MODERN ENGLISH WRITERS.

Crown 8vo, 2/6 each.

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, EDINBURGH AND LONDON.

ROBERT BROWNING

BY

C.H. HERFORD

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE
UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS

EDINBURGH AND LONDON

MCMV

TO THE

REV. F.E. MILLSON.

DEAR OLD FRIEND,

A generation has passed since the day when, in your study at Brackenbed Grange, your reading of "Ben Ezra," the tones of which still vibrate in my memory, first introduced me to the poetry of Robert Browning. He was then just entering upon his wider fame. You had for years been one not merely of the few who recognised him, but of those, yet fewer, who proclaimed him. The standpoint of the following pages is not, I think, very remote from your own; conversations with you have, in any case, done something to define it. You see, then, that your share of responsibility for them is, on all counts, considerable, and you must not refuse to allow me to associate them with a name which the old Rabbi's great heartening cry: "Strive, and hold cheap the strain, Learn, nor account the pang, Dare, never grudge the throe," summons spontaneously to many other lips than mine. To some it is brought yet closer by his calm retrospect through sorrow.

ει δη θειον ο νους προς τον ανθρωπον, και ο κατα τουτον βιος θειος προς τον ανθρωπινον βιον —ARIST., Eth. N. x. 8.

"Nè creator nè creatura mai,"
Cominciò ei, "figliuol, fu senza amore."
—DANTE, Purg. xvii. 91.

PREFACE.

BROWNING is confessedly a difficult poet, and his difficulty is by no means all of the kind which opposes unmistakable impediments to the reader's path. Some of it is of the more insidious kind, which may co-exist with a delightful persuasion that the way is absolutely clear, and Browning's "obscurity" an invention of the invertebrate. The problems presented by his writing are merely tough, and will always yield to intelligent and patient scrutiny. But the problems presented by his mind are elusive, and it would be hard to resist the cogency of his interpreters, if it were not for their number. The rapid succession of acute and notable studies of Browning put forth during the last three or four years makes it even more apparent than it was before that the last word on Browning has not yet been said, even in that very qualified sense in which the last word about any poet, or any poetry, can ever be said at all. The present volume, in any case, does not aspire to say it. But it is not perhaps necessary to apologise for adding, under these conditions, another to the list. From most of the recent studies I have learned something; but this book has its roots in a somewhat earlier time, and may perhaps be described as an attempt to work out, in the detail of Browning's life and poetry, from a more definitely literary standpoint and without Hegelian prepossessions, a view of his genius not unlike that set forth with so much eloquence and penetration, in his well-known volume, by Professor Henry Jones. The narrative of Browning's life, in the earlier chapters, makes no pretence to biographical completeness. An immense mass of detail and anecdote bearing upon him is now available and within easy reach. I have attempted to sift out from this picturesque loose drift the really salient and relevant material. Much domestic incident, over which the brush would fain linger, will be missed; on the other hand, the great central epoch of Browning's poetic life, from 1846 to 1869, has been treated, deliberately, on what may appear an inordinately generous scale. Some amount of overlapping and repetition, it may be added, in the analytical chapters the plan of the book rendered it impossible wholly to avoid.

I am indebted to a friend, who wishes to be nameless, for reading the proofs, with results extremely beneficial to the book.

UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER,
January 1905.

CONTENTS.

PART I.

BROWNING'S LIFE AND WORK

BROWNING.

CHAPTER I.

EARLY LIFE. PARACELSUS.

The Boy sprang up ... and ran,
Stung by the splendour of a sudden thought.
— A Death in the Desert.

Dass ich erkenne, was die Welt
Im Innersten zusammenhält.
— Faust.

Judged by his cosmopolitan sympathies and his encyclopædic knowledge, by the scenery and the persons among whom his poetry habitually moves, Browning was one of the least insular of English poets. But he was also, of them all, one of the most obviously and unmistakably English. Tennyson, the poetic mouthpiece of a rather specific and exclusive Anglo-Saxondom, belonged by his Vergilian instincts of style to that main current of European poetry which [finds] response and recognition among cultivated persons of all nationalities; and he enjoyed a European distinction not attained by any other English poet since Byron. Browning, on the contrary, with his long and brilliant gallery of European creations, Browning, who claimed Italy as his "university," remains, as a poet, all but unknown even in Italy, and all but non-existent for the rest of the civilised world beyond the Channel. His cosmopolitan sympathies worked through the medium of a singularly individual intellect; and the detaching and isolating effect which pronounced individuality of thinking usually produces, even in a genial temperament, was heightened in his case by a robust indifference to conventions of all kinds, and not least to those which make genius easily intelligible to the plain man.

What is known of Browning's descent makes these contrasts in some degree intelligible. An old strain of Wessex squires or yeomen, dimly discernible in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, issued, about the middle of the eighteenth, in the first distinct personality among the poet's forebears, his grandfather, who also bore the name Robert. He was a robust, hard-headed, energetic, pushing man of business and the world, who made his way from a clerkship to an important and responsible post in the Bank of England, and settled accounts with religion and with literature in a right English way, by reading the Bible and 'Tom Jones' through every year, and very little else. More [problematical] and elusive is the figure of his first wife, Margaret Tittle, with whom, to judge from the character of her eldest son, literary and artistic sensibility first mingled in the hard practical Browning stock. In this second Robert Browning, indeed, the somewhat brutal and grasping egotism of the father gave place to a cultured humanity of almost feminine tenderness and charm. All his life long he was passionately devoted to literature, to art, to children. He collected rare books and prints with avidity, but was no less generous in giving them away. Indifferent to money, he hated to see a scrap of paper wasted. He had a neat touch in epigrams, and a boyish delight in grotesque rhymes. But there was no lack of grit in this accomplished, fresh-minded, and lovable man. He had the tough fibre of his race; only it was the wrongs of others that called out its tenacity, not his own. While holding an appointment on his mother's West Indian estate, he braved the fierce resentment of the whole colony by teaching a negro-boy to read; and finally incurred disinheritance rather than draw a livelihood from slave-labour. This Shelleyan act involved for him the resignation of his intellectual and artistic ambitions; and with the docility characteristic of him, where only his own interests were concerned, he forthwith entered the fairly well-paid but unexciting service of the Bank.

In 1811 he married, and on May 7 of the following year his eldest son, Robert, was born. His wife [was] the daughter of a German shipowner, William Wiedemann, who had settled and married at Dundee. Wiedemann is said to have been an accomplished draughtsman and musician, and his daughter, without herself sharing these gifts, probably passed them on to her son. Whether she also communicated from her Scottish and German ancestry the "metaphysical" proclivities currently ascribed to him, is a hypothesis absolutely in the air.[1] What is clear is that she was herself intellectually simple and of few ideas, but rich in the temperament, at once nervous and spiritual, which when present in the mother so often becomes genius in the son. "She was a divine woman," such was her son's brief sufficing tribute. Physically he seems to have closely resembled her,[2] and they were bound together by a peculiarly passionate love from first to last.

[1] A similar but more groundless suggestion, that the author of Holy-cross Day and Rabbi ben Ezra probably had Jewish blood in his veins, can only be described as an impertinence—not to Browning but to the Jewish race. As if to feel the spiritual genius of Hebraism and to be moved by the pathos of Hebraic fate were an eccentricity only to be accounted for by the bias of kin! It is significant that his demonstrable share of German blood left him rather conspicuously impervious to the literary—and more especially to the "metaphysical"—products of the German mind.
[2] Browning himself reports the exclamation of the family doctor when trying to diagnose an attack of his: "Why, has anybody to search far for a cause of whatever nervous disorder you may suffer from, when there sits your mother—whom you so absolutely resemble!" (Letters to E.B.B., ii. 456.)

The home in Camberwell into which the boy Robert [was] born reflected the serene, harmonious, self-contented character of his parents. Friends rarely disturbed the even tenor of its ways, and the storms of politics seem to have intruded as faintly into this suburban seclusion as the roar of London. Books, business, and religion provided a framework of decorous routine within which these kindly and beautiful souls moved with entire content. Well-to-do Camberwell perhaps contained few homes so pure and refined; but it must have held many in which the life-blood of political and social interests throbbed more vigorously, and where thought and conversation were in closer touch with the intellectual life of the capital and the larger movements of the time. Nothing in Browning's boyhood tended to open his imagination to the sense of citizenship and nationality which the imperial pageants and ceremonies of Frankfurt so early kindled in the child Goethe. But within the limits imposed by this quiet home young Robert soon began to display a vigour and enterprise which tried all its resources. "He clamoured for occupation from the moment he could speak," and "something to do" meant above all some living thing to be caught for him to play with. The gift of an animal was found a valuable aid to negotiations with the young despot; when medicine was to be taken, he would name "a speckled frog" as the price of his compliance, and presently his mother would be seen hovering hither and thither among the strawberry-beds. A quaint menagerie was gradually assembled: owls and monkeys, magpies [and] hedgehogs, an eagle and snakes. Boy-collectors are often cruel; but Robert showed from the first an anxious tenderness and an eager care for life: we hear of a hurt cat brought home to be nursed, of ladybirds picked up in the depths of winter and preserved with wondering delight at their survival. Even in stories the death of animals moved him to bitter tears. He was equally quick at books, and soon outdistanced his companions at the elementary schools which he attended up to his fourteenth year. Near at hand, too, was the Dulwich Gallery,—"a green half-hour's walk across the fields,"—a beloved haunt of his childhood, to which he never ceased to be grateful.[3] But his father's overflowing library and portfolios played the chief part in his early development. He read voraciously, and apparently without restraint or control. The letters of Junius and of Horace Walpole were familiar to him "in boyhood," we are assured with provoking indefiniteness by Mrs Orr; as well as "all the works of Voltaire." Most to his mind, however, was the rich sinewy English and athletic fancy of the seventeenth-century Fantastic Quarles; a preference which foreshadowed his later delight in the great master of the Fantastic school, and of all who care for close-knit intellect in poetry, John Donne.

[3] To E.B.B., March 3, 1846.]

Curiously enough, it was some fragments of the grandiose but shadowy Ossian which first stirred the imitative impulse in this poet of trenchant and clear-cut form. "The first composition I ever was guilty [of]," he wrote to Elizabeth Barrett (Aug. 25, 1846), "was something in imitation of Ossian, whom I had not read, but conceived through two or three scraps in other books." And long afterwards Ossian was "the first book I ever bought in my life" (ib.) These "imitations" were apparently in verse, and in rhyme; and Browning's bent and faculty for both was very early pronounced. "I never can recollect not writing rhymes; ... but I knew they were nonsense even then." And a well-known anecdote of his infancy describes his exhibition of a lively sense of metre in verses which he recited with emphatic accompaniments upon the edge of the dining-room table before he was tall enough to look over it. The crowding thoughts of his maturity had not yet supervened to prevent the abundant music that he "had in him" from "getting out." It is not surprising that a boy of these proclivities was captivated by the stormy swing and sweep of Byron; nor that he should have caught also something of his "splendour of language," and even, a little later, a reflection, respectable and suburban enough, of his rebellious Titanism. The less so, that in Robert's eleventh or twelfth year Byron, the head of the Satanic school, had become the heroic champion of Greek liberation, and was probably spoken of with honour in the home of the large-hearted banker who had in his day suffered so much for the sake of the unemancipated slave. In later years Browning was accustomed to deliver himself of breezy sarcasms at the expense of the ["flat-fish"] who declaimed so eloquently about the "deep and dark blue ocean." But it is easy to see that this genial chaff covered a real admiration,—the tribute of one abounding nature to another, which even years and the philosophic mind did not seriously abate. "I always retained my first feeling for Byron in many respects," he wrote in a significant letter to Miss Barrett in 1846. " ... I would at any time have gone to Finchley to see a curl of his hair or one of his gloves, I am sure,—while Heaven knows that I could not get up enthusiasm enough to cross the room if at the other end of it all Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey were condensed into the little china bottle yonder."[4] It was thus no mere freak of juvenile taste that took shape in these early Byronic poems. He entitled them, with the lofty modesty of boyish authorship, Incondita, and his parents sought to publish them. No publisher could be found; but they won the attention of a notable critic, W.J. Fox, who feared too much splendour and too little thought in the young poet, but kept his eye on him nevertheless.

[4] To E.B.B., Aug. 22, 1846.]

Two years later the boy of fourteen caught the accents of another poetic voice, destined to touch the sources of music and passion in him with far more intimate power. His casual discovery, on a bookstall, of "Mr Shelley's Atheistical poem" seems to have for the first time made known to him even the name of the poet who had died in Italy four years before. Something [of] Shelley's story seems to have been known to his parents. It gives us a measure of the indulgent sympathy and religious tolerance which prevailed in this Evangelical home, that the parents should have unhesitatingly supplied the boy of fourteen, at some cost of time and trouble, with all the accessible writings of the "atheistical" poet, and with those of his presumably like-minded friend Keats as well. He fell instantly under the spell of both. Whatever he may have known before of ancient or modern literature, the full splendour of romantic poetry here broke upon him for the first time. Immature as he was, he already responded instinctively to the call of the spirits most intimately akin to his own. Byron's stormy power thrilled and delighted him; but it was too poor in spiritual elements, too negative, self-centred, and destructive to stir the deeper sources of Browning's poetry. In Keats and in Shelley he found poetic energies not less glowing and intense, bent upon making palpable to eye and ear visions of beauty which, with less of superficial realism, were fed by far more exquisite and penetrating senses, and attached by more and subtler filaments to the truth of things. Beyond question this was the decisive literary experience of Browning's early years. Probably it had a chief part in making the poet's career his fixed ideal, and ultimately, with his father's willing consent, his definite choice. What we know of his inner and outer life during the important years which turned the boy into the man is slight and baffling enough. The fiery spirit of poetry [can] rarely have worked out its way with so little disturbance to the frame. Minute scrutiny has disclosed traits of unrest and revolt; he professed "atheism" and practised vegetarianism, betrayed at times the aggressive arrogance of an able youth, and gave his devoted and tender parents moments of very superfluous concern. For with all his immensely vivacious play of brain, there was something in his mental and moral nature from first to last stubbornly inelastic and unimpressible, that made him equally secure against expansion and collapse. The same simple tenacity of nature which kept his buoyantly adventurous intellect permanently within the tether of a few primary convictions, kept him, in the region of practice and morality, within the bounds of a rather nice and fastidious decorum. Malign influences effected no lodgment in a nature so fundamentally sound; they might cloud and trouble imagination for a while, but their scope hardly extended further, and as they were literary in origin, so they were mainly literary in expression. In the meantime he was laying, in an unsystematic but not ineffective way, the foundations of his many-sided culture and accomplishment. We hear much of private tutors, of instruction in French, in music, in riding, fencing, boxing, dancing; of casual attendance also at the Greek classes in University College. In all these matters he seems to have won more or less definite accomplishment, and from most of them his versatile literary talent took, at one time or another, an effective [toll]. The athletic musician, who composed his own songs and gloried in a gallop, was to make verse simulate, as hardly any artificer had made it before, the labyrinthine meanderings of the fugue and the rhythmic swing of hoofs.

Of all these varied aims and aspirations, of all in short that was going on under the surface of this brilliant and versatile Robert Browning of twenty, we have a chaotic reflection in the famous fragment Pauline. The quite peculiar animosity with which its author in later life regarded this single "crab" of his youthful tree of knowledge only adds to its interest. He probably resented the frank expression of passion, nowhere else approached in his works. Yet passion only agitates the surface of Pauline. Whether Pauline herself stand for an actual woman—Miss Flower or another—or for the nascent spell of womanhood—she plays, for one who is ostensibly the heroine of the poem, a discouragingly minor part. No wonder she felt tempted to advise the burning of so unflattering a record. Instead of the lyric language of love, she has to receive the confessions of a subtle psychologist, who must unlock the tumultuous story of his soul "before he can sing." And these confessions are of a kind rare even amongst self-revelations of genius. Pauline's lover is a dreamer, but a dreamer of an uncommon species. He is preoccupied with the processes of his mind, but his mind ranges wildly over the universe and chafes at the limitations it is forced to recognise. Mill, a master, [not] to say a pedant, of introspection, recognised with amazement the "intense self-consciousness" of this poet, and self-consciousness is the keynote which persists through all its changing harmonies. It is the self-consciousness of a soul compelled by quick and eager senses and vivid intelligence to recognise a host of outer realities not itself, which it constantly strives to bring into relation with itself, as constantly baffled and thrown back by the obstinate objectivity of that outer world. A pure dreamer would have "contentedly lived in a nut-shell and imagined himself king of infinite space"; a purely scientific intelligence would have applied himself to the patient mastery of facts; in the hero of Pauline the despotic senses and intellect of science and the imperious imagination of the poet appear to coexist and to contend, and he tosses to and fro in a fever of fitful efforts, continually frustrated, to find complete spiritual response and expressiveness in the intractable maze of being. There had indeed been an earlier time when the visions of old poets had wholly sufficed him; and the verses in which he recalls them have almost the pellucid charm of Homer,—

"Never morn broke clear as those
On the dim clustered isles in the blue sea,
The deep groves, and white temples, and wet caves."

But growing intellect demanded something more. Shelley, the "Sun-treader," weaving soul and sense into a radiant vesture "from his poet's station between both," did much to sustain him; Plato's more explicit [and] systematic idealism gave him for a while a stronger assurance. But disillusion broke in: "Suddenly, without heart-wreck I awoke; I said, 'twas beautiful, yet but a dream, and so adieu to it!" Then the passionate restlessness of his nature stings him forth afresh. He steeps himself in the concrete vitality of things, lives in imagination through "all life where it is most alive," immerses himself in all that is most beautiful and intense in Nature, so fulfilling, it might seem, his passionate craving to "be all, have, see, know, taste, feel all,"—yet only to feel that satisfaction is not here:

"My soul saddens when it looks beyond:
I cannot be immortal, taste all joy;"

only the sickness of satiety. But when all joy was tasted, what then? If there was any "crowning" state, it could only be, thought Browning, one in which the soul looked up to the unattainable infinity of God.

Such seem to be the outlines of the mental history which passes before us, brilliant and incoherent as a dream, in Pauline. The material, vast and many-sided as it is, is not fully mastered; but there is nothing merely imitative; it is everywhere Browning, and no mere disciple of Shelley or another, who is palpably at work. The influence of Shelley seems, indeed, to have been already outgrown when Pauline was written; Browning gloried in him and in his increasing fame, but he felt that his own aims and destiny were different. Rossetti, a few years later, took Pauline to be the work of an [unconscious] pre-Raphaelite; and there is enough of subtle simplicity, of curious minuteness, in the details to justify the error. In the meantime many outward circumstances conspired to promote the "advance" which every line of it foretold. His old mentor of the Incondita days, W.J. Fox, in some sort a Browningite before Browning, reviewed Pauline in The Monthly Repository (April 1833) with generous but discerning praise. This was the beginning of a warm friendship between the two, which ended only with Fox's death. It was founded upon hearty admiration on both sides, and no man living was better qualified to scatter the morbid films that clung about the expanding genius of young Browning than this robust and masculine critic and preacher. A few months later came an event of which we know very little, but which at least did much to detach him from the limited horizons of Camberwell. At the invitation of M. Benckhausen, Russian consul-general, Browning accompanied him, in the winter of 1833-34, on a special mission to St Petersburg. The journey left few apparent traces on his work. But he remembered the rush of the sledge through the forest when, half a century later, he told the thrilling tale of Iván Ivánovitch. And even the modest intimacy with affairs of State obtainable in the office of a consul-general seems to have led his thoughts seriously to diplomacy as a career. One understands that to the future dissector of a Hohenstiel-Schwangau and a Blougram the career might present attractions. It [marks] the seriousness of his ambition that he actually applied for a post in the Persian Embassy. This fancy of Ferishtah, like a similar one of ten years later, was not gratified, but the bent which was thus thwarted in practical life disported itself freely in poetry, and the marks of the diplomatist in posse are pretty clearly legible in the subtle political webs which make up so much of the plots of Strafford, King Victor, and Sordello.

