Book: The Poetry Of Robert Browning

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That memorable day,
(June was the month, Lorenzo named the Square)
I leaned a little and overlooked my prize
By the low railing round the fountain-source
Close to the statue, where a step descends:
While clinked the cans of copper, as stooped and rose
Thick-ankled girls who brimmed them, and made place
For marketmen glad to pitch basket down,
Dip a broad melon-leaf that holds the wet,
And whisk their faded fresh. And on I read
Presently, though my path grew perilous
Between the outspread straw-work, piles of plait
Soon to be flapping, each o'er two black eyes
And swathe of Tuscan hair, on festas fine:
Through fire-irons, tribes of tongs, shovels in sheaves,
Skeleton bedsteads, wardrobe-drawers agape,
Rows of tall slim brass lamps with dangling gear,--
And worse, cast clothes a-sweetening in the sun:
None of them took my eye from off my prize.
Still read I on, from written title page
To written index, on, through street and street,
At the Strozzi, at the Pillar, at the Bridge;
Till, by the time I stood at home again
In Casa Guidi by Felice Church,
Under the doorway where the black begins
With the first stone-slab of the staircase cold,
I had mastered the contents, knew the whole truth
Gathered together, bound up in this book,
Print three-fifths, written supplement the rest.

This power, combined with his power of portraiture, makes this long poem
alive. No other man of his century could paint like him the to and fro
of a city, the hurly-burly of humanity, the crowd, the movement, the
changing passions, the loud or quiet clash of thoughts, the gestures,
the dress, the interweaving of expression on the face, the whole play of
humanity in war or peace. As we read, we move with men and women; we are
pressed everywhere by mankind. We listen to the sound of humanity,
sinking sometimes to the murmur we hear at night from some high window
in London; swelling sometimes, as in _Sordello_, into a roar of
violence, wrath, revenge, and war. And it was all contained in that
little body, brain and heart; and given to us, who can feel it, but not
give it. This is the power which above all endears him to us as a poet.
We feel in each poem not only the waves of the special event of which he
writes, but also the large vibration of the ocean of humanity.

He was not unaware of this power of his. We are told in _Sordello_ that
he dedicated himself to the picturing of humanity; and he came to think
that a Power beyond ours had accepted this dedication, and directed his
work. He declares in the introduction that he felt a Hand ("always above
my shoulder--mark the predestination"), that pushed him to the stall
where he found the fated book in whose womb lay his child--_The Ring and
the Book_. And he believed that he had certain God-given qualities which
fitted him for this work. These he sets forth in this introduction, and
the self-criticism is of the greatest interest.

The first passage is, when he describes how, having finished the book
and got into him all the gold of its fact, he added from himself that to
the gold which made it workable--added to it his live soul, informed,
transpierced it through and through with imagination; and then, standing
on his balcony over the street, saw the whole story from the beginning
shape itself out on the night, alive and clear, not in dead memory but
in living movement; saw right away out on the Roman road to Arezzo, and
all that there befell; then passed to Rome again with the actors in the
tragedy, a presence with them who heard them speak and think and act.
The "life in him abolished the death of things--deep calling unto deep."
For "a spirit laughed and leaped through his every limb, and lit his
eye, and lifted him by the hair, and let him have his will" with
Pompilia, Guido, Caponsacchi, the lawyers, the Pope, and the whole of
Rome. And they rose from the dead; the old woe stepped on the stage
again at the magician's command; and the rough gold of fact was rounded
to a ring by art. But the ring should have a posy, and he makes that in
a passionate cry to his dead wife--a lovely spell where high thinking
and full feeling meet and mingle like two deep rivers. Whoso reads it
feels how her spirit, living still for him, brooded over and blest his
masterpiece:

O lyric Love, half angel and half bird
And all a wonder and a wild desire,--
Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun,
Took sanctuary within the holier blue,
And sang a kindred soul out to his face,--
Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart--
When the first summons from the darkling earth
Reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue,
And bared them of the glory--to drop down,
To toil for man, to suffer or to die,--
This is the same voice: can thy soul know change
Hail then, and hearken from the realms of help!
Never may I commence my song, my due
To God who best taught song by gift of thee,
Except with bent head and beseeching hand--
That still, despite the distance and the dark,
What was, again may be; some interchange
Of grace, some splendour once thy very thought,
Some benediction anciently thy smile:
--Never conclude, but raising hand and head
Thither where eyes, that cannot reach, yet yearn
For all hope, all sustainment, all reward,
Their utmost up and on,--so blessing back
In those thy realms of help, that heaven thy home,
Some whiteness which, I judge, thy face makes proud,
Some wanness where, I think, thy foot may fall!

