"I — I — was so young!Besides I loved him, Thorold — and I hadNo mother; God forgot me: so I fell ——"
or that where, "at end of the disastrous day," Luria takes the phial of poison from his breast, muttering —
"Strange! This is all I brought from my own landTo help me."
—* "Strafford", 1837; "King Victor and King Charles", 1842;"The Return of the Druses", and "A Blot in the 'Scutcheon", 1843;"Colombe's Birthday", 1844; "Luria", and "A Soul's Tragedy", 1845.—
Before passing on from these eight plays to Browning's most imperishable because most nearly immaculate dramatic poem, "Pippa Passes", and to "Sordello", that colossal derelict upon the ocean of poetry, I should like — out of an embarrassing quantity of alluring details — to remind the reader of two secondary matters of interest, pertinent to the present theme. One is that the song in "A Blot in the 'Scutcheon", "There's a woman like a dew-drop", written several years before the author's meeting with Elizabeth Barrett, is so closely in the style of "Lady Geraldine's Courtship", and other ballads by the sweet singer who afterwards became a partner in the loveliest marriage of which we have record in literary history, that, even were there nothing to substantiate the fact, it were fair to infer that Mertoun's song to Mildred was the electric touch which compelled to its metric shape one of Mrs. Browning's best-known poems.
The further interest lies in the lordly acknowledgment of the dedication to him of "Luria", which Landor sent to Browning — lines pregnant with the stateliest music of his old age: —
"Shakespeare is not our poet but the world's,Therefore on him no speech! and brief for thee,Browning! Since Chaucer was alive and haleNo man has walked along our roads with stepSo active, so enquiring eye, or tongueSo varied in discourse. But warmer climesGive brighter plumage, stronger wing: the breezeOf Alpine heights thou playest with, borne onBeyond Sorrento and Amalfi, whereThe Siren waits thee, singing song for song."
In my allusion to "Pippa Passes", towards the close of the preceding chapter, as the most imperishable because the most nearly immaculate of Browning's dramatic poems, I would not have it understood that its pre-eminence is considered from the standpoint of technical achievement, of art, merely. It seems to me, like all simple and beautiful things, profound enough for the searching plummet of the most curious explorer of the depths of life. It can be read, re-read, learned by heart, and the more it is known the wider and more alluring are the avenues of imaginative thought which it discloses. It has, more than any other long composition by its author, that quality of symmetry, that `symmetria prisca' recorded of Leonardo da Vinci in the Latin epitaph of Platino Piatto; and, as might be expected, its mental basis, what Rossetti called fundamental brain-work, is as luminous, depth within depth, as the morning air. By its side, the more obviously "profound" poems, Bishop Blougram and the rest, are mere skilled dialectics.
The art that is most profound and most touching must ever be the simplest. Whenever Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, are at white heat they require no exposition, but meditation only — the meditation akin to the sentiment of little children who listen, intent upon every syllable, and passionately eager of soul, to hearthside tragedies. The play of genius is like the movement of the sea. It has its solemn rhythm: its joy, irradiate of the sun; its melancholy, in the patient moonlight: its surge and turbulence under passing tempests: below all, the deep oceanic music. There are, of course, many to whom the sea is but a waste of water, at best useful as a highway and as the nursery of the winds and rains. For them there is no hint "of the incommunicable dream" in the curve of the rising wave, no murmur of the oceanic undertone in the short leaping sounds, invisible things that laugh and clap their hands for joy and are no more. To them it is but a desert: obscure, imponderable, a weariness. The "profundity" of Browning, so dear a claim in the eyes of the poet's fanatical admirers, exists, in their sense, only in his inferior work. There is more profound insight in Blake's Song of Innocence, "Piping down the valleys wild," or in Wordsworth's line, "Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears," or in Keats' single verse, "There is a budding morrow in midnight," or in this quatrain on Poetry, by a young living poet —
"She comes like the husht beauty of the night,But sees too deep for laughter;Her touch is a vibration and a lightFrom worlds before and after ——"
there is more "profundity" in any of these than in libraries of "Sludge the Medium" literature. Mere hard thinking does not involve profundity, any more than neurotic excitation involves spiritual ecstasy. `De profundis', indeed, must the poet come: there must the deep rhythm of life have electrified his "volatile essence" to a living rhythmic joy. In this deep sense, and this only, the poet is born, not made. He may learn to fashion anew that which he hath seen: the depth of his insight depends upon the depth of his spiritual heritage. If wonder dwell not in his eyes and soul there can be no "far ken" for him. Here it seems apt to point out that Browning was the first writer of our day to indicate this transmutive, this inspired and inspiring wonder-spirit, which is the deepest motor in the evolution of our modern poetry. Characteristically, he puts his utterance into the mouth of a dreamy German student, the shadowy Schramm who is but metaphysics embodied, metaphysics finding apt expression in tobacco-smoke: "Keep but ever looking, whether with the body's eye or the mind's, and you will soon find something to look on! Has a man done wondering at women? — there follow men, dead and alive, to wonder at. Has he done wondering at men? — there's God to wonder at: and the faculty of wonder may be, at the same time, old and tired enough with respect to its first object, and yet young and fresh sufficiently, so far as concerns its novel one."
This wonder is akin to that `insanity' of the poet which is but impassioned sanity. Plato sums the matter when he says, "He who, having no touch of the Muse's madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks he will get into the temple by the help of Art — he, I say, and his poetry, are not admitted."
In that same wood beyond Dulwich to which allusion has already been made, the germinal motive of "Pippa Passes" flashed upon the poet. No wonder this resort was for long one of his sacred places, and that he lamented its disappearance as fervently as Ruskin bewailed the encroachment of the ocean of bricks and mortar upon the wooded privacies of Denmark Hill.
Save for a couple of brief visits abroad, Browning spent the years, between his first appearance as a dramatic writer and his marriage, in London and the neighbourhood. Occasionally he took long walks into the country. One particular pleasure was to lie beside a hedge, or deep in meadow-grasses, or under a tree, as circumstances and the mood concurred, and there to give himself up so absolutely to the life of the moment that even the shy birds would alight close by, and sometimes venturesomely poise themselves on suspicious wings for a brief space upon his recumbent body. I have heard him say that his faculty of observation at that time would not have appeared despicable to a Seminole or an Iroquois: he saw and watched everything, the bird on the wing, the snail dragging its shell up the pendulous woodbine, the bee adding to his golden treasure as he swung in the bells of the campanula, the green fly darting hither and thither like an animated seedling, the spider weaving her gossamer from twig to twig, the woodpecker heedfully scrutinising the lichen on the gnarled oak-bole, the passage of the wind through leaves or across grass, the motions and shadows of the clouds, and so forth. These were his golden holidays. Much of the rest of his time, when not passed in his room in his father's house, where he wrote his dramas and early poems, and studied for hours daily, was spent in the Library of the British Museum, in an endless curiosity into the more or less unbeaten tracks of literature. These London experiences were varied by whole days spent at the National Gallery, and in communion with kindred spirits. At one time he had rooms, or rather a room, in the immediate neighbourhood of the Strand, whither he could go when he wished to be in town continuously for a time, or when he had any social or theatrical engagement.
