Book: The Poetry Of Robert Browning

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Few passages are more beautiful in English poetry than that in which
Aprile narrates his youthful aspiration: how, loving all things
infinitely, he wished to throw them into absolute beauty of form by
means of all the arts, for the love of men, and receive from men love
for having revealed beauty, and merge at last in God, the Eternal Love.
This was his huge aim, his full desire.

Few passages are more pathetic than that in which he tells his failure
and its cause. "Time is short; the means of life are limited; we have
no means answering to our desires. Now I am wrecked; for the
multitudinous images of beauty which filled my mind forbade my seizing
upon one which I could have shaped. I often wished to give one to the
world, but the others came round and baffled me; and, moreover, I could
not leave the multitude of beauty for the sake of one beauty. Unless I
could embody all I would embody none.

"And, afterwards, when a cry came from man, 'Give one ray even of your
hoarded light to us,' and I tried for man's sake to select one, why,
then, mists came--old memories of a thousand sweetnesses, a storm of
images--till it was impossible to choose; and so I failed, and life is
ended.

"But could I live I would do otherwise. I would give a trifle out of
beauty, as an example by which men could guess the rest and love it all;
one strain from an angel's song; one flower from the distant land, that
men might know that such things were. Then, too, I would put common life
into loveliness, so that the lowest hind would find me beside him to put
his weakest hope and fear into noble language. And as I thus lived with
men, and for them, I should win from them thoughts fitted for their
progress, the very commonest of which would come forth in beauty, for
they would have been born in a soul filled full of love. This should now
be my aim: no longer that desire to embrace the whole of beauty which
isolates a man from his fellows; but to realise enough of loveliness to
give pleasure to men who desire to love. Therefore, I should live, still
aspiring to the whole, still uncontent, but waiting for another life to
gain the whole; but at the same time content, for man's sake, to work
within the limitations of life; not grieving either for failure, because
love given and received makes failure pleasure. In truth, the failure to
grasp all on earth makes, if we love, the certainty of a success beyond
the earth."

And Paracelsus listening and applying what Aprile says to his old desire
to grasp, apart from men, the whole of knowledge as Aprile had desired
to grasp the whole of love, learns the truth at last, and confesses it:

Love me henceforth, Aprile, while I learn
To love; and, merciful God, forgive us both!
We wake at length from weary dreams; but both
Have slept in fairy-land: though dark and drear
Appears the world before us, we no less
Wake with our wrists and ankles jewelled still.
I too have sought to KNOW as thou to LOVE--
Excluding love as thou refusedst knowledge.

We are halves of a dissevered world, and we must never part till the
Knower love, and thou, the Lover, know, and both are saved.

"No, no; that is not all," Aprile answers, and dies. "Our perfection is
not in ourselves but in God. Not our strength, but our weakness is our
glory. Not in union with me, with earthly love alone, will you find the
perfect life. I am not that you seek. It is God the King of Love, his
world beyond, and the infinite creations Love makes in it."

But Paracelsus does not grasp that last conclusion. He only understands
that he has left out love in his aim, and therefore failed. He does not
give up the notion of attainment upon earth. He cannot lose the first
imprint of his idea of himself--his lonely grasp of the whole of
Knowledge.

The next two parts of the poem do not strengthen much the main
thoughts. Paracelsus tries to work out the lesson learnt from Aprile--to
add love to knowledge, to aspire to that fulness in God. But he does not
love enough. He despises those who follow him for the sake of his
miracles, yet he desires their worship. Moreover, the pride of knowledge
still clings to him; he cannot help thinking it higher than love; and
the two together drive him into the thought that this world must give
him satisfaction. So, he puts aside the ideal aim. But here also he is
baffled. Those who follow him as the great teacher ask of him signs. He
gives these; and he finds at Basel that he has sunk into the desire of
vulgar fame, and prostituted his knowledge; and, sick of this, beaten
back from his noble ambitions, he determines to have something at least
out of earth, and chooses at Colmar the life of sensual pleasure. "I
still aspire," he cries. "I will give the night to study, but I will
keep the day for the enjoyment of the senses. Thus, intellect and sense
woven together, I shall at least have attained something. If I do not
gain knowledge I shall have gained sensual pleasure. Man I despise and
hate, and God has deceived me. I take the world." But, even while he
says this, his ancient aspiration lives so much in him that he scorns
himself for his fall as much as he scorns the crowd.

