IV.

1. JOY IN LIGHT AND COLOUR.

Browning's repute as a thinker and "teacher" long overshadowed his glory as a singer, and it still to some extent impedes the recognition of his bold and splendid colouring. It is true that he is never a colourist pure and simple; his joy in light and colour is never merely epicurean. Poets so great as Keats often seem to sit as luxurious guests at their own feasts of sense; Browning has rather the air of a magnificent dispenser, who "provides and not partakes." His colouring is not subtle; it recalls neither the aethereal opal of Shelley nor the dewy flushing glow and "verdurous glooms" of Keats, nor the choice and cultured splendour of Tennyson; it is bold, simple, and intense. He neglects the indecisive and subdued tones; the mingled hues chiefly found in Nature, or the tender "silvery-grey" of Andrea's placid perfection. He dazzles us with scarlet and crimson; with rubies, and blood, and "the poppy's red effrontery," with topaz, and amethyst, and the glory of gold, makes the sense ache with the lustre of blue, and heightens the effect of all by the boldest contrast. Who can doubt that he fell the more readily upon one of his quaintest titles because of the priestly ordinance that the "Pomegranates" were to be "of blue and of purple and of scarlet," and the "Bells" "of gold"? He loves the daybreak hour of the world's awakening vitality as poets of another temper love the twilight; the splendour of sunrise pouring into the chamber of Pippa, and steeping Florence in that "live translucent bath of air"[64]; he loves the blaze of the Italian mid-day—

"Great noontides, thunderstorms, all glaring pomps That triumph at the heels of June the god."

Even a violet-bed he sees as a "flash" of "blue."[65] He loves the play of light on golden hair, and rarely imagines womanhood without it, even in the sombre South and the dusky East; Poiphyria and Lady Carlisle, Evelyn Hope and the maid of Pornic, share the gift with Anael the Druse, with Sordello's Palma, whose

"tresses curled Into a sumptuous swell of gold, and wound About her like a glory! even the ground Was bright as with spilt sunbeams;"

and the girl in Love among the Ruins, and the "dear dead women" of Venice. His love of fire and of the imagery of flame has one of its sources in his love of light. Verona emerges from the gloom of the past as "a darkness kindling at the core." He sees the "pink perfection of the cyclamen," the "rose bloom o'er the summit's front of stone." And, like most painters of the glow of light, he throws a peculiar intensity into his glooms. When he paints a dark night, as in Pan and Luna, the blackness is a solid jelly-like thing that can be cut. And even night itself falls short of the pitchy gloom that precedes the Eastern vision, breaking in despair "against the soul of blackness there," as the gloom of Saul's tent discovers within it "a something more black than the blackness," the sustaining tent-pole, and then Saul himself "gigantic and blackest of all."

[Footnote 64: "I never grow tired of sunrises," he wrote in a letter, recently published, to Aubrey de Vere, in 1851 (A. de Vere: A Memoir, by Wilfrid Ward).]

[Footnote 65: Two Poets of Croisic.]

But mostly the foil is a vivid, even strident, contrast. He sees the "old June weather" blue above, and the

"great opaque Blue breadth of sea without a break"

under the walls of the seaside palazzo in Southern Italy, "where the baked cicala dies of drouth"; and the blue lilies about the harp of golden-haired David; and Solomon gold-robed in the blue abyss of his cedar house, "like the centre spike of gold which burns deep in the blue-bell's womb";[66] and the "gaze of Apollo" through the gloom of Verona woods;[67] he sees the American pampas—"miles and miles of gold and green," "where the sunflowers blow in a solid glow," with a horse—"coal-black"—careering across it; and his swarthy Ethiop uses the yellow poison-wattles of a lizard to divine with.[68] If he imagines the "hairy-gold orbs" of the sorb-fruit, they must be ensconced in "black glossy myrtle-berries," foils in texture as in hue;[69] and he neglects the mellow harmonies of autumnal decay in order to paint the leaf which is like a splash of blood intense, abrupt, across the flame of a golden shield.[70] He makes the most of every hint of contrast he finds, and delights in images which accentuate the rigour of antithesis; Cleon's mingled black and white slaves remind him of a tesselated pavement, and Blougram's fluctuating faith and doubt of a chess-board. And when, long after the tragic break-up of his Italian home, he reverted in thought to Miss Blagden's Florentine garden, the one impression that sifted itself out in his tell-tale memory was of spots of colour and light upon dark backgrounds,—"the herbs in red flower, and the butterflies on the top of the wall under the olive-trees."[71]

[Footnote 66: Popularity.]

[Footnote 67: Sordello.]

[Footnote 68: Ibid.]

[Footnote 69: Englishman in Italy.]

[Footnote 70: By the Fireside.]

[Footnote 71: Mrs Orr, Life, p. 258.]

Browning's colouring is thus strikingly expressive of the build of his mind, as sketched above. It is the colouring of a realist in so far as it is always caught from life, and never fantastic or mythical. But it is chosen with an instinctive and peremptory bias of eye and imagination—the index of a mind impatient of indistinct confusions and placid harmony, avid of intensity, decision, and conflict.

V.

2. JOY IN FORM.

If the popular legend of Browning ignores his passion for colour, it altogether scouts the suggestion that he had a peculiar delight in form. By general consent he lacked the most ordinary and decent attention to it. No doubt he is partly responsible for this impression himself. His ideals of literary form were not altogether those commonly recognised in literature. If we understand by form the quality of clear-cut outline and sharply defined articulation, there is a sense in which it was one of the most ingrained instincts of his nature, indulged at times with even morbid excess. Alike in life and in art he hated sloth,—the slovenliness of the "ungirt loin" and of the indecisive touch. In conduct, this animus expressed itself in a kind of punctilious propriety. The forms of social convention Browning observed not merely with the scrupulous respect of the man of fashion, but with the enthusiasm of the virtuoso. Near akin in genius to the high priests of the Romantic temple, Browning rarely, even in the defiant heyday of adolescence, set more than a tentative foot across the outer precincts of the Romantic Bohemia. His "individualism" was not of the type which overflows in easy affectations; he was too original to be eccentric, too profoundly a man of letters to look "like a damned literary man." In his poetry this animus took a less equivocal shape. Not a little, both of its vividness and of its obscurity, flows from the undisciplined exuberance of his joy in form. An acute criticism of Mrs Browning's—in some points the very best critic he ever had—puts one aspect of this admirably. The Athenaeum had called him "misty." "Misty," she retorts, "is an infamous word for your kind of obscurity. You never are misty, not even in Sordello—never vague. Your graver cuts deep sharp lines, always,—and there is an extra distinctness in your images and thoughts, from the midst of which, crossing each other infinitely, the general significance seems to escape."[72] That is the overplus of form producing obscurity. But through immense tracts of Browning the effect of the extra-distinctness of his images and thoughts, of the deep sharp lines cut by his graver, is not thus frustrated, but tells to the full in amazingly vivid and unforgettable expression. Yet he is no more a realist of the ordinary type here than in his colouring. His deep sharp lines are caught from life, but under the control of a no less definite bias of eye and brain. Sheer nervous and muscular energy had its part here also. As he loved the intense colours which most vigorously stimulate the optic nerve, so he delighted in the angular, indented, intertwining, labyrinthine varieties of line and surface which call for the most delicate, and at the same time the most agile, adjustments of the muscles of the eye. He caught at the edges of things—the white line of foam against the shore, the lip of the shell, and he could compare whiteness as no other poet ever did to "the bitten lip of hate." He once saw with delight "a solitary bee nipping a leaf round till it exactly fitted the front of a hole."[73] Browning's joy in form was as little epicurean as his joy in colour; it was a banquet of the senses in which the sense of motion and energy had the largest part. Smooth, flowing, rounded, undulating outlines, which the eye glides along without check, are insipid and profitless to him, and he "welcomes the rebuff" of every jagged excrescence or ragged fray, of every sudden and abrupt breach of continuity. His eye seizes the crisp indentations of ferns as they "fit their teeth to the polished block" of a grey boulder-stone;[74] seizes the "sharp-curled" olive-leaves as they "print the blue sky" above the morning glories of Florence;[75] seizes the sharp zigzag of lightning against the Italian midnight, the fiery west through a dungeon grating or a lurid rift in the clouds,[76]—"one gloom, a rift of fire, another gloom,"—the brilliant line of Venice suspended "between blue and blue." "Cup-mosses and ferns and spotty yellow leaves—all that I love heartily," he wrote to E.B.B.[77] Roses and moss strike most men's senses by a soft luxuriance in which all sharp articulation of parts is merged; but what Browning seizes on in the rose is its "labyrinthine" intricacy, while the moss becomes a little forest of "fairy-cups and elf needles." And who else would have thought of saying that "the fields look rough with hoary dew"?[78] In the Easter-Day vision he sees the sky as a network of black serrated ridges. He loves the intricate play of light and shade, and the irregular, contorted, honeycombed surface which produces it; craggy, scarred, indented mountains, "like an old lion's cheek-teeth";[79] old towns with huddled roofs and towers picked out "black and crooked," like "fretwork," or "Turkish verse along a scimitar"; old walls, creviced and crannied, intertwined with creepers, and tenanted by crossing swarms of ever-busy flies,—such things are the familiar commonplace of Browning's sculpturesque fancy. His metrical movements are full of the same joy in "fretwork" effects—verse-rhythm and sense-rhythm constantly crossing where the reader expects them to coincide.[80]

[Footnote 72: E.B. to R.B., Jan. 19, 1846.]

[Footnote 73: To E.B.B., Jan. 5, 1846.]

[Footnote 74: By the Fireside.]

[Footnote 75: Old Pictures in Florence.]

[Footnote 76: Sordello, i. 181.]

[Footnote 77: Jan. 5, 1846, apropos of a poem by Horne. The "love" may refer to Horne's description of these things, but it matters little for the present purpose.]

[Footnote 78: Home Thoughts.]

[Footnote 79: Karshish, i. 515. Cf. Englishman in Italy, i. 397.]

[Footnote 80: Cf., e.g., his treatment of the six-line stanza.]

Nor was his imaginative sculpture confined to low-relief. Every rift in the surface catches his eye, and the deeper and more intricate the recess, the more curiously his insinuating fancy explores it. Sordello's palace is "a maze of corridors,"—"dusk winding stairs, dim galleries." He probes the depths of the flower-bell; he pries after the warmth and scent that lie within the "loaded curls" of his lady, and irradiates the lizard, or the gnome,[81] in its rock-chamber, the bee in its amber drop,[82] or in its bud,[83] the worm in its clod. When Keats describes the closed eyes of the sleeping Madeline he is content with the loveliness he sees:—

"And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep."