Browning's life at this period was distraught by more than one episode of the heart. It would be strange were it otherwise. He had in no ordinary degree a rich and sensuous nature, and his responsiveness was so quick that the barriers of prudence were apt to be as shadowy to him as to the author of "The Witch of Atlas". But he was the earnest student for the most part, and, above all, the poet. His other pleasure, in his happy vagrant days, was to join company with any tramps, gipsies, or other wayfarers, and in good fellowship gain much knowledge of life that was useful at a later time. Rustic entertainments, particularly peripatetic "Theatres Royal", had a singular fascination for him, as for that matter had rustic oratory, whether of the alehouse or the pulpit. At one period he took the keenest interest in sectaries of all kinds: and often he incurred a gentle reproof from his mother because of his nomad propensities in search of "PASTORS new". There was even a time when he seriously deliberated whether he should not combine literature and religious ministry, as Faraday combined evangelical fervour with scientific enthusiasm. "'Twas a girl with eyes like two dreams of night" that saved him from himself, and defrauded the Church Independent of a stalwart orator.
It was, as already stated, while he strolled through Dulwich Wood one day that the thought occurred to him which was to find development and expression in "Pippa Passes". "The image flashed upon him," writes his intimate friend, Mrs. Sutherland Orr, "of some one walking thus alone through life; one apparently too obscure to leave a trace of his or her passage, yet exercising a lasting though unconscious influence at every step of it; and the image shaped itself into the little silk-winder of Asolo, Felippa or Pippa."
It has always seemed to me a radical mistake to include "Pippa Passes" among Browning's dramas. Not only is it absolutely unactable, but essentially undramatic in the conventional sense. True dramatic writing concerns itself fundamentally with the apt conjunction of events, and the more nearly it approximates to the verity of life the more likely is it to be of immediate appeal. There is a `vraie verite' which only the poet, evolving from dramatic concepts rather than attempting to concentrate these in a quick, moving verisimilitude, can attempt. The passing hither and thither of Pippa, like a beneficent Fate, a wandering chorus from a higher amid the discordant medley of a lower world, changing the circumstances and even the natures of certain more or less heedless listeners by the wild free lilt of her happy song of innocence, is of this `vraie verite'. It is so obviously true, spiritually, that it is unreal in the commonplace of ordinary life. Its very effectiveness is too apt for the dramatist, who can ill afford to tamper further with the indifferent banalities of actual existence. The poet, unhampered by the exigencies of dramatic realism, can safely, and artistically, achieve an equally exact, even a higher verisimilitude, by means which are, or should be, beyond adoption by the dramatist proper.
But over and above any `nice discrimination', "Pippa Passes" is simply a poem, a lyrical masque with interspersed dramatic episodes, and subsidiary interludes in prose. The suggestion recently made that it should be acted is a wholly errant one. The finest part of it is unrepresentable. The rest would consist merely of a series of tableaux, with conversational accompaniment.
The opening scene, "the large mean airy chamber," where Pippa, the little silk-winder from the mills at Asolo, springs from bed, on her New Year's Day `festa', and soliloquises as she dresses, is as true as it is lovely when viewed through the rainbow glow of the poetic atmosphere: but how could it succeed on the stage? It is not merely that the monologue is too long: it is too inapt, in its poetic richness, for its purpose. It is the poet, not Pippa, who evokes this sweet sunrise-music, this strain of the "long blue solemn hours serenely flowing." The dramatic poet may occupy himself with that deeper insight, and the wider expression of it, which is properly altogether beyond the scope of the playwright. In a word, he may irradiate his theme with the light that never was on sea or land, nor will he thereby sacrifice aught of essential truth: but his comrade must see to it that he is content with the wide liberal air of the common day. The poetic alchemist may turn a sword into pure gold: the playwright will concern himself with the due usage of the weapon as we know it, and attribute to it no transcendent value, no miraculous properties. What is permissible to Blake, painting Adam and Eve among embowering roses and lilies, while the sun, moon, and stars simultaneously shine, is impermissible to the portrait-painter or the landscapist, who has to idealise actuality to the point only of artistic realism, and not to transmute it at the outset from happily-perceived concrete facts to a glorified abstract concept.
In this opening monologue the much-admired song, "All service ranks the same with God," is no song at all, properly, but simply a beautiful short poem. From the dramatist's point of view, could anything be more shaped for disaster than the second of the two stanzas? —
"Say not `a small event'! Why `small'?Costs it more pain than this, ye callA `great event', should come to pass,Than that? Untwine me from the massOf deeds which make up life, one deedPower shall fall short in or exceed!"
The whole of this lovely prologue is the production of a dramatic poet, not of a poet writing a drama. On the other hand, I cannot agree with what I read somewhere recently — that Sebald's song, at the opening of the most superb dramatic writing in the whole range of Victorian literature, is, in the circumstances, wholly inappropriate. It seems to me entirely consistent with the character of Ottima's reckless lover. He is akin to the gallant in one of Dumas' romances, who lingered atop of the wall of the prison whence he was escaping in order to whistle the concluding bar of a blithe chanson of freedom. What is, dramatically, disastrous in the instance of Mertoun singing "There's a woman like a dew-drop", when he ought to be seeking Mildred's presence in profound stealth and silence, is, dramatically, electrically startling in the mouth of Sebald, among the geraniums of the shuttered shrub-house, where he has passed the night with Ottima, while her murdered husband lies stark in the adjoining room.
It must, however, be borne in mind that this thrilling dramatic effect is fully experienced only in retrospection, or when there is knowledge of what is to follow.
A conclusive objection to the drama as an actable play is that three of the four main episodes are fragmentary. We know nothing of the fate of Luigi: we can but surmise the future of Jules and Phene: we know not how or when Monsignor will see Pippa righted. Ottima and Sebald reach a higher level in voluntary death than they ever could have done in life.
It is quite unnecessary, here, to dwell upon this exquisite flower of genius in detail. Every one who knows Browning at all knows "Pippa Passes". Its lyrics have been unsurpassed, for birdlike spontaneity and a rare high music, by any other Victorian poet: its poetic insight is such as no other poet than the author of "The Ring and the Book" and "The Inn Album" can equal. Its technique, moreover, is superb. From the outset of the tremendous episode of Ottima and Sebald, there is a note of tragic power which is almost overwhelming. Who has not know what Jakob Boehme calls "the shudder of a divine excitement" when Luca's murderer replies to his paramour,
"morning? It seems to me a night with a sun added."
How deep a note, again, is touched when Sebald exclaims, in allusion to his murder of Luca, that he was so "wrought upon", though here, it may be, there is an unconscious reminiscence of the tenser and more culminative cry of Othello, "but being wrought, perplext in the extreme." Still more profound a touch is that where Ottima, daring her lover to the "one thing that must be done; you know what thing: Come in and help to carry," says, with affected lightsomeness, "This dusty pane might serve for looking-glass," and simultaneously exclaims, as she throws them rejectingly from her nervous fingers, "Three, four — four grey hairs!" then with an almost sublime coquetry of horror turns abruptly to Sebald, saying with a voice striving vainly to be blithe —
"Is it so you saidA plait of hair should wave across my neck?No — this way."
