Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Mrs. Browning far outdistanced her husband in the early days in popularity. She pleased the people by her social enthusiasm, a characteristic more marked in her verse than in that of any of the poets mentioned. The critics have found many faults in her style, mainly those growing out of an impassioned nature which carried her at times beyond the realm of perfectly balanced art. But even an English critic of the conservatism of Edmund Gosse could at last admit that “In some of her lyrics and more rarely in her sonnets she rose to heights of passionate humanity which place her only just below the great poets of her country.”
Contemporary criticism of “Aurora Leigh,” which was certainly a departure both in form and matter from the accepted standards, was, on the whole, just.The Quarterly Reviewin 1862 said of it: “This ‘Aurora Leigh’ is a great poem. It is a wonder of art. It will live. No large audience will it have, but it will have audience; and that is more than most poems have. To those who know what poetry is and in what struggles it is born—how the great thoughts justify themselves—this work will be looked upon as one of thewonders of the age.” Mrs. Browning resembles her husband in the fact that she does not fit into the main line of evolution of the romantic school, but is an individual manifestation of the romantic spirit, showing almost as great freedom from the trammels of accepted romanticism as Browning does.
The writer of the century whose experience as a novelist almost paralleled that of Browning as poet was Meredith. Because of his psychological analysis and the so-called obscurity of his style, he waited many years for recognition and finally was accepted as one of the most remarkable novelists of the age. His poetry, showing similar tendencies, and overshadowed by his novels, has not yet emerged into the light of universal appreciation. One finds it even ignored altogether in the most recent books of English literature, yet he is the author of one of the most remarkable series of sonnets in the English language, “Modern Love,” presenting, as it does, a vivid picture of domestic decadence which forms a strange contrast to Rossetti’s sonnets, “The House of Life,” indicating how many and various have been the forces at work during the nineteenth century in the disintegrating and molding of social ideals. Meredith writes of “Hiding the Skeleton”.
“At dinner she is hostess, I am host.Went the feast ever cheerfuller? She keepsThe topic over intellectual deepsIn buoyancy afloat. They see no ghost.With sparkling surface-eyes we ply the ball:It is in truth a most contagious game;Hiding the Skeletonshall be its name.Such play as this the devils might appall,But here’s the greater wonder; in that we,Enamor’d of our acting and our wits,Admire each other like true hypocrites.Warm-lighted glances, Love’s Ephemeral,Shoot gayly o’er the dishes and the wine.We waken envy of our happy lot.Fast sweet, and golden, shows our marriage-knot.Dear guests, you now have seen Love’s corpse-light shine!”
Rossetti writes “Lovesight”:
“When do I see thee most, beloved one?When in the light the spirits of mine eyesBefore thy face, their altar, solemnizeThe worship of that Love through thee made known?Or when, in the dusk hours (we two alone),Close-kiss’d and eloquent of still repliesThy twilight—hidden glimmering visage lies,And my soul only sees thy soul its own?O love, my love! if I no more should seeThyself, nor on the earth the shadow of thee,Nor image of thine eyes in any spring,—How then should sound upon Life’s darkening slope,The ground-whirl of the perish’d leaves of Hope,The wind of Death’s imperishable wing?”
Browning’s criticism of painting was evidently much influenced by the pre-Raphaelites. Their admiration for the painters who preceded Raphael, revealing as it did to them an art not satisfied with itself, but reaching after higher things, and earnestly seeking to interpret nature and human life, is echoed in his “Old Pictures in Florence,” which was written but six years after Hunt, Millais, and Rossetti formed their brotherhood. In poetry, they did not eschew classical subjects, as Browning did for the most part, but they treated these subjects in a romantic spirit, and so removed them from the sort of strictures that Browning made upon the perfection of Greek art.
From this summary of the chief lines of literary development in the nineteenth century it will be seen, not only what a marvelous age it has been for the flowering of individualism in literary invention, but how Browning has surpassed all the other poets of note in the wideness of his departure from accepted standards, and how helpless the earlier critics were in the face of this departure, because of their dependence always upon critical shibboleths—in other words, of principles not sufficiently universal—as their means of measuring a poet’s greatness. Tennyson and thepre-Raphaelites won their popularity sooner among critics because they followed logically in the line of development inaugurated by the earlier poets, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, etc., whose poetry had already done some good work in breaking down the school of Dryden and Pope, though it succeeded only in erecting another standard not sufficiently universal to include Browning. The evolution of art forms, a principle so clearly understood, as we have shown by Browning, has never become a guiding one with critics, though Mr. Gosse in his “Modern English Literature” has expressed a wish that the principle of evolution might be adapted to criticism. He has evidently felt how hopeless is the task of appraising poets by the old individualistic method, which, as he says, has been in favor for at least a century. It possesses, he declares, considerable effectiveness in adroit hands, but is, after all, an adaptation of the old theory of the unalterable type, merely substituting for the one authority of the ancients an equal rigidity in a multitude of isolated modern instances. For this inflexible style of criticism he proposes that a scientific theory shall be adopted which shall enable us at once to take an intelligent pleasure in Pope and in Wordsworth, in Spenser and in Swift. He writes:
“Herbert Spencer has, with infinite courage, opened the entire world of phenomena to the principles of evolution, but we seem slow to admit them into the little province of æsthetics. We cling to the individualist manner, to that intense eulogy which concentrates its rays on the particular object of notice and relegates all others to proportional obscurity. There are critics of considerable acumen and energy who seem to know no other mode of nourishing a talent or a taste than that which is pursued by the cultivators of gigantic gooseberries. They do their best to nip off all other buds, that the juices of the tree of fame may be concentrated on their favorite fruit. Such a plan may be convenient for the purposes of malevolence, and in earlier times our general ignorance of the principles of growth might well excuse it. But it is surely time that we should recognize only two criteria of literary judgment. The first is primitive, and merely clears the ground of rubbish; it is, Does the work before us, or the author, perform what he sets out to perform with a distinguished skill in the direction in which his powers are exercised? If not, he interests the higher criticism not at all; but if yes, then follows the second test: Where, in the vast and ever-shifting scheme of literary evolution, does he take his place,and in what relation does he stand, not to those who are least like him, but to those who are of his own kith and kin?”
