On June 4th 1860 they left Rome, travelling by vettura through Orvieto and Chiusi to their home in Florence.[80] The journey fatigued Mrs Browning, but on arriving they had the happiness of finding Landor well; he looked not less than magnificent, displaying "the most beautiful sea-foam of a beard ... all in a curl and white bubblement of beauty." Wilson had the old man under happy control; only once had he thrown his dinner out of the window; that he should be at odds with all the world was inevitable, and that all the world should be in the wrong was exhilarating and restorative. The plans for the summer were identical with those of the preceding year; the same "great lonely villa" near Siena was occupied again; the same "deep soothing silence" lapped to rest Mrs Browning's spirits; Landor, her "adopted son"—a son of eighty-six years old—was hard by as he had been last summer. The neighbourhood of Miss Blagden was this year an added pleasure. "The little eager lady," as Henry James describes her, "with gentle, gay black eyes," had seen much, read much, written already a little (with more to follow), but better than all else were her generous heart and her helpful hand. The season was one of unusual coolness for Italy. Pen's pony, as before, flashed through the lanes and along the roads. Browning had returned from Rome in robust health, and looking stouter in person than six months previously. Now, while a tenant of the Villa Alberti, he spent his energies in long rides, sometimes rides of three or four continuous hours. On returning from such careers on horseback little inclination, although he had his solitary room in which to work, remained for the pursuit of poetry.

The departure for Rome was early—about September; in the Via Felice rooms were found. A new and great sorrow had fallen upon Mrs Browning—her sister Henrietta, Mrs Surtees Cook, was dead, leaving behind her three young children. Mrs Browning could not shed tears nor speak of her grief: she felt tired and beaten by the pain; and tried to persuade herself that for one who believed the invisible world to be so near, such pain was but a weakness. Her husband was able to do little, but he shared in his degree in the sense of loss, and protected her from the intrusion of untimely visitors. Sir John Bowring was admitted because he presented a letter of introduction and had intimate relations with the French Emperor; his ridicule of the volunteer movement in England, with its cry of "Riflemen, form!" was grateful to Mrs Browning's political feelings. French troops were now in Rome; their purpose was somewhat ambiguous; but Pen had fraternised with the officers on the Pincio, had learnedly discussed Chopin and Stephen Heller with them, had been assured that they did not mean to fight for the Holy Father, and had invited "ever so many of them" to come and see mamma—an invitation which they were too discreet to accept. Mrs Browning's excitement about public affairs had somewhat abated; yet she watched with deep interest the earlier stages of the great struggle in America; and she did not falter in her hopes for Italy; by intrigues and smuggling the newspapers which she wished to see were obtained through the courteous French generals. But her spirits were languid; "I gather myself up by fits and starts," she confesses, "and then fall back."

Apart from his anxieties for his wife's health and the unfailing pleasure in his boy, whom a French or Italian abbe now instructed, Browning was wholly absorbed in one new interest. He had long been an accomplished musician; in Paris he had devoted himself to drawing; now his passion was for modelling in clay, and the work proceeded under the direction and in the studio of his friend, the sculptor Story. His previous studies in anatomy stood him in good stead; he made remarkable progress, and six hours a day passed as if in an enchantment. He ceased even to read; "nothing but clay does he care for," says Mrs Browning smilingly, "poor lost soul." The union of intellectual energy with physical effort in such work gave him the complete satisfaction for which he craved. His wife "grudged a little," she says, the time stolen from his special art of poetry; but she saw that his health and spirits gained from his happy occupation. Of late, he had laboured irregularly at verse; fits of active effort were followed by long intervals during which production seemed impossible. And some vent was necessary for the force coiled up within him; if this were not to be obtained, he wore himself out with a nervous impatience—"beating his dear head," as Mrs Browning describes it, "against the wall, simply because he sees a fly there, magnified by his own two eyes almost indefinitely into some Saurian monster." Now he was well and even exultant—"nothing ever," he declared, "made him so happy before." Of advancing years—Browning was now nearly forty-nine—the only symptoms were that he had lost his youthful slightness of figure, and that his beard and hair were somewhat blanched by time. "The women," his wife wrote to his sister, "adore him everywhere far too much for decency," and to herself he seemed "infinitely handsomer and more attractive" than when, sixteen years previously, she had first seen him. On the whole therefore she was well pleased with his new passion for clay, and could wish for him loads of the plastic stuff in which to riot. Afterwards, in his days of sorrow in London, when he compared the colour of his life to that of a snow-cloud, it seemed to him as if one minute of these months at Rome would yield him gold enough to make the brightness of a year; he longed for the smell of the wet clay in Story's studio, where the songs of the birds, and the bleat of a goat coming through the little door to the left, were heard.[81]

While hoping and planning for the future, his wife was not unaware of her own decline. "For the first time," she writes about December, "I have had pain in looking into Penini's face lately—which you will understand." And a little earlier: "I wish to live just as long as, and no longer than to grow in the soul." The winter was mild, though snow had fallen once; a spell of colder weather was reserved for the month of May. They thought of meeting Browning's father and sister in some picturesque part of the forest of Fontainebleau, or, if that should prove unsuitable, perhaps at Trouville. Mrs Browning, who had formerly enjoyed the stir of life in Paris, now shrank from its noise and bustle. Her wish would be to creep into a cave for the whole year. At eight o'clock each evening she left her sitting-room and sofa, and was in bed. Yet she trusted that when she could venture again into the open air she would be more capable of enduring the friction of the world. In May she felt stronger, and saw visitors, among whom was Hans Andersen, "very earnest, very simple, very childlike."[82] A little later she was cast down by the death of Cavour—"that great soul which meditated and made Italy"; she could hardly trust herself to utter his name. It was evident to Browning that the journey to France could not be undertaken without serious risk. They had reached Casa Guidi, and there for the present she must take her rest.

The end came swiftly, gently. A bronchial attack, attended with no more than the usual discomfort, found her with diminished power of resistance. Browning had forebodings of evil, though there seemed to be no special cause to warrant his apprehension. On the last evening—June 28, 1861—she herself had no anticipation of what was at hand, and talked of their summer plans. When she slept, her slumber was heavy and disturbed. At four in the morning her husband was alarmed and sent to summon the doctor; but she assured him that his fears were exaggerated. Then inestimable words were spoken which lived forever in his heart. And so "smilingly, happily, with a face like a girl's," resting her head upon her husband's cheek, she passed away.[83]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 70: Letters of E.B.B. (To Mrs Jameson), ii. 221.]

[Footnote 71: F.G. Kenyon. Letters of E.B.B., ii. 263.]

[Footnote 72: "Browning was intimately acquainted," writes Miss Anna Swanwick, "with Salvini." What especially lived in Browning's memory as transcending everything else he had witnessed on the stage was Salvini's impersonation of the blind Oedipus, and in particular one incident: a hand is laid on the blind man's shoulder, which he supposes the hand of one of his sons; he discovers it to be the hand of Antigone; the sudden transition from a look of fiery hate to one of ineffable tenderness was unsurpassable in its mastery of dramatic expression. (Condensed from "Anna Swanwick, a Memoir and Recollections," 1903, pp. 132, 133.)]

[Footnote 73: Story says that Landor "was turned out of doors by his wife and children." He had conveyed the villa to his wife. It is Story who compares Landor to King Lear. "Conversations in a Studio," p. 436.]

[Footnote 74: Letters of E.B.B., ii. 354.]

[Footnote 75: When Browning at Rome was invited to dine with the Prince of Wales (March 1859) by the desire of Queen Victoria, Mrs Browning told him to "eschew compliments," of his infelicity in uttering which she gives amusing examples. Letters of E.B.B., ii. 309, 310.]

[Footnote 76: On Browning's action in the affairs of Landor see Forster's Life of Landor, and the letters of Browning in vol. ii. of Henry James's Life of Story (pp. 6-11).]

[Footnote 77: See, for this residence at Siena, an interesting letter of Story to C. Eliot Norton in Henry James's W.W. Story, vol. ii. pp. 14, 15.]

[Footnote 78: Condensed from information given by Prinsep to Mrs Orr, Life and Letters of R.B., pp. 234-37.]

[Footnote 79: Letters of E.B.B., ii. 388, note. Mr Kenyon suggests A Death in the Desert as at least possibly meant. The Ring and the Book "certainly had not yet been begun."]

[Footnote 80: Halting at Siena, whence Browning wrote an account of the journey to Story: Henry James's W.W. Story, ii. pp. 50-52.]

[Footnote 81: H. James's W.W. Story, vol. ii. pp. 111, 113.]

[Footnote 82: Henry James tells of a children's party at the Palazzo Barberini, Rome, of several years earlier, when Hans Andersen read "The Ugly Duckling," and Browning, "The Pied Piper"; which led to "a grand march through the spacious Barberini apartment, with Story doing his best on a flute in default of bagpipes." W.W. Story, vol. i.p. 286.]

[Footnote 83: The circumstances of Mrs Browning's death are described as above, but with somewhat fuller detail, in a letter of Browning to Miss Haworth, July 20, 1861, first printed by Mrs Orr. Many details of interest will be found in a long letter of Story, Henry James's W.W. Story, vol. ii. pp. 61-68: "She talked with him and jested and gave expression to her love in the tenderest words; then, feeling sleepy, and he supporting her in his arms, she fell into a doze. In a few minutes, suddenly, her head dropped forward. He thought she had fainted, but she had gone for ever." A painful account of the funeral service, "blundered through by a fat English parson," is given by Story.]