Who has not been moved by the tragic grandeur of the verse, as well as by the dramatic intensity of the episode of the lovers' "crowning night"?
"Ottima. The day of it too, Sebald!When heaven's pillars seemed o'erbowed with heat,Its black-blue canopy suffered descendClose on us both, to weigh down each to each,And smother up all life except our life.So lay we till the storm came.Sebald. How it came!Ottima. Buried in woods we lay, you recollect;Swift ran the searching tempest overhead;And ever and anon some bright white shaftBurned thro' the pine-tree roof, here burned and there,As if God's messenger thro' the close wood screenPlunged and replunged his weapon at a venture,Feeling for guilty thee and me: then brokeThe thunder like a whole sea overhead ——"
Surely there is nothing in all our literature more poignantly dramatic than this first part of "Pippa Passes". The strains which Pippa sings here and throughout are as pathetically fresh and free as a thrush's song in the heart of a beleaguered city, and as with the same unconsidered magic. There is something of the mavis-note, liquid falling tones, caught up in a moment in joyous caprice, in
"Give her but a least excuse to love me!When — where ——"
No one of these songs, all acutely apt to the time and the occasion, has a more overwhelming effect than that which interrupts Ottima and Sebald at the perilous summit of their sin, beyond which lies utter darkness, behind which is the narrow twilit backward way.
"Ottima. Bind it thrice about my brow;Crown me your queen, your spirit's arbitress,Magnificent in sin. Say that!Sebald. I crown youMy great white queen, my spirit's arbitress,Magnificent . . .
[From without is heard the voice of PIPPA singing —]
The year's at the spring,And day's at the morn;Morning's at seven;The hill-side's dew-pearled;The lark's on the wing;The snail's on the thorn:God's in his heaven —All's right with the world![PIPPA passes.]Sebald. God's in his heaven! Do you hear that?Who spoke?"
This sweet voice of Pippa reaches the guilty lovers, reaches Luigi in his tower, hesitating between love and patriotic duty, reaches Jules and Phene when all the happiness of their unborn years trembles in the balance, reaches the Prince of the Church just when his conscience is sore beset by a seductive temptation, reaches one and all at a crucial moment in the life of each. The ethical lesson of the whole poem is summed up in
"All service ranks the same with God —With God, whose puppets, best and worst,Are we: there is no last nor first,"
and in
"God's in his heaven —All's right with the world!"
"With God there is no lust of Godhood," says Rossetti in "Hand and Soul": `Und so ist der blaue Himmel grosser als jedes Gewoelk darin, und dauerhafter dazu,' meditates Jean Paul: "There can be nothing good, as we know it, nor anything evil, as we know it, in the eye of the Omnipresent and the Omniscient," utters the Oriental mystic.
It is interesting to know that many of the nature touches were indirectly due to the poet's solitary rambles, by dawn, sundown, and "dewy eve", in the wooded districts south of Dulwich, at Hatcham, and upon Wimbledon Common, whither he was often wont to wander and to ramble for hours, and where he composed one day the well-known lines upon Shelley, with many another unrecorded impulse of song. Here, too, it was, that Carlyle, riding for exercise, was stopped by `a beautiful youth', who introduced himself as one of the philosopher's profoundest admirers.
It was from the Dulwich wood that, one afternoon in March, he saw a storm glorified by a double rainbow of extraordinary beauty; a memorable vision, recorded in an utterance of Luigi to his mother: here too that, in autumnal dusks, he saw many a crescent moon with "notched and burning rim." He never forgot the bygone "sunsets and great stars" he saw in those days of his fervid youth. Browning remarked once that the romance of his life was in his own soul; and on another occasion I heard him smilingly add, to some one's vague assertion that in Italy only was there any romance left, "Ah, well, I should like to include poor old Camberwell!" Perhaps he was thinking of his lines in "Pippa Passes", of the days when that masterpiece came ebullient from the fount of his genius —
"May's warm slow yellow moonlit summer nights —Gone are they, but I have them in my soul!"
There is all the distinction between "Pippa Passes" and "Sordello" that there is between the Venus of Milos and a gigantic Theban Sphinx. The latter is, it is true, proportionate in its vastness; but the symmetry of mere bulk is not the `symmetria prisca' of ideal sculpture. I have already alluded to "Sordello" as a derelict upon the ocean of poetry. This, indeed, it still seems to me, notwithstanding the well-meaning suasion of certain admirers of the poem who have hoped "I should do it justice," thereby meaning that I should eulogise it as a masterpiece. It is a gigantic effort, of a kind; so is the sustained throe of a wrestling Titan. That the poem contains much which is beautiful is undeniable, also that it is surcharged with winsome and profound thoughts and a multitude of will-o'-the-wisp-like fancies which all shape towards high thinking.
But it is monotonous as one of the enormous American inland seas to a lover of the ocean, to whom the salt brine is as the breath of delight. The fatal facility of the heroic couplet to lapse into diffuseness, has, coupled with a warped anxiety for irreducible concision, been Browning's ruin here.
There is one charge even yet too frequently made against "Sordello", that of "obscurity". Its interest may be found remote, its treatment verbose, its intricacies puzzling to those unaccustomed to excursions from the familiar highways of old usage, but its motive thought is not obscure. It is a moonlit plain compared with the "silva oscura" of the "Divina Commedia".
Surely this question of Browning's obscurity was expelled to the Limbo of Dead Stupidities when Mr. Swinburne, in periods as resplendent as the whirling wheels of Phoebus Apollo's chariot, wrote his famous incidental passage in his "Essay on Chapman".
Too probably, in the dim disintegrating future which will reduce all our o'ertoppling extremes, "Sordello" will be as little read as "The Faerie Queene", and, similarly, only for the gleam of the quenchless lamps amid its long deserted alleys and stately avenues. Sadly enough, for to poets it will always be an unforgotten land — a continent with amaranth-haunted Vales of Tempe, where, as Spenser says in one of the Aeclogues of "The Shepherd's Calendar", they will there oftentimes "sitten as drouned in dreme."
It has, for those who are not repelled, a charm all its own. I know of no other poem in the language which is at once so wearisome and so seductive. How can one explain paradoxes? There is a charm, or there is none: that is what it amounts to, for each individual. `Tutti ga i so gusti, e mi go i mii' — "everybody follows his taste, and I follow mine," as the Venetian saying, quoted by Browning at the head of his Rawdon Brown sonnet, has it.
All that need be known concerning the framework of "Sordello", and of the real Sordello himself, will be found in the various Browning hand-books, in Mr. Nettleship's and other dissertations, and, particularly, in Mrs. Dall's most circumspect and able historical essay. It is sufficient here to say that while the Sordello and Palma of the poet are traceable in the Cunizza and the strange comet-like Sordello of the Italian and Provencal Chronicles (who has his secure immortality, by Dante set forth in leonine guise — `a guisa di leon quando si posa' — in the "Purgatorio"), both these are the most shadowy of prototypes. The Sordello of Browning is a typical poetic soul: the narrative of the incidents in the development of this soul is adapted to the historical setting furnished by the aforesaid Chronicles. Sordello is a far more profound study than Aprile in "Paracelsus", in whom, however, he is obviously foreshadowed. The radical flaw in his nature is that indicated by Goethe of Heine, that "he had no heart." The poem is the narrative of his transcendent aspirations, and more or less futile accomplishment.