George Meredith
With such principles of criticism as this, the public would sooner be brought to an appreciation of all that is best worth while in literature, instead of being taken, as it too often is, upon a wrong scent to worship at the shrine of the Nokes and Stokes, who simply print blue and eat the turtles.
If Mr. Gosse had himself been fully imbued with such principles would he have made the statement quoted in chapter two in regard to Browning’s later books? And should we have such senseless criticism as a remark which has become popular lately, and which I believe emanated from a university in the South—namely, that Browning never said anything that Tennyson had not said better? As an illustration of this a recent critic may be quoted who is entirely scornful of the person who prefers Browning’s
“God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world”
to Tennyson’s
“And hear at times a sentinelWho moves about from place to place,And whispers to the worlds of spaceIn the deep night that all is well.”
One might reply to this that it is a matter of taste had not Courthope shown conclusively that Matthew Arnold’s criterion of criticism—namely, that a taste which is born of culture is the only certain possession by which the critic can measure the beauty of a poet’s line—is a fallacy. His argument is worth quoting:
“You have stated strongly one side of the truth, but you have ignored, completely ignored, the other. You have asserted the claims of individual liberty, and up to a certain point I agree with you. I do not deny that spiritual liberty is founded on consciousness, and hence the self-consciousness of the age is part of the problem we are considering. I do not deny that the prevailing rage for novelty must also be taken into account. Liberty, variety, novelty, are all necessary to the development of Art. Without novelty there can be no invention, without variety there can be no character, without liberty there can be no life. Life, character, invention, these are of the essence of Poetry. But while you have defended with energy the freedom of the Individual, you have said nothing of the authority of society. And yet the conviction of the existence of this authority is a belief perhaps even more firmly founded in the human mind than the sentiment as to the rights of individual liberty....The great majority of the professors of poetry, however various their opinions, however opposite their tastes, have felt sure that there was in taste, as in science, a theory of false and true; in art, as in conduct, a rule of right and wrong. And even among those who have asserted most strongly the inward and relative nature of poetry, do you think there was one so completely a skeptic as to imagine that he was the sole proprietor of the perception he sought to embody in words; one who doubted his power, by means of accepted symbols, to communicate to his audience his own ideas and feelings aboutexternal things? Yet until some man shall have been found bold enough to defend a thesis so preposterous, we must continue to believe that there is a positive standard, by which those at least who speak a common language may reason about questions of taste.”
“You have stated strongly one side of the truth, but you have ignored, completely ignored, the other. You have asserted the claims of individual liberty, and up to a certain point I agree with you. I do not deny that spiritual liberty is founded on consciousness, and hence the self-consciousness of the age is part of the problem we are considering. I do not deny that the prevailing rage for novelty must also be taken into account. Liberty, variety, novelty, are all necessary to the development of Art. Without novelty there can be no invention, without variety there can be no character, without liberty there can be no life. Life, character, invention, these are of the essence of Poetry. But while you have defended with energy the freedom of the Individual, you have said nothing of the authority of society. And yet the conviction of the existence of this authority is a belief perhaps even more firmly founded in the human mind than the sentiment as to the rights of individual liberty....
The great majority of the professors of poetry, however various their opinions, however opposite their tastes, have felt sure that there was in taste, as in science, a theory of false and true; in art, as in conduct, a rule of right and wrong. And even among those who have asserted most strongly the inward and relative nature of poetry, do you think there was one so completely a skeptic as to imagine that he was the sole proprietor of the perception he sought to embody in words; one who doubted his power, by means of accepted symbols, to communicate to his audience his own ideas and feelings aboutexternal things? Yet until some man shall have been found bold enough to defend a thesis so preposterous, we must continue to believe that there is a positive standard, by which those at least who speak a common language may reason about questions of taste.”
Armed with this gracious permission on the part of a professor of poetry, we may venture to reason a little upon the foregoing quotations from Tennyson and Browning to the effect that the person of really good taste might like each of them in its place. While Tennyson’s mystical quatrain is beautiful and quite appropriate in such a poem as “In Memoriam,” it would not be in the least appropriate from the lips of a little silk-winding girl as she wanders through the streets of Asolo on a sunny morning singing her little songs. She is certainly a more lifelike child speaking Browningese, as she has often been criticised for doing, than she would be if upon this occasion she spoke in a Tennysonian manner. That her song has touched the hearts of the twentieth century, if it was not altogether appreciated in the nineteenth, is proved by the fact that it is one of the most popular songs of the day as set by Mrs. H. H. A. Beach, and that the line is heard upon the lips of people to-day who do not even know whose it is, and herein lies the ultimate test of greatness.
