Chapter IV: Part 4

"You think I should have promptlier disowned
This deed with its strange unforeseen success,
In favour of Luitolfo. But the peril,
So far from ended, hardly seems begun.
To-morrow, rather, when a calm succeeds,
We easily shall make him full amends:
And meantime--if we save them as they pray,
And justify the deed by its effects?
_Eu._ You would, for worlds, you had denied at once.
_Ch._ I know my own intention, be assured!
All's well. Precede us, fellow-citizens!"

Thus ends act first, "being what was called the poetry of Chiappino's life;" and act second, "its prose," opens after a supposed interval of a month.

The second act exhibits, in very humorous prose, the gradual and inevitable deterioration which the silence and the deception have brought about. Drawn on and on, upon his own lines of thought and conduct, by Ogniben, the Pope's legate, who has come to put down the revolt by diplomatic measures, Chiappino denies his political principles, finding a democratic rule not at all so necessary when the provostship may perhaps fall to himself; denies his love, for his views of love are, he finds, widened; and finally, denies his friend, to the extent of arguing that the very blow which, as struck by Luitolfo, has been the factor of his fortune, was practically, because logically, his own. Ogniben now agrees to invest him with the Provost's office, making at the same time the stipulation that the actual assailant of the Provost shall suffer the proper penalty. Hereupon Luitolfo comes forward and avows the deed. Ogniben orders him to his house; Chiappino "goes aside for a time;" "and now," concludes the legate, addressing the people, "give thanks to God, the keys of the Provost's palace to me, and yourselves to profitable meditation at home."

Besides Chiappino, there are three other characters, who serve to set off the main figure. Eulalia is an observer, Luitolfo a foil, Ogniben a touchstone. Eulalia and Luitolfo, though sufficiently worked out for their several purposes, are only sketches, the latter perhaps more distinctly outlined than the former, and serving admirably as a contrast to Chiappino. But Ogniben, who does so much of the talking in the second act, is a really memorable figure. His portrait is painted with more prominent effect, for his part in the play is to draw Chiappino out, and to confound him with his own weapons: "I help men," as he says, "to carry out their own principles; if they please to say two and two make five, I assent, so they will but go on and say, four and four make ten." His shrewd Socratic prose is delightfully wise and witty. This prose, the only dramatic prose written by Browning, with the exception of that in _Pippa Passes_, is, in its way, almost as good as the poetry: keen, vivacious, full-thoughted, picturesque, and singularly original. For instance, Chiappino is expressing his longing for a woman who could understand, as he says, the whole of him, to whom he could reveal alike his strength and weakness.

"Ah, my friend," rejoins Ogniben, "wish for nothing so
foolish! Worship your love, give her the best of you to see;
be to her like the western lands (they bring us such strange
news of) to the Spanish Court; send her only your lumps of
gold, fans of feathers, your spirit-like birds, and fruits
and gems. So shall you, what is unseen of you, be supposed
altogether a paradise by her,--as these western lands by
Spain: though I warrant there is filth, red baboons, ugly
reptiles and squalor enough, which they bring Spain as few
samples of as possible."

There is in all this prose, lengthy as it is, the true dramatic note, a recognisable tone of talk. But _A Soul's Tragedy_ is for the study, not the stage.

13. LURIA: A Tragedy in Five Acts.

[Published in 1846 (with _A Soul's Tragedy_) as No. VIII of
_Bells and Pomegranates_ (_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol. VI.
pp. 205-289). The action takes place from morning to night of
one day].

The action and interest in _Luria_ are somewhat less internalised than in _A Soul's Tragedy_, but the drama is in form a still nearer approach to monologue. Many of the speeches are so long as to be almost monologues in themselves; and the whole play is manifestly written (unlike the other plays, except its immediate predecessor, or rather its contemporary) with no thought of the stage. The poet is retreating farther and farther from the glare of the footlights; he is writing after his own fancy, and not as his audience or his manager would wish him to write. None of Browning's plays is so full of large heroic speech, of deep philosophy, of choice illustration; seldom has he written nobler poetry. There is not the intense and throbbing humanity of _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_; the characters are not so simply and so surely living men and women; but in the grave and lofty speech and idealised characters of _Luria_ we have something new, and something great as well.

The central figure is Luria himself; but the other characters are not so carefully and completely subordinated to him as are those in _A Soul's Tragedy_ to Chiappino. Luria is one of the noblest and most heroic figures in Browning's works. A Moor, with the instincts of the East and the culture of the West, he presents a racial problem which is very subtly handled; while his natural nobility and confidence are no less subtly set off against the Italian craft of his surroundings. The spectacle he presents is impressive and pathetic. An alien, with no bond to Florence save that of his inalienable love, he has led her forces against the Pisans, and saved her. Looking for no reward but the grateful love of the people he has saved, he meets instead with the basest ingratitude. While he is fighting and conquering for her, Florence, at home, is trying him for his life on a charge of treachery: a charge which has no foundation but in the base natures of his accusers, who know that he might, and therefore suspect that he will, turn to evil purpose his military successes and the power which they have gained him over the army. Generals of their own blood have betrayed them: how much more will this barbarian? Luria learns of the treachery of his allies in time to take revenge, he is urged to take revenge, and the means are placed in his hands, but his nobler nature conquers, and the punishment he deals on Florence is the punishment of his own voluntary death. The strength of love which restrains him from punishing the ungrateful city forbids him to live when his only love has proved false, his only link to life has gone. But before he dies he has the satisfaction of seeing the late repentance and regret of every enemy, whether secret schemer or open foe.

