Book: The Poetry Of Robert Browning

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And colour acted on Browning in the same way. I said he had been
impressionist, when he liked, for forty years before Impressionism was
born in modern art. He was so, because from the beginning he saw things
in colour, more than in light and shade. It is well worth a reader's
while to search him for colour-impressions. I take one, for example,
with the black horse flung in at the end exactly in the way an artist
would do it who loved a flash of black life midst of a dead expanse of
gold and green:

Fancy the Pampas' sheen!
Miles and miles of gold and green
Where the sunflowers blow
In a solid glow,
And--to break now and then the screen--
Black neck and eyeballs keen,
Up a wild horse leaps between!

Having, then, this extraordinary power of sight, needing no carefulness
of observation or study, but capable of catching and holding without
trouble all that his eye rested or glanced upon, it is no wonder that
sometimes it amused him to put into verse the doings of a whole day: the
work done in it by men of all classes and the natural objects that
encompassed them; not cataloguing them dryly, but shooting through them,
like rays of light, either his own fancies and thoughts, or the fancies
and thoughts of some typical character whom he invented. This he has
done specially in two poems: _The Englishman in Italy_, where the vast
shell of the Sorrento plain, its sea and mountains, and all the doings
of the peasantry, are detailed with the most intimate delight and
truth. The second of these poems is _Up at a Villa--Down in the City_,
where a farm of the Casentino with its surroundings is contrasted with
the street-life of Florence; and both are described through the
delightful character whom he invents to see them. These poems are
astonishing pieces of intimate, joyful observation of scenery.

Again, there is no poet whose love of animals is greater than
Browning's, and none who has so frequently, so carefully, so vividly
described them. It is amazing, as we go through his work, to realise the
largeness of his range in this matter, from the river-horse to the
lizard, from the eagle to the wren, from the loud singing bee to the
filmy insect in the sunshine. I give a few examples. Mortal man could
not see a lynx more clearly than Karshish--

A black lynx snarled and pricked a tufted ear;
Lust of my blood inflamed his yellow balls.

And the very soul of the Eagle is in this question--

Ask the geier-eagle why she stoops at once
Into the vast and unexplored abyss,
What full-grown power informs her from the first,
Why she not marvels, strenuously beating
The silent boundless regions of the sky!

He has watched the heavy-winged osprey in its haunts, fain to fly,

but forced the earth his couch to make
Far inland, till his friend the tempest wake,

on whose fiercer wings he can flap his own into activity.

In _Caliban upon Setebos_, as would naturally be the case, animal life
is everywhere; and how close to truth, how keenly observed it is, how
the right points for description are chosen to make us feel the beast
and bird in a single line; how full of colour, how flashed into words
which seem like colours, the descriptions are, any animal-lover may hear
in the few lines I quote:

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.

That is enough to prove his power. And the animals are seen, not as a
cultured person sees them, but as a savage, with his eyes untroubled by
thoughts, sees them; for Browning, with his curious self-transmuting
power, has put himself into the skin of Caliban. Then again, in that
lovely lyric in _Paracelsus_,

Thus the Mayne glideth,

the banks and waves are full of all the bird and beast life of a river.
Elsewhere, he sees the falcon spread his wings like a banner, the stork
clapping his bill in the marsh, the coot dipping his blue breast in the
water, the swallow flying to Venice--"that stout sea-farer"--the lark
shivering for joy, and a hundred other birds; and lastly, even the great
bird of the Imagination, the Phoenix, flying home; and in a splendid
verse records the sight:

As the King-bird with ages on his plumes
Travels to die in his ancestral glooms.

Not less wonderful, and more unique in English poetry, is his painting
of insects. He describes the hermit-bee, the soft, small, unfrighted
thing, lighting on the dead vine-leaf, and twirling and filing all day.
He strikes out the grasshopper at a touch--

Chirrups the contumacious grasshopper.

He has a swift vision of the azure damsel-fly flittering in the wood:

Child of the simmering quiet, there to die.

