"When frothy spume and frequent sputter Prove that the soul's depths boil in earnest."

These lines, and the great Shelleyan declaration that

"A loving worm within its clod Were diviner than a loveless God,"

are the key to both poems, but peculiarly to the Christmas-Day, in which they occur. We need not in any wise identify Browning with the Christmas-Day visionary; but it is clear that what is "dramatic" in him exfoliates, as it were, from a root of character and thought which are altogether Browning's own. Browning is apparent in the vivacious critic and satirist of religious extravagances, standing a little aloof from all the constituted religions; but he is apparent also in the imaginative and sympathetic student of religion, who divines the informing spark of love in all sincere worship; and however far he may have been from putting forward the little conventicle with its ruins of humanity, its soul at struggle with insanity, as his own final choice, that choice symbolised in a picturesque half-humorous way his own profound preference for the spiritual good which is hardly won. He makes the speaker choose the "earthen vessel" in spite of its "taints of earth," because it brimmed with spiritual water; but in Browning himself there was something which relished the spiritual water the more because the earthen vessel was flawed.

Like Christmas-Eve, Easter-Day is a dramatic study,—profound convictions of the poet's own being projected as it were through forms of religious consciousness perceptibly more angular and dogmatically defined than his own. The main speaker is plainly not identical with the narrator of Christmas-Eve, who is incidentally referred to as "our friend." Their first beliefs may be much alike, but in the temper of their belief they differ widely. The speaker in Christmas-Eve is a genial if caustic observer, submitting with robust tolerance to the specks in the water which quenches his thirst; the speaker of Easter-Day is an anxious precisian, fearful of the contamination of earth, and hoping that he may "yet escape" the doom of too facile content. The problem of the one is, what to believe; the problem of the other, how to believe; and each is helped towards a solution by a vision of divine love. But the Easter-Day Vision conveys a sterner message than that of Christmas-Eve. Love now illuminates, not by enlarging sympathy and disclosing the hidden soul of good in error, but by suppressing sympathies too diffusely and expansively bestowed. The Christmas Vision makes humanity seem more divine; the Easter Vision makes the divine seem less human. The hypersensitive moral nature of the Easter-Day speaker, on the other hand, sees his own criminal darkness of heart and mind before all else, and the divine visitation becomes a Last Judgment, with the fierce vindictive red of the Northern Lights replacing the mild glory of the lunar rainbows, and a stern and scornful cross-examination the silent swift convoy of the winged robe. This difference of temper is vividly expressed in the style. The rollicking rhymes, the "spume and sputter" of the fervent soul, give place to a manner of sustained seriousness and lyric beauty.

Yet the Easter-Day speaker probes deeper and raises more fundamental issues. When the form of Christian belief to be adopted has been settled, a certain class of believing minds, not the least estimable, will still remain restive. Browning of all men felt impatient of every nominal belief held as unassimilated material, not welded into the living substance of character; and he makes his Easter-Day visionary confound with withering irony the "faith" which seeks assurance in outward "evidence,"—

"'Tis found, No doubt: as is your sort of mind, So is your sort of search: you'll find What you desire."

Still less mercy has he for the dogmatic voluptuary who complacently assumes the "all-stupendous tale" of Christianity to have been enacted

"to give our joys a zest, And prove our sorrows for the best."

Upon these complacent materialisms and epicureanisms of the religious character falls the scorching splendour of the Easter Vision, with its ruthless condemnation of whatever is not glorified by Love, passing over into the uplifting counter—affirmation, indispensable to Browning's optimism, that—

"All thou dost enumerate Of power and beauty in the world The mightiness of Love was curled Inextricably round about."

With all their nobility of feeling, and frequent splendour of description, these twin poems cannot claim a place in Browning's work at all corresponding to the seriousness with which he put them forward, and the imposing imaginative apparatus called in. The strong personal conviction which seems to have been striving for direct utterance, checked without perfectly mastering his dramatic instincts and habitudes, resulting in a beautiful but indecisive poetry which lacks both the frankness of a personal deliverance and the plasticity of a work of art. The speakers can neither be identified with the poet nor detached from him; they are neither his mouthpieces nor his creations. The daring supernaturalism seems to indicate that the old spell of Dante, so keenly felt in the Sordello days, had been wrought to new potency by the magic of the life in Dante's Florence, and the subtler magic of the love which he was presently to compare not obscurely to that of Dante for Beatrice.[36] The divine apparitions have the ironic hauteurs and sarcasms of Beatrice in the Paradise. Yet the comparison brings into glaring prominence the radical incoherence of Browning's presentment. In Dante's world all the wonders that he describes seem to be in place; but the Christmas and Easter Visions are felt as intrusive anachronisms in modern London, where the divinest influences are not those which become palpable in visions, but those which work through heart and brain.

[Footnote 36: One Word More.]

Browning probably felt this, for the Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day stands in this respect alone in his work. But the idea of Christ as the sign and symbol of the love which penetrates the universe lost none of its hold upon his imagination; and it inspired some of the greatest achievements of the Men and Women. It was under this impulse that he now, at some time during the early Italian years, completed the splendid torso of Saul. David's Vision of the Christ that is to be has as little apparent relation to the quiet pastoralism of the earlier stanzas as the Easter Vision to the common-sense reflections that preceded it. But while this Vision abruptly bursts upon him, David's is the final conquest of his own ardent intellect, under the impulse of a great human task which lifts it beyond its experience, and calls out all its powers. David is occupied with no speculative question, but with the practical problem of saving a ruined soul; and neither logical ingenuity nor divine suggestion, but the inherent spiritual significance of the situation, urges his thought along the lonely path of prophecy. The love for the old king, which prompts him to try all the hidden paths of his soul in quest of healing, becomes a lighted torch by which he tracks out the meaning of the world and the still unrevealed purposes of God; until the energy of thought culminates in vision, and the Christ stands full before his eyes. All that is supernatural in the Saul is viewed through the fervid atmosphere of David's soul. The magic of the wonderful Nocturne at the close, where he feels his way home through the appalled and serried gloom, is broken by no apparition; the whole earth is alive and awake around him, and thrills to the quickening inrush of the "new land"; but its light is the tingling emotion of the stars, and its voice the cry of the little brooks; and the thronging cohorts of angels and powers are unuttered and unseen.

Only less beautiful than Browning's pictures of spiritual childhood are his pictures of spiritual maturity and old age. The lyric simplicity, the naive intensity which bear a David, a Pippa, a Pompilia without effort into the region of the highest spiritual vision, appealed less fully to his imagination than the more complex and embarrassed processes through which riper minds forge their way towards the completed insight of a Rabbi ben Ezra. In this sense, the great song of David has a counterpart in the subtle dramatic study of the Arab physician Karshish. He also is startled into discovery by a unique experience. But where David is lifted on and on by a continuous tide of illuminating thought, perfectly new and strange, but to which nothing in him opposes the semblance of resistance, Karshish feels only a mysterious attraction, which he hardly confesses, and which all the intellectual habits and convictions of a life given up to study and thought seem to gainsay. No touch of worldly motive belongs to either. The shepherd-boy is not more single-souled than this devoted "picker up of learning's crumbs," who makes nothing of perilous and toilsome journeys for the sake of his art, who is threatened by hungry wild beasts, stripped and beaten by robbers, arrested as a spy. At every step his quick scrutiny is rewarded by the discovery of some new drug, mineral, or herb,—"things of price"—"blue flowering borage, the Aleppo sort," or "Judaea's gum-tragacanth." But Karshish has much of the temper of Browning himself: these technicalities are the garb of a deep underlying mysticism. This man's flesh so admirably made by God is yet but the earthly prison for "that puff of vapour from his mouth, man's soul." The case of Lazarus, though at once, as a matter of course, referred to the recognised medical categories, yet strangely puzzles and arrests him, with a fascination that will not be put by. This abstracted docile man of perfect physical vigour, who heeds the approach of the Roman avenger as he would the passing of a woman with gourds by the way, and is yet no fool, who seems apathetic and yet loves the very brutes and the flowers of the field,—compels his scrutiny, as a phenomenon of soul, and it is with the eye of a psychological idealist rather than of a physician that he interprets him:—

"He holds on firmly to some thread of life— ... Which runs across some vast distracting orb Of glory on either side that meagre thread, Which, conscious of, he must not enter yet— The spiritual life around the earthly life: The law of that is known to him as this, His heart and brain move there, his feet stay here. So is the man perplext with impulses Sudden to start off crosswise, not straight on, Proclaiming what is right and wrong across, And not along, this black thread through the blaze— 'It should be' baulked by 'here it cannot be.'"

Lazarus stands where Paracelsus conceived that he himself stood: he "knows God's secret while he holds the thread of life"; he lives in the glare of absolute knowledge, an implicit criticism of the Paracelsian endeavour to let in upon men the searing splendour of the unclouded day. To Karshish, however, these very embarrassments—so unlike the knowing cleverness of the spiritual charlatan—make it credible that Lazarus is indeed no oriental Sludge, but one who has verily seen God. But then came the terrible crux,—the pretension, intolerable to Semitic monotheism, that God had been embodied in a man. The words scorch the paper as he writes, and, like Ferishtah, he will not repeat them. Yet he cannot escape the spell of the witness, and the strange thought clings tenaciously to him, defying all the evasive shifts of a trained mind, and suddenly overmastering him when his concern with it seems finally at an end—when his letter is finished, pardon asked, and farewell said—in that great outburst, startling and unforeseen yet not incredible:—

"The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think? So, the All-Great were the All-Loving too,— So, through the thunder comes a human voice Saying, 'O heart I made, a heart beats here!' Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself!"