"Luria goes not poorly forth.
If we could wait! The only fault's with time;
All men become good creatures: but so slow!"

In the pathos of his life and death Luria may remind us of another unrequited lover, Strafford, whose devotion to his king gains the same reward as Luria's devotion to his adopted country.

In Luria's faithful friend and comrade Husain we have a contrasted picture of the Moor untouched by alien culture. The instincts of the one are dulled or disturbed by his Western wisdom and experience; Husain still keeps the old instincts and the unmixed nature, and still speaks the fervid and highly-coloured Eastern speech. But while Husain is to some extent a contrast with Luria, Luria and Husain together form an infinitely stronger contrast with the group of Italians. Braccio, the Florentine Commissary, is an admirable study of Italian subtlety and craft. Only a writer with Browning's special knowledge and sympathies could have conceived and executed so acute and true a picture of the Italian temper of the time, a temper manifested with singular appropriateness by the city of Machiavelli. Braccio is the chief schemer against Luria, and he schemes, not from any real ill-will, but from the diplomatic distrust of a too cautious and too suspicious patriot. Domizia, the vengeful Florentine lady, plotting against Florence with the tireless patience of an unforgetting wrong, is also a representative sketch, though not so clearly and firmly outlined as a character. Puccio, Luria's chief officer, once his commander, the simple fighting soldier, discontented but honest, unswervingly loyal to Florence, but little by little aware of and aggrieved at the wrong done to Luria, is a really touching conception. Tiburzio, the Pisan leader, is yet finer in his perfect chivalry of service to his foe. Nothing could be more nobly planned than the first meeting, and indeed the whole relations, of these magnanimous and worthy opponents, Luria and Tiburzio. There is a certain intellectual fascination for Browning in the analysis of mean natures and dubious motives, but of no contemporary can it be more justly said that he rises always and easily to the height and at the touch of an heroic action or of a noble nature.

14. CHRISTMAS-EVE AND EASTER-DAY: A Poem.

[Published in 1850 (_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol. V., pp.
207-307). Written in Florence.]

_Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day_ is the chief work in which Browning deals directly and primarily with the subject of Christianity and the religious beliefs of the age. Both the poems which appear under this title are studies of religious life and thought, the first more in the narrative and critical way, the second rather in relation to individual experience. Browning's position towards Christianity is perhaps unique. He has been described as "the latest extant Defender of the Faith," but the manner of his belief and the modes of his defence are as little conventional as any other of his qualities. Beyond all question the most deeply religious poet of our day, perhaps the greatest religious poet we have ever had, Browning has never written anything in the ordinary style of religious verse, the style of Herbert, of Keble, of the hymn-writers. The spirit which runs through all his work is more often felt as an influence than manifested in any concrete and separate form. _Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day_, _La Saisiaz_ and _Ferishtah's Fancies_ are the only prominent exceptions to this rule.

_Christmas-Eve_ is a study or vision of the religious life of the time. It professes to be the narrative of a strange experience lived through on a Christmas-Eve ("whether in the body I cannot tell, or whether out of the body,") in a little dissenting chapel on the outskirts of a country town, in St. Peter's at Rome, and at an agnostic lecture-hall in Göttingen. The vivid humorous sketch of the little chapel and its flock is like a bit of Dickens at his best. Equally good, in another kind, is the picture of the Professor and his audience at Göttingen, with its searching and scathing irony of merciless logic, and the tender and subtle discrimination of its judgment, sympathetic with the good faith of the honest thinker. Different again in style, and higher still in poetry, is the glowing description of the Basilica and its sensuous fervour of ceremonial; and higher and greater yet the picture of the double lunar rainbow merging into that of the vision: a piece of imaginative work never perhaps exceeded in spiritual exaltation and concordant splendour of song in the whole work of the poet, though equalled, if not exceeded, by the more terrible vision of judgment which will be cited later from _Easter-Day_.

"For lo, what think you? suddenly
The rain and the wind ceased, and the sky
Received at once the full fruition
Of the moon's consummate apparition.
The black cloud-barricade was riven,
Ruined beneath her feet, and driven
Deep in the West; while, bare and breathless,
North and South and East lay ready
For a glorious thing that, dauntless, deathless,
Sprang across them and stood steady.
'Twas a moon-rainbow, vast and perfect,
From heaven to heaven extending, perfect
As the mother-moon's self, full in face.
It rose, distinctly at the base
With its seven proper colours chorded,
Which still, in the rising, were compressed,
Until at last they coalesced,
And supreme the spectral creature lorded
In a triumph of purest white,--
Above which intervened the night.
But above night too, like only the next,
The second of a wondrous sequence,
Reaching in rare and rarer frequence,
Till the heaven of heavens were circumflexed,
Another rainbow rose, a mightier,
Fainter, flushier, and flightier,--
Rapture dying along its verge.
Oh, whose foot shall I see emerge,
Whose, from the straining topmost dark,
On to the keystone of that arc?"

At moments of such energy and ecstasy as this, all that there is in the poet of mere worldly wisdom and intellectual ingenuity drops off, or rather is consumed to a white glow in the intense flame of triumphant and over-mastering inspiration.