He sees all the insect population of an old green wall; fancies the
fancies of the crickets and the flies, and the carousing of the cicala
in the trees, and the bee swinging in the chalice of the campanula, and
the wasps pricking the papers round the peaches, and the gnats and early
moths craving their food from God when dawn awakes them, and the
fireflies crawling like lamps through the moss, and the spider,
sprinkled with mottles on an ash-grey back, and building his web on the
edge of tombs. These are but a few things out of this treasure-house of
animal observation and love. It is a love which animates and populates
with life his landscapes.

Many of the points I have attempted here to make are illustrated in
_Saul_. In verse v. the sheep are pictured, with all a shepherd's
delightful affection, coming back at evening to the folding; and, with
David's poetic imagination, compared to the stars following one another
into the meadows of night--

And now one after one seeks his lodging, as star follows star
Into eve and the blue far above us,--so blue and so far!--

In verse vi. the quails, and the crickets, and the jerboa at the door
of his sand house, are thrilled into quicker life by David's music. In
verse ix. the full joy of living in beasts and men is painted in the
midst of landscape after landscape, struck out in single lines,--till
all nature seems crowded and simmering with the intense life whose
rapture Browning loved so well. These fully reveal his poetic communion
with animals. Then, there is a fine passage in verse x. where he
describes the loosening of a thick bed of snow from the
mountain-side[4]--an occurrence which also drew the interest on Shelley
in the _Prometheus_--which illustrates what I have said of Browning's
conception of the separate life, as of giant Titans, of the vaster
things in Nature. The mountain is alive and lives his life with his own
grim joy, and wears his snow like a breastplate, and discharges it when
it pleases him. It is only David who thinks that the great creature
lives to guard us from the tempests. And Hebron, high on its crested
hill, lifts itself out of the morning mist in the same giant fashion,

For I wake in the grey dewy covert, while Hebron upheaves
The dawn struggling with night on his shoulder, and Kidron retrieves
Slow the damage of yesterday's sunshine.

Then, at the end of the poem, Browning represents all Nature as full of
emotion, as gathered into a fuller life, by David's prophecy of the
coming of immortal Love in Christ to man. This sympathy of Nature with
humanity is so rare a thought in Browning, and so apart from his view of
her, that I think he felt its strangeness here; so that he has taken
some pains to make us understand that it is not Nature herself who does
this, but David, in his uplifted inspiration, who imputes it to her. If
that is not the case, it is at least interesting to find the poet,
impassioned by his imagination of the situation, driven beyond his usual
view into another land of thought.

There is one more thing to say in closing this chapter. Browning, unlike
Tennyson, did not invent his landscapes. He drew directly from nature.
The landscapes in _Pauline_ and _Sordello_, and in the lyrical poems are
plainly recollections of what he has seen and noted in his memory, from
the sweep of the mountainous or oceanic horizon to the lichen on the
rock and the painted shell on the seashore. Even the imaginative
landscape of _Childe Roland_ is a memory, not an invention. I do not say
he would have been incapable of such invented landscape as we find in
_Oenone_ and the _Lotos-Eaters_, but it was not his way to do this.
However, he does it once; but he takes care to show that it is not real
landscape he is drawing, but landscape in a picture. In _Gerard de
Lairesse_, one of the poems in _Parleyings with Certain People_, he sets
himself to rival the "Walk" in Lairesse's _Art of Painting_, and he
invents as a background to mythological or historic scenes, five
landscapes, of dawn, morning, and noon, evening and falling night. They
may be compared with the walk in _Pauline_, and indeed one of them with
its deep pool watched over by the trees recalls his description of a
similar pool in _Pauline_--a lasting impression of his youth, for it is
again used in _Sordello_. These landscapes are some of his most careful
natural description. They begin with the great thunderstorm of dawn in
which Prometheus is seen riveted to his rock and the eagle-hound of Zeus
beside him. Then the morning is described and the awakening of the earth
and Artemis going forth, the huntress-queen and the queen of death; then
noon with Lyda and the Satyr--that sad story; then evening charged with
the fate of empires; and then the night, and in it a vast ghost, the
ghost of departing glory and beauty. The descriptions are too long to
quote, but far too short to read. I would that Browning had done more of
this excellent work; but that these were created when he was an old man
proves that the fire of imagination burnt in him to the end. They are
full of those keen picture-words in which he smites into expression the
central point of a landscape. They realise the glory of light, the
force, fierceness, even the quiet of Nature, but they have lost a great
deal of the colour of which once he was so lavish. Nevertheless, the
whole scheme of colour in these pictures, with their figures, recalls
the pictures of Tintoret. They have his _furia_, his black, gold, and
sombre purple, his white mist and barred clouds and the thunder-roar in
his skies. Nor are Prometheus and Artemis, and Lyda on her heap of skins
in the deep woods, unworthy of the daring hand of the great Venetian.
They seem to stand forth from his canvas.