CLASSIC SURVIVALS
Beforepassing in review Browning’s treatment of classical subjects as compared with the other great poets of the nineteenth century, it will be interesting to take a glimpse at his choice of subject-matter in general.
To compare Browning’s choice of subject-matter with that of other English poets is to strike at the very root of his position in the chain of literary development. Subject-matter is by no means simple in its nature, but as a musical sound is composed of vibrations within vibrations, so it is made up of the complex relations of body and spirit—the mere external facts of the story are blended with such philosophical undercurrent, or dramaticmotif, or unfolding of the hidden springs of action as the poet is able to insinuate into it.
However far back one penetrates in the history of poetry, poets will be found depending largely upon previous sources, rather than upon their own creative genius, for the bodyof their subject-matter, until the question presents itself with considerable force as to who could have been the mysterious first poet who supplied plots to the rest of mankind. Conjecture is obliged to play a part here, as it does wherever human origins are in question. Doubtless, this first poet was no separate individual, but simply the elements man and nature, through whose action and reaction upon each other grew up story-forms, evidently compounded of human customs, and observed natural phenomena such as those we find in the great Hindu, Greek, and Teutonic classics, and which thus crystallized became great well-springs of inspiration for future generations of poets.
Each new poet, however, who is worthy of the name, sets up his own particular interplay with man and nature; and however much he may be indebted for his inspiration to past products of this universal law of action and reaction, he is bound to use them or interpret them in a manner colored by his own personal and peculiar relations with the universe.
In so doing he supplies the more important spiritual side of subject-matter and becomes in very truth the poet or maker, to that extent at least which Browning himself lays down as the province of art—namely, to arrange,
“Dissociate, redistribute, interchangePart with part: lengthen, broaden... simply what lay looseAt first lies firmly after, what designWas faintly traced in hesitating lineOnce on a time grows firmly resoluteHenceforth and evermore.”
Sometimes the poet’s power of arranging and redistributing and interchanging carries him upward into the realm of ideas alone, among which his imagination plays in absolute freedom; he throws over the results of man’s past dallyings with Nature and makes his own terms with her, and the result is an approach to absolute creation.
Except in the case of lyric poetry the instances where there have been no suggestions as to subject-matter are rare in comparison with those where the subject-matter has been derived from some source.
Look, for instance, at the father of English poetry, Chaucer, how he ransacked French, Italian and Latin literature for his subject-matter, most conscientiously carrying out his own saying, that
“Out of olde feldys as men seyComyth all this newe corn from yere to yere,And out of olde books in good feyCometh all this new science that men alere.”
How external a way he had of working over old materials, especially in his earlier work, is well illustrated in “The Parliament of Fowls,” which he opens by relating the dream of Scipio, originally contained in Cicero’s treatise on the “Republic,” and preserved by Macrobius. This dream, which tells how Africanus appears to Scipio, and carries him up among the stars of the night, shows him Carthage, and prophesies to him of his future greatness, tells him of the blissful immortal life that is in store for those who have served their country, points out to him the brilliant celestial fires, and how insignificant the earth is in comparison with them, and opens his ears to the wondrous harmony of the spheres—this dream is as far removed from the main argument of the poem as anything well could be a contest between three falcons for the hand of a formel. The bringing together of such diverse elements presents no difficulties to the childlike stage of literary development that depends upon surface analogies for the linking together of its thoughts. Just as talking about his ancestor, the great Scipio Africanus, with the old King Masinissa caused Scipio to dream of him, so reading about this dream caused Chaucer, who has to close his bookand go to bed for want of a light, to dream of Scipio Africanus also, who “was come and stood right at his bedis syde.”
Africanus then plays the part of conductor to Chaucer in a manner suggestive not only of his relations to Scipio, but of Virgil’s relation to Dante, and brings him to the great gateway and through it into the garden of love. The description is of the temple of Venus in Boccaccio’s “La Teseide.” There Nature and the “Fowls” are introduced and described, and at last the point is reached. Nature proclaims that it is St. Valentine’s day, and all the fowls may choose them mates. The royal falcon is given first choice, and chooses the lovely formel that sits upon Nature’s hand. Two other ardent falcons declare their devotion to the same fowl, and Nature, when the formel declares that she will serve neither Venus nor Cupid and asks a respite for a year, decides that the three shall serve their lady another year—a pretty allegory supposed to refer to the wooing of Blanche of Lancaster by John of Gaunt.
The main argument of this poem, when it finally is reached by artificially welding together rich links borrowed from other poets, is one of the few examples in Chaucer of subject-matter derived direct from a realevent, but the putting of it in an allegorical form at once lays him under obligations to his poetic predecessors, not only on Anglo-Saxon soil, but in France and Italy.
His most important contributions as an inventor are, of course, his descriptions of the Canterbury Pilgrims, which are the pure outcome of a keen observation of men and women at first hand. So lifelike are they that in them he has made the England of the fourteenth century live again. But how small a proportion of the bulk of the “Canterbury Tales” is contained in these glimpses of English life and manners. It is but the framework upon which luxuriate vines of fancy transplanted from many another garden, and even in its place resembling, if not borrowed from, Boccaccio.