But much sharper rebuffs than this would have failed to disturb the immense buoyancy of Browning's temperament. He was twenty-three, and in the first flush of conscious power. His exuberant animal spirits flowed out in whimsical talk; he wrote letters of the gayest undergraduate insouciance to Fox, and articles full of extravagant jesting for The Trifler, an amateur journal which received the lucubrations of his little circle. He enjoyed life like a boy, and shared its diversions like a man about town. These superficial vivacities were the slighter play of a self-consciousness which in its deeper recesses was steadily gathering power, richness, and assurance. His keen social instincts saved him from most of the infirmities of budding genius; but the poems he contributed to Fox's journal during the following two years (1834-36) show a significant predilection for imagining the extravagances and fanaticisms of lonely self-centred minds. Joannes Agricola, sublime on the dizzy pinnacle of his theological arrogance, looking up through the gorgeous [roof] of heaven and assured that nothing can stay his course to his destined abode, God's breast; Porphyria's lover, the more uncanny fanatic who murders with a smile; the young man who in his pride of power sees in the failures and mistakes of other men examples providentially intended for his guidance,—it was such subjects as these that touched Browning's fancy in those ardent and sanguine years. He probably entered with keener relish into these extravagances than his maturer wisdom approved. It is significant, at any rate, that when Agricola and Porphyria's Lover were republished in The Bells and Pomegranates of 1842, a new title, Madhouse Cells, gave warning that their insanity was not to be attributed to the poet. The verses "Still ailing wind," he qualified in a yet more explicit fashion twenty years later, for they are the young man's poem which James Lee's wife reads "under the cliff," and subjects to her austere and disillusioned criticism. But they mark the drift of Browning of the mid-'Thirties, so far as they go, clearly enough. Fortunately, however, we are not dependent upon these slight clues. For during the winter months of 1834-35 he was occupied in portraying a far more imposing embodiment of the young man's pride of power, a Joannes Agricola of equally superb confidence and far more magnificent ideals. In April 1835 Browning was able to announce to his good friend Fox the completion of Paracelsus.

He owed the suggestion to another new acquaintance, whose intimacy, like that of the Russian consul-general, [marks] the fascination exercised by young Browning upon men of antecedents, race, and social standing widely different from his own. Count Amédée de Ripert Monclar was a French royalist and refugee; he was also an enthusiastic student of history. Possibly he recognised an affinity between the vaguely outlined dreams of Pauline's lover and those of the historic Paracelsus; and he may well have thought that the task of grappling with definite historic material would steady the young poet's hand. We could applaud the acuteness of the suggestion with more confidence had not the Count had an unlucky afterthought, which he regarded as fatal, to the effect that the story of Paracelsus, however otherwise adapted to the creator of Pauline's lover, was entirely destitute of a Pauline. There was no opening for love. But Pauline, with all her warm erotic charms and her sparkling French prose, was the most unsubstantial and perishable thing in the poem which bore her name: she and the spirit which begot her had vanished like a noisome smoke, and Browning threw himself with undiminished ardour upon the task of interpreting a career in which the sole sources of romance and of tragedy appeared to be the passion for knowledge and the arrogance of discovery.

For it is quite clear that, whatever criticisms Browning finally brought to bear upon Paracelsus, his attitude towards him, at no time hostile, was at the outset rather that of a literary champion, vindicating a man of original [genius] from the calumnies of ignorance and dulness. This view, then rather unusual, was a very natural one for him to take, Paracelsus being among the many keen interests of the elder Browning.[5] It is a strange mistake to suppose, with a recent very ingenious commentator, that Browning, eager to destroy the fallacy of intellectual pride, singled out Paracelsus as a crucial example of the futilities of intellect. On the contrary, he filled his annotations with documentary evidences which attest not only the commanding scientific genius of Paracelsus, but the real significance of his achievements, even for the modern world. In the intellectual hunger of Paracelsus, in that "insatiable avidity of penetrating the secrets of nature" which his follower Bitiskius (approvingly quoted by Browning) ascribed to him, he saw a fascinating realisation of his own vague and chaotic "restlessness." Here was a spirit made up in truth "of an intensest life," driven hither and thither by the hunger for intellectual mastery of the universe; and Browning, far from convicting him of intellectual futility, has made him actually divine the secret he sought, and, in one of the most splendid passages of modern poetry, declare with his dying lips a faith which is no less Browning's than his own.

[5] His library, as I am informed by Prof. Hall Griffin, contained a copy of the works of Paracelsus, doubtless that used by his son.

While he thus lavished his utmost power on portraying the soaring genius of Paracelsus, as he conceived it, he turned impatiently away from the husk of popular legend [by] which it was half obscured. He shrank from no attested fact, however damaging; but he brushed away the accretions of folklore, however picturesque. The attendant spirit who enabled Paracelsus to work his marvellous cures, and his no less renowned Sword, were for Browning contemptible futilities. Yet a different way of treating legend lay nearer to the spirit of contemporary poetry. Goethe had not long before evolved his Mephistopheles from the "attendant spirit" attached by that same sixteenth century to the Paracelsus of Protestantism, Faust; Tennyson was already meditating a scene full of the enchantment of the Arthurian sword Excalibur. Browning's peremptory rejection of such springs of poetry marks one of his limitations as a poet. Much of the finest poetry of Faust, as, in a lower degree, of the Idylls, is won by a subtle transformation of the rude stuff of popular imagination: for Browning, with rare exceptions, this rude stuff was dead matter, impervious to his poetic insight, and irresponsive to the magic of his touch. Winnowing the full ears, catching eagerly the solid and stimulating grain, he hardly heeded the golden gleam of the chaff as it flew by.

He did not, however, refrain from accentuating his view of the story by interweaving in it some gracious figures of his own. Festus, the honest, devoted, but somewhat purblind friend, who offers Paracelsus the criticism of sober common-sense, and is vindicated—at the bar of common-sense—by his great comrade's tragic [end]; Michal, an exquisitely tender outline of womanhood, even more devoted, and even less distinguished; and the "Italian poet" Aprile, a creature of genius, whose single overpowering thought avails to break down the stronghold of Paracelsus's else unassailable conviction. Aprile, who lives for love as Paracelsus for knowledge, is not to be identified with Shelley, but he has unmistakable Shelleyan traits, and the dreamy pageant of his imaginary creations might stand for a summary review of Shelley's work. Had Shelley lived, he might have come nearer than any one else to fulfilling the rounded and complete ideal of which Paracelsus and Aprile were dissevered halves: the greater part of his actual achievement belonged, Browning evidently thought, to the category of those dazzling but imperfectly objective visions which he ascribes to his Aprile. But Shelley—the poet of Alastor, the passionate "lover of Love," was yet the fittest embodiment of that other finer spiritual energy which Paracelsus in his Faustian passion for knowledge had ruthlessly put from him. Sixteen years later, Browning was to define in memorable words what he held to be the "noblest and predominating characteristic of Shelley"—viz., "his simultaneous perception of Power and Love in the Absolute and of Beauty and Good in the concrete, while he throws, from his poet's station between both, swifter, subtler, and more numerous films for the connection of each with each than have been thrown by any modern artificer of [whom] I have knowledge." This divining and glorifying power it is that Browning ascribes to Love; the lack of it is in his conception the tragic flaw which brings to the ground the superbly gifted genius of Paracelsus. This genuine and original tragic motive is not worked out with uniform power; his degeneration, his failures, are painted with the uncertain hand of one little acquainted with either. But all the splendour of a young imagination, charged with the passion for truth and for beauty, glows in the pictures of the great moments in Paracelsus's career,—the scene in the quiet Würzburg garden, where he conquers the doubts of Festus and Michal by the magnificent assurance of his faith in his divine calling; and that in the hospital cell at Salzburg, where his fading mind anticipates at the point of death the clearness of immortal vision as he lays bare the conquered secret of the world.

That Paracelsian secret of the world was for Browning doubtless the truth, though he never again expounded it so boldly. Paracelsus's reply to the anxious inquiry of Festus whether he is sure of God's forgiveness: "I have lived! We have to live alone to well set forth God's praise"—might stand as a text before the works of Browning. In all life he sees the promise and the potency of God,—in the teeming vitalities of the lower world, in the creative energies of man, in the rich conquests of his Art, in his myth-woven Nature. "God is glorified in Man, and to man's glory vowed I soul and limb." [The] historic Paracelsus failed most signally in his attempt to connect vast conceptions of Nature akin to this with the detail of his empiric discoveries. Browning, with his mind, as always, set upon things psychical, attributes to him a parallel incapacity to connect his far-reaching vision of humanity with the gross, malicious, or blockish specimens of the genus Man whom he encountered in the detail of practice. It was the problem which Browning himself was to face, and in his own view triumphantly to solve; and Paracelsus, rising into the clearness of his dying vision, becomes the mouthpiece of Browning's own criticism of his failure, the impassioned advocate of the Love which with him is less an elemental energy drawing things into harmonious fusion than a subtle weapon of the intellect, making it wise

"To trace love's faint beginnings in mankind,
To know even hate is but a mask of love's,
To see a good in evil and a hope
In ill-success."

Paracelsus is a clear self-revelation, rich and inspired where it marks out the circle of sublime ideas within which the poet was through life to move, and by which he was, as a man and a thinker, if not altogether as a poet, to live; reticent where it approaches the complexities of the concrete which the poet was not yet sufficiently mature to handle, restrained where increased power was to breed a too generous self-indulgence, a too [manifest] aptitude for glorying and drinking deep. It is flushed with the peculiar mellow beauty which comes if at all to the early manhood of genius,—a beauty like that of Amiens or Lincoln in Gothic art, where the crudeness of youth is overworn, and the problems of full maturity, though foreshadowed and foreseen, have not yet begun to perplex or to disintegrate.

CHAPTER II.

ENLARGING HORIZONS. SORDELLO.

Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach, in meiner Brust,
Die eine will sich von der andern trennen;
Die eine hält in derber Liebeslust
Sich an die Welt mit klammernden Organen;
Die andre hebt gewaltsam sich vom Dust
Zu den Gefilden hoher Ahnen.
—Faust.

Paracelsus, though only a series of quasi-dramatic scenes, suggested considerable undeveloped capacity for drama. From a career in which the most sensational event was a dismissal from a professorship, and the absorbing passion the thirst for knowledge, he had elicited a tragedy of the scientific intellect. But it was equally obvious that the writer's talent was not purely dramatic; and that his most splendid and original endowments required some other medium than drama for their full unfolding. The author of Paracelsus was primarily concerned with character, and with action as the mirror of character; agreeing in both points substantially with the author of Hamlet. But while Browning's [energetic] temperament habitually impelled him to represent character in action, his imaginative strength did not lie in the region of action at all, but in the region of thought; the kinds of expression of which he had boundless command were rather those which analyse character than those which exhibit it. The two impulses derived from temperament and from imagination thus drew him in somewhat diverse directions; and for some years the joy in the stir and stress and many-sided life of drama competed with the powerful bent of the portrayer of souls, until the two contending currents finally coalesced in the dramatic monologues of Men and Women. In 1835 the solution was not yet found, but the five years which followed were to carry Browning, not without crises of perplexity and hesitation, far on his way towards it. Paracelsus was no sooner completed than he entered upon his kindred but more esoteric portrayal of the soul-history of Sordello,—a study in which, with the dramatic form, almost all the dramatic excellences of its predecessors are put aside. But the poet was outgrowing the method; the work hung fire; and we find him, before he had gone far with the perplexed record of that "ineffectual angel," already "eager to freshen a jaded mind by diverting it to the healthy natures of a grand epoch."[6]

[6] Preface to the first edition of Strafford (subsequently omitted).

The open-eyed man of the world and of affairs in Browning was plainly clamouring for more expression than he had yet found. An invitation from the first [actor] of the day to write a tragedy for him was not likely, under these circumstances, to be declined; and during the whole winter of 1836-37 the story of Sordello remained untold, while its author plunged, with a security and relish which no one who knew only his poetry could have foretold, into the pragmatic politics and diplomatic intrigues of Strafford. The performance of the play on May 1, 1837 introduced further distractions. And Sordello had made little further progress, when, in the April of the following year, Browning embarked on a sudden but memorable trip to the South of Europe. It gave him his first glimpse of Italy and of the Mediterranean, and plenty of the rough homely intercourse with men which he loved. He travelled, in a fashion that suited his purse and his hardy nature, by a merchant vessel from London to the Adriatic. The food was uneatable, the horrors of dirt and discomfort portentous; but he bore them cheerfully for the sake of one advantage,—"the solitariness of the one passenger among all those rough new creatures, I like it much, and soon get deep into their friendship."[7] Grim tragedies of the high-seas, too, came within his ken.[8] Two or three moments of the voyage stand out for us with peculiar distinctness: the gorgeous sunset off Cadiz bay, when he watched the fading outlines of Gibraltar and Cape St Vincent,—ghostly mementos of England,—not as Arnold's weary Titan, but as a Herakles stretching a hand of help [across] the seas; the other sunset on the Mediterranean, when Etna loomed against the flaming sky;[9] and, between them, that glaring noontide on the African shore, when the "solitary passenger," weary of shipboard and sea sickness, longed for his good horse York in the stable at home, and scribbled his ballad of brave horses, How they brought the Good News, in a blank leaf of Bartoli's Simboli. The voyage ended at Trieste; and thence he passed to Venice, brooded among her ruined palaces over Sordello, and "English Eyebright" and all the destiny and task of the poet; and so turned homeward, through the mountains, gathering vivid glimpses as he went of "all my places and castles,"[10] and laying by a memory, soon to germinate, of "delicious Asolo," "palpably fire-clothed" in the glory of his young imagination.

[7] R.B. to E.B.B., i. 505.
[8] Cf. the long letter to Miss Haworth, Orr, Life, p. 96.
[9] Cf. Sordello, bk. iii., end.
[10] Ib., p. 99.

Thus when, in 1840, Sordello was at length complete, it bore the traces of many influences and many moods. It reflected the expanding ideals and the critical turning-points of four years of his life. In the earlier books the brilliant yet self-centred poet of Paracelsus is still paramount, and even the "oddish boy" who had shyly evolved Pauline is not entirely effaced. But in the later books we recognise without difficulty the man who has mixed with the larger world, has won some fame in letters, has immersed himself in the stirring atmosphere of a supreme national conflict, has seen Italy, and has, in the solitude and detachment from his milieu which foreign travel brings, girded up his loins anew for a [larger] and more exacting poetic task. The tangled political dissensions of the time are set before us with the baffling allusiveness of the expert. The Italian landscape is painted, not with richer imagination, for nothing in Browning exceeds some passages of the earlier books, but with more depth of colouring, more precision of contour and expression. And he has taken the "sad disheveled form," Humanity, for his bride, the mate of an art which will disdain no evil and turn away from nothing common, in the service of man. Doubtless the result was not all gain. The intermittent composition and the shifting points of view add an element of real ambiguity and indecision to faults of expression which mainly spring from the swiftness and discursiveness of a brilliant and athletic intellect. The alleged "obscurity" of the poem is in great part a real obscurity; the profiles are at times not merely intricate, but blurred. But he had written nothing yet, and he was to write little after, which surpasses the finest pages of Sordello in close-packed, if somewhat elusive, splendour; the soil, as he wrote of Italy, is full of loose fertility, and gives out intoxicating odours at every footfall. Moreover, he can now paint the clash and commotion of crowds, the turmoil of cities and armies, with superb force—a capacity of which there is hardly a trace in Paracelsus. Sordello himself stands out less clearly than Paracelsus from the canvas; but the sympathetic reader finally admits that this visionary being, who gleams ghostlike at the end of all the avenues [and] vistas of the poem, whom we are always looking at but never rightly see, is an even more fascinating figure.

He is however less historical, in spite of the abstruse historic background upon which he moves. Of the story of Paracelsus Browning merely reinterpreted the recorded facts; whereas he brushes aside the greater part of the Sordello story, as told confusedly and inconsistently by Italian and Provençal tradition. The whole later career of the Mantuan poet as an accomplished and not unsuccessful man of the world, as the friend of Raymond of Toulouse and Charles of Anjou, rewarded with ample estates by the latter for substantial services,—is either rejected as myth, or purposely ignored. To all appearance, the actual Sordello by no means lacked ability to "fit to the finite" such "infinity" as he possessed. And if he had the chance, as is obscurely hinted at the close, of becoming, like Dante, the "Apollo" of the Italian people, he hardly missed it "through disbelief that anything was to be done." But the outward shell of his career included some circumstances which, had they befallen a Dante, might have deeply moulded the history of Italy. His close relations with great Guelph and Ghibelline families would have offered extraordinary opportunities to a patriot of genius, which, for the purposes of patriotism, remained unused. Yet Dante, a patriot of genius if ever there was one, had given Sordello a position of extraordinary honour in the Purgatory, had allowed him to illuminate [the] darkness of Virgil, and to guide both the great poets towards the Gate. The contrast offered an undeniable problem. But Dante had himself hinted the solution by placing Sordello among those dilatory souls whose tardy repentance involved their sojourn in the Ante-purgatory. To a mind preoccupied, like Browning's, with the failures of aspiring souls, this hint naturally appealed. He imagined his Sordello, too, as a moral loiterer, who, with extraordinary gifts, failed by some inner enervating paralysis[11] to make his spiritual quality explicit; and who impressed contemporaries sufficiently to start a brilliant myth of what he did not do, but had to wait for recognition until he met the eye and lips of Dante. It is difficult not to suspect the influence of another great poet. Sordello has no nearer parallel in literature than Goethe's Tasso, a picture of the eternal antagonism between the poet and the world, for which Bordello's failure to "fit to the finite his infinity" might have served as an apt motto. Browning has nowhere to our knowledge mentioned Tasso; but he has left on record his admiration of the beautiful sister-drama Iphigenie.[12]

[11] "Ah but to find
A certain mood enervate such a mind," &c.
—Works, i. 122.
[12] To E.B.B., July 7, 1846. He is "vexed" at Landor's disparagement of the play, and quotes with approval Landor's earlier declaration that "nothing so Hellenic had been written these two thousand years."

The elaboration of this conception is, however, [entirely] Browning's own, and discloses at every point the individual quality of his mind. Like Faust, like the Poet in the Palace of Art, Sordello bears the stamp of an age in which the ideal of intellect, art, culture, and the ideal of humanity, of social service, have both become potent inspirations, often in apparent conflict, and continually demanding a solution of their differences. Faust breaks away from the narrow pedantries of the schools in order to heap upon his breast the weal and woe of mankind, and to draw all their life and thought into the compass of his mind. Tennyson's "glorious devil" (by a curious irony intended for no other than Faust's creator) sets up his lordly pleasure-house apart from the ways of men, until at last, confuted by experience, he renounces his folly. Sordello cannot claim the mature and classical brilliance of the one, nor the limpid melodious beauty of the other; but it approaches Faust itself in its subtle soundings of the mysteries of the intellectual life. It is a young poet's attempt to cope with the problem of the poet's task and the poet's function, the relation of art to life, and of life to art. Neither Goethe nor Tennyson thought more loftily of the possibilities of poetic art. And neither insisted more peremptorily—or rather assumed more unquestioningly—that it only fulfils these possibilities when the poet labours in the service of man. He is "earth's essential king," but his kingship rests upon his carrying out the kingliest of mottoes—"Ich dien." Browning [all] his life had a hearty contempt for the foppery of "Art for Art," and he never conveyed it with more incisive brilliance than in the sketch of Bordello's "opposite," the Troubadour Eglamor.

"How he loved that art!
The calling marking him a man apart
From men—one not to care, take counsel for
Cold hearts, comfortless faces, ... since verse, the gift
Was his, and men, the whole of them, must shift
Without it."

To Eglamor his art is a mysterious ritual, of which he is the sacrosanct priest, and his happy rhyme the divine response vouchsafed to him in answer. Such beauty as he produces is no effluence from a soul mating itself, like Wordsworth's, "in love and holy passion with the universe," but a cunning application of the approved recipes for effective writing current in the literary guild;—

"He, no genius rare,
Transfiguring in fire or wave or air
At will, but a poor gnome that, cloistered up
In some rock-chamber, with his agate-cup,
His topaz-rod, his seed-pearl, in these few
And their arrangement finds enough to do
For his best art."[13]

[13] Works, i. 131.

From these mysticisms and technicalities of Troubadour and all other poetic guilds Browning decisively detaches his poet. Sordello is not a votary of poetry; he does not "cultivate the Muse"; he does not even [prostrate] himself before the beauty and wonder of the visible universe. Poetry is the atmosphere in which he lives; and in the beauty without he recognises the "dream come true" of a soul which (like that of Pauline's lover) "existence" thus "cannot satiate, cannot surprise." "Laugh thou at envious fate," adorers cry to this inspired Platonist,

"Who, from earth's simplest combination ...
Dost soar to heaven's complexest essence, rife
With grandeurs, unaffronted to the last,
Equal to being all."[14]

[14] Works, i. 122.

And, in truth, his power of imaginative apprehension has no bounds. From the naïve self-reflection of his boyish dreams he passes on to visions which embrace a continually fuller measure of life, until he forestalls the sublime Dantesque conception of a poetry vast and deep as humanity, where every soul will stand forth revealed in its naked truth. But he cannot, like Dante, put his vast conceptions into the shackles of intelligible speech. His uncompromising "infinity" will not comply with finite conditions, and he remains an inefficient and inarticulate genius, a Hamlet of poetry.

