Chapter II: Part 2

He has such a hopefulness of belief in human nature that he shrinks from no _man_, however clothed and cloaked in evil, however miry with stumblings and fallings. I am a man, he might say with the noblest utterance of antiquity, and I deem nothing alien that is human. His investigations of evil are profoundly consistent with an indomitable optimism. Any one can say "All's right with the world," when he looks at the smiling face of things, at comfortable prosperity and a decent morality. But the test of optimism is its sight of evil. Browning has fathomed it, and he can still hope, for he sees the reflection of the sun in the depths of every foul puddle. This vivid hope and trust in man is bound up with a strong and strenuous faith in God. Browning's Christianity is wider than our creeds, and is all the more vitally Christian in that it never sinks into pietism. He is never didactic, but his faith is the root of his art, and transforms and transfigures it. Yet as a dramatic poet he is so impartial, and can express all creeds with so easy an interpretative accent, that it is possible to prove him (as Shakespeare has been proved) a believer in every thing and a disbeliever in anything.

Such, so far as I can realise my conception of him, is Robert Browning; and such the tenour of his work as a whole. It is time to pass from general considerations to particular ones; from characteristics of the writer to characteristics of the poems. In the pages to follow I shall endeavour to present a critical chronicle of Browning's works; not neglecting to give due information about each, but not confining myself to the mere giving of information. It is hoped that the quotations for which I may find room will practically illustrate and convincingly corroborate what I have to say about the poetry from which they are taken.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: _Luria_, Act iii.]

[Footnote 2: _Aurora Leigh_, Book Fifth.]

[Footnote 3: Walter Pater, _The Renaissance_, p, 226.]

[Footnote 4: _Aurora Leigh_, Book Third.]

[Footnote 5: Preface to _Poems_, 1853.]

[Footnote 6: _George Chapman: A Critical Essay_, 1875.]

[Footnote 7: _Works_, 1847, Preface to Sermons, pp. viii.-ix., where will also be found some exceedingly sensible remarks, which I commend to those whom it concerns, on persons "who take it for granted that they are acquainted with everything; and that no subject, if treated in the manner it should be, can be treated in any manner but what is familiar and easy to them."]

[Footnote 8: "Realism in Dramatic Art," _New Quarterly Magazine_, Oct., 1879.]

[Footnote 9: Allowing at its highest valuation all that need be allowed on this score, we find only that Mr. Browning has the defects of his qualities; and from these who is exempted? By virtue of this style of his he has succeeded in rendering into words the inmost thoughts and finest shades of feeling of the "men and women fashioned by his fancy," and in such a task we can pardon even a fault, for such a result we can overlook even a blemish; as Lessing, in _Laokoon_, remarking on an error in Raphael's drapery, finely says, "Who will not rather praise him for having had the wisdom and the courage to commit a slight fault, for the sake of greater fulness of expression?"]

[Footnote 10: George Meredith, _Diana of the Crossways_.]

[Footnote 11: Italians, it is pleasant to remember, have warmly welcomed the poet who has known and loved Italy best. "Her town and country, her churches and her ruins, her sorrows and her hopes," said Prof. Nencioni, as long ago as 1867, "are constantly sung by him. How he loves the land that inspires him he has shown by his long residence among us, and by the thrilling, almost lover-like tone with which he speaks of our dear country. 'Open my heart and you will see, Graved inside of it Italy,' as he exclaims in _De Gustibus_."]

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POEMS

(1833-1890)

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE POEMS

(1833-1890.)

* * * * *

1. PAULINE: a Fragment of a Confession.

[Published anonymously in 1833; first reprinted (the text
unaltered) in _Poetical Works_, 6 vols., Smith, Elder and
Co., 1868 (Vol. I., pp. 1-41); revised text, _Poetical
Works_, 1889, Vol. I., pp. 1-45.]

_PAULINE_ was written at the age of twenty. Its prefatory motto from Cornelius Agrippa (dated "_London, January, 1833_. _V.A.XX._") serves to convey a hint that the "confession" is dramatic, and at the same time lays claim to the indulgence due to the author's youth. These two points are stated plainly in the "exculpatory word" prefixed to the reprint in 1868. After mentioning the circumstances under which the revival of the poem was forced on him, Browning says:

"The thing was my earliest attempt at 'poetry always dramatic
in principle, and so many utterances of so many imaginary
persons, not mine,' which I have since written according to a
scheme less extravagant and scale less impracticable than
were ventured upon in this crude preliminary sketch--a sketch
that, on reviewal, appears not altogether wide of some hint
of the characteristic features of that particular _dramatis
persona_ it would fain have reproduced: good draughtsmanship,
however, and right handling were far beyond the artist at
that time."

In a note to the collected edition of 1889, Browning adds:

"Twenty years' endurance of an eyesore seems more than
sufficient; my faults remain duly recorded against me, and I
claim permission to somewhat diminish these, so far as style
is concerned, in the present and final edition."

A revised text follows, in which, while many "faults" are indeed "diminished," it is difficult not to feel at times as if the foot-notes had got into the text.