The thoroughly human instincts of the poet assert themselves, however, in the choice of the tales which he puts into the mouths of his pilgrims. He allows a place to the crudities and even the vulgarities of common stories as well as to culture-lore. The magic of the East, the love tales of Italy, the wisdom of philosophers, the common stories of the people, all give up their wealth to his gentle touch. With a keen sense of propriety he, with few exceptions, gives each one of hispilgrims a tale suited in its general tendency to the character of its narrator, and in the critical chatter of the pilgrims about the tales, reflects not only his own tastes, but that of the times, the opinions expressed frequently being most uncomplimentary in their tenor.
In fine, the life of reality and the life of books is spread out before Chaucer, and his observation of both is keen and interested; and this it is which makes him much more than the “great translator” that Eustace Les Champs called him, and settles the nature of the “subtle thing” called spirit contributed by the individuality of the poet to his subject-matter. He brings everything within the reach of human sympathy, because his way of putting a story into his own words is sympathetic. He was a combination of the story-teller, the scholar, the poet, and the critic. As a scholar he brings in learned allusions that are entirely extraneous to the action in hand; as the story-teller, he takes delight in the tales that both the poet and the people have told; as the poet, his imagination dresses up a story with a fresh environment, often anachronous, and sometimes he alters the moral tone of the characters. Cressida is an interesting example of this. But instead of the characters suggesting bytheir own action and speech all the needed moral, Chaucer himself appears ever at hand to analyze and criticise and moralize, though he does it so delightfully that one hesitates to call him didactic. The result of all this is that the external form and the underlying essence of his subject-matter are not completely fused. We often see a sort of guileless working of the machinery of art, yet it is true, no doubt, though perhaps not to the extent insisted on by Morley, that he has something of the Shakespearian quality which enables him to show men as they really are, “wholly developed as if from within, not as described from without by an imperfect and prejudiced observer.”
In his great work, Spenser is no less dependent upon sources for his inspiration, but there is a marked difference in his use of them. Although his range of observation is much narrower than Chaucer’s, hardly extending at all into the realm of actual human effort, yet he makes an advance in so far as his powers of redistribution are much greater than Chaucer’s.
The various knights of the “Fairy Queen” and their exploits are not modeled directly upon any previous stories, but they are made up of incidents similar to those foundscattered all through classic lore; and as his inspirations were drawn in most cases directly from the fountain-head of story in the Greek writers—instead of as they filtered through the Latin, Italian, and French, with the inevitable accretions that result from migrations,—and from the comparatively unalloyed Arthurian legends, there is a clearer reflection in them of the cosmic elements that shine through both the Greek and Arthurian originals than is found in Chaucer.
Although Spenser was certainly unaware of any such modern refinement of the mythologist as a solar myth, yet the “Fairy Queen” forms a curious and interesting study on account of the survivals everywhere evident of solar characteristics in his characters and plots. Indeed it could hardly be otherwise, considering his intention, and his method of carrying it out, which he, himself, explains in his quaint letter to Sir Walter Raleigh—namely, “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.” He goes on:
“I close the history of King Arthur as most fit for the excellency of his person, being made famous by many men’s former works, and also further from danger and envy of suspicion of present time. In which I have followed all the antique poets historical; first Homer, who in the person ofAgamemnon and Ulysses hath ensampled a good governor and a virtuous man, the one in his ‘Iliad,’ the other in his ‘Odyssey’; then Virgil, whose like intention was to do in the person of Æneas: After him, Ariosto comprised them both in his Orlando, and lately Tasso dissevered them again, and formed both parts in two persons, the part which they in Philosophy call Ethice or virtues of a private man, colored in his Rinaldo, the other, named Politice, in his Godfieldo. By example of which excellent poets, I labor to portray in Arthur before he was King, the image of a brave Knight perfected in the twelve private moral virtues as Aristotle hath devised, the which is the purpose of these first twelve books.”
“I close the history of King Arthur as most fit for the excellency of his person, being made famous by many men’s former works, and also further from danger and envy of suspicion of present time. In which I have followed all the antique poets historical; first Homer, who in the person ofAgamemnon and Ulysses hath ensampled a good governor and a virtuous man, the one in his ‘Iliad,’ the other in his ‘Odyssey’; then Virgil, whose like intention was to do in the person of Æneas: After him, Ariosto comprised them both in his Orlando, and lately Tasso dissevered them again, and formed both parts in two persons, the part which they in Philosophy call Ethice or virtues of a private man, colored in his Rinaldo, the other, named Politice, in his Godfieldo. By example of which excellent poets, I labor to portray in Arthur before he was King, the image of a brave Knight perfected in the twelve private moral virtues as Aristotle hath devised, the which is the purpose of these first twelve books.”
In the fashioning of his knight he took Arthur, a hero whose life as it appears in the early romances is inextricably mingled with solar elements, and has built up his virtues upon other ancient solar heroes. Here are all the paraphernalia of solar mythology: invincible knights with marvelous weapons, brazen castles guarded by dragons, marriage with a beautiful maiden and parting from the bride to engage in new quests, an enchantress who turns men into animals, even the outcast child; but none of the incidents appear intact. It is as if there had been a great explosion in the ancient land of romance and that in the mending up of things the separate pieces are all recognizable, although all joined together in a different pattern, while under all is theallegory. A gentle knight is no longer a solar hero as set forth by Max Müller or Cox, but Holiness; his invincible armor is not the all-powerful rays of the sun, but truth; the enchantress not night casting a spell over mortals, but sensuous pleasure entangling them.
