Chapter VII: Part 7

Now the "Titanic pamphleteer" is more recognisable in Browning's most vivid portrait than the "lyric poet of aerial delicacy" who in some strange fashion, beyond his own wildest metamorphoses, distracted and idealised the otherwise congruous figure. Not that this is overlooked or forgotten: it is brought out admirably in several places, notably in the fine song put into the mouth of Aristophanes at the close; but it is scarcely so prominent as lovers of him could desire. It is possible, too, that Browning somewhat over-accentuates his earnestness; not his fundamental earnestness, but the extent to which he remembered and exhibited it. "My soul bade fight": yes, but "laugh," too, and laugh for laughter's as well as fight for principle's sake. This, again, is merely a matter of detail, of shading. There can be little doubt that the whole general outline of the man is right, none whatever that it is a living and breathing outline. His apology is presented in Browning's familiar manner of genuine feeling tempered with sophistry. As a piece of dramatic art it is worthy to stand beside his famous earlier apologies; and it has value too as a contribution to criticism, to a vital knowledge of the Attic drama and the work and personality of Aristophanes and Euripides, and to a better understanding of the drama as a criticism of life.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 50: George Meredith, _On the Idea of Comedy_.]

23. THE INN ALBUM.

[Published in November, 1875. (_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol
XII. pp. 179-311.) Translated into German in 1877: "_Das
Fremdenbuch_ von Robert Browning. Aus dem Englischen von E.
Leo. Hamburg: W. Mauke Söhne."]

The story of _The Inn Album_ is founded on fact, though it is not, like _Red Cotton Night-Cap Country_, an almost literal transcript from life. The characters of the poem are four, all unnamed: a young "polished snob," an impoverished middle-aged nobleman, a woman, whom he had seduced, and who is now married to a clergyman; and a young girl, her friend, who is betrothed to the younger of the two men. Of these characters, the only one whom Browning has invented is the girl, through whom, in his telling of the story, the tragedy is brought about. But he has softened the repulsiveness of the original tale, and has also brought it to a ringing close, not supplied by the bare facts. The career of the elder man, which came to an end in 1839, did not by any means terminate with the events recorded in the poem.

_The Inn Album_ is a story of wrecked lives, lost hopes, of sordid and gloomy villainies; with only light enough in its darkness to make that darkness visible. It is profoundly sad; yet

"These things are life:
And life, they say, is worthy of the Muse."

It would also be profoundly depressing but for the art which has wrung a grandeur out of grime, which has uplifted a story of mere vulgar evil to the height of tragedy. Out of materials that might be melodramatic, Browning has created a drama of humanity of which the impression is single, intense and overpowering. Notwithstanding the clash of physical catastrophe at the close, it is really a spiritual tragedy; and in it Browning has achieved that highest of achievements: the right, vivid and convincing presentment of human nature at its highest and lowest, at its extremes of possible action and emotion. It is not perfect: the colloquialism which truth and art alike demand sinks sometimes, though not in the great scenes, to the confines of a bastard realism. But in the main the poem is an excellent example of the higher imaginative realism, of the close, yet poetic or creative, treatment of life.

The four characters who play out the brief and fateful action of this drama in narrative (the poem is more nearly related in form to the pure drama than any other of Browning's poems not cast in the dramatic form) are creations, three of them at least, in a deeper sense than the characters in _Red Cotton Night-Cap Country_, or than the character in _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_. The "good gay girl," serving her unconscious purpose in the tragic action, is properly enough a mere sketch; but the two men and the elder woman are profoundly studied characters, struck into life and revealed to themselves, to one another and to us, at the supreme moment of a complex crisis. The elder man is one of Browning's most finished studies, and, morally, one of the worst characters even he has ever investigated. He is at once bad, clever and cynical, the combination, of all others, most noxious and most hopeless. He prides himself above all things on his intellect; and it is evident that he has had the power to shape his course and to sway others. But now, at fifty, he knows himself to be a failure. The cause of it he traces mainly to a certain crisis of his life, when he won, only to abuse, the affections of a splendidly beautiful woman, whose equal splendour of soul he saw only when too late. It is significant of him that he never views his conduct as a crime, a wrong to the woman, but as a mistake on his part; and his attitude is not that of remorse, but of one who has missed a chance. When, after four years, he meets unexpectedly the woman whom he has wronged and lost, the good and evil in him blaze out in a sudden and single flame of earnest appeal. In the fact that this passionate appeal should be only half-sincere, or, if sincere, then only for the moment, that to her who hears it, it should seem wholly insincere, lies the intensity of the situation.

The character of the woman is less complex but not less consistent and convincing. Like the man, her development has been arrested and distorted by the cause which has made him too a wreck. Her love was single-hearted and over-mastering; its very force, in recoil, turned it into hate. Yoked to a soulless husband, whom she has married half in pity, half in despair, her whole nature has frozen; so that when we see her she is, while physically the same, spiritually the ghost of her former self. The subtlety of the picture is to show what she is now while making equally plain what she was in the past. She is a figure not so much pathetic as terrible.

Pathetic, despite its outer comedy, is the figure of the young man, the great rough, foolish, rich youth, tutored in evil by his Mephistopheles, but only, we fancy, skin-deep in it, slow of thought but quick of feeling, with his one and only love, never forgotten, and now found again in the very woman whom his "friend" has wronged. His last speech, with its clumsy yet genuine chivalry, its touching, broken words, its fine feeling and faltering expression, is one of the most pathetic things I know. Such a character, in its very absence of subtlety, is a triumph of Browning's, to whom intellectual simplicity must be the hardest of all dramatic assumptions.

24. PACCHIAROTTO, and how he worked in Distemper: with other poems.

[Published in July, 1876 (_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol. XIV.
pp. 1-152).]