Chapter XI

London: Dramatis Personae

The grief of the desolate man was an uncontrollable passion; his heart was strong and all its strength entered into its sorrow. Miss Blagden, "perfect in all kindness," took motherly possession of the boy, and persuaded his father to accompany Penini to her villa at Bellosguardo. When all that was needful at Casa Guidi had been done, Browning's first thought was to abandon Italy for many a year, and hasten to London, there to have speech for a day or two at least with Mrs Browning's sister Arabel. "The cycle is complete," he said, looking round the sitting-room of Casa Guidi. "I want my new life," he wrote, "to resemble the last fifteen years as little as possible." Yet while he stayed in the accustomed rooms he held himself together; "when I was moved," he says, "I began to go to pieces."[84] Yet something remained to sustain him.

To one who has habitually given as well as received much not the least of the pangs of separation arises from the incapacity to render any further direct service. It fortified Browning's heart to know that much could be done, and in ways which his wife would have approved and desired, for her child. And as he himself had been also her care, it was his business now to see that his life fulfilled itself aright. Yet he breaks out in July: "No more 'house-keeping' for me, even with my family. I shall grow still, I hope—but my root is taken, and remains." From the outward paraphernalia of death Browning, as Mrs Orr notices, shrank with aversion; it was partly the instinct by which a man seeks to preserve what is most sacred and most strong in his own feelings from the poor materialisms and the poor sentimentalisms of the grave; partly a belief that any advance of the heart towards what has been lost may be rather hindered than helped by the external circumstance surrounding the forsaken body. Browning took measures that his wife's grave should be duly cared for, given more than common distinction; but Florence became a place from which even for his own sake and the sake of her whose spirit lived within him he must henceforth keep aloof.

The first immediate claim upon Browning was that of duty to his father. On August 1st he left Florence for Paris, accompanied by Isa Blagden, who still watched over him and the boy. Two months were spent with his sister and the old man, still hale and strong of heart, at a place "singularly unspoiled, fresh and picturesque, and lovely to heart's content"—so Browning describes it—St Enogat, near St Malo. The solitary sea, the sands, the rocks, the green country gave him at least a breathing-space. Then he proceeded to London, not without an outbreak of his characteristic energy in over-coming the difficulties—which involved two hours of "weary battling"—of securing a horse-box for Pen's pony. At Amiens Tennyson, with his wife and children, was on the platform. Browning pulled his hat over his face and was unrecognised.[85] In "grim London," as he had called it, though with a quick remorse at recollection of the kindness awaiting him, he had the comfort of daily intercourse with Miss Arabel Barrett.

It was decided that an English education, but not that of a public school, would be best for the boy; the critical time for taking "the English stamp" must not be lost; his father's instruction, aided by that of a tutor, would suffice to prepare him for the University, and he would have the advantage of the motherly care of his mother's favourite sister. Browning distrusted, he says to Story, "ambiguous natures and nationalities." Thus he bound himself to England and to London, while at times he sighed for the beauty of Italian hills and skies. He shrank from society, although before long old friends, and especially Procter, infirm and deaf, were not neglected. He found, or made, business for himself; had "never so much to do or so little pleasure in doing it." The discomfort of London lodgings was before long exchanged for the more congenial surroundings of a house by the water-side in Warwick Crescent, which he occupied until 1887, two years before his death. The furniture and tapestries of Casa Guidi gave it an air of comfort and repose. "It was London," writes Mrs Ritchie, referring to her visits of a later date, "but London touched by some indefinite romance; the canal used to look cool and deep, the green trees used to shade the Crescent.... The house was an ordinary London house, but the carved oak furniture and tapestries gave dignity to the long drawing-rooms, and pictures and books lined the stairs. In the garden at the back dwelt, at the time of which I am writing, two weird gray geese, with quivering silver wings and long throats, who used to come and meet their master hissing and fluttering." In 1866 an owl—for Browning still indulged a fantasy of his own in the choice of pets—was "the light of our house," as a letter describes this bird of darkness, "for his tameness and engaging ways." The bird would kiss its master on the face, tweak his hair, and if one said "Poor old fellow!" in a commiserating voice would assume a sympathetic air of depression.[86] Miss Barrett lived hard by, in Delamere Terrace. With her on Sundays Browning listened at Bedford Chapel to the sermons of a non-conformist preacher, Thomas Jones, to some of which when published in 1884, he prefixed an introduction. "The Welsh poet-preacher" was a man of humble origin possessed of a natural gift of eloquence, which, with his "liberal humanity," drew Browning to become a hearer of his discourses.

He made no haste to give the public a new volume of verse. Mrs Browning had mentioned to a correspondent, not long before her death, that her husband had then a considerable body of lyrical poetry in a state of completion. An invitation to accept the editorship of the Cornhill Magazine, on Thackeray's retirement, was after some hesitation declined. He was now partly occupied with preparing for the press whatever writings by his wife seemed suitable for publication. In 1862 he issued with a dedication "to grateful Florence" her Last Poems; in 1863, her Greek Christian Poets; in 1865 he prepared a volume of Selections from her poems, and had the happiness of knowing that the number of her readers had rather increased than diminished. The efforts of self-constituted biographers to make capital out of the incidents of her life, and to publish such letters of hers as could be laid hands on, moved him to transports of indignation, which break forth in a letter to his friend Miss Blagden with unmeasured violence: what he felt with the "paws" of these blackguards in his "very bowels" God knows; beast and scamp and knave and fool are terms hardly strong enough to relieve his wrath. Such sudden whirls of extreme rage were rare, yet were characteristic of Browning, and were sometimes followed by regret for his own distemperature. In 1862 a gratifying task was laid on him—that of superintending the three volume edition of his Poetical Works which was published in the following year. At the same time his old friend Forster, with help from Procter, was engaged in preparing the first—and the best—of the several Selections from Browning's poems; it was at once an indication of the growing interest in his writings and an effective means towards extending their influence. He set himself steadily to work out what was in him; he waited no longer upon his casual moods, but girded his loins and kept his lamp constantly lit. His genius, such as it was—this was the field given him to till, and he must see that it bore fruit. "I certainly will do my utmost to make the most of my poor self before I die"—so he wrote in 1865. There were gains in such a resolved method of work; but there were also losses. A man of so active a mind by planting himself before a subject could always find something to say; but it might happen that such sheer brain-work was carried on by plying other faculties than those which give its highest value to poetry.[87]

In the late summer and early autumn of 1862 Browning, in company with his son, was among the Pyrenees at "green pleasant little Cambo, and then at Biarritz crammed," he says, "with gay people of whom I know nothing but their outsides." The sea and sands were more to his liking than the gay people.[88] He had with him one book and no other—a Euripides, in which he read vigorously, and that the readings were fruitful his later poetry of the Greek drama bears witness. At present however his creative work lay in another direction; the whole of "the Roman murder story"—the story of Pompilia and Guido and Caponsacchi—he describes as being pretty well in his head. It needed a long process of evolution before the murder story could uncoil its sinuous lengths in a series of volumes. The visit to Ste-Marie "a wild little place in Brittany" near Pornic, in the summer of 1863—a visit to be repeated in the two summers immediately succeeding—is directly connected with two of the poems of Dramatis Personae. The story of Gold Hair and the landscape details of James Lee's Wife are alike derived from Pornic. The solitude of the little Breton hamlet soothed Browning's spirit. The "good, stupid and dirty" people of the village were seldom visible except on Sunday; there were solitary walks of miles to be had along the coast; fruit and milk, butter and eggs in abundance, and these were Browning's diet. "I feel out of the very earth sometimes," he wrote, "as I sit here at the window.... Such a soft sea, and such a mournful wind!" But the lulling charm of the place which, though so different, brought back the old Siena mood, did not convert him into an idler. The mornings, which began betimes, were given to work; in his way of desperate resolve to be well occupied he informs Miss Blagden (Aug. 18, 1863) that having yesterday written a poem of 120 lines, he means to keep writing whether he likes it or not.[89]

"With the spring of 1863," writes Mr Gosse, "a great change came over Browning's habits. He had refused all invitations into society; but now, of evenings, after he had put his boy to bed, the solitude weighed intolerably upon him. He told the present writer [Mr Gosse] long afterwards, that it suddenly occurred to him on one such spring night in 1863 that this mode of life was morbid and unworthy, and, then and there, he determined to accept for the future every suitable invitation which came to him." "Accordingly," goes on Mr Gosse, "he began to dine out, and in the process of time he grew to be one of the most familiar figures of the age at every dinner-table, concert-hall, and place of refined entertainment in London. This, however, was a slow process." Mrs Ritchie refers to spoken words of Browning which declared that it was "a mere chance whether he should live in the London house that he had taken and join in social life, or go away to some quiet retreat, and be seen no more." It was in a modified form the story of the "fervid youth grown man," in his own "Daniel Bartoli," who in his desolation, after the death of his lady,

Trembled on the verge Of monkhood: trick of cowl and taste of scourge He tried: then, kicked not at the pricks perverse, But took again, for better or for worse, The old way of the world, and, much the same Man o' the outside, fairly played life's game.