_Pauline_ is the confession of an unnamed poet to the woman whom he loves, and whose name is given in the title. It is a sort of spiritual autobiography; a record of sensations and ideas, rather than of deeds. "The scenery is in the chambers of thought; the agencies are powers and passions; the events are transitions from one state of spiritual existence to another." There is a vagueness of outline about the speaker which is due partly, no doubt, to the immaturity of the writer, partly also to the too exclusive portraiture of inactive mood. The difficulty is acknowledged in a curious "editor's" note, written in French, and signed "Pauline," in which Browning offered a sort of explanatory criticism of his own work. So far as we can grasp his personality, the speaker appears to us a highly-gifted and on the whole right-natured man, but possessed of a morbid self-consciousness and a limitless yet indecisive ambition. Endowed with a highly poetic nature, yet without, as it seems, adequate concentrative power; filled, at times, with a passionate yearning after God and good, yet morally unstable; he has spent much of his strength in ineffectual efforts, and he is conscious of lamentable failure and mistake in the course of his past life. Specially does he recognise and mourn his "self-idolatry," which has isolated him from others, and confined him within the close and vitiated circle of his own selfhood. Led by some better impulse, he now turns to Pauline, and to the memory of a great and dearly-loved poet, spoken of as "Sun-treader," finding in these, the memory and the love, a quietude and a redemption.

The poet of the poem is an imaginary character, but it is possible to trace in this character some real traits of its creator. The passage beginning "I am made up of an intensest life" is certainly a piece of admirable self-portraiture; allusions here and there have a personal significance. In this earliest poem we see the germ of almost all the qualities (humour excepted) which mark Browning's mature work. Intensity of religious belief, love of music, of painting, and of the Greek classics; insight into nature, a primary interest in and intense insight into the human soul, these are already manifest. No characteristic is more interesting in the light of long subsequent achievement than the familiarity with Greek literature, shown not merely by the references to Plato and to Agamemnon, but by what is perhaps the finest passage in the poem, the one ending:--

"Yet I say, never morn broke clear as those
On the dim clustered isles in the blue sea,
The deep groves and white temples and wet caves:
And nothing ever will surprise me now--
Who stood beside the naked Swift-footed,
Who bound my forehead with Proserpine's hair."

The enthusiasm which breathes through whole pages of address to the "Sun-treader" gives no exaggerated picture of Browning's love and reverence for Shelley, whose _Alastor_ might perhaps in some respects be compared with _Pauline_. The rhythm of Browning's poem has a certain echo in it of Shelley's earlier blank verse; and the lyrically emotional descriptions and the vivid and touching metaphors derived from nature frequently remind us of Shelley, and sometimes of Keats. On every page we meet with magical touches like this:--

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

with lines full of exquisite fancy, such as those on the woodland tarn:--

"The trees bend
O'er it as wild men watch a sleeping girl;"

and in one place we have a marvellously graphic description, extending over three pages, perhaps the most elaborately painted landscape in Browning's work. It seems like wronging the poem to speak of its _promise_: it is, indeed, far from mature, but it has a superb precocity marking a certain stage of ripeness. It is lacking, certainly, as Browning himself declares, in "good draughtsmanship and right handling," but this defect of youth is richly compensated by the wealth of inspiration, the keen intellectual and ethical insight, and the numberless lines of haunting charm, which have nothing of youth in them but its vigorous freshness.

2. PARACELSUS.

[Published in 1835; first acknowledged work (_Poetical
Works_, 1889, Vol. II., pp. 1-186.) The original MS. is in the
Forster Library at South Kensington.]

The poem is divided into five scenes, each a typical episode in the life of Paracelsus. It is in the form of dialogue between Paracelsus and others: Festus and his wife Michal in the first scene, Aprile, an Italian poet, in the second, and Festus only in the remainder. The poem is followed by an appendix, containing a few notes and a brief biography of Paracelsus, translated from the _Biographie Universelle_.

_Paracelsus_ might be praised, and has justly been praised, for its serious and penetrating quality as an historical study of the great mystic and great man of science, who had realised, before most people, that "matter is the visible body of the invisible God," and who had been the Luther of medicine. But the historical element is less important than the philosophical; both are far less important than the purely poetical. The leading motive is not unlike that of _Pauline_ and of _Sordello_: it is handled, however, far more ably than in the former, and much more clearly than in the latter. Paracelsus is a portrait of the seeker after knowledge, one whose ambition transcends all earthly limits, and exhausts itself in the thirst of the impossible. His career is traced from its noble outset at Würzburg to its miserable close in the hospital at Salzburg, through all its course of struggle, conquest and deterioration. His last effort, the superb dying speech, gives the moral of his mistake, and, in the light of the new intuition flashed on his soul by death, the true conception of the powers and limits of man.

The character and mental vicissitudes of Paracelsus are brought out, as has been stated, in dialogue with others. The three minor characters, though probably called into being as mere foils to the protagonist, have a distinct individuality of their own. Michal is Browning's first sketch of a woman. She is faint in outline and very quiet in presence, but though she scarcely speaks twenty lines, her face remains with us like a beautiful face seen once and never to be forgotten. There is something already, in her tentative delineation, of that "piercing and overpowering tenderness which glorifies the poet of Pompilia." Festus, Michal's husband, the friend and adviser of Paracelsus, is a man of simple nature and thoughtful mind, cautious yet not cold, clear-sighted rather than far-seeing, yet not without enthusiasm; perhaps a little narrow and commonplace, as the prudent are apt to be. He, like Michal, has no influence on the external action of the poem. Aprile, the Italian poet whom Paracelsus encounters in the second scene, is an integral part of the poem; for it is through him that a crisis is reached in the development of the seeker after knowledge. Unlike Festus and Michal, he is a type rather than a realisable human being, the type of the Artist pure and simple, the lover of beauty and of beauty alone, a soul immoderately possessed with the desire to love, as Paracelsus with the desire to know. He flickers, an expiring flame, across the pathway of the stronger spirit, one luminous moment and no more.