_Pacchiarotto and other Poems_ is the first collection of miscellaneous pieces since the _Dramatis Personæ_ of 1864. It is somewhat of an exception to the general rule of Browning's work. A large proportion of it is critical rather than creative, a criticism of critics; perhaps it would be at once more correct and concise to call it "Robert Browning's Apology." _Pacchiarotto_, _At the "Mermaid"_, _House_, _Shop_ and _Epilogue_, are all more or less personal utterances on art and the artist, sometimes in a concrete and impersonal way, more often in a somewhat combative and contemptuous spirit. The most important part of the volume, however, is that which contains the two or three monodramatic poems and the splendid ballad of the fleet, _Hervé Riel_.

The first and longest poem, _Of Pacchiarotto, and how he worked in Distemper_, divides itself into two parts, the first being the humorous rendering of a true anecdote told in Vasari, of Giacomo Pacchiarotto, a Sienese painter of the sixteenth century; and the second, a still more mirthful onslaught of the poet upon his critics. The story--

"Begun with a chuckle,
And throughout timed by raps of the knuckle,"--

is funny enough in itself, and it points an excellent moral; but it is chiefly interesting as a whimsical freak of verse, an extravaganza in staccato. The rhyming is of its kind almost incomparable as a sustained effort in double and triple grotesque rhymes. Not even in _Hudibras_, not even in _Don Juan_, is there anything like them. I think all other experiments of the kind, however successful as a whole, let you see now and then that the author has had a hard piece of work to keep up his appearance of ease. In _Pacchiarotto_ there is no evidence of the strain. The masque of critics, under the cunning disguise of May-day chimney-sweepers:--

"'We critics as sweeps out your chimbly!
Much soot to remove from your flue, sir!
Who spares coal in kitchen an't you, sir!
And neighbours complain it's no joke, sir!
You ought to consume your own smoke, sir!'"--

this after-part, overflowing with jolly humour and comic scorn, a besom wielded by a laughing giant, is calculated to put the victims in better humour with their executioner than with themselves. Browning has had to endure more than most men at the hands of the critics, and he takes in this volume, not in this poem only, a full and a characteristically good-humoured revenge. The _Epilogue_ follows up the pendant to _Pacchiarotto_. There is the same jolly humour, the same combative self-assertiveness, the same retort _Tu quoque_, with a yet more earnest and pungent enforcement.

"Wine, pulse in might from me!
It may never emerge in must from vat,
Never fill cask nor furnish can,
Never end sweet, which strong began--
God's gift to gladden the heart of man;
But spirit's at proof, I promise that!
No sparing of juice spoils what should be
Fit brewage--wine for me.

Man's thoughts and loves and hates!
Earth is my vineyard, these grow there:
From grape of the ground, I made or marred
My vintage; easy the task or hard,
Who set it--his praise be my reward!
Earth's yield! Who yearn for the Dark Blue Sea's
Let them 'lay, pray, bray'[51]--the addle-pates!
Mine be Man's thoughts, loves, hates!"

Despite its humorous expression, the view of poetic art contained in these verses is both serious and significant. It is a frank (if defiant) confession of faith.

_At the "Mermaid"_, a poem of characteristic energy and directness, is a protest against the supposition or assumption that the personality and personal views and opinions of a poet are necessarily reflected in his dramatic work. It protests, at the same time, against the sham melancholy and pseudo-despair which Byron made fashionable in poetry:--

"Have you found your life distasteful?
My life did and does smack sweet.
Was your youth of pleasure wasteful?
Mine I saved and hold complete.

Do your joys with age diminish?
When mine fail me, I'll complain.
Must in death your daylight finish?
My sun sets to rise again.

* * * * *

I find earth not gray but rosy,
Heaven not grim but fair of hue.
Do I stoop? I pluck a posy.
Do I stand and stare? All's blue."

_House_ confirms or continues the primary contention in _At the "Mermaid"_: this time by the image of a House of Life, which some poets may choose to set on view: "for a ticket apply to the Publisher." Browning not merely denounces but denies the so-called self-revelations of poets. He answers Wordsworth's

"With this same key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart,"

by the characteristic retort:--

"Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!"

In _Shop_ we have another keen piece of criticism: a protest against poets who make their shop their home, and their song mere ware for sale.

After the personal and critical section we pass to half-a-dozen lyrics: _Fears and Scruples_, a covert and startling poem, a doctrine embodied in a character; then two beautiful little _Pisgah-Sights_, a dainty experiment in metre, and in substance the expression of Browning's favourite lesson, the worth of earth and the need of the mystery of life; _Appearances_, a couple of stanzas whose telling simplicity recalls the lovely earlier lilt, _Misconceptions; Natural Magic_ and _Magical Nature_, two magical snatches, as perfect as the "first fine careless rapture" of the earlier lyrics. I quote the latter:--

"MAGICAL NATURE.

1.

Flower--I never fancied, jewel--I profess you!
Bright I see and soft I feel the outside of a flower.
Save but glow inside and--jewel, I should guess you,
Dim to sight and rough to touch: the glory is the dower.

2.

You, forsooth, a flower? Nay, my love, a jewel--
Jewel at no mercy of a moment in your prime!
Time may fray the flower-face: kind be time or cruel,
Jewel, from each facet, flash your laugh at time!"