Probably Browning had come to understand that in his relation to the past he was not more loyal in solitude than he might be in society; it was indeed the manlier loyalty to bear his full part in life. And as to his art, he felt that, with sufficient leisure to encounter the labour he had enjoined upon himself, it mattered little whether the remaining time was spent in a cave or in a court; strength may encounter the seductions either of the hermitage or of the crowd and still be the victor:

Strength may conclude in Archelaos' court, And yet esteem the silken company So much sky-scud, sea-froth, earth-thistledown, For aught their praise or blame should joy or grieve. Strength amid crowds as late in solitude May lead the still life, ply the wordless task.[90]

One cannot prescribe a hygiene to poets; the poet of passionate contemplation, such as was Wordsworth, could hardly quicken or develop his peculiar faculty by devotion to the entertainments of successive London seasons. And perhaps it is not certain that the genius of Browning was wholly a gainer by the superficial excitations of the dinner table and the reception room. But the truth is, as Mrs Browning had observed, that his energy was not exhausted by literary work, and that it preyed upon himself if no means of escape were found. If he was not at the piano, or shaping clay, or at the drawing-board, or walking fast and far, inward disturbances were set up which rent and frayed his mind. The pleasures of society both fatigued and rested Browning; they certainly relieved him from the troubles of super-abundant force.

In 1864 Dramatis Personae was published. It might be described as virtually a third volume of Men and Women. And yet a certain change of tone is discernible. Italy is no longer the background of the human figures. There is perhaps less opulence of colour; less of the manifold "joys of living." If higher points in the life of the spirit are not touched, the religious feeling has more of inwardness and is more detached from external historical fact than it had ever been before; there is more sense of resistance to and victory over whatever may seem adverse to the life of the soul. In the poems which deal with love the situations and postures of the spirit are less simple and are sometimes even strained; the fantastic and the grotesque occupy a smaller place; a plain dignity, a grave solemnity of style is attained in passages of A Death in the Desert, which had hardly been reached before. Yet substantially the volume is a continuation of the poems of 1855; except in one instance, where Tennyson's method in Maud, that of a sequence of lyrics, is adopted, the methods are the same; the predominating themes of Men and Women, love, art, religion, are the predominating themes of Dramatis Personae. A slight metrical complication—the internal rhyme in the second line of each stanza of Dis aliter visum and in the third line of the quatrains of May and Death—may be noted as indicating Browning's love of new metrical experiments. In the former of these poems the experiment cannot be called a success; the clash of sounds, "a mass of brass," "walked and talked," and the like, seems too much as if an accident had been converted into a rule.

Mr Sludge, "the Medium" the longest piece in the volume, has been already noticed. The story of the poor girl of Pornic, as Browning in a letter calls her, attracted him partly because it presented a psychological curiosity, partly because he cared to paint her hair in words,—gold in contrast with that pallid face—as much as his friend Rossetti might have wished to display a like splendour with the strokes of his brush:

Hair such a wonder of flix and floss, Freshness and fragrance—floods of it too! Gold, did I say? Nay, gold's mere dross.

The story, which might gratify a cynical observer of human nature, is treated by Browning without a touch of cynicism, except that ascribed to the priest—good easy man—who has lost a soul and gained an altar. A saint manque, whose legend is gruesome enough, but more pathetic than gruesome, becomes for the poet an involuntary witness of the Christian faith, and a type of the mystery of moral evil; but the psychological contrasts of the ambiguous creature, saint-sinner, and the visual contrast of

that face, like a silver wedge 'Mid the yellow wealth,

are of more worth than the sermon which the writer preaches in exposition of his tale. Had the form of the poem been Browning's favourite dramatic monologue, we can imagine that an ingenious apologia, convincing at least to Half-Pornic, could have been offered for the perversity of the dying girl's rifting every golden tress with gold.

No poem in the volume of Dramatis Personae is connected with pictorial art, unless it be the few lines entitled A Face, lines of which Emily Patmore, the poet's wife, was the subject, and written, as Browning seldom wrote, for the mere record of beauty. That "little head of hers" is transferred to Browning's panel in the manner of an early Tuscan piece of ideal loveliness; in purity of outline and of colour the delicate profile, the opening lips, the neck, the chin so naturally ally themselves to painting that nature is best comprehended through its imaginative transference to art. As Master Hugues of the earlier collection of poems converts a bewildering technique of music into poetry, and discovers in its intricate construction a certain interposing web spun by the brain between the soul and things divine, so Abt Vogler interprets music on the other side—that of immediate inspiration, to which the constructive element—real though slight—is subordinate. In the silence and vacuity which follow the impromptu on his orchestrion, the composer yearns, broods, aspires. Never were a ghostly troop of sounds reanimated and incarnated into industrious life more actually than by Browning's verse. They climb and crowd, they mount and march, and then pass away; but the musician's spirit is borne onward by the wind of his own mood, and it cannot stay its flight until it has found rest in God; all that was actual of harmonious sound has collapsed; but the sense of a mystery of divine suggestion abides in his heart; the partial beauty becomes a pledge of beauty in its plenitude; and then by a gentle return upon himself he resumes the life of every day, sobered, quieted and comforted. The poem touches the borderland where art and religion meet. The Toccata of Galuppi left behind as its relics the melancholy of mundane pleasure and a sense of its transitory existence. The extemporising of Abt Vogler fills the void which it has opened with the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.

Faith, victor over loss, in Abt Vogler, is victor over temporal decay in Rabbi Ben Ezra. The poem is the song of triumph of devout old age. Neither the shrunken sadness of Matthew Arnold's poem on old age, nor the wise moderation and acquiescence in the economy of force which an admirable poem by Emerson expresses, can be found here; and perhaps some stress and strain may be felt in Browning's effort to maintain his position. It is no "vale of years" of which Rabbi Ben Ezra tells; old age is viewed as an apex, a pinnacle, from which in thin translucent air all the efforts and all the errors of the past can be reviewed; the gifts of youth, the gifts of the flesh are not depreciated; but the highest attainment is that of knowledge won by experience—knowledge which can divide good from evil and what is true from what merely seems, knowledge which can put a just valuation not only on deeds but on every faint desire and unaccomplished purpose, and not only on achievements but failures. Possessed of such knowledge, tried in the probation of life and not found wanting, accepting its own peculiar trials, old age can enter into the rest of a clear and solemn vision, confident of being qualified at last to start forth upon that "adventure brave and new" to which death is a summons, and assured through experience that the power which gives our life its law is equalled by a superintending love. Ardour, and not lethargy, progress and not decline, are here represented as the characteristics of extreme old age. An enthusiasm of effort and of strenuous endurance, an enthusiasm of rest in knowledge, an enthusiasm of self-abandonment to God and the divine purpose make up the poem. At no time did Browning write verse which soars with a more steadfast and impassioned libration of wing. Death in Rabbi Ben Ezra is death as a friend. In the lines entitled Prospice it is death the adversary that is confronted and conquered; the poem is an act of the faith which comes through love; it is ascribed to no imaginary speaker, and does not, indeed, veil its personal character. No lonely adventure is here to reward the victor over death; the transcendent joy is human love recovered, which being once recovered, let whatever God may please succeed. The verses are a confession which gives the reason of that gallant beating up against the wind, noticeable in many of Browning's later poems. He could not cease from hope; but hope and faith had much to encounter, and sometimes he would reduce the grounds of his hope to the lowest, as if to make sure against illusion and to test the fortitude of hope even at its weakest. The hope of immortality which was his own inevitably extended itself beyond himself, and became an interpreter of the mysteries of our earthly life. In contrast with the ardent ideality of Rabbi Ben Ezra may be set the uncompromising realism of Apparent Failure, with its poetry of the Paris morgue. The lover of life will scrutinise death at its ugliest and worst, blinking no hideous fact. Yet, even so, the reverence for humanity—

Poor men, God made, and all for that!—

is not quenched, nor is the hope quenched that

After Last returns the First, Though a wide compass round be fetched, That what began best, can't end worst.

The optimism is unreasoned, and rightly so, for the spirit of the poem, with its suggestive title, is not argumentative. The sense of "the pity of it" in one heart, remorse which has somehow come into existence out of the obscure storehouse of nature, or out of God, is the only justification suggested for a hope that nature or God must at the last intend good and not evil to the poor defeated abjects, who most abhorred their lives in Paris yesterday. And the word "Nature" here would be rejected by Browning as less than the truth.

In 1864 under somewhat altered conditions, and from a ground somewhat shifted, Browning in A Death in the Desert and the Epilogue to "Dramatis Personae" continued his apology for the Christian faith. The apologetics are, however, in the first instance poems, and they remain poems at the last. The imaginary scene of the death of the Evangelist John is rendered with the finest art; its dignity is that of a certain noble bareness; in the dim-lighted grotto are the aged disciple and the little group of witnesses to whom he utters his legacy of words; at the cave's edge is the Bactrian crying from time to time his bird-like cry of assurance:

Outside was all noon and the burning blue.

