,
The Captain crowed out, "Euoi, praise the God!
Ooep, boys, bring our owl-shield to the fore!
Out with our Sacred Anchor! Here she stands,
Balaustion! Strangers, greet the lyric girl!
Euripides? Babai! what a word there 'scaped
Your teeth's enclosure, quoth my grandsire's song
Why, fast as snow in Thrace, the voyage through,
Has she been falling thick in flakes of him!
Frequent as figs at Kaunos, Kaunians said.
Balaustion, stand forth and confirm my speech!
Now it was some whole passion of a play;
Now, peradventure, but a honey-drop
That slipt its comb i' the chorus. If there rose
A star, before I could determine steer
Southward or northward--if a cloud surprised
Heaven, ere I fairly hollaed 'Furl the sail!'--
She had at fingers' end both cloud and star
Some thought that perched there, tame and tuneable,
Fitted with wings, and still, as off it flew,
'So sang Euripides,' she said, 'so sang
The meteoric poet of air and sea,
Planets and the pale populace of heaven,
The mind of man, and all that's made to soar!'
And so, although she has some other name,
We only call her Wild-pomegranate-flower,
Balaustion; since, where'er the red bloom burns
I' the dull dark verdure of the bounteous tree,
Dethroning, in the Rosy Isle, the rose,
You shall find food, drink, odour, all at once;
Cool leaves to bind about an aching brow.
And, never much away, the nightingale.
Sing them a strophe, with the turn-again,
Down to the verse that ends all, proverb like.
And save us, thou Balaustion, bless the name"

And she answered: "I will recite the last play he wrote from first to
last--_Alkestis_--his strangest, saddest, sweetest song."

Then because Greeks are Greeks, and hearts are hearts.
And poetry is power,--they all outbroke
In a great joyous laughter with much love:
"Thank Herakles for the good holiday!
Make for the harbour! Row, and let voice ring,
'In we row, bringing more Euripides!'"
All the crowd, as they lined the harbour now,
"More of Euripides!"--took up the cry.
We landed; the whole city, soon astir,
Came rushing out of gates in common joy
To the suburb temple; there they stationed me
O' the topmost step; and plain I told the play,
Just as I saw it; what the actors said,
And what I saw, or thought I saw the while,
At our Kameiros theatre, clean scooped
Out of a hill side, with the sky above
And sea before our seats in marble row:
Told it, and, two days more, repeated it
Until they sent us on our way again
With good words and great wishes.

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