_Paracelsus_, though written in dialogue, is not intended to be a drama. This was clearly stated in the preface to the first edition, an important document, never afterwards reprinted. "Instead of having recourse," wrote Browning, "to an external machinery of incidents to create and evolve the crisis I desire to produce, I have ventured to display somewhat minutely the mood itself in its rise and progress, and have suffered the agency by which it is influenced to be generally discernible in its effects alone, and subordinate throughout, if not altogether excluded."[12] The proportions of the work are epical rather than dramatic; but indeed it is difficult to class, so exuberant is the vitality which fills and overflows all limits. What is not a drama, though in dialogue, nor yet an epic, except in length, can scarcely be considered, any more than its successors, and perhaps imitators, _Festus_, _Balder_, or _A Life Drama_, properly artistic in form. But it is distinguished from this prolific progeny not only by a finer and firmer imagination, a truer poetic richness, but by a moderation, a concreteness, a grip, which are certainly all its own. In few of Browning's poems are there so many individual lines and single passages which we are so apt to pause on, to read again and again, for the mere enjoyment of their splendid sound and colour. And this for a reason. The large and lofty character of Paracelsus, the avoidance of much external detail, and the high tension at which thought and emotion are kept throughout, permit the poet to use his full resources of style and diction without producing an effect of unreality and extravagance. We meet on almost every page with lines like these:--

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

Or again, lines like these, which have become the watch-word of a Gordon:--

"I go to prove my soul!
I see my way as birds their trackless way.
I shall arrive! what time, what circuit first,
I ask not: but unless God send his hail
Or blinding fireballs, sleet or stifling snow,
In some time, his good time, I shall arrive:
He guides me and the bird. In his good time!"

At times the brooding splendour bursts forth in a kind of vast ecstasy, and we have such magnificence as this:--

"The centre fire heaves underneath the earth,
And the earth changes like a human face;
The molten ore bursts up among the rocks,
Winds into the stone's heart, outbranches bright
In hidden mines, spots barren river-beds,
Crumbles into fine sand where sunbeams bask--
God joys therein. The wroth sea's waves are edged
With foam, white as the bitten lip of hate,
When, in the solitary waste, strange groups
Of young volcanos come up, cyclops-like,
Staring together with their eyes on flame--
God tastes a pleasure in their uncouth pride.
Then all is still; earth is a wintry clod:
But spring-wind, like a dancing psaltress, passes
Over its breast to waken it, rare verdure
Buds tenderly upon rough banks, between
The withered tree-roots and the cracks of frost,
Like a smile striving with a wrinkled face;
The grass grows bright, the boughs are swoln with blooms
Like chrysalids impatient for the air,
The shining dorrs are busy, beetles run
Along the furrows, ants make their ado;
Above, birds fly in merry flocks, the lark
Soars up and up, shivering for very joy;
Afar the ocean sleeps; white fishing-gulls
Flit where the strand is purple with its tribe
Of nested limpets; savage creatures seek
Their loves in wood and plain--and God renews
His ancient rapture."

The blank verse of _Paracelsus_ is varied by four lyrics, themselves various in style, and full of rare music: the spirit song of the unfaithful poets--

"The sad rhyme of the men who sadly clung
To their first fault, and withered in their pride,"

the gentle song of the Mayne river, and that strange song of old spices which haunts the brain like a perfume:--

"Heap cassia, sandal-buds and stripes
Of labdanum, and aloe-balls,
Smeared with dull nard an Indian wipes
From out her hair: such balsam falls
Down sea-side mountain pedestals,
From tree-tops where tired winds are fain,
Spent with the vast and howling main,
To treasure half their island gain.

And strew faint sweetness from some old
Egyptian's fine worm-eaten shroud
Which breaks to dust when once unrolled;
Or shredded perfume, like a cloud
From closet long to quiet vowed,
With mothed and dropping arras hung,
Mouldering her lute and books among,
As when a queen, long dead was young."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 12: See the whole Preface, Appendix II.]

3. STRAFFORD: an Historical Tragedy.

[Written toward the close of 1836; acted at the Theatre
Royal, Covent Garden (_Strafford_, Mr. Macready; _Countess of
Carlisle_, Miss Helen Faucit), May 1, 1837; by the Browning
Society at the Strand Theatre, Dec. 21, 1886, and at Oxford
by the O.U.D.S. in 1890; published in 1837 (_Poetical Works_,
1889, Vol. II., pp. 187-307).]