The slow return of the dying man to consciousness of his surroundings is as true as if it were studied from a death-bed; his sudden awakening at the words "I am the Resurrection and the Life" arrives not as a dramatic surprise but as the simplest surprise of nature—light breaking forth before sunset. The chief speaker of the poem is chosen because the argument is one concerning faith that comes through love, and St John was the disciple who had learnt love's deepest secrets. The dialectic proceeds along large lines, which have only the subtlety of simplicity. The verse moves gravely, tenderly, often weighted with monosyllables; a pondering, dwelling verse; and great single lines arise so naturally that while they fill the mind with a peculiar power, they are felt to be of one texture with the whole: this, for example,—

We would not lose The last of what might happen on his face;

and this:—

When there was mid sea and the mighty things;

and this:—

Lie bare to the universal prick of light;

and these:—

The Bactrian was but a wild childish man, And could not write nor speak, but only loved.

Such lines, however, are made to be read in situ.

The faith of these latter days is the same as that of the first century, and is not the same. The story and the teaching of Christ had alike one end—to plant in the human consciousness the assurance of Divine Love, and to make us, in our degree, conscious partakers of that love. Where love is, there is Christ. Our conceptions of God are relative to our own understanding; but God as power, God as a communicating intelligence, God as love—Father, Son and Spirit—is the utmost that we can conceive of things above us. Let us now put that knowledge—imperfect though it may be—to use. Power, intelligence, love—these surround us everywhere; they are not mere projections from our own brain or hand or heart; and by us they are inconceivable otherwise than as personal attributes. The historical story of Christ is not lost, for it has grown into a larger assurance of faith. We are not concerned with the linen clothes and napkins of the empty sepulchre; Christ is arisen. Why revert to discuss miracles? The work of miracles—whatever they may have been—was long ago accomplished. The knowledge of the Divine Love, its appropriation by our own hearts, and the putting forth of that love in our lives—such for us is the Christian faith, such is the work of Christ accomplishing itself in humanity at the present time. And the Christian story is no myth but a reality, not because we can prove true the beliefs of the first century, but because those beliefs contained within them a larger and more enduring belief. The acorn has not perished because it has expanded into an oak.

This, reduced here to the baldest statement, is in substance the dying testimony of Browning's St John. It is thrown into lyrical form as his own testimony in the Epilogue to the volume of 1864. The voices of singers, the sound of the trumpets of the Jewish Dedication Day, when the glory of the Lord in His cloud filled His house, have fallen silent. We are told by some that the divine Face, known to early Christian days as love, has withdrawn from earth for ever, and left humanity enthroned as its sole representative:

Oh, dread succession to a dizzy post, Sad sway of sceptre whose mere touch appals.

Browning's reply is that to one whose eyes are rightly informed the whole of nature and of human life shows itself as a perpetual mystery of providential care:

Why, where's the need of Temple, when the walls O' the world are that? What use of swells and falls From Levites' choir, Priests' cries, and trumpet calls?

That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows, Or decomposes but to recompose, Become my universe that feels and knows.[91]

In the great poem of 1868-69, The Ring and the Book, one speaker, the venerable Pope, like St John of A Death in the Desert, has almost reached the term of a long life: he is absorbed in the solemn weighing of truth and falsehood, good and evil; his soul, like the soul of the dying Evangelist:

Lies bare to the universal prick of light.

He, if any of the speakers in that sequence of monologues, expresses Browning's own highest thought. And the Pope's exposition of the Christianity of our modern age is identical with that of John. Man's mind is but "a convex glass" in which is represented all that by us can be conceived of God, "our known unknown." The Pope has heard the Christian story which is abroad in the world; he loves it and finds it credible. God's power—that is clearly discernible in the universe; His intelligence—that is no less evidently present. What of love? The dread machinery of sin and sorrow on this globe of ours seems to negative the idea of divine love. The surmise of immortality may indeed justify the ways of God to man; this "dread machinery" may be needed to evolve man's highest moral qualities. The acknowledgment of God in Christ, the divine self-sacrifice of love, for the Pope, as for St John, solves

All questions in the earth and out of it.

But whether the truth of the early centuries be an absolute historic fact,

Or only truth reverberate, changed, made pass A spectrum into mind, the narrow eye— The same and not the same, else unconceived—

the Pope dare not affirm. Nor does he regard the question as of urgent importance at the present day; the effect of the Christian tale—historic fact, or higher fact expressed in myth—remains:

So my heart be struck, What care I,—by God's gloved hand or the bare?

By some means, means divinely chosen even if but a child's fable-book, we have got our truth, and it suffices for our training here on earth. Let us give over the endless task of unproving and re-proving the already proved; rather let us straightway put our truth to its proper uses.[92]

If the grotesque occupies a comparatively small place in Dramatis Personae, the example given is of capital importance in this province of Browning's art. The devil of Notre Dame, looking down on Paris, is more effectively placed, but is hardly a more impressive invention of Gothic fantasy than Caliban sprawling in the pit's much mire,

With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin,

while he discourses, with a half-developed consciousness, itself in the mire and scarcely yet pawing to get free, concerning the nature of his Creator. The grotesque here is not merely of the kind that addresses the eye; the poem is an experiment in the grotesque of thought; and yet fantastic as it seems, the whole process of this monstrous Bridgewater treatise is governed by a certain logic. The poem, indeed, is essentially a fragment of Browning's own Christian apologetics; it stands as a burly gate-tower from which boiling pitch can be flung upon the heads of assailants. The poet's intention is not at all to give us a chapter in the origins of religion; nor is Caliban a representative of primitive man. A frequently recurring idea with Browning is that expressed by Pope Innocent in the passage already cited; the external world proves the power of God; it proves His intelligence: but the proof of love is derived exclusively from the love that lives in the heart of man. Are you dissatisfied with such a proof? Well, then, see what a god we can construct out of intelligence and power, with love left out! If this world is not a place of trial and training appointed by love, then it is a scene of capricious cruelty or capricious indifference on the part of our Maker; His providence is a wanton sporting with our weakness and our misery. Why were we brought into being? To amuse His solitary and weary intelligence, and to become the victims or the indulged manifestations of His power. Why is one man selected for extreme agony from which a score of his fellows escape? Because god Setebos resembles Caliban, when through mere caprice he lets twenty crabs march past him unhurt and stones the twenty-first,

Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.

If any of the phenomena of nature lead us to infer or imagine some law superior to the idle artistry and reckless will of Setebos, that law is surely very far away; it is "the Quiet" of Caliban's theology which takes no heed of human life and has for its outposts the cold unmoving stars.

Except the short piece named May and Death, which like Rossetti's poem of the wood-spurge, is founded upon one of those freaks of association that make some trival object the special remembrancer of sorrow, the remaining poems of Dramatis Personae, as originally published, are all poems of love. A Likeness, skilfully contrived in the indirect directness of its acknowledgment of love, its jealous privacy of passion, and its irresistible delight in the homage rendered by one who is not a lover, is no exception. Not one of these poems tells of the full assurance and abiding happiness of lovers. But the warmth and sweetness of early passion are alive under the most disastrous circumstances in Confessions. The apothecary with his bottles provides a chart of the scene of the boy-and-girl adventures; the professional gravities of the parson put an edge on the memory of the dear indiscretions; "summer's distillation," to borrow a word from Shakespeare, makes faint the odour of the bottle labelled "Ether"; the mummy wheat from the coffin of old desire sprouts up and waves its green pennons. Youth and Art may be placed beside the earlier Respectability as two pages out of the history of the encounters of prudence and passion; youth and maiden alike, boy-sculptor and girl-singer, prefer the prudence of worldly success to the infinite prudence of love; and they have their reward—that success in life which is failure. Like the tedious brief scene of young Pyramus and Thisbe, this is a poem of "very tragical mirth." And no less tragically mirthful is Dis Aliter Visum, a variation on the same or a kindred theme, where our young Bohemian sculptor is replaced by the elderly poet, bent, wigged, and lamed, but sure of the fortieth chair in the Academy, and the lone she-sparrow of the house-top by a young beauty, who adds to her other attractions a vague, uninstructed yearning for culture and entirely substantial possessions in the three-per-cents. But the moral is the same—the folly of being overwise, the wisdom of acting upon the best promptings of the heart. In Too Late Browning attempts to render a mood of passionate despair;—love and the hopes of love are defeated by a woman's sentence of rejection, her marriage, and, last, her death; it reads, more than any other poem of the writer, like a leaf torn out of "Wuthering Heights." There is a fixity of grief which is more appalling than this whirlblast; the souls that are wedged in ice occupy a lower circle in the region of sorrow than those which are driven before the gale. The Worst of it—another poem of the failures of love—reverses the conventional attitude of the wronged husband; he ought, according to all recognised authorities of drama and novel, rage against his faithless wife, and commiserate his virtuous self; here he endeavours, though vainly, to transfer every stain and shame to himself from her; his anguish is all on her behalf, or if on his own chiefly because he cannot restore her purity or save her from her wrong done against herself. It is a poem of moral stress and strain, imagined with great intensity. Browning in general isolates a single moment or mood of passion, and studies it, with its shifting lights and shadows, as a living microcosm; often it is a moment of crisis, a moment of culmination. For once in James Lee's Wife (named in the first edition by a stroke of perversity James Lee), he represents in a sequence of lyrics a sequence of moods, and with singular success. The season of the year is autumn, and autumn as felt not among golden wheatfields, but on a barren and rocky sea-coast; the processes of the declining year, from the first touch of change to bareness everywhere, accompany and accord with those of the decline of hope in the wife's heart for any return of her love. Her offence is that she has loved too well; that she has laid upon her husband too great a load of devotion; hostility might be met and vanquished; but how can she deal with a heart which love itself only petrifies? It should be a warning to critics who translate dramatic poems into imaginary biography to find that Browning, who had known so perfect a success in the one love of his life, should constantly present in work of imagination the ill fortunes of love and lovers. Looking a little below the surface we see that he could not write directly, he could not speak effusively, of the joy that he had known. But in all these poems he thinks of love as a supreme possession in itself and as a revelation of infinite things which lie beyond it; as a test of character, and even as a pledge of perpetual advance in the life of the spirit.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 84: Letter to Story in Henry James's "W.W. Story," vol. ii. p. 91 and p. 97.]