It would be vain to attempt here any adequate excerption of lines of singular beauty. Readers familiar with the poem will recall passage after passage — among which there is probably none more widely known than the grandiose sunset lines: —
"That autumn eve was stilled:A last remains of sunset dimly burnedO'er the far forests, — like a torch-flame turnedBy the wind back upon its bearer's handIn one long flare of crimson; as a brand,The woods beneath lay black." . . .
What haunting lines there are, every here and there — such as those of Palma, with her golden hair like spilt sunbeams, or those on Elys, with her
"Few fine locksColoured like honey oozed from topmost rocksSun-blanched the livelong summer," . . .
or these,
"Day by dayNew pollen on the lily-petal grows,And still more labyrinthine buds the rose ——"
or, once more,
"A touch divine —And the sealed eyeball owns the mystic rod;Visibly through his garden walketh God ——"
But, though sorely tempted, I must not quote further, save only the concluding lines of the unparalleled and impassioned address to Dante: —
"Dante, pacer of the shoreWhere glutted hell disgorgeth filthiest gloom,Unbitten by its whirring sulphur-spume,Or whence the grieved and obscure waters slopeInto a darkness quieted by hope;Plucker of amaranths grown beneath God's eyeIn gracious twilights where his chosen lie ——". . . . .
It is a fair land, for those who have lingered in its byways: but, alas, a troubled tide of strange metres, of desperate rhythms, of wild conjunctions, of panic-stricken collocations, oftentimes overwhelms it. "Sordello" grew under the poet's fashioning till, like the magic vapour of the Arabian wizard, it passed beyond his control, "voluminously vast."
It is not the truest admirers of what is good in it who will refuse to smile at the miseries of conscientious but baffled readers. Who can fail to sympathise with Douglas Jerrold when, slowly convalescent from a serious illness, he found among some new books sent him by a friend a copy of "Sordello". Thomas Powell, writing in 1849, has chronicled the episode. A few lines, he says, put Jerrold in a state of alarm. Sentence after sentence brought no consecutive thought to his brain. At last the idea occurred to him that in his illness his mental faculties had been wrecked. The perspiration rolled from his forehead, and smiting his head he sank back on the sofa, crying, "O God, I AM an idiot!" A little later, adds Powell, when Jerrold's wife and sister entered, he thrust "Sordello" into their hands, demanding what they thought of it. He watched them intently while they read. When at last Mrs. Jerrold remarked, "I don't understand what this man means; it is gibberish," her delighted husband gave a sigh of relief and exclaimed, "Thank God, I am NOT an idiot!"
Many friends of Browning will remember his recounting this incident almost in these very words, and his enjoyment therein: though he would never admit justification for such puzzlement.
But more illustrious personages than Douglas Jerrold were puzzled by the poem. Lord Tennyson manfully tackled it, but he is reported to have admitted in bitterness of spirit: "There were only two lines in it that I understood, and they were both lies; they were the opening and closing lines, `Who will may hear Sordello's story told,' and `Who would has heard Sordello's story told!'" Carlyle was equally candid: "My wife," he writes, "has read through `Sordello' without being able to make out whether `Sordello' was a man, or a city, or a book."
In an article on this poem, in a French magazine, M. Odysse Barot quotes a passage where the poet says "God gave man two faculties" — and adds, "I wish while He was about it (`pendant qu'il etait en train') God had supplied another — viz., the power of understanding Mr. Browning."
And who does not remember the sad experience of generous and delightful Gilead P. Beck, in "The Golden Butterfly": how, after "Fifine at the Fair", frightful symptoms set in, till in despair he took up "Red Cotton Nightcap Country", and fell for hours into a dull comatose misery. "His eyes were bloodshot, his hair was pushed in disorder about his head, his cheeks were flushed, his hands were trembling, the nerves in his face were twitching. Then he arose, and solemnly cursed Robert Browning. And then he took all his volumes, and, disposing them carefully in the fireplace, set light to them. `I wish,' he said, `that I could put the poet there too.'" One other anecdote of the kind was often, with evident humorous appreciation, recounted by the poet. On his introduction to the Chinese Ambassador, as a "brother-poet", he asked that dignitary what kind of poetic expression he particularly affected. The great man deliberated, and then replied that his poetry might be defined as "enigmatic". Browning at once admitted his fraternal kinship.
That he was himself aware of the shortcomings of "Sordello" as a work of art is not disputable. In 1863, Mrs. Orr says, he considered the advisability of "rewriting it in a more transparent manner, but concluded that the labour would be disproportionate to the result, and contented himself with summarising the contents of each `book' in a continuous heading, which represents the main thread of the story."
The essential manliness of Browning is evident in the famous dedication to the French critic Milsand, who was among his early admirers. "My own faults of expression were many; but with care for a man or book such would be surmounted, and without it what avails the faultlessness of either? I blame nobody, least of all myself, who did my best then and since."
Whatever be the fate of "Sordello", one thing pertinent to it shall survive: the memorable sentence in the dedicatory preface — "My stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul: little else is worth study."
The poem has disastrous faults, but is a magnificent failure. "Vast as night," to borrow a simile from Victor Hugo, but, like night, innumerously starred.
"Pippa Passes", "The Ring and the Book", "The Inn Album", these are Browning's three great dramatic poems, as distinct from his poetic plays. All are dramas in the exact sense, though the three I have named are dramas for mental and not for positive presentation. Each reader must embody for himself the images projected on his brain by the electric quality of the poet's genius: within the ken of his imagination he may perceive scenes not less moving, incidents not less thrilling, complexities of motive and action not less intricately involved, than upon the conventional stage.
The first is a drama of an idea, the second of the immediate and remote consequences of a single act, the third of the tyranny of the passions.
I understand the general opinion among lovers and earnest students of Browning's poetry to be that the highest peaks of his genius tower from the vast tableland of "The Ring and the Book"; that thenceforth there was declension. But Browning is not to be measured by common estimates. It is easy to indicate, in the instances of many poets, just where the music reaches its sweetest, its noblest, just where the extreme glow wanes, just where the first shadows come leaping like greyhounds, or steal almost imperceptibly from slow-closing horizons.
But with Browning, as with Shakespeare, as with Victor Hugo, it is difficult for our vision to penetrate the glow irradiating the supreme heights of accomplishment. Like Balzac, like Shakespeare again, he has revealed to us a territory so vast, that while we bow down before the sun westering athwart distant Andes, the gold of sunrise is already flashing behind us, upon the shoulder of Atlas.
It is certain that "The Ring and the Book" is unique. Even Goethe's masterpiece had its forerunners, as in Marlowe's "Faustus", and its ambitious offspring, as in Bailey's "Festus". But is it a work of art? Here is the only vital question which at present concerns us.