The piercing light cast in the poem on the representative creeds of the age is well worthy of serious consideration, from an ethical as well as from a poetical point of view. No nobler lesson of religious tolerance, united with religious earnestness, has been preached in our day. Nothing could be more novel and audacious than the union here attempted and achieved of colloquial realism and grotesque humour with imaginative vision and solemn earnestness. The style and metre vary with the mood. Where the narrative is serious the lines are regular and careful, they shrink to their smallest structural limit, and the rhymes are chiefly single and simple. Where it becomes humorous, the rhythm lengthens out its elastic syllables to the full extent, and swings and sways, jolts and rushes; the rhymes fall double and triple and break out into audible laughter.

_Easter-Day_, like its predecessor, is written in lines of four beats each, but the general effect is totally dissimilar. Here the verse is reduced to its barest constituents; every line is, syllabically as well as accentually, of equal length; and the lines run in pairs, without one double rhyme throughout. The tone and contents of the two poems (though also, in a sense, derived from the same elements) are in singular contrast. _Easter-Day_, despite a momentary touch or glimmer, here and there, of grave humour, is thoroughly serious in manner and continuously solemn in subject. The burden of the poem is stated in its first two lines:--

"How very hard it is to be
A Christian!"

Up to the thirteenth section it is an argument between the speaker, who is possessed of much faith but has a distinct tendency to pessimism, and another, who has a sceptical but also a hopeful turn of mind, respecting Christianity, its credibility, and how its doctrines fit human nature and affect the conduct of life. After keen discussion the argument returns to the lament, common to both disputants: how very hard it is to be, practically, a Christian. The speaker then relates, on account of its bearing on the discussion, an experience (or vision, as he leaves us free to imagine) which once came to him. Three years before, on an Easter-Eve, he was crossing the common where stood the chapel referred to by their friend (the poem thus, and thus only, links on to _Christmas-Eve_.) As he walked along, musingly, he asked himself what the Faith really was to him; what would be his fate, for instance, if he fell dead that moment? And he said to himself, jestingly enough, why should not the judgment-day dawn now, on Easter-morn?

"And as I said
This nonsense, throwing back my head
With light complacent laugh, I found
Suddenly all the midnight round
One fire. The dome of heaven had stood
As made up of a multitude
Of handbreadth cloudlets, one vast rack
Of ripples infinite and black,
From sky to sky. Sudden there went,
Like horror and astonishment,
A fierce vindictive scribble of red
Quick flame across, as if one said
(The angry scribe of Judgment) 'There--
Burn it!' And straight I was aware
That the whole ribwork round, minute
Cloud touching cloud beyond compute,
Was tinted, each with its own spot
Of burning at the core, till clot
Jammed against clot, and spilt its fire
Over all heaven, which 'gan suspire
As fanned to measure equable,--
Just so great conflagrations kill
Night overhead, and rise and sink,
Reflected. Now the fire would shrink
And wither off the blasted face
Of heaven, and I distinct might trace
The sharp black ridgy outlines left
Unburned like network--then, each cleft
The fire had been sucked back into,
Regorged, and out its surging flew
Furiously, and night writhed inflamed,
Till, tolerating to be tamed
No longer, certain rays world-wide
Shot downwardly. On every side,
Caught past escape, the earth was lit;
As if a dragon's nostril split
And all his famished ire o'erflowed;
Then as he winced at his lord's goad,
Back he inhaled: whereat I found
The clouds into vast pillars bound,
Based on the corners of the earth
Propping the skies at top: a dearth
Of fire i' the violet intervals,
Leaving exposed the utmost walls
Of time, about to tumble in
And end the world."

Judgment, according to the vision, is now over. He who has chosen earth rather than heaven, is allowed his choice: earth is his for ever. How the walls of the world shrink and narrow, how the glow fades off from the beauty of nature, of art, of science; how the judged soul prays for only a chance of love, only a hope of ultimate heaven; how the ban is taken off him, and he wakes from the vision on the grey plain as Easter-morn is breaking: this, with its profound and convincing moral lessons, is told, without a didactic note, in poetry of sustained splendour. In sheer height of imagination _Easter-Day_ could scarcely exceed the greatest parts of _Christmas-Eve_, but it preserves a level of more equable splendour, it is a work of art of more chastened workmanship. In its ethical aspect it is also of special importance, for, while the poet does not necessarily identify himself in all respects with the seer of the vision, the poem enshrines some of Browning's deepest convictions on life and religion.

15. MEN AND WOMEN.

[Published in 1855, in 2 vols.; now dispersed in Vols. IV.,
V. and VI. of _Poetical Works_, 1889.]

The series of _Men and Women_, fifty-one poems in number, represents Browning's genius at its ripe maturity, its highest uniform level. In this central work of his career, every element of his genius is equally developed, and the whole brought into a perfection of harmony never before or since attained. There is no lack, there is no excess. I do not say that the poet has not touched higher heights since, or perhaps before; but that he has never since nor before maintained himself so long on so high a height, never exhibited the rounded perfection, the imagination, thought, passion, melody, variety, all fused in one, never produced a single work or group at once so great and so various, admits, I think, of little doubt. Here are fifty poems, every one of which, in its way, is a masterpiece; and the range is such as no other English poet has perhaps ever covered in a single book of miscellaneous poems.