[Footnote 85: H. James's "W.W. Story," vol. ii. p. 100.]

[Footnote 86: "Rossetti Papers," p. 302.]

[Footnote 87: In 1863 Browning gave time and pains to revising his friend Story's Roba di Roma.]

[Footnote 88: In 1864 Browning again "braved the awful Biarritz" and stayed at Cambo. On this occasion he visted Fontarabia. An interesting letter from Cambo, undated as to time, is printed in Henry James's "W.W. Story," vol. ii. pp. 153-156. The year—1864—may be ascertained by comparing it with a letter addressed to F.T. Palgrave, given in Palgrave's Life, the date of this letter being Oct. 19, 1864. Browning in the letter to Story speaks of "the last two years in the dear rough Ste.-Marie."]

[Footnote 89: Was the poem Gold Hair? If three stanzas were added to the first draft before the poem appeared in The Atlantic Monthly the number of lines would have been 120. Stanzas 21, 22 and 23 were added in the Dramatis Personae version.]

[Footnote 90: Aristophanes' Apology (spoken of Euripides).]

[Footnote 91: Compare with Epilogue: Third Speaker the lines from A Death in the Desert:

Then stand before that fact, that Life and Death, Stay there at gaze, till it dispart, dispread, As though a star should open out, all sides, Grow the world on you, as it is my world.

[Footnote 92: Statements by Mrs Orr with respect to Browning's relations to Christianity will be found on p. 319 and p. 373 of her Life of Browning. She regarded "La Saisiaz" as conclusive proof of his "heterodox attitude." Robert Buchanan, in the Epistle dedicatory to "The Outcast," alleges that he questioned Browning as to whether he were a Christian, and that Browning "thundered No!" The statement embodied in my text above is substantially not mine but Browning's own. See on Ferishtah's Fancies in chapter xvi.]



Chapter XII

The Ring and the Book

The publication of Dramatis Personae marks an advance in Browning's growing popularity; a second edition, in which some improvements were effected, was called for in 1864, the year of its first publication. "All my new cultivators," Browning wrote, "are young men"; many of them belonged to Oxford and Cambridge. But he was resolved to consult his own taste, to take his own way, and let popularity delay or hasten as it would—"pleasing myself," he says, "or aiming at doing so, and thereby, I hope, pleasing God." His life had ordered itself as seemed best to him—a life in London during the months in which the tide flows and sparkles; then summer and autumn quietude in some retreat upon the French coast. The years passed in such a uniformity of work and rest, with enjoyment accompanying each of these, that they may almost be grasped in bundles. In 1865, the holiday was again at Sainte-Marie, and the weather was golden; but he noticed with regret that the old church at Pornic, where the beautiful white girl of his poem had been buried, was disappearing to give space in front of a new and smart erection of brick and stucco. His Florence, as he learnt, was also altering, and he lamented the change. Every detail of the Italian days lived in his memory; the violets and ground ivy on a certain old wall; the fig tree behind the Siena villa, under which his wife would sit and read, and "poor old Landor's oak." "I never hear of any one going to Florence," he wrote in 1870, "but my heart is twitched." He would like to "glide for a long summer-day through the streets and between the old stone-walls—unseen come and unheard go." But he must guard himself against being overwhelmed by recollection: "Oh, me! to find myself some late sunshiny Sunday afternoon, with my face turned to Florence—'ten minutes to the gate, ten minutes home!' I think I should fairly end it all on the spot."[93]

Other changes sadder than the loss of old Norman pillars and ornaments, or new barbarous structures, run up beside Poggio, were happening. In May 1866 Browning's father, kind and cheery old man, was unwell; in June Miss Browning telegraphed for her brother, and he arrived in Paris twenty-four hours before the end. The elder Browning had almost completed his eighty-fifth year. To the last he retained what his son described as "his own strange sweetness of soul." It was the close of a useful, unworldly, unambitious life, full of innocent enjoyment and deep affection. The occasion was not one for intemperate grief, but the sense of loss was great. Miss Browning, whose devotion during many years first to her mother, then to her widowed father, had been entire, now became her brother's constant companion. They rested for the summer at Le Croisic, a little town in Brittany, in a delightfully spacious old house, with the sea to right and left, through whose great rushing waves Browning loved to battle, and, inland, a wild country, picturesque with its flap-hatted, white-clad, baggy-breeched villagers. Their enjoyment was unspoilt even by some weeks of disagreeable weather, and to the same place, which Browning has described in his Two Poets of Croisic—

Croisic, the spit of sandy rock which juts Spitefully north,

they returned in the following summer. During this second visit (September 1867) that most spirited ballad of French heroism, Herve Riel, was written, though its publication belongs to four years later.[94]

In June 1868 came grief of a kind that seemed to cut him off from outward communication with a portion of what was most precious in his past life. Arabel Barrett, his wife's only surviving sister, who had supported him in his greatest sorrow, died in Browning's arms. "For many years," we are told by Mr Gosse, "he was careful never to pass her house in Delamere Terrace." Although not prone to superstition, he had noted in July 1863 a dream of Miss Barrett in which she imagined herself asking her dead sister Elizabeth, "When shall I be with you?" and received the answer, "Dearest, in five years." "Only a coincidence," he adds in a letter to Miss Blagden, "but noticeable." That summer, after wanderings in France, Browning and his sister settled at Audierne, on the extreme westerly point of Brittany, "a delightful, quite unspoiled little fishing town," with the ocean in front and green lanes and hills behind. It was in every way an eventful year. In the autumn his new publishers, Smith, Elder & Co., produced the six-volume edition of his Poetical Works, on the title-page of which the author describes himself as "Robert Browning, M.A., Honorary Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford." The distinction, partly due to Jowett's influence, had been conferred a year previously. In 1865, Browning, who desired that his son should be educated at Oxford, first became acquainted with Jowett. Acquaintance quickly ripened into friendship, which was not the less genuine or cordial because Jowett had but a qualified esteem for Browning's poems. "Ought one to admire one's friend's poetry?" was a difficult question of casuistry which the Master of Balliol at one time proposed. Much of Browning's work appeared to him to be "extravagant, perverse, topsy-turvy"; "there is no rest in him," Jowett wrote with special reference to the poems "Christmas Eve" and "Easter Day," which he regarded as Browning's noblest work. But for the man his admiration was deep-based and substantial. After Browning's first visit to him in June 1865, Jowett wrote that though getting too old to make, as he supposed, new friends, he had—he believed—made one. "It is impossible to speak without enthusiasm of Mr Browning's open, generous nature and his great ability and knowledge. I had no idea that there was a perfectly sensible poet in the world, entirely free from vanity, jealousy, or any other littleness, and thinking no more of himself than any ordinary man. His great energy is very remarkable, and his determination to make the most of the remainder of life. Of personal objects he seems to have none except the education of his son."[95] Browning's visits to Oxford and Cambridge did not cease when he dropped away from the round of visiting at country houses. He writes with frank enjoyment of the almost interminable banquet given at Balliol in the Lent Term, 1877, on the occasion of the opening of the new Hall. Oxford conferred upon him her D.C.L. in 1882, on which occasion a happy undergraduate jester sent fluttering towards the new Doctor's head an appropriate allusion in the form of a red cotton night-cap. The Cambridge LL.D. was conferred in 1879. In 1871 he was elected a Life Governor of the University of London. In 1868 he was invited to stand, with the certainty of election, for the Lord Rectorship of the University of St Andrews, as successor to John Stuart Mill, an honour which he declined.[96] The great event of this year in the history of his authorship was the publication in November and December of the first two volumes of The Ring and the Book. The two remaining volumes followed in January and February 1869.



In June 1860 Browning lighted, among the litter of odds and ends exposed for sale in the Piazza San Lorenzo, Florence, upon the "square old yellow book," part print, part manuscript, which contained the crude fact from which his poem of the Franceschini murder case was developed. The price was a lira, "eightpence English just." As he leaned by the fountain and walked through street and street, he read, and had mastered the contents before his foot was on the threshold of Casa Guidi[97]. That night his brain was a-work; pacing the terrace of Casa Guidi, while from Felice church opposite came

the clear voice of the cloistered ones, Chanting a chant made for mid-summer nights,

he gave himself up to the excitement of re-creating the actors and re-enacting their deeds in his imagination:

I fused my live soul and that inert stuff, Before attempting smithcraft.