Then comes the last scene, when, at Salzburg, he returns to find his
friend Festus, and to die. In the hour of his death he reviews his whole
life, his aims, their failure and the reason of it, and yet dies
triumphant for he has found the truth.

I pass over the pathetic delirium in which Paracelsus thinks that
Aprile is present, and cries for his hand and sympathy while Festus is
watching by the couch. At last he wakes, and knows his friend, and that
he is dying. "I am happy," he cries; "my foot is on the threshold of
boundless life; I see the whole whirl and hurricane of life behind me;
all my life passes by, and I know its purpose, to what end it has
brought me, and whither I am going. I will tell you all the meaning of
life. Festus, my friend, tell it to the world.

"There was a time when I was happy; the secret of life was in that
happiness." "When, when was that?" answers Festus, "all I hope that
answer will decide."

PAR. When, but the time I vowed myself to man?

FEST. Great God, thy judgments are inscrutable!

Then he explains. "There are men, so majestical is our nature, who,
hungry for joy and truth, win more and more of both, and know that life
is infinite progress in God. This they win by long and slow battle. But
there are those, of whom I was one"--and here Browning draws the man of
genius--"who are born at the very point to which these others, the men
of talent, have painfully attained. By intuition genius knows, and I
knew at once, what God is, what we are, what life is. Alas! I could not
use the knowledge aright. There is an answer to the passionate longings
of the heart for fulness, and I knew it. And the answer is this: Live in
all things outside of yourself by love and you will have joy. That is
the life of God; it ought to be our life. In him it is accomplished and
perfect; but in all created things it is a lesson learned slowly
against difficulty.

"Thus I knew the truth, but I was led away from it. I broke down from
thinking of myself, my fame, and of this world. I had not love enough,
and I lost the truth for a time. But whatever my failures were, I never
lost sight of it altogether. I never was content with myself or with the
earth. Out of my misery I cried for the joy God has in living outside of
himself in love of all things."

Then, thrilled with this thought, he breaks forth into a most noble
description--new in English poetry, new in feeling and in thought,
enough of itself to lift Browning on to his lofty peak--first of the joy
of God in the Universe he makes incessantly by pouring out of himself
his life, and, secondly, of the joy of all things in God. "Where dwells
enjoyment there is He." But every realised enjoyment looks forward, even
in God, to a new and higher sphere of distant glory, and when that is
reached, to another sphere beyond--

thus climbs
Pleasure its heights for ever and for ever.

Creation is God's joyous self-giving. The building of the frame of earth
was God's first joy in Earth. That made him conceive a greater joy--the
joy of clothing the earth, of making life therein--of the love which in
animals, and last in man, multiplies life for ever.

So there is progress of all things to man, and all created things before
his coming have--in beauty, in power, in knowledge, in dim shapes of
love and trust in the animals--had prophecies of him which man has
realised, hints and previsions, dimly picturing the higher race, till
man appeared at last, and one stage of being was complete. But the law
of progress does not cease now man has come. None of his faculties are
perfect. They also by their imperfection suggest a further life, in
which as all that was unfinished in the animals suggested man, so also
that which is unfinished in us suggests ourselves in higher place and
form. Man's self is not yet Man.

We learn this not only from our own boundless desires for higher life,
and from our sense of imperfection. We learn it also when we look back
on the whole of nature that was before we were. We illustrate and
illuminate all that has been. Nature is humanised, spiritualised by us.
We have imprinted ourselves on all things; and this, as we realise it,
as we give thought and passion to lifeless nature, makes us understand
how great we are, and how much greater we are bound to be. We are the
end of nature but not the end of ourselves. We learn the same truth when
among us the few men of genius appear; stars in the darkness. We do not
say--These stand alone; we never can become as they. On the contrary, we
cry: All are to be what these are, and more. They longed for more, and
we and they shall have it. All shall be perfected; and then, and not
till then, begins the new age and the new life, new progress and new
joy. This is the ultimate truth.

"And as in inferior creatures there were prognostics of man--and here
Browning repeats himself--so in man there are prognostics of the future
and loftier humanity.