_Strafford_ was written, at Macready's earnest request, in an interval of the composition of _Sordello_. Like all Browning's plays which were acted, it owed its partial failure to causes quite apart from its own merits or defects as a play.[13] Browning may not have had the making of a good playwright; but at least no one ever gave him the chance of showing whether he was or not. The play is not without incident, especially in the third act. But its chief merit lies in the language and style of the dialogue. There is no aim at historical dignity or poetical elaboration; the aim is nature, quick with personal passion. Every word throbs with emotion; through these exclamatory, yet how delicate and subtle lines, we seem actually to see and hear the speakers, and with surprising vividness. The words supply their own accents, looks and gestures.

In his preface to the first edition (reprinted in Appendix II.) Browning states that he believes the historical portraits to be faithful. This is to a considerable extent confirmed by Professor Gardiner, who has given a careful consideration of the play in its historical aspects, in his Introduction to Miss Hickey's annotated edition (G. Bell & Sons, 1884). As a representation of history, he tells us, it is inaccurate; "the very roots of the situation are untrue to fact." But (as he allows) this departure from fact, in the conduct of the action, is intentional, and, of course, allowable: Browning was writing a drama, not a history. Of the portraits, the really vital part of the play as an interpretation of history, he writes:--

"For myself, I can only say that, every time I read the play,
I feel more convinced that Mr. Browning has seized the real
Strafford, the man of critical brain, of rapid decision, and
tender heart, who strove for the good of his nation, without
sympathy for the generation in which he lived. Charles, too,
with his faults perhaps exaggerated, is, nevertheless, a real
Charles.... There is a wonderful parallelism between the Lady
Carlisle of the play and the less noble Lady Carlisle which
history conjectures rather than describes.... On the other
hand, Pym is the most unsatisfactory, from an historical
point of view, of the leading personages."

Yet, if it is interesting, it is by no means of primary importance to know the historical basis and probable accuracy of Browning's play. The whole interest is centred in the character of Strafford; it is a personal interest, and attaches itself to the personal character or the hero. The leading motive is Strafford's devotion to his king, and the note of tragic discord arises from the ingratitude and faithlessness of Charles set over against the blind fidelity of his minister. The antagonism of law and despotism, of Pym and Strafford, is, perhaps, less clearly and forcibly brought out: though essential to the plot, it wears to our sight a somewhat secondary aspect. Strafford himself appears not so much a superb and unbending figure, a political power, as a man whose service of Charles is due wholly to an intense personal affection, and not at all to his national sympathies, which seem, indeed, rather on the opposite side. He loves the man, not the king, and his love is a freak of the affections. That it is against his better reason he recognises, but the recognition fails to influence his heart or his conduct. This is finely expressed in the following lines, spoken by Lady Carlisle:--

"Could you but know what 'tis to bear, my friend,
One image stamped within you, turning blank
The else imperial brilliance of your mind,--
A weakness, but most precious,--like a flaw
I' the diamond, which should shape forth some sweet face
Yet to create, and meanwhile treasured there
Lest nature lose her gracious thought for ever'"

Browning has rarely drawn a more pathetic figure. Every circumstance that could contribute to this effect is skilfully seized and emphasised: Charles's incredibly selfish weakness, the implacable sternness of Pym, the _triste_ prattle of Strafford's children and their interrupted joyous song in the final scene, all serve to heighten our feeling of affectionate pity and regret. The imaginary former friendship between Pym and Strafford adds still more to the pathos of the delineation, and gives rise to some of the finest speeches, notably the last great colloquy between these two, which so effectively rounds and ends the play. The fatal figure of Pym is impressive and admirable throughout, and the portrait of the Countess of Carlisle, Browning's second portrait of a woman, is a noble and singularly original one. Her unrecognised and undeterred devotion to Strafford is finely and tenderly pathetic; it has the sorrowful dignity of faithful service, rewarded only in serving.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 13: See _Robert Browning: Personalia_, by Edmund Gosse (Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1890).]

4. SORDELLO.

[Published in 1840 (_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol. I., pp.
47-289).]

_Sordello_ is generally spoken of as being the most obscure and the least attractive of Browning's poems; it has even been called "the most illegible production of any time or country." Hard, very hard, it undoubtedly is; but undoubtedly it is far from unattractive to the serious student of poetry, who will find in it something of the fascination of an Alpine peak: not to be gained without an effort, treacherous and slippery, painfully dazzling to weak eyes, but for all that irresistibly fascinating. _Sordello_ contains enough poetic material for a dozen considerable poems; indeed, its very fault lies in its plethora of ideas, the breathless crowd of hurrying thoughts and fancies, which fill and overflow it. That this is not properly to be called "obscurity" has been triumphantly shown by Mr. Swinburne in his essay on George Chapman. Some of his admirable statements I have already quoted, but we may bear to be told twice that Browning is too much the reverse of obscure, that he is only too brilliant and subtle, that he never thinks but at full speed. But besides this characteristic, which is common to all his work, there are one or two special reasons which have made this particular poem more difficult than others. The condensation of style which had marked Browning's previous work, and which has marked his later, was here (in consequence of an unfortunate and most unnecessary dread of verbosity, induced by a rash and foolish criticism) accentuated not infrequently into dislocation. The very unfamiliar historical events of the story[14] are introduced, too, in a parenthetic and allusive way, not a little embarrassing to the reader.