In _Men and Women_ Browning's special instrument, the monologue, is brought to perfection. Such monologues as _Andrea del Sarto_ or the _Epistle of Karshish_ never have been, and probably never will be surpassed, on their own ground, after their own order. To conceive a drama, to present every side and phase and feature of it from one point of view, to condense all its potentialities of action, all its significance and import, into some few hundred lines, this has been done by but one poet, and nowhere with such absolute perfection as here. Even when dealing with a single emotion, Browning usually crystallizes it into a choice situation; and almost every poem in the series, down to the smallest lyric, is essentially a dramatic monologue. But perhaps the most striking instances of the form and method, and, with the little drama of _In a Balcony_, the principal poems in the collection, are the five blank verse pieces, _Andrea del Sarto_, _Fra Lippo Lippi_, _Cleon_, _Karshish_, and _Bishop Blougram_. Each is a masterpiece of poetry. Each is in itself a drama, and contains the essence of a life, condensed into a single episode, or indicated in a combination of discourse, conversation, argument, soliloquy, reminiscence. Each, besides being the presentation of a character, moves in a certain atmosphere of its own, philosophical, ethical, or artistic. _Andrea del Sarto_ and _Fra Lippo Lippi_ deal with art. _Cleon_ and _Karshish_, in a sense companion poems, are concerned, each secondarily, with the arts and physical sciences, primarily with the attitude of the Western and Eastern worlds when confronted with the problem of the Gospel of Christ. _Bishop Blougram_ is modern, ecclesiastical and argumentative. But however different in form and spirit, however diverse in _milieu_, each is alike the record of a typical soul at a typical moment.

_Andrea del Sarto_ is a "translation into song" of the picture known as "Andrea del Sarto and his Wife," in the Pitti Palace at Florence. The story of Andrea del Sarto is told by Vasari, in one of the best known of his _Lives_: how the painter, who at one time seemed as if he might have competed with Raphael, was ruined, as artist and as man, by his beautiful, soulless wife, the fatal Lucrezia del Fede; and how, led and lured by her, he outraged his conscience, lowered his ideal, and, losing all heart and hope, sank into the cold correctness, the unerring fluency, the uniform, melancholy repetition of a single type, his wife's, which distinguish his later works. Browning has taken his facts from Vasari, and he has taken them quite literally. But what a change, what a transformation and transfiguration! Instead of a piece of prose biography and criticism, we have (in Mr. Swinburne's appropriate words) "the whole man raised up and reclothed with flesh." No more absolutely creative work has been done in our days; few more beautiful and pathetic poems written. The mood of sad, wistful, hopeless mournfulness of resignation which the poem expresses, is a somewhat rare one with Browning's vivid and vivacious genius. It is an autumn twilight piece.

"A common greyness silvers everything,--
All in a twilight, you and I alike
--You, at the point of your first pride in me
(That's gone, you know),--but I, at every point;
My youth, my hope, my art, being all toned down
To yonder sober pleasant Fiesole.
There's the bell clinking from the chapel top;
That length of convent-wall across the way
Holds the trees safer, huddled more inside;
The last monk leaves the garden; days decrease,
And autumn grows, autumn in everything.
Eh, the whole seems to fall into a shape
As if I saw alike my work and self
And all that I was born to be and do,
A twilight-piece."

The very movement of the lines, their tone and touch, contribute to the effect. A single clear impression is made to result from an infinity of minute, scarcely appreciable touches: how fine these touches are, how clear the impression, can only be hinted at in words, can be realised only by a loving and scrupulous study.

Whether the picture which suggested the poem is an authentic work of Andrea, or whether, as experts have now agreed, it is a work by an unknown artist representing an imaginary man and woman is, of course, of no possible consequence in connection with the poem. Nor is it of any more importance that the Andrea of Vasari is in all probability not the real Andrea. Historic fact has nothing to do with poetry: it is mere material, the quarry of ideas; and the real truth of Browning's portrait of Andrea would no more be impugned by the establishment of Vasari's inaccuracy, than the real truth of Shakespeare's portrait of Macbeth by the proof of the untrustworthiness of Holinshed.

A greater contrast, in every respect, than that between _Andrea del Sarto_ and _Fra Lippo Lippi_ can scarcely be conceived. The story of Filippo Lippi[29] is taken, like that of Andrea, from Vasari's _Lives_: it is taken as literally, it is made as authentically living, and, in its own more difficult way, it is no less genuine a poem. The jolly, jovial tone of the poem, its hearty humour and high spirits, and the breathless rush and hurry of the verse, render the scapegrace painter to the life. Not less in keeping is the situation in which the unsaintly friar is introduced: caught by the civic guard, past midnight, in an equivocal neighbourhood, quite able and ready, however, to fraternise with his captors, and pour forth, rough and ready, his ideas and adventures. A passage from the poem placed side by side with an extract from Vasari will show how faithfully the record of Fra Lippo's life is followed, and it will also show, in some small measure, the essential newness, the vividness and revelation of the poet's version.

"By the death of his father," writes Vasari,[30] "he was left
a friendless orphan at the age of two years, his mother also
having died shortly after his birth. The child was for some
time under the care of a certain Mona Lapaccia, his aunt, the
sister of his father, who brought him up with great
difficulty until he had attained his eighth year, when, being
no longer able to support the burden of his maintenance, she
placed him in the above-named convent of the Carmelites."

Here is Browning's version:--

"I was a baby when my mother died
And father died and left me in the street.
I starved there, God knows how, a year or two
On fig-skins, melon-parings, rinds and shucks,
Refuse and rubbish. One fine frosty day,
My stomach being empty as your hat,
The wind doubled me up and down I went.
Old Aunt Lapaccia trussed me with one hand,
(Its fellow was a stinger as I knew)
And so along the wall, over the bridge,
By the straight cut to the convent. Six words there,
While I stood munching my first bread that month:
'So, boy, you're minded,' quoth the good fat father,
Wiping his own mouth, 'twas refection-time,--
'To quit this very miserable world?'"