According to Mr Rudolf Lehmann, but possibly he has antedated the incident, Browning at once conceived the mode in which the subject could be treated in poetry, and it was precisely the mode which was afterwards adopted: "'When I had read the book,' so Browning told me, 'my plan was at once settled. I went for a walk, gathered twelve pebbles from the road, and put them at equal distances on the parapet that bordered it. Those represented the twelve chapters into which the poem is divided, and I adhered to that arrangement to the last.'"[98] When in the autumn he journeyed with his wife to Rome, the vellum-bound quarto was with him, but the persons from whom he sought further light about the murder and the trial could give little information or none. Smithcraft did not soon begin. He offered the story, "for prose treatment" to Miss Ogle, so we are informed by Mrs Orr, and, she adds, but with less assurance of statement, offered it "for poetic use to one of his leading contemporaries." We have seen that in a letter of 1862 from Biarritz, Browning speaks of the Roman murder case as being the subject of a new poem already clearly conceived though unwritten. In the last section of The Ring and the Book, he refers to having been in close converse with his old quarto of the Piazza San Lorenzo during four years:

How will it be, my four-years' intimate, When thou and I part company anon?

The publication of Dramatis Personae in 1864 doubtless enabled Browning to give undivided attention to his vast design. In October of that year he advanced to actual definition of his scheme. When staying in the south of France he visited the mountain gorge which is connected with the adventure of the Roland of romance, and there he planned the whole poem precisely as it was carried out. "He says," Mr W.M. Rossetti enters in his diary after a conversation with Browning (15 March 1868), "he writes day by day on a regular systematic plan—some three hours in the early part of the day; he seldom or never, unless in quite brief poems, feels the inspiring impulse and sets the thing down into words at the same time—often stores up a subject long before he writes it. He has written his forthcoming work all consecutively—not some of the later parts before the earlier."[99]

When Carlyle met Browning after the appearance of The Ring and the Book, he desired to be complimentary, but was hardly more felicitous than Browning himself had sometimes been when under a like necessity: "It is a wonderful book," declared Carlyle, "one of the most wonderful poems ever written. I re-read it all through—all made out of an Old Bailey story that might have been told in ten lines, and only wants forgetting."[100] A like remark might have been made respecting the book which, in its method and its range of all English books most resembles Browning's poem, and which may indeed be said to take among prose works of fiction a similar place to that held among poetical creations by Browning's tale of Guido and Pompilia. Richardson's Clarissa consists of eight volumes made out of an Old Bailey story, or what might have been such, which one short newspaper paragraph could have dismissed to a happy or sorrowful oblivion. But then we should never have known two of the most impressive figures invented by the imagination of man, Clarissa and her wronger; and had we not heard their story from all the participators and told with Richardson's characteristic interest in the microscopy of the human heart, it could never have possessed our minds with that full sense of its reality which is the experience of every reader. Out of the infinitesimally little emerges what is great; out of the transitory moments rise the forms that endure. It is of little profit to discuss the question whether Richardson could have effected his purpose in four volumes instead of eight, or whether Browning ought to have contented himself with ten thousand lines of verse instead of twenty thousand. No one probably has said of either work that it is too short, and many have uttered the sentence of the critical Polonius—"This is too long." But neither Clarissa nor The Ring and the Book is one of the Hundred Merry Tales; the purpose of each writer is triumphantly effected; and while we wish that the same effect could have been produced by means less elaborate, it is not safe to assert confidently that this was possible.

It has often been said that the story is told ten times over by almost as many speakers; it would be more correct to say that the story is not told even once. Nine different speakers tell nine different stories, stories of varying incidents about different persons—for the Pompilia of Guido and the Pompilia of Caponsacchi are as remote, each from other, as a marsh-fire from a star, and so with the rest. In the end we are left to invent the story for ourselves—not indeed without sufficient guidance towards the truth of things, since the successive speeches are a discipline in distinguishing the several values of human testimony. We become familiar with idols of the cave, idols of the tribe, idols of the market-place, and shall recognise them if we meet them again. Gossipry on this side is checked and controlled by gossipry on that; and the nicely balanced indifferentism of men emasculate, blank of belief, who play with the realities of life, is set forth with its superior foolishness of wisdom. The advocacy which consists of professional self-display is exhibited genially, humorously, an advocacy horn-eyed to the truth of its own case, to every truth, indeed, save one—that which commends the advocate himself, his ingenious wit, and his flowers of rhetoric. The criminal is allowed his due portion of veracity and his fragment of truth—"What shall a man give for his life?" He has enough truth to enable him to fold a cloud across the light, to wrench away the sign-posts and reverse their pointing hands, to remove the land-marks, to set up false signal fires upon the rocks. And then are heard three successive voices, each of which, and each in a different way, brings to our mind the words, "But there is a spirit in man; and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding." First the voice of the pure passion of manhood, which is naked and unashamed; a voice terrible in its sincerity, absolute in its abandonment to truth, prophet-like in its carelessness of personal consequences, its carelessness of all except the deliverance of a message—and yet withal a courtly voice, and, if it please, ironical. It is as if Elihu the son of Barachel stood up and his wrath were kindled: "Behold my belly is as wine which hath no vent; it is ready to burst like new bottles. I will speak that I may be refreshed." And yet we dare not say that Caponsacchi's truth is the whole truth; he speaks like a man newly converted, still astonished by the supernatural light, and inaccessible to many things visible in the light of common day. Next, a voice from one who is human indeed "to the red-ripe of the heart," but who is already withdrawn from all the turbulence and turbidity of life; the voice of a woman who is still a child; of a mother who is still virginal; of primitive instinct, which comes from God, and spiritual desire kindled by that saintly knighthood that had saved her; a voice from the edge of the world, where the dawn of another world has begun to tremble and grow luminous,—uttering its fragment of the truth. Last, the voice of old age, and authority and matured experience, and divine illumination, old age encompassed by much doubt and weariness and human infirmity, a solemn, pondering voice, which, with God somewhere in the clear-obscure, goes sounding on a dim and perilous way, until in a moment this voice of the anxious explorer for truth changes to the voice of the unalterable justicer, the armed doomsman of righteousness.

Truth absolute is not attained by any one of the speakers; that, Browning would say, is the concern of God. And so, at the close, we are directed to take to heart the lesson

That our human speech is naught, Our human testimony false, our fame And human estimation words and wind.

But there are degrees of approximation to truth and of remoteness from it. Truth as apprehended by pure passion, truth as apprehended by simplicity of soul ("And a little child shall lead them"), truth as apprehended by spiritual experience—such respectively make up the substance of the monologues of Caponsacchi, of Pompilia, and of the Pope. For the valuation, however, of this loftier testimony we require a sense of the level ground, even if it be the fen-country. A perception of the heights must be given by exhibiting the plain. If we were carried up in the air and heard these voices how should we know for certain that we had not become inhabitants of some Cloudcuckootown? And the plain is where we ordinarily live and move; it has its rights, and is worth understanding for its own sake. Therefore we shall mix our mind with that of "Half-Rome" and "The Other Half-Rome" before we climb any mounts of transfiguration or enter any city set upon a hill. The "man in the street" is a veritable person, and it is good that we should make his acquaintance; even the man in the salon may speak his mind if he will; such shallow excitements, such idle curiosities as theirs will enable us better to appreciate the upheaval to the depths in the heart of Caponsacchi, the quietude, and the rapt joy in quietude, of Pompilia, the profound searchings of spirit that proceed all through the droop of that sombre February day in the closet of the Pope. And, then, at the most tragic moment and when pathos is most poignant, life goes on, and the world is wide, and laughter is not banished from earth. Therefore Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis, Procurator of the Poor, shall make his ingenious notes for the defence of Count Guido, and cite his precedents and quote his authorities, and darken counsel with words, all to be by and by ecclesiasticized and regularized and Latinized and Ciceroized, while more than half the good man's mind is occupied with thought of the imminent "lovesome frolic feast" on his boy Cinone's birth-night, which shall bring with it lamb's fry and liver, stung out of its monotony of richness by parsley-sprigs and fennel. Yes, and we shall hear also the other side—how, in a florilegium of Latin, selected to honour aright the Graces and the Muses and the majesty of Law, Johannes-Baptista Bottinius can do justice to his client and to his own genius by showing, with due exordium and argument and peroration, that Pompilia is all that her worst adversaries allege, and yet can be established innocent, or not so very guilty, by her rhetorician's learning and legal deftness in quart and tierce.