But it is also evident that the difficulties of a gigantic conception were not completely conquered by the writer's genius, not then fully matured; that lack of entire mastery over the material has frequently caused the two interests of the poem, the psychological and the historical, to clash; the background to intrude on and confuse the middle distance, if not even the foreground itself. Every one of these faults is the outcome of a merit: altogether they betray a growing nature of extraordinary power, largeness and richness, not as yet to be bound or contained within any limits or in any bonds.

_Sordello_ is a psychological epic. But to call it this only would be to do it somewhat less than justice. There is in the poem a union of breathless eagerness with brooding suspense, which has an almost unaccountable fascination for those who once come under its charm, and nowhere in Browning's work are there so many pictures, so vivid in aspect, so sharp in outline, so rich in colour. At their best they are sudden, a flash of revelation, as in this autumnal Goito:--

"'Twas the marsh
Gone of a sudden. Mincio, in its place,
Laughed, a broad water, in next morning's face,
And, where the mists broke up immense and white
I' the steady wind, burned like a spilth of light,
Out of the crashing of a myriad stars."

Verona, by torchfire, seen from a window, is shown with the same quick flare out of darkness:--

"Then arose the two
And leaned into Verona's air, dead-still.
A balcony lay black beneath until
Out, 'mid a gush of torchfire, grey-haired men
Came on it and harangued the people: then
Sea-like that people surging to and fro
Shouted."

Only Carlyle, in the most vivid moments of his _French Revolution_, has struck such flashes out of darkness. And there are other splendours and rarities, not only in the evocation of actual scenes and things, but in mere similes, like this, in which the quality of imagination is of a curiously subtle and unusual kind:--

"As, shall I say, some Ethiop, past pursuit
Of all enslavers, dips a shackled foot
Burnt to the blood, into the drowsy black
Enormous watercourse which guides him back
To his own tribe again, where he is king:
And laughs because he guesses, numbering
The yellower poison-wattles on the pouch
Of the first lizard wrested from its couch
Under the slime (whose skin, the while, he strips
To cure his nostril with, and festered lips,
And eyeballs bloodshot through the desert-blast)
That he has reached its boundary, at last
May breathe;--thinks o'er enchantments of the South
Sovereign to plague his enemies, their mouth,
Eyes, nails, and hair; but, these enchantments tried
In fancy, puts them soberly aside
For truth, projects a cool return with friends,
The likelihood of winning mere amends
Ere long; thinks that, takes comfort silently,
Then, from the river's brink, his wrongs and he,
Hugging revenge close to their hearts, are soon
Off-striding for the Mountains of the Moon."

And, while much of the finest poetry is contained in picturesque passages such as these, we find verse of another order, thrilling as the trumpet's "golden cry," in the passionate invocation of Dante, enshrining the magnificently Dantesque characterization of the three divisions of the _Divina Commedia_.

"For he--for he,
Gate-vein of this hearts' blood of Lombardy,
(If I should falter now)--for he is thine!
Sordello, thy forerunner, Florentine!
A herald-star I know thou didst absorb
Relentless into the consummate orb
That scared it from its right to roll along
A sempiternal path with dance and song
Fulfilling its allotted period,
Serenest of the progeny of God--
Who yet resigns it not! His darling stoops
With no quenched lights, desponds with no blank troops
Of disenfranchised brilliances, for, blent
Utterly with thee, its shy element
Like thine upburneth prosperous and clear.
Still, what if I approach the august sphere
Named now with only one name, disentwine
That under-current soft and argentine
From its fierce mate in the majestic mass
Leavened as the sea whose fire was mixt with glass
In John's transcendent vision,--launch once more
That lustre? Dante, pacer of the shore
Where glutted hell disgorgeth filthiest gloom,
Unbitten by its whirring sulphur-spume--
Or whence the grieved and obscure waters slope
Into a darkness quieted by hope;
Plucker of amaranths grown beneath God's eye
In gracious twilights where his chosen lie,
I would do this! If I should falter now!"

Browning has himself told us that his stress lay on the "incidents in the development of a soul." The portrait of Sordello is one of the most elaborate and complete which he has given us. It is painted with more accessory detail and on a larger canvas than any other single figure. Like _Pauline_ and _Paracelsus_, with which it has points of affinity, the poem is a study of ambition and of egoism; of a soul "whose ambition," as it has been rightly said, "is in extravagant disproportion to its physical powers and means, and whose temptation is at every crisis to seek pleasure in the picture of willing and doing rather than in willing and doing itself." Sordello's youth is fed upon fancy: he imagines himself Apollo, this or that hero of the time; in dreams he is and does to the height of his aspirations. But from any actual doing he shrinks; at the approach or the call of action, his will refuses to act. We might sum up his character in a general sense by saying that his imagination overpowers every other faculty; an imagination intensely personal, a sort of intellectual egoism, which removes him equally from action and from sympathy. He looks on men as foils to himself, or as a background on which to shine. But the root of his failure is this, and it is one which could never be even apprehended by a vulgar egoism: he longs to grasp the whole of life at once, to realise his aims in their entirety, without complying with the necessary conditions. His mind perceives the infinite and essential so clearly that it scorns or spurns the mere accidents. But earth being earth, and life growth, and accidents an inevitable part of life, the rule remains that man, to attain, must climb step by step, and not expect to fly at once to the top of the ladder. Finding that he cannot do everything, Sordello sees no alternative but to do nothing. Consequently his state comes to be a virtual indolence or inactivity; though it is in reality that of the top, spinning so fast that its motion is imperceptible. Poet and man of action, for he contains more than the germ of both, confound and break down one another. He meets finally with a great temptation, conquers it, but dies of the effort. For the world his life has been a failure, for himself not absolutely so, since, before his eyes were closed, he was permitted to see the truth and to recognise it. But in all his aims, in all his ambitions, he has failed; and the world has gained nothing from them or from him but the warning of his example.