In the second half of the poem the Hamlet of poetry becomes likewise a Hamlet of politics. He aspires to serve the people otherwise than by holding up to them the mirror of an all-revealing poetry. Though by birth associated with the aristocratic and imperial Ghibellines, his natural affinity is clearly with the Church, which in [some] sort stood for the people against the nobles, and for spirit against brute force. We see him, now, a frail, inspired Shelleyan[15] democrat, pleading the Guelph cause before the great Ghibelline soldier Salinguerra,—as he had once pitted the young might of native song against the accomplished Troubadour Eglamor. Salinguerra is the foil of the political, as Eglamor of the literary, Sordello, and the dramatic interest of the whole poem focusses in those two scenes. He had enough of the lonely inspiration of genius to vanquish the craftsman, but too little of its large humanity to cope with the astute man of the world. When Salinguerra, naturally declining his naïve entreaty that he should put his Ghibelline sword at the service of the Guelph, offers Sordello, on his part, the command of the imperial forces in Italy if he will remain true to the Ghibelline cause, he makes this finite world more alluring than it had ever been before to the "infinite" Sordello. After a long struggle, he renounces the offer, and—dies, exhausted with the strain of choice.

[15] There are other Shelleyan traits in Sordello—e.g., the young witch image (as in Pauline) at the opening of the second book.

What was Browning's judgment upon Sordello? Does he regard him as an idealist of aims too lofty for success in this world, and whose "failure" implied his triumph in another, where his "broken arc" would become the "perfect round"? Assuredly not. That might indeed be his destiny, but Browning makes it perfectly clear [that] he failed, not because his ideal was incommensurate with the conditions in which he lived, but because he lacked the supreme gift by which the greatest of souls may find their function and create their sphere in the least promising milieu,—a controlling and guiding passion of love. With compassionate tenderness, as of a father to his wayward child, Browning in the closing pages of the poem lays his finger on the ailing place. "Ah, my Sordello, I this once befriend and speak for you." It was true enough, in the past, that Soul, as belonging to Eternity, must needs prove incomplete for Time. But is life to be therefore only a struggle to escape from the shackles of the body? Is freedom only won by death? No, rejoins the poet, and the reply comes from the heart of his poetry, though at issue with much of his explicit doctrine; a harmony of soul and body is possible here in which both fulfil their functions:

"Like yonder breadth of watery heaven, a bay,
And that sky-space of water, ray for ray
And star for star, one richness where they mixed,"

the Soul seeing its way in Time without being either dazzled by, or losing, its vision of Eternity, having the saving clue of Love. Dante, for whom Love was the pervading spirit of the universe, and the beginning and end of his inspiration, wrought his vision of eternal truth and his experience of the passing lives of men into such a harmony with unexampled power; and [the] comparison, implicit in every page of Sordello, is driven home with almost scornful bitterness on the last:—

"What he should have been,
Could be, and was not—the one step too mean
For him to take—we suffer at this day
Because of: Ecelin had pushed away
Its chance ere Dante could arrive and take
That step Sordello spurned, for the world's sake.
. . . A sorry farce
Such life is, after all!"

The publication of Sordello in 1840 closes the first phase of Browning's literary career. By the great majority of those who had hailed the splendid promise of Paracelsus, the author of Sordello was frankly given up. Surprisingly few thought it worth while to wrestle with the difficult book. It was the day of the gentle literary public which had a few years before recoiled from Sartor Resartus, and which found in the difficulty of a book the strongest presumption against it. A later generation, leavened by Carlyle, came near to regarding difficulty as a presumption in its favour, and this more strenuous and athletic attitude towards literature was among the favouring conditions which brought Browning at length into vogue.

CHAPTER III.

MATURING METHODS. DRAMAS AND DRAMATIC LYRICS.

Since Chaucer was alive and hale,
No man hath walk'd along our roads with step
So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue
So varied in discourse.
—LANDOR.

The memorable moment when Browning, standing on the ruined palace-step at Venice, had taken Humanity for his mate, opened an epoch in his poetic life to which the later books of Sordello form a splendid prelude. For the Browning of 1840 it was no longer a sufficient task to trace the epochs in the spiritual history of lonely idealists, to pursue the problem of existence in minds themselves preoccupied with its solution. "Soul" is still his fundamental preoccupation; but the continued play of an eager intellect and vivacious senses upon life has immensely multiplied the points of concrete experience which it vivifies and transfigures to his eyes. It is as if a painter trained in the school of Raphael or Lionardo had discovered [that] he could use the minute and fearless brush of the Flemings in the service of their ideals. He pursues soul in all its rich multiplicity, in the tortuosities and dark abysses of character; he forces crowds of sordid, grotesque, or commonplace facts to become its expressive speech; he watches its thought and passion projected into the tide of affairs, caught up in the clash and tangle of plot. In all these three ways the Dramas and Dramatic Lyrics and Romances, which were to be his poetic occupation during the Forties, detach themselves sharply from Paracelsus and the early books of Sordello. A poem like The Laboratory (1844), for instance, stands at almost the opposite pole of art to these. All that Browning neglected or veiled in Paracelsus he here thrusts into stern relief. The passion and crime there faintly discerned in the background of ideally beautiful figures are here his absorbing theme. The curious technicalities of the chemist's workshop, taken for granted in Paracelsus, are now painted with a realism reminiscent of Romeo's Apothecary and The Alchemist. And the outward drama of intrigue, completely effaced in Paracelsus by the inward drama of soul, sounds delusive scorn and laughter in the background, the more sinister because it is not seen. These lyrics and romances are "dramatic" not only in the sense that the speakers express, as Browning insisted, other minds and sentiments than his own, but in the more legitimate sense that they are plucked as it were out [of] the living organism of a drama, all the vital issues of which can be read in their self-revelation.

A poet whose lyrics were of this type might be expected to find in drama proper his free, full, and natural expression. This was not altogether the case with Browning, who, despite an unquenchable appetency for drama, did better work in his dramatic monologues than in his plays. The drama alone allowed full scope for the development of plot-interest. But it was less favourable to another yet more deeply rooted interest of his. Not only did action and outward event—the stuff of drama—interest Browning chiefly as "incidents in the development of soul," but they became congenial to his art only as projected upon some other mind, and tinged with its feeling and its thought. Half the value of a story for him lay in the colours it derived from the narrator's personality; and he told his own experience, as he uttered his own convictions, most easily and effectively through alien lips. For a like reason he loved to survey the slow continuities of actual events from the standpoint of a given moment, under the conditions of perspective and illusion which it imposed. Both these conditions were less well satisfied by drama, which directly "imitates action," than by the dramatic speech or monologue, which imitates action as focussed in a particular mind. And Browning's dramatic genius found its most natural and effective outlet in the wealth of implicit drama which he concentrated in [these] salient moments tense with memory and hope. The insuppressible alertness and enterprise of his own mind tells upon his portrayal of these intense moments. He sees passion not as a blinding fume, but as a flame, which enlarges the area, and quickens the acuteness, of vision; the background grows alive with moving shapes. To the stricken girl in Ye Banks and Braes memory is torture, and she thrusts convulsively from her, like dagger-points, the intolerable loveliness of the things that remind her of her love; whereas the victim of The Confessional pours forth from her frenzied lips every detail of her tragic story.

So in The Laboratory, once more, all the strands of the implicit drama are seen like incandescent filaments in the glow of a single moment of fierce impassioned consciousness:—

"He is with her, and they know that I know
Where they are, what they do: they believe my tears flow
While they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to the drear
Empty church, to pray God in, for them!—I am here."

Both kinds—drama and dramatic lyric—continued to attract him, while neither altogether satisfied; and they engaged him concurrently throughout the decade.

In this power of seizing the salient moment of a complex situation and laying bare at a stroke all its issues, Browning's monologues have no nearer parallel than the Imaginary Conversations of Landor, which illuminate with so strange a splendour so many unrecorded scenes of the great drama of history. To [Landor], according to his wife's testimony, Browning "always said that he owed more than to any contemporary"; to Landor he dedicated the last volume of the Bells and Pomegranates. Landor, on his part, hailed in Browning the "inquiring eye" and varied discourse of a second Chaucer. It is hardly rash to connect with his admiration for the elder artist Browning's predilection for these brief revealing glimpses into the past. Browning cared less for the actual personnel of history, and often imagined his speakers as well as their talk; but he imagined them with an equal instinct for seizing the expressive traits of nationalities and of times, and a similar, if more spontaneous and naïve, anti-feudal temper. The French camp and the Spanish cloister, Gismond and My Last Duchess (originally called France and Italy), are penetrated with the spirit of peoples, ages, and institutions as seized by a historical student of brilliant imagination and pronounced antipathies.

But in one point Landor and Browning stood at opposite poles. Landor, far beyond any contemporary English example, had the classic sense and mastery of style; Browning's individuality of manner rested on a robust indifference to all the traditional conventions of poetic speech. The wave of realism which swept over English letters in the early 'Forties broke down many barriers of language; the new things that had to be said demanded new ways of saying them; homely, grotesque, or sordid life was rendered in sordid, [grotesque], and homely terms. Pickwick in 1837 had established the immense vogue of Dickens, the Heroes in 1840 had assured the imposing prestige of Carlyle; and the example of both made for the freest and boldest use of language. Across the Channel the stupendous fabric of the Comédie Humaine was approaching completion, and Browning was one of Balzac's keenest English readers. Alone among the greater poets of the time Browning was in genius and temperament a true kinsman to these great romantic realists; his poetry, as it emerged in the rich dramatic harvest of the 'Forties, is the nearest counterpart and analogue of their prose.

I.

Browning's first drama, as is well known, was the result of a direct application from Macready. Introduced in November 1835 by his "literary father" Fox, Browning immediately interested the actor. A reading of Paracelsus convinced him that Browning could write, if not a good play, yet one with an effective tragic rôle for himself. Strained relations with his company presently made him eager to procure this service. Browning, suddenly appealed to (in May 1836), promptly suggested Strafford. He was full of the subject, having recently assisted his friend Forster in compiling his life. The actor closed with the suggestion, and a year later (May 1, 1837) the play was [performed] at Covent Garden. The fine acting of Macready, and of Helen Faucit, who was now associated with him, procured the piece a moderate success. It went through five performances.

Browning's Strafford, like his Paracelsus, was a serious attempt to interpret a historic character; and historic experts like Gardiner have, as regards the central figure, emphatically indorsed his judgment. The other persons, and the action itself, he treated more freely, with evident regard to their value as secondary elements in the portrayal of Stafford; and it is easy to trace in the whole manner of his innovations the well-marked ply of his mind. The harsh and rugged fanaticisms, the splendid frivolities, of the seventeenth century, fade and lose substance in an atmosphere charged with idealism and self-consciousness. Generous self-devotion is not the universal note, but it is the prevailing key, that in which the writer most naturally thinks and most readily invents. Strafford's devotion to Charles and Pym's to his country were historical; but Browning accentuates Pym's heroism by making the man he sends to the scaffold his old friend; and devotion is the single trait of the beautiful but imaginary character of Lucy Carlisle. "Give me your notion of a thorough self-devotement, self-forgetting," he wrote a few years later to Miss Flower: the idea seems to have been already busy moulding his still embryonic invention of character. Something of the visionary exaltation of the dying Paracelsus thus hangs [over] the final scene in which Strafford goes to meet the fate which the one friend imposes on him and the other cannot turn aside. All the characters have something of the "deep self-consciousness" of the author of Pauline. Not that they are, any of them, drawn with very profound grasp of human nature or a many-sided apprehension of life. They are either absolutely simple, like Lady Carlisle, or built upon a rivalry or conflict of simple elements, like Strafford and Charles; but there is so much restless vivacity in their discourse, the broad surface of mood is so incessantly agitated by the play and cross-play of thought and feeling, that they seem more complex than they are.

Though played for only five nights, Strafford had won a success which might well have dazzled a young and untried aspirant, and which was sufficiently impressive to shrewd men of business like Messrs Longman to induce them to undertake its publication free of cost. It appeared in April, with an interesting preface, subsequently withdrawn, from which a significant sentence has already been quoted. The composition of Strafford had not only "freshened a jaded mind" but permanently quickened his zest for the drama of political crises. New projects for historical dramas chased and jostled one another through his busy brain, which seems to have always worked most prosperously in a highly charged atmosphere. I am going "to begin ... thinking a Tragedy," he wrote characteristically to Miss Haworth—"(an Historical one, so I shall want heaps of [criticisms] on Strafford), and I want to have another tragedy in prospect; I write best so provided."[16]

[16] Orr, Life, p. 103.

The "Historical Tragedies" here foreshadowed, King Victor and King Charles and The Return of the Druses, were eventually published as the Second and Fourth of the Bells and Pomegranates, in 1842-43. How little Browning cared for history except as a quarry for psychical problems, how little concern he had at bottom with the changing drama of national life, is clear from the directions in which he now sought his good. In Strafford as in Paracelsus, and even in Sordello, the subject had made some appeal to the interest in great epochs and famous men. Henceforth his attitude, as a dramatist, to history is a curious blend of the historical specialist who explores the recondite byways of history, and the romantic poet who abandons actuality altogether. He seeks his heroes in remote sequestered corners of the world,—Sardinia, Juliers, Lebanon; but actual historic research gradually yields ground to a free invention which, however, always simulates historic truth. King Victor and King Charles contains far less poetry than Paracelsus, but it was the fruit of historic studies no less severe. There was material for genuine tragedy in the story. The old king, who after fifty years of despotic rule shifts the crown to the head of his son with the intention of still pulling the wires behind the scenes, but, finding that Charles means to rule as well as reign, clutches angrily at his surrendered crown,—this [King] Victor has something in him of Lear, something of the dying Henry IV. But history provided more sober issues, and Browning's temperament habitually inclined him to stave off the violence of tragic passion which disturbs the subtle eddyings of thought and feeling. Charles is no Regan, hardly even an Albany, no weakling either, but a man of sensitive conscience, who shifts and gyrates responsively to the complex play of motive which Browning brings to bear upon him. Reluctantly he orders Victor's arrest, and when the old man, baffled and exasperated, is brought before him and imperiously demands the crown, he puts it upon his father's head. Neither character is drawn with the power of Strafford, but the play is largely built upon the same contrasts between personal devotion and political expediency, the untutored idealism of youth and the ruses or rigidity of age. This was a type of dramatic action which Browning imagined with peculiar power and insight, for it bodied forth a contrast between contending elements of his own nature. Towards this type all his drama tended to gravitate. In The Return of the Druses Browning's native bent can be more freely studied, for history has contributed only the general situation. His turn for curious and far-fetched incident is nowhere better illustrated than in this tangled intrigue carried on between Frankish Hospitallers, Venetians, and Druses of Lebanon in a lonely island of the Aegean where none of the three are at home. A political revolution—the revolt of the Druses against their Frankish [lords]—provides the outer momentum of the action; but the central interest is concentrated upon a "Soul's tragedy," in which the conflict of races goes on within the perplexed and paralysed bosom of a single man. Djabal, the Druse patriot brought up in Brittany, analyses his own character with the merciless self-consciousness of Browning himself:

"I with my Arab instinct—thwarted ever
By my Frank policy, and with in turn
My Frank brain thwarted by my Arab heart—
While these remained in equipoise, I lived—
Nothing; had either been predominant,
As a Frank schemer or an Arab mystic
I had been something."

The conflict between policy and devotion is now transferred to the arena of a single breast, where its nature is somewhat too clearly understood and formulated. The "Frank schemer" conceives the plan of turning the Druse superstition to account by posing as an incarnation of their Founder. But the "Arab mystic" is too near sharing the belief to act his part with ease, and while he is still paltering the devoted Anael slays the Prefect. The play is thenceforth occupied, ostensibly, with the efforts of the Christian authorities to discover and punish the murderers. Its real subject is the subtle changes wrought in Djabal and Anael by their gradual transition from the relation of prophet and devotee to that of lovers. Her passion, even before he comes to share it, has begun to sap the security of his false [pretensions:] he longs, not at first to disavow them, but to make them true: he will be the prophetic helper of his people in very deed. To the outer world he maintains his claim with undiminished boldness and complete success; but the inner supports are gradually giving way, Arab mystic and Frank schemer lose their hold, and

"A third and better nature rises up,
My mere man's nature."

Anael, a simpler character than any previous woman of the plays, thus has a more significant function. Lady Carlisle fumbles blindly with the dramatic issues without essentially affecting them; Polyxena furthers them with loyal counsel, but is not their main executant. Anael, in her fervid devotion, not only precipitates the catastrophe, but emancipates her lover from the thraldom of his lower nature. In her Browning for the first time in drama represented the purifying power of Love. The transformations of soul by soul were already beginning to occupy Browning's imagination. The poet of Cristina and Saul was already foreshadowed. But nothing as yet foreshadowed the kind of spiritual influence there portrayed—that which, instead of making its way through the impact of character upon character, passion upon passion, is communicated through an unconscious glance or a song. For one who believed as fixedly as Browning in the power of these moments to change the prevailing bias of character and conduct, such a conception was full of implicit drama. A chance [inspiration] led him to attempt to show how a lyric soul flinging its soul-seed unconsciously forth in song might become the involuntary deus ex machina in the tangle of passion and plot through which she moved, resolving its problems and averting its catastrophes.

The result was a poem which Elizabeth Barrett "could find it in her heart to envy" its author, which Browning himself (in 1845) liked better than anything else he had yet done.[17] It has won a not less secure place in the affections of all who care for Browning at all. It was while walking alone in a wood near Dulwich, we are told by Mrs Orr, that "the idea flashed upon him of some one walking thus through life; one apparently too obscure to leave a trace of his or her passage, yet exercising a lasting though unconscious influence at every step of it; and the image shaped itself into the little silk-winder of Asolo."[18] The most important effect of this design was to call out Browning's considerable powers of rendering those gross, lurid, unspiritualised elements of the human drama upon which Pippa was to flash her transforming spell. His somewhat burly jocosity had expatiated freely in letters; but he had done nothing which, like the cynical chaff of his art students, suggests the not unskilful follower of Balzac and Dickens. And he had given no hint of the elemental tragic power shown in the great Ottima and Sebald scene, nor of the fierce and cruel sensuality, the magnificence in sin, of Ottima herself.

[17] Letters of R. and E.B.B., i. 28.
[18] Orr, Handbook, p. 55.

Pippa Passes, the most romantic in conception of all Browning's plays, thus first disclosed his genius for realism. Strafford, King Victor, The Druses are couched in the tempered ideality of blank verse; here we pass to and fro from the airiest lyric to the most massive and sinewy prose. It counted for something, too, that Italy, and above all the little hill-town in which the scene was laid, was a vivid personal memory, not a vague region of fancy like his Sardinia or Lebanon. Asolo, with its walls and turret, its bishop's palace and duomo, and girls sitting on the steps, its upland farms among the cherry orchards, its beetles sparkling along the dust, its "warm slow yellow moonlit nights" of May, and "glaring pomps" of June,—Asolo, with its legend of "Kate the queen" and her carolling page, lives as few other spots do for Browning's readers. Pippa herself, in her exquisite detachment from the sordid humanity amid which she moves, might have appeared too like a visionary presence, not of earth though on it, had she not been brought into touch, at so many points, with things that Browning had seen. Pippa Passes has, among Browning's dramas, the same kind of peculiar interest which belongs to the Tempest and to Faust among Shakespeare's and Goethe's. Faery and devilry were not Browning's affair; but, within the limits of his resolute humanism, Pippa Passes is an ideal construction, shadowing forth, under the semblance of a single definite bit of life, the controlling elements, as [Browning] imagined them, in all life. For Browning, too, the world teemed with Stephanos and Trinculos, Sebastians and Antonios; it was, none the less, a magical Isle, where strange catastrophes and unsuspected revolutions sprang suddenly into being at the unseen carol of Ariel as he passed. Browning's Ariel is the organ of a spiritual power which, unlike Prospero, seeks not merely to detect and avert crime, or merely to dismiss the would-be criminal, forgiven, to "live and deal with others better," but to renovate character; to release men from the bondage of their egoisms by those influences, slight as a flower-bell or a sunset touch, which renew us by setting all our aims and desires in a new proportion.

II.

Browning's first four plays seemed to mark a growing neglect of the requirements and traditions of the stage. He might even appear to have renounced the stage altogether when in 1841 he arranged with Moxon to publish his writings in a cheap pamphlet form. The first number of Bells and Pomegranates contained the least theatrical of his dramas, Pippa Passes. "Two or three years ago" he declared in the preface (not reprinted), "I wrote a play, about which the chief matter I much care to recollect at present is that a Pit-full of good-natured people applauded it. Ever since I have been desirous of doing something in the same way that should better [reward] their attention. What follows I mean for the first of a series of Dramatical Pieces, to come out at intervals; and I amuse myself by fancying that the cheap mode in which they appear will for once help me to a sort of Pit-audience again."