It is altogether useless to urge, as so many admirers of Browning do, that "The Ring and the Book" is as full of beauties as the sea is of waves. Undeniably it is, having been written in the poet's maturity. But, to keep to the simile, has this epical poem the unity of ocean? Does it consist of separate seas, or is it really one, as the wastes which wash from Arctic to Antarctic, through zones temperate and equatorial, are yet one and indivisible? If it have not this unity it is still a stupendous accomplishment, but it is not a work of art. And though art is but the handmaiden of genius, what student of Comparative Literature will deny that nothing has survived the ruining breath of Time — not any intellectual greatness nor any spiritual beauty, that is not clad in perfection, be it absolute or relative — for relative perfection there is, despite the apparent paradox.
The mere bulk of "The Ring and the Book" is, in point of art, nothing. One day, after the publication of this poem, Carlyle hailed the author with enthusiastic praise in which lurked damning irony: "What a wonderful fellow you are, Browning: you have written a whole series of `books' about what could be summed up in a newspaper paragraph!" Here, Carlyle was at once right and wrong. The theme, looked at dispassionately, is unworthy of the monument in which it is entombed for eternity. But the poet looked upon the central incident as the inventive mechanician regards the tiny pivot remote amid the intricate maze of his machinery. Here, as elsewhere, Browning's real subject is too often confounded with the accidents of the subject. His triumph is not that he has created so huge a literary monument, but rather that, notwithstanding its bulk, he has made it shapely and impressive. Stress has frequently been laid on the greatness of the achievement in the writing of twelve long poems in the exposition of one theme. Again, in point of art, what significance has this? None. There is no reason why it should not have been in nine or eleven parts; no reason why, having been demonstrated in twelve, it should not have been expanded through fifteen or twenty. Poetry ever looks askance at that gipsy-cousin of hers, "Tour-de-force".
Of the twelve parts — occupying in all about twenty-one thousand lines — the most notable as poetry are those which deal with the plea of the implicated priest, Caponsacchi, with the meditation of the Pope, and with the pathetic utterance of Pompilia. It is not a dramatic poem in the sense that "Pippa Passes" is, for its ten Books (the first and twelfth are respectively introductory and appendical) are monologues. "The Ring and the Book", in a word, consists, besides the two extraneous parts, of ten monodramas, which are as ten huge facets to a poetic Koh-i-Noor.
The square little Italian volume, in its yellow parchment and with its heavy type, which has now found a haven in Oxford, was picked up by Browning for a `lira' (about eightpence), on a second-hand bookstall in the Piazza San Lorenzo at Florence, one June day, 1865. Therein is set forth, in full detail, all the particulars of the murder of his wife Pompilia, for her supposed adultery, by a certain Count Guido Franceschini; and of that noble's trial, sentence, and doom. It is much the same subject matter as underlies the dramas of Webster, Ford, and other Elizabethan poets, but subtlety of insight rather than intensity of emotion and situation distinguishes the Victorian dramatist from his predecessors. The story fascinated Browning, who, having in this book and elsewhere mastered all the details, conceived the idea of writing the history of the crime in a series of monodramatic revelations on the part of the individuals more or less directly concerned. The more he considered the plan the more it shaped itself to a great accomplishment, and early in 1866 he began the most ambitious work of his life.
An enthusiastic admirer has spoken of the poem as "one of the most extraordinary feats of which we have any record in literature." But poetry is not mental gymnastics. All this insistence upon "extraordinary feats" is to be deprecated: it presents the poet as Hercules, not as Apollo: in a word, it is not criticism. The story is one of vulgar fraud and crime, romantic to us only because the incidents occurred in Italy, in the picturesque Rome and Arezzo of two centuries ago. The old bourgeois couple, Pietro and Violante Comparini, manage to wed their thirteen-year-old putative daughter to a middle-aged noble of Arezzo. They expect the exquisite repute of an aristocratic connection, and other tangible advantages. He, impoverished as he is, looks for a splendid dowry. No one thinks of the child-wife, Pompilia. She becomes the scapegoat, when the gross selfishness of the contracting parties stands revealed. Count Guido has a genius for domestic tyranny. Pompilia suffers. When she is about to become a mother she determines to leave her husband, whom she now dreads as well as dislikes. Since the child is to be the inheritor of her parents' wealth, she will not leave it to the tender mercies of Count Guido. A young priest, a canon of Arezzo, Giuseppe Caponsacchi, helps her to escape. In due course she gives birth to a son. She has scarce time to learn the full sweetness of her maternity ere she is done to death like a trampled flower. Guido, who has held himself thrall to an imperative patience, till his hold upon the child's dowry should be secure, hires four assassins, and in the darkness of night betakes himself to Rome. He and his accomplices enter the house of Pietro Comparini and his wife, and, not content with slaying them, also murders Pompilia. But they are discovered, and Guido is caught red-handed. Pompilia's evidence alone is damnatory, for she was not slain outright, and lingers long enough to tell her story. Franceschini is not foiled yet, however. His plea is that he simply avenged the wrong done to him by his wife's adulterous connection with the priest Caponsacchi. But even in the Rome of that evil day justice was not extinct. Guido's motive is proved to be false; he himself is condemned to death. An appeal to the Pope is futile. Finally, the wretched man pays the too merciful penalty of his villainy.
There is nothing grand, nothing noble here: at most only a tragic pathos in the fate of the innocent child-wife Pompilia. It is clear, therefore, that the greatness of "The Ring and the Book" must depend even less upon its subject, its motive, than upon its being "an extraordinary feat" in the gymnastics of verse.
In a sense, Browning's longest work is akin to that of his wife. Both "The Ring and the Book" and "Aurora Leigh" are metrical novels. The one is discursive in episodes and spiritual experiences: the other in intricacies of evidence. But there the parallel ends. If "The Ring and the Book" were deflowered of its blooms of poetry and rendered into a prose narrative, it might interest a barrister "getting up" a criminal case, but it would be much inferior to, say, "The Moonstone"; its author would be insignificant beside the ingenious M. Gaboriau. The extraordinariness of the feat would then be but indifferently commented upon.
As neither its subject, nor its extraordinariness as a feat, nor its method, will withstand a searching examination, we must endeavour to discern if transcendent poetic merit be discoverable in the treatment. To arrive at a just estimate it is needful to free the mind not merely from preconceptions, but from that niggardliness of insight which can perceive only the minor flaws and shortcomings almost inevitable to any vast literary achievement, and be blind to the superb merits. One must prepare oneself to listen to a new musician, with mind and body alert to the novel harmonies, and oblivious of what other musicians have done or refrained from doing.
"The Ring and the Book", as I have said, was not begun in the year of its imagining.* It is necessary to anticipate the biographical narrative, and state that the finding of the parchment-booklet happened in the fourth year of the poet's widowerhood, for his happy married period of less than fifteen years came to a close in 1861.