August anticipations, symbols, types
Of a dim splendour ever on before
In that eternal cycle life pursues.
For men begin to pass their nature's bound--

ceaselessly outgrowing themselves in history, and in the individual
life--and some, passionately aspiring, run ahead of even the general
tendency, and conceive the very highest, and live to reveal it, and in
revealing it lift and save those who do not conceive it.

"I, Paracelsus," he cries--and now Browning repeats the whole argument
of the poem--"was one of these. To do this I vowed myself, soul and
limb.

"But I mistook my means, I took the wrong path, led away by pride. I
gazed on power alone, and on power won by knowledge alone. This I
thought was the only note and aim of man, and it was to be won, at once
and in the present, without any care for all that man had already done.
I rejected all the past. I despised it as a record of weakness and
disgrace. Man should be all-sufficient now; a single day should bring
him to maturity. He has power to reach the whole of knowledge at one
leap.

"In that, I mistook the conditions of life. I did not see our barriers;
nor that progress is slow; nor that every step of the past is necessary
to know and to remember; nor that, in the shade of the past, the present
stands forth bright; nor that the future is not to be all at once, but
to dawn on us, in zone after zone of quiet progress. I strove to laugh
down all the limits of our life, and then the smallest things broke me
down--me, who tried to realise the impossible on earth. At last I knew
that the power I sought was only God's, and then I prayed to die. All my
life was failure.

"At this crisis I met Aprile, and learned my deep mistake. I had left
love out; and love and knowledge, and power through knowledge, must go
together. And Aprile had also failed, for he had sought love and
rejected knowledge. Life can only move when both are hand in hand:

love preceding
Power, and with much power, always much more love:
Love still too straitened in its present means,
And earnest for new power to set love free.
I learned this, and supposed the whole was learned.

"But to learn it, and to fulfil it, are two different things. I taught
the simple truth, but men would not have it. They sought the complex,
the sensational, the knowledge which amazed them. And for this knowledge
they praised me. I loathed and despised their praise; and when I would
not give them more of the signs and wonders I first gave them, they
avenged themselves by casting shame on my real knowledge. Then I was
tempted, and became the charlatan; and yet despised myself for seeking
man's praise for that which was most contemptible in me. Then I sought
for wild pleasure in the senses, and I hated myself still more. And
hating myself I came to hate men; and then all that Aprile taught to me
was lost.

"But now I know that I did not love enough to trace beneath the hate of
men their love. I did not love enough to see in their follies the grain
of divine wisdom.

To see a good in evil, and a hope
In ill-success; to sympathise, be proud
Of their half-reasons, faint aspirings, dim
Struggles for truth, their poorest fallacies,
Their prejudice and fears and cares and doubts;
All with a touch of nobleness, despite
Their error, upward tending all though weak.

"I did not see this, I did not love enough to see this, and I failed.

"Therefore let men regard me, who rashly longed to know all for power's
sake; and regard Aprile, the poet, who rashly longed for the whole of
love for beauty's sake--and regarding both, shape forth a third and
better-tempered spirit, in whom beauty and knowledge, love and power,
shall mingle into one, and lead Man up to God, in whom all these four
are One. In God alone is the goal.

"Meanwhile I die in peace, secure of attainment. What I have failed in
here I shall attain there. I have never, in my basest hours, ceased to
aspire; God will fulfil my aspiration:

If I stoop
Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud.
It is but for a time; I press God's lamp
Close to my breast; its splendour, soon or late,
Will pierce the gloom: I shall emerge one day.
You understand me? I have said enough?

Aprile! Hand in hand with you, Aprile!"

And so he dies.

* * * * *




CHAPTER V

_THE POET OF ART_


The theory of human life which Browning conceived, and which I attempted
in the last chapter to explain out of _Pauline_ and _Paracelsus_,
underlies the poems which have to do with the arts. Browning as the poet
of Art is as fascinating a subject as Browning the poet of Nature; even
more so, for he directed of set purpose a great deal of his poetry to
the various arts, especially to music and painting. Nor has he neglected
to write about his own art. The lover in Pauline is a poet. Paracelsus
and Aprile have both touched that art. Sordello is a poet, and so are
many others in the poems. Moreover, he treats continually of himself as
a poet, and of the many criticisms on his work.