But the finest lyric in the volume is _St. Martin's Summer_, a poem fantastically tragic, hauntingly melodious, mysterious and chilling as the ghostly visitants at late love's pleasure-bower of whom it sings. I do not think Browning has written many lyrical poems of more brilliant and original quality. _Bifurcation_, as its name denotes, is a study of divided paths in life, the paths of Love and Duty chosen severally by two lovers whose epitaphs Browning gives. The moral problem, which is sinner, which is saint, is stated and left open. The poem is an etching, sharp, concise and suggestive. _Numpholeptos_ (nymph-entranced) has all the mystery, the vague charm, the lovely sadness, of a picture of Burne Jones. Its delicately fantastic colouring, its dreamy passion, and the sad and quiet sweetness of its verse, have some affinity with _St. Martin's Summer_, but are unlike anything else in Browning. It is the utterance of a hopeless-hoping and pathetically resigned love: the love of a merely human man for an angelically pure and unhumanly cold woman, who requires in him an unattainable union of immaculate purity and complete experience of life.

"Still you stand, still you listen, still you smile!
Still melts your moonbeam through me, white awhile,
Softening, sweetening, till sweet and soft
Increase so round this heart of mine, that oft
I could believe your moonbeam smile has past
The pallid limit and, transformed at last,
Lies, sunlight and salvation--warms the soul
It sweetens, softens!

* * * * *

What means the sad slow silver smile above
My clay but pity, pardon?--at the best,
But acquiescence that I take my rest,
Contented to be clay, while in your heaven
The sun reserves love for the Spirit-Seven
Companioning God's throne they lamp before,
--Leaves earth a mute waste only wandered o'er
By that pale soft sweet disempassioned moon
Which smiles me slow forgiveness! Such the boon
I beg? Nay, dear ...
Love, the love whole and sole without alloy!"

The action of this soul's tragedy takes place under "the light that never was on sea or land": it is the tragedy of a soul, but of a disembodied soul.

_A Forgiveness_ is a drama of this world. It is the legitimate successor of the monologues of _Men and Women_; it may, indeed, be most precisely compared with an earlier monologue, _My Last Duchess_; and it is, like these, the concentrated essence of a complete tragedy. Like all the best of Browning's poems, it is thrown into a striking situation, and developed from this central point. It is the story of a love merged in contempt, quenched in hate, and rekindled in a fatal forgiveness, told in confession to a monk by the man whom the monk has wronged. The personage who speaks is one of the most sharply-outlined characters in Browning: a clear, cold, strong-willed man, implacable in love or hate. He tells his story in a quiet, measured, utterly unemotional manner, with reflective interruptions and explanations, the acute analysis of a merciless intellect; leading gradually up to a crisis only to be matched by the very finest crises in Browning:--

"Immersed
In thought so deeply, Father? Sad, perhaps?
For whose sake, hers or mine or his who wraps
--Still plain I seem to see!--about his head
The idle cloak,--about his heart (instead
Of cuirass) some fond hope he may elude
My vengeance in the cloister's solitude?
Hardly, I think! As little helped his brow
The cloak then, Father--as your grate helps now!"

The poem is by far the greatest thing in the volume; it is, indeed, one of the very finest examples of Browning's psychological subtlety and concentrated dramatic power.[52]

The ballad of _Hervé Riel_ which has no rival but Tennyson's _Revenge_ among modern sea-ballads, was written at Croisic, 30th September 1867, and was published in the _Cornhill Magazine_ for March, 1871 in, order that the £100 which had been offered for it might be sent to the Paris Relief Fund. It may be named, with the "Ride from Ghent to Aix," as a proof of how simply and graphically Browning can write if he likes; how promptly he can stir the blood and thrill the heart. The facts of the story, telling how, after the battle of the Hogue, a simple Croisic sailor saved all that was left of the French fleet by guiding the vessels into the harbour, are given in the Croisic guide-books; and Browning has followed them in everything but the very effective end:--

"'Since 'tis ask and have, I may--
Since the others go ashore--
Come! A good whole holiday!
Leave to go and see my wife, whom I call the Belle Aurore!'
That he asked and that he got,--nothing more."

"Ce brave homme," says the account, "ne demanda pour récompense d'un service aussi signalé, qu'un _conge absolu_ pour rejoindre sa femme, qu'il nomma la Belle Aurore."

_Cenciaja_, the only blank verse piece in the volume, is of the nature of a note or appendix to Shelley's "superb achievement" _The Cenci_. It serves to explain the allusion to the case of Paolo Santa Croce (_Cenci_, Act V. sc. iv.). Browning obtained the facts from a MS. volume of memorials of Italian crime, in the possession of Sir John Simeon, who published it in the series of the Philobiblon Society.[53]

_Filippo Baldinucci on the Privilege of Burial_, a grotesque and humorously-told "reminiscence of A.D. 1670," is, up to stanza 35, the versification of an anecdote recorded by Baldinucci, the artist and art critic (1624-1696), in his History of Painters. The incident with which it concludes is imaginary.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 51: The jocose vindictiveness with which Browning returns again and again to the assault of the bad grammar and worse rhetoric of Byron's once so much belauded address to the ocean is very amusing. The above is only one out of four or five instances.]

[Footnote 52: It is worth comparing _A Forgiveness_ with a poem of very similar motive by Leconte de Lisle: _Le Jugement de Komor_ (_Poèmes Barbares_). Each is a fine example of its author, in just those qualities for which both poets are eminent: originality and subtlety of subject, pregnant picturesqueness of phrase and situation, and grimly tragic power. The contrast no less than the likeness which exists between them will be evident on a comparison of the two poems.]

[Footnote 53: In reference to the title _Cenciaja_, and the Italian proverb which follows it, _Ogni cencio vuol entrare in bucato_, Browning stated, in a letter to Mr. H.B. Forman (printed in his _Shelley_, 1880, ii. 419), that "'aia' is generally an accumulative yet depreciative termination: 'Cenciaja'--a bundle of rags--a trifle. The proverb means, 'Every poor creature will be pressing into the company of his betters,' and I used it to deprecate the notion that I intended anything of the kind."]