That words like these, intensely Johannine in conception, should seem to start naturally from a mind which just before has shrunk in horror from the idea of an approximation between God and that which He fashioned, is an extraordinary tour de force of dramatic portraiture. Among the minor traits which contribute to it is one of a kind to which Browning rarely resorts. The "awe" which invests Lazarus is heightened by a mystic setting of landscape. The visionary scene of his first meeting with Karshish, though altogether Browningesque in detail, is Wordsworthian in its mysterious effect upon personality:—

"I crossed a ridge of short, sharp, broken hills Like an old lion's cheek teeth. Out there came A moon made like a face with certain spots Multiform, manifold and menacing: Then a wind rose behind me."

A less formidable problem is handled in the companion study of Cleon. The Greek mind fascinated Browning, though most of his renderings of it have the savour of a salt not gathered in Attica, and his choice of types shows a strong personal bias. From the heroic and majestic elder art of Greece he turns with pronounced preference to Euripides the human and the positive, with his facile and versatile intellect, his agile criticism, and his "warm tears." It is somewhat along these lines that he has conceived his Greek poet of the days of Karshish, confronted, like the Arab doctor, with the "new thing." As Karshish is at heart a spiritual idealist, for all his preoccupation with drugs and stones, so Cleon, a past-master of poetry and painting, is among the most positive and worldly-wise of men. He looks back over a life scored with literary triumphs, as Karshish over his crumbs of learning gathered at the cost of blows and obloquy. But while Karshish has the true scholar's dispassionate and self-effacing thirst for knowledge, Cleon measures his achievements with the insight of an epicurean artist. He gathers in luxuriously the incense of universal applause,—his epos inscribed on golden plates, his songs rising from every fishing-bark at nightfall,—and wistfully contrasts the vast range of delights which as an artist he imagines, with the limited pleasures which as a man he enjoys. The magnificent symmetry, the rounded completeness of his life, suffer a serious deduction here, and his Greek sense of harmony suffers offence as well as his human hunger for joy. He is a thorough realist, and finds no satisfaction in contemplating what he may not possess. Art itself suffers disparagement, as heightening this vain capacity of contemplation:—

"I know the joy of kingship: well, thou art king!"

With great ingenuity this Greek realism is made the stepping-stone to a conception of immortality as un-Greek as that of the Incarnation is un-Semitic. Karshish shrank intuitively from a conception which fascinated while it awed; to Cleon a future state in which joy and capability will be brought again to equality seems a most plausible supposition, which he only rejects with a sigh for lack of outer evidence:—

"Zeus has not yet revealed it; and alas, He must have done so, were it possible!"

The little vignette in the opening lines finely symbolises the brilliant Greek decadence, as does the closing picture in Karshish the mystic dawn of the Earth. Here the portico, flooded with the glory of a sun about to set, profusely heaped with treasures of art; there the naked uplands of Palestine, and the moon rising over jagged hills in a wind-swept sky.

In was in such grave adagio notes as these that Browning chose to set forth the "intimations of immortality" in the meditative wisdom and humanity of heathendom. The after-fortunes of the Christian legend, on the other hand, and the naive ferocities and fantasticalities of the medieval world provoked him rather to scherzo,—audacious and inimitable scherzo, riotously grotesque on the surface, but with a grotesqueness so penetrated and informed by passion that it becomes sublime. Holy-Cross Day and The Heretic's Tragedy both culminate, like Karshish and Clean, in a glimpse of Christ. But here, instead of being approached through stately avenues of meditation, it is wrung from the grim tragedy of persecution and martyrdom. The Jews, packed like rats to hear the sermon, mutter under their breath the sublime song of Ben Ezra, one of the most poignant indictments of Christianity in the name of Christ ever conceived:—

"We withstood Christ then? Be mindful how At least we withstand Barabbas now! Was our outrage sore? But the worst we spared, To have called these—Christians, had we dared! Let defiance of them pay mistrust of Thee, And Rome make amends for Calvary!"

And John of Molay, as he burns in Paris Square, cries upon "the Name he had cursed with all his life." The Tragedy stands alone in literature; Browning has written nothing more original. Its singularity springs mainly from a characteristic and wonderfully successful attempt to render several planes of emotion and animus through the same tale. The "singer" looks on at the burning, the very embodiment of the robust, savagely genial spectator, with a keen eye for all the sporting-points in the exhibition,—noting that the fagots are piled to the right height and are of the right quality—

"Good sappy bavins that kindle forthwith, ... Larch-heart that chars to a chalk-white glow:"

and when the torch is clapt-to and he has "leapt back safe," poking jests and gibes at the victim. But through this distorting medium we see the soul of John himself, like a gleam-lit landscape through the whirl of a storm; a strange weird sinister thing, glimmering in a dubious light between the blasphemer we half see in him with the singer's eyes and the saint we half descry with our own. Of explicit pathos there is not a touch. Yet how subtly the inner pathos and the outward scorn are fused in the imagery of these last stanzas:—

"Ha, ha, John plucketh now at his rose To rid himself of a sorrow at heart! Lo,—petal on petal, fierce rays unclose; Anther on anther, sharp spikes outstart; And with blood for dew, the bosom boils; And a gust of sulphur is all its smell; And lo, he is horribly in the toils Of a coal-black giant flower of hell!

So, as John called now, through the fire amain, On the Name, he had cursed with, all his life— To the Person, he bought and sold again— For the Face, with his daily buffets rife— Feature by feature It took its place: And his voice, like a mad dog's choking bark, At the steady whole of the Judge's face— Died. Forth John's soul flared into the dark."

None of these dramatic studies of Christianity attracted so lively an interest as Bishop Blougram's Apology. It was "actual" beyond anything he had yet done; it portrayed under the thinnest of veils an illustrious Catholic prelate familiar in London society; it could be enjoyed with little or no feeling for poetry; and it was amazingly clever. Even Tennyson, his loyal friend but unwilling reader, excepted it, on the last ground, from his slighting judgment upon Men and Women at large. The figure of Blougram, no less than his discourse, was virtually new in Browning, and could have come from him at no earlier time. He is foreshadowed, no doubt, by a series of those accomplished mundane ecclesiastics whom Browning at all times drew with so keen a zest,—by Ogniben, the bishop in Pippa Passes, the bishop of St Praxed's. But mundane as he is, he bears the mark of that sense of the urgency of the Christian problem which since Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day had so largely and variously coloured Browning's work. It occurred to none of those worldly bishops to justify their worldliness,—it was far too deeply ingrained for that. But Blougram's brilliant defence, enormously disproportioned as it is to the insignificance of the attack, marks his tacit recognition of loftier ideals than he professes. Like Cleon, he bears involuntary witness to what he repudiates.

But there is much more in Blougram than this. The imposing personality of Wiseman contained much to attract and conciliate a poet like Browning, whose visionary idealism went along with so unaffected a relish for the world and the talents which succeed there. A great spiritual ruler, performing with congenial ease the enormous and varied functions of his office, and with intellectual resources, when they were discharged, to win distinction in scholarship, at chess, in society, appealed powerfully to Browning's congenital delight in all strong and vivid life. He was a great athlete, who had completely mastered his circumstances and shaped his life to his will. Opposed to a man of this varied and brilliant achievement, an ineffectual dilettante appeared a sorry creature enough; and Browning, far from taking his part and putting in his craven mouth the burning retorts which the reader in vain expects, makes him play helplessly with olive-stones while the great bishop rolls him out his mind, and then, as one cured and confuted, betake himself to the life of humbler practical activity and social service.

It is plain that the actual Blougram offered tempting points of contact with that strenuous ideal of life which he was later to preach through the lips of "Rabbi ben Ezra." Even what was most problematic in him, his apparently sincere profession of an outworn creed, suggested the difficult feat of a gymnast balancing on a narrow edge, or forcibly holding his unbelief in check,—

"Kept quiet like the snake 'neath Michael's foot, Who stands calm just because he feels it writhe."

But Browning marks clearly the element both of self-deception and deliberate masquerade in Blougram's defence. He made him "say right things and call them by wrong names." The intellectual athlete in him went out to the intellectual athlete in the other, and rejoiced in every equation he seemed to establish. He played, and made Blougram play, upon the elusive resemblance between the calm of effortless mastery and that of hardly won control.

The rich and varied poetry reviewed in the last three sections occupies less than half of Men and Women, and leaves the second half of the title unexplained. In that richer emotional atmosphere which breathes from every line of his Italian work, the profound fulfilment of his spiritual needs which he found in his home was the most vital and potent element. His imaginative grasp of every kind of spiritual energy, of every "incident of soul," was deepened by his new but incessant and unqualified experience of love. His poetry focussed itself more persistently than ever about those creative energies akin to love, of which art in the fullest sense is the embodiment, and religion the recognition. It would have been strange if the special form of love-experience to which the quickening thrill was due had remained untouched by it. In fact, however, the title of the volume is significant as well as accurate; for Browning's poetry of the love between men and women may be said, save for a few simple though exquisite earlier notes, to begin with it.