Browning's mining fancy insists on showing us the eye of the dead Porphyria "ensconced" within its eyelid, "like a bee in a bud." A cleft is as seductive to his imagination as a cave to Shelley's. In a cleft of the wind gashed Apennines he imagines the home he would best love in all the world;[84] in a cleft the pine-tree, symbol of hardy song,[85] strikes precarious root, the ruined eagle finds refuge,[86] and Sibrandus Schaffnaburgensis a watery Inferno. A like instinct allures him to other images of deep hollow things the recesses of which something else explores and occupies,—the image of the sheath; the image of the cup. But he is equally allured by the opposite, or salient, kind of angularity. Beside the Calabrian seaside house stands a "sharp tree—a cypress—rough iron-spiked, ripe fruit o'er-crusted,"—in all points a thoroughly Browningesque tree.

[Footnote 81: Sordello.]

[Footnote 82: This turn of fancy was one of his points of affinity with Donne; cf. R.B. to E.B.B., i. 46: "Music should enwrap the thought, as Donne says an amber drop enwraps a bee."]

[Footnote 83: Porphyria.]

[Footnote 84: De Gustibus.]

[Footnote 85: Pan and Luna.]

[Footnote 86: E.g., Balaustion's Adventure; Proem.]

And so, corresponding to the cleft-like array of sheaths and cups, a not less prolific family of spikes and wedges and swords runs riot in Browning's work. The rushing of a fresh river-stream into the warm ocean tides crystallises into the "crystal spike between two warm walls of wave;"[87] "air thickens," and the wind, grown solid, "edges its wedge in and in as far as the point would go."[88] The fleecy clouds embracing the flying form of Luna clasp her as close "as dented spine fitting its flesh."[89] The fiery agony of John the heretic is a plucking of sharp spikes from his rose.[90] Lightning is a bright sword, plunged through the pine-tree roof. And Mont Blanc himself is half effaced by his "earth-brood" of aiguilles,—"needles red and white and green, Horns of silver, fangs of crystal, set on edge in his demesne."[91]

[Footnote 87: Caliban on Setebos.]

[Footnote 88: A Lover's Quarrel.]

[Footnote 89: Pan and Luna.]

[Footnote 90: The Heretic's Tragedy.]

[Footnote 91: La Saisiaz.]

Browning's joy in abrupt and intricate form had then a definite root in his own nervous and muscular energy. It was no mere preference which might be indulged or not, but an instinctive bias, which deeply affected his way not only of imagining but of conceiving the relations of things. In this brilliant visual speech of sharply cut angles and saliences, of rugged incrustations, and labyrinthine multiplicity, Browning's romantic hunger for the infinite had to find its expression; and it is clear that the bias implicit in speech imposed itself in some points upon the matter it conveyed. Abrupt demarcations cut off soul from body, and man from God; the infinite habitually presented itself to him as something, not transcending and comprehending the finite, but beginning where the finite stopped,—Eternity at the end of Time. But the same imaginative passion for form which imposed some concrete limitations upon the Absolute deprived it also of the vagueness of abstraction. Browning's divinity is very finite, but also amazingly real and near; not "interfused" with the world, which is full of stubborn distinctness, but permeating it through and through, "curled inextricably round about" all its beauty and its power,[92] "intertwined" with earth's lowliest existence, and thrilling with answering rapture to every throb of life. The doctrine of God's "immanence" was almost a commonplace with Browning's generation. Browning turned the doctrine into imaginative speech equalled in impressiveness by that of Carlyle and by that of Emerson, but distinguished from both by an eager articulating concrete sensibility which lifts into touch with supreme Good all the labyrinthine multiplicity of existence which Carlyle impatiently suppressed, while it joyously accentuates the sharp dissonances which Emerson's ideality ignored.

[Footnote 92: Easter-Day, xxx.]

VI.

3. JOY IN POWER.

Browning was thus announced, we have seen, even by his splendour of colouring and his rich and clear-cut plasticity, as something more than a feaster upon colour and form. In his riot of the senses there was more of the athlete than of the voluptuary. His joy was that of one to whom nervous and muscular tension was itself a stimulating delight. In such a temperament the feeling of energy was an elementary instinct, a passionate obsession, which projected itself through eye and ear and imagination into the outer world, filling it with the throbbing pulsations or the clashing conflict of vehement powers. We know that it was thus with Browning. "From the first Power was, I knew," he wrote in the last autumn of his life.[93] It was a primitive instinct, and it remained firmly rooted to the last. As Wordsworth saw Joy everywhere, and Shelley Love, so Browning saw Power. If he later "saw Love as plainly," it was the creative and transforming, not the emotional, aspect of Love which caught his eye. His sense of Power played a yet more various part in the shaping of his poetic world than did his sense of form. But intellectual growth inevitably modified the primitive instinct which it could not uproot; and his sense of Power traverses the whole gamut of dynamic tones, from the lusty "barbaric" joy in the sheer violence of ripping and clashing, to the high-wrought sensibility which throbs in sympathy with the passionate heart-beats of the stars.

[Footnote 93: Asolando: Reverie.]

No one can miss the element of savage energy in Browning. His associates tell us of his sudden fits of indignation, "which were like thunder-storms"; of his "brutal scorn" for effeminacy, of the "vibration of his loud voice, and his hard fist upon the table," which made short work of cobwebs.[94] The impact of hard resisting things, the jostlings of stubborn matter bent on going its own way, attracted him as the subtle compliances of air appealed to Shelley; and he runs riot in the vocabulary (so abundantly developed in English) which conveys with monosyllabic vigour to the ear these jostlings and impacts.

[Footnote 94: Mr E. Gosse, in Dict. of N.B.]

"Who were the stragglers, what war did they wage; Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank Soil to a plash?"

he asks in Childe Roland,—altogether an instructive example of the ways of Browning's imagination when working, as it so rarely did, on a deliberately fantastic theme. Hear again with what savage joy his Moon "rips the womb" of the cloud that crosses it; Shelley's Moon, in keeping with the ways of his more tender-hefted universe, merely broke its woof. So the gentle wife of James Lee sees in a vineyard "the vines writhe in rows each impaled on its stake."

His "clefts" and "wedges" owe their attraction not only to their intricate angularity but to the violent cleavings and thrustings apart which they result from or produce. And his clefts are as incomplete without some wild bit of fierce or frightened life in their grip as are Shelley's caves without some form of unearthly maidenhood in their embrace.[95] His mountains—so rarely the benign pastoral presences of Wordsworth—are not only craggy and rough, but invisible axes have hewn and mutilated them,—they are fissured and cloven and "scalped" and "wind-gashed." When they thrust their mighty feet into the plain and "entwine base with base to knit strength more intensely,"[96] the image owes its grandeur to the double suggestion of sinewy power and intertwined limbs. Still grander, but in the same style, is the sketch of Hildebrand in Sordello:—

"See him stand Buttressed upon his mattock, Hildebrand Of the huge brain-mask welded ply o'er ply As in a forge; ... teeth clenched, The neck tight-corded too, the chin deep-trenched, As if a cloud enveloped him while fought Under its shade, grim prizers, thought with thought At deadlock."[97]

[Footnote 95: Cf. Prometheus Unbound, passim.]

[Footnote 96: Saul.]

[Footnote 97: Sordello, i. 171.]

When the hoary cripple in Childe Roland laughs, his mouth-edge is "pursed and scored" with his glee; and his scorn must not merely be uttered, but written with his crutch "in the dusty thoroughfare." This idea is resumed yet more dramatically in the image of the palsied oak, cleft like "a distorted mouth that splits its rim gaping at death." Later on, thrusting his spear into the gloom, he fancies it "tangled in a dead man's hair or beard." Similarly, Browning is habitually lured into expressive detail by the idea of smooth surfaces frayed or shredded,—as of flesh torn with teeth or spikes: Akiba,—

"the comb Of iron carded, flesh from bone, away,"[98]

or Hippolytus, ruined on the "detested beach" that was "bright with blood and morsels of his flesh."[99]

[Footnote 98: Joch. Halk.]

[Footnote 99: Artemis Prol.]

This savageness found vent still more freely in his rendering of sounds. By one of those apparent paradoxes which abound in Browning, the poet who has best interpreted the glories of music in verse, the poet of musicians par excellence, is also the poet of grindings and jostlings, of jars and clashes, of grating hinges and flapping doors; civilisation mated with barbarism, "like Jove in a thatched house."

Music appealed to him by its imaginative suggestiveness, or by its intricate technique; as the mine from which Abt Vogler reared his palace, the loom on which Master Hugues wove the intertwining harmonies of his fugue. But the most dulcet harmony aroused him less surely to vivacious expression than some "gruff hinge's invariable scold,"[100] or the quick sharp rattle of rings down the net-poles,[101] or the hoof-beat of a galloping horse, or the grotesque tumble of the old organist, in fancy, down the "rotten-runged, rat-riddled stairs" of his lightless loft. There was much in him of his own Hamelin rats' alacrity of response to sounds "as of scraping tripe" and squeezing apples, and the rest. Milton contrasted the harmonious swing of the gates of Paradise with the harsh grinding of the gates of hell. Browning would have found in the latter a satisfaction subtly allied to his zest for other forms of robust malignity.

[Footnote 100: Christmas Eve, i. 480.]

[Footnote 101: Englishman in Italy, i. 396.]

And with his joy in savage images went an even more pronounced joy in savage words. He loved the grinding, clashing, and rending sibilants and explosives as Tennyson the tender-hefted liquids. Both poets found their good among Saxon monosyllables, but to Tennyson they appealed by limpid simplicity, to Browning by gnarled and rugged force. Dante, in a famous chapter of the De Vulgari Eloquio[102] laid down a fourfold distinction among words on the analogy of the varying texture of the hair; enjoining the poet to avoid both the extremes of smoothness and roughness,—to prefer the "combed" and the "shaggy" to the "tousled" and the "sleek." All four kinds had their function in the versatile technique of Browning and Tennyson; but it is safe to say that while Tennyson's vocabulary is focussed among the "combed" in the direction of the "sleek," Browning's centres in the "shaggy," verging towards the "tousled."[103] The utmost sweetness is his when he will; it is the counterpart of his pure intensity of colouring, and of the lyric loveliness of his Pippas and Pompilias; but

"All the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one bee,"

though genuine Browning, is not distinctively and unmistakably his, like

"Irks care the crop-full bird? Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?"

[Footnote 102: De Vulg. Eloq., ii. 8.]