25. THE AGAMEMNON OF ÆSCHYLUS.

[Published in October, 1877 (_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol.
XIII. pp. 259-357).]

Browning prefaces his transcript of the _Agamemnon_ with a brief introduction, in which he thus sets forth his theory of translation:--

"If, because of the immense fame of the following Tragedy, I
wished to acquaint myself with it, and could only do so by
the help of a translator, I should require him to be literal
at every cost save that of absolute violence to our language.
The use of certain allowable constructions which, happening
to be out of daily favour, are all the more appropriate to
archaic workmanship, is no violence: but I would be tolerant
for once,--in the case of so immensely famous an
original,--of even a clumsy attempt to furnish me with the
very turn of each phrase in as Greek a fashion as English
will bear: while, with respect to amplifications and
embellishments, anything rather than, with the good farmer,
experience that most signal of mortifications, 'to gape for
Æschylus and get Theognis.' I should especially
decline,--what may appear to brighten up a passage,--the
employment of a new word for some old one--[Greek: phonos],
or [Greek: megas], or [Greek: telos], with its congeners,
recurring four times in three lines.... Further,--if I
obtained a mere strict bald version of thing by thing, or at
least word pregnant with thing, I should hardly look for an
impossible transmission of the reputed magniloquence and
sonority of the Greek; and this with the less regret,
inasmuch as there is abundant musicality elsewhere, but
nowhere else than in his poem the ideas of the poet. And
lastly, when presented with these ideas I should expect the
result to prove very hard reading indeed if it were meant to
resemble Æschylus."

Every condition here laid down has been carried out with unflinching courage. Browning has rendered word by word and line by line; with, indeed, some slight inevitable expansion in the rhymed choruses, very slight, infinitely slighter than every other translator has found needful. Throughout, there are numberless instances of minute and happy accuracy of phrase, re-creations of the very thoughts of Æschylus. An incomparable dexterity is shown in fitting phrase upon phrase, forcing line to bear the exact weight of line, rendering detail by detail. But for this very reason, as a consequence of this very virtue, there is no denying that Browning's version is certainly "very hard reading," so hard reading that it is sometimes necessary to turn to the Greek in order to fully understand the English. Browning has anticipated, but not altogether answered, this objection. For, besides those passages which in their fidelity to every "minute particular," simply reproduce the obscurity of the original, there is much that seems either obscure or harsh, and is so simply because it gives "the turn of each phrase," not merely "in as Greek a fashion as English will bear," but beyond it: phrases which are native to Greek, foreign to English. The choruses, which are attempted in metre as close as English can come to Greek metre, suggest the force, but not the dignity of the original; and seem often to be content to drop much of the poem by the way in getting at "the ideas of the poet." It is a Titan's version of an Olympian, and it is thus no doubt the scholar rather than the general reader who will find most to please him in "this attempt to give our language the similitude of Greek by close and sustained grappling, word to word, with so sublime and difficult a masterpiece."[54]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 54: J.A. Symonds, _Academy_, Nov. 10, 1877.]

26. LA SAISIAZ: THE TWO POETS OF CROISIC.

[Published in May, 1878. _La Saisiaz_ (written November,
1877), pp. 1-82; _The Two Poets of Croisic_, pp. 83-201.
(_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol. XIV. pp. 153-204, 205-279).]

In _La Saisiaz_ Browning reasons of God and the soul, of life here and of life to come. The poem is addressed to a friend of old date, who died suddenly while she was staying with Browning and his sister, in the summer of 1877, at a villa called La Saisiaz (The Sun) in the mountains near Geneva. The first twenty pages tell the touching story; the rest of the poem records the argument which it called forth. "Was ending ending once and always, when you died?" Browning asks himself, and he attempts to answer the question, not on traditional grounds, or on the authority of a creed, but by honest reasoning. He assumes two postulates, and two only, that God exists and that the soul exists; and he proceeds to show, very forcibly, the unsatisfactory nature of life if consciousness ends with death, and its completely satisfactory nature if the soul's existence continues.

"Without the want,
Life, now human, would be brutish: just that hope, however scant,
Makes the actual life worth leading; take the hope therein away,
All we have to do is surely not endure another day.
This life has its hopes for this life, hopes that promise joy:
life done--
Out of all the hopes, how many had complete fulfilment? none.
'But the soul is not the body': and the breath is not the flute;
Both together make the music: either marred and all is mute."

This hypothesis is purely personal, and as such he holds it. But, to his own mind at least, he finds that

"Sorrow did and joy did nowise,--life well weighed--preponderate.
By necessity ordained thus? I shall bear as best I can;
By a cause all-good, all-wise, all-potent? No, as I am man!"

Yet, if only the assumption of a future life may be made, he will thankfully acquiesce in an earthly failure, which will then be only relative, and the earnest of a heavenly gain. Having arrived at this point, Browning proceeds to argue out the question yet further, under the form of a dialogue between "Fancy" (or the soul's instinct) and "Reason." He here shows that not merely is life explicable only as a probation, but that probation is only possible under our present conditions, in our present uncertainty. If it were made certain that there is a future life in which we shall be punished or rewarded, according as we do evil or good, we should have no choice of action, hence no virtue in doing what were so manifestly to our own advantage. Again, if we were made certain of this future life of higher faculties and greater happiness, should we hesitate to rush to it at the first touch of sorrow, before our time? He ends, therefore, with a "hope--no more than hope, but hope--no less than hope," which amounts practically to the assurance that, as he puts it in the last line--

"He at least believed in Soul, was very sure of God!"