VII.

The love-poetry of the Men and Women volumes, as originally published, was the most abundant and various, if not the most striking, part of its contents. It was almost entirely transferred, in the collected edition of his Poems issued in 1863, to other rubrics, to the Dramatic Lyrics, of which it now forms the great bulk, and to the Dramatic Romances. But of Browning's original "fifty men and women," nearly half were lovers or occupied with love. Such fertility was natural enough in the first years of a supremely happy marriage, crowning an early manhood in which love of any kind had, for better or worse, played hardly any part at all. Yet almost nothing in these beautiful and often brilliant lyrics is in any strict sense personal. The biographer who searches them for traits quivering with intimate experience searches all but in vain. Browning's own single and supreme passion touched no fountain of song, such as love sets flowing in most poets and in many who are not poets: even the memorable months of 1845-46 provoked no Sonnets "to the Portuguese." His personal story impresses itself upon his poetry only through the preoccupation which it induces with the love-stories of other people, mostly quite unlike his own. The white light of his own perfect union broke from that prismatic intellect of his in a poetry brilliant with almost every other hue. No English poet of his century, and few of any other, have made love seem so wonderful; but he habitually takes this wonder bruised and jostled in the grip of thwarting conditions. In his way of approaching love Browning strangely blends the mystic's exaltation with the psychologist's cool penetrating scrutiny of its accompanying phenomena, its favourable or impeding conditions. The keen analytic accent of Paracelsus mingles with the ecstatic unearthly note of Shelley. "Love is all" might have served as the text for the whole volume of Browning's love-poetry; but the text is wrought out with an amazingly acute vision for all the things which are not love. "Love triumphing over the world" might have been the motto for most of the love-poems in Men and Women; but some would have had to be assigned to the opposite rubric, "The world triumphing over love." Sometimes Love's triumph is, for Browning, the rapture of complete union, for which all outer things exist only by subduing themselves to its mood and taking its hue; sometimes it is the more ascetic and spiritual triumph of an unrequited lover in the lonely glory of his love.

The triumph of Browning's united lovers has often a superb Elizabethan note of defiance. Passion obliterates for them the past and throws a mystically hued veil over Nature. The gentle Romantic sentiments hardly touch the fresh springs of their emotion. They may meet and woo "among the ruins," as Coleridge met and wooed his Genevieve "beside the ruined tower"; but their song does not, like his, "suit well that ruin old and hoary," but, on the contrary, tramples with gay scorn upon the lingering memories of the ruined city,—a faded pageant yoked to its triumphal car.

"Oh heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns! Earth's returns For whole centuries of folly, noise, and sin! Shut them in, With their triumphs and their glories and the rest! Love is best."

Another lover, in My Star, pours lyric disdain upon his friends for whose purblind common-sense vision the star which to him "dartled red and blue," now a bird, now a flower, was just—a star. More finely touched than either of these is By the Fireside. After One Word More, to which it is obviously akin, it is Browning's most perfect rendering of the luminous inner world, all-sufficing and self-contained, of a rapturous love. The outer world is here neither thrust aside nor fantastically varied; it is drawn into the inner world by taking its hue and becoming the confidant and executant of its will. A landscape so instinct with the hushed awe of expectation and with a mystic tenderness is hardly to be found elsewhere save in Christabel,—

"We two stood there with never a third, But each by each, as each knew well: The sights we saw and the sounds we heard, The lights and the shades made up a spell, Till the trouble grew and stirred.

* * * * *

A moment after, and hands unseen Were hanging the night around us fast; But we knew that a bar was broken between Life and life: we were mixed at last In spite of the mortal screen.

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

By the Fireside is otherwise memorable as portraying with whatever disguise the Italian home-life of the poet and his wife. The famous description of "the perfect wife" as she sat

"Musing by firelight, that great brow And the spirit-small hand propping it, Yonder, my heart knows how"—

remain among the most living portraitures of that exquisite but fragile form. Yet neither here nor elsewhere did Browning care to dwell upon the finished completeness of the perfect union. His intellectual thirst for the problematic, and his ethical thirst for the incomplete, combined to hurry him away to the moments of suspense, big with undecided or unfulfilled fate. The lover among the ruins is awaiting his mistress; the rapturous expectancy of another waiting lover is sung in In Three Days. And from the fireside the poet wanders in thought from that highest height of love which he has won to the mystic hour before he won it, when the elements out of which his fate was to be resolved still hung apart, awaiting the magical touch, which might never be given:—

"Oh moment, one and infinite! The water slips o'er stock and stone; The West is tender, hardly bright: How grey at once is the evening grown— One star, its chrysolite!

* * * * *

Oh, the little more, and how much it is! And the little less, and what worlds away! How a sound shall quicken content to bliss, Or a breath suspend the blood's best play, And life be a proof of this!"

But the poet who lingered over these moments of suspended fate did not usually choose the harmonious solution of them. The "little less" of incomplete response might "suspend the breath" of the lover, but it was an inexhaustible inspiration to the poet. It provokes, for instance, the delicate symbolism of the twin lyrics Love in a Life and Life in a Love, variations on the same theme—vain pursuit of the averted face—the one a largo, sad, persistent, dreamily hopeless; the other impetuous, resolute, glad. The dreamier mood is elaborated in the Serenade at the Villa and One Way of Love. A few superbly imaginative phrases bring the Italian summer night about us, sultry, storm-shot, starless, still,—

"Life was dead, and so was light."

The Serenader himself is no child of Italy but a meditative Teuton, who, Hamlet-like, composes for his mistress the answer which he would not have her give. The lover in One Way of Love is something of a Teuton too, and has thoughts which break the vehemence of the impact of his fate. But there is a first moment when he gasps and knits himself closer to endure—admirably expressed in the sudden change to a brief trochaic verse; then the grim mood is dissolved in a momentary ecstasy of remembrance or of idea—and the verse, too, unfolds and releases itself in sympathy:—

"She will not hear my music? So! Break the string; fold music's wing; Suppose Pauline had bade me sing!"

Or, instead of this systole and diastole alternation, the glory and the pang are fused and interpenetrated in a continuous mood. Such a mood furnishes the spiritual woof of one of Browning's most consummate and one of his loveliest lyrics, The Last Ride Together and Evelyn Hope. "How are we to take it?" asks Mr Fotheringham of the latter. "As the language of passion resenting death and this life's woeful incompleteness? or as a prevision of the soul in a moment of intensest life?" The question may be asked; yet the passion of regret which glows and vibrates through it is too suffused with exalted faith in a final recovery to find poignant expression. This lyric, with its taking melody, has delighted thousands to whom Browning is otherwise "obscure," partly because it appeals with naive audacity at once to Romantic and to Christian sentiment—combining the faith in love's power to seal its object for ever as its own with the Christian faith in personal immortality—a personal immortality in which there is yet marrying and giving in marriage, as Romance demands. The Last Ride Together has attracted a different audience. Its passion is of a rarer and more difficult kind, less accessible to the love and less flattering to the faith of common minds. This lover dreams of no future recovery of more than he still retains; his love, once for all, avails nothing; and the secure faith of Evelyn's lover, that "God creates the love to reward the love," is not his. His mistress will never "awake and remember and understand." But that dead form he is permitted to clasp; and in the rapture of that phantom companionship passion and thought slowly transfigure and glorify his fate, till from the lone limbo of outcast lovers he seems to have penetrated to the innermost fiery core of life, which art and poetry grope after in vain—to possess that supreme moment of earth which, prolonged, is heaven.

"What if heaven be that, fair and strong At life's best, with our eyes upturned Whither life's flower is first discerned, We, fixed so, ever should so abide? What if we still ride on, we two With life for ever old yet new, Changed not in kind but in degree, The instant made eternity,— And heaven just prove that I and she Ride, ride together, for ever ride?"

The "glory of failure" is with Browning a familiar and inexhaustible theme; but its spiritual abstraction here flushes with the human glory of possession; the aethereal light and dew are mingled with breath and blood; and in the wonderful long-drawn rhythm of the verse we hear the steady stride of the horses as they bear their riders farther and farther in to the visionary land of Romance.

It is only the masculine lover whom Browning allows thus to get the better of unreturned love. His women have no such remedia amoris; their heart's blood will not transmute into the ichor of poetry. It is women almost alone who ever utter the poignancy of rejected love; in them it is tragic, unreflecting, unconsolable, and merciless; while something of his own elastic buoyancy of intellect, his supple optimism, his analytic, dissipating fancy, infused itself into his portrayal of the grief-pangs of his own sex. This distinction is very apparent in the group of lyrics which deal with the less complete divisions of love. An almost oppressive intensity of womanhood pulses in A Woman's Last Word, In a Year, and Any Wife to Any Husband: the first, with its depth of self-abasement and its cloying lilting melody, trembles, exquisite as it is, on the verge of the "sentimental." There is a rarer, subtler pathos in Two in the Campagna. The outward scene finds its way to his senses, and its images make a language for his mood, or else they break sharply across it and sting it to a cry. He feels the Campagna about him, with its tranced immensity lying bare to heaven:—

"Silence and passion, joy and peace, An everlasting wash of air— ... Such life here, through such length of hours, Such miracles performed in play, Such primal naked forms of flowers, Such letting nature have her way While heaven looks from its towers;"

and in the presence of that large sincerity of nature he would fain also "be unashamed of soul" and probe love's wound to the core. But the invisible barriers will not be put aside or transcended, and in the midst of that "infinite passion" there remain "the finite hearts that yearn." Or else he wakes after the quarrel in the blitheness of a bright dawn:—

"All is blue again After last night's rain, And the South dries the hawthorn spray. Only, my love's away! I'd as lief that the blue were grey."