The poem begins with the view that one half of Rome took of the events.
At the very commencement we touch one of the secondary interests of the
book, the incidental characters. Guido, Caponsacchi, Pompilia, the Pope,
and, in a lesser degree, Violante and Pietro, are the chief characters,
and the main interest contracts around them. But, through all they say
and do, as a motley crowd through a street, a great number of minor
characters move to and fro; and Browning, whose eye sees every face, and
through the face into the soul, draws them one by one, some more fully
than others in perhaps a hundred lines, some only in ten. Most of them
are types of a class, a profession or a business, yet there is always a
touch or two which isolates each of them so that they do not only
represent a class but a personal character. He hated, like Morris, the
withering of the individual, nor did he believe, nor any man who knows
and feels mankind, that by that the world grew more and more. The poem
is full of such individualities. It were well, as one example, to read
the whole account of the people who come to see the murdered bodies laid
out in the Church of Lorenzo. The old, curious, doddering gossip of the
Roman street is not less alive than the Cardinal, and the clever pushing
Curato; and around them are heard the buzz of talk, the movement of the
crowd. The church, the square are humming with humanity.

He does the same clever work at the deathbed of Pompilia. She lies in
the House of the dying, and certain folk are allowed to see her. Each
one is made alive by this creative pencil; and all are different, one
from the other--the Augustinian monk, old mother Baldi chattering like a
jay who thought that to touch Pompilia's bedclothes would cure her
palsy, Cavalier Carlo who fees the porter to paint her face just because
she was murdered and famous, the folk who argue on theology over her
wounded body. Elsewhere we possess the life-history of Pietro and
Violante, Pompilia's reputed parents; several drawings of the retired
tradesmen class, with their gossips and friends, in the street of a poor
quarter in Rome; then, the Governor and Archbishop of Arezzo, the friar
who is kindly but fears the world and all the busy-bodies of this
provincial town. Arezzo, its characters and indwellers, stand in clear
light. The most vivid of these sketches is Dominus Hyacinthus, the
lawyer who defends Guido. I do not know anything better done, and more
amusingly, than this man and his household--a paternal creature, full of
his boys and their studies, making us, in his garrulous pleasure, at
home with them and his fat wife. Browning was so fond of this sketch
that he drew him and his boys over again in the epilogue.

These represent the episodical characters in this drama of life; and
Browning has scattered them, as it were, behind the chief characters,
whom sometimes they illustrate and sometimes they contrast. Of these the
whitest, simplest, loveliest is Pompilia, of whom I have already
written. The other chief characters are Count Guido and Giuseppe
Caponsacchi; and to the full development of these two characters
Browning gives all his powers. They are contrasted types of the spirit
of good and the spirit of evil conquering in man. Up to a certain point
in life their conduct is much alike. Both belong to the Church--one as a
priest, one as a layman affiliated to the Church. The lust of money and
self, when the character of Pompilia forces act, turns Guido into a
beast of greed and hate. The same character, when it forces act, lifts
Caponsacchi into almost a saint. This was a piece of contrasted
psychology in which the genius of Browning revelled, and he followed all
the windings of it in both these hearts with the zest of an explorer.
They were labyrinthine, but the more labyrinthine the better he was
pleased. Guido's first speech is made before the court in his defence.
We see disclosed the outer skin of the man's soul, all that he would
have the world know of him--cynical, mocking, not cruel, not
affectionate, a man of the world whom life had disappointed, and who
wishing to establish himself in a retired life by marriage had been
deceived and betrayed, he pleads, by his wife and her parents--an
injured soul who, stung at last into fury at having a son foisted on
him, vindicates his honour. And in this vindication his hypocrisy slips
at intervals from him, because his hatred of his wife is too much for
his hypocrisy.