But not only has Browning given a wonderfully realistic portrait of the man; a man to whom life in its fulness was the only joy, a true type of the Renaissance spirit, metamorphosed by ironic fate into a monk; he has luminously indicated the true end and aim of art and the false asceticism of so-called "religious" art, in the characteristic comments and confessions of an innovator in the traditions of religious painting.

_Cleon_ is prefaced by the text "As certain also of your own poets have said" (_Acts_, xvii. 28), and is supposed to be a letter from one of the poets to whom St. Paul refers, addressed to Protus, an imaginary "Tyrant," whose wondering admiration of Cleon's many-sided culture has drawn him to one who is at once poet, painter, sculptor, musician and philosopher. Compared with such poems as _Andrea del Sarto_, there is little realisable detail in the course of the calm argument or statement, but I scarcely see how the temper of the time, among its choicest spirits (the time of classic decadence, of barren culture, of fruitless philosophy) could well have been more finely shadowed forth. The quality of the versification, unique here as in every one of the five great poems, is perfectly adapted to the subject. The slow sweep of the verse, its stately melody, its large, clear, classic harmony, enable us to receive the right impression as admirably as the other qualities, already pointed out, enable us to feel the resigned sadness of Andrea and the jovial gusto of Lippo. In _Cleon_ we have a historical picture, imaginary indeed, but typical. It reveals or records the religious feeling of the pagan world at the time of the coming of Christ; its sadness, dissatisfaction and expectancy, and the failure of its wisdom to fathom the truths of the new Gospel.

In _An Epistle containing the strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician_, we have perhaps a yet more subtle delineation of a character similar by contrast. Cleon is a type of the Western and sceptical, Karshish of the Eastern and believing, attitude of mind; the one repellent, the other absorbent, of new things offered for belief. Karshish, "the picker up of learning's crumbs," writes from Syria to his master at home, "Abib, all sagacious in our art," concerning a man whose singular case has fascinated him, one Lazarus of Bethany. There are few more lifelike and subtly natural narratives in Browning's poetry; few more absolutely interpenetrated by the finest imaginative sympathy. The scientific caution and technicality of the Arab physician, his careful attempt at a statement of the case from a purely medical point of view, his self-reproachful uneasiness at the strange interest which the man's story has caused in him, the strange credulity which he cannot keep from encroaching on his mind: all this is rendered with a matchless delicacy and accuracy of touch and interpretation. Nor can anything be finer than the representation of Lazarus after his resurrection, a representation which has significance beyond its literal sense, and points a moral often enforced by the poet: that doubt and mystery, in life and in religion alike, are necessary, and indeed alone make either life or religion possible. The special point in the tale of Lazarus which has impressed Karshish with so intense an interest is that

"This man so cured regards the curer, then,
As--God forgive me! who but God himself,
Creator and sustainer of the world,
That came and dwelt in flesh on it awhile!
--'Sayeth that such an one was born and lived,
Taught, healed the sick, broke bread at his own house,
Then died, with Lazarus by, for aught I know,
And yet was ... what I said nor choose repeat,
And must have so avouched himself, in fact,
In hearing of this very Lazarus
Who saith--but why all this of what he saith?
Why write of trivial matters, things of price
Calling at every moment for remark?
I noticed on the margin of a pool
Blue-flowering borage, the Aleppo sort,
Aboundeth, very nitrous. It is strange!"

How perfectly the attitude of the Arab sage is here given, drawn, against himself, to a conviction which he feels ashamed to entertain. As in _Cleon_ the very pith of the letter is contained in the postscript, so, after the apologies and farewell greetings of Karshish, the thought which all the time has been burning within him bursts into flame.

"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!
Thou hast no power nor may'st conceive of mine,
But love I gave thee, with myself to love,
And thou must love me who have died for thee!'
The madman saith He said so: it is strange."

So far, the monologues are single-minded, and represent the sincere and frank expression of the thoughts and opinions of their speakers. _Bishop Blougram's Apology_ introduces a new element, the casuistical. The Bishop's Apology is, literally, an _apologia_, a speech in defence of himself, in which the aim is to confound an adversary, not to state the truth. This form, intellectual rather than emotional, argumentative more than dramatic, has had, from this time forward, a considerable attraction for Browning, and it is responsible for some of his hardest work, such as _Fifine at the Fair_ and _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_.

_Bishop Blougram's Apology_ represents the after-dinner talk of a great Roman Catholic dignitary. It is addressed to Mr. Gigadibs, a young and shallow literary man, who poses as free-thinker and as critic of the Bishop's position. Mr. Gigadibs' implied opinion is, that a man of Blougram's intellect and broad views cannot, with honesty, hold and teach Roman Catholic dogma; that his position is anomalous and unideal. Blougram retorts with his voluminous and astonishingly clever "apology." In this apology we trace three distinct elements. First, there is a substratum of truth, truth, that is, in the abstract; then there is an application of these true principles to his own case and conduct, an application which is thoroughly unjustifiable--

"He said true things, but called them by wrong names--"

but which serves for an ingenious, and apparently, as regards Gigadibs, a triumphant, defence; finally, there is the real personal element, the man as he is. We are quite at liberty to suppose, even if we were not bound to suppose, that after all Blougram's defence is merely or partly ironical, and that he is not the contemptible creature he would be if we took him quite seriously. It is no secret that Blougram himself is, in the main, modelled after and meant for Cardinal Wiseman, who, it is said, was the writer of a good-humoured review of the poem in the Catholic journal, _The Rambler_ (January, 1856). The supple, nervous strength and swiftness of the blank verse is, in its way, as fine as the qualities we have observed in the other monologues: there is a splendid "go" in it, a vast capacity for business; the verse is literally alive with meaning, packed with thought, instinct with wit and irony; and not this only, but starred with passages of exquisite charm, such as that on "how some actor played Death on the stage," or that more famous one:--

"Just when we're safest, there's a sunset-touch,
A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death,
A chorus-ending from Euripides,--
And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears
As old and new at once as nature's self,
To rap and knock and enter in our soul,
Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring
Round the ancient idol, on his base again,--
The grand Perhaps!"