The disasters of love rarely, with Browning, stir us very deeply. His temperament was too elastic, his intellect too resourceful, to enter save by artificial processes into the mood of blank and hopeless grief. Tragedy did not lie in his blood, and fortune—kinder to the man than to the poet—had as yet denied him, in love, the "baptism of sorrow" which has wrung immortal verse from the lips of frailer men. It may even be questioned whether all Browning's poetry of love's tragedy will live as long as a few stanzas of Musset's Nuits,—bare, unadorned verses, devoid of fancy or wit, but intense and penetrating as a cry:—

"Ce soir encor je t'ai vu m'apparaitre, C'etait par une triste nuit. L'aile des vents battait a ma fenetre; J'etais seul, courbe sur mon lit. J'y regardais une place cherie, Tiede encor d'un baiser brulant; Et je songeais comme la femme oublie, Et je sentais un lambeau de ma vie, Qui se dechirait lentement. Je rassemblais des lettres de la veille, Des cheveux, des debris d'amour. Tout ce passe me criait a l'oreille Ses eternels serments d'un jour. Je contemplais ces reliques sacrees, Qui me faisaient trembler la main: Larmes du coeur par le coeur devorees, Et que les yeux qui les avaient pleurees Ne reconnaitront plus demain!"[37]

[Footnote 37: Musset, Nuit de decembre.]

The same quest of the problematic which attracted Browning to the poetry of passion repelled or unrequited made him a curious student also of fainter and feebler "wars of love"—embryonic or simulated forms of passion which stood still farther from his personal experience. A Light Woman, A Pretty Woman, and Another Way of Love are refined studies in this world of half tones. But the most important and individual poem of this group is The Statue and the Bust, an excellent example of the union in Browning of the Romantic temper with a peculiar mastery of everything in human nature which traverses and repudiates Romance. The duke and the lady are simpler and slighter Hamlets—Hamlets who have no agonies of self-questioning and self-reproach; intervening in the long pageant of the famous lovers of romantic tradition with the same disturbing shock as he in the bead-roll of heroic avengers. The poet's indignant denunciation of his lovers at the close, apparently for not violating the vows of marriage, is puzzling to readers who do not appreciate the extreme subtlety of Browning's use of figure. He was at once too much and too little of a casuist,—too habituated to fine distinctions and too unaware of the pitfalls they often present to others,—to understand that in condemning his lovers for wanting the energy to commit a crime he could be supposed to imply approval of the crime they failed to commit.

Lastly, in the outer periphery of his love poetry belong his rare and fugitive "dreams" of love. Women and Roses has an intoxicating swiftness and buoyancy of music. But there is another and more sinister kind of love-dream—the dream of an unloved woman. Such a dream, with its tragic disillusion, Browning painted in his poignant and original In a Balcony. It is in no sense a drama, but a dramatic incident in three scenes, affecting the fates of three persons, upon whom the entire interest is concentrated. The three vivid and impressive character-heads stand out with intense and minute brilliance from a background absolutely blank and void. Though the scene is laid in a court and the heroine is a queen, there is no bustle of political intrigue, no conflict between the rival attractions of love and power, as in Colombe's Birthday. Love is the absorbing preoccupation of this society, the ultimate ground of all undertakings. There is vague talk of diplomatic victories, of dominions annexed, of public thanksgivings; but the statesman who has achieved all this did it all to win the hand of a girl, and the aged queen whom he has so successfully served has secretly dreamed all the time, though already wedded, of being his. For a brilliant young minister to fail to make love to his sovereign, in spite of her grey hairs and the marriage law, is a kind of high treason. In its social presuppositions this community belongs to a world as visionary as the mystic dream-politics of M. Maeterlinck. But, those presuppositions granted, everything in it has the uncompromising clearness and persuasive reality that Browning invariably communicates to his dreams. The three figures who in a few hours taste the height of ecstasy and then the bitterness of disillusion or severance, are drawn with remarkable psychologic force and truth. For all three love is the absorbing passion, the most real thing in life, scornfully contrasted with the reflected joys of the painter or the poet. Norbert's noble integrity is of a kind which mingles in duplicity and intrigue with disastrous results; he is too invincibly true to himself easily to act a part; but he can control the secret hunger of his heart and give no sign, until the consummate hour arrives when he may

"resume Life after death (it is no less than life, After such long unlovely labouring days) And liberate to beauty life's great need O' the beautiful, which, while it prompted work, Suppress'd itself erewhile."

In the ecstasy of release from that suppression, every tree and flower seems to be an embodiment of the harmonious freedom he had so long foregone, as Wordsworth, chafing under his unchartered freedom, saw everywhere the willing submission to Duty. Even

"These statues round us stand abrupt, distinct, The strong in strength, the weak in weakness fixed, The Muse for ever wedded to her lyre, Nymph to her fawn, and Silence to her rose: See God's approval on his universe! Let us do so—aspire to live as these In harmony with truth, ourselves being true!"

But it is the two women who attract Browning's most powerful handling. One of them, the Queen, has hardly her like for pity and dread. A "lavish soul" long starved, but kindling into the ecstasy of girlhood at the seeming touch of love; then, as her dream is shattered by the indignant honesty of Norbert, transmuted at once into the daemonic Gudrun or Brynhild, glaring in speechless white-heat and implacable frenzy upon the man who has scorned her proffered heart and the hapless girl he has chosen.[38] Between these powerful, rigid, and simple natures stands Constance, ardent as they, but with the lithe and palpitating ardour of a flame. She is concentrated Romance. Her love is an intense emotion; but some of its fascination lies in its secrecy,—

"Complots inscrutable, deep telegraphs, Long-planned chance meetings, hazards of a look";

she shrinks from a confession which "at the best" will deprive their love of its spice of danger and make them even as their "five hundred openly happy friends." She loves adventure, ruse, and stratagem for their own sake. But she is also romantically generous, and because she "owes this withered woman everything," is eager to sacrifice her own hopes of happiness.

[Footnote 38: An anecdote to which Prof. Dowden has lately called attention (Browning, p. 66) describes Browning in his last years as demurring to the current interpretation of the denoument. Some one had remarked that it was "a natural sequence that the guard should be heard coming to take Norbert to his doom." "'Now I don't quite think that,' answered Browning, as if he were following out the play as a spectator. 'The queen has a large and passionate temperament.... She would have died by a knife in her heart. The guard would have come to carry away her dead body.'" The catastrophe here suggested is undoubtedly far finer tragedy. But we cannot believe that this was what Browning originally meant to happen. That Norbert and Constance expect "doom" is obvious, and the queen's parting "glare" leaves the reader in no doubt that they are right. They may, nevertheless, be wrong; but what, then, is meant by the coming of the guard, and the throwing open of the doors? The queen has in any case not died on the stage, for she had left it; and if she died outside, how should they have come "to carry away her dead body"?]

Were it not for its unique position in Browning's poetry, one might well be content with a passing tribute to the great love canticle which closes Men and Women—the crown, as it is in a pregnant sense the nucleus, of the whole. But here, for "once, and only once, and for one only," not only the dramatic instinct, which habitually coloured all his speech, but the reticence which so hardly permitted it to disclose his most intimate personal emotion, were deliberately overcome—overcome, however, only in order, as it were, to explain and justify their more habitual sway. All the poetry in it is reached through the endeavour to find speaking symbols for a love that cannot be told. The poet is a high priest, entering with awed steps the sanctuary which even he cannot tread without desecration save after divesting himself of all that is habitual and of routine,—even the habits of his genius and the routine of his art. Unable to divest himself of his poetry altogether, for he has no other art, he lays aside his habitual dramatic guise to speak, for once, not as Lippo, Roland, or Andrea, but "in his true person." And he strips off the veil of his art and speaks in his own person only to declare that speech is needless, and to fall upon that exquisite symbol of an esoteric love uncommunicated and incommunicable to the apprehension of the world,—the moon's other face with all its "silent silver lights and darks," undreamed of by any mortal. "Heaven's gift takes man's abatement," and poetry itself may only hint at the divinity of perfect love. The One Word More was written in September 1855, shortly before the publication of the volume it closed, as the old moon waned over the London roofs. Less than six years later the "moon of poets" had passed for ever from his ken.



CHAPTER V.

LONDON. DRAMATIS PERSONAE.

Ah, Love! but a day And the world has changed! The sun's away, And the bird estranged. —James Lee's Wife.

That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows, Or decomposes but to recompose, Become my universe that feels and knows. —Epilogue.