This is the only touch of the wolf in the man--his cruel teeth shown
momentarily through the smooth surface of his defence. A weaker poet
would have left him there, not having capacity for more. But Browning,
so rich in thought he was, had only begun to draw him. Guido is not only
painted by three others--by Caponsacchi, by Pompilia, by the Pope--but
he finally exposes his real self with his own hand. He is condemned to
death. Two of his friends visit him the night before his execution, in
his cell. Then, exalted into eloquence by the fierce passions of fear of
death and hatred of Pompilia, he lays bare as the night his very soul,
mean, cruel, cowardly, hungry for revenge, crying for life, black with
hate--a revelation such as in literature can best be paralleled by the
soliloquies of Iago. Baseness is supreme in his speech, hate was never
better given; the words are like the gnashing of teeth; prayers for life
at any cost were never meaner, and the outburst of terror and despair at
the end is their ultimate expression.

Over against him is set Caponsacchi, of noble birth, of refined manner,
one of those polished and cultivated priests of whom Rome makes such
excellent use, and of whom Browning had drawn already a different type
in Bishop Blougram. He hesitated, being young and gay, to enter the
Church. But the archbishop of that easy time, two hundred years ago,
told him the Church was strong enough to bear a few light priests, and
that he would be set free from many ecclesiastical duties if, by
assiduity in society and with women, he strengthened the social weight
of the Church. In that way, making his madrigals and confessing fine
ladies, he lived for four years. This is an admirable sketch of a type
of Church society of that date, indeed, of any date in any Church; it
is by no means confined to Rome.

On this worldly, careless, indifferent, pleasure-seeking soul Pompilia,
in her trouble and the pity of it, rises like a pure star seen through
mist that opens at intervals to show her excelling brightness; and in a
moment, at the first glimpse of her in the theatre, the false man drops
away; his soul breaks up, stands clear, and claims its divine birth. He
is born again, and then transfigured. The life of convention, of
indifference, dies before Pompilia's eyes; and on the instant he is true
to himself, to her, and to God. The fleeting passions which had absorbed
him, and were of the senses, are burned up, and the spiritual love for
her purity, and for purity itself--that eternal, infinite desire--is now
master of his life. Not as Miranda and Ferdinand changed eyes in
youthful love, but as Dante and Beatrice look on one another in
Paradise, did Pompilia and Caponsacchi change eyes, and know at once
that both were true, and see without speech the central worth of their
souls. They trusted one another and they loved for ever. So, when she
cried to him in her distress, he did her bidding and bore her away to
Rome. He tells the story of their flight, and tells it with
extraordinary beauty and vehemence in her defence. So noble is the tale
that he convinces the judges who at first had disbelieved him; and the
Pope confesses that his imprudence was a higher good than priestly
prudence would have been. When he makes his defence he has heard that
Pompilia has been murdered. Then we understand that in his conversion to
goodness he has not lost but gained passion. Scorn of the judges, who
could not see that neither he was guilty nor Pompilia; fiery
indignation with the murderer; infinite grief for the lamb slain by the
wolf, and irrevocable love for the soul of Pompilia, whom he will dwell
with eternally when they meet in Heaven, a love which Pompilia, dying,
declares she has for him, and in which, growing and abiding, she will
wait for him--burn on his lips. He is fully and nobly a man; yet, at the
end--and he is no less a man for it--the wild sorrow at his heart breaks
him down into a cry:

O great, just, good God! Miserable me!

Pompilia ends her words more quietly, in the faith that comes with
death. Caponsacchi has to live on, to bear the burden of the world. But
Pompilia has borne all she had to bear. All pain and horror are behind
her, as she lies in the stillness, dying. And in the fading of this
life, she knows she loves Caponsacchi in the spiritual world and will
love him for ever. Each speaks according to the circumstance, but she
most nobly:

He is ordained to call and I to come!
Do not the dead wear flowers when dressed for God?
Say,--I am all in flowers from head to foot!
Say,--not one flower of all he said and did,
Might seem to flit unnoticed, fade unknown,
But dropped a seed, has grown a balsam-tree
Whereof the blossoming perfumes the place
At this supreme of moments! He is a priest;
He cannot marry therefore, which is right:
I think he would not marry if he could.
Marriage on earth seems such a counterfeit,
Mere imitation of the inimitable:
In heaven we have the real and true and sure.
'Tis there they neither marry nor are given
In marriage but are as the angels: right,
Oh how right that is, how like Jesus Christ
To say that! Marriage-making for the earth,
With gold so much,--birth, power, repute so much,
Or beauty, youth so much, in lack of these!
Be as the angels rather, who, apart,
Know themselves into one, are found at length
Married, but marry never, no, nor give
In marriage; they are man and wife at once
When the true time is; here we have to wait
Not so long neither! Could we by a wish
Have what we will and get the future now,
Would we wish aught done undone in the past?
So, let him wait God's instant men call years;
Meantime hold hard by truth and his great soul,
Do out the duty! Through such souls alone
God stooping shows sufficient of His light
For us i' the dark to rise by. And I rise.