These two poets, Chaucer and Spenser, are prototypes of two poet types of two poetical tendencies that have gone on developing side by side in English literature: Chaucer, democratic, interested supremely in the personalities of men and women, portraying the real, and Spenser, aristocratic, interested in imaging forth an ideal of manhood, choosing his subject-matter from sources that will lend themselves to such a purpose; Chaucer drawing his lessons out of the real actions of humanity; Spenser framing his story so that it will illustrate the moral he wishes to inculcate.
Shakespeare, of course, ranges himself in line with Chaucer. His interest centered on character, and wherever a story capable of character development presented itself, that he chose, altered it in outline comparatively little, and when he did so it was in order to carry forward the dramaticmotifwhich he infused into his subject. The dramatic formin which he wrote furnished him a better medium for reaching a complete welding together of the external and spiritual side of his subject-matter. Where Chaucer hinted at the possibilities of an artistic development of character that would cause the events of the story to appear as the inevitable outcome of the hidden springs of action, Shakespeare accomplished it, and peopled the world of imagination with group after group of living, acting characters.
In the nineteenth century Tennyson and Browning have represented, broadly speaking, these two tendencies. As with Spenser, the classics and the Arthurian legends have been the sources from which Tennyson has drawn most largely; but although a philosophical undercurrent is this poet’s spiritual addition to the subject-matter, his method of putting his soul inside his work is very different from Spenser’s. He does not tear the old myths to pieces and join them together again after a pattern of his own to fit his allegorical situation, but keeps the events of his stories almost unchanged, in this particular resembling Chaucer and Shakespeare, and—except in a few instances, such as Tithonus and Lucretius, where the classic spirit of the originals is preserved—he infuses in his subject a veinof philosophy, illustrating those modern tendencies of English thought of which Tennyson, himself, was the exemplar. Even when inventing subjects, founded upon the experiences of everyday life, he so manipulates the story as to make it illustrate some of his favorite moral maxims. His characters do not act from motives which are the inherent necessities of their natures, but they act in accordance with Tennyson’s preconceived notions of how they ought to act. He manipulates the elements of character to suit his own view of development, just as Spenser manipulated the elements of the story to suit his own allegorical purpose.
Browning is the nineteenth-century heir of Chaucer; but it is doubtful whether Chaucer would recognize his own offspring, so remarkable has the development been in those five centuries. With Chaucer’s keen interest in human nature deepened to a profound insight into the very soul of humanity, and the added wealth of these centuries of human history, Browning not only had a far wider range of choice in subject-matter, but he was enabled to instil into it greater intellectual and emotional complexities.
Rarely has he treated any subject that has already been treated poetically unlesswe except the transcripts from the classics soon to be considered. Wherever he saw an interesting historical personage, interesting, not on account of his brilliant achievements in the eyes of the world, but on account of potentialities of character, such a one he has set before us to reveal himself. There are between twenty and thirty portraits of this nature in his work, chosen from all sorts and conditions of men—men who stand for some phase of growth in human thought; and always in developing a personality he gives the kernel of truth upon which their peculiar point of view is based. Thus, among the musical poems, Abt Vogler speaks for the intuitionalist—he who is blessed by a glimpse of the absolute truth. Charles Avison, on the other hand, is the philosopher of the relative in music and the arts generally. Among the art poems, Fra Lippo Lippi is the apostle of beauty in realism, Andrea del Sarto the attainer of perfection in form. In the religious poems the Jewish standpoint is illustrated in “Saul” and “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the Christian in the portrait of John in “The Death in the Desert”; the empirical reasoner in “Paracelsus.”
This is only one of Browning’s methods in the choice and use of subject-matter. Thecharacters and incidents in his stories are frequently the result of pure invention, but he sets them in an environment recreated from history, developing their individualities in harmony with the environment, thus giving at one stroke the spirit of the time and the individual qualities of special representatives of the time. Examples of this are: “My Last Duchess,” where the Duke is an entirely imaginary person and the particular incident is invented, but he is made to act and talk in a way perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the time—mediæval Italy. “Hugues of Saxe-Gotha” is another being of Browning’s fancy, who yet represents to perfection the spirit of the old fugue writers. “Luria,” “The Soul’s Tragedy,” “In a Balcony,” all represent the same method.
Another plan pursued by the poet is either to invent or borrow a historical personage into whose mouth he puts the defence of some course of action or ethical standard that may or may not be founded upon the highest ideals. Sludge, the hero of “Fifine at the Fair,” Bishop Blougram, Hohenstiel-Schwangau, range themselves in this group.
There are comparatively few cases where he has taken a complete story and developedits spiritual possibilities without much change in external detail, but how adequate his art was to such ends, “The Ring and the Book,” “Inn Album,” “Two Poets of Croisic,” “Red Cotton Nightcap Country,” the historical dramas of “Strafford,” and “King Victor and King Charles” fully prove, including, as they do, some of his finest masterpieces.