[Footnote 103: Making allowance, of course, for the more "shaggy" and "tousled" character of the English vocabulary as a whole, compared with Italian.]

Browning's genial violence continually produced strokes which only needed a little access of oddity or extravagance to become grotesque. He probably inherited a bias in this direction; we know that his father delighted in drawing grotesque heads, and even "declared that he could not draw a pretty face."[104] But his grotesqueness is never the mere comic oddness which sometimes assumes the name. It is a kind of monstrosity produced not by whimsical mutilations, but by a riot of exuberant power. And he has also a grave and tragic use of the grotesque, in which he stands alone. He is, in fact, by far the greatest English master of grotesque. Childe Roland, where the natural bent of his invention has full fling, abounds with grotesque traits which, instead of disturbing the romantic atmosphere, infuse into it an element of strange, weird, and uncanny mirth, more unearthly than any solemnity; the day shooting its grim red leer across the plain, the old worn-out horse with its red, gaunt, and colloped neck a-strain; or, in Paracelsus, the "Cyclops-like" volcanoes "staring together with their eyes on flame," in whose "uncouth pride" God tastes a pleasure. Shelley had recoiled from the horrible idea of a host of these One-eyed monsters;[105] Browning deliberately invokes it. But he can use grotesque effects to heighten tragedy as well as romance. One source of the peculiar poignancy of the Heretic's Tragedy is the eerie blend in it of mocking familiarity and horror.

[Footnote 104: H. Corkran, Celebrities and I.]

[Footnote 105: Cf. Locock, Examination of the Shelley MSS. in the Bodleian, p. 19. At the words "And monophalmic (sic) Polyphemes who haunt the pine-hills, flocked," the writing becomes illegible and the stanza is left incomplete. Mr Forman explains the breaking-off in the same way.]

Yet it was not always in this brutal and violent guise that Browning imagined power. He was "ever a fighter," and had a sense as keen as Byron's, and far more joyous, for storm and turbulence; but he had also, as Byron had not, the finer sense which feels the universe tense with implicit energies, and the profoundest silences of Nature oppressive with the burden of life straining to the birth. The stars in Saul "beat with emotion" and "shot out in fire the strong pain of pent knowledge," and a "gathered intensity" is "brought to the grey of the hills"; upon the lovers of In a Balcony evening comes "intense with yon first trembling star." Wordsworth's "quiet" is lonely, pensive, and serene; his stars are not beating with emotion, but "listening quietly." Browning's is hectic, bodeful, high-strung. The vast featureless Campagna is instinct with "passion," and its "peace with joy."[106]

"Quietude—that's a universe in germ— The dormant passion needing but a look To burst into immense life."[107]

[Footnote 106: Two in the Campagna.]

[Footnote 107: Asolando: Inapprehensiveness.]

Half the romantic spell of Childe Roland lies in the wonderful suggestion of impending catastrophe. The gloom is alive with mysterious and impalpable menace; the encompassing presences which everything suggests and nothing betrays, grow more and more oppressively real, until the decisive moment when Roland's blast suddenly lets them loose.

For the power that Browning rejoiced to imagine was pre-eminently sudden; an unforeseen cataclysm, abruptly changing the conditions it found, and sharply marking off the future from the past. The same bias of imagination which crowded his inner vision of space with abrupt angular forms tended to resolve the slow, continuous, organic energies of the world before his inner vision into explosion and catastrophe. His geology neglects the aeons of gradual stratification; it is not the slow stupendous upheaval of continents, but the volcanic uprush of the molten ore among the rocks, which renew the ancient rapture of the Paracelsian God. He is the poet of the sudden surprises of plant-life: the bud "bursting unaware" into flower, the brushwood about the elm-tree breaking, some April morning, into tiny leaf, the rose-flesh mushroom born in a night. The "metamorphoses of plants,"[108] which fascinated Goethe by their inner continuity, arrest Browning by their outward abruptness: that the flower is implicit in the leaf was a fact of much less worth for him than that the bud suddenly passes into something so unlike it as the flower. The gradual coming on of spring among the mountains concentrates itself for him in one instant of epic sublimity,—that in which the mountain unlooses its year's load of sound, and

"Fold on fold all at once it crowds thunderously down to his feet."[109]

[Footnote 108: Metamorphose der Pflanzen.]

[Footnote 109: Saul.]

Even in the gradual ebb of day he discovers a pregnant instant in which day dies:—

"For note, when evening shuts, A certain moment cuts The deed off, calls the glory from the grey."

Hence his love of images which convey these sudden transformations,—the worm, putting forth in autumn its "two wondrous winglets,"[110] the "transcendental platan," breaking into foliage and flower at the summit of its smooth tall bole; the splendour of flame leaping from the dull fuel of gums and straw. In such images we see how the simple joy in abrupt changes of sensation which belonged to his riotous energy of nerve lent support to his peremptory way of imagining all change and especially all vital and significant becoming. For Browning's trenchant imagination things were not gradually evolved; a sudden touch loosed the springs of latent power, or an overmastering energy from without rushed in like a flood. With all his connoisseur's delight in technique, language and sound were only spells which unlocked a power beyond their capacity to express. Music was the "burst of pillared cloud by day and pillared fire by night," starting up miraculously from the barren wilderness of mechanical expedients,[111] and poetry "the sudden rose"[112] "breaking in" at the bidding of a "brace of rhymes." That in such transmutations Browning saw one of the most marvellous of human powers we may gather from the famous lines of Abt Vogler already quoted:—

"And 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."

[Footnote 110: Sordello (Works, i. 123).]

[Footnote 111: Fifine, xlii.]

[Footnote 112: Transcendentalism.]

VII.

4. JOY IN SOUL.

No saying of Browning's is more familiar than that in which he declared "incidents in the development of souls"[113] to be to him the supreme interest of poetry. The preceding sections of this chapter have sufficiently shown how far this formula was from exhausting the vital springs of Browning's work. "Little else" might be "worth study"; but a great many other things had captured those rich sensibilities, without which the "student's analytic zeal" might have devoured the poet. On the other hand, his supreme interest in "incidents in the development of souls" was something very different from the democratic enthusiasm for humanity, or the Wordsworthian joy in the "common tears and mirth" of "every village." The quiet routine existence of uneventful lives hardly touched him more than the placid quiescence of animal and vegetable existence; the commonplace of humanity excited in him no mystic rapture; the human "primrose by the river's brim," merely as one among a throng, was for him pretty much what it was to Peter Bell. There was no doubt a strain of pantheistic thought in Browning which logically involved a treatment of the commonplace as profoundly reverent as Wordsworth's own. But his passionate faith in the divine love pervading the universe did not prevent his turning away resolutely from regions of humanity, as of nature, for which his poetic alchemy provided no solvent. His poetic throne was not built on "humble truth"; and he, as little as his own Sordello, deserved the eulogy of the plausible Naddo upon his verses as based "on man's broad nature," and having a "staple of common-sense."[114] The homely toiler as such, all members of homely undistinguished classes and conditions of men, presented, as embodiments of those classes and conditions, no coign of vantage to his art. In this point, human-hearted and democratic as he was, he fell short not only of the supreme portrayers of the eternal commonplaces of peasant life,—of a Burns, a Wordsworth, a Millet, a Barnes,—but even of the fastidious author of The Northern Farmer. Once, in a moment of exaltation, at Venice, Browning had seen Humanity in the guise of a poor soiled and faded bit of Venetian girlhood, and symbolically taken her as the future mistress of his art. The programme thus laid down was not, like Wordsworth's similarly announced resolve to sing of "sorrow barricadoed evermore within the walls of cities," simply unfulfilled; but it was far from disclosing the real fountain of his inspiration.

[Footnote 113: Preface to Sordello, ed. 1863.]

[Footnote 114: Sordello, ii. 135.]

And as Browning deals little with the commonplace in human nature, so he passes by with slight concern the natural relationships into which men are born, as compared with those which they enter by passion or choice. The bond of kinship, the love between parents and children, brothers and sisters, so prolific of poetry elsewhere, is singularly rare and unimportant in Browning, to whom every other variety of the love between men and women was a kindling theme. The names of husband, of wife, of lover, vibrate for him with a poetry more thrilling than any that those names excite elsewhere in the poetry of his generation; but the mystic glory which in Blake and Wordsworth and Coleridge gathered about unconscious childhood is all but fled. Children—real children, naive and inarticulate, like little Fortu—rarely appear in his verse, and those that do appear seem to have been first gently disengaged, like Pippa, David, Theocrite, from all the clinging filaments of Home. In its child pathos The Pied Piper—addressed to a child—stands all but alone among his works. His choicest and loveliest figures are lonely and unattached. Pippa, David, Pompilia, Bordello, Paracelsus, Balaustion, Mildred, Caponsacchi, have no ties of home and blood, or only such as work malignly upon their fate. Mildred has no mother, and she falls; Sordello moves like a Shelleyan shadow about his father's house; Balaustion breaks away from the ties of kindred to become a spiritual daughter of Athens; Paracelsus goes forth, glorious in the possession of "the secret of the world," which is his alone; Caponsacchi, himself sisterless and motherless, releases Pompilia from the doom inflicted on her by her parents' calculating greed; the song of Pippa releases Luigi from the nobler but yet hurtful bondage of his mother's love.

More considerable, but yet relatively slight, is the part played in Browning's poetry by those larger and more complex communities, like the City or the State, whose bond of membership, though less involuntary than that of family, is still for the most part the expression of material necessity or interest, not of spiritual discernment, passion, or choice. Patriotism, in this sense, is touched with interest but hardly with conviction, or with striking power, by Browning. Casa Guidi windows betrayed too much. Two great communities alone moved his imagination profoundly; just those two, namely, in which the bond of common political membership was most nearly merged in the bond of a common spiritual ideal. And Browning puts the loftiest passion for Athens in the mouth of an alien, and the loftiest Hebraism in the mouth of a Jew of the dispersion. Responsive to the personal cry of the solitary hero, Browning rarely caught or cared to reproduce the vaguer multitudinous murmur of the great mass. In his defining, isolating imagination the voice of the solitary soul rings out with thrilling clearness, but the "still sad music of humanity" escapes. The inchoate and the obsolescent, the indistinctness of immaturity, the incipient disintegration of decay, the deepening shadow of oblivion, the half-instinctive and organic bond of custom, whatever stirs the blood but excites only blurred images in the brain, and steals into character without passing through the gates of passion or of thought, finds imperfect or capricious reflection in his verse.