But Browning's ambition for fame as a maker of plays was still keen, and nothing but a renewed invitation to write for the stage was needed to lure him back into tentative compliance with its ways. In the course of 1841 Macready intervened with a request for another play from the author of Strafford.[19] Thereupon Browning produced with great rapidity A Blot in the 'Scutcheon. After prolonged and somewhat sordid green-room vicissitudes, it was performed on Feb. 11, 1843. Macready, its first begetter, did his best to wreck it; the majority of the players refused to understand their parts; but through the fine acting of Helen Faucit (Mildred) and Phelps (Lord Tresham), it achieved a moderate but brief success.

[19] The date is fixed by Browning's statement (Orr, p. 119).

The choice of subject indicates, as has been said, a desire to make terms with stage tradition. But the ordinary theatre-goer, who went expecting to witness what the title appeared to promise, found himself, as the play proceeded, perplexed and out of his bearings. An English nobleman, with the deep-engrained family pride of his order, had suffered, or was to suffer, dishonour. But this seemingly commonplace motif was developed in a strange and unfamiliar ethical atmosphere—an [atmosphere] of moral ideas which seemed to embrace both those who upheld the feudal honour and those who "blotted" it; to hint at a purity deeper than sin. In a more sinister sense than Colombe's Birthday, this play might have been prefaced by the beautiful motto of its successor:—

"Ivy and violet, what do ye here
With blossom and shoot in the warm spring weather
Hiding the arms of Montecchi and Vere?"

The love of Mildred and Mertoun, which blots the Tresham 'scutcheon, is in origin as innocent as that which breaks into flower across the royal ambitions of Colombe; and their childlike purity of passion becomes, in spite of the wrong to which it has led them, the reconciling fact upon which at the close all animosities and resentments die away. The conception is genuinely tragic, for the doom which descends upon them all is a Nemesis which they have all contributed to provoke, but which none of them deserves; and which precisely the blended nobility and naïveté of Mildred and Mertoun prevents from passing by them altogether. More mature or less sensitive lovers would have found an issue from the situation as easily as an ordinary Hamlet from his task of vengeance. But Mertoun and Mildred are at once too timid and too audacious, too tremulous in their consciousness of guilt, too hardy and reckless in their mutual devotion, to carry through so difficult a game. Mertoun falters and stammers in his suit to Tresham; Mildred stands mute at her brother's charge, [incapable] of evasion, only resolute not to betray. Yet these same two children in the arts of politic self-defence are found recklessly courting the peril of midnight meetings in Mildred's chamber with the aid of all the approved resources and ruses of romance—the disguise, the convenient tree, the signal set in the window, the lover's serenade. And when the lover, who dared all risks to his lady and to himself for a stolen interview with her night by night, finally encounters Tresham, he is instantly paralysed, and will not even lift a sword in his own defence. Upon this union of boundless daring for one another's sake and sensibility to the shame of having wronged the house and blotted the 'scutcheon Mertoun's fate hangs, and with his Mildred's, and with hers Tresham's.

Beside the tragedy and the stain of the love of Mertoun and Mildred, Browning characteristically sets the calm, immaculate, cousinly affection of Gwendolen and Austin. One has a glimpse here of his habitual criticism of all satisfied attainment, of all easy completeness on a low plane. It is Gwendolen herself who half disarms that criticism, or makes it, as applied to her, more pathetic than trenchant by instantly detecting and proclaiming the different quality of Mertoun's love. "Mark him, Austin: that's true love! Ours must begin again." In Tresham Browning seems to have designed to portray the finest type of ancestral pride. He is "proud" of his "interminable line," because the men were all "paladins" and the women all of flawless [honour;] and he has the chivalrous tenderness of ideal knighthood, as well as its honourable pride. When Mertoun has received his death-stroke and told his story, the tenderness comes out; the sullied image of his passionately loved sister not only recovers its appeal, but rises up before him in mute intolerable reproach; and Mildred has scarcely breathed her last in his arms when Tresham succumbs to the poison he has taken in remorse for his hasty act. It is unlucky that this tragic climax, finely conceived as it is, is marred by the unconscious burlesque of his "Ah,—I had forgotten: I am dying." In such things one feels Browning's want of the unerring sureness of a great dramatist at the crucial moments of action.

Although not brilliantly successful on the boards, A Blot in the 'Scutcheon made a deep impression upon the more competent part of the audience. For Browning himself the most definite result was that Macready passed out of his life—for twenty years they never met—and that his most effective link with the stage was thus finally severed. But his more distant and casual relations with it were partly balanced by the much enlarged understanding of dramatic effect which he had by this time won; and A Blot in the 'Scutcheon was followed by a drama which attains a beauty and charm not far below that of Pippa Passes under the conditions of a regular dramatic plot. The ostensible subject of Colombe's Birthday is a political crisis on the familiar lines;—an imperilled throne in the centre of [interest,] a background of vague oppression and revolt. But as compared with King Victor or The Druses the dispute is harmless, the tumult of revolution easily overheard. The diplomatic business is not etherealised into romance, like the ladies' embassy in Love's Labour's Lost; but neither is it allowed to become grave or menacing. Berthold's arrival to present his claim to the government of this miniature state affects us somewhat like the appearance of a new and formidable player in some drawing-room diversion; and the "treason" of the courtiers like the "unfairness" of children at play. Nevertheless, the victory of love over political interest which the motto foreshadows is not accomplished without those subtle fluctuations and surprises which habitually mark the conduct of Browning's plots. The alternative issues gain in seriousness and ideality as we proceed, and Browning has nowhere expressed the ideal of sovereignty more finely than it is expressed in this play, by the man for whose sake a sovereign is about to surrender her crown.[20] Colombe herself is one of Browning's most gracious and winning figures. She brings the ripe decision of womanhood to bear upon a series of difficult situations without losing the bright glamour of her youth. Her inborn truth and nature draw her on as by a quiet [momentum], and gradually liberate her from the sway of the hollow fictions among which her lot is cast. Valence, the outward instrument of this liberation, is not the least noble of that line of chivalrous lovers which reaches from Gismond to Caponsacchi. With great delicacy the steps are marked in this inward and spiritual "flight" of Colombe. Valence's "way of love" is to make her realise the glory and privileges of the rulership which places her beyond his reach, at the very moment when she is about to resign it in despair. She discovers the needs of the woman and the possibilities of power at the same time, and thus is brought, by Valence's means, to a mood in which Prince Berthold's offer of his hand and crown together weighs formidably, for a moment, against Valence's offer of his love alone, until she discovers that Berthold is the very personation, in love and in statecraft alike, of the fictions from which she had escaped. Then, swiftly recovering herself, she sets foot finally on the firm ground where she had first sought her "true resource."

[20] This fine speech of Valence to the greater glory of his rival (Act iv.) is almost too subtle for the stage. Browning with good reason directed its omission unless "a very good Valence" could be found.

Berthold, like Blougram, Ogniben, and many another of Browning's mundane personages, is a subtler piece of psychology than men of the type of Valence, in whom his own idealism flows freely forth. He comes before us with a weary nonchalance admirably contrasted with the fiery intensity of Valence. He means to be emperor one day, and his whole life is a process of which that is to be the product; but he finds the process unaffectedly boring. Without relaxing a whit in the mechanical [pursuit] of his end, he views life with much mental detachment, and shows a cool and not unsympathetic observation of men who pursue other ideals, as well as an abundance of critical irony towards those who apparently share his own. An adept in courtly arts, and owing all his successes to courtly favour, he meets the assiduities of other courtiers with open contempt. His ends are those of Laertes or Fortinbras, and he is quite capable of the methods of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; but he regards ends and methods alike with the sated distaste of Hamlet. By birth and principle a man of action, he has, even more than most of Browning's men of action, the curious introspectiveness of the philosophic onlooker. He "watches his mind," and if he does not escape illusions, recognises and exposes them with ironical candour. Few of Browning's less right-minded persons attain final insight at less cost to dramatic propriety than Berthold when he pronounces his final verdict:—

"All is for the best.
Too costly a flower were this, I see it now,
To pluck and set upon my barren helm
To wither,—any garish plume will do."

Colombe's Birthday was published in 1844 as No. 6 of the Bells, but had for the present no prospect of the stage. Nine years later, however, the loyal Phelps, who had so doughtily come to the rescue of its predecessor, put it successfully on the boards of his theatre at Sadler's Wells.

The most buoyant of optimists has moments of self-mockery, and the hardiest believer in ideal truth moods in which poetry seems the phantom and prose the fact. Such a mood had its share in colouring the dramatic sketch which, it is now pretty evident, Browning wrote not long after finishing Colombe's Birthday.[21] That play is a beautiful triumph of poetry over prose, of soul and heart over calculation and business. A Soul's Tragedy exhibits the inverse process: the triumph of mundane policy and genial savoir faire in the person of Ogniben over the sickly and equivocal "poetry" of Chiappino. Browning seems to have thrown off this bitter parody of his own idealisms in a mood like that in which Ibsen conceived the poor blundering idealist of the Wild Duck. Chiappino is Browning's Werle; the reverse side of a type which he had drawn with so much indulgence in the Luigi of Pippa Passes. Plainly, it was a passing mood; as plainly, a mood which, from the high and luminous vantage-ground of 1846, he could look back upon with regret, almost with scorn. His intercourse with Elizabeth Barrett was far advanced before she was at length reluctantly allowed to see it. "For The Soul's [Tragedy]," he wrote (Feb. 11)—"that will surprise you, I think. There is no trace of you there,—you have not put out the black face of it—it is all sneering and disillusion—and shall not be printed but burned if you say the word." This word his correspondent, needless to add, did not say; on the contrary, she found it even more impressive than its successor Luria. This was, however, no tribute to its stage qualities; for in hardly one of his plays is the stage more openly ignored. The dramatic form, though still preserved, sets strongly towards monologue; the entire second act foreshadows unmistakably the great portrait studies of Men and Women; it might be called Ogniben with about as good right as they are called Lippo Lippi or Blougram; the personality of the supple ecclesiastic floods and takes possession of the entire scene; we see the situation and the persons through the brilliant ironic mirror of his mind. The Chiappino of the second act is Ogniben's Chiappino, as Gigadibs is Blougram's Gigadibs. His "tragedy" is one in which there is no room for terror or pity, only for contempt. All real stress of circumstance is excluded. Both sides fight with blunted weapons; the revolt is like one of those Florentine risings which the Brownings later witnessed with amusement from the windows of Casa Guidi, which were liable to postponement because of rain. The prefect who is "assassinated" does not die, and the rebellious city is genially bantered into submission. The "soul" of Chiappino is, in fact, not the [stuff] of which tragedy is made. Even in his instant acceptance of Luitolfo's bloodstained cloak when the pursuers are, as he thinks, at the door, he seems to have been casually switched off the proper lines of his character into a piece of heroism which properly belongs to the man he would like to be thought, but has not the strength to be. On the whole, Browning's scorn must be considered to have injured his art. Tragedy, in the deepest sense, lay beyond his sphere; and this "tragedy" of mere degeneration and helpless collapse left untouched all the springs from which his poetry drew its life.

[21] Browning's letter to Elizabeth Barrett, Feb. 13, 1846, which does not seem to have been adequately noticed. The piece is ignored by Mrs Orr. He speaks of suspending the publication of the "unlucky play" until a second edition of the Bells—an "apparition" which Moxon, he says, seems to think possible; and then inserting it before Luria: it will then be "in its place, for it was written two or three years ago." In other words, The Soul's Tragedy was written in 1843-44, between Colombe's Birthday and Luria.

In the autumn of 1844 Browning made a second tour to Italy. It was chiefly memorable for his meeting, at Leghorn, with Edward John Trelawney, to whom he carried a letter of introduction;—one who had not only himself "seen Shelley plain," but has contributed more than any one else, save Hogg, to flash the unfading image of what he saw on the eyes of posterity. The journey quickened and enriched his Italian memories; and left many vivid traces in the poetry of the following year. Among these was the drama of Luria, ultimately published as the concluding number of the Bells.

In this remarkable drama Browning turned once more to the type of historical tragedy which he had originally essayed in Strafford. The fall of a man of passionate fidelity through the treachery of the prince or the people in whom he has put his trust, was for Browning one of the most arresting of the great traditional motives of [tragic] drama. He dwelt with emphasis upon this aspect of the fate of Charles's great minister; in Luria, where he was working uncontrolled by historical authority, it is the fundamental theme. At the same time the effect is heightened by those race contrasts which had been so abundantly used in The Return of the Druses. Luria is a Moor who has undertaken the service of Florence, and whose religion it is to serve her. Like Othello,[22] he has been intrusted, alien as he is, by a jealous and exacting State, with the supreme command of her military forces, a position in which the fervour of the Oriental and the frank simplicity of the soldier inevitably lie open to the subtle strategy of Italians and statesmen. "Luria," wrote Browning, while the whole scheme was "all in my brain yet, ... devotes himself to something he thinks Florence, and the old fortune follows, ... and I will soon loosen my Braccio and Puccio (a pale discontented man) and Tiburzio (the Pisan, good true fellow, this one), and Domizia the lady—loosen all these on dear foolish (ravishing must his folly be) golden-hearted Luria, all these with their worldly wisdom and Tuscan shrewd ways." Florence, in short, plays collectively somewhat the part of Iago to this second Othello, but of an Iago (need it be said) immeasurably less deeply rooted in malignity than Shakespeare's. It was a source of weakness as well as of strength in Browning as a dramatist that the [evil] things in men dissolve so readily under his scrutiny as if they were mere shells of flimsy disguise for the "soul of goodness" they contain. He has, in fact, put so much strong sense on the side of the jealous Florentine masters of his hero that his own sympathies were divided, with paralysing effect, it would seem, upon his interest in drama.[23] Even the formidable antagonism of Braccio, the Florentine Commissary, is buttressed, if not based, upon a resolve to defend the rights of civilisation against militarism, of intellect against brute force. "Brute force shall not rule Florence." Even so, it is only after conflict and fluctuation that he decides to allow Luria's trial to take its course. Puccio, again, the former general of Florence, superseded by Luria, and now serving under his command, turns out not quite the "pale discontented man" whom Browning originally designed and whom such a situation was no doubt calculated to produce. Instead of a Cassius, enviously scowling at the greatness of his former comrade, Cæsar, we have one whose generous admiration for the alien set over him struggles hard, and not unsuccessfully, with natural resentment. In keeping with such company is the noble Pisan general, who vies with Luria in generosity and twice intervenes decisively to save him from the Florentine attack. Even Domizia, the ["panther"] lady who comes to the camp burning for vengeance upon Florence for the death of her kinsmen, and hoping to attain it by embroiling him with the city, finally emerges as his lover. But in Domizia he confessedly failed. The correspondence with Miss Barrett stole the vitality from all mere imaginary women; "the panther would not be tamed." Her hatred and her love alike merely beat the air. With all her volubility, she is almost as little in place in the economy of the drama as in that of the camp; her "wild mass of rage" has the air of being a valued property which she manages and exhibits, not an impelling and consuming fire. The more potent passion of Luria and his lieutenant Husain is more adequately rendered, though "the simple Moorish instinct" in them is made to accomplish startling feats in European subtlety. The East with its gift of "feeling" comes once more, as in the Druses, into tragic contact with the North and its gift of "thought"; but it is to the feeling East and not to thinking North that we owe the clear analysis and exposition of the contrast. Luria has indeed, like Djabal, assimilated just so much of European culture as makes its infusion fatal to him: he suffers the doom of the lesser race

"Which when it apes the greater is forgone."

But the noblest quality of the lesser race flashes forth at the close when he takes his life, not in defiance, nor in despair, but as a last act of passionate fidelity to [Florence]. This is conceived with a refinement of moral imagination too subtle perhaps for appreciation on the stage; but of the tragic power and pathos of the conception there can be no question. Mrs Browning, whose eager interest accompanied this drama through every stage of its progress, justly dwelt upon its "grandeur." The busy exuberance of Browning's thinking was not favourable to effects which multiplicity of detail tends to destroy; but the fate of this son of the "lone and silent East," though utterly un-Shakespearean in motive, recalls, more nearly than anything else in Browning's dramas, the heroic tragedy of Shakespeare.

[22] Browning himself uses this parallel in almost his first reference to Luria while still unwritten: Letters of R.B. and E.B.B., i. 26.
[23] "For me, the misfortune is, I sympathise just as much with these as with him,—so there can no good come of keeping this wild company any longer."—Feb. 26, 1845.

III.

"Mere escapes of my inner power, like the light of a revolving lighthouse leaping out at intervals from a narrow chink;" so wrote Browning in effect to Miss Barrett (Feb. 11, 1845) of the "scenes and song-scraps," of which the first instalment had appeared three years before as the Dramatic Lyrics. Yet it is just by the intermittent flashes that the lighthouse is identified; and Browning's genius, as we have seen, was in the end to be most truly denoted by these "mere escapes." With a few notable exceptions, they offer little to the student of Browning's ideology; they do not illustrate his theories of life, they disclose no good in evil and no hope in ill-success. But they are full of an exuberant joy in life itself, as seen by a keen observer [exempt] from its harsher conditions, to whom all power and passion are a feast. He watches the angers, the malignities of men and women, as one might watch the quarrels of wild beasts, not cynically, but with the detached, as it were professional, interest of a born "fighter." The loftier hatred, which is a form of love,—the sublime hatred of a Dante, the tragic hatred of a Timon, even the unforgetting, self-consuming hatred of a Heathcliff,—did not now, or ever, engage his imagination. The indignant invective against a political renegade, "Just for a handful of silver he left us," in which Browning spoke his own mind, is poor and uncharacteristic compared with pieces in which he stood aside and let some accomplished devil, like the Duke in My last Duchess, some clerical libertine, like the bishop of St Praxed's, some sneaking reptile, like the Spanish friar, some tiger-hearted Regan, like the lady of The Laboratory, or some poor crushed and writhing worm, like the girl of The Confessional, utter their callous cynicism or their deathbed torment, the snarl of petty spite, the low fierce cry of triumphant malice, the long-drawn shriek of futile rage. There was commonly an element of unreason, extravagance, even grotesqueness, in the hatreds that caught his eye; he had a relish for the gratuitous savagery of the lady in Time's Revenges, who would calmly decree that her lover should be burnt in a slow fire "if that would compass her desire." He seized the grotesque side of persecution; and it is not fanciful to see in the [delightful] chronicle of the Nemesis inflicted upon "Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis" a foretaste of the sardonic confessions of Instans Tyrannus. And he seized the element of sheer physical zest in even eager and impassioned action; the tramp of the march, the swing of the gallop in the fiery Cavalier Tunes, the crash of Gismond's "back—handed blow" upon Gauthier's mouth; the exultant lift of the "great pace" of the riders who bring the Good News.

Of love poetry, on the other hand, there was little in these first Lyrics and Romances. Browning had had warm friendships with women, and was singularly attractive to them; but at thirty-three love had at most sent a dancing ripple across the bright surface of his life, and it apparently counted for nothing in his dreams. His plans, as he told Miss Barrett, had been made without any thought of "finding such a one as you." That discovery introduced a new and unknown factor into his scheme of things. The love-poetry of the Dramatic Lyrics and Romances is still somewhat tentative and insecure. The beautiful fantasia In a Gondola was directly inspired by a picture of his friend Maclise. He paints the romance of the lover's twilight tryst with all his incisive vigour; but his own pulse beats rather with the lover who goes forth at daybreak, and feels the kindling summons of the morning glory of sea and sunlight into the "world of men." His attitude to women is touched with the virginal reserve of the young Hippolytus, whose tragic fate he had told in [the] lofty Prologue of Artemis. He approaches them with a kind of delicate and distant awe; tender, even chivalrous, but accentuating rather the reserves and reticences of chivalry than its rewards. The lady of The Flower's Name is beautiful, but her beauty is only shyly hinted; we see no feature of face or form; only the fold of her dress brushing against the box border, the "twinkling" of her white fingers among the dark leaves. The typical lover of these lyrics is of a temperament in which feminine sensitiveness and masculine tenacity are characteristically blended; a temperament which the faintest and most fugitive signs of love—a word, a glance, the impalpable music of a romantic name—not only kindle and subdue, but permanently fortify and secure. Cristina, Rudel, and the Lost Mistress stand in a line of development which culminates in The Last Ride Together. Cristina's lover has but "changed eyes" with her; but no queenly scorn of hers can undo the spiritual transformation which her glance has wrought:

"Her soul's mine; and thus, grown perfect,
I shall pass my life's remainder."

The Lost Mistress is an exquisitely tender and pathetic farewell, but not the stifled cry of a man who has received a crushing blow. Not easily, but yet without any ruinous convulsion, he makes that transition from love to "mere friendship" which passionate men so hardly endure.

The really tragic love-story was, for Browning, the story not of love rejected but of love flagging, fading, or crushed out.