At least six of the poems contained in _Men and Women_ deal with painting and music. But while four of these seem to fall into one group, the remaining two, _Andrea del Sarto_ and _Fra Lippo Lippi_, properly belong, though themselves the greatest of the art-poems as art-poems, to the group of monodramas already noticed. But _Old Pictures in Florence_, _The Guardian Angel_, _Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha_ and _A Toccata of Galuppi's_, are chiefly and distinctively notable in their relation to art, or to some special picture or piece of music.

_The Guardian Angel_ is a "translation into song" of Guercino's picture of that name (_L'Angelo Custode_). It is addressed to "Waring," and was written by Browning at Ancona, after visiting with Mrs. Browning the church of San Agostino at Fano, which contains the picture. This touching and sympathetic little poem is Browning's only detailed description of a picture; but it is of more interest as an expression of personal feeling. Something in its sentiment has made it one of the most popular of his poems. _Old Pictures in Florence_ is a humorous and earnest moralising on the meaning and mission of art and the rights and wrongs of artists, suggested by some of the old pictures in Florence. It contains perhaps the most complete and particular statement of Browning's artistic principles that we have anywhere in his work, as well as a very noble and energetic outburst of indignant enthusiasm on behalf of the "early masters," the lesser older men whom the world slurs over or forgets. The principles which Browning imputes to the early painters may be applied to poetry as well as to art. Very characteristic and significant is the insistence on the deeper value of life, of soul, than of mere expression or technique, or even of mere unbreathing beauty. _Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha_ is the humorous soliloquy of an imaginary organist over a fugue in F minor by an imaginary composer, named in the title. It is a mingling of music and moralising. The famous description of a fugue, and the personification of its five voices, is a brilliantly ingenious _tour de force_; and the rough humour is quite in keeping with the _dramatis persona_. In complete contrast to _Master Hugues_ is _A Toccata of Galuppi's_,[31] one of the daintiest, most musical, most witching and haunting of Browning's poems, certainly one of his masterpieces as a lyric poet. It is a vision of Venice evoked from the shadowy Toccata, a vision of that delicious, brilliant, evanescent, worldly life, when

"Balls and masks began at midnight, burning ever to midday,"

and the lover and his lady would break off their talk to listen while Galuppi

"Sat and played Toccatas, stately at the clavichord."

But "the eternal note of sadness" soon creeps in.

"Yes, you, like a ghostly cricket, creaking where a house was burned:
'Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned.

* * * * *

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 this poem Browning has called up before us the whole aspect of Venetian life in the eighteenth century. In three other poems, among the most remarkable that he has ever written, _A Grammarian's Funeral_, _The Heretic's Tragedy_ and _Holy-Cross Day_, he has realised and represented the life and temper of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. _A Grammarian's Funeral_, "shortly after the Revival of Learning in Europe," gives the nobler spirit of the earlier pioneers of the Renaissance, men like Cyriac of Ancona and Filelfo, devoted pedants who broke ground in the restoration to the modern world of the civilisation and learning of ancient Greece and Rome. It gives this, the nobler and earlier spirit, as finely as _The Tomb at St. Praxed's_ gives the later and grosser. In Browning's hands the figure of the old grammarian becomes heroic. "He settled _Hoti's_ business," true; but he did something more than that. It is the spirit in which the work is done, rather than the special work itself, here only relatively important, which is glorified. Is it too much to say that this is the noblest of all requiems ever chanted over the grave of the scholar?

"Here's the top peak; the multitude below
Live, for they can, there:
This man decided not to Live but Know--
Bury this man there.
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 or dying."

The union of humour with intense seriousness, of the grotesque with the stately, is one that only Browning could have compassed, and the effect is singularly appropriate. As the disciples of the old humanist bear their dead master up to his grave on the mountain-top, chanting their dirge and eulogy, the lines of the poem seem actually to move to the steady climbing rhythm of their feet.

_The Heretic's Tragedy: a Middle-Age Interlude_, is described by the author as "a glimpse from the burning of Jacques du Bourg-Molay [last Grand-Master of the Templars], A.D. 1314, as distorted by the refraction from Flemish brain to brain during the course of a couple of centuries." Of all Browning's mediæval poems this is perhaps the greatest, as it is certainly the most original, the most astonishing. Its special "note" is indescribable, for there is nothing with which we can compare it. If I say that it is perhaps the finest example in English poetry of the pure grotesque, I shall fail to interpret it aright to those who think of the grotesque as a synonym for the ugly and debased. If I call it fantastic, I shall do it less than justice in suggesting a certain lightness and flimsiness which are quite alien to its profound seriousness, a seriousness which touches on sublimity. Browning's power of sculpturing single situations is seldom shown in finer relief than in those poems in which he has seized upon some "occult eccentricity of history" or of legend, like this of _The Heretic's Tragedy_, or that in _Holy-Cross Day_, fashioning it into some quaint, curt, tragi-comic form. _Holy-Cross Day_ expresses the feelings of the Jews, who were forced on this day (the 14th September) to attend an annual Christian sermon in Rome. A deliciously naïve extract from an imaginary _Diary by the Bishop's Secretary_, 1600, first sets forth the orthodox view of the case; then the poem tells us "what the Jews really said." Nothing more audaciously or more sardonically mirthful was ever written than the first part of this poem, with its