The catastrophe of June 29, 1861, closed with appalling suddenness the fifteen years' married life of Browning. "I shall grow still, I hope," he wrote to Miss Haworth, a month later, "but my root is taken, and remains." The words vividly express the valour in the midst of desolation which animated one little tried hitherto by sorrow. The Italian home was shattered, and no thought of even attempting a patched-up existence in its ruined walls seems to have occurred to him; even the neighbourhood of the spot in which all that was mortal of her had been laid had no power to detain him. But his departure was no mere flight from scenes intolerably dear. He had their child to educate and his own life to fulfil, and he set himself with grim resolution to the work, as one who had indeed had everything, but who was as little inclined to abandon himself to the past as to forget it. After visiting his father in Paris—the "dear nonno" of his wife's charming letters[39]—he settled in London, at first in lodgings, then at the house in Warwick Crescent which was for a quarter of a century to be his home. Something of that dreary first winter found its way, ten years later, through whatever dramatic disguise, into the poignant epilogue of Fifine. Browning had been that "Householder," had gone through the dragging days and nights,—

"All the fuss and trouble of street-sounds, window-sights, All the worry of flapping door and echoing roof; and then All the fancies,"—

perhaps, among them, that of the "knock, call, cry," and the pang and rapture of the visionary meeting. Certainly one of the effects of his loss was to accentuate the mood of savage isolation which lurked beneath Browning's genial sociality. The world from which his saint had been snatched looked very common, sordid, and mean, and he resented its intrusiveness on occasion with startling violence. When proposals were made in 1863 in various quarters to publish her life, he turned like a wild beast upon the "blackguards" who "thrust their paws into his bowels" by prying into his intimacies. To the last he dismissed similar proposals by critics of the highest status with a cavalier bluntness highly surprising to persons who only knew him as the man of punctilious observance and fastidious good form. For the rest, London contained much that was bound by degrees to temper the gloom and assuage the hostility. Florence and Rome could furnish nothing like the circle of men of genius and varied accomplishment, using like himself the language of Shakespeare and Milton, in which he presently began to move as an intimate. Thackeray, Ruskin, Tennyson, Carlyle, Rossetti, Leighton, Woolner, Prinsep, and many more, added a kind of richness to his life which during the last fifteen years he had only enjoyed at intervals. And the flock of old friends who accepted Browning began to be reinforced by a crowd of unknown readers who proclaimed him. Tennyson was his loyal comrade; but the prestige of Tennyson's popularity had certainly blocked many of the avenues of Browning's fame, appealing as the Laureate largely did to tastes in poetry which Browning rudely traversed or ignored. On the Tennysonian reader pur sang Browning's work was pretty sure to make the impression so frankly described by Frederick Tennyson to his brother, of "Chinese puzzles, trackless labyrinths, unapproachable nebulosities." Even among these intimates of his own generation were doubtless some who, with F. Tennyson again, believed him to be "a man of infinite learning, jest, and bonhomie, and a sterling heart that reverbs no hollowness," but who yet held "his school of poetry" to be "the most grotesque conceivable." This was the tone of the 'Fifties, when Tennyson's vogue was at its height. But with the 'Sixties there began to emerge a critical disposition to look beyond the trim pleasances of the Early Victorians to more daring romantic adventure in search of the truth that lies in beauty, and more fearless grip of the beauty that lies in truth. The genius of the pre-Raphaelites began to find response. And so did the yet richer and more composite genius of Browning. Moreover, the immense vogue won by the poetry of his wife undoubtedly prepared the way for his more difficult but kindred work. If Pippa Passes counts for something in Aurora Leigh, Aurora Leigh in its turn trained the future readers of The Ring and the Book.

[Footnote 39: His father beautifully said of Mrs Browning's portrait that it was a face which made the worship of saints seem possible.]

The altered situation became apparent on the publication, in rapid succession, in 1864, of Browning's Dramatis Personae and Mr Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon. Both volumes found their most enthusiastic readers at the universities. "All my new cultivators are young men," Browning wrote to Miss Blagden; adding, with a touch of malicious humour, "more than that, I observe that some of my old friends don't like at all the irruption of outsiders who rescue me from their sober and private approval, and take those words out of their mouths which they 'always meant to say,' and never did." The volume included practically all that Browning had actually written since 1855,—less than a score of pieces,—the somewhat slender harves of nine years. But during these later years in Italy, as we have seen, he had done little at his art; and after his return much time had been occupied in projecting the great scheme of that which figures in his familiar letters as his "murder-poem," and was ultimately known as The Ring and the Book. As a whole, the Dramatis Personae stands yet more clearly apart from Men and Women than that does from all that had gone before. Both books contain some of his most magnificent work; but the earlier is full of summer light and glow, the later breathes the hectic and poignant splendour of autumn. The sense of tragic loss broods over all its music. In lyric strength and beauty there is no decay; but the dramatic imagination has certainly lost somewhat of its flexible strength and easy poise of wing: falling back now upon the personal convictions of the poet, now upon the bald prose of daily life. Rabbi ben Ezra and Abt Vogler, A Death in the Desert, are as noble poetry as Andrea del Sarto or The Grammarian's Funeral; but it is a poetry less charged with the "incidents" of any other soul than his own; and, on the other hand, Dis Aliter Visum and Youth and Art, and others, effective as they are, yet move in an atmosphere less remote from prose than any of the songs and lays of love which form one of the chief glories of Men and Women. The world which is neither thrillingly beautiful nor grotesquely ugly, but simply poor, unendowed, humdrum, finds for the first time a place in his poetry. Its blankness answered too well to the desolate regard which in the early 'Sixties he turned upon life. The women are homely, even plain, like James Lee's wife, with her "coarse hands and hair," and Edith in Too Late, with her thin, odd features, or mediocre, like the speaker in Dis Aliter Visum; and they have homely names, like "Lee" or "Lamb" or "Brown," not gratuitously grotesque ones like Blougram, Blouphocks, or the outrageous "Gigadibs." "Sludge" stands on a different footing; for it is dramatically expressive, as these are not. The legend of the gold-haired maiden of Pornic is told with a touch of harsher cynicism than was heard in Galuppi's "chill" music of the vanished beauties of Venice. If we may by no means say that the glory of humanity has faded for Browning, yet its glory has become more fugitive and more extrinsic,—a "grace not theirs" brought by love "settling unawares" upon minds "level and low, burnt and bare" in themselves. And he dwells now on desolate and desert scenes with a new persistence, just as it was wild primitive nooks of the French coast which now became his chosen summer resorts in place of the semi-civic rusticity which had been his choice in Italy. "This is a wild little place in Brittany," he wrote to Miss Blagden in August 1863; "close to the sea, a hamlet of a dozen houses, perfectly lonely—one may walk on the edge of the low rocks by the sea for miles.... If I could I would stay just as I am for many a day. I feel out of the very earth sometimes as I sit here at the window." The wild coast scenery falls in with the desolate mood of James Lee's wife; the savage luxuriance of the Isle with the primitive fancies of Caliban; the arid desert holds in its embrace, like an oasis, the well-spring of Love which flows from the lips of the dying Apostle. In the poetry of Men and Women we see the ripe corn and the flowers in bloom; in Dramatis Personae, the processes of Nature are less spontaneous and, as it were, less complete; the desert and the abounding streams, the unreclaimed human nature and the fertilising grace of love, emerge in a nearer approach to elemental nakedness, and there are moods in which each appears to dominate. Doubtless the mood which finally triumphed was that of the dying John and of the Third Speaker; but it was a triumph no longer won by "the happy prompt instinctive way of youth," and the way to it lay through moods not unlike those of James Lee's wife, whose problem, like his own, was how to live when the answering love was gone. His "fire," like hers, was made "of shipwreck wood",[40] and her words "at the window" can only be an echo of his—

"Ah, Love! but a day And the world has changed! The sun's away, And the bird estranged; The wind has dropped, And the sky's deranged: Summer has stopped."

[Footnote 40: The second section of James Lee's Wife, By the Fireside, cannot have been written without a conscious, and therefore a purposed and significant, reference to the like-named poem in Men and Women, which so exquisitely plays with the intimate scenery of his home-life.]

As her problem is another life-setting of his, so she feels her way towards its solution through processes which cannot have been strange to him. She walks "along the Beach," or "on the Cliff," or "among the rocks," and the voices of sea and wind ("Such a soft sea and such a mournful wind!" he wrote to Miss Blagden) become speaking symbols in her preoccupied mind. Not at all, however, in the fashion of the "pathetic fallacy." She is too deeply disenchanted to imagine pity; and Browning puts into her mouth (part vi.) a significant criticism of some early stanzas of his own, in which he had in a buoyant optimistic fashion interpreted the wailing of the wind.[41] If Nature has aught to teach, it is the sterner doctrine, that nothing endures; that Love, like the genial sunlight, has to glorify base things, to raise the low nature by its throes, sometimes divining the hidden spark of God in what seemed mere earth, sometimes only lending its transient splendour to a dead and barren spirit,—the fiery grace of a butterfly momentarily obliterating the dull turf or rock it lights on, but leaving them precisely what they were.

[Footnote 41: Cf. supra, p. 16.]