"Never fear, but there's provision
Of the devil's to quench knowledge
Lest on earth we walk in rapture,"

Cristina's lover had bitterly reflected. Courts, as the focuses of social artifice and ceremonial restraint, were for him the peculiar breeding-places of such tragedies, and in several of the most incisive of the Lyrics and Romances he appears as the champion of the love they menace. The hapless Last Duchess suffers for the largess of her kindly smiles. The duchess of The Flight and the lady of The Glove successfully revolt against pretentious substitutes for love offered in love's name. The Flight is a tale, as Mrs Browning said, "with a great heart in it." Both the Gipsy-woman whose impassioned pleading we overhear, and the old Huntsman who reports it, are drawn from a domain of rough and simple humanity not very often trodden by Browning. The genial retainer admirably mediates between the forces of the Court which he serves and those of the wild primitive race to which his world-old calling as a hunter makes him kin; his hearty, untutored speech and character envelop the story like an atmosphere, and create a presumption that heart and nature will ultimately have their way. Even the hinted landscape-background serves as a mute chorus. In this "great wild country" of wide [forests] and pine-clad mountains, the court is the anomaly.

Similarly, in The Glove, the lion, so magnificently sketched by Browning, is made to bear out the inner expressiveness of the tale in a way anticipated by no previous teller. The lion of Schiller's ballad is already assuaged to his circumstances, and enters the arena like a courtier entering a drawing-room. Browning's lion, still terrible and full of the tameless passion for freedom, bursts in with flashing forehead, like the spirit of the desert of which he dreams: it is the irruption of this mighty embodiment of elemental Nature which wakens in the lady the train of feeling and thought that impel her daring vindication of its claims.

Art was far from being as strange to the Browning of 1842-45 as love. But he seized with a peculiar predilection those types and phases of the Art-world with which love has least to do. He studies the egoisms of artists, the vanities of connoisseurs; the painter Lutwyche showing "how he can hate"; the bishop of St Praxed's piteously bargaining on his death-bed for the jasper and lapislazuli "which Gandolph shall not choose but see and burst"; the duke of the Last Duchess displaying his wife's portrait as the wonder of his gallery, and unconcernedly disposing of her person. In a single poem only Browning touches those problems of the artist life which were to occupy him in the 'Fifties; and the Pictor Ignotus is as far behind the Andrea del [Sarto] and Fra Lippo Lippi in intellectual force as in dramatic brilliance and plasticity. Browning's sanguine and energetic temperament always inclined him to over-emphasis, and he has somewhat over-emphasised the anæmia of this anæmic soul. Rarely again did he paint in such resolute uniformity of ashen grey. The "Pictor" is the earliest, and the palest, of Browning's pale ascetics, who make, in one way or another, the great refusal, and lose their souls by trying to save them in a barrenness which they call purity.

The musician as such holds at this stage an even smaller place in Browning's art than the painter. None of these Lyrics foreshadows Abt Vogler and Hugues of Saxe-Gotha as the Pictor foreshadows Lippi and Del Sarto. But if he did not as yet explore the ways of the musical soul, he shows already a peculiar instinct for the poetic uses and capabilities of music. He sings with peculiar entrain of the transforming magic of song. The thrush and cuckoo, among the throng of singing-birds, attract him by their musicianly qualities—the "careless rapture" repeated, the "minor third" which only the cuckoo knows. These Lyrics and Romances of 1842-45 are as full of tributes to the power of music as L'Allegro and Il Penseroso themselves. Orpheus, whose story Milton there touched so ravishingly, was too trite an instance to arrest Browning; it needed perhaps the stimulus of his friend Leighton's picture to call forth, long afterwards, the few choice verses on Eurydice. More to his mind was the legend of that motley Orpheus [of] the North, the Hamelin piper,—itself a picturesque motley of laughter and tears. The Gipsy's lay of far-off romance awakens the young duchess; Theocrite's "little human praise" wins God's ear, and Pippa's songs transform the hearts of men. A poet in this vein would fall naturally enough upon the Biblical story of the cure of the stricken Saul by the songs of the boy David. But a special influence drew Browning to this subject,—the wonderful Song to David of Christopher Smart,—"a person of importance in his day," who owes it chiefly to Browning's enthusiastic advocacy of a poem he was never weary of declaiming, that he is a poet of importance in ours. Smart's David is before all things the glowing singer of the Joy of Earth,—the glory of the visible creation uttering itself in rapturous Praise of the Lord. And it is this David of whom we have a presentiment in the no less glowing songs with which Browning's shepherd-boy seeks to reach the darkened mind of Saul.

Of the poem we now possess, only the first nine sections belong to the present phase of Browning's work. These were confessedly incomplete, but Browning was content to let them go forth as they were, and less bent upon even their ultimate completion, it would seem, than Miss Barrett, who bade him "remember" that the poem was "there only as a first part, and that the next parts must certainly follow and complete what will be a great lyrical work—now remember."[24] And the "next parts" when they came, in Men and Women, bore the mark [of] his ten years' fellowship with her devout and ecstatic soul, as well as of his own growth towards the richer and fuller harmonies of verse. The 1845 fragment falls, of course, far short of its sequel in imaginative audacity and splendour, but it is steeped in a pellucid beauty which Browning's busy intellectuality was too prone to dissipate. Kenyon read it nightly, as he told Mrs Browning, "to put his dreams in order"; finely comparing it to "Homer's Shield of Achilles, thrown into lyrical whirl and life." And certainly, if Browning anywhere approaches that Greek plasticity for which he cared so little, it is in these exquisitely sculptured yet breathing scenes. Then, as the young singer kindles to his work, his song, without becoming less transparent, grows more personal and impassioned; he no longer repeats the familiar chants of his tribe, but breaks into a new impetuous inspiration of his own; the lyrical whirl and life gathers swiftness and energy, and the delicate bas-reliefs of Saul's people, in their secular pieties of grief or joy, merge in the ecstatic vision of Saul himself, as he had once been, and as he might yet be, that

"boyhood of wonder and hope,
Present promise and wealth of the future beyond the eye's scope,"

all the fulness and glory of the life of humanity gathered upon his single head. It is the very voice of life, which thrills and strikes across the spiritual darkness of Saul, as the coming of Hyperion scattered the shadows of Saturnian night.

[24] E.B.B. to R.B., Dec. 10, 1845.

CHAPTER IV.

WEDDED LIFE IN ITALY. MEN AND WOMEN.

This foot, once planted on the goal;
This glory-garland round my soul.
—The Last Ride Together.

Warmer climes
Give brighter plumage, stronger wing; the breeze
Of Alpine highths thou playest with, borne on
Beyond Sorrento and Amalfi, where
The Siren waits thee, singing song for song.
—LANDOR.

I.

The Bells and Pomegranates made no very great way with the public, which found the matter unequal and the title obscure. But both the title and the greater part of the single poems are linked inseparably with the most intimate personal relationship of his life. Hardly one of the Romances, as we saw, but had been read in MS. by Elizabeth Barrett, and pronounced upon with the frank yet critical delight of her nature. In the abstruse symbolic title, too,—implying, as Browning expected his readers to discover, "sound and sense" [or] "music and discoursing,"—her wit had divined a more felicitous application to Browning's poetry—

"Some 'Pomegranate,' which, if cut deep down the middle,
Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity."

The two poets were still strangers when this was written; but each had for years recognised in the other a new and wonderful poetic force,[25] and the vivid words marked the profound community of spirit which was finally to draw them together. A few years later, a basket of pomegranates was handed to her, when travelling with her husband in France, and she laughingly accepted the omen. The omen was fulfilled; Elizabeth Browning's poetry expanded and matured in the companionship of that rich-veined human heart; it was assuredly not by chance that Browning, ten years after her death, recalled her symbol in the name of his glorious woman-poet, Balaustion.

[25] She had at once discerned the "new voice" in Paracelsus, 1835; and the occasion may have been not much later ("years ago" in 1845) on which he was all but admitted to the "shrine" of the "world's wonder" (R.B. to E.B.B., Jan. 10, 1845).

But she, on her part, also brought a new and potent influence to bear upon his poetry, the only one which after early manhood he ever experienced; and their union was by far the most signal event in Browning's intellectual history, as it was in his life. Her experience up to the time when they met had been in most points [singularly] unlike his own. Though of somewhat higher social status, she had seen far less of society and of the world; but she had gone through the agony of a passionately loved brother's sudden death, and the glory of English wood and meadow was for her chiefly, as to Milton in his age, an enchanted memory of earlier days, romantically illuminating a darkened London chamber. "Most of my events, and nearly all my intense pleasures," she said to Horne, "have passed in my thoughts." Both were eager students, and merited the hazardous reputation which both incurred, of being "learned poets"; but Browning wore his learning, not indeed "lightly, like a flower," but with the cool mastery of a scholarly man of the world, whose interpretation of books is controlled at every point by his knowledge of men; while Miss Barrett's Greek and Hebrew chiefly served to allure an imagination naturally ecstatic and visionary along paths crowded with congenial unearthly symbols, with sublime shapes of gods and Titans, angels and seraphim. Then, notwithstanding the rôle of hopeless invalid which she was made to play, and did play with touching conviction, she had, it is clear, a fund of buoyant and impulsive vitality hardly inferior to Browning's own; only that the energy which in him flowed out through natural channels had in her to create its own opportunities, and surged forth with harsh or startling violence,—sometimes "tearing open a parcel instead of untying it," and sometimes compelling words to serve her will by masterful audacities of collocation. [Both] poets stood apart from most of their contemporaries by a certain exuberance—"a fine excess"—quite foreign to the instincts of a generation which repudiated the Revolution and did its best to repudiate Byron. But Browning's exuberance was genial, hearty, and on occasion brutal; hers was exalted, impulsive, "head-long,"[26] intense, and often fantastic and quaint. His imagination flamed forth like an intenser sunlight, heightening and quickening all that was alive and alert in man and Nature; hers shot out superb or lurid volcanic gleams across the simplicity of natural chiaro-oscuro, disturbing the air with conflicting and incalculable effects of strange horror and strange loveliness. It might have been averred of Browning that he said everything he thought; of her the truer formula would be her own, that she "took every means of saying" what she thought.[27] There was something of Æschylus in her, as there was much of Aristophanes in him; it was not for nothing that her girlish ardour had twice flung itself upon the task of rendering the Prometheus Bound in English; they met on common ground in the human and pathetic Euripides. But her power was [lyric], not dramatic. She sang from the depths of a wonderfully rich and passionate nature; while he was most truly himself when he was personating some imaginary mind.

[26] The word her Italian tutor meant to describe her by, but could not pronounce it. He said she was testa lunga (Letters of R. and E.B., i. 7).
[27] Letters, R. and E.B., i. 8. Cf. her admirable letter to Ruskin, ten years later, apropos of the charge of "affectation." "To say a thing faintly, because saying it strongly sounds odd or obscure or unattractive for some reason to careless readers, does appear to me bad policy as well as bad art" (Letters of E.B.B., ii., 200).

Early in January 1845 the two poets were brought by the genial Kenyon, her cousin and his good friend, into actual communication, and the memorable correspondence, the most famous of its kind in English literature, at once began. Browning, as his way was in telling other men's stories, burst at once in medias res in this great story of his own. "I love your verses, my dear Miss Barrett, with all my heart," he assures her in the first sentence of his first letter. He feels them already too much a part of himself to ever "try and find fault,"—"nothing comes of it all,—so into me has it gone and part of me has it become, this great living poetry of yours, not a flower of which but took root and grew." It was "living," like his own; it was also direct, as his own was not. His frank cameraderie was touched from the outset with a fervent, wondering admiration to which he was by no means prone. "You do, what I always wanted, hoped to do, and only seem likely now to do for the first time. You speak out, you,—I only make men and women speak—give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light, even if it is in me, but I am going to try." Thus the first contact with the "Lyric Love" of after days set vibrating the chords of all that was lyric and personal in Browning's nature. His [brilliant] virtuosity in the personation of other minds threatened to check all simple utterance of his own. The "First Poem" of Robert Browning had yet to be written, but now, as soon as he had broken from his "dancing ring of men and women,"—the Dramatic Lyrics and Romances and one or two outstanding dramas,—he meant to write it. Miss Barrett herself hardly understood until much later the effect that her personality, the very soul that spoke in her poetry, had upon her correspondent. She revelled in the Dramatic Lyrics and Romances, and not least in rollicking pieces, like Sibrandus or The Spanish Cloister, which appealed to the robust masculine humour with which this outwardly fragile woman is too rarely credited. Pippa Passes she could find in her heart to covet the authorship of, more than any of his other works—a preference in which he agreed. Few more brilliant appreciations of English poetry are extant than some of those which sped during 1845 and 1846 from the invalid chamber in Harley Street to the "old room" looking out on the garden at New Cross. But she did not conceal from him that she wished him to seek "the other crown" also. "I do not think, with all that music in you, only your own personality should be dumb."[28] But she undoubtedly, with all her sense of the glory of the dramatic art, discouraged his writing for the stage, a domain which she regarded with an animus curiously compounded of Puritan loathing, poetic scorn, and [wellbred] shrinking from the vulgarity of the green-room. And it is clear that before the last plays, Luria and A Soul's Tragedy, were published his old stage ambition had entirely vanished. It was not altogether hyperbole (in any case the hyperbole was wholly unconscious) when he spoke of her as a new medium to which his sight was gradually becoming adjusted, "seeing all things, as it does, in you."

[28] E.B.B to R.B., 26th May 1846. Cf. R.B., 13th Feb. 1846.

She, on her part, united, as clever women in love so often do, with a woman's more utter self-abasement a larger measure of critical penetration. The "poor tired wandering singer," who so humbly took the hand of the liberal and princely giver, and who with perfect sincerity applied to herself his unconscious phrase—

"Cloth of frieze, be not too bold
Though thou'rt match'd with cloth of gold,"

"That, beloved, was written for me!"[29]—shows at the same time the keenest insight into the qualities of his work. She felt in him the masculine temper and the masculine range, his singular union of rough and even burly power with subtle intellect and penetrating music. With the world of society and affairs she had other channels of communication. But no one of her other friends—not Orion Horne, not even Kenyon—bridged as Browning did the gulf between the world of society and affairs, which she vaguely knew, and the romantic world of poetry in which she lived. If she quickened the [need] for lyrical utterance in him, he drew her, in his turn, into a closer and richer contact with common things. If she had her part in Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day, he had his, no less, in Aurora Leigh.

[29] E.B.B. to R.B., 9th Jan. 1846.

Twenty-one months passed between Browning's first letter and their marriage. The tentative exchange of letters passed into a formal "contract" to correspond,—sudden if not as "unadvised" as the love-vows of Juliet, a parallel which he shyly hinted, and she, with the security of the whole-hearted, boldly recalled. All the winter and early spring her health forbade a meeting, and it is clear that but for the quiet pressure of his will they never would have met. But with May came renewed vigour, and she reluctantly consented to a visit. "He has a way of putting things which I have not, a way of putting aside,—so he came." A few weeks later he spoke. She at first absolutely refused to entertain the thought; he believed, and was silent. But in the meantime the letters and the visits "rained down more and more," and the fire glowed under the surface of the writing and the talk, subdued but unsuppressed. Once more his power of "putting aside" compelled her to listen, and when she listened she found herself assailed at a point which her own exalted spirituality made her least able to defend, by a love more utterly self-sacrificing than even she had ever imagined. This man of the masterful will, who took no refusals, might perhaps in any case have finally "put aside" all obstacles to her consent. But when [he] disclosed—to her amazement, well as she thought she knew him—that he had asked the right to love her without claiming any love in return, that when he first spoke he had believed her disease to be incurable, and yet preferred to be allowed to sit only a day at her side to the fulfilment of "the brightest dream which should exclude her," her resistance gave way,—and little by little, in her own beautiful words, she was drawn into the persuasion that something was left, and that she could still do something for the happiness of another. In another sense than she intended in the great opening sonnet "from the Portuguese," Love, undreamt of, had come to her with the irresistible might of Death, and called her back into life by rekindling in her the languishing, almost extinguished, desire to live. Is it hyperbole, to be reminded of that other world-famous rescue from death which Browning, twenty-five years later, was to tell with such infinite verve? Browning did not need to imagine, but only to remember, the magnificent and audacious vitality of his Herakles; he had brought back his own "espoused saint," like Alcestis, from the grave.

But the life thus gained was, in the immediate future, full of problems. Browning, said Kenyon, was "great in everything"; and during the year which followed their engagement he had occasion to exhibit the capacities both of the financier he had once declined to be, and of the diplomatist he was willing to become. Love [had] flung upon his life, as upon hers, a sudden splendour for which he was in no way prepared. "My whole scheme of life," he wrote to her,[30] "(with its wants, material wants at least, closely cut down), was long ago calculated—and it supposed you, the finding such an one as you, utterly impossible." But his schemes for a profession and an income were summarily cut short. Elizabeth Barrett peremptorily declined to countenance any such sacrifice of the work he was called to for any other. The same deep sense of what was due to him, and to his wife, sustained her through the trial that remained,—from the apparent degradation of secrecy and subterfuge which the domestic policy of Mr Barrett made inevitable, to the mere physical and nervous strain of rising, that September morning of 1846, from an invalid's couch to be married. That "peculiarity," as she gently termed it, of her father's, malign and cruel as it was, twice precipitated a happy crisis in their fortunes, which prudence might have postponed. His refusal to allow her to seek health in Italy in Oct. 1845 had brought them definitely together; his second refusal in Aug. 1846 drove her to the one alternative of going there as Browning's wife. A week after the marriage ceremony, during which they never met, Mrs Browning left her home, with the faithful Wilson and the indispensable Flush, en route for Southampton. The following day they arrived in Paris.

[30] R.B. to E.B.B., Sept. 13, 1845.

II.

There followed fifteen years during which the inexhaustible correspondents of the last twenty months exchanged no further letter, for they were never parted. That is the sufficient outward symbol of their all but flawless union. After a leisurely journey through France, and an experimental sojourn at the goal of Mrs Browning's two frustrated journeys, Pisa, they settled towards the close of April 1847 in furnished apartments in Florence, moving some four months later into the more permanent home which their presence was to render famous, the Palazzo (or "Casa") Guidi, just off the Piazza Pitti.

Their life—mirrored for us in Mrs Browning's vivid and delightful letters—was, like many others, in which we recognise rare and precious quality, singularly wanting in obviously expressive traits. It is possible to describe everything that went on in the Browning household in terms applicable to those of scores of other persons of wide interests, cultivated tastes, and moderate but not painfully restricted means. All that was passionate, ideal, heroic in them found expression through conditions which it needs a fine eye to distinguish from those of easy-going bourgeois mediocrity. Their large and catholic humanity exempted them from much that makes for bold and sensational outline in the story of a career. Their poetic home was built upon all the philistine virtues. Mrs Jameson laughed at their ["miraculous] prudence and economy"; and Mrs Browning herself laughed, a little, at her husband's punctilious rigour in paying his debts,—his "horror of owing five shillings for five days"; Browning, a born virtuoso in whatever he undertook, abhorring a neglected bill as he did an easy rhyme, and all other symbols of that slovenly Bohemia which came nearest, on the whole, to his conception of absolute evil. They lived at first in much seclusion, seeking no society, and unknown alike to the Italian and the English quarters of the Florentine world. But Arcady was, at bottom, just as foreign to their ways as Bohemia. "Soundless and stirless hermits," Mrs Browning playfully called them; but in no house in Florence did the news of political and literary Europe find keener comment or response than in this quiet hermitage. Two long absences, moreover (1851-52 and 1855-56), divided between London and Paris, interrupted their Italian sojourn; and these times were crowded with friendly intercourse, which they keenly enjoyed. "No place like Paris for living in," Browning declared after returning from its blaze to the quiet retreat of Casa Guidi. But both felt no less deeply the charm of their "dream life" within these old tapestried walls.[31] Nor did either, in spite of their delight in French poetry and their vivid interest in French politics, really enter the French world. They were received by George Sand, whose "indiscreet immortalities" had ravished Elizabeth Barrett in her invalid [chamber] years before; but though she "felt the burning soul through all that quietness," and through the "crowds of ill-bred men who adore her à genoux bas, betwixt a puff of smoke and an ejection of saliva,"—they both felt that she did not care for them. Dumas, another admiration, they did not see; an introduction to Hugo, Browning carried about for years but had no chance of presenting; Béranger they saw in the street, and regretted the absence of an intermediator. Balzac, to their grief, was just dead. A complete set of his works was one of their Florentine ambitions. One memorable intimacy was formed, however, during the Paris winter of 1851-52; for it was now that he first met Joseph Milsand, his warm friend until Milsand's death in 1886, and probably, for the last twenty years at least, the most beloved of all his friends, as he was at all times one of his shrewdest yet kindliest critics. Their summer visits to London (1851, 1852, 1855, 1856) brought them much more of intimate personal converse, tempered, however, inevitably, in a yet greater proportion, by pain, discomfort, and fatigue. Of himself, yet more than of the Laureate, might have been used the phrase in which he was to dedicate a later poem to Tennyson—"noble and sincere in friendship." The visitors who gathered about him in these London visits included friends who belonged to every phase and aspect of his career—from his old master and mentor, Fox, and Kenyon, the first begetter of his wedded happiness, to Dante Rossetti, his first and, for years to come, [solitary] disciple, and William Allingham, whom Rossetti introduced. Among his own contemporaries they were especially intimate with Tennyson,—the sterling and masculine "Alfred" of Carlyle, whom the world first learnt to know from his biography; and with Carlyle himself, a more genial and kindly Carlyle than most others had the gift of evoking, and whom his biographers mostly efface.