Browning's interest in "soul" was not, then, a diffused enjoyment of human nature as such. But, on the other hand, human nature stood for too much with him, his sense of what all personality at the lowest implies was too keen, to allow him to relish, or make much use of, those unpsychological amalgams of humanity and thought,—the personified abstractions. Whether in the base form branded by Wordsworth, or in the lofty and noble form of Keats's "Autumn" and Shelley's "West Wind," this powerful instrument of poetic expression was touched only in fugitive and casual strokes to music by Browning's hand. Personality, to interest him, had to possess a possible status in the world of experience. It had to be of the earth, and like its inhabitants. The stamp of fashioning intelligence, or even of blind myth-making instinct, alienates and warns him off. He climbs to no Olympus or Valhalla, he wanders through no Empyrean. His rare divinities tread the visible and solid ground. His Artemis "prologizes" to, his Herakles plays a part in, a human drama; and both are as frankly human themselves as the gods of Homer. Shelley and Keats had rekindled about the faded forms of the Greek gods the elemental Nature-worship from which they had started; Apollo, Hyperion, are again glorious symbols of the "all-seeing" and all-vitalising Sun. Browning, far from seeking to recover their primitive value, treats their legends, with the easy rationalism of Euripides or Ferishtah, as a mine of ethical and psychological illustration. He can play charmingly, in later years, with the myth of Pan and Luna, of Arion and the dolphin,[115] or of Apollo and the Fates, but idyl gets the better of nature feeling; "maid-moon" Luna is far more maid than moon. The spirit of autumn does not focus itself for him, as for Keats, in some symbolic shape, slumbering among the harvest swathes or at watch over the fragrant cider-press; it breaks up into the vivid concrete traits of The Englishman in Italy. The spirit of humanity is not shadowed forth in a Prometheus, but realised in a Caponsacchi.

[Footnote 115: Fifine at the Fair, lxxviii.]

VIII.

What, then, in the vast multifarious field of soul-life were the points of special attraction for Browning? To put it in a word, the same fundamental instincts of the senses and the imagination which we have watched shaping the visible world of his poetry, equally determined the complexion of its persons. The joy in pure and intense colour, in abruptness of line and intricacy of structure, in energetic movement and sudden disclosure and transformation,—all these characteristics have their analogies in Browning's feeling for the complexion, morphology, and dynamics of what he calls the soul. Just as this lover of crowded labyrinthine forms surprises us at first by his masses of pure and simple colour, untroubled by blur or modulation, so in the long procession of Browning's men of the world, adepts in the tangled lore of experience, there mingle from time to time figures radiant with a pure, intense, immaculate spiritual light,—Pippa, Pompilia, the David of the earlier Saul. Something of the strange charm of these naively beautiful beings springs from their isolation. That detachment from the bonds of home and kindred which was noticed above in its negative aspect, appears now as a source of positive expressiveness. They start into unexplained existence like the sudden beauty of flames from straw. Browning is no poet of the home, but he is peculiarly the poet of a kind of spirituality which subsists independently of earthly ties without disdaining them, lonely but unconscious of loneliness. Pippa would hardly be so recognisably steeped as she is in the very atmosphere of Browning's mind, but for this loneliness of hers,—the loneliness neither of the exile nor of the anchorite, but native, spontaneous, and serene. Wordsworth sometimes recalls it, but he is apt to invest his lonely beings with a mystic glamour which detaches them from humanity as well as from their fellow-men. The little "H.C., six years old," is "a dewdrop which the morn brings forth," that

"at the touch of wrong, without a strife, Slips in a moment out of life."

Pippa, with all her ideality and her upward gaze, has her roots in earth; she is not the dewdrop but the flower.

But loneliness belongs in a less degree to almost all characters which seriously engaged Browning's imagination. His own intense isolating self-consciousness infused itself into them. Each is a little island kingdom, judged and justified by its own laws, and not entirely intelligible to the foreigner. Hence his persistent use of the dramatic monologue. Every man had his point of view, and his right to state his case. "Where you speak straight out," Browning wrote in effect, as we saw, in one of his earliest letters to his future wife, "I break the white light in the seven colours of men and women"[116]; and each colour had its special truth and worth. His study of character is notoriously occupied with failures of transit between mind and mind. His lovers miss the clue; if they find it, as in By the Fireside, the collapse of the barrier walls is told with triumph, and the spell of the forests invoked to explain it.

[Footnote 116: R.B. to E.B.B., i. 6.]

And within the viewless intrenchments thus drawn about character Browning's imagination was prone to reproduce the abrupt and intricate play of line and surface which fascinated his outward eye. "The care-bit, erased, broken-up beauties ever took my taste," says, in Sordello, the creator of the pure flame-like soul-beauty of Pompilia and Pippa; very much as the crumbling and blistering of the frescoed walls are no less needful to the charm he feels in his Southern villa than the "blue breadth of sea without break" expanding before it. The abruptness, the sharp transitions, the startling and picturesque contrasts which mark so much of the talk of his persons, reflect not merely his agility of mind but his aesthetic relish for the Gothic richness and fretted intricacy that result. The bishop of St Praxed's monologue, for instance, is a sort of live mosaic,—anxious entreaty to his sons, diapered with gloating triumph over old Gandulph. The larger tracts of soul-life are apt in his hands to break up into shifting phases, or to nodulate into sudden crises; here a Blougram, with his "chess-board" of faith diversified by doubt, there a Paracelsus, advancing by complex alternations of "aspiring" and "attainment." Everywhere in Browning the slow continuities of existence are obscured by vivid moments,—the counterpart of his bursts of sunlight through rifts and chinks. A moment of speech with Shelley stands out, a brilliant handbreadth of time between the blank before and after; a moment of miserable failure blots out the whole after-life of Martin Relph; a moment of heroism stamps once for all the quality of Clive; the whole complex story of Pompilia focuses in the "splendid minute and no more" in which she is "saved"; the lover's whole life is summed up in "some moment's product" when "the soul declares itself,"[117] or utters the upgarnered poetry of its passion; or else, conversely, he looks back on a moment equally indelible, when the single chance of love was missed. "It once might have been, once only," is the refrain of the lover's regret in Browning, as "once and only once and for one only" is the keynote of his triumph. In the contours of event and circumstance, as in those of material objects, he loves jagged angularity, not harmonious curve. "Our interest's in the dangerous edge of things,"—

"The honest thief, the tender murderer, The superstitious atheist;"

where an alien strain violently crosses the natural course of kind; and these are only extreme examples of the abnormal nature which always allured and detained Browning's imagination, though it was not always the source of its highest achievement. Ivanovitch, executing justice under the forms of murder, Caponsacchi, executing mercy under the forms of an elopement, the savagery of Halbert and Hob unnerved by an abrupt reminiscence,—it is in these suggestive and pregnant situations, at the meeting-points of apparently irreconcilable classes and kinds, that Browning habitually found or placed those of his characters who represent any class or kind at all.

[Footnote 117: By the Fireside.]

The exploring, in-and-out scrutinising instincts of Browning's imagination equally left their vivid impress upon his treatment of character. If the sharp nodosities of character caught his eye, its mysterious recesses and labyrinthine alleys allured his curiosity; this lover of "clefts," this pryer among tangled locks and into the depths of flower-bells, peered into all the nooks and chambers of the soul with inexhaustible enterprise. It is hard to deny that even The Ring and the Book itself suffers something from the unflagging zest with which the poet pursues all the windings of popular speculation, all the fretwork of Angelo de Hyacinthis's forensic and domestic futilities. The poem is a great poetic Mansion, with many chambers, and he will lead us sooner or later to its inner shrine; but on the way there are "closets to search and alcoves to importune,"—

"The day wears, And door succeeds door, We try the fresh fortune, Range the wide house from the wing to the centre."

For the most part, after the not wholly successful experiment of direct analysis in Sordello, he chose to make his men and women the instruments of their own illumination; and this was a second source of his delight in the dramatic monologue. He approached all problematic character with a bias towards disbelieving appearances, which was fed, if not generated, by that restlessly exploring instinct of an imagination that spontaneously resolved surface and solidity into integument and core. Not that Browning always displays the core; on the contrary, after elaborately removing an imposing mask from what appears to be a face, he will hint that the unmasked face is itself a mask. "For Blougram, he believed, say, half he spoke." Browning is less concerned to "save" the subjects of his so-called "Special Pleadings" than to imagine them divested of the gross disguises of public rumour about them; not naked as God made them, but clothed in the easy undress of their own subtly plausible illusions about themselves. But the optimist in him is always alert, infusing into the zest of exploration a cheery faith that behind the last investiture lurks always some soul of goodness, and welcoming with a sudden lift of verse the escape of some diviner gleam through the rifts, such as Blougram's—

"Just when we're safest comes a sunset touch."

Yet it is hardly a paradox to say that his faith throve upon the obstacles it overcame. He imagined yet more vividly than he saw, and the stone wall which forbade vision but whetted imagination, acquired an ideal merit in his eyes because it was not an open door. In later life he came with growing persistence to regard the phenomenal world as a barrier of illusion between man and truth. But instead of chilling his faith, the obstacle only generated that poet's philosophy of the "value of a lie" which perturbs the less experienced reader of Fifine. "Truth" was "forced to manifest itself through falsehood," won thence by the excepted eye, at the rare season, for the happy moment, till "through the shows of sense, which ever proving false still promise to be true," the soul of man worked its way to its final union with the soul of God.[118]

[Footnote 118: Fifine at the fair, cxxiv.]

* * * * *

And here at length if not before we have a clear glimpse of the athlete who lurks behind the explorer. Browning's joy in imagining impediment and illusion was only another aspect of his joy in the spiritual energy which answers to the spur of difficulty and "works" through the shows of sense; and this other joy found expression in a poetry of soul yet more deeply tinged with the native hue of his mind. "From the first, Power was, I knew;" and souls were the very central haunt and focus of its play. Not that strong natures, as such, have much part in Browning's poetic-world; the strength that allured his imagination was not the strength that is rooted in nerve or brain, slowly enlarging with the build of the organism, but the strength that has suddenly to be begotten or infused, that leaps by the magic of spiritual influence from heart to heart. If Browning multiplies and deepens the demarcations among material things, he gives his souls a rare faculty of transcending them. Bright spiritual beings like Pippa shed their souls innocently and unwittingly about like a spilth of "X-rays," and the irradiation penetrates instantly the dense opposing integuments of passion, cupidity, and worldliness. At all times in his life these accesses of spiritual power occupied his imagination. Cristina's momentary glance and the Lady of Tripoli's dreamed-of face lift their devotees to completeness:—

"She has lost me, I have gained her, Her soul's mine, and now grown perfect I shall pass my life's remainder."