_The Two Poets of Croisic_ is a comedy in narrative, dealing mainly with the true tale of Paul Desforges-Maillard, whose story furnished Piron with the matter of his _Métromanie_. The first of the "two poets" is one René Gentilhomme, born 1610, once page to the Prince of Condé, afterwards court-poet to Louis XIII. His story, by an easy transition, leads into the richer record of Desforges, which Browning gives with not a few variations, evidently intentional, from the facts of the case. Paul-Briand Maillard, self-surnamed Desforges, was born at Croisic, April 24, 1699: he died at the age of seventy-three. His memory has survived that of better poets on account of the famous hoax which he played on the Paris of his day, including no less a person than Voltaire. The first part of the story is told pretty literally in Browning's pages:--how Desforges, unsuccessful as a poet in his own person, assumed the title of a woman, and as Mlle. Malcrais de la Vigne (his verses being copied by an obliging cousin, Mme. Mondoret) obtained an immediate and astonishing reputation. The sequel is somewhat altered. Voltaire's revenge when the cheat was discovered, so far from being prompt and immediate, was treacherously dissimulated, and its accomplishment deferred for more than one long-subsequent occasion. Desforges lived to have the last word, in assisting at the first representation of Piron's _Métromanie_, in which Voltaire's humiliation and the Croisic poet's clever trick are perpetuated for as long as that sprightly and popular comedy shall be remembered.

In his graphic and condensed version of the tale, Browning has used a poet's licence to heighten the effect and increase the piquancy of the narrative. The poem is written in _ottava rima_, but, very singularly, there is not one double rhyme from beginning to end. It is difficult to see why Browning, a finer master of grotesque compound rhymes than Byron, should have so carefully avoided them in a metre which, as in Byron's hands, owes no little of its effect to a clever introduction of such rhymes. The lines (again of set purpose, it is evident) overlap one another without an end-pause where in Italian it is almost universal, namely, after the sixth line. The result of the innovation is far from successful: it destroys the flow of the verse and gives it an air of abruptness. Of the liveliness, vivacity and pungency of the tale, no idea can be given by quotation: two of the stanzas in which the moral is enforced, the two finest, perhaps, in the poem, are, however, severable from their context:--

"Who knows most, doubts most; entertaining hope,
Means recognizing fear; the keener sense
Of all comprised within our actual scope
Recoils from aught beyond earth's dim and dense.
Who, grown familiar with the sky, will grope
Henceforward among groundlings? That's offence
Just as indubitably: stars abound
O'erhead, but then--what flowers made glad the ground!

So, force is sorrow, and each sorrow, force:
What then? since Swiftness gives the charioteer
The palm, his hope be in the vivid horse
Whose neck God clothed with thunder, not the steer
Sluggish and safe! Yoke Hatred, Crime, Remorse,
Despair: but ever 'mid the whirling fear,
Let, through the tumult, break the poet's face
Radiant, assured his wild slaves win the race!"

The poem is followed by an exquisite Epilogue, one of the most delicately graceful and witty and tender of Browning's lyrics. The briefer Prologue is not less beautiful:--

"Such a starved bank of moss
Till, that May-morn,
Blue ran the flash across:
Violets were born!

Sky--what a scowl of cloud
Till, near and far,
Ray on ray split the shroud:
Splendid, a star!

World--how it walled about
Life with disgrace
Till God's own smile came out:
That was thy face!"

27. DRAMATIC IDYLS.

[Published in May 1879 (_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol. XV. pp.
1-80).]

In the _Dramatic Idyls_ Browning may almost be said to have broken new ground. His idyls are short poems of passionate action, presenting in a graphic and concentrated way a single episode or tragic crisis. Not only by their concreteness and popular effectiveness, their extraordinary vigour of conception and expression, are they distinguished from much of Browning's later writing: they have in addition this significant novelty of interest, that here for the first time Browning has found subjects for his poetry among the poor, that here for the first time he has painted, with all his close and imaginative realism, the human comedy of the lower classes. That he has never done so before, though rather surprising, comes, I suppose, from his preponderating interest in intellectual problems, and from the difficulty of finding such among what Léon Cladel has called _tragiques histoires plébéiennes_. But the happy instinct has at last come to him, and we are permitted to watch the humours of that delicious pair of sinners saved, "Publican Black Ned Bratts and Tabby his big wife too," as a relief to the less pleasant and profitable spectacle of His Majesty Napoleon III., or of even the two poets of Croisic. All the poems in the volume (with the exception of a notable and noble protest against vivisection, in the form of a touching little true tale of a dog) are connected together by a single motive, on which every poem plays a new variation. The motto of the book might be:--

"There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of his life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries."

This idea of a turning-point or testing-time in the lives of men is more or less expressed or implied in very much of Browning's poetry, but nowhere is it expressed so completely, so concisely, or so consecutively, as here. In _Martin Relph_ (which "embodies," says Mrs. Orr, "a vague remembrance of something read by Mr. Browning when he was himself a boy") we have an instance of the tide "omitted," and a terrible picture of the remorse which follows. Martin Relph has the chance presented to him of saving two lives, that of the girl he loves and of his rival whom she loves. The chance is but of an instant's duration. He hesitates, and the moment is for ever lost. In that one moment his true soul, with its instinctive selfishness, has leapt to light, and the knowledge of it torments him with an inextinguishable agony. In _Ivàn Ivànovitch_ (founded on a popular Russian story of a woman throwing her children to the wolves to save her own life) we have a twofold illustration of the theme. The testing-moment comes to the mother, Loùscha, and again to Ivàn Ivànovitch. While the woman fails terribly in her duty, and meets a terrible reward, the man rises to a strange and awful nobility of action, and "acts for God." _Halbert and Hob_, a grim little tragedy (suggested by a passage in the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle), presents us with the same idea in a singularly concrete form. The crisis has a saving effect, but it is an incomplete, an unwilling or irresistible, act of grace, and it bears but sorry fruit. In _Ned Bratts_ (suggested by the story of "Old Tod," in Bunyan's _Life and Death of Mr. Badman_[55]) we have a prompt and quite hurried taking of the tide: the sudden conversion, repentance, and expiation of the "worst couple, rogue and quean, unhanged." _Pheidippides_ (the legend of the runner who brought the news of Marathon to Athens, and died in the utterance) illustrates the idea in a more obvious but less individual way.