The poem closes with a charming lyric, half-sad, half-joyful, in which
he hails the spring, and which in itself is full of his heart when it
was close to the hopefulness he drew from natural beauty. I quote it to
close this chapter:

Dance, yellows and whites and reds,
Lead your gay orgy, leaves, stalks, heads
Astir with the wind in the tulip-beds.

There's sunshine; scarcely a wind at all
Disturbs starved grass and daisies small
On a certain mound by a churchyard wall.

Daisies and grass be my heart's bed-fellows,
On the mound wind spares and sunshine mellows:
Dance you, reds and whites and yellows.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] David could only have seen this on the upper slopes of Hermon. But
at the time of the poem, when he is the shepherd-youth, he could
scarcely have visited the north of Palestine. Indeed, he does not seem
all his life long to have been near Hermon. Browning has transferred to
David what he himself had seen in Switzerland.

* * * * *




CHAPTER III

_THE TREATMENT OF NATURE_


In the previous chapter, some of the statements made on Browning as a
poet of Nature were not sufficiently illustrated; and there are other
elements in his natural description which demand attention. The best way
to repair these deficiencies will be to take chronologically the natural
descriptions in his poems and to comment upon them, leaving out those on
which we have already touched. New points of interest will thus arise;
and, moreover, taking his natural description as it occurs from volume
to volume, we may be able--within this phase of his poetic nature--to
place his poetic development in a clearer light.

I begin, therefore, with _Pauline_. The descriptions of nature in that
poem are more deliberate, more for their own sake, than elsewhere in
Browning's poetry. The first of them faintly recalls the manner of
Shelley in the _Alastor_, and I have no doubt was influenced by him. The
two others, and the more finished, have already escaped from Shelley,
and are almost pre-Raphaelite, as much so as Keats, in their detail. Yet
all the three are original, not imitative. They suggest Shelley and
Keats, and no more, and it is only the manner and not the matter of
these poets that they suggest. Browning became instantly original in
this as in other modes of poetry. It was characteristic of him from the
beginning to the end of his career, to possess within himself his own
methods, to draw out of himself new matter and new shapings.

From one point of view this was full of treasureable matter for us. It
is not often the gods give us so opulent an originality. From another
point of view it was unfortunate. If he had begun by imitating a little;
if he had studied the excellences of his predecessors more; if he had
curbed his individuality sufficiently to mark, learn and inwardly digest
the noble style of others in natural description, and in all other
matters of poetry as well, his work would have been much better than it
is; his original excellences would have found fitter and finer
expression; his faults would have been enfeebled instead of being
developed; his style would have been more concise on one side, less
abrupt on another, and we should not have been wrongly disturbed by
obscurities of diction and angularities of expression. He would have
reached more continuously the splendid level he often attained. This is
plentifully illustrated by his work on external nature, but less perhaps
than by his work on humanity.

The first natural description he published is in the beginning of
_Pauline_:

Thou wilt remember one warm morn when winter
Crept aged from the earth, and spring's first breath
Blew soft from the moist hills; the blackthorn boughs,
So dark in the bare wood, when glistening
In the sunshine were white with coming buds,
Like the bright side of a sorrow, and the banks
Had violets opening from sleep like eyes.