—* The title is explained as follows: — "The story of the Franceschini case,as Mr. Browning relates it, forms a circle of evidenceto its one central truth; and this circle was constructedin the manner in which the worker in Etruscan goldprepares the ornamental circlet which will be worn as a ring.The pure metal is too soft to bear hammer or file;it must be mixed with alloy to gain the necessary power of resistance.The ring once formed and embossed, the alloy is disengaged,and a pure gold ornament remains. Mr. Browning's materialwas also inadequate to his purpose, though from a different cause.It was too HARD. It was `pure crude fact', secreted from the fluid beingof the men and women whose experience it had formed. In its existing stateit would have broken up under the artistic attempt to weld and round it.He supplied an alloy, the alloy of fancy, or — as he also calls it —of one fact more: this fact being the echo of those past existencesawakened within his own. He breathed into the dead recordthe breath of his own life; and when his ring of evidence had re-formed,first in elastic then in solid strength, here delicately incised,there broadly stamped with human thought and passion,he could cast fancy aside, and bid his readers recognisein what he set before them unadulterated human truth." — Mrs. Orr.—
On the afternoon of the day on which he made his purchase he read the book from end to end. "A Spirit laughed and leapt through every limb." The midsummer heats had caused thunder-clouds to congregate above Vallombrosa and the whole valley of Arno: and the air in Florence was painfully sultry. The poet stood by himself on his terrace at Casa Guidi, and as he watched the fireflies wandering from the enclosed gardens, and the sheet-lightnings quivering through the heated atmosphere, his mind was busy in refashioning the old tale of loveless marriage and crime.
"BeneathI' the street, quick shown by openings of the skyWhen flame fell silently from cloud to cloud,Richer than that gold snow Jove rained on Rhodes,The townsmen walked by twos and threes, and talked,Drinking the blackness in default of air —A busy human sense beneath my feet:While in and out the terrace-plants, and roundOne branch of tall datura, waxed and wanedThe lamp-fly lured there, wanting the white flower."
Much, far the greater part, of the first "book" is — interesting! It is mere verse. As verse, even, it is often so involved, so musicless occasionally, so banal now and again, so inartistic in colour as well as in form, that one would, having apprehended its explanatory interest, pass on without regret, were it not for the noble close — the passionate, out-welling lines to "the truest poet I have ever known," the beautiful soul who had given her all to him, whom, but four years before he wrote these words, he had laid to rest among the cypresses and ilexes of the old Florentine garden of the dead.
"O lyric Love, half angel and half birdAnd all a wonder and a wild desire, —Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun,Took sanctuary within the holier blue,And sang a kindred soul out to his face, —Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart —When the first summons from the darkling earthReached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue,And bared them of the glory — to drop down,To toil for man, to suffer or to die, —This is the same voice: can thy soul know change?Hail then, and hearken from the realms of help!Never may I commence my song, my dueTo God who best taught song by gift of thee,Except with bent head and beseeching hand —That still, despite the distance and the dark,What was, again may be; some interchangeOf grace, some splendour once thy very thought,Some benediction anciently thy smile:— Never conclude, but raising hand and headThither where eyes, that cannot reach, yet yearnFor all hope, all sustainment, all reward,Their utmost up and on, — so blessing backIn those thy realms of help, that heaven thy home,Some whiteness which, I judge, thy face makes proud,Some wanness where, I think, thy foot may fall!". . . . .
Thereafter, for close upon five thousand words, the poem descends again to the level of a versified tale. It is saved from ruin by subtlety of intellect, striking dramatic verisimilitude, an extraordinary vigour, and occasional lines of real poetry. Retrospectively, apart from the interest, often strained to the utmost, most readers, I fancy, will recall with lingering pleasure only the opening of "The Other Half Rome", the description of Pompilia, "with the patient brow and lamentable smile," with flower-like body, in white hospital array — a child with eyes of infinite pathos, "whether a flower or weed, ruined: who did it shall account to Christ."
In these three introductory books we have the view of the matter taken by those who side with Count Guido, of those who are all for Pompilia, and of the "superior person", impartial because superciliously indifferent, though sufficiently interested to "opine".
In the ensuing three books a much higher poetic level is reached. In the first, Guido speaks; in the second, Caponsacchi; the third, that lustrous opal set midway in the "Ring", is Pompilia's narrative. Here the three protagonists live and move before our eyes. The sixth book may be said to be the heart of the whole poem. The extreme intellectual subtlety of Guido's plea stands quite unrivalled in poetic literature. In comparing it, for its poetic beauty, with other sections, the reader must bear in mind that in a poem of a dramatic nature the dramatic proprieties must be dominant. It would be obviously inappropriate to make Count Guido Franceschini speak with the dignity of the Pope, with the exquisite pathos of Pompilia, with the ardour, like suppressed molten lava, of Caponsacchi. The self-defence of the latter is a superb piece of dramatic writing. Once or twice the flaming volcano of his heart bursts upward uncontrollably, as when he cries —
"No, sirs, I cannot have the lady dead!That erect form, flashing brow, fulgurant eye,That voice immortal (oh, that voice of hers!) —That vision of the pale electric swordAngels go armed with — that was not the lastO' the lady. Come, I see through it, you find,Know the manoeuvre! Also herself saidI had saved her: do you dare say she spoke false?Let me see for myself if it be so!"
Than the poignant pathos and beauty of "Pompilia", there is nothing more exquisite in our literature. It stands alone. Here at last we have the poet who is the Lancelot to Shakespeare's Arthur. It takes a supreme effort of genius to be as simple as a child. How marvellously, after the almost sublime hypocrisy of the end of Guido's defence, after the beautiful dignity of Caponsacchi's closing words, culminating abruptly in the heart-wrung cry, "O great, just, good God! miserable me!" — how marvellously comes upon the reader the delicate, tearful tenderness of the innocent child-wife —
"I am just seventeen years and five months old,And, if I lived one day more, three full weeks;'Tis writ so in the church's register,Lorenzo in Lucina, all my namesAt length, so many names for one poor child,— Francesca Camilla Vittoria AngelaPompilia Comparini — laughable!"
Only two writers of our age have depicted women with that imaginative insight which is at once more comprehensive and more illuminative than women's own invision of themselves — Robert Browning and George Meredith, but not even the latter, most subtle and delicate of all analysts of the tragi-comedy of human life, has surpassed "Pompilia". The meeting and the swift uprising of love between Lucy and Richard, in "The Ordeal of Richard Feveral", is, it is true, within the highest reach of prose romance: but between even the loftiest height of prose romance and the altitudes of poetry, there is an impassable gulf.