History and story have furnished many of the incidents which he has worked up in his dramatic lyrics and romances like “Clive,” “Hervé Riel,” “Donald,” etc. There remains, however, a large number of poems containing some of Browning’s loveliest work in which the subject-matter is, as far as we know, the creation of pure, unadulterated fancy. “A Blot in the ’Scutcheon,” “In a Balcony,” “Colombe’s Birthday,” “Childe Roland,” “James Lee’s Wife” are some of them. Even in this rapid survey of the field the fact is patent that Browning’s range of subject-matter is infinitely wider and his method of developing it far more varied than has been that of any other English poet. He seems the first to have completely shaken himself free from the trammels of classic or mediæval literature. There are no echoes of Arthur and his Knights in his poetry, the shadows of the Greek gods and goddesses exert nospell—except in the few instances when he deliberately chose a Greek subject.
The fact that Browning was so free from classical influence in the great body of his work as compared with the other chief poets of the nineteenth century gives an especial interest to those poems in which he chose classical themes for his subjects. There are not more than ten all told, and one of these is a translation, yet they represent some of his finest and most original work, for Browning could not touch a classical theme without infusing into it that grasp and insight peculiar to his own genius.
His first and most conventionally classical poem is the fragment in “Men and Women,” “Artemis Prologizes,” written in 1842. It was to have been the introduction to a long poem telling of the mad love of Hippolytus for a nymph of Artemis, after that goddess had brought about his resuscitation. It has been suggested by Mr. Boynton in an interesting paper that Browning shows traces of the influence of Landor in his poetry. This fragment certainly furnishes argument for this opinion, though it has a strength of diction along with its Greek severity and terseness of style which leads to the conclusion that the influence came from the fountain headof Greek poetry itself rather than through the lesser muse of this nineteenth-century Greek.
The poem is said to have been begun on a sick-bed and when the poet recovered he had forgotten or lost interest in his plans. This is to be regretted for if he had continued as he began, the poem would have stood unique in his work as a true survival of Greek subject wedded with classical form and style, and would certainly have challenged comparison with the best work done in this field by Landor or Swinburne, who tell over the classical stories or even invent new episodes, but, when all is said, do not write as if they were actually themselves Greeks.
There is no other instance in Browning of such a survival. In his other poems on Greek subjects it is Browning bringing Greek life to our ken with wonderful distinctness, but doing it according to his own accustomed poetical methods, or, as in “Ixion,” a Greek story has been used as a symbol for the inculcating of a philosophy which is largely Browning’s own.
In spite of the fact that he has turned to Greece so seldom for inspiration, his Greek poems range from such stirring pictures of Greek life and feeling as one gets in the splendiddramatic idyl “Pheidippides,” based on a historical incident, through the imaginary “Cleon,” in which is found the sublimated essence of Greek philosophical thought at the time of Christ—thought, weary of law and beauty, longing for a fresh inspiration, knowing not what, and unable to perceive it in the new ideal of love being taught by the Christians—to “Aristophanes’ Apology,” in which the Athens of his day, with its literary and political factions, is presented with a force and analysis which place it second only to “The Ring and the Book.”
This poem taken, with Balaustion, gives the reader not only a comprehensive view of the historical atmosphere of the time but indirectly shows the poet’s own attitude toward the literary war between Euripides and Aristophanes. So different are Browning’s Greek poems from all other poems upon classical subjects that it will be interesting to dwell upon the most important of them at greater length than has been deemed necessary in the case of the more widely known and read of the poems.
“Cleon” links itself with the nineteenth century, because of its dealing with the problem of immortality, a problem which has been ever present in the mind of the century.Cleon has, beside that type of synthetic mind which belongs to a ripe phase of civilization. Though he is a Greek and a pagan, he stretches hands across the centuries to men of the type of Morris or Matthew Arnold. He is the latest child of his own time, the heir of all the ages during which Greece had developed its æsthetic perfection, discovered the inadequacy of its established religion, come through its philosophers and poets to a perception of the immortality of the soul, and sunk again to a skepticism which had no vision of personal immortality at least, though among the stoics there were some who believed in an absorption into divine being. Cleon would fain believe in personal immortality but cannot, and, like Matthew Arnold, believes in facing death imperturbably.
In “Balaustion’s Adventure” a historical tradition is used as the central episode of the poem, but life and romance are given to it by the creation of the heroine, Balaustion, a young Greek woman whose fascinating personality dominates the whole poem. She was a Rhodian, else her freedom of action and speech might seem too modern, but among the islands of Greece, at least at the time of Euripides, there still survived that attitude toward woman which we see reflected in theHomeric epics. Away from Athens, too, Euripides was a power; hence his defence is put into the mouth of one not an Athenian. She had saved a shipload of Athenian sympathizers by reciting Euripides when they were in danger from the hostile Syracusans.
Euripides
Besides the romantic touch which is given the story by the creation of the lyric girl, there is an especial fitness in making the enthusiastic devotee of this poet a woman, for no one among the ancients has so fully and sympathetically portrayed woman in all her human possibilities of goodness and badness as Euripides, yet he has been called a woman-hater—because some of his men have railed against women—but one Alkestis is enough to offset any dramatic utterances of his men about women. The poet’s attitude should be looked for in his power of portraying women of fine traits, not in any opinions expressed by his men. Furthermore, Browning had before him a model of Balaustion in her enthusiasm for Euripides, in Mrs. Browning. These circumstances are certainly sufficient to prove the appropriateness of making a Rhodian girl the defender of Euripides.