[31] Letters of E.B.B., ii. 199.

After their return from the second journey to the north their Italian life lost much of its dream-like seclusion. The publication of Men and Women (1855) and Aurora Leigh (1856) drew new visitors to the salon in Casa Guidi, and after 1853 they repeatedly wintered in Rome, mingling freely in its more cosmopolitan society, and, on occasion, in the gaieties of the Carnival. To the end, however, their Roman circle was more American than English. "Is Mr Browning an American?" asked an English lady of the American ambassador. "Is it possible that you ask me that?" came the prompt and crushing retort; "why, there is not a village in the United States so small that they could not tell you that Robert Browning is an Englishman, and they wish he were an American." Spiritualism, in the main an American institution, became during the later years a centre of fervid interest to the one and an irritant to the other. One turns gladly from that episode to their noble and helpful friendship for a magnificent old dying lion, with whom, as every one else discovered, it was ill to play—Walter Savage Landor. Here it was [the] wife who looked on with critical though kindly sarcasm at what she thought her husband's generous excess of confidence. Of all these intimacies and relationships, however, the poetry of these years discloses hardly a glimpse. His actual dealings with men and women called out all his genial energies of heart and brain, but—with one momentous exception—they did not touch his imagination.

III.

Almost as faint as these echoes of personal friendship are those of the absorbing public interest of these years, the long agony, fitfully relieved by spells of desperate and untimely hope, of the Italian struggle for liberty. The Brownings arrived in Florence during the lull which preceded the great outbreak of 1848. From the historic "windows of Casa Guidi" they looked forth upon the gentle futilities of the Tuscan revolution, the nine days' fight for Milan, the heroic adventure of Savoy, and the apparently final collapse of all these high endeavours on the field of Novara. Ten years of petty despotism on the one side, of "a unanimity of despair" on the other, followed; and then the monotonous tragedy seemed to break suddenly into romance, as the Emperor, "deep and cold," marched his armies over the Alps for the Deliverance of Italy.

Of all this the Brownings were deeply moved spectators. Browning shared his wife's sympathy with the [Italians] and her abhorrence of Austria, and it is not likely that he uttered either sentiment with less vivacity and emphasis, though much less of his talk is on record. "'How long, O Lord, how long!' Robert kept saying." But he had not her passionate admiration for France, still less her faith in the President-Emperor. His less lyric temperament did not so readily harbour unqualified emotion as hers. His judgment of character was cooler, and with all his proverbial readiness as a poet to provide men of equivocal conduct with hypothetical backgrounds of lofty or blameless motive, he was in practice as exempt from amiable illusions as he was from narrow spite. Himself the most exact and precise in his dealings with the world, he could pardon the excesses and irregularities of a great nature; but sordid self-seeking under the mask of high ideals revolted him. He laughed at the boyish freaks of Lander's magnificent old age, which irritated even his large-hearted wife; but he could not forgive Louis Napoleon the coup d'état, and when the liberation of Lombardy was followed by the annexation of Savoy and Nice, the Emperor's devoted defender had to listen, without the power of effective retort, to his biting summary of the situation: "It was a great action; but he has taken eighteenpence for it, which is a pity."

A dozen years later Louis Napoleon's equivocal character and career were to be subjected by Browning to a still more equivocal exposition. But this sordid [trait] brought him within a category of "soul" upon which Browning did not yet, in these glowing years, readily lavish his art. A poem upon Napoleon, which had occupied him much during the winter of 1859 (cf. note, p. [167] below), was abandoned. "Blougram's" splendid and genial duplicity already attracted him, but the analysis of the meretricious figure of Napoleon became a congenial problem only to that later Browning of the 'Sixties and 'Seventies who was to explore the shady souls of a Guido, a Miranda, and a Sludge. On the other hand, deeply as he felt the sorrows of Italy, it was no part of his poetic mission to sing them. The voice of a great community wakened no lyric note in him, nor did his anger on its behalf break into dithyrambs. Nationality was not an effectual motive with him. He felt as keenly as his wife, or as Shelley; but his feeling broke out in fitful allusion or sardonic jest in the De Gustibus or the Old Pictures—not in a Casa Guidi Windows, or Songs before Congress, an Ode to Naples, or a Hellas. An "Ode" containing, by his own account, fierce things about England, he destroyed after Villafranca. It is only in subtle and original variations that we faintly recognise the broad simple theme of Italy's struggle for deliverance. The Patriot and Instans Tyrannus both have a kind of nexus with the place and time; but the one is a caustic satire on popular fickleness and the other a sardonically humorous travesty of persecution. Italy is mentioned in neither. [Both] are far removed from the vivid and sympathetic reflection of the national struggle which thrills us in The Italian in England and the third scene of Pippa Passes. This "tyrant" has nothing to do with the Austrian whom Luigi was so eager to assassinate, or any other: whatever in him belongs to history has been permeated through and through with the poet's derisive irony; he is despotism stripped of the passionate conviction which may lend it weight and political significance, reduced to a kind of sport, like the chase of a butterfly, and contemplating its own fantastic tricks with subdued amusement.

IV.

The great political drama enacted in Italy during the Brownings' residence there, thus scarcely stirred the deeper currents of Browning's imagination, any more than, for all the vivid and passionate eloquence she poured forth in its name, it really touched the genius of his wife. The spell of Italian scenery was less easily evaded than the abstractions of politics by a poet of his keen sensibility to light and colour. And the years of his Italian sojourn certainly left palpable traces, not only, as is obvious, upon the landscape background which glows behind his human figures, but on his way of conceiving and rendering the whole relation between Nature and Man. They did not, indeed, make him in any sense a Nature poet. In [that] very song of delight in "Italy, my Italy," which tells how the things he best loves in the world are

"a castle precipice-encurled
In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine,"

or some old palazzo, with a pointed cypress to guard it, by the opaque blue breadth of summer sea, the joy in mountain and sea is subtly reinforced at every point by the play of human interest; there are frescoes on the crumbling walls, and a barefooted girl tumbles melons on the pavement with news that the king has been shot at; art and politics asserting their place beside Nature in the heart of Italy's "old lover." And in the actual life of the Brownings "Nature" had to be content, as a rule, with the humbler share. Their chosen abode was not a castle in the Apennines or an old crumbling house by the southern sea, but an apartment commanding the crowded streets of Florence; and their principal absences from it were spent in Rome, in London, or in the yet more congenial "blaze of Paris." They delighted certainly to escape into the forest uplands. "Robert and I go out and lose ourselves in the woods and mountains, and sit by the waterfalls on the starry and moonlit nights," she wrote from their high perch above Lucca in 1849; but their adventures in this kind were on the whole like the noon-disport of the amphibian swimmer in Fifine,—they always admitted of an easy retreat to the terra firma of civilisation,—

"Land the solid and safe
To welcome again (confess!)
When, high and dry, we chafe
The body, and don the dress."

The Nature Browning knew and loved was well within sight of humanity, and it was commonly brought nearer by some intrusive vestiges of man's work; the crescent moon drifting in the purple twilight, or "lamping" between the cypresses, is seen over Fiesole or Samminiato; the "Alpine gorge" above Lucca has its ruined chapel and its mill; the Roman Campagna has its tombs—"Rome's ghost since her decease"; the Etrurian hill—fastnesses have their crowning cities "crowded with culture." He had always had an alert eye for the elements of human suggestion in landscape. But his rendering of landscape before the Italian period was habitually that of a brilliant, graphic, but not deeply interested artist, wielding an incisive pencil and an opulent brush, fastening upon every bit of individual detail, and sometimes, as in the admirable Englishman in Italy, recalling Wordsworth's indignant reproof of the great fellow-artist—Scott—who "made an inventory of Nature's charms." This hard objective brilliance does not altogether disappear from the work of his Italian period. But it tends to give way to a strangely subtle interpenetration of the visible scene with the passion of the seeing soul. Nature is not more alive, but her life thrills and palpitates in subtler relation with the life of man. The author of Men and Women is a greater poet [of] Nature than the author of the Lyrics and Romances, because he is, also, a greater poet of "Soul"; for his larger command of soul-life embraces just those moods of spiritual passion which beget the irradiated and transfigured Nature for which, since Wordsworth, poetry has continually striven to find expression. Browning's subtler feeling for Nature sprang from his profounder insight into love. Love was his way of approach, as it was eminently not Wordsworth's, to the transfigured Nature which Wordsworth first disclosed. It is habitually lovers who have these visions,—all that was mystical in Browning's mind attaching itself, in fact, in some way to his ideas of love. To the Two in the Campagna its primeval silence grows instinct with passion, and its peace with joy,—the joy of illimitable space and freedom, alluring yet mocking the finite heart that yearns. To the lovers of the Alpine gorge the old woods, heaped and dim, that hung over their troth-plighting, mysteriously drew them together; the moment that broke down the bar between soul and soul also breaking down, as it were, the bar between man and nature:

"The forests had done it; there they stood;
We caught for a moment the powers at play:
They had mingled us so, for once and good,
Their work was done, we might go or stay,
They relapsed to their ancient mood."

Such "moments" were, in fact, for Browning as well as for his lovers, rare and fitful exceptions to the general [nonchalance] of Nature towards human affairs. The powers did good, as they did evil, "at play"; intervening with a kind of cynical or ironical detachment (like Jaques plighting Touchstone and Audrey) in an alien affair of hearts. A certain eerie playfulness is indeed a recurring trait in Browning's highly individual feeling about Nature; the uncanny playfulness of a wild creature of boundless might only half intelligible to man, which man contemplates with mingled joy, wonder, and fear. Joy, when the brown old Earth wears her good gigantic smile, on an autumn morning; wonder, when he watches the "miracles wrought in play" in the teeming life of the Campagna; fear, when, on a hot August midnight, Earth tosses stormily on her couch. And all these notes of feelings are struck, with an intensity and a boldness of invention which make it unique among his writings, in the great romantic legend of Childe Roland. What the Ancient Mariner is in the poetry of the mysterious terrors and splendours of the sea, that Childe Roland is in the poetry of bodeful horror, of haunted desolation, of waste and plague, ragged distortion, and rotting ugliness in landscape. The Childe, like the Mariner, advances through an atmosphere and scenery of steadily gathering menace; the "starved ignoble" Nature, "peevish and dejected" among her scrub of thistle and dock, grows malignant; to the barren waste succeed the spiteful little river with its drenched despairing willows, the blood-trampled mire and wrecked torture-engine, the poisonous [herbage] and palsied oak, and finally the mountains, ignoble as the plain—"mere ugly heights and heaps," ranged round the deadly den of the Dark Tower. But Browning's horror-world differs from Coleridge's in the pervading sense that the powers which control its issues are "at play." The catastrophe is not the less tragic for that; but the heroic knight is not a culprit who has provoked the vengeance of his pursuers, but a quarry whose course they follow with grim half-suppressed laughter as he speeds into the trap. The hoary cripple cannot hide his malicious glee, the "stiff blind horse" is as grotesque as he is woeful, the dreary day itself, as it sinks, shoots one grim red leer at the doomed knight as he sets forth; in the penury and inertness of the wasted plain he sees "grimace"; the mountains fight like bulls or doze like dotards; and the Dark Tower itself is "round and squat," built of brown stone, a mere anticlimax to romance; while round it lie the sportsmen assembled to see the end—

"The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay
Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay."

V.

But the scenery of Italy, with all its appeals of picturesque outline and glowing colour, interested Browning less than its painting, sculpture, and music. "Nature I loved, and after Nature, Art," Landor declared in one of his stately epitaphs on himself; Browning [would], in this sense of the terms at least, have inverted their order. Casa Guidi windows commanded a view, not only of revolutionary throngs, but of the façade of the Pitti—a fact of at least equal significance. From the days of his boyish pilgrimages to the Dulwich Gallery across the Camberwell meadows, he had been an eager student and critic of painting; curious, too, if not yet expert in all the processes and technicalities of the studio. He judged pictures with the eye of a skilful draughtsman; and two rapid journeys had given him some knowledge of the Italian galleries. Continuous residence among the chief glories of the brush and chisel did not merely multiply artistic incitement and appeal; it brought the whole world of art into more vital touch with his imaginative activity. It would be hard to say that there is any definite change in his view of art, but its problems grow more alluring to him, and its images more readily waylay and capture his passing thought. The artist as such becomes a more dominant figure in his hierarchy of spiritual workers; while Browning himself betrays a new self-consciousness of his own function as an artist in verse; conceiving, for instance, his consummate address to his wife as an artist's way of solving a perplexity which only an artist could feel, that of finding unique expression for the unique love.

"He who works in fresco, steals a hair-brush,
Curbs the liberal hand, subservient proudly,
Cramps his spirit, crowds its all in little,
Makes a strange art of an art familiar,
Fills his lady's missal-marge with flowerets;
He who blows thro' bronze may breathe thro' silver,
Fitly serenade a slumbrous princess;
He who writes may write for once, as I do."

Browning is distinguished among the poets to whom art meant much by the prominence with him of the specifically artist's point of view. He cared for pictures, or for music, certainly, as clues to the interpretation of human life, hints of "the absolute truth of things" which the sensible world veils and the senses miss. But he cared for them also, and yet more, as expressions of the artist's own "love of loving, rage of knowing, seeing, feeling" that absolute truth. And he cared for them also and not less, without regard to anything they expressed, as simple outflows of vitality, however grotesque or capricious. His own eye and ear continually provoked his hand to artistic experiments and activities. During the last years in Italy his passion for modelling even threatened to divert him from poetry; and his wife playfully lamented that the "poor lost soul" produced only casts, which he broke on completion, and no more Men and Women. And his own taste in art drew him, notoriously, to work in which the striving hand was palpable,—whether it was a triumphant tour de force like Cellini's Perseus, in the Loggia—their daily banquet in the early days at Florence; or the half-articulate utterances of "the Tuscan's early art," like those "Pre-Giotto pictures" which [surrounded] them in the salon of Casa Guidi, "quieting" them if they were over busy, as Mrs Browning beautifully says,[32] more perhaps in her own spirit than in her husband's.

[32] Letters of E.B.B., ii. 199.

Almost all Browning's finest poems of painting belong to these Italian years, and were enshrined in Men and Women. They all illustrate more or less his characteristic preoccupation with the artist's point of view, and also, what is new, the point of view of particular and historical artists,—a Guercino, an Andrea del Sarto, a Giotto, a Lippo Lippi. Even where he seems to write under the peculiar spell of his wife, as in the Guardian Angel, this trait asserts itself. They had spent three glowing August days of 1848 at Fano, and thrice visited the painting by Guercino there,—"to drink its beauty to our soul's content." Mrs Browning wrote of the "divine" picture. Browning entered, with a sympathy perhaps the more intimate that his own "angel" was with him, and the memory of an old friend peculiarly near, into sympathy with the guardian angel; but with one of his abrupt turns he passes into the world of the studio, telling us how he has written for the sake of "dear Guercino's fame," because he "did not work thus earnestly at all times, and has endured some wrong." With all this, however, the Guardian Angel is one of the few pieces left by Browning which do not instantly discover themselves as his. His typical children are well-springs of spiritual influence, [scattering] the aerial dew of quickening song upon a withered world, or taking God's ear with their "little human praise." The spirituality of this child is of a different temper,—the submissive "lamblike" temper which is fulfilled in quiescence and disturbed by thought.

What is here a mere flash of good-natured championship becomes in the great monologue of Andrea del Sarto an illuminating compassion. Compassion, be it noted, far less for the husband of an unfaithful wife than for the great painter whose genius was tethered to a soulless mate. The situation appealed profoundly to Browning, and Andrea's monologue is one of his most consummate pieces of dramatic characterisation. It is a study of spiritual paralysis, achieved without the least resort to the rhetorical conventions which permit poetry to express men's silence with speech and their apathy with song. Tennyson's Lotos-eaters chant their world-weariness in choral strains of almost too magnificent afflatus to be dramatically proper on the lips of spirits so resigned. Andrea's spiritual lotus-eating has paralysed the nerve of passion in him, and made him impotent to utter the lyrical cry which his fate seems to crave. He is half "incapable of his own distress"; his strongest emotions are a flitting hope or a momentary pang, quickly dissolved into the ground-tone of mournful yet serene contemplation, which seems to float ghostlike in the void between grief and joy. Reproach turns to [grateful] acquiescence on his lips; the sting of blighted genius is instantly annulled by the momentary enchantment of her smile, whose worth he knows too well and remembers too soon:—

"And you smile indeed!
This hour has been an hour! Another smile?
If you would sit thus by me every night
I should work better, do you comprehend?
I mean that I should earn more, give you more."

The tragedy is for us, not for him: he regrets little, and would change still less. The "silver-grey" lights of dreamy autumn eve were never with more delicate insight rendered in terms of soul.

Suddenly these autumnal half-tones give way to the flash of torches in the fragrant darkness of an Italian night. There is a scurry of feet along a dark alley, a scuffle at the end, and the genial rotundity of Brother Lippo Lippi's face, impudent, brilliant, insuppressible, leers into the torchlight. Fra Lippo Lippi is not less true and vivacious than the Andrea, if less striking as an example of Browning's dramatic power. Sarto is a great poetic creation; Browning's own robust temperament provided hardly any aid in delineating the emaciated soul whose gifts had thinned down to a morbid perfection of technique. But this vigorous human creature, with the teeming brain, and the realist eye, and the incorrigible ineptitude for the restraints of an insincere clerical or other idealism, was a being to which Browning's heart went out; [and] he even makes him the mouthpiece of literary ideas, which his own portrait as here drawn aptly exemplifies. There is not much "soul" in Lippo, but he has the hearty grasp of common things, of the world in its business and its labour and its sport and its joys, which "edifies" men more than artificial idealities designed expressly to "beat nature." He "lends his mind out" and finds the answering mind in other men instead of imposing one from without:—

"This world's no blot for us,
Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good:
To find its meaning is my meat and drink."

"Ay, but," objects the Prior, "you do not instigate to prayer!" And it is the prior and his system which for Lippi stand in the place of Andrea's soulless wife. Lucrezia's illusive beauty lured his soul to its doom; and Lippo, forced, as a child of eight, to renounce the world and put on the cassock he habitually disgraced, triumphantly cast off the incubus of a sham spirituality which only tended to obscure what was most spiritual in himself. He was fortunate in the poet who has drawn his portrait so superbly in his sitter's own style.

These two monologues belong to the most finished achievements of Browning. But we should miss much of the peculiar quality of his mind, as well as a vivid glimpse into the hope-and-fear-laden atmosphere of Tuscany in the early 'Fifties, if we had not that quaint heterogeneous causerie called Old Pictures in Florence. There is passion in its grotesqueness and [method] in its incoherence; for the old painters, whose apologies he is ostensibly writing, with their imperfect achievement and their insuppressible idealism, sounded a congenial note to men whose eyes were bent incessantly upon the horizon waiting for the invisible to come into play, and Florence looked for her completion as Giotto's unfinished campanile for its spire.

If Italy deepened Browning's hold upon the problems of painting, it witnessed the beginnings of his equally characteristic achievement in the kindred poetry of music. Not that his Italian life can have brought any notable access of musical impressions to a man who had grown up within easy reach of London concerts and operas. But England was a land in which music was performed; Italy was a land in which it was made. Verdi's "worst opera" could be heard in many places; but in Florence the knowing spectator might see Verdi himself, at its close,

"Look through all the roaring and the wreaths
Where sits Rossini patient in his stall."

Italian music, with its facile melody and its relative poverty of ideas, could not find so full a response in Browning's nature as Italian painting. It had had its own gracious and tender youth; and Palestrina, whom he contrasts with the mountainous fuguists of "Saxe-Gotha" and elsewhere, probably had for him the same kind of charm as the early painters of Florence. Out of that "infancy," however, there had arisen no "titanically infantine" Michelangelo, but a race of accomplished [petits maîtres], whose characteristic achievement was the opera of the rococo age. A Goldsmith or a Sterne can make the light songs of their contemporaries eloquent even to us of gracious amenities and cultivated charm; but Browning, with the eternal April in his heart and brain, heard in the stately measures it danced to, only the eloquence of a dirge, penetrated with the sense of the mortality of such joy as theirs. Byron had sung gaily of the gaieties of Venice; but the vivacious swing of Beppo was less to Browning's mind than the "cold music" of Baldassare Galuppi, who made his world dance to the strains of its own requiem, and fall upon dreamy suggestions of decay in the very climax of the feast:—

"What? Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished,
sigh on sigh,
Told them something? Those suspensions, those solutions
—'Must we die?'
Those commiserating sevenths—"Life might last! We can
but try!"