Last of these main characters, the Pope appears. Guido, condemned to
death by the law, appeals from the law to the head of the Church,
because, being half an ecclesiastic, his death can only finally be
decreed by the ecclesiastical arm. An old, old man, with eyes clear of
the quarrels, conventions, class prejudices of the world, the Pope has
gone over all the case during the day, and now night has fallen. Far
from the noise of Rome, removed from the passions of the chief
characters, he is sitting in the stillness of his closet, set on his
decision. We see the whole case now, through his mind, in absolute
quiet. He has been on his terrace to look at the stars, and their solemn
peace is with him. He feels that he is now alone with God and his old
age. And being alone, he is not concise, but garrulous and discursive.
Browning makes him so on purpose. But discursive as his mind is, his
judgment is clear, his sentence determined. Only, before he speaks, he
will weigh all the characters, and face any doubts that may shoot into
his conscience. He passes Guido and the rest before his spiritual
tribunal, judging not from the legal point of view, but from that which
his Master would take at the Judgment Day. How have they lived; what
have they made of life? When circumstances invaded them with temptation,
how did they meet temptation? Did they declare by what they did that
they were on God's side or the devil's? And on these lines he delivers
his sentence on Pompilia, Caponsacchi, Guido, Pietro, Violante, and the
rest. He feels he speaks as the Vicegerent of God.

This solemn, silent, lonely, unworldly judgment of the whole case, done
in God's presence, is, after the noisy, crowded, worldly judgment of it
by Rome, after the rude humours of the law, and the terrible clashing of
human passions, most impressive; and it rises into the majesty of old
age in the summing up of the characters of Pompilia, Caponsacchi, and
Guido. I wish Browning had left it there. But he makes a sudden doubt
invade the Pope with a chill. Has he judged rightly in thinking that
divine truth is with him? Is there any divine truth on which he may
infallibly repose?

And then for many pages we are borne away into a theological discussion,
which I take leave to say is wearisome; and which, after all, lands the
Pope exactly at the point from which he set out--a conclusion at which,
as we could have told him beforehand, he would be certain to arrive. We
might have been spared this. It is an instance of Browning's pleasure in
intellectual discourse which had, as I have said, such sad results on
his imaginative work. However, at the end, the Pope resumes his interest
in human life. He determines; and quickly--"Let the murderer die
to-morrow."

Then comes the dreadful passion of Guido in the condemned cell, of
which I have spoken. And then, one would think the poem would have
closed. But no, the epilogue succeeds, in which, after all the tragedy,
humour reigns supreme. It brings us into touch with all that happened in
this case after the execution of Guido; the letters written by the
spectators, the lawyer's view of the deed, the gossip of Rome upon the
interesting occasion. No piece of humour in Browning's poetry, and no
portrait-sketching, is better than the letter written by a Venetian
gentleman in Rome giving an account of the execution. It is high comedy
when we are told that the Austrian Ambassador, who had pleaded for
Guido's life, was so vexed by the sharp "no" of the Pope (even when he
had told the Pope that he had probably dined at the same table with
Guido), that he very nearly refused to come to the execution, and would
scarcely vouchsafe it more than a glance when he did come--as if this
conduct of his were a slight which the Pope would feel acutely. Nor does
Browning's invention stop with this inimitable letter. He adds two other
letters which he found among the papers; and these give to the
characters of the two lawyers, new turns, new images of their steady
professional ambition not to find truth, but to gain the world.

One would think, after this, that invention would be weary. Not at all!
The Augustinian monk who attended Pompilia has not had attention enough;
and this is the place, Browning thinks, to show what he thought of the
case, and how he used it in his profession. So, we are given a great
part of the sermon he preached on the occasion, and the various
judgments of Rome upon it.