This Sordello of Browning seems to have little identity with the brief and splendid Sordello of Dante, the figure that fronts us in the superb sixth canto of the _Purgatoria_, "a guisa di leon quando si posa." The records of the real Sordello are scant, fragmentary and contradictory. No coherent outline of his personality remains, so that the character which Browning has made for him is a creation as absolute as if it had been wholly invented. The name indeed of Sordello, embalmed in Dante's verse, is still fresh to our ears after the "ravage of six long sad hundred years," and it is Dante, too, who in his _De Vulgari Eloquentia_, has further signalised him by honourable record. Sordello, he says, excelled in all kinds of composition, and by his experiments in the dialects of Cremona, Brescia and Verona, cities near Mantua, helped to form the Tuscan tongue. But besides the brief record of Dante, there are certain accounts of Sordello's life, very confused and conflicting, in the early Italian Chronicles and the Provençal lives of the Troubadours. Tiraboschi sifts these legends, leaving very little of them. According to him, Sordello was a Mantuan of noble family, born at Goito at the close of the twelfth century. He was a poet and warrior, though not, as some reports profess, captain-general or governor of Mantua. He eloped with Cunizza, the wife of Count Richard of St. Boniface; at some period of his life he went into Provence; and he died a violent death, about the middle of the thirteenth century. The works attributed to him are poems in Tuscan and Provençal, a didactic poem in Latin named _Thesaurus Thesaurorum_ (now in the Ambrosiana in Milan), an essay in Provençal on "The Progress and Power of the Kings of Aragon in the Comté of Provence," a treatise on "The Defence of Walled Towns," and some historial translations from Latin into the vulgar tongue. Of all these works only the _Thesaurus_ and some thirty-four poems in Provençal, _sirventes_ and _tensens_, survive: some of the finest of them are satires.[15]

The statement that Sordello was specially famed for his philosophical verses, though not confirmed by what remains of his poetry, is interesting and significant in connection with Browning's conception of his character. There is little however in the scanty tales we have of the historic Sordello to suggest the "feverish poet" of the poem. The fugitive personality of the half mythical fighting poet eludes the grasp, and Browning has rather given the name of Sordello to an imagined type of the poetic character than constructed a type of character to fit the name. Still less are the dubious attributes with which the bare facts of history or legend invest Cunizza (whom, none the less, Dante spoke with in heaven) recognisable in the exquisite and all-golden loveliness of Palma.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 14: "Mr. Browning prepared himself for writing _Sordello_," says Mrs. Orr, "by studying all the chronicles of that period of Italian history which the British Museum contained; and we may be sure that every event he alludes to as historical, is so in spirit, if not in the letter; while such details as come under the head of historical curiosities are absolutely true. He also supplemented his reading by a visit to the places in which the scenes of the story are laid."--_Handbook_, p. 31.]

[Footnote 15: Of all these matters, and of all else that is known of Sordello, a good and sympathetic account will be found in Mr. Eugene Benson's little book on _Sordello and Cunizza_ (Dent, 1903).]

5. PIPPA PASSES.

[Published in 1841 as No. I of _Bells and Pomegranates_
(_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol. III., pp. 1-79).]

_Pippa Passes_ is Browning's most perfect work, and here, more perhaps than in anything he ever wrote, he wrote to please himself. As a whole, he has never written anything to equal it in artistic symmetry; while a single scene, that between Ottima and Sebald, reaches the highest level of tragic utterance which he has ever attained. The plan of the work, in which there are elements of the play and elements of the masque, is a wholly original one: a series of scenes, connected only by the passing through them of a single person, who is outside their action, and whose influence on that action is unconscious. "Mr Browning," says Mrs. Sutherland Orr in the _Handbook_, "was walking alone in a wood near Dulwich, when the image flashed upon him of some one walking thus alone 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, Felippa or Pippa."[16] It is this motive that makes unity in variety, linking together a sequence of otherwise independent scenes. The poem is the story of Pippa's New Year's Day holiday, her one holiday in the year. She resolves to fancy herself to be in turn the four happiest people in Asolo, and, to realise her fancy as much as she can, she spends her day in wandering about the town, passing, in the morning, the shrub-house up the hillside, where Ottima and her lover Sebald have met; at noon, the house of Jules, over Orcana; in the evening, the turret on the hill above Asolo, where are Luigi and his mother; and at night, the palace by the Duomo, now tenanted by Monsignor the Bishop. These, whom she imagines to be the happiest people in the town, have all, in reality, arrived at crises of tremendous and tragic importance to themselves, and, in one instance, to her. Each stands at the turning-point of a life: Ottima and Sebald, unrepentant, with a crime behind them; Jules and Phene, two souls brought strangely face to face by a fate which may prove their salvation or their perdition; Luigi, irresolute, with a purpose to be performed; Monsignor, undecided, before a great temptation. Pippa passes, singing, at the moment when these souls' tragedies seem tending to a fatal end, at the moment when the baser nature seems about to triumph over the better. Something in the song, "like any flash that cures the blind," strikes them with a sudden light; each decides, suddenly; each, according to the terms of his own nature, is saved. And Pippa passes, unconscious of the influence she has exerted, as they are but half-aware of the agency of what they take as an immediate word from God. Each of these four scenes is in dialogue, the first three in blank verse, the last in prose. Between each is an interlude, in prose or verse, representing the "talk by the way," of art-students, Austrian police, and poor girls, all bearing on some part of the action. Pippa's prologue and epilogue, like her songs, are in varied lyric verse. The blank verse throughout is the most vivid and dignified, the most coloured and yet restrained, that Browning ever wrote; and he never wrote anything better for singing than some of Pippa's songs.