Forty years later, Browning told with far greater realistic power and a grim humour suited to the theme, the "transmutation" of Ned Bratts. Karshish has his sudden revealing flash as he ponders the letter of Abib:—

"The very God! Think, Abib, dost thou think,— So the All-great were the All-loving too"—

and the boy David his prophetic vision. A yet more splendid vision breaks from the seemingly ruined brain of the dying Paracelsus, and he has a gentler comrade in the dying courtier, who starts up from his darkened chamber crying that—

"Spite of thick air and closed doors God told him it was June,—when harebells grow, And all that kings could ever give or take Would not be precious as those blooms to me."

But it is not only in these magical transitions and transformations that Browning's joy in soul was decisively coloured by his joy in power. A whole class of his characters—the most familiarly "Browningesque" division of them all—was shaped under the sway of this master-passion; the noble army of "strivers" who succeed and of "strivers" who fail, baffled artists and rejected lovers who mount to higher things on stepping-stones of their frustrated selves, like the heroes of Old Painters in Florence, and The Last Ride Together, and The Lost Mistress; and on the other hand, the artists and lovers who fail for want of this saving energy, like the Duke and Lady of the Statue and the Bust, like Andrea del Sarto and the Unknown Painter. But his very preoccupation with Art and with Love itself sprang mainly from his peculiar joy in the ardent putting-forth of soul. No kind of vivid consciousness was indifferent to him, but the luxurious receptivity of the spectator or of a passively beloved mistress touched him little, compared with the faintest pulsation of the artist's "love of loving, rage of knowing, feeling, seeing the absolute truth of things," of the lover's passion for union with another soul. When he describes effects of music or painting, he passes instinctively over to the standpoint of the composer or the performer; shows us Hugues and Andrea themselves at the organ, or the easel; and instead of feeling the world turned into "an unsubstantial faery place" by the magic of the cuckoo or the thrush, strikes out playful theories of the professional methods of these songsters,—the cuckoo's monopoly of the "minor third," the thrush's wise way of repeating himself "lest you should think he never could recapture his first fine careless rapture." Suffering enters Browning's poetry almost never as the artless wail of the helpless stricken thing; the intolerable pathos of Ye Banks and Braes, or of

"We twa hae paidl't in the burn Frae morning sun till dine,"

belonged to a side of primitive emotion to which "artificial" poets like Tennyson were far more sensitive than he. Suffering began to interest him when the wail passed into the fierceness of vindictive passion, as in The Confessional, or into the outward calm of a self-subjugated spirit, as in Any Wife to any Husband, or A Woman's Last Word; or into reflective and speculative, if bitter, retrospect, as in The Worst of It or James Lee's Wife. And happiness, equally,—even the lover's happiness,—needed, to satisfy Browning, to have some leaven of challenging disquiet; the lover must have something to fear, or something to forgive, some hostility, or guilt, or absence, or death, to brave. Or the rapturous union of lovers must be remembered with a pang, when they have quarrelled; or its joy be sobered by recalling the perilous hairbreadth chances incurred in achieving it (By the Fireside)—

"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!"

Further, his joy in soul drew into the sphere of his poetry large tracts of existence which lay wholly or partly outside the domain of soul itself. The world of the lower animals hardly touched the deeper chords of his thought or emotion; but he watched their activities with a very genuine and constant delight, and he took more account of their pangs than he did of the soul-serving throes of man.[119] His imaginative selection among the countless types of these "low kinds" follows the lead of all those forms of primitive joy which we have traced in his types of men and women: here it is the quick-glancing intricate flights of birds or insects, the flitting of quick sandpipers in and out of the marl, or of flies about an old wall; now the fierce contrasts of hue, angularity, and grotesque deformity all at once in Caliban's beasts:—

"Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech; Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam, That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye By moonlight;"

or it is the massive power of the desert lion, in The Glove or the bright aethereal purity of the butterfly fluttering over the swimmer's head, with its

"membraned wings So wonderful, so wide, So sun-suffused;"[120]

or the cheery self-dependence of the solitary insect. "I always love those wild creatures God sets up for themselves," he wrote to Miss Barrett, "so independently, so successfully, with their strange happy minute inch of a candle, as it were, to light them." [121]

[Footnote 119: Donald.]

[Footnote 120: Some of these examples are from Mr Brooke's excellent chapter on Browning's Treatment of Nature.]

[Footnote 121: To E.B.B., 5th Jan. 1846.]

Finally, Browning's joy in soul flowed over also upon the host of lifeless things upon which "soul" itself has in any way been spent. To bear the mark of Man's art and toil, to have been hewn or moulded or built, compounded or taken to pieces, by human handiwork, was to acquire a certain romantic allurement for Browning's imagination hardly found in any other poet in the same degree. The "artificial products" of civilised and cultured life were for him not merely instruments of poetic expression but springs of poetic joy. No poetry can dispense with images from "artificial" things; Wordsworth himself does not always reject them; with most poets they are commoner, merely because they are better known; but for Browning the impress of "our meddling intellect" added exactly the charm and stimulus which complete exemption from it added for Wordsworth. His habitual imagery is fetched, not from flowers or clouds or moving winds and waters, but from wine-cups, swords and sheaths, lamps, tesselated pavements, chess-boards, pictures, houses, ships, shops. Most of these appealed also to other instincts,—to his joy in brilliant colour, abrupt line, intricate surface, or violent emotion. But their "artificiality" was an added attraction. The wedge, for instance, appeals to him not only by its angularity and its rending thrust, but as a weapon contrived by man's wit and driven home by his muscle. The cup appeals to him not only by its shape, and by the rush of the foaming wine, but as fashioned by the potter's wheel, and flashing at the festal board. His delight in complex technicalities, in the tangled issues of the law-courts, and the intertwining harmonies of Bach, sprang from his joy in the play of mind as well as from his joy in mere intricacy as such. His mountains are gashed and cleft and carved not only because their intricacy of craggy surface or the Titanic turmoil of mountain-shattering delights him, but also because he loves to suggest the deliberate axe or chisel of the warrior or the artist Man. He turns the quiet vicissitudes of nature into dexterous achievements of art. If he does not paint or dye the meads, he turns the sunset clouds into a feudal castle, shattered slowly with a visible mace; the morning sun pours into Pippa's chamber as from a wine-bowl; and Fifine's ear is

"cut Thin as a dusk-leaved rose carved from a cocoanut."[122]

[Footnote 122: Fifine at the Fair, ii. 325.]

Sordello's slowly won lyric speech is called

"a rude Armour ... hammered out, in time to be Approved beyond the Roman panoply Melted to make it."[123]

[Footnote 123: Sordello, i. 135.]

And thirty years later he used the kindred but more recondite simile of a ring with its fortifying alloy, to symbolise the welded Wahrheit and Dichtung of his greatest poem.

Between Dichtung and Wahrheit there was, indeed, in Browning's mind, a closer affinity than that simile suggests. His imagination was a factor in his apprehension of truth; his "poetry" cannot be detached from his interpretation of life, nor his interpretation of life from his poetry. Not that all parts of his apparent teaching belong equally to his poetic mind. On the contrary, much of it was derived from traditions of which he never shook himself clear; much from the exercise of a speculative reason which, though incomparably agile, was neither well disciplined in its methods nor particularly original in its grasp of principles. But with the vitalising heart of his faith neither tradition nor reasoning had so much to do as that logic of the imagination by which great poets often implicitly enunciate what the after-thinker slowly works out. The characteristic ways of Browning's poetry, the fundamental joys on which it fed, of which the present chapter attempts an account, by no means define the range or the limits of his interpreting intellect, but they mark the course of its deepest currents, the permanent channels which its tides overflow, but to which in the last resort they return. In the following chapter we shall have to study these fluctuating movements of his explicit and formulated thought, and to distinguish, if we may, the ground-tone of the deep waters from the more resonant roll of the shifting tides.



CHAPTER X.

THE INTERPRETER OF LIFE.

His voice sounds loudest and also clearest for the things that as a race we like best; ... the fascination of faith, the acceptance of life, the respect for its mysteries, the endurance of its charges, the vitality of the will, the validity of character, the beauty of action, the seriousness, above all, of great human passion.

—HENRY JAMES.



I.

The trend of speculative thought in Europe during the century which preceded the emergence of Browning may be described as a progressive integration along several distinct lines of the great regions of existence which common beliefs, resting on a still vigorous medievalism, thrust apart. Nature was brought into nearer relation with Man, and Man with God, and God with Nature and with Man. In one aspect, not the least striking, it was a "return to Nature"; economists from Adam Smith to Malthus worked out the laws of man's dependence upon the material world; poets and idealists from Rousseau to Wordsworth discovered in a life "according to nature" the ideal for man; sociologists from Hume to Bentham, and from Burke to Coleridge, applied to human society conceptions derived from physics or from biology, and emphasised all that connects it with the mechanical aggregate of atoms, or with the organism.

In another aspect it was a return to God. If the scientific movement tended to subjugate man to a Nature in which, as Laplace said, there was no occasion for God, Wordsworth saw both in Nature and in man a spirit "deeply interfused"; and the great contemporary school of German philosophy set all ethical thinking in a new perspective by its original handling of the old thesis that duty is a realisation of the will of God.

But, in yet another aspect, it was a return to Man. If Man was brought nearer to Nature and to God, it was to a Nature and to a God which had themselves acquired, for him, closer affinities with humanity. He divined, with Wordsworth, his own joy, with Shelley his own love, in the breathing flower; he saw with Hegel in the Absolute Spirit a power vitally present in all man's secular activities and pursuits. And these interpreting voices of poets and philosophers were but the signs of less articulate sensibilities far more widely diffused, which were in effect bringing about a manifold expansion and enrichment of normal, mental, and emotional life. Scott made the romantic past, Byron and Goethe, in their different ways, the Hellenic past, a living element of the present; and Fichte, calling upon his countrymen to emancipate themselves, in the name not of the "rights of men" but of the genius of the German people, uttered the first poignant recognition of national life as a glorious vesture arraying the naked body of the individual member, not an aggregate of other units competing with or controlling him.

In this complicated movement Browning played a very notable and memorable part. But it was one of which the first generation of his readers was entirely, and he himself to a great extent, unconscious, and which his own language often disguises or conceals. Of all the poets of the century he had the clearest and most confident vision of the working of God in the world, the most buoyant faith in the divine origin and destiny of man. Half his poetry is an effort to express, in endless variety of iteration, the nearness of God, to unravel the tangled circumstance of human life, and disclose everywhere infinity enmeshed amid the intricacies of the finite.