James Lee's Wife is a type of the other idyls of love which form so large a part of the Dramatis Personae. The note of dissonance, of loss, which they sound had been struck by Browning before, but never with the same persistence and iteration. The Dramatic Lyrics and Men and Women are not quite silent of the tragic failure of love; but it is touched lightly in "swallow flights of song," like the Lost Mistress, that "dip their wings in tears and skim away." And the lovers are spiritual athletes, who can live on the memory of a look, and seem to be only irradiated, not scorched, by the tragic flame. But these lovers of the 'Sixties are of less aetherial temper; they are more obviously, familiarly human; the loss of what they love comes home to them, and there is agony in the purifying fire. Such are the wronged husband in The Worst of It, and the finally frustrated lover in Too Late. In the group of "Might-have-been" lyrics the sense of loss is less poignant and tragic but equally uncompensated. "You fool!" cries the homely little heroine of Dis Aliter Visum to the elderly scholar who ten years before had failed to propose to her,—

"You fool for all your lore!... The devil laughed at you in his sleeve! You knew not? That I well believe; Or you had saved two souls;—nay, four."

Nor is there much of the glory of failure in Kate Brown's bitter smile, as she sums up the story of Youth and Art:—

"Each life unfulfilled, you see; It hangs still, patchy and scrappy, We have not sighed deep, laughed free, Starved, feasted, despaired,—been happy."

It is no accident that with the clearer recognition of sharp and absolute loss Browning shows increasing preoccupation with the thought of recovery after death. For himself death was now inseparably intertwined with all that he had known of love, and the prospect of the supreme reunion which death, as he believed, was to bring him, drew it nearer to the core of his imagination and passion. Not that he looked forward to it with the easy complacency of the hymn-writer. Prospice would not be the great uplifting song it is were the note of struggle, of heroic heart to bear the brunt and pay in one moment all "life's arrears of pain, darkness, and cold," less clearly sounded; and were the final cry less intense with the longing of bereavement. How near this thought of rapturous reunion lay to the springs of Browning's imagination at this time, how instantly it leapt into poetry, may be seen from the Eurydice to Orpheus which he fitly placed immediately after these—

"But give them me, the mouth, the eyes, the brow! Let them once more absorb me!"

But in two well-known poems of the Dramatis Personae Browning has splendidly unfolded what is implicit in the strong simple clarion—note of Prospice. Abt Vogler and Rabbi ben Ezra are among the surest strongholds of his popular fame. Rabbi ben Ezra is a great song of life, bearing more fully perhaps than any other poem the burden of what he had to say to his generation, but lifted far above mere didacticism by the sustained glow in which ethical passion, and its imaginative splendour, indistinguishably blend. It is not for nothing that Browning put this loftiest utterance of all that was most strenuous in his own faith into the mouth of a member of the race which has beyond others known how to suffer and how to transfigure its suffering. Ben Ezra's thoughts are not all Hebraic, but they are conceived in the most exalted temper of Hebrew prophecy; blending the calm of achieved wisdom with the fervour of eagerly accepted discipline, imperious scorn for the ignorance of fools, and heroic ardour, for the pangs and throes of the fray. Ideals which, coolly analysed, seem antithetical, and which have in reality inspired opposite ways of life, meet in the fusing flame of the Rabbi's impassioned thought: the body is the soul's beguiling sorceress, but also its helpful comrade; man is the passive clay which the great Potter moulded and modelled upon the Wheel of Time, and yet is bidden rage and strive, the adoring acquiescence of Eastern Fatalism mingling with the Western gospel of individual energy. And all this complex and manifold ethical appeal is conveyed in verse of magnificent volume and resonance, effacing by the swift recurrent anvil crash of its rhythm any suggestion that the acquiescence of the "clay" means passivity.

In Abt Vogler the prophetic strain is even more daring and assured; only it springs not from "old experience," but from the lonely ecstasy of artistic creation. Browning has put into the mouth of his old Catholic musician the most impassioned and undoubting assertion to be found in his work of his faith that nothing good is finally lost. The Abbe's theology may have supplied the substance of the doctrine, but it could not supply the beautiful, if daring, expansion of it by which the immortality of men's souls is extended to "all we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good." This was the work of music; and the poem is in truth less remarkable for this rapturous statement of faith than for the penetrating power with which the mystical and transcendental suggestions of music are explored and unfolded,—the mysterious avenues which it seems to open to kinds of experience more universal than ours, exempt from the limitations of our narrow faculties, even from the limitations of time and space themselves. All that is doctrinal and speculative in Abt Vogler is rooted in musical experience,—the musical experience, no doubt, of a richly imaginative mind, for which every organ-note turns into the symbol of a high romance, till he sees heaven itself yearning down to meet his passion as it seeks the sky. Of the doctrine and speculation we may think as we will; of the psychological force and truth of the whole presentment there can be as little question as of its splendour and glow. It has the sinew, as well as the wing, of poetry. And neither in poetry nor in prose has the elementary marvel of the simplest musical form been more vividly seized than in the well-known couplet—

"I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star."

A Death in the Desert, though a poem of great beauty, must be set, in intrinsic value, below these two. To attack Strauss through the mouth of the dying apostle was a smart pamphleteering device; but it gave his otherwise noble verse a disagreeable twang of theological disputation, and did no manner of harm to Strauss, who had to be met on other ground and with other weapons,—the weapons of history and comparative religion—in which Browning's skill was that only of a brilliant amateur. But the impulse which created it had deeper springs than this. What is most clearly personal and most deeply felt in it is the exaltation of love, which seems to have determined the whole imaginative fabric. Love, Browning's highest expression of spiritual vitality, was the cardinal principle of his creed; God was vital to him only as a loving God, and Christ only as the human embodiment and witness of God's love. The traditional story of Christ was in this sense of profound significance for him, while he turned away with indifference or disgust from the whole doctrinal apparatus of the Atonement, which, however closely bound up with the popular conception of God's love, had nothing to do with his conception of it, and he could thus consistently decline the name of Christian, as some witnesses aver that he did.[42] It was thus in entire keeping with his way of approaching Christianity that he imagined this moving episode,—the dying apostle whose genius had made that way so singularly persuasive, the little remnant of doomed and hunted fugitives who seem to belong to earth only by the spiritual bond of their love to him, as his own physical life is now a firebrand all but extinct,—"all ashes save the tip that holds a spark," but that still glowing with undiminished soul. The material fabric which enshrines this fine essence of the Christian spirit is of the frailest; and the contrast is carried out in the scenic setting,—the dim cool cavern, with its shadowy depth and faint glimmerings of day, the hushed voices, the ragged herbage, and the glory in the face of the passing saint within; without, the hard dazzling glare of the desert noon, and the burning blue, and the implacable and triumphant might of Rome.

[Footnote 42: Other testimony, it is true, equally strong, asserts that he accepted the name; in any case he used it in a sense of his own.]

The discourse of the "aged friend" is full of subtle and vivid thinking, and contains some of Browning's most memorable utterances about Love, in particular the noble lines—

"For life with all it yields of joy and woe ... Is just our chance of the prize of learning love, How love might be, hath been indeed, and is."

Nowhere, either, do we see more clearly how this master-conception of his won control of his reasoning powers, framing specious ladders to conclusions towards which his whole nature yearned, but which his vision of the world did not uniformly bear out. Man loved, and God would not be above man if He did not also love. The horrible spectre of a God who has power without love never ceased to lurk in the background of Browning's thought, and he strove with all his resources of dialectic and poetry to exorcise it. And no wonder. For a loving God was the very keystone of Browning's scheme of life and of the world, and its withdrawal would have meant for him the collapse of the whole structure.

It is no accident that the Death in the Desert is followed immediately by a theological study in a very different key, Caliban upon Setebos. For in this brilliantly original "dramatic monologue" Caliban—the "savage man"—appears "mooting the point 'What is God?'" and constructing his answer frankly from his own nature. It was quite in Browning's way to take a humorous delight in imagining grotesque parallels to ideas and processes in which he profoundly believed; a proclivity aided by the curious subtle relation between his grotesquerie and his seriousness, which makes Pacchiarotto, for instance, closely similar in effect to parts of Christmas-Eve. Browning is one of three or four sons of the nineteenth century who dared to fill in the outlines, or to complete the half-told tale, of Shakespeare's Caliban.[43] Kenan's hero is the quondam disciple of Stephano and Trinculo, finished and matured in the corrupt mob-politics of Europe; a caustic symbol of democracy, as Renan saw it, alternately trampling on and patronising culture. Browning's Caliban is far truer to Shakespeare's conception; he is the Caliban of Shakespeare, not followed into a new phase but observed in a different attitude,—Caliban of the days before the Storm, an unsophisticated creature of the island, inaccessible to the wisdom of Europe, and not yet the dupe of its vice. His wisdom, his science, his arts, are all his own. He anticipates the heady joy of Stephano's bottle with a mash of gourds of his own invention. And his religion too is his own,—no decoction from any of the recognised vintages of religious thought, but a home-made brew cunningly distilled from the teeming animal and plant life of the Island. It is a mistake to call Caliban's theology a study of primitive religion; for primitive religion is inseparable from the primitive tribe, and Caliban the savage, who has never known society, was a conception as unhistorical as it was exquisitely adapted to the individualist ways of Browning's imagination. Tradition and prescription, which fetter the savage with iron bonds, exist for Caliban only in the form of the faith held by his dam, which he puts aside in the calm decisive way of a modern thinker, as one who has nothing to fear from the penalties of heresy, and has even outlived the exultation of free thought:—

"His dam held that the Quiet made all things Which Setebos vexed only: 'holds not so; Who made them weak, made weakness He might vex."