There is nothing more delicious in Browning than Balaustion’s relation of “Alkestis,” as she had seen it acted, to her three friends.Her woman’s comment and criticisms combine a Browning’s penetration of the fine points in the play with a girl’s idealism. Such a combination of masculine intellectualism and feminine charm has been known in women of all centuries. As the translation of the beautiful play of “Alkestis” proceeds, Balaustion interprets its art and moral, defending her favorite poet, not with the ponderousness of a grave critic weighing the influences which may have molded his genius, or calculating the pros and cons of his style, but with the swift appreciation of a mind and spirit full of the ardor of sympathy. Moreover, her talk of the play being a recollection of how it appeared to her as she saw it acted, the mere text is constantly enlarged upon and made vital with flashing glimpses of the action, as, for example, in the passage just after the funeral of Alkestis:
“So, to the struggle off strode Herakles,When silence closed behind the lion-garb,Back came our dull fact settling in its place,Though heartiness and passion half-dispersedThe inevitable fate. And presentlyIn came the mourners from the funeral,One after one, until we hoped the lastWould be Alkestis, and so end our dream.Could they have really left Alkestis loneI’ the wayside sepulchre! Home, all save she!And when Admetos felt that it was so,By the stand-still: when he lifted head and faceFrom the two hiding hands and peplos’ fold,And looked forth, knew the palace, knew the hills,Knew the plains, knew the friendly frequence there,And no Alkestis any more again,Why, the whole woe billow-like broke on him.”
Again, her criticism of Admetos gives at once the natural feeling of a girl who could not be satisfied with what seemed to her his selfish action, and Browning’s feeling that Euripides saw its selfishness just as surely as Balaustion, despite the fact that it was in keeping, as numerous critics declare, with the customs of the age, and would not by any of his contemporaries be regarded as selfish on his part:
“So he stood sobbing: nowise insincere,But somehow child-like, like his children, likeChildishness the world over. What was newIn this announcement that his wife must die?What particle of pain beyond the pactHe made with his eyes wide open, long ago—Made and was, if not glad, content to make?Now that the sorrow, he had called for, came,He sorrowed to the height: none heard him say,However, what would seem so pertinent,‘To keep this pact, I find surpass my power;Rescind it, Moirai! Give me back her life,And take the life I kept by base exchange!Or, failing that, here stands your laughing-stockFooled by you, worthy just the fate o’ the foolWho makes a pother to escape the bestAnd gain the worst you wiser Powers allot!’No, not one word of this; nor did his wifeDespite the sobbing, and the silence soonTo follow, judge so much was in his thought—Fancy that, should the Moirai acquiesce,He would relinquish life nor let her die.The man was like some merchant who in storm,Throws the freight over to redeem the ship;No question, saving both were better still,As it was,—why, he sorrowed, which sufficed.So, all she seemed to notice in his speechWas what concerned her children.”
Among modern critics who take the conventional ground in regard to Admetos may be cited Churton Collins, whose opinion is, of course, weighty. He writes:
“Alcestis would be considered fortunate for having had an opportunity of displaying so conspicuously the fidelity to a wife’s first and capital duty. Had Admetus prevented such a sacrifice he would have robbed Alcestis of an honor which every nobly ambitious woman in Hellas would have coveted. This is so much taken for granted by the poet that all that he lays stress on in the drama is the virtue rewarded by the return of Alcestis to life, the virtue characteristic of Admetus, the virtue of hospitality; to this duty in all the agony of his sorrow Admetus had been nobly true, and as a reward for what he had thus earned, the wife who had been equally true to woman’s obligations was restored all-glorified to home and children and mutual love.”
“Alcestis would be considered fortunate for having had an opportunity of displaying so conspicuously the fidelity to a wife’s first and capital duty. Had Admetus prevented such a sacrifice he would have robbed Alcestis of an honor which every nobly ambitious woman in Hellas would have coveted. This is so much taken for granted by the poet that all that he lays stress on in the drama is the virtue rewarded by the return of Alcestis to life, the virtue characteristic of Admetus, the virtue of hospitality; to this duty in all the agony of his sorrow Admetus had been nobly true, and as a reward for what he had thus earned, the wife who had been equally true to woman’s obligations was restored all-glorified to home and children and mutual love.”
Most readers, however, will find it difficult to put themselves into the appropriate Greek frame of mind, and will sympathize with Browning’s supposition that after all Euripides had transcended current ideas on the subject and deliberately intended to convey such an interpretation of the character of Admetos as Balaustion gives.
Balaustion shows her penetration again in her appreciation of Herakles. He distinguishes clearly between evil that is inherent in the nature as the selfishness of Admetos, and evil which is more or less external, growing out of conditions incident to the time rather than from any real trait of nature. Herakles’ delight in the hospitality accorded him, his drinking and feasting in the interim of his labors, did not touch the genuine, large-hearted helpfulness of the demigod, who became sober the moment he learned there was sorrow in the house and need of his aid.
In her proposed version of the story, Balaustion is surely the romantic girl, who would have her hero a hero indeed and in every way the equal of his spouse. Yet if we delve below this romanticism of Balaustion we shall find the poet’s own belief in the almost omniscient power of human love the basis of the relation between Admetos and Alkestis.