On the side of Nature his interest was less keen and his vision less subtle. His "visitations of the living God" came to him by other avenues than those opened by Wordsworth's ecstatic gaze, "in love and holy passion," upon outward beauty. Only limited classes of natural phenomena appealed to him powerfully at all, the swift and sudden upheavals and catastrophes, the ardours and accesses, the silence that thrills with foreboding and suspense. For continuities, both of the mechanical and the organic kind, he lacked sense. We have seen how his eye fastened everywhere upon the aspects of life least suggestive of either iron uniformity or harmonious evolution. The abrupt demarcations which he everywhere imposes or discovers were the symptom of a primitive ingrained atomism of thought which all the synthetic strivings of a God-intoxicated intellect could not entirely overcome.

II.

His metaphysical thinking thus became an effort to reconcile an all-embracing synthesis with a sense of individuality as stubborn and acute as ever man had. Body and Soul, Nature and Spirit, Man and God, Good and Evil, he presented now as co-operative or alien, now as hostile antagonists or antitheses. That their opposition is not ultimate, that evil is at bottom a form of good, and all finite existence a passing mode of absolute being, was a conviction towards which his thought on one side constantly strove, which it occasionally touched, but in which it could not securely rest. Possessed by the thirst for absoluteness, he vindicated the "infinity" of God and the soul by banishing all the "finiteness" of sense into a limbo of illusion. The infinite soul, imprisoned for life in a body which at every moment clogs its motion and dims its gaze, fights its way through the shows of sense,[124] "which ever proving false still promise to be true," until death opens the prison-gate and restores the captive to its infinity. Sorrow and evil were stains imposed by Time upon the white radiance of an eternal being; and Browning sometimes rose, though with a less sure step, to the dizzier height of holding Time itself to be unreal, and the soul's earthly life not an episode in an endless sequence, but a dream of progressive change imposed upon a changeless and timeless essence.

[Footnote 124: Fifine at the Fair.]

But there were, as has been said, elements in Browning's mental make which kept this abstract and formal theory, fortified though it was by theological prepossessions, in check. His most intense consciousness, his most definite grip upon reality, was too closely bound up with the collisions and jostlings, the limits and angularities, of the world of the senses, for the belief in their illusoriness easily to hold its ground. This "infinite soul" palpably had its fullest and richest existence in the very heart of finite things. Wordsworth had turned for "intimations of immortality" to the remembered intuitions of childhood; Browning found them in every pang of baffled aspiration and frustrate will. Hence there arose in the very midst of this realm of illusion a new centre of reality; the phantoms took on solid and irrefragable existence, and refused to take to flight when the cock-crow announced that "Time was done, Eternity begun."

Body and Time had in general too strong a grip upon him to be resolved into illusion. His actual pictures of departed souls suggest a state very unlike that reversion of the infinite spirit which had been thrust upon Matter and distended in Time, to the timeless Infinitude it had forgone. It does not escape from Time, but only passes on from the limited section of Time known as life, into another section, without limit, known as Eternity. And if it escapes from Body, at least Browning represents his departed soul more boldly than any other modern poet in a garb of flesh. Evelyn Hope, when she wakens in another world, will find her unknown lover's leaf in her hand, and "remember, and understand."

And just as Matter and Time invade Browning's spiritual eternity, so his ideal of conduct for man while still struggling with finite conditions casts its shadow on to the state of immortal release. Two conceptions, in fact, of the life after death, corresponding to divergent aspects of his thought, contend in Browning's mind. Now it is a state of emancipation from earthly limits,—when the "broken arcs" become "perfect rounds" and "evil" is transformed into "so much good more," and "reward and repose" succeed the "struggles"[125] by which they have been won. But at times he startles the devout reader by foreshadowing not a sudden transformation but a continuation of the slow educative process of earth in a succession of preliminary heavens before the consummate state is reached. "Progress," in short, was too deeply ingrained in Browning's conception of what was ultimately good, and therefore ultimately real, not to find entrance into his heaven, were it only by some casual backdoor of involuntary intuition. Even in that more gracious state "achievement lacked a gracious somewhat"[126] to his indomitable fighting instinct.

[Footnote 125: Saul, xvii.]

[Footnote 126: One Word More.]

"Soul resteth not, and mine must still advance,"

he had said in Pauline, and the soul that ceased to advance ceased for Browning, in his most habitual mood, to exist. The "infinity" of the soul was not so much a gift as a destiny, a power of hungering for ever after an ideal completeness which it was indefinitely to pursue and to approach, but not to reach. Far from having to await a remote emancipation to become completely itself, the soul's supremest life was in its hours of heroic stress, when it kept some dragon of unbelief quiet underfoot, like Michael,

"Who stands calm, just because he feels it writhe."

It was at this point that the athletic energy of Browning's nature told most palpably upon the complexion of his thought. It did not affect its substance, but it altered the bearing of the parts, giving added weight to all its mundane and positive elements. It gave value to every challenging obstruction akin to that which allured him to every angular and broken surface, to all the "evil" which balks our easy perception of "good."[127] Above all, by idealising effort, it created a new ethical end which every strenuous spirit could not merely strive after but fulfil, every day of its mortal life; and thus virtually transferred the focus of interest and importance from "the next world's reward and repose" to the vital "struggles in this."

[Footnote 127: Bishop Blougram.]

Browning's characteristic conception of the nature and destiny of man was thus not a compact and consistent system, but a group of intuitions nourished from widely different regions of soul and sense, and undergoing, like the face of a great actor, striking changes of expression without material change of feature under the changing incidence of stress and glow. The ultimate gist of his teaching was presented through the medium of conceptions proper to another school of thought, which, like a cryptogram, convey one meaning but express another, He had to work with categories like finite and infinite, which the atomic habits of his mind thrust into exclusive opposition; whereas the profoundest thing that he had to say was that the "infinite" has to be achieved in and through the finite, that just the most definitely outlined action, the most individual purpose, the most sharply expressive thought, the most intense and personal passion, are the points or saliency in life which most surely catch the radiance of eternity they break. The white light was "blank" until shattered by refraction; and Browning is less Browning when he glories in its unbroken purity than when he rejoices in the prism, whose obstruction alone

"shows aright The secret of a sunbeam, breaks its light Into the jewelled bow from blankest white."[128]

[Footnote 128: Deaf and Dumb.]

We have now to watch Browning's efforts to interpret this profound and intimate persuasion of his in terms of the various conceptions at his disposal.[129]

[Footnote 129: On the matter of this section cf. Mr A.C. Pigou's acute and lucid discussions, Browning as a Religious Teacher, ch. viii. and ix.]

III.

Beside the soul, there was something else that "stood sure" for Browning—namely, God. Here, too, a theological dogma, steeped in his ardent mind, acquired a new potency for the imagination, and a more vital nexus with man and nature than any other poet of the century had given it. And here, too, the mystic and the positive strains of Browning's genius wrought together, impressing themselves equally in that wonderful Browningesque universe in which every germ seems to be itself a universe "needing but a look to burst into immense life," and infinity is ever at hand, behind a closed door. The whole of his theology was an attempt to express consistently two convictions, rarely found of the same intensity in the same brain, of the divineness of the universe and the individuality of man.

The mechanical Creator of Paley and the deists could never have satisfied him. From the first he "saw God everywhere." There was in him the stuff of which the "God-intoxicated" men are made, and he had moments, like that expressed in one of his most deliberate and emphatic personal utterances, in which all existence seemed to be the visible Face of God—

"Become my universe that feels and knows."[130]

[Footnote 130: Epilogue.]

He clearly strained towards the sublime pantheistic imaginings of the great poets of the previous generation,—Wordsworth's "Something far more deeply interfused," Shelley's "One spirit's plastic stress," and Goethe's Erdgeist, who weaves the eternal vesture of God at the loom of Time. The dying vision of Paracelsus is as sublime as these, and marks Browning's nearest point of approach to the ways of thought they embody. In all the vitalities of the world, from the uncouth play of the volcano to the heaven-and-earth transfiguring mind of man, God was present, sharing their joy. But even here the psychological barrier is apparent, against which all the surge of pantheistic impulse in Browning broke in vain. This God of manifold joys was sharply detached from his universe; he was a sensitive and sympathetic spectator, not a pervading spirit. In every direction human personality opposed rigid frontiers which even the infinite God could not pass, and no poet less needed the stern warning which he addressed to German speculation against the "gigantic stumble"[131] of making them one. The mystic's dream of seeing all things in God, the Hegelian thesis of a divine mind realising itself in and through the human, found no lodgment in a consciousness of mosaic-like clearness dominated by the image of an incisively individual and indivisible self. In later life the sharp lines which he drew from the first about individual personality became a ring-fence within which each man "cultivated his plot,"[132] managing independently as he might the business of his soul. The divine love might wind inextricably about him,[133] the dance of plastic circumstance at the divine bidding impress its rhythms upon his life,[134] he retained his human identity inviolate, a "point of central rock" amid the welter of the waves.[135] His love might be a "spark from God's fire," but it was his own, to use as he would; he "stood on his own stock of love and power."[136]

[Footnote 131: Christmas-Eve.]

[Footnote 132: Ferishtah.]

[Footnote 133: Easter-Day.]

[Footnote 134: Rabbi ben Ezra.]

[Footnote 135: Epilogue.]

[Footnote 136: Christmas-Eve.]

IV.

In this sharp demarcation of man's being from God's, Browning never faltered. On the contrary, the individualising animus which there found expression impelled him to raise more formidable barriers about man, and to turn the ring-fence which secured him from intrusion into a high wall which cut off his view. In other words, the main current of Browning's thought sets strongly towards a sceptical criticism of human knowledge. At the outset he stands on the high a priori ground of Plato. Truth in its fulness abides in the soul, an "imprisoned splendour," which intellect quickened by love can elicit, which moments of peculiar insight, deep joy, and sorrow, and the coming on of death, can release. But the gross flesh hems it in, wall upon wall, "a baffling and perverting carnal mesh,"[137] the source of all error. The process of discovery he commonly conceived as an advance through a succession of Protean disguises of truth, each "one grade above its last presentment,"[138] until, at the rare moment, by the excepted eye, the naked truth was grasped. But Browning became steadily more reluctant to admit that these fortunate moments ever occurred, that the Proteus was ever caught. Things would be known to the soul as they were known to God only when it was emancipated by death. Infinity receded into an ever more inaccessible remoteness from the finite. For the speaker in Christmas-Eve man's mind was the image of God's, reflecting trace for trace his absolute knowledge; for Francis Furini the bare fact of his own existence is all he knows, a narrow rock-spit of knowledge enisled in a trackless ocean of ignorance. Thus for Browning, in differing moods and contexts, the mind of man becomes now a transparent pane, opening directly upon the truth as God sees it, now a coloured lens, presenting truth in blurred refraction, now an opaque mirror idly bodying forth his futile and illusive dreams.