Of the four principal scenes, by far the greatest is the first, that between Ottima and her paramour, the German Sebald, on the morning after the murder of old Luca Gaddi, the woman's husband. It is difficult to convey in words any notion of its supreme excellence of tragic truth: to match it we must revert to almost the very finest Elizabethan work. The representation of Ottima and Sebald, the Italian and the German, is a singularly acute study of the Italian and German races. Sebald, in a sudden access of brutal rage, has killed the old doting husband, but his conscience, too feeble to stay his hand before, is awake to torture him after the deed. But Ottima is steadfast in evil, with the Italian conscienceless resoluteness. She can no more feel either fear or remorse than Clytæmnestra. The scene between Jules, the French sculptor, and his bride Phene, and that between Luigi, the light-headed Italian patriot, and his mother, are less great indeed, less tragic and intense and overpowering, than this crowning episode; but they are scarcely less fine and finished in a somewhat slighter style. Both are full of colour and music, of insight into nature and into art, and of superb lines and passages, such as this, which is spoken by Luigi:--

"God must be glad one loves his world so much.
I can give news of earth to all the dead
Who ask me:--last year's sunsets, and great stars
That had a right to come first and see ebb
The crimson wave that drifts the sun away--
Those crescent moons with notched and burning rims
That strengthened into sharp fire, and there stood,
Impatient of the azure--and that day
In March, a double rainbow stopped the storm--
May's warm slow yellow moonlit summer nights--
Gone are they, but I have them in my soul!"

But in neither is there any single passage of such incomparable quality as the thunderstorm in the first scene, a storm not to be matched in English poetry:--

"Buried in woods we lay, you recollect;
Swift ran the searching tempest overhead;
And ever and anon some bright white shaft
Burned through the pine-tree roof, here burned and there,
As if God's messenger through the close wood screen
Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture,
Feeling for guilty thee and me: then broke
The thunder like a whole sea overhead."

The vivid colloquial scenes in prose have much of that pungent semi-satirical humour of which Browning had shown the first glimpse in _Sordello_. Besides these, there is one intermediate scene in verse, the talk of the "poor girls" on the Duomo steps, which seems to me one of the most pathetic things ever written by the most pathetic of contemporary poets. It is this scene that contains the exquisite song, "You'll love me yet."

"You'll love me yet!--and I can tarry
Your love's protracted growing:
June reared that bunch of flowers you carry,
From seeds of April's sowing.

I plant a heartful now: some seed
At least is sure to strike,
And yield--what you'll not pluck indeed,
Not love, but, may be, like.

You'll look at least on love's remains,
A grave's one violet:
Your look?--that pays a thousand pains.
What's death? You'll love me yet!"

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 16: _Handbook_, p. 54.]

6. KING VICTOR AND KING CHARLES: A Tragedy.

[Published in 1842 as No. II. of _Bells and Pomegranates_,
although written some years earlier (_Poetical Works_, 1889,
Vol. III., pp. 81-165).]

_King Victor and King Charles_ is an historical tragedy, dealing with the last episode in the career of Victor II., first King of Sardinia. Browning says in his preface:

"So far as I know, this tragedy is the first artistic
consequence of what Voltaire termed 'a terrible event without
consequences;' and although it professes to be historical, I
have taken more pains to arrive at the history than most
readers would thank me for particularising: since acquainted,
as I will hope them to be, with the chief circumstances of
Victor's remarkable European career--nor quite ignorant of
the sad and surprising facts I am about to reproduce (a
tolerable account of which is to be found, for instance, in
Abbé Roman's _Récit_, or even the fifth of Lord Orrery's
_Letters from Italy_)--I cannot expect them to be versed, nor
desirous of becoming so, in all the details of the memoirs,
correspondence, and relations of the time.... When I say,
therefore, that I cannot but believe my statement (combining
as it does what appears correct in Voltaire and plausible in
Condorcet) more true to person and thing than any it has
hitherto been my fortune to meet with, no doubt my word will
be taken, and my evidence spared as readily."

The episode recorded in the play is the abdication of Victor in favour of his son Charles, and his subsequent attempt to return to the throne. The only point in which Browning has departed from history is that the very effective death on the stage replaces the old king's real death in captivity a year later. As a piece of literature, this is the least interesting and valuable of Browning's plays, the thinnest in structure, the dryest in substance.