Perhaps for sheer perfection of art, for fundamental tragedy, for a quality of compassionate and unflinching imaginative vision, nothing in the book quite comes up to _Halbert and Hob_. There is hardly in Browning a more elemental touch than that of: "A boy threw stones: he picked them up and stored them in his breast." _Martin Relph_, besides being a fine tale splendidly told, is among the most masterly of all renderings of remorse, of the terrors and torments of conscience. Every word is like a drop of agony wrung out of a tortured soul. _Ivàn Ivànovitch_ is, as a narrative, still finer: as a piece of story-telling Browning has perhaps never excelled it. Nothing could be more graphic and exciting than the description of the approach of the wolves: the effective change from iambs to anapæsts gives their very motion.

"Was that--wind?
Anyhow, Droug starts, stops, back go his ears, he snuffs,
Snorts,--never such a snort! then plunges, knows the sough's
Only the wind: yet, no--our breath goes up too straight!
Still the low sound,--less low, loud, louder, at a rate
There's no mistaking more! Shall I lean out--look--learn
The truth whatever it be? Pad, pad! At last, I turn--
'Tis the regular pad of the wolves in pursuit of the life in
the sledge!
An army they are: close-packed they press like the thrust of a wedge:
They increase as they hunt: for I see, through the pine-trunks
ranged each side,
Slip forth new fiend and fiend, make wider and still more wide
The four-footed steady advance. The foremost--none may pass:
They are elders and lead the line, eye and eye--green-glowing brass!
But a long way distant still. Droug, save us! He does his best:
Yet they gain on us, gain, till they reach,--one reaches....
How utter the rest?"

The setting of the story, the vast motionless Russian landscape, the village life, the men and women, has a singular expressiveness; and the revelation of the woman's character, the exposure of her culpable weakness, seen in the very excuses by which she endeavours to justify herself, is brought about with singularly masterly art. There are moments of essential drama, not least significantly in the last lines, above all in those two pregnant words: "_How otherwise_? asked he."

_Ned Bratts_ takes almost the same position among Browning's humorous poems that _Ivàn Ivànovitch_ does among his narratives. It is a whole comedy in itself. Surroundings and atmosphere are called up with perfect art and the subtlest sympathy. What opening could be a better preparation for the heated and grotesque utterances of Ned Bratts than the wonderful description of the hot day? It serves to put us into precisely the right mood for seeing and feeling the comic tragedy that follows. Dickens himself never painted a more riotously realistic scene, nor delineated a better ruffian than the murderous rascal precariously converted by Bunyan and his book.

In the midst of these realistic tragedies and comedies, _Pheidippides_, with its clear Greek outline and charm and heroical grace, stands finely contrasted. The measure is of Browning's invention, and is finely appropriate to the character of the poem.

"So, to this day, when friend meets friend, the word of salute
Is still 'Rejoice!'--his word which brought rejoicing indeed.
So is Pheidippides happy for ever,--the noble strong man
Who could race like a God, bear the face of a God, whom a God
loved so well
He saw the land saved he had helped to save, and was suffered to tell
Such tidings, yet never decline, but, gloriously as he began,
So to end gloriously--once to shout, thereafter be mute:
'Athens is saved!' Pheidippides dies in the shout for his meed."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 55: At a summer Assizes holden at _Hartfort_, while the Judge was sitting upon the Bench, comes this old _Tod_ into the Court, cloathed in a green Suit with his Leathern Girdle in his hand, his bosom open, and all on a dung sweat, as if he had run for his Life; and, being come in, he spake aloud as follows: _My Lord_, said he, _Here is the veryest Rogue that breaths upon the face of the earth, ... My Lord, there has not been a Robbery committed this many years, within so many miles of this place but I have either been at it or privy to it._

"The Judge thought the fellow was mad, but after some conference with some of the Justices, they agreed to Indict him; and so they did, of several felonious Actions; to all of which he heartily confessed Guilty, and so was hanged with his wife at the same time....

"As for the truth of this Story, the Relator told me that he was at the same time himself in the Court, and stood within less than two yards of old _Tod_, when he heard him aloud to utter the words."--Bunyan's _Life and Death of Mr. Badman_, 1680.]

28. DRAMATIC IDYLS. Second Series.

[Published in July, 1880. _Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol. XV.
pp. 81-163.]

The second series of _Dramatic Idyls_ is bound together, like the first, though somewhat less closely, by a leading idea, which, whether consciously or not, is hinted at in a pointed little prologue: the idea of the paradox of human action, and the apparent antagonism between motive and result. The volume differs considerably from its precursor, and it contains nothing quite equal to the best of the earlier poems. There is more variety, perhaps, but the human interest is less intense, the stories less moving and absorbing. With less humour, there is a much more pronounced element of the grotesque. And most prominent of all is that characteristic of Browning which a great critic has called agility of intellect.

The first poem, _Echetlos_, is full of heroical ardour and firm, manly vigour of movement. Like _Pheidippides_, it is a legend of Marathon. It sings of the mysterious helper who appeared to the Greeks, in rustic garb and armed with a plough.