[Footnote 137: Paracelsus.]

[Footnote 138: Fifine, cxxiv.]

These conflicting views were rooted in different elements of Browning's many-sided nature. His vivid intuition of his own self-consciousness formed a standing type of seemingly absolute immediate knowledge, to which he stubbornly clung. When the optimism of the "Head" was discredited, passion-fraught instinct, under the name of the Heart, came to the rescue, and valiantly restored its authority. On the other hand, a variety of subtle attractions drew him on to give "illusion" a wider and wider scope. Sheer joy in battle had no small share. The immortal and infinite soul, projected among the shows of sense, could not be expected to do its part worthily if it saw through them: it had to believe its enemies real enemies, and its warfare a rational warfare; it had to accept time and place, and good and evil, as the things they seem. To have a perfectly clear vision of truth as it is in God was to be dazzled with excess of light, to grope and fumble about the world as it is for man, like the risen Lazarus—

"witless of the size, the sum, The value in proportion of all things, Or whether it be little or be much."

The mystic who withdrew from the struggle with phantoms to gaze upon eternal realities was himself the victim of the worst illusions; while the hero who plunged into that struggle was training his soul, and thereby getting a grip upon ultimate truth. Thus Browning's passionate and reiterated insistence upon the illusiveness of knowledge was rooted in his inalienable faith in the worth and reality of moral conflict. The infinite soul realised itself most completely when it divested itself of the trappings of its infinity, and it worked out God's law most implicitly when it ignored God's point of view.

V.

Such a result could not be finally satisfying, and Browning's thought fastened with increasing predilection and exclusiveness upon one intense kind of vitality in which the hard antagonism of good and evil seems to be transcended, and that complete immersion of the soul in a nature not its own appears not as self-abnegation but as self-fulfilment. He did not himself use this phraseology about Love; it is that of a school to which he, at no time, it would seem, made any conscious approach. But it is clear that he found in the mysterious union and transfusion of diverse being which takes place in Love, as Hegel found in the union of opposites, the clue to the nature of reality, the very core of the heart of life. He did not talk of the union of opposites, but of "infinitude wreaking itself upon the finite." God himself would have been less divine, and so, as God, less real, had he remained aloof in lonely infinity instead of uniting himself with all creation in that love which "moves the world and the other stars"; the "loving worm," to quote his pregnant saying once more, were diviner than a loveless God. We saw how his theology is double-faced between the pantheistic yearning to find God everywhere and the individualist's resolute maintenance of the autonomy of man. God's Love, poured through the world, inextricably blended with all its power and beauty, thrilled with answering rapture by all its joy, and striving to clasp every human soul, provided the nearest approach to a solution of that conflict which Browning's mechanical metaphysics permitted. One comprehends, then, the profound significance for him of the actual solution apparently presented by Christian theology. In one supreme, crucial example the union of God with man in consummate love had actually, according to Christian belief, taken place, and Browning probably uttered his own faith when he made St John declare that

"The acknowledgment of God in Christ Acknowledged by thy reason solves for thee All questions in the earth and out of it."[139]

[Footnote 139: Death in the Desert. These lines, however "dramatic," mark with precision the extent, and the limits, of Browning's Christian faith. The evidence of his writings altogether confirms Mrs Orr's express statement that Christ was for him, from first to last, "a manifestation of divine love," by human form accessible to human love; but not the Redeemer of the orthodox creed.]

For to acknowledge this was to recognise that love was divine, and that mankind at large, in virtue of their gift of love, shared in God's nature, finite as they were; that whatever clouds of intellectual illusion they walked in, they were lifted to a hold upon reality as unassailable as God's own by the least glimmer of love. Whatever else is obscure or elusive in Browning, he never falters in proclaiming the absolute and flawless worth of love. The lover cannot, like the scientific investigator, miss his mark, he cannot be baffled or misled; the object of his love may be unworthy, or unresponsive, but in the mere act of loving he has his reward.

"Knowledge means Ever renewed assurance by defeat That victory is somehow still to reach; But love is victory, the prize itself."[140]

[Footnote 140: Pillar of Sebzevir.]

This aspect of Browning's doctrine of love, though it inspired some of his most exalted lyrics, throws into naked relief the dearth of social consciousness in Browning's psychology. Yet it is easy to see that the absolute self-sufficiency into which he lifted the bare fact of love was one of the mainsprings of his indomitable optimism. In Love was concentrated all that emancipates man from the stubborn continuities of Nature. It started up in corrupt or sordid hearts, and swept all their blind velleities into its purifying flame of passion—

"Love is incompatible With falsehood,—purifies, assimilates All other passions to itself."[141]

[Footnote 141: Colombe's Birthday.]

And the glimmer of soul that lurked in the veriest act of humanity the breath of love could quicken into pervading fire.[142] Love was only the most intense and potent of those sudden accesses of vitality which are wont, in Browning, suddenly to break like a flame from the straw and dross of a brutish or sophisticated consciousness, confounding foresight and calculation, but giving endless stimulus to hope. Even in the contact with sin and sorrow Browning saw simply the touch of Earth from which Love, like Antaeus, sprang into fuller being; they were the "dread machinery" devised to evolve man's moral qualities, "to make him love in turn and be beloved."[143]

[Footnote 142: Fifine.]

[Footnote 143: The Pope.]

But with all its insurgent emancipating vehemence Love was for Browning, also, the very ground of stable and harmonious existence, "the energy of integration," as Myers has finely said, "which makes a cosmos of the sum of things," the element of permanence, of law. True, its harmony was of the kind which admits discord and eschews routine; its law that which is of eternity and not of yesterday; its stability that which is only assured and fortified by the chivalry that plucks a Pompilia, or an Alcestis, from their legal doom. The true anarchist, as he sometimes dared to hint, was the cold unreason of duty which, as in Bifurcation, keeps lovers meant for each other apart. It is by love that the soul solves the problem—so tragically insoluble to poor Sordello—of "fitting to the finite its infinity," and satisfying the needs of Time and Eternity at once;[144] for Love, belonging equally to both spheres, can bring the purposes of body and soul into complete accord:

"Like yonder breadth of watery heaven, a bay And that sky-space of water, ray for ray And star for star, one richness where they mixed, As this and that wing of an angel, fixed Tumultuary splendours."

[Footnote 144: Sordello, sub fin.]

In a life thus thrilled into harmony heaven was already realised on earth; and Eternity itself could but continue what Time had begun. Death, for such a soul, was not an awaking, for it had not slept; nor an emancipation, for it was already free; nor a satisfying of desire, for the essence of Love was to want; it was only a point at which the "last ride together" might pass into an eternal "riding on"—

"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!"

VI.

No intellectual formula, no phrase, no word, can express the whole purport of those intense and intimate fusions of sensation, passion, and thought which we call poetic intuition, and which all strictly poetic "philosophy" or "criticism of life" is an attempt to interpret and articulate. Browning was master of more potent weapons of the strictly intellectual kind than many poets of his rank, and his work is charged with convictions which bear upon philosophic problems and involve philosophic ideas. But they were neither systematic deductions from a speculative first principle nor fragments of tradition eclectically pieced together; by their very ambiguity and Protean many-sidedness they betrayed that, however tinged they might be on the surface with speculative or traditional phrases, the nourishing roots sprang from the heart of joyous vitality in a primitive and original temperament. In Browning, if in any man, Joy sang that "strong music of the soul" which re-creates all the vitalities of the world, and endows us with "a new Earth and a new Heaven." And if joy was the root of Browning's intuition, and life "in widest commonalty spread" the element in which it moved, Love, the most intimate, intense, and marvellous of all vital energies, was the ideal centre towards which it converged. In Love, as Browning understood it, all those elementary joys of his found satisfaction. There he saw the flawless purity which rejoiced him in Pompilia's soul, which "would not take pollution, ermine-like armed from dishonour by its own soft snow." There he saw sudden incalculableness of power abruptly shattering the continuities of routine, throwing life instantly into a new perspective, and making barren trunks break into sudden luxuriance like the palm; or, again, intimately interpenetrating soul with soul,—"one near one is too far"; or entangling the whole creation in the inextricable embrace of God.

But if all his instincts and imaginative proclivities found their ideal in Love, they also insensibly impressed their own character upon his conception of it. The "Love" which has so deep a significance for Browning is a Love steeped in the original complexion of his mind, and bearing the impress of the singular position which he occupies in the welter of nineteenth-century intellectual history. His was one of the rare natures in which revolutionary liberalism and spiritual reaction, encountering in nearly equal strength, seem to have divided their principles and united their forces. Psychologically, the one had its strongest root in the temper which reasons, and values ideas; the other in that which feels, and values emotions. Sociologically, the one stood for individualism, the other for solidarity. In their ultimate presuppositions, the one inclined to the standpoint of the senses and experience; the other to a mostly vague and implicit idealism. In their political ideals, the one strove for progress, and for freedom as its condition; the other for order, and for active legal intervention as its safeguard.