All through this work on the arts, the theory of which we have written
appears continuously. It emerges fully in the close of _Easter-Day_. It
is carefully wrought into poems like _Abt Vogler_ and _A Grammarian's
Funeral_, in which the pursuit of grammar is conceived of as the pursuit
of an art. It is introduced by the way in the midst of subjects
belonging to the art of painting, as in _Old Pictures in Florence_ and
_Andrea del Sarto_. Finally, in those poems which represent in vivid
colour and selected personalities special times and forms of art, the
theory still appears, but momentarily, as a dryad might show her face in
a wood to a poet passing by. I shall be obliged then to touch again and
again on this theory of his in discussing Browning as the poet of the
arts. This is a repetition which cannot be helped, but for which I
request the pardon of my readers.

The subject of the arts, from the time when Caliban "fell to make
something" to the re-birth of naturalism in Florence, from the earliest
music and poetry to the latest, interested Browning profoundly; and he
speaks of them, not as a critic from the outside, but out of the soul of
them, as an artist. He is, for example, the only poet of the nineteenth
century till we come to Rossetti, who has celebrated painting and
sculpture by the art of poetry; and Rossetti did not link these arts to
human life and character with as much force and penetration as Browning.
Morris, when he wrote poetry, did not care to write about the other
arts, their schools or history. He liked to describe in verse the
beautiful things of the past, but not to argue on their how and why. Nor
did he ever turn in on himself as artist, and ask how he wrote poetry or
how he built up a pattern. What he did as artist was to _make_, and when
he had made one thing to make another. He ran along like Pheidippides to
his goal, without halting for one instant to consider the methods of his
running. And all his life long this was his way.

Rossetti described a picture in a sonnet with admirable skill, so
admirable that we say to ourselves--"Give me the picture or the sonnet,
not both. They blot out one another." But to describe a picture is not
to write about art. The one place where he does go down to its means and
soul is in his little prose masterpiece, _Hand and Soul_, in which we
see the path, the goal, the passion, but not the power of art. But he
never, in thought, got, like Browning, to the bottom-joy of it. He does
not seem to see, as clearly as Browning saw, that the source of all art
was love; and that the expression of love in beautiful form was or ought
to be accomplished with that exulting joy which is the natural child of
self-forgetfulness. This story of Rossetti's was in prose. In poetry,
Rossetti, save in description from the outside, left art alone; and
Browning's special work on art, and particularly his poetic studies of
it, are isolated in English poetry, and separate him from other poets.

I cannot wish that he had thought less and written less about other arts
than poetry. But I do wish he had given more time and trouble to his own
art, that we might have had clearer and lovelier poetry. Perhaps, if he
had developed himself with more care as an artist in his own art, he
would not have troubled himself or his art by so much devotion to
abstract thinking and intellectual analysis. A strange preference also
for naked facts sometimes beset him, as if men wanted these from a poet.
It was as if some scientific demon entered into him for a time and
turned poetry out, till Browning got weary of his guest and threw him
out of the window. These reversions to some far off Browning in the
past, who was deceived into thinking the intellect the king of life,
enfeebled and sometimes destroyed the artist in him; and though he
escaped for the best part of his poetry from this position, it was not
seldom in his later years as a brand plucked from the burning. Moreover,
he recognised this tendency in himself; and protested against it,
sometimes humorously, sometimes seriously. At least so I read what he
means in a number of poems, when he turns, after an over-wrought piece
of analysis, upon himself, and bursts out of his cobwebs into a solution
of the question by passion and imagination. Nevertheless the charm of
this merely intellectual play pulled at him continually, and as he could
always embroider it with fancy it seemed to him close to imagination;
and this belief grew upon him as he got farther away from the warmth and
natural truth of youth. It is the melancholy tendency of some artists,
as they feel the weakness of decay, to become scientific; and a fatal
temptation it is. There is one poem of his in which he puts the whole
matter clearly and happily, with a curious and suggestive title,
"_Transcendentalism_: A Poem in Twelve Books."

He speaks to a young poet who will give to men "naked thought, good,
true, treasurable stuff, solid matter, without imaginative imagery,
without emotion."

Thought's what they mean by verse, and seek in verse.
Boys seek for images and melody,
Men must have reason--so, you aim at men.

It is "quite otherwise," Browning tells him, and he illustrates the
matter by a story.