"But one man kept no rank and his sole arm plied no spear,
As a flashing came and went, and a form i' the van, the rear,
Brightened the battle up, for he blazed now there, now here.

* * * * *

Did the steady phalanx falter? To the rescue, at the need,
The clown was ploughing Persia, clearing Greek earth of weed,
As he routed through the Sakian and rooted up the Mede."

After the battle, the man was nowhere to be seen, and inquiry was made of the oracle.

"How spake the Oracle? 'Care for no name at all!
Say but just this: We praise one helpful whom we call
The Holder of the Ploughshare. The great deed ne'er grows small.'"

With _Echetlos_ may be mentioned the Virgilian legend of _Pan and Luna_, a piece of graceful fancy, with its exquisite burden, that

"Verse of five words, each a boon:
Arcadia, night, a cloud, Pan, and the moon."

_Clive_, the most popular in style, and certainly one of the finest poems in the volume, is a dramatic monologue very much akin, in subject, treatment and form, to the narratives in the first series. The story deals with an episode in the life of Clive, when, as a young man, he first proved his courage in the face of a bully whom he had caught cheating at cards. The poem is full of fire and brilliance, and is a subtle analysis and presentation of the character of Clive. Its structure is quite in Browning's best manner: a central situation, illumined by "what double and treble reflection and refraction!" Like Balzac (whose _Honorine_, for instance, is constructed on precisely similar lines) Browning often increases the effect of his picture by setting it in a framework, more or less elaborate, by placing the central narrative in the midst of another slighter and secondary one, related to it in some subtle way. The story of _Clive_ obtains emphasis, and is rendered more impressive, by the lightly but strongly sketched-in figure of the old veteran who tells the tale. Scarcely anything in the poem seems to me so fine as this pathetic portrait of the lonely old man, sitting, like Colonel Newcome, solitary in his house among his memories, with his boy away: "I and Clive were friends."

The Arabian tale of _Muléykeh_ is the most perfect and pathetic piece in the volume. It is told in singularly fine verse, and in remarkably clear, simple, yet elevated style. The end is among the great heroic things in poetry. Hóseyn, though he has neither herds nor flocks, is the richest and happiest of men, for he possesses the peerless mare, Muléykeh the Pearl, whose speed has never been outstripped. Duhl, the son of Sheybán, who envies Hóseyn and has endeavoured by every means, but without success, to obtain the mare, determines at last to steal her. He enters Hóseyn's tent noiselessly by night, saddles Muléykeh, and gallops away. In an instant Hóseyn is on the back of Buhéyseh, the Pearl's sister, only less fleet than herself, and in pursuit.

"And Hóseyn--his blood turns flame, he has learned long since
to ride,
And Buhéyseh does her part,--they gain--they are gaining fast
On the fugitive pair, and Duhl has Ed-Dárraj to cross and quit,
And to reach the ridge El-Sabán,--no safety till that be spied!
And Buhéyseh is, bound by bound, but a horse-length off at last,
For the Pearl has missed the tap of the heel, the touch of the bit.

She shortens her stride, she chafes at her rider the strange
and queer:
Buhéyseh is mad with hope--beat sister she shall and must,
Though Duhl, of the hand and heel so clumsy, she has to thank.
She is near now, nose by tail--they are neck by croup--joy! fear!
What folly makes Hóseyn shout 'Dog Duhl, Damned son of the Dust,
Touch the right ear and press with your foot my Pearl's left flank!'

And Duhl was wise at the word, and Muléykeh as prompt perceived
Who was urging redoubled pace, and to hear him was to obey,
And a leap indeed gave she, and evanished for evermore.
And Hóseyn looked one long last look as who, all bereaved,
Looks, fain to follow the dead so far as the living may:
Then he turned Buhéyseh's neck slow homeward, weeping sore.

And, lo, in the sunrise, still sat Hóseyn upon the ground
Weeping: and neighbours came, the tribesmen of Bénu-Asád
In the vale of green Er-Rass, and they questioned him of his grief;
And he told them from first to last how, serpent-like, Duhl had wound
His way to the nest, and how Duhl rode like an ape, so bad!
And how Buhéyseh did wonders, yet Pearl remained with the thief.

And they jeered him, one and all: 'Poor Hóseyn is crazed past hope!
How else had he wrought himself his ruin, in fortune's spite!
To have simply held the tongue were a task for a boy or girl,
And here were Muléykeh again, the eyed like an antelope,
The child of his heart by day, the wife of his breast by night!'
'And the beaten in speed!' wept Hóseyn: 'You never have loved
my Pearl!'"

There remain _Pietro of Abano_[56] and _Doctor_ ----. The latter, a Talmudic legend, is probably the poorest of Browning's poems: it is rather farce than humour. The former is a fine piece of genuine grotesque art, full of pungent humour, acuteness, worldly wisdom, and clever phrasing and rhyming. It is written in an elaborate comic metre of Browning's invention, indicated at the end by eight bars of music. The poem is one of the most characteristic examples of that "Teutonic grotesque, which lies in the expression of deep ideas through fantastic forms," a grotesque of noble and cultivated art, of which Browning is as great a master in poetry as Carlyle in prose.

The volume ends with a charming lyrical epilogue, not without its personal bearing, though it has sometimes, very unfairly, been represented as a piece of mere self-gratulation.

"Thus I wrote in London, musing on my betters,"

Browning tells us in some album-verses which have found their way into print, and he naturally complains that what he wrote of Dante should be foisted upon himself. Indeed, he has quite as much the characteristics of the "spontaneous" as of the "brooding" poet of his parable.