That is fairly good; he describes what he has seen; but it might have
been better. We know what he means, but his words do not accurately or
imaginatively convey this meaning. The best lines are the first three,
but the peculiar note of Shelley sighs so fully in them that they do not
represent Browning. What is special in them is his peculiar delight not
only in the morning which here he celebrates, but in the spring. It was
in his nature, even in old age, to love with passion the beginnings of
things; dawn, morning, spring and youth, and their quick blood; their
changes, impulses, their unpremeditated rush into fresh experiment.
Unlike Tennyson, who was old when he was old, Browning was young when he
was old. Only once in _Asolando_, in one poem, can we trace that he felt
winter in his heart. And the lines in _Pauline_ which I now quote,
spoken by a young man who had dramatised himself into momentary age, are
no ill description of his temper at times when he was really old:

As life wanes, all its care and strife and toil
Seem strangely valueless, while the old trees
Which grew by our youth's home, the waving mass
Of climbing plants heavy with bloom and dew,
The morning swallows with their songs like words.
All these seem clear and only worth our thoughts:
So, aught connected with my early life,
My rude songs or my wild imaginings,
How I look on them--most distinct amid
The fever and the stir of after years!

The next description in _Pauline_ is that in which he describes--to
illustrate what Shelley was to him--the woodland spring which became a
mighty river. Shelley, as first conceived by Browning, seemed to him
like a sacred spring:

Scarce worth a moth's flitting, which long grasses cross,
And one small tree embowers droopingly--
Joying to see some wandering insect won
To live in its few rushes, or some locust
To pasture on its boughs, or some wild bird
Stoop for its freshness from the trackless air.

A piece of careful detail, close to nature, but not close enough;
needing to be more detailed or less detailed, but the first instance in
his work of his deliberate use of Nature, not for love of herself only,
(Wordsworth, Coleridge or Byron would have described the spring in the
woods for its own sake), but for illustration of humanity. It is
Shelley--Shelley in his lonely withdrawn character, Shelley hidden in
the wood of his own thoughts, and, like a spring in that wood, bubbling
upwards into personal poetry--of whom Browning is now thinking. The
image is good, but a better poet would have dwelt more on the fountain
and left the insects and birds alone. It is Shelley also of whom he
thinks--Shelley breaking away from personal poetry to write of the fates
of men, of liberty and love and overthrow of wrong, of the future of
mankind--when he expands his tree-shaded fountain into the river and
follows it to the sea:

And then should find it but the fountain head,
Long lost, of some great river washing towns
And towers, and seeing old woods which will live
But by its banks untrod of human foot.
Which, when the great sun sinks, lie quivering
In light as some thing lieth half of life
Before God's foot, waiting a wondrous change;
Then girt with rocks which seek to turn or stay
Its course in vain, for it does ever spread
Like a sea's arm as it goes rolling on,
Being the pulse of some great country--so
Wast thou to me, and art thou to the world!

How good some of that is; how bad it is elsewhere! How much it needs
thought, concentration, and yet how vivid also and original! And the
faults of it, of grammar, of want of clearness, of irritating
parenthesis, of broken threads of thought, of inability to leave out the
needless, are faults of which Browning never quite cleared his work. I
do not think he ever cared to rid himself of them.

The next description is not an illustration of man by means of Nature.
It is almost the only set description of Nature, without reference to
man, which occurs in the whole of Browning's work. It is introduced by
his declaration (for in this I think he speaks from himself) of his
power of living in the life of all living things. He does not think of
himself as living in the whole Being of Nature, as Wordsworth or Shelley
might have done. There was a certain matter of factness in him which
prevented his belief in any theory of that kind. But he does transfer
himself into the rejoicing life of the animals and plants, a life which
he knows is akin to his own. And this distinction is true of all his
poetry of Nature. "I can mount with the bird," he says,

Leaping airily his pyramid of leaves
And twisted boughs of some tall mountain tree,
Or like a fish breathe deep the morning air
In the misty sun-warm water.