The musician himself has no such illusions; but his music is only a more bitter echo:—

"Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what
Venice earned:
The soul, doubtless, is immortal—where a soul can be
discerned."

And so the poet, in the self-consciousness of his immense vitality, sweeps into the limbo of oblivion these dusty débris of the past, with no nearer approach to the romantic regret of a Malory for the glories of [old] time or to Villon's awestruck contemplation of the mysterious evanishment of storied beauty, than the half-contemptuous echo—

"'Dust and ashes!' So you creak it, and I want the heart
to scold.
Dear dead women, with such hair too—what's become of
all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and
grown old."

In the other music-poem of the Italian time it is not difficult to detect a kindred mood beneath the half-disguise of rollicking rhymes and whimsical comparisons. Once more Browning seems preoccupied with that in music which lends expression to a soulless animation, a futile and aimless vivacity. Only here it is the vivacity of the schools, not of the ballroom. Yet some lines seem a very echo of that hollow joyless mirth, for ever revolving on itself:—

"Est fuga, volvitur rota;
On we drift: where looms the dim port?"

The intertwining and conflicting melodies of the fugue echo the impotent strife of jangling tongues, "affirming, denying, holding, risposting, subjoining,"—the shuttle play of comment and gloze shrouding the light of nature and truth:—

"Over our heads truth and nature—
Still our life's zigzags and dodges,
Ins and outs, weaving a new legislature—
God's gold just shining its last where that lodges,
Palled beneath man's usurpature."

But Browning was at heart too alive to the charm of this shuttle-play, of these zigzags and dodges,—of zigzags and dodges of every kind,—not to feel the irony of the attack upon this "stringing of Nature through cobwebs"; when the organist breaks out, as the fugue's intricacy grows, "But where's music, the dickens?" we hear Browning mocking the indignant inquiries of similar purport so often raised by his readers. Master Hugues could only have been written by one who, with a childlike purity of vision for truth and nature, for the shining of "God's gold" and the glimpses of the "earnest eye of heaven," had also a keen perception and instinctive delight in every filament of the web of human "legislature."

This double aspect of Browning's poetic nature is vividly reflected in the memorable essay on Shelley which he wrote at Paris in 1851, as an introduction to a series of letters since shown to have been forged. The essay—unfortunately not included in his Works—is a document of first-rate importance for the mind of Browning in the midst of his greatest time; it is also by far the finest appreciation of Shelley which had yet appeared. He saw in Shelley one who, visionary and subjective as he was, had solved the problem which confronts every idealist who seeks to grasp the visible world in its concrete actuality. To Browning himself that problem presented itself in a form which tasked far more severely the resources of poetic imagination, in proportion as actuality bodied itself forth to his alert [senses] in more despotic grossness and strength. Shelley is commonly thought to have evaded this task altogether,—building his dream-world of cloud and cavern loveliness remote from anything we know. It is Browning, the most "actual" of poets, who insisted, half a century ago, on the "practicality" of Shelley,—insisted, as it is even now not superfluous to insist, on the fearless and direct energy with which he strove to root his intuitions in experience. "His noblest and predominating characteristic," he urges, to quote these significant words once more, "is his simultaneous perception of Power and Love in the absolute, and of Beauty and Good in the concrete, while he throws, from his poet's station between both, swifter, subtler, and more numerous films for the connection of each with each than have been thrown by any modern artificer of whom I have knowledge; proving how, as he says—

"'The spirit of the worm beneath the sod
In love and worship blends itself with God.'"

Browning has nowhere else expounded so fully his ideas about the aims of his own art. It lay in the peculiar "dramatic" quality of his mind to express himself freely only in situations not his own. Hence, while he does not altogether avoid the poet as a character, his poets are drawn with a curious externality and detachment. It is in his musicians, his painters, his grammarians, that the heart and passion of Browning the poet really live. He is the poet of musicians and of painters, the poet of lawyers and physicians and Rabbis, [and] of scores of callings which never had a poet before; but he is not the poets' poet. In the Transcendentalism, however, after tilting with gay irony at the fault of over-much argument in poetry, which the world ascribed to his own, he fixes in a splendid image the magic which it fitfully yet consummately illustrates. The reading public which entertained any opinion about him at all was inclined to take him for another Boehme, "with a tougher book and subtler meanings of what roses say." A few knew that they had to deal, not less, with a "stout Mage like him of Halberstadt," who

"with a 'look you' vents a brace of rhymes,
And in there breaks the sudden rose herself,
Over us, under, round us every side."

The portrait of the poet of Valladolid, on the other hand (How it Strikes a Contemporary), is not so much a study of a poet as of popular misconception and obtuseness. A grotesquely idle legend of the habits of the "Corregidor" flourishes among the good folks of Valladolid; the speaker himself, who desires to do him justice, is a plain, shrewd, but unimaginative observer ("I never wrote a line of verse, did you?"), and makes us acquainted with everything but the inner nature of the man. We see the corregidor in the streets, in his chamber, at his frugal supper and "decent cribbage" with his maid, but never at his verse. We see the alert objective eye of this man with the "scrutinizing hat," who

"stood and watched the cobbler at his trade, ...
If any beat a horse, you felt he saw,
If any cursed a woman, he took note,"—

and all this, for Browning, went to the making of the poet, but we get no inkling of the process itself. Browning had, in his obscure as in his famous days, peculiar opportunities of measuring the perversities of popular repute. Later on, in the heyday of his renown, he chaffed its critical dispensers in his most uproarious vein in Pacchiarotto. The Popularity stanzas present us with a theory of it conveyed in that familiar manner of mingled poetry and grotesqueness which was one of the obstacles to his own.

There is, however, among these fifty men and women one true and sublime poet,—the dying "Grammarian," who applies the alchemy of a lofty imagination to the dry business of verbal erudition.

"He said, 'What's time? Leave Now for dogs and apes!
Man has Forever.'"

This is one of the half-dozen lyrics which enshrine in noble and absolutely individual form the central core of Browning's passion and thought. Even the verse, with its sequence of smooth-flowing iambics broken by the leap of the dactyl, and the difficult double rhyme, sustains the mood of victorious but not lightly won serenity of soul—"too full for sound and foam." It is, among songs over the dead, what Rabbi ben Ezra and Prospice are among the songs which face and grapple with death; the fittest requiem to follow such deaths as [those.] Like Ben Ezra, the Grammarian "trusts death," and stakes his life on the trust:—

"He ventured neck or nothing—heaven's success
Found, or earth's failure:
'Wilt thou trust death or not?' He answered, 'Yes:
Hence with life's pale lure!'"

To ordinary eyes he spends his days grovelling among the dust and dregs of erudition; but it is the grovelling of a builder at work upon a fabric so colossally planned that life is fitly spent in laying the foundations. He was made in the large mould of the gods,—born with "thy face and throat, Lyric Apollo,"—and the disease which crippled and silenced him in middle life could only alter the tasks on which he wreaked his mind. And now that he is dead, he passes, as by right, to the fellowship of the universe—of the sublime things of nature.

"Here—here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form,
Lightnings are loosened,
Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm,
Peace let the dew send!
Lofty designs must close in like effects:
Loftily lying,
Leave him—still loftier than the world suspects,
Living and dying."

VI.

The Grammarian's Funeral achieves, in the terms and with the resources of Browning's art, the problem of which he saw the consummate master in Shelley,—that [of] throwing "films" for the connexion of Power and Love in the abstract with Beauty and Good in the concrete, and finding a link between the lowliest service or worship and the spirit of God. Such a conception of a poet's crowning glory implied a peculiarly close relation in Browning's view between poetry and religion, and in particular with the religion which, above all others, glorified the lowly. Here lay, in short, the supreme worth for him of the Christian idea. "The revelation of God in Christ" was for him the consummate example of that union of divine love with the world—"through all the web of Being blindly wove"—which Shelley had contemplated in the radiant glow of his poetry; accepted by the reason, as he wrote a few years later, it solved "all problems in the earth and out of it." To that solution Shelley seemed to Browning to be on the way, and his incomplete grasp of it appealed to him more powerfully than did the elaborate dogmatisms professedly based upon it. Shelley had mistaken "Churchdom" for Christianity; but he was on the way, Browning was convinced, to become a Christian himself. "I shall say what I think,—had Shelley lived he would have finally ranged himself with the Christians."

This emphatic declaration is of great importance for Browning's intellectual history. He may have overlooked the immense barriers which must have always divided Shelley from the Christian world of his time; he may have overlooked also that the Christian thought [of] our time has in some important points "ranged itself with" Shelley; so that the Christianity which he might finally have adopted would have been sufficiently unlike that which he assailed. But it is clear that for Browning himself the essence of Christianity lay at this time in something not very remote from what he revered as the essence of Shelleyism—a corollary, as it were, ultimately implicit in his thought.

It was thus a deeper poetical rather than a religious or doctrinal interest which drew Browning in these Italian years, again and again to seek his revealing experiences of souls amid the eddies and convulsions, the exultations and the agonies, brought into the world by the amazing "revelation of God in Christ." It is true that we nowhere approach this focus of interest, that we have no glimpse, through Browning's art, how that "revelation" shaped itself in the first disciples, far less of Christ himself. But that was at no time Browning's way of bringing to expression what he deeply cared for. He would not trumpet forth truth in his own person, or blazon it through the lips of the highest recognised authority; he let it struggle up through the baffling density, or glimmer through the conflicting persuasions of alien minds, and break out in cries of angry wonder or involuntary recognition. And nowhere is this method carried further than in the Christian poems of the Italian time. The supreme musicians and painters he avoids, but Fra Lippo Lippi [and] Master Hugues belong at least to the crafts whose secrets they expound; while the Christian idea is set in a borrowed light caught from the souls of men outside the Christian world—an Arab physician, a Greek poet, a Jewish shepherd or rabbi, or from Christians yet farther from the centre than these, like Blougram and the Abbe Deodaet. In method as in conception these pieces are among the most Browningesque things that Browning ever wrote. It is clear, however, that while his way of handling these topics is absolutely his own, his peculiar concern with them is new. The Karshish, the Clean, and the Blougram have no prototype or parallel among the poems of Browning's previous periods. In the early Dramatic Lyrics and Romances, and in the plays, there is exquisite rendering of religion, and also of irreligion; but the religion is just the simple faith of Pippa or of Theocrite that "God's in his world"; and the irreligion is the Humanist paganism of St Praxed's, not so much hostile to Christianity as unconscious of it. No single poem written before 1850 shows that acute interest in the problems of Christian faith which constantly emerges in the work of this and the following years. Saul, which might be regarded as signally refuting this view, strikingly confirms it; the David of the first nine sections, which alone were produced in 1845, being the naïve, devout child, brother of Pippa and of Theocrite; the evolution of this harping shepherd-boy into the illuminated prophet of Christ [was] the splendid achievement of the later years.[33] And to all this more acutely Christian work the Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day (1850) served as a significant prologue.

[33] It is, indeed, clear, as has been seen, from Browning's correspondence that a sequel of this kind was intended when the first nine sections were published. The traditional legend of David would in any case suggest so much. That the intention was not then executed is just the significant fact.

There can be little doubt that the devout Christian faith of his wife was principally concerned in this new direction of his poetry. Yet we may easily overstate both the nature of her influence and its extent. She, as little as he, was a dogmatic Christian; both refused to put on, in her phrase, "any of the liveries of the sects."[34] "The truth, as God sees it, must be something so different from these opinions about truth.... I believe in what is divine and floats at highest, in all these different theologies,—and because the really Divine draws together souls, and tends so to a unity, could pray anywhere and with all sorts of worshippers, from the Sistine chapel to Mr Fox's, those kneeling and those standing."[35] Yet she demurs, a little farther on in the same letter, to both these extremes. "The Unitarians seem to me to throw over what is most beautiful in the Christian Doctrine; but the Formulists, on the other side, stir up a dust, in which it appears excusable not to see." To which he replies (Aug. 17): "Dearest, I know your very meaning, in what you said of religion, [and] responded to it with my whole soul—what you express now is for us both, ... those are my own feelings, my convictions beside—instinct confirmed by reason."

[34] E.B.B. to R.B., 15th Aug. 1846.
[35] Ib.

These words of Browning's seem to furnish the clue to the relation between their minds in this matter. Their intercourse disturbed no conviction on either side, for their convictions were identical. But her intense personal devoutness undoubtedly quickened what was personal in his belief, drew it into an atmosphere of keener and more emotional consciousness, and in particular gave to that "revelation of God in Christ" which they both regarded as what was "most beautiful in the Christian doctrine," a more vital hold upon his intellectual and imaginative life. In this sense, but only in this sense, his fervid words to her (February 1846)—"I mean to ... let my mind get used to its new medium of sight, seeing all things as it does through you; and then let all I have done be the prelude and the real work begin"—were not unfulfilled. No deep hiatus, such as this phrase suggests, divides the later, as a whole, from the earlier work: the "dramatic" method, which was among the elements of his art most foreign to her lyric nature, established itself more and more firmly in his practice. But the letters of 1845-46 show that her example was stimulating him to attempt a more direct and personal utterance in poetry, and while he did not succeed, or succeeded only "once and for one only," in evading his dramatic bias, he certainly [succeeded] in making the dramatic form more eloquently expressive of his personal faith.

This was peculiarly the case in the remarkable Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day (1850), the first-fruits of his married life, and the most instinct of all his poems with the mingled literary and religious influences which it brought. The influence of the ardent singer, which impelled him to fuller self-expression, here concurred with that of the devout but undogmatic Christian, which drew the problem of Christianity nearer to the focus of his imagination and his thought. There is much throughout which suggests that Browning was deliberately putting off the habits and usages of his art, and reaching out this way and that towards untried sources and avenues of expression. He lays hold for the first time of the machinery of supernatural vision. Nothing that he had yet done approached in boldness these Christmas and Easter apparitions of the Lord of Love. They break in, unheralded, a startling but splendid anomaly, upon his human and actual world. And the really notable thing is that never had he drawn human actuality with so remorseless and even brutal fidelity as just here. He seeks no legendary scene and atmosphere like that of Theocrite's Rome, in which the angels who come and go, and God who enjoys his "little human praise," would be missed if they were not there; but opens the visions of the Empyrean upon modern Camberwell. The pages in which Browning might seem, for once, to vie with the author of the Apocalypse [are] interleaved with others in which, for once, he seems to vie with Balzac or Zola. Of course this is intensely characteristic of Browning. The quickened spiritual pulse which these poems betoken betrays itself just in his more daringly assured embrace of the heights and the depths of the universe, as communicating and akin, prompting also that not less daring embrace of the extremes of expression,—sublime imagery and rollicking rhymes,—as equally genuine utterances of spiritual fervour,—

"When frothy spume and frequent sputter
Prove that the soul's depths boil in earnest."

These lines, and the great Shelleyan declaration that

"A loving worm within its clod
Were diviner than a loveless God,"

are the key to both poems, but peculiarly to the Christmas-Day, in which they occur. We need not in any wise identify Browning with the Christmas-Day visionary; but it is clear that what is "dramatic" in him exfoliates, as it were, from a root of character and thought which are altogether Browning's own. Browning is apparent in the vivacious critic and satirist of religious extravagances, standing a little aloof from all the constituted religions; but he is apparent also in the imaginative and sympathetic student of religion, who divines the informing spark of love in all sincere worship; and however far he may have been from putting forward the little conventicle with its ruins of humanity, [its] soul at struggle with insanity, as his own final choice, that choice symbolised in a picturesque half-humorous way his own profound preference for the spiritual good which is hardly won. He makes the speaker choose the "earthen vessel" in spite of its "taints of earth," because it brimmed with spiritual water; but in Browning himself there was something which relished the spiritual water the more because the earthen vessel was flawed.

Like Christmas-Eve, Easter-Day is a dramatic study,—profound convictions of the poet's own being projected as it were through forms of religious consciousness perceptibly more angular and dogmatically defined than his own. The main speaker is plainly not identical with the narrator of Christmas-Eve, who is incidentally referred to as "our friend." Their first beliefs may be much alike, but in the temper of their belief they differ widely. The speaker in Christmas-Eve is a genial if caustic observer, submitting with robust tolerance to the specks in the water which quenches his thirst; the speaker of Easter-Day is an anxious precisian, fearful of the contamination of earth, and hoping that he may "yet escape" the doom of too facile content. The problem of the one is, what to believe; the problem of the other, how to believe; and each is helped towards a solution by a vision of divine love. But the Easter-Day Vision conveys a sterner message than that of Christmas-Eve. Love now illuminates, not by enlarging sympathy and disclosing the hidden soul of good in [error], but by suppressing sympathies too diffusely and expansively bestowed. The Christmas Vision makes humanity seem more divine; the Easter Vision makes the divine seem less human. The hypersensitive moral nature of the Easter-Day speaker, on the other hand, sees his own criminal darkness of heart and mind before all else, and the divine visitation becomes a Last Judgment, with the fierce vindictive red of the Northern Lights replacing the mild glory of the lunar rainbows, and a stern and scornful cross-examination the silent swift convoy of the winged robe. This difference of temper is vividly expressed in the style. The rollicking rhymes, the "spume and sputter" of the fervent soul, give place to a manner of sustained seriousness and lyric beauty.

Yet the Easter-Day speaker probes deeper and raises more fundamental issues. When the form of Christian belief to be adopted has been settled, a certain class of believing minds, not the least estimable, will still remain restive. Browning of all men felt impatient of every nominal belief held as unassimilated material, not welded into the living substance of character; and he makes his Easter-Day visionary confound with withering irony the "faith" which seeks assurance in outward "evidence,"—

"'Tis found,
No doubt: as is your sort of mind,
So is your sort of search: you'll find
What you desire."

Still less mercy has he for the dogmatic voluptuary who [complacently] assumes the "all-stupendous tale" of Christianity to have been enacted

"to give our joys a zest,
And prove our sorrows for the best."

Upon these complacent materialisms and epicureanisms of the religious character falls the scorching splendour of the Easter Vision, with its ruthless condemnation of whatever is not glorified by Love, passing over into the uplifting counter—affirmation, indispensable to Browning's optimism, that—

"All thou dost enumerate
Of power and beauty in the world
The mightiness of Love was curled
Inextricably round about."

With all their nobility of feeling, and frequent splendour of description, these twin poems cannot claim a place in Browning's work at all corresponding to the seriousness with which he put them forward, and the imposing imaginative apparatus called in. The strong personal conviction which seems to have been striving for direct utterance, checked without perfectly mastering his dramatic instincts and habitudes, resulting in a beautiful but indecisive poetry which lacks both the frankness of a personal deliverance and the plasticity of a work of art. The speakers can neither be identified with the poet nor detached from him; they are neither his mouthpieces nor his creations. The daring supernaturalism seems to indicate that the old spell of Dante, so keenly felt in the Sordello days, had been [wrought] to new potency by the magic of the life in Dante's Florence, and the subtler magic of the love which he was presently to compare not obscurely to that of Dante for Beatrice.[36] The divine apparitions have the ironic hauteurs and sarcasms of Beatrice in the Paradise. Yet the comparison brings into glaring prominence the radical incoherence of Browning's presentment. In Dante's world all the wonders that he describes seem to be in place; but the Christmas and Easter Visions are felt as intrusive anachronisms in modern London, where the divinest influences are not those which become palpable in visions, but those which work through heart and brain.

[36] One Word More.

Browning probably felt this, for the Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day stands in this respect alone in his work. But the idea of Christ as the sign and symbol of the love which penetrates the universe lost none of its hold upon his imagination; and it inspired some of the greatest achievements of the Men and Women. It was under this impulse that he now, at some time during the early Italian years, completed the splendid torso of Saul. David's Vision of the Christ that is to be has as little apparent relation to the quiet pastoralism of the earlier stanzas as the Easter Vision to the common-sense reflections that preceded it. But while this Vision abruptly bursts upon him, David's is the final conquest of his own ardent intellect, under the impulse of a great human task which lifts it beyond its experience, and [calls] out all its powers. David is occupied with no speculative question, but with the practical problem of saving a ruined soul; and neither logical ingenuity nor divine suggestion, but the inherent spiritual significance of the situation, urges his thought along the lonely path of prophecy. The love for the old king, which prompts him to try all the hidden paths of his soul in quest of healing, becomes a lighted torch by which he tracks out the meaning of the world and the still unrevealed purposes of God; until the energy of thought culminates in vision, and the Christ stands full before his eyes. All that is supernatural in the Saul is viewed through the fervid atmosphere of David's soul. The magic of the wonderful Nocturne at the close, where he feels his way home through the appalled and serried gloom, is broken by no apparition; the whole earth is alive and awake around him, and thrills to the quickening inrush of the "new land"; but its light is the tingling emotion of the stars, and its voice the cry of the little brooks; and the thronging cohorts of angels and powers are unuttered and unseen.