The secondary personages in Richardson's "Clarissa" grow somewhat faint in our memories; but the figures of his heroine and of Lovelace remain not only uneffaceable but undimmed by time. Four of the dramatis personae of Browning's poem in like manner possess an enduring life, which shows no decline or abatement after the effect of the monologues by the other speakers has been produced and the speakers themselves almost forgotten. Count Guide Franceschini is not a miracle of evil rendered credible, like Shakespeare's Iago, nor a strange enormity of tyrannous hate and lust like the Count Cenci of Shelley. He has no spirit of diabolic revelry in crime; no feeling for its delicate artistry; he is under no spell of fascination derived from its horror. He is clumsy in his fraud and coarse in his violence. Sin may have its strangeness in beauty; but Guido does not gleam with the romance of sin. If Browning once or twice gives his fantasy play, it is in describing the black cave of a palace at Arezzo into which the white Pompilia is borne, the cave and its denizens—the "gaunt gray nightmare" of a mother, mopping and mowing in the dusk, the brothers, "two obscure goblin creatures, fox-faced this, cat-clawed the other," with Guido himself as the main monster. Yet the Count, short of stature, "hook-nosed and yellow in a bush of beard" is not a monster but a man; possessed of intellectual ability and a certain grace of bearing when occasion requires; although wrenched and enfeebled by the torture of the rack he holds his ground, has even a little irony to spare, and makes a skilful defence. Browning does not need a lithe, beautiful, mysterious human panther, and is content with a plain, prosaic, serviceable villain, who would have been disdained by the genius of the dramatist Webster as wanting in romance. But like some of Webster's saturnine, fantastic assistants or tools in crime, Guido has failed in everything, is no longer young, chews upon the bitter root of failure, and is half-poisoned by its acrid juices. He is godless in an age of godless living; cynical in a cynical generation; and ever and anon he betrays the licentious imagination of an age of license. He plays a poor part in the cruel farce of life, and snarls against the world, while clinging desperately to the world and to life. A disinterested loyalty to the powers of evil might display a certain gallantry of its own, but, though Guido loathes goodness, his devotion to evil has no inverted chivalry in it—there is always a valid reason, a sordid motive for his rage. And in truth he has grounds of complaint, which a wave of generous passion would have swept away, but which, following upon the ill successes of his life, might well make a bad man mad. His wife, palmed off upon the representative of an ancient and noble house, is the child of a nameless father and a common harlot of Rome; she is repelled by his person; and her cold submission to what she has been instructed in by the Archbishop as the duties of a wife is more intolerable than her earlier remoter aversion. He is cheated of the dowry which lured him to marriage. He is pointed at with smiling scorn by the gossips of Arezzo. A gallant of the troop of Satan might have devised and executed some splendid revenge; but Guido is ever among the sutlers and camp-followers of the fiend, who are base before they are bold. When he makes his final pleading for life in the cell of the New Prison by Castle Angelo, the animal cry, like that of a wild cat on whom the teeth of the trap have closed, is rendered shrill by the intensity of imagination with which he pictures to himself the apparatus of the scaffold and the hideous circumstance of his death. His effort, as far as it is rational, is to transfer the guilt of his deeds to anyone or everyone but himself. When all other resources fail he boldly lays the offence upon God, who has made him what he is. It was a fine audacity of Browning in imagining the last desperate shriek of the wretched man, uttered as the black-hatted Brotherhood of Death descend the stairs singing their accursed psalm, to carry the climax of appeal to the powers of charity, "Christ,—Maria,—God," one degree farther, and make the murderer last of all cry upon his victim to be his saviour from the death which he dares to name by the name of his own crime, a name which that crime might seem to have sequestered from all other uses:—

"Pompilia, will you let them murder me?"

Pompilia is conceived by Browning not as a pale, passive victim, but as strong with a vivid, interior life, and not more perfect in patience than in her obedience to the higher law which summons her to resistance to evil and championship of the right. Her purity is not the purity of ice but of fire. When the Pope would find for himself a symbol to body forth her soul, it is not a lily that he thinks of but a rose. Others may yield to the eye of God a "timid leaf" and an "uncertain bud,"

While—see how this mere chance sown, cleft-nursed seed That sprang up by the wayside 'neath the foot Of the enemy, this breaks all into blaze, Spreads itself, one wide glory of desire To incorporate the whole great sun it loves From the inch-height whence it looks and longs. My flower, My rose, I gather for the breast of God.

As she lies on her pallet, dying "in the good house that helps the poor to die," she is far withdrawn from the things of time; her life, with all its pleasures and its pains, seems strange and far away—

Looks old, fantastic and impossible: I touch a fairy thing that fades and fades.

Two possessions, out of what life has brought, remain with her—the babe, who while yet unborn had converted her from a sufferer to a defender, and the friend who has saved her soul. Even motherhood itself is not the deepest thing in Pompilia's nature. The little Gaetano, whom she had held in her arms for three days, will change; he will grow great, strong, stern, a tall young man, who cannot guess what she was like, who may some day have some hard thought of her. He too withdraws into the dream of earth. She can never lose him, and yet lose him she surely must; all she can do is by dying to give him "out-right to God, without a further care," so to be safe. But one experience of Pompilia's life was quite out of time, and belongs by its mere essence to eternity. Having laid her babe away with God, she must not even "think of him again, for gratitude"; and her last breath shall spend itself in doing service to earth by striving to make men know aright what earth will for a time possess and then, forever, heaven—God's servant, man's friend, the saviour of the weak, the foe of all who are vile—and to the gossips of Arezzo and of Rome the fribble and coxcomb and light-of-love priest, Caponsacchi.

If any point in the whole long poem, The Ring and the Book, can be described as central, it must be found in the relations, each to the other, of Caponsacchi and Pompilia. The truth of it, as conceived by Browning, could hardly be told otherwise than in poetry, for it needs the faith that comes through spiritual beauty to render it comprehensible and credible, and such beauty is best expressed by art. It is easy to convince the world of a passion between the sexes which is simply animal; nor is art much needed to help out the proof. Happily the human love, in which body and soul play in varying degrees their parts, and each an honoured part, is in widest commonalty spread. But the love that is wholly spiritual seems to some a supernatural thing, and if it be not discredited as utterly unreal (which at certain periods, if literature be a test, has been the case), it is apt to appear as a thing phantom-like, tenuous, and cold. But, in truth, this reality once experienced makes the other realities appear the shadows, and it is an ardour as passionate as any that is known to man. Its special note is a deliverance from self with a joy in abandonment to some thing other than self, like that which has been often recorded as an experience in religious conversion; when Bunyan, for example, ceased from the efforts to establish his own righteousness and saw that righteousness above him in the eternal heavens, he walked as a man suddenly illuminated, and could hardly forbear telling his joy to the crows upon the plough-land; and so, in its degree, with the spiritual exaltation produced by the love of man and woman when it touches a certain rare but real altitude. If a poet can succeed in lifting up our hearts so that they may know for actual the truth of these things, he has contributed an important fragment towards an interpretation of human life. And this Browning has assuredly done. The sense of a power outside oneself whose influence invades the just-awakened man, the conviction that the secret of life has been revealed, the lying passive and prone to the influx of the spirit, the illumination, the joy, the assurance that old things have passed away and that all things have become new, the acceptance of a supreme law, the belief in a victory obtained over time and death, the rapture in a heart prepared for all self-sacrifice, entire immolation—these are rendered by Browning with a fidelity which if reached solely by imagination is indeed surprising, for who can discover these mysteries except through a personal experience?[101] If the senses co-operate—as perhaps they do—in such mysteries, they are senses in a state of transfiguration, senses taken up into the spirit—"Whether in the body or out of the body I cannot tell." When Caponsacchi bears the body of Pompilia in a swoon to her chamber in the inn at Castelnuovo, it is as if he bore the host. From the first moment when he set eyes upon her in the theatre,

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

he is delivered from his frivolous self, he is solemnized and awed; the form of his worship is self-sacrifice; his first word to her—"I am yours "—is

An eternity Of speech, to match the immeasurable depth O' the soul that then broke silence.

To abstain from ever seeing her again would be joy more than pain if this were duty to her and to God. For him the mere revelation of Pompilia would suffice. His inmost feeling is summed up with perfect adequacy in a word to the Judges: "You know this is not love, Sirs—it is faith."

There is another kind of faith which comes not suddenly through passion but slowly through thought and action and trial, and the long fidelity of a life. It is that of which Milton speaks in the lines:

Till old experience do attain To something of Prophetic strain.

This is the faith of Browning's Pope Innocent, who up to extreme old age has kept open his intelligence both on the earthward and the Godward sides, and who, being wholly delivered from self by that devotion to duty which is the habit of his mind, can apprehend the truth of things and pronounce judgment upon them almost with the certitude of an instrument of the divine righteousness. And yet he is entirely human, God's vicegerent and also an old man, learned in the secrets of the heart, patient in the inquisition of facts, weighing his documents, scrutinising each fragment of evidence, burdened by the sense of responsibility, cheered also by the opportunity of true service, grave but not sad—

Simple, sagacious, mild yet resolute, With prudence, probity and—what beside From the other world he feels impress at times;

a "grey ultimate decrepitude," yet visited by the spiritual fire which touches a soul whose robe of flesh is worn thin; not unassailed by doubts as to the justice of his final decision, but assured that his part is confidently to make the best use of the powers with which he has been entrusted; young of heart, if also old, in his rejoicing in goodness and his antipathy to evil.

The Ring and the Book is a great receptacle into which Browning poured, with an affluence that perhaps is excessive, all his powers—his searchings for truth, his passion, his casuistry, his feeling for beauty, his tenderness, his gift of pity, his veiled memories of what was most precious in the past, his hopes for the future, his worldly knowledge, his unworldly aspirations, his humour, such as it was, robust rather than delicate. Could the three monologues which tell how in various ways it strikes a Roman contemporary have been fused into a single dialogue, could the speeches of the two advocates have been briefly set over, one against the other, instead of being drawn out at length, we might still have got the whole of Browning's mind. But we must take things as we find them, and perhaps a skilled writer knows his own business best. Never was Browning's mastery in narrative displayed with such effect as in Caponsacchi's account of the flight to Rome, which is not mere record, but record winged with lyrical enthusiasm. Never was his tenderness so deep or poignant as in his realisation of the motherhood of Pompilia. Never were the gropings of intellect and the intuitions of the spirit shown by him in their weakness and their strength with such a lucid subtlety as in the deliberations and decisions of the Pope. The whole poem which he compares to a ring was the ring of a strong male finger; but the posy of the ring, and the comparison is again his own, tells how it was a gift hammered and filed during the years of smithcraft "in memoriam"; in memory and also with a hope.