And as it is with simplicity so it is with tenderness. Only the sternly strong can be supremely tender. And infinitely tender is the poetry of "Pompilia" —
"Oh, how good God is that my babe was born,— Better than born, baptised and hid awayBefore this happened, safe from being hurt!That had been sin God could not well forgive:HE WAS TOO YOUNG TO SMILE AND SAVE HIMSELF ——"
or the lines which tell how as a little girl she gave her roses not to the spick and span Madonna of the Church, but to the poor, dilapidated Virgin, "at our street-corner in a lonely niche," with the babe that had sat upon her knees broken off: or that passage, with its exquisite naivete, where Pompilia relates why she called her boy Gaetano, because she wished "no old name for sorrow's sake," so chose the latest addition to the saints, elected only twenty-five years before —
"So, carefuller, perhaps,To guard a namesake than those old saints grow,Tired out by this time, — see my own five saints!"
or these —
"Thus, all my life,I touch a fairy thing that fades and fades.— Even to my babe! I thought, when he was born,Something began for once that would not end,Nor change into a laugh at me, but stayFor evermore, eternally quite mine ——"
once more —
"One cannot judgeOf what has been the ill or well of lifeThe day that one is dying. . . .Now it is over, and no danger more . . .To me at least was never evening yetBut seemed far beautifuller than its day,For past is past ——"
Lovely, again, are the lines in which she speaks of the first "thrill of dawn's suffusion through her dark," the "light of the unborn face sent long before:" or those unique lines of the starved soul's Spring (ll. 1512-27): or those, of the birth of her little one —
"A whole long fortnight; in a life like mineA fortnight filled with bliss is long and much.All women are not mothers of a boy. . . .I never realised God's birth before —How he grew likest God in being born.This time I felt like Mary, had my babeLying a little on my breast like hers."
When she has weariedly, yet with surpassing triumph, sighed out her last words —
"God stooping shows sufficient of His lightFor us i' the dark to rise by. And I rise ——"
who does not realise that to life's end he shall not forget that plaintive voice, so poignantly sweet, that ineffable dying smile, those wistful eyes with so much less of earth than heaven?
But the two succeeding "books" are more tiresome and more unnecessary than the most inferior of the three opening sections — the first of the two, indeed, is intolerably wearisome, a desolate boulder-strewn gorge after the sweet air and sunlit summits of "Caponsacchi" and "Pompilia". In the next "book" Innocent XII. is revealed. All this section has a lofty serenity, unsurpassed in its kind. It must be read from first to last for its full effect, but I may excerpt one passage, the high-water mark of modern blank-verse: —
"For the main criminal I have no hopeExcept in such a suddenness of fate.I stood at Naples once, a night so darkI could have scarce conjectured there was earthAnywhere, sky or sea or world at all:But the night's black was burst through by a blaze ——Thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore,Through her whole length of mountain visible:There lay the city thick and plain with spires,And, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea.So may the truth be flashed out by one blow,And Guido see, one instant, and be saved."
Finally comes that throbbing, terrible last "book" where the murderer finds himself brought to bay and knows that all is lost. Who can forget its unparalleled close, when the wolf-like Guido suddenly, in his supreme agony, transcends his lost manhood in one despairing cry —
"Abate, — Cardinal, — Christ, — Maria, — God, . . .Pompilia, will you let them murder me?"
Lastly, the Epilogue rounds off the tale. But is this Epilogue necessary?Surely the close should have come with the words just quoted?
It will not be after a first perusal that the reader will be able to arrive at a definite conviction. No individual or collective estimate of to-day can be accepted as final. Those who come after us, perhaps not the next generation, nor the next again, will see "The Ring and the Book" free of all the manifold and complex considerations which confuse our judgment. Meanwhile, each can only speak for himself. To me it seems that "The Ring and the Book" is, regarded as an artistic whole, the most magnificent failure in our literature. It enshrines poetry which no other than our greatest could have written; it has depths to which many of far inferior power have not descended. Surely the poem must be judged by the balance of its success and failure? It is in no presumptuous spirit, but out of my profound admiration of this long-loved and often-read, this superb poem, that I, for one, wish it comprised but the Prologue, the Plea of Guido, "Caponsacchi", "Pompilia", "The Pope", and Guido's last Defence. I cannot help thinking that this is the form in which it will be read in the years to come. Thus circumscribed, it seems to me to be rounded and complete, a great work of art void of the dross, the mere debris which the true artist discards. But as it is, in all its lordly poetic strength and flagging impulse, is it not, after all, the true climacteric of Browning's genius?
"The Inn Album", a dramatic poem of extraordinary power, has so much more markedly the defects of his qualities that I take it to be, at the utmost, the poise of the first gradual refluence. This analogy of the tidal ebb and flow may be observed with singular aptness in Browning's life-work — the tide that first moved shoreward in the loveliness of "Pauline", and, with "long withdrawing roar," ebbed in slow, just perceptible lapse to the poet's penultimate volume. As for "Asolando", I would rather regard it as the gathering of a new wave — nay, again rather, as the deep sound of ocean which the outward surge has reached.
But for myself I do not accept "The Inn Album" as the first hesitant swing of the tide. I seem to hear the resilient undertone all through the long slow poise of "The Ring and the Book". Where then is the full splendour and rush of the tide, where its culminating reach and power?
I should say in "Men and Women"; and by "Men and Women" I mean not merely the poems comprised in the collection so entitled, but all in the "Dramatic Romances", "Lyrics", and the "Dramatis Personae", all the short pieces of a certain intensity of note and quality of power, to be found in the later volumes, from "Pacchiarotto" to "Asolando".
And this because, in the words of the poet himself when speaking of Shelley, I prefer to look for the highest attainment, not simply the high — and, seeing it, to hold by it. Yet I am not oblivious of the mass of Browning's lofty achievement, "to be known enduringly among men," — an achievement, even on its secondary level, so high, that around its imperfect proportions, "the most elaborated productions of ordinary art must arrange themselves as inferior illustrations."
How am I to convey concisely that which it would take a volume to do adequately — an idea of the richest efflorescence of Browning's genius in these unfading blooms which we will agree to include in "Men and Women"? How better — certainly it would be impossible to be more succinct — than by the enumeration of the contents of an imagined volume, to be called, say "Transcripts from Life"?