"'Touch him ne'er so lightly, into song he broke:
Soil so quick-receptive,--not one feather-seed,
Not one flower-dust fell, but straight its fall awoke
Vitalising virtue: song would song succeed
Sudden as spontaneous--prove a poet soul!'
Indeed?
Rock's the song-soil rather, surface hard and bare:
Sun and dew their mildness, storm and frost their rage
Vainly both expend,--few flowers awaken there:
Quiet in its cleft broods--what the after age
Knows and names a pine, a nation's heritage."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 56: Pietro of Abano was an Italian physician, alchemist and philosopher, born at Abano, near Padua, in 1246, died about 1320. He had the reputation of a wizard, and was imprisoned by the Inquisition. He was condemned to be burnt; he died in prison, and his dead body was ordered to be burnt; but as that had been taken away by his friends, the Inquisition burnt his portrait. His reputed antipathy to milk and cheese, with its natural analogy, suggested the motive of the poem. The book referred to in it is his principal work, _Conciliator differentiarum quæ inter philosophos et medicos versantur_. Mantua, 1472.]

29. JOCOSERIA.

[Published in March, 1883 (_Poetical Works_, 1889, pp.
165-266).]

The name _Jocoseria_ (mentioned by Browning in its original connection, Melander's "Jocoseria," in the notes to _Paracelsus_) expresses very cleverly the particular nature of the volume, in its close union and fusion of grave and gay. The book is not, as a whole, so intense or so brilliant as the first and second series of _Dramatic Idyls_, but one or two of the shorter poems are, in their way, hardly excelled by anything in either volume.

The longest poem, though by no means the best is the imaginary Rabbinical legend of _Jochanan Hakkadosh_ (John the Saint), which Browning, with a touch of learned quizzicalness, states in his note[57] "to have no better authority than that of the treatise, existing dispersedly, in fragments of Rabbinical writing, [the name, 'Collection of many Lies,' follows in Hebrew,] from which I might have helped myself more liberally." It is written in _terza rima_, like _Doctor_ ---- in the second series of _Dramatic Idyls_, and is supposed to be told by "the Jew aforesaid" in order to "make amends and justify our Mishna." That it may to some extent do, but it seems to me that its effectiveness as an example of the serio-grotesque style would have been heightened by some metre less sober and placid than the _terza rima_; by rhythm and rhyme as audacious and characteristic as the rhythm and the rhymes of _Pietro of Abano_, for instance.

_Ixion_, a far finer poem than _Jochanan Hakkadosh_, is, no doubt, an equally sincere utterance of personal belief. The poem is a monologue, in unrhymed hexameters and pentameters. It presents the old myth in a new light. Ixion is represented as the Prometheus of man's righteous revolt against the tyranny of an unjust God. The poem is conceived in a spirit of intense earnestness, and worked out with great vigour and splendour of diction. For passion and eloquence nothing in it surpasses the finely culminating last lines, of which I can but tear a few, only too barbarously, from their context:--

"What is the influence, high o'er Hell, that turns to a rapture
Pain--and despair's murk mists blends in a rainbow of hope?
What is beyond the obstruction, stage by stage tho' it baffle?
Back must I fall, confess 'Ever the weakness I fled'?
No, for beyond, far, far is a Purity all-unobstructed!
Zeus was Zeus--not Man: wrecked by his weakness I whirl.
Out of the wreck I rise--past Zeus to the Potency o'er him!
I--to have hailed him my friend! I--to have clasped her--my love!
Pallid birth of my pain,--where light, where light is, aspiring
Thither I rise, whilst thou--Zeus, keep the godship and sink!"

While _Ixion_ is the noblest and most heroically passionate of these poems, _Adam, Lilith, and Eve_, is the most pregnant and suggestive. Browning has rarely excelled it in certain qualities, hardly found in any other poet, of pungency, novelty, and penetrating bitter-sweetness.

"ADAM, LILITH, AND EVE.

One day it thundered and lightened.
Two women, fairly frightened,
Sank to their knees, transformed, transfixed,
At the feet of the man who sat betwixt;
And 'Mercy!' cried each, 'If I tell the truth
Of a passage in my youth!'

Said This: 'Do you mind the morning
I met your love with scorning?
As the worst of the venom left my lips,
I thought, "If, despite this lie, he strips
The mask from my soul with a kiss--I crawl,
His slave,--soul, body and all!"'

Said That: 'We stood to be married;
The priest, or someone, tarried;
"If Paradise-door prove locked?" smiled you.
I thought, as I nodded, smiling too,
"Did one, that's away, arrive--nor late
Nor soon should unlock Hell's gate!"'

It ceased to lighten and thunder.
Up started both in wonder,
Looked round, and saw that the sky was clear,
Then laughed, 'Confess you believed us, Dear!'
'I saw through the joke!' the man replied
They seated themselves beside."

Much of the same power is shown in _Cristina and Monaldeschi_,[58] a dramatic monologue with all the old vigour of Browning's early work of that kind; not only keen and subtle, but charged with a sharp electrical quality, which from time to time darts out with a sudden and unexpected shock. The style and tone are infused with a peculiar fierce irony. The metre is rapid and stinging, like the words of the vindictive queen as she hurries her treacherous victim into the hands of the assassins. There is dramatic invention in the very cadence:

"Ah, but how each loved each, Marquis!
Here's the gallery they trod
Both together, he her god,
She his idol,--lend your rod,
Chamberlain!--ay, there they are--'_Quis
Separabit_?'--plain those two
Touching words come into view,
Apposite for me and you!"

_Mary Wollstonecraft and Fuseli_, a dramatic lyric of three verses, the pathetic utterance of an unloved loving woman's heart, is not dissimilar in style to _Cristina and Monaldeschi_. It would be unjust to Fuseli to name him Bottom, but only fair to Mary Wollstonecraft to call her Titania.