[Footnote 43: It is characteristic that M. Maeterlinck found no place for Caliban in his striking fantasia on the Tempest, Joyzelle.]

Caliban's theology has, moreover, very real points of contact with Browning's own. His god is that sheer Power which Browning from the first recognised; it is because Setebos feels heat and cold, and is therefore a weak creature with ungratified wants, that Caliban decides there must be behind him a divinity that "all it hath a mind to, doth." Caliban is one of Browning's most consummate realists; he has the remorselessly vivid perceptions of a Lippo Lippi and a Sludge. Browning's wealth of recondite animal and plant lore is nowhere else so amazingly displayed; the very character of beast or bird will be hit off in a line,—as the pie with the long tongue

"That pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm, And says a plain word when she finds her prize,"

or the lumpish sea-beast which he blinded and called Caliban (an admirable trait)—

"A bitter heart that bides its time and bites."

And all this curious scrutiny is reflected in Caliban's god. The sudden catastrophe at the close

("What, what? A curtain o'er the world at once!")

is one of Browning's most superb surprises, breaking in upon the leisured ease of theory with the suddenness of a horrible practical emergency, and compelling Caliban, in the act of repudiating his theology, to provide its most vivid illustration.

Shakespeare, with bitter irony, brought his half-taught savage into touch with the scum of modern civilisation, and made them conspire together against its benignity and wisdom. The reader is apt to remember this conjunction when he passes from Caliban to Mr Sludge. Stephano and Trinculo, almost alone among Shakespeare's rascals, are drawn without geniality, and Sludge is the only one of Browning's "casuists" whom he treats with open scorn. That some of the effects were palpably fraudulent, and that, fraud apart, there remained a residuum of phenomena not easy to explain, were all irritating facts. Yet no one can mistake Sludge for an outflow of personal irritation, still less for an act of literary vengeance upon the impostor who had beguiled the lofty and ardent intelligence of his wife. The resentful husband is possibly there, but so elementary an emotion could not possibly have taken exclusive possession of Browning's complex literary faculty, or baulked the eager speculative curiosity which he brought to all new and problematic modes of mind. His attitude towards spiritualism was in fact the product of strangely mingled conditions. Himself the most convinced believer in spirit among the poets of his time, he regarded the bogus demonstrations of the "spiritualist" somewhat as the intellectual sceptic regards the shoddy logic by which the vulgar unbeliever proves there is no God. But even this anger had no secure tenure in a nature so rich in solvents for disdain. It is hard to say where scorn ends and sympathy begins, or where the indignation of the believer who sees his religion travestied passes over into the curious interest of the believer who recognises its dim distorted reflection in the unlikeliest quarters. But Sludge is clearly permitted, like Blougram before and Juan and Hohenstiel-Schwangau after him, to assume in good faith positions, or at least to use, with perfect sincerity, language, which had points of contact with Browning's own. He has an eye for "spiritual facts" none the less genuine in its gross way that it has been acquired in the course of professional training, and is valued as a professional asset. But his supernaturalism at its best is devoid of spiritual quality. His "spiritual facts" are collections of miraculous coincidences raked together by the anteater's tongue of a cool egoist, who waits for them

"lazily alive, Open-mouthed, ... Letting all nature's loosely guarded motes Settle and, slick, be swallowed."

Like Caliban, who also finds the anteater an instructive symbol, he sees "the supernatural" everywhere, and everywhere concerned with himself. But Caliban's religion of terror, cunning, and cajolery is more estimable than Sludge's business-like faith in the virtue of wares for which he finds so profitable a market, and which he gets on such easy terms. Caliban tremblingly does his best to hitch his waggon to Setebos's star—when Setebos is looking; Sludge is convinced that the stars are once for all hitched to his waggon; that heaven is occupied in catering for his appetite and becoming an accomplice in his sins. Sludge's spiritual world was genuine for him, but it had nothing but the name in common with that of the poet of Ben Ezra, and of the Epilogue which immediately follows.[44]

[Footnote 44: The foregoing account assumes that the poem was not written, as is commonly supposed, in Florence in 1859-60, but after his settlement in London. The only ground for the current view is Mrs Browning's mention of his having been "working at a long poem" that winter (Letters, May 18, 1860). I am enabled, by the kindness of Prof. Hall Griffin, to state that an unpublished letter from Browning to Buchanan in 1871 shows this "long poem" to have been one on Napoleon III. (cf. above, p. 90). Some of it probably appears in Hohenstiel Schwangau.]

This Epilogue is one of the few utterances in which Browning draws the ambiguous dramatic veil from his personal faith. That he should choose this moment of parting with the reader for such a confession confirms one's impression that the focus of his interest in poetry now, more than ever before, lay among those problems of life and death, of God and man, to which nearly all the finest work of this collection is devoted. Far more emphatically than in the analogous Christmas-Eve, Browning resolves not only the negations of critical scholarship but the dogmatic affirmations of the Churches into symptoms of immaturity in the understanding of spiritual things; in the knowledge how heaven's high with earth's low should intertwine. The third speaker voices the manifold protest of the nineteenth century against all theologies built upon an aloofness of the divine and human, whether the aloof God could be reached by special processes and ceremonies, or whether he was a bare abstraction, whose "pale bliss" never thrilled in response to human hearts. The best comment upon his faith is the saying of Meredith, "The fact that character can be and is developed by the clash of circumstances is to me a warrant for infinite hope."[45] Only, for Browning, that "infinite hope" translates itself into a sense of present divine energies bending all the clashing circumstance to its benign end, till the walls of the world take on the semblance of the shattered Temple, and the crowded life within them the semblance of the seemingly vanished Face, which

"far from vanish, rather grows, Or decomposes but to recompose, Become my universe that feels and knows."[46]

[Footnote 45: Quoted Int. Journ. of Ethics, April 1902.]

[Footnote 46: The last line is pantheistic in expression, and has been so understood by some, particularly by Mr J.M. Robertson. But pantheism was at most a tendency, which the stubborn concreteness of his mind held effectually in check; a point, one might say, upon which his thinking converges, but which it never even proximately attains. God and the Soul never mingle, however intimate their communion. Cf. chap. x. below.]



CHAPTER VI.

THE RING AND THE BOOK.

Tout passe.—L'art robuste Seul a l'eternite. Le buste Survit a la cite. Et la medaille austere Que trouve un laboureur Sous terre Revele un empereur. —GAUTIER: L'Art.

After four years of silence, the Dramatis Personae was followed by The Ring and the Book. This monumental poem, in some respects his culminating achievement, has its roots in an earlier stratum of his life than its predecessor. There is little here to recall the characteristic moods of his first years of desolate widowhood—the valiant Stoicism, the acceptance of the sombre present, the great forward gaze upon the world beyond. We are in Italy once more, our senses tingle with its glowing prodigality of day, we jostle the teeming throng of the Roman streets, and are drawn into the vortex of a vast debate which seems to occupy the entire community, and which turns, not upon immortality, or spiritualism, or the nature of God, or the fate of man, but on the guilt or innocence of the actors in one pitiful drama,—a priest, a noble, an illiterate girl.

With the analytic exuberance of one to whom the processes of Art were yet more fascinating than its products, Browning has described how he discovered this forgotten tale and forged its glowing metal into the Ring. The chance finding of an "old square yellow book" which aroused his curiosity among the frippery of a Florentine stall, was as grotesquely casual an inception as poem ever had. But it was one of those accidents which, suddenly befalling a creative mind, organise its loose and scattered material with a magical potency unattainable by prolonged cogitation. The story of Pompilia took shape in the gloom and glare of a stormy Italian night of June 1860, as he watched from the balcony of Casa Guidi. The patient elaboration of after-years wrought into consummate expressiveness the donnee of that hour. But the conditions under which the elaboration was carried out were pathetically unlike those of the primal vision. Before the end of June in the following year Mrs Browning died, and Browning presently left Florence for ever. For the moment all the springs of poetry were dried up, and it is credible enough that, as Mrs Orr says, Browning abandoned all thought of a poem, and even handed over his material to another. But within a few months, it is clear, the story of Pompilia not merely recovered its hold upon his imagination, but gathered a subtle hallowing association with what was most spiritual in that vanished past of which it was the last and most brilliant gift. The poem which enshrined Pompilia was thus instinct with reminiscence; it was, with all its abounding vitality, yet commemorative and memorial; and we understand how Browning, no friend of the conventions of poetic art, entered on and closed his giant task with an invocation to the "Lyric Love," as it were the Urania, or heavenly Muse, of a modern epic.