Only less beautiful than Browning's pictures of spiritual childhood are his pictures of spiritual maturity and old age. The lyric simplicity, the naïve intensity which bear a David, a Pippa, a Pompilia without effort into the region of the highest spiritual vision, appealed less fully to his imagination than the more complex and embarrassed processes through which riper minds forge their way towards the completed insight of a Rabbi ben [Ezra]. In this sense, the great song of David has a counterpart in the subtle dramatic study of the Arab physician Karshish. He also is startled into discovery by a unique experience. But where David is lifted on and on by a continuous tide of illuminating thought, perfectly new and strange, but to which nothing in him opposes the semblance of resistance, Karshish feels only a mysterious attraction, which he hardly confesses, and which all the intellectual habits and convictions of a life given up to study and thought seem to gainsay. No touch of worldly motive belongs to either. The shepherd-boy is not more single-souled than this devoted "picker up of learning's crumbs," who makes nothing of perilous and toilsome journeys for the sake of his art, who is threatened by hungry wild beasts, stripped and beaten by robbers, arrested as a spy. At every step his quick scrutiny is rewarded by the discovery of some new drug, mineral, or herb,—"things of price"—"blue flowering borage, the Aleppo sort," or "Judaea's gum-tragacanth." But Karshish has much of the temper of Browning himself: these technicalities are the garb of a deep underlying mysticism. This man's flesh so admirably made by God is yet but the earthly prison for "that puff of vapour from his mouth, man's soul." The case of Lazarus, though at once, as a matter of course, referred to the recognised medical categories, yet strangely puzzles and arrests him, with a fascination that will not be put by. This abstracted docile man of perfect physical vigour, who heeds the approach of [the] Roman avenger as he would the passing of a woman with gourds by the way, and is yet no fool, who seems apathetic and yet loves the very brutes and the flowers of the field,—compels his scrutiny, as a phenomenon of soul, and it is with the eye of a psychological idealist rather than of a physician that he interprets him:—

"He holds on firmly to some thread of life— ...
Which runs across some vast distracting orb
Of glory on either side that meagre thread,
Which, conscious of, he must not enter yet—
The spiritual life around the earthly life:
The law of that is known to him as this,
His heart and brain move there, his feet stay here.
So is the man perplext with impulses
Sudden to start off crosswise, not straight on,
Proclaiming what is right and wrong across,
And not along, this black thread through the blaze—
'It should be' baulked by 'here it cannot be.'"

Lazarus stands where Paracelsus conceived that he himself stood: he "knows God's secret while he holds the thread of life"; he lives in the glare of absolute knowledge, an implicit criticism of the Paracelsian endeavour to let in upon men the searing splendour of the unclouded day. To Karshish, however, these very embarrassments—so unlike the knowing cleverness of the spiritual charlatan—make it credible that Lazarus is indeed no oriental Sludge, but one who has verily seen God. But then came the terrible crux,—the pretension, intolerable to Semitic monotheism, that God had been embodied in a man. The words scorch the paper as he writes, and, like Ferishtah, he will not repeat them. [Yet] he cannot escape the spell of the witness, and the strange thought clings tenaciously to him, defying all the evasive shifts of a trained mind, and suddenly overmastering him when his concern with it seems finally at an end—when his letter is finished, pardon asked, and farewell said—in that great outburst, startling and unforeseen yet not incredible:—

"The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think?
So, the All-Great were the All-Loving too,—
So, through the thunder comes a human voice
Saying, 'O heart I made, a heart beats here!'
Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself!"

That words like these, intensely Johannine in conception, should seem to start naturally from a mind which just before has shrunk in horror from the idea of an approximation between God and that which He fashioned, is an extraordinary tour de force of dramatic portraiture. Among the minor traits which contribute to it is one of a kind to which Browning rarely resorts. The "awe" which invests Lazarus is heightened by a mystic setting of landscape. The visionary scene of his first meeting with Karshish, though altogether Browningesque in detail, is Wordsworthian in its mysterious effect upon personality:—

"I crossed a ridge of short, sharp, broken hills
Like an old lion's cheek teeth. Out there came
A moon made like a face with certain spots
Multiform, manifold and menacing:
Then a wind rose behind me."

A less formidable problem is handled in the companion study of Cleon. The Greek mind fascinated Browning, though most of his renderings of it have the savour of a salt not gathered in Attica, and his choice of types shows a strong personal bias. From the heroic and majestic elder art of Greece he turns with pronounced preference to Euripides the human and the positive, with his facile and versatile intellect, his agile criticism, and his "warm tears." It is somewhat along these lines that he has conceived his Greek poet of the days of Karshish, confronted, like the Arab doctor, with the "new thing." As Karshish is at heart a spiritual idealist, for all his preoccupation with drugs and stones, so Cleon, a past-master of poetry and painting, is among the most positive and worldly-wise of men. He looks back over a life scored with literary triumphs, as Karshish over his crumbs of learning gathered at the cost of blows and obloquy. But while Karshish has the true scholar's dispassionate and self-effacing thirst for knowledge, Cleon measures his achievements with the insight of an epicurean artist. He gathers in luxuriously the incense of universal applause,—his epos inscribed on golden plates, his songs rising from every fishing-bark at nightfall,—and wistfully contrasts the vast range of delights which as an artist he imagines, with the limited pleasures which as a man he enjoys. The magnificent symmetry, the rounded completeness of his life, suffer a serious deduction here, and his Greek sense of harmony suffers offence as well as his human hunger for joy. He [is] a thorough realist, and finds no satisfaction in contemplating what he may not possess. Art itself suffers disparagement, as heightening this vain capacity of contemplation:—

"I know the joy of kingship: well, thou art king!"

With great ingenuity this Greek realism is made the stepping-stone to a conception of immortality as un-Greek as that of the Incarnation is un-Semitic. Karshish shrank intuitively from a conception which fascinated while it awed; to Cleon a future state in which joy and capability will be brought again to equality seems a most plausible supposition, which he only rejects with a sigh for lack of outer evidence:—

"Zeus has not yet revealed it; and alas,
He must have done so, were it possible!"

The little vignette in the opening lines finely symbolises the brilliant Greek decadence, as does the closing picture in Karshish the mystic dawn of the Earth. Here the portico, flooded with the glory of a sun about to set, profusely heaped with treasures of art; there the naked uplands of Palestine, and the moon rising over jagged hills in a wind-swept sky.

In was in such grave adagio notes as these that Browning chose to set forth the "intimations of immortality" in the meditative wisdom and humanity of heathendom. The after-fortunes of the Christian legend, on the other hand, and the naïve ferocities and fantasticalities of the medieval world provoked him rather to [scherzo],—audacious and inimitable scherzo, riotously grotesque on the surface, but with a grotesqueness so penetrated and informed by passion that it becomes sublime. Holy-Cross Day and The Heretic's Tragedy both culminate, like Karshish and Clean, in a glimpse of Christ. But here, instead of being approached through stately avenues of meditation, it is wrung from the grim tragedy of persecution and martyrdom. The Jews, packed like rats to hear the sermon, mutter under their breath the sublime song of Ben Ezra, one of the most poignant indictments of Christianity in the name of Christ ever conceived:—

"We withstood Christ then? Be mindful how
At least we withstand Barabbas now!
Was our outrage sore? But the worst we spared,
To have called these—Christians, had we dared!
Let defiance of them pay mistrust of Thee,
And Rome make amends for Calvary!"

And John of Molay, as he burns in Paris Square, cries upon "the Name he had cursed with all his life." The Tragedy stands alone in literature; Browning has written nothing more original. Its singularity springs mainly from a characteristic and wonderfully successful attempt to render several planes of emotion and animus through the same tale. The "singer" looks on at the burning, the very embodiment of the robust, savagely genial spectator, with a keen eye for all the sporting-points in the exhibition,—noting that the fagots are piled to the right height and are of the right quality—

"Good sappy bavins that kindle forthwith, ...
Larch-heart that chars to a chalk-white glow:"

and when the torch is clapt-to and he has "leapt back safe," poking jests and gibes at the victim. But through this distorting medium we see the soul of John himself, like a gleam-lit landscape through the whirl of a storm; a strange weird sinister thing, glimmering in a dubious light between the blasphemer we half see in him with the singer's eyes and the saint we half descry with our own. Of explicit pathos there is not a touch. Yet how subtly the inner pathos and the outward scorn are fused in the imagery of these last stanzas:—

"Ha, ha, John plucketh now at his rose
To rid himself of a sorrow at heart!
Lo,—petal on petal, fierce rays unclose;
Anther on anther, sharp spikes outstart;
And with blood for dew, the bosom boils;
And a gust of sulphur is all its smell;
And lo, he is horribly in the toils
Of a coal-black giant flower of hell!

So, as John called now, through the fire amain,
On the Name, he had cursed with, all his life—
To the Person, he bought and sold again—
For the Face, with his daily buffets rife—
Feature by feature It took its place:
And his voice, like a mad dog's choking bark,
At the steady whole of the Judge's face—
Died. Forth John's soul flared into the dark."

None of these dramatic studies of Christianity attracted so lively an interest as Bishop Blougram's Apology. It was "actual" beyond anything he had yet [done]; it portrayed under the thinnest of veils an illustrious Catholic prelate familiar in London society; it could be enjoyed with little or no feeling for poetry; and it was amazingly clever. Even Tennyson, his loyal friend but unwilling reader, excepted it, on the last ground, from his slighting judgment upon Men and Women at large. The figure of Blougram, no less than his discourse, was virtually new in Browning, and could have come from him at no earlier time. He is foreshadowed, no doubt, by a series of those accomplished mundane ecclesiastics whom Browning at all times drew with so keen a zest,—by Ogniben, the bishop in Pippa Passes, the bishop of St Praxed's. But mundane as he is, he bears the mark of that sense of the urgency of the Christian problem which since Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day had so largely and variously coloured Browning's work. It occurred to none of those worldly bishops to justify their worldliness,—it was far too deeply ingrained for that. But Blougram's brilliant defence, enormously disproportioned as it is to the insignificance of the attack, marks his tacit recognition of loftier ideals than he professes. Like Cleon, he bears involuntary witness to what he repudiates.

But there is much more in Blougram than this. The imposing personality of Wiseman contained much to attract and conciliate a poet like Browning, whose visionary idealism went along with so unaffected a relish for the world and the talents which succeed there. A great spiritual ruler, performing with congenial ease the [enormous] and varied functions of his office, and with intellectual resources, when they were discharged, to win distinction in scholarship, at chess, in society, appealed powerfully to Browning's congenital delight in all strong and vivid life. He was a great athlete, who had completely mastered his circumstances and shaped his life to his will. Opposed to a man of this varied and brilliant achievement, an ineffectual dilettante appeared a sorry creature enough; and Browning, far from taking his part and putting in his craven mouth the burning retorts which the reader in vain expects, makes him play helplessly with olive-stones while the great bishop rolls him out his mind, and then, as one cured and confuted, betake himself to the life of humbler practical activity and social service.

It is plain that the actual Blougram offered tempting points of contact with that strenuous ideal of life which he was later to preach through the lips of "Rabbi ben Ezra." Even what was most problematic in him, his apparently sincere profession of an outworn creed, suggested the difficult feat of a gymnast balancing on a narrow edge, or forcibly holding his unbelief in check,—

"Kept quiet like the snake 'neath Michael's foot,
Who stands calm just because he feels it writhe."

But Browning marks clearly the element both of self-deception and deliberate masquerade in Blougram's defence. He made him "say right things and call them by wrong names." The intellectual athlete in him went out to the intellectual athlete in the other, and rejoiced in [every] equation he seemed to establish. He played, and made Blougram play, upon the elusive resemblance between the calm of effortless mastery and that of hardly won control.

The rich and varied poetry reviewed in the last three sections occupies less than half of Men and Women, and leaves the second half of the title unexplained. In that richer emotional atmosphere which breathes from every line of his Italian work, the profound fulfilment of his spiritual needs which he found in his home was the most vital and potent element. His imaginative grasp of every kind of spiritual energy, of every "incident of soul," was deepened by his new but incessant and unqualified experience of love. His poetry focussed itself more persistently than ever about those creative energies akin to love, of which art in the fullest sense is the embodiment, and religion the recognition. It would have been strange if the special form of love-experience to which the quickening thrill was due had remained untouched by it. In fact, however, the title of the volume is significant as well as accurate; for Browning's poetry of the love between men and women may be said, save for a few simple though exquisite earlier notes, to begin with it.

VII.

The love-poetry of the Men and Women volumes, as originally published, was the most abundant and various, if not the most striking, part of its contents. It was almost entirely transferred, in the collected edition of [his] Poems issued in 1863, to other rubrics, to the Dramatic Lyrics, of which it now forms the great bulk, and to the Dramatic Romances. But of Browning's original "fifty men and women," nearly half were lovers or occupied with love. Such fertility was natural enough in the first years of a supremely happy marriage, crowning an early manhood in which love of any kind had, for better or worse, played hardly any part at all. Yet almost nothing in these beautiful and often brilliant lyrics is in any strict sense personal. The biographer who searches them for traits quivering with intimate experience searches all but in vain. Browning's own single and supreme passion touched no fountain of song, such as love sets flowing in most poets and in many who are not poets: even the memorable months of 1845-46 provoked no Sonnets "to the Portuguese." His personal story impresses itself upon his poetry only through the preoccupation which it induces with the love-stories of other people, mostly quite unlike his own. The white light of his own perfect union broke from that prismatic intellect of his in a poetry brilliant with almost every other hue. No English poet of his century, and few of any other, have made love seem so wonderful; but he habitually takes this wonder bruised and jostled in the grip of thwarting conditions. In his way of approaching love Browning strangely blends the mystic's exaltation with the psychologist's cool penetrating scrutiny of its accompanying phenomena, its favourable or impeding conditions. The keen analytic accent of Paracelsus mingles with the ecstatic unearthly [note] of Shelley. "Love is all" might have served as the text for the whole volume of Browning's love-poetry; but the text is wrought out with an amazingly acute vision for all the things which are not love. "Love triumphing over the world" might have been the motto for most of the love-poems in Men and Women; but some would have had to be assigned to the opposite rubric, "The world triumphing over love." Sometimes Love's triumph is, for Browning, the rapture of complete union, for which all outer things exist only by subduing themselves to its mood and taking its hue; sometimes it is the more ascetic and spiritual triumph of an unrequited lover in the lonely glory of his love.

The triumph of Browning's united lovers has often a superb Elizabethan note of defiance. Passion obliterates for them the past and throws a mystically hued veil over Nature. The gentle Romantic sentiments hardly touch the fresh springs of their emotion. They may meet and woo "among the ruins," as Coleridge met and wooed his Genevieve "beside the ruined tower"; but their song does not, like his, "suit well that ruin old and hoary," but, on the contrary, tramples with gay scorn upon the lingering memories of the ruined city,—a faded pageant yoked to its triumphal car.

"Oh heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns!
Earth's returns
For whole centuries of folly, noise, and sin!
Shut them in,
With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!
Love is best."

Another lover, in My Star, pours lyric disdain upon his friends for whose purblind common-sense vision the star which to him "dartled red and blue," now a bird, now a flower, was just—a star. More finely touched than either of these is By the Fireside. After One Word More, to which it is obviously akin, it is Browning's most perfect rendering of the luminous inner world, all-sufficing and self-contained, of a rapturous love. The outer world is here neither thrust aside nor fantastically varied; it is drawn into the inner world by taking its hue and becoming the confidant and executant of its will. A landscape so instinct with the hushed awe of expectation and with a mystic tenderness is hardly to be found elsewhere save in Christabel,—

"We two stood there with never a third,
But each by each, as each knew well:
The sights we saw and the sounds we heard,
The lights and the shades made up a spell,
Till the trouble grew and stirred.

. . . . . . . . . .

A moment after, and hands unseen
Were hanging the night around us fast;
But we knew that a bar was broken between
Life and life: we were mixed at last
In spite of the mortal screen.

The forests had done it; there they stood;
We caught for a moment the powers at play:
They had mingled us so, for once and good,
Their work was done—we might go or stay,
They relapsed to their ancient mood."

By the Fireside is otherwise memorable as portraying with whatever disguise the Italian home-life of the poet and his wife. The famous description of "the perfect wife" as she sat

"Musing by firelight, that great brow
And the spirit-small hand propping it,
Yonder, my heart knows how"—

remain among the most living portraitures of that exquisite but fragile form. Yet neither here nor elsewhere did Browning care to dwell upon the finished completeness of the perfect union. His intellectual thirst for the problematic, and his ethical thirst for the incomplete, combined to hurry him away to the moments of suspense, big with undecided or unfulfilled fate. The lover among the ruins is awaiting his mistress; the rapturous expectancy of another waiting lover is sung in In Three Days. And from the fireside the poet wanders in thought from that highest height of love which he has won to the mystic hour before he won it, when the elements out of which his fate was to be resolved still hung apart, awaiting the magical touch, which might never be given:—

"Oh moment, one and infinite!
The water slips o'er stock and stone;
The West is tender, hardly bright:
How grey at once is the evening grown—
One star, its chrysolite!

. . . . . . . . . .

Oh, the little more, and how much it is!
And the little less, and what worlds away!
How a sound shall quicken content to bliss,
Or a breath suspend the blood's best play,
And life be a proof of this!"

But the poet who lingered over these moments of suspended fate did not usually choose the harmonious solution of them. The "little less" of incomplete response might "suspend the breath" of the lover, but it was an inexhaustible inspiration to the poet. It provokes, for instance, the delicate symbolism of the twin lyrics Love in a Life and Life in a Love, variations on the same theme—vain pursuit of the averted face—the one a largo, sad, persistent, dreamily hopeless; the other impetuous, resolute, glad. The dreamier mood is elaborated in the Serenade at the Villa and One Way of Love. A few superbly imaginative phrases bring the Italian summer night about us, sultry, storm-shot, starless, still,—

"Life was dead, and so was light."

The Serenader himself is no child of Italy but a meditative Teuton, who, Hamlet-like, composes for his mistress the answer which he would not have her give. The lover in One Way of Love is something of a Teuton too, and has thoughts which break the vehemence of the impact of his fate. But there is a first moment when he gasps and knits himself closer to endure—admirably expressed in the sudden change to a brief trochaic verse; then the grim mood is dissolved in a [momentary] ecstasy of remembrance or of idea—and the verse, too, unfolds and releases itself in sympathy:—

"She will not hear my music? So!
Break the string; fold music's wing;
Suppose Pauline had bade me sing!"

Or, instead of this systole and diastole alternation, the glory and the pang are fused and interpenetrated in a continuous mood. Such a mood furnishes the spiritual woof of one of Browning's most consummate and one of his loveliest lyrics, The Last Ride Together and Evelyn Hope. "How are we to take it?" asks Mr Fotheringham of the latter. "As the language of passion resenting death and this life's woeful incompleteness? or as a prevision of the soul in a moment of intensest life?" The question may be asked; yet the passion of regret which glows and vibrates through it is too suffused with exalted faith in a final recovery to find poignant expression. This lyric, with its taking melody, has delighted thousands to whom Browning is otherwise "obscure," partly because it appeals with naïve audacity at once to Romantic and to Christian sentiment—combining the faith in love's power to seal its object for ever as its own with the Christian faith in personal immortality—a personal immortality in which there is yet marrying and giving in marriage, as Romance demands. The Last Ride Together has attracted a different audience. Its passion is of a rarer and more difficult kind, less accessible to the love and less flattering to the faith of common minds. This lover dreams of no future [recovery] of more than he still retains; his love, once for all, avails nothing; and the secure faith of Evelyn's lover, that "God creates the love to reward the love," is not his. His mistress will never "awake and remember and understand." But that dead form he is permitted to clasp; and in the rapture of that phantom companionship passion and thought slowly transfigure and glorify his fate, till from the lone limbo of outcast lovers he seems to have penetrated to the innermost fiery core of life, which art and poetry grope after in vain—to possess that supreme moment of earth which, prolonged, is heaven.

"What if heaven be that, fair and strong
At life's best, with our eyes upturned
Whither life's flower is first discerned,
We, fixed so, ever should so abide?
What if we still ride on, we two
With life for ever old yet new,
Changed not in kind but in degree,
The instant made eternity,—
And heaven just prove that I and she
Ride, ride together, for ever ride?"

The "glory of failure" is with Browning a familiar and inexhaustible theme; but its spiritual abstraction here flushes with the human glory of possession; the æthereal light and dew are mingled with breath and blood; and in the wonderful long-drawn rhythm of the verse we hear the steady stride of the horses as they bear their riders farther and farther in to the visionary land of Romance.