The soul of Alkestis in one look entered into that of Admetos; she died, but he is entirely guiltless of agreeing to her death. Alkestis herself had made the pact with Apollo to die for her husband. He, when he learns it, refuses to accept the sacrifice, and unable to persuade him that his duty to humanity demands that he accept it, Alkestis asks him to look at her. Then her soul enters his, but when she goes to Hades and demands to become a ghost, the Queen of Hades replies:
“Hence, thou deceiver! This is not to die,If, by the very death which mocks me now,The life, that’s left behind and past my power,Is formidably doubled—Say, there fightTwo athletes, side by side, each athlete armedWith only half the weapons, and no more,Adequate to a contest with their foes.If one of these should fling helm, sword and shieldTo fellow—shieldless, swordless, helmless late—And so leap naked o’er the barrier, leaveA combatant equipped from head to heel,Yet cry to the other side, ‘Receive a friendWho fights no longer!’ ‘Back, friend, to the fray!’Would be the prompt rebuff; I echo it.Two souls in one were formidable odds:Admetos must not be himself and thou!“And so, before the embrace relaxed a whit,The lost eyes opened, still beneath the look;And lo, Alkestis was alive again,And of Admetos’ rapture who shall speak?”
How unique a treatment of a classical subject this poem is, is self-evident. Not content with making a superb translation of the play, remarkable both for its literalness and for its poetic beauty, the poet has dared to present that translation indirectly through the mouth of another speaker, and to incorporate with it a running commentary of criticism in blank verse. Still more daring was it to make play and criticism an episode in a dramatic monologue in which we learn not only the story of the rescue of the shipload of Athenian sympathizers, but the story of Balaustion’s love. Along with all this complexity of interest there is still room for a lifelike portrayal of Balaustion herself, one of the loveliest conceptions of womanhood in literature.
To reiterate what I have upon another occasion expressed in regard to her, she is a girl about whom the fancy loves to cling—she is so joyous, so brave, and so beautiful, and possessed of so rare a mind scintillating with wit, wisdom and critical insight, not Browning’s own mind either except in so far as his sympathies were with Euripides. Her ardor for purity and perfection is perhaps peculiarly feminine. It is quite different from that of the mind tormented by the problem of evil and taking refuge in a partisanship ofevil as a force which works for good and without which the world would be a waste of insipidity. Her suggested version of the Alkestis story converts Admetos into as much of a saint as Alkestis, and makes an exquisite and soul-stirring romance of their perfect union, though it must be admitted that it would do away with all the intensity and dramatic force of the play as it is presented by Euripides. Like the angels who rejoice more over one sinner returned than over the ninety and nine that did not go astray, an artist prefers the contrast and movement of a sinning and regenerated Admetos to an Admetos more suited from the first to be the consort of Alkestis. This is the touch, however, which preserves Balaustion’s feminine charm and makes her truly her own self—an ardent soul very far from being simply Browning’s mouthpiece.
“Aristophanes’ Apology” is a still more remarkable play in its complexity. Again, Balaustion is the speaker, and Browning has set himself the task in this monologue of relating the fall of Athens, of presenting the personality of Aristophanes, of defending Euripides, a translation of whose play, “Herakles,” is included, and incidentally sketching the history of Greek comedy, all through themouth of the one speaker, Balaustion. Not until one has grasped the law by which the poet has accomplished this, and has moreover freshly in his mind the facts of Greek history at the time of Athens’ fall, and Greek literature, especially the plays of Aristophanes and Euripides, can the poem be thoroughly enjoyed.
In the very first line the suggestion of the scene setting is given, and such suggestions occur from time to time all through the poem. It should be observed that they are never brought in for themselves alone, but are always used in connection with some mood of Balaustion’s or as imagery in relation to some thought. While the reader is thus kept conscious of the background of wind and wave, as Balaustion and her husband voyage toward Rhodes, it is not until the end of the poem that we learn with a pleasant surprise that the boat on which they are sailing is the same one saved once by Balaustion when she recited Euripides’ “sweetest, saddest song.” Thus there is a dramatic denouement in connection with the scene setting.
Through the expression of a mood of despair on the part of Balaustion at the opening of the poem the reader is put in possession not only of the scene setting butof the occasion of the voyage, which is the overthrow of Athens. From the mood of despair Balaustion passes to one in which she describes how she could better have borne to see Athens perish. This carries her on to a more hopeful frame of mind, in which she can foresee the spiritual influence of Athens persisting. The peace of mind ensuing upon this consideration makes it possible for her calmly to survey the events connected with its downfall, among which the picturesque episode of the dancing of the flute girls to the demolition of the walls of the Piræus is conspicuous. She then sees the vision of the immortal Athens while Sparta the victorious in arms will die. Then comes a mood in which she declares it will be better to face the grief than to brood over it, which leads to her proposing to Euthukles that they treat the fall of Athens as a tragic theme, as the poet might do, and enact it on the voyage. Then grief over the recent events takes possession of her again, and now with the feminine privilege of changing her mind, she thinks it would be better to rehearse an event which happened to herself a year ago as a prologue. Speaking of adventures causes her very naturally to drop into reminiscences about her first adventure, when she recitedEuripides and met the man who was to become her husband.