Book: The Poetry Of Robert Browning

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Lastly, there is the fresh presentation of Balaustion, of the matured
and experienced woman whom we have known as a happy girl. Euthycles and
she are married, and one night, as she is sitting alone, he comes in,
bringing the grave news that Euripides is dead, but had proved at the
court of Archelaos of Macedonia his usefulness as counsellor to King and
State, and his power still to sing--

Clashed thence _Alkaion_, maddened _Pentheus'_ up;
Then music sighed itself away, one moan
Iphigeneia made by Aulis' strand;
With her and music died Euripides.

And Athens, hearing, ceased to mock and cried "Bury Euripides in
Peiraios, bring his body back." "Ah," said Balaustion, "Death alters the
point of view. But our tribute is in our hearts; and more, his soul
will now for ever teach and bless the world.

Is not that day come? What if you and I
Re-sing the song, inaugurate the fame?

For, like Herakles, in his own _Alkestis_, he now strides away (and this
is the true end of the _Alkestis_) to surmount all heights of destiny."
While she spoke thus, the Chorus of the Comedy, girls, boys, and men, in
drunken revel and led by Aristophanes, thundered at the door and claimed
admittance. Balaustion is drawn confronting them--tall and superb, like
Victory's self; her warm golden eyes flashing under her black hair,
"earth flesh with sun fire," statuesque, searching the crowd with her
glance. And one and all dissolve before her silent splendour of reproof,
all save Aristophanes. She bids him welcome. "Glory to the Poet," she
cries. "Light, light, I hail it everywhere; no matter for the murk, that
never should have been such orb's associate." Aristophanes changes as he
sees her; a new man confronts her.

"So!" he smiled, "piercing to my thought at once,
You see myself? Balaustion's fixed regard
Can strip the proper Aristophanes
Of what our sophists, in their jargon, style
His accidents?"

He confesses her power to meet him in discourse, unfolds his views and
plans to her, and having contrasted himself with Euripides, bids her use
her thrice-refined refinement, her rosy strength, to match his argument.
She claims no equality with him, the consummate creator; but only, as a
woman, the love of all things lovable with which to meet him who has
degraded Comedy. She appeals to the high poet in the man, and finally
bids him honour the deep humanity in Euripides. To prove it, and to win
his accord, she reads the _Herakles_, the last of Euripides.

It is this long night of talk which Balaustion dictates to Euthycles as
she is sailing, day after day, from Athens back to Rhodes. The aspect of
sea and sky, as they sail, is kept before us, for Balaustion uses its
changes as illustrations, and the clear descriptions tell, even more
fully than before, how quick this woman was to observe natural beauty
and to correlate it with humanity. Here is one example. In order to
describe a change in the temper of Aristophanes from wild license to
momentary gravity, Balaustion seizes on a cloud-incident of the
voyage--Euthycles, she cries,

... "o'er the boat side, quick, what change,
Watch--in the water! But a second since,
It laughed a ripply spread of sun and sea,
Ray fused with wave, to never disunite.
Now, sudden, all the surface hard and black,
Lies a quenched light, dead motion: what the cause?
Look up, and lo, the menace of a cloud
Has solemnised the sparkling, spoiled the sport!
Just so, some overshadow, some new care
Stopped all the mirth and mocking on his face."

Her feeling for nature is as strong us her feeling for man, and both are
woven together.

All her powers have now ripened, and the last touch has been given to
them by her ideal sorrow for Athens, the country of her soul, where high
intelligence and imagination had created worlds. She leaves it now,
ruined and degraded, and the passionate outbreak of her patriotic sorrow
with which the poem opens lifts the character and imagination of
Balaustion into spiritual splendour. Athens, "hearted in her heart," has
perished ignobly. Not so, she thinks, ought this beauty of the world to
have died, its sea-walls razed to the ground to the fluting and singing
of harlots; but in some vast overwhelming of natural energies--in the
embrace of fire to join the gods; or in a sundering of the earth, when
the Acropolis should have sunken entire and risen in Hades to console
the ghosts with beauty; or in the multitudinous over-swarming of ocean.
This she could have borne, but, thinking of what has been, of the misery
and disgrace, "Oh," she cries, "bear me away--wind, wave and bark!" But
Browning does not leave Balaustion with only this deep emotion in her
heart. He gives her the spiritual passion of genius. She is swept beyond
her sorrow into that invisible world where the soul lives with the gods,
with the pure Ideas of justice, truth and love; where immortal life
awaits the disembodied soul and we shall see Euripides. In these high
thoughts she will outlive her sorrow.