It would be to some extent, but not rigidly, arranged chronologically.It would begin with that masterpiece of poetic concision,where a whole tragedy is burned in upon the brain in fifty-six lines,"My Last Duchess". Then would follow "In a Gondola",that haunting lyrical drama `in petto', where the lover is stabbed to deathas his heart is beating against that of his mistress; "Cristina",with its keen introspection; those delightfully stirring pieces,the "Cavalier Tunes", "Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr",and "The Pied Piper of Hamelin"; "The Flower's Name";"The Flight of the Duchess"; "The Tomb at St. Praxed's", the poemwhich educed Ruskin's enthusiastic praise for its marvellous apprehensionof the spirit of the Middle Ages; "Pictor Ignotus", and "The Lost Leader".But as there is not space for individual detail, and as manyof the more important are spoken of elsewhere in this volume,I must take the reader's acquaintance with the poems for granted.So, following those first mentioned, there would come"Home Thoughts from Abroad"; "Home Thoughts from the Sea";"The Confessional"; "The Heretic's Tragedy"; "Earth's Immortalities";"Meeting at Night: Parting at Morning"; "Saul"; "Karshish";"A Death in the Desert"; "Rabbi Ben Ezra"; "A Grammarian's Funeral";"Love Among the Ruins"; Song, "Nay but you"; "A Lover's Quarrel";"Evelyn Hope"; "A Woman's Last Word"; "Fra Lippo Lippi";"By the Fireside"; "Any Wife to Any Husband"; "A Serenade at the Villa";"My Star"; "A Pretty Woman"; "A Light Woman"; "Love in a Life";"Life in a Love"; "The Last Ride Together"; "A Toccata of Galuppi's";"Master Hugues of Saxe Gotha"; "Abt Vogler"; "Memorabilia";"Andrea Del Sarto"; "Before"; "After"; "In Three Days"; "In a Year";"Old Pictures in Florence"; "De Gustibus"; "Women and Roses";"The Guardian Angel"; "Cleon"; "Two in the Campagna"; "One Way of Love";"Another Way of Love"; "Misconceptions"; "May and Death"; "James Lee's Wife";"Dis Aliter Visum"; "Too Late"; "Confessions"; "Prospice"; "Youth and Art";"A Face"; "A Likeness"; "Apparent Failure". Epilogue to Part I. —"O Lyric Voice", etc., from end of First Part of "The Ring and the Book".Part II. — "Herve Riel"; "Amphibian"; "Epilogue to Fifine";"Pisgah Sights"; "Natural Magic"; "Magical Nature"; "Bifurcation";"Numpholeptos"; "Appearances"; "St. Martin's Summer"; "A Forgiveness";Epilogue to Pacchiarotto volume; Prologue to "La Saisiaz";Prologue to "Two Poets of Croisic"; "Epilogue"; "Pheidippides";"Halbert and Hob"; "Ivan Ivanovitch"; "Echetlos"; "Muleykeh";"Pan and Luna"; "Touch him ne'er so lightly"; Prologue to "Jocoseria";"Cristina and Monaldeschi"; "Mary Wollstonecraft and Fuseli"; "Ixion";"Never the Time and the Place"; Song, "Round us the wild creatures";Song, "Wish no word unspoken"; Song, "You groped your way"; Song, "Man I am";Song, "Once I saw"; "Verse-making"; "Not with my Soul Love";"Ask not one least word of praise"; "Why from the world";"The Round of Day" (Pts. 9, 10, 11, 12 of Gerard de Lairesse);Prologue to "Asolando"; "Rosny"; "Now"; "Poetics"; "Summum Bonum";"A Pearl"; "Speculative"; "Inapprehensiveness"; "The Lady and the Painter";"Beatrice Signorini"; "Imperante Augusto"; "Rephan"; "Reverie";Epilogue to "Asolando" (in all, 122).
But having drawn up this imaginary anthology, possibly with faults of commission and probably with worse errors of omission, I should like to take the reader into my confidence concerning a certain volume, originally compiled for my own pleasure, though not without thought of one or two dear kinsmen of a scattered Brotherhood — a volume half the size of the projected Transcripts, and rare as that star in the tip of the moon's horn of which Coleridge speaks.
`Flower o' the Vine', so it is called, has for double-motto these two lines from the Epilogue to the Pacchiarotto volume —
"Man's thoughts and loves and hates!Earth is my vineyard, these grew there ——"
and these words, already quoted, from the Shelley Essay, "I prefer to look for the highest attainment, not simply the high."
I. From "Pauline"*1* — 1. "Sun-treader, life and lightbe thine for ever!" 2. The Dawn of Beauty; 3. Andromeda; 4. Morning.II. "Heap Cassia, Sandal-buds," etc. (song from "Paracelsus").III. "Over the Sea our Galleys went" (song from "Paracelsus").IV. The Joy of the World ("Paracelsus").*2* V. From "Sordello" —1. Sunset;*3* 2. The Fugitive Ethiop;*4* 3. Dante.*5*VI. Ottima and Sebald (Pt. 1, "Pippa Passes"). VII. Jules and Phene(Pt. 2, "Pippa Passes"). VIII. My Last Duchess. IX. In a Gondola.X. Home Thoughts from Abroad (1 and 2). XI. Meeting at Night:Parting at Morning. XII. A Grammarian's Funeral.XIII. Saul. XIV. Rabbi Ben Ezra. XV. Love among the Ruins.XVI. Evelyn Hope. XVII. My Star. XVIII. A Toccata of Galuppi's.XIX. Abt Vogler. XX. Memorabilia. XXI. Andrea del Sarto.XXII. Two in the Campagna. XXIII. James Lee's Wife. XXIV. Prospice.XXV. From "The Ring and the Book" — 1. O Lyric Love (The Invocation:26 lines); 2. Caponsacchi (ll. 2069 to 2103); 3. Pompilia (ll. 181 to 205);4. Pompilia (ll. 1771 to 1845); 5. The Pope (ll. 2017 to 2228);6. Count Guido (Book 11, ll. 2407 to 2427). XXVI. Prologue to "La Saisiaz".XXVII. Prologue to "Two Poets of Croisic". XXVIII. Epilogue to"Two Poets of Croisic". XXIX. Never the Time and Place.XXX. "Round us the Wild Creatures," etc. (song from "Ferishtah's Fancies").XXXI. "The Walk" (Pts. 9, 10, 11, 12, of "Gerard de Lairesse").XXXII. "One word more" (To E. B. B.).*6*
— *1* The first, from the line quoted, extends through 55 lines — "To see thee for a moment as thou art." No. 2 consists of the 18 lines beginning, "They came to me in my first dawn of life." No. 3, the 11 lines of the Andromeda picture. No. 4, the 59 lines beginning, "Night, and one single ridge of narrow path" (to "delight"). *2* No. IV. comprises the 29 lines beginning, "The centre fire heaves underneath the earth," down to "ancient rapture." *3* No. V. The 6 lines beginning, "That autumn ere has stilled." *4* The 22 lines beginning, "As, shall I say, some Ethiop." *5* The 29 lines beginning, "For he, — for he." *6* To these 32 selections there must now be added "Now", "Summum Bonum", "Reverie", and the "Epilogue", from "Asolando". —
It is here — I will not say in `Flower o' the Vine', nor even venture to restrictively affirm it of that larger and fuller compilation we have agreed, for the moment, to call "Transcripts from Life" — it is here, in the worthiest poems of Browning's most poetic period, that, it seems to me, his highest greatness is to be sought. In these "Men and Women" he is, in modern times, an unparalleled dramatic poet. The influence he exercises through these, and the incalculably cumulative influence which will leaven many generations to come, is not to be looked for in individuals only, but in the whole thought of the age, which he has moulded to new form, animated anew, and to which he has imparted a fresh stimulus. For this a deep debt is due to Robert Browning. But over and above this shaping force, this manipulative power upon character and thought, he has enriched our language, our literature, with a new wealth of poetic diction, has added to it new symbols, has enabled us to inhale a more liberal if an unfamiliar air, has, above all, raised us to a fresh standpoint, a standpoint involving our construction of a new definition.
Here, at least, we are on assured ground: here, at any rate, we realise the scope and quality of his genius. But, let me hasten to add, he, at his highest, not being of those who would make Imagination the handmaid of the Understanding, has given us also a Dorado of pure poetry, of priceless worth. Tried by the severest tests, not merely of substance, but of form, not merely of the melody of high thinking, but of rare and potent verbal music, the larger number of his "Men and Women" poems are as treasurable acquisitions, in kind, to our literature, as the shorter poems of Milton, of Shelley, of Keats, and of Tennyson. But once again, and finally, let me repeat that his primary importance — not greatness, but importance — is in having forced us to take up a novel standpoint, involving our construction of a new definition.