It is wonderful, after invention has been actively at work for eleven
long books, pouring forth its waters from an unfailing fountain, to find
it, at the end, as gay, as fresh, as keen, as youthful as ever. This, I
repeat, is the excellence of Browning's genius--fulness of creative
power, with imagination in it like a fire. It does not follow that all
it produces is poetry; and what it has produced in _The Ring and the
Book_ is sometimes, save for the metre, nothing better than prose. But
this is redeemed by the noble poetry of a great part of it. The book is,
as I have said, a mixed book--the central arena of that struggle in
Browning between prose and poetry with a discussion of which this
chapter began, and with the mention of which I finish it.

* * * * *




CHAPTER XVII

_LATER POEMS_


A just appreciation of the work which Browning published after _The Ring
and the Book_ is a difficult task. The poems are of various kinds, on
widely separated subjects; and with the exception of those which treat
of Balaustion, they have no connection with one another. Many of them
must belong to the earlier periods of his life, and been introduced into
the volumes out of the crowd of unpublished poems every poet seems to
possess. These, when we come across them among their middle-aged
companions, make a strange impression, as if we found a white-thorn
flowering in an autumnal woodland; and in previous chapters of this book
I have often fetched them out of their places, and considered them where
they ought to be--in the happier air and light in which they were born.
I will not discuss them again, but in forming any judgment of the later
poems they must be discarded.

The struggle to which I have drawn attention between the imaginative and
intellectual elements in Browning, and which was equally balanced in
_The Ring and the Book_, continued after its publication, but with a
steady lessening of the imaginative and a steady increase of the
intellectual elements. One poem, however, written before the publication
of _The Ring and the Book_, does not belong to this struggle. This is
_Herve Riel_, a ballad of fire and joy and triumph. It is curiously
French in sentiment and expression, and the eager sea-delight in it is
plainly French, not English in feeling. Nor is it only French; it is
Breton in audacity, in self-forgetfulness, in carelessness of reward,
and in loyalty to country, to love and to home. If Browning had been all
English, this transference of himself into the soul of another
nationality would have been wonderful, nay, impossible. As it is, it is
wonderful enough; and this self-transference--one of his finest poetic
powers--is nowhere better accomplished than in this poem, full of the
salt wind and the leap and joy of the sea-waves; but even more full, as
was natural to Browning, of the Breton soul of Herve Riel.

In _Balaustion's Adventure_ (1871) which next appeared, the imaginative
elements, as we have seen, are still alive and happy; and though they
only emerge at intervals in its continuation, _Aristophanes' Apology_
(1875), yet they do emerge. Meanwhile, between _Balaustion's Adventure_
and the end of 1875, he produced four poems--_Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau,
Saviour of Society_; _Fifine at the Fair_; _Red Cotton Nightcap
Country_, or _Turf and Towers_; and _The Inn Album_. They are all long,
and were published in four separate volumes. In them the intellectual
elements have all but completely conquered the imaginative. They are,
however, favourite "exercise-places" for some of his admirers, who think
that they derive poetic pleasures from their study. The pleasure these
poems give, when they give it, is not altogether a poetic pleasure. It
is chiefly the pleasure of the understanding called to solve with
excitement a huddle of metaphysical problems. They have the name but not
the nature of poetry.

They are the work of my Lord Intelligence--attended by wit and
fancy--who sits at the desk of poetry, and with her pen in his hand. He
uses the furniture of poetry, but the goddess herself has left the room.
Yet something of her influence still fills the air of the chamber. In
the midst of the brilliant display that fancy, wit, and intellect are
making, a soft steady light of pure song burns briefly at intervals, and
then is quenched; like the light of stars seen for a moment of quiet
effulgence among the crackling and dazzling of fireworks.

The poems are, it is true, original. We cannot class them with any
previous poetry. They cannot be called didactic or satirical. The
didactic and satirical poems of England are, for the most part,
artificial, concise, clear. These poems are not artificial, clear or
concise. Nor do they represent the men and women of a cultured,
intellectual and conventional society, such as the poetry of Dryden and
Pope addressed. The natural man is in them--the crude, dull, badly-baked
man--what the later nineteenth century called the real man. We see his
ugly, sordid, contemptible, fettered soul, and long for Salinguerra, or
Lippo Lippi, or even Caliban. The representations are then human enough,
with this kind of humanity, but they might have been left to prose.
Poetry has no business to build its houses on the waste and leprous
lands of human nature; and less business to call its work art. Realism
of this kind is not art, it is science.

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