Jacob Boehme did not care for plants. All he cared for was his mysticism.
But one day, as if the magic of poetry had slipped into his soul, he
heard all the plants talking, and talking to him; and behold, he loved
them and knew what they meant. Imagination had done more for him than
all his metaphysics. So we give up our days to collating theory with
theory, criticising, philosophising, till, one morning, we wake "and
find life's summer past."

What remedy? What hope? Why, a brace of rhymes! And then, in life, that
miracle takes place which John of Halberstadt did by his magic. We feel
like a child; the world is new; every bit of life is run over and
enchanted by the wild rose.

And in there breaks the sudden rose herself,
Over us, under, round us every side,
Nay, in and out the tables and the chairs
And musty volumes, Boehme's book and all--Buries
us with a glory, young once more,
Pouring heaven into this shut house of life.

So come, the harp back to your heart again!

I return, after this introduction, to Browning's doctrine of life as it
is connected with the arts. It appears with great clearness in
_Easter-Day_. He tells of an experience he had when, one night, musing
on life, and wondering how it would be with him were he to die and be
judged in a moment, he walked on the wild common outside the little
Dissenting Chapel he had previously visited on Christmas-Eve and thought
of the Judgment. And Common-sense said: "You have done your best; do not
be dismayed; you will only be surprised, and when the shock is over you
will smile at your fear." And as he thought thus the whole sky became a
sea of fire. A fierce and vindictive scribble of red quick flame ran
across it, and the universe was burned away. "And I knew," thought
Browning, "now that Judgment had come, that I had chosen this world, its
beauty, its knowledge, its good--that, though I often looked above, yet
to renounce utterly the beauty of this earth and man was too hard for
me." And a voice came: "Eternity is here, and thou art judged." And then
Christ stood before him and said: "Thou hast preferred the finite when
the infinite was in thy power. Earthly joys were palpable and tainted.
The heavenly joys flitted before thee, faint, and rare, and taintless.
Thou hast chosen those of this world. They are thine."

"O rapture! is this the Judgment? Earth's exquisite treasures of wonder
and delight for me!"

"So soon made happy," said the voice. "The loveliness of earth is but
like one rose flung from the Eden whence thy choice has excluded thee.
The wonders of earth are but the tapestry of the ante-chamber in the
royal house thou hast abandoned.

All partial beauty was a pledge
Of beauty in its plenitude:
But since the pledge sufficed thy mood,
Retain it! plenitude be theirs
Who looked above!

"O sharp despair! but since the joys of earth fail me, I take art. Art
gives worth to nature; it stamps it with man. I'll take the Greek
sculpture, the perfect painting of Italy--that world is mine!"

"Then obtain it," said the voice: "the one abstract form, the one face
with its one look--all they could manage. Shall I, the illimitable
beauty, be judged by these single forms? What of that perfection in
their souls these artists were conscious of, inconceivably exceeding all
they did? What of their failure which told them an illimitable beauty
was before them? What of Michael Angelo now, who did not choose the
world's success or earth's perfection, and who now is on the breast of
the Divine? All the beauty of art is but furniture for life's first
stage. Take it then. But there are those, my saints, who were not
content, like thee, with earth's scrap of beauty, but desired the whole.
They are now filled with it. Take thy one jewel of beauty on the beach;
lose all I had for thee in the boundless ocean."

"Then I take mind; earth's knowledge carries me beyond the finite.
Through circling sciences, philosophies and histories I will spin with
rapture; and if these fail to inspire, I will fly to verse, and in its
dew and fire break the chain which binds me to the earth;--Nay, answer
me not, I know what Thou wilt say: What is highest in knowledge, even
those fine intuitions which lead the finite into the infinite, and which
are best put in noble verse, are but gleams of a light beyond them,
sparks from the sum of the whole. I give that world up also, and I take
Love. All I ask is leave to love."

"Ah," said the voice, "is this thy final choice? Love is the best; 'tis
somewhat late. Yet all the power and beauty, nature and art and
knowledge of this earth were only worth because of love. Through them
infinite love called to thee; and even now thou clingest to earth's love
as all. It is precious, but it exists to bear thee beyond the love of
earth into the boundless love of God in me." At last, beaten to his
last fortress, all broken down, he cries:

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