The British Public, whom Browning addresses at the close of his poem, and who "liked him not" during so many years, now when he was not far from sixty went over to his side. The Ring and the Book almost immediately passed into a second edition. The decade from 1869 onwards is called by Mrs Orr the fullest period in Browning's life. His social occupations and entertainments both in London and for a time as a visitor at country-houses became more numerous and absorbing, yet he had energy for work as well as for play. During these ten years no fewer than nine new volumes of his poetry appeared. None of them are London poems, and Italy is for the present almost forgotten; it is the scene of only two or three short pieces, which are included in the volume of 1876—Pacchiarotto and how he worked in distemper; with other Poems. The other pieces of the decade as regards their origin fall with a single exception into two groups; first those of ancient Greece, suggested by Browning's studies in classical drama; secondly those, which in a greater or less degree, are connected with his summer wanderings in France and Switzerland. The dream-scene of Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau is Leicester Square; but this also is one of the poems of France. The Inn Album alone is English in its characters and their surroundings. Such a grouping of the works of the period is of a superficial nature, and it can be readily dismissed. It brings into prominence, however, the fact that Browning, while resolved to work out what was in him, lay open to casual suggestions. He had acquired certain methods which he could apply to almost any topic. He had confidence that any subject on which he concentrated his powers of mind could be compelled to yield material of interest. It cannot be said that he exercised always a wise discretion in the choice of subjects; these ought to have been excellent in themselves; he trusted too much to the successful issue of the play of his own intellect and imagination around and about his subjects. The Ring and the Book had given him practice, extending over several years, in handling the large dramatic monologue. Now he was prepared to stretch the dramatic monologue beyond the bounds, and new devices were invented to keep it from stagnating and to carry it forward. Imaginary disputants intervene in the monologue; there are objections, replies, retorts; a second player in the game not being found, the speaker has to play against himself.

In the story of the Roman murder-case fancy was mingled with fact, and truth with falsehood, with a view to making truth in the end the more salient. The poet had used to the full his dramatic right of throwing himself into intellectual sympathy with persons towards whom he stood in moral antagonism or at least experienced an inward sense of alienation. The characteristic of much of his later poetry is that it is for ever tasking falsehood to yield up truth, for ever (to employ imagery of his own) as a swimmer beating the treacherous water with the feet in order that the head may rise higher into the pure air made for the spirit's breathing. Browning's genius united an intellect which delighted in the investigation of complex problems with a spiritual and emotional nature manifesting itself in swift and simple solutions of those problems; it united an analytic or discursive power supplied by the head with an intuitive power springing from the heart. He employed his brain to twist and tangle a Gordian knot in order that in a moment it might be cut with the sword of the spirit. In the earlier poems his spiritual ardours and intuitions were often present throughout, and without latency, without reserve; impassioned truth often flashed upon the reader through no intervening or resisting medium. In The Ring and the Book, and in a far greater degree in some subsequent poems, while the supreme authority resides in the spiritual intuitions or the passions of the heart, their instantaneous, decisive work waits until a prolonged casuistry has accomplished its utmost; falsehood seems almost more needful in the process of the poet than truth. And yet it is never actually so. Rather to the poet, as a moral explorer, it appeared a kind of cowardice to seek truth only where it may easily be found; the strenuous hunter will track it through all winding ways of error; it is thrown out as a spot of intense illumination upon a background of darkness; it leaps forth as the flash of the search-light piercing through a mist. The masculine characters in the poems are commonly made the exponents of Browning's intellectual casuistry—a Hohenstiel-Schwangau, an Aristophanes; and they are made to say the best and the most truthful words that can be uttered by such as they are and from such positions as theirs; the female characters, a Balaustion, the Lady of Sorrows in The Inn Album, and others are often revealers of sudden truth, which with them is either a divine revelation—the vision seen from a higher and clearer standpoint—or a dictate of pure human passion. Eminent moments in life had an extraordinary interest for Browning—moments when life, caught up out of the habitual ways and the lower levels of prudence, takes its guidance and inspiring motive from an immediate discovery of truth through some noble ardour of the heart. Therefore it did not seem much to him to task his ingenuity through almost all the pages of a laborious book in creating a tangle and embroilment of evil and good, of truth and falsehood, in view of the fact that a shining moment is at last to spring forward and do its work of severing absolutely and finally right from wrong, and shame from a splendour of righteousness. Browning's readers longed at times, and not without cause, for the old directness and the old pervading presence of spiritual and impassioned truth.[102]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 93: Letter to Miss Blagden, Feb. 24, 1870, given by Mrs Orr, p. 287.]

[Footnote 94: Vivid descriptions of Le Croisic at an earlier date may be found in one of Balzac's short stories.]

[Footnote 95: Life of Jowett by Evelyn Abbott and Lewis Campbell, i. 400, 401.]

[Footnote 96: A repeated invitation in 1877 was also declined. In 1875 Browning was nominated by the Independent Club to the office of Lord Rector of Glasgow University.]

[Footnote 97: Such a book would naturally attract Browning, who, like his father, had an interest in celebrated criminal cases. In his Memories (p. 338), Kegan Paul records his surprise at a dinner-party where the conversation turned on murder, to find Browning acquainted "to the minutest detail" with every cause celebre of that kind within living memory.]

[Footnote 98: An Artist's Reminiscences, by R. Lehmann (1894), p. 224.]

[Footnote 99: Rossetti Papers, p. 302.]

[Footnote 100: So the story was told by Dante Rossetti, as recorded by Mrs Gilchrist; she says that she believed the story was told of himself by Carlyle.]

[Footnote 101: The passage specially referred to is in Caponsacchi's monologue, II. 936-973, beginning with "Thought? nay, sirs, what shall follow was not thought."]

[Footnote 102: I have used here some passages already printed in my Studies in Literature.]



Chapter XIII

Poems on Classical Subjects

During these years, 1869-1878, Browning's outward life maintained its accustomed ways. In the summer of 1869 he wandered with his son and his sister, in company with his friends of Italian days, the Storys, in Scotland, and at Lock Luichart Lodge visited Lady Ashburton.[103] Three summers, those of 1870, 1872 and 1873 were spent at Saint-Aubin, a wild "un-Murrayed" village on the coast of Normandy, where Milsand occupied a little cottage hard by. At night the light-house of Havre shot forth its beam, and it was with "a thrill" that Browning saw far off the spot where he had once sojourned with his wife.[104] "I don't think we were ever quite so thoroughly washed by the sea-air from all quarters as here," he wrote in August 1870. Every morning, as Mme. Blanc (Th. Bentzon) tells us, he might be seen "walking along the sands with the small Greek copy of Homer which was his constant companion. On Sunday he went with the Milsands ... to a service held in the chapel of the Chateau Blagny, at Lion-sur-Mer, for the few Protestants of that region. They were generally accompanied by a young Huguenot peasant, their neighbour, and Browning with the courtesy he showed to every woman, used to take a little bag from the hands of the strong Norman girl, notwithstanding her entreaties." The visit of 1870 was saddened by the knowledge of what France was suffering during the progress of the war. He lingered as long as possible for the sake of comradeship with Milsand, around whose shoulder Browning's arm would often lie as they walked together on the beach.[105] But communication with England became daily more and more difficult. Milsand insisted that his friend should instantly return. It is said by Mme. Blanc that Browning was actually suspected by the peasants of a neighbouring village of being a Prussian spy. Not without difficulty he and his sister reached Honfleur, where an English cattle-boat was found preparing to start at midnight for Southampton.

Two years later Miss Thackeray was also on the coast of Normandy and at no great distance. "It was a fine hot summer," she writes, "with sweetness and completeness everywhere; the cornfields gilt and far-stretching, the waters blue, the skies arching high and clear, and the sunsets succeeding each other in most glorious light and beauty." Some slight misunderstanding on Browning's part, the fruit of mischief-making gossipry, which caused constraint between him and his old friend was cleared away by the good offices of Milsand. While Miss Thackeray sat writing, with shutters closed against the blazing sun, Browning himself "dressed all in white, with a big white umbrella under his arm," arrived to take her hand with all his old cordiality. A meeting of both with the Milsands, then occupying a tiny house in a village on the outer edges of Luc-sur-mer, soon followed, and before the sun had fallen that evening they were in Browning's house upon the cliff at Saint-Aubin. "The sitting-room door opened to the garden and the sea beyond—fresh-swept bare floor, a table, three straw chairs, one book upon the table. Mr Browning told us it was the only book he had with him. The bedrooms were as bare as the sitting-room, but I remember a little dumb piano standing in a corner, on which he used to practise in the early morning. I heard Mr Browning declare they were perfectly satisfied with their little house; that his brains, squeezed as dry as a sponge, were only ready for fresh air."[106] Perhaps Browning's "only book" of 1872 contained the dramas of AEschylus, for at Fontainebleau where he spent some later weeks of the year these were the special subject of his study. It was at Saint-Aubin in 1872 that he found the materials for his poem of the following year, and to Miss Thackeray's drowsy name for the district,