This introduces the description of a walk of twenty-four hours through
various scenes of natural beauty. It is long and elaborate--the scenery
he conceives round the home where he and Pauline are to live. And it is
so close, and so much of it is repeated in other forms in his later
poetry, that I think it is drawn direct from Nature; that it is here
done of set purpose to show his hand in natural description. It begins
with night, but soon leaves night for the morning and the noon. Here is
a piece of it:

Morning, the rocks and valleys and old woods.
How the sun brightens in the mist, and here,
Half in the air, like[5] creatures of the place,
Trusting the elements, living on high boughs
That sway in the wind--look at the silver spray
Flung from the foam-sheet of the cataract
Amid the broken rocks! Shall we stay here
With the wild hawks? No, ere the hot noon come
Dive we down--safe! See, this is our new retreat
Walled in with a sloped mound of matted shrubs,
Dark, tangled, old and green, still sloping down
To a small pool whose waters lie asleep,
Amid the trailing boughs turned water-plants:
And tall trees overarch to keep us in,
Breaking the sunbeams into emerald shafts,
And in the dreamy water one small group
Of two or three strange trees are got together
Wondering at all around--

This is nerveless work, tentative, talkative, no clear expression of the
whole; and as he tries to expand it further in lines we may study with
interest, for the very failures of genius are interesting, he becomes
even more feeble. Yet the feebleness is traversed by verses of power,
like lightning flashing through a mist upon the sea. The chief thing to
say about this direct, detailed work is that he got out of its manner as
fast as he could. He never tried it again, but passed on to suggest the
landscape by a few sharp, high-coloured words; choosing out one or two
of its elements and flashing them into prominence. The rest was left to
the imagination of the reader.

He is better when he comes forth from the shadowy woodland-pool into the
clear air and open landscape:

Up for the glowing day, leave the old woods!
See, they part like a ruined arch: the sky!
Blue sunny air, where a great cloud floats laden
With light, like a dead whale that white birds pick,
Floating away in the sun in some north sea.
Air, air, fresh life-blood, thin and searching air,
The clear, dear breath of God that loveth us,
Where small birds reel and winds take their delight!

The last three lines are excellent, but nothing could be worse than the
sensational image of the dead whale. It does not fit the thing he
desires to illustrate, and it violates the sentiment of the scene he is
describing, but its strangeness pleased his imagination, and he put it
in without a question. Alas, in after times, he only too often, both in
the poetry of nature and of the human soul, hurried into his verse
illustrations which had no natural relation to the matter in hand, just
because it amused him to indulge his fancy. The finished artist could
not do this; he would hear, as it were, the false note, and reject it.
But Browning, a natural artist, never became a perfect one.
Nevertheless, as his poetry went on, he reached, by natural power,
splendid description, as indeed I have fully confessed; but, on the
other hand, one is never sure of him. He is never quite "inevitable."

The attempt at deliberate natural description in _Pauline_, of which I
have now spoken, is not renewed in _Paracelsus_. By the time he wrote
that poem the movement and problem of the spirit of man had all but
quenched his interest in natural scenery. Nature is only introduced as a
background, almost a scenic background for the players, who are the
passions, thoughts, and aspirations of the intellectual life of
Paracelsus. It is only at the beginning of Part II. that we touch a
landscape:

Over the waters in the vaporous West
The sun goes down as in a sphere of gold
Behind the arm of the city, which between;
With all the length of domes and minarets,
Athwart the splendour, black and crooked runs
Like a Turk verse along a scimitar.

That is all; nothing but an introduction. Paracelsus turns in a moment
from the sight, and absorbs himself in himself, just as Browning was
then doing in his own soul. Nearly two thousand lines are then written
before Nature is again touched upon, and then Festus and Paracelsus are
looking at the dawn; and it is worth saying how in this description
Browning's work on Nature has so greatly improved that one can scarcely
believe he is the same poet who wrote the wavering descriptions of
_Pauline_. This is close and clear:

Morn must be near.

FESTUS. Best ope the casement: see,
The night, late strewn with clouds and flying stars,
Is blank and motionless: how peaceful sleep
The tree-tops all together! Like an asp[6]
The wind slips whispering from bough to bough.

* * *

PARACELSUS. See, morn at length. The heavy darkness seems
Diluted, grey and clear without the stars;
The shrubs bestir and rouse themselves as if
Some snake, that weighed them down all night, let go
His hold; and from the East, fuller and fuller,
Day, like a mighty river, flowing in;
But clouded, wintry, desolate and cold.

That is good, clear, and sufficient; and there the description should
end. But Browning, driven by some small demon, adds to it three lines of
mere observant fancy.

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