"Fee, faw, fum! bubble and squeak!
Blessedest Thursday's the fat of the week;"

while the sudden transition to the sublime and steadfast Song of Death of Rabbi ben Ezra is an effect worthy of Heine: more than worthy. Heine would inevitably have put his tongue in his cheek again at the end.

With the three great mediæval poems should be named the slighter sketch of _Protus_. The first and last lines, describing two imaginary busts, are a fine instance of Browning's power of translating sense into sound. Compare the smooth and sweet melody of the opening lines--

"Among these latter busts we count by scores
Half-emperors and quarter-emperors,

* * * * *

One loves a baby-face, with violets there--
Violets instead of laurels in the hair,--
As they were all the little locks could bear"--

with the rasping vigour and strength of sound which point the contrast of the conclusion:--

"Here's John the Smith's rough-hammered head. Great eye,
Gross jaw and griped lips do what granite can
To give you the crown-grasper. What a man!"

One poem of absolutely unique order is the romance of "_Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came_." If it were not for certain lines, certain metaphors and images, here and there in his earlier works, we should find in this poem an exception to the rule of Browning's work so singular and startling as to be almost phenomenal. But in passages of _Pauline_, of _Paracelsus_, of the lyric written in 1836, and incorporated, more than twenty years later, with _James Lee's Wife_, we have distinct evidence of a certain reserve, as it were, of romantic sensibility, a certain tendency, which we may consider to have been consciously checked rather than early exhausted, towards the weird and fanciful. In _Childe Roland_ all this latent sensibility receives full and final expression. The poem is very generally supposed to be an allegory, and a number of ingenious interpretations have been suggested, and the "Dark Tower" has been defined as Love, Life, Death and Truth. But, as a matter of fact, Browning, in writing it, had no allegorical intention whatever. It was meant to be, and is, a pure romance. It was suggested by the line from Shakespeare which heads it, and was "built up," in Mrs. Orr's words "of picturesque impressions, which have separately or collectively produced themselves in the author's mind, ... including a tower which Mr. Browning once saw in the Carrara Mountains, a painting which caught his eye years later in Paris; and the figure of a horse in the tapestry in his own drawing-room."[32] The poem depicts the last adventure of a knight vowed to the quest of a certain "Dark Tower." The description of his journey across a strange and dreadful country is one of the ghastliest and most vivid in all poetry; ghastly without hope, without alleviation, without a momentary touch of contrast; vivid and ghastly as the lines following:--

"A sudden little river crossed my path
As unexpected as a serpent comes.
No sluggish tide congenial to the glooms;
This, as it frothed by, might have been a bath
For the fiend's glowing hoof--to see the wrath
Of its black eddy bespate with flakes and spumes.

So petty yet so spiteful! All along,
Low scrubby alders kneeled down over it;
Drenched willows flung them headlong in a fit
Of mute despair, a suicidal throng:
The river which had done them all the wrong,
Whate'er that was rolled by, deterred no whit.

Which while I forded,--good saints, how I feared
To set my foot upon a dead man's cheek,
Each step, or feel the spear I thrust to seek
For hollows, tangled in his hair or beard!
--It may have been a water-rat I speared
But, ugh! it sounded like a baby's shriek."

The manner of the poem, wholly unlike that of any other poem, may be described by varying Flaubert's phrase of "epic realism": it is romantic realism. The weird, fantastic and profoundly imaginative picture brought before us with such startling and almost oppressive vividness, is not painted in a style of vague suggestiveness, but in a hard, distinct, definite, realistic way, the realism which results from a faithful record of distorted impressions. The poet's imagination is like a flash of lightning which strikes through the darkness, flickering above the earth, and lighting up, point by point, with a momentary and fearful distinctness, the horrors of the landscape.

A large and important group of _Men and Women_ consists of love-poems, or poems dealing, generally in some concrete and dramatic way, sometimes in a purely lyrical manner, with the emotion of love. _Love among the Ruins_, a masterpiece of an absolutely original kind, is the idyl of a lover's meeting, in which the emotion is emphasised and developed by the contrast of its surroundings. The lovers meet in a turret among the ruins of an ancient city, and the moment chosen is immediately before their meeting, when the lover gazes around him, struck into sudden meditation by the vision of the mighty city fallen and of the living might of Love.

"And I know, while thus the quiet-coloured eve
Smiles to leave
To their folding, all our many-tinkling fleece
In such peace,
And the slopes and rills and undistinguished grey
Melt away--
That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair
Waits me there
In the turret whence the charioteers caught soul
For the goal,
When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb
Till I come.

For he looked upon the city, every side,
Far and wide,
All the mountains topped with temples, all the glades'
Colonnades,
All the causeys, bridges, aqueducts,--and then,
All the men!
When I do come, she will speak not, she will stand,
Either hand
On my shoulder, give her eyes the first embrace
Of my face,
Ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight and speech
Each on each.