The interest of the play is, even more than that of _Strafford_, political. The intrigue turns on questions of government, complicated with questions of relationship and duty. The conflict is one between ruler and ruler, who are also father and son; and the true tragedy of the situation seems to be this: shall Charles obey the instincts of a son, and cede to his father's wish to resume the government he has abdicated, or is there a higher duty which he is bound to follow, the duty of a king to his people? The motive is a fine one, but it is scarcely handled with Browning's accustomed skill and subtlety. King Victor, of whose "fiery and audacious temper, unscrupulous selfishness, profound dissimulation, and singular fertility in resources," Browning speaks in his preface, is an impressive study of "the old age of crafty men," the futile wiliness of decrepit and persevering craft, though we are scarcely made to feel the once potent personality of the man, or to understand the influence which his mere word or presence still has upon his son. D'Ormea, who checkmates all the schemes of his old master, is a curious and subtle study of one who "serves God at the devil's bidding," as he himself confesses in the cynical frankness of his continual ironical self-criticism. After twenty years of unsuccessful intrigue, he has learnt by experience that honesty is the best policy. But at every step his evil reputation clogs and impedes his honest action, and the very men whom he is now most sincere in helping are the most mistrustful of his sincerity. Charles, whose good intentions and vacillating will are the precise opposites of his father's strong will and selfish purposes, is really the central figure of the play. He is one of those men whom we at once despise and respect. Gifted with many good qualities, he seems to lack the one thing needful to bind them together. Polyxena, his wife, possesses just that resolution in which he is wanting. She is a fine, firm, clear character, herself admirable, and admirably drawn. Her "noble and right woman's manliness" (to use Browning's phrase) is prompt to sweep away the cobwebs that entangle her husband's path or obscure his vision of things. From first to last she sees through Charles, Victor and D'Ormea, who neither understand one another nor perhaps themselves; from first to last she is the same clear-headed, decisive, consistent woman, loyal always to love, but always yet more loyal toward truth.

7. DRAMATIC LYRICS.[17]

[Published in 1842 as No. III. of _Bells and Pomegranates_
(_Poetical Works_, 1889, dispersedly in Vols. IV., V., and
VI.).]

_Dramatic Lyrics_, Browning's first volume of short poems, contains some of his finest, and many of his most popular pieces. The little volume, it was only sixteen pages in length, has, however, an importance even beyond its actual worth; for we can trace in it the germ at least of most of Browning's subsequent work. We see in these poems for the first time that extraordinary mastery of rhyme which Butler himself has not excelled; that predilection for the grotesque which is shared by no other English poet; and, not indeed for the first time, but for the first time with any special prominence, the strong and thoughtful humour, running up and down the whole compass of its gamut, gay and hearty, satirical and incisive, in turn. We see also the first formal beginning of the dramatic monologue, which, hinted at in _Pauline_, disguised in _Paracelsus_, and developed, still disguised, in _Sordello_, became, from the period of the _Dramatic Lyrics_ onward, the staple form and special instrument of the poet, an instrument finely touched, at times, by other performers, but of which he is the only Liszt. The literal beginning of the monologue must be found in two lyrical poems, here included, _Johannes Agricola_ and _Porphyria's Lover_ (originally named _Madhouse Cells_), which were published in a magazine as early as 1836, or about the time of the publication of _Paracelsus_. These extraordinary little poems reveal not only an imagination of intense fire and heat, but an almost finished art: a power of conceiving subtle mental complexities with clearness and of expressing them in a picturesque form and in perfect lyric language. Each poem renders a single mood, and renders it completely. But it is still only a mood: _My Last Duchess_ is a life. This poem (it was at first one of two companion pieces called _Italy and France_) is the first direct progenitor of _Andrea del Sarto_ and the other great blank verse monologues; in it we see the form, save for the scarcely appreciable presence of rhyme, already developed. The poem is a subtle study in the jealousy of egoism, not a study so much as a creation; and it places before us, as if bitten in by the etcher's acid, a typical autocrat of the Renaissance, with his serene self-composure of selfishness, quiet uncompromising cruelty, and genuine devotion to art. The scene and the actors in this little Italian drama stand out before us with the most natural clearness; there is some telling touch in every line, an infinitude of cunningly careless details, instinct with suggestion, and an appearance through it all of simple artless ease, such as only the very finest art can give. But let the poem speak for itself.

"My LAST DUCHESS.

"FERRARA.

"That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Frà Pandolf's hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will 't please you sit and look at her? I said
'Frà Pandolf' by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so, not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, 'twas not
Her husband's presence only, called that spot
Of joy into the Duchess' cheek: perhaps
Frà Pandolf chanced to say 'Her mantle laps
Over my lady's wrist too much,' or 'Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half-flush that dies along her throat:' such stuff
Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She had
A heart--how shall I say?--too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, 'twas all one! My favour at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace--all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least. She thanked men,--good! but thanked
Somehow--I know not how--as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody's gift. Who'd stoop to blame
This sort of trifling? Even had you skill
In speech--(which I have not)--to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say, 'Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
Or there exceed the mark,'--and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse,
--E'en then would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop. Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive. Will 't please you rise? We'll meet
The company below, then. I repeat
The Count your master's known munificence
Is ample warrant that no just pretence
Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;
Though his fair daughter's self, as I avowed
At starting, is my object. Nay, we'll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!"