The definite planning of the poem in its present shape belongs to the autumn of 1862. In September 1862 he wrote to Miss Blagden from Biarritz of "my new poem which is about to be, and of which the whole is pretty well in my head—the Roman murder-story, you know."[48] After the completion of the Dramatis Personae in 1863-64, the "Roman murder-story" became his central occupation. To it three quiet early morning hours were daily given, and it grew steadily under his hand. For the rest he began to withdraw from his seclusion, to mix freely in society, to "live and like earth's way." He talked openly among his literary friends of the poem and its progress, rumour and speculation busied themselves with it as never before with work of his, and the literary world at large looked for its publication with eager and curious interest. At length, in November 1868, the first instalment was published. It was received by the most authoritative part of the press with outspoken, even dithyrambic eulogies, in which the severely judicial Athenaeum took the lead. Confirmed sceptics or deriders, like Edward FitzGerald, rubbed their eyes and tried once again, in vain, to make the old barbarian's verses construe and scan. To critics trained in classical traditions the original structure of the poem was extremely disturbing; and most of FitzGerald's friends shared, according to him, the opinion of Carlyle, who roundly pronounced it "without Backbone or basis of Common-sense," and "among the absurdest books ever written by a gifted Man." Tennyson, however, admitted (to FitzGerald) that he "found greatness" in it,[47] and Mr Swinburne was in the forefront of the chorus of praise. The audience which now welcomed Browning was in fact substantially that which had hailed the first fresh runnels of Mr Swinburne's genius a few years before; the fame of both marked a wave of reaction from the austere simplicity and attenuated sentiment of the later Idylls of the King. Readers upon whom the shimmering exquisiteness of Arthurian knighthood began to pall turned with relish to Browning's Italian murder story, with its sensational crime, its mysterious elopement, its problem interest, its engaging actuality.

[Footnote 47: W.M. Rossetti reports Browning to have told him, in a call, March 15, 1868, that he "began it in October 1864. Was staying at Bayonne, and walked out to a mountain-gorge traditionally said to have been cut or kicked out by Roland, and there laid out the full plan of his twelve cantos, accurately carried out in the execution." The date is presumably an error of Rossetti's for 1862 (Rossetti Papers, p. 302). Cf. Letter of Sept. 29, 1862 (Orr, p. 259).]

[Footnote 48: More Letters of E.F.G.]

And undoubtedly this was part of the attraction of the theme for Browning himself. He had inherited his father's taste for stories of mysterious crime.[49] And to the detective's interest in probing a mystery, which seems to have been uppermost in the elder Browning, was added the pleader's interest in making out an ingenious and plausible case for each party. The casuist in him, the lover of argument as such, and the devoted student of Euripides,[50] seized with delight upon a forensic subject which made it natural to introduce the various "persons of the drama," giving their individual testimonies and "apologies." He avails himself remorselessly of all the pretexts for verbosity, for iteration, for sophistical invention, afforded by the cumbrous machinery of the law, and its proverbial delay. Every detail is examined from every point of view. Little that is sordid or revolting is suppressed. But then it is assuredly a mistake to represent, with one of the liveliest of Browning's recent exponents, that the story was for him, even at the outset, in the stage of "crude fact," merely a common and sordid tale like a hundred others, picked up "at random" from a rubbish-heap to be subjected to the alchemy of imagination by way of showing the infinite worth of "the insignificant." Rather, he thought that on that broiling June day, a providential "Hand" had "pushed" him to the discovery, in that unlikely place, of a forgotten treasure, which he forthwith pounced upon with ravishment as a "prize." He saw in it from the first something rare, something exceptional, and made wondering inquiries at Rome, where ecclesiasticism itself scarcely credited the truth of a story which told "for once clean for the Church and dead against the world, the flesh, and the devil."[51] The metal which went to the making of the Ring, and on which he poured his imaginative alloy, was crude and untempered, but it was gold. Its disintegrated particles gleamed obscurely, as if with a challenge to the restorative cunning of the craftsman. Above all, of course, and beyond all else, that arresting gleam lingered about the bald record of the romance of Pompilia and Caponsacchi. It was upon these two that Browning's divining imagination fastened. Their relation was the crucial point of the whole story, the point at which report stammered most lamely, and where the interpreting spirit of poetry was most needed "to abolish the death of things, deep calling unto deep." This process was itself, however, not sudden or simple. This first inspiration was superb, visionary, romantic,—in keeping with "the beauty and fearfulness of that June night" upon the terrace at Florence, where it came to him.

"All was sure, Fire laid and cauldron set, the obscene ring traced, The victim stripped and prostrate: what of God? The cleaving of a cloud, a cry, a crash, Quenched lay their cauldron, cowered i' the dust the crew, As, in a glory of armour like Saint George, Out again sprang the young good beauteous priest Bearing away the lady in his arms Saved for a splendid minute and no more."[52]

[Footnote 49: Cf. II. Corkran, Celebrities and I (R. Browning, senior), 1903.]

[Footnote 50: It is perhaps not without significance that in the summer sojourn when The Ring and the Book was planned, Euripides was, apart from that, his absorbing companion. "I have got on," he writes to Miss Blagden, "by having a great read at Euripides,—the one book I brought with me."]

[Footnote 51: Ring and the Book, i. 437.]

[Footnote 52: Ring and the Book, i. 580-588.]

Such a vision might have been rendered without change in the chiselled gold and agate of the Idylls of the King. But Browning's hero could be no Sir Galahad; he had to be something less; and also something more. The idealism of his nature had to force its way through perplexities and errors, beguiled by the distractions and baffled by the duties of his chosen career. Born to be a lover, in Dante's great way, he had groped through life without the vision of Beatrice, seeking to satisfy his blind desire, as perhaps Dante after Beatrice's death did also, with the lower love and scorning the loveless asceticism of the monk. The Church encouraged its priest to be "a fribble and a coxcomb"; and a fribble and a coxcomb, by his own confession, Caponsacchi became. But the vanities he mingled with never quite blinded him. He walked in the garden of the Hesperides bent on great adventure, plucked in ignorance hedge-fruit and feasted to satiety, but yet he scorned the achievement, laughing at such high fame for hips and haws.[53] Then suddenly flashed upon him the apparition, in the theatre, of

"A lady, young, tall, beautiful, strange and sad."

[Footnote 53: Caponsacchi, 1002 f.]

The gaze burnt to his soul, and the beautiful, sad, strange smile haunted him night and day; but their first effect was to crush and scatter all thoughts of love. The young priest found himself haunting the solemn shades of the Duomo instead of serenading countesses; vowed to write no more canzonets, and doubted much whether Marini were a better poet than Dante after all. His patron jocularly charged him with playing truant in Church all day long:—

"'Are you turning Molinist?' I answered quick: 'Sir, what if I turned Christian? It might be.'"

The forged love-letters he instantly sees through. They are the scorpion—blotch feigned to issue miraculously from Madonna's mouth. And then Pompilia makes her appeal. "Take me to Rome!" The Madonna has turned her face upon him indeed, "to summon me and signify her choice," and he at once receives and accepts

"my own fact, my miracle Self-authorised and self-explained,"

in the presence of which all hesitation vanished,—nay, thought itself fell back before the tide of revealing emotion:—

"I paced the city: it was the first Spring. By the invasion I lay passive to, In rushed new things, the old were rapt away; Alike abolished—the imprisonment Of the outside air, the inside weight o' the world That pulled me down."

The bonds of his old existence snapped, the former heaven and earth died for him, and that death was the beginning of life:—

"Death meant, to spurn the ground. Soar to the sky,—die well and you do that. The very immolation made the bliss; Death was the heart of life, and all the harm My folly had crouched to avoid, now proved a veil Hiding all gain my wisdom strove to grasp: As if the intense centre of the flame Should turn a heaven to that devoted fly Which hitherto, sophist alike and sage, Saint Thomas with his sober grey goose-quill, And sinner Plato by Cephisian reed, Would fain, pretending just the insect's good, Whisk off, drive back, consign to shade again. Into another state, under new rule I knew myself was passing swift and sure; Whereof the initiatory pang approached, Felicitous annoy, as bitter-sweet As when the virgin-band, the victors chaste, Feel at the end the earthly garments drop, And rise with something of a rosy shame Into immortal nakedness: so I Lay, and let come the proper throe would thrill Into the ecstasy and outthrob pain."

But he presently discovered that his new task did not contravene, but only completed, the old ideal. The Church had offered her priest no alternative between the world and the cloister,—self-indulgence and self-slaughter. For ignoble passion her sole remedy was to crush passion altogether. She calls to the priest to renounce the fleshly woman and cleave to Her, the Bride who took his plighted troth; but it is a scrannel voice sighing from stone lungs:—

"Leave that live passion, come, be dead with me!"

From the exalted Pisgah of his "new state" he recognised that the true self-sacrifice, the perfect priesthood, lay by way of life, not death, that life and death

"Are means to an end, that passion uses both, Indisputably mistress of the man Whose form of worship is self-sacrifice."

Yet it is not this recognition, but the "passion" which ultimately determines his course. Love is, for Browning, in his maturity, deeper and more secure than thought; Caponsacchi wavers in his thinking, falls back upon the narrower conception of priesthood, persuades himself that his duty is to serve God:—

"Duty to God is duty to her: I think God, who created her, will save her too Some new way, by one miracle the more, Without me."