In one year they sent a million fighters forth
South and North,
And they built their gods a brazen pillar high
As the sky,
Yet reserved a thousand chariots in full force--
Gold, of course.
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."

The quaint chime or tinkle of a metre made out of the cadence of sheep-bells renders with curious felicity the quietness and fervent meditation of the subject. _A Lovers' Quarrel_ is in every respect a contrast. It is a whimsical and delicious lyric, with a flowing and leaping melody, a light and piquant music deepened into pathos by a mournful undertone of retrospect and regret, not without a hope for the future. All Browning is seen in this pathetic gaiety, this eagerness and unrest and passionate make-believe of a lover's mood. _Evelyn Hope_ strikes a tenderer note; it is one of Browning's sweetest, simplest and most pathetic pieces, and embodies, in a concrete form, one of his deepest convictions. It is the lament of a man, no longer young, by the death-bed of a young girl whom he has loved, unknown to her. She has died scarcely knowing him, not even suspecting his love. But what matter? God creates love to reward love, and there is another life to come.

"So hush,--I will give you this leaf to keep
See, I shut it inside the sweet cold hand!
There, that is our secret: go to sleep!
You will wake, and remember, and understand."

_A Woman's Last Word_ is an exquisite little lyric which sings itself to its own music of delicate gravity and gentle pathos; but it too holds, in its few small lines, a complete situation, that most pathetic one in which a woman resolves to merge her individuality in the wish and will of her husband, to bind, for his sake, her intellect in the chains of her heart.

"A WOMAN'S LAST WORD.

I.

Let's contend no more, Love,
Strive nor weep:
All be as before, Love,
--Only sleep!

II.

What so wild as words are?
I and thou
In debate, as birds are,
Hawk on bough!

III.

See the creature stalking
While we speak!
Hush and hide the talking,
Cheek on cheek!

IV.

What so false as truth is,
False to thee?
Where the serpent's tooth is,
Shun the tree--

V.

Where the apple reddens
Never pry--
Lest we lose our Edens,
Eve and I.

VI.

Be a god and hold me
With a charm!
Be a man and fold me
With thine arm!

VII.

Teach me, only teach, Love!
As I ought
I will speak thy speech, Love,
Think thy thought--

VIII.

Meet, if thou require it,
Both demands,
Laying flesh and spirit
In thy hands.

IX.

That shall be to-morrow
Not to-night:
I must bury sorrow
Out of sight:

X.

--Must a little weep, Love,
(Foolish me!)
And so fall asleep, Love,
Loved by thee."

_Any Wife to any Husband_ is the grave and mournful lament of a dying woman, addressed to the husband whose love has never wavered throughout her life, but whose faithlessness to her memory she foresees. The situation is novel in poetry, and it is realised with an intense sympathy and depth of feeling. The tone of dignified sadness in the woman's words, never passionate or pleading, only confirmed and hopeless, is admirably rendered in the slow and solemn metre, whose firm smoothness and regularity translate into sound the sentiment of the speech. _A Serenade at the Villa_, which expresses a hopeless love from the man's side, has a special picturesqueness, and something more than picturesqueness: nature and life are seen in throbbing sympathy. The little touches of description give one the very sense of the hot thundrous summer night as it "sultrily suspires" in sympathy with the disconsolate lover at his fruitless serenading. I can scarcely doubt that this poem (some of which has been quoted on p. 25 above), was suggested by one of the songs in Sidney's _Astrophel and Stella_, a poem on the same subject in the same rare metre:--

"Who is it that this dark night
Underneath my window plaineth?
It is one who from thy sight
Being, ah! exiled, disdaineth
Every other vulgar light."

If Browning's love-poems have any model or anticipation in English poetry, it is certainly in the love-songs of Sidney, in what Browning himself has called,

"The silver speech,
Of Sidney's self, the starry paladin."

No lover in English poetry has been so much a man as Sidney and Browning.

_Two in the Campagna_ presents a more intricate situation than most of the love-poems. It is the lament of a man, addressed to the woman at his side, whom he loves and by whom he is loved, over the imperfection and innocent inconstancy of his love. The two can never quite grow to one, and he, oppressed by the terrible burden of imperfect sympathies, is for ever seeking, realising, losing, then again seeking the spiritual union still for ever denied. The vague sense of the Roman Campagna is distilled into exquisite words, and through all there sounds the sad and weary undertone of baffled endeavour:--

"Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn."

_The Last Ride Together_ is one of those love-poems which I have spoken of as specially noble and unique, and it is, I think, the noblest and most truly unique of them all. Thought, emotion and melody are mingled in perfect measure: it has the lyrical "cry," and the objectiveness of the drama. The situation, sufficiently indicated in the title, is selected with a choice and happy instinct: the very motion of riding is given in the rhythm. Every line throbs with passion, or with a fervid meditation which is almost passion, and in the last verse, and, still more, in the single line--

"Who knows but the world may end to-night?"

the dramatic intensity strikes as with an electric shock.

_By the Fireside_ though in all its circumstances purely dramatic and imaginary, rises again and again to the fervour of personal feeling, and we can hardly be wrong in classing it, in soul though not in circumstance, with _One Word More_ and the other sacred poems which enshrine the memory of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But, apart from this suggestion, the poem is a masterpiece of subtle simplicity and picturesqueness. Nothing could be more admirable in themselves than the natural descriptions throughout; but these are never mere isolated descriptions, nor even a mere stationary background: they are fused with the emotion which they both help to form and assist in revealing.