In two of these four points of contrast, Browning's temperament ranged him more or less decisively on the Liberal side. Individualist to the core, he was conspicuously deficient in the kind of social mind which makes a poet the voice of an organised community, a nation, or a class. Progress, again, was with him even more an instinct than a principle; and he became the vates sacer of unsatisfied aspiration. On the other hand, that he was not without elements of the temper which makes for order was shown by his punctilious, almost eager, observance of social conventions, and, in the last years of his life, by the horror excited in him by what he took to be the anarchy of Women's Suffrage and Home Rule. In the other two fields of opposition he belonged decisively to the spiritual and emotional reaction. Spirit was for him the ultimate fact of existence, the soul and God were the indissoluble realities. But his idealism was not potent and pure enough either to control the realist suggestions of his strong senses and energetic temperament, or to interpret them in its own terms. And in the conflict between reason and feeling, or, as he put it, between "head" and "heart," as sources of insight, and factors in human advancement, feeling found its most brilliant champion in Browning, and its most impressive statement in his doctrine of Love. An utilitarian reduction of welldoing to a distribution of properly calculated doses of satisfaction he dismissed with a scorn as derisive as Carlyle's; "general utility" was a favourite of "that old stager the devil."[145] Yet no critic of intellect ever used intellect more vigorously, and no preacher of the rights of the heart ever dealt less in flaccid sentiment. Browning was Paracelsus as well as Aprile, and sharply as he chose to dissever "Knowledge" and "Love," Love was for him never a foe of intellect, but a more gifted comrade who does the same work more effectively, who dives deeper, soars higher, welds more potently into more enduring unities, and flings upon dry hearts with a more infallible magic the seed of more marvellous new births. Browning as the poet of Love is thus the last, and assuredly not the least, in the line which handed on the torch of Plato. The author of the Phoedrus saw in the ecstasy of Love one of the avenues to the knowledge of the things that indeed are. To Dante the supreme realities were mirrored in the eyes of Beatrice. For Shelley Love was interwoven through all the mazes of Being; it was the source of the strength by which man masters his gods. To all these masters of idealism Browning's vision of Love owed something of its intensity and of its range. With the ethical Love of Jesus and St Paul his affinities were more apparent, but less profound. For him, too, love was the sum of all morality and the root of all goodness. But it resembled more the joyous self-expansion of the Greek than the humility and self-abnegation of Christian love. Not the saintly ascetic nor the doer of good works, but the artist and the "lover," dominated his imagination when he wrote of Love; imbuing even God's love for the world with the joy of creation and the rapture of embrace. Aprile's infinite love for things impelled him to body them visibly forth. Deeper in Browning than his Christianity, and prior to it, lay his sense of immeasurable worth in all life, the poet's passion for being.

[Footnote 145: Red-cotton Night-cap Country.]

Browning's poetry is thus one of the most potent of the influences which in the nineteenth century helped to break down the shallow and mischievous distinction between the "sacred" and the "secular," and to set in its place the profounder division between man enslaved by apathy, routine, and mechanical morality, and man lifted by the law of love into a service which is perfect freedom, into an approximation to God which is only the fullest realisation of humanity.



INDEX.

Note—The names of the Persons are given in small capitals; titles of literary works in italics; other names in ordinary type; *black figures* indicate the more detailed references. Only the more important of the incidental quotations are included. Poems are referred to only under their authors' names.

AESCHYLUS, 215. ALLINGHAM, W., 87. American fame of Browning, 87. ARISTOPHANES, 77, 207 f. ARNOLD, M., 26. Asolo, 27, 50, 220, 232. Athenaeum, The, 172, 251.

BALZAC, 42, 49, 86, 117. BARRETT, ELIZABETH. See Browning, E.B. BARTOLI, his Simboli, 27. BENCKHAUSEN, Russian Consul-General, 14. BERANGER, 86. BLAGDEN, ISA. See BROWNING, R., letters. BRONSON, Mrs ARTHUR, 220, 231. BRONTE, EMILY, her character "Heathcliff," 66. BROWNING, ROBERT (grandfather), 2. BROWNING, ROBERT (father), 3, 6, 18, 149 n., 173. BROWNING, ROBERT, cosmopolitan in sympathies, English by his art, 1, 2; his birth, 3; likeness to his mother, 4 n.; character of his home, 5; boyhood, 5, 6; early sense of rhythm, 7; reads Shelley, Keats, and Byron, 8 f.; journey to St Petersburg, 14; first voyage to Italy, 26 f.; second voyage to Italy, 61; correspondence with E.B. Barrett, 78; marriage, 81; settlement in Italy, 84; friendships and society at Florence, 84 f.; Italian politics, 88; Italian scenery, 91; Italian painting, 98 f.; and music, 103 f.; religion, 110 f.; his interpretation of In a Balcony, 145 n.; death of Mrs Browning, 147; return to London, 148; society, 150; summer sojourns in France, 153 f., 202 f.; in the Alps, 216; death of Miss Egerton-Smith, 216; Italy once more, 220; Asolo and Venice, 231 f.; death, 234. Works— Abt Vogler, 71, *158* f. Agamemnon (translation of), 215 f. Andrea del Sarto, 70 f., *100* f. Another Way of Love, 142. Any Wife to Any Husband, 140. Appearances, 212. Aristophanes' Apology, *206* f. Artemis Prologizes, 68, 190. Asolando, 220, *232* f. At the Mermaid, 211. Bad Dreams, 232. Balaustion's Adventure, 75, *190* f. Baldinucci, 214. Bells and Pomegranates, 16, 41 f., 74. Bifurcation, 213. Bishop of St Praxed's, The, 70, 113, 275. Blot in the 'Scutcheon, A, *52* f. Blougram's Apology, 14, 57, 60, 90, 113, *129* f., 277 f. Boy and the Angel, The, 113, 116. By the Fireside, 94, *135* f., 275. Caliban upon Setebos, *162* f. Cavalier Tunes, 67. Childe Roland, *95* f., 262 f. Christmas-Eve and Easter Day, 81, *114* f., 162. Cleon, 113, *126* f. Clive, 223. Colombe's Birthday, 53, *55* f. Confessional, The, 40, 66. Cristina, 48, *68* f. Deaf and Dumb, 295. Death in the Desert, A, 152, *160* f. De Gustibus, 90, 92, 254. Dis Aliter Visum, 152, 156. Dramas, 37 f. Dramatic Idylls, *221* f. Dramatic Lyrics, 38 f., *65* f., 79. Dramatic Romances, 38, 79. Dramatis Personae, *151-168*, 213. Echetlos, 222. Englishman in Italy, The, 93. Epilogue to Dramatis Personae, 154, *167* f., 296. Epistle of Karshish, An, 113, *123* f. Eurydice to Orpheus, 157. Evelyn Hope, 138, 293. Fears and Scruples, 212. Ferishtah's Fancies, *227* f. Fifine at the Fair, 92 f., 149, *197* f., 209, 242. Flight of the Duchess, The, *69* f., 199. Flower's Name, The, 68. Forgiveness, A, 213. Fra Lippo Lippi, 71, *101* f., 112. Francis Furini, 298. Gerard de Lairesse, 222. Gismond, 41, 57, 67. Glove, The, 69, *70*. Grammarian's Funeral, The, *109* f. Guardian Angel, The, 99. Halbert and Hob, *222*. Helen's Tower, sonnet, 188. Heretic's Tragedy, A, *128* f., 263. Herve Riel, *189* f., 222. Holy Cross Day, 4 n., *128*. Home Thoughts from Abroad (quoted), 265. Home Thoughts from the Sea, 26. House, 211. How it Strikes a Contemporary, 108 f. How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix, 27, 67, 222. Hugues of Saxe Gotha, Master, 71, *105* f., 113. In a Balcony, *143* f. In a Gondola, 67. In a Year, 140. Incondita, 8. Inn Album, The, 188, *208* f. Instans Tyrannus, 66, 90. In Three Days, 137, 141. Italian in England, The, 91. Ivan Ivanovitch, 14, 221, *223*. Ixion, *225* f. James Lee's Wife, 153 f. Jochanan Halkadosh, 225. Jocoseria, *224* f. Johannes Agricola, 15 f. King Victor and King Charles, 15, *45*, 50. Laboratory, The, 38, 66. La Saisiaz, *216* f. Last Ride Together, The, 68, *138* f., 304. Life in a Love, 137. Light Woman, A, 142. Lost Leader, The, 66. Lost Mistress, The, 68, 156. Love in a Life, 137. Luria, 60, *61* f. Madhouse Cells, 16. Martin Relph, 222 f., 275. Men and Women, 25, 60, 72, 74, *87-147*, 152, 213. Muleykeh, 223. My Last Duchess, 66, 70, 213. My Star, 140. Natural Magic, 213. Ned Bratts, 222. Never the Time and the Place, 226. Now, 233. Numpholeptos, 213. Old Pictures in Florence, 90, 102 f. One Way of Love, 137. One Word More, 97 f., *146* f. Pacchiarotto, 109, 162, 188, *210* f. Pan and Luna, 248. Paracelsus, 16 f., 25, 29, 38, 42. Parleyings with Certain People of Importance, 229 f. Patriot, The, 90. Pauline, 11 f. Pearl, a Girl, A, 233. Pheidippides, 222. Pictor Ignolus, 70 f. Pied Piper, The, 71 f., 269. Pippa Passes, *49* f., 59, 79, 91, 151, 181. Popularity, 109. Porphyria's Lover, 16. Pretty Woman, A, 142. Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, 14, *194* f. Prospice, 109, 157. Rabbi ben Ezra, 4 n., 109, *157* f. Red-cotton Night-cap Country, 90 (Miranda), 188, *203* f. Return of the Druses, The, 45, *46* f., 64. Reverie, 233. Ring and the Book, The, 151 f., *169-186*, 276 f. Rudel, 68. Saint Martin's Summer, 213. Saul, 48, *72* f., 113, *121* f. Serenade at the Villa, 137. Shelley, Essay on, 20, *106* f., 109 f. Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis, 67, 79. Sludge, Mr, the Medium, 90, *165* f. Solomon and Balkis, 225. Sordello, 15, *25* f., 238. Soul's Tragedy, A, 59 f. Spanish Cloister, The, 79. Statue and the Bust, The, 142, 213. Strafford, 15, 25, *42* f. Summum Bonum, 233. Time's Revenges, 66. Toccata of Galuppi's, A, 104 f.,153. Too Late, 153. Transcendentalism, 108. Two in the Campagna, 93, 134, *140*, 238. Two Poets of Croisic, The, *218* f. Woman's Last Word, A, 140. Women and Roses, 143. Worst of It, The, 156. Youth and Art, 152, 156. Letters, to E.B.B., 4 n., 6, 8, 49, 59 n., 62, 63, 65, 67, 72, 75, 78-83 passim, 85, 114 f., 241, 252 f., 283; to Miss Blagden, 153, 171, 173 n., 249; to Miss Flower, 43; to Miss Haworth, 26 n., 44, 237; to Ruskin, 237; to Aubrey de Vere, 247 n. BROWNING, ELIZABETH BARRETT MOULTON-BARRETT (wife). First allusion to Browning, 75; reads Paracelsus, 75 n.; her character, early life, and poetry, 76 f.; correspondence with Browning, 78 f.; marriage, 81; settlement in Italy, 84; friendships, society at Florence, 84 f.; death, 147; her relation to Pompilia, 180. Aurora Leigh, 81, 87, 151, 209. Songs before Congress, 90. Sonnets from the Portuguese, 87. Casa Guidi Windows, 90. Letters to R.B., 49, 65, 77 n., 78-83 passim, 114, 251. Letter to Ruskin, 77 n. Letters to others, 85, 89, 92, 99, 245. BROWNING, SARAH ANNA (mother), 4. BURNS, R., 40, 281. BYRON, LORD, 7, 8, 104, 198, 218, 263.