Chapter IV: Wedded Life in Italy. Men and Women (1)

This foot, once planted on the goal;
This glory-garland round my soul.
--_The Last Ride Together_.

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

I.

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

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

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

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

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

[Footnote 26: The word her Italian tutor meant to describe her by, but could not pronounce it. He said she was _testa lunga (Letters of R. and E.B., i. 7)_.]

[Footnote 27: _Letters, R. and E. B._, i. 8. Cf. her admirable letter to Ruskin, ten years later, apropos of the charge of "affectation." "To say a thing faintly, because saying it strongly sounds odd or obscure or unattractive for some reason to careless readers, does appear to me bad policy as well as bad art" (_Letters of E. B. B._, ii., 200).]

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

[Footnote 28: _E.B.B to R.B._, 26th May 1846. Cf. _R.B._, 13th Feb. 1846.]

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

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

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

[Footnote 29: _E.B.B. to R.B._, 9th Jan. 1846.]

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

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

[Footnote 30: _R.B. to E.B.B._, Sept. 13, 1845.]

II.

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

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

[Footnote 31: _Letters of E.B.B._, ii. 199.]

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

III.

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

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

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

IV.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V.

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

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

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

[Footnote 32: _Letters of E.B.B._, ii. 199.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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