Why should despair be? Since, distinct above
Man's wickedness and folly, flies the wind
And floats the cloud, free transport for our soul
Out of its fleshly durance dim and low,--
Since disembodied soul anticipates
(Thought-borne as now, in rapturous unrestraint)
Above all crowding, crystal silentness,
Above all noise, a silver solitude:--
Surely, where thought so bears soul, soul in time
May permanently bide, "assert the wise,"
There live in peace, there work in hope once more--
O nothing doubt, Philemon! Greed and strife,
Hatred and cark and care, what place have they
In yon blue liberality of heaven?
How the sea helps! How rose-smit earth will rise
Breast-high thence, some bright morning, and be Rhodes!
Heaven, earth and sea, my warrant--in their name,
Believe--o'er falsehood, truth is surely sphered,
O'er ugliness beams beauty, o'er this world
Extends that realm where, "as the wise assert,"
Philemon, thou shalt see Euripides
Clearer than mortal sense perceived the man!

We understand that she has drunk deep of Socrates, that her spiritual
sense reached onward to the Platonic Socrates. In this supersensuous
world of thought she is quieted out of the weakness which made her
miserable over the fall of Athens; and in the quiet, Browning, who will
lift his favourite into perfectness, adds to her spiritual imagination
the dignity of that moral judgment which the intellect of genius gathers
from the facts of history. In spite of her sorrow, she grasps the truth
that there was justice in the doom of Athens. Let justice have its way.
Let the folk die who pulled her glory down. This is her prophetic
strain, the strength of the Hebrew in the Greek.

And then the prophet in the woman passes, and the poet in her takes the
lyre. She sees the splendid sunset. Why should its extravagance of glory
run to waste? Let me build out of it a new Athens, quarry out the golden
clouds and raise the Acropolis, and the rock-hewn Place of Assembly,
whence new orators may thunder over Greece; and the theatre where
AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, godlike still, may contend for the
prize. Yet--and there is a further change of thought--yet that may not
be. To build that poetic vision is to slip away from reality, and the
true use of it. The tragedy is there--irrevocable. Let it sink deep in
us till we see Rhodes shining over the sea. So great, so terrible, so
piteous it is, that, dwelt on in the soul and seen in memory, it will do
for us what the great tragedians made their tragic themes do for their
hearers. It will purify the heart by pity and terror from the baseness
and littleness of life. Our small hatreds, jealousies and prides, our
petty passions will be rebuked, seem nothing in its mighty sorrow.

What else in life seems piteous any more
After such pity, or proves terrible
Beside such terror;

This is the woman--the finest creature Browning drew, young and fair and
stately, with her dark hair and amber eyes, lovely--the wild pomegranate
flower of a girl--as keen, subtle and true of intellect as she is
lovely, able to comment on and check Euripides, to conceive a new play
out of his subject, to be his dearest friend, to meet on equality
Aristophanes; so full of lyric sympathy, so full of eager impulse that
she thrills the despairing into action, enslaves a city with her
eloquence, charms her girl-friends by the Ilissus, and so sends her
spirit into her husband that, when the Spartans advise the razing of
Athens to the ground he saves the city by those famous lines of
Euripides, of which Milton sang; so at one with natural beauty, with all
beauty, that she makes it live in the souls of men; so clear in judgment
that she sees the right even when it seems lost in the wrong, that she
sees the justice of the gods in the ruin of the city she most loved; so
poetic of temper that everything speaks to her of life, that she
acknowledges the poetry which rises out of the foulness she hates in
Aristophanes, that she loves all humanity, bad or good, and Euripides
chiefly because of his humanity; so spiritual, that she can soar out of
her most overwhelming sorrow into the stormless world where the gods
breathe pure thought and for ever love; and, abiding in its peace, use
the griefs of earth for the ennoblement of the life of men, because in
all her spiritual apartness, however far it bear her from earth, she
never loses her close sympathy with the fortunes of mankind. Nay, from
her lofty station she is the teacher of truth and love and justice, in
splendid prophecy. It is with an impassioned exaltation, worthy of Sibyl
and Pythoness in one, of divine wisdom both Roman and Greek, that she
cries to the companions of her voyage words which embody her soul and
the soul of all the wise and loving of the earth, when they act for men;
bearing their action, thought and feeling beyond man to God in man--

Speak to the infinite intelligence,
Sing to the everlasting sympathy!

* * * * *




CHAPTER XVI

_THE RING AND THE BOOK_


When Browning published _The Ring and the Book_, he was nearly fifty
years old. All his powers (except those which create the lyric) are used
therein with mastery; and the ease with which he writes is not more
remarkable than the exultant pleasure which accompanies the ease. He
has, as an artist, a hundred tools in hand, and he uses them with
certainty of execution. The wing of his invention does not falter
through these twelve books, nor droop below the level at which he began
them; and the epilogue is written with as much vigour as the prologue.
The various books demand various powers. In each book the powers are
proportionate to the subject; but the mental force behind each exercise
of power is equal throughout. He writes as well when he has to make the
guilty soul of Guido speak, as when the innocence of Pompilia tells her
story. The gain-serving lawyers, each distinctly isolated, tell their
worldly thoughts as clearly as Caponsacchi reveals his redeemed and
spiritualised soul. The parasite of an aristocratic and thoughtless
society in _Tertium Quid_ is not more vividly drawn than the Pope, who
has left in his old age the conventions of society behind him, and
speaks in his silent chamber face to face with God. And all the minor
characters--of whom there are a great number, ranging from children to
old folk, from the peasant to the Cardinal, through every class of
society in Italy--are drawn, even when they are slashed out in only
three lines, with such force, certainty, colour and life that we know
them better than our friends. The variousness of the product would seem
to exclude an equality of excellence in drawing and invention. But it
does not. It reveals and confirms it. The poem is a miracle of
intellectual power.

This great length, elaborate detail, and the repetition so many times of
the same story, would naturally suggest to an intending reader that the
poem might be wearisome. Browning, suspecting this, and in mercy to a
public who does not care for a work of _longue haleine_, published it at
first in four volumes, with a month's interval between each volume. He
thought that the story told afresh by characters widely different would
strike new, if each book were read at intervals of ten days. There were
three books in each volume. And if readers desire to realise fully the
intellectual _tour de force_ contained in telling the same story twelve
times over, and making each telling interesting, they cannot do better
than read the book as Browning wished it to be read. "Give the poem four
months, and let ten days elapse between the reading of each book," is
what he meant us to understand. Moreover, to meet this possible
weariness, Browning, consciously, or probably unconsciously, since
genius does the right thing without asking why, continually used a trick
of his own which, at intervals, stings the reader into wakefulness and
pleasure, and sends him on to the next page refreshed and happy. After
fifty, or it may be a hundred lines of somewhat dry analysis, a vivid
illustration, which concentrates all the matter of the previous lines,
flashes on the reader as a snake might flash across a traveller's dusty
way: or some sudden description of an Italian scene in the country or in
the streets of Rome enlivens the well-known tale with fresh humanity. Or
a new character leaps up out of the crowd, and calls us to note his
ways, his dress, his voice, his very soul in some revealing speech, and
then passes away from the stage, while we turn, refreshed (and indeed at
times we need refreshment), to the main speaker, the leading character.

But to dwell on the multitude of portraits with which Browning's keen
observation, memory and love of human nature have embellished _The Ring
and the Book_ belongs to another part of this chapter. At present the
question rises: "What place does _The Ring and the Book_ hold in
Browning's development?" It holds a central place. There was always a
struggle in Browning between two pleasures; pleasure in the exercise of
his intellect--his wit, in the fullest sense of the word; pleasure in
the exercise of his poetic imagination. Sometimes one of these had the
upper hand in his poems, sometimes the other, and sometimes both happily
worked together. When the exercise of his wit had the upper hand, it
tended to drive out both imagination and passion. Intellectual play may
be without any emotion except its delight in itself. Then its mere
cleverness attracts its user, and gives him an easily purchased
pleasure. When a poet falls a complete victim to this pleasure,
imagination hides her face from him, passion runs away, and what he
produces resembles, but is not, poetry. And Browning, who had got
perilously near to the absence of poetry in _Bishop Blougram's Apology_,
succeeded in _Mr. Sludge, the Medium_, in losing poetry altogether. In
_The Ring and the Book_ there are whole books, and long passages in its
other books in which poetry almost ceases to exist and is replaced by
brilliant cleverness, keen analysis, vivid description, and a
combination of wit and fancy which is rarely rivalled; but no emotion,
no imagination such as poets use inflames the coldness of these
qualities into the glow of poetry. The indefinable difference which
makes imaginative work into poetry is not there. There is abundance of
invention; but that, though a part of imagination, belongs as much to
the art of prose as to the art of poetry.

Browning could write thus, out of his intellect alone. None of the
greater poets could. Their genius could not work without fusing into
their intellectual work intensity of feeling; and that combination
secured poetic treatment of their subject. It would have been totally
impossible for Milton, Shakespeare, Dante, Vergil, or even the great
mass of second-rate poets, to have written some of Browning's so-called
poetry--no matter how they tried. There was that in Browning's nature
which enabled him to exercise his intellectual powers alone, without
passion, and so far he almost ceases to deserve the name of poet. And
his pleasure in doing this grew upon him, and having done it with
dazzling power in part of _The Ring and the Book_, he was carried away
by it and produced a number of so-called poems; terrible examples of
what a poet can come to when he has allowed his pleasure in clever
analysis to tyrannise over him--_Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_, _The Inn
Album_, _Red Cotton Nightcap Country_, and a number of shorter poems in
the volumes which followed. In these, what Milton meant by passion,
simplicity and sensuousness were banished, and imagination existed only
as it exists in a prose writer.

This condition was slowly arrived at. It had not been fully reached when
he wrote _The Ring and the Book_. His poetic powers resisted their
enemies for many years, and had the better in the struggle. If it takes
a long time to cast a devil out, it takes a longer time to depose an
angel. And the devil may be utterly banished, but the angel never. And
though the devil of mere wit and the little devils of analytic
exercise--devils when they usurp the throne in a poet's soul and enslave
imaginative emotion--did get the better of Browning, it was only for a
time. Towards the end of his life he recovered, but never as completely
as he had once possessed them, the noble attributes of a poet. The evils
of the struggle clung to him; the poisonous pleasure he had pursued
still affected him; he was again and again attacked by the old malaria.
He was as a brand plucked from the burning.

_The Ring and the Book_ is the central point of this struggle. It is
full of emotion and thought concentrated on the subject, and commingled
by imagination to produce beauty. And whenever this is the case, as in
the books which treat of Caponsacchi and Pompilia, we are rejoiced by
poetry. In their lofty matter of thought and feeling, in their
simplicity and nobleness of spiritual beauty, poetry is dominant. In
them also his intellectual powers, and his imaginative and passionate
powers, are fused into one fire. Nor is the presentation of Guido
Franceschini under two faces less powerful, or that of the Pope, in his
meditative silence. But in these books the poetry is less, and is
mingled, as would naturally indeed be the case, with a searching
analysis, which intrudes too much into their imaginative work.
Over-dissection makes them cold. In fact, in fully a quarter of this
long poem, the analysing understanding, that bustling and self-conscious
person, who plays only on the surface of things and separates their
elements from one another instead of penetrating to their centre; who is
incapable of seeing the whole into which the various elements have
combined--is too masterful for the poetry. It is not, then, imaginative,
but intellectual pleasure which, as we read, we gain.

Then again there is throughout a great part of the poem a dangerous
indulgence of his wit; the amusement of remote analogies; the use of
far-fetched illustrations; quips and cranks and wanton wiles of the
reasoning fancy in deviating self-indulgence; and an allusiveness which
sets commentators into note-making effervescence. All these, and more,
which belong to wit, are often quite ungoverned, allowed to disport
themselves as they please. Such matters delight the unpoetic readers of
Browning, and indeed they are excellent entertainment. But let us call
them by their true name; let us not call them poetry, nor mistake their
art for the art of poetry. Writing them in blank verse does not make
them poetry. In _Half-Rome_, in _The Other Half-Rome_, and in _Tertium
Quid_, these elements of analysis and wit are exhibited in three-fourths
of the verse; but the other fourth--in description of scenes, in vivid
portraiture, in transient outbursts out of which passion, in glimpses,
breaks--rises into the realm of poetry. In the books which sketch the
lawyers and their pleadings, there is wit in its finest brilliancy,
analysis in its keenest veracity, but they are scarcely a poet's work.
The whole book is then a mixed book, extremely mixed. All that was
poetical in Browning's previous work is represented in it, and all the
unpoetical elements which had gradually been winning power in him, and
which showed themselves previously in _Bishop Blougram_ and _Mr.
Sludge_, are also there in full blast. It was, as I have said, the
central battlefield of two powers in him. And when _The Ring and the
Book_ was finished, the inferior power had for a time the victory.

To sum up then, there are books in the poem where matter of passion and
matter of thought are imaginatively wrought together. There are others
where psychological thought and metaphysical reasoning are dominant, but
where passionate feeling has also a high place. There are others where
analysis and wit far excel the elements of imaginative emotion; and
there are others where every kind of imagination is absent, save that
which is consistent throughout and which never fails--the power of
creating men and women into distinct individualities. That is left, but
it is a power which is not special to a poet. A prose writer may possess
it with the same fulness as a poet. Carlyle had it as remarkably as
Browning, or nearly as remarkably. He also had wit--a heavier wit than
Browning's, less lambent, less piercing, but as forcible.

One thing more may be said. The poem is far too long, and the subject
does not bear its length. The long poems of the world (I do not speak of
those by inferior poets) have a great subject, are concerned with
manifold fates of men, and are naturally full of various events and
varied scenery. They interest us with new things from book to book. In
_The Ring and the Book_ the subject is not great, the fates concerned
are not important, and the same event runs through twelve books and is
described twelve times. However we may admire the intellectual force
which actually makes the work interesting, and the passion which often
thrills us in it--this is more than the subject bears, and than we can
always endure. Each book is spun out far beyond what is necessary; a
great deal is inserted which would be wisely left out. No one could be
more concise than Browning when he pleased. His power of flashing a
situation or a thought into a few words is well known. But he did not
always use this power. And in _The Ring and the Book_, as in some of the
poems that followed it, he seems now and then to despise that power.

And now for the poem itself. Browning tells the story eight times by
different persons, each from a different point of view, and twice more
by the same person before and after his condemnation and, of course,
from two points of view. Then he practically tells it twice more in the
prologue and the epilogue--twelve times in all--and in spite of what I
have said about the too great length of the poem, this is an
intellectual victory that no one else but Browning could have won
against its difficulties. Whether it was worth the creation by himself
of the difficulty is another question. He chose to do it, and we had
better submit to him and get the good of his work. At least we may avoid
some of the weariness he himself feared by reading it in the way I have
mentioned, as Browning meant it to be read. Poems--being the highest
product of the highest genius of which man is capable--ought to be
approached with some reverence. And a part of that reverence is to read
them in accordance with the intention and desire of the writer.

We ought not to forget the date of the tale when we read the book. It is
just two hundred years ago. The murder of Pompilia took place in 1698;
and the book completes his studies of the Renaissance in its decay. If
_Sordello_ is worth our careful reading as a study of the thirteenth
century in North Italy, this book is as valuable as a record of the
society of its date. It is, in truth, a mine of gold; pure crude ore is
secreted from man's life, then moulded into figures of living men and
women by the insight and passion of the poet. In it is set down Rome as
she was--her customs, opinions, classes of society; her dress, houses,
streets, lanes, byeways and squares; her architecture, fountains,
statues, courts of law, convents, gardens; her fashion and its
drawing-rooms, the various professions and their habits, high life and
middle class, tradesmen and beggars, priest, friar, lay-ecclesiastic,
cardinal and Pope. Nowhere is this pictorial and individualising part of
Browning's genius more delighted with its work. Every description is
written by a lover of humanity, and with joy.

Nor is he less vivid in the _mise-en-scene_ in which he places this
multitude of personages. In _Half-Rome_ we mingle with the crowd between
Palazzo Fiano and Ruspoli, and pass into the church of Lorenzo in Lucina
where the murdered bodies are exposed. The mingled humours of the crowd,
the various persons and their characters are combined with and enhanced
by the scenery. Then there is the Market Place by the Capucin convent of
the Piazza Barberini, with the fountains leaping; then the _Reunion_ at
a palace, and the fine fashionable folk among the mirrors and the
chandeliers, each with their view of the question; then the Courthouse,
with all its paraphernalia, where Guido and Caponsacchi plead; then, the
sketches, as new matters turn up, of the obscure streets of Rome, of the
country round Arezzo, of Arezzo itself, of the post road from Arezzo to
Rome and the country inn near Rome, of the garden house in the suburbs,
of the households of the two advocates and their different ways of
living; of the Pope in his closet and of Guido in the prison cell; and
last, the full description of the streets and the Piazza del Popolo on
the day of the execution--all with a hundred vivifying, illuminating,
minute details attached to them by this keen-eyed, observant, questing
poet who remembered everything he saw, and was able to use each detail
where it was most wanted. Memories are good, but good usage of them is
the fine power. The _mise-en-scene_ is then excellent, and Browning was
always careful to make it right, fitting and enlivening. Nowhere is this
better done than in the Introduction where he finds the book on a stall
in the Square of San Lorenzo, and describes modern Florence in his walk
from the Square past the Strozzi, the Pillar and the Bridge to Casa
Guidi on the other side of the Arno opposite the little church of San
Felice. During the walk he read the book through, yet saw everything he
passed by. The description will show how keen were his eyes